should put you on this full time."
  Randolph wanted to say fuck you, but he'd said that too many times to bosses who'd 
fired him the minute after, and he couldn't afford to lose this job: not with the rent to 
pay and heating his one-room apartment costing a damn fortune while the snow continued to 
fall. Besides, something was happening to him while he passed the solitary hours in the 
Dead Letter Room, something it took him to the end of the third week to begin to enjoy, 
and the end of the fifth to comprehend.
  He was sitting at the crossroads of America.
  Homer had been right. Omaha, Nebraska, wasn't the geographical center of the USA, but 
as far as the Post Office was concerned, it may as well have been.
  The lines of communication crossed, and recrossed, and finally dropped their orphans 
here, because nobody in any other state wanted them. These letters had been sent from 
coast to coast looking for someone to open them, and had found no takers. Finally they'd 
ended with him: with Randolph Ernest Jaffe, a balding nobody with ambitions never spoken 
and rage not expressed, whose little knife slit them, and little eyes scanned them, and 
who-sitting at his crossroads-began to see the private face of the nation.
  There were love-letters, hate-letters, ransom notes, pleadings, sheets on which men had 
drawn round their hard-ons, valentines of pubic hair, blackmail by wives, journalists, 
hustlers, lawyers and senators, junk-mail and suicide notes, lost novels, chain letters, 
resumes, undelivered gifts, rejected gifts, letters sent out into the wilderness like 
bottles from an island, in the hope of finding help, poems, threats and recipes. So much. 
But these many were the least of it. Though sometimes the love-letters got him sweaty, 
and the ransom notes made him wonder if, having gone unanswered, their senders had 
murdered their hostages, the stories of, love and death they told touched him only 
fleetingly. Far more persuasive, far more moving, was another story, which could not be 
articulated so easily.
  Sitting at the crossroads he began to understand that America had a secret life; one 
which he'd never even glimpsed before. Love and death he knew about. Love and death were 
the great cliches; the twin obsessions of songs and soap operas. But there was another 
life, which every fortieth letter, or fiftieth, or hundredth, hinted at, and every 
thousandth stated with a lunatic plainness. When they said it plain, it was not the whole 
truth, but it was a beginning, and each of the writers had their own mad way of stating 
something close to un-stateable.
  What it came down to was this: the world was not as it seemed. Not remotely as it 
seemed. Forces conspired (governmental, religious, medical) to conceal and silence those 
who had more than a passing grasp of that fact, but they couldn't gag or incarcerate 
every one of them. There were men and women who slipped the nets, however widely flung; 
who found back-roads to travel where their pursuers got lost, and safe houses along the 
way where they'd be fed and watered by like visionaries, ready to misdirect the dogs when 
they came sniffing. These people didn't trust Ma Bell, so they didn't use telephones. 
They didn't dare assemble in groups of more than two for fear of attracting attention to 
themselves. But they wrote. Sometimes it was as if they had to, as if the secrets they 
kept sealed up were too hot, and burned their way out. Sometimes it was because they knew 
the hunters were on their heels and they'd have no other chance to describe the world to 
itself before they were caught, drugged and locked up. Sometimes there was even a 
subversive glee in the scrawlings, sent out with deliberately indistinct addresses in the 
hope that the letter would blow the mind of some innocent who'd received it by chance. 
Some of the missives were stream-of-consciousness rantings, others precise, even 
clinical, descriptions of how to turn the world inside out by sex-magic or 
mushroom-eating. Some used the nonsense imagery of National Enquirer stories to veil 
another message. They spoke of UFO sightings and zombie cults; news from Venusian 
evangelists and psychics who tuned in to the dead on the TV. But after a few weeks of 
studying these letters (and study it was; he was like a man locked in the ultimate 
library) Jaffe began to see beyond the nonsenses to the hidden story. He broke the code; 
or enough of it to be tantalized. Instead of being irritated each day when Homer opened 
the door and had another half dozen satchels of letters brought in, he welcomed the 
addition. The more letters, the more clues; the more clues the more hope he had of a 
solution to the mystery. It was, he became more certain as the weeks turned into months 
and the winter mellowed, not several mysteries but one. The writers whose letters were 
about the Veil, and how to draw it aside, were finding their own way forward towards 
revelation; each had his own particular method and metaphor; but somewhere in the 
cacophony a single hymn was striving to be sung.
  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 among the dead letters be shared. The money, the skin magazines, the cheap 
jewelry 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."