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It was not about love. At least not as the sentimentalists knew it. Nor about death, as a literalist would have understood the term. It was – in no particular order – something to do with fishes, and the sea (sometimes the Sea of Seas); and three ways to swim there; and dreams (a lot about dreams); and an island which Plato had called Atlantis, but had known all along was some other place. It was about the end of the World, which was in turn about its beginning. And it was about Art.
Or rather, the Art.
That, of all the codes, was the one he beat his head hardest against, and broke only his brow. The Art was talked about in many ways. As The Final Great Work. As The Forbidden Fruit. As da Vinci’s Despair or The Finger in the Pie or The Butt-Digger’s Glee. There were many ways to describe it, but only one Art. And (here was a mystery) no Artist.
‘So, are you happy here?’ Homer said to him one May day.
Jaffe looked up from his work. There were letters strewn all around him. His skin, which had never been too healthy, was as pale and etched upon as the pages in his hand.
‘Sure,’ he said to Homer, scarcely bothering to focus on the man. ‘Have you got some more for me?’
Homer didn’t answer at first. Then he said: ‘What are you hiding, Jaffe?’
‘Hiding? I’m not hiding anything.’
‘You’re stashing stuff away you should be sharing with the rest of us.’
‘No I’m not,’ Jaffe said. He’d been meticulous in obeying Homer’s first edict, that anything found amongst the dead letters be shared. The money, the skin magazines, the cheap jewellery he’d come across once in a while; it all went to Homer, to be divided up. ‘You get everything,’ he said. ‘I swear.’
Homer looked at him with plain disbelief. ‘You spend every fucking hour of the day down here,’ he said. ‘You don’t talk with the other guys. You don’t drink with ’em. Don’t you like the smell of us, Randolph? Is that it?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Or are you just a thief?’
‘I’m no thief,’ Jaffe said. ‘You can look for yourself.’ He stood up, raising his hands, a letter in each. ‘Search me.’
‘I don’t want to fucking touch you,’ came Homer’s response. ‘What do you think I am, a fucking fag?’ He kept staring at Jaffe. After a pause he said: ‘I’m going to have somebody else come down here and take over. You’ve done five months. It’s long enough. I’m going to move you.’
‘I don’t want –’
‘What?’
‘I mean … what I mean to say is, I’m quite happy down here. Really. It’s work I like doing.’
‘Yeah,’ said Homer, clearly still suspicious. ‘Well from Monday you’re out.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I say so! If you don’t like it find yourself another job.’
‘I’m doing good work aren’t I?’ Jaffe said.
Homer was already turning his back.
‘It smells in here,’ he said as he exited. ‘Smells real bad.’
There was a word Randolph had learned from his reading which he’d never known before: synchronicity. He’d had to go buy a dictionary to look it up, and found it meant that sometimes events coincided. The way the letter writers used the word it usually meant that there was something significant, mysterious, maybe even miraculous in the way one circumstance collided with another, as though a pattern existed that was just out of human sight.
Such a collision occurred the day Homer dropped his bombshell, an intersecting of events that would change everything. No more than an hour after Homer had left, Jaffe took his short-bladed knife, which was getting blunt, to an envelope that felt heavier than most. He slit it open, and out fell a small medallion. It hit the concrete floor: a sweet ringing sound. He picked it up, with fingers that had been trembling since Homer’s exit. There was no chain attached to the medallion, nor did it have a loop for that purpose. Indeed it wasn’t attractive enough to be hung around a woman’s neck as a piece of jewellery, and though it was in the form of a cross closer inspection proved it not to be of Christian design. Its four arms were of equal length, the full span no more than an inch and a half. At the intersection was a human figure, neither male nor female, arms outstretched as in a crucifixion, but not nailed. Spreading out along the four routes were abstract designs, each of which ended in a circle. The face was very simply rendered. It bore, he thought, the subtlest of smiles.
He was no expert on metallurgy, but it was apparent the thing was not gold or silver. Even if the dirt had been cleaned from it he doubted it would ever gleam. But there was something deeply attractive about it nevertheless. Looking at it he had the sense he’d sometimes had waking in the morning from an intense dream but unable to remember the details. This was a significant object, but he didn’t know why. Were the sigils spreading from the figure vaguely familiar from one of the letters he’d read, perhaps? He’d scanned thousand upon thousand in the last twenty weeks, and many of them had carried little sketches, obscene sometimes, often indecipherable. Those he’d judged the most interesting he’d smuggled out of the Post Office, to study at night. They were bundled up beneath the bed in his room. Perhaps he’d break the dream-code on the medallion by careful examination of those.
He decided to take lunch that day with the rest of the workers, figuring it’d be best to do as little as possible to irritate Homer any further. It was a mistake. In the company of the good ol’ boys talking about news he’d not listened to in months, and the quality of last night’s steak, and the fuck they’d had, or failed to have, after the steak, and what the summer was going to bring, he felt himself a total stranger. They knew it too. They talked with their backs half-turned to him, dropping their voices at times to whisper about his weird look, his wild eyes. The more they shunned him the more he felt happy to be shunned, because they knew, even fuckwits like these knew, he was different from them. Maybe they were even a little afraid.
He couldn’t bring himself to go back to the Dead Letter Room at one-thirty. The medallion and its mysterious signs was burning a hole in his pocket. He had to go back to his lodgings and start the search through his private library of letters now. Without even wasting breath telling Homer, he did just that.
It was a brilliant, sunny day. He drew the curtains against the invasion of light, turned on the lamp with the yellow shade, and there, in a jaundiced fever, began his study, taping the letters with any trace of illustration to the bare walls, and when the walls were full spreading them on the table, bed, chair and floor. Then he went from sheet to sheet, sign to sign, looking for anything that even faintly resembled the medallion in his hand. And as he went, the same thought kept creeping back into his head: that he knew there was an Art, but no Artist, a practice but no practitioner, and that maybe he was that man.
The thought didn’t have to creep for long. Within an hour of perusing the letters it had pride of place in his skull. The medallion hadn’t fallen into his hands by accident. It had come to him as a reward for his patient study, and as a way to draw together the threads of his investigation and finally begin to make some sense of it. Most of the symbols