The Ignored (10 page)

No one at my table even looked at me.

Later that afternoon, Stewart called me into his office. “I heard you
were at the employee picnic and you won the grand prize.”

He
heard?
He was there.

I nodded, saying nothing.

“You seem to be spending an awful lot of time socializing on company
time. I would think with your deadlines and all the work you have to do, you’d
spend a little less time with your friends and a little more time on your
assignments.”

I stared at him. “Attendance at the picnic was required. I wouldn’t’ve
gone—”

“You do a lot of gabbing with your buddies during work hours, don’t
you?”

“What buddies? I don’t know anyone here. I come, do my job, and go
home.”

He smiled slightly, a hard, mirthless smile. “That’s your problem,
Jones. Your attitude. If you put a little more effort into your work and started
thinking of this as a career instead of just a job, you might get somewhere in
life. It would behoove you, I think, to be a little more, of a team player.”

I did not even bother to respond. For the first time, I noticed how
empty and bare Stewart’s office looked. There was nothing to indicate its
occupant’s personal tastes or interests. There were no framed photos on the
desk, no knickknacks or plants in the room. The few papers tacked to the
bulletin board on the wall were all memos or official company notices. The pile
of magazines on the corner of the desk were all technical journals whose address
labels were imprinted with the name and P.O. box of the corporation.

“Jones?” Stewart said. “Are you listening to me?”

I nodded.

“Why haven’t you been submitting your biweekly progress report?”

I stared at him. “You told me I didn’t have to turn in a report. You
said that was only for the programmers.”

A trace of a smile touched his lips. “This requirement is clearly stated
in your job description, which I suggest you take the time to read.”

“If I had known it was required, I would have done it. But you told me
specifically that I didn’t have to turn in a progress report.”

“You do.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me that before? Why did you wait this long
before letting me know?”

He glared at me. “As I’m sure you’re aware, your performance review is
coming up in a few weeks. I’m afraid I have no choice but to make note of your
poor work attitude and continual insubordination.”

Insubordination?

This isn’t the fucking army, I wanted to say. I’m not your slave, you
fascist son of a bitch.

But I said nothing.

When he was through with his diatribe, I went back to my office.

Derek looked up when I returned. That in itself was unusual. But what
was even stranger was that he actually spoke to me.

“Were you at the picnic?” he asked.

I was still ticked off at Stewart and was tempted to give Derek a taste
of his own medicine, to not answer him, to ignore him and act as though he
weren’t there. But I couldn’t do it. “Yeah,” I said, “I was there.”

“Do you know who won the drawing? The grand prize?”

Was this a joke? I frowned at him.

“It’s for the employee newsletter,” he explained. “I’ve been asked to
compile a list.”

“I won,” I said slowly.

He looked surprised. “Really? Why didn’t you go up and collect your
prize, then?”

“I did. Here it is.” I picked up the certificate from my desk and waved
it at him.

“Oh.” He started writing, then looked up at me. “What’s your first
name?” he asked.

This was ridiculous.

“Bob,” I found myself answering.

“Last name?”

“Jones.”

He nodded. “It’ll be in the next issue of the newsletter.”

He went back to his work.

He did not speak to me for the rest of the day.

Jane was not there when I came home. There was a note from her on the
refrigerator telling me that she’d gone to the library to find some books on the
Montessori method of teaching preschool children. It was just as well. I wasn’t
in the mood to either talk or listen to anyone else. I just wanted to be alone
and think.

I popped a frozen burrito into the microwave.

After my short conversation with Derek, I had not been able to
concentrate on work for the remainder of the afternoon. I had placed papers
before me on my desk and, pen in hand, had pretended to read them, but my mind
had been on anything but instruction manuals. I kept going over everything Derek
had said, searching for something that would indicate he had been joking or
playing with me, not willing to believe that he really had not known my name. I
kept wishing he had asked for the spelling. That at least would have allowed me
a legitimate out. I could have rationalized that he had known my name but had
not known the spelling.

But that wasn’t the case.

No matter how much I replayed that conversation in my head, no matter
how much I tried to analyze what we both had said, I kept reaching the same
conclusion. He had not known my name, though we’d been sharing an office for
over two months. He had not seen me win the drawing, though I had stood on the
stage in front of him.

I was invisible to him.

Hell, maybe the reason he never talked to me was because he didn’t even
notice I was there.

The bell on the microwave rang, and I took out my burrito, dropping it
on a plate. I poured myself a glass of milk and walked out to the living room,
turning on the TV and sitting down on the couch. I tried to eat and watch the
news, tried not to think about what had happened. I blew on my burrito, took a
bite. Tom Brokaw was reporting the results of a recent AIDS poll, looking
seriously into the camera as a the image of a caduceus flashed on the blue
screen behind him, and he said, “According to the latest
New York Times
-NBC poll, the average American believes—”

The average American.

The phrase jumped out at me.

The average American.

That was me. That’s what I was. I stared at Brokaw. I felt as though I
were sick and my illness had been successfully diagnosed, but there was none of
the relief that would have accompanied such a medical breakthrough. The
description was true, as far as it went, but it was also too general, too
benign. There was reassurance in those three words, the implication of normalcy.
And I was not normal. I was ordinary, but I was not just ordinary. I was extra
ordinary, ultra ordinary, so damn ordinary that even my friends did not remember
me, that even my own coworkers did not notice me.

I had a weird feeling about this. The chill I’d felt when Lois and
Virginia had insisted they’d seen me at Stacy’s birthday lunch was back. This
whole thing was getting way too freaky. It was one thing to be just an average
guy. But it was quite another to be so… so pathologically average. So
consistently middle-of-the-road in every way that I was invisible. There was
something creepy about it, something frightening and almost supernatural.

On an impulse, I reached over and picked up yesterday’s newspaper off
the table. I found the Calendar section and looked at the boxed statistics that
showed the top five films of the past weekend.

They were the five films I most wanted to see.

I turned the page to look at the top ten songs of the week.

They were my current favorites, ranked in order of preference.

My heart pounding, I stood and walked across the room to the
block-and-plank shelves next to the stereo. I scanned my collection of records
and CDs, and I realized that it was a history of the number one albums over the
past decade.

This was crazy.

But it made sense.

If I was average, I was average. Not just in appearance and personality,
but in everything. Across the board. It explained, perhaps, my adherence to the
Golden Mean, my unshakable belief in the rightness of the adage “moderation in
all things.” Never in my life had I gone to extremes. In anything. I had never
eaten too much or too little. I had never been selfishly greedy or selfishly
altruistic. I had never been a radical liberal or a reactionary conservative. I
was neither a hedonist nor an ascetic, a drunk nor a teetotaler.

I had never taken a stand on anything.

Intellectually, I knew it was incorrect to think that compromise was
always the ideal solution, that truth always existed somewhere in the middle of
two opposing passions—there was no happy medium between right and wrong,
between good and evil—but the equivocation that rendered me impotent in
regard to minor practical decisions afflicted me morally, too, and I inevitably
vacillated between differing points of view, stuck squarely in the middle and
unable to definitely and unequivocally take a side.

The average American.

My extraordinary ordinariness was not just an aspect of my personality,
it was the very essence of my being. It explained why I alone among my peers had
never questioned or complained about the outcome of any election or the winner
of any award. I had always been squarely in the mainstream and had never
disagreed with anything agreed upon by the majority. It explained why none of my
arguments in any of my high school or college classes had made even the
slightest dent in the course of a debate.

It explained, as well, my odd attraction to the city of Irvine. Here,
where all the streets and houses looked the same, where homeowners’ associations
tolerated no individuality in the external appearance of houses or landscaping,
I felt comfortable and at home. The homogeneity appealed to me, spoke to me.

But it wasn’t logical to think that the fact that I was average rendered
me invisible, caused people to ignore me. Was it? Most people, when you came
down to it, were not exceptional. Most people were normal, average. Yet they
were not ignored by their coworkers, friends, and acquaintances. It was not only
the sublime and the horrific that were noticed, not only the individual and
idiosyncratic that had their existences validated by attention.

But I was average.

And I was ignored.

I tried to think of some action or event that would disprove my theory,
something I’d done that would prove I was not totally ordinary. I remembered
being picked on by bullies when I was in the third grade. I hadn’t been average
then, had I? I had been different enough to have been specifically chosen as the
object of harassment by the three toughest kids in the school. One time, in
fact, they’d caught me on my way home. One of them held me down while the other
two took off my pants. They played Keep Away, tossing the pants over my head to
each other while I tried vainly to intercept their throws. A crowd gathered,
laughing, and there were girls in the crowd, and for some reason I liked the
fact that the girls were there. I liked the fact that they saw me in my
underwear.

I used to think of that later, when I was a teenager, when I was
masturbating. It made me more excited to think of those girls watching me trying
to get my pants from the bullies.

That wasn’t normal, was it? That wasn’t average.

But I was grasping at straws. Everyone had little offbeat fantasies and
perversities.

And I probably had the average number of them.

Even my out-of-the-ordinary experiences were ordinary. Even my
irregularities were regular.

Christ, even my name was average. Bob Jones. Next to John Smith, it was
probably the most common name in the phone book.

My burrito was cold, but I no longer felt hungry. I no longer felt like
eating. I looked up at the TV. A reporter was describing a mass killing in
Milwaukee.

Most people were probably watching the news right now.

The average American was watching news with his dinner.

I got up, switched the channel to
M*A*S*H.
I carried my plate
into the kitchen, dumped the leftover burrito into the garbage, placed the plate
in the sink. I took a beer out of the refrigerator. I felt like getting good and
drunk.

I brought the beer back with me into the living room and sat there
watching TV, trying to concentrate on the
M*A*S*H
episode, trying not to
think about myself.

I realized that the lines punctuated by the laugh track were the ones I
found funniest.

I switched off the TV.

Jane came home around nine. I’d already downed a six-pack and was
feeling, if not better, at least far enough out of it that I no longer cared
about my problems. She looked at me, frowned, then walked past me and put her
notebooks down on the kitchen table. She picked up the certificate from where
I’d left it. “What’s this?” she asked.

I’d forgotten about winning the dinner. I looked at her, hoisted my
current beer. “Congratulate me,” I said. “I won a drawing at work.”

She read the name on the certificate. “Elise?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“This is great!”

“Yeah. Great.”

She frowned at me again. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.” I finished my beer, put it next to
its empty brothers on the table, and headed to the bathroom where I promptly
threw up.

We went to dinner at Elise three weeks later.

A child of the suburbs, I could not remember ever eating at a restaurant
that was not part of a chain. From McDonald’s to Love’s to The Black Angus to
Don Jose’s, the restaurants I patronized were not unique, individually owned
businesses but corporate cookie-cutter eateries, comfortable in the reliability
of their conformity. As we walked into the entryway and I saw the elegant decor,
the classy clientele, I realized that I did not know how to act here, did not
know what to do. Despite the fact that both Jane and I had dressed up—she in
her prom gown, me in my interview suit—and outwardly fit in with the
restaurant’s patrons, I felt jarringly out of place among the other diners. We
seemed to be decades younger than everyone else. And instead of actually paying
for our meal, we’d be using that stupid gift certificate. I put my hand in my
pocket, felt the ruffled edge of the certificate, and I wondered if I’d brought
enough money for a tip. I suddenly wished we hadn’t come.