The Ignored (17 page)

I walked from room to room, wing to wing, floor to floor, past English
furniture and French silverware and Indian statues, scanning the paintings on
the walls, looking for one of the big names, one of the heavy hitters. Finally I
found one. Renoir. A painting of people eating at an outdoor cafe.

There were no other guests in this gallery or even this wing, only a
lone uniformed guard standing silently by the entry way. I stepped back, into
the center of the room. This, I knew, was class. This was culture. This was Art
with a capital A.

I stared at the painting and felt cold. I wanted to experience the
magic, the sense of awe and wonder, the feeling of transcendence that people
were supposed to have when confronted with great works of art, but I felt only a
mild enjoyment. I looked at the other paintings on display. Before me were the
treasures of the world, the very finest objects that man had produced in the
history of the planet, and all I could muster was a halfhearted interest. My
senses were muffled, subdued, stifled by the nature of my being, by the fact
that I was completely and utterly ordinary.

The extraordinary had no power to touch me.

It was what I’d thought, what I’d feared, and although it only confirmed
what I’d expected, that confirmation hit home with the force of a death
announcement.

I looked again at the Renoir, moved closer, studied it, examined it,
trying to force myself to feel something, anything, trying desperately to
understand what others might see in the work, but it was beyond me. I turned to
go—

—and saw someone standing in the entryway of the gallery, staring at
me.

The tall, sharp-eyed man I’d seen at the mall.

A wave of cold passed over me, through me.

And then he was gone, disappearing behind the wall to the left of the
door. I hurried over to the entryway, but by the time I reached it there was no
sign of him. There was only a lone couple, dressed in matching black
turtlenecks, walking toward me from the far end of the wing.

I was tempted to ask the guard whether he’d seen the man, but I realized
instantly that he wouldn’t have. The guard was facing into the room, away from
where the man had been, and he would not have seen a thing.

The museum suddenly seemed darker, colder, bigger than it had, and as J
walked alone toward the front of the building, past silent wings and empty
rooms, I realized that I was holding my breath.

I was scared.

I walked faster, wanting to run but not daring to, and it was only when
I was safely outside, in the sunshine, surrounded by people, that I was again
able to breathe normally.

On Monday, David was gone. I was not told why and I did not ask, but his
desk was cleared off, the metal shelves behind him empty, and I knew without
being told that he no longer worked for Automated Interface. I wondered if he’d
quit or been fired. Fired, I assumed. Otherwise he would’ve told me.

Or maybe not.

What they say and what they mean are two different things.

I found myself thinking about what he’d said about women when I’d told
him that I hadn’t made an effort to contact Jane after she’d left me. It had
been bothering me ever since he’d said it, nagging at the back of my mind,
making me feel, not exactly guilty, but… responsible somehow for the fact
that she hadn’t come back. I thought for a moment, then stood, closed the door
to the office, and sat down at David’s desk, picking up the phone. I still
remembered the day care center’s phone number after all this time, my fingers
punching the seven digits almost instinctively.

“May I speak to Jane?” I asked the old woman who answered the phone.

“Jane Reynolds?”

“Yes.”

“She quit four months ago. She no longer works here.”

I felt as though I’d been kicked in the stomach.

I hadn’t seen, talked to, or communicated with Jane since we’d broken
up, but somehow the idea that she’d been near, that she’d continued carrying on
her normal life, even though I was no longer part of that life, had been
comforting to me, calming. I might not be with her, but just knowing that she
was there reassured me. Now, I suddenly discovered, she’d dumped
all
of
her old life at the same time she’d dumped me.

Where was she now? What was she doing?

I imagined her cruising across the country on the back of some Hell’s
Angel’s Harley.

No. I pushed the thought out of my mind. That wasn’t Jane. And even if
it was, it was none of my business. We weren’t together anymore. I had no right
to be affected by the details of her new life.

“Hello?” the old woman said. “Are you still there? Who is this?”

I hung up the phone.

I saw him outside my apartment that evening. The sharp-eyed man. He was
standing in the shadows under a tree, his left side lightly and partially
illuminated by the streetlamp halfway up the block. I saw him through the front
window as I was closing the drapes, and the sight of him scared the shit out of
me. I had been trying not to think about him so I would not have to rationalize
his existence to myself, but seeing him there, waiting in the dark, staring at
my apartment, watching me, made me very afraid. It was clear now that he was
spying on me—

stalking me

—though I had no idea why. I hurried to the door, opened it, and
bravely stepped out on the porch, but when I looked toward the tree he was gone.
There was no one there.

I closed the door, chilled. The thought occurred to me that he wasn’t
human. Maybe he was like the hitchhiker who kept following the woman in that
Twilight Zone
episode. Maybe he was Death. Maybe he was a guardian angel.
Maybe he was the ghost of a person my family had wronged who was now fated to
follow me everywhere.

Now I was just being stupid.

But was I? If I could accept the idea that I was Ignored, why couldn’t I
accept the idea that he was a ghost or some other sort of supernatural being?

I had a tough time falling asleep that night.

I dreamed of the sharp-eyed man.

I began skipping out, taking days off work. As long as I was there to
fill out my time card on Friday, it didn’t really seem to make any difference
whether I showed up the rest of the week.

I never felt like going home, and at first I hung out at the various
malls: Costa Mesa’s South Coast Plaza, Santa Ana’s Main Place, Orange’s Orange
Mall, Brea’s Brea Mall. But I soon tired of that, and I eventually found myself
driving around Irvine, hovering about the city like a moth near a porch light.

I started parking the car and walking through Irvine’s shopping
districts, taking comfort in the uniformity of the shops, feeling relaxed in the
midst of all this harmonious homogeneity. I settled into something of a routine,
eating lunch at the same Burger King each day, stopping in at the same music,
book, and clothing stores to browse. As the days passed, I began to recognize
faces on the street, other men, like myself, who were dressed as if for work but
were obviously not working and obviously not job-hunting. Once, I saw one of the
men steal from a convenience store. I was standing across the street, at the
crosswalk, waiting for the light to change, and I watched a tall, well-dressed
man walk into a 7-Eleven, pick up two cartons of Coors from the display in the
front window, and walk out, apparently without paying. The two of us passed each
other on the sidewalk in front of the convenience store.

I found myself wondering if he’d left any fingerprints in the store, if
he’d touched anything else besides the beer. He had to have touched the door to
open it. If I went into the store and told the clerk, could the police dust for
prints and catch the man that way?

I opened my right hand, moved it up in front of my face, looked at my
fingers. Every individual in the world was supposed to have a unique
fingerprint, distinctive only to him or her. But as I stared at the lightly
ridged whorls of skin that covered the tip of my index finger, I wondered if
that was true after all. I had the sneaking suspicion that my fingerprints were
not unique, were not truly my own. If nothing else about me was original, if
nothing else about me was inimitable, why should this be different? I’d seen
pictures of prints before, in magazines, on the news, and the differences
between them were always so slight as to be nearly unnoticeable. If the print
patterns were so limited to begin with, how reasonable was it to think that no
two, in the entire history of man, were ever alike? There had to be sets of
fingerprints that looked the same.

And mine were no doubt the most common kind.

But that was stupid. If that were the case, someone would have noticed
it by now. Police would have discovered even a small contingent of identical
fingerprints, and that would have automatically invalidated the use of prints as
weapons in crime detection and as evidence in court.

But maybe the police
had
discovered that all fingerprints were
not unique. And maybe they had kept it quiet. After all, the police had a vested
interest in maintaining the status quo. Fingerprinting worked in the majority of
cases, and if a few people fell through the cracks… well, that was the
price that had to be paid for an orderly society.

I suddenly felt chilled, and at that moment the entire criminal justice
system seemed a lot more sinister to me than it had only a few seconds before.
In my mind I saw innocent men convicted of crimes, jailed, perhaps even
executed, because their prints matched those of the real murderers. I saw
computers displaying a list of people with fingerprints identical to those found
on a murder weapon and the police picking a scapegoat using
eenie-meenie-minie-moe.

All of Western civilization operated on the assumption that everyone was
different, everyone was unique. It was the basis of our philosophical
constructs, our political structure, our religions.

But it wasn’t true, I thought. It wasn’t true.

I told myself to stop thinking about that, to stop projecting my own
situation onto, the entire world. I told myself to enjoy my day off.

I turned away from the 7-Eleven and walked over to the music store to do
some browsing. At noon I ate lunch at Burger King.

Christmas came. And New Year’s.

I spent both holidays alone, watching TV.

The work was piling up, and I knew that even if my absences weren’t
noticed, my lack of output would be. At least by Stewart. I decided to spend a
whole week in my office, catching up on my assignments.

It was halfway through the week when I walked over to the break room to
buy a Coke—-or a Shasta—and I heard Stewart’s voice: “He’s gay, you know.”

“I thought maybe he was.” Stacy. “He’s never tried to hit on me.”

I walked into the break room and Stewart grinned at me. Stacy, Bill, and
Pam all looked away, and their impromptu group began immediately and guiltily
dispersing.

I realized that they had been talking about me.

I felt my face redden. I should have been outraged by their intolerance
and homophobia. I should have given an angry speech denouncing their
unenlightened narrow-mindedness. But I felt embarrassed and humiliated, ashamed
that they thought I was homosexual, and I blurted out: “I’m not gay!”

Stewart was still grinning. “You miss David, don’t you?”

This time I said it: “Fuck you.”

His grin grew. “You’d like to, wouldn’t you?”

It was like a school yard argument, the trading of insults by junior
high school students. I knew that intellectually. I understood that. But I was
also a part of it, and emotionally I felt like I was once again a skinny kid on
the playground being picked on by a bigger bully jock.

I took a deep breath, willed myself to remain calm. “This is
harassment,” I said. “I’m going to talk to Mr. Banks about your behavior.”

“Oooh, you’re going to go tell Mr. Banks on me,” he said in an
exaggeratedly whiny crybaby voice. His voice hardened. “Well, I’m going to make
a report of your insubordination and have you bounced out of this corporation so
fast your head will spin.”

“I don’t give a shit,” I said.

The programmers were not looking at us. They had not left—they wanted
to see what was going to happen—but they were off in other corners of the
room, pretending to look at the selections in the vending machines, flipping
through the pages of the women’s magazines left on the tables.

Stewart smiled at me, and it was a hard smile, a cruel smile, a
triumphant smile. “You’re out of here, Jones. You’re history.”

I watched him walk out of the break room, away from me, down the hall.
There were other people in the corridor, employees from other departments, and I
noticed for the first time that though he was nodding at those he passed, no one
was nodding back, no one was smiling, no one was saying hello, no one was
acknowledging him in any way.

I thought of his spare, impersonal office, and it hit me.

He was Ignored, too!

I watched him turn the corner into his office. It made perfect sense.
The only reason he was noticed at all was because he was a supervisor. It was
only his position of power that kept him from fading into the woodwork
completely. The programmers and secretaries paid attention to him because they
had to, because it was part of their job, because he was above them in the
corporate hierarchy. Banks paid attention to him because Banks was responsible
for the whole division and had to keep close tabs on what everyone was doing,
particularly the department heads.

But no one else was aware of his existence.

Maybe that was why Stewart disliked me so much. He saw in me the things
he hated most about himself. Odds were that he didn’t even know he was Ignored.
He was sheltered by his position and probably wasn’t aware of the fact that no
one outside of our department paid any attention to him at all.