At
first he refused to deliver junk mail because it was stupid, all those
deodorant ads, moneymaking ideas and contests. Then he began to
doubt the importance of the other mail he carried. He began to
randomly select first class mail for non-delivery. After he had
finished his mail route each day he would return home with his handful
of letters and put them in the attic. He didn't open them and
never even looked at them again. It was as if he were an agent of
Fate, capricious and blind. In the several years before he was
caught, friends vanished, marriages failed, business deals fell
through. Toward the end he became more and more bold, deleting
houses, then whole blocks from his route. He began to feel he'd
been born in the wrong era. If only he could have been a Pony
Express rider galloping into some prairie town with an empty bag, or
the runner from Marathon collapsing in the streets of Athens, gasping,
"No news."
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