The Unnoticeables

by Robert Brockway

  White T-shirt laughed. “Geoff, I’d be happy to put a steak and a baby in you. You saying you want to be wooed?”

  “I want to be wooed,” Geoff confirmed. “Is that too much to ask, Chaz? A little song, a little dance, a little reach-around…”

  “I love when you’re coy. You know that. Makes me feel like a sexual predator. But there’s a limit, baby. Be forthright. Just tell me what you need to make this happen, and I’ll make that happen.”

  “My wife’s shithead brother’s shithead kid wants to break into the biz—his words”—Geoff made a wanking gesture with his hand—“so I need a major film, but a minor part. Something action-oriented. Maybe sci-fi. Make that a reality, and I’ll get Nic into the tights for you.”

  “Is that it?” Chaz laughed. “I thought I was gonna have to buy you lobster and take you dancing, and all you’re asking for is a McRib and the bowling alley? Consider it done! It’s already happened, baby!”

  On the table across from me, I spotted a framed photo: Marco, his arm wrapped around an old Asian man in a maroon robe. Eyeglasses in large square frames.

  The fucking Dalai Lama.

  Marco was making bunny ears behind the man’s head with his fingers, all with that same plastic smile and those glinting shark eyes.

  This is his home. You are in his home.

  My head was swimming. My breath came shallow. I was in way over my head here. I needed help.

  “What are you thinking?” Geoff asked Chaz.

  “Shit, I don’t know. How about the next Transformers? He can be, like, a fucking GoBot or whatever.”

  “There’s a next Transformers?”

  “There’s always a next Transformers. It’s like the tide.”

  I decided to chance it.

  “Excuse me?” I stepped up between the two men, and it took a full minute for them to get their heads pointed at me. Their nostrils were red and inflamed. White T-shirt—Chaz, I gathered—still had powder on his upper lip. They didn’t look like they’d be much help, but they were the only people here having anything resembling a human conversation.

  “I’m looking for my friend,” I continued.

  “Oh, yeah. Busted-up old guy?”

  “Right!” Geoff said. “I saw him come in, and I thought, That’s Mickey Rourke, if nobody fed him for a year. Love the look. Totally unique.”

  “I don’t know, I feel like haggard old dudes are out this year. It’s due for a swing back to young and fit any day n—”

  “I was actually talking about another friend.” I waved my hand in front of Chaz’s face, trying to get his focus back. “A girl. Short hair, brunette, thick cat’s-eye glasses … Maybe she was wearing a kind of tuxedo thing?”

  “Oh, her?” Geoff’s head executed a lazy orbit around his own neck. “Yeah. I seen her. In the back, I think.”

  “Jackie something?” Chaz asked.

  “Yes!” A surge of adrenaline shot through me.

  She was here!

  “This way.” Chaz snapped his fingers and stumbled down the hallway.

  “I saw her, and I thought, Oof, not another one of these chicks. This hipster thing is played out,” Geoff droned behind me. “Like, we got over Ally Sheedy when Ally Sheedy was still around, you know?”

  “I disagree,” Chaz said, swinging open a door and motioning me through it. “I’ll never get sick of banging girls that dress like my grandma. It adds a much-needed element for me.”

  My eyes took a few seconds to adjust to the dimmer light. Wan yellow shapes swam around the room, making wet slapping sounds. When my sight returned, I saw that they were girls, mostly. A few pale, skinny Asian boys mixed in. All naked. All screwing. All in a nearly catatonic, drugged haze. My chest clenched. I looked for Jackie’s face, her hair, the Steamboat Willie tattoo on her butt—but she wasn’t there. I sighed with relief.

  Then I heard the door lock behind me.

  I turned and found the two men blocking the exit. From the way they’d been talking to each other earlier, I thought they were human. Douche bags, certainly—but human ones. Some oblivious bystanders attending what they thought was another industry party. Now I realized they weren’t people at all—they were just well practiced. Standing this close, I now recognized the vacant, unfocused stare of the Empty Ones.

  “I don’t see my friend here,” I tried, knowing it was futile.

  “She’s got a vibe to her, doesn’t she?” Chaz asked, gesturing vaguely in my direction.

  “Yeah, kind of a Buffy-meets-young-Linda-Hamilton feel,” Geoff responded, sliding out of his blazer and slowly unbuttoning his shirt. “But that finger will have to go.”

  “I disagree,” Chaz said. He wrenched his jeans down over his hips and kicked them across the room. They landed on the face of a writhing blond girl with a buzz cut and dull eyes. She didn’t duck. She didn’t even pull them off her head.

  “Ha.” Geoff laughed. He was down to his purple silk boxers. “Now I know you’re just twisting my dick. Mutations will never play with the flyover states.”

  “She’s a niche demo for sure, but niche is the new mainstream.”

  Chaz was naked from the waist down. He didn’t bother removing his T-shirt. He closed the distance from the door to the bed in a few loping strides, then seamlessly slipped into a redhead with milky white skin grinding absentmindedly against a bedpost. With every thrust, he brought a closed fist smashing down on her breastbone. She didn’t so much as flinch.

  “I don’t deal in niche. If niche wanted to be mainstream, they shouldn’t have been so fucking niche in the first place.”

  Geoff stood immobile. He distractedly pawed at his own crotch as Chaz hammered on the redhead.

  They hadn’t looked at me once. I wasn’t even here anymore. I took a few steps to the side and tried to blend in with the shadows behind an overturned armchair. They stayed like that for a while—Chaz bashing in the impassive girl’s chest as Geoff pantomimed masturbation. When she finally stopped moving, Chaz straightened and peered around the room. His posture was that of a snake, waiting for vibrations. From the shadows in the corner opposite mine, the slightest whimper.

  Geoff flew across the room and over the bed faster than my eyes could track the movement. If there was any doubt the two men were something like human, it ended there. He thrashed at something I couldn’t see, making short, sharp barking sounds in the back of his throat. Chaz laughed, pulled out of the unconscious redhead, and danced a perverse jig across the bedspread toward the commotion.

  I didn’t see what they did to that whimpering shape in the shadows. I was thankful for that. I could only hear the muted whining, the wet sucking noises, and a few vicious snaps. When the noises stopped, the two men reemerged, both covered in blood from the waist down. I froze completely. I couldn’t have twitched a finger if I’d wanted to.

  “I’m thinking about remaking Ghostbusters,” Chaz said, in a voice utterly devoid of tone.

  “The blond kid from One Direction wants to get into acting,” Geoff replied. “He’d make a killer Egon.”

  I could only tell there were two voices speaking by the distance between them. They had become identical in every respect.

  Chaz shuffled sleepily to a nightstand, opened a drawer, and withdrew a bag of white powder.

  The other door, Kaitlyn. Look. They forgot all about you. Go. Go. Go!

  My useless limbs would not respond.

  “I was thinking Shia LaBeouf,” Chaz said, seizing a small Asian boy by the back of the head and dragging him up onto the bed. He yanked on the kid’s hair, tipping his chin back, then upended the bag over his face. The boy coughed and spasmed, but Chaz clamped a hand over his neck and held him fast.

  “Thinking Shia LaBeouf for what?” Geoff asked, though there was no inflection to mark it as a question.

  “For anything,” Chaz said. He bent and snorted powder from the boy’s twitching face, his hand still white-knuckling around the kid’s throat. “I was just thinking Shia LaBeouf.”


  Chaz motioned to Geoff, and the portly older man took a deep huff from the thrashing boy’s mouth just as he threw one last frantic kick and lay still.

  “You cashed this one,” Chaz noted.

  “I’ll get you another,” Geoff said.

  He reached down and hauled up a thick-hipped girl with a teardrop tattoo on one cheek. He threw her down atop the Asian boy, mashing her face into his. She didn’t protest. She didn’t blink. She didn’t make a sound, even when Geoff entered her from behind and Chaz leapt up on the bed to put his foot on the back of her neck.

  The girl was looking right at me the entire time. I could see her eyes with perfect clarity. There was nothing left in them.

  Survival finally won out over fear, and my legs freed themselves. I bolted for the door, stupidly yanking at the handle. I could see it was locked, but it was like panic lived in my fingers now. I willed them to stop scrabbling uselessly at the handle and to just twist the little switch, but they wouldn’t. They would only pull and pull and pull.

  “She tries to flee,” a voice droned behind me, each word punctuated by the slap of skin on skin.

  “She thinks there is somewhere to flee to,” the other voice answered.

  “Does she know we have a role for her.”

  The slapping increased in tempo.

  “Perfect casting. She was born for it.”

  “Like fuel is born for fire.”

  “She comes to us freely, as they all do.”

  The slapping came faster and faster. There was a sound like wet paper tearing. I pried my hands from the handle. Held them out in front of me. Focused on making them still.

  “Yet they wonder why they are here.”

  “They are drawn to this place. They are flawed, weak, and stupid. They are human. Yet through systematic degradation and avarice, they are reduced. Cleared of pretension.”

  “And here, at last and for the first time, they are rendered useful.”

  “They walk proudly into this place. They speak of it in hushed and optimistic tones. They dream all their lives of the refinery.”

  “And still wonder why we burn them when they arrive.”

  There was a sucking pop and the sound of liquid splashing to the floor.

  I set my fingers around the lock and twisted. I pulled the door inward toward me, trying not to think that, as I did so, I was taking a step backward toward the two men and whatever they were doing to whatever was left of that girl.

  I was out. I was gone.

  And then, to my own horror, I found myself turning around. I was operating purely on muscle memory, and muscle memory was turning to politely close the door behind me. I caught a glimpse of something like a man, bent grotesquely out of shape. He crouched with his knees to either side of his head like a grasshopper. A pile of gore lay in front of him. He was still thrusting. My eyes flicked away before they had a chance to take in any more details.

  And they landed on a familiar image.

  A young, muscled Latino man smiling up at the camera, waist-deep in crystal blue water. The words J. C. SABLE across the top in bright pink letters.

  Marco wasn’t kidding when I first met him. He really did have the same poster above his bed.

  SEVENTEEN

  1977. New York City, New York. Carey.

  We followed Gus’s van for a full hour before it finally pulled up in front of an unsigned building on the East Side. Along the way, I drove us into an open manhole, a mailbox, an ice cream truck, and a Puerto Rican.

  Didn’t catch his name.

  I busted my lip, and Jezza did a full headstand on the street that fucked up his pompadour pretty bad, but Wash came out mostly unscathed. Well, shit, I don’t know that: The Puerto Rican guy called him a homo as we sped off. Maybe it hurt his feelings.

  “I believe the best strategy is no strategy: I will hit that guy in the face,” Wash said, pointing to a fucking monument of a man hovering like an overprotective boyfriend around the front door of the building.

  A bouncer, a hopping club booming live music nine o’clock at night in Manhattan, and no line? These bastards really didn’t understand people.

  Jezza and I waited for Wash to continue his thought, but I guess that was it.

  “I don’t think that’s gonna work, mate,” Jezza said. “Bloke’s got ten stone on you, easy.”

  “Maybe we can cut down through the sewers,” I said. “There’s got to be, like, an entryway up into that building from below.”

  “Why?” Jezza laughed. “Why would there be an entrance from the sewer into there?”

  “Well, I don’t fucking know; there always is on the TV.”

  “Is there an entrance up from the sewer into your apartment? It’s not a bloody sidewalk. You know what’s in the sewer?”

  “Poop,” Wash offered.

  “He’s right,” Jezza confirmed.

  “What else do they do in situations like this, on the television?” Wash asked.

  “Distraction?”

  “Yes.” I punched Jezza in the shoulder by way of congratulations. “We need a distraction. I think I’ve got enough fluid left in my lighter to soak Jezza’s shirt, then we can light him up, and while they’re over there stomping him out, me and Wash will—”

  “Hold on, now!” Jezza cried, “I see a great big bollocking problem with this plan.”

  “Shit.” I snapped my fingers. “He’s right. Gus still has my lighter.”

  “That wasn’t the probl—”

  “My first plan still seems to be our only reasonable course of action,” Wash cut in. “I shall hit that man in the face.”

  Jezza and I tried to think, but we weren’t great at it.

  “Okay,” I conceded, “you coldcock the guy, and we’ll try to jump him from behind while he’s beating the holy shit out of you.”

  Wash nodded somberly, then stood and walked off to punch a man the size of a car straight in the head. I took a breath. Jezza muttered a long stream of worried profanities. We reluctantly followed.

  “Name?” the man asked Wash, when it became apparent he was heading toward the door.

  “This is my name,” Wash said, and heaved the most gorgeous uppercut I have ever seen. He sprinted a few steps, dropped all the way to the pavement, then came bursting up like an industrial spring. It was perfect. It was like ballet. It didn’t do a goddamned thing.

  Well, that’s not strictly true. I’m pretty sure it broke some of Wash’s knuckles.

  The bouncer didn’t so much as blink. Wash was dancing around, holding his busted hand to his chest and waiting for a beatdown. The man simply checked his notepad.

  “You’re not on the list,” he told Wash, without a hint of malice.

  That ham hock of a head swiveled to acknowledge Jezza and me.

  “Name?” he asked us.

  Jezza whimpered something I couldn’t make out.

  “Carey,” I answered, too stunned to do anything but exactly what the human cliff told me.

  The bouncer checked his notepad. Every movement was like a statue coming to life. You just didn’t think something that big could be mobile. It defied nature.

  “Here you are,” he said, crossing a line off on his little pad. “Head on in.”

  He swung the heavy steel door inward, and a furious clash of mistuned guitars washed out. Still in obedience mode, I headed into the club without another word. Wash followed, eyeballing the hulk warily. Jezza didn’t move. I had to go back out and physically drag him in with us. His eyes were locked solidly on his feet until he was sure the door was shut behind us and the bouncer was out of sight. Then he looked up—and probably wished he hadn’t.

  We wouldn’t have noticed, a week ago. We wouldn’t have spotted anything wrong with the scene in front of us: just a bunch of mediocre punks in an anonymous dive bar with a six-inch stage in one corner. Some amateur band failing to produce music while everybody ignored them in favor of building a foundation for a nice drunk. But I knew, by the silence behind me, tha
t Wash and Jezza saw it, too. The crowd’s clothes were torn and shabby, but it was all done in this careful, uniform way. You could see repeating patterns if you looked hard enough: three little tears at the right hip, one big rip under the left armpit. Their stained Chucks were suitably filthy, but the seams were still crisp, like new. These weren’t shoes that had been stomped on a thousand times in crowded venues, thrashed through puddles and puked on after the last shot of the night. They’d barely been used. The whole bar had bought their footwear within the last month, and torn their clothes according to some preestablished punk-rock template. I scanned their faces and came up blank. I couldn’t tell you what a single one looked like, even if I focused. Even knowing the trick, I just couldn’t get through it. There were too many of them together. It was like trying to recognize one grain of sand out of a beach full of them.

  There was one distinguishable face in the crowd. It stood out from the anonymity like a lighthouse in the sea. Flat and impassive. Viking cheekbones. Blank blue eyes. Long unwashed hair. It turned its thousand-yard stare vaguely in our direction and beckoned with one hand.

  Gus wanted us to join him at his private table.

  “We have to get out of here,” Jezza said, backing away.

  “Bullshit.” I grabbed his sleeve and hauled him over to me. “We’re here for Thing 1, remember? Fuck, maybe they even have Randall. If it was you they had, we wouldn’t just cut and run.”

  “Yes, you bloody would!”

  “All right,” I conceded, “probably, yeah. But they don’t have you. They have her, and him, and so we’re not going anywhere. Besides, you think that fucking Grizzly Bear out there is just gonna let you walk? He’s gonna use you to pick meat out of his teeth.”

  “I’ll take my chances! You might have a stiff willy over that blue-haired bird, but me and Wash are…”

  Jezza scanned the room frantically. His eyes went wide. I turned to look for what had gotten him so riled up, and saw Wash shoving his way right through the press of Unnoticeables. He was making a beeline toward Gus. I dropped Jezza and ran.

  Like hell I’m getting showed up by fucking Wash.

  I raced into the crowd, shoving through an indistinguishable block of leering faces. Every goddamned one of them had some snide comment for me: