The More You Ignore Me

by Travis Nichols

  “Nico, why don’t you get an iPod?” he will say, lashing out, conspicuous consumer, unwitting marketer for Steven P. Jobs that he is. “It’s not like these compact discs are high fidelity.”

  (Chris’s voice is as thin as his character. It is, I imagine, an insufferable baritone that somehow travels through his nose before his mouth, then comes out in a haughty hack. Sickening.)

  Nico, bless his heart, will make sea lion–like noises as he settles his bulk down in the backseat. He will (rightly!) dismiss Chris’s suggestion with a wave of his hand and begin a reverie.

  “ I saw a Mingus tribute once,” Nico will say in his characteristic mumble. “At the Drake Metro. Right before they played the encore, the saxophone player said, ‘This song goes out to the ladies . . . because without the ladies’—it was really funny, he said, ‘because without the ladies, we wouldn’t be able to have sex!’”

  (What a joke! Mingus tribute? No. I admit it is, in fact, my own creation.)

  “Hilarious,” Chris will deadpan, unappreciative, disapproving of anyone else’s pleasure but his own. “Maybe I’ll use that as your toast.”

  Nico will laugh again loudly (sweet boy!), unaware how he has been mildly insulted and “one-upped” by Chris.

  “Nice,” Nico will say, nestling into his wadded suit jacket and closing his eyes. “That’s funny, man. You’re funny.”

  Chris will of course smile his thin-lipped smile at the compliment, for he needs such flattery, he gobbles it insatiably like a dirty cannibal sucking human muscle from a femur bone in some tribal muck.

  “Are you still doing the website?” Nico will say with a yawn. “You should write up some wedding toasts and post them.”

  “Post them?”

  “Yeah. To the website.”

  Chris will here feel a pang of conscience. He will want to explain to Nico that the website has gone horribly astray, that he has mismanaged it to such a degree that shutdown is imminent, that he has failed his friend, his compatriot, his brother, because he is not only secretly in love with the bride but also afraid of the truth and prejudiced against the type of men who speak such truth to power. But no, in the rearview, Chris will see Nico’s mouth drooping open and his face going slack. Asleep. Silence.

  Here, the moment will present itself that will alter the course not only of this little scene but of all of our lives. Community!!! Pay attention!!!! The blood will be on your hands!!!!!! For observe: A Dodge Neon will here sneak up on Chris and Nico in the right lane. (Chris will, of course, wallow in the left lane as if it were by rights his alone.) This Neon will lumber and swerve. It will be too close. It will trail a noxious gray cloud from its battered exhaust pipe as it nearly runs Chris’s Honda “Civic” off the road. The Neon’s driver, a robust-looking man with a trim goatee and ruddy complexion, will smile wryly to himself before leaning slightly to the left, and—yes!—clipping the “Civic.” It would just be a trifle, but because Chris’s instincts have surely been neutered by video game play and sugary cereal, he will feel the contact, swerve left, and then, fatally overcompensating (of course!), he will swerve again back to the right!! His rear right tire will touch the Neon’s scuffed bumper (the car will be borrowed); the Civic’s rear left tire will buckle under; Nico in the backseat, still half-asleep, will smile faintly as the surge of inertia grips his ******; the car will flip, crash, explode on the interstate with Chris and poor Nico dying in a flurry of snapping bones and sizzling gristle. Screams. Everyone will grieve, though Charli not as much as one might expect. The Neon will drive on into the sunset. THE END

  Oh, dear readers!

  It pained me to speak in these voices and to imagine the deaths of two vibrant young people, but I found I could do it so easily!

  I found that, for example, Nico’s voice erupted from my chest when I simply closed my eyes and imagined myself having been at an early age beaten severely about the head with a baseball bat.

  True, I have sat for hours with my two hands acting out scenes between these characters, with my Nico hand (left) drooping down, thumb-chin rolling and lumbering to make simple phrases while the Chris hand (right) poses stiffly with its haughty fingers in the air, waiting its turn to make some pseudointellectual comment in response.

  They have a rapport, it’s true, and some nights their conversations go on and on in my mind. Acting them out with my hands and then writing out the dialogue is one of the only ways I am able to cleanse my mind of these thoughts, and so I must play out the string.

  I know it doesn’t work to write it out, that all of this won’t leave me just because I make it manifest in language and, for example, post it to the public. I keep it inside of me and its corridors expand accordion-like as I write.

  The ideas—and the consequences of the ideas!—become vast and, at the same time, dense, like dark ice spreading over the expanse of my soul. And yet I continue to write, to think, to act, and to communicate, for dear readers, I’ve been told my examinations of the dark floes illuminate the world for others.

  These troubles are not mine alone, and though it often feels, here in the deep night, that I am the only one struck by the cold, it is not so! I have found peers, and through these admirers, or even simple acknowledgers, I find a thaw becomes possible. It does not occur, mind you, but it becomes an object of hope for me. And so I go on, and in some instances, it’s true, I act out a scene with my hands or type out the vagaries of a thought with the hope that I will in fact be able to fling it from my mind, as if it were some kind of parasitical crustacean hoping to suction out my essence through my face or mouth.

  I fling it out into the world: Begone!

  But perhaps I am cursed, for postfling I often find myself unable to quite forget. There was something beautiful in that parasitical purple flesh. Or if not beautiful, at least valuable. To me, or others.

  True, there is something of “John Cage” in my imaginings.

  No doubt I could make a mint if I were to indulge some ascot-wearing poof at a gallery with my renditions of Chris and Nico’s scat. But, you see, I have standards.

  I have integrity. My hands are not show ponies. Though it is no real effort to put forth this scene for you, members of the community, it is not art.

  It is simply a way of both siphoning off the pressure accumulating in my skull from inside and of blowing off the imposition bearing down on my face from outside.

  A letting.

  I’ve found that I am inadvertently bridging the gap between otherwise isolated islands of consciousness, providing a service, but my true art, dears, lies elsewhere.

  I will reveal only this to you now: it is in the grand American tradition of Eakins, Roth, Poe, Rockwell, and Eastwood.

  I am well aware what nonsense the tastemakers put forward today as “art,” but I am not fooled.

  I know the scam.

  They must pretend it is art available and accessible to all—for aren’t galleries free? museums pay what you wish?—but this is a lie.

  Knowing they can’t physically block the people, they set up shibboleths, passwords, codes embedded in the work that only the ELITE have had opportunity to learn through their private colleges and grant-funded retreats.

  It is a racket, and if one does not know the passwords, the ways to talk about “art,” then one will be escorted from the premises, the conversation, the milieu, just as swiftly as workers and vagabonds once were escorted from the salons of Europe.

  But don’t misunderstand me: I know the codes!

  It would have been irresponsible of me not to learn them.

  It was easy.

  Duchamp.

  Black women.

  Digital reproduction.

  But just because one is aware doesn’t mean one must endorse!

  Don’t be a fool!

  My art is in constant battle with these forces.

  Soon, perchance, I will reveal some of it to you, but until then, a little more of this Left Hand and Right Hand routine?

  Would th
at please you?

  Yes?

  Well, it seems my mind is full of voices tonight, so let’s forget the crash and explosion I presented on the blog. (I admit, I may have gone too far there to make my point that lives are in danger, but I feel justified in my exaggeration, for the community must be made aware!)

  Let’s instead roust Nico from his slumber in the Honda “Civic” and have these two converse again so we can learn more of their pitiable selves through a dialogue that may in fact reveal more to you than my explanations and comments alone ever could.

  Such is even this lowly art!

  Now, you see, I only have to imagine my hands in conversation again, and the scene arrives.

  If I could still comment on the blog, no doubt I would simply post a transcript there, but since I am BANNED, this will be a scene solely for you, my dears!

  Note: I need not clutter the vision with excess verbal styling, but rather let it flow directly from my mind’s eye to some (as yet unfound) luminous screen.

  Of course it’s not only this Charli situation that lends itself to such writing! No, ever since this imbroglio started, I’ve felt as if a fiery belch were constantly about to uncork from deep in my gut. Sadly, no full fiery belch ever quite manages to spring forth, and so at night, after I wake up coughing from the stomach acid burbling up into the back of my throat, I stay awake for hours, doing “yoga,” breathing exercises, and obscure gargle remedies in my room, but nothing keeps the surge at bay for long.

  Sometimes, true, a belch of some kind does indeed uncork, but then another one reveals itself to be right where the last one had been.

  Glorious nature knows how to punish!

  Here’s a belch now—under my wishbone, in the soft solar plexus, expanding.

  Oof!

  Of course, I have been to my doctor, who prescribed the generic version of a drug featured in commercials with gray-haired men running to the bathroom in the middle of candlelit dinners with dazzling blondes.

  You’ve seen it—Ask your doctor about Briostac.

  I did ask my doctor, and I took the medicine, but it only made the fiery belches feel as if they had a ring of ice around them.

  Naturally, I told the doctor, and the result was of such interest that I’ve rendered the scene for you here as, shall we say, an appetizer?

  Yes, let’s say that.

  INT. DOCTOR’S OFFICE. DAY.

  [THE DOCTOR stands with a clipboard, nodding, while I sit on the table, clothes off, a gown hanging loosely from my frame, one hand rolling forward in courtly fashion.]

  ME

  . . . the fiery belches feel, you see, as if they had a ring of ice around them.

  DOCTOR

  (nonchalant)

  Oh yeah. That’s a side effect.

  ME

  Of the Briostac?

  DOCTOR

  Yep. Or whatever it is you’re taking. Generic, right?

  [The DOCTOR gestures over at my “Saturday” clothes in a pile by the chair, under the table of insipid magazines.]

  DOCTOR

  Hey, why don’t you prop your elbows up on the table, and I’ll see if you’ve got any black gunk in your butt. Heh.

  [Despite the inappropriate strangeness of the DOCTOR’S laughter, I do as I’m told.]

  DOCTOR

  Such a strange feeling.

  ME

  There are worse things.

  DOCTOR

  (affronted)

  No, I mean for me. Putting a finger up there. Not cool.

  [The DOCTOR shudders and unsheathes his hand. He tosses the glove expertly into the biohazard bin. He furiously scrubs both hands in the sink. I turn over.]

  DOCTOR

  (frowning)

  Your kitty’s clean. Keep taking the medicine and we’ll send you to a specialist in a month if it doesn’t clear up.

  ME

  But the medicine makes it worse!

  [The DOCTOR nudges me on the shoulder with his left hand and nods down to his right hand, which is out for me to shake. I shake it.]

  DOCTOR

  (sliding out the door)

  All right. You have a good one!

  [I stand in the cold room with my pants off. (Humiliation!) A nurse eventually comes in to shoo me out to the payment desk where the receptionist baffles me with paperwork.]

  [FADE TO BLACK]

  So you see!

  My talent for revelation extends to many genres! Of course, I’ve been told my work is a bit challenging, that it would take a true auteur to fully realize it, but I shall not pander or dumb it down.

  Lest you worry about my “condition,” you should know I have it under control. I keep a digestion diary, recording everything I eat, how my stomach feels after, and what kind of excremental end point the whole process comes to. There, I am able to read that my condition is improving.

  On a camping trip by myself in March, for example, I noted that I had, from morning until midnight, ingested nothing but tamari almonds and red wine.

  I fell asleep on a partially inflated air mattress in my tent and awoke just as dawn broke over the hills.

  I felt an overwhelming urge pressing at my lower back.

  After running into the freezing woods, I unleashed, with an ecstatic grunt, an inverse cast of my large intestine.

  I stared at the steaming pile in wonder, then scrambled back through the wet leaves to my tent to record the event in a joyous fever.

  That digestive event remains one of my most cherished memories of the past few years; not a birthday, not a vacation, not a party—that big defecation alone has made me happy!

  But whom could I share this happiness with?

  The last girl I dated, a thirty-five-year-old hussy (who, I should note, misrepresented herself in her online profile to a nearly criminal degree) remained squeamish about digestion issues the whole time we were together, claiming to her perpetual horror that “boys always have to talk about it.”

  Always one to zig when the boys zagged, I acted very prim when I was first with her.

  No bodily conversation, no restroom visits without matches, and thorough wipings of the bowl after urination.

  It had become such a repressed digestion environment that once, when I hovered over her on her couch, kissing her neck in my patented way, she adjusted her weight and squeaked out the tiniest piff from her digestive tract’s end point.

  I laughed and told her it was like the sneeze of a rabbit.

  Eyes wide in horror, she ran out of the room in shame, thinking I was disgusted at her little explosion.

  I realized then that I had perhaps overplayed my hand.

  Our relationship ended soon after—for obvious reasons.

  Back to the point: I believe in you, dear readers, and I know, since I have recorded “rough cuts” of a few of the “Charli” screenplays whilst playing each part myself, that these scripts are not unrealizable.

  Looking back on my most recently finished scene—one that I may indeed post for you should anyone express an interest—I am astonished at my facility with the genre.

  What a scene! I admit, I have impressed myself.

  It’s only a matter of time before you see this scene (and the others I have on file!) on screens across the country.

  The full-length feature will be called, I think, The Rapists of a Generation.

  I see David Duchovny playing a certain pivotal role.

  But please don’t be distracted by this hint of riches!

  Come back to me, dear readers!

  I have merely mentioned the screenplay to illustrate a point, that the TRUTH is being suppressed.

  How do I know these things?

  How can I predict the future in this manner?

  Is it because I possess a superhuman intellect?

  Perhaps.

  I have never been given the proper tests, but I believe this genius is simply a product of observation and deduction—and age, of course; it does beget wisdom about some things, despite what you have heard.


  Strange, isn’t it?

  I’m beginning to reclaim all the power now despite what it might look like.

  I have nothing, you see.

  I am a nobody.

  What could this puffed-up somebody possibly do to me that hasn’t already been done by countless others?

  I’m like the Vietcong, the Sandinistas, the PLO, the American Revolutionaries, while Chris is just a bruise in the side of a dying empire.

  A bedsore.

  I know.

  But it is just those bruises, those bedsores, that will become infected and run with pus and eventually weaken the immune system so that the host will cough his last burbling soon enough.

  Yes.

  He appears to have everything, but more importantly he believes himself to have everything. Of course that makes him weak.

  A name, a job, a reputation, a “family.” I have none of these things. But, you see, I will take it all away from him. I will make him into a creature beneath me, so he can feel what it’s like, finally, to be shunned.

  It does not feel good.

  Though I imagine there will be some consolation for him, knowing, as he does, that he deserves his fate.

  Will I ever be happy again?

  Will I ever feel free of the excruciating burden of this crusade?