The More You Ignore Me (12 page)

She, wild-eyed, covered herself up and gaped at the darkness without comprehending—until he flicked the light switch off.

Then I heard her scream (and him laugh).

If she had not been startled and handled so rudely by her brother, do you think she would have found my attention quite so unflattering?

There couldn't have been many boys—if any at all, honestly—who found her as alluring as I did.

You might expect, as I admit I did, sitting there in the dark watching her turn her gaze toward me in horror, that she would appreciate the attention.

Perhaps, under different circumstances, she would have, but Emmett made it so that our great love could never enter the world.

I was banned from the house and ridiculed further at school as a peep.

So you see?

My love has been thwarted from the start.

I could tell you so many more stories, but why pay so much attention to these admitted travesties when for all intents and purposes they are out my control?

I know.

Believe me, I do.

But I've realized a certain vital part of me refuses to accept injustice on whatever scale.

Chris Novtalis, this corrupt dribble of afterbirth, should not be allowed to shut me out.

He should not have the authority, in, yes, the exact same way—the exact!—that the president has not earned the right to make his decisions.

He obviously does not know the lay of the land, is in over his head, and yet he refuses to acknowledge these facts,
and by withholding this information, by stonewalling his petitioners, he is making the catastrophe worse.

During the campaign, he listened.

When someone brought up a problem—and there were many, we were helpful!—he addressed it forthrightly.

It was an open and vital conversation in which very serious issues were being discussed, and many problems solved.

But now that campaign, and that discussion, is at zero.

There is nothing.

And, I'm sure you see, that is the very same case on the wedding blog.

Nothing is happening!

It is a barren stretch of white waste.

We are not being heard!

Only the sanitized voices beholden to the established interests get a say!

I truly thought the site would be different.

I should have known, but for a joyous spring—the wild time of innocent youth and happiness—we had a voice, a space, and look at the magnificent work we did.

The proof is there in the record, but before examining the record further—I'm sorry; I've let this digression proceed too far—let us not leave that campus of long ago.

There is more!

Of course now it seems so obvious to say that era was the end of something rather than the beginning, but back then, the thrill felt curiously like hope.

I, for one, believed in my vision of new days with my new love by my side.

These days spread out before me—a completely different time of understanding and empathy was heralded by our reconciliation.

Well, “reconciliation” is perhaps not quite the right word since that does imply a mutual act, when in this particular instance I alone did the reconciling, or, rather, pursued my love object with fervor, so in some ways it was an inverse reconciliation, a natural falling away of boundaries.

I remember when I first saw Rachil truly see me, there in the ticket window with her Louise Brooks bob, sighing, unaware exactly who it was receiving the “employee” discount despite having left his
ID
at home once again.

She took me in with her almond eyes, up and down, then raised her delicately plucked eyebrows as if to say, “Well, well, you do indeed exist after all!”

I tilted my chin at her, not wanting to overplay my hand, and gave her a wink.

She feigned disgust.

The point: I had finally made contact with my love and it seemed no coincidence that the cinema played host
that quarter to films by the new auteurs, those filmmakers we all thought were harbingers of a revolution, but were, in fact, only the end of an evolutionary cycle.

After this showing of
Born on the Fourth of July
, in a daze, I followed (at a discreet distance) Corn and Rachil back to the “church.”

I should explain here, dear readers, that I had not yet been permanently cast out of the university at this particular juncture, but had simply been “
AWOL
,” a mysterious absence from the classroom.

I had hoped for a glorious return.

The misunderstanding had yet to occur.

Can I help what others perceive?

Tell me truly, dear readers: is it my fault what goes on in the minds of others?

Surely not, you say, and yet here I sit in my humid room, unloved, cast aside, neglected, and banned, because other members of society cannot perceive my intentions and thus judge my actions correctly.

Incorrectly?

Whatever.

Language fails.

I reach for my tea and hope to find succor, but it is bitter.

How I wish I could still smoke—but in this I believe the doctor might be correct.

But then!

Back then!

I would squat in the shrubs outside the church, smoking cigarette after cigarette, listening through the window to the conversations between Rico and Corn, Rachil and Rico, Corn and Rachil.

I spied the dark dimples forming the small of Rachil's back as she scooped a Spree candy wrapper off the floor of the church.

“You guys,” she laughed. “Spree!”

We three—Rico, Corn, and I—swooned.

She had us all in the palm of her hand, and Rico and I were such naïve fools that we thought she and Corn flirted innocently!

It would be the last time I underestimated his powers.

I let myself in through the church window when I thought no one was home, and I sat at the kitchen table smoking one of Rico's menthol cigarettes, pondering the wood paneling on the wall opposite.

One particular eddy had a striking resemblance to the curve of Rachil's neck, and the longer I stared, the more I
seemed to see her eyes there, and before long, it was as if I could hear her voice, slightly muffled, almost moaning.

I shook my head to clear it of these sounds—not again!—but I found that no amount of shaking stopped what did indeed sound like moaning.

One of the neighbor kids suddenly burst in.

He wanted to use the bathroom because, he told me, somebody had “torn it up” in the bathroom at his house.

No way was he going in there, he said, no way.

Fine, I waved him over and nodded my approval.

He ran down the hall to the bathroom, but just as quickly he was back.

“I can't get in,” he yelled, pointing maniacally back down the hall. “They in there hunchin'!”

“Who's hunchin' what?” I asked with a cough, perplexed by the child's native slang.

“Your boy! He in there hunchin'!”

Since I seemed to have the run of the place, the child evidently assumed some “your boy” relationship between myself and Corn.

It did not seem the time to disabuse him of this “your boy” notion.

“Really?” I said.

“I can hear 'em in there hunchin' it up!”

My heart began to race.

Hunchin'?

Perhaps it didn't quite mean what it seemed to mean.

I followed the child down the hall.

Rico had put aluminum foil on the walls and ceiling of the bathroom, spray painted half of it black.

Why? Lord knows!

A flap of this foil poked out from under the door by the child's knee, where he had bent down to get the best acoustics on the alleged “hunchin'.”

I leaned down to where he was and put my ear to the door.

Hunchin'!

It was true and the noise, dear readers, was indescribable.

It staggered me.

I'm sure I went white as a ghost.

The child saw the confirmation in my eyes and a grin slowly spread across his face until it reached psychotic proportions.

“They in there hunchin'!” he yelled and began jerking the doorknob furiously.

Corn—who had outside the Boiler Room heard Rico ardently profess he would not have sex with Rachil until he was married, who had been up until this point seemingly vanquished in his quest for love—was in there hunchin' with Rachil!

My first love.

MFL
!!!!!

How did this happen?

Where was Rico?

How had the triangle been violated so effortlessly, and without a scintilla of awareness on my part?

The child wanted to see.

I did not.

I felt faint.

I left the child pulling on the doorknob and walked out the big double doors at the front of the church into the yard, where I collapsed in a fever.

I awoke in the shrubbery, mercifully undiscovered.

I saw the window of the church lit up and the three of them inside, laughing, as if reality were still intact.

Had I dreamed the hunchin'?

Was it simply one of my visions, which, already twenty-five years ago, had begun?

I had to know, and so here, at this time, I vowed to renew my observations in earnest as soon as I made it back to the dormitory to clean myself of the blood and vomit on my shirt.

I prayed my roommate would not be home, and, for once, my prayers were answered.

Thoroughly scrubbed with peppermint soap and a stiff washcloth, I breathed as best I could, and I plotted my course.

After a further week of observation, I reached a conclusion: that night I had indeed simply let my imagination run too free, for whatever “relationship” Corn and Rachil seemed to have secretly embarked upon, it was awkward and bumbling and, at first it seemed, free of penetration.

I noted many “inside” jokes and episodes of shrill, repressed laughter, but nothing more.

I admit, there was still cause for concern: Rico was noticeably more and more absent from the church, leaving Corn and Rachil alone.

Where was he?

At class?

At work?

No longer the sober Christian, he only appeared to sulk and drink at the church, then shuffle off to who knows
where with his hippy friends, who were always stooped over some baggie of powder.

One night, Rachil cried to Corn about this distance and depression of Rico's, and there at the church, in the gluey yellow light, they kissed—I saw it, outraged—but then, rather than sprinting off to the bedroom to hunch, their amour disintegrated.

“We shouldn't,” Rachil said.

“You're right,” Corn said.

“What about Rico?” she said.

“Oh, yes. Rico,” he said. “I worry about him so much.”

(Liar!)

She embraced him, snuffling and leaking everywhere. I thought I could detect a sly grin on his face as he patted her shoulder a bit too much.

Regardless, it was clear that Rachil felt sorry for Rico and Corn, and Corn clearly thought this pity would be enough to allow him to work his dark magic on her.

I longed for him to try to play her one of his ballads, for surely that would allow her to see the sad bastard in his true light, but he had evidently accepted her pity as enough of a kind of love, one that earned him a victory over Rico, and so, a few nights later, he tried to kiss her ears, to put his hands on her little thighs.

She squirmed, sighed, equivocated, made fun of his prim clothes.

Drank.

Corn was thwarted!

But then, weeks later still, I came to the window late after an altercation at the bus station (not worth going into). I saw her pale thighs exposed in the living room, barely a shy mouthful for the lunging Corn mouth.

My mind made a fist.

“Wait,” she said.

Withdrawn, his mouth dispossessed.

“Don't,” she said, then giggled, pushing down her skirt. “Let's skip it and go to the Boiler Room.”

I found I could breath again.

It was nothing.

Days passed.

The skirt stayed down.

But then I saw her again squirming away from his mouth, her hand covering her wet ear this time, and I wondered why these types of scenes kept happening—why didn't she simply call the police?

“Stop,” she hissed.

He once more pushed his open mouth onto her taut lips anyway.

“Have you flossed?” she asked him.