The Unnoticeables

by Robert Brockway

  Three flights. Six landings.

  Eighteen divided by six is three, multiplied by the number of rooms per floor—twenty-three—is sixty-nine; six minus nine is negative three, times the number of floors—two—is negative six, and it’s always six, any way you cut it.

  I saw it. I saw it coming when I counted out the bills that punk kid gave me and handed them over to the night clerk at the check-in desk. I gave him seventeen even. I said, “Keep the change, my good man,” and he smiled all sad and said, “Looks like you need it more,” and he slid one bill back to me, and I ended up giving him sixteen dollars, no matter how hard I tried not to. I went down to the corner store and I bought myself a candy bar and a bottle of cheap wine with a cat on the label. I looked at the prices for a good ten minutes to make sure, so that when I slid my cash over the counter I knew what I was getting back. Fifty-eight cents.

  Ha-ha, you know what he said to me? You know what that little Korean fella said to me? He looked me straight in the eye and he said: “All outta pennies, man.”

  And he slid me sixty fucking cents.

  I guess he expected me to be surprised, but I’m on to them by now. I know the game. So I just smiled and I gave him a big wink and I said, “Well, don’t that just beat all,” and I took my cat wine and my chocolate bar and I went back to my room.

  At the Motel 6.

  If you can’t beat ’em … and all that.

  But then something kinda funny happened. I locked that cheap plywood door behind me, I turned on the lamp with the chintzy tassels and fringe all across the bottom, I cranked the AC to full, and I lay down on the bed with its detergent smell and its busted springs, and the numbers … they just sorta stopped.

  I could feel them there at the edge of my mind, nudging up against my thoughts like a dog pawing at the door. But they weren’t getting in. I saw that somebody left the dial on the TV tuned to channel 6, and it almost bothered me. But then I flipped that son of a bitch on anyway, and Scooby-Doo was playing. I fucking love Scooby-Doo. That Velma girl—she has it going on. That tight sweater, short skirt, and knee socks? You can’t tell me she got dressed in the dark. Some folks, they got it out for Daphne. But you know to look at her—she’s one of those girls that talks it up all day, but when it comes down to lights-out she just lies there and acts like she’s doing you a favor. Velma? You know she takes off those glasses and she gets to work.

  I took a big ol’ swig of rotten wine and killed the aftertaste with a tiny bite of chocolate, and damn it all if I didn’t feel good for the first time in—

  Christ, I don’t even know how long it’s been since my thoughts went this clear. Six months, maybe?

  Ha, there you go again. You keep scratching at the door, six, you’re sleeping outside tonight.

  Shaggy was making himself a big sandwich, and my belly growled a little bit, but I shut that sucker down with a fat pull of wine and another bite of chocolate and I laughed some.

  “Sammy,” I told myself, “you got to take the good moments when they come to you.”

  There was a flash, and the room dimmed a little. I thought a bulb went out at first, but then I saw that wasn’t it. It looked more like a new bulb had just turned on, making the rest of the lights seem less bright.

  A new bulb that hovered about two feet above the burnt-orange carpeting, halfway between me and the bathroom.

  “Like, it’s a g-g-g-g—” Shaggy stammered.

  The orb of light grew. Not brighter but more substantial, I guess. There was a sound like wind chimes—like wind chimes made up of static and screaming—that paused whenever I blinked. The carpet went gray. The TV went black and white. The color just bled right out of the world, wherever the light touched it. Something moved inside the light. It was too bright to see any real shapes, but I understood what it was.

  I wasn’t new to this game. I remembered Lisbon. And Mandalay. And Alicante. And São Paulo. I remembered no matter how hard I tried to forget. No matter how important it was to forget.

  The fucking angels finally found me.

  Couldn’t have happened when I was huddled up on some stoop in an ice storm. Couldn’t have happened when I was lunging at rats down in the subway tunnels, trying to catch dinner. No, it had to happen on my one good day. It had to happen right in the middle of Scooby-Doo.

  It was a good episode too—no bullshit celebrity guests to muck up the plot.

  Something vaguely like a hand formed from a refracting pattern of light. It reached out and opened a drawer from the end-table and withdrew the old navy revolver.

  “Ha.” I laughed, and clapped for the angel. “After all I went through to get that dang gun. That’s great. That’s downright poetic.”

  And then I realized it wasn’t just the gun: Everything was significant.

  The candy bar in my hand was a Snickers. My favorite as a kid. One of the few indulgences we ever got back in the bad old days. The wine wasn’t anything I’d ever seen before, but it was cheap and red and burned going down, and that was as familiar as an old dog.

  On the television, Fred was chasing down a werewolf, and I thought of Abby and her unibrow and what we used to call her. I came up with that nickname.

  God damn. God damn it. I thought I’d see it coming when it came. I thought I’d have a chance to brace myself before it got this far. But no, I hadn’t been paying close enough attention, and now they had it. They’d finally figured it out.

  My solution.

  The angel raised its radiant hand and slowly, gently pulled the trigger. I know you won’t believe it, but I swear to God I felt the very instant that pockmarked old bullet brushed up against the lens of my eyeball. That’s the second my humanity started swirling away like water down a drain.

  TWENTY-ONE

  2013. Los Angeles, California. Kaitlyn.

  “Markho,” Carey spat through broken teeth, “kumm closhuhr, yuhr lippsh canch reash my dickh fruhm zhere.”

  “Shh! Shut up.” I waved my hand in Carey’s general direction, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of Jackie.

  She was unbalanced and unfocused. A few inches from her outstretched fingertips, a blurry weave of gears gnashed, waiting to seize the slightest part of her and pull her in.

  She didn’t move. She was frozen. Waiting.

  Nobody was moving. Everybody was waiting.

  Marco turned to me with an expectant smile.

  “What?” I screamed, after it became obvious that I was supposed to do something. “I already said I’ll do whatever you want! Just tell me, for God’s sake!”

  “Finish the ritual,” the car salesman said.

  It was picked up all over and tossed back at me in low murmurs from every direction, each equally toneless and firm.

  “I don’t know what that is,” I pleaded. And I hated myself for it.

  I am begging them? I am begging them to let me help?

  A fist-sized lump of fury kicked over in my guts, but I held it down.

  “You’re the hero, lil’ darlin’.” The car salesman spread his arms wide and gestured at the motionless crowd. “This is your audience. Now you get to do your thing. Learn your lesson. Save the day. We’re just here to watch.”

  “So I—what? I just get to take my friends and go?” I edged toward Jackie, afraid that moving too quickly might break whatever magical spell I’d apparently cast.

  “No.” Marco tried on a disapproving frown, but he clearly hadn’t practiced the expression. He looked like some kind of deep-sea eel, only emerging to snap at the bothersome cameras.

  “What’s a victory without sacrifice? The audience needs to feel it,” the balding guy said.

  “You can take one of them,” Marco supplied. “It is the decision that is important.”

  Marco pointed briefly to Jackie, then to Carey, and then appeared to forget about his own arm. It hung there immobile, stalled somewhere between the gesture and its normal place at his side.

  I almost had to think about it.

  That�
��s not even true. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I don’t want to admit it. I don’t want to admit how quickly I made up my mind. But I had known Carey for what, a week? He was old and strange and probably crazy, and definitely smelly.

  I’d known Jackie since I was twelve.

  She gave me her brand-new sweater to wrap around my waist when I peed myself in gym class.

  She told Bobby Mariano that I liked him, even when I begged her not to, and he asked me to the Valentine’s Day dance.

  She stole my car keys when I talked about giving up on this movie stuff and moving back to Barstow.

  Our fucking cycles were in sync.

  It was Jackie. The decision was Jackie, and I made it in a heartbeat.

  I caught Carey’s eye for just a moment, right before I turned away from him. He smiled at me. He flipped me off.

  I tried not to run the dozen steps to Jackie’s side, but I didn’t try very hard. I grabbed her arm, and the second I touched her I watched life flare up again behind her glassy eyes.

  “K?” she said uncertainly and took in her surroundings. “Why am I naked in a church? Oh, shit, did I get roofied again? These fucking Hollywood douche bags, I swear to Chri—”

  “Jackie, quiet. I’ll explain in a second. We just have to get out of—”

  I turned toward the door and found that the church had dissolved in a ball of nuclear fire. A blur of light hovered there, the pure white shade of absence. Something acute shifted inside of it. I instinctually closed my eyes against the flare. When I opened them again, it sang to me in a voice like waves crashing against rocks.

  “He has been abandoned!” Marco cried from somewhere behind the blinding light, and for the first time since I’d met him, I believed that the emotion in his voice—the unhinged, fanatical zeal I heard there—was genuine.

  “He is ours! He is ours!”

  The gathered crowd of Empty Ones—what little I could see of them through the light—leapt to their feet and began to flail with psychotic abandon. They screamed nonsense. They swung their arms and snapped their heads back and forth. All pretense of humanity had been dropped: Their limbs bent at impossible angles, cracking and twisting grotesquely. The flesh on their necks split open as their spines bent and burst through the skin. They lashed out and danced and struck each other, bit each other, seized on and dug into one another’s flesh with their fingertips.

  I watched a middle-aged woman wearing an impeccable set of pearls tear at her breast until it came off. She flapped it in the air like a patriot waving a flag. A blank-eyed child reached into his mouth, tore out his tongue, and flung it at the fat man holding his hand. They both gripped each other’s shoulders and spun about merrily, laughing. The balding car-salesman guy was on the floor. He had his legs bent backward, broken at the knees. His torso moved in loose orbits around his waist while his eyes rolled in his head. Both of Marco’s arms were dislocated. He was doing a mad sort of jig, the loose limbs flopping side to side like empty sleeves. He was endlessly repeating that joyous refrain:

  “He is ours! He is ours!”

  And so slowly you couldn’t quite see it—more like it was shrinking than moving—I watched as the angel approached the spot where Carey was lying immobile, just trying not to bleed.

  It … it wasn’t about me?

  I was surprised to find that the tightly wound ball of anger I’d tamped down when Marco made me beg had been growing tendrils and spreading throughout my belly. Wrapping around my guts. Taking hold.

  What was that crap? All the gibberish about the rituals and the hero, and I was—what, incidental? Here to help some otherworldly math nerd turn Carey into a sociopathic blob of light? No. Fuck that. Fuck this.

  Jackie’s eyes lost focus. She had been booted out into the middle of this chaos from whatever haze the Empty Ones had inflicted on her, and it was too much. She had gone somewhere else for a lovely vacation rather than deal with the bloody monstrosities dancing all around her. I wrenched her hand and ducked forward, right under the singing ball of light. She moved perfunctorily, her body just waiting for direction. When we came up on the other side of the angel, I ran toward Carey. I expected … something. For the angel to adjust or attack or grow arms and give us all noogies. Anything, really. But it didn’t seem to notice us, or care what we did. Not until I’d dodged past Marco’s whipping limbs, reached down, and grabbed Carey by the collar of his patchwork leather jacket.

  The second I touched him, the light behind us blinked out of existence. Then on again. And off. It flickered rapidly. I turned around and found the angel vanishing and reappearing at random points around the church. It was back at the gears now, then up in the rafters, over by the pulpit, and out among the pews. It wasn’t so much an object as a blank spot where somebody had come down and erased part of the universe, so I don’t want to anthropomorphize it or anything—but I swear, it seemed almost … frantic.

  It wasn’t until I started physically dragging both Carey and Jackie toward the door that I realized how strong my grip had become. My pinky—the sixth finger on my left hand—it didn’t hurt. Every day of my life, the thing ached at the slightest movement, and here it was curled firmly into the black, brittle leather of Carey’s jacket, and I felt no pain at all.

  That had only happened twice before. Once on the night of the fire, when I lost my sister, and then again that day at my apartment with the Peeping Tom. The day that started all of this. I flashed back to the alleyway and that pervert hobo. How the angel had moved when I lost my sandal, how it popped into existence directly over the spot where I’d dropped my knife. Like it hadn’t been aware of those things … until I stopped touching them.

  It couldn’t see me.

  Marco and the Empty Ones were too far gone to notice anything was amiss. An old woman with perfectly braided hair was chewing straight through the thigh of a man I swore played the butler in an eighties sitcom about a rich family adopting inner-city children. A tan fellow with an intense widow’s peak was holding two severed hands in his own, drumming them enthusiastically against the carpet. They didn’t spare us a single glance as I dragged Carey’s limp form with one hand and used the other to guide Jackie’s remote-control body toward the exit. The angel blinked faster and faster—spot to spot to spot—and then stopped. It pulsed slightly. If I had to guess, I’d say it was thinking.

  Then one of the girls, one of the few left alive from the second line, screamed.

  Her body sucked up into itself, her guts expelled onto the floor by the force of her own collapsing torso. There was a deep pop, the floor shuddered, and she was gone. Next to where she’d been standing, a scene played in the air. The images were faint and transparent, like those from an old movie projector shining on a bedsheet. It was a dog chasing an old truck through the parking lot of a supermarket, over and over again.

  A sound like bagpipes dropping. Another girl yelped, and her chest became a vortex that absorbed the rest of her body. A third girl sniffed the air, panicked at what she found there, covered her ears, and began vomiting up a thick black sludge. It ran out of her mouth with unnatural purpose, slowly coating her face, her neck, her arms. She collapsed in a dark, sticky pile that shimmered like grease. It seemed to move of its own volition.

  Clearly, it was time to duck out of this party.

  I turned to reach for the doorknob. I had the cold brass in my hand and was squeezing the lever when I realized my mistake.

  I had let go of Jackie’s hand.

  I panicked and snatched at her shoulder, but it was too late. She was watching something in the air in front of her. A ghostly rectangle of moving images. A television playing underwater. It showed a close-up of a little girl with two precocious, lopsided pigtails sticking out from either side of her head; one was tied with a ribbon, the other held in place by a cheap plastic clip with a little nub in the shape of a cartoon cat. She smiled.

  There was no mistaking Jackie’s goofy grin.

  The girl twirled, and her pigtails spread o
ut like a dancer’s skirt. She laughed and hopped and spun so fast that she didn’t even see the curb. It caught her foot and she was down. She barely had a chance to cry before an older woman in overalls rushed up to help her. Then I smelled burning plastic laced with dead flowers.

  Jackie screamed, and a stale white light flared up behind her eyes.

  “Jackie! Jackie, no.” The inside of her skull was lit up like an airport. “Don’t let it do this to you. Stay here. Stay with me.”

  She opened her mouth to scream again, and a stream of faded color dribbled out across her lips, ran down her bare chest, and dissipated somewhere around her navel.

  Carey tried to pull me toward the door.

  “Emp … empchee won,” he slurred around a mouthful of blood. Then tried again: “Emp. Tee. One. Run. RUN!”

  TWENTY-TWO

  1977. New York City, New York. Carey.

  I started to stand, but a hand on my shoulder held me back. I looked around to find the offending party and punch him in the fucking mug—and found Wash staring up at me.

  “We need a plan,” he said.

  Another one of those hypnotized punk kids stepped willingly into the gears. A high-pitched whine and a deep stuttering growl, like stuffing a watermelon down a garbage disposal, and he got pulped into a fine slop. Randall stepped forward one place in line.

  “I have a plan,” I whispered. “I’m gonna go down there and kick some ass.”

  A girl up next: She sat down at the edge of the rumbling machine, carefully adjusted her posture like she was posing for a picture, then reclined into the gears. The ragged metal caught her hair, ripped part of her scalp off, and continued yanking all the way down her torso. One of the Unnoticeables dutifully stepped forward and kicked the rest of her skinned, twitching body into the maw. Two more, and then it was Randall’s turn.

  “I think that is a bad plan,” Wash said, after a very long moment’s consideration.

  “It’s the only one I’ve ever had,” I said, shaking Wash’s hand off my arm and starting for the ledge, “and it hasn’t let me down yet.”