It’s a carnival ride. You’re on the way home in a quiet bus filled with passengers, and more than half have their own little people attached to them, sitting and lounging in the proximity of their faces. There’s a middle aged man, slumped dozing a couple of rows in front of you; long thinning hair pressed against a window. His little people gesture at a teenage boy one seat farther up. Now the boy’s miniature gang, all teenagers themselves, begin to shout back, make obscene gestures; completely unrestrained. And as you watch, the unrest mounts, spreads until several rows of seats are in an uproar. Dozens of angry little people, in some cases leaping from one passenger to another, do battle with their fists. Their blows pass harmlessly through each other’s incorporeal body which makes them even more furious. It’s like watching soccer hooligans with the sound turned off, while the actual people, their hosts, stoically reign in their thoughts and feelings and continue to ride the bus in a normal, civilized fashion.
Not everyone’s shoulders are as crowded as Myrna’s. Most people have just two or three, and some only one—one solitary little surrogate—traveling along with his or her solitary person, shouting into his or her ear, pulling on the short ends of his or her hair. You can’t help but notice how these creatures, though dressed strangely out of some other period of time, often resemble the person they cling to. The bus driver has a little coachman in tails cracking his whip. A young woman with a designer backpack plops herself down on a handicapped seat, frowning, pretending to stare into nothingness while her little people gesture obscenely at the little people perched on the shoulders of the elderly ladies who are forced to hang on to the grab-handles along the aisle.
When you reach your apartment you find that Mr Nobody has torn out the side of the bag of kibble even though you’d talked on the phone to the Super about feeding him. You give him fresh water and spoon out a can of tuna and scratch him behind the ears the way he likes it but you do it hurriedly, partly because you’re exhausted, and partly because you’re dying to turn on the TV. Now flipping through its several hundred channels, including the sports and shopping ones that are supposedly live, you can’t find a single host or reporter with a small-scale person. From this, you conclude that the little influencers—which is what you’ve begun to call them in your mind—cannot be picked up by cameras. You heat up a can of French onion soup, toast yourself a stale English muffin and, with Mr Nobody purring madly sprawled beside you on the sofa, you struggle to get interested in the latest implausible installment of Madmen.
Back at the boffice, it’s a house of horrors: virtually every person here has some, and depending on their position in the company, their influencers share nearly the same status as their hosts. Many, but not all of these influencers look like they arrived from a hundred years ago. You see little people with glue pots, men with sleeve bands and visors, hoop skirts, canes, derby hats. One of the ACDs, Lemme Stoche, carries a romantic looking lady with a bulging bustle and frilly dress. She clutches a bouquet of tiny flowers and blows kisses in all directions. Harold Black, the Video Producer, travels with six officers with swords hanging from their belts. What’s most shocking is, when you find yourself stuck once again in the elevator with Jack Seminole, you can see, riding on the shoulders of his immaculate vicuña suit, none other than the Count Otto Von Bismark—a historical figure you recognize from your college course in European History. Five or six other personages of both sexes travel with the count, all upper-class gentry, wearing an assortment of riding breeches, top hats, big flouncy dresses and frock coats. The count, with his pointy helmet, is the tallest. Now it’s clear why Jack Seminole has never responded to your greetings. It’s not because he’s so deeply distracted by his agency’s business, it’s because conversing with you is so beneath him. Moments after you enter the elevator, Von Bismark turns his back while his confederates peer down at you and snicker.
So a pattern is emerging: The behavior of people on earth is modified by the personalities of the beings that cling to them. Whether these are ancestors or reincarnations, you have no way of knowing. You can’t hear them or speak with them though it’s clear they talk among themselves. You can only observe their behavior, their body language, their gestures. You can see their lips moving and the expressions on their faces.
And you can see the way they relate to you. You can see how many of them laugh and point their fingers at you if they acknowledge you at all. You can clearly see how you’re somebody of minuscule import here at the boffice, of virtually no interest to anyone, mildly amusing if a little bit suspect. Although you find all this transparency upsetting, and you feel shocked and unhappy at first, it turns out, at GSB at least, it’s a sort of blessing: your newfound ability to see, in a moment, the unstated intentions and tendencies of all the people you work with. And maybe it’s not surprising that the people with whom you have the most affinity have the most sympathetic influencers, and the people you never feel comfortable with have the most daunting, mean spirited and unlikeable ones. In the meantime, Myrna, along with her own assembly of misfits, is her usual self: caustic, unrestrained, but just like she was in the hospital, sounding weirdly emo about her latest happenings.
“Thank god you’re back,” she whispers. “Nobody else around here has a gag reflex.”
“About what?” you whisper back.
“About any of it. Like using the face of Simone d’Beauvoir to sell granola bars.”
“They’re doing one with Gandhi too.”
“That’s ’cause it has cashews.”
You laugh silently. “How have you been?”
“I'm getting a tattoo of the shark!” she says.
“Really? Where?”
She touches her slim forearm. “The AD on Simian Mobile, Gorrim or whatever his name is, says he’ll draw it up for me.”
“You know Art Directors can’t draw, Myrna. They just know Photoshop.”
“If I don’t like it, Sam says he knows an artist who can do it.”
“Oh, Sam…. How’s he doing?”
“He’s fucking magnificent.”
“Wow.”
“He’s revelatory.”
Three of Myrna’s surrogates seem to be observing you. The monk’s in the lotus position with his eyes closed; meditating… or eavesdropping. The little Jacobin lady with the red hat grins at you and slowly points her pole with its decapitated head in your direction.
“So you and Sam…? That’s great!” you add quickly.
Myrna leans close and lowers her whisper. “I gotta say, young men can really fuck!”
“Ha!” is all you can think of.
“He’s ten years younger than me!”
“I wasn’t asking—”
“It’s just fantastic!”
Ajani shows up then. She’s focused on Myrna. “Cheesy Bites,” she says. “How soon?”
“I’ll do it after I get through with this cheesy bank shit.”
“Cheesy Bites are hotter.”
Myrna bends down and starts shuffling through the job jackets on the floor. “You shoulda told me before,” she says.
Ajani finally looks over at you but you’re eyes are on the pretty girls on her shoulder; both of them. They sit primly, side by side in summer dresses. Maybe they’re twins. A burly little man dressed like a coal miner is slumped on the other side of her head. He’s less than half as big as the girls, facing away from you.
“Hey, Navel,” Ajani says.
“Hey.”
“It’s been a shit show here.”
You don’t say anything. You’re thinking about what Myrna just told you.
“The new freelancer’s a clusterella,” she adds in an undertone.
“Sorry to hear.”
“Were you on vacation?”
“I think I remember calling you from the hospital…?”
“Oh, yeah. But there’s no way you’ve been in the hospital for two weeks?”
“Thirteen days.”
Besides Myrna, Ajani’s the only person who seems to have noticed you’ve been gone. And after coming to work for several days, you finally conclude you’re the only person in the entire agency who doesn’t have an influencer. This must be the deficiency that makes you so obscure. Not having influencers of your own has doomed you to a separate and special category, the category of nonentity. You walk around town and notice them precisely because of this nonexistent trait; people you have to scrutinize in order to see. They’re the ones making change through little windows, the ones being bumped by somebody’s cart at the store. They wait vainly for a drink at the bar. They have to scurry to make it across the street. Those without influencers are left to soldier on, to muddle through all the transactions of life. The barista can never remember your name when he uncapps his Sharpie. People describe you as nondescript. It’s people like you who are born to fill the gaps of the social stratum you think. It’s the only conclusion you can reach, and it helps to solidify the thoughts you had about yourself even before you started seeing the influencers. It’s something you’ve known for years even if you could never put your finger on it.
So now there’s a new big mystery: How does one get to have these influencers? And how do you get the right kind of influencers to help you lead the life you always wanted…?
As if you even know what sort of life you ever wanted.
More and more, you find yourself going out of your way to see people that otherwise you never cared to see simply because you want to find out who their influencers might be. You buy an expensive pair of binoculars and begin to attend musical events, sporting events. You take a new interest in theater. You go to political rallies. Your curiosity gets the better of you and you rush off from work to see what sorts of influencers this latest famous person, this big cheese, this one celebrity or another has on his or her shoulders to make them do the things they do and act the way they act. In every case you’re rewarded with an insight. That history repeats itself is because the movers and shakers of history have never gone away. You haven’t seen Hitler or Einstein yet, but you’re fairly sure they can be found attached to some contemporary fascist or Nobel laureate, if you can only get close enough to look.
Influencers aren’t visible in photos. You can’t see them on the internet. They exist in a strange slightly tremulous blue light and you can only detect them with your naked eye. Extraordinary people with extraordinary allies; you’ve been thinking about it for some time. You have to wonder: What kind of influencers attend that person who so dazzled you with her radiance? The ineffable beauty, the one who baited you and so nonchalantly toyed with you and made you run for your life? What sort of influencers might be found on graceful shoulders of the beautiful Alana? It’s your burning curiosity about this question that moves you to call her on the phone.
I'm sensing a pattern here. Swan also had visions of little people - "also known as Lilliputian visions - are not uncommon in the land of Charles Bonnet syndrome. Many living with CBS report 'seeing' miniature people who are about the size of a finger." Ottala was definitely influential. Will these little influencers stick around to the end and be audible? I'd like to hear what they have to say.
I can emphasize with Neville. I've waited at bars in vain many times.