Sleeper

A short story

No one noticed when Lowell fell off the stool at Hank’s Bar. One minute he was astride the stool, sipping a beer, and the next he was looking upward. He wasn’t drunk. Not even a little. Probably shouldn’t have rocked back on the feeble legs. He studied the cobweb draped from a broken ceiling fan and contemplated invisibility. His invisibility. He wasn’t truly invisible, but he might as well have been for how routinely he was ignored.

People didn’t look at him; they looked through him. Someone once sat right atop him on a bus, startling them both. Shoppers pushed their carts into him at the grocery—and failed to apologize. Cashiers left their posts while he was standing at the checkout, food items on the belt. Even his mother forgot his birthday. Every year.

He sometimes pinched himself to make sure he hadn’t died and no one told him.

Going to the bar had been risky and now with the floor beneath his back, he couldn’t believe how stupid he’d been. He’d long dealt with the pain of being overlooked by dodging social intercourse, becoming so well-practiced in avoidance that at forty-two, his primary achievement in life was anonymity. It had never been a goal or desire, but when one possessed little presence and even less personality, anonymity was the result. And that, he concluded, was the root of his problem; he lacked a personality.

Could he get a personality transplant? Why not? Doctors transplanted kidneys, hearts, livers, and even hands, so why not a personality? Maybe there was a machine like Woody Allen’s Orgasmatron in Sleeper, but instead of pleasure, one got Self. One got Ego. Something, anything to end his internal cryogenic suspension.

There had to be a solution, a psychiatrist, perhaps. He imagined how his first session would go.

—What brings you here today, Mr. Insignificant?

—Well, doc, I need a personality.

—What makes you think you need a personality?

—People ignore me.

—Tell me about that.

Not even a minute later, the shrink reaches for his cell phone. Tap, tap, tap.

Cross counseling off the list.

He’d read about rebirthing, but he hadn’t had a traumatic childhood. Besides, that was all mumbo-jumbo as far as he was concerned. Undoubtedly, some enterprising re-birther would tell him it was exactly what he needed, guaranteeing results. He’d be a new person for the low fee of five grand. Swindler.

What about a meditative retreat? Getting in touch with himself while getting in touch with nature. Lock himself in with people who weren’t supposed to notice one another while secretly scoping faces for interest? Scoping and hoping. He’d watch the hookups, and that would be the takeaway from the two-thousand-dollar week at a remote cabin in the Alleghenies. Winks and nods, what happens in the mountains stays in the mountains. But not for him. He’d leave with a worse sense of his misaligned place in the world, feeling he’d been to the Poconos instead.

Could he learn to be content with the hole in his soul? What about a monastery? Spend a year with monks? If he went to a Buddhist monastery, he’d learn to chant—and the art of self-immolation. He shivered. What about a Catholic monastery? He’d learn to say the rosary—and need early knee replacements. Maybe a Colorado Mountains fishing retreat would be just the thing. He’d learn to cast a fly rod—and saw himself drowning in a river. Did protestants have retreats?

He would have been a perfect spy. But he was too old to train with the CIA or whatever agency wanted eyes that noticed without being noticed. Why hadn’t he thought of it twenty years ago?

Despite viewing himself as an amorphous blob, he wasn’t overweight or pillowy. Physically, he was in reasonably good shape, and that thought gave him a modicum of comfort. The Id and Ego were where things got squishy, never mind the Superego.

“Hey. Are you okay?”

How long had he been on the floor? He looked from the ceiling fan to the eyes peering at him. The eyes blinked. Golden brown irises and long dark lashes. The face came into focus. Sally Lewis? How long had it been, fifteen, twenty years? She’d moved to Texas, and the last he’d heard was working with a Christian charity in Brownsville to help disadvantaged youths. He took in her decorative western boots and followed the fitted jeans upward until his survey landed again on her face. She wouldn’t remember him. No one remembered him.

“Lowell?”

(Illustration thanks to Leonardo with my apologies.)