by Jack Ketchum
I never would've believed that I'd miss junk mail, but I discovered that there was something comforting about seeing your name on a mailing label. It let you know that someone—even an automated mailing service—acknowledged your existence.
The last piece of mail I received was the week of Christmas. I was excited, because I could always count on holiday cards from my mother and younger sister, Karen. Mom's cards were always sappy and included an awkwardly written personal note, while Karen's were always of the homogenized, humorous variety; your typical mass-produced greeting card.
It was Friday, December 24th, when I looked into my mailbox for the last time that side of the New Year. Inside, I discovered a single handwritten envelope. An honest to goodness letter! I actually flushed for a moment at the prospect of sitting down to read it. After all, in those days of emails, texts and instant messages, who wrote letters anymore?
But as I read the envelope I felt the blood drain from my face.
The letter was addressed to my neighbor. The postman had put it in my mailbox by mistake.
After that, things worsened. A few weeks later, I called my mother to wish her a happy birthday.
"Hello?" she answered, sounding distracted.
"It's me, Mom," I said.
"Can I call you back?" she replied in a way that told me she'd most likely forget.
I started to say "I love you," but she hung up on me.
I never spoke to her again.
Then my phone stopped ringing. I still got a dial tone when I picked up the receiver and could call out just fine. But no one called me. Not even those automated reminders for overdue bills.
It was quite humiliating coming home night after night to an answering machine that blinked zero at me. Sometimes I'd press the play button just to hear the automated recording, informing me that there are no new messages.
But at least it was a voice.
I even began to regret signing up for the government's "do not call list," which banned telemarketers. At that point, even a canned sales pitch would have been welcome.
There had to be some sort of logical explanation. I was a pretty rational person. My approach to life was methodical, particularly at my job where I analyzed insurance claims.
Initially, I approached my situation the way I did most things: systematically. First, I checked for any issues with the phone company. Next, I called every organization that I did business with or that I owed money. Oddly, I was unable to find any problems within any line of communication.
Every billing representative that I spoke with assured me that they would resend my bills—but for some reason they never did.
Every facet of my life became infected. At work I "slipped people's minds" on a regular basis. Missed appointments became the status quo, and people ignored me wherever I went.
I got so pissed off that I decided to skip work without telling anyone.
It was the first time I'd ever done that. I even planned it so I'd miss my yearly evaluation from my boss, just to make sure my absence would be noticed.
It wasn't and he didn't. In fact, no one did.
Fifteen years I'd dedicated to that company. And not a single person noticed I was gone.
***
Any attempts I made to reconnect with the world were met with a wall of indifference. At first, I tried being overtly nice to everyone, starting with my obnoxious, two-packs-a-day neighbor who sat on his porch most of the day, blowing secondhand smoke through my living room window. When that didn't work, I tried being friendly to the forever imposed upon barista at my local coffee house. Her stony-faced visage spoke of a childhood devoid of smiles. I also tried my snot-nosed cubicle mate at work and the Chinese food delivery guy with the terminal case of halitosis.
It made no difference.
When the niceties failed, I became overtly nasty. I shot people dirty looks, spat at others, even yelled at a few strangers for no other reason than to elicit a response.
No one blinked an eye.
Out of frustration, I threw a full-blown temper tantrum right in the middle of our Thursday afternoon staff meeting, just to get a rise out of someone...anyone.
Having failed to interject a single word into the discussion, I screamed at the top of my lungs, "Excuse me!"
Kevin, the lead financial analyst sitting next to me, winced a bit at the sound of my voice, but kept right on talking. Finally, I heaved my hot latte, cup and all, as hard as I could against the far wall.
Suddenly, I had everybody's attention.
"Did you just throw that?" my boss, Barry said.
"Umm...yes," I said, suddenly wishing to God I hadn't.
"Why would you do that?" Kevin asked, but there was no judgment in his eyes. It seemed to be an honest question.
I started to stammer out a poor excuse for an answer. But within a matter of seconds, I was forgotten again. It was as if I could only maintain their interest for mere moments with the greatest of outrage and passion—emotions that I normally bottled up and rarely exhibited.
I panicked at that point and ran down the halls like a lunatic under a full moon. My wild energy provoked a smattering of human response, but not much more than if I were a monkey performing at the zoo, caged behind a sheet of impenetrable glass. It proved impossible to maintain such impassioned feelings. They were like unused muscles that had atrophied; the result of a lifetime of my own passivity and apathy. I was quickly disregarded; left alone to sob on the orange and puke-brown carpet outside my cubicle.
A little while later, I gathered the wherewithal to drag myself home.
But sitting in my apartment was like solitary confinement. As I paced the floor, I thought I was going to lose my mind.
I had to find a way to engage with someone.
There was this gloomy 24-hour coffee shop down the street where local night owls perched every evening. I'd passed it countless times before, but had never felt compelled to go inside.
Until then.
I sat there for hours, soaking up the greasy walls of the dimly lit coffee shop, watching nothing but nameless faces with sunken, hopeless eyes. They seemed to be drawn to the place, like moths ticking at light bulbs. A grizzled waitress with a blank expression wafted across the floor like a specter, while the brooding clientele stared silently from the shadows.
Sometimes, while passing by late at night, I'd wondered what kind of people lurked inside this place at such an ungodly hour. Now—I was one of them. One of them: the silent ones; the nameless and forgotten; the in-between people that no one saw; the homeless that businessmen stepped over to get to their power lunches; the faceless figures that simply—filled up space and nothing more.
Somehow I'd become one of them.
I knew this because, for the first time in weeks—I'd been finally acknowledged. They seemed to recognize me. With a slight nod of the head or a weary meeting of the eyes, my status had been established. I was one of them now.
I watched them gather there all night, hovering quietly at their tables, comforted by the fact that they were not alone in their—our—misery. I had to get the hell out of there while I could. I may have been offered membership into the dead-end club, but that didn't mean I had to accept it.
***
I didn't go back to work. No one noticed my presence, so I doubted they'd notice my absence. Money wasn't a problem, of course. I could steal any store blind and no one would raise an eyebrow. I wish I could say that provided me with some comfort.
I roamed the streets all week, searching for human connection. The city seemed...different, almost unrecognizable. Then again, perhaps it was my growing appreciation for things. Oddly, I'd never noticed the snow-dusted desert ranges, or the tall cacti that stood sentinel in the shadows of the great mountains. I was also surprised to see such a diversity of architecture pervade the city. I heard countless birds for the first time, chirping their esoteric songs from faraway places.
New scents and fragrant flowers seemed to permeate the air
wherever I walked, and the endless blue of the September sky awed me.
However, what struck me the most were the people on the streets that I used to take for granted. They were filled with an energy that I found almost impossible to describe. Children glowed with it, like tiny suns. The adults and the elderly, I observed, shone with varying degrees of this radiant light.
Whatever this energy was, I envied it. When I gazed at my own reflection, I saw none. The other silent ones were also devoid of this radiance. We shuffled through the city unseen, except by our own kind.
I suspected that I might be dead—a wandering spirit perhaps. But neither of those conclusions made sense. I had yet to see a single indication of my death: a cleared out desk at my office; a boxed up and emptied apartment; a cheap funeral with a handful of detached mourners. But there was nothing.
The world remained unaware of my disappearance.
One day I walked through a local cemetery, searching for some peace of mind. My family plot had been there for years, passed down for three generations—a giant cavity in the earth, waiting patiently for its next meal. Everyone dead in my family was accounted for there.
I was relieved not to see a tombstone bearing my name. But the relief was short-lived, for it dawned on me that I hadn't consumed anything, neither food nor water, in several days.
Somehow, I had been subsisting on...nothing.
I was not dead. I was not a ghost.
I feared I had become something far worse.
***
It had been well over a week since I had gotten out of bed at home. By that stage I had memorized every crack, fissure, and imperfection in the ceiling. I had yet to sleep, eat, or even relieve myself. But all of that seemed as meaningless as my life.
Now that the distractions of life had fallen away, the inevitable introspection appeared like an unwanted guest. The inescapable questions came up: What was my legacy? What had I contributed? Who the hell cared if I lived or died?
The weight of the answers had trapped me in this bed, sweating and stinking in a pool of regret. I found myself flipping through the pages of my past to discover a mental scrapbook filled with empty paper. I returned again and again to the same forgotten dream—eons ago—before the mundanities of life had slowly pushed it aside.
I once dreamt of being a man with something to say.
I saw a lovely face, peering at me through the veil of the past. Her name was Mrs. Wainwright—my exceptionally well-endowed grade school teacher. She often praised my flair for words. And that flattery led to my naïve, but wondrous fantasies about writing the great American novel (as well as fondling Mrs. Wainwright's breasts).
However, I was from a family of accountants, bankers, and financial analysts who not only scoffed at the idea of writing for a living, they made sure to humiliate me for even considering it.
I didn't have the fortitude to disagree.
Eventually my great dream faded into nothingness.
And now my very physicality, my very essence was joining that faded dream.
***
I shot myself in the face with a twelve-gauge shotgun.
I stole it from a local gun shop, came home, wedged it against the corner of my nightstand, stuffed the barrel into my mouth—and pulled the trigger. There was a vicious explosion as the world turned blindingly white—followed by impenetrable black. When I regained consciousness I was face down in a soup of blood, flesh and bone.
By all known laws of this universe, I should have been dead. I couldn't understand what was happening to me. It was as if this new existence wouldn't allow me to die.
With my remaining eye I could still see dried scraps of my brain coagulated on the wall across the room. The reflection staring back at me in the bathroom mirror made me vomit into the sink. My tongue dangled from my mouth like a dried-up, broken swing and pieces of my skull jutted from my face like shards of crimson glass.
If there was a hell, I prayed I'd find it soon. Even the devil himself would have been welcome company in such a lonely room.
***
I had become a human moth.
I swore I wouldn't return to the Godforsaken coffee shop, yet there I was again amongst those pathetic souls and that oppressive silence.
I was no longer allowed in the main eating and drinking area. When I stepped through the front door I was immediately directed toward a back room by a large and unfriendly fellow who practically shoved me inside.
This dark, smoke-filled room was smaller and even more congested than the main coffee shop. The silent ones back here were a whole other level of afflicted and forlorn.
My shocking visage didn't seem to bother anyone except me. As a matter of fact, this night's particularly vile looking crowd was riddled with what appeared to be failed suicide attempts. The blonde perched next to me at the tiny bar looked as though she may have been attractive once. But the precious reservoir of blood that pumped through her veins was long dried up. I could see crusted bones and shredded muscle through the tattered skin of her wrists: she had ripped them open with very little grace.
Worse off were two grim figures directly across from me: an obscenely bloated man who cradled his decapitated head under his arm like a mangled pet cat, and a figure to his right with skin so horribly burned I couldn't ascertain its gender. If you listened closely you could hear the seared flesh crackle and pop as it moved. Another gruesome character slithered across the floor like a human snake, his body reduced to a fleshy pulp—presumably after taking a nosedive off a very tall building. I nearly retched watching his shredded web of entrails drag after him on the dirt-encrusted floor.
But the worst by far was the festering abomination propped against the wall in the far corner. It was impossible to describe him/her/it. But the wretched thing was so dreadful that even the regulars wouldn't go near it.
I stepped past it later, as I moved toward the back door and heard what sounded like whimpers coming from what might have been a mouth once.
I wanted to scream at the sight of it, but I never got the chance. Just then a tall brunette woman stepped up to me and gave me the once over.
"Hello," she said.
For a brief moment I felt a rush of gratitude. I was so stunned that someone had spoken to me that I took an involuntary step back.
"Hel...hello," I replied. Or would have if it had been physically possible; my tongue was still hanging loosely from the cavity where my mouth used to be. And yet, somehow, I had communicated this simple greeting.
"You're new." the woman said matter-of-factly. She was probably in her mid-40s and had been attractive once. Her mouth didn't move when she spoke, nor did her awkwardly positioned head. It appeared as if she'd been in a serious car accident and broken her neck. I found it difficult to look her in the eyes, since they were practically vertical.
"I can hear you, but you're not talking..."
"That's the way it works here."
"Here?" What...what is this place?"
"No one knows," she said with no emotion. "A place for lost lives, perhaps."
She smiled at me then. The smile of a madwoman.
I took another step back, wanting to be anywhere but in this hellhole of a room. A man could go mad here. Clearly, some of the denizens already had.
When I left, I knew it would be for the last time. Loneliness may be hell, but it was better than facing those things night after night.
***
My life once again consisted of an empty apartment and my tedious reflections, countless days wishing for something—anything—to happen.
And finally, something did.
A young couple named James and Susan McIntyre moved into, or rather invaded my apartment. It had been vacant for a good while (I simply came home one day to find my personal belongings gone), so I suppose an intrusion like this was inevitable. I admit that, at first, I was thrilled. Their presence added some much needed color to what was beginning to feel like my own personal mausoleum. I followed them fro
m room to room for days, listening to their intimate conversations like a man-sized fly on the wall. Sometimes I would lie next to them as they made love, trying to recall the fading memory of that experience myself.
During one particularly passionate session, I couldn't stop myself from reaching out to touch Susan. I was transfixed by her gorgeous auburn hair, which glistened with the sweat born of their lovemaking.
Her eyes locked with mine and she saw me.
She screamed, as I'd never heard anyone scream before. And it took her husband all night to calm her down and convince her that it was just her imagination.
Fortunately, she hasn't been able to see me since.
The weeks passed and I often huddled close to them as they talked into the wee hours, discussing the future and relishing their possibilities. Possibilities I once had, failed to notice and carelessly threw away.
One night, Susan discovered an old picture of me that had been wedged in a crevice on the top shelf of the bedroom closet. She didn't recognize me, of course, and tossed it into the garbage, where it sat for several days unnoticed.
But I noticed. I noticed how the image began to fade once it had been discarded. And by the second day, my image had vanished completely.
It was as if reality itself had forgotten me.
Any initial distractions the McIntyres provided soon soured. Their joy had become my pain—their love my hate. They flaunted their lives before me with a constant torment of shameless affection. Now, when I saw them caress each other, I could only wish I were a ghost so I could haunt this place and force them from my home. But I remained invisible and powerless, unable to do anything but leave the last part of my previous life behind.
