The Ignored

completely and utterly mad. She has seen the awesome, godlike power of a creature the ancients inadequately referred to as the great god Pan. She has also been impregnated there, and when her daughter grows up, the daughter possesses the ability to pass between the two worlds at will. In this world, our world, the daughter is a murderer, courting men, then letting them see her true face and driving them to suicide. She is finally discovered and killed.

Throughout the story, Philipe had underlined several passages. One in which the daughter is walking through a meadow and suddenly disappears. One noting the strange, heavy feeling left in the air after she passes between the two worlds. One describing the “secret forces,” the unspeakable, unnamable, unimaginable forces that lay at the heart of existence and are far too powerful for human comprehension. And the final line of the story, stating that the daughter, the creature, was now permanently in that other world and with her true companions.

It was this last that sent a chill through me. I thought of the murderer, mortally wounded, running toward the safety of the purple trees.

Philipe was looking at me as I closed the book. “Sound familiar?”

“It’s a story,” I said.

“But it’s truer than people think. Truer, maybe, than the author knew. We’ve seen that world, you and I.” He paused. “I have heard the voice of the great god Pan.”

I looked at him. I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t disbelieve him, either.

“What we are,” he said, “are transmitters to that world. We can see it; we can hear it; we can carry messages from it. That’s our purpose. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we were put on this earth. It even explains the gradations of Ignored. You and I can communicate with the powers there. We can tell it to the other Ignored. They can tell it to the half-and-halfs like Joe. Joe and his kind can tell the rest of the world.”

“But the other Ignored don’t hear us anymore,” I pointed out. “And I thought you said Joe was no longer Ignored.”

He waved away my objection.

“Besides, that can’t be all we are, transmitters. That wouldn’t make us average; that has nothing to do with being ordinary — ”

“No one is only one thing. A black man is not just black. He’s also a man. A son. Maybe a brother, a husband, a father. He might like rap or rock or classical music. He might be an athlete or a scholar. There are different facets to everyone. No one is so one-dimensional that they can be described by a single word.” He paused. “Not even us.”

I did not know whether I believed him. I did not know whether I wanted to believe him. It would be nice to think that being Ignored was not the sole attribute of my existence, that it was not the defining feature of my being. But for my purpose in life to be entirely unrelated to that, to have nothing whatsoever to do with my individual talents or collective identity… I couldn’t buy that. I didn’t want to buy it.

Philipe leaned forward. “Maybe this is where the human race is going; maybe this is where it’s all been heading. Maybe we’re the goal, the ultimate byproducts of this Ignored evolution. Maybe one day everyone will be able to pass back and forth between worlds. Maybe we are Helen’s companions,” he said, pointing to the book.

I thought of the murderer, of his obvious insanity, and though it did remind me of the daughter in the story, I shook my head. “No,” I said.

“Why not?”

“We’re not evolving into higher beings who can move at will between worlds or dimensions or whatever the hell this is. We’re fading out of this world and into that other one. We’re being sucked into it. And then we’ll be gone. That’s the purpose of evolution? For people to be dragged away from their loved ones to live with monster spiders? I don’t think so.”

“You’re looking at it from a short-sighted — ”

“No, I’m not.” I shook my head. “Besides, I don’t care. I don’t want to go there. I don’t even want to be able to see it. I want to stay right here with Jane. If you spent as much time thinking about how we can stop this process as you’ve spent thinking about what it is, we could probably survive.”

“No, we couldn’t,” he said.

No, we couldn’t.

I stared at Philipe. I had not realized until that moment how much I had been counting on him to get me out of this mess, to save me, and his flat negation of hope was like a stake through my heart. All of a sudden, I saw that his elaborate theories, his weaving of our facts into Machen’s fiction, were merely attempts to deal with the certain knowledge that we were not going to be able to come back, that we were doomed. Philipe, I saw, was just as frightened of the unknown as I was.

“What are we going to do about it? I asked.

“Nothing. There’s nothing we can do.”

“Bullshit!” I slammed my hand down on the coffee table. “We can’t just fade away without a fight.”

Philipe looked at me. No, David looked at me. Philipe was gone, and in his place was a tired, resigned, and defeated man. “We can,” he said. “And we will.”

I stood up angrily and walked without speaking out of his apartment. He said something behind me, but I could not hear what it was and I did not care. Tears of anger burned my eyes, and I strode through the purple trees to my car. Philipe could not help me, I knew now. No one could help me. I wanted to believe that a miracle would occur, that something would stop this inevitable progression before it claimed me entirely, but I could not.

I drove away, through Thompson and through that other world.

I did not look back.

Fourteen

Magic.

I clung to James’ idea, wanting desperately to believe that what afflicted me was not irreversible, was not the inevitable result of a logical progression but could disappear overnight with the wave of a wand or the application of some as yet undiscovered power.

Hadn’t Philipe been hinting about that? Magic?

I tried to sustain my belief in the days that followed. But even if it had been the vagaries of magic that had made me this way and not the deliberate building blocks of genetics, the fact remained that I was getting worse. In the mirror, when I looked at myself, I saw someone older-looking than me, someone duller. Around the house, Thompson was disappearing, being taken over by orange grass and silver streams and pink rocks and purple trees and hissing spiders the size of horses.

I began praying to God to make that other world disappear, to make me normal, but He — or She — ignored my pleas.

Were we ignored by God?

The only time I felt all right was when I was with Jane. Even the imposition of that other world faded somewhat in her presence, the inside of the house, at least, remaining free from its influence, and I kept Jane with me as much as possible. I did not know if it was my imagination or if Jane really did protect me from those alien views, but I believed in her, believed that she was my talisman, my amulet, and I took advantage of what she could give me.

We tried to figure out why she might have this power — if it was a power — and what we could do to harness it, amplify it, but neither of us could think of anything, and the only thing we knew to do was stay with each other and hope that would stave everything off.

It didn’t, though.

She quit her job to stay home with me. It didn’t really matter — everything in Thompson was free, anyway, and she could just go to the store and pick up what we needed when we needed it.

I don’t want to make it sound like we just sat around waiting for the end, feeling sorry for ourselves. We didn’t. But neither did we pretend that nothing was wrong. We faced the truth — and tried to make the best of things under the circumstances.