It was late one night at the 24-hour diner. 10pm was the productive time for writing. With bad coffee and scrambled eggs. Pangolin’s fingers were working on the keys, racing the low battery warning, an unknown timer. It was productive to write letters. Even if it was only for one person. And even if it was an email, not a letter. If F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hannah Arendt couldn’t be really known until their letters were read, so too it was for Pango. He thought of himself as essentially a professional letter-writer at this point. The short stories had fallen off, and the poetry felt like the last decade’s news. Now the news was correspondence.
True to his namesake, the armor didn’t unfurl to reveal the soft underside unless there was trust. And Pango didn’t trust easily. So it helped that it was late and that no one was paying attention to him. And it helped to get to know people by writing. Every new pen pal Pango had added seemed like they would be too much. But here he was, in daily correspondence with sixteen people. And his fellow letter-writers were starting to write to each other. One-to-one only. Shyness and trust difficulties don’t lend themselves to more than one recipient, and paper, hand-written letters didn’t allow for such an abominable practice, so why start just because the silicon made it possible?
Pango’s current missive was about money and expectations. What are relationships but the expectation of continued interaction? What are transactions but the consummation of relationships? What is a family but a ledger in a quarterly report? This particular correspondence with Mona had been developing for years. Her appreciation for Pango’s oblique and meandering questions and hypothesis-making had guided an intellectual journey through the woods of culture, economics, and politics. Pango loved seeing echoes of their conversations in the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’ reports on the economy. Mona sometimes quoted him directly, which tickled Pango in particular (they had a blanket fair use understanding in their correspondence).
Pango had quit the workforce three years ago, when letter-writing had become the obvious choice of profession. For some, he was a therapist. For others, he was a hopeful mirror. For yet others, he was a literary playmate. He would stay in the spare bedrooms or spare houses of his high-wordcount connections; most often in the rural New Mexico town where this diner scratched away its living, on Mathis’ farm. But also sometimes in St. Louis, sometimes in southern Norway. Money hadn’t ended up being a problem. One of his most frequent correspondents was with a journalist, and Maxy published their letters in a newspaper, more than paying for Pango’s relatively infrequent flights. And beyond the flying, Pango’s hosts were unbelievably forthcoming. Food was always delicious and available, as was love. The correspondence club had even congealed to become The Correspondence Club, a publishing/insurance/tithing association that put memorable snapshots of letters into the public domain, saved money to support members in catastrophes, and provided an equal income to each member based on a 5% tithe each member contributed from their annual take-home. Mathis contributed an unequal share (running a plumbing-focused private equity firm is pretty lucrative, it turns out), but knew that his retirement would be social and secure without the stress that seemed to accompany even his wealthiest peers. The group had just recently agreed to bring in new members, with the stipulation that any new member had to enter into letter-writing relationships for at least three months with at least three members before joining.
Pango finished his eggs, drained his coffee, and hit send on his final letter of the night. He was looking forward to leaning back and staring into the galaxy on his walk back to the farm, feeling that his light was as close as the stars appeared, even as his people were mostly so far away.
Roman Ryan 