The Ignored

One

On the day I got the job, we celebrated.

I’d been out of school for nearly four months, and I’d almost given up hope of ever finding employment. I’d graduated from UC Brea in December with a BA in American Studies — not the world’s most practical major — and I’d been looking for a job ever since. I’d been told more than once by my professors and my advisor that American Studies was ideal for someone attempting to start a career, that the “interdisciplinary course work” would make me more desirable to prospective employers and more valuable in today’s job market than someone with more narrow, specialized knowledge.

That was bullshit.

I’m sure the professors at UC Brea didn’t intentionally try to sabotage my life. I’m sure they really did think that a degree in American Studies was as valuable to people in the outside world as it was to them. But the end result of my misdirected education was that no one wanted to hire me. On Donahue and Oprah, representatives from major corporations said in panel discussions that they were looking for well-rounded individuals, not just business majors but liberal arts majors. But the PR they fed to the public through the media and what really went on were two different things. Business majors were being hired right and left — and I was still working part-time at Sears, selling men’s clothing.

It was my own fault, really. I’d never known what I wanted to do with my life or how I wanted to earn my living. After finishing my General Ed requirements, I’d drifted into American Studies because the department’s courses that semester had sounded interesting and fit easily into my work schedule at Sears. I gave no thought whatsoever to my career, to my future, to what I wanted to do after I graduated. I had no goals, no plans; I just sort of took things as they came, and before I knew it, I was out.

Maybe some of that came across in my job interviews. Maybe that’s why I hadn’t been hired yet.

It certainly didn’t show up on my resume, which was professionally typeset and, if I do say so myself, damned impressive.

I’d seen the notice for this job opening at the Buena Park Public Library. There was a big binder that contained flyers and notices for all sorts of government agencies, public institutions, and private corporations, and I’d been checking it out each Monday, after notices for the coming week were added. The jobs listed at the library seemed to be of a higher quality than those in the want ads of the Register or the Los Angeles Times, and anything was better than the so-called Career Center at UC Brea.

This position, listed under the heading “Business and Corporations,” was for some sort of technical writer, and the requirements looked promisingly nonspecific. No previous experience was necessary, and the only hard-and-fast rule seemed to be that all applicants have a bachelor’s degree in Business, Computer Science, English, or Liberal Arts.

American Studies was nearly Liberal Arts, so I wrote down the name of the company and the address, and after driving back to the apartment and leaving a note for Jane on the refrigerator, I drove out to Irvine.

The corporation was a huge faceless building in a block of huge faceless buildings. I walked through the massive lobby and, following the directions of a security guard at the front desk, to the elevator that led to the personnel department. There I was given a form, a clipboard, and a pen, and I sat down in a comfortably padded office chair to fill out my application. I had already decided in my own mind that I would not get this job, but I dutifully filled out the entire application and turned it in.

A week later, I received a notice in the mail informing me that I had been scheduled for an interview on the coming Wednesday at one-thirty.

I didn’t want to go, and I told Jane I didn’t want to go, but Wednesday morning found me calling in sick to Sears and ironing my one white shirt on a towel on the kitchen table.

I arrived for the interview a half hour early, and after filling out another form, I was given a printed description of the position and led by a personnel assistant down a hall to the conference room where interviews were being conducted. “There’s one applicant ahead of you,” the assistant told me, nodding toward a closed door. “Have a seat, and they’ll be with you shortly.”

I waited on a small plastic chair outside the door. I had been advised by the people at the Career Center to always plan ahead what I was going to say in a job interview, to think of all the questions that I might be asked and come up with a prepared answer for each, but hard as I tried, I could think of nothing that might be asked of me. I leaned back, close to the door, and listened carefully, trying to hear what was being asked of my rival inside the room so I could learn from his mistakes. But the door was soundproof and kept in all noise.

So much for planning my answers.

I looked around the hallway. It was nice. Wide, spacious, with lots of light. The tan carpet was clean, the white walls recently painted. A pleasant working environment. A young, well-dressed woman carrying a sheaf of papers in her hand emerged from a doorway down the hall, passing by me without a glance.

I was nervous, and I could feel sweat trickling in twin rivulets from under my arms down the sides of my body. Thank God I’d worn a suit with a jacket. I glanced down at the paper in my hand. The description of the job’s educational requirements was clear — I didn’t have to worry about that — but the actual responsibilities of the position were vague, couched in indecipherable bureaucratese, and I realized that I did not really know anything about the job for which I was applying.

The door opened, and a handsome, business-suited man several years my senior strode out. He had a professional demeanor, his hair was short and neatly trimmed, and he carried in his hand a leather portfolio. This was who I was competing against? I suddenly felt ill-prepared, shabby in my appearance and amateurish in my attitude, and I knew with unarguable certainty that I was not going to get the job.

“Mr. Jones?”

I looked up as my name was called.

An older Asian woman was holding the door open. “Would you step in, please?”

I stood, nodded, and followed her into the conference room. She motioned toward three men seated at a long table in the front of the room, and promptly sat down on a chair next to the door.

I walked forward. The men looked forbidding. All three were wearing nearly identical gray suits, and none of them were smiling. The one on the right was the oldest, a heavyset gray-haired man with a severely lined face and thick black-framed glasses, but it was the youngest man, in the center, who appeared to be in charge of the proceedings. He had a pen in his hand, and on the table before him was a stack of applications identical to the one I had submitted. The short man on the left seemed to take no notice of my entrance and was staring disinterestedly out the window of the room.

The middle man stood, smiled, and offered me his hand, which I shook. “Bob?” he said.

I nodded.

“Glad to meet you, I’m Tom Rogers.” He motioned for me to sit in the lone chair in front of the table and sat down himself.

I felt a little better. Despite the formality of his attire, Rogers had about him a distinctly informal air, a casually relaxed way of speaking and moving that immediately put me at ease. He was also not that much older than me, and I figured that might be a point in my favor.

Rogers glanced down for a moment at my application and nodded to himself. He smiled up at me. “You certainly look good here. Oh, I almost forgot, this is Joe Kearns from Personnel.” He nodded toward the small man staring out the window. “And this is Ted Banks, head of Documentation Standards.” The older man nodded brusquely.

Rogers picked up another sheet of paper. Through its translucent back, I could see lines of type. Questions, I assumed.

“Have you written any computer documentation before?” Rogers asked.

I shook my head. “No.” I thought it was best to be blunt and to the point. Maybe I’d get extra credit for honesty.

“Are you familiar with SQL and D-Base?”

The questions went on from there, not straying far from those technical lines. I knew right away that I would not get the job — I had never even heard most of the computer terms that were being bandied about — but I stuck it out to the end, bravely trying to play up my broad educational background and strong writing skills. Rogers stood, shook my hand, smiled, and said they’d let me know. The other two men, who had remained silent throughout the interview, said nothing. I thanked them for their time, made an effort to nod to each, and left.

My car died on the way home.

It was a bad end to a bad day, and I can’t say that I was surprised. It seemed somehow appropriate. So many things had gone so wrong for so long that what would have once sent me into paroxysms of panic now did not even phase me. I just felt tired. I got out of the car and, with the door open and one hand on the steering wheel, pushed it to the side of the street, out of traffic. The car was a piece of crap, had been a piece of crap since the day I’d bought it from a now defunct used-car lot, and part of me was tempted to leave it where it was and walk off. But, as always, what I wanted to do and what I actually did were two different things.

I locked the car and walked across the store to a 7-Eleven to call AAA.

It wouldn’t have been so bad, I suppose, if I hadn’t been so far away from home, but my car had died in Tustin, a good twenty miles from Brea, and the belligerent Neanderthal who was sent out by AAA to tow my car said that he was authorized to bring my car to any mechanic within a five-mile radius but that anything beyond that would cost me $2.50 a mile.

I didn’t have any money, but I had even less patience, and I told him to take my car to the Sears in Brea. I’d charge the tow, charge the auto work, and hitch a ride home from someone.

I got home at the same time as Jane. I gave her a thumbnail sketch of my day, let her know I wasn’t in the mood to talk, and spent the rest of the evening lying on the couch silently watching TV.

They called late Friday afternoon.

Jane answered the phone, then called me over. “It’s the job!” she whispered.

I took the receiver from her. “Hello?”

“Bob? This is Joe Kearns from Automated Interface. I have some good news for you.”

“I got the job?”

“You got the job.”

I remembered Tom Rogers, but I didn’t know which of my nonspeaking interviewers was Joe Kearns. It didn’t matter, though. I’d gotten the job.

“Can you come in Monday?”

“Sure,” I said.

“I’ll see you then, then. Come on up to Personnel and we’ll get the formalities straightened out.”

“What time?”

“Eight o’clock.”

“Should I wear a suit?”

“White shirt and tie will be fine.”

I felt like dancing, like jumping, like screaming into the phone. But I just said, “Thank you, Mr. Kearns.”

“We’ll see you Monday.”

Jane was staring at me expectantly. I hung up the phone, looked at her, and grinned. “I got it,” I said.

We celebrated by going to McDonald’s. It had been a long time since we’d gone out at all, and even a trip like this seemed a luxury. I pulled into the parking lot and looked over at Jane. I made my voice sound as British and snobbish as I could, given my complete lack of any dramatic talent: “The drive-thru, madam?”

She caught on and looked at me with a superior and slightly disapproving tilt of her head. “Certainly not,” she sniffed. “We will dine indoors, in the dining room, like civilized human beings.”

We both laughed.

As we walked into McDonald’s, I felt good. The air outside was cool, but inside, the restaurant was warm and cozy and smelled deliciously of french fries. We decided to splurge — cholesterol be damned — and we each ordered Big Macs, large fries, large Cokes, and apple pies. We sat on plastic seats in a four-person booth next to a life-sized statue of Ronald McDonald. There was a family in one of the adjoining booths — a mom and dad taking their uniformed young son for a post-Pop Warner treat — and watching them eat over Jane’s shoulder made me feel comfortably relaxed.

Jane picked up her Coke and held it out to me, over the middle of the table, motioning for me to do the same. I did, and she tapped her wax paper cup against mine.

She grinned. “Cheers,” she said.

Two

Automated Interface, Inc.

The name of the corporation said nothing and said everything. It was the same sort of nondescriptive doublespeak adopted as a moniker by thousands of other modern businesses, and it indicated to me that the company I was going to work for produced products of no real importance, of no real value, and that although the firm no doubt made a lot of money, it would probably make no difference to the world if it dropped off the face of the planet tomorrow.

It was exactly the sort of place I never thought I’d work, and it depressed me to realize that this was the only place that would have me.

Truth be told, I had never really thought about what sort of job I would eventually hold. I had never planned that far ahead. But I realized now that I was not the sort of person I’d thought I was — or wanted to be. I’d always seen myself as intellectual, imaginative, creative. Artistic, I suppose, although I’d never done anything even remotely artistic in my life. But now that I looked at it, my perception of myself seemed to be based more upon my empathy with literary and cinematic characters than on any qualities I actually possessed.

I pulled into the parking lot, passing an entire row of reserved spaces before finally squeezing my extra-wide Buick into an extra-narrow space between a red Triumph and a white Volvo. I got out of the car, straightened my tie, and for the first time examined the building where I’d be working. It had seemed faceless to me before and still did now. The facade was cement and glass, modern-looking, though not modern enough to grant it a distinctive identity. Despite it’s utter lack of character, something about it appealed to me. I thought it looked friendly, almost welcoming, and for the first time since waking up that morning, I felt a small hope flare within me. Maybe this job wouldn’t be so bad after all.

Other cars were pulling into the parking lot, power-tied men and power-suited women getting out of their expensively trendy cars and, briefcases swinging, walking briskly into the building.

I followed the flow.

During my initial interview, I had taken notice of only the personnel office and the conference room in which the interview had been conducted. Now I looked carefully around the building’s lobby. Here the impression of sterile newness fostered by the building’s exterior faded somewhat. I could see a worn path on the burgundy carpet, a layer of dust on the plastic palms and ficuses that flanked the door. Even the high rounded desk in front of the security guard exhibited chips and scuffs on its wood finish.

The other men and women walking through the lobby strode purposefully past the guard, nodding at him on their way to the elevator. I wasn’t sure if I should do the same or if I had to check in, so I walked up to the desk.

“Excuse me,” I said.

The guard looked at me and through me, not seeming to notice my presence. He nodded to an overweight man with thick horn-rimmed glasses. “Jerry.”

“Excuse me,” I said again, louder this time.

The guard’s eyes focused on my face. “Yes?”

“I’m a new employee. I just got hired, and I’m not sure where I should — ”

He motioned toward the elevator with his head. “Take the elevator to Personnel. Third floor.”

It was exactly what he had told me last time, when I’d come for the interview, and I was about to say something to that effect, jokingly, but he had already dismissed me in his mind, again looking past me to the other employees entering the lobby.

I thanked him, though he wasn’t listening, and walked back to the elevator.

Two women were already waiting for the elevator, one in her early thirties, one in her mid-forties. They were discussing the younger one’s lack of sexual interest in her husband. “It’s not that I don’t love him,” the woman said. “But I just don’t seem to be able to come with him anymore. I pretend I do — I don’t want to hurt his feelings and give him some kind of confidence problem — but I just don’t feel it. I usually wait until he’s asleep and then do it myself.”

“These things go in cycles,” the older woman told her. “Your interest’ll be back. Don’t worry.”

“What am I supposed to do until then? Have an affair?”

“Just close your eyes and pretend he’s someone else.” The woman paused. “Someone bigger.”

They both laughed.

I was standing right next to the younger woman, but I was close to both of them, and I could not believe that two strangers were talking like this in front of me. I felt embarrassed, and I kept my eyes on the descending lighted numbers above the elevator door.

A few seconds later, the door opened and the three of us walked in. The younger woman pushed the button for the fifth floor; I pushed the button for the third.

The older woman started talking about her husband’s impotence.

I was grateful when the elevator door opened on the third floor, and I quickly stepped out.

There were five people behind the counter in Personnel: two middle-aged men seated at computer terminals; an elderly woman standing in front of a desk, taking a sack lunch out of her purse; another elderly woman sitting at another desk, and a pretty brunette girl about my age standing next to the counter itself.

I looked for Mr. Kearns, and although I didn’t remember which interviewer he was, there was no one behind the counter who looked even vaguely familiar. I walked across the floor, stepped in front of the girl. “Hello,” I said. “My name’s Bob Jones. I — ”

She smiled at me. “We’ve been waiting for you, Mr. Jones.”

I’m late, I thought. It’s my first day, and I’m late.

But the girl continued to smile, and I realized as she handed me a manila envelope that it was not even eight o’clock yet. How could I be late? They’d probably been waiting for me because I was the only new employee they had today.

I opened the envelope. Inside was a paperback-sized booklet titled AII Employee Handbook, several pamphlets, a pen, and a sheaf of forms that I was apparently supposed to fill out.

“There are a few formalities we have to get out of the way before you go upstairs and meet Mr. Banks. You have to fill out a W-4 form, medical, dental, and life insurance applications, a drug-free oath, and additional information for our personnel file that did not appear on your application.” The girl walked through a small gate and stepped out from behind the counter. “We also have what we call our Initiation Program for new hirees. It’s not an official presentation or anything, but there’s a video that runs about a half hour and an accompanying survey. You’ll find the survey form in the packet I gave you.”

I stared at her blankly, and she laughed lightly. “I know that’s an awful lot to absorb at once, but don’t worry. Right now, we’ll just go down to the conference room, and you can relax and watch the video. Afterward, I’ll go through all the forms and everything with you. By the way, my name’s Lisa.” She smiled at me, then caught the eye of one of the elderly women behind the counter and pointed down the hall. The other woman nodded back.

She led me down the same hallway in which I’d sat while waiting for my interview, and I glanced at the closed door to the interview room as we passed by. I still did not understand why I’d been hired. From the questions I’d been asked, I’d gathered that they were looking for someone knowledgeable about, or at least somewhat familiar with, computers. But I had no computer experience at all. Not only did I not know anything about them, I had no interest in knowing anything about them.

Was this all a huge mistake?

We continued down the hall and stopped in front of a closed door. Lisa pushed open the door, and we walked inside. “Have a seat,” she said.

The room was empty save for a long conference table, its attendant chairs and a combination television/VCR on a moveable metal stand near the table’s head. I pulled out a chair and sat down while Lisa turned on the TV and VCR. She made a show of it, exaggeratedly bending over, obviously aware of the way she filled out her stretch pants, and I could see the outline of her underwear against the material. “Okay,” she said. “Take your pen and survey form out of the packet. You’re going to need them at the end of the video.” She straightened. “I’ll be back down the hall at the counter. Just come and get me when you’re done, and I’ll help you fill out the necessary forms. You can leave the videotape on, but turn off the TV when you leave the room. Do you know how to turn it off?”

“I’ll figure it out.”

“It’s this button here.” She pressed a red square at the lower left corner of the console. The television flicked off. She pressed the square again, and the TV snapped back to life. “I’ll see you in about half an hour.” She pressed a button on the VCR, then walked around the table. She touched my shoulder as she passed by, patted it, and then she was out the door, closing it behind her.

I leaned back in my chair to watch the show, but I could tell after the first few minutes that I was not going to like it. The video was state-of-the-art industrial PR, but though it had the clean look and sophisticated techniques of a modern production, the narration and determinedly cheerful background music reminded me of those leftover educational films from the early 1960s that they’d shown at my grammar school. That depressed me. Nostalgia always depressed me, and I suppose that was why I never liked to think about the past. It wasn’t because it reminded me of what once was, but because it reminded me of what could have been. My past had not been that great, but my future was supposed to have been so.

My future was not supposed to be spent watching PR videos at Automated Interface, Inc.

I didn’t want to think about it. I refused to let myself think about it. I tried to tune out the sound track and concentrate on the images, but that didn’t work, and I found myself getting out of my chair, walking over to the window, and staring down at the parking lot until the video was over. I returned to the table as sound faded to silence and realized that I hadn’t paid attention to the survey question instructions at the end of the video, but I looked down at the form and it was pretty self-explanatory. I answered the questions on my own before turning off the TV and VCR, grabbing my packet, and walking back down the hall.

It took another twenty minutes to fill out the additional forms and answer the questions put to me by Lisa. Although I was required to fill out two pages of personal information for my health insurance, she told me that I had my choice of three plans and that the information would be forwarded to the insurance company of my choosing.

“If you have any other problems or questions, over anything at all, you can come to me.” She smiled, and there seemed to be more than friendliness in that smile. It had been a while since I’d been available or looking, and maybe I was misreading the signs, but it occurred to me that she was genuinely interested. I thought of the light pat on the shoulder in the conference room, thought of the way she’d bent over in front of the TV. She handed me the insurance brochures, and for the briefest of seconds, our fingers touched. I felt cool skin, lingering a beat too long.

She was definitely flirting.

I noticed for the first time that she was not wearing a bra, that I could see the outline of her nipples against the thin material of her blouse.

My face felt hot, but I tried my best to cover it by smiling, nodding my thanks, and backing smoothly away from the counter. I was flattered but not in the market, and I didn’t want to give her the wrong impression.

“Mr. Banks’ office is on the fifth floor,” Lisa said. “Do you want me to show you where it is?”

I shook my head. “I’ll find it. Thanks.”

“Okay, but any problems, you give me a yell.” She waved at me, smiling.

“I will,” I said. “Thanks.”

I stood by the elevator, waiting, willing it to hurry, not daring to look back to where I knew Lisa was still standing, watching me. Finally the metal doors slid open, and I stepped inside, pressing the button for the fifth floor.

I waved good-bye as the doors closed.

I had no trouble finding Ted Banks. He was waiting in front of the doors when they opened, and he reached out and shook my hand the second I stepped off the elevator. “Glad to see you again,” he said, although he seemed anything but glad. I remembered him now. He’d been the surly older man at my interview, one of the two who’d sat silently through the proceedings. He stopped shaking my hand and smiled at me, but it was a pretend smile and did not reach his eyes. Not that I could see his eyes very clearly behind the thick black-framed glasses. “What do you say we walk over to my office so we can get acquainted?”

“Okay,” I said.

“Good.”

I followed him to his office. Neither of us spoke along the way, and I found myself wishing that I had taken Lisa up on her offer to accompany me here. I could not see Banks’ face, just the back of his head, but he seemed to me to be angry. There was something about the way he carried himself that seemed… hostile. I found myself wondering if I’d been hired over his objections. I got the feeling I had.

In his office, he sat behind his desk in a high-backed leather chair and motioned for me to take the seat opposite him. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s talk.”

We talked. Or rather he talked, I listened. He told me about the corporation, about the department, about my job. Automated Interface, he said, was not only an industry leader in the development of commercial business software, it was also a great place to work. It offered a comfortable yet professional working environment and limitless opportunity for advancement for those with ability and ambition. The most important department within the organization, he said, was Documentation Standards, since it was by the clarity of the software documentation that customers tended to judge the user-friendliness of a product. Documentation was in the front lines of both public relations and customer support, and the continued success of the corporation rested in large part with the quality of documentation. In my position, according to Banks, I would be directly affecting, for better or worse, the statue of the department and, by extension, the entire company.

I nodded as Banks spoke, agreeing with him, pretending like I knew what the hell he was talking about even though I had only a vague idea of what was being discussed. Software documentation? User-friendliness? These were not terms with which I was comfortable or familiar. These were phrases I’d heard but had always made an extra effort to avoid. This was someone else’s language, not mine.

“Do you have any questions so far?” Banks asked.

I shook my head.

“Good,” he said.

But it was anything but good. He continued to talk, and I continued to listen, but… how can I describe it? The atmosphere was uncomfortable? There was no rapport between us? We were different types of people? All of these descriptions are correct, but they do not really reflect what I felt in that office. For as we sat there, as we looked at one another, we both realized that we did not like each other — and never would. There is a sort of instantaneous antipathy between people who don’t get along, an unspoken recognition acknowledged by both parties, and that was what was happening here. The conversation remained polite, official, and the surface formalities were observed, but there was something else going on as well, and the relationship that was being forged between us was not one of friendship.

If we’d both been ten and on the playground at school, Ted Banks would have been one of the bullies who wanted to beat me up.

“Ron Stewart will be your immediate supervisor,” Banks was saying. “Ron is Coordinator of Interoffice Procedures and Phase II Documentation, and you’ll be reporting directly to him.”

As if on cue, there was a knock on the door. “Come in!” Banks called.

The door opened, and Ron Stewart stepped into the office.

I disliked him on sight.

I don’t know why. There was no rational reason. I didn’t know the man at all and really had nothing to base my judgment on, but my first impression was strong, very strong, and definitely not favorable.

Stewart walked confidently into the room. He was tall and good-looking, dressed impeccably in a gray business suit, white shirt, and red tie. He strode into the office smiling, offering me his hand, and there was something about his bearing, about the arrogant way he walked, stood, and carried himself, that immediately rubbed me the wrong way. But I put on a smile, stood, shook his hand, and returned his greeting.

“Glad to have you aboard,” he said. His voice was brisk, curt, businesslike. His grip was strong and firm. Too firm.

Glad to have you aboard. I’d known before he opened his mouth that he’d say something like that, that he’d use some sports metaphor, that he’d welcome me “aboard,” tell me he was glad to have me on the “team.”

I nodded politely.

“I’m looking forward to working with you, Jones. From what I’ve heard, I think you’ll be a valuable asset to AII.”

From what he’d heard? I watched Stewart as he sat down. What could he have heard?

“I’ve been talking to Jones about our overall operation,” Banks said. “Why don’t you tell him a little bit about Interoffice Procedures and Phase II Documentation.”

Stewart began talking, repeating an obviously memorized spiel. I listened to him, nodded in the appropriate places, but I found it hard to concentrate on what he was saying. His tone of voice was unrelievedly condescending, as though he was explaining a simple concept to a slow child, and although I allowed no reaction to show on my face, his tone grated on me.

Finally, Stewart stood. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll take you on a tour of the department.”

“Okay,” I said.

We took the elevators downstairs, to the fourth floor, walking through the rabbit warren of modular workstations where the Phase II programmers were housed. He introduced me to each: Emery Phillips, Dave DeMotta, Stacy Kerrin, Dan Chan, Kim Thomas, Gary Yamaguchi, Albert Connor, and Pam Greene. They seemed nice enough, most of them, but they were all so involved in their work it was hard to tell. Only Stacy, a short, ultra efficient-looking blond woman, bothered to look up from her terminal when I was introduced. She met my eyes, gave me a brisk nod, shook my hand, then turned away. The rest of them merely nodded distractedly or raised a curt hand in greeting.

“Programmers necessarily have to develop and maintain a high level of concentration,” Stewart said. “Don’t take it personally if they’re not always as talkative as they should be.”

“I won’t,” I said.

“You’ll be working closely with the programmers once you become involved in systems documentation. You’ll find out they’re not as antisocial as they first appear.”

We walked out of the programming area and past a series of glass-walled rooms where testing and other peripheral activities were performed. He introduced me to Hope Williams, the department secretary, and Lois and Virginia, the two women from the steno pool we shared with the third floor.

Then it was time to check out my office.

My office.

The word “office” had conjured in my mind the image of a spacious room. Plush carpeting, wood paneling, an oak desk. A window with a view. Bookshelves. Something akin to what Banks had. Instead, I was led into a small, narrow cubicle slightly bigger than my parents’ walk-in closet. There were two desks here, ugly metal behemoths that took up almost all available space and were situated side by side, with only walking room between them. Both desks faced a blank wall, a white add-on separated into even segments by thin metal connecting strips running lengthwise from floor to ceiling. Behind them was a row of gray metal filing cabinets.

Seated at the desk nearest the door was an old man with a crown of white hair and the small, hard eyes and belligerent stare of the terminally petty. He glared at me as I stepped into the office.

This was his domain and I was trespassing, and he wanted me to know it.

All the hopes I’d had of coming into an interesting job in a pleasant working environment died finally and forever as I forced myself to nod and smile at the man Stewart introduced to me simply as “Derek.”

“Hello,” Derek said dryly. His features had a cast of blunt ignorance: pug nose, small mouth with jutting lower lip, tiny intolerant eyes. It was a face that showed no patience to members of ethnic groups, other generations, or the opposite sex. He reached across his desk, took my proffered hand, and shook, but it was clear from the expression on his face that I was too young for serious consideration. His palm was cold and clammy, and he immediately sat back down and pretended to ignore me, scribbling something on a piece of paper in front of him.

“Well give you an hour or so to get settled. Derek here’ll show you the ropes, won’t you?”

The old man looked up, nodded noncommittally.

“You can go through your desk, keep what you’ll need, toss out what you don’t want. After break, maybe, I’ll drop by and we can start going over your first assignment.”

As with Banks, there were several levels at work here. The surface words were standard, noncommittal, but there was an undercurrent in Stewart’s delivery that let me know that, however hard I might try, I would never be part of the “team.”

“I’ll catch you later,” Stewart said. Once again, he shook my hand, pressing hard, and then he was gone.

I moved past Derek’s desk in the crowded, suddenly silent office and over to my own. I sat down awkwardly in the ancient swivel chair provided me.

This was not working out the way I’d expected. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I guess I’d thought it would be like How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. I’d seen the movie on TV when I was little, and while I had never even considered a career in business, that film had glamorized the corporate world for me, instilling within me a vision that not even years of subsequently grittier and more realistic movies had been able to erase entirely.

But the cleanly stylized offices and boardrooms through which Robert Morse sang were a far cry from the cramped and claustrophobic quarters in which I now found myself.

I opened the drawers of my desk, but I didn’t know what to clean out. I didn’t know enough about my job to know what I would and wouldn’t need.

I glanced over at Derek. He smiled at me, but the smile was not quick enough to cover the hard expression that had been in its place a second before.

“New jobs,” he said, shaking his head as though sympathetically identifying with a common experience.

“Yeah,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

I looked at the top of my desk. Both the metal in box and out box were full, and a selection of books were stacked next to them: Roget’s Thesaurus, Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, Creating Creative Technical Manuals, Dictionary of Computer Terminology.

Creating technical manuals? Computer terminology? I felt like a fraud already, even though I hadn’t officially started my work. What did I know about this stuff?

I was still not sure of my duties exactly. Lisa had given me a single-page job description, but it was filled with the same vague wording as the one handed to me at the interview. I had a general idea of what was required of me, but the specific tasks I was supposed to perform, the precise requirements of my position had never been spelled out to me, and I felt lost. I thought of asking Derek about it — he was, after all, supposed to be showing me “the ropes” — but when I glanced again in his direction, he was looking too intently and too obviously at a typed sheet of paper, and I knew that he did not want to talk to me.

Following his lead, I removed the stack of papers from my in box and, one by one, began sorting through them. I had no idea what I was looking at, but it didn’t seem to matter. Derek said nothing to me, and I continued to look at each page, pretending I knew what I was doing.

It was an hour later when the phone on my desk buzzed twice, although it felt to me as though five hours had passed.

“Mr. Stewart,” Derek said, speaking his first words since the enigmatic “New jobs.” He nodded toward the phone. “Press star seven.”

I picked up the receiver, pressed the asterisk button and the number seven on the console. “Hello?” I said.

“No.” Stewart’s voice was strong and disapproving. “When you answer the phone, you say, ‘Interoffice Procedures and Phase II Documentation. Bob Jones speaking.’”

“Sorry,” I said. “No one told me.”

“Now you’ve been told. I don’t want to catch you answering the phone incorrectly again.”

“Sorry,” I said again.

“I may have forgotten to mention it,” Stewart said, “but you are entitled to two fifteen-minute breaks and an hour lunch each day. Your breaks will be taken at ten in the morning and three in the afternoon. Your lunch will be from noon until one. Your break may be spent at your desk or in the fourth-floor break room. You may leave the building and spend your lunch wherever you want as long as you return to your desk by one.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

The phone clicked in my ear, and I looked down for a moment, panicked. I’d been fiddling with the phone cord, and I thought I might have accidentally cut him off, but my hand was nowhere near the cradle, and I realized that he had simply hung up on me.

I replaced the handset and glanced over at Derek. “Where’s the break room?” I asked.

He did not look up. “End of the hall, turn right.”

“Thanks,” I said, walking past his desk and out the door.

The break room was small, the size of the living room in our apartment. There was a refrigerator and a soft-drink machine against one wall, a dilapidated couch against another, and two mismatched dining room tables in the center. The room smelled of old ladies, of closeted linen and cloying perfume. Underneath, more lightly, I detected a stale scent that was either refrigerated lunches or lingering body odor.

There were three old women seated around the closest table, dressed in too-bright floral blouses, and pantsuits that had been stylish several decades back. One woman, hair dyed years younger than was flattering, sat nibbling on a bear claw, staring into space. The other two drank cups of coffee, idly flipping through well-thumbed copies of Redbook. None of the women spoke. They barely looked up at the sound of my footsteps as I entered the room.

What the hell had I gotten myself into here? I suddenly found myself wishing that I’d kept my part-time job at Sears as a backup. I could’ve quit this job then. We’d been poor with both of us working part-time, but we’d gotten by, and if I’d known it was going to be like this, I would’ve turned down this position and waited for another.

But I was screwed now, trapped here until I could find something else.

I vowed to start applying elsewhere as soon as possible.

Cokes were fifty cents. I had three quarters in my pocket, and I dropped two of them into the machine, pressed the button. A can of Shasta Cola rolled out. Shasta? The machine sported a Coca-Cola logo.

I shouldn’t have been surprised.

Stewart was sitting in my seat when I returned to the office. He swiveled to face me as I entered the room. “Where have you been?” he asked.

I looked at the clock above the filing cabinets. I’d been gone less than ten minutes. “Break,” I said.

He shook his head. “You’re not one of those, are you?”

I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“You’re entitled to a break by law,” he said. “But don’t abuse the privilege.”

I wanted to respond, wanted to remind him that he had called me and told me to take a fifteen-minute break and that I had been gone only seven or eight minutes, but I didn’t dare. I nodded. “Okay.”

“All right, then.”

I waited. He did not get out of my chair but sat there, leaning back, as he looked at a stapled sheaf of papers in his hand. I stood awkwardly in front of my desk. “On January first,” he said, “Automated Interface will be coming out with a new software package called PayPer. PayPer is an integrated payroll and personnel information system that will allow users to maintain personal data files on employees as well as process payrolls, calculate state and federal withholding deductions, and incorporate pretax and posttax flexible benefit programs. I want you to write a description of the product for a press release I’m preparing.”

Already I felt hopelessly out of my depth, but I nodded in what I hoped was a confident, competent manner.

“I’ll leave this overview with you to look at.” He leaned forward, placed the sheaf of papers on top of my desk, and stood. “I don’t think you’ll have any problems, but if you do, just give me a ring. You can turn in the description before you leave today, or even tomorrow morning if you want. That should give you more than enough time to finish the assignment.”

I nodded again, flattened against the wall to let him pass as he walked around the side of the desk.

I sat down, looked at the paper he’d left me. I wasn’t sure what he wanted. A description? What did that mean? No stylistic guidelines had been laid out for me, I’d been given no examples of the company’s previous press releases; I had not been told “this is what we want” or “this is what we don’t want”; I had not been given a length or line limit. I was on my own, and I realized that this was my first test in the new job and that I’d damn well better pass it.

I glanced over at Derek, and this time there was a real smile on his face.

I did not like the way it looked.

I gathered that Stewart was writing a press release, and that I had to write a short description of this PayPer system for him to incorporate into the release. I read the information he gave me, which was basically a detailed description of PayPer written from a technical standpoint, and figured all I had to do was paraphrase and simplify what I’d been given.

Before I knew it, it was twelve, and Derek was putting away his papers and getting ready to go to lunch. In the hallway outside our office, I saw other men and women carrying sack lunches or jingling keys as they walked toward the elevator. I did not want to be stuck eating lunch with Derek, so I let him leave, then gave him a few extra minutes before walking over to the elevator myself.

I hadn’t brought a lunch, and I didn’t especially feel like hanging around the building for an hour, so I took the elevator to the first floor and walked out to my car. I’d seen a Taco Bell near the freeway on my way in that day, and I figured I’d eat there.

Apparently, a lot of other people from Automated Interface or the other corporations in the area had the same idea as me, because Taco Bell was packed. It was a half hour before I ordered and got my food, and because all of the tables were taken, I was forced to eat in my car. By the time I finished eating, drove back to work, and found a parking place, I knew my hour would be over.

From now on, I decided, I would bring my lunch.

I saw Lisa walking out to her car when I returned, and I waved to her and smiled as I made my way through the parking lot. She stared at me blankly, then looked away. I realized, too late, that her show up there in Personnel had been just that — a show. She had not been flirting with me after all. She had been doing her job. Obviously, she smiled at everyone the way she’d smiled at me, touched everyone the way she’d touched me.

I returned to my office, feeling chastened and humiliated.

I was finished with my description by two, but I still had three hours to kill, so I spent the time going over my copy, trying to make it perfect. I typed the description on the typewriter next to my desk and brought it to Stewart’s office around four-thirty. He said nothing as he read it, and no expression crossed his face. He didn’t say it was brilliant, didn’t say it was a piece of shit, so I assumed it was acceptable.

He placed the page in a drawer. “Next time,” he said, “I want you to write on the PC so we can revise your work if necessary. I’m going to have the typewriter taken out of your office.”

I was not that familiar with word processors, but I had used one in a communications course in college and was pretty sure I’d be able to pick it up easily, so I nodded. “I would’ve used it for this,” I said, “but no one told me where it was.”

He glanced at me. “Sometimes you have to take your own initiative,” he said.

I nodded, said nothing.

Jane was making dinner when I came home — spaghetti — and I took off my jacket and tie, threw them on the back of the couch, and walked into the kitchen. It felt weird to me, coming home like this. The apartment was warm and filled with the smell of cooking food, the local news was on TV, and though these were things that happened every day, I felt out of it and slightly disoriented because they were already in progress when I arrived. I hadn’t been home when Jane had closed the windows against the late afternoon chill, I hadn’t been home when she’d turned on the TV for Donahue, I hadn’t been home when she’d started dinner, and all of this made me feel like a stranger, an outsider. I guess I’d gotten used to the way things were, to working part-time and hanging around the apartment for a good portion of the day, and this readjustment of my daily life threw me more than I would have expected.

I walked into the kitchen, and Jane turned to me, smiling, still stirring the spaghetti sauce. “How was it?” she asked.

She didn’t say, “How was your day, dear?”, but the intent was the same and for some reason it rubbed me the wrong way. It was… too Ozzie and Harriet. I shrugged, sitting down. “Okay.” I wanted to say more. I wanted to tell her about Lisa and Banks and Stewart and Derek, about my horrible office and the horrible break room and my horrible job, but her question put me off somehow and I sat silently, staring through the kitchen doorway at the TV in the living room.

I opened up later, during dinner, telling her everything, apologizing for my earlier silence. I was not sure why I’d taken out my frustration on her — I had never done that before — but she took it in stride and was more than understanding.

“First days are always the worst,” she said, collecting our plates and carrying them to the sink.

I closed the lid of the parmesan cheese container. “I hope so.”

She returned to the table, reached underneath and gave my penis a small squeeze. “Don’t worry. I’ll cheer you up later,” she said.

We watched TV after dinner, our standard lineup of Monday sitcoms, but I told her I had to get to bed early because I had to wake up at six for work, and we walked into the bedroom at ten instead of the usual eleven.

“Do you want to take a shower with me?” she asked as I sat down on the bed.

I shook my head. “I’m not in the mood.”

“Too tired?”

I smiled. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m too tired.”

“Too tired,” was our own personal euphemism for oral sex, one that had gotten started when we’d first moved in together. She’d wanted to make love one night, but I wasn’t sure I’d be up for it, so I told her I was too tired. I’d closed my eyes, and the next thing I knew, her mouth had been open and ready for business. It had been wonderful, and ever since then the phrase “too tired” had taken on a new meaning for us.

Jane gave me a quick kiss. “I’ll be right back, then.”

I took off my clothes and crawled into bed. I was excited and already had an erection, but I really did feel tired, and I lay back and closed my eyes, listening to the sound of the water running in the bathroom, and by the time she finished her shower, I was dead asleep.

Three

Assistant Coordinator of Interoffice Procedures and Phase II Documentation.

Despite the implications of my rather pretentious title, I turned out to be little more than a glorified clerk, typing memos that needed to be typed, proofreading instruction sheets that needed to be proofread, doing the jobs the Coordinator of Interoffice Procedures and Phase II Documentation didn’t want to assign to a secretary and didn’t want to do himself.

That first assignment was either an aberration, or else I’d failed so miserably at it that Stewart was not willing to risk having me work on a real job again.

I was afraid to ask which.

I tried talking to Derek the first few days, saying hello when I arrived in the morning, good-bye when I left for home, occasionally attempting to start a conversation at other times throughout the day. But all of my efforts were met with the same stony silence, and I soon gave up. Technically, we were office mates, but our relationship was even more impersonal than that. We shared the same work space.

Period.

The depressing thing was that it was not just Derek. No one, it seemed, wanted to speak to me. I did not know why this was. I was new and knew no one, and in an effort to become acquainted with my coworkers, I tried nodding or waving to other employees I passed in the halls, saying “Hi,” “Good morning,” “How are you?”, but more often than not, I was met with blank looks, my greetings ignored. Every so often, someone would wave back, smile slightly, or say hello, but that was the exception rather than the rule, and pretty damn rare.

Among the computer programmers, my presence was barely tolerated. I was not required to deal with them on a regular basis, but several times those first few days I had to go over to their area and either deliver copies of memos or pick up papers to be proofread, and they made clear their disdain for me by ignoring me and treating me as though I were a slave — an emotionless, personalityless automaton there only to do my professional duty.

Every so often, I would meet one of them in the break room, and I always tried to break the ice and establish some sort of one-on-one relationship, but my attempts invariably failed. I talked twice to Stacy Kerrin, the blond woman, and I gathered from reading between the lines of what she said and what she didn’t say that my predecessor had been well-liked within the department. Apparently, he had maintained friendships with many of the programmers outside of work and had seen them on a social basis. She spoke of him fondly, as an equal.

But I was clearly a second-class citizen.

I wanted to feel superior to these people, should have been able to feel superior — they were dorks and nerds, geeks to a man — but I found myself feeling uncomfortably out of place around them and even slightly intimidated. In the real world they might be losers, but here in their world they were the norm and I was the outcast.

I took to spending most of my breaks at my desk, alone.

On Friday, Stewart had assigned me to correct the grammar on an old chapter of the department Standards Manual, and I spent at least an hour trying to get the paper aligned in the printer. I was supposed to have the assignment finished before noon, and I had to wait until all of the pages were printed before leaving, so I was late for lunch.

It was twelve-thirty by the time I xeroxed the chapter, placed a copy on Stewart’s desk, and finally went outside.

The two BMWs that had flanked my car this morning were gone, and I pulled out easily. The Buick was almost out of gas, and there was no gas station between here and the freeway, so I decided to try the other direction. I figured I’d find a Shell or a Texaco or something at one of the intersections.

Ten minutes later, I was hopelessly lost.

I’d never really driven through Irvine before. I’d driven past it on my way to San Diego, I’d passed through a corner of it on my way to the beach, but I’d never driven in it. I didn’t know the city, and as I headed south on Emery, I was amazed by its monochromatic sameness. I drove for miles without encountering a store, gas station, or shopping center of any kind. There was only row upon row of identical two-story tan houses behind a seemingly endless brown brick wall. I passed four stoplights, then turned at the fifth. None of the street names were recognizable to me, and I continued turning, right and left and right and left, hoping to find a gas station, or at least a liquor store where I could ask directions to a gas station, but there was only that brown brick wall, lining both sides of every street. It was like some labyrinthian science fiction city, and I was getting worried because my gas gauge was now definitely on E, but there was also a part of me that found this exciting. I’d never seen anything like it before. Irvine was a planned community, with businesses all in one area, residences in another, farmland in another, and apparently stores and gas stations in another. Something about that appealed to me, and though I was afraid of running out of gas, I also felt strangely comfortable here. The mazelike uniformity of the streets and the buildings fascinated me, and seemed to me somehow wondrous.

Finally I did find an Arco, deceptively disguised in an unobtrusive corner building the same brown brick as the wall, and I got my gas and asked the attendant how to get back to Emery. The directions were surprisingly easy — I hadn’t gone as far afield as I thought — and I thanked him, and drove off.

I returned to work feeling lighter and happier for my little noontime jaunt.

I promised myself I’d spend more of my lunch hours exploring Irvine.

The days dragged.

My job was mind-numbingly boring, made even more so by the knowledge that it was completely useless. From what I could tell, Automated Interface would have had absolutely no trouble getting along without me. The corporation could have eliminated my position entirely and no one would have even noticed.

I mentioned this to Jane over dinner one night, and she tried to tell me that, when you got down to it, most jobs were useless. “What about the people who work for companies that make foot deodorant or those magnets that look like sandwiches and Oreo cookies? No one really needs that stuff. Those people’s jobs aren’t important.”

“Yeah, but people buy those things. People want those things.”

“People want computer things, too.”

“But I don’t even make computer things. I don’t design, produce, market, or sell — ”

“There are people with jobs like yours in every company.”

“That doesn’t make it okay.”

She looked at me. “What do you want to do? Go to Africa and feed starving children? I don’t think you’re the type.”

“I’m not saying that — ”

“What are you saying, then?”

I let it drop. I could not seem to articulate what I was trying to say. I felt useless and unimportant — guilty, I suppose, for taking home a paycheck when I wasn’t actually doing or accomplishing anything. It was a strange feeling, and not one I could easily explain to Jane, but it discomfited me and I was not able to ignore it.

Although I did not like my job, I did not hate it enough to quit. In the back of my mind was the idea that this was temporary, something to tide me over until I found the position I really wanted. I told myself this was a transitional phase between school and my real occupation.

But I had no idea what my “real” occupation would be.

One thing I quickly learned was that, in a major corporation, as much time is spent trying to look busy as is spent actually working. The week’s worth of assignments I was given each Monday I could have easily completed by Wednesday, but although workers in movies and on TV eagerly complete their assignments in record time and then ask for more work, impressing those higher up on the corporate ladder and elevating themselves through the ranks, it was made clear to me early on that such initiative in real life was not only not encouraged, it was frowned upon. The people surrounding me in the company hierarchy had asses to protect. They had, over the years, worked out what was for them a comfortable ratio of work to nonwork, and if I suddenly started cranking out documentation, it would throw off the productivity curve in the company’s labor distribution study. It would make them look bad. It would make my supervisor look bad; it would make his supervisor look bad. What I was expected to do was equal or improve very slightly upon the output of my predecessor. Period. I was supposed to fit into the preexisting niche created for me and conform to its boundaries. The Peter Principle in action.

Which meant that I had a lot of time to kill.

I learned quickly to follow the lead of those around me, and I discovered many ways to simulate hard work. When Stewart or Banks stopped by the office to check on my progress, there were paper shufflings I could perform, desk straightenings I could do, drawers I could rifle through. I don’t know if Derek ever noticed my little act, but if he did, he didn’t say anything. I suspected that he did the same thing himself, since he too seemed to suddenly become a lot busier when the supervisor or department head came into the office.

I missed going to school, and I seemed to spend a lot of time thinking about it. I’d had fun in college, and though it had been less than half a year since I graduated, emotionally those days seemed a million miles away. I found that I missed being with people my own age, missed just doing nothing and hanging out. I remembered the time I went with Craig Miller to the Erogenous Zone, an “adult” toy store in a seedy mini-mall close to campus. We’d been carpooling at the time, and Craig suggested that we stop by the shop. I’d never been there, was kind of curious and said okay, and we pulled into the small L-shaped parking lot. The second we walked into the store, ringing the small bell above the door, all three cashiers and several customers turned to look at us. “Craig!” they called out in unison. It reminded me of the TV show Cheers, when the patrons of the bar would all cry, “Norm!”, and I couldn’t help laughing. Craig grinned at me sheepishly, and I remembered thinking, in the words of the song, how nice it was to go to a place where everybody knew your name.

At Automated Interface, no one knew my name.

I was still not sure why I’d been hired, particularly since both Stewart and Banks seemed to despise me. Was I some sort of quota hiree? Did I meet some type of criteria or fit into the right age or ethnic group? I had no idea. I only knew that if the hiring had been up to Banks or Stewart, I would not have gotten the job.

I seldom saw Ted Banks, but when I did, when he took his occasional tours of the department, he was rude to me and unnecessarily abrasive. Unprovoked, he made derogatory comments about my hair, my ties, my posture, anything he could think of. I had no idea why he did this, but I tried to ignore it and play it off.

Ron Stewart was a little harder to ignore. He was not as obvious or crude in his dislike as Banks; he was even polite to me in a superficial way, but there was something about him that rubbed me the wrong way. When he spoke, it was always with a slight trace of condescension. His words were pleasant enough, but they were delivered in a manner that made it clear he felt far superior to me in intellect and position and was doing me a great favor by talking to me at all.

The annoying thing was that, when talking to him, I couldn’t help feeling that he was superior to me, that he was more intelligent, more interesting, more sophisticated, more everything. The words we spoke were the friendly words of equals, but the underlying attitudes that subtly shaped the subtexts of our conversations told a different story, and I found myself behaving in a slightly subservient manner, playing the deferential flunky to his smug overseer, and though I hated myself for it, I couldn’t help it.

I wondered if I was being paranoid. Maybe Banks and Stewart treated everyone that way.

No. Banks joked with the programmers, was courteous to the secretary and the steno women. Stewart was friendly to all of the other people under him. He even indulged in light conversation with Derek.

I was the sole recipient of their hostility.

It was about a month after I’d been hired that I heard Stewart and Banks talking in the hallway outside of my office. They were speaking loudly, just outside the door, as though they wanted to make sure I heard what they were saying.

I did.

Banks: “How’s he working out?”

“He’s not a team player.” Stewart. “I don’t know that he’ll ever get with the program.”

“We have no room here for slackers.”

My first review was not for another two months. They were just trying to provoke me. I knew that, but still I felt angry, and I could not let such accusations go unchallenged. I stood up, strode around my desk and into the hall. “For your information,” I said, confronting them, “I have completed every assignment given to me, and I have completed them all on time.”

Stewart looked at me mildly. “That’s nice, Jones.”

“I heard what you said about me — ”

Banks smiled indulgently, all innocence. “We weren’t talking about you, Jones. What made you think we were talking about you?”

I looked at him.

“And why were you eavesdropping on our private conversation?”

I had no answer for that, no reply that would not sound like an overly defensive rationalization, so I said nothing but retreated, red-faced, back into the office. Derek, at his desk, was grinning.

“Serves you right,” he said.

Fuck you, I wanted to say. Eat shit and die.

But I ignored him and uncapped my pen and silently went back to work.

That night, when I got home, Jane said she wanted to go somewhere, do something. We had not really been out of the house since I’d gotten the job, and she was feeling cramped and restless and more than a little housebound. I was, too, to be honest, and we both decided that it would be nice to get out for an evening.

We went to Balboa, and we ate dinner at the Crab Cooker, buying individual bowls of clam chowder and eating them on the bench outside the restaurant, watching and commenting upon the passersby. Afterward, we drove down the peninsula to the pier across from the Fun Zone, parking in the small lot next to the pier itself. This had always been “our” spot. The site of many a free date during our poorer days, this was where I had taken Jane on our first night out, and where we had later made out in the car. Throughout the first two years of our relationship, when we could not even afford to go to a movie, we’d come here: walking through the Fun Zone itself; window-shopping in the surf stores and T-shirt shops; watching the kids in the arcades; following the boats on the bay; walking out to Ruby’s, the hamburger stand at the end of the pier.

Afterward, after most of the people had gone and the stores had closed, we usually ended up making love in the backseat of my Buick.

It seemed strange going through the Fun Zone now. For the first time, we could afford to buy T-shirts if we wanted. We could afford to play arcade games. Out of habit, though, we did neither. We walked, hand in hand, through the crowds, passing a gang of leather-jacketed punks lounging against a faded fence near the broken Ferris wheel, past a booth offering nighttime harbor cruises. The air was filled with the smell of junk food — hamburgers, pizza, fries — and under that, more subtly, the fishy scent of the bay.

We went into a shell shop and Jane decided that she wanted a sand dollar, so I bought her one. After that, we took the ferry across the bay to Balboa Island, strolled for an hour around the island’s perimeter, bought frozen bananas from an ice cream stand, and took the ferry back.

Returning to the parking lot and the pier, we heard music and saw a crowd of well-heeled yuppies standing on the sidewalk in front of a small club. The neon sign on the wall between the open door and the darkened windows read STUDIO CAFE, and a makeshift sandwich marquee said NOW APPEARING: SANDY OWEN. We stopped for a moment to listen. The music was amazing — jazz saxophone, alternately bop hot and smooth cool, played over soaring, shimmering piano — and was unlike anything I had ever heard. The overall effect was mesmerizing, and we stood on the sidewalk listening for nearly ten minutes before the press of the crowd compelled us to move on.

Instead of walking back to the car, we continued up the sloping sidewalk to the pier. Ruby’s was little more than a square of light against the darkness of the ocean night, and the pier itself was lined with fishermen, dotted with other strolling couples. We passed a group of dark-haired, dark-skinned, dark-clothed high school girls speaking in Spanish, an old man fly-tying on the worn wooden bench, and an overdressed couple leaning against the railing, making out. The music followed us, ebbing and flowing with the breeze, and for some reason it didn’t feel like we were in Orange County. It seemed as though we were in some other, better place, a movie version of Southern California, where the air was clean and the people were nice and everything was wonderful.

Ruby’s was doing a thriving business, a crowd of would-be diners clustered outside the small building, people eating at the chrome tables inside. Jane and I walked around to the rear of the restaurant and took a spot at the railing between two fishermen. It was black on the ocean, the night deeper and darker than it ever got inland, and I stared into the blackness, seeing only the lone bobbing light of a boat on the water. I put my arm around Jane and turned around to face the shore, leaning my back against the metal railing. Above Newport, the sky was orangish, a dome of illumination from the buildings and the cars that kept the real night away. The sound of the waves was muffled, a distant breaking.

In the movie Stardust Memories, there’s a scene in which Woody Allen is drinking his Sunday morning coffee and watching his lover, Charlotte Rampling, read the newspaper on the floor. The Louis Armstrong recording of “Stardust” is on the turntable, and Woody says in a voice over that at that moment the sights, the sounds, the smells, everything came together, everything dovetailed perfectly, and at that instant, for a few brief seconds, he was happy.

That was how I felt with Jane, on the pier.

Happy.

We stood there for a while, saying nothing, enjoying the night, enjoying just being together. Along the coast, we could see all the way to Laguna Beach.

“I’d like to live by the beach,” Jane said. “I love the sound of the water.”

“Which beach?”

“Laguna.”

I nodded. It was a pipe dream — there was no way in hell either of us would ever earn enough money to buy beachfront property in Southern California — but it was something to strive for.

Jane shivered, drawing closer to me.

“It’s getting cold,” I said, putting an arm around her. “You want to head back?”

She shook her head. “Let’s just stay here for a while. Like this.”

“Okay.” I pulled her closer, held her tight, and we stared into the night toward the twinkling lights of Laguna, beckoning to us across the water and the darkness.

Four

We were still living in our small apartment near UC Brea, but I wanted to move. We could afford it now, and I didn’t want to deal with the constant flood of drunken fraternity boys who paraded down our street on their way to or from this week’s keg party. But Jane said she wanted to stay. She liked our apartment, and it was convenient for her since it was close to both the campus and the Little Kiddie Day Care Center, where she worked.

“Besides,” she said, “what if you get laid off or something? We could still survive here. I could afford to pay the rent until you found another job.”

That was my opening. That was my chance. I should’ve told her then and there, I should’ve told her that I hated my job, that I’d made a mistake by taking it and wanted to quit and look for another position.

But I didn’t.

I didn’t say anything.

I don’t know why. It wasn’t like she would’ve jumped down my throat. She might have tried to argue me out of it, but ultimately she would’ve understood. I could have walked away clean, no harm, no foul, and everything would have been over and done with.

I couldn’t do it, though. I didn’t have any work-ethic phobia about quitting, I had no loyalty to some abstract ideal, but as much as I despised my job, as unqualified as I seemed to be for my position, as out of place as I felt among my coworkers, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was supposed to do this, that somehow, for some reason, I should be working at Automated Interface.

And I said nothing.

Jane’s mom dropped by to see us on Saturday morning, and I tried to pretend that I was busy when she came over, hiding in the bedroom and tinkering with a broken sewing machine that had been given to Jane by one of her friends. I had never much liked Jane’s mom, and she had never liked me. We hadn’t seen her since I’d gotten my job, although Jane had told her about it, and while she pretended to be happy that I had finally found full-time work, I could tell she was secretly annoyed that there would be one less thing she could criticize me for and harp on Jane about.

Georgia — or George as she liked to be called — was part of a dying breed, one of the last of the martini moms, those hard and hard-drinking women who had been so prevalent in the suburbia of my childhood, those gravel-voiced, raucous women who always seemed to adopt the nicknames of men: Jimmy, Gerry, Willie, Phil. It frightened me a little to know that this was Jane’s mother, because I always thought that, in regard to women, you could tell how a daughter was going to turn out by looking at the mother. And I had to admit that I did see some of George in Jane. But there was no hardness in Jane. She was softer, kinder, prettier than her mother, and the differences between the two were pronounced enough that I knew history would not repeat itself.

I made a lot of noise, working on the sewing machine, purposely trying to drown out words that I knew I would not want to hear, but in between the pounding and scraping, I could still hear George’s alcohol-ravaged voice from the kitchen: “…he’s still a nobody…” and “…gutless nothing…” and “…loser…”

I did not come out of the bedroom until she was gone.

“Mom’s real excited about your job,” Jane said, taking my hand.

I nodded. “Yeah. I heard.”

She looked into my eyes, smiled. “Well, I am.”

I kissed her. “That’s good enough for me.”

At work, Stewart’s smug condescension gave way to a more direct disdain. Something had changed. I didn’t know what it was, whether I’d done something to piss him off or whether it was something that had happened in his personal life, but his attitude toward me became markedly different. The surface politeness was gone, and now there was only undisguised hostility.

Instead of calling me into his office each Monday to give me the week’s assignments, Stewart began leaving work on my desk, attaching notes that explained what I was supposed to do. Often, the notes were incomplete or cryptically vague, and though I could usually figure out the gist of the assignment, sometimes I had no idea what he wanted at all.

One morning, I found a batch of ancient computer manuals piled on my desk. As far as I could tell, the manuals explained how to utilize a type of keyboard and terminal that Automated Interface did not possess. Stewart’s Post-It note said only: “Revise.”

I had no idea what I was supposed to revise, so I picked up the top manual and the note and carried them over to Stewart’s office. He was not there, but I could hear his voice and I found him talking with Albert Connor, one of the programmers, about an action movie he’d seen over the weekend. I stood, waiting. Connor kept looking at me, obviously trying to hint to Stewart that I wanted to see him, but Stewart continued to describe the movie, slowly and in detail, purposely ignoring my presence.

Finally, I cleared my throat. It was a soft sound, polite, tentative, quiet, but the supervisor whirled on me as if I had just yelled an obscenity. “Will you stop interrupting me when I’m talking? For Christ’s sake, can’t you see I’m busy?”

I took a step backward. “I just needed — ”

“You just need to shut up. I’m tired of you, Jones. I’m tired of your shit. Your probation period’s not over yet, you know. You can be let go without cause.” He glared at me. “Do you understand?”

I understood what he was saying. But I also understood that he was bluffing. Neither he nor Banks had as much control over me as they wanted me to believe. If what they tried to make me believe was true, I would’ve been fired weeks ago. Or, more likely, I never would’ve been hired at all. Someone above them was calling the shots, and they were hamstrung. They could rant and rave and piss and moan, but when push came to shove, they couldn’t do diddly.

Maybe that was why Stewart had been riding me so hard lately.

I stood my ground. “I just wanted to know what I was supposed to revise. I couldn’t tell from the note.”

Connor was staring at us. Even he seemed taken aback by the force of Stewart’s outburst.

“You are supposed to revise the manuals,” Stewart said. He spoke slowly and deliberately, angrily.

“Which part of the manuals?” I asked.

“Everything. If you had bothered to look through the books I left on your desk, you would have noticed that we no longer use that hardware system. I want you to revise those operator manuals so that they reflect our current system.”

“How do I do that?” I asked.

He stared at me. “You’re asking me how to do your job?”

Connor had grown increasingly uncomfortable, and he nodded toward me. “I’ll show you,” he offered.

I looked at him gratefully, smiling my thanks.

Stewart fixed the programmer with a disapproving glare but said nothing.

I followed Connor back to his cubicle.

It was easier than I’d thought it would be. Connor simply gave me a stack of manuals that had come with the computers Automated Interface had recently purchased. He told me to xerox them, put them in binders, then deliver them to the different departments within the company.

“You mean I’m just supposed to replace the old books with new ones?” I asked.

“Right.”

“How come Mr. Stewart told me to revise the manuals?”

“That’s just the way he talks.” The programmer tapped the cover of the top manual he’d given me. “Just make sure you return those to me when you’re through. I need them. You should find a distribution list somewhere in your desk that will tell you how many copies each department gets. Gabe always kept an up-to-date distribution list.”

Gabe. My predecessor. In addition to being friendly and outgoing, he’d apparently been well-organized and efficient as well.

“Thanks,” I told Connor.

“You’re welcome.”

I licked my lips. This was the first positive contact I’d actually had with one of my coworkers, and more than anything else I wanted to follow up on it. I wanted to build on this tentative base, to try and establish some sort of relationship with Connor. But I did not know how. I could have attempted to continue the conversation, I suppose. I could have asked him what he was working on. I could have tried to talk about something non-work related.

But I didn’t.

He turned back to his terminal, and I returned to my office.

I saw Connor later, near the Coke machine, and I smiled and waved at him as I entered the break room, but he ignored me, turned away, and, embarrassed, I quickly got my drink and left.

At lunch, I saw Connor leaving with Pam Greene. They didn’t see me, and I stood on the sidelines, watching them take the elevator down. I’d begun dreading lunch, feeling self-conscious about the fact that I always ate by myself. I would have much preferred working eight hours straight and getting off an hour earlier at the end of the day, not taking a lunch at all. I did not need sixty minutes each day to prove to me how I was regarded by my coworkers. I was depressed enough by the job as it was.

What depressed me further was the fact that everyone — everyone — seemed to have someone to eat with. Even someone like Derek, who as far as I could tell was almost universally reviled, had someone with whom he spent his lunch: a squat, toadlike man who worked someplace upstairs. I alone was alone. The secretaries who were nice to me during working hours all said good-bye and waved politely before abandoning me at lunchtime, not even bothering to ask if I would like to accompany them, perhaps assuming that I already had something to do with my lunch hour.

Perhaps not.

Whatever the reason, I was ignored, not invited, left to my own devices.

The secretaries, I must admit, did seem to be nicer to me than everyone else. Hope, our department secretary, always treated me well. She had the calm, kind, perpetually friendly air of a stereotypical grandmother, and she greeted me each day with a cheerful smile and a heartfelt “Hello!” She asked about my weekend plans on Friday afternoons; she asked how those plans turned out on Monday morning. She said good-bye to me each evening before I left.

Or course, she was equally nice to everyone within the department. She talked to everyone, seemed to like everyone, but that didn’t make her interest in me any less genuine or any less appreciated.

Likewise, Virginia and Lois, the women from the steno pool, were decent to me, friendly in a way that separated them from everyone else within our department.

Or within the building.

The guard in the lobby still paid no attention to me, although he seemed to be jovially familiar with everyone else who passed through the doors of Automated Interface.

To Jane, I continued to give a fairly neutral account of my days at work. I told her of my frustration with Stewart, complained about some of my bigger problems, but the day-to-day difficulties, my seeming inability to fit in with my fellow workers, the sense of social ostracism I felt, these things I kept to myself.

It was my cross to bear.

A week after I’d distributed the computer manuals, Stewart walked into my office, waving a sheet of blue interoffice memo paper. I was on break and reading the Times, but Stewart slammed down the memo on top of my newspaper. “Read that,” he demanded.

I read the memo. It was from the head of the accounting department and simply asked if we could send an extra copy of the computer manual since Accounting had recently received a new terminal. I looked up at Stewart. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll make another copy and send them a manual.”

“Not good enough,” Stewart said. “You should’ve sent them the correct number to begin with.”

“All I had to go on was Gabe’s distribution list,” I told him. “I didn’t know they’d gotten another computer.”

“It’s your job to know. You should have asked each department head how many copies he or she needed instead of relying on that outdated list. You screwed up, Jones.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You’re sorry? This reflects on the whole department.” He picked up the memo. “I’m going to have to show this to Mr. Banks. I’ll let him decide on the proper course of action to take with you. In the meantime, get that manual to Accounting ASAP.”

“I will,” I said.

“You’d better.”

My workday went downhill from there.

Things did not improve when I got home. Jane was cooking hamburger casserole and watching an old rerun of M*A*S*H when I arrived. I’d always hated hamburger casserole, but I’d never told her so and it was not something she’d ever been able to figure out for herself.

I walked over to the TV and switched the channel. I liked M*A*S*H but I was a news junkie, and from the moment I got home until the start of prime time, I liked to watch the news. It made me nervous not to know what was going on in the world, to be oblivious to brewing disasters, but it didn’t seem to bother Jane at all. Even when the news was on, she paid attention only to movie reviews, and she preferred to watch reruns or films on cable.

It had been the source of many fights.

She knew my position, she knew how I felt, and I couldn’t help thinking that her choice of TV fare tonight was a direct provocation, an attempt to goad me. Usually, she had the news on when I came home. The fact that she didn’t this evening seemed to me to be a direct slap in the face.

I confronted her. “Why isn’t the news on?”

“I had a test today. I was tired. I wanted some light entertainment. I didn’t want to have to think.”

I understood how she felt, and I should have let it go, but I was still pissed off at Stewart, and I guess I had to take it out on somebody.

We got into it.

It was a big fight, almost a physical fight. Afterward, we both said we were sorry, and we kissed and hugged and made up. She went into the kitchen to finish making dinner, and I stayed in the living room and watched the news. I kicked off my shoes and lay down on the couch. I hadn’t told her I loved her, I realized. We’d made up, but I hadn’t told her I loved her.

She hadn’t told me she loved me, either.

I thought about that. I did love her and I knew she loved me, but we never used those words. Or at least we hadn’t for quite some time. We’d said them at first, but strangely enough, though I’d told her that I loved her, I wasn’t sure at the time if I meant it. I’d said it, but the words had seemed hollow and clichéd, almost false. The first time, it had been more of a hope than an admission, and I felt no different after than before. There’d been no surge of joy or relief, only a vague sense of unease, as though I had lied to her and was afraid I’d be found out. I’m not sure how she felt, but for me “love” was a transitional word, an acceptable way to escalate the relationship from boyfriend/girlfriend to live-in lovers. It had been necessary, and not necessarily true.

After we moved in together, I stopped saying it.

So did she.

But we did love each other. More than before. It was just that… it wasn’t the way we’d imagined it. We enjoyed each other’s company, we were comfortable together, but when I came home after work I didn’t rip off her clothes and throw her on the kitchen floor and rape her then and there. She didn’t greet me wearing nothing but a G-string and a smile. It wasn’t the intense passionate romance we’d been promised by books and movies and music and TV. It was nice. But it was not all-encompassing, not constantly exciting.

We didn’t even make wild passionate love after an argument, the way we were supposed to.

We made love that night, though, before going to sleep, and it was good. It was so good that I wanted to tell her that I loved her.

I wanted to.

But for some reason I didn’t.

Five

At work, my duties became more substantive. I don’t know why this was, whether my success with previous assignments had proved me capable of handling more difficult chores, or whether word came down from on high that I should be pulling my weight and earning my salary by doing real work. Whatever the reason, I was given first one press release to write, then another, and then a full overview for a set of previously written instructions for something called FIS, the File Inventory System.

Stewart made no comment when I turned in the first press release, a two-page piece of unabashed hype modeled after a press release of his own. I attempted to be a little less Madison Avenue in the second release, putting forth the positive attributes of the product in a more objective, journalistic manner. Again, no comment.

The overview was harder to write. I was supposed to describe what the File Inventory System accomplished and how it worked without getting bogged down in too much technical detail, and it took me nearly a week to finish it. When it was done, I made a copy on the Xerox machine and took it over to Stewart, who told me to leave it on his desk and get out of his office.

An hour later, he called.

I picked up the phone. “Hello. Documentation. Bob Jones speaking.”

“Jones, I have some things I want to add to your FIS overview. I’m going to mark up the copy you gave me and let you type in the additions.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I’ll look it over one more time after you’re finished. I have to approve it before we send it on to Mr. Banks.”

“All right. I’ll — ” I began.

The phone clicked as he hung up.

I sat there listening to the dial tone. Bastard, I thought. I replaced my handset in the cradle and looked down at the original copy of the overview on my desk. It was strange that he would even call to tell me something like that. It didn’t make sense. If he was going to correct my work, why didn’t he just do it and order me to type in his revisions? Why had he even called me with this song and dance? There was a reason for this, I knew, but I could not figure out what it was.

Derek was looking at me. “Watch your ass,” he said.

I was not sure if that was a threat or a warning — it was impossible to tell from the old man’s tone of voice. I wanted to ask him, but he had already turned away from me and was busily scribbling notes on a typed piece of paper.

That was Wednesday. When Thursday and Friday passed, then Monday, Tuesday, and the next Wednesday and I still hadn’t heard back from Stewart on the overview, I made a trip over to his office.

He was seated at his desk. His door was open, and he was reading a copy of Computer World. I rapped lightly on the doorframe, and he looked up. He frowned when he saw me. “What do you want?”

Nervously, I cleared my throat. “Did you, uh, have a chance to go over my work?”

He stared at me. “What?”

“The overview I wrote for the File Inventory System last week. You said you’d get back to me on it. You said you had some new things to add?”

“No, I didn’t.”

I shifted uncomfortably. “Well, I thought you said you had to okay it or approve it or something before it was sent to Mr. Banks.”

“What do you want? A pat on the back each time you complete a simple assignment? I’ll tell you right now, Jones, we don’t work that way around here. And if you think I’m going to allow you to just mope around while you wait for some sort of ego gratification, you’ve got another think coming. No one here gets medals for simply doing their jobs.”

“It’s not that.”

“What is it, then?” He stared at me, unblinking, waiting for an answer.

I didn’t know what to say. I felt flustered. I hadn’t expected him to flat-out deny what he’d told me, and I didn’t understand what was going on. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “I guess I misunderstood what you said. I’d better get back to my desk.”

“I guess you’d better.”

It might’ve been my imagination, but I thought I heard him chuckling as I left.

When I returned, there was a note from Hope waiting on my desk, written on a sheet of her pink personalized stationery. I picked up the paper, read the message: “For Stacy’s birthday. Sign the card and pass it on to Derek. See you at the lunch!” Paper-clipped to the stationery was a birthday card that showed a group of goofy cartoon jungle animals waving their arms. “From the whole herd!” the front of the card said.

I opened the card and looked at the signatures. All of the programmers except Stacy had signed it, as had Hope, Virginia, and Lois. Each of the signees had also added a short personal note. I didn’t know Stacy at all, but I picked up my pen, wrote “Hope you have a great birthday!” and signed my name.

I handed the card to Derek. “What time is the lunch?” I asked.

He took the card from me. “What lunch?”

“Stacy’s birthday lunch, I guess.”

He shrugged, didn’t answer, signed the card, placed it in its envelope. Ignoring me, he walked out of the office, taking the card with him.

I wanted to say something to him, to tell him what an inconsiderate jerk he was, but as always, I did nothing.

Ten minutes later, my phone rang. I picked it up. It was Banks. He wanted me to come up to his office. I had not been to his office since the first day, and my initial thought was that I was about to be fired. I didn’t know why or what for, but I figured that between the two of them, Banks and Stewart had finally come up with a plausible reason why I should be let go.

I was nervous as I waited for the elevator. I didn’t like my job, but I certainly didn’t want to lose it. I stared at the descending lighted numbers above the metal doors. My palms were sweaty. I wished Banks had not asked me up to his office. If I was going to get fired, I thought, I would have much rather been notified through the mail. I had never been good at personal confrontations.

The elevator doors opened. An older woman in a loud print dress got out, and I stepped in, pressing the button for the fifth floor.

Banks was waiting for me in his office, seated behind his huge desk. He did not say hello, did not stand when I entered, but motioned for me to sit down. I sat. I wanted to wipe my sweaty hands on my pants, but he was looking straight at me and I knew it would be too obvious.

Banks leaned forward in his chair. “Has Ron talked to you about GeoComm?”

I blinked, stared dumbly. “Uh… no,” I said.

“It’s a geobase system that we’re developing for cities, counties, and municipal governments. You do know what a geobase system is?”

I shook my head, still not sure where this was leading.

He gave me a look of annoyance. “Geobase is short for geographic database. It allows the user to…”

But I was already tuning him out. I wasn’t going to lose my job, I realized. I was being given a new assignment. I was going to be writing instructions for a new computer system. Not just partial instructions, not just one-page rewrites, but an entire manual.

I wasn’t going to be fired. I’d been promoted.

Banks stopped talking, looked at me. “Aren’t you going to take notes?”

I looked at him. “I didn’t bring a notebook,” I admitted.

“Here.” Sighing heavily, he pulled a pad of yellow legal paper from the top drawer in his desk, handed it to me.

I took a pen from my pocket and began writing.

When I returned to my office an hour later, it was a little after eleven-thirty. Derek was gone. I put my notes and the papers Banks had given me down on my desk and walked over to Hope’s station. She was gone, too.

As were the programmers.

And Virginia and Lois.

They’d already left for Stacy’s birthday lunch.

I did what I always did, waited until twelve-fifteen, until most of the other people in the building had gone, and then drove to McDonald’s, ordering my lunch from the drive-thru and eating in my car at a nearby city park. I don’t know why, but I was hurt by the fact that they hadn’t waited for me. I shouldn’t have expected anything else, but I’d been asked to sign the card, Hope had written “See you at the lunch!” and I guess I’d let myself think that I was actually wanted and welcome. I ate my cheeseburger, taking out the pickle, and listened to the radio as I stared out the car window at a teenage couple making out on a blanket on the grass.

I drove back to work feeling even more depressed.

They arrived back from the lunch a half hour late. I was walking from desk to desk, passing out interoffice phone directories that Stewart had left in my in box and asked me to distribute, when Virginia and Lois passed by me on their way to the steno pool. They were both walking slowly, both holding their hands over their obviously full stomachs.

“I ate too much,” Lois said.

Virginia nodded. “Me, too.”

“How was it?” I asked. It was a pointed question. I wanted to make them feel guilty for not waiting for me, like Charlie Brown in the Christmas special when he sarcastically thanks Violet for sending him a card she obviously did not send.

Virginia looked at me. “What?”

“How was the lunch?”

“What do you mean, ‘How was the lunch?’”

“I was just curious.”

“You were there.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

Lois frowned. “Yes, you were. I was talking to you. I was telling you about that accident my daughter got in.”

I blinked. “I wasn’t there. I was here the whole time.”

“Are you sure?”

I nodded. Of course I was sure. I knew where I’d been for lunch, knew what I’d done, but I nonetheless felt chilled, slightly uneasy, and the thought irrationally crossed my mind that there was a doppelganger out there, a double acting in my stead.

“Huh,” Lois said, shaking her head. “That’s weird. I could’ve sworn you were there.”

I was ignored. By everyone.

I hadn’t noticed the extent of it at first because the company was not one big happy family. It was a pretty impersonal place to work, and even friends did not get much of a chance to speak in the hallways beyond a quick “hi”.

But people seemed to go out of their way not to notice me.

I tried not to think about it, tried not to let it bother me. But it did bother me. And I was reminded of it each workday, each time I sat in my office with Derek, each time I walked through the halls, each time I took my breaks or went to lunch.

It seemed frivolous to dwell to such an extent on my own problems, to be so chronically self-absorbed. I mean, there were people in Third World countries dying every day from diseases that science had the means to eradicate completely. There were people in our own country who were homeless and starving, and here I was worried that I didn’t get along with my coworkers.

But everyone’s reality is different.

And in my reality, this was important.

I thought of talking about it with Jane, wanted to talk to her about it, even planned to talk about it, but somehow I never seemed able to bring it up.

On Friday, Hope passed out the checks at four o’clock, the way she always did. I thanked her as she handed me my envelope, and I opened it up to look at the check.

It was sixty dollars less than it was supposed to be.

I stared at the printed number, not sure of what to do. I looked over at Derek. “Is there anything wrong with your check?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Don’t know. Haven’t looked.”

“Could you check?”

“It’s none of your business,” he told me.

“Fine.” I stood up and took my check down the hall to Stewart’s office. As usual, he was sitting at his desk, reading a computer magazine. I knocked once on his doorframe, and when he didn’t look up, I walked in.

He frowned at me. “What are you doing here?”

“I have a problem,” I said. “I need to talk to you.”

“What kind of problem?”

There was a chair available, but he didn’t offer it to me and I remained standing. “My paycheck’s sixty dollars off.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” Stewart said.

“I know. But you’re my supervisor.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? That I’m responsible for everything that goes on in your life?”

“No, I just thought — ”

“Don’t think. I don’t know anything about your little check problem, and to be honest with you, Jones, I don’t care.” He picked up his magazine, began reading it again. “If you have a question, talk to Accounting.”

I looked down at the check, at the attached pay stub, and I noticed something I hadn’t seen before. I cleared my throat. “It says here in the hours box that I only worked four days last week.”

“There you go, then. That’s why your check’s short. Case closed.”

“But I worked five days.”

He lowered his newspaper. “Can you prove it?”

“Prove it? You saw me. Monday I helped you with the IBM memo and retyped that page for the new keyboard. Tuesday I met with you and Mr. Banks to talk about GeoComm. Wednesday and Thursday I worked on the list of processing functions for GeoComm. Friday I turned in what I’d done and started on that Biweekly Report System update.”

“I can’t be expected to keep track of every little movement made by every little person in this organization. To be honest with you, Jones, I’ve never known Accounting to make a mistake like this before. If they say you only worked four days last week, then I’m prepared to believe them.”

He returned to his magazine.

I stared at him. This was an Orwellian nightmare, a real-life Catch-22. I couldn’t believe it was happening. I forced myself to take a deep breath. Over the years, I’d grown immune to this sort of reasoning. In the abstract. The three-hundred dollar Pentagon hammers, my dealings with the cable company, all of this had caused me to take for granted the absurdity of the modern world in which I lived. But to come face-to-face with this sort of thinking on such a personal level was not only unbelievable but truly infuriating.

Stewart continued to ignore me, made a big show of licking his thumb and turning the page of his magazine.

He was smiling to himself, and I wanted to smack him, to just walk around the side of his desk, slap him upside the head, and wipe that smirk off his smug pretty-boy face.

Instead, I turned and left, walking straight to the elevator. Accounting was on the third floor, along with Personnel, and I saw Lisa behind the counter as I walked through the third-floor lobby. I ignored her and headed down the main hallway, in the opposite direction of the conference room.

I spoke to a clerk, then an accountant, then the finance director, and though I’d half-expected to hear that I had to get Stewart to sign a form verifying my whereabouts on each working day last week, the director apologized for the error and promised to get me a check for the difference by Monday.

I thanked him and left.

I told Jane about it when I got home, related the entire story to her, but I couldn’t seem to impart to her the feeling of frustration, the powerlessness I felt in the face of Stewart’s disbelief in me and his complete faith in the infallibility of the system. No matter how much I talked, I couldn’t make her understand how I felt, and I ended up getting mad at her for not understanding, and both of us went to bed angry.

Six

I don’t know why my job affected my relationship with Jane, but it did. I found myself being unnecessarily curt, getting angry at her for no reason at all. I guess I resented her for not being stuck in a crummy dead-end job like I was. It was stupid and irrational — she was still going to school and working part-time, so of course she couldn’t be in the same boat I was in — but I took my frustrations out on her anyway. I felt guilty for doing so. Throughout all those frustrating months when I could not find work, she had been there for me. She had put no pressure on me, she had never been anything but supportive. I felt bad that I was doing this to her, treating her this way.

That made me resent her even more.

Something was definitely wrong with me.

I’d called my parents when I’d first gotten the job but hadn’t talked to them since, and although Jane kept pressuring me to do so, I kept putting it off. My mom had been supportive, my dad happy that I’d finally found work, but neither of them had been thrilled, and I’d felt vaguely embarrassed. I didn’t know what kind of job they’d expected me to get after graduation, but it was obviously something better than this one, and I felt even more awkward about discussing my work with them now than I had that first time.

I loved my parents, but we didn’t exactly have the closest family in the world.

Jane and I were not as close as we had been either. Until recently, we had occupied the same little universe, that of the college student, and our free time had been spent together, doing the same things. But there were differences now, gaps. We were no longer in sync. I worked from eight to five, came home, and my day was done. I relaxed and read, or watched TV. She had night classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays and on those evenings did not come home until after nine. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays she did schoolwork or prepared activities for the kids at the day care center.

Her weekends were spent in the library or in the bedroom, buried in textbooks.

My weekends were free, but I still wasn’t used to that. Truth be told, I didn’t really know what to do with myself. Throughout my college years, I’d either had a part-time job or, like Jane, I’d done schoolwork when I wasn’t in class. Now, having two days with nothing at all to do left me at loose ends. There was only so much work that needed to be done around the apartment, only so much TV I could watch, only so much time I could spend reading. Everything grew old fast, and I was conscious of the weight of all this free time. Occasionally on weekends, Jane and I would go grocery shopping or hit a movie matinee, but more often than not she was doing her school stuff and I was left to my own devices.

It was on one such Saturday that I found myself in Brea Mall, checking out Music Plus, buying tapes I didn’t really want because I had nothing else to do. I’d just stopped by Hickory Farms for some free samples when I saw Craig Miller coming out of an electronics store. I felt a sudden lift in my spirits. I hadn’t seen Craig since before graduation, and I hurried toward him, smiling and waving as I approached.

He obviously didn’t see me and continued walking straight ahead.

“Craig!” I called.

He stopped, frowned, and looked over at me. The expression on his face was blank for a second, as if he didn’t recognize me, then he returned my smile. “Hey,” he said. “Long time no see.” He held out his hand and we shook, though that seemed like kind of a weird and formal thing to do.

“So what are you doing now?” I asked.

“Still going to school. I’m going for my master’s in poly sci.”

I grinned. “Still hanging out at the Erogenous Zone?”

He reddened. That was a surprise. I’d never seen Craig embarrassed by anything. “You saw me there?”

“You took me there, remember?”

“Oh, yeah.”

There was a moment of silence, and it was awkward because I didn’t know what to say and it was obvious Craig didn’t either. Strange. Craig was a natural motor-mouth and had never been one to let silences remain unfilled. As long as I’d known him, he’d never been without a comment or a reply. He’d always had something to say.

“Well,” he said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “I better get going. I’m supposed to be home now. Jenny’ll kill me if I’m late.”

“How is Jenny?” I asked.

“Oh, fine, fine.”

He nodded. I nodded. He looked at his watch. “Well, hey, I’d better be going. Nice seeing you again, uh — ” He looked at me, caught, instantly aware of his mistake.

I met his eyes and I knew.

He didn’t recognize me.

He didn’t know who I was.

I felt as though I’d been slapped in the face. I felt like I’d been… betrayed. I watched him trying to come up with my name.

“Bob,” I prompted.

“Yeah, Bob. I’m sorry. I just forgot for a second.” He shook his head, tried to laugh it off. “Alzheimer’s.”

I merely looked at him. Forgot? We’d hung out together for two years. He was the closest thing to a friend I’d had at UC Brea. I hadn’t seen him in a couple of months, but you didn’t completely forget the name of a buddy in less than half a year.

I understood now why he’d been so awkward and formal with me. He hadn’t known who I was and had been trying to bluff his way through the conversation.

I thought he’d try to make up for it now. He knew me. He remembered me. I figured he’d loosen up a little, stop acting so stiff and distant, start a real conversation, a personal conversation. But he looked again at his watch, said, “Sorry, I really do have to go. Good to see you.” Then he was off, giving me a quick impersonal wave, heading briskly through the crowd, away from me.

I watched him disappear, still stunned. What the hell had happened here? I looked to my left. On the bank of televisions in the window of the electronics store I saw a familiar beer commercial. A group of college chums was getting together with beer and potato chips to watch a Sunday afternoon football game. The young men were all good-looking and good-natured, comfortable enough with themselves and each other to pat one another’s shoulders and slap one another’s backs.

My college life had not been like that.

The scene of the men laughing as they sat around the television faded into a close-up of an overflowing glass of beer, overlaid with the beer company’s logo.

I had not had a group of friends in college, a gang with whom I hung out. I had not had any real friends at all. I’d had Craig and Jane, and that had been it. My Sunday afternoons had been spent not with a group of pals, watching football, but alone in my bedroom, studying. I stared at the TVs as another commercial came on. I had not realized until now how solitarily I had spent the four years I’d attended UC Brea. Those media images of close camaraderie and lasting friendships had been only that for me — images. Their reality had never materialized. I had not known my classmates in college the way I’d known my classmates in grammar school, junior high, and high school. College had been a much colder, much more impersonal experience.

I thought back on my college classes, and I suddenly realized that I’d gone through my entire academic career having had no personal contact with any of my instructors. I had known them, of course, but I’d known them in the same way I knew characters on TV, from observation not interaction. I doubted that a single one would remember me. They’d known me only for a semester and even then only as a number on a roll sheet. I never asked questions, never stayed after for extra help, always sat in the middle of the room. I had been completely anonymous.

I had been planning to hang around the mall a little longer, check out a few other stores, but I no longer felt like doing so. I wanted to be home. All of a sudden I felt strange wandering from shop to shop alone, anonymously, not noticed or known by anybody. I felt uncomfortable, and I wanted to be with Jane. She might be busy studying, she might not have time to do anything with me right now, but at least she knew who I was, and that alone was a comforting thought, incentive enough to make me leave.

I found myself thinking about my meeting with Craig as I drove back to the apartment. I tried to explain it, tried to rationalize it, tried to play it off, but I couldn’t. He had not been a mere acquaintance, someone I saw only in class. We had gone places together. We had done things together. Craig was not stupid, and unless he’d had some sort of brain tumor or mental illness or drug problem, there was no way he could have forgotten who I was.

Maybe the problem wasn’t with him. Maybe the problem was with me.

That seemed the most likely answer, and it frightened me to think about it. I knew I was not the most interesting person in the world, but was I so hopelessly boring that even a friend could forget who I was within the space of a couple months? It was a terrifying idea, and an almost unbearably depressing one. I was not an egomaniac, and I certainly didn’t harbor any illusions about my making a significant mark on the world, but it nonetheless unnerved me to think my existence was so meaningless that it passed entirely unnoticed.

Jane was on the phone when I arrived home, talking to some girl from work, but she looked up when I entered, smiled at me, and that made me feel good.

Maybe I was reading too much into all this, I thought. Maybe I was overreacting.

I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I studied myself for quite a while, trying to be objective, trying to see myself as others might see me. I was not good-looking, but neither was I ugly. My hair, light brown, was neither long nor short, my nose not big and not small.

I was average-looking. I was of average build, average height. I wore average clothes.

I was average.

It was a weird realization. I cannot say that I was surprised, but I had not really thought about it before and I felt strange being able to categorize myself so easily and so completely. I wished it weren’t so, wished there were something about me that was unique and exceptional and wonderful, but I knew there wasn’t. I was completely and totally ordinary.

Perhaps it explained the situation at work.

I pushed the thought out of my mind and hurried out of the bathroom, back to the living room where Jane was.

I was acutely conscious, the next few days, of everything I did, everything I said, and I was both horrified and discouraged to discover that, yes, I really was thoroughly and consistently unexceptional. My conversations with Jane were banal, my work was never less or more than adequate. No wonder Craig had not remembered me. I seemed to be so average in every way that I was entirely forgettable.

Was I also average in bed?

It was a question that, in one version or another, had been haunting me for some time, even before I’d seen Craig, lurking in the back of my mind when I was with Jane, unfocused but there, a vague threat. Now it had been, if not voiced, at least given shape, and I knew it would not go away. I tried to push it out of my mind, tried not to think of it when we were together, when were eating or talking or taking a shower or lying in bed, but it gnawed at me, growing in my brain from a whisper to a shout until I felt compelled to bring it up.

On Saturday evening, as always, we made love, doing it during the half-hour local news before Saturday Night Live. I did not usually analyze our love-making while it was happening, did not examine what we were doing or why we were doing it, but I found myself watching from a distance this time, as though I were a camera, and I realized how limited were my moves, how scripted my responses, how boring and goddamn predictable everything was. I had a difficult time maintaining an erection, and I had to force myself to concentrate in order to finish.

Afterward, I rolled off her, spent, breathing heavily, and stared up at the ceiling, thinking about my performance. I would have liked to believe that it was great, that I was a true stud, but I knew that was not the case. I was average.

My penis was probably the average size.

I probably gave her the average number of orgasms.

I looked over at Jane. Even now, perhaps especially now, hot and sweaty in the aftermath of sex, hair clumped in damp tangles, she looked beautiful. I had always known that she could do a lot better than me, that she was pretty enough, intelligent enough, interesting enough to attract someone superior to myself, but it was suddenly brought home to me in a way that was almost painful.

I touched her shoulder, gently, tentatively. “How was it?” I asked.

She looked at me. “What?”

“Did you… come?”

“Of course.” She frowned. “What’s wrong with you? You’ve been acting weird all night.”

I wanted to explain to her how I felt, but I couldn’t.

I shook my head, said nothing.

“Bob?” she said.

I guess what I really wanted was to be reassured, to hear her say that I was not average, that I was special, that I was great, but in my mind I could hear her trying to assuage my fears by saying, “I love you even though you’re average.” Which was not what I wanted to hear.

Her mother’s words echoed in my head: “…a nothing… a nobody…”

That was how I felt.

What would happen, I wondered, if she met someone with more skillful hands, a faster tongue, a bigger penis?

I didn’t even want to think about that.

“I… love you,” I said.

She looked surprised, and her expression softened. “I love you, too.” She kissed me on the mouth, on the nose, on the forehead, and we snuggled together and pulled the blanket higher and watched TV until we fell asleep.

Seven

Acknowledgment of my mediocrity only seemed to hasten my fade into the woodwork. Even Hope no longer spoke to me unless I addressed her first, and more than once it seemed that she’d forgotten I worked at Automated Interface. It was as if I were becoming a shade within the corporation, a ghost in the machine.

The weather changed, became warmer, became summer. I felt melancholy, sad. Sunny days always made me feel that way. The sharp contrast between the blue beauty of a summer sky and the drab grayness of my life made the difference between my dreams and my reality seem that much more pronounced.

I was working full-time on GeoComm now, writing a real instruction manual, not playing around with the piddly-ass projects to which I’d previously been assigned. I was given access to computer screens by the programmers; I was given demonstrations of the system; I was allowed to play around with the system on one of the terminals in the test facility. I suppose the work could have been considered challenging — could have, had I had any interest in it at all. But I did not. Assistant Coordinator of Interoffice Procedures and Phase II Documentation was a job I had taken not out of choice but out of necessity, and its specifics held no allure for me.

The one person who did not ignore me was Stewart. He seemed more hostile than ever. I was a constant source of irritation to him. The fact that Banks, or someone above Banks, had decided to let me work on a legitimate project made him furious, and at least once each day he would come into the office, nod to Derek, then move in front of my desk and stand there, looking down at whatever I was working on. He would not say anything, would not ask me what I was doing, would simply stand there, staring. It annoyed me and he knew it annoyed me, but I refused to give him the satisfaction of letting my feelings show. I would ignore him, concentrate on the work in front of me, and wait him out. Eventually, he would leave.

I’d watch him go, and I’d want to just punch him.

I’d never been a violent person. Even my revenge fantasies had usually involved humiliation, not physical harm. But something about Stewart made me want to just beat the living shit out of him.

Not that I could.

He was in a hell of a lot better shape than I was, and I had no doubt that he could’ve easily kicked my ass.

I finished documenting the functions from the first GeoComm submenu. I gave the instructions to Stewart, who supposedly gave them to Banks. I heard nothing back from either of them and began work on the system’s second submenu.

It was Thursday, the day of Jane’s night class, and though we didn’t usually have sex on Thursdays because she got home late and tired, I convinced her to do it this time. Afterward, I rolled off her. We’d done it in the missionary position, I realized. We always did it in the missionary position.

We were silent for a moment, lying next to each other. Jane reached for the remote and turned on the TV. A cop show was on.

“Did you come?” I asked her finally.

“Yes.”

“More than once?”

She propped herself up on one elbow. “Not this again. Am I going to have to reassure you each time we make love?”

“Sorry I asked.”

“What do you want from me? I came, you know I came, and you still have to ask me about it.”

“I thought maybe you were faking it.”

“I’ve had enough of this.” Angrily, she pulled up the covers, bunching them beneath her chin. “If I knew I was going to have to go through all this crap again, we wouldn’t’ve done it at all.”

I looked at her, hurt and trying to show it. “You don’t like having sex with me.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!”

“How am I supposed to feel, huh? I mean, how do you feel about me? Do you still love me? Would you still love me if we met today for the first time?”

“I’m only going to say this once, okay? Yes, I love you. Now that’s it. End of discussion. Drop it and go to sleep.”

“Okay,” I said. “Fine.” I was angry with her, but there was really no reason for me to be angry.

We turned away from each other and fell asleep to the sounds of the television.

Eight

I began to see flyers for Automated Interface’s annual employee picnic tacked up on the bulletin board in the break room, taped to the doors of our department. I ignored the flyers, preferring not to think about the picnic, though I overheard the programmers talking about it. The event seemed to be a biggie, and apparently, from what I gathered, attendance was required.

Required attendance. That was what bothered me. I knew that I would have no one to go with, no friend to sit next to, and the idea of sitting alone at a picnic table while everyone else around me talked and laughed and visited and had a great time worried me.

I worried more and more about the picnic as the flyers proliferated, as conversational references became more common. It was turning into an honest-to-God obsession. As the week, and then the day, grew closer, I found myself hoping absurdly that some sort of natural disaster would occur and prevent the event from taking place.

On Tuesday, the night before the picnic, I even considered calling in sick.

I don’t know what prompted this almost pathological fear of the picnic, but I suspect it was a combination of things: my inability to fit in at work, the recent discovery of how hopelessly average I was, the increasing rockiness of my relationship with Jane. My self-esteem and self-confidence were at an all-time low, and I didn’t think my ego could stand the sort of bashing the picnic would provide. Like Charlie Brown said, “I know no one likes me. Why do we have to have holidays to remind me of it?”

This wasn’t exactly a holiday, but it followed the same principle. I was nothing, I was invisible, and this would only serve to bring it home.

The picnic was scheduled to start at noon and finish at two and was being held in the oversized greenbelt behind the Automated Interface building. At eleven forty-five, the toadlike man from upstairs who ate lunch with Derek stopped by the office, said “Ready?” and he and Derek went out to the picnic. Neither of them spoke to me, neither of them invited me to accompany them, and although I hadn’t expected them to invite me to come along, the fact that they didn’t pissed me off.

In the hallway, I heard other voices, saw other people pass by, but I remained at my desk. I wondered if I could close the door and stay here, hide and not go. No one would notice if I was missing. No one would know if I didn’t show up.

There was an interruption of the Muzak piped over the building’s speakers, and a deep-voiced man announced: “The annual employee picnic has now started. All employees must attend. Repeat. The annual employee picnic has now started. All employees must attend.”

I should’ve called in sick, I thought.

I waited a moment, then stood slowly and walked out of the office and down the hall to the elevator. The elevator stopped on the other two floors, and by the time we reached the lobby, it was packed. There were even more people in the lobby — employees from the first floor, others who had taken the stairs — and I followed the crowd across the floor of the lobby through the rear double doors. We walked through a short corridor, then through a door that opened outside onto the back of the building. I stood for a moment at the top of the steps, letting everyone pass by me. Rows of picnic tables were now set up on the previously virgin grass. A portable stage with a canvas roof had been wheeled in from somewhere and sat at the head of the tables, facing the side parking lot. Long banquet tables covered with white tablecloths and piled high with salads, desserts, and main dishes were being added to and overseen by a group of busy women. A series of garbage cans filled with soft drinks and ice cubes lined the area of the lawn nearest the building.

I stood there for a moment, not sure what to do, not knowing if I should go out and grab some chow, or find a place to sit and wait until other people started eating first. From here, I had a clear view of the knolly landscaped greenbelts of the adjacent companies, and it was almost like looking into their backyards. I had a sudden vision of these buildings as giant houses, the greenbelts their yards, the parking lots their driveways.

Most of the people were looking for friends, finding seats, but a few had grabbed plates and gotten into line for the food and I followed their example. I took a can of Coke from one of the garbage cans and piled my paper plate high with hot dogs, chili beans, potato salad, and chips. The picnic table at which Banks, Stewart, the programmers, Hope, Virginia, and Lois sat was full, there was no room for me, so I looked around for an empty seat at one of the other tables. There were several open spots at a table occupied by a group of old women, and I walked over there, carrying my plate. No one was staring at me as I walked across the grass, no one was pointing or giggling, no one was taking any notice of me. I was totally inconspicuous; I blended perfectly into the crowd. But I didn’t feel as though I blended perfectly into the crowd. Even if no one else was aware of me, I was acutely aware of them.

I reached the table and sat down, smiling at the woman next to me, but she stared past me, ignoring me completely, and I resigned myself to eating alone and in silence.

“Beautiful music,” that bastard offspring of Muzak, was issuing from two small speakers on either side of the stage. It wasn’t a radio station but a tape and was far worse than even the stringed instrumental renditions of soft pop hits that we usually listened to each day. A uniformed maintenance worker climbed up on the stage and set up a folding table. On top of the table he placed a small cardboard box. He plugged a few wires into the back of one of the speakers, then strung the wires and the Mr. Microphone to which they were connected across the stage floor to the table. I watched him work as I ate, feigning interest, grateful to have something on which to focus my attention.

A few minutes later, a man I didn’t know but who seemed to be familiar to most of the other employees hopped up on stage to a round of applause. He waved at the crowd, picked up the Mr. Microphone, and began talking. “I know this is the part of our picnic you’ve all been waiting for. Especially you, Roy.” He pointed toward a balding overweight man at the table closest to him and everyone laughed.

“Yeah, Roy!” someone called out.

The man on stage held up his hand. “Come on, now. What we’re going to do this year is start with the smallest prizes first, then after that we’ll have the drawing for our grand prize — dinner at Orange County’s finest and most expensive restaurant, Elise!”

There were hoots and whistles and catcalls.

I ate my lunch as the man put his hand in the box on the table and drew out names for free car washes, free video rentals, free hamburgers. Then came the grand prize, the dinner at Elise.

I won.

I sat there, unmoving, as the man read my name, my brain not correctly processing the information. When he read my name again, this time with a questioning tone in his voice, as if trying to determine whether or not I was present, I stood. My heart was pounding, my lips dry as I walked onto the stage. I expected there to be silence — no one knew me, after all — but there was polite applause, the type of applause given only out of obligation and reserved for strangers. The earlier whistles and catcalls were gone. I looked over at my department’s table as I accepted the gift certificate and said “Thank you” into the proffered Mr. Microphone. The secretaries and programmers were clapping politely, but Stewart and Banks were not clapping at all. Stewart was scowling.

I hurried off the stage and immediately sat back down at my seat.

No one at my table even looked at me.

Later that afternoon, Stewart called me into his office. “I heard you were at the employee picnic and you won the grand prize.”

He heard? He was there.

I nodded, saying nothing.

“You seem to be spending an awful lot of time socializing on company time. I would think with your deadlines and all the work you have to do, you’d spend a little less time with your friends and a little more time on your assignments.”

I stared at him. “Attendance at the picnic was required. I wouldn’t’ve gone — ”

“You do a lot of gabbing with your buddies during work hours, don’t you?”

“What buddies? I don’t know anyone here. I come, do my job, and go home.”

He smiled slightly, a hard, mirthless smile. “That’s your problem, Jones. Your attitude. If you put a little more effort into your work and started thinking of this as a career instead of just a job, you might get somewhere in life. It would behoove you, I think, to be a little more, of a team player.”

I did not even bother to respond. For the first time, I noticed how empty and bare Stewart’s office looked. There was nothing to indicate its occupant’s personal tastes or interests. There were no framed photos on the desk, no knickknacks or plants in the room. The few papers tacked to the bulletin board on the wall were all memos or official company notices. The pile of magazines on the corner of the desk were all technical journals whose address labels were imprinted with the name and P.O. box of the corporation.

“Jones?” Stewart said. “Are you listening to me?”

I nodded.

“Why haven’t you been submitting your biweekly progress report?”

I stared at him. “You told me I didn’t have to turn in a report. You said that was only for the programmers.”

A trace of a smile touched his lips. “This requirement is clearly stated in your job description, which I suggest you take the time to read.”

“If I had known it was required, I would have done it. But you told me specifically that I didn’t have to turn in a progress report.”

“You do.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me that before? Why did you wait this long before letting me know?”

He glared at me. “As I’m sure you’re aware, your performance review is coming up in a few weeks. I’m afraid I have no choice but to make note of your poor work attitude and continual insubordination.”

Insubordination?

This isn’t the fucking army, I wanted to say. I’m not your slave, you fascist son of a bitch.

But I said nothing.

When he was through with his diatribe, I went back to my office.

Derek looked up when I returned. That in itself was unusual. But what was even stranger was that he actually spoke to me.

“Were you at the picnic?” he asked.

I was still ticked off at Stewart and was tempted to give Derek a taste of his own medicine, to not answer him, to ignore him and act as though he weren’t there. But I couldn’t do it. “Yeah,” I said, “I was there.”

“Do you know who won the drawing? The grand prize?”

Was this a joke? I frowned at him.

“It’s for the employee newsletter,” he explained. “I’ve been asked to compile a list.”

“I won,” I said slowly.

He looked surprised. “Really? Why didn’t you go up and collect your prize, then?”

“I did. Here it is.” I picked up the certificate from my desk and waved it at him.

“Oh.” He started writing, then looked up at me. “What’s your first name?” he asked.

This was ridiculous.

“Bob,” I found myself answering.

“Last name?”

“Jones.”

He nodded. “It’ll be in the next issue of the newsletter.”

He went back to his work.

He did not speak to me for the rest of the day.

Jane was not there when I came home. There was a note from her on the refrigerator telling me that she’d gone to the library to find some books on the Montessori method of teaching preschool children. It was just as well. I wasn’t in the mood to either talk or listen to anyone else. I just wanted to be alone and think.

I popped a frozen burrito into the microwave.

After my short conversation with Derek, I had not been able to concentrate on work for the remainder of the afternoon. I had placed papers before me on my desk and, pen in hand, had pretended to read them, but my mind had been on anything but instruction manuals. I kept going over everything Derek had said, searching for something that would indicate he had been joking or playing with me, not willing to believe that he really had not known my name. I kept wishing he had asked for the spelling. That at least would have allowed me a legitimate out. I could have rationalized that he had known my name but had not known the spelling.

But that wasn’t the case.

No matter how much I replayed that conversation in my head, no matter how much I tried to analyze what we both had said, I kept reaching the same conclusion. He had not known my name, though we’d been sharing an office for over two months. He had not seen me win the drawing, though I had stood on the stage in front of him.

I was invisible to him.

Hell, maybe the reason he never talked to me was because he didn’t even notice I was there.

The bell on the microwave rang, and I took out my burrito, dropping it on a plate. I poured myself a glass of milk and walked out to the living room, turning on the TV and sitting down on the couch. I tried to eat and watch the news, tried not to think about what had happened. I blew on my burrito, took a bite. Tom Brokaw was reporting the results of a recent AIDS poll, looking seriously into the camera as a the image of a caduceus flashed on the blue screen behind him, and he said, “According to the latest New York Times — NBC poll, the average American believes — ”

The average American.

The phrase jumped out at me.

The average American.

That was me. That’s what I was. I stared at Brokaw. I felt as though I were sick and my illness had been successfully diagnosed, but there was none of the relief that would have accompanied such a medical breakthrough. The description was true, as far as it went, but it was also too general, too benign. There was reassurance in those three words, the implication of normalcy. And I was not normal. I was ordinary, but I was not just ordinary. I was extra ordinary, ultra ordinary, so damn ordinary that even my friends did not remember me, that even my own coworkers did not notice me.

I had a weird feeling about this. The chill I’d felt when Lois and Virginia had insisted they’d seen me at Stacy’s birthday lunch was back. This whole thing was getting way too freaky. It was one thing to be just an average guy. But it was quite another to be so… so pathologically average. So consistently middle-of-the-road in every way that I was invisible. There was something creepy about it, something frightening and almost supernatural.

On an impulse, I reached over and picked up yesterday’s newspaper off the table. I found the Calendar section and looked at the boxed statistics that showed the top five films of the past weekend.

They were the five films I most wanted to see.

I turned the page to look at the top ten songs of the week.

They were my current favorites, ranked in order of preference.

My heart pounding, I stood and walked across the room to the block-and-plank shelves next to the stereo. I scanned my collection of records and CDs, and I realized that it was a history of the number one albums over the past decade.

This was crazy.

But it made sense.

If I was average, I was average. Not just in appearance and personality, but in everything. Across the board. It explained, perhaps, my adherence to the Golden Mean, my unshakable belief in the rightness of the adage “moderation in all things.” Never in my life had I gone to extremes. In anything. I had never eaten too much or too little. I had never been selfishly greedy or selfishly altruistic. I had never been a radical liberal or a reactionary conservative. I was neither a hedonist nor an ascetic, a drunk nor a teetotaler.

I had never taken a stand on anything.

Intellectually, I knew it was incorrect to think that compromise was always the ideal solution, that truth always existed somewhere in the middle of two opposing passions — there was no happy medium between right and wrong, between good and evil — but the equivocation that rendered me impotent in regard to minor practical decisions afflicted me morally, too, and I inevitably vacillated between differing points of view, stuck squarely in the middle and unable to definitely and unequivocally take a side.

The average American.

My extraordinary ordinariness was not just an aspect of my personality, it was the very essence of my being. It explained why I alone among my peers had never questioned or complained about the outcome of any election or the winner of any award. I had always been squarely in the mainstream and had never disagreed with anything agreed upon by the majority. It explained why none of my arguments in any of my high school or college classes had made even the slightest dent in the course of a debate.

It explained, as well, my odd attraction to the city of Irvine. Here, where all the streets and houses looked the same, where homeowners’ associations tolerated no individuality in the external appearance of houses or landscaping, I felt comfortable and at home. The homogeneity appealed to me, spoke to me.

But it wasn’t logical to think that the fact that I was average rendered me invisible, caused people to ignore me. Was it? Most people, when you came down to it, were not exceptional. Most people were normal, average. Yet they were not ignored by their coworkers, friends, and acquaintances. It was not only the sublime and the horrific that were noticed, not only the individual and idiosyncratic that had their existences validated by attention.

But I was average.

And I was ignored.

I tried to think of some action or event that would disprove my theory, something I’d done that would prove I was not totally ordinary. I remembered being picked on by bullies when I was in the third grade. I hadn’t been average then, had I? I had been different enough to have been specifically chosen as the object of harassment by the three toughest kids in the school. One time, in fact, they’d caught me on my way home. One of them held me down while the other two took off my pants. They played Keep Away, tossing the pants over my head to each other while I tried vainly to intercept their throws. A crowd gathered, laughing, and there were girls in the crowd, and for some reason I liked the fact that the girls were there. I liked the fact that they saw me in my underwear.

I used to think of that later, when I was a teenager, when I was masturbating. It made me more excited to think of those girls watching me trying to get my pants from the bullies.

That wasn’t normal, was it? That wasn’t average.

But I was grasping at straws. Everyone had little offbeat fantasies and perversities.

And I probably had the average number of them.

Even my out-of-the-ordinary experiences were ordinary. Even my irregularities were regular.

Christ, even my name was average. Bob Jones. Next to John Smith, it was probably the most common name in the phone book.

My burrito was cold, but I no longer felt hungry. I no longer felt like eating. I looked up at the TV. A reporter was describing a mass killing in Milwaukee.

Most people were probably watching the news right now.

The average American was watching news with his dinner.

I got up, switched the channel to M*A*S*H. I carried my plate into the kitchen, dumped the leftover burrito into the garbage, placed the plate in the sink. I took a beer out of the refrigerator. I felt like getting good and drunk.

I brought the beer back with me into the living room and sat there watching TV, trying to concentrate on the M*A*S*H episode, trying not to think about myself.

I realized that the lines punctuated by the laugh track were the ones I found funniest.

I switched off the TV.

Jane came home around nine. I’d already downed a six-pack and was feeling, if not better, at least far enough out of it that I no longer cared about my problems. She looked at me, frowned, then walked past me and put her notebooks down on the kitchen table. She picked up the certificate from where I’d left it. “What’s this?” she asked.

I’d forgotten about winning the dinner. I looked at her, hoisted my current beer. “Congratulate me,” I said. “I won a drawing at work.”

She read the name on the certificate. “Elise?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“This is great!”

“Yeah. Great.”

She frowned at me again. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.” I finished my beer, put it next to its empty brothers on the table, and headed to the bathroom where I promptly threw up.

We went to dinner at Elise three weeks later.

A child of the suburbs, I could not remember ever eating at a restaurant that was not part of a chain. From McDonald’s to Love’s to The Black Angus to Don Jose’s, the restaurants I patronized were not unique, individually owned businesses but corporate cookie-cutter eateries, comfortable in the reliability of their conformity. As we walked into the entryway and I saw the elegant decor, the classy clientele, I realized that I did not know how to act here, did not know what to do. Despite the fact that both Jane and I had dressed up — she in her prom gown, me in my interview suit — and outwardly fit in with the restaurant’s patrons, I felt jarringly out of place among the other diners. We seemed to be decades younger than everyone else. And instead of actually paying for our meal, we’d be using that stupid gift certificate. I put my hand in my pocket, felt the ruffled edge of the certificate, and I wondered if I’d brought enough money for a tip. I suddenly wished we hadn’t come.

We’d made reservations ahead of time, two weeks ahead of time, and we were promptly seated and provided with a calligraphically hand-printed description of the day’s dishes. From what I could tell, we had no choice to make; there was only one meal available, a multi-course dinner de jour, and I nodded my approval to the waiter, handing back the description. Jane did the same.

“What would you care to drink, sir?” the waiter asked me.

For the first time, I saw a wine list on the table in front of me, and not wanting to appear as ignorant as I was, I studied the list for a moment. I looked to Jane for help, but she only shrugged, looking away, and I pointed to one of the wines in the middle of the list.

“Very good, sir.”

The wine and our first course, some sort of smoked salmon appetizer, arrived minutes later. A dash of wine was poured into my glass, and I sipped it, the way I’d seen it done in movies, then nodded to the waiter. The wine was poured into our glasses. Then we were left alone.

I glanced across the table at Jane. This was the first time we’d had a meal together in over a week. There were legitimate reasons — she’d had to see her mother; I’d had to take the car into Sears to have the brakes checked; she’d had to study at the library — but the real truth was that we’d been avoiding each other. Looking at her now, I realized I didn’t know what to say to her. Any conversation starter would be just that, a forced and awkward effort to initiate talk. Whatever rapport we had once had, whatever naturalness had previously existed in our relationship, seemed to have fled. What would have once come easily was now stiffly self-conscious. I realized that I was becoming as estranged from her as I was from everyone else.

Jane looked around the dining room. “This is really a nice place,” she said.

“Yes, it is,” I agreed. “It really is.” I had nothing to follow this with, nothing more to say, so I repeated it again. “It really is.”

The service was amazing. There was a virtual platoon of waiters assigned to our table, but they did not hover, did not make us feel uncomfortable. When one dish was done, a waiter silently and efficiently took it away, replacing it with the next course.

Jane finished her wine soon after the salad. I poured her another glass. “Did I tell you about Bobby Tetherton’s mom?” she said. I shook my head and she started describing a run-in with an overprotective parent she’d had at the day care center that afternoon.

I listened to her. Maybe nothing was wrong, I thought. Maybe it was all in my head. Jane was acting as though everything was normal, everything was okay. Maybe I’d imagined the rift between us.

No.

Something had happened. Something had come between us. We had always shared our problems, had always discussed with each other our difficulties at school or work. I had never met her coworkers at the day care center, but she’d brought them alive for me, I knew their names, and I cared about their office politics.

But now I found my mind wandering while she recited the litany of today’s injustices.

I didn’t care about her day.

I tuned her out, not listening to her. We had always had a balanced relationship, a modern relationship, and I’d always considered her work, her career, her activities, as important as my own. It was not rhetoric, not something I forced myself to do out of obligation, but something I truly felt. Her life was as important as mine. We were equals.

But I didn’t feel that way anymore.

Her problems seemed so fucking petty compared to my own.

She chattered on about kids I didn’t know and didn’t want to know. I was annoyed with her and my annoyance soon graduated to anger. I had not told her about being ignored, about discovering I was some sort of quintessentially average… freak, but, damn it, she should have noticed something was wrong and she should have asked me about it. She should have tried to talk to me, to find out what was bothering me and cheer me up. She shouldn’t have just pretended that everything was okay.

“…these parents entrust their children to our center,” she was saying, “then they try to tell us how to — ”

“I don’t care,” I said.

She blinked. “What?”

“I don’t care about your damn day care center.”

Her mouth closed, flattened into a grim line. She nodded, as if this was something she’d been expecting. “Now it comes out,” she said. “Now the truth finally comes out.”

“Come on, let’s just enjoy our meal.”

“After that?”

“After what? Can’t we just try to have a nice meal together and enjoy our evening?”

“Enjoy it in silence? Is that what you mean?”

“Look — ”

“No, you look. I don’t know what’s wrong with you. I don’t know what’s been bothering you lately — ”

“Why don’t you try asking?”

“I would if I thought it would do any good. But you’ve been living in your own world the past month or so. You just sit there brooding all the time, not talking, not doing anything, shutting me out — ”

“Shutting you out?”

“Yes. Every time I try to get close to you, you push me away.”

“I push you away?”

“When’s the last time we made love?” She stared at me. “When’s the last time you even tried to make love with me?”

I glanced around the restaurant, embarrassed. “Don’t make a scene,” I said.

“Make a scene? I’ll make a scene if I want to. I don’t know these people, and I’ll never see them again. What do I care what they think of me?”

“I care,” I said.

“They don’t.”

She was right. Our voices were raised now, we were definitely arguing, but no one was looking at us or paying us even the slightest bit of attention. I assumed it was because they were too polite to do so. But a small voice in the back of mind said that it was because they didn’t notice me, because I created a kind of force field of invisibility that surrounded us.

“Let’s just finish eating,” I said. “We can talk about this at home.”

“We can talk about it now.”

“I don’t want to.”

She looked at me, and it was like she was a cartoon character or something. I could see in the exaggerated expression on her face the birth of an idea, the dawning of realization. “You don’t care about this relationship at all, do you? You don’t care about me. You don’t care about us. You’re not even willing to fight for what we have. All you care about is you.”

“You don’t care about me,” I countered.

“Yes, I do. I always have. But you don’t care about me.” She sat there, staring at me across the table, and the way she looked at me made me feel not only uncomfortable but profoundly sad. She was looking at me as though I were a stranger, as though she had just discovered that I had been cloned and replaced by a soulless look-alike impostor. I could see the sense of loss on her face, could tell how deeply hurt and suddenly alone she felt, and I wanted to reach across the table and take her hands in mine and tell her that I was the same person I’d always been, that I loved her and was truly sorry if I’d said or done anything to hurt her. But something kept me from it. Something held me back. I was dying inside, desperate to right the things that had gone so wrong between us, but something made me look away from her and down at my plate.

I picked up my fork, began eating.

“Bob?” she said.

I looked at my plate.

“Bob?” Questioningly, tentatively.

I did not answer, kept eating.

After a moment, she too picked up a fork and started eating.

Smoothly, silently, a waiter took my plate, replaced it with another.

Nine

August became September.

I arrived at work one morning to find a manila interoffice envelope and a small rectangular cardboard box sitting on my desk. I was early; Derek had not yet come in, and I had the office to myself. I sat down and picked up the envelope, staring at the rows of crossed-off names on its front. The envelope’s itinerary for the past month was printed plainly on its cover, in different ink, with different signatures, and it made me realize just how much I hated my job. As I scanned down the list of names and departments now hidden behind ineffectual lines and halfhearted scribbles, I found that there was not a single individual I felt warmly toward.

I also realized how long I’d been here.

Three months.

A fourth of a year.

Pretty soon it would be a half a year. Then a whole year. Then two.

I dropped the envelope without opening it, feeling unaccountably depressed. I sat there for a moment, staring at the ugly blank office wall in front of me, then reached for the box. I picked it up, pulled off the top, looked inside.

Business cards.

Hundreds of cards, making up a single solid block of white, filled the inside of the small box. On the face of the front card, I saw my name and my title printed next to the Automated Interface logo and the corporation’s address and P.O. box number.

My first business cards.

I should have felt happy. I should have felt excited. I should have felt something positive. But that huge stack of wallet-sized cards filled me instead with an emotion akin to dread. The cards bespoke commitment, a belief on the part of the corporation that I would be there for a long time to come. The cards seemed at that moment as binding as a contract, as adhesive as glue, an investment in obligation. I wanted to scream. I wanted to throw the cards away. I wanted to send them back.

But I did nothing of the sort.

I took a few others out of the box and put them in my wallet and placed the rest in the upper right drawer of my desk.

The drawer closed with a metallic clank that sounded disproportionately loud and had about it a tone of finality.

I found myself focusing on the permanently jammed keyhole in the center of the drawer. So this was it. This was my life. Here I would spend the next forty years or so, then I would retire and then I would die. It was an overly pessimistic view of the situation, maybe a little melodramatic. But it was essentially true. I knew what I was like. I knew my personality and patterns. Theoretically, I could move on to another job. I could even go back to school eventually, get another degree. There were many options available to me. But I knew that none of those things would happen. I would simply adjust to my situation and live with it, the way I always had. I was not an initiator, a doer, a get-up-and-goer. I was a stayer and a stick-it-outer.

And then my life would be over.

I thought back to the dreams I’d had in grammar school and junior high, my plans of being an astronaut and then a rock star and then a movie director. I wondered if it was this way for everyone, and I decided that it probably was. No little kid wanted to be a bureaucrat or a technocrat or a middle management supervisor — or an Assistant Coordinator of Interoffice Procedures and Phase II Documentation.

These were the jobs we settled for when our dreams died.

And that’s all they had been — dreams. I was not going to be an astronaut; I was not going to be a rock star; I was not going to be a movie director. This was where I was, this was who I was, and the reality of the situation depressed the hell out of me.

Derek came in just before eight, ignored me as usual, and immediately started making phone calls. At nine, Banks called and said he wanted to have a meeting with me and Stewart, and I went upstairs to his office where the two of them berated me for half an hour and told me how unsatisfactory my GeoComm documentation had been until now.

I spent the rest of the morning and the afternoon rewriting the GeoComm function descriptions I’d already written.

Exactly five years ago this month, I realized, I had started attending UC Brea. What a difference those five years had made. Then I’d been just out of high school, my whole future ahead of me. Now I was rapidly speeding toward thirty, locked into this horrible job, my life a dead end.

Typing my revisions into WordPerfect on the PC, I accidentally pressed a wrong key and deleted ten pages of work. I looked up at the clock. Four-thirty. A half hour to go. There was no way I’d be able to retype all of that in a half hour.

This was the bottom, I thought. This was hell. There was no way things could get worse than this.

But, as usual, I was wrong.

The apartment was dark when I got home, and it still smelled of breakfast. Faint traces of toast and egg and orange juice lingered in the still air. I reached next to the door and flipped on the light switch.

The living room was empty. Not just empty as in no people, but empty as in no furniture. The couch was gone, as was the coffee table. The TV was still there, but the VCR was gone. Both the ficus and the Boston fern were gone, and the walls were bare, all of the framed art prints missing.

I felt as thought I’d stepped into another dimension, into the twilight zone. An overreaction, maybe, but the look of the apartment was so shocking, so unexpected, that my mind could not focus on particulars, could only take in the totality of the situation, and that totality was so overwhelming that I could not put anything into perspective.

But I knew instantly what had happened.

Jane was gone.

I pulled off my tie as I hurried into the kitchen. Here again, things were missing: the toaster, the cookie jars.

There was a note on the kitchen table.

A note?

I stared down at the folded piece of paper with my name on it, stunned. This was not like Jane at all. This was totally out of character. This was just not the sort of thing she’d do. If she was unhappy, if she had a problem, she’d talk to me about it and then we’d fight it out. She wouldn’t just pack her stuff and sneak away and leave me a note. She wouldn’t just give up. She wouldn’t walk away from me, from us, from what we had together.

The first thing I probably should’ve thought was that somebody had taken her, that she’d been kidnapped by the same person who had ransacked our apartment.

But somehow I knew that wasn’t the case.

She’d left me.

I don’t know how I knew, but I knew. Maybe I had seen it coming but hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it. I thought back, remembered her telling me that communication was the most important thing in a relationship, that even if two people loved each other, there was no relationship if they couldn’t communicate. I recalled her trying to talk to me for the past few months, trying to get me to talk to her and tell her what was bothering me, what was wrong.

I remembered the night at Elise.

We hadn’t really talked much since that evening. We’d fought about not talking a few times, she accusing me of emotional secrecy, of not opening up and sharing my feelings with her, my lying and claiming that there were no feelings to share, that everything was fine. But even our fights had been tepid, lukewarm affairs, not the passionate battles of the past.

I looked again at the folded square of white notebook paper with my name on it.

Maybe she would have told me of her plans to leave at one time. But we definitely had not been talking much lately, and in that context the note made perfect sense.

I reached down, picked up the paper, unfolded it.

Dear Bob,

These are the hardest words I’ve ever had to write.

I didn’t want to do it this way, and I know it’s wrong, but I don’t think I could face you right now. I don’t think I could go through with it.

I know what you’re thinking. I know what you’re feeling. I know you’re angry right now, and you have every right to be. But it’s just not working out between us. I’ve turned this over and over again in my mind, wondering if we should try to work it out or if we should just spend some time apart, in a trial separation, and I finally decided that the best thing to do would be to make a clean break. It’ll be hard at first (at least it will be for me), but I think in the long run it will be for the best.

I love you. You know that. But sometimes love isn’t enough. For a relationship to work, there has to be trust and a willingness to share. We don’t have that. Maybe we never had that. I don’t know. But I thought we did at one time.

I don’t want to place blame here. It’s not your fault this happened. It’s not my fault. It’s both our faults. But I know us. I know me, I know you, and I know that even though we’ll say we’ll work on our relationship, nothing will change. I think it’s better to say good-bye now before things get too ugly.

I’ll never forget you, Bob. You’ll always be a part of me. You were the first person I ever loved, the only person I’ve ever loved. I’ll remember you always.

I’ll love you always.

Good-bye.

Beneath that was her signature. She’d signed her full name, both first and last, and it was that bit of formality that hurt more than anything else. It’s a cliché to say that I felt an emptiness inside me, but I did. There was an ache that was almost physical, an undefined hurt that had no set center but seemed to alternate between my head and heart.

“Jane Reynolds.”

I glanced again at the paper in my hand. Now that I looked at it, now that I reread it, it wasn’t just the signature that struck me as being too formal. The entire letter seemed stiff and stilted. The words and sentiments hit home, but they still seemed familiar and far too pat. I’d read them before in a hundred novels, heard them said in a hundred movies.

If she loved me so much, why were there no tears? I wondered. Why weren’t any of the letters smeared; why wasn’t the ink running?

I looked around the kitchen, back into the living room. Someone had to have helped her move the furniture, the couch, the table. Who? Some guy? Someone she’d met? Someone she was fucking?

I sat down hard on one of the chairs. No. I knew that wasn’t the case. She was not seeing someone else. She would not have been able to hide something like that from me. She would not even have tried. That she would’ve told me about. That she would’ve talked to me about.

Her dad had probably helped her move.

I walked out of the kitchen, through the living room to the bedroom. In here the loss was less, but more personal, and all the more painful for that. No furniture had been removed. The bed was still in place, as was the dresser, but the bedspread and the lace doily covering the top of the dresser were gone. In the closet there were only my clothes. The framed photographs on the nightstands had been taken.

I sat down on the bed. My insides felt like the apartment — physically, structurally unchanged, but gutted, hollowed out, soulless, the heart removed. I sat there as the room darkened, late afternoon turning to dusk, dusk to evening.

I made my own dinner, Kraft macaroni and cheese, and afterward watched the news, Entertainment Tonight, and all the other shows I usually watched. I was paying attention to the TV, yet not paying attention; waiting for a phone call from Jane, yet not waiting. It was as though I was possessed of multiple personalities — all with conflicting thoughts and desires — and was aware of all of them at once, but the overall effect was one of numbed lethargy, and I sat on the couch and did not move until the late news came on at eleven.

It was strange walking into the dark, empty bedroom, strange not hearing Jane in the bathroom, brushing her teeth or taking a shower, and with the television turned off I realized how quiet the apartment was. From down the street somewhere, muffled and indistinct, I could hear the sounds of a frat party. Outside, life continued on as usual.

I took off my clothes, but instead of dropping them on the floor and then crawling into bed like I usually did, I decided to put them in the hamper, as Jane had always nagged me to do. I carried my pants and shirt into the bathroom, opened the plastic top of the dirty clothes basket, and was about to drop them in when I looked down.

There at the bottom of the hamper, rolled up next to one of my socks, was a pair of Jane’s panties.

The white cotton ones.

I dropped my clothes on the floor. I swallowed hard. Suddenly, staring down at Jane’s rolled-up underwear, I felt like crying. I took a deep breath. I remembered the first time I’d ever seen her. She’d been wearing white panties and a pair of jeans with a rip in the crotch to school. I had been sitting across from her in the library and I had been able to see that white peeking through the hole in the blue, and nothing had ever turned me on so much in my life.

My eyes were wet as I bent over, reached into the hamper for the panties. I picked them up gingerly, handling them as though they were breakable, and carefully unrolled them. They felt damp to my touch, and when I lifted them to my face, the cotton smelled faintly of her.

“Jane,” I whispered, and it felt good to say her name.

I whispered it again. “Jane,” I said. “Jane…”

Ten

Jane had been gone for three weeks.

I settled into my chair and looked at the calendar I’d tacked up on the wall to my left. There were fifteen red X’s drawn through the month’s workdays.

As I did each morning, I crossed out another date, today’s date. My eye was drawn back to that first X — September 3. I had not heard from Jane since she’d left. She had not called to see how I was; she had not sent me a letter to tell me that she was all right. I’d expected to hear from her, if not for sentimental reasons, then for practical reasons. I figured there were logistical things she’d need to discuss — belongings she’d forgotten and wanted me to send, mail she wanted forwarded — but she had cut off all contact cold.

I worried about her, and more than once, I thought about going to the Little Kiddie Day Care Center, or even calling her parents, just to make sure she was okay, but I never did. I guess I was afraid to.

Although I could tell from the drastic decrease in mail that she had put in a change-of-address request at the post office, she still occasionally received bills or letters or junk mail, and I saved it all for her.

Just in case.

After work, I stopped by Von’s for milk and bread, but I felt so depressed that I ended up buying half a gallon of chocolate ice cream and a bag of Doritos as well. All of the checkout stands were crowded, so I picked the one with the shortest line. The cashier was young and pretty, a slim brunette, and she was bantering happily and easily with the man ahead of me as she ran his items over the scanner. I watched the two of them with envy. I wished I had the ability to start up a conversation with a perfect stranger, to discuss the weather or current events or whatever it was that people talked about, but even in my imagination I was unable to do it. I just could not seem to think of what to say.

Jane had been the one to start the first conversation between us. If the responsibility had been left up to me, we probably never would have gotten together.

When I reached the cashier, she smiled at me. “Hello,” she said. “How are you today?”

“Fine,” I told her.

I watched in silence as she rang up my items on the cash register. “Six forty-three,” she said.

Silently, I handed her the money.

I’d never thought about it before, but as I put the ice cream in the freezer, the Doritos and bread in the cupboard, I realized that there’d always been something within me that distanced people. Even my relationships with my grandparents were overly formal; we never hugged or kissed, though they were naturally affectionate. Ditto with my parents. Throughout my life, our “friends of the family,” my parents’ friends, had always been nice to me, cordial to me, but I never got the impression that any of them liked me.

They didn’t dislike me.

They just didn’t notice me.

I was a nobody, a nothing.

Had it always been this way? I wondered. It was possible. I had always had friends in elementary school, junior high school, high school, but never very many of them, and as I thought back now, I realized that nearly all of them had been, like myself, totally nondescript.

On an impulse, I went into the bedroom, opened the closet door, and found the pile of sealed boxes under my hanging clothes — the record of my past. Dragging the boxes to the center of the room, I ripped off the masking tape and opened their tops one by one, digging through the contents of each until I found my high school yearbooks.

I took the books out, began looking through them. I hadn’t seen the yearbooks since high school, and it was strange to see again those places, those faces, those fashions and hairstyles from half a decade back. It made me feel old and a little sad.

But it also made me feel more than a little uneasy.

As I’d suspected, there were no photographs of me or my friends in any of the sports, clubs, or dance pictures. There were not even any of us in the random shots of the campus that were sprinkled throughout the books. We were nowhere to be seen. It was as though my friends and I had not even existed, as though we had not eaten lunch at the school or walked across campus from class to class.

I looked up the names of John Parker and Brent Burke, my two best friends, in the section of the senior yearbook dedicated to individual photographs of each class member. They were there, but they looked different than I recalled, the cast of their features slightly off. I stared at the pages, flipping back and forth from Brent to John and back again. I had remembered them as looking more interesting than they apparently had, more intelligent, more alive, but it seemed my memory had altered the facts. For there they were, staring blandly into the camera five years ago and out of the pages at me now, their faces devoid of even the slightest hint of character.

I turned to the blank green pages at the front of the book to see what they’d written to me on this, the eve of our graduation.

“I’m glad I got to know you. Have a great summer. John.”

“Have a cool summer and good luck. Brent.”

These were my best friends? I closed the yearbook, licked my dry lips. Their comments were just as impersonal as those of everyone else.

I sat there for a moment in the middle of the floor, staring at the opposite wall. Was this what it was like for people with Alzheimer’s? Or people going crazy? I took a deep breath, trying to gather my courage to open the yearbook again. Had it been them or myself? I wondered. Or both? Was I now as big a blank to them as they were to me, merely a name from the past and a hazily remembered face? I opened the yearbook again, turned to my own photo, stared, at my picture. I found my visage not bland, not blank, not nondescript, but interesting and intelligent.

Maybe I had grown more average over the years, I thought absurdly. Maybe it was a disease and I’d caught it from John and Brent.

No. I wished it were something as simple as that. But there was something far more comprehensive, far more frightening here.

I skimmed the rest of the yearbook, scanning the pages, and a familiar envelope fell from between the last page and the back cover. Inside the envelope were my grades. I opened the envelope, scanned the thin translucent sheets of paper. My senior year: all C’s. Junior year: the same.

I hadn’t been average in English, I knew. I’d always been an above-average writer.

But my grades did not reflect that.

I had gotten C’s across the board.

A wave of cold passed over me, and I dropped the yearbook and hurried out of the bedroom. I went into the kitchen, took a beer out of the refrigerator, popped open the top and chugged it down. The apartment seemed silent again. I stood in the kitchen, leaning against the sink, staring at the door of the refrigerator.

How deep did this thing go?

I didn’t know and I didn’t want to know. I didn’t even want to think about it.

The sky was darkening outside, the sun going down, and the inside of the apartment was filling with shadows, the furniture that I could see through the living room doorway shifted slowly into silhouette. I walked across the kitchen, turned on the light. From here, I could see where the couch had been, where the prints had hung. I looked into the living room and all of a sudden I felt lonely. Really lonely. So damn lonely that I almost felt like crying.

I thought of opening the refrigerator and getting out another beer, maybe getting drunk, but I didn’t want to do that.

I didn’t want to spend the evening in the apartment.

So I got put of the house and drove, hitting the Costa Mesa Freeway and heading south. I only realized where I was going when I was halfway there, and by that time I did not want to turn back, although the ache within me grew even more acute.

The freeway ended, turned into Newport Boulevard, and I drove to the beach, our beach, parking in the small metered lot next to the pier. I got out of the car, locked it, and wandered aimlessly through the crowded streets. The sidewalks were teeming with beautifully tanned bikini-clad women and handsome athletic men. Roller skaters glided through the throng, maneuvering around the walkers.

Again, from the Studio Cafe, I heard that music, Sandy Owen, although this time the music did not seem magically transcendent but sad and melancholy and, once more, wholly appropriate: a different sound track for a different night.

I looked toward the pier, toward the blackness of the ocean night beyond.

I wondered what Jane was doing.

I wonder who she was with.

Eleven

Derek retired in October.

I did not attend his going-away party — I was not even invited — but I knew when it was being held because of the notices on the break room bulletin board, and I called in sick on the day that it took place.

Odd as it seemed, I missed him after he was gone. Merely having another body in the office, even if it was Derek’s, had somehow made me feel less alone, had been like a tie to the outside world, to other people, and the office, in his absence, seemed very empty.

I was starting to worry about myself, about my lack of human contact. The evening after Derek’s departure I realized that I had gone for a whole day without speaking, without uttering a single, solitary word.

And it had not made a damn bit of difference to anyone. No one had even noticed.

The next day, I woke up, went to work, had a few words with Stewart in the morning, stated my order to the clerk at Del Taco at lunch, said nothing to anyone during the afternoon, went home, made dinner, watched TV, went to bed. I had probably spoken a total of six sentences the entire day — to Stewart and the Del Taco clerk. And that was it.

I needed to do something. I needed to change my job, change my personality, change my life.

But I couldn’t.

“Average,” I thought, was not really an accurate description of what I was. It was true as far as it went, but it didn’t imply enough. It didn’t quite cut it. It was too benign, not pejorative enough. “Ignored” was more appropriate, and that was how I began thinking of myself.

I was Ignored.

With a capital I.

I made a point the next day of passing by the desks of the programmers, the desks of Hope, Virginia, and Lois. I said hello to each, and each one of them ignored me. Hope, the kindest, nodded distractedly at me, mumbled something vaguely salutatory.

It was getting worse.

I was fading away.

On my way home, on the freeway, I drove wildly, cutting in front of cars, not letting people pass, slamming on my brakes when I felt the drivers were following too close behind me. I received horn honks and middle fingers in return.

Here I was noticed, I thought. Here I was not invisible. These people knew I was alive.

I cut off a black woman in a Saab, was gratified to hear her honk at me.

I swerved in front of a punk in a VW, smiled as he screamed at me out the window.

I started buying lottery tickets each Wednesday and Saturday, the two days on which the game was played. I knew I had no chance of winning — according to an article in the newspaper, I had a better chance of being hit by lightning than winning the lottery — but I began to see the game as the only way of escaping the strait-jacket that was my job. Each Wednesday and Saturday night as I sat in front of the television, watching the numbered white Ping-Pong balls flying about in their glass vacuum case, I not only hoped I would win, I actually thought I would win. I began to concoct elaborate scenarios in my head, plans of what I would do with my newfound wealth. First, I would settle some scores at work. I would hire someone to dump a thousand pounds of cow shit on top of Banks’ desk. I would hire a thug to make Stewart dance naked in the first-floor lobby to Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” I would yell obscenities over the corporation’s PA system until someone called Security and had me forcibly removed from the building.

After that, I would get the hell out of California. I did not know where I’d go; I had no real destination in mind, but I knew that I wanted out of here. This place had come to represent everything that was wrong with my life, and I would ditch it and start over somewhere else, somewhere new, somewhere fresh.

At least that was the plan.

But each Thursday and Monday, after watching the lottery drawing and comparing the chosen numbers with those on the ticket in my hand, I inevitably ended up back at work, a dollar poorer and a day more depressed, all my plans shot to hell.

It was on one of these Mondays that I came across a photo someone had accidentally dropped on the floor of the elevator. It was an eight-by-ten, a picture of the testing department that had obviously been taken in the sixties. The men all had inappropriately long sideburns and wide, loud ties, the women short skirts and bell-bottomed pantsuits. There were faces I recognized in the photo, and that was the weird thing. I saw longhaired young women who had become short-haired old women; smiling, easygoing men whose faces had since hardened permanently into uptight frowns. The dichotomy was so striking, the differences so obvious, that it was like seeing a horror movie makeup transformation. Never before had I seen such a depressingly clear example of the ravaging effects of time.

For me, it was like Scrooge seeing the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. I saw my present in that photo, my future in the now-hardened faces of my coworkers.

I returned to my desk, more shaken than I would have liked to admit. On my desk, I found a stack of papers and, on top of that, a yellow Post-It upon which Stewart had scrawled a short note: “Revise Termination Procedures for Personnel. Due tomorrow. 8:00.”

The 8:00 was underlined.

Twice.

Sighing, I sat down, picked up the papers. For the next hour, I read through the highlighted paragraphs in the provided pages and looked over the margin notes that Stewart wanted me to incorporate into the text. I made my own notes, hacked out a rough draft of the corrections, which I paper-clipped to the proper pages, then carried my materials down the hall to the steno pool. I smiled at Lois and Virginia, said hi, but both of them ignored me, and I retreated to the word-processing desk in the corner and sat down at the PC.

I turned on the terminal, inserted my diskette, and was about to start typing the first of the corrections when I stopped. I don’t know what came over me, I don’t know why I did it, but I put my fingers to the keys and typed: “A full-time employee can be terminated in one of the three ways — hanging, electrocution, or lethal injection.”

I reread what I’d written. I almost stopped there. I almost moved the cursor to the beginning of the line and pressed the delete key.

Almost.

My hesitation lasted only a second. I knew I could be fired if I distributed these corrections and someone read them, but in a way I would have welcomed that. At least it would have put an end to my misery here. It would have forced me to find another job someplace else.

But I knew from experience that no one would read what I was writing. The people to whom I gave my updates seldom even inserted them in the appropriate manuals, let alone read them. Hell, even Stewart seemed to have stopped going over my work.

“An employee terminated for poor work performance can no longer be drawn and quartered under the new regulations,” I typed. “The revised guidelines state clearly that such an employee is now to be terminated by hanging from the neck until dead.”

I grinned as I reread the sentence. Behind me, Lois and Virginia were talking as they did their own work, discussing some miniseries they’d seen the night before. Part of me was afraid that they would come up behind me, look over my shoulder and read what I’d written, but then I thought no, they’d probably forgotten I was even there.

“Unapproved, non-illness-related absences of over three days will be grounds for termination by electrocution,” I typed. “Department and division supervisors will flank the electric chair as the death sentence is carried out.”

I waited for repercussions from my Termination Procedure stunt, but none came. A day passed. Two. Three. A week. Obviously, Stewart had not bothered to read the update — although he’d had a bee up his butt about getting it done instantly, that day, as if it were the most important thing in the world.

Just to be safe, just to make sure, I asked him about it, caught him by Hope’s desk one morning and asked if he’d gone over the update to make sure it was correct. “Yeah,” he said distractedly, waving me away. “It’s fine.”

He hadn’t read it.

Or… maybe he had.

I felt a familiar churning in the pit of my stomach. Was what I wrote as anonymous as what I said or did? Was my writing ignored, too? I had not thought of that before, but it was possible. It was more than possible.

I thought of my C’s in English on that report card.

On my next set of screen instructions for GeoComm, I wrote: “When all on-screen fields are correct, press [ENTER] and your mama will take it up the ass. She likes it best that way.”

I got no comment on it.

Since no one seemed to notice me, I took it a step further and began coming in wearing jeans and T-shirts, comfortable street clothes, instead of the more formal dress shirt and tie. There were no reprimands, no recriminations. I rode up on the elevator each morning, denim-clad amidst a sea of white shirts and red ties, and no one said a word. I wore ripped Levi’s and dirty sneakers and T-shirts from old rock concerts to my meetings with Stewart and Banks and neither of them noticed.

In mid-October, Stewart went on a week’s vacation, leaving a list of assignments and their deadlines on my desk. It was a relief to have him gone, but his absence meant that what miniscule interaction I had with other people was for that week suspended. I spoke to no one at all while he was gone. No one spoke to me. I was unseen, unnoticed, entirely invisible.

Friday evening I got home and I desperately wanted to talk to someone. Anyone. About anything.

But I had no one to talk to.

Out of desperation, I looked through an old magazine and found a number for one of those porno calls, the ones where women talk to you about sex for a three-dollar-a-minute toll. I dialed the number, just wanting to speak to a person who would speak back.

I got a recording.

Twelve

When I arrived at work the next Monday morning, someone was sitting at Derek’s desk.

I literally stopped in my tracks, I was so surprised. It was a guy about my age, a little older maybe, with a brown beard and thick, longish hair. He was dressed in regulation white shirt/gray pants, but his tie was wide and silk and brightly colored, with a print of toucans standing on pineapples. He grinned when he saw me, and his smile was wide, generous, and unaffected. “Hey, dude,” he said.

I nodded hello, unsure of how to respond.

“David’s the name.” He stood, extended a hand, and we shook. “I’ve been transferred here from Bookkeeping. You must be Bob.”

Again I nodded. “You’re taking over Derek’s job?” I asked dumbly.

He laughed. “What job? That position’s gone. It was nothing but a title, anyway. They just let that guy hang on until retirement out of pity.”

“I always wondered what he did.”

“So did everyone else. How did you get along with him?”

I shrugged noncommittally. “I didn’t know him too well. I just started working here a few months ago — ”

“Come on. The guy’s a dick with feet.”

I found myself smiling. “All right,” I admitted. “We weren’t bosom buddies.”

“Good,” David said. “I like you already.”

I walked over to my desk and sat down, feeling good. It had been so long since I’d had an actual conversation with anyone that I was emotionally charged by even this small contact, my spirits absurdly buoyed by the fact that I had a new office mate who had actually noticed me.

Maybe my condition was reversible.

“So what is your job?” I asked.

“Still bookkeeping,” he said. “Only for your department now. I think they invented this job so they could kick me upstairs a floor. None of the old farts in my department like working with me.”

I laughed.

“I’m stone serious.”

I smiled. The people in his department might not like working with him, but I could tell that I would.

I was right. David and I hit it off immediately. We were close in age so there was that generational connection, but he was also friendly and easygoing, one of those people who were naturally open and accessible, and from the beginning he talked to me as though we’d been close for years. There was nothing about himself he could not discuss with me, no opinion that he would refrain from expressing. The wall of formality that seemed to exist between me and everyone else did not exist between David and myself.

He not only noticed and accepted me, he seemed to like me.

It was Wednesday before he asked The Question. I knew it would come up eventually, I’d been prepared for it, but it was still something of a surprise. It was afternoon, I was proofreading the GeoComm instructions I’d printed out earlier in the day, and David was taking an early break, leaning back in his chair and munching on Fritos.

He popped a chip in his mouth and looked over at me. “So do you have a wife or girlfriend or anything?”

“Girlfriend,” I said. “Ex-girlfriend,” I corrected myself. I felt a funny sort of fluttering in my stomach.

My feelings must have shown on my face, because David quickly backed off. “Sorry, man, I didn’t mean to pry. If you don’t want to talk about it…”

But I did want to talk about it. I hadn’t talked about our breakup to anybody, and I found that I had a sudden need to tell someone what had happened.

I told David everything. Well, not everything. I left out the part about my being Ignored, but I told him how we’d begun drifting apart ever since I got this damn job, and about how I’d been too stubborn to meet her halfway and how one day I’d come home and she’d been packed and gone. I’d expected to feel better after talking about it, but in truth I felt worse. The memories were recent, the events still fresh, and dredging them up only made me relive the pain, not exorcise it.

David shook his head. “That’s cold. She just hit the road and left a note?”

I nodded.

“Well, what happened when you went after her? What did she say when you confronted her?”

I blinked. “What?”

“What happened when you tracked her down?” He looked at me, frowned. “You did go after her, didn’t you?”

Should I have? Was that what she’d wanted? Proof that I cared, that I loved her, that I needed her? Should I have gone after her like some sort of hero and tried to win her back? I had this sinking feeling that I should have, that that was what she’d wanted, that that was what she’d expected. I looked at David, slowly shaking my head. “No, I didn’t.”

“Oh, man. You blew it. Now you’ll never get her back. How long’s it been?”

“Two months.”

He shook his head. “She’s found someone else by now. Your window of opportunity’s closed, dude. Didn’t you even try to call her?”

“I didn’t know where she’d gone.”

“You should’ve called her parents. They’d know.”

“She said she just wanted to cut off all contact cold, not see each other anymore. She said it’d be easier that way.”

“They always say things like that. But what they say and what they mean are two different things.”

There was movement in the doorway. Stewart. “Hey, girls,” he said, peeking his head into the office, “stop your talking. Get back to work.”

I quickly picked up my pen, began going over the instructions.

“I’m on break,” David said, eating a Frito. “I still have five minutes to go.”

“Then you take your break in the break room where you won’t disturb — ” There was a pause as he blanked on my name. “ — Jones.”

“Fine.” David got up slowly, grinned at me as he followed Stewart out the door.

I smiled back, but I felt sick inside.

What they say and what they mean are two different things.

I had the horrible feeling that he was right.

There was traffic on the freeway, a three-car accident in the fast lane, and it was nearly six-thirty by the time I got home. I parked in the garage and trudged up the stairway to my apartment. I opened my mailbox and rifled through the envelopes as I unlocked the door. There was a bill from the gas company, this week’s Pennysaver… and something that felt like a card.

A card? Who would be sending me a card?

Jane?

My hopes soared. Maybe she’d gotten tired of waiting for me to make contact. Maybe she’d decided to contact me. Maybe she missed me as much as I missed her.

I quickly ripped open the envelope and saw the words “Happy Birthday!” above a picture of hot-air balloons sailing into a blue sky. I opened the card.

Preprinted on the white background in laser-jet perfection was the message “Happy Birthday From Your Friends at Automated Interface, Inc.”

My heart sank.

A form birthday card from work.

I crumpled up the card, threw it over the stairway railing, and watched it hit the ground.

In two days it would be my birthday.

I’d almost forgotten.

Thirteen

I spent my birthday typing and filing, filing and typing. David was sick, and I was alone in the office all day.

I spent that night watching television.

No one at work did anything for my birthday. I hadn’t expected them to, but I had half expected a call from Jane — or at least a card. She knew how important birthdays were to me. But of course there was nothing. What was even more depressing was that my parents didn’t acknowledge my birthday either. No present, no card, not even a phone call.

I tried to call them, several times, but the line was always busy and I eventually gave it up.

In five years, I thought, I would be thirty. I remembered when my mom had turned thirty. Her friends had thrown her a surprise birthday party and everyone had gotten drunk and I’d been allowed to stay up way past my bedtime. I’d been eight then, and my mom had seemed so old.

I was getting old, too, but the strange thing was that I didn’t feel it. According to the professor of a Cultural Anthropology class I’d taken, American culture has no rite of passage, no formal initiation into manhood, no clear demarcation between childhood and adulthood. Maybe that was why, in many ways, I still felt like a kid. I did not feel the way my parents had probably felt at my age, did not see myself the way my parents had probably seen themselves. I might be living an adult life, but my feelings were a child’s feelings, my attitudes and interests those of a teenager. I had not really grown up.

And my twenties were half over.

I thought about Jane all night, thought about what this birthday could have been, what it should have been, and what it wasn’t.

I went to bed hoping against hope that the phone would ring.

But it didn’t.

And sometime after midnight I fell asleep.

Fourteen

Thanksgiving came and went and I spent the holiday in my apartment by myself, watching the Twilight Zone marathon on Channel 5 and wondering what Jane was doing.

I’d tried ringing my parents the week before, calling them several times, planning to wrangle a Thanksgiving dinner invitation out of them, but no one was ever home when I called. Although they’d invited me and Jane over for the past three Thanksgivings, we had never gone, begging off because of school, work, whatever excuse we could think up. Now this year, when I finally wanted to go, when I needed to go, no invitation was offered. I wasn’t exactly surprised, but I couldn’t help feeling a little hurt. I knew my parents weren’t trying to be mean, weren’t going out of their way to purposely not invite me — they’d probably assumed that once again Jane and I had plans of our own — but I didn’t have any plans and I desperately wanted them to provide me with some.

I still hadn’t told them I’d broken up with Jane. I hadn’t even called them since the split. My parents and I had never really been close, and talking about something like this with them would have made me feel extremely uncomfortable. I knew they’d ask a million questions — How did it happen? Why did it happen? Whose fault was it? Are you guys going to patch things up? — and I didn’t want to have to talk to them about things like that. I just didn’t want to deal with it. I’d rather they find out later, secondhand.

I’d been planning to lie if I’d gone down to San Diego to spend Thanksgiving with them, to tell them that Jane got sick at the last minute and was spending the holiday with her family. It was a pretty flimsy and pathetic excuse, but I had no doubt that my parents would buy it. They were pretty gullible about things like that.

But I never did get ahold of them. I could have invited myself, I knew. I could have just shown up on their doorstep Thursday morning. But somehow I didn’t feel comfortable doing that.

So I stayed home, lounged on the couch, watched The Twilight Zone. I made macaroni and cheese for my Thanksgiving meal. It was pretty damn depressing, and I could not remember having ever felt so alone and so abandoned.

I was almost grateful for Monday.

On Monday morning, David was there before I was, feet up on the desk, eating some type of muffin. I was glad to see him after the four days I’d just spent in semi-isolation, but at the same time I felt an emotional weight, a feeling almost like dread, settle upon me as I sat down at my desk and surveyed the array of papers before me.

I liked David, but, God, I hated my job.

I looked over at him. “This is hell,” I said.

He finished the last of his muffin, crumpling the cupcake paper and tossing it into the trash can between our desks. “I read this story once where hell was a hallway filled with all the bugs you’d killed in your life: all the flies you’d swatted, all the spiders you’d squished, all the snails you’d dissolved. And you had to keep walking back and forth down this hallway. Naked. Back and forth. Back and forth. Forever.” David grinned. “Now that would be hell.”

I sighed. “This is close.”

He shrugged. “Purgatory, maybe. But hell? I don’t think so.”

I picked up a pen, looked at the latest batch of GeoComm instructions I’d written. I was sick of documenting that damn system. What had once seemed like a great step forward, a huge increase in responsibility, was now a burden around my neck. I was starting to long for the days when my job had been less defined and my tasks varied with the day. My work might have been more pointless and frivolous then, but it had not been so stultifyingly the same.

“I think it might be,” I said.

It was four o’clock and the employees who were on flexible work schedules were starting to leave, passing by our office and heading down the hall toward the elevators, when David leaned back in his chair and looked over at me. “Hey, what’re you doing after work?” he asked. “Anything?”

I knew where this was leading, and my first instinct was to beg off, to invent an excuse why I couldn’t go with him, wherever he was going. But it had been so long since I had done anything or gone anywhere with another person that I found myself saying, “Nothing. Why?”

“There’s this club I go to in Huntington Beach. Stocked with babes. I thought you might wanna come.”

The second level. An invitation.

Part of me wanted to say yes, and for a brief second I thought that this might turn the tide, this might save me. I’d go out clubbing with David; we’d become good buddies, close friends; he’d help me meet some women; my entire life would change in one smooth, easy stroke.

But my true nature won out, and I shook my head and smiled regretfully. “I wish I could, but I have plans.” I said.

“What plans?”

I shook my head. “I can’t.”

He looked at me, nodded slowly. “I understand.” he said.

David and I were not as close after that. I don’t know if it was his fault or mine, but the bond that had existed between us seemed to have been broken, the closeness dissipated. It wasn’t like it had been with Derek, of course. I mean, David and I still talked to each other. We were still friendly. But we were not friends. It was as though we had approached friendship but had backed off, deciding we were better suited to acquaintanceship.

The routine returned. It had never really gone away, but since David had started sharing my office I had been able, to some extent, to ignore it. Now that I was fading into the periphery of David’s life, however, and he into mine, the mind-numbing dullness of my workday once more took center stage.

I was an uninteresting person with an uninteresting job and an uninteresting life.

My apartment, too, I noticed, was bland and characterless. Most of the furniture was new, but it was generic: not ugly, not wonderful, but existing somewhere in the netherworld of plainness in between. In a way, gaudiness or ugliness would have been preferable. At least it would have stamped an imprint of life upon my home. As it was, a photograph of my living room would have fit neatly and perfectly into a furniture catalog. It had the same featureless, antiseptic quality as a showroom display.

My bedroom looked like it had come straight out of a Holiday Inn.

Obviously, whatever character the place had had was attributable to Jane. And obviously it had departed with her.

That was it, I decided. I was going to change. I was going to make an effort to be different, be original, be unique. Even if civil-service chic became all the rage, I would never again fall into a rut of quiet unobtrusiveness. I would live loud, dress loud, make a statement. If it was my nature to be Ignored, I would go against my nature and do everything I could to make myself noticed.

I went that weekend to furniture stores, charged a couch and bed and end tables and lamps — mismatched items from the wildest and most disparate styles I could find. I tied them in the trunk of the Buick, tied them to the roof, took them home and put them in places where they weren’t supposed to be: bed in the dining area, couch in the bedroom. This wasn’t ordinary; this wasn’t average or mundane. No one could ignore this. I walked around my apartment, admiring the extravagantly gauche decorations, satisfied.

I went to Marshall’s, charged a new wardrobe. Loud shirts and outrageously designed pants.

I went to Supercuts, got a modified mohawk.

I had done it. I had changed. I had made myself over. I was a new me.

And at work on Monday, nobody noticed.

I walked through the parking lot and into the lobby feeling almost foolishly conspicuous, my band of centered hair standing tall and stiff on my otherwise bald head, my pants baggy and shiny red, my shirt lime-green, my tie fluorescent pink. But no one gave me a second glance. There was not even a pause in the conversation between two fifth-floor secretaries waiting for the elevator as I walked up and stood next to them. Neither of them glanced in my direction or paid me any attention at all.

Even David did not notice the difference. He said hi to me when I walked into the office, finished his breakfast muffin, then settled down to work.

I was Ignored no matter what I did.

I sat down at my desk, discouraged and depressed, feeling like an asshole with my hair and my clothes. Why was this happening to me? Why was I Ignored? What was wrong with me? I touched my mohawk, as if to reassure myself that it was real, that I was real, that I had physical substance. My hand felt hard lacquered hair.

What was I?

That was the real question.

And for that, of course, I had no answer.

The week passed slowly, with seconds that seemed like hours, hours that seemed like days, days that were of interminable length. David was out for the second half of the week, and by the time Friday rolled around I had been so consistently disregarded and overlooked that I was about ready to attack one of the secretaries to prove to myself and everyone else that I existed, that I was there.

On my way home, I tried to speed, to drive crazily and recklessly, but my heart wasn’t in it and I failed to make even a small dent in the consciousness of my fellow freeway travelers.

Inside my apartment, the garishly clashing color scheme of the living room only made me feel tired and even more depressed. I stared at the Monster Roster poster hung at an inappropriate angle above my pink butterfly chair. I had somehow managed to make the gaudy look mundane, the garish unobtrusive.

I loosened my tie and sat down on he couch. I felt drained. The weekend loomed before me: two days of freedom in which I would constantly be confronted with my anonymity. I tried to think of something I could do, some place I could go where I wouldn’t be continually faced with the meaningless obscurity that was my existence.

My parents, I thought. I could visit my parents. I wasn’t ignored by them. I was not just a forgettable face to my mom, not just a nobody to my dad. I might not be able to talk to them about my situation, but just being with them, just being with people who noticed and paid attention to me, would help.

I hadn’t tried calling them after Thanksgiving, feeling vaguely pissed off at their treatment of me and wanting to punish them for it, but Christmas was fast approaching and I needed both my mom and my dad to give me some idea of what they wanted this year.

I figured that was as good an excuse as any to give them a ring.

I walked over to the phone, picked it up and dialed. Busy. I hung up, dialed again. We weren’t close, my parents and I. We did not see eye to eye on most things; we did not even like each other a lot of the time. But we loved each other. We were family. And if you couldn’t turn to your family in time of need, who could you turn to?

The line was still busy. I hung up the phone. I had a plan. I would be spontaneous. I would surprise them by driving down right now and showing up on their doorstep for dinner.

Average people weren’t spontaneous.

I packed a toothbrush and a change of clothes, and ten minutes later I was on the freeway, headed for San Diego.

I considered pulling off at San Juan Capistrano, then at Oceanside, then at Del Mar and trying to call again. Now that I thought about it, my parents probably wouldn’t like it if I just showed up on their doorstep without warning. But I had momentum, I didn’t want to get sidetracked, and I stayed on the highway, moving south.

It was close to nine when I pulled up in front of my parents’ home. Our home. It hadn’t changed much since I was a child, and that was reassuring. I got out of the car and walked up the short cement path to the porch. Although I had been here less than a year ago, it seemed like it had been forever, and I felt as though I were returning after a long, long absence. I stepped onto the porch, knocked, rang the bell.

A strange man answered the door.

I jumped, startled.

From behind the stranger came the voice of another stranger, a woman. “Who is it, dear?”

“I don’t know!” the man called back. He was unshaven, overweight, wearing low-slung jeans and a tank top T-shirt. He looked at me through the screen. “Yes?”

I cleared my throat. There was a funny feeling in my stomach. “Are my parents here?” I asked.

The man frowned. “What?”

“I came to visit my parents. They live here. I’m Bob Jones.”

The man looked puzzled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I live here.”

“This is my parents’ house.”

“Maybe you have the wrong street or something.”

“Taz!” the woman called.

“In a minute!” the man called back.

“I don’t have the wrong street. This is my parents’ house. I was born here. My parents have lived here for the past thirty years!”

“I live here now. What did you say your parents’ names were?”

“Martin and Ella Jones.”

“Never heard of them.”

“They own this house!”

“I rent from Mr. Sanchez. He’s the owner. Maybe you should talk to him.”

My heart was pounding. I was sweating, though the weather was chilly. I tried to remain calm, tried to tell myself that there was a rational explanation for this, that it was all part of a simple misunderstanding, but I knew it was not true. I swallowed, tried not to show my fear. “Could you give me Mr. Sanchez’s address and phone number?”

The man nodded. “Sure.” He started to turn around, then stopped. “I don’t know, though. Mr. Sanchez might not appreciate me giving out personal stuff — ”

“A daytime number, then. Don’t you have his work phone number?”

“Yeah, sure. Hold on a sec.”

The man retreated into the house — our house — to find a pen and paper, and I realized that a work number wouldn’t do me any good. It was Friday night. Unless I wanted to wait until Monday, I was screwed. On an impulse, I looked toward the wood frame house next door. The name on the burnt wood novelty shingle hanging from the lighted porch was CRAWFORD. The Crawfords! I should have thought of them before. If Mr. and Mrs. Crawford still lived next door, they would know what the hell had happened. They would know why my parents were not here, why this strange man and his wife were living in our house.

Without waiting for the man to return, I hopped off the porch and started across the lawn toward the Crawfords’. “Hey!” the man called out behind me. I heard his wife yell something.

I stepped over the low hedge that separated our house from the Crawfords’ and walked up their porch, ringing the doorbell. A moment later, I was gratified to see Mrs. Crawford open the door. I was afraid she’d be frightened by my mohawk, and I purposely tried to look as nonthreatening as possible, but she opened the door all the way, totally unafraid. “Yes?”

“Mrs. Crawford! Thank God you still live here. Where are my parents? I just went next door and there’s a strange man living in our house who said he’s never heard of us.”

Now there was fear in her eyes. She moved slightly behind the door, ready to slam it at the slightest provocation. “Who are you?” Her voice sounded older than I remembered, weaker.

“I’m Bob.”

“Bob?”

“Bob Jones. Don’t you remember?” I could see that she didn’t. “I’m Martin and Ella’s son!”

“Martin and Ella had no son.”

“You used to babysit me!”

She started to close the door. “I’m sorry — ”

I was so frustrated that I felt like screaming at her, but I kept my voice even. “Just tell me where my parents are. Martin and Ella Jones. Where are they?”

She looked at me, squinting for a moment as thought she almost recognized me, then shook her head, obviously giving up her memory search.

“Where are they?”

“The Joneses died six months ago in an automobile accident. Drunk driver.”

My parents were dead.

I stood there as she closed the door on me, not moving, not reacting, not doing anything. The door clicked shut, followed by the snick of a dead bolt. In my peripheral vision, I could see the curtains move on the window to the right side of the door, could see Mrs. Crawford’s face peek through the opening. I was vaguely aware that the man living in my parents’ house — Taz — was calling to me, saying something.

My parents were dead.

I wanted to cry but I couldn’t. I had not had enough time to think about their lives to be able to react to their deaths. I had not had time to prepare for and cultivate a sense of loss. The shock had been too sudden. I wanted to feel sad, but I didn’t. I simply felt numb.

I turned slowly around, walked out to the sidewalk.

I hadn’t been invited to my own parents’ funeral.

I wished that my parents and I had been closer, but I’d always assumed there’d be time for that, that eventually it would happen, that age would provide common ground, that years would bring togetherness. It was not something I’d actively planned for or sought out, just a general feeling, but now those vague hopes had been permanently dashed. I should’ve made an effort, I thought. I should’ve known that something like this could happen to them, and I should’ve put aside the babyishness, the pettiness, and not let our disagreements divide us. I should’ve gotten closer to them while I’d had the chance.

Taz was still calling to me, but I ignored him and got in my car, turning the key in the ignition. I glanced back toward the Crawfords’ as I pulled out, and now both Mrs. and Mr. Crawford were looking openly through the parted curtains.

Six months ago. That would’ve been June. Jane and I had still been together then. I would’ve just gotten my job two months before.

Why hadn’t someone notified me? Why hadn’t I been called? Hadn’t someone found my name and address somewhere amidst their personal effects?

I had not really thought of myself as being ignored by my parents, but as I thought back to my childhood, I was surprised to find my memories slightly hazy. I could not recall any specific instances in which I’d done things with my mom or gone places with my dad. I remembered teachers, kids, pets, places, toys — and events related to each of them — but of my parents there was only a general sense that they’d done a good job of raising me. I’d had a fairly normal, happy childhood — at least I’d thought I had — but the warm, loving recollections I should’ve held, the remembrances of individual events I should’ve possessed, were nowhere to be found. There was no personalization to my parental memories.

Maybe that’s why we hadn’t been closer. Maybe I’d been merely a generic child to them, a personalityless blank they were obliged to feed, clothe, and raise.

Maybe I’d been Ignored since birth.

No, that couldn’t be true. I had not been ignored by my parents. They’d always bought me birthday and Christmas presents, for Christ’s sake. That proved that they thought about me. They’d always invited me home for Easter, for Thanksgiving. They cared about me.

Jane had cared about me, too, though. That didn’t mean I wasn’t Ignored.

Six months ago.

That was about the time I’d first started to notice my condition, that I’d first become aware of my true nature. Maybe it was connected. Maybe when my parents died, when the people who knew me and loved me best passed away, what had always been dormant within me had been activated. Maybe it was their knowledge of my existence that had kept me from being completely Ignored.

I’d been fading even faster since I’d lost Jane.

I pulled onto Harbor Drive, pushing the thought out of my mind, not wanting to think about it.

Where were my parents’ belongings? I wondered. Had they been auctioned off? Donated to a charity? There were no other relatives except me, and I hadn’t gotten anything. Where were all our pictures and photo albums?

The photo albums.

It was the photo albums that did it. It was the photo albums that were the trigger.

I started to cry.

I was driving toward the freeway, and suddenly I couldn’t see because of the tears in my eyes. Everything was runny, blurry, and I pulled to the side of the road and wiped my cheeks and eyes. I felt a sob in my throat, heard a sound come out of my mouth, and I forced myself to stop it, to knock it off. This was not the time to be maudlin and sentimental.

I took a deep breath. I had no one now. No girlfriend, no relatives, no friends. Nobody. I was all alone and on my own, and I was Ignored. I had only myself — and my job. As strange and ironic as it was, it was now only through my job that I had any sort of identity at all.

But that was going to change. I was going to find out who I was, what I was. I was through living in darkness and ignorance. And I was through with letting opportunities pass me by. I had learned from my mistakes, I had learned from my past, and my future was going to be different.

I put the car into gear and headed toward the freeway. It would be nearly midnight before I got back to Brea.

I stopped by a Burger King and got a Coke for the long trip home.

Fifteen

Monday.

I was ten minutes late for work due to a three-car pileup on the Costa Mesa Freeway, but I didn’t sweat it. No one would notice if I was late.

I’d spent the weekend calling my parents’ friends, the ones I remembered, asking if they knew what had happened to my parents’ personal effects. None of them had known. Several of them wouldn’t even talk to me.

None of them remembered me.

No one had known or was willing to tell me which mortuary had handled the arrangements and at which cemetery my parents were buried, so I went to the library, xeroxed the appropriate pages from the San Diego Yellow Pages, and called every damn funeral home in the book. Of course, it turned out to be the last one. I asked the funeral director if he knew what had happened to my parents’ belongings, and he said no, he didn’t. I asked him who had paid for the funeral, and he said that information was confidential. He was understanding and apologetic and told me that if I could bring proof that Martin and Ella Jones were my parents he would be happy to divulge the information to me, but he could not tell me over the phone. Proof? I asked. Birth certificate, he told me.

My parents had kept my birth certificate.

He did tell me where my parents were buried, and I thanked him and wrote it down and hung up.

My past was gone, I realized. I had no roots, no history. I now existed entirely in the present.

David was hard at work on something when I walked into the office, and he did not even look up as I entered the room. I walked past him, took off my coat, and sat down at my desk. On top of the desk was a huge stack of papers. Adjacent to the papers was a hastily scrawled note on FROM THE DESK OF RON STEWART stationery that read: “Please document these procedures by 12/10.” It was initialed “RS.”

December 10. That was today.

The note was dated November 2.

I stared, read the note again. The bastard had deliberately done this to get me in trouble. I quickly shuffled through the pile of papers. There were memos from Banks and from Banks’ superiors dated several months back asking that this or that procedure be documented. I had never seen any of them before. I had never heard anything about these procedures.

Stewart had set me up.

I was furious, but I was so preconditioned that I actually got out a pen and began looking over the top page. There was no way I could complete even a third of these today, and after a few frustrating minutes I realized that I could not do this. I had to get out of here. I threw down my pen, grabbed my coat, and headed out the door.

At that point, I really didn’t care whether or not I got fired. I just had to get away from that office.

Outside, the early morning gloom was starting to lift, sunshine showing through the clouds, blue usurping the place of gray. I was parked out in the boonies of the Automated Interface parking lot, and by the time I reached my car I was already starting to sweat. I threw my coat on the passenger seat, rolled down the front windows, and backed out, leaving the lone open space amidst the endless rows of shiny cars. I pulled onto Emery, heading south. I turned right on the first cross street with a stoplight, then left on the next street. I did not know where I was going, had no definite destination in mind, was simply planning to lose myself in the comforting sameness of Irvine’s mazelike streets, but I found myself heading more or less in an westerly direction.

I ended up at South Coast Plaza.

I parked out by Sears and trekked across the asphalt to the main entrance. I walked into the mall, grateful for the relaxed coolness of air-conditioning after the humid heat outside.

Even though the Christmas season was here, there did not seem to be as many people in the mall as there should have been. The parking lot had been crowded, but inside South Coast Plaza the crowds were curiously sparse.

Muzak carols were playing over the mall’s speakers; elf figures and toy sleighs and fake snow adorned the window fronts. In front of Nordstrom, a huge flocked Christmas tree was festooned with garlands and tinsel and every type of ornament imaginable. Christmas had always been my favorite time of year. I’d always loved the feel of the season, the mood, everything from the nativity scenes to the festive fantasy trappings of Santa that had put a secular face on this sacred occasion. But this year it just didn’t feel like Christmas. I had no presents to buy; I was expecting no presents myself. Last year, Jane and I had spent almost every spare November and December moment shopping for gifts, planning our celebration, enjoying each other and the promise of the season. This year I was alone and lonely, with no plans, no purpose.

I stood next to the Christmas tree and scanned the faces of the passersby, but even the frank and open stares with which I greeted people did not phase them. Theoretically, the women and children in the mall should have noticed me. Shopkeepers should have eyed me with suspicion. Even during the height of the punk movement it had not been normal to see mohawked, Day-Glo-dressed men loitering around South Coast Plaza, and those days were long gone. Someone who looked like me definitely should have attracted attention.

But, of course, I didn’t.

Not everyone was ignoring me, though.

Standing next to one of the small benches between Rizzoli’s bookstore and the Garden Bistro restaurant was a sharp-eyed man a few years older than myself who was staring intently, watching my every move. I did not notice him at first, but I kept seeing him out of the corner of my eye, unmoving, and I began to have the uncomfortable feeling that I was being observed, spied upon. I put the two together and casually looked to my left, toward the man. I caught his eye, and he looked away, pretending to be interested in the Garden Bistro’s menu. Now it was my turn to watch him. He was tall and thin, with short black hair that accentuated the hard, cold severity of his face. He stood stiffly, in a manner that was almost regal, but there was an indefinable air of the plebeian about him.

I wondered why he had been staring at me, how he had noticed me, and I started walking toward him, intending to ask, but he quickly moved away, making a beeline toward the center of the mall, hurriedly moving past two women and cutting in front of them to get away from me.

I considered following him, and I started to do so, but then he pushed through a small group of people and started up the stairs to the mall’s second level, and I knew that I would not be able to catch up. I watched him hurry up the steps. Strange. I had never seen the man before in my life. Why had he been looking at me? And why had he acted so guilty and suspicious when I caught him staring? It might have been my clothes and hair that caught his attention. That was a logical assumption. But then why had no one else noticed me?

I stared at the top step, where I had last seen the man before he’d hurried toward the Sears wing of the mall. It was probably nothing, probably just my imagination, an overreaction to the fact that someone had actually seen me.

But I felt uneasy as I walked into Nordstrom.

I stayed in the mall all day. I had nowhere to go, nothing to do; I didn’t feel like driving around and I certainly didn’t feel like going home. So I wandered in and out of the various stores, bought a lunch at Carl’s Jr., read some magazines at B. Dalton, looked through the CDs at Music Plus.

Business picked up in the late afternoon, after the schools let out. I was in Miller’s Outpost, had pretty much seen everything I wanted to see, and was about to leave, when I happened to glance behind me.

And saw the sharp-eyed man staring at me from between the racks.

This wasn’t just coincidence.

Our eyes locked for a second, and I felt a cold chill pass through me. Then he turned away, moving quickly up the aisle toward the front of the store. I headed after him, but by the time I reached the store’s open entrance he had already blended into the crowd, disappearing into the stream of package-carrying customers passing through the mall.

I wanted to stop him, but what could I do? Run after him? Yell?

I stood there for a moment, unmoving, watching as the man tried desperately to get away from me, thinking how frightened I’d been when I’d looked into his hard, cold eyes.

But why should I be frightened of him when he was obviously just as frightened of me?

But if he was so frightened of me, why was he stalking me?

Stalking.

Why had I thought of that word?

I started walking. Something about the man seemed familiar to me on a subconscious level. There was something almost, but not quite, recognizable in his features that I had not noticed until I’d seen him up close, and that something bothered me, nagged at me, all the way out to the parking lot and all the way home.

Sixteen

I expected to be quizzed on where I’d been, and I’d prepared an elaborate story to justify my absence. But none of it was necessary. No one asked about my day off. In fact, when I mentioned to David that I was feeling much better today, he looked at me with surprise. “You were sick?”

“I wasn’t here yesterday,” I told him.

“Huh,” he said. “Didn’t even notice.”

Stewart might not have noticed that I’d been gone, but he noticed that I’d missed his deadline and he called me into his office soon after lunch. He faced me from across the desk. “Jones? You’ve failed to complete an important assigned task, despite having had a very generous deadline to work with.”

Generous deadline? I stared straight at him. He and I both knew what he had pulled.

“This is going to be noted on your six-month review.”

I mustered my courage. “Why are you doing this?” I asked.

He stared at me innocently. “Doing what? Enforcing department standards?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

“Do I?”

I met his eyes. “You have it in for me, don’t you?”

He smiled that smug jock’s smile. “Yes,” he admitted. “I do.”

“Why?”

“I don’t like you, Jones. I’ve never liked you. You represent everything I despise.”

“But why?”

“Does it matter?”

“It does to me.”

“Then it doesn’t matter. Get back to work, Jones. I’m pretty dissatisfied with your performance so far. So is Mr. Banks. We all are.”

Fuck you, I wanted to say. But I said it only with my eyes and turned and left the office.

I was Ignored because I was average. It seemed the most logical answer, the most reasonable assumption. Having come of age in the latter half of the twentieth century, I was a product of the mass media standardization of culture, my thoughts and tastes and feelings shaped and determined by the same influences that were acting upon everyone else of my generation.

But I didn’t buy it.

For one thing, I wasn’t completely average. If I had been, if everything had been that consistent, my existence would have been understandable, predictable. But there were glaring inconsistencies in the theory. My television viewing might correspond exactly with the Nielsen ratings, the shows ranked the same order in the newspaper and in my mind, but my taste in books was nowhere near mainstream.

Then again, while my reading tastes might be different from those of the general public, perhaps they were precisely average for white males of my socio-economic and educational background.

How specific did this thing get?

It would take a statistician years to sort through this information and pick out a pattern.

I was driving myself crazy with this endless speculation, trying so desperately hard to find out who or what I was.

I looked around my apartment, at the outlandish furnishings that my influence had somehow made mundane. I had an idea, and I went into the kitchen and dug through the junk drawer until I found my AAA map of Los Angeles. I spread the map out, located the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

There was a car parked on the street in front of my apartment. A white Dodge Dart. I didn’t think much of it at first, but when the car pulled behind me as I drove out of the driveway… then followed me down College Avenue, down Imperial Highway and onto the freeway, I began to feel a little unnerved. I knew it was probably nothing. I’d simply seen too many movies. And my solitary existence had only contributed to my paranoia. But I couldn’t help noticing that the car remained behind me: changing lanes when I changed lanes, speeding up when I sped up, slowing down when I slowed down. There was no reason for anyone to be following me — such an idea was obviously ludicrous — but I still felt uneasy and a little bit frightened.

In my rearview mirror I saw that a black four-door pickup had zoomed into the space between me and the Dart, and I used this opportunity to get away, flooring the gas pedal, suddenly swerving in front of a VW and exiting the nearest off-ramp. I waited at the intersection of the street at the bottom of the off-ramp, not moving even when the light changed to green, but the Dart did not reappear behind me.

I’d lost him.

I got back on the freeway, heading toward L.A.

The art museum was crowded, and it was hard to find a parking spot. I finally had to shell out five bucks and park at a rip-off lot across the side street from the La Brea Tar Pits. I walked through the park, past the outrageously colored replicas of long-extinct mammals, and up to the museum, where I paid another five bucks for a pass.

Inside, the museum was cool and dark and silent. There were people here, but the building was so big that they seemed few and far between, and even the most flamboyant among them were cowed into quiet by the hushed and intimidating atmosphere.

I walked from room to room, wing to wing, floor to floor, past English furniture and French silverware and Indian statues, scanning the paintings on the walls, looking for one of the big names, one of the heavy hitters. Finally I found one. Renoir. A painting of people eating at an outdoor cafe.

There were no other guests in this gallery or even this wing, only a lone uniformed guard standing silently by the entry way. I stepped back, into the center of the room. This, I knew, was class. This was culture. This was Art with a capital A.

I stared at the painting and felt cold. I wanted to experience the magic, the sense of awe and wonder, the feeling of transcendence that people were supposed to have when confronted with great works of art, but I felt only a mild enjoyment. I looked at the other paintings on display. Before me were the treasures of the world, the very finest objects that man had produced in the history of the planet, and all I could muster was a halfhearted interest. My senses were muffled, subdued, stifled by the nature of my being, by the fact that I was completely and utterly ordinary.

The extraordinary had no power to touch me.

It was what I’d thought, what I’d feared, and although it only confirmed what I’d expected, that confirmation hit home with the force of a death announcement.

I looked again at the Renoir, moved closer, studied it, examined it, trying to force myself to feel something, anything, trying desperately to understand what others might see in the work, but it was beyond me. I turned to go —

— and saw someone standing in the entryway of the gallery, staring at me.

The tall, sharp-eyed man I’d seen at the mall.

A wave of cold passed over me, through me.

And then he was gone, disappearing behind the wall to the left of the door. I hurried over to the entryway, but by the time I reached it there was no sign of him. There was only a lone couple, dressed in matching black turtlenecks, walking toward me from the far end of the wing.

I was tempted to ask the guard whether he’d seen the man, but I realized instantly that he wouldn’t have. The guard was facing into the room, away from where the man had been, and he would not have seen a thing.

The museum suddenly seemed darker, colder, bigger than it had, and as J walked alone toward the front of the building, past silent wings and empty rooms, I realized that I was holding my breath.

I was scared.

I walked faster, wanting to run but not daring to, and it was only when I was safely outside, in the sunshine, surrounded by people, that I was again able to breathe normally.

Seventeen

On Monday, David was gone. I was not told why and I did not ask, but his desk was cleared off, the metal shelves behind him empty, and I knew without being told that he no longer worked for Automated Interface. I wondered if he’d quit or been fired. Fired, I assumed. Otherwise he would’ve told me.

Or maybe not.

What they say and what they mean are two different things.

I found myself thinking about what he’d said about women when I’d told him that I hadn’t made an effort to contact Jane after she’d left me. It had been bothering me ever since he’d said it, nagging at the back of my mind, making me feel, not exactly guilty, but… responsible somehow for the fact that she hadn’t come back. I thought for a moment, then stood, closed the door to the office, and sat down at David’s desk, picking up the phone. I still remembered the day care center’s phone number after all this time, my fingers punching the seven digits almost instinctively.

“May I speak to Jane?” I asked the old woman who answered the phone.

“Jane Reynolds?”

“Yes.”

“She quit four months ago. She no longer works here.”

I felt as though I’d been kicked in the stomach.

I hadn’t seen, talked to, or communicated with Jane since we’d broken up, but somehow the idea that she’d been near, that she’d continued carrying on her normal life, even though I was no longer part of that life, had been comforting to me, calming. I might not be with her, but just knowing that she was there reassured me. Now, I suddenly discovered, she’d dumped all of her old life at the same time she’d dumped me.

Where was she now? What was she doing?

I imagined her cruising across the country on the back of some Hell’s Angel’s Harley.

No. I pushed the thought out of my mind. That wasn’t Jane. And even if it was, it was none of my business. We weren’t together anymore. I had no right to be affected by the details of her new life.

“Hello?” the old woman said. “Are you still there? Who is this?”

I hung up the phone.

I saw him outside my apartment that evening. The sharp-eyed man. He was standing in the shadows under a tree, his left side lightly and partially illuminated by the streetlamp halfway up the block. I saw him through the front window as I was closing the drapes, and the sight of him scared the shit out of me. I had been trying not to think about him so I would not have to rationalize his existence to myself, but seeing him there, waiting in the dark, staring at my apartment, watching me, made me very afraid. It was clear now that he was spying on me —

stalking me

— though I had no idea why. I hurried to the door, opened it, and bravely stepped out on the porch, but when I looked toward the tree he was gone. There was no one there.

I closed the door, chilled. The thought occurred to me that he wasn’t human. Maybe he was like the hitchhiker who kept following the woman in that Twilight Zone episode. Maybe he was Death. Maybe he was a guardian angel. Maybe he was the ghost of a person my family had wronged who was now fated to follow me everywhere.

Now I was just being stupid.

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 their job, because he was above them in the corporate hierarchy. Banks paid attention to him because Banks was responsible for the whole division and had to keep close tabs on what everyone was doing, particularly the department heads.

But no one else was aware of his existence.

Maybe that was why Stewart disliked me so much. He saw in me the things he hated most about himself. Odds were that he didn’t even know he was Ignored. He was sheltered by his position and probably wasn’t aware of the fact that no one outside of our department paid any attention to him at all.

The thought occurred to me that I could kill him and no one would notice.

I instantly tried to take the thought back, tried to pretend I hadn’t had it. But it was there in my mind, defying my attempts to erase it even as I desperately tried to think of something else. I don’t know to whom I was denying this thought. Myself, perhaps. Or God — if He or She was listening in on my mind and monitoring the morality of my random ideas and notions. It wasn’t just a random notion, though. And as I tried not to think about it and only thought about it more, I realized that while I wanted to find the idea horrifying and completely repugnant, it actually seemed… attractive.

I could kill Stewart and no one would notice.

I thought of the man stealing Coors from the 7-Eleven and not getting caught.

I could kill Stewart and no one would notice.

I was not a murderer. I owned no guns. Killing went against everything I’d ever been taught or believed in.

But the idea of doing away with Stewart had a definite appeal. I would never really go through with it, of course. It was just a fantasy, a daydream —

No, it wasn’t.

I wanted to kill him.

I began thinking about it logically. Was Stewart truly Ignored? Or was he just kind of a boring guy who wasn’t very popular? Could I be certain that if I killed him I would get away with it?

It didn’t matter if he was Ignored. I was Ignored. People might notice that he was dead, but they wouldn’t know that I was the killer. I could murder him in his office and walk down the hallway, go down the elevator, and pass through the lobby all covered with blood and no one would pay any attention to me at all.

The programmers left the break room and I was alone, standing in the center of the room, surrounded by the humming refrigerator and the vending machines. Things were moving too fast. This wasn’t who I was. I wasn’t a criminal. I didn’t kill people. I shouldn’t even want to kill people.

But I did want to.

And, as I stood there, I knew that I would do it.

Twenty

On the day of the murder I went to work in a clown suit.

I don’t know what possessed me to go to that extreme. Maybe, subconsciously, I wanted to be found out and stopped, prevented from going through with it. Maybe I wanted someone to force me to do what I knew I should do and couldn’t.

But that didn’t happen.

There’d been fewer preparations necessary than I’d expected. As the days passed and the certainty grew within me that I was going to kill Stewart, I started to formulate a plan. At first, I thought I’d have to learn all of the of the exits and entrances within the building, the location of each fire alarm, the exact shift hours of each downstairs security guard, but I soon realized that it would not be that complicated. I was not robbing Fort Knox here. And I was practically invisible already. All I really had to do was get in, do it, and get out.

The major problem would be Stewart himself. I was not invisible to him — he saw me — and he was in a hell of a lot better shape than I was. He could kick my ass with one hand tied behind his back.

And if he knew what I was — what we were — he could kill me and get away with it. No one would know. And no one would care.

I’d have to have the element of surprise on my side.

I followed him about for a few days, trying to learn his patterns, his routine, hoping I could figure out from this how, and where, I could most effectively strike at him. I was sneaky about it, not obvious. Since no one ever noticed where I went or what I did, I staked out a corner by the programmers’ section where I could keep an eye on Stewart’s office. I watched him come and go for two days, and was gratified to learn that his habits were very regular, his daily routine practically set in stone. From there, I moved to the main hallway, making sure I was walking down the hallway at the times he left his office so that I would be able to see where he went and what he did.

He went into the bathroom each day after lunch, at approximately one-fifteen, and he stayed in there a good ten minutes.

I knew that that was where I would kill him.

It was the perfect spot, the bathroom. He would be vulnerable and unsuspecting, and I would have the element of surprise. If I could catch him while his pants were down it would be even better, because he would be partially incapacitated: he wouldn’t be able to kick me or run away.

That was the plan.

It was simple and to the point, and I knew that that was why it would work.

I set a date: January 30.

Thursday.

On January 30, I woke up early and put on my clown clothes. The clothes had been a last-minute decision. I’d stopped by a costume rental shop on my way home the night before. I’d pretended to myself that it was a disguise, but I knew that was bullshit. In a business environment, a clown suit was not an effective disguise, it was a red flag. And I’d paid for the rental with my Visa card. There was a record of this. There was a paper trail. Evidence.

I think, subconsciously, I wanted to get caught.

I took my time painting my face with the greasepaint supplied by the costume shop, making sure I covered every inch of skin with white, making sure the red smiling mouth was perfectly painted on, making sure the nose was precisely in place.

It was already after eight before I left the house.

Next to me, on the passenger seat of the car, was the carving knife I’d taken from the kitchen.

It was like I was someone else, like I was in a movie and watching myself secondhand. I drove to Automated Interface, parked way the hell out in God’s country, walked through the rows of cars to the building, walked through the lobby, took the elevator upstairs, and went into my office. I carried the knife all the way, holding it out in front of me, practically advertising what I intended to do, making no effort to hide it, but no one stopped me, no one saw me.

I sat at my desk, unmoving, the knife in front of me, until one o’clock.

At five after, I stood, walked down the hallway to the bathroom, went into the first stall. I’d expected to be nervous, but I was not. My hands were neither sweaty nor shaking, and I was calm as I sat down on the toilet. This was the time to back out. Nothing had happened. I could call it off right now and no one would know. No one would get hurt.

But I wanted Stewart to get hurt.

I wanted him dead.

I made a deal with myself. If he walked into my stall, I would kill him. If he walked into one of the other stalls, I would call the whole thing off now and forever.

I grasped the knife tighter. Now I was starting to sweat. My mouth was dry, and I licked my lips, trying to generate some saliva.

The bathroom door opened.

My heart was pounding, whether from excitement or fear I couldn’t tell. The sound seemed extraordinarily loud in my head and I wondered if Stewart could hear it.

Footsteps crossed the tile floor toward the stalls.

What if it wasn’t even Stewart? What if it was someone else and they opened the door of my stall and saw me there, a deranged clown with a knife? What would I do? What could I do?

The footsteps stopped outside my stall.

The metal door was pulled open.

It was Stewart.

For a split second, his face registered surprise. Then I stabbed him. The knife did not slide easily into his body. It hit muscle and rib and it was tough going, and I pulled it out and pushed it in again, only this time with more of a thrusting motion. I guess the shock must’ve worn off then because he started to scream. I shoved my left hand over his mouth to keep him quiet, but even without the screams the loud, rough sounds of our struggle echoed in the empty bathroom. He was pressed against the side of the stall, and he was kicking and fighting and trying desperately to get away. There was blood everywhere, flowing, spurting, on him, on me. A kick connected with my right knee and almost brought me down. His fist hit the side of my head. I realized instantly that I’d made a mistake, but it was too late to turn back now, and I continued to stab.

It didn’t feel good, the way I’d thought it would. I didn’t feel satisfied, didn’t feel as if justice was being served. I felt like what I was. A cold-blooded killer. In my plans, in my fantasies, this had been the payoff scene of a movie, and I’d been cheering the hero — me — as he finally meted out retribution to the villain. But in reality it was not that way. It was brutal and messy and ugly: he trying furiously to save his life, me no longer wanting to kill him but fully committed to that course of action and unable to stop.

He fell, hitting his head on the bottom edge of the metal door and causing a new geyser of blood to gush forth from his forehead. He was dying, but not quickly and not without a struggle, and I was being hurt. If he had been quicker or I had been slower, he would have knocked the knife out of my hand or wrestled it away from me and that would have been the end.

He punched me in the balls and I tripped backward, but I fell onto the toilet, and I lunged forward and stabbed him in the face.

His body convulsed crazily for a few seconds, then was still.

I withdrew my knife from his nose. It was followed by a wave of blood and some sickly gray clumpy stuff that washed over my shoes.

How was I going to explain all this to the costume rental shop? I thought stupidly.

I stood, pulled off some toilet paper, and wiped the blood from the knife. I stepped over Stewart’s body and closed the stall door behind me. His head and one arm were sticking out from underneath the side of the stall, his hand practically touching the edge of the adjacent urinal, but I didn’t care. There was no way I could hide the body at this point or even remotely disguise what had happened.

I felt nothing. No guilt, no fear, no panic, no exhilaration. Nothing. I realized that I was probably suffering from some kind of shock, but I didn’t feel like I was suffering from shock. I seemed to be thinking clearly, my mind functioning normally.

It had not happened the way I’d thought it would happen, but I decided to stick with my original plan. I walked out of the bathroom and down the hall to the elevator. I walked through the lobby and outside, but by the time I started looking around for my car I had already passed it. I was on the sidewalk and looking at cars parked on the street. I guess I was more in shock than I thought.

It hit me then.

I started trembling, and I dropped the knife. I could no longer see because of the tears in my eyes. I could still feel the knife stabbing through muscle and hitting bone, could still feel my hand over his mouth as he bled and drooled all over me and tried desperately to escape. Would I ever be able to erase those images and sensations from my consciousness?

I walked slowly and dazedly down the sidewalk. I probably would have felt foolish had I thought about the way I was dressed, but right now my appearance was the last thing on my mind.

I had killed a man. I had taken a human life.

I realized that I knew nothing about Stewart’s existence away from work. Was he married? Did he have a family? Would there be a young son and daughter waiting at a house with a white picket fence for their father to come home for dinner? I felt guilty, horrible, and within me was a black blank feeling that went far beyond depression. The strength and will I’d felt at the moment of the murder was gone, replaced by a tired, lethargic despair.

What had I done?

Behind me, on the street, I heard sirens.

Police.

“Bob!”

I turned around at the sound of my name.

And saw the sharp-eyed man running toward me across the sidewalk.

I had a momentary sensation of panic, a quickflash feeling of fear, but though I wanted to run, I did not. I turned fully, faced the man.

He slowed as he approached, grinning at me. “You killed him, didn’t you?”

I tried to keep my face innocently neutral, tried not to let the alarm show on my face. “Who?”

“Your boss.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do, Bob. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

“No, I don’t. And how do you know my name?”

He laughed, but strangely enough there didn’t seem to be any maliciousness in the laugh. “Come on. You know I’ve been following you, and you know why.”

“No, I don’t know why.”

“You’ve passed the initiation ceremony. You’re in.”

The fear returned. I suddenly wished I hadn’t dropped the knife. “In?”

“You’re one of us.”

It was like I’d suddenly figured out how to do a complicated math problem that had been frustrating me. I knew what he was. “You’re Ignored,” I said.

He nodded. “But I prefer to call myself a terrorist. A Terrorist for the Common Man.”

I felt strange, unlike I’d ever felt before, and I didn’t know if the feeling was good or bad. “Are… are there more of you?”

He laughed again. “Oh, yes. There are more of us.” He stressed the word “us.”

“But — ”

“We want you to join us.” He moved forward, next to me. “You’re free now. You’ve cut off your ties to their world. You’re part of our world now. You never were one of them, but you thought you had to play by their rules. Now you know you don’t. No one knows you; no one will remember you. You can do what you want.” His sharp eyes focused on mine. “We’ve all done the same thing. We’ve all done what you’ve done, I offed my boss and his boss. I thought I was all alone then, but… well, I found out that I wasn’t. I found others. And I decided that we should band together. When I saw you that first time, at South Coast Plaza, I knew you were one of us, too. But I could tell that you were still searching. You hadn’t found yourself yet. So I waited for you.”

“You don’t even know me.”

“I know you. I know what foods you like; I know your taste in clothes; I know everything about you. And you know everything about me.”

“Except your name.”

“Philipe.” He grinned. “Now you know everything.”

It was true. He was right. And as I stood there and looked at him and that strange feeling settled inside me, I knew that the feeling was good.

“Are you in?” he asked.

I looked back down the street, toward the mirrored facade of the Automated Interface building, and I nodded slowly. “I’m in,” I said.

Philipe pumped his fist in the air. “Yes!” His smile grew broader. “You’re a victor now, not a victim. You won’t regret this.” He spread his arms wide. “The town,” he crowed, “is ours!”