I'm famous, but I don't know what for

“Mom, look!”

“Stop tugging my sleeve. What's so―Oh...”

Both the Mom and the daughter gaped at me from down the Target aisle. I half-waved, half-grinned uncomfortably. Do they know me somehow? Do I know them?

The little girl giggled, then dragged her mom by her sleeve around the corner.

I finished grocery shopping. Rice, bread, beans, the usuals. It wasn’t until I was standing in the checkout line that the Mom approached me again, with her daughter peering out from behind her. She held out a piece of paper.

“Sorry to bother you, but would you mind, you know, signing this?”

“Do I know you?” I asked.

The mom went red. “No. My daughter just―but of course, we’re bothering you.”

This time it was the mom to pull the daughter away. I didn’t see them again.

For a week nothing else happened. Maybe it did, but I hadn't clued in at that point. For one wonderful week, my life was normal. Then I started noticing.

A stranger in a suitcoat waved to me on the subway like we were old friends.

Walking to work, several people did double takes at me. Is something on my face? I wondered at first. I checked my reflection every five seconds in the windows. Seemed normal.

One day at the park, three teenagers gawked when I walked by. I saw them snap a selfie, with me in the background, but they never came up to talk to me.

I started wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses when I went out, the way every celebrity does in movies, hoping they won’t be recognized. That seemed to help for a bit.

“Do people ever stare at you?” I asked my wife one night. “Like in public.”

“Don’t get jealous,” she joked. “If they do, I don’t stare back.”

“Not like that. I mean random people you don’t know but who seem to think they know you. Or like they can’t believe they’re seeing you. I’m starting to wonder if I was in the background of some viral reel.”

She just raised an eyebrow.

At first, the people close to me were unaffected. Wife, family, coworkers―strangers were acting odd, but everybody important acted the same, thank goodness. Even then, I wasn’t really concerned about what was going on. It wasn't affecting me much.

A few days into the second week my company hired a new software engineer for our team. I watched her make the rounds from desk to desk, greeting all her new employees. When she got to me, her eyes bulged and her mouth hung open.

Great.

“Sorry,” she said. “It’s just, I wasn’t expecting to see you in a place like this.”

Later, in the breakroom, I caught snatches of her conversation with our product manager.

“Why’s he working here?” and “Is he going to leave? He can’t need this job, can he?”

I approached her a little after that, at her desk, fed up with this all. “Do we know each other somehow?”

“Oh. Um. Not exactly. I mean, I know you, obviously―big fan―but I’m sure you wouldn't know me.”

“Why obviously? What do you mean you’re a fan?”

She’d only laughed like I was joking, like I was poking at a truth so obvious, why should she bother explaining it to me?

Things went downhill from there. That new employee was like the parasite that worked into the rest of my life and started infecting it. Not my life around strangers but my actual relationships.

Family started calling me less.

“We know how busy you are with a life like yours,” my mom reassured me over the phone.

Friends started calling me more. Mostly, they would ask for advice, but it would always feel like they were beating around the bush of what they really wanted. Some would blatantly ask for favors though. One old friend from high school even went so far as to ask me for money. Maybe I would have said yes if I’d spoken with them in the last decade, or if my wife and I weren’t still paying off student loans, but I barely remembered the guy.

He cussed me out. “It isn’t like you couldn’t afford it. Once people get all big and famous, they forget about everybody else.”

That was the first time that word popped up. Famous.

A few weeks later there was a big work event. Everybody in the company gathered a giant auditorium for a TEDTalk type speech. I hadn't really paid attention to it leading up, and didn’t think much when my direct manager led me from the rest of our group to behind the stage.

“Put this on,” she said.

“Why? What is that?”

“A mic. How else do you expect everybody to hear you?”

“Hear me? What are you talking about.”

She gestured past the curtain, where I could see lights glaring down onto the stage. “Your speech? Everybody’s waiting. They’ve been excited for weeks. It’s not every company that has somebody like you working at them.”

This was the last straw. After weeks, I finally snapped.

“What’s going on! What do you mean somebody like me? How does everybody know me!”

But nothing she said explained anything. However much I pressed, she would only give vagaries and loose explanations. I shouted. I screamed, getting madder and madder. I threw the mic at the wall where it exploded. Eventually, security guards came and got me. When I still wouldn’t calm down, the police came.

They put me in a holding cell for a few hours for causing “public disturbances” before finally letting me go.

“Shame what stardom does to the mind,” I heard one officer tell the other.

It only got worse.

My job let me go after that. I can't blame them. Luckily, we had enough savings to pay rent the next few months, but getting a job in the tech market isn’t as easy nowadays.

Fan mail started coming. Slow at first, just a trickle, but then more and more of it, a hundred a day. Letters from all different ages, countries, genders. None of it said anything substantial, just I’m you’re biggest fan or You inspire me. I couldn’t go outside without being surrounded by mobs and asked for autographs. Maybe worst of all was that it all stopped seeming weird to my wife.

“It makes sense,” she told me. “For somebody like you.” When I would press why, nothing she said would explain it either.

People got stalkerish. I noticed half of our neighbors had posted security cameras showing into our yard― paid off I suspected. Strangers started coming to the door. I stopped answering. They would camp outside on the sidewalk. Even when I would call the cops to take them away, more would replace them.

One came inside. It was a girl, in her twenties. She barged right in―I’d forgotten to lock the door―and threw herself on me in the kitchen, right in front of my wife. She kissed and groped, until I shoved her off and called the police.

“Who was that!” my wife demanded.

“I don’t know!”

“You’re lying!”

It happened more. I would lock the door, but the girls always found a way in, sometimes during the day if I was lucky, sometimes at night.

Eventually, my wife left. “I can’t anymore,” she told me. “I knew there would be fans when I married you, but I didn’t know it would be like this.”

“What do you mean when you married me! I wasn’t famous then. I don’t know why I am now!”

But she was gone. When I tried to call or text, she never responded.

At this point I thought I was crazy. I almost hoped I was. These people, these stalkers and fans, were delusions. Maybe I’d never been married. Maybe I’d never had a job or a house, and I was imagining all this from a ditch on the side of the road.

That’s when the man came.

It was late, eleven or so, when the knock came at the door. At this point, I would only glance at my visitors through the peephole, then walk away, but something about him… he didn’t have the same crazed, excited look as most of my late night knockers, despite a hoodie pulled around his face. Call me crazy (I already thought I was), but I opened it.

“It’s happening to you too, isn’t it?”

I stared.

“Sorry, what?” I asked. “Who are you?”

The man teared up. “You have no idea how happy that question makes me. Look, I don’t have time. I can’t risk letting anybody see me, but I needed to come warn you while there was still time.”

I laughed bitterly. “Too late for that. If you’re really like me, you know how terrible it is. My life’s already ruined. I’m too famous.”

“No.” He grasped my shoulder, then scanned to either side as if expecting somebody to leap from the bushes. “You think it’s bad now, but they still love you. It gets worse once they don’t.”

A van pulled up to my driveway, and one of the usual magazine photographers stepped out, already snapping photos. The man scampered away.

“You’re beautiful,” the photographer called at me before I slammed the door.

***

The man might have been crazy. Goodness knows most of my fans are, but I can’t stop thinking about him and the fear in his eyes when he saw another person.

“It gets worse once they don’t.”

I don’t know what will happen or what that means, but I dread the inevitable shift he was alluding to. I feel it coming, but I don’t know when. That’s why I wrote to you all. It’s stupid. It sounds so self-centered, but I just have to know.

Do you still love me?