The Ignored

We talked a lot.

We made love several times a day.

We’d been living for the most part off our usual junk food staples — hot dogs, hamburgers, tacos, macaroni and cheese — but Jane decided that we might as well take advantage of the time we had left together in an epicurean way as well, and she went to the store to get steaks and lobsters, crabs and caviar. None of these things were to our taste, or at least to my taste, but the idea of living it up at the end definitely appealed to Jane, and I didn’t want to rain on her parade.

Time was too short to waste it arguing.

I was sitting in the living room watching a rerun of Gilligan’s Island when she returned from the store, carrying two huge sacks of food in her arms. I stood to help her. She looked around the room. “Bob?” she said.

My heart lurched in my chest.

She didn’t see me.

“I’m here!” I screamed.

She jumped at the sound of my voice, dropping one of the sacks, and I ran over to her. I took the other sack from her arms, put it down on the floor, and threw my arms around her, hugging her tightly, squeezing her. I pressed my face into her hair and let the tears come. “I thought it was over,” I said. “I thought you couldn’t see me anymore.”

“I see you. I can see you.” She held on to me as hard as I held on to her, as though I were perched at the edge of a crumbling cliff and she was trying to keep me from slipping away. There was fear in her voice, and I knew that for those first few seconds before I’d screamed, when she was scanning the living room, she hadn’t been able to see me.

I was going to lose her.

Milk was draining onto the carpet from a split and overturned carton, but we didn’t care. We held on to each other, not letting go, not saying anything, not needing to, as the afternoon shadows lengthened on the orange grass outside.

I was awakened in the middle of the night by a voice calling my name. It was not a low voice, a hushed voice, a whispered voice, as those sorts of voices always are in movies. Rather it was shouted but muffled by distance, like someone yelling to me from across a field.

“Bob!”

I sat up in bed. Next to me, Jane was still asleep, oblivious.

“Bob!”

I pushed off the covers and got out of bed. I pulled open the drapes and looked outside.

Thompson was gone.

I was staring out at an orange field. At the opposite end grew a forest of purple trees. Beyond that, in the haze of distance, were pink mountains. A dark black sun hung lightlessly in an illuminated gold sky.

“Bob!”

The voice seemed to be coming from within the trees. I looked in that direction and saw, moving within the forest, hints of blackness that looked like the spider things. Beyond that, darker and more indistinct, was a larger unmoving object that I somehow knew was alive. This was where the voice was coming from.

How did it know my name?

“Bob!”

“What?” I called back.

“Join us!”

I was not scared, although I knew I should have been. That dark shape in the forest should have terrified the hell out of me. But the voice was warm and comforting, and something about the fact that this had finally happened, that the waiting was over, made me feel relieved.

“Come!” the voice called. “We’re waiting for you!”

Before me, the window and wall dissolved. As though in a dream, as though hypnotized, I walked through what had been the wall and felt different breezes blowing my hair, different air in my lungs. Even the temperature felt not the same. It was not hotter or colder, it was just… different.

I was in another world.

I was filled with a strange sense of well-being, a lethargic sort of contentment that persisted despite legitimate warnings and concerns that were being brought up intellectually by my mind.

I moved forward.

“No!”

Jane’s voice, shrill and desperate, filled with a hopeless, helpless, agonized despair, cut through the warm fuzziness of my feelings, and I snapped my head around to look at her. For a brief fraction of a second, I was standing in the front yard of our house and she was screaming at me through the window, then I was again in the field and she was yelling at me from a wall less room that looked like it had been plunked down in Oz by a tornado from Kansas.

“Bob!” that other voice called. It was no longer so warm and comforting. In fact, it seemed nearly as threatening as its origin, that huge black shape in the trees, and I tried to walk back toward Jane, toward our bedroom, but my feet would not move in that direction.

“Bob!” Jane screamed.

The scene flickered again. I saw the yard, the house.

“Jane!” I called.

“I see you!” she cried. “I notice you! I love you!”

I don’t know what made her yell that, what made her think of that, what led her to believe that those words would do any good, but they elicited a deep rumble of rage from the shape in the trees, and I was suddenly able to move again. I turned and ran toward her, and that other world, that strange world, began to recede, fading slowly from sight until it was entirely gone. I ended up naked, outside, on the grass, pressing my hands and face against the bedroom window as, on the other side of the glass, Jane did the same. I did not know what had just happened or how, but I knew that she had pulled me back from the brink. She had saved me.

I ran around to the kitchen door and waited until Jane unlocked it, and then we were in each others’ arms.

“I heard you yell something and then I saw you outside and you were… fading!” Jane sobbed. “You were disappearing!”

“Shhh,” I said, holding her. “It’s all right.”

And it was. There was no gold sky, no orange grass, no purple trees. There was only our house and Thompson and the Arizona night sky. If this were a movie, it would have been her love for me that brought me back, that saved me from disappearing into that other world, but somehow I knew that that was not what had done it. It was a part of it, but only a part. It was also the fact that she saw me. That she did not ignore me.

And that she said those words. In that order.

“I see you — I notice you — I love you.”

Magic.

“I love you,” she said again.

We’re not Ignored to those who love us.

I clutched her tightly. “I love you, too,” I said. “And I see you. And I notice you. And I will never stop noticing you. Never.”

Fifteen

I went out the next day and I was invisible. Completely invisible. No one saw me, no one heard me. I was not just ignored. I did not exist.

I’d thought it was over. I’d thought I could go back to work, that my condition had reversed itself, that