The Ignored

by Bentley Little - (ebook by Undead)

  But I didn’t buy it.

  For one thing, I wasn’t completely average. If I had been, if everything had been that consistent, my existence would have been understandable, predictable. But there were glaring inconsistencies in the theory. My television viewing might correspond exactly with the Nielsen ratings, the shows ranked the same order in the newspaper and in my mind, but my taste in books was nowhere near mainstream.

  Then again, while my reading tastes might be different from those of the general public, perhaps they were precisely average for white males of my socio-economic and educational background.

  How specific did this thing get?

  It would take a statistician years to sort through this information and pick out a pattern.

  I was driving myself crazy with this endless speculation, trying so desperately hard to find out who or what I was.

  I looked around my apartment, at the outlandish furnishings that my influence had somehow made mundane. I had an idea, and I went into the kitchen and dug through the junk drawer until I found my AAA map of Los Angeles. I spread the map out, located the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

  There was a car parked on the street in front of my apartment. A white Dodge Dart. I didn’t think much of it at first, but when the car pulled behind me as I drove out of the driveway… then followed me down College Avenue, down Imperial Highway and onto the freeway, I began to feel a little unnerved. I knew it was probably nothing. I’d simply seen too many movies. And my solitary existence had only contributed to my paranoia. But I couldn’t help noticing that the car remained behind me: changing lanes when I changed lanes, speeding up when I sped up, slowing down when I slowed down. There was no reason for anyone to be following me—such an idea was obviously ludicrous—but I still felt uneasy and a little bit frightened.

  In my rearview mirror I saw that a black four-door pickup had zoomed into the space between me and the Dart, and I used this opportunity to get away, flooring the gas pedal, suddenly swerving in front of a VW and exiting the nearest off-ramp. I waited at the intersection of the street at the bottom of the off-ramp, not moving even when the light changed to green, but the Dart did not reappear behind me.

  I’d lost him.

  I got back on the freeway, heading toward L.A.

  The art museum was crowded, and it was hard to find a parking spot. I finally had to shell out five bucks and park at a rip-off lot across the side street from the La Brea Tar Pits. I walked through the park, past the outrageously colored replicas of long-extinct mammals, and up to the museum, where I paid another five bucks for a pass.

  Inside, the museum was cool and dark and silent. There were people here, but the building was so big that they seemed few and far between, and even the most flamboyant among them were cowed into quiet by the hushed and intimidating atmosphere.

  I walked from room to room, wing to wing, floor to floor, past English furniture and French silverware and Indian statues, scanning the paintings on the walls, looking for one of the big names, one of the heavy hitters. Finally I found one. Renoir. A painting of people eating at an outdoor cafe.

  There were no other guests in this gallery or even this wing, only a lone uniformed guard standing silently by the entry way. I stepped back, into the center of the room. This, I knew, was class. This was culture. This was Art with a capital A.

  I stared at the painting and felt cold. I wanted to experience the magic, the sense of awe and wonder, the feeling of transcendence that people were supposed to have when confronted with great works of art, but I felt only a mild enjoyment. I looked at the other paintings on display. Before me were the treasures of the world, the very finest objects that man had produced in the history of the planet, and all I could muster was a halfhearted interest. My senses were muffled, subdued, stifled by the nature of my being, by the fact that I was completely and utterly ordinary.

  The extraordinary had no power to touch me.

  It was what I’d thought, what I’d feared, and although it only confirmed what I’d expected, that confirmation hit home with the force of a death announcement.

  I looked again at the Renoir, moved closer, studied it, examined it, trying to force myself to feel something, anything, trying desperately to understand what others might see in the work, but it was beyond me. I turned to go—

  —and saw someone standing in the entryway of the gallery, staring at me.

  The tall, sharp-eyed man I’d seen at the mall.

  A wave of cold passed over me, through me.

  And then he was gone, disappearing behind the wall to the left of the door. I hurried over to the entryway, but by the time I reached it there was no sign of him. There was only a lone couple, dressed in matching black turtlenecks, walking toward me from the far end of the wing.

  I was tempted to ask the guard whether he’d seen the man, but I realized instantly that he wouldn’t have. The guard was facing into the room, away from where the man had been, and he would not have seen a thing.

  The museum suddenly seemed darker, colder, bigger than it had, and as J walked alone toward the front of the building, past silent wings and empty rooms, I realized that I was holding my breath.

  I was scared.

  I walked faster, wanting to run but not daring to, and it was only when I was safely outside, in the sunshine, surrounded by people, that I was again able to breathe normally.

  SEVENTEEN

  On Monday, David was gone. I was not told why and I did not ask, but his desk was cleared off, the metal shelves behind him empty, and I knew without being told that he no longer worked for Automated Interface. I wondered if he’d quit or been fired. Fired, I assumed. Otherwise he would’ve told me.

  Or maybe not.

  What they say and what they mean are two different things.

  I found myself thinking about what he’d said about women when I’d told him that I hadn’t made an effort to contact Jane after she’d left me. It had been bothering me ever since he’d said it, nagging at the back of my mind, making me feel, not exactly guilty, but… responsible somehow for the fact that she hadn’t come back. I thought for a moment, then stood, closed the door to the office, and sat down at David’s desk, picking up the phone. I still remembered the day care center’s phone number after all this time, my fingers punching the seven digits almost instinctively.

  “May I speak to Jane?” I asked the old woman who answered the phone.

  “Jane Reynolds?”

  “Yes.”

  “She quit four months ago. She no longer works here.”

  I felt as though I’d been kicked in the stomach.

  I hadn’t seen, talked to, or communicated with Jane since we’d broken up, but somehow the idea that she’d been near, that she’d continued carrying on her normal life, even though I was no longer part of that life, had been comforting to me, calming. I might not be with her, but just knowing that she was there reassured me. Now, I suddenly discovered, she’d dumped all of her old life at the same time she’d dumped me.

  Where was she now? What was she doing?

  I imagined her cruising across the country on the back of some Hell’s Angel’s Harley.

  No. I pushed the thought out of my mind. That wasn’t Jane. And even if it was, it was none of my business. We weren’t together anymore. I had no right to be affected by the details of her new life.

  “Hello?” the old woman said. “Are you still there? Who is this?”

  I hung up the phone.

  I saw him outside my apartment that evening. The sharp-eyed man. He was standing in the shadows under a tree, his left side lightly and partially illuminated by the streetlamp halfway up the block. I saw him through the front window as I was closing the drapes, and the sight of him scared the shit out of me. I had been trying not to think about him so I would not have to rationalize his existence to myself, but seeing him there, waiting in the dark, staring at my apartment, watching me, made me very afraid. It was clear now that he was spying on me—
r />   stalking me

  —though I had no idea why. I hurried to the door, opened it, and bravely stepped out on the porch, but when I looked toward the tree he was gone. There was no one there.

  I closed the door, chilled. The thought occurred to me that he wasn’t human. Maybe he was like the hitchhiker who kept following the woman in that Twilight Zone episode. Maybe he was Death. Maybe he was a guardian angel. Maybe he was the ghost of a person my family had wronged who was now fated to follow me everywhere.

  Now I was just being stupid.

  But was I? If I could accept the idea that I was Ignored, why couldn’t I accept the idea that he was a ghost or some other sort of supernatural being?

  I had a tough time falling asleep that night.

  I dreamed of the sharp-eyed man.

  I began skipping out, taking days off work. As long as I was there to fill out my time card on Friday, it didn’t really seem to make any difference whether I showed up the rest of the week.

  I never felt like going home, and at first I hung out at the various malls: Costa Mesa’s South Coast Plaza, Santa Ana’s Main Place, Orange’s Orange Mall, Brea’s Brea Mall. But I soon tired of that, and I eventually found myself driving around Irvine, hovering about the city like a moth near a porch light.

  I started parking the car and walking through Irvine’s shopping districts, taking comfort in the uniformity of the shops, feeling relaxed in the midst of all this harmonious homogeneity. I settled into something of a routine, eating lunch at the same Burger King each day, stopping in at the same music, book, and clothing stores to browse. As the days passed, I began to recognize faces on the street, other men, like myself, who were dressed as if for work but were obviously not working and obviously not job-hunting. Once, I saw one of the men steal from a convenience store. I was standing across the street, at the crosswalk, waiting for the light to change, and I watched a tall, well-dressed man walk into a 7-Eleven, pick up two cartons of Coors from the display in the front window, and walk out, apparently without paying. The two of us passed each other on the sidewalk in front of the convenience store.

  I found myself wondering if he’d left any fingerprints in the store, if he’d touched anything else besides the beer. He had to have touched the door to open it. If I went into the store and told the clerk, could the police dust for prints and catch the man that way?

  I opened my right hand, moved it up in front of my face, looked at my fingers. Every individual in the world was supposed to have a unique fingerprint, distinctive only to him or her. But as I stared at the lightly ridged whorls of skin that covered the tip of my index finger, I wondered if that was true after all. I had the sneaking suspicion that my fingerprints were not unique, were not truly my own. If nothing else about me was original, if nothing else about me was inimitable, why should this be different? I’d seen pictures of prints before, in magazines, on the news, and the differences between them were always so slight as to be nearly unnoticeable. If the print patterns were so limited to begin with, how reasonable was it to think that no two, in the entire history of man, were ever alike? There had to be sets of fingerprints that looked the same.

  And mine were no doubt the most common kind.

  But that was stupid. If that were the case, someone would have noticed it by now. Police would have discovered even a small contingent of identical fingerprints, and that would have automatically invalidated the use of prints as weapons in crime detection and as evidence in court.

  But maybe the police had discovered that all fingerprints were not unique. And maybe they had kept it quiet. After all, the police had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Fingerprinting worked in the majority of cases, and if a few people fell through the cracks… well, that was the price that had to be paid for an orderly society.

  I suddenly felt chilled, and at that moment the entire criminal justice system seemed a lot more sinister to me than it had only a few seconds before. In my mind I saw innocent men convicted of crimes, jailed, perhaps even executed, because their prints matched those of the real murderers. I saw computers displaying a list of people with fingerprints identical to those found on a murder weapon and the police picking a scapegoat using eenie-meenie-minie-moe.

  All of Western civilization operated on the assumption that everyone was different, everyone was unique. It was the basis of our philosophical constructs, our political structure, our religions.

  But it wasn’t true, I thought. It wasn’t true.

  I told myself to stop thinking about that, to stop projecting my own situation onto, the entire world. I told myself to enjoy my day off.

  I turned away from the 7-Eleven and walked over to the music store to do some browsing. At noon I ate lunch at Burger King.

  EIGHTEEN

  Christmas came. And New Year’s.

  I spent both holidays alone, watching TV.

  NINETEEN

  The work was piling up, and I knew that even if my absences weren’t noticed, my lack of output would be. At least by Stewart. I decided to spend a whole week in my office, catching up on my assignments.

  It was halfway through the week when I walked over to the break room to buy a Coke—-or a Shasta—and I heard Stewart’s voice: “He’s gay, you know.”

  “I thought maybe he was.” Stacy. “He’s never tried to hit on me.”

  I walked into the break room and Stewart grinned at me. Stacy, Bill, and Pam all looked away, and their impromptu group began immediately and guiltily dispersing.

  I realized that they had been talking about me.

  I felt my face redden. I should have been outraged by their intolerance and homophobia. I should have given an angry speech denouncing their unenlightened narrow-mindedness. But I felt embarrassed and humiliated, ashamed that they thought I was homosexual, and I blurted out: “I’m not gay!”

  Stewart was still grinning. “You miss David, don’t you?”

  This time I said it: “Fuck you.”

  His grin grew. “You’d like to, wouldn’t you?”

  It was like a school yard argument, the trading of insults by junior high school students. I knew that intellectually. I understood that. But I was also a part of it, and emotionally I felt like I was once again a skinny kid on the playground being picked on by a bigger bully jock.

  I took a deep breath, willed myself to remain calm. “This is harassment,” I said. “I’m going to talk to Mr. Banks about your behavior.”

  “Oooh, you’re going to go tell Mr. Banks on me,” he said in an exaggeratedly whiny crybaby voice. His voice hardened. “Well, I’m going to make a report of your insubordination and have you bounced out of this corporation so fast your head will spin.”

  “I don’t give a shit,” I said.

  The programmers were not looking at us. They had not left—they wanted to see what was going to happen—but they were off in other corners of the room, pretending to look at the selections in the vending machines, flipping through the pages of the women’s magazines left on the tables.

  Stewart smiled at me, and it was a hard smile, a cruel smile, a triumphant smile. “You’re out of here, Jones. You’re history.”

  I watched him walk out of the break room, away from me, down the hall. There were other people in the corridor, employees from other departments, and I noticed for the first time that though he was nodding at those he passed, no one was nodding back, no one was smiling, no one was saying hello, no one was acknowledging him in any way.

  I thought of his spare, impersonal office, and it hit me.

  He was Ignored, too!

  I watched him turn the corner into his office. It made perfect sense. The only reason he was noticed at all was because he was a supervisor. It was only his position of power that kept him from fading into the woodwork completely. The programmers and secretaries paid attention to him because they had to, because it was part of their job, because he was above them in the corporate hierarchy. Banks paid attention to him because Banks was resp
onsible for the whole division and had to keep close tabs on what everyone was doing, particularly the department heads.

  But no one else was aware of his existence.

  Maybe that was why Stewart disliked me so much. He saw in me the things he hated most about himself. Odds were that he didn’t even know he was Ignored. He was sheltered by his position and probably wasn’t aware of the fact that no one outside of our department paid any attention to him at all.

  The thought occurred to me that I could kill him and no one would notice.

  I instantly tried to take the thought back, tried to pretend I hadn’t had it. But it was there in my mind, defying my attempts to erase it even as I desperately tried to think of something else. I don’t know to whom I was denying this thought. Myself, perhaps. Or God—if He or She was listening in on my mind and monitoring the morality of my random ideas and notions. It wasn’t just a random notion, though. And as I tried not to think about it and only thought about it more, I realized that while I wanted to find the idea horrifying and completely repugnant, it actually seemed… attractive.

  I could kill Stewart and no one would notice.

  I thought of the man stealing Coors from the 7-Eleven and not getting caught.

  I could kill Stewart and no one would notice.

  I was not a murderer. I owned no guns. Killing went against everything I’d ever been taught or believed in.

  But the idea of doing away with Stewart had a definite appeal. I would never really go through with it, of course. It was just a fantasy, a daydream—

  No, it wasn’t.

  I wanted to kill him.

  I began thinking about it logically. Was Stewart truly Ignored? Or was he just kind of a boring guy who wasn’t very popular? Could I be certain that if I killed him I would get away with it?

  It didn’t matter if he was Ignored. I was Ignored. People might notice that he was dead, but they wouldn’t know that I was the killer. I could murder him in his office and walk down the hallway, go down the elevator, and pass through the lobby all covered with blood and no one would pay any attention to me at all.