Free The More You Ignore Me by Travis Nichols

manifestations’ eventual downfall?
    Yes.
    It is.
    Let’s enjoy the irony for a moment.
    Perhaps in due time I will post the entirety of my as-yet-unproduced screenplay for your enjoyment, dear readers, but until then let’s acknowledge that the screenplay form, glorious as it is in my hands, has its limits.
    It cannot encompass all of experience.
    If we are to fully understand these types of relationships, which we are indeed to do if we are to proceed, then we need to push beyond all “genre” limitations.
    Yes, it is obvious that the past requires a novelist’s touch, that majestic sentences must stream from the pinpricks of facts to adequately capture the time and place of my (or any!) sentimental education, for the novelist takes a true story and lies about it, or takes a lie and tells a true story about it. Either way, to the reader it all appears at the same time to be gospel and supreme artifice.
    Shall we begin?

CHAPTER 1
    Rachil sold tickets in a brightly lit glass-enclosed booth that sat in front of the shabby University cinema, which itself fit snugly inside a student union, a campus hub at the center of a tawdry rural town made nationally prominent only by this second-rate educational institution’s rah-rah football team.
    Seen from above, the campus looked like a metastasizing cancer growth in an otherwise robust body of farmland.
    A boy named Corn ran the cinema’s projector in a dark concrete room that smelled like wet Band-Aids and trench foot.
    It was 1989.
    Night after night, Corn would curl his lithe body around the film splicer, snipping out the stills of titillating scenes for his “private collection,” sweat pouring from his greasy scalp as his wormy fingers did their wormy work.
    Night after night, Rachil, an almond-eyed brunette with the dark allure of a young Ally Sheedy, would sell her allotment of tickets and, drawn by a rank impulse quite inexplicable, would knock on the fireproof door to the projection booth while Corn built up or broke down the film.
    He would heave open the door and bid her enter with a pervy grin.
    Up she would climb, mounting the few steps to the projection platform where Corn sat amid the fluttering reels of celluloid.
    On some nights, as Rachil and Corn lounged in that dark bunker, he would watch her laugh her perfect laugh and wonder how he hadn’t always known about the blaring clown horn that existed inside of him.
    It now blared all day long: RAAAACHHHHILLLL RAAAACHHHHILLLL!
    Yes, it was the horn of love, readers. We can almost pity poor Corn.
    Before this horn, Corn had merely expelled his seed into/onto whatever deluded virgin crossed his path without a care for “feelings,” but now, there she was, leaning on the steel banister on the stairs of the projection room, rolling her eyes as she recounted tales of barroom boys with earnest ardor, and suddenly the horn sounded in Corn’s heart:
    RAAAAAAACHHHHILLLLL!
    It rendered him glassy-eyed and mute and, yes, full of feelings.
    â€œWhat a dork!” Rachil would say of a recent beau, chewing a pinky nail, settling onto the projection room floor cross-legged.
    â€œTotally,” Corn would say, in a patently false imitation of the argot of the day, willing to give up everything, including his very way of speaking, to stay in her presence. “Can’t these morons see that it’s much more fun to be free of ‘relationships’ and all their, like, entrapments?”
    â€œI know ,” she would say.
    â€œI mean,” he would say, “they could be like us, right? Best friends!”
    â€œSex,” she would say, idly plucking an eyelash. “Yuck.”
    He would smile his secret smile to himself and hunch over to hide his bourgeoning “member.”
    Corn could hardly believe no one else heard all this honking in his heart, that no one could see the falseness of his every move nor understand that his canny claim of interest in