I turned to the blank green pages at the front of the book to see what they’d written to me on this, the eve of our graduation.
“I’m glad I got to know you. Have a great summer. John.”
“Have a cool summer and good luck. Brent.”
These were my best friends? I closed the yearbook, licked my dry lips. Their comments were just as impersonal as those of everyone else.
I sat there for a moment in the middle of the floor, staring at the opposite wall. Was this what it was like for people with Alzheimer’s? Or people going crazy? I took a deep breath, trying to gather my courage to open the yearbook again. Had it been them or myself? I wondered. Or both? Was I now as big a blank to them as they were to me, merely a name from the past and a hazily remembered face? I opened the yearbook again, turned to my own photo, stared, at my picture. I found my visage not bland, not blank, not nondescript, but interesting and intelligent.
Maybe I had grown more average over the years, I thought absurdly. Maybe it was a disease and I’d caught it from John and Brent.
No. I wished it were something as simple as that. But there was something far more comprehensive, far more frightening here.
I skimmed the rest of the yearbook, scanning the pages, and a familiar envelope fell from between the last page and the back cover. Inside the envelope were my grades. I opened the envelope, scanned the thin translucent sheets of paper. My senior year: all C’s. Junior year: the same.
I hadn’t been average in English, I knew. I’d always been an above-average writer.
But my grades did not reflect that.
I had gotten C’s across the board.
A wave of cold passed over me, and I dropped the yearbook and hurried out of the bedroom. I went into the kitchen, took a beer out of the refrigerator, popped open the top and chugged it down. The apartment seemed silent again. I stood in the kitchen, leaning against the sink, staring at the door of the refrigerator.
How deep did this thing go?
I didn’t know and I didn’t want to know. I didn’t even want to think about it.
The sky was darkening outside, the sun going down, and the inside of the apartment was filling with shadows, the furniture that I could see through the living room doorway shifted slowly into silhouette. I walked across the kitchen, turned on the light. From here, I could see where the couch had been, where the prints had hung. I looked into the living room and all of a sudden I felt lonely. Really lonely. So damn lonely that I almost felt like crying.
I thought of opening the refrigerator and getting out another beer, maybe getting drunk, but I didn’t want to do that.
I didn’t want to spend the evening in the apartment.
So I got put of the house and drove, hitting the Costa Mesa Freeway and heading south. I only realized where I was going when I was halfway there, and by that time I did not want to turn back, although the ache within me grew even more acute.
The freeway ended, turned into Newport Boulevard, and I drove to the beach, our beach, parking in the small metered lot next to the pier. I got out of the car, locked it, and wandered aimlessly through the crowded streets. The sidewalks were teeming with beautifully tanned bikini-clad women and handsome athletic men. Roller skaters glided through the throng, maneuvering around the walkers.
Again, from the Studio Cafe, I heard that music, Sandy Owen, although this time the music did not seem magically transcendent but sad and melancholy and, once more, wholly appropriate: a different sound track for a different night.
I looked toward the pier, toward the blackness of the ocean night beyond.
I wondered what Jane was doing.
I wonder who she was with.
ELEVEN
Derek retired in October.
I did not attend his going-away party—I was not even invited—but I knew when it was being held because of the notices on the break room bulletin board, and I called in sick on the day that it took place.
Odd as it seemed, I missed him after he was gone. Merely having another body in the office, even if it was Derek’s, had somehow made me feel less alone, had been like a tie to the outside world, to other people, and the office, in his absence, seemed very empty.
I was starting to worry about myself, about my lack of human contact. The evening after Derek’s departure I realized that I had gone for a whole day without speaking, without uttering a single, solitary word.
And it had not made a damn bit of difference to anyone. No one had even noticed.
The next day, I woke up, went to work, had a few words with Stewart in the morning, stated my order to the clerk at Del Taco at lunch, said nothing to anyone during the afternoon, went home, made dinner, watched TV, went to bed. I had probably spoken a total of six sentences the entire day—to Stewart and the Del Taco clerk. And that was it.
I needed to do something. I needed to change my job, change my personality, change my life.
But I couldn’t.
“Average,” I thought, was not really an accurate description of what I was. It was true as far as it went, but it didn’t imply enough. It didn’t quite cut it. It was too benign, not pejorative enough. “Ignored” was more appropriate, and that was how I began thinking of myself.
I was Ignored.
With a capital I.
I made a point the next day of passing by the desks of the programmers, the desks of Hope, Virginia, and Lois. I said hello to each, and each one of them ignored me. Hope, the kindest, nodded distractedly at me, mumbled something vaguely salutatory.
It was getting worse.
I was fading away.
On my way home, on the freeway, I drove wildly, cutting in front of cars, not letting people pass, slamming on my brakes when I felt the drivers were following too close behind me. I received horn honks and middle fingers in return.
Here I was noticed, I thought. Here I was not invisible. These people knew I was alive.
I cut off a black woman in a Saab, was gratified to hear her honk at me.
I swerved in front of a punk in a VW, smiled as he screamed at me out the window.
I started buying lottery tickets each Wednesday and Saturday, the two days on which the game was played. I knew I had no chance of winning—according to an article in the newspaper, I had a better chance of being hit by lightning than winning the lottery—but I began to see the game as the only way of escaping the strait-jacket that was my job. Each Wednesday and Saturday night as I sat in front of the television, watching the numbered white Ping-Pong balls flying about in their glass vacuum case, I not only hoped I would win, I actually thought I would win. I began to concoct elaborate scenarios in my head, plans of what I would do with my newfound wealth. First, I would settle some scores at work. I would hire someone to dump a thousand pounds of cow shit on top of Banks’ desk. I would hire a thug to make Stewart dance naked in the first-floor lobby to Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” I would yell obscenities over the corporation’s PA system until someone called Security and had me forcibly removed from the building.
After that, I would get the hell out of California. I did not know where I’d go; I had no real destination in mind, but I knew that I wanted out of here. This place had come to represent everything that was wrong with my life, and I would ditch it and start over somewhere else, somewhere new, somewhere fresh.
At least that was the plan.
But each Thursday and Monday, after watching the lottery drawing and comparing the chosen numbers with those on the ticket in my hand, I inevitably ended up back at work, a dollar poorer and a day more depressed, all my plans shot to hell.
It was on one of these Mondays that I came across a photo someone had accidentally dropped on the floor of the elevator. It was an eight-by-ten, a picture of the testing department that had obviously been taken in the sixties. The men all had inappropriately long sideburns and wide, loud ties, the women short skirts and bell-bottomed pantsuits. There were faces I recognized in the photo, and that was the weird thing.
I saw longhaired young women who had become short-haired old women; smiling, easygoing men whose faces had since hardened permanently into uptight frowns. The dichotomy was so striking, the differences so obvious, that it was like seeing a horror movie makeup transformation. Never before had I seen such a depressingly clear example of the ravaging effects of time.
For me, it was like Scrooge seeing the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. I saw my present in that photo, my future in the now-hardened faces of my coworkers.
I returned to my desk, more shaken than I would have liked to admit. On my desk, I found a stack of papers and, on top of that, a yellow Post-It upon which Stewart had scrawled a short note: “Revise Termination Procedures for Personnel. Due tomorrow. 8:00.”
The 8:00 was underlined.
Twice.
Sighing, I sat down, picked up the papers. For the next hour, I read through the highlighted paragraphs in the provided pages and looked over the margin notes that Stewart wanted me to incorporate into the text. I made my own notes, hacked out a rough draft of the corrections, which I paper-clipped to the proper pages, then carried my materials down the hall to the steno pool. I smiled at Lois and Virginia, said hi, but both of them ignored me, and I retreated to the word-processing desk in the corner and sat down at the PC.
I turned on the terminal, inserted my diskette, and was about to start typing the first of the corrections when I stopped. I don’t know what came over me, I don’t know why I did it, but I put my fingers to the keys and typed: “A full-time employee can be terminated in one of the three ways—hanging, electrocution, or lethal injection.”
I reread what I’d written. I almost stopped there. I almost moved the cursor to the beginning of the line and pressed the delete key.
Almost.
My hesitation lasted only a second. I knew I could be fired if I distributed these corrections and someone read them, but in a way I would have welcomed that. At least it would have put an end to my misery here. It would have forced me to find another job someplace else.
But I knew from experience that no one would read what I was writing. The people to whom I gave my updates seldom even inserted them in the appropriate manuals, let alone read them. Hell, even Stewart seemed to have stopped going over my work.
“An employee terminated for poor work performance can no longer be drawn and quartered under the new regulations,” I typed. “The revised guidelines state clearly that such an employee is now to be terminated by hanging from the neck until dead.”
I grinned as I reread the sentence. Behind me, Lois and Virginia were talking as they did their own work, discussing some miniseries they’d seen the night before. Part of me was afraid that they would come up behind me, look over my shoulder and read what I’d written, but then I thought no, they’d probably forgotten I was even there.
“Unapproved, non-illness-related absences of over three days will be grounds for termination by electrocution,” I typed. “Department and division supervisors will flank the electric chair as the death sentence is carried out.”
I waited for repercussions from my Termination Procedure stunt, but none came. A day passed. Two. Three. A week. Obviously, Stewart had not bothered to read the update—although he’d had a bee up his butt about getting it done instantly, that day, as if it were the most important thing in the world.
Just to be safe, just to make sure, I asked him about it, caught him by Hope’s desk one morning and asked if he’d gone over the update to make sure it was correct. “Yeah,” he said distractedly, waving me away. “It’s fine.”
He hadn’t read it.
Or… maybe he had.
I felt a familiar churning in the pit of my stomach. Was what I wrote as anonymous as what I said or did? Was my writing ignored, too? I had not thought of that before, but it was possible. It was more than possible.
I thought of my C’s in English on that report card.
On my next set of screen instructions for GeoComm, I wrote: “When all on-screen fields are correct, press [ENTER] and your mama will take it up the ass. She likes it best that way.”
I got no comment on it.
Since no one seemed to notice me, I took it a step further and began coming in wearing jeans and T-shirts, comfortable street clothes, instead of the more formal dress shirt and tie. There were no reprimands, no recriminations. I rode up on the elevator each morning, denim-clad amidst a sea of white shirts and red ties, and no one said a word. I wore ripped Levi’s and dirty sneakers and T-shirts from old rock concerts to my meetings with Stewart and Banks and neither of them noticed.
In mid-October, Stewart went on a week’s vacation, leaving a list of assignments and their deadlines on my desk. It was a relief to have him gone, but his absence meant that what miniscule interaction I had with other people was for that week suspended. I spoke to no one at all while he was gone. No one spoke to me. I was unseen, unnoticed, entirely invisible.
Friday evening I got home and I desperately wanted to talk to someone. Anyone. About anything.
But I had no one to talk to.
Out of desperation, I looked through an old magazine and found a number for one of those porno calls, the ones where women talk to you about sex for a three-dollar-a-minute toll. I dialed the number, just wanting to speak to a person who would speak back.
I got a recording.
TWELVE
When I arrived at work the next Monday morning, someone was sitting at Derek’s desk.
I literally stopped in my tracks, I was so surprised. It was a guy about my age, a little older maybe, with a brown beard and thick, longish hair. He was dressed in regulation white shirt/gray pants, but his tie was wide and silk and brightly colored, with a print of toucans standing on pineapples. He grinned when he saw me, and his smile was wide, generous, and unaffected. “Hey, dude,” he said.
I nodded hello, unsure of how to respond.
“David’s the name.” He stood, extended a hand, and we shook. “I’ve been transferred here from Bookkeeping. You must be Bob.”
Again I nodded. “You’re taking over Derek’s job?” I asked dumbly.
He laughed. “What job? That position’s gone. It was nothing but a title, anyway. They just let that guy hang on until retirement out of pity.”
“I always wondered what he did.”
“So did everyone else. How did you get along with him?”
I shrugged noncommittally. “I didn’t know him too well. I just started working here a few months ago—”
“Come on. The guy’s a dick with feet.”
I found myself smiling. “All right,” I admitted. “We weren’t bosom buddies.”
“Good,” David said. “I like you already.”
I walked over to my desk and sat down, feeling good. It had been so long since I’d had an actual conversation with anyone that I was emotionally charged by even this small contact, my spirits absurdly buoyed by the fact that I had a new office mate who had actually noticed me.
Maybe my condition was reversible.
“So what is your job?” I asked.
“Still bookkeeping,” he said. “Only for your department now. I think they invented this job so they could kick me upstairs a floor. None of the old farts in my department like working with me.”
I laughed.
“I’m stone serious.”
I smiled. The people in his department might not like working with him, but I could tell that I would.
I was right. David and I hit it off immediately. We were close in age so there was that generational connection, but he was also friendly and easygoing, one of those people who were naturally open and accessible, and from the beginning he talked to me as though we’d been close for years. There was nothing about himself he could not discuss with me, no opinion that he would refrain from expressing. The wall of formality that seemed to exist between me and everyone else did not exist between David and myself.
He not only noticed and accepted me, he seemed to like me.
He popped a chip in his mouth and looked over at me. “So do you have a wife or girlfriend or anything?”
“Girlfriend,” I said. “Ex-girlfriend,” I corrected myself. I felt a funny sort of fluttering in my stomach.
My feelings must have shown on my face, because David quickly backed off. “Sorry, man, I didn’t mean to pry. If you don’t want to talk about it…”
But I did want to talk about it. I hadn’t talked about our breakup to anybody, and I found that I had a sudden need to tell someone what had happened.
I told David everything. Well, not everything. I left out the part about my being Ignored, but I told him how we’d begun drifting apart ever since I got this damn job, and about how I’d been too stubborn to meet her halfway and how one day I’d come home and she’d been packed and gone. I’d expected to feel better after talking about it, but in truth I felt worse. The memories were recent, the events still fresh, and dredging them up only made me relive the pain, not exorcise it.
David shook his head. “That’s cold. She just hit the road and left a note?”
I nodded.
“Well, what happened when you went after her? What did she say when you confronted her?”
I blinked. “What?”
“What happened when you tracked her down?” He looked at me, frowned. “You did go after her, didn’t you?”
Should I have? Was that what she’d wanted? Proof that I cared, that I loved her, that I needed her? Should I have gone after her like some sort of hero and tried to win her back? I had this sinking feeling that I should have, that that was what she’d wanted, that that was what she’d expected. I looked at David, slowly shaking my head. “No, I didn’t.”
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