The Overlooked Man

Here's a story I've been working on for a while.  Kind of sad, I suppose, but hopefully also funny.

The Overlooked Man

by
Alexander Nowak

Stuart Selwyn Kurnitz was born on an overcast winter day that could have defined the color gray.  It was an easy delivery, unremarkable, except perhaps in its speed.  He was born within fifteen minutes of his mother's admittance to the hospital.  He didn't even cry.  The next day, as his parents were departing the maternity ward, they briefly forgot to retrieve their newborn son from the nursery.
    The third of five children, Stuart occupied the median post with quiet grace and ease early on.  He knew that he would not be afforded the attention that his younger siblings garnered so easily.  Nor would he vie for it as his older siblings so often did.  He was a conscientious child, and he didn't wish to burden his parents with the added pressure of keeping him happy and occupied.  Stuart didn't have many friends, though.  His somewhat quiet disposition kept playmates to a minimum.  And for a time, he was content amusing himself through flights of fanciful imagination.
    It wasn't until his tenth birthday that Stuart realized that something in his life was amiss.  He had awaited the day with great anticipation, excited for the party he'd been promised and dreaming of the present that would shine in his memory forever.  A new bike perhaps?  Or the little drum set he'd seen at the fair store?  But when the morning finally arrived, he awoke late, and venturing downstairs, found no party had been planned.  In fact, his parents had forgotten about his birthday altogether.  They were apologetic, to be sure, but not very proactive about salvaging the day.  This especially stung at  Stuart, given that his younger sister Megan had recently celebrated her birthday twice – once during a family dinner to a restaurant of her choosing, and then again with her friends on the weekend.  Disappointed as he was, Stuart soon got over it but not without noting it in the back of his mind.
    Two years later, his family was preparing for a large reunion at his grandmother's house.  Everything had been pre-planned in an attempt to get the most out of the day.  But when they were ready to depart, Stuart was in the bathroom.  He called out that he'd be ready in a moment, but when he opened the garage door, the car wasn't there.  No one was waiting for him in the driveway, either.  They'd simply left him behind.
    More and more, Stuart started to realize that his presence was being overlooked.  It wasn't always that he was being intentionally ignored, as when he would ask a sibling if they wanted to play and they would continue watching television or reading a book.  Sometimes, he was forgotten altogether.  Frequently, he found no place setting for himself at the dinner table, and occasionally, not enough food to feed him either.  His parents seem to have developed an alarming indifference to him that only deepened as he grew older.  As he entered his teenage years, he was becoming somewhat bitter about it.
    He started devising experiments to test his theory.  Once, as his father was passing him in the hall, Stuart dropped a vase of flowers onto the floor in front of him.  Rather than appear angry at the obviously intentional “accident,” his father looked quizzically at the shattered vase, almost as if he was wondering how it had suddenly gotten from the dining room table to under his feet.
    On another occasion, Stuart left the bathtub running with water until it started to spill over the edge.  And despite standing in the pooling water as his parents entered the room, he was not punished for his lack of care.  Rather his older sister took the blame, as she had recently become fixated on hygiene and personal appearance upon entering high school, but even she was not angry with him.  Instead she blamed their younger sister, who had taken to mocking her peculiar bathing habits.
    Even at school, Stuart was never called upon to answer a question at the chalkboard.  Few of the other children ever acknowledged him when he sat at their lunch table or tried to join a conversation.  And at recess, he was never chosen by either team to play kickball, despite being the last child in the group waiting to be picked.
    By the time he was 14, Stuart had been disregarded by his family and peers to the point of an almost living non-existence.  It was at this point that he decided to take drastic action, and packing up his most beloved possessions, he walked down to the county courthouse to put himself up for adoption.  Surprisingly to Stuart, his actions were met with helpful cooperation by the courthouse staff.  He hadn't anticipated his dilemma extending further than his immediate social circle.  All the paperwork was mysteriously put through the system, entirely without parental consent or notice by any other authority.
    Stuart only stayed with one adoptive family for about a month before finally accepting that his social invisibility was likely comprehensive.  He departed without notice and moved back into his room at home, going equally unnoticed there.  He continued his education and tried to live normally, despite being alone most of the time.  He graduated from college without pomp or circumstance.  He didn't even attend his graduation ceremony.  He moved into a modest flat in the city and found a job as an auditor at a small insurance company.
    His apartment was humble by any standard, but it suited him nicely.  He didn't have many possessions to start with, and he seldom bought anything new, unless he should really need it.  He watched television on occasion, but he preferred listening to the radio.  The only hobby he maintained over the years was a stamp collection, which he had started midway through high school.  He was surprised at taking a real liking to it.  He found himself enamored with the creativity imbued within each individual stamp.  They were so beautiful.  And they suggested so many far off places that Stuart longed to see for himself.  He dreamed of walking the Great Wall, rowing the Grand Canal in Venice, and climbing to the top of Ayer's Rock.  He imagined riding a camel past the Great Pyramids and sharing a romantic evening atop the Eiffel Tower with a mysterious and beautiful Parisian woman.  He wished he could see all those places for real, but he didn't make enough money to indulge in any of those fantasies.  His stamps were the closest he could ever come to being there.
    Stuart had noticed over the course of several years that his “condition,” as he had come to call it, wasn't absolute with new acquaintances.  Upon first meeting a person, he was afforded a polite, if rather glassy, acknowledgment.  This is how he was able to achieve the modest levels of success he could lay claim to.  Over time, however, everyone began to disregard Stuart until he reached his “normal” state.  Luckily, his job didn't require much human interaction.  After obtaining the position, his audits were delivered automatically to his mailbox.  When he finished his work, he placed it in the corresponding box and went about his way.
    Stuart tried not to think about his predicament, but it became increasingly harder to do the older he got.  He was a lonely man.  Once, when he tried to strike up a conversation around the water cooler at work, one of his colleagues looked to the man next to Stuart and asked, “Did you say something?”
    “No,” was the reply.  “Did you, Shelly?”
    Shelly did not.
    “Strange,” said the first.  “Thought I heard something.  Guess it was nothing.”
    Stuart tried a few more times to similar results.  After that, he only visited the water cooler when he was thirsty.
    At 27, he began to really feel the absence of a love life.  Having no luck in the real world, he turned to the virtual realm.  He signed up for a dating service and sent out several messages to women he found attractive and similarly disposed.  Only one ever replied, however, and only to tell him that she wished to pursue other matches.  It was a pre-arranged response.  Stuart speculated that she probably hadn't even looked at his profile.  He decided to try in his professional circle, but none of his female co-workers afforded him even the slightest look.  Not even Belinda, the plain, meek clerk from Accounting would offer him a smile.  She glanced when he said hello.  Nodded even, but she didn't respond any more fully.
    For two years, Stuart pursued a personal relationship of any sort in every way he could think of, but to no avail.  Desperate, he took to wandering the streets of the city, stopping people in their tracks and speaking directly to them, but they all brushed by.  Nobody ever spoke back, even in anger at being stopped by a complete stranger.  They simply walked on, distracted by their own busy lives.
    By the time he was 32, Stuart had become disillusioned about most everything.  He experimented with skipping work for a time.  His audits began to stack up, higher and higher, until finally there was a six week backlog that nobody could quite figure out.  Usually, these audits were just - done.  No one remembered who was responsible for them.  Stuart had taken down his name plate from his mailbox as a precaution, but wondered later if that was even necessary.  He continued to receive a paycheck, as it was directly deposited into his account every two weeks.  It appeared that his deliberate absence was never even examined.
    At 34, Stuart decided to rob a bank.  His bank, to be precise.  He figured that having already set up his account and being a regular customer, he would likely be invisible to the bank staff.  He tested this theory first by following several of the employees around the premises.  He walked in and out of the teller areas.  He sat in the bank president's office.  He even managed to look over a teller's shoulder as she punched in the code to the vault door.  And as he suspected, he was never questioned by anyone.
    The bank only had a few thousand dollars in the vault, as most of its customers money was maintained electronically.  That suited Stuart fine.  He wasn't looking to make grand larceny a career.  On the day he chose to act on his plan, he walked calmly into the bank, moved directly to the teller counter, lifted the door, and strolled up to the vault.  He punched in the code and walked inside.  He emptied all the cash he could carry into a large backpack, and as easily as he came in, he ambled back out.  He sat in the cafe across the street for the next several hours, waiting for the police to arrive.  They finally did, greeted at the door by the bank president, who was wearing a rather befuddled look on his face.  Stuart considered the bank's surveillance cameras intently for the next hour or so.  He wasn't nervous - more curious at what action the police would take.  He knew he wasn't concealed from electronic capture.  The question was whether the police would see him as a suspect or just another bank employee.
    As it turned out, he was assumed to be the latter.  He was never approached about the crime by anyone.  Apparently, the police were looking closely at a teller who had been planning an extended vacation.  The next week, disappointed by the result of his experiment, he returned the money in the same fashion that he'd taken it.  The disappearance was written off as a clerical error, as he found out several days later.  This didn't raise his spirits any.
    Two years later, Stuart's life was destitute.  He hadn't been to work for a year and a half, though he still received his pay on a regular basis.  Mostly, he wandered the city, stopping in bars, restaurants, parks, the subway, anywhere human interaction was prevalent.  He studied the faces of people in every walk of life, from high-powered executives to cab drivers, coffee corner poets to department store clerks and homeless men living in alleys.  He witnessed the utter joy of a bride at a wedding and the heartbreaking tragedy of a family lost in a car accident.  He tried to soak in all the feelings that he could only acquire through observation of other people's lives.
    On his 37th birthday, Stuart decided to kill himself.  He took a long, soothing shower, carefully shaved, and put on his very best suit.  He listened to his favorite radio program and then arranged the manner of his demise – pills and a bottle of expensive champagne.  It was only when he sat down to draft his letter of farewell that he realized he had no one to leave it to.  His family had forgotten him long ago.  He received his last Christmas card from them when he was 24.  They never called, and the few times he called them, they didn't  recognize his voice and asked him to repeat his name.  During the last call, they simply hung up.  And he had no friends to speak of.  Not even his landlord really knew who he was.  Six months earlier, Stuart had stopped paying his rent.  The landlord started showing his apartment to potential tenants, noting that it was already furnished, often while Stuart was sitting in his chair or eating a sandwich in the kitchen.  Luckily, nobody had been interested in such a tiny living space, and his landlord soon gave up on showing it for a time.
    Stuart laughed at the absurdity of his situation.  There was little else he could do.  Seeing no point in ending his life anymore, he put away the pills and simply enjoyed the champagne as he listened to the radio long into the night.
    Not long afterward, Stuart picked up his life where he'd left off.  He resumed work and started paying his rent again, to no one's notice, as expected.  He continued to observe the public lives of others, but he focused more on the happy times than he had before.  He was still lonely, though he tried not to think about it.  He lived quietly in his tiny apartment, seeing to his stamp collection and falling asleep to classical music in the evenings.  He told himself that invisibility was simply his lot in life and that he shouldn't let it spoil what he had, though he wasn't always so positive about it.  He even traveled to a few of the places he dreamed of long ago, wandering those far away cities, in equal solitude as at home.
    When he was 53, Stuart took a walk.  He made his way downtown and looked up at the buildings.  He breathed in deeply, and feeling a pain in his chest, he fell to the sidewalk.  He didn't remember that part, only coming to a moment later lying on his back.  People walked around him, eyes forward.  But then – a plump woman with a vibrant face in her forties glanced down at him.  She looked him right in the eyes and jumped as though he'd just appeared out of thin air.  She knelt down beside him and took his hand, which was clenched at his chest.  He looked at her in wonderment.  She called out for help.  She pleaded with the passing crowd for someone to call an ambulance.  There was a sick man here.  She was doing it for him.  He gazed up at her serene face as she looked back down at his, a tear rolling off her eyelashes.  It landed on his cheek, where it mingled with his own.  He felt a welling of joy in his stomach like he had never known before.  He thought, why couldn't this have happened to me 20 years ago.  And at that moment, lying on the sidewalk, a heavenly stranger clutching his hand, Stuart Selwyn Kurnitz closed his eyes and died.