“An Orderly Enterprise in Its Time” (fiction)

Image made by AI and the author using Adobe Spark

The Rolling Stone donor has deteriorated.

Every month, he leaves two copies of Rolling Stone in the lobby on the bench by the mailboxes. He removes the subscription labels before putting them down.

Two copies with their subscription labels removed. Every month.

It was an orderly enterprise in its time. Though he removed the label, the remainder of the magazine would be as crisp as if you had bought it at the newsstand. The lines where the panel had been removed were at nearly perfect right angles.

Really, the labels had been removed with surgical precision. Doubtless he used scissors, a ruler, perhaps even an exacto blade or box cutter.

I had deep respect for the work he did. Such care could only result from precise, polished faculties. With lines cut like that, with the copies organized in a neat stack in the same convenient, predictable place, you could be sure you were in the hands of a secure and stable mind.

The removal of the labels was the work of a meticulous intelligence that showed signs of brilliance. It was a beacon of lucidity to those of us in the apartment. It was a beacon of lucidity to us all.

Now, I concede that it did kind of ruin the cover. It was true, it ruined the cover, which looked less attractive with the subscription panel missing. It was true — what can I say? It was. It was true. True. But I didn’t hold a grudge. He had a right to hide his identity. I, myself, have masked my identity three to four times.

Besides, he had done such a beautiful job of trimming the subscription labels that it was hard not to appreciate his craftsmanship.

I admit, I do admit that I hungered to know the man’s identity. He was a craftsman, and in today’s society, craftsmen are on the decline.

Once, before the decline, I boldly approached a man I believed to be the Rolling Stone donor.

I expressed myself in the clear way that the Rolling Stone donor might appreciate: “Are you the Rolling Stone donor?” I asked. I knew a craftsman of that caliber would appreciate a sentence of such fine work.

Are you the Rolling Stone donor? A formulation that is itself a model of precision and elegance.

I wanted to send the message that I was the type of man who could appreciate the work he did with subscription labels: a like-minded amateur craftsman, even.

In fact, I had come to the point that I was considering purchasing my own dual subscription to a magazine to join him in removing the subscription labels each month (dare it be Rolling Stone? I wouldn’t want him to feel I was encroaching on his quarters). I would be the second to join his movement, and perhaps many would follow. I imagined craftsmen across the country removing the subscription panels of their magazines monthly.

It was a movement that could sweep the nation. It ought to sweep the nation.

As I approached, the man’s eyebrows stood out to me. They looked like mustaches.

“No,” he said in response to my fine verbal handiwork. He seemed to float, bobbing left and right.

“Do you know who does donate the Rolling Stone magazines?”

“I don’t read it,” he said, wavering as he hovered above the ground.

Two copies of the December issue were out on the bench. I walked over and held them up for him. “You didn’t see who left these here?”

“I didn’t read it.”

“Very well, but has anyone ever told you that you look like you should have noses on your forehead?” I asked.

His answer was to float off petulantly, doubtless to spend the rest of his afternoon circulating around the lobby. His arms had a peculiar, loose quality, and he swayed as though a mild wind blew him this way and that, much like a balloon.

I sensed something menacing about this balloon with mustaches for eyebrows.

Suddenly frightened, I took the Rolling Stone copies upstairs with me. I waited until I got inside to inspect them. I brought them to where I had torn an exceedingly small hole in the plastic that I’d put over the window. After all, an apartment needs natural light. The rest of the window was covered with plastic bags I’d gotten from the liquor store where I buy my Schnapps. There was only one window.

It was then that the depth of the change sunk in. Prior to that, I had noticed the corners of where the subscription panel had been removed starting to look a little frayed. At the time, I’d excused it: the old boy had gotten a little sloppy. We all have our off days.

But this, this was something else. The space missing was still the size of a subscription panel, but the edges were ragged, as though he had torn the label off with his hands. His hands. His hands, mind you. The panel’s uneven edge bespoke mental decline. It was a rebuke to the austere beauty we had come to depend on.

That ragged edge was a murder.

From there, things deteriorated rapidly. They say it goes that way: slow at first and then all at once. The Rolling Stone donor became a barbarian. A lunatic. By the February issue, he was tearing off the entire bottom third of the page. By June, the cover was mangled like a dog had taken it into its jaws and thrust it this way and that.

I sensed the fall ahead of us. I began to collect the evidence. I would store each magazine in its own brown envelope. My increase in precision would be inversely correlated with the donor’s decline — not that I was ever so shabby in such an area to begin with.

On the front, I would write a description of the condition the magazine had been in when I found it, the date and time, the angle of the issue relative to the other of that month in the pile (there of course always being two copies — things might decline, but we weren’t scumbags), its place relative to the bench’s edge, the approximate temperature in the room at the time of me finding it, the color of the hair of the person on the cover, and what I have had for breakfast that morning (dinner rolls, of course).

I called this collection Dossier X. I was prepared at all times to submit Dossier X to anyone who was interested. Perhaps on a conscious level no one had been interested, but I suspect that on a subconscious level, everyone had a yearning for Dossier X.

It was the April issue that spelled the end.

I saw the guy with mustaches for eyebrows before I saw the magazine. He was in the back of the lobby, floating from wall to wall. From what I could tell, he had been making his way around the perimeter of the room when I walked up. He was close to its edge when he turned to me. I didn’t bother to reintroduce myself because his face showed a gleeful familiarity.

I looked to the bench.

“Cover’s off,” I said, nodding towards the bench. Only a thin line near the spine of the magazine remained of what had been the cover.

He smiled. In the darkness of the lobby, his face had taken on a red glow.

“The cover is off,” I said.

His smile widened.

“The cover is off,” I screeched.

“I’m sorry to say that I didn’t read it,” he said.