The Boundary is an invisible line, but after a night untouched, it’s secreted its own membrane of small objects that we dutifully collect and catalogue and sort into their respective containers. There’s a box for house keys, a box for framed photographs, for children’s toys, for musical instruments, for teeth, for jewelry, for wristwatches. These are the offerings the dead like to leave us.
After we have cleared the Boundary of what has been left in the night, we watch for anything new. It’s an unappealing job, somewhere between sanitation and mortuary services, but someone has to do it, and it’s not exactly one of those occupations that allows inattention either. You can’t listen to a podcast while patrolling the Boundary, because the Boundary isn’t always where it was a few minutes ago. Drawing a chalk outline is useless, just as drawing a chalk outline for the ocean is useless. Death ebbs in tides, and takes away anything that steps in too close.
Two weeks after I started here, I saw someone get swallowed by the Boundary. He was there then he wasn’t. Six days later, we found his wedding ring lying beside the Boundary. Fortuitously, he’d engraved it with his and his wife’s names.
As I watch, I see something bright red begin to push itself across the Boundary. First the headlights, then the red hood, the cab, the yellow rubber wheels, and finally the blue truck bed. It takes five minutes for the toy dump truck to slowly inch its way across the Boundary, its wheels rolling incrementally on the grass. I imagine it must take a great amount of effort to pass objects across the Boundary, though there’s no way to be sure. I wait until the truck is all the way across before retrieving it. It’s faintly sticky and warm, as if it has just left a child’s hands.
After that, I find a crystal pear, a blue and white polka dot umbrella, a stuffed snow leopard, a pair of boots tied together by their laces, and a postcard. The picture on the postcard is of a cherry blossom tree in bloom. The writing on the back reads “Dear Daniel, today I took Harriet to the beach and she did five somersaults. Miss you terribly. See you soon. Love, April.” The address is in town: 682 West Angelwood Street, #5E. I slip the postcard into my pocket when no one is looking.
I put the rest of the offerings in their boxes. They’ll get taken to a storage facility somewhere out of the city along with everything else unclaimed. Usually it’s only the jewelry that gets picked up, either by relatives of the deceased, or by thieves.
Of course, none of us are saints. I have a watch I took from the dead, and I’ve even gifted an ex of mine with a bracelet that made its way across the Boundary. It’s less stealing, more salvage. Most of these items go unclaimed. And if you think the dead will seek retribution for wrongfully wearing their offerings, think again. The dead have their land; we have ours. Nothing crosses the Boundary except for memories.
#
I’ve recently moved in with the girl I’m seeing now. Every Tuesday and Thursday evening, she teaches clarinet to retirees, and the apartment becomes unlivable. The cacophony of five beginner clarinets all sounding off at once is an ungodly noise that’s so horrible, I see one woman preemptively remove her hearing aids as she sits down. Of course, I usually find somewhere else to be on these days.
Today, I linger. My girlfriend likes when I chat with her students before they begin their lessons. She says it makes them feel less lonely and more connected, and it’s important to foster connections with the elderly. Before anyone of them can open their clarinet cases, I produce the postcard.
The hearing aids go back in. They all want to know who April is, and whether Harriet is still doing somersaults on the beach and whether Daniel still lives on Angelwood Street, though it is likely that one or all of these people are dead. I tell them that I plan to go to the address written on the postcard and see for myself. This receives ecstatic encouragement. My girlfriend sends me nonverbal communications with her eyebrows from across the living room telling me to leave; she has been trying in vain to start everyone on scales for the past five minutes.
She’s a talented musician. The community hall orchestra asks her every July Fourth to perform the opening glissando for “Rhapsody in Blue”. I like watching her carve reeds with her little sharp knife. She swears by cane over plastic, cures each thin piece of wood by holding it between her tongue and the roof of her mouth. I like that something dead can come back to life when she gets it wet in her mouth.
I think she will break up with me soon. Every time we go to dinner at our favorite Thai restaurant, I mourn their delicious crab rangoon. I won’t be able to come back after she dumps me. Same with the green carpeted used bookstore and the park hidden behind the church and the coffee shop built out of salvaged railcars and the bridge where the swans gather. All of these places will become impassable, the memory of her too powerful to trespass on.
The postcard has been passed around and examined, and my girlfriend is looking at the door, then at me, then back at the door. I stand magnanimously and put the postcard in my shirt’s front pocket. The retirees all wish me luck and open their clarinet cases. As I leave, I see the woman surreptitiously remove her hearing aids again.
#
Angelwood Street is easy to find, but the address itself is in a building that requires visitors to be buzzed in, so I wait until a delivery man steps inside, and I catch the door as it’s closing, giving him a nod as I brush past as if I live here. I feel like a spy, or a hired killer. I’ve never done anything like this. I’ve taken many offerings from the dead, but never to give those offerings back to anyone who might remember the dead’s name. I can’t tell if it feels obscene or noble.
I’ve thought long and hard about what kind of offering I would leave if the worst should happen. I go back and forth between something enigmatic like a deer skull, and something mundane like my anchovy keychain with one eye missing where my thumb rubbed it off. I don’t own a deer skull yet, but I think it would make an interesting story for whoever found it at the Boundary. After all, that’s why I’m here.
I stand at 5E’s door for far too long, my hand poised to knock. The chance that Harriet or April or Daniel or anyone with any ties to them still lives at this address is slim. The housing market is good, but not that good. Renters rent, and then they move, and all they leave behind are faint watermarks on windowsills where their houseplants once grew.
I’m about to turn around and leave. I’ll invent a vague story to appease my girlfriend’s nosy clarinetists so they won’t think I’m a coward. But before I can make my escape, someone steps out of the elevator. He walks up to 5E, keys in his hand. He looks me up and down and asks me if I’ve brought him a postcard.
#
5E is full of postcards from April. They line the walls, Daniel having carefully arranged them by date of receipt. The earliest postcards begin on the fridge, held up by magnets with real estate agents’ faces on them, and they make their way to the still blank wall behind the couch.
The postcards are of steam trains, lighthouses, mountain summits, Roman ruins, Van Gogh paintings, botanical gardens, salt mines, and famous skyscrapers. A lot of them mention Harriet, though some of them are just April saying Dear Daniel, I love you. I miss you. I think about you all the time.
I ask Daniel if April traveled a lot.
No, he says. The furthest April ever went was Calgary, once, on a work trip.
And Harriet?
She was too little to travel, Daniel answers.
I ask Daniel when the postcards started coming.
Daniel says, five years after they both died.
Well, what can you say to that. I help Daniel put the postcard up on the blank wall. He admires the tree in the picture, its cherry blossoms pink and vivid, already falling and in flight when the photograph was taken. Daniel especially likes the story of Harriet doing somersaults on the beach. He can’t remember if it actually happened, but after a moment of thought, he decides that it must have. Yes, it must have.
People bring him postcards from the Boundary all the time. Workers like me who hand deliver them, but more often they show up in his mailbox, freshly stamped. He says he can never move from this address, so that April’s postcards will always find him.
I study the postcards for a long time. Most of all, I think it’s a shame, a real shame, that Daniel can’t ever write April a postcard back. One that says Dear April, give Harriet a hug for me, and lots of kisses. Or maybe Dear April, I love you too. Let me go.
The dead can send us offerings, but everything that’s sent from this side over to them always comes right back. There’s only one way for the living to cross the Boundary.
I know my girlfriend’s students will ask what I have seen on Angelwood Street, and now I will have to tell them the truth, and they won’t like it. Perhaps my girlfriend will break up with me by then and save me the trouble, but perhaps not. These things never happen the way we expect, though I usually have a good sense for upcoming calamity and I can take care of myself. This has served me well. I have sorted many precious memories into boxes and shipped them away. I have borne away the offerings of the dead and not given a second thought to what lives they led.
It’s still hard to leave Daniel behind.
I take the elevator down, and stand in the lobby looking at Daniel’s name on the mailbox and then I take the elevator right back up and knock on the door to 5E until he answers. I ask him if he’s ever thought about learning the clarinet.