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
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
