At the letterbox, Roger pulled out a wad of flyers, most of them advertising local businesses—palm readers, tea leave readers, tarot card readers, and Madame Zignault, emergency consultations available on request. Roger crumpled the wad and dropped it at his feet, but Mrs. Kim was standing in the doorway to her husband’s convenience store and witnessed the act of vandalism in the reflection of the building across the street. Roger smiled at the stony-faced image and picked up the flyers.
Two weeks earlier, the mail had brought a manila envelope from a genealogical society and in it, a letter that informed Roger he was a direct descendant of Voltaire. Ever since, Roger had taken to giving his name a French accent, softening the “g” and shifting the emphasis to the second syllable. But none of this mattered to Mrs. Kim. She still called him Lodger, which was technically correct since he rented the room upstairs from the convenience store.
Dozing by the window of his apartment, Roger passed hours with a broken-spined copy of Candide splayed on his lap. He was determined to become a man of reason. He owed it to his heritage. Sometimes he woke at two in the morning and watched the patterns of red and blue light play across the far wall. Outside, Madame Zignault’s neon sign flickered—a giant red hand with a blue eye in the palm.
Roger couldn’t understand why anybody would want to kill trees and stuff the results into mailboxes, all for the sake of promoting superstition. He waved the crumpled wad at Mrs. Kim. “If they could see the future, they’d realize how this—this—tree slaughter—how it’s going to wreck everything. Ironic, don’t you think?”
Mrs. Kim stared at him and said nothing.
“Ironic. Do you know ironic?”
Mrs. Kim made no move to acknowledge Lodger. For his part, Roger was tired of it all—tired of the flickering lights that kept him awake half the night, tired of the dead trees and toxic ink that spilled from his mailbox every day, tired of the credulous people who fed these charlatans. “There oughtta be a law,” he said, but Mrs. Kim had turned away from him to arrange fruit on the table by the front door.
Men of reason use laws to regulate. They also write letters. Voltaire wrote thousands of letters. Roger went back upstairs, and sitting at the table by his front window, he wrote a letter to his member of parliament complaining about the proliferation of charlatans who took advantage of the elderly and the gullible, and who damaged public discourse by promoting superstition and nonsense. They were all foreigners. He didn’t mind foreigners, as such. In fact, it was a damn shame they had to be raised in places where they didn’t have access to a proper education. But just because they were deprived of an enlightened education didn’t mean they were free to run around giving people the evil eye and spitting three times whenever they saw a crow.
Roger could post the letter at the corner. He heard that nowadays people use email when they want to tell a politician what they think. Roger had no use for email. It cheapened the value of a good word. Almost no point anymore. Might as well sit all in a row, dumb like monkeys, staring at nothing but our toes.
On the way back from the corner, Roger paused in front of Madame Zignault’s and looked through the front window. It was dark inside, so he crept closer, cupping his hands around his eyes and pressing against the glass. An elderly woman’s face lurched into view, pale as a ghost’s, and Roger started backward, pricking his ass in a barberry shrub. The woman’s expression would have appeared neutral if it weren’t for the great jowls which drew all the flesh into a severe frown. It looked like Madame Tussaud had worked on the woman’s face but left it sitting too close to an open flame. She wore a musty turban with peacock feathers and a crystal stuck in the center above her forehead. When Roger righted himself, he felt how his heart pounded and took a deep breath to settle it.
Mme Zignault motioned him to the front door, and for whatever reason, he complied. She asked if he wanted to come inside. “A reading perhaps?” But he stood firm on the paving stones.
“It’s people like you—” Roger shook his fist in the air.
Mme Zignault didn’t respond. She stood in the open door and let the hem of her chasuble soak up water from a puddle.
“You think you can come here and spread your superstition?”
The woman fixed Roger with a look like no one had ever fixed him. She watched him with her dark inscrutable eyes. The look sent a shudder through his body.
That night, Roger woke with a start from a dream in which he was laid out on a wooden floor, naked, or mostly naked, or at least discretely covered where it mattered, candles, stars, hex signs scratched in chalk, blood poured from a golden chalice, incantations, a staff made from a gnarled branch, the head of a goat. He looked out the window at the blue hand and red eye flashing in the night. The bad dream was Mme Zignault’s fault; he was certain of it. He cursed the woman for ruining his sleep. He tried to calm himself by reading one of the Meditationes by René Descartes, but that didn’t work, so he decided to write another letter. If he was going to be upset, he might as well use the energy of his distress to good advantage. This time, instead of writing to his member of parliament, he wrote to the minister of immigration and citizenship. He wrote that the government was in dereliction of its duty, opening the country’s borders to people who practised Satanism and took money from hard-working citizens who were actually born here. It defied reason.
In the morning, Roger walked to the corner with his letter and dropped it into the box. He liked that it didn’t cost anything to send letters to his elected representatives. Inexplicably, that thought brought a smile to his face. On the way back to his apartment, Roger noticed Mme Zignault standing in her doorway and watching him with that evil gaze of hers. He stopped in front of her and squared his shoulders. “I just posted a letter to the minister of immigration. I hope they deport you.”
The woman shrugged and smiled. That was the first time Roger had seen her smile. She had a large gap between her two top front teeth.
A car swerved too fast around the corner and struck the mailbox. Roger didn’t see the car but he heard the screeching tires and the metallic bang as the rear bumper clipped the mailbox and toppled it into the street. The driver tried to right the car but overcompensated and sent it careening across the street and onto the far sidewalk. Roger turned in time to see a table collapse and a load of exotic fruits and vegetables tumble into oncoming traffic. Although he couldn’t say why, Roger sensed that something terrible had happened. He tore across road and found that Mrs. Kim had been pinned beneath the car. Already, the light had passed from her eyes.
What?
Were you expecting a point to any of this?
Don’t be unreasonable.