The Mailbox Game

The Mailbox Game

I’ve heard in other cities the children start playing the Mailbox Game at age eleven, and although I don’t quite believe it, I’ve also been told that in some places, you start playing when you’re two or three. I try to tell myself that it’s just a rumor, that no sane parent would encourage a three-year-old to participate in that kind of bedlam, but at the same time, I know there is someone saying that same thing about how cold you’d have to be to let someone my age play the Game.

You start playing at about fourteen here, in August. You peer with wide, weary, doe-like eyes out the backseat window of your parents’ car as it slides smoothly from that sunny, golden-skied life of yours into the grasp of a squat, shadowy parking garage where the walls are pasty and gray and obnoxiously opaque almost to the point where you’re sure you couldn’t break through them and escape if you had a bulldozer at your disposal. As you swing open the door, one foot on the ground, you see your parents smiling reassuringly, their eyes reflecting the overhead fluorescents like the distant glint of streetlights that lets a hitchhiker know he is again within reach of the forces of humanity, but as you try to smile back, a strange chill travels up and down your nerves, and before you have a chance to look away, you see the light dim until your parents look like a set of underexposed stock photos, not your real parents, who wouldn’t even dream of taking you here, of all places, but some cardboard impostors , perpetually frozen in feigned encouragement as they walk you down to the guillotine. You blindly yank your cheek muscles as high up as they’ll go in attempt to appease these demons that have tricked you and throw the door back into its socket behind you. Then you run.

You go to the only place you see to go: a white doorway under a filthy, flickering backlit sign that reads ORIENTATION in a mercilessly serif-less font, where the rest of the kids your age are pooling, hesitant yet scared more of some unknown force behind them, until it seems as if they’re piranhas closing in on the opening. You seem to take a thousand steps forward without making any progress for hours until you find yourself in a stark white chamber about the size of a basketball court. As you sit down in the nearest of the hundreds of immaculately arranged white folding chairs, the door you came in slides shut, and a woman in a solid gray suit mechanically steps forward to a white podium and explains the rules of the Mailbox Game.

You play the Game for four years, longer if you’re in a town where they start earlier. You’re issued a set of plain white cotton garments, same as everyone else, and then they wash the makeup, hair product, nail polish, whatever you have that could set you apart, off of you, until you’re as clean and bland as a toilet bowl, until the only difference between you and the poor sap next to you is how much you’re willing to do to win the Game.

You spend the next four years marching through an infinitely long hallway in a single file line. Right, left, right, left, right, left. You can’t stop for any reason, not if you’re hungry, thirsty, tired, bored, ill. Just right, left, right, left, right, left, on and on, trying to amass points. You get points for staying in line. You get points for marching on in the face of exhaustion, for putting everything in your life second to the simple yet strenuous act of plodding along in that silent parade. You get points for interacting with the people in line with you, but not too much; after all, you can’t have them finishing the game with more points than you. You have to watch them, see what they’re doing, do it better yourself.

At some point in the Game, you start to see how many points you have. Lining the endless hall are machines that stamp passing players with big black numbers, letting the oily dye sink into the creases of your identical white clothing. The first number is between one and four, and if you’re lucky, it will eventually creep upwards until it’s approaching five. The longer you walk the more numbers end up plastered on your clothes, the biggest of which remains the one between one and five. There are numbers that go up to 240, 800, 36, and a particularly big one that can make it all the way to 2400 if you walk tirelessly enough.

And the machines don’t just stamp numbers; there are any number of them that label you like a can of anchovies as you tread past them. You might look down to find the words varsity basketball tattooed across your torso or newspaper editor up the length of your arm. Pretty soon you realize you need more of these brands on you, and you adjust your walking regimen accordingly. You’re on the student council now, you’re in the jazz band, you volunteer, but it doesn’t matter; it all comes from the same stamp machine. It all goes into the same point total.

About 75% into your fourth year of the never-ending march, you spot the end of the path. There, about a hundred yards and three hundred people in front of you, stands a small, circular, raised platform made out of marble. In the center of the platform looms the Mailbox.

For the first time since your parents dropped you off at orientation almost four years ago, you stop walking, and you wait. You stand still as one by one your comrades in front of you slowly ascend to the platform, some fidgeting about with nervous glances in every direction, some barely managing to drag their fatigued, nearly apathetic carcasses up the smooth steps, watching as each one fumbles with the Mailbox door and reaches inside to see what their points are worth.

Prior to this cruel judgment day, your point total has been recorded and carefully threaded though a mile-long set of algorithms in a computer somewhere else in the building. The algorithm changes every year, every month, sometimes even for every person, growing more and more complex with each number that feeds into it. It accounts for every single component of your very essence during the past four years, quantifying your character, your personality, your moral fiber, your work ethic, the clothes you wear, the sports you play, the magazines you read, your family’s income, your very soul, until you cease to be a soul and become an number. The number determines which letters you find when you open the mailbox at the end of the Game.

The faces always vary as the eyes reach the stack of letters for the first time. Relief. Gleeful surprise. Teary-eyed surprise. Teary-eyed despair. Anger. Denial. All that work and this is what I get repaid with? A gallon of arsenic-tinged shame for in-state tuition? Anything below excellence is met with a cool glare and a diluted ostracism, the sub-superhuman the anathema of the American Way. Meanwhile, those whose numbers have been received favorably descend upon their fellow participants, the faintest glint shining in their dead starved eyes and a tinge of color beginning to return to their pale cheeks, white from the years without sun. You try to remember their names, but suddenly the only sounds you can pin to them form the word Ivy, and you know that you are no longer in the same genus as them. They are your superiors now, former humans that have ascended to divinity, leaving the likes of you behind in a pile of your own dust.

And then, all of the sudden, you can’t see anything. You’re pushed like an animal into a dark, windowless, soundproof chamber to wait until your four years are up, stripped of all possessions save one, the letter you’ve chosen to take from the Mailbox. But even that means nothing; it’s just a word on a sheet of letterhead. You’re fairly sure it will take you to some other place, some other phase of your life, once your time is up, but you can’t see it. You don’t know what it’s going to be like there, if it’s friendly, hostile, unlivable. You don’t know if it will be better or worse than what you just went through, just that you swear you spent the last four years letting everything, the numbers, the labeling machines, the lights, the exhaustion, chip away at you just so you could go there, and you forget every survival instinct, every whim of logic, every gut feeling in a desperate attempt to have the faith in your society necessary to believe that they wouldn’t put you through that unless there was a reason.

Welcome to high school.

Try to get through it with your soul intact.