The Ignored (44 page)

“I heard it was a country. Somewhere in the Pacific, between Hawaii and
Australia.”

Inside, I heard the rattle of dishes.

“I’m thinking of leaving,” James said. “There’s nothing for me here. I
feel like I’m just putting in time. I’m thinking of looking for that other
country.” He paused. “I was wondering if maybe you wanted to come along with
me.”

Part of me wanted to. Part of me missed the excitement and adventure of
being on the road. Part of me also felt stifled here in Thompson. But Jane loved
it here. And I loved Jane. And I would never again do anything to jeopardize our
relationship.

And part of me loved it here, too.

I tried to turn it into a joke. “You just haven’t found any poon here,”
I said.

James nodded solemnly. “That’s part of it.”

I shook my head slowly. “I can’t go,” I said. “This is where I live now.
This is my home.”

He nodded, as if this was the answer he’d been expecting.

“Have you asked any of the other terrorists?”

“No. But I will.”

“You like it here, though, don’t you?” I looked at him. “I know what you
think of this place. But you still like it here, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” he admitted.

“What the fuck are we? We’re like robots. Push the right buttons and
you’ll get the response you want.”

“We’re Ignored.”

I looked up at the sky. “But what does that mean? What is that? Even
being Ignored isn’t consistent. It’s not an absolute. There was a guy at the
place I worked, a friend of mine, who could see me, who noticed me when no one
else did. And what about Joe?”

“Magic has no laws,” James said. “Science has laws. You keep trying to
think of this in scientific terms. It’s not genetics; it’s not physics; it
doesn’t conform to any set of rules. It just is. Alchemists tried to codify
magic and they came up with science, but magic just exists. There’s no rational
reason for it, no cause and effect.”

I shook my head. “Magic.”

“I’ve done a lot of reading on the subject. It’s the only thing that
makes sense to me.”

“Magic?”

“Maybe that’s the wrong word.” He leaned forward, the front legs of his
chair coming down on the porch. “All I know is that whatever makes us this way
cannot be measured or quantified or explained. It’s not physics, it’s
metaphysics.”

“Maybe we’re crystals that have been astral-projected into human form.”

He stood, laughed. “Maybe.” He looked at his watch. “Look, it’s getting
late; I gotta go. I have to work tomorrow.”

“Me, too. For no pay.”

“It’s a weird world.”

We walked through the house, he said good-bye to Jane, and I accompanied
him out the front door to his car. “Are you really leaving?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Probably.”

“Let me know when you decide.”

“Of course.”

I watched him pull away, watched his taillights disappear around the
corner. I was not tired, and I didn’t feel like staying inside and watching TV.
Neither did Jane, and when she finished washing the dishes, we went for a walk.
We ended up in my old neighborhood, standing on a small dock to which was
anchored a child’s sailboat.

We looked out over the small man-made lake that wound between the
condos. Jane put an arm around me, leaned against my shoulder. “Remember when we
used to go out to the pier at Newport?”

“And eat at Ruby’s?”

“Cheeseburger and onion rings,” she said, smiling. “That sounds good
right now.”

“Clam chowder at the Crab Cooker sounds better.”

We were silent for a moment.

“I guess we’ll never live in Laguna Beach,” she said quietly.

A mosquito buzzed by my head, and I slapped at it. The condos across the
water looked cheap to me all of a sudden, the lake pathetic. I thought of the
deep darkness of the ocean night, the clusters of lights that marked the beach
towns visible from the pier, and I felt unaccountably sad. I felt almost like
crying. More than anything else, I wished things were different, wished we were
back in our old life in our old apartment and none of this had ever happened.

I wished we weren’t Ignored.

I turned, pulled her with me back toward the sidewalk. “Come on,” I
said. “It’s getting late. Let’s go home.

The murderer came into the office in the middle of the morning, getting
off the elevator and walking calmly over to the front desk.

I caught him out of the corner of my eye, a brightly colored blur, and I
glanced up to see a short, heavyset man in a clown suit and mime makeup open the
small swinging gate that separated the public waiting area from our work area.

My stomach lurched; my mouth suddenly went dry. Even before I saw the
knife in the clown’s hands, I knew why he was here. My first thought was that
someone had been allowed into Thompson who hadn’t yet killed his boss and that
that person was going to kill whoever was his boss here. But I didn’t recognize
the clown, and I knew he didn’t work on this floor.

And then I noticed that no one was looking at him.

No one saw him.

All this I thought in the space of a few seconds, the time it took the
clown to walk up to Ray Lang’s desk, put a hand over Ray’s mouth, and draw the
knife across his throat.

I lurched to my feet, knocking over my chair, trying to scream but
unable to get out any sound at all.

He drew the knife slowly, expertly. The blood did not shoot, did not
squirt, but oozed and flowed from the thin opening, spreading down over Ray’s
white shirt in a continuous wave. Hand still holding Ray’s mouth shut, the man
quickly shoved his knife first in one of Ray’s eyes, then the other. The blade
emerged with pieces of white and green goo stuck to the otherwise red steel.

The man wiped the blade off on Ray’s hair before taking his hand from
the planning inspector’s mouth. The noise that issued from Ray’s bloody throat
was more a gurgle than a scream, but by now he was flailing around wildly enough
that he had gotten the attention of everyone in the office.

The clown grinned at me, did a little jig. I looked into his eyes, and I
knew that he was insane. Even beneath the clown makeup, I could see the
craziness. This was not the temporary insanity of Philipe. This was the real
thing. And it scared the shit out of me.

“There he is!” I cried, pointing, finally able to move, to act, to
speak. People were running over to where Ray was slipping bloodily out of his
chair, but no one heard me, no one paid any attention to me.

And no one saw the murderer.

“You’re almost there,” the man said, and his voice was a crazed raspy
whisper. He laughed, a sound like fingernails grating on a chalkboard. “Oh, the
things you’ll see….”

And then he was gone. Vanished. Where he had been there was nothing,
only clear space.

The air felt heavy, filled with the burnt-rubber smell of drilled teeth.

I looked around wildly, ran to the elevator, waited for it to open, all
the while scanning the room. But there was nothing. And when the elevator door
did not open, when it was obvious that the murderer had not simply turned
invisible and made for the exit but had actually disappeared, I hurried back
behind the counter to where Ray lay dying.

Paramedics arrived, performed emergency lifesaving procedures, rushed
Ray to the hospital, but he was dead even before he left the floor, and they
were unable to revive him.

After Ray’s departure, I became the center of attention. The police were
there, photographing the chair, taking down statements, and a crowd gathered as
I gave my story. The same people who had been ignoring me as I screamed and
pointed at the murderer were now all ears as I related what I’d seen, what had
happened. I recalled what the clown had said to me: “You’re almost there.”

What did that mean?

But I knew what that meant.

I was becoming Ignored here in Thompson.

Like he was.

The Ignored of the Ignored.

I remembered as a child going on a ride at Disneyland called Adventures
Through Inner Space. On the ride, you were supposed to feel as though you had
been shrunk by the Mighty Microscope and were entering the invisible world of
the atom. I wondered now if I was in just such an invisible world, a world that
most people couldn’t see, that existed concurrently with the visible universe.

Maybe the murderer was a ghost.

I wondered about that, too. People throughout the years, throughout the
centuries, who claimed to have seen ghosts? Maybe they’d just seen an Ignored
Ignored. A man like that would be two steps removed from normal human life.
Perhaps there were no ghosts. Perhaps there was no afterlife. Maybe we just
ceased to exist when we died. Maybe the whole concept of life after death had
originated with a misinterpretation of Ignored sightings.

I wished there was a history of our people, a history of the Ignored.

Ralph got off the elevator and hurried immediately over to where I was
talking to the police. “I was at the bank when I heard. What happened?” he
demanded.

The cop questioning me gave him a brief overview of what had occurred.

Ralph looked at me. “You’re the only one who saw anything?”

“I guess so.”

“We need you,” the mayor said. “For whatever reason, you can see this
guy. You can help us track him.”

For whatever reason.

I knew the reason, and I was frightened. It was getting worse. Like some
progressive disease. At one time, I had had normal friends, participated in
normal society. But I had faded into the ranks of the Ignored. Now I seemed to
be fading even more. At the moment, I appeared able to bridge the gap between
the regular Ignored and this guy—whoever, whatever he was. But would I
eventually become like him, invisible to everybody? Would James and Jane and
everyone else I knew stop thinking about me, stop noticing me, and one day look
around and find that I was not there, that they could no longer see me?

No, I told myself. It didn’t work that way. I wouldn’t become invisible.
I wouldn’t
let
myself become invisible.

“He’s crazy,” I said. “He’s insane.”

“Don’t worry. You won’t be in any danger. Someone will always be with
you. You don’t have to hunt him down, just track him. Like a bloodhound.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about.”

“We’ll take him out,” the cop said. “He won’t kill again.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about,” I said.

“Then what are you worried about?”

I looked away from them, unable or unwilling to share with them my true
fears. “I don’t know,” I lied.

He struck again, an hour later, killing Teddy Howard in the church and
leaving the reverend’s slit-open body to flop around on the altar like a gutted
fish until unmerciful death arrived.

The mood of the city changed overnight. Instantly, everyone became
tense, nervous, on edge. It was like the Night Stalker days back in Southern
California. Thompson had never had serial killings before. There was a crime
rate, of course—with rape and domestic violence statistically on a par with
the national average. But there had never been anything like this, and when the
police composite based on my description was printed in the paper and shown on
the Thompson channel, the fear factor jumped up considerably. The clown costume
struck a chord in everyone, and the fact that there was an Ignored out there who
was ignored even by us, who was trapped in that boss-killing initiation mode,
scared everyone. Gun sales shot through the roof. Even Jane started sleeping
with a baseball bat next to the bed.

And yet…

And yet I could not get as worked up about the killer as everyone else.
I had seen him, I knew how dangerously deranged he was, but it was not the fact
that he was a murderer that disturbed me.

It was the fact that no one but me had seen him.

You’re almost there.

I had been Ignored at Automated Interface, at UC Brea, perhaps for my
entire life. I could deal with that. I had accepted the fact that I was
different from normal people. But I could not accept the idea that I was
different from the other Ignored.

That I was getting worse.

I went to work the next day, and I noticed for the first time that the
nods and smiles I had once gotten from my coworkers at city hall were no longer
forthcoming. How long had this been going on? Had I been fading away for a while
now and just not noticed it?

I tried to think about what I discussed with my coworkers and friends.
Was it any more boring than the conversational topics of others? Was I that
forgettable even here? Again, my thoughts on being Ignored were swinging back
again. Maybe I wasn’t average because I was Ignored. Maybe I was Ignored because
I was average. Maybe I had brought this on myself. Maybe there was something I
could do, some way I could change my behavior or personality, that would reverse
the process.

I was temporarily transferred from the planning department to the police
department. Here I was not ignored. I was an important detecting device in the
eyes of the mayor and the chief, and I was treated as though I were Hercule
Poirot.

The only problem was that there was really nothing to go on, nothing
that could be done to facilitate the capture of this lunatic. I could only walk
around town, followed by two detectives, and see if I could spot him anywhere.
For an entire week, I spent my days walking through offices and stores and
shopping centers, my eyes peeled for the clown or for someone who looked like he
could be the clown. I rode with patrolmen up and down neighborhoods. I looked
through books of mug shots.

Nothing.

And I became more and more uneasy. Even while walking, I noticed that I
was not noticed, and the feeling was eerily reminiscent of those early days when
I’d first discovered that I was Ignored. I thought of Paul and the way we’d
found him at Yosemite, naked and crazy and yelling obscenities into crowds of
people at the top of his lungs. Was that what had happened to the clown? Had he
just snapped under the pressure of such unremitting isolation?