a warm letter into a void, answered by a mailroom form · S6

The family channel at its bleakest: Avril's chirpy, newsy letters keep arriving as if a two-way relationship were ongoing — the pathos, the editorial header says, is that they imply "a context of regular inter-party communication, still" — and Orin's answer is to route the reply through a team mailroom, a form thank-you-for-your-support under a fictitious technician's name. A mother's genuine address met not with silence, which would at least be honest, but with a counterfeit of response manufactured to look like no one is home. The letter is real and the reply is a machine pretending to be a stranger.