High above the city, in the dustiest, windiest, sparsest corner of the north-west quadrant, Remi was sorting the mail. He had arrived out of breath at the sorting office. He glanced at his stopwatch and noted, with a flicker of irritation, that he was at the upper end of the time he allowed himself for this short journey. The early-morning rain had added an element of risk to some of the sharper corners, and on several occasions he’d had to slow almost to a stop to avoid injury to himself or damage to his bicycle. Happily, though, he lived on the same level as his workplace, and his commute was generally a straightforward three-kilometre cycle ride on the slippery paths that snaked through the tea plantations from the small home he shared with his mother. In a month or two, with the onset of the harsh summer sun, these paths would quickly mould into dusty, deeply grooved channels. In turn the channels would soon evolve into narrow ruts, which would hug his bicycle tyres so snugly that he could ride much of the way with his eyes closed – a feat he had often attempted with considerable, albeit unrecorded, success. Even in the wet spring months his journey to work was not strenuous; his bicycle could probably still find its own way through sheer habit, and this was certainly the easiest section of his day’s circuit. That morning, however, his journey had been interrupted not once but twice, on the first occasion by a neighbour, who needed help with a stuck pig, then shortly afterwards by a second neighbour, who held the firm belief that a problem shared was a problem halved. Remi had wondered, as he pedalled furiously to make up for the lost seconds, whether the sharing of a problem exactly doubled it, providing it with two minds instead of one in which to fester, and he further worried that the problem, like the simplest of organisms, was simultaneously dividing and subdividing in his brain and that of his neighbour.

As always, however, Remi’s most pressing concern had been his prompt arrival at the office for, despite the absence of a supervisor’s watchful eye or any sort of mechanism to monitor his comings and goings, Remi’s deep commitment to the state had engendered within him a work ethic unlikely to be rivalled within the whole of Vallerosa. In his decade of postal duties he had never been late for work, notching up instead some two hundred hours of unpaid overtime through his systematic early arrival. This uninterrupted record of excellence counted for little, however, and the banked hours bore no currency other than within his own conscience. Had he been pushed to verbalize the seriousness with which he approached timekeeping, he would probably admit that if he were to stray from his self-governed schedule on more than one or two occasions, he would not hesitate to sack himself.

The sorting office – a basic construction with lofty eaves and a trill of natural light that flitted down from windows too high to provide a view in or out – served multitudinous roles and could, just by a change of the swinging sign outside, transform itself from postal hub to the country’s only ticketing office to the bureau of the registrar and back again. With the ticket sign hoisted, citizens would come here from far and wide to receive their allocated quota for state-organized events, including the busy annual season of festa, dances and sporting competitions. Not long ago these duties would have been fulfilled far below in the official city buildings surrounding Piazza Rosa but the president (who had pledged his life to the rigorous execution of his responsibilities but occasionally had difficulty separating valid solutions from denial) had taken exception to opening his curtains in the morning and looking down upon slowly shuffling queues of people. Queues, the president was quite sure, were a symbol of need, the physical manifestation of demand outweighing supply and, most worryingly, a queue might suggest, to any rational man peering from his balcony above, a failure on the part of the president accurately to judge and cater for the requirements of his people. So the issue of tickets had been moved as far from the palace windows as possible. Now occasions such as the Annual Blindfolded Hog Chasing Finals or the Spousal Waltz would cause an unobtrusive and unobserved queue to snake as far as the eye could see.

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The Characters

Epigraph

In Which a Letter Stands Out