Can I Pass?

I was walking through a television building when a familiar face appeared in front of me.

For a moment I could not place the problem. I knew the face perfectly well, but not from a corridor. It belonged on a screen, framed by a studio, with lights and cameras somewhere outside the image. Seeing the same person a few steps away made the ordinary hallway feel incorrectly arranged.

So I stopped.

She stopped too.

I looked at her. Apparently I kept looking longer than a normal person should.

“If you’re finished, can I pass?”

That was the entire encounter.

There are many things I might have said. Hello would have been enough. I could have smiled, moved aside, and continued walking. Instead, I had become an obstacle with eyes.

I moved.

She passed.

The corridor returned to normal.

For years, that sentence remained attached to the memory because it told the whole story without needing any explanation. I had imagined, like everyone else, that meeting a famous person might produce some clever remark. Perhaps I would be relaxed. Perhaps I would behave as if famous people were completely ordinary to me.

The actual result was much more efficient.

Famous person appears.

System stops.

Some time later, I saw a well-known singer in a nightclub. This time nobody had to ask me to move. She passed close by, smiling, and I again produced almost no visible response.

Two encounters were enough for me to recognize a pattern.

Other people asked for photographs, started conversations, or at least managed to say hello. My special technique was to become extremely interested in the existence of the floor.

I began to think of this as my “no reaction” reaction.

It was useful to give it a name. A failure becomes easier to live with once it sounds like a method.

The strange thing was that I could speak to strangers without difficulty in ordinary situations. I could ask a cashier a question, talk to a waiter, make conversation with someone waiting beside me. But public recognition changed the scale of the moment before a single word had been spoken.

The face was familiar.

The person was not.

My brain seemed unable to hold both facts at once.

Years later, what I remember most clearly is not fame. It is how ordinary the famous person’s problem was.

She wanted to walk down a corridor.

I was standing in the way.

The television image had become a person trying to get past me.

And I, for several unnecessary seconds, had become furniture.