The Ignored

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