The Unnoticeables

by Robert Brockway

  I reached out to slug her, but she spun away. She did a taunting little robot dance, then turned and went back to her followers.

  “So we’ve already established that we’re both fans of me,” Marco said, still chuckling. “What about you? What do you do?”

  “I’m a waitress,” I said.

  I was finding it hard to think of him as a real person. He was J. C. Sable; he was a fictional character; a poster in a fourteen-year-old girl’s room. And he looked like he’d been carved from stone by an ancient Roman, for Christ’s sake.

  “Oh? That’s nice,” he replied. “Usually everybody I talk to is in the business.”

  “Well, I sort of am, I guess. I do some work as a stuntwoman, whenever I can get it. But I don’t make my living from it yet, so I try not to tell people, ‘I’m a stuntwoman,’ when I actually pay my rent by balancing plates of food.”

  “Oh? That’s nice,” Marco repeated, with the exact same intonation as before. I got the feeling all he knew about small talk he learned from press junkets. “That sounds like a lot of fun.”

  Awkward. Silence.

  “So…,” I finally said, seeing that he had no intention of pursuing the last line of conversation, “what are you working on these days?”

  At the prompt, he sprung into enthusiastic life: “I’ve got a great new project lined up with E! It’s a reality show all about my work with inner-city Latino kids, trying to show them there’s another path besides drugs and gang violence. We just shot the first episode: I teach a gangbanger how to Rollerblade!”

  “Oh, wow, that’s so cool. So you work with troubled kids?”

  “That’s what the show is about, yes,” Marco confirmed.

  Awkward. Silence.

  Yeah, he was just being polite, talking to you. What the hell would he want with a girl like you anyway, Kaitlyn? He probably power-screws a bus full of supermodels between takes.

  “So listen,” I said, mowing through the last of my bacon-wrapped somethings, “I’ve gotta talk to my friend real quick, but I’ll see you later, okay?”

  “Adios!” he said, just like Sable did in the show. Weird.

  I made my way over to Jackie, who was deep into an anecdote that necessitated her pantomiming ramming her fist into some kind of hole over and over again. The paunchy soul-patch guy was turning purple, he was laughing so hard. The lean, plastic-faced blonde next to him was covering her mouth with one hand, equal parts amused and terrified. I stood just to one side until Jackie finished her story—something about a mayonnaise jar, I gathered—and then swooped in when everybody paused to breathe.

  “I’m gonna head out,” I said, and she gave me a disappointed look. “I know you need to stay. You’re killing here, but I have work in the morning. Again.”

  “You called a cab yet?” Jackie asked me, annoyed but understanding—or at least accepting that arguing was pointless.

  “No, I figured I’d call and wait out front.”

  “F that noise,” Jackie said, waving Marco over.

  “Jackie, no!” I whispered harshly. “He practically died of boredom just talking to me.”

  Marco was standing exactly where I’d left him, strangely blank, like somebody had just switched him off. When he saw Jackie wave, he immediately broke into that trademark expectant half smile and began strolling over.

  “I am not hooking up with Marco,” I informed her evenly. “You’re just going to embarrass me. Stop. Please, seriously, stop.”

  “How could you possibly not?” she whispered back. “I mean, sure, no way he’s any good in bed, looking like that. But if you don’t at least try to stick it to J. C. Motherfucking Sable, what would fourteen-year-old you think?”

  “I…” I started to protest, but she was right, of course. Some things you just have to do because you never should have gotten the opportunity to do them, like eat caviar or slobber on former Tiger Beat hunks.

  “Marco!” Jackie exclaimed, and hugged him like a long-lost brother. “You were saying you had to head out soon. My friend here needs a ride home. Do you think you could do her a solid?”

  “Sure thing!” Marco threw on his eager smirk. “Anything for my number-one fan!”

  My whole body flushed. I felt like somebody had thrown me into a microwave on defrost: Warm tingling spread outward in waves, pulsing from my core to my skin.

  Oh, God. Was this really…? No way. No fucking way.

  Flashbacks to cutting his picture out of magazines. Jackie and I making jokes about what we’d do to Sable and Mack if we were students at Lakeview High. Touching myself beneath the covers, looking up at that poster where he sat frozen, immobile, guarding over my bed at night …

  Marco looped his arm through mine, which was totally hokey but also kind of adorable, and I decided right then that whatever else happened, no matter how much of an ass I would surely make of myself, I had to go for it. Arm in arm, we moved toward the brightly lit cubes of the generic party mansion. I turned to wave to Jackie, but she was already back to entertaining.

  “Adios!” Marco expelled suddenly and loudly, just like on the show.

  SIX

  1977. New York City, New York. Carey.

  Randall held up a single finger. I spotted it out of the corner of my eye, swung around, and punched him in the chest.

  This was a game we played called Reaction, where one player starts counting with his fingers. If he gets to three before you notice, he punches you in the chest. If you can punch him in the chest before he gets to three, you … don’t get punched in the chest.

  Look, nobody said it was a good game.

  But we were bored and anxious. It was pissing down rain outside of Max’s Kansas City. Ceaseless sheets of fat, warm drops that triggered a blink reflex every time they hit your face. It felt like God was spitting right in your eye every couple of seconds, and the only dry space, right under the awning, was already full of big shots and hot girls showing cleavage.

  The bouncers called who got those spots, so there we were: standing in heaven’s urine stream, killing time until the doors opened.

  Randall had stopped coughing from the blow and went back to talking to Gray Greg, the ashen-faced junkie who sold dope to kids in line at shows.

  “I’m not saying it’s right, I’m just saying he talks, you know, like people, so if you had to have sex with—”

  Randall wasn’t looking at me. I held up my pointer finger as nonchalantly as possible.

  Nothing.

  “I don’t understand,” Gray Greg was protesting, still awkwardly holding out a bag of dope that Randall wouldn’t take.

  I flipped up my middle finger.

  “I mean it’s like you have something in common, right? You could at least affirm it was consensual—”

  I clenched my fist and went to raise the third finger.

  “No, I guess I wouldn’t want to hear him speak.” Gray Greg was shaking his head, little flecks of dry skin grating off of his face like dandruff.

  I managed the slightest twitch of my ring finger before Randall spun like a tornado and struck me square in the solar plexus.

  “So what you’re saying, then, is that you like to fuck dogs because they can’t talk back,” Randall finished, without missing a beat.

  Greg threw up his hands and walked away. Off to find easier marks.

  I doubled over, gagging on my own lack of air, and waited for the stars to pass. When they did, I saw Randall grinning at me in the side mirror of the station wagon he was leaning on.

  God damn it. Leave it to Randall to turn a nice game of punch exchange into some tactical fucking exercise.

  I nodded concession to him and looked for something else to occupy my time. The parasites had latched on to us again tonight. We had invited them over to the apartment a few times this week, because they usually chipped in for beer money. They had taken that as some sort of official approval, and now we couldn’t get rid of them. We tried telling them to fuck off; they didn’t listen. We were all out
of ideas.

  Thing 1 and Thing 2 were playing a game with string laced between their fingers. They were trying to teach Wash, who was studying it like an electron microscope. Safety Pins had secured a spot under the awning, where she stood with studied disinterest, just like the rest of the cleavage girls. We tried to use her as an excuse to take some space in the dry, but one look at my busted-up face and sideways nose, and the bouncers jostled us back into the rain.

  The parasites were all laughing at something. I didn’t feel like busting into their nervous little circle. I needed something else to do—something productive and enlightening.

  I settled for ogling the cleavage girls and making faces at them when they caught me. One or two seemed to be into it. A stunning redhead, her pale skin practically glinting in the streetlight, waggled her tongue at me in exchange. Most just rolled their eyes and cut off eye contact.

  It was to be expected. Richard Hell was playing tonight, and girls went crazy for the bastard. He looked like Bob Dylan’s plague-stricken younger brother. He moved like he was always in a bathrobe: all lazy and aloof. Hell had that whole malnourished-nihilist thing going for him. That always brings out the stunners. I did okay for my part: A certain kind of girl was actually drawn to the just-got-hit-by-a-truck look that I carefully nurtured. But when Richard Hell opens a show, it’s a Salvation Army runway show out front. Models in precisely ripped T-shirts and meticulously dirty jeans.

  I was miming blow jobs to a bored blonde, who was trying to figure out the sexiest way to flip me off, when an argument broke out.

  “What is this, the tits-only section?” the kid hollered. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen. His hair was done up in shoddy spikes, the telltale white crust of Elmer’s glue drying on the tips.

  I got a weird knot in my stomach, which I decided to chalk up to microwave burritos and Iron City.

  The guy blocking the door just laughed and roughly shuffled the kid away from the awning. The kid spat at him in reply. By the time the bouncer’s eyes went wide with fury, the kid was already bolting around the corner, down Seventeenth. A couple of the cleavage girls laughed.

  I turned back to Randall, who was watching the proceedings with a worried look on his face.

  “Weird,” he said, slapping me on the arm and gesturing to the crowd I’d just turned away from.

  I looked back and didn’t see it.

  “What?”

  “There’s, like, a dozen people following that kid,” Randall said.

  “I don’t—”

  It was only when he pointed right at them that I finally noticed.

  It’s not that I didn’t see them—they were completely visible—it’s just that it didn’t occur to me that there was anything weird about ten people breaking away all at once to follow some scruffy little punk-rock kid into an empty side street. Not until Randall pointed it out. And even after he did, a huge chunk of my brain argued.

  This is boring, my brain said; nothing to see here. Let’s do something else. Let’s start a fire.

  It was the way they moved: casual and natural, like somebody sliding past you on an elevator. You don’t even think to object when they brush against your junk; it’s just a thing that happens, sometimes.

  Only when you’re not looking for ’em do you notice how weird it is that you’re not looking for ’em.

  That’s what Matt the Black Unicorn had said.

  “Hey, where’s Matt?” I shouted into the parasite huddle.

  “He’s havin’ a squat behind the skip,” Jezza answered.

  Scuffed Flannel giggled.

  “Could somebody translate that from asshole to English?” I asked the huddle.

  “He’s pooping behind the Dumpster,” Thing 1 answered. She did something with the string around her fingers and caught Wash’s hand tight.

  “Damn. All right. If he gets back, tell him me and Randall are heading up Seventeenth to fight those invisible people he was talking about.”

  “Cool,” Wash said, trying and utterly failing to fathom the net of yarn wrapped around his wrist. “Wait—what?”

  I was already off jogging after the group, who had just rounded the corner and slipped out of sight. I heard Randall sigh loudly, and then his ratty combat boots were slapping the pavement right alongside me.

  We came skidding across a section of wet grating just as the Unnoticeables caught up to the kid. They were all around him, but it wasn’t until one reached out and grabbed his arm—a girl, blond hair, wait—brunette? Jesus, just focus on her, Carey—that he thought to object.

  “Hey,” the kid said, struggling against the girl’s grip.

  The others moved in, closing a circle around him.

  “Hey!” the kid tried again, panicking now. “Hey, fuck you!”

  I couldn’t see him anymore. The others were blocking my view.

  “Help!” he screamed. “Somebody help!”

  The kid tried “fuck you” before he tried “help.”

  They shall not have this one.

  The mob was moving now, the kid caught in the middle as they forced him toward an open garage a half block up Seventeenth. A pale orange light flickered in there, like fire inside a barrel.

  I tried to think of something creative to say as I was sprinting up to them, but I settled for a flying tackle instead. I nailed the biggest one first. It was hard even to tell that much, looking at them all together: Big, small, blond, redhead, race, clothing—the more there were of them in any one place, the harder it was to pick one out. Just a big indistinct mass of wiggling humanity.

  As we tumbled across soggy pavement, the sharp points of our limbs knocking painfully on the cement, I got to focus on the big guy a bit more clearly. He was tall but not thick. Black guy. Close-cropped hair and hooded eyes. He didn’t even look surprised to see me, as I headbutted his nose into a brownish pudding.

  I looked back in time to see Randall clock a petite girl in pigtails with a trash can. She crumpled like a wet paper bag. He was trying to use the momentum, ride the surprise of the moment, but none of the Unnoticeables was shaken in the least. The four nearest him turned to face Randall, while the rest continued shuffling the kid off toward the garage.

  I got my feet under me and executed an absolutely stunning two-footed, full-body, Captain Kirk–style dropkick on a guy that looked like a punk-rock accountant. Wire glasses, birdlike features, carefully stained Ramones T-shirt, and sharp-creased jeans. He folded up double and stayed that way. The man even passed out in an orderly fashion.

  I cracked my tailbone painfully on the landing but pushed away the shock and tried to stand again. Too late. Two of the Unnoticeables were on me. They were too close together. I couldn’t tell them apart. I saw a vague mass of limbs and flesh enclosing me, tangling up my arms and feet. I was looking one dead in the face—I swear to God I was—and it was like I was forgetting him even as I spat right into his eyeball. I cursed, tried a wild bite, took a blow to the head. No good. I couldn’t move.

  One set of limbs released their grip.

  Then another.

  I looked up at Randall’s face, grinning wildly down at me.

  I glanced over to where I’d last seen him, and there were four lumps of indistinguishable human clutching themselves and moaning.

  Randall offered his hand and I took it.

  “How did you take all those fuckers out?” I asked, spitting blood and shaking my head clear.

  “I got steel-toed boots and they got balls.” He shrugged. “Even Wash can do that math.”

  We heard a muffled protest from somewhere behind us: a gentle request for somebody to go fornicate with themselves, forcibly.

  Randall and I turned to face the garage, just in time to see a rolling hump of Unnoticeable flesh kick the spiky-haired kid down an open manhole.

  I started to run after him, but Randall caught the arm of my jacket and used the momentum to swing me down and back onto my ass. I began composing a filthy ode to his mother, but he just silent
ly pointed into the shadows on either side of the garage.

  Something glinted there. Brass. Round. Grooved edges.

  Two pairs of gears, floating in the dark.

  The tar men shuffled forward on stumpy elephant feet. They moved like cold molasses. More flowing than walking. I could smell them now. Plastic and molten rubber. Tupperware left on a stovetop.

  “Fu—” Randall started, but the words left him.

  He hadn’t been up close with them like this before. He probably only half-believed what little he’d seen, until that moment. He was backpedaling with his arms, but his legs weren’t moving.

  The tar men advanced on us like a slow-motion flood. They burbled and burped from somewhere deep inside. The gears on one’s face snapped together with a metallic clink and started to whir as they picked up speed.

  That goddamned sound.

  I felt the vertigo in my knees first. Nausea broke over me like a barstool.

  Randall was weaving. Unsteady on his feet.

  “These ones are easy,” I reassured him, trying to keep my own voice from cracking.

  I slid my shiny new brass Zippo from the small pocket in my jeans and snapped the flint against my hip. It struck immediately. The tiny flame wavered but stayed strong. I tossed it underhand right into the guts of the tar man with the spinning gears.

  It went up like a bottle rocket: a high and painful whistle as air sucked into the frantic inferno of its chest. There was a thin pop followed by a deep, reverberating thunderclap, and the tar man flared out of existence. When my eyes stopped misfiring sparks, I saw that the other tar man was still there. Still coming toward us.

  “Randall.” I slapped his cheek, and his eyes slid over to me. The rest of his face stayed fixated on the approaching blob.

  “Randall!” I shook him. “Just use your fucking lighter, man!”

  “I-I can’t,” he finally managed, “I lent it to Gray Greg. I … I think he pocketed it.”

  I slowly and with great and unwavering purpose raised a middle finger directly before his face. I shook it there for emphasis.

  “Carey,” Randall said, his eyes going wide.

  Yes, Randall. Absorb it. Observe all of this middle finger. It is all for you. Forever.