every type of ornament imaginable. Christmas had always been my favorite time of year. I’d always loved the feel of the season, the mood, everything from the nativity scenes to the festive fantasy trappings of Santa that had put a secular face on this sacred occasion. But this year it just didn’t feel like Christmas. I had no presents to buy; I was expecting no presents myself. Last year, Jane and I had spent almost every spare November and December moment shopping for gifts, planning our celebration, enjoying each other and the promise of the season. This year I was alone and lonely, with no plans, no purpose.
I stood next to the Christmas tree and scanned the faces of the passersby, but even the frank and open stares with which I greeted people did not phase them. Theoretically, the women and children in the mall should have noticed me. Shopkeepers should have eyed me with suspicion. Even during the height of the punk movement it had not been normal to see mohawked, Day-Glo-dressed men loitering around South Coast Plaza, and those days were long gone. Someone who looked like me definitely should have attracted attention.
But, of course, I didn’t.
Not everyone was ignoring me, though.
Standing next to one of the small benches between Rizzoli’s bookstore and the Garden Bistro restaurant was a sharp-eyed man a few years older than myself who was staring intently, watching my every move. I did not notice him at first, but I kept seeing him out of the corner of my eye, unmoving, and I began to have the uncomfortable feeling that I was being observed, spied upon. I put the two together and casually looked to my left, toward the man. I caught his eye, and he looked away, pretending to be interested in the Garden Bistro’s menu. Now it was my turn to watch him. He was tall and thin, with short black hair that accentuated the hard, cold severity of his face. He stood stiffly, in a manner that was almost regal, but there was an indefinable air of the plebeian about him.
I wondered why he had been staring at me, how he had noticed me, and I started walking toward him, intending to ask, but he quickly moved away, making a beeline toward the center of the mall, hurriedly moving past two women and cutting in front of them to get away from me.
I considered following him, and I started to do so, but then he pushed through a small group of people and started up the stairs to the mall’s second level, and I knew that I would not be able to catch up. I watched him hurry up the steps. Strange. I had never seen the man before in my life. Why had he been looking at me? And why had he acted so guilty and suspicious when I caught him staring? It might have been my clothes and hair that caught his attention. That was a logical assumption. But then why had no one else noticed me?
I stared at the top step, where I had last seen the man before he’d hurried toward the Sears wing of the mall. It was probably nothing, probably just my imagination, an overreaction to the fact that someone had actually seen me.
But I felt uneasy as I walked into Nordstrom.
I stayed in the mall all day. I had nowhere to go, nothing to do; I didn’t feel like driving around and I certainly didn’t feel like going home. So I wandered in and out of the various stores, bought a lunch at Carl’s Jr., read some magazines at B. Dalton, looked through the CDs at Music Plus.
Business picked up in the late afternoon, after the schools let out. I was in Miller’s Outpost, had pretty much seen everything I wanted to see, and was about to leave, when I happened to glance behind me.
And saw the sharp-eyed man staring at me from between the racks.
This wasn’t just coincidence.
Our eyes locked for a second, and I felt a cold chill pass through me. Then he turned away, moving quickly up the aisle toward the front of the store. I headed after him, but by the time I reached the store’s open entrance he had already blended into the crowd, disappearing into the stream of package-carrying customers passing through the mall.
I wanted to stop him, but what could I do? Run after him? Yell?
I stood there for a moment, unmoving, watching as the man tried desperately to get away from me, thinking how frightened I’d been when I’d looked into his hard, cold eyes.
But why should I be frightened of him when he was obviously just as frightened of me?
But if he was so frightened of me, why was he stalking me?
Why had I thought of that word?
I started walking. Something about the man seemed familiar to me on a subconscious level. There was something almost, but not quite, recognizable in his features that I had not noticed until I’d seen him up close, and that something bothered me, nagged at me, all the way out to the parking lot and all the way home.
Sixteen
I expected to be quizzed on where I’d been, and I’d prepared an elaborate story to justify my absence. But none of it was necessary. No one asked about my day off. In fact, when I mentioned to David that I was feeling much better today, he looked at me with surprise. “You were sick?”
“I wasn’t here yesterday,” I told him.
“Huh,” he said. “Didn’t even notice.”
Stewart might not have noticed that I’d been gone, but he noticed that I’d missed his deadline and he called me into his office soon after lunch. He faced me from across the desk. “Jones? You’ve failed to complete an important assigned task, despite having had a very generous deadline to work with.”
Generous deadline? I stared straight at him. He and I both knew what he had pulled.
“This is going to be noted on your six-month review.”
I mustered my courage. “Why are you doing this?” I asked.
He stared at me innocently. “Doing what? Enforcing department standards?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“Do I?”
I met his eyes. “You have it in for me, don’t you?”
He smiled that smug jock’s smile. “Yes,” he admitted. “I do.”
“Why?”
“I don’t like you, Jones. I’ve never liked you. You represent everything I despise.”
“But why?”
“Does it matter?”
“It does to me.”
“Then it doesn’t matter. Get back to work, Jones. I’m pretty dissatisfied with your performance so far. So is Mr. Banks. We all are.”
Fuck you, I wanted to say. But I said it only with my eyes and turned and left the office.
I was Ignored because I was average. It seemed the most logical answer, the most reasonable assumption. Having come of age in the latter half of the twentieth century, I was a product of the mass media standardization of culture, my thoughts and tastes and feelings shaped and determined by the same influences that were acting upon everyone else of my generation.
But I didn’t buy it.
For one thing, I wasn’t completely average. If I had been, if everything had been that consistent, my existence would have been understandable, predictable. But there were glaring inconsistencies in the theory. My television viewing might correspond exactly with the Nielsen ratings, the shows ranked the same order in the newspaper and in my mind, but my taste in books was nowhere near mainstream.
Then again, while my reading tastes might be different from those of the general public, perhaps they were precisely average for white males of my socio-economic and educational background.
How specific did this thing get?
It would take a statistician years to sort through this information and pick out a pattern.
I was driving myself crazy with this endless speculation, trying so desperately hard to find out who or what I was.
I looked around my apartment, at the outlandish furnishings that my influence had somehow made mundane.
