Ajax dreamt, and in his dreams he drowned in the drifted snow.
He struggled and flailed pointlessly; each desperate attempt to establish his grasp brought only more snow down upon him. The soft, powdery frost of the drift gave way like dust and ash. Despite the cold, Ajax burned, sweltering, unable to breathe.
A whisper in his ear:
One, two, three, four... Is it snowing where you are?Who’s there?
He couldn’t remember how he’d become trapped. He couldn’t remember anything.
Again, far off:
One, two, three, four... Is it snowing where you are?Spots swam before his eyes and his head grew light. In one last attempt to save himself from suffocation, he managed to turn over, rolling onto his stomach. With a tremendous downward thrust of his arms and legs, he spent his remaining strength and all went black.
One, two, three, four... Is it snowing where you are?...
Ajax managed to wake himself from his dream with this final exertion. He found himself on his hands and knees, his chest heaving as his lungs greedily drank in the free air. Sweat ran down his face and into his eyes, and several moments passed before he realized that it had been a dream, and that the soft white hill on which he was kneeling wasn’t made of snow.
It was paper. Envelopes. Millions of them. Letters, parcels, boxes. They were piled several feet thick all about him. He had fallen asleep on them. Now fully awake, he saw that a great mountain of the stuff had slid in the night, burying him.
And although he couldn’t remember it, he had come across the dead letter office where he’d fallen asleep at sunset the day before. It was the final destination for misaddressed, mishandled, waylaid, unwanted, or otherwise undeliverable mail. The inscription on the marble arch over the great front entrance said so.
Dead Letter Office. The words had tasted strange to him at the time, but night was falling and he was cold. Forcing his way though the decrepit doors, he’d waded and climbed through peaks and troughs of countless lost envelopes, wayward packages, and forgotten mail. At no point did he see the floor. There were huge sorting rooms full of the stuff, long dark halls flooded from floor to ceiling. The basement was snowed in completely; the crush of correspondence had climbed the steps and spilled out onto the first floor.
The silence was all encompassing. Nothing stirred. Even the sound of the wind outside was deadened by the sea of paper.
He’d found an office in the back, somewhat less crowded than the other rooms. He’d hid himself behind a wall of letters before putting his head down for the night. It appeared to him now that he must’ve turned over in his sleep, disturbing the pile and triggering the avalanche. He looked around in confusion. He didn’t recognize a thing.
Ajax had almost no memory whatsoever. The past was as a blank page to him. Beyond the sunrise, he could recollect nothing.
Rubbing the blear from his eyes, he yawned. Now what? And then he heard it:
One, two, three, four... Is it snowing where you are?Ajax spun around fast enough to sprain his neck. An old-looking radio on a desk in the corner, covered in dust, had been quietly sputtering out pops and clicks through a blizzard of static. A faint, high whistling quavered through the empty carrier signal. But he had heard a voice. Most definitely. Someone had spoken. And that meant a broadcast, from somewhere.
The words were strangely familiar. Where had he heard them before?
He went over to the console and fiddled with the unlabeled nobs. The radio looked like it belonged in someone’s home, in a nice, little front room, not here in this lost place. It must have been a beautiful piece of equipment once, but its lacquered, wooden hull was scratched and pitted, and its gleaming finish was dull with wear and age. The cloth speaker covers were torn. Ajax touched one and the threads crumbled to dust beneath his fingertips. A dim, yellow glow still illuminated the grimy channel display, but the glass was cracked, and the band indicator had broken off. He had no idea what frequency he was listening to. It never occurred to him to wonder where the electricity that powered the radio was coming from.
One last time:
One, two, three, four... Is it snowing where you are?After that, the voice never came back.
...
He lazily picked up an envelope at random. Turning it over, he found that he couldn’t read the address. He didn’t even recognize the alphabet in which it had been written. After a few minutes of scavenging, Ajax found this to be the case almost universally. Most of the few addresses that were written with characters he could understand were nonetheless in languages he could not. He tore a few open, finding only the same nonsense on the pages inside, some typed, some written in scripts both ugly and beautiful.
He enjoyed the stamps, though. Some were simply pretty: small and square, bearing the images of exotic flowers and birds that he had never seen before. Others were strange, like the large circular stamp of thick, coarse paper, which bore an ancient-looking picture of a coiled serpent devouring an egg. It was affixed to a wooden box with lumpy paste that crept out from around the edges. Ajax shook the container, but immediately dropped it and kicked it away when something inside started chirping and scratching furiously. Some stamps were stranger still. One particularly complex image appeared to be hand-drawn directly onto the envelope itself. Ajax wondered what kind of postal service would honor such postage.
A thick, broad envelope caught his eye. The blue ink of both the recipient’s and the sender’s addresses was faded and blurred well past legibility, but something about the size and weight of the package appealed to him. And it bore words he could understand. A pleasing manila color, it was covered with markings, stamps, and stickers that said familiar things like “ADDRESSEE NOT FOUND” and “RETURN TO SENDER”. One stamp said simply “END IS NEAR”.
Ajax briefly pondered the ethical implications of opening the package. It was true that it was intended for someone else, but on the other hand, it was here, undeliverable beyond all hope, a lost soul.
Perhaps he wouldn’t have felt so guilty if he could remember that outside, the world had ended. The envelope would never find its way home again.
He neatly tore open the top flap with his finger. Out slid what felt like a thick magazine printed on cheap, pulpy paper. Ajax turned it over to look at the cover. It was a comic book.
The Wraith, it read in large but somber letters of a pale color. The image below was intriguingly dreary and deliciously mysterious: a silhouetted figure, in a long coat, standing beneath a dim streetlight on a corner at the end of a broad cobblestone avenue at night. Large, opulent townhouses hid behind cool trees along the sidewalk, which was lined with a tall, spidery, wrought iron fence. A lonely ship floated far away in a harbor beneath a baleful moon near the stapled fold of the book. In the distance, a dark and unfriendly cityscape rose from the water’s edge.
Ajax fanned the pages, stopping here and there to gaze at a particularly striking image. The inside of the book was much like the cover: simple, angular compositions and deep perspective, lots of ashy grays, smoky blacks, and deep, dark blues. There were very few captions or word balloons. No ads, either. Staring out from the back cover was a close-up of the silhouetted stranger that Ajax assumed to be “the Wraith” himself. Although his face was completely obscured by the shadows thrown by the streetlight in the drawing, Ajax still felt the figure staring at him somehow.
He folded the comic and slid it into a pocket deep in his navy blue raincoat.
...
Making his way out of the back office and down the hall was no mean feat. Every time Ajax took a step, he teetered on the edge of disaster. Piles of correspondence gave way, sliding here and collapsing there. Sudden pits opened up beneath him. Mountains crumbled as he passed. More than once he found it necessary to swim his way out of an unexpected deluge. His hands and face were shredded with tiny paper cuts; his neck was slick with sweat. It was sweltering, and the air was incredibly dry. Ajax’s tongue felt like a tangle of old wool in his mouth.
He eventually found his way to the main hall. At the far end of the chamber, he could see daylight peeping through the shattered doors at the entrance where he’d come in the night before. He remembered none of this, of course. It was as if he were seeing these things for the first time. In the silent stillness, Ajax could pick out individual dust motes buoyed in the thick, warm air, churning, illuminated in an auric ray. A long bank of tellers’ stations hid in the darkness across the way. Shadows clung to the vaulted ceiling high above, obscuring a strange, complicated relief of dark green marble and gold. He hadn’t noticed the mural in the dusk yesterday evening.
Not that he would have remembered it, anyway.
Ajax craned his neck back and waited until his eyes had adjusted, but still couldn’t quite make out all the ceiling’s sculpted details. Etched into the glossy, verdant stone, he could see an image of a great cloaked figure at one end, his left hand raised, covering his eyes. Below, two smaller versions of the same figure clutched at each other’s throats. The one on the right had been damaged at some point. The marble comprising his face had been violently gouged away, leaving only a rough depression. The face of the figure on the left was twisted in a horrible grimace of pain. Beneath them in important-looking characters read:
1991 V. Ex.Ajax knew it all meant something, but had no idea what.
Something stirred in the twilight of his forgetfulness, prompted by the echoes of meaning and history in the image, but amnesia settled over his thoughts like a soft, gray curtain of rain. Today would be like any other day: remembering nothing, knowing nothing, doing nothing, going nowhere. His life was like an endless, dim dream from which he couldn’t wake. He was almost always hungry and thirsty, and seldom remembered ever having eaten or drunk anything, but he must have done so at some point, or else he would have died already. Wouldn’t he?
He wondered.
Eventually, Ajax looked at the watch on his left wrist. The face was cracked and the hands missing. It seemed terribly appropriate. Turning his wrist, he opened his hand and noticed something written there on his palm, in faded blue ink that spidered through the cracks and lines in his calloused skin:
Your name is Ajax Auslander. It was nearly faded beyond legibility.
Though he didn't know it, it wasn’t his real name, if he’d ever even had one. He certainly didn’t remember what that was. He’d simply chosen words at random from a book he’d found until he came across a pair that he liked, that sounded good together. He had no memory of ever having done this, however. He knew that those words were written there on his palm, here and now, and that was all.
After searching his pockets, he took out a pen, removed the cap with his teeth, and wrote the words again, tracing each new letter on the ghost of its former self, fearful that the memory of his name would fade with the ink.
Your name is Ajax Auslander.
