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.