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.