The tree was still there after breakfast, still there after I took my shower. Jane wanted to go to the store and pick up some groceries for dinner, and I happily volunteered to go for her. She said fine, she had a lot of work to do around the house anyway, and I took the list she gave me and drove off.
I’d been acting as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, but I saw other purple trees in the park, red and black bushes growing in the center of Main Street, a silver stream passing through the Montgomery Ward’s parking lot, and it was obvious that overnight something really bizarre had happened.
Had happened to me.
No one else in town seemed to see these manifestations.
Jane had asked me to go to the IGA—she liked their produce better than Von’s of Safeway—and while inside the supermarket I saw another tree, identical to the one in my yard, growing out of the meat counter, its branches passing through the ceiling.
I stood there staring at the tree as other shoppers passed around me. There was no way I could live with this day in and day out, no way I could pretend to live a normal life while fantasy forests were popping up around me in the midst of my ordinary surroundings.
Was this what had happened to the murderer?
I quickly got what I came for and hurried home. I found Jane mopping the kitchen floor, and I put the sack of groceries on the table and came right out and said it: “Something is wrong.”
She looked up, not surprised. “I was hoping you’d tell me what it was.”
I licked my lips. “I… see things,” I said. I looked into her eyes, hoping to see a hint of recognition, but there was nothing. “Do you know what I mean?”
She shook her head slowly.
“There. Outside.” I pointed through the window. “Do you see that tree? The one with the purple leaves?”
Again she shook her head. “No,” she said softly. “I don’t.”
Did she think I was crazy?
“Come here.” I led her into the front yard, stopped at the base of the tree. “You don’t see anything there?”
“No.”
I took her hand, pulled her through the tree. “Still nothing?”
She shook her head.
I took a deep breath. “I’m fading away,” I said.
I told her everything. About the clown, the police, Steve, Ralph, the people at work who no longer saw me. About the trees and bushes and streams I’d seen on my way to the store today. She was silent when I was through, and I saw tears in her eyes.
“I’m not going crazy,” I told her.
“I don’t think you are.”
“Then why—?”
“I don’t want to lose you.”
I put my arms around her and held her tightly, and she cried into my shoulder. My own eyes were overflowing. Oh, God. Was I going to be separated from her again? Was I destined to be parted from her once more?
I pulled back from her, tilted her chin up until she was looking in my eyes. “Do you still see me?” I asked.
“Yes.” Her nose was running, and she wiped it with the back of her hand.
“Am I… different at all? Do you think about me less often? Do you forget I live here?”
She shook her head, began to cry again.
I hugged her. That was something. But it was only a temporary respite, I knew. She loved me. I was important to her. No wonder I would linger longer in her consciousness. But eventually, inevitably, I would fade from her sight, too. I would move in and out of focus. Maybe one day I’d be home and she wouldn’t know it. I’d be sitting on the couch and she’d pass right by me, calling my name, and I’d answer and she wouldn’t hear me.
I’d kill myself if that happened.
She grasped my hand firmly. “We’ll find someone,” she said. “A doctor. Someone who’ll be able to reverse it.”
I turned on her. “How?” I demanded. “Don’t you think if there was a way to do that it would’ve been done already? You think everyone likes living here? You think they all wouldn’t want to be normal if they could, if there was a way to do it? Christ!”
“Don’t yell at me. I just thought—”
“No, you didn’t. You didn’t think.”
“I didn’t mean they could actually reverse the process, but I thought they could slow it, stop it from progressing. I thought—” She burst into tears and ran away from me, across the grass, into the house.
I followed her, caught up to her in the kitchen. “I’m sorry,” I said, holding her, kissing the top of her head. “I don’t know what got into me. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get mad at you.”
She hugged me back. “I love you,” she said.
“I love you, too.”
We stood like that for a long time, not moving, saying nothing, just holding tightly to each other as if that embrace could keep me anchored so I wouldn’t fade away.
I called James that night. I wanted to talk to him, wanted to tell him what was happening. The more people I brought into this, the more people who knew, the more heads we had working on the problem, the more likely it was that something could be done about it.
He answered on the fourth ring. “Hello?”
“James!” I said. “It’s me!”
“Hello?”
“James?”
“Who’s there?”
He couldn’t hear me.
“James!”
“Hello?” He was becoming annoyed. “Who is this?”
I hung up the phone.
I had not seen Philipe since the day of his departure for the White House assault, had not heard a word about him since his return. But I wanted to talk to him. I needed to talk to him. If anybody could understand what had happened to me, if anybody could do something about it, it was Philipe. He might be psychotic, but he was also the most competent, ambitious, and farsighted person I knew, and though I had a lot of reservations about contacting him again, I had to do it.
I just hoped he could see me.
I tracked him down through city hall’s computer. I found him living in a small one-bedroom apartment in the run-down west side of town. Here, amidst the less well tended residences of the city, the attempts to individualize houses, duplexes, and apartments were not as visible, not as obvious, and the entire area seemed especially nondescript. It took three passes for me to even find his apartment building.
Once I did locate where he lived, I parked on the street and sat for a few moments in my car, trying to gather up enough courage to knock on the door. Jane had wanted to come, but I’d vetoed that idea, telling her that Philipe and I had not parted on the best of terms and that it was probably better if I went alone. Now I wished that she had come with me. Or at least that I’d called Philipe ahead of time to let him know that I wanted to see him.
I got out of the car, walked up to apartment 176. I knew if I waited any longer, I would probably talk myself out of doing it, so I just forced myself to go up to his door and ring the bell.
My heart was pounding as the door opened, my mouth suddenly drained of saliva. I took an involuntary step backward.
And there stood Philipe.
My fear disappeared, replaced by a strange, heartrending sense of loss. The Philipe who stood in the doorway before me was not the Philipe I had known, not the boundlessly forward-looking man who had recruited me into the terrorists, not the take-charge leader who had led us through our adventures, not the crazed delusional psycho of the sandstorm night, not even the defeated would-be hero who had returned from Washington, D.C. The Philipe who stood before me was a pathetically average man. No more, no less. The seeker and searcher who had once seemed so bold and charismatic now looked gray and nondescript. The brightness was gone from his eyes, the spark that had once animated his features apparently extinguished. He looked exhausted, and much older than he had the last time I’d seen him. He was a nobody here in Thompson, and I could see how that weighed on him.
I tried not to let the shock show on my face. “Hey, Philipe,” I said.
“Long time no see.”
“David,” he said tiredly. “My real name’s David. I just called myself Philipe.”
My name is not David! It’s Philipe!
“Oh.” I nodded, as if agreeing with him, but there was nothing for me to agree with. We looked at each other, studied each other. He saw me, I realized. He noticed me. I was not ignored by him. But that was small consolation. I wished I had not come.
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.”
TWELVE
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.
THIRTEEN
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.
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