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.