Bentley Little - The Ignored

When I’d graduated from college, when I’d first gotten the job at Automated Interface, it seemed like I had just been starting out, like I had my whole life ahead of me. Now time was speeding by. Soon I’d be thirty. Then forty. Then old. Then dead. The cliché was right: life was short.

And what was I doing with my life? What was the point of it? Would the world be any different for my having lived? Or was the point that there was no point, that we existed now and one day we wouldn’t and we might as well try to have fun while we were here?

I didn’t know, and I realized I would probably never know.

James came over after work one day, and Jane invited him to stay for dinner. Afterward, James and I retired to the back porch and reminisced about the old days. I reminded him of the first time I’d gone out with the terrorists, to the courthouse, and we both started laughing.

“I’ll never forget the judge’s face when you said, ‘Get a dick!’”

I was laughing so hard I was crying, and I wiped the tears from my eyes. “Remember Buster? He just kept yelling, ‘Pussy!’”

We continued to laugh, but there was a sadness in it now, and I thought of Buster. I remembered the way he’d looked, there in Old Town in Family land, when the suits had shot him down.

We grew quiet and stared up at the stars. It was an Arizona night sky, all of the major constellations visible against the clouded backdrop of the Milky Way.

“Are you guys awake?” Jane called from the kitchen. “It’s so quiet out there.”

“Just thinking,” I said.

James leaned back in his chair. “Are you happy here?” he asked.

I shrugged.

“I’ve heard there’s a land somewhere,” he said. “A country of Ignored.”

I snorted. “Atlantis or Mu?”

“I’m serious.” His voice grew wistful. “We could be free there. Really free. Not just slaves for Thompson. Sometimes I feel like we’re pets now, like trained animals, just doing what we’ve been told to do, over and over again.”

I was silent. I knew what he was feeling.

“I heard it was a town,” I said. “In Iowa.”

“I heard it was a country. Somewhere in the Pacific, between Hawaii and Australia.”

Inside, I heard the rattle of dishes.

“I’m thinking of leaving,” James said. “There’s nothing for me here. I feel like I’m just putting in time. I’m thinking of looking for that other country.” He paused. “I was wondering if maybe you wanted to come along with me.”

Part of me wanted to. Part of me missed the excitement and adventure of being on the road. Part of me also felt stifled here in Thompson. But Jane loved it here. And I loved Jane. And I would never again do anything to jeopardize our relationship.

And part of me loved it here, too.

I tried to turn it into a joke. “You just haven’t found any poon here,” I said.

James nodded solemnly. “That’s part of it.”

I shook my head slowly. “I can’t go,” I said. “This is where I live now. This is my home.”

He nodded, as if this was the answer he’d been expecting.

“Have you asked any of the other terrorists?”

“No. But I will.”

“You like it here, though, don’t you?” I looked at him. “I know what you think of this place. But you still like it here, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” he admitted.

“What the fuck are we? We’re like robots. Push the right buttons and you’ll get the response you want.”

“We’re Ignored.”

I looked up at the sky. “But what does that mean? What is that? Even being Ignored isn’t consistent. It’s not an absolute. There was a guy at the place I worked, a friend of mine, who could see me, who noticed me when no one else did. And what about Joe?”

“Magic has no laws,” James said. “Science has laws. You keep trying to think of this in scientific terms. It’s not genetics; it’s not physics; it doesn’t conform to any set of rules. It just is. Alchemists tried to codify magic and they came up with science, but magic just exists. There’s no rational reason for it, no cause and effect.”

I shook my head. “Magic.”

“I’ve done a lot of reading on the subject. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me.”

“Magic?”

“Maybe that’s the wrong word.” He leaned forward, the front legs of his chair coming down on the porch. “All I know is that whatever makes us this way cannot be measured or quantified or explained. It’s not physics, it’s metaphysics.”

“Maybe we’re crystals that have been astral-projected into human form.”

He stood, laughed. “Maybe.” He looked at his watch. “Look, it’s getting late; I gotta go. I have to work tomorrow.”

“Me, too. For no pay.”

“It’s a weird world.”

We walked through the house, he said good-bye to Jane, and I accompanied him out the front door to his car. “Are you really leaving?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Probably.”

“Let me know when you decide.”

“Of course.”

I watched him pull away, watched his taillights disappear around the corner. I was not tired, and I didn’t feel like staying inside and watching TV. Neither did Jane, and when she finished washing the dishes, we went for a walk. We ended up in my old neighborhood, standing on a small dock to which was anchored a child’s sailboat.

We looked out over the small man-made lake that wound between the condos. Jane put an arm around me, leaned against my shoulder. “Remember when we used to go out to the pier at Newport?”

“And eat at Ruby’s?”

“Cheeseburger and onion rings,” she said, smiling. “That sounds good right now.”

“Clam chowder at the Crab Cooker sounds better.”

We were silent for a moment.

“I guess we’ll never live in Laguna Beach,” she said quietly.

A mosquito buzzed by my head, and I slapped at it. The condos across the water looked cheap to me all of a sudden, the lake pathetic. I thought of the deep darkness of the ocean night, the clusters of lights that marked the beach towns visible from the pier, and I felt unaccountably sad. I felt almost like crying. More than anything else, I wished things were different, wished we were back in our old life in our old apartment and none of this had ever happened.

I wished we weren’t Ignored.

I turned, pulled her with me back toward the sidewalk. “Come on,” I said. “It’s getting late. Let’s go home.

The murderer came into the office in the middle of the morning, getting off the elevator and walking calmly over to the front desk.

I caught him out of the corner of my eye, a brightly colored blur, and I glanced up to see a short, heavyset man in a clown suit and mime makeup open the small swinging gate that separated the public waiting area from our work area.

My stomach lurched; my mouth suddenly went dry. Even before I saw the knife in the clown’s hands, I knew why he was here. My first thought was that someone had been allowed into Thompson who hadn’t yet killed his boss and that that person was going to kill whoever was his boss here. But I didn’t recognize the clown, and I knew he didn’t work on this floor.

And then I noticed that no one was looking at him.

No one saw him.

All this I thought in the space of a few seconds, the time it took the clown to walk up to Ray Lang’s desk, put a hand over Ray’s mouth, and draw the knife across his throat.

I lurched to my feet, knocking over my chair, trying to scream but unable to get out any sound at all.

He drew the knife slowly, expertly. The blood did not shoot, did not squirt, but oozed and flowed from the thin opening, spreading down over Ray’s white shirt in a continuous wave. Hand still holding Ray’s mouth shut, the man quickly shoved his knife first in one of Ray’s eyes, then the other. The blade emerged with pieces of white and green goo stuck to the otherwise red steel.