"Where Letters Go to Die: A Gulag Review"…read more
I arrive at 5:00 AM, expecting to be first in line. Instead, I find a queue wrapped around the building like the bread line outside a 1962 Minsk grocery store. Babushkas in housecoats. Grown men clutching Priority Mail boxes like they're smuggling defense secrets. Nobody speaks. Nobody smiles. Somewhere, a crow caws ominously.
The building does not open at 8:30 AM. The building considers opening at 8:30 AM, deliberates on it internally, consults the Politburo, and then -- MAYBE -- cracks the door at 8:37, releasing a smell like a meat locker that lost power during a heat wave. I do not know what they are storing back there. I do not want to know. I suspect it predates the Cold War.
Once inside, you are assigned a number and a fate. Speak out of turn, sigh too loudly, or make prolonged eye contact with an employee, and you are sent to the back of the line -- or, if the postal worker's mood is sufficiently sour that day, to what longtime patrons here simply refer to as "the Gulag Line," a mythical second queue that may or may not loop through a supply closet and back out into the parking lot.
I came here today for one reason: to find out what happened to FOUR -- count them, FOUR -- letters I mailed over a month ago. Two to comrades in New Jersey. Two here in Vegas. My poor babushka has not received her money. My vendors are calling me daily, demanding payment, assuming I have simply vanished into the Nevada desert like a man who owed the wrong people money. I have become, through no fault of my own, an international letter-smuggling fugitive in the eyes of my own family.
The clerk -- no name tag, obviously, they don't want to be identified by the tribunal later -- informed me with the warmth of a Siberian wind that "mail sometimes takes time" and that there was "nothing to track." Comrade, I don't need reassurance. I need Interpol. I need a forensic mail accountant. I need to know if my letters are lost, stolen, or currently being read aloud at a KGB holiday party.
Pros: Excellent cardio from standing for three hours. Free character development.
Cons: My rubles -- er, dollars -- are missing. So is my faith in the postal system. So, possibly, is an election somewhere.
Do svidaniya, Russell Road Post Office. I will see you again next month, same line, same silence, same suspicious meat smell. Not because I want to. Because I have no choice. None of us do.
1 star. Would not defect again, but have no other option.
