Harwood Model III

Harwood Model III
Originally uploaded by Snurri.

"One entrepreneur's attempt to alleviate the isolation that so many citizens feel, being cut off from the outside world, has resulted in the ornate, magical mailboxes of Clinton Harwood. Harwood, a blacksmith and amateur chaos magician, claimed to have been inspired by the concept of Schrödinger's cat; the difference being that the potential states of a locked mailbox are not 'dead' or 'alive' but rather empty or not. Over the course of four years of experiments, during which he was nearly killed several times (at one point he conjured a badger, which took two of his fingers), he calibrated potentialities until he perfected his product. Essentially, he created a way for his customers to receive mail which might have been sent had the Exile never occurred. . . . 'When you open that box in the morning,' Harwood has been quoted as saying, 'you get to feel like everything is back to normal, if only for a few minutes. That's what I'm selling--a little bit of comfort.' . . . In the early days (the first model of the line premiered in 1974) he sold that comfort for prices few could afford. Mayor Faldbakken III was one of Harwood's first customers, and appeared on Channel 8 with a postcard, dated the week before, from a cousin who was traveling in Hawaii. 'The mail wasn't this fast before the Exile!' the mayor said. The joke fell flat with the city's former postal corps, but those citizens who still had televisions were entranced. Most, however, had to wait for Harwood's later, lower-priced models. . . . The low-end Harwood mailbox yields up its riches once per week: letters from loved ones, magazine subscriptions, even utility bills for services no longer provided. . . . Calibrating the potentiality of mail has proved to be inexact, however. Since the very principle of the Harwood is to receive correspondence never sent from a world which appears to have entirely forgotten the city, it is perhaps unsurprising that some deliveries come from worlds that never existed. Letters from lovers never met have been known to cause marital crises, and a certain quantum irregularity seems to have centered upon People Magazine--nearly every Harwood receives it, but the content of each copy differs from the next in some way. . . . Unheard of before the Exile, People has become one of the preferred forms of escape for citizens. Speculating upon what celebrity stories are true has become an art form of sorts, with the most seasoned practitioners building narratives of the outer world based upon their collections. A Steve McQueen presidency, for example, invalidates any report of the actor's death, which in turn gives the lie to all other stories within issues reporting his death, and so forth. . . . Many Harwood owners treasure even their junk mail, such as advertising circulars, many of which seem to consist of rejected celebrities pitching rejected products using rejected copy; the most common depicts a Bolivian soccer striker named Obedencio guzzling a bottle of Pringles Quench next to the slogan 'Everyone sweats in the same language.' Obedencio has never appeared in People, but many neighborhoods celebrate his birthday regardless, having arbitrarily set it as June 14th. . . . Harwoods are still being made today, although Clinton Harwood himself was killed on January 3, 1989 during a publicity stunt. He had placed one of his mailboxes at the base of the Black Tower; joking that the tower's inhabitants would finally show themselves when he brought them their mail, he unlocked the box and disappeared in a plume of flame that was seen two miles away. (See p.94.) The Harwood still stands at the base of the Black Tower, but the key is lost, and no one has approached it since that day." (p.387-388)