The Ignored (46 page)

He remained in the doorway, not inviting me in. “What do you want?” he
asked. “Why are you here?”

I didn’t want to just jump right in, but I didn’t know what to say to
him. I cleared my throat nervously. “I got married. Remember me telling you
about Jane? I found her here. She’s Ignored, too.”

“So?”

I looked at him, took a deep breath. “Something’s happening,” I said.
“Something’s gone wrong. I need your help.”

His eyes held mine for a moment, and it was as if he was searching
within me to see if I was telling the truth, as though he was somehow testing
me. I must have passed the test, because he nodded slowly. He moved away from
the door, back into the apartment. “Come on in,” he said. “We’ll talk.”

The inside of his apartment had the same stultifying old-lady look his
house had had, and it felt a little creepy to walk into the small living room
and sit down on the tan flowered couch underneath the cheap oil painting of a
mountain lake.

“You want anything to drink?” he asked.

I shook my head, but he went into the kitchen and got two beers anyway,
putting one open can in front of me. I thanked him.

I still didn’t know what to say, still didn’t know how to bring up what
I’d come here to talk with him about. “Do you still see any of the terrorists?”
I asked.

He shook his head.

“What about Joe? Do you ever hear from him?”

“I think he’s crossed over. I don’t think he’s Ignored anymore.”

Not Ignored anymore.

Was that possible? Sure it was. I thought of myself, of my own
situation, and I felt chilled.

“It’s not a static situation,” he said. “You can move one way or the
other.” He took a long, loud sip of his beer. “We’re moving the other way.”

I looked sharply over at him.

“Yeah. I know why you’re here. I can see what’s going on. I know what’s
happening.”

I leaned forward on the couch. “What
is
happening?”

“We’re fading away.”

The fear I felt was tempered with relief. I felt the same way I had when
I’d found out that there were other Ignored: scared, but grateful that I would
not have to face the situation alone. Once again, Philipe had come through for
me.

“No one sees me anymore,” I said.

He smiled wryly. “Tell me about it.”

I looked at him, at his pallid complexion, his ordinary clothes, and I
started to laugh. He began laughing, too, and all of a sudden it was like the
old days, like Mary had never happened, like Familyland had never happened, like
Desert Palms had never happened, like we were in my old apartment, hanging out,
friends, brothers forever.

The ice was broken between us, and we started talking. He told me about
his quick fade into obscurity after the White House fiasco, about the long
months of living here, in this apartment all alone. I told him about my life
with Jane, and then about the murderer and about my discovery that I was
becoming as Ignored here as I had been in the outside world.

I took a swig of beer. “I also… see things,” I said.

“See things?”

“There,” I said, pointing out the window. “I see a meadow with red
grass. There’s a black tree at the far end that looks kind of like a cactus with
leaves and branches.”

“I see it,” Philipe said.

“You do?”

He nodded sadly. “I wasn’t going to say anything. I didn’t want to alarm
you. I wasn’t sure you’d progressed as far as I had.”

“What is it?” I asked. “What’s happening? Why are we seeing these
things?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I have some theories. But that’s all
they are. Theories.”

I looked at him. “Do you think it’s reversible, our condition? Or do you
think we’ll just keep fading away forever?”

He stared out the window, at the red meadow, at the black cactus tree.
“I don’t think it’s reversible,” he said softly. “And I don’t think there’s
anything we can do about it.”

The murderer struck again on Thursday.

I don’t know why I continued to go to work, but I did. I could have done
what I’d done at Automated Interface, just stopped showing up. I could have, and
probably should have, spent my remaining time with Jane. But I kept setting that
alarm each morning, kept going in to city hall each day.

And on Thursday the murderer returned to the scene of his crime.

He was not wearing a clown suit this time, so I did not recognize him. I
was not really working, but was sitting at my desk, staring distractedly at the
fluorescent pink rock formation that had grown through the window since
yesterday, thinking for the millionth time of what I would do when I became
invisible to Jane, when the elevator door opened and he stepped onto the floor.

I took no notice of him until it was almost too late. Out of the corner
of my eye, I saw him walk across the lobby toward the front desk, and there was
something familiar about the way he moved, but it didn’t really register in my
brain.

Suddenly the air felt heavy, smelled of drilled teeth.

I stood, instantly on the alert, my mind putting together the guy
getting off the elevator, the familiar way he moved, the clown.

He jumped me from behind.

I was grabbed around the neck, and I saw for a brief second a flash of
knife metal. Instantly, instinctively, before my conscious mind even realized
what I was doing or why I was doing it, I twisted to the side and simultaneously
threw myself to the ground, missing the attempted stab and landing on top of the
murderer. He hit the ground with a muffled
oomph
, lost his grip around
my neck, and I rolled away, climbing to my knees and then my feet, grabbing a
pair of scissors from the top of my desk.

He was as crazy as he had been before, and I saw the look of
disconnected dementia on his face as he grinned at me, knife held forward. “I
know you’ve been looking for me, fucker. I saw you out there.”

I backed slowly around the edge of my desk, putting it between us. I did
not like the way he looked. He was bald and middle-aged, with a bulbous,
naturally clownish nose, and there was a disturbing shifting quality to the cast
of his features that somehow made him seem saner with the makeup on.

“I don’t want you here,” he said. “You can’t come in.” He stopped on a
low blue bush that was growing up from the floor, and his foot disturbed the
leaves, knocking a few of them off.

He could touch these manifestations.

With a sudden flying leap, he flung himself at me, lunging over the
desk, knife arm outstretched. He was off balance and missed my stomach by a wide
margin, but he was already righting himself and I jumped to the side and slashed
at him with the scissors. I hit him across the face, one scissor blade
puncturing his cheek. He let out a primal cry of rage and pain that distorted
his already distorted features, and I pulled the scissors out and stabbed lower,
embedding the twin halves into his chest. I felt the blades hit bone, felt a
rush of hot blood spill over my hand, and again I pulled the scissors out,
shoved them hard into his stomach.

I backed away.

No longer screaming, making only a low pitiful strangled crying sound,
he staggered off the side of the desk and onto the floor. His blood spattered
both the city hall tile and the blades of orange grass growing up from it. He
was losing a lot of blood, and his skin looked gray and pale, as though he was
dying.

I prayed to God that he was.

The entire encounter had passed unnoticed in front of the eyes of my
coworkers and the two contractors applying for permits at the counter. Around
us, the normal office routine of the planning department continued on as usual.

A secretary carrying blueprints to Xerox stepped into a puddle of blood,
did not see it, did not leave footprints.

The murderer looked at me, glassy-eyed. “You…” he began, then
trailed off. He lurched to his left, past another desk—

—and through the wall.

I blinked. I could see the wall behind the desk, but suddenly I could
see a meadow behind the wall, sloping ground leading away from the hill atop
which I was standing. I rushed forward, tried to follow him, tried to chase
after him, but though I could see the path on which the murderer was running, it
was not there for me. I did not go into the meadow. I ran into hard stucco,
hitting my head.

I staggered back, staring through the transparent wall as, wounded,
bleeding, crying piteously, the murderer limped off, down the sloped meadow,
across the orange grass, into the purple trees.

The nightmare was over, but no one knew it.

I had single-handedly saved Thompson from what would have probably been
an unending string of serial murders.

And Jane was the only one who was aware of it.

I tried telling Ralph, tried telling the police chief, but neither one
of them could see me. I even wrote an anonymous letter, sending copies to the
mayor, the chief, the paper, anyone I could think of who might be able to get
the word out, but no one paid any attention, and the official search for the
murderer continued blindly along.

I spent the next week in the bedroom with the shades drawn, coming out
only to eat and go to the bathroom. It wasn’t the lack of recognition that was
bothering me. It was not even the fact that I had killed another man.

It was the intrusion of this… other world.

For that was what it was. Another world. I knew that now. More and more
often, I saw unfamiliar horizons, alien plant life and geologic formations,
color schemes not of this earth. I did not know if they were part of another
dimension that shared the same space as our own or if there was some other
explanation, all I knew was that this other world was intruding on my space with
greater frequency and greater intensity. Even locking myself in the bedroom did
no good, because more often than not these days, the rug wasn’t the rug but was
a carpet of orange grass, the walls weren’t solid white but were transparent
windows on strange landscapes, the ceiling a skylight through which I could
watch brown clouds float across a gold sky.

I could have withdrawn entirely into myself, pulled away from Jane, but
I did not. I tried to fight these visions or manifestations or whatever they
were, but I did not push Jane away from me as I probably would have done in the
past. Instead, I kept her close, told her everything I saw, everything I felt,
and it seemed that when I was with her, when we were together, that other world
faded a little and I was more fully in Thompson.

I saw the creature on Sunday.

Until now, my glimpses into this alternate universe had been limited to
landscapes, to plant life and rocks. I had seen nothing animate, nothing alive.
But on Sunday morning I awoke, opened the bedroom drapes, looked outside, and
saw the creature. It was staring at me from across an orange meadow. I watched
it move sideways across the tall grass. It was like a spider, only it was as big
as a horse, and there was in its face, visible even from this distance, a look
of sly knowledge that chilled me to the bone. I saw its hairy mouth open, heard
a loud sibilant whisper, and I quickly let the drapes drop, stepping back and
away from them. I did not know what the creature had said and I did not want to
know, but something told me that if I continued staring at it, watching it, I
would be able to make out what it was saying.

I crawled back into bed, pulled the covers over my head.

Later that day, I went again to see Philipe. Jane wanted to come, but I
told her she couldn’t. I said Philipe would be spooked, that he would not want
her with us, and though she didn’t like that at all, she believed it. It wasn’t
true—I’m sure Philipe would have loved to meet her—but for some reason I
did not want her to meet Philipe, and I did not feel bad lying to her about it.

He opened the door to his apartment before I was halfway up the walk,
and I was shocked by the change in him. It had been less than two weeks since
I’d seen him last, but in that time he had deteriorated badly. It was nothing
specific, nothing I could put my finger on. He wasn’t thinner than he had been,
he hadn’t lost all his hair, he had just… faded. Whatever had set Philipe
apart from everyone else, whatever had made him unique, an individual, seemed to
have gone, and the person standing before me was as bland and unremarkable as a
department store mannequin.

Had the same thing happened to me?

Then he spoke, called my name, and some of his old self was back. I
recognized the voice, heard in it the intelligence and drive that had once drawn
me to him, and I followed him into his apartment. The floor was covered with
dirt and beer bottles and uprooted alien plants, and I looked at him. “You can… touch those things?” I asked.

He nodded.

I reached for a blue branch lying on his coffee table, and my hand
passed through it. I was filled with an overwhelming sense of relief.

“You’ll be there soon,” he said sadly.

You’re almost there.

I nodded. I looked around at the damage, at the destroyed plants and
shrubs. I cleared my throat. “Do you still have those, uh… ?” I trailed
off.

He knew what I was getting at. “Not since that last time. Not since the
terrorists broke up.”

“You haven’t… killed anyone?”

He smiled slightly. “Not that I’m aware of.”

There was a question that had been bugging me since that night of the
sandstorm, since I’d followed him into that house, and I figured that now was
the time to ask it. “You were talking to someone,” I said. “That night.
Answering questions. Who were you talking to?”

“God, I thought.”

“You thought?”

“It was the same voice that had named me Philipe. I’d heard it a long
time ago. In my dreams. Even before I knew I was Ignored. It told me to call
myself Philipe, told me to put together the terrorists. It told me… other
things, too.”