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.