The Ignored

But was I? If I could accept the idea that I was Ignored, why couldn’t I accept the idea that he was a ghost or some other sort of supernatural being?

I had a tough time falling asleep that night.

I dreamed of the sharp-eyed man.

I began skipping out, taking days off work. As long as I was there to fill out my time card on Friday, it didn’t really seem to make any difference whether I showed up the rest of the week.

I never felt like going home, and at first I hung out at the various malls: Costa Mesa’s South Coast Plaza, Santa Ana’s Main Place, Orange’s Orange Mall, Brea’s Brea Mall. But I soon tired of that, and I eventually found myself driving around Irvine, hovering about the city like a moth near a porch light.

I started parking the car and walking through Irvine’s shopping districts, taking comfort in the uniformity of the shops, feeling relaxed in the midst of all this harmonious homogeneity. I settled into something of a routine, eating lunch at the same Burger King each day, stopping in at the same music, book, and clothing stores to browse. As the days passed, I began to recognize faces on the street, other men, like myself, who were dressed as if for work but were obviously not working and obviously not job-hunting. Once, I saw one of the men steal from a convenience store. I was standing across the street, at the crosswalk, waiting for the light to change, and I watched a tall, well-dressed man walk into a 7-Eleven, pick up two cartons of Coors from the display in the front window, and walk out, apparently without paying. The two of us passed each other on the sidewalk in front of the convenience store.

I found myself wondering if he’d left any fingerprints in the store, if he’d touched anything else besides the beer. He had to have touched the door to open it. If I went into the store and told the clerk, could the police dust for prints and catch the man that way?

I opened my right hand, moved it up in front of my face, looked at my fingers. Every individual in the world was supposed to have a unique fingerprint, distinctive only to him or her. But as I stared at the lightly ridged whorls of skin that covered the tip of my index finger, I wondered if that was true after all. I had the sneaking suspicion that my fingerprints were not unique, were not truly my own. If nothing else about me was original, if nothing else about me was inimitable, why should this be different? I’d seen pictures of prints before, in magazines, on the news, and the differences between them were always so slight as to be nearly unnoticeable. If the print patterns were so limited to begin with, how reasonable was it to think that no two, in the entire history of man, were ever alike? There had to be sets of fingerprints that looked the same.

And mine were no doubt the most common kind.

But that was stupid. If that were the case, someone would have noticed it by now. Police would have discovered even a small contingent of identical fingerprints, and that would have automatically invalidated the use of prints as weapons in crime detection and as evidence in court.

But maybe the police had discovered that all fingerprints were not unique. And maybe they had kept it quiet. After all, the police had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Fingerprinting worked in the majority of cases, and if a few people fell through the cracks… well, that was the price that had to be paid for an orderly society.

I suddenly felt chilled, and at that moment the entire criminal justice system seemed a lot more sinister to me than it had only a few seconds before. In my mind I saw innocent men convicted of crimes, jailed, perhaps even executed, because their prints matched those of the real murderers. I saw computers displaying a list of people with fingerprints identical to those found on a murder weapon and the police picking a scapegoat using eenie- meenie-minie-moe.

All of Western civilization operated on the assumption that everyone was different, everyone was unique. It was the basis of our philosophical constructs, our political structure, our religions.

But it wasn’t true, I thought. It wasn’t true.

I told myself to stop thinking about that, to stop projecting my own situation onto, the entire world. I told myself to enjoy my day off.

I turned away from the 7-Eleven and walked over to the music store to do some browsing. At noon I ate lunch at Burger King.

Eighteen

Christmas came. And New Year’s.

I spent both holidays alone, watching TV.

Nineteen

The work was piling up, and I knew that even if my absences weren’t noticed, my lack of output would be. At least by Stewart. I decided to spend a whole week in my office, catching up on my assignments.

It was halfway through the week when I walked over to the break room to buy a Coke — or a Shasta — and I heard Stewart’s voice: “He’s gay, you know.”

“I thought maybe he was.” Stacy. “He’s never tried to hit on me.”

I walked into the break room and Stewart grinned at me. Stacy, Bill, and Pam all looked away, and their impromptu group began immediately and guiltily dispersing.

I realized that they had been talking about me.

I felt my face redden. I should have been outraged by their intolerance and homophobia. I should have given an angry speech denouncing their unenlightened narrow-mindedness. But I felt embarrassed and humiliated, ashamed that they thought I was homosexual, and I blurted out: “I’m not gay!”

Stewart was still grinning. “You miss David, don’t you?”

This time I said it: “Fuck you.”

His grin grew. “You’d like to, wouldn’t you?”

It was like a school yard argument, the trading of insults by junior high school students. I knew that intellectually. I understood that. But I was also a part of it, and emotionally I felt like I was once again a skinny kid on the playground being picked on by a bigger bully jock.

I took a deep breath, willed myself to remain calm. “This is harassment,” I said. “I’m going to talk to Mr. Banks about your behavior.”

“Oooh, you’re going to go tell Mr. Banks on me,” he said in an exaggeratedly whiny crybaby voice. His voice hardened. “Well, I’m going to make a report of your insubordination and have you bounced out of this corporation so fast your head will spin.”

“I don’t give a shit,” I said.

The programmers were not looking at us. They had not left — they wanted to see what was going to happen — but they were off in other corners of the room, pretending to look at the selections in the vending machines, flipping through the pages of the women’s magazines left on the tables.

Stewart smiled at me, and it was a hard smile, a cruel smile, a triumphant smile. “You’re out of here, Jones. You’re history.”

I watched him walk out of the break room, away from me, down the hall. There were other people in the corridor, employees from other departments, and I noticed for the first time that though he was nodding at those he passed, no one was nodding back, no one was smiling, no one was saying hello, no one was acknowledging him in any way.

I thought of his spare, impersonal office, and it hit me.

He was Ignored, too!

I watched him turn the corner into his office. It made perfect sense. The only reason he was noticed at all was because he was a supervisor. It was only his position of power that kept him from fading into the woodwork completely. The programmers and secretaries paid attention to him because they had to, because it was part of