The Faceless Ones

It was raining. Lightning streaked across the sky in various sequences, illuminating the streets below. Maynard Eddings didn’t have an umbrella, nor did he have a raincoat. He was huddled against the wall underneath an awning over an entrance to some deli; the only constant light was the bluish glow of the neon hot dog sign, flickering just beside him. Other people were gathered around him, trying to keep dry, waiting at the Akard DART station for the light rail to come and take them off to the suburbs. It wasn’t always like this for Maynard Eddings. He used to be the owner of Maynard Financial, LLC, one of the most powerful brokerages in the world. He used to have mansions across the US, condos in London and Rome, women hanging off his arms wherever he went. Now he was ruined. Freshly out of the penitentiary in a cheap charity suit, stubble growing on his face. He sighed.

When times were bad before, he knew he could go to the bank and take out a loan, or use his credit cards. Not anymore. No one would lend to anyone with the last name of Eddings, not after the sub-prime scams he had been accused of doing. Of course, he maintained his innocence, but the SEC, the FBI and the court system had politely disagreed. He knew his money was gone when his wife and lawyer had shown up together at the pen to visit. While they walked away, she had given his lawyer a peck on the cheek and he a slap on her rear. And he didn't have any friends - he had forgotten or destroyed anyone close to him on his way to the top, so he understood why none helped him now that he was on the bottom. Those that were with him at the top weren't friends, they were, in the words of Kissinger, "interests".

That’s not who he was mad at. He couldn’t blame his lawyer – his wife was attractive, or his wife – she married him for the money, after all. He couldn't blame his friends either. No, who he thought about on that rainy day in May was Special Agent Milton Brands. Eddings had long learned in life that people were not born equal. Either you were born with that special flair that made you into someone or you were born normal like everyone else, doomed to live your life as a bottom feeder. That was the way of things. What Eddings couldn’t stand about Brands, and all these other government people, was that here were a bunch of ordinaries carrying the tools of the State to keep men like him down. Eddings wasn’t the first man Brands and his cronies had brought in on embezzlement charges. And he wouldn’t be the last. It wouldn’t be too soon until all the Atlases of the world shrugged.

He had to quit doting on his hatred for Milton Brands. There were more pressing concerns – more immediate concerns, mainly that of food and shelter. In his pocket was two hundred dollars and a calling card to someone who could help him get a job – as what? A produce manager? Eddings would starve before he worked at a grocery store. He had people do shopping for him. Well, he did have people who did that for him.

“Excuse me, do you have any spare change? I can give you a dollar, I just need to use the phone,” he said to his closest neighbor, a scrawny, middle aged black man in a tan suit.

“Here, you can just use my phone,” he said, handing his phone to Eddings.

“Oh thanks,” he replied. He dialed the only person’s number he had memorized, his driver. “Hey Marty, it’s me.”

“Yeah, I’d recognize that voice. So they let you out?” Marty said.

“Fresh out. Look, I was wondering if I could hold up at your place for a while?”

“You remember that time you didn’t let me off work when my mom was dying?”

“No.”

“Of course you wouldn’t.”

Click.

Eddings lowered the phone from his ear and stared at it. He began to imagine every future conversation with his past acquaintances turning out like that. He handed the phone back to the man, who then stepped away to catch his train.

“Maynard Eddings?” a woman’s voice called out. A young, freckle faced, red haired woman emerged from the rain to stand next to him under the awning. She folded up her umbrella so that the rain drops wouldn’t flow down on him like the Victoria Falls the rest of his luck was. “I’m Cadence Juneau. I used to work for you.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, shaking his head. A pity, she was fairly attractive and did - as Maynard Eddings was always to notice - have a shapely bosom lifting up her purple blouse.

“I used to be one of your admins,” her tone was noticeably drier. She hadn’t originally come up to be hostile to him, but since she had worked in his office and often answered his emails and sent faxes for him, she had even slept with him, and he didn’t even remember her.

Another train rumbled up. The blue banner across the front said “Garland”. “That’s my train,” she told him, excusing herself. She ran to the platform and climbed on the blue-line train. Eddings watched her as she went along, hitting himself in the head with his open palm. He was off his game. Of course, these were strange circumstances. He never had expected to get caught – not that he was doing anything wrong, of course. Well, at least he had the five hundred dollars in his pocket. That’ll give him a few nights to think at the Magnolia Hotel and at least somewhere to go to get out of the rain.

Eddings stared at himself in the small hotel room mirror. With his five hundred dollars, he had four nights. He sighed. Four nights, or one night with a lot of drink, and he really felt like the drink, to take off the edge. Moments later, he found himself at a sports bar, sitting at a marble countertop, staring gloomily in the dimly lit mirror, occasionally glancing to the side where they were filming some reality TV show. This is it then, having to mix with all these ordinaries, drinking scotch and dressed in a cheap suit. Even the material felt cheap. It could get worse, he supposed, he could be on the street, without the room to go back to. Three more nights then.

Several days later, Eddings had no room and no money. He had squandered it away, something he had never done before. How times had changed, but he had to take it how it came. Standing near the Pearl Street DART station, he leaned against the wall, looking at a beggar. The beggar was dressed in a dirty brown raincoat with a collection of argyle rags underneath. His face had long been unshaven and was, in a way that Eddings couldn’t quite pin, rather nondescript. It wasn’t that he had no features, it was that he had no describable features. He didn’t understand what he was seeing, which brought him intense interest.

The beggar went from person to person, head tucked down and letting out a low haggard mutter for help. A walrus could have panhandled better and invoked more sympathy than this bum. Even more interesting to Maynard was that no one seemed to notice him. They could, of course, have been ignoring him, he would have done the same on a normal occasion - had he ever had to take the light rail before, that is. He would have been reading the Wall Street Journal or going over various numbers on his iPhone, completely oblivious to the outside world. But now he was disillusioned with the world of finance. He just didn’t want to go back – there was an unexplainable aversion. Not that he could go back, anyway, who would hire him? Who would lend him money to invest? He had no capital and he had no leverage.

“Change?” a mutter drifted through the air from beneath the beggar’s constantly shifting beard. It was low and forced, not unlike the solid rattle of an aging HVAC unit. The rattle sliced through Eddings’ thoughts and he looked up at the beggar and attempted to meet his gaze, but it was too downcast and wasn’t really holdable anyway. The beggar’s face made him sick and made his head spin. He didn’t understand what was happening – he couldn’t even figure out what color the bum’s beard was.

“You… can see me?” the beggar said, raising his face towards Eddings. Eddings stepped back, gasping.

“You have no face!” he said. That’s what it was that Eddings didn’t understand. It wasn’t that the beard had no color; it was that there was no beard. It wasn’t that the face was indescribable; it was that there was no face to describe!

The beggar shuffled off.

Eddings was sick to the stomach. He had to sit down or he was going to empty it on the railway. He found a seat at one of the steel mesh benches, designed so that no one would want to sit in one for longer than it took for a train to arrive.

“You’re Maynard Eddings,” came a gruff, cigarette laced voice from next to him on the bench. Someone was resisting the design technique of the bench and had been sitting in it for longer than the train to arrive, Eddings realized. Eddings looked next to him, hoping that this guy wasn’t faceless like the last one. It was another bum, but this one had a very describable face, thankfully. It hung low, like a pug’s, drooping down to the ground. His eyes were clear and blue and there was a deep scar across his left cheek.

“Yes,” Eddings said. His queasiness was beginning to subside, though the pungent smell of the man next to him was quickly giving him a new reason to be queasy.

“Welcome to our world,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Only those on their way can see the faceless ones. It’s a difficult sight.”

“You mean those people weren’t just ignoring him?”

“There isn’t much difference, is there?” the man said. Eddings could smell vodka on his breath, but the man spoke clearly and with an even cadence. He was evidently not drunk.

“I guess not,” he said softly after a moment. “Are there many of… of them?”

“There is a whole city of them down at the Trinity Park, underneath the highway. Few can stand them, but we’ll all be them soon, so we make sure there’s food. Us norms supply them today, other norms supply us tomorrow. It’s an investment of sorts,” he chuckled. "I guess that kind of work doesn't really make sense to you folk."

“How does it happen?”

“When you’re on the street long enough, you begin to be forgotten by everyone. You begin to disappear from existence and eventually you even forget who you are. When that happens, the image that you project begins to deteriorate. It's complicated, you know. But basically, you're only the sum of what people think of you, on like, a psychological, spiritual and metaphysical level.”

Eddings was quiet. Maybe this guy was drunk. There was no clear way of telling, except perhaps by the insanity that he was hearing. But then there was that… that thing that he saw earlier. Would he really become like that one day? No, certainly people remembered him, if not even for good things.

“You have fallen a long way, Maynard Eddings, but you still have a great distance more to fall.” The bum stood up, patted his dirt caked jeans and started walking away.

Eddings raced to his side. “Wait! Who are you? Why are you not faceless?”

“My name is Robert Keines, but that’s not important. And I have only not turned yet… I am still remembered, someone out there still thinks of me.”

Eddings stopped, letting Keines walk on. Robert Keines. He knew that name from somewhere. Robert Keines was a painter, that’s where he recognized the name. He had bought one of his paintings sometime ago at a gallery showing down on Lemmon Street. And he’s a bum? How fickle is fortune after all? But at least he’s clearly not forgotten. Insane, very likely, but not forgotten. And what had he, Maynard Eddings, done that was lasting and would leave him remembered and not without identity? He had built a financial empire that now only lives on in dust covered SEC and FBI records. And who reads those?

But he barely remembered Keines, even the fame in art fades, and unless they had achieved something great, then artists will fade all the same. What both Keines and himself had in common then, was that clearly they were both without true friends. Eddings wondered what the artist had done to alienate himself. And perhaps his own infamy could propel him in the same terms Keines’s art had done. Perhaps he will be enough cursed by those whose lives he had ruined that his face will remain.

He no longer was greatly worried about food and shelter, or killing Milton Brands, now that he knew there were greater things to fear.

Eddings felt strange. It wasn’t the Pabst Blue Ribbon that was in the tall can on the ground next to him. It wasn’t that he was awake in the cold at three in the morning, sitting on the Mockingbird Street bridge that crossed over Highway 75, staring at the giant towers of downtown Dallas just to the south. He was feeling extraordinarily lonely and keen to asking himself the most basic existential questions.

“Quit pondering that, Maynard,” a voice came from behind.

“Robert!”

“You’re starting to regress. You feel it, don’t you?”

“How do I stop it?”

Keines grunted and was quiet. “The stars of the city are its lights,” Keines finally said.

“What does that mean?”

“It’s from a song I heard once. It means lots of things. You can’t see the stars from the city, but all the lights shine like stars. But it can also mean that the lights of the city, the real philanthropists and do-gooders, are its stars. I used to make tons of money, Maynard, but I hated everyone. It didn’t matter that I was an excellent painter – the best – I treated everyone badly and now look where I am.” He looked up, seeing only the North Star shining clearly. “Stars don't eat up everything around them. They give light. Black holes eat up everything around them. We're black holes, Maynard.”

“You want a beer?” Eddings asked Keines after a while.

“How you have fallen,” Keines shook his head with a smile. “Sure.” Eddings handed him a Pabst. They both sat there, staring at the stars of the city, listening to the cars roar behind them.

“I see you’ve managed to keep your shoes,” Keines said.

“Yeah, someone tried to steal them the other night, but I kicked them.”

“Brutal,” Keines replied. “Maybe he needed them more than you?”

“We can’t all have my shoes,” Eddings replied.

“I’m going to help you,” Keines said.

“You’re a star,” Eddings told him.

At first, Maynard Eddings had refused to beg. He had always worked hard for everything he did and he would never accept charity from anyone. Hunger had a humbling effect on him, though. There was an obvious and inverse relationship between Eddings’s hunger and his level of pride. He was comforted also by the fact that people could still see him and that made the matter of his panhandling easier to swallow.

He found some good tactics. He learned that people who were trapped, that is, on a patio or at a bus stop, were less likely to give than people walking along. Also, the more exposure to people he had increased his return, so that it was best to beg during lunch or rush hours than while people were at work. The sales rule, “law of averages”, also played into effect: you couldn’t get angry when you didn’t get any money, you just put your ego aside and moved on, the big one was waiting. Also, the middle class people were more likely to give a dollar or two. Service industry people were always bitter towards him and rich people were usually a bit more stingy. He therefore stationed himself near the lunch areas, so that he was in the path of people who were either going to or coming back from lunch. He was in-between the great rectangular Bank of America building and the marble clad Department of Justice building, near the great parking lot that divided the two so eloquently. There was where Milton Brands worked. He needed resources if he was going to take care of Milton Brands. And those resources were the people walking by. Every time he turned towards that building, he sneered.

“Excuse me sir, I just need to get a few dollars to eat,” he said to one guy walking along in business casual. Those are the best targets. This man gave him two dollars.

“Thank you,” he said to him. He wasn’t to the point of doling out blessings, but he did thank people. He turned back and saw Cadence Juneau walking right towards him. He remembered her name this time and he remembered how hurt she was when he forgot who she was. And he remembered what Keines had said. Normally he wouldn’t care about hurting some woman’s feelings, especially one he had no real use for. But she remembered him and that’s what he needed now.

“Cadence!” he called out to her. He saw her turn to her male friend and say, “Here he is.” She didn’t seem happy. “Cadence, I’m sorry about the other day, I was just under so much stress and you look so different then when I last knew you.”

“Different?”

“Prettier. You must have done something with your hair.”

“Well, yes. Look, just get away, I can’t deal with you,” she told him.

When the two passed, he heard the friend say, “Good job, I’m proud of you.”

Eddings shuffled away from Cadence, head down and hurt. Why was he hurt? He wouldn’t have cared before, but now he was so afraid. He was to meet Keines soon and now all he could think of was Cadence. This was idiocy, he thought. Screw her, if she’s going to be like that. He’ll find someone else to remember him. He was strong, he didn’t need anyone else. And yet he did if he was going to survive. He was already starting to lose himself. Soon he’ll be one of the faceless ones too.

“Maynard!” Keines called out to him. “Are you ready?”

“Yes. Where are we going?”

“Just come with me. I can’t promise you it will be easy, though.”

They walked together to the south of the downtown, towards the Trinity River Bridge, built as a loop around downtown, barring practical use of the greenbelt known as the Trinity River Park. The park was always empty and barren, perfect for its primary inhabitants – the faceless ones. The abode of those who were forgotten. Keines led Eddings to one of the bridges that spanned over the park, to get a view of the whole expanse, to see the whole population of them.

“Look at them,” he told Eddings.

“I can’t,” Eddings replied.

“If you want to live, look at them!”

“I can’t!” he cried back. He turned around and threw up. “It’s too… they’re too… nauseating. They make my head spin.”

“You’re weak. If you want to be saved, you must walk among them. There’s something that you have to get that they have among them. Look at them from here, it’s easier here. Get used to it. Then we’ll go down.”

Eddings brought himself back up to the rail, forcing himself to look down. His eyes kept averting from their faces, brushing off, but he kept forcing them back. It made his stomach reel, churning and rising.

“Look at them!” Keines yelled.

He was dizzy. He was going to wretch again. He was going to fall down and pass out. But he kept forcing himself to keep looking. He didn’t wretch again or do those other things. His nausea subsided. He became stronger.

“Let’s do it,” he told Keines.

Keines led him down below the bridge, into the pit of the forgotten. They pushed their way to the middle, Eddings shivering and shaking along the way, but he still managed to hold himself. They arrived at the center of the park, next to, ironically, a monument to the unknown soldier.

“Now,” Keines said to Eddings, who was keeping his eyes in constant aversion to the faceless ones around him. “Look at them.”

He forced his eyes up to look at those faces. They constantly slipped and slid and changed. Was it his imagination or was it real? The faces took form and changed. Their voices called out to him for help. “Help me!” “Help me!” “Help!” They all called to him in whispers. They reached out and touched his jacket and his face and his hair. They all crowded in, wanting so badly to touch him.

And there was his brother next to him. He had last seen his brother, asking for his help, having just been through a foreclosure. Maynard had said good riddance. There were his parents, who he had left alone in the nursing home all those years.

“Scott?” Eddings called out. “Mom? Dad?”

The faces slid and changed constantly. There was Lisa and Brian and David and Joan, there were all the people who had been a part of his life that he had cast out and trampled on. There was Milton Brands. There was Cadence.

“No, I can’t do this!” he cried out. “Get me out of here!”

“Look at them!” Keines yelled back, pulling Eddings’s hair to force his face up and forward.

“Help me! Help me!” they continued crying out. He knew these faces, he knew these voices. Eddings punched Keines in the jaw and knocked his hands out of his hair. Then he pushed all the homeless and faceless, making his way through to the open. When he was free, he at last wretched, emptying out the remaining contents of his stomach. “No, no, no,” he kept repeating to himself as he kept crawling away. He finally broke, unable to crawl further and he curled up in a fetal position crying. Crying to his brother, to his parents, to Cadence, to all the people he had ruined. Keines followed him and knelt down, putting his hand on his shoulder.

“Who did you see?”

Eddings told him. “Did that happen to you too? You saw them too?”

“Yes. Others have to. I stayed so that I could show others, change others, save them. This is worth more than my art, it is my art now, in a sense.”

“I see why you don’t change now.”

“Why?” Keines asked, despite knowing the answer. He wondered if Eddings really got it.

“So that you won’t be forgotten?”

“No, no,” Keines said, frowning. “Or, in a sense, I suppose, but I like to think it has more to do with love, but maybe you’re right. It’s still a bit selfish isn’t it? But I’m an artist. I imagine higher things.”

“I know how that is, I was a financier. I wanted higher things.”

“Our higher things were a bit different, I’m thinking.”

“Probably,” Eddings wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “What now?”

“Now maybe you won’t be forgotten. Go and make yourself again.”

Eddings was back on the street, on Wednesday, at the same place he had seen Cadence. He was staring at the federal court house, thinking that he should let go of his hatred for Milton Brands. He looked there no longer with contempt, but rather, with ease. It was okay. He had deserved what he got.

“Maynard?” he heard someone call. He turned. It was Cadence. “Maynard, listen -”

“No, you listen. I’m sorry. I was terrible to you. Not just for not recognizing you, but for when you worked with me. For what happened.”

She saw his earnestness. Tears flowed from her face freely. “I’m sorry for being cruel to you the other day. Look, I know you need some help. I’ve got some extra money that maybe I can help you with, as you know, a loan or something?”

“That’d be nice. I don’t think I can take anything from you though.”

“Well, you’re welcome to it.”

“I won’t forget your kindness. Please, don’t forget me.”

 She looked at him strangely. Then she said, “I won’t.”