“Maybe that’s the wrong word.” He leaned forward, the front legs of his chair coming down on the porch. “All I know is that whatever makes us this way cannot be measured or quantified or explained. It’s not physics, it’s metaphysics.”
“Maybe we’re crystals that have been astral-projected into human form.”
He stood, laughed. “Maybe.” He looked at his watch. “Look, it’s getting late; I gotta go. I have to work tomorrow.”
“Me, too. For no pay.”
“It’s a weird world.”
We walked through the house, he said good-bye to Jane, and I accompanied him out the front door to his car. “Are you really leaving?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Probably.”
“Let me know when you decide.”
“Of course.”
I watched him pull away, watched his taillights disappear around the corner. I was not tired, and I didn’t feel like staying inside and watching TV. Neither did Jane, and when she finished washing the dishes, we went for a walk. We ended up in my old neighborhood, standing on a small dock to which was anchored a child’s sailboat.
We looked out over the small man-made lake that wound between the condos. Jane put an arm around me, leaned against my shoulder. “Remember when we used to go out to the pier at Newport?”
“And eat at Ruby’s?”
“Cheeseburger and onion rings,” she said, smiling. “That sounds good right now.”
“Clam chowder at the Crab Cooker sounds better.”
We were silent for a moment.
“I guess we’ll never live in Laguna Beach,” she said quietly.
A mosquito buzzed by my head, and I slapped at it. The condos across the water looked cheap to me all of a sudden, the lake pathetic. I thought of the deep darkness of the ocean night, the clusters of lights that marked the beach towns visible from the pier, and I felt unaccountably sad. I felt almost like crying. More than anything else, I wished things were different, wished we were back in our old life in our old apartment and none of this had ever happened.
I wished we weren’t Ignored.
I turned, pulled her with me back toward the sidewalk. “Come on,” I said. “It’s getting late. Let’s go home.
Eight
The murderer came into the office in the middle of the morning, getting off the elevator and walking calmly over to the front desk.
I caught him out of the corner of my eye, a brightly colored blur, and I glanced up to see a short, heavyset man in a clown suit and mime makeup open the small swinging gate that separated the public waiting area from our work area.
My stomach lurched; my mouth suddenly went dry. Even before I saw the knife in the clown’s hands, I knew why he was here. My first thought was that someone had been allowed into Thompson who hadn’t yet killed his boss and that that person was going to kill whoever was his boss here. But I didn’t recognize the clown, and I knew he didn’t work on this floor.
And then I noticed that no one was looking at him.
No one saw him.
All this I thought in the space of a few seconds, the time it took the clown to walk up to Ray Lang’s desk, put a hand over Ray’s mouth, and draw the knife across his throat.
I lurched to my feet, knocking over my chair, trying to scream but unable to get out any sound at all.
He drew the knife slowly, expertly. The blood did not shoot, did not squirt, but oozed and flowed from the thin opening, spreading down over Ray’s white shirt in a continuous wave. Hand still holding Ray’s mouth shut, the man quickly shoved his knife first in one of Ray’s eyes, then the other. The blade emerged with pieces of white and green goo stuck to the otherwise red steel.
The man wiped the blade off on Ray’s hair before taking his hand from the planning inspector’s mouth. The noise that issued from Ray’s bloody throat was more a gurgle than a scream, but by now he was flailing around wildly enough that he had gotten the attention of everyone in the office.
The clown grinned at me, did a little jig. I looked into his eyes, and I knew that he was insane. Even beneath the clown makeup, I could see the craziness. This was not the temporary insanity of Philipe. This was the real thing. And it scared the shit out of me.
“There he is!” I cried, pointing, finally able to move, to act, to speak. People were running over to where Ray was slipping bloodily out of his chair, but no one heard me, no one paid any attention to me.
And no one saw the murderer.
“You’re almost there,” the man said, and his voice was a crazed raspy whisper. He laughed, a sound like fingernails grating on a chalkboard. “Oh, the things you’ll see….”
And then he was gone. Vanished. Where he had been there was nothing, only clear space.
The air felt heavy, filled with the burnt-rubber smell of drilled teeth.
I looked around wildly, ran to the elevator, waited for it to open, all the while scanning the room. But there was nothing. And when the elevator door did not open, when it was obvious that the murderer had not simply turned invisible and made for the exit but had actually disappeared, I hurried back behind the counter to where Ray lay dying.
Paramedics arrived, performed emergency lifesaving procedures, rushed Ray to the hospital, but he was dead even before he left the floor, and they were unable to revive him.
After Ray’s departure, I became the center of attention. The police were there, photographing the chair, taking down statements, and a crowd gathered as I gave my story. The same people who had been ignoring me as I screamed and pointed at the murderer were now all ears as I related what I’d seen, what had happened. I recalled what the clown had said to me: “You’re almost there.”
What did that mean?
But I knew what that meant.
I was becoming Ignored here in Thompson.
Like he was.
The Ignored of the Ignored.
I remembered as a child going on a ride at Disneyland called Adventures Through Inner Space. On the ride, you were supposed to feel as though you had been shrunk by the Mighty Microscope and were entering the invisible world of the atom. I wondered now if I was in just such an invisible world, a world that most people couldn’t see, that existed concurrently with the visible universe.
Maybe the murderer was a ghost.
I wondered about that, too. People throughout the years, throughout the centuries, who claimed to have seen ghosts? Maybe they’d just seen an Ignored Ignored. A man like that would be two steps removed from normal human life. Perhaps there were no ghosts. Perhaps there was no afterlife. Maybe we just ceased to exist when we died. Maybe the whole concept of life after death had originated with a misinterpretation of Ignored sightings.
I wished there was a history of our people, a history of the Ignored.
Ralph got off the elevator and hurried immediately over to where I was talking to the police. “I was at the bank when I heard. What happened?” he demanded.
The cop questioning me gave him a brief overview of what had occurred.
Ralph looked at me. “You’re the only one who saw anything?”
“I guess so.”
“We need you,” the mayor said. “For whatever reason, you can see this guy. You can help us track him.”
