Letters

a short story about incarnation

There was a letter in the mailbox. An actual letter, not a bank statement or a bill. It was personally handwritten and placed inside a particular envelope, chosen with care, light green in color. It was addressed to Ferdinand, which was not his real name, but rather the name with which he signed his life’s work, a work he never showed to anyone, and so it was indeed very strange, not only to receive a letter in an age that no longer sends them, but that it was addressed to a name that no one should know about.

He hadn’t checked the mailbox in a few days, perhaps a week, and so found the letter between a handful of flyers. He never threw the flyers away, not just there and then anyway, and never without examining each. The flyers advertised, in this order, a kebab shop, a real estate agency, a nail salon, then the letter, another kebab shop and a pizza place. He only learned this later, the bundle of papers was transferred intact from mailbox to kitchen counter. If he did notice the envelope, which is doubtful, he probably assumed it was yet another advertisement, just presented in a different form, perhaps an accounting firm, something superficially more serious to justify the addition of the envelope. Though rare, they do still exist. What we know, or can at least reason to be the case, is that were it not for the indian summer in october, the flyers, and thus the letter, would have remained untouched a little while longer, days, maybe weeks even, it was after all not uncommon for them to pile up in the corner of the kitchen counter.

Next to the letters was a container half full of soup, prepared just four days before by his housekeeper, now spoiled by the heat. It was his fault, he left it on the counter, instead of the fridge, during a heatwave. This, in turn, prompted him to check the flyers collected from the mailbox in search of some kind of meal to order in. The pizza flyer was kept, the others thrown away, the letter now examined. To Ferdinand, is all that is written, by hand. No addresses, no postage stamps, no other names. Opening the envelope one finds a small piece of paper, cream colored, with a very short message.

Dear Ferdinand, please speak to Ophelia. Do not wait too long. Your friend, Frieda.

He read the message over and over, and the more he read the more its meaning eluded him. He didn’t know any Friedas, and if he did, they weren’t friends. He did know an Ophelia, a young intern from his office. He never exchanged more than words of circumstance with her, in part because her beauty and youth intimidated him, and in part because he thought any kind of attachment to a woman would be a distraction from his life’s purpose. He dealt with sexual desire as he dealt with any other bodily need, like hunger or thirst or any other call of nature, satisfying it quickly and without much thought, taking little pleasure in it, except for the temporary relief. Even if he did, and he admitted it to himself, at one point or another, allowed this Ophelia into his fantasies, they were short lived, happening within a glance as their eyes crossed paths, or as she walked from one end of the office to another, or as she made coffee, or when she dropped some papers over at his desk. Thus he never entertained the idea of talking to her, or, if it came to it, of leading her on. He was much too busy for fantasies of love, and even more so to realities of it.

But all these fantasies, which he was finding now in retrospect to be more frequent than he had noticed before, were most certainly beside the point. The letter was a hoax, a prank, and though somewhat disturbing, because who would go to such lengths, who would come up with such a bizarre idea and go through with it, it was ultimately of no importance. A highschool drama, at best, and completely out of place. He didn’t throw the letter away, but left it there, next to the envelope, over the pizza flyer, and so proceeded to do what he normally did. His living room was more of an office than a place for visits, which were very rare indeed, and it was there he sat down in a large desk, surrounded by papers and books and drawings, rewriting the history of the world from Eden to the Flood. This was his great project. For it he was reconstructing a language out of bits and pieces, drawing and redrawing maps of continents and countries that no longer existed, creating myths and legends, and legendary authors, and legendary books, and games, and festivals, and climates, and tribes, a whole world. It was a daunting task, and every single moving part was unfinished. Next to the desk was a big trunk full of hundreds of thousands of pages, none of it organized, except broadly by assigning initials for categories, and this very inconsistently. He picked up what he was working from the day before, a legend, in his constructed language, about the world egg, which he had been unable to finish. He read what he had written and tried to put pen to paper to continue, but nothing was forthcoming, so he labelled the page on the top right M, for myth, and, L, for legend, or perhaps for language, for not all of the legends were penned using his constructed language, and put it inside the trunk. He examined some other pages and collections that were towards the surface of that abyss of paper, but nothing caught his attention enough to demand immediate continuation, and so he found himself looking at the blank sheet of paper in front of him, the pen in his hand, and almost distractedly, he wrote, Ophelia. He wouldn’t be able to work. Maybe the heat was getting to him. He took a shower, cold. The strategy was somewhat unsuccessful. Although it did relieve more than one kind of heat, it ignited some paranoia about the letter. Whatever its intention, it was a clear invasion of privacy, someone was watching, playing tricks on him. Ophelia herself had vanished from his mind, it was Frieda, most likely an alias, who he needed to find, and expose.

The next day he brought the letter with him to the office. During the morning it stayed hidden in his briefcase. He avoided Ophelia, more like a precautionary measure, as the first thing to be done was to search the company records for someone named Frieda. More than one hundred people worked in that office, and there was no Frieda. A fake name. This was expected. Suspicious glances during the rest of the morning provided no breakthrough on the case, everyone seemed normal. After lunch came plan b. He took out the letter and, putting it under his arm, along with some papers, to call attention to the light green envelope saying, To Ferdinand, a name that no one there used to address him, he walked slowly all over the office, making excuses to stop here or there, talk to people about this or that, and meanwhile, record the reactions of those he most suspected, and less so of those he suspected less. Then after he made sure everyone had seen him and the envelope, he requested a meeting with the boss, not one of his suspects, making up some work related excuse for the visit, and was admitted into his office. Ten minutes later he got out, envelope now in his hand, inconspicuous, and walked back to his desk, recording the looks from other people. And nothing. Most did not pay any attention to him. Ophelia did, but he avoided her eyes at the last minute. It couldn’t be her, could it. No, what sense would there be in that. He sat down and got back to his suspicious looks towards his colleagues, discovering not the faintest hint of conspiracy.

His paranoia started to yield after a month or so of investigation with no fruits. But he had spent a whole month alienated from his literary work, and this he considered a tragedy, if not a great fault, to allow himself to be distracted, and by a woman, or rather, two. Things had finally began to settle, and slowly he was able to regain some rhythm to his work, and the only real change in his life was that now he avoided, at all costs, any contact with Ophelia. And then, once life seemed fully back to normal, he received a second letter. The same light green color to the envelope, the same To Ferdinand in the same careful handwriting, and an equally short message.

Dear Ferdinand, Time is running out. Please speak to Ophelia. I love you both. Frieda.

The second message was more dramatic than the first, but its effect was less so. He had prepared himself for this. What would a prankster do when the prank had lost its effect. Do another one of course. And thus the second letter was the expected follow up to the first, and though it still puzzled him, whenever he tried to make sense of it, he could now ignore it, just as long as he avoided Ophelia. And this was true of his conscious mind, in the office, or at home at work on his projects, he could become completely absorbed like before, the letter and the women locked in a dark cell. But then at night, when he dreamed, they were allowed to come out into the open. He saw Ophelia, and sometimes Frieda, who in his dreams was of varying ages, from a child to an old woman, and every age in between. Yet as long as they remained only in his dreams, his life could go on as normal. It was almost summer, and he was looking forward to his vacation. He always spent a whole month at the beach, scribbling in the sun. He felt he needed it after such a strange year. He would even excuse himself from participating in the office summer party, and drive that same friday night to the beachside apartment he always rented. As he came home on that friday, he almost didn’t check his mailbox, fearing that something in there could disturb his peace and his plans. But then the curiosity got the best of him, and there it was, over a bunch of flyers, a third letter.

Dear Ferdinand, I don’t know where to begin. There is so much to say. It is now probably too late for you and Ophelia, and this is why I do not worry about breaking the rules, which I was most certainly doing by writing to you in the first place, and more so now, that I will explain everything. I know it will be hard to believe, but I am writing to you from another world, which you too once inhabited. In it, you are my father, and Ophelia is my mother. And I am Frieda, one your daughters in the spirit world. It has been my desire for a long time to meet you, both of you, in the flesh. For this to happen, however, you and mother would have had to fall in love on the earth, so that I could be conceived. But this is unlikely to happen now. Ophelia has already accepted a job in another city and you probably won’t cross paths again. Do not feel bad. Love can not be forced. I believed that if you met each other, and had a chance to get to know each other, you would have fallen in love, as you had in the spirit world, but it seems that was not meant to be. And this is why I wrote the letters, and now I write to solve the mystery, so that from now on it won’t trouble you anymore. Your daughter, who loves you, Frieda.

The curious mind of a spirit child. What could she possibly mean by not being troubled by such news, when the schemes he had imagined before were so pale in comparison. Maybe she simply meant that the truth of things, however simple or strange, has a clearing effect, as if dispelling clouds and doubts, and maybe that’s why Ferdinand rose from the armchair where his temporarily weak legs sought refuge early into the first reading of the letter. Now after the third reading he was still troubled, in a way, because something very unexpected was stirring inside him, but his legs were no longer weak, and so determined he walked towards the door. He got into the landing and ran down the stairs and out into the street in such haste that he almost missed Ophelia, who had been pacing in front of the entrance, arms folded over her breast, holding three light blue envelopes, trying to decide if she should come in.