I tried not to let the shock show on my face. “Hey, Philipe,” I said. “Long time no see.”
“David,” he said tiredly. “My real name’s David. I just called myself Philipe.”
My name is not David! It’s Philipe!
“Oh.” I nodded, as if agreeing with him, but there was nothing for me to agree with. We looked at each other, studied each other. He saw me, I realized. He noticed me. I was not ignored by him. But that was small consolation. I wished I had not come.
He remained in the doorway, not inviting me in. “What do you want?” he asked. “Why are you here?”
I didn’t want to just jump right in, but I didn’t know what to say to him. I cleared my throat nervously. “I got married. Remember me telling you about Jane? I found her here. She’s Ignored, too.”
“So?”
I looked at him, took a deep breath. “Something’s happening,” I said. “Something’s gone wrong. I need your help.”
His eyes held mine for a moment, and it was as if he was searching within me to see if I was telling the truth, as though he was somehow testing me. I must have passed the test, because he nodded slowly. He moved away from the door, back into the apartment. “Come on in,” he said. “We’ll talk.”
The inside of his apartment had the same stultifying old-lady look his house had had, and it felt a little creepy to walk into the small living room and sit down on the tan flowered couch underneath the cheap oil painting of a mountain lake.
“You want anything to drink?” he asked.
I shook my head, but he went into the kitchen and got two beers anyway, putting one open can in front of me. I thanked him.
I still didn’t know what to say, still didn’t know how to bring up what I’d come here to talk with him about. “Do you still see any of the terrorists?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“What about Joe? Do you ever hear from him?”
“I think he’s crossed over. I don’t think he’s Ignored anymore.”
Not Ignored anymore.
Was that possible? Sure it was. I thought of myself, of my own situation, and I felt chilled.
“It’s not a static situation,” he said. “You can move one way or the other.” He took a long, loud sip of his beer. “We’re moving the other way.”
I looked sharply over at him.
“Yeah. I know why you’re here. I can see what’s going on. I know what’s happening.”
I leaned forward on the couch. “What is happening?”
“We’re fading away.”
The fear I felt was tempered with relief. I felt the same way I had when I’d found out that there were other Ignored: scared, but grateful that I would not have to face the situation alone. Once again, Philipe had come through for me.
“No one sees me anymore,” I said.
He smiled wryly. “Tell me about it.”
I looked at him, at his pallid complexion, his ordinary clothes, and I started to laugh. He began laughing, too, and all of a sudden it was like the old days, like Mary had never happened, like Familyland had never happened, like Desert Palms had never happened, like we were in my old apartment, hanging out, friends, brothers forever.
The ice was broken between us, and we started talking. He told me about his quick fade into obscurity after the White House fiasco, about the long months of living here, in this apartment all alone. I told him about my life with Jane, and then about the murderer and about my discovery that I was becoming as Ignored here as I had been in the outside world.
I took a swig of beer. “I also… see things,” I said.
“See things?”
“There,” I said, pointing out the window. “I see a meadow with red grass. There’s a black tree at the far end that looks kind of like a cactus with leaves and branches.”
“I see it,” Philipe said.
“You do?”
He nodded sadly. “I wasn’t going to say anything. I didn’t want to alarm you. I wasn’t sure you’d progressed as far as I had.”
“What is it?” I asked. “What’s happening? Why are we seeing these things?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I have some theories. But that’s all they are. Theories.”
I looked at him. “Do you think it’s reversible, our condition? Or do you think we’ll just keep fading away forever?”
He stared out the window, at the red meadow, at the black cactus tree. “I don’t think it’s reversible,” he said softly. “And I don’t think there’s anything we can do about it.”
Twelve
The murderer struck again on Thursday.
I don’t know why I continued to go to work, but I did. I could have done what I’d done at Automated Interface, just stopped showing up. I could have, and probably should have, spent my remaining time with Jane. But I kept setting that alarm each morning, kept going in to city hall each day.
And on Thursday the murderer returned to the scene of his crime.
He was not wearing a clown suit this time, so I did not recognize him. I was not really working, but was sitting at my desk, staring distractedly at the fluorescent pink rock formation that had grown through the window since yesterday, thinking for the millionth time of what I would do when I became invisible to Jane, when the elevator door opened and he stepped onto the floor.
I took no notice of him until it was almost too late. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him walk across the lobby toward the front desk, and there was something familiar about the way he moved, but it didn’t really register in my brain.
Suddenly the air felt heavy, smelled of drilled teeth.
I stood, instantly on the alert, my mind putting together the guy getting off the elevator, the familiar way he moved, the clown.
He jumped me from behind.
I was grabbed around the neck, and I saw for a brief second a flash of knife metal. Instantly, instinctively, before my conscious mind even realized what I was doing or why I was doing it, I twisted to the side and simultaneously threw myself to the ground, missing the attempted stab and landing on top of the murderer. He hit the ground with a muffled oomph, lost his grip around my neck, and I rolled away, climbing to my knees and then my feet, grabbing a pair of scissors from the top of my desk.
He was as crazy as he had been before, and I saw the look of disconnected dementia on his face as he grinned at me, knife held forward. “I know you’ve been looking for me, fucker. I saw you out there.”
I backed slowly around the edge of my desk, putting it between us. I did not like the way he looked. He was bald and middle-aged, with a bulbous, naturally clownish nose, and there was a disturbing shifting quality to the cast of his features that somehow made him seem saner with the makeup on.
“I don’t want you here,” he said. “You can’t come in.” He stopped on a low blue bush that was growing up from the floor, and his foot disturbed the leaves, knocking a few of them off.
He could touch these manifestations.
With a sudden flying leap, he flung himself at me, lunging over the desk, knife arm outstretched. He was off balance and missed my stomach by a wide margin, but he was already righting himself and I jumped to the side and slashed at him with the scissors. I hit him across the face, one scissor blade puncturing his cheek. He let out a primal cry of rage and pain that distorted his already distorted features, and I pulled the scissors out and stabbed lower, embedding the twin halves into his chest. I felt the blades hit bone, felt a rush of hot blood spill over my hand, and again I pulled the scissors out, shoved them hard into his stomach.
I backed away.
No longer screaming, making only a low pitiful strangled crying sound, he staggered off the side of the desk and onto the floor. His blood spattered both the city hall tile and the blades of orange grass growing up from it. He was losing a lot of blood, and his skin looked gray and pale, as though he was dying.