There was a vault. No, not a vault, a locked cabinet. A locked cabinet in the L.A. County Coroner’s office. There was one key to the lock, no more. The key kept on a ring among other keys, the ring of keys kept in a drawer during working hours, taken home with the director each evening. Select the key on its ring, insert it into the lock, insert and turn right. The lock gives way and the cabinet can be opened.
What’s inside? Letters. Letters sealed in plastic. Letters without envelopes. Letters without envelopes are called notes, so these were mostly gathered as notes though many were written as letters and left to be found on tables or on dresser tops. Nearby where they were found in each case was a body, deceased, within minutes or hours or days or weeks of a last pulse. These were suicide letters left as notes and many hired staffers had read them, coroner included.
Some were addressed to specific persons, wives or children, siblings or parents. Some were addressed to a general hypothetical audience against which the deceased had long nursed a grievance. Some were composed as final dispatches from a private self-monologue. Many attempted to explain the past, justify the death soon to come from it, citing evidence sampled from a history of failure to describe why the past should come to term so definitively. Many apologized for what had not yet happened, assuming their attempt would be successful, the one successful act they were perhaps capable of accomplishing. Some were cryptic, incoherent, cast in pinched, hurried penmanship from a mind out of balance. Some said goodbye thoughtfully, assuring siblings and spouses left behind in the ever-occurring present that, while the past was a burden and they were part of it, it was not their fault.
These letters bereft of envelopes had been collected along with other articles of evidence, during analysis and clearing of the scene. Written by citizens of Los Angeles County, they were determined valuable and even after their respective cases were closed, were retained. Unknown—whether families of the deceased had been offered or would accept their return, should they want them. If so, how many more had been spared such company in a cabinet? One letter folded and creased and shuffled into a stack among other letters, each distinct, each equally unimportant.
One by one letters arrived as notes, the cabinet unlocked by a hand with a key, new letters stacked on top of old. Return to sender, employees in the coroner’s office would joke. More fan mail. Some days outside it would be raining, others it would be bright and pleasant and warm. Never would there be sleet or snow. Outside their office the Nineteen-Twenties came and went, the Thirties. Busy years for the arrival of letters as notes. Most of the Nineteen-Forties had passed as well, rain and sunshine and sounds of traffic coming and going. The first full year of the Fifties was almost over when the door to the L.A. County coroner’s office opened and a man, recent acquaintance of the director, a professor, entered. He was young and had an hour to spare. He shook a few hands before he and the director involved themselves in conversation.
They had begun talking about something far from the concern at hand, they had been moving through small talk, when some observation made by the professor reminded the director of the cabinet and key in his drawer. There is a cabinet, the director told the professor, I think you would find it worth a look. The drawer was opened, the ring of keys removed, the cabinet key selected, inserted in its lock, the cabinet shuddering a bit as it opened. Every suicide note collected by Los Angeles County the past two or three decades, the director told him.
Can I?--the professor asked. The director said he could. A spare room was offered, a desk and chair and lamp to lighten the way, sentence by sentence. There the professor sat through the morning and afternoons a full week. Reading, taking second-order notes of his own, notes that didn’t aspire to letterhood. Notes serving some other purpose entirely. There was an ashtray but the professor kept the tray at arm’s reach from the desk, atop a cabinet. He didn’t dare risk scorching with errant hot ash the letters unstacked before him.
There were patterns, repetitions of phrasing and sentiment. There were variations of theme in their stated motivations. There were species of handwriting, each suggesting a particular species of mind in extremis. Over the course of five mornings and afternoons, hundreds of letters were read and re-read. Gradually each day's yield gathered into three stacks by the end of the day—the read, the unread, the unreadable. The latter written in Spanish or Chinese or Persian, languages native to the deceased and therefore death itself, but indecipherable to most eyes left behind to read them.
Forensics of a novel kind, the professor said to himself, the director overhearing him. There were minds still here to be studied. If bodies could be kept in the cool of a morgue, dissected and studied, where could their minds be stored but here, on this desk, in these letters? Hundreds. What was their cumulative effect? The director and professor agreed the professor had read enough to qualify as a skillful imposter, a forger of letters, should he choose to be. A bet, the director said. Five dollars if you can fool me. Take a week, write a letter, bring it to the office. I’ll steal off to my office and give you access to the key and the cabinet. Choose three letters from the stacks, lay them out side by side on the tabletop with yours mixed in with them. See if I can read them in a sitting and tell the difference.
There was a pen, a pen resting on the desk near a right hand. Between the right hand resting on desk top and its left doing the same nearby, a pen recently filled with ink and waiting. The professor had selected the pen carefully, after much forethought, after having selected three freshly written notes from a more recently compiled stack of evidence culled from crime scenes. The crimes were suicides, self-homicide, murder of grievances or griefs by proxy. Their pages were crisp, their ink dark and bright, youthful to the world. Newborn letters to the living.
If his attempt was going to be convincing, the professor reasoned, the real letters in his line-up would have to be new. Each were laid out before him, pages of different size. The first half a page, torn across the bottom. The second two pages front and back. The third a full page, intricate with mazy cursive arranged in one neat block. None on hotel stationary, none with personalized letterhead. Unlined and white, all three—these passed the test of comparison to the sheet laid beneath the pen on the desk before him.
How many letters had he written in his life? Too many to count, but each the same in this one way—written from his perspective. Each surfaced from the same mind at various points in a continuum, across the course of its life. Some of an official capacity, job-related, others obligatory, addressed to mother or father. Many furtive and potentially embarrassing, should they ever be returned to him by the many girlfriends in his past. Many such love letters were shoeboxed somewhere in the house he shared with his wife of three years, he was sure. If he read them, would it seem someone else had composed them? Maybe that might prepare him. To read dispatches from his own scattered history and strain to remember details.
Never had he written from an invented perspective and never with goodbyes in mind. The left hand on the desk reached for the left-most letter before him. An angry letter and the shortest. Debbie, have it your way…it began. Blame and guilt. Framing the demise of its author as some Debbie’s sole responsibility. The left hand returned it to its spot on the desk then wiped a sweaty palm on a pants leg.
The second letter, the longest by page count, rambled, lost in a meander of regrets and self-loathing reprisals against its author’s predicament. After the first paragraph the professor noticed he had begun counting the number of first-person assertions—I, me, myself, mine. He doubled back to the beginning and read the letter through for a proper count. Fifty-six appearances of first person pronoun in four pages. This one hadn’t been addressed to anyone but had been signed twice, in cursive and in block letters, after its conclusion. A postscript followed the signatures. P.S.—To whoever finds me: sorry. If I could’ve disappeared, I would’ve.
The third letter, though shorter than the second, took longer to read. Both right and left hands took hold either side of it, to hold closer for reading. It must’ve taken hours to compose, he thought, no mistakes, no scribbling out of words or arrows pointing to corrections. This last letter had the air of a final draft, the last in a lineage of revisions. It was addressed to the Board of Directors of a fruit company and written by a middle-manager denied a promotion. The letter stated the man’s qualifications and speculations for why he’d been passed over, concluding that his removal from the company payroll at this time would be best for all involved. He hoped they would look after his wife and two children, since they had wives and children of their own and would hope, if in a similar situation, the company would do the same. It was an unreasonable request from an unreasonable state of mind, never mind the reasonableness of the man.
These were the letters, then, and—fresh page before him—he considered what it might mean to write them. Not to have written them, not to have left them where they might be found. Rather to sit in a bedroom or kitchen or at some other office desk among many millions like it throughout the city and county, at the end of a life not his own, having made a decision. The decision then articulated by a pen or pencil in hand, the hand forced into role of morbid stenographer for some mind that no longer wanted any part of its brain. In the present moment, what would it be like—to feel that way? To write a letter convincing enough to fool a coroner; best to tap into that feeling before writing.
The page was blank, too amiable to play effigy for a void. It was summer outside and windows were open. Electric fans had been stationed atop desks and cabinets; ceiling fans alone weren’t enough to chop through the thick of the air. Beyond the room where the professor sat with his blank page and his pen, secretaries and county employees had arrived and left. Interdepartmental mail had been opened and filed. Lunch breaks had been taken. How to hate a life he hadn’t lived—that was the problem before him. How to throw it away, escape it?
There was a woman of forty-two, maiden name Mia Barton. Born in San Luis Obispo, her father a grocer. When the father died, her mother brought three girls—she and two sisters—to Los Angeles to live with grandparents. Years bloomed one from the other, in vague succession. Mia Barton became a teenager and lived that way a while until people began to view her as a woman—but what did that feel like, to be a woman? If this was how she felt most days, standing in the small kitchen of her apartment in Lynwood, dressed for a desk job, this must be what it’s like, she would think. Not pretty enough, not smart enough, not charming. The list of deficiencies were well-established by the feeling. There was a way to be something other than a woman, a way out of being Mia Barton on a daily basis. Lay a head on a pillow each evening and wait for sleep to pull her under. The curse of repeated reincarnation, waking each morning as a self again. The other path to take was dark and uncertain but promised more permanent liberation.
There was the sash of a bathrobe, bathrobe hanging on a hook on the bathroom door. There was a bottle on the nightstand, sleeping pills. There were ledges in every direction from where she stood, ponds and lakes deep enough to swallow her. Objects outside her head were unassuming, innocent of intent. Inside skull and brain there was a narrative and a vision of where that narrative might end—five minutes on the other side of a life, when the head ceases its ruminative tortures and settles quiet for the rest of collective human history. A small fact of the world, Mia Barton, complete and relieved of a future.
The woman once Mia Barton was talking to herself in the present moment, she was reciting reasons to end her life. Inside a hand holding a pen, she was carried forward sentence by sentence. A professor at a desk was imagining her, imagining himself as her, having nurtured her from birth until adulthood, lonely though married, friendless though social, eaten alive by a depression that avoided doctors. The professor sat at his desk in the room given to him by the director, writing a letter by an imaginary woman. It had taken two full days to imagine her properly. He had lived her life through its full course several times, each turn a little more vividly, picking up along the way more details. By the end of the second day he could picture her from behind closed eyes. Brunette with gray-hazel irises, full cheeks and a chin that met her neck smoothly. A tragic caricature but enough to unsettle him. She was convincing, this golem of dislike, this woman he would never become except in writing. So on the third morning he sat down to write in her voice. The words came without hitch, flowingly.
The letter ran three pages, front to back. After he finished writing, the professor lit another cigarette and stood, walked to the other side of the desk. Turning to face the empty chair where only a moment ago he’d been sitting, he admired the tenor of the sunlight angling through the window, the warps and blemishes of the windowpane amplified into blotty shadows on the desktop. He was himself again, back in the room. He was in his own life, spared Mia Barton’s future by something simple as a smoke break.
There it was, the letter. Upside-down and beneath him, from where he stood. Was it maudlin?—maybe it would have to be, he thought. If it was going to convince, it would have to be. Would its desperations sound rehearsed? But aren’t most genuine desperations rehearsed in someone’s head for weeks and years, anyway?
The professor reached across the desk, drew the pages toward him. There they lay, upside-down. The left hand, free of cigarette, rotated the pages right-side-up. Hand in tow, the pages lifted off the desk and presented themselves. He was someone else now. He was a professor of psychology standing in an office. Having come across a trove of suicide notes stockpiled in the L.A. County Coroner’s office, he prepared to analyze another sample. This one undated but recently acquired, judging from the freshness of the ink in which it’d been written.
The professor began reading. On the other side of the pages, a woman was describing reasons why she had decided to take her life. Where was she taking it? She was taking it for a walk, like a dog, she said. She was letting it off the leash, so she could stand at the dark edges of a field and watch it run.
Four letters, a desk, a chair, in a room lit by a lamp and window. A door leading from the room but the door closed, so the contents of the room hidden. The professor stood outside, hands in pockets, leaned against a filing cabinet. Two secretaries watched him watch the door.
The director had entered the room ten minutes before. The door had closed behind him and rendered him hypothetical. Behind the door the director was sitting at the desk, the professor imagined. He’d entered to find four neat stacks of pages of various size arranged on the desktop. Rising to the challenge of his task, the director had taken a seat, lit a cigarette, pulled the first of the notes towards him and began reading.
Finishing he would pause, consider—was it authentic? Was this the preamble to a real human death or skilled prose pretending?
The professor closed his eyes and saw the room laid bare in the dark of his own head. There he was, the director. Bent over the last of the notes, pointer finger of his right hand tracing beneath sentences as he read them. At the sound of a doorknob turning, he opened his eyes. No more imagination was needed—the director stepped from the room, waved the professor over. Together they entered the room and the door closed behind them.
So which is it, the professor asked. The director took the chair and raised a finger to his lips. The professor nodded, stopped talking. The finger then left the director’s lips, lowered to the level of the desktop. Four notes lay beneath, one waiting to be chosen.
This one, the director said. The one full of explanations and apologies.
The professor worked to retain a neutral face. Which specifically, he asked.
The director’s finger lowered to the desk, touched paper. Other fingers opened to take hold of the letter, lift it.
This one. The depressed woman with the purple prose. Eloquent about understanding and forgiveness and the rest.
The professor’s face lost its neutrality. He pulled a quick frown then nodded.
Looks like I’ll be keeping my five dollars this time, the director told the professor. Good try, though. Tell you what. For your efforts, why don’t I buy you lunch?
Three of the notes were gathered, returned to their cabinet, locked by the turn of a key. The fourth was folded, pocketed by the professor. There it was carried out of the office and down the street, to a luncheonette. There it sat beneath a table, warmed by the professor’s leg through pants-cloth. Afterwards it walked with the leg to a parked car, took seat behind the wheel. Driven miles through criss-crossing streets to a house in the western suburbs. There, in a kitchen half a city away from where it’d been composed, the letter was removed from its pocket and laid on a counter. The professor’s wife stood on one side of the counter, the professor on the other. The professor had produced the letter after having described the lost bet between he and the director. He had asked if she might read it and give her honest opinion. Did it read like someone who didn’t feel they were dying? A grim request, he knew. But she was a woman and housewife and he figured she might be more attuned to false notes, inaccuracies of the heart, where he had gone astray in writing it.
I’d be happy to, she told him. But first, let’s have dinner.
First year of their marriage she had indulged his thoughts about his day soon as he came through the door. She had been a student of psychology only a few years before but had agreed to delay further studies until they had bought a house and had children. Small talk with her husband, especially after he’d returned from work, fed the student in her, sustained her through another week of chores. They would take a seat on the back patio and talk. Her husband would work through his ideas, what’d he’d gleaned from reading journals and research, and his wife would ask pertinent, searching questions. Many dinners were burned in the oven that way. The student in her trumped the wife in her that first year, and because of it often they went underfed.
For a while they’d adjusted the routine. They’d have dinner soon as he came home. Her husband would retire afterwards to the back patio to smoke and unwind while she washed the dishes. She would rush through scrubbing and rinsing, impatient to sit for a daily dosage of lecture and discussion. Often a towel would still be in her hands when she stepped onto the patio, hands wrestling with the cloth to dry themselves. They would talk a while then but it wasn’t the same. Her husband, full of belly and sipping scotch, would have lost the energy to talk his way through her questions. When he would yawn, she couldn’t keep herself from spontaneously yawning as well. Soon after they’d step back inside, prepare for bed. Each morning she woke to the same, a routine the student in her found increasingly stifling.
Third year of their marriage, her husband would often skip his after-dinner trips to the back patio, walk to the bedroom instead. Before she would be finished drying the dishes, he would have emerged in his pajamas to kiss her forehead. In bed she’d find him grading papers or leafing through research. Sometimes a well-phrased question about the latter could get him talking, but not often. On the weekends he’d be more receptive. They’d drive to the hills outside of the city and he’d ask about her own reading, her thoughts about the reading, and her days.
Halfway through their third year of marriage, one late afternoon he’d returned from an hours-long drive after lunch with the director of the L.A. Coroner’s office. He’d driven along the coast, then every direction inland, taking turns randomly. He’d even driven to Lynwood. She’d been standing in the kitchen with dinner almost ready, same as every weekday, six o’clock or thereabouts he would usually come through the door. There was an intensity about him when he stepped into the kitchen. From years of living with him, she knew how read these periods of restlessness. If there was some work problem for which he couldn’t readily find an acceptable solution, his unease would express itself through fidgeting. From his pocket he produced several pages creased and folded. He had mentioned offhandedly days before of a wager he and the director had made—to write a suicide note that could convince a trained professional. He’d worked alone on the letter, hadn’t discussed it with her. The previous evenings he’d sat up in bed, arms folded, books and paper set on the nightstand, thinking through the wording, the tone. When he’d finished and he and the director had resolved their bet, she trusted he’d disclose the outcome to her over dinner.
Now here was the letter, on the counter. A failed experiment. His disappointment was obvious though muted.
While they ate he had requested they not discuss it further. He wanted her reading of the letter to be fresh, unhampered by influence. His right hand held a knife, his left a fork. Together they carved a steak into edible pieces on his plate. He ate quickly then excused himself. He wasn’t sullen so much as intent on giving her time to read the letter. She cleared the table, washed the dishes. She grabbed the letter off the countertop, took a seat again at the table. It was still light outside, she could’ve sat on the patio while she read. But given the nature of the letter, it seemed more appropriate to read it at a kitchen table.
To whoever has found this and is reading this, it began. A hand reached into her apron pocket, emerged with a pencil.
The hand resting on the table holding the pencil was hers. The letter resting on the table next to her hand wasn’t.
Hand lifted, bringing the pencil with it, crossed out a sentence in the letter. Above the crossed-out sentence a few words were written. The professor’s wife read through the letter, re-read it. As she did so, hand and pencil worked and reworked what was read.
The professor’s wife was still asleep when he woke the next morning. He carried his shirt and shoes and jacket into the living room after pulling on his pants, didn’t want to disturb her. Twice a year at most he was left to make his own breakfast and this would be one of those mornings.
He entered the kitchen to find the table set for one, plate with fork, knife, and spoon at his end of the table. Ceramic owl centerpiece with brown and white plumage and orange beak. Salt and pepper shakers placed like sacrificial mice before it. He flicked on the kitchen light. The owl’s glazed head glowed. On the plate was a piece of paper, handwriting on it, the handwriting familiar. A note, maybe, like ones she usually left him rare mornings when she was sick or planning to sleep in. Eggs and ham in the fridge. Bread for toast. Fruit in the bowl. No breakfast from me today, sorry. Enjoy your day, hon. He looked around the countertop for the letter he’d written, peeled a banana while doing so. Where was it? Maybe she’d left it on the nightstand. He’d finished the banana, was still chewing the last of it, was in the process of dumping the peel in the kitchen trash before walking back to the bedroom to hunt for the letter, when he found it down among used napkins and scraps of last night’s dinner, banana peel freshly plunked atop it.
With forefinger and thumb he fished the letter from the trash. It was splotched with grease and freckled with wet coffee grounds. Unfolding it, he found the letter a blizzard of pencil marks, much edited. He looked to the plate set before his chair, the paper there, walked over for a closer look. Not a morning note—a letter. He set the soiled letter on the table, lifted this fresh one off its plate. The same letter, same tone, much the same words, whittled down to fifth the original length. He read it straight through, unaware he’d held his breath for the duration. Ten sentences at most. He paused, considered, counted them. Nine, actually. He remembered each of them, had written them, but hardly recognized them for the feeling he was experiencing just then. Standing in his own well-lit kitchen feeling a weight descend on his shoulders, as if a much stronger man had taken hold of both and had begun pressing his whole weight down on them. He felt her—this woman, Mia Barton. He’d failed to make her convincing by prose alone but here she was, pinning her sadness on him so he could know her.
Scared—immediately after he stood in the bedroom doorway, letter in hand. Later driving to work he wouldn’t be able to recall rushing from kitchen to bedroom. An awful certainty had come over him and next thing he could remember there he stood. He must have made a sound because by the time he’d reached the doorway his wife’s eyes had opened. She was smiling sleepily, eyes drowsy and squinting. What do you think, she asked him. He’d been holding his breath until then, let the breath go at the question. The breath made a falling sound, like an armload of hay dropped to the ground. He walked through the breath toward her and stretched out beside her. You’re too good, he told her. You actually made me miss her.
His wife wiped a hand down her face, picked matter from a tear duct. Write me another, she said. I might have a future profession ahead of me.
Sunshine through windows, shadows cutting sharp lines across the floor. Lines that lift and cut across desk tops, stacks of papers. Lines that divide a hand from a wrist as it reaches for a stamp to press against a red ink blotter, before pressing elsewhere on papers the bright block letters CONFIDENTIAL. The hand belonging to Mrs. Mosley, secretary with most seniority in the office. Twenty-two years of service and older than the director by at least ten.
The professor held a manila envelope and was conversing with the director. The director had been talking with Mrs. Mosley when the professor arrived. Director had excused himself from their conversation to greet him. Now from behind her desk she was watching them. The professor handed the director the envelope, the director and professor turned to look at her. This gave her a fright—maybe they had noticed she’d been watching, concerned she’d overheard whatever they’d been discussing. The director walked over, followed by the professor.
Mrs. Mosley?—he asked. I was wondering if you might have a moment to help Professor Schneidman and I revive a bet, so we could settle it properly.
Of course, she said. If the director issued her a request, it was her duty to at least give it her best effort. How could she help?
The professor stepped away, opened the door to an unoccupied office between the wall-length city map and a fleet of file cabinets. Weeks prior he’d worked out of the office; she and other secretaries had been asked by the director not to enter while the professor was away. The professor was involved in a project and did not want his papers to be disturbed.
The director explained what he would like her to do. It would take half an hour at most. She listened to his simple, clear-cut instructions, similar to other instructions he’d issued over the past six years. She nodded as he explained but when he finished she continued nodding. One of Mrs. Mosley’s many unconscious quirks—she would often nod as way to aid thinking.
The professor had returned shortly before the director had finished. Mrs. Mosley was asked to wait until preparations had been completed. It would be best, the professor suggested, if she took five minutes to smoke on the front steps outside or sit on a bench in the hallway. She stood, gathered her purse. The director said it was much appreciated.
The hallway was brighter than usual. Mid-morning, sun hit the large eastern window at hall’s end and shone across the marble floor.
To the left of the office was a varnished wooden bench. She took a seat. The watch on her wrist counted seconds until they became minutes. After five minutes had passed, she rose, purse in hand, entered the office.
Both the professor and director were standing either side of the spare room door, door open between them. Mrs. Mosley followed the instructions given to her and entered the room, professor and director wordlessly stepping aside. Turning, she closed the door behind her.
A desk, a chair. A lamp and within the light cast by the lamp, four squares of paper of varied size arranged neatly at even distance from one another. She laid her purse at the edge of the desk, took a seat. She looked from one sample to another then selected the leftmost page before her. She pulled it toward her and began reading.
A five dollar bill torn in half then taped back together. To prove a point the director had produced the bill from his wallet, laid its middle width-wise along the edge of his desk, torn it cleanly across the crease. Keeping half, he pushed the remainder across the desk towards the professor—this gesture marking a fair conclusion to their bet.
The professor held his half before lamplight, admired the watermark of three number fives ghosting the paper. Half of Lincoln’s face now in his possession, what would it buy him? He had lost the bet then won it on a second try; the door had opened and there stood Mrs. Mosley with actual tears shining down her cheeks, eyelashes dabbed wet with mascara—blinking exaggeratedly as if that would be enough to dry them. The director had never seen the woman cry before and something about the sight shamed him. He offered her a handkerchief from his pocket. It was then both he and the professor noticed the page the woman had been holding in the hand gone limp beside her.
Is this it?—she asked. She offered the paper but neither took it; the professor recognized the handwriting.
Who was she? Mrs. Mosley wanted to know. What was her name, how long had it been?
Out of respect for the dead, Mrs. Mosley refrained from finishing this last question, left the rest of it to be supplied by conventions well-embedded in speech and memory. How long had it been since she’d died?
There may have been a misunderstanding, the director told her. Maybe he hadn’t explained clearly what she would be looking for. Three of the letters had been found at actual scenes of a suicide, only one had been forged. The one Mrs. Mosley held was the fake, he explained, written by the professor and revised by his wife just last evening.
The woman pushed the letter toward the director, confused, then after a pause drew it close to her face, exaggeratedly scanning the page for evidence of the mistake. Are you sure, she asked. Have you read it? It seems real. Maybe there had been a mix-up and they’d misattributed authenticity to the wrong letter?
Not the case, the professor assured her. He’d written it himself and could describe the contents to her, if she liked. He could even describe the sentiments and disclosures edited from the original draft by his wife. He agreed with Mrs. Mosley—he’d felt the same, having read that very version held in her hand earlier that morning.
Abrupt—the change that came over her face then. Suspicion, revulsion. Emotions that surfaced quicksilver as instinct, before they were caught by good manners and healthy fear of departmental hierarchy, domesticated just as swiftly back into the usual face she wore around the office, gone.
The director thanked her for her participation, apologized for any distress they may have caused her. She could take the rest of the day off with pay, if she liked.
Mrs. Mosley declined the offer, returned to her desk and its paperwork.
Three notes were gathered, locked among hundreds like it, in a cabinet. In the director’s office a five dollar bill was subjected to King Solomon’s justice—cut in half to determine who most feared the destruction of a healthy five dollar bill. It bothered neither of them. Each held a half toward the same lamp but from opposite angles. Each admired half a president’s face and watermarks of the number five glowing faintly through paper.
Doesn’t feel quite right, the professor said. The director agreed it didn’t feel as he thought it might—holding his half of a dare. It felt mean somehow, petty. What’d he done to earn even this much gain or loss? Someone else deserves it more—who?
On the desk the two halves were edged together. A strip of scotch tape lain along the tear. Flipped on its back, underbelly of the tear repaired as well.
Five dollars as paper but not quite, the professor said. Wouldn’t be five dollars properly until it’d found its rightful owner.
The bill was laid next to the letter, as if, given time, the letter would disclose the answer. Written by him but copied by his wife’s hand.
