"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 every-thing. 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 jewelry, 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 
thousands upon thousands 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 and sketches on the pages were irrelevant, but there were many, too many to be a 
coincidence, that echoed images on the cross. No more than two ever appeared on the same 
sheet, and most of these were crude renderings, because none of the writers had the 
complete solution in their hands the way he did, but they'd all comprehended some part of 
the jigsaw, and their observations about the part they had, whether haiku, dirty talk or 
alchemical formulas, gave him a better grasp of the system behind the symbols.
  A term that had cropped up regularly in the most perceptive of the letters was the 
Shoal. He'd passed over it several times in his reading, and never thought much about it. 
There was a good deal of evolutionary talk in the letters, and he'd assumed the term to 
be a part of that. Now he understood his error. The Shoal was a cult, or a church of some 
kind, and its symbol was the object he held in the palm of his hand. What it and the Art 
had to do with each other was by no means clear, but his long-held suspicion that this 
was one mystery, one journey, was here confirmed, and he knew that with the medallion as 
a map he'd find his way from Shoal to Art eventually.
  In the meantime there was a more urgent concern. When he thought back to the tribe of 
co-workers, with Homer at its head, he shuddered to think that any of them might ever 
share the secret he'd uncovered. Not that they had any chance of making any real progress 
decoding it: they were too witless. But Homer was suspicious enough to at least sniff 
along the trail a little way, and the idea of anybody-but especially the boorish 
Homer-tainting this sacred ground was unbearable. There was only one way to prevent such 
a disaster. He had to act quickly to destroy any evidence that might put Homer on the 
right track. The medallion he'd keep, of course: he'd been entrusted with it by higher 
powers, those faces he'd one day get to see. He'd also keep the twenty of thirty letters 
that had proffered the best information on the Shoal; the rest (three hundred or so) had 
to be burned. As to the collection in the Dead Letter Room, they had to go into the 
furnace too. All of them. It would take time, but it had to be done, and the sooner the 
better. He made a selection of the letters in his room, parcelled up those he didn't need 
to keep, and headed off back to the Sorting Office.
  It was late afternoon now, and he travelled against the flow of human traffic, entering 
the Office by the back door to avoid Homer, though he knew the man's routine well enough 
to suspect he'd punched out at five-thirty to the second, and was already guzzling beer 
somewhere. The furnace was a sweaty rattling antique, tended by another sweaty rattling 
antique, called Miller, with whom Jaffe had never exchanged a single word, Miller being 
stone-deaf. It took some time for Jaffe to explain that he was going to be feeding the 
furnace for an hour or two, beginning with the parcel he'd brought from home, which he 
immediately tossed into the flames. Then he went up to the Dead Letter Room.
  Homer had not gone guzzling beer. He was waiting, sitting in Jaffe's chair under a bare 
bulb, going through the piles around him.
  "So what's the scam?" he said as soon as Jaffe stepped through the door.