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1 The Letter In that early evening hour, as men and women poured from the Q shuttle bus up Telegraph Avenue, I plunged into the stream of bodies congealing into darkness and pressed toward the small curiosities shop where, once a season, I was paid to ink handwritten letters. That fall, planned blackouts blanketed huge swaths of the city in shadow. But at the mouth of Temescal Alley, a smart blue postbox shone wetly in the gathering dusk. I didn’t know why the U.S. Postal Service had decided to take its last stand in that enclave of digital hipsters. No one in the instant, frictionless world wrote letters. But I missed them. I missed the paper and the ink and the longing. I missed the unfathomable distances. A witty graffitist had tagged the postbox in white paint: “This is not a postbox.” Clever. Turning object into art with words. I brushed my fingers across the stenciled letters the way I had once seen a woman skim her fingers against a doorpost and then touch them to her lips. Six weeks earlier, I’d dropped a letter in this box addressed to Q, Department of Arts & Letters, a plea to be chosen for an artist’s residency at the social media behemoth’s most elusive division. I’d never heard back. My phone buzzed twice in my hand. A message from my mother: When are you coming home? An equally urgent notice from 1-800-Flowers.com warning me that I had just seven days left to send an arrangement in time for Connie’s birthday. It was October again. The season for haunting. I deleted the ad, texted my mother Don’t wait, and threaded my way to the shop. Set back from the corner of 49th Street, Crimson Horticultural Rarities was warm and close, its shelves creeping with exotic plants, driftwood shadow boxes, glittering square-bottled perfumes, a small blood-colored shop smelling of candle wax and mineral earth. Customers floated among the tentacled plants, fingering volumes of botany. There was a density to the air, the soft gauze of spices brushing your cheeks. I found it deeply soothing. “Amy!” Greer waved a sheaf of printed pages. I recognized her by her nose ring and her asymmetrical hair, dyed, this season, cerulean blue. “I set up your table in the back.” I glanced through the list of late fall stock—Tillandsia and succulents, cedar eggs and sandalwood soaps—names I would scribe across ivory card stock in my careful, fifteenth-century chancery hand. The hand-scribed cards were part of the vibe, charmingly irregular, a promise of something real. I could have calligraphed Greer’s cards at home in my room, or at the Hawk & Pony, but Greer didn’t like keeping the shop open at night. Years ago, in her first college apartment, she’d been raped by a man who had climbed through the window. Now, along with tech stocks and rents, crime was up. The curbs of Telegraph Avenue glittered every morning with broken glass. Greer wanted me in the storeroom so that, on that Fall Festival night, the first night of the year that she stayed open after dark, she wouldn’t be alone. I didn’t fear either darkness or solitude. In the tiny, cramped storeroom of Crimson Horticultural Rarities, my sense of purpose and my present tense for once slid into alignment: I slipped back into an Age of Letters, the era in which I should have been born. The storage closet was hardly the medieval scribe’s public square, but that’s what the internet was for. I live-tweeted my location from @illuminated and ducked through the curtained doorway into the cramped storeroom where anyone who wanted my services could thus easily find me. An old card table had been squirreled away among the shop’s overstock. Grabbing a spare drape from a shelf, I spread the swatch of velvet over the table to veil the spidery legs and arranged the tools of my trade across it: a sharpened quill, four square cut-glass bottles of ink—indigo and sepia, emerald and black. A set of votive candles. Next to them, I set out my pasteboard placard, penned in clear, black ink: Love Letters, Hand-Scribed. The room was no more than a closet stuffed with boxes. But behind the doorway’s velvet curtain, with candles glowing, I imagined myself in one of the small, dark cells of the medieval monks and scriveners, content to do the thing I loved, if only for myself. And then, suddenly, I wasn’t alone. Like a thought forming into words, a man in narrow jeans and a tweed vest pulsed through the curtains. A glistening beard and mustache clung to the man’s face like a mask. The flames twitched. A drop of ink dripped onto the crimson cloth and quivered before the velvet drank it up. Could I say I was surprised, when the thing that had just happened was something I’d imagined long and desperately enough to feel at that moment like a wish come true? The man seemed nervous. His dark eyes flicked at the shelving, at the walls and boxes over my shoulders. In the warm, waxen light of the votives, his forehead shimmered with sweat. The shops on the alley had been stables once and, at that moment, I imagined I could smell the muscular heat and grassy breath of horses. The man’s eyes fell on the pasteboard sign at my elbow. He hesitated, fingering the chain that hung from the watch pocket in his vest. “I’m disturbing you.” He nodded at the pages spread in front of me, the bottles of ink. In the silhouette he cast on the wall, his heartbeat jumped in his neck. “No. Please.” I smoothed the velvet with my palms and pointed at the empty folding chair opposite mine. Suddenly, I felt shocked by my own audacity. I’d never actually written a letter for another person, for a stranger, for money. I spoke quickly to hide the tremor in my voice: “Sit down.” He glanced over his shoulder, but the curtains had already settled behind him; the parted waters had closed. His hips slid around the folding chair, a fluid, serpentine movement, like an animal slithering through a hole. As he sat, he braced his palms against the table, but he misjudged its solidity—it was only a card table, covered by a rag. The ink bottles chimed against each other and his fingers scrabbled to silence them. Living with my brother in the house, I was used to small, abrupt catastrophes. I put my hands over the bottles, stilling them, and smiled. I offered him my portfolio. (I had never handed my portfolio to anyone and, for a fleeting moment, I shivered with the fear of a new mother handing her baby to a stranger, the terror that he would flee. Silly, I chastised myself, considering the storeroom packed tight with boxes: Where could he possibly go?) He considered the brown leather cover. On the front, a craftsman had hand-tooled a capital A in the Insular style—A for the beginning of all letters; A for Amy. A long time ago, it had been a gift from Connie. We’d met in college, Beasts & Bestiaries, Medieval History. When Professor Lindgren turned his back, Connie tore the corner carefully from the top of a page and folded it into a tight square she pressed to the back of my hand. (She was a chemistry major, used to minuscule notation. Subscript. Superscript.) I had slept with girls before. But none of them had ever written to me. We all have a medium through which the world makes sense, through which it means. It might be music, poetry, or paint. A medium through which our experience of life is the most perfectly apprehended. I unfolded the note. I straightened my spine against my seat. In the outstretched arms and legs of her Ws, I saw that we would become lovers. As much as I had once missed Connie herself, I still missed that: crabbed handwriting and bright, square envelopes; lined notebook sheets; dark, bottled indigo. The kind of love that could dye your whole world midnight blue. I still kept Connie’s first note in an antique pewter snuffbox, the only letter between us I hadn’t burned.
