Free The Moon In Its Flight by Gilbert Sorrentino

should, well, no need to go into the nooks and crannies of that impossible eventuality. At present.
    To your right, you will notice a series of shelves or pigeonholes stocked with stationery of varied hues, shades, tones, and colors. On closer inspection—do not attempt to inspect at this time, PLEASE!—on closer inspection you will see that the stationery contains the preprinted names and addresses of those salesmen who are yours to assist, obey, jolly along, praise, flatter, and take the blame for in all matters epistolary. There are also, in the drawers beneath the shelves and pigeonholes, paradigms, or model letters, which we call “dummies,” that will guide you in drafting replies to the various letters sent “your” particular salesmen, letters requesting samples, information, guidance, loans, photographs, reading lists, and, on those impossibly rare if not impossible occasions that I just mentioned, requests for sexual dalliances of diverse types. These, as I have said, will never reach you, actually, but in case they should get by Mr. Bjornstrom’s seasoned vetters, they are to be ignored by you, and such occasions brought to my attention, whereupon you will probably be, as they say, “let go.” For no reason should such a letter be answered in your salesman’s name, is that understood? Is that understood? It may seem unfair that one or more of you might possibly be “let go” through no fault of your own, through, as it were, your devotion to duty and the job. It is unfair, but life is always terribly hard on those with neither money nor power, despite propaganda to the contrary. Am I right? Of course I’m right! If you should, how shall I put it?, cheat, that is, fail to call such a misguided letter to my attention, the furnaces are always roaring in the sub-sub-basement! Ha! Ha! Ha! I like my little joke!
    You will discover that the stationery on the shelves is nothing, really, other than good American paper and nothing but; nothing to be in awe of, letterheads or no. And you would do well to ignore the rumors suggesting otherwise. Rumors of all sorts are born and circulate in a large and virtually omnipotent corporation such as this one. They emanate, for the most part, from the “creative” divisions of the firm, the Professional Trash-Fiction Division, the Memoir Division, the Hip-Youth Division, the Sure-Fire Division, the Dim-Bulb Division, the Texas School-Adoption-of-Everything Division, the Devout-Christian Rapture-Mania Division, the Unborn-Child-Series Division, as well as those divisions that support what the company likes to think of as its old soldiers—those editors, publicists, accountants, and lunch-eaters who have made their lives into one long testament to their belief that they have done their best to make real for all humankind the kind of book that is both an exciting read and a contribution to the general culture of regular Americans—and others, of course, depending on how the rights are spelled out in the contracts. As their unofficial coat-of-arms proclaims: GOOD BOOKS, BIG BUCKS. You may, at times, even hear a rumor that can be traced to the Shipping and Receiving Department, but the nonentities who toil therein are prone to whining, and may be ignored or, better yet, reviled at any opportunity that presents itself. Management and the Correspondence Department tend to think of these employees as we do waitresses—necessary, perhaps, but wonderful targets for insult. Best for you to ignore all information that is not included in the company newspaper, edited by Mr. Pearl, The White Shirt.
    The stationery, or paper, then, comes in the following colors—or hues or shades: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, black, and white. The letters that you send to your salesmen’s correspondents will be on white paper. Clear, sharp copies will be made on the varicolored stationery and distributed as follows: red to Mr. Bjornstrom; orange to the Correspondence Department