The Ignored (19 page)

“You don’t even know me.”

“I know you. I know what foods you like; I know your taste in clothes; I
know everything about you. And you know everything about me.”

“Except your name.”

“Philipe.” He grinned. “Now you know everything.”

It was true. He was right. And as I stood there and looked at him and
that strange feeling settled inside me, I knew that the feeling was good.

“Are you in?” he asked.

I looked back down the street, toward the mirrored facade of the
Automated Interface building, and I nodded slowly. “I’m in,” I said.

Philipe pumped his fist in the air. “Yes!” His smile grew broader.
“You’re a victor now, not a victim. You won’t regret this.” He spread his arms
wide. “The town,” he crowed, “is ours!”

I felt no guilt. That was the weird thing. Aside from those first few
initial qualms, I felt no guilt over what I’d done. I wanted to; I tried to. I
even attempted to analyze why I didn’t. Murder was wrong. I’d been taught that
since I was a child, and I believed it. No human being had the right to take the
life of another. To do so was… evil.

So why didn’t I feel bad?

I suppose it was because deep down, despite my surface reservations
against murder, I felt that Stewart had deserved it. How I could think that, how
I could believe that arrogance toward an underling qualified one for the death
penalty, I could not rationally say. It was an instinctive feeling, a gut
reaction, and whether it was Philipe’s persuasive arguments or my own
rationalizations, I soon came to think, to believe, that what I had done was not
wrong. It might have been illegal, but it was fair, it was just.

Legality and illegality.

Did such concepts apply to me?

I thought not. I began to think that perhaps, like Philipe said, I had
been put on this earth for a purpose, that my anonymity was not a curse but a
blessing, that my invisibility protected me from the mundane morality that ruled
the lives of everyone else. I was average, Philipe kept telling me, but that
made me special, that gave me rights and licenses that went far beyond those
accorded to the people who’d surrounded me all my life.

I was born to be a Terrorist for the Common Man.

Terrorist for the Common Man.

It was an attractive concept, and it was obviously something to which
Philipe had given a lot of thought. He introduced me to my fellow terrorists
that first day. I was still stunned, still not fully functioning, but he led me
back to my car and had me drive, following his directions, to a Denny’s coffee
shop in Orange. The other terrorists were already there, taking up two
pushed-together tables in the back of the restaurant and being completely
ignored by both the waitresses and the other customers. We walked over to where
they sat. There were eight of them, not counting Philipe. All men. Four of them,
like Philipe and myself, appeared to be in their twenties. Three of them looked
to be in their thirties, and one was an old man who could not have been a day
under sixty-five.

I looked at the men and I realized what had struck me before about
Philipe, why there had been something familiar about him. He looked like me.
They all looked like me. I don’t mean that we had the same physical features,
the same-sized noses or the same color hair, but there was a similarity in our
expressions, in our attitudes, an undefinable quality that marked us as being of
a kind. We were all Caucasian. I noticed that immediately. There were no
minorities among us. But our similarity went far deeper than mere race.

We were all Ignored.

Philipe introduced me to the others. “This is the man I’ve been telling
you about,” he said, gesturing toward me. “The one I’ve been cultivating. He
finally did his boss today. Now he’s one of us.”

Nervous, embarrassed, I looked down at my hands. I saw dried blood in
the short lines of my knuckles, around the edges of my fingernails. I realized I
was still wearing the clown suit.

The others stood, all smiling and talking excitedly, and they shook my
hand and congratulated me one by one as Philipe introduced them. Buster was the
old man, a former janitor. The young guys were John, James, Steve, and Tommy.
John and Tommy had both worked for chain department stores before hooking up
with Philipe. James had been a circulation manager for the
Pennysaver.
Steve had been a file clerk working for a temporary agency. Two of the
thirtysomethingers, Bill and Don, had both held middle-management positions—Bill with the County of Orange, Don with a private investment firm. The other,
Pete, had been a construction worker.

These, then, were my peers.

“Sit down,” Philipe said. He pulled out a chair, looked at me. “You
hungry? Want something to eat?”

I nodded, sitting down in the chair next to him. I
was
hungry, I
realized. I hadn’t eaten breakfast or lunch, and all of this… excitement
had left me with a huge appetite. But none of the waitresses had even looked in
this direction since we’d walked in.

“Don’t worry,” Philipe said, as if reading my thoughts. He walked to the
middle of the room and stood directly in front of a plump older waitress who was
heading back toward the kitchen. She stopped just before running into him, an
expression of surprise crossing her features as she saw him for the first time.
“Could we get some service?” Philipe said loudly. He pointed to our table, and
the waitress’ gaze followed his finger.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I—” She caught herself. “Are you ready to
order?”

“Yes.”

She followed Philipe back to our table. He ordered a patty melt and a
cup of coffee, I ordered a cheeseburger, onion rings, and a large Coke. The
other men had already eaten but asked for refills of their drinks.

I looked around the table at my fellow Ignored. Everything was happening
so fast. My brain was registering the information, but my emotions were lagging
a beat or two behind. I knew what was happening but not how to feel about it. I
found myself staring at John and Tommy, or Tommy and John—I couldn’t remember
who was who—trying to recall if I’d seen either of them on the streets of
Irvine during the days I’d ditched work. There was something about them that
made them seem more familiar to me than the others.

Had I seen them before?

Had one of them stolen the Coors from the 7-Eleven?

“Okay.” Philipe smiled at me. “I know this is all new to you, so instead
of me trying to explain everything, why don’t you just ask what you want to
ask.”

I looked from one face to another. I saw no unfriendliness there, no
suspicion, no superiority, only sympathetic understanding. They all knew what I
was going through, what I was feeling. They’d been there themselves.

None of them looked like terrorists, I found myself thinking. Philipe
was probably the hardest among them, but even he did not look mean enough or
sufficiently fanatic enough to be a true terrorist. They were like kids, I
thought. Pretending. Playacting.

I realized that, as they’d introduced themselves to me, they’d all told
me what they
had
been doing, what their jobs
had
been, but none of
them had said what they were doing now. I cleared my throat. “Where do you, uh,
work?” I asked. “Do you… do you all work together someplace?”

“Work?” Buster laughed. “We don’t work. We’re through with that shit.”

“We don’t need to work,” Steve said. “We’re terrorists.”

“Terrorists? What does that mean? What do you do? Do you all live
together someplace, like a commune? Or do you guys meet, like, once a week, or
what?”

I was facing Steve when I asked the question, but he immediately looked
toward Philipe. They were all looking toward Philipe.

“It’s not like a job,” Philipe said. “It’s not what we
do.
It’s
what we
are
.”

The others nodded in agreement, but none of them volunteered to expand
on that.

“You asked what we did,” Philipe continued, “where we work. That’s the
problem. Most people identify themselves with their jobs. Without their jobs,
they’re lost. That’s the source of their identity. That’s who they are. A lot of
them don’t know anything
but
work. They need that sort of structure to
give their lives purpose, to feel fulfilled. But how fulfilling can a job as a
secretary be? With free time, you can do anything! Your limits are those of your
imagination. Most people don’t have any meaning in their lives. They don’t know
why they’re here, and they don’t care. But we have a chance to be different. We
don’t need to just keep busy, to put in our time until we die. We can live!”

I thought of my long weekends, my boring vacations. I’d always been one
of those people who were lost without imposed structure. I looked around the
table, at the faces of my fellow Ignored. They, I knew, were that way, too.

But Philipe was right. This was a chance to break out. We had already
killed. Each of us at the table, as nice as we seemed, as friendly as we looked,
had murdered someone. What else was left after that? What other taboo could
there be? We had already proved that we were not bound by the strictures of
society.

I nodded at Philipe.

He smiled at me. “We’re freer than everyone else,” he said. “Most people
think that what they do is important, that they matter. But we know better.
There are sales clerks who come back to work immediately after they have a baby
because they’re convinced that their work is so important and valuable, their
contribution so unique, that things could not go on without them. The truth is
that they’re just cogs in the machine. If they quit or died, someone else would
immediately take their place and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference to
anybody.

“That’s why we’ve been blessed. We’ve been shown that we are disposable,
dispensable, unimportant. We’ve been freed for other, greater things.”

“So what do we do?” I asked. “I mean as terrorists, what do we do?”

“Whatever we want,” Buster said.

“Yeah, but what do we want?”

Again, all eyes turned to Philipe.

He straightened in his seat, obviously enjoying the attention. This was
his idea, his baby, and he was proud of it. He leaned forward, elbows on the
table, talking in the furtive yet passionately committed manner of a rebel
leader giving a pep talk to his troops. He saw our role as that of avengers, he
explained. We had experienced the persecution of the known, of the intellectual
and physical elite. We knew what it was like to be overlooked and disregarded
and unseen. Because of that, he said, because of our experiences, because of our
oppression, because we had seen society from the yoke end of the plow, we knew
what needed to be done. And he knew how to do it. With planning, with
organization, we could bring about changes, great changes.

Everyone nodded enthusiastically, like true believers at a tent revival,
and I, too, felt a proud stirring inside myself. But at the same time I found
myself wondering if we all truly had such Utopian goals in our hearts.

Or if we just wanted to be a part of something for once in our lives.

“But are we really… terrorists?” I asked. “Do we blow things up and
kidnap people and… perform terrorist acts?”

Philipe nodded excitedly. “We’re starting small, working our way up. We
haven’t been together that long, but we’ve already vandalized a McDonald’s, a
K-Mart, a Crown Books, and Blockbuster Video, some of the most recognized and
well-known franchises in the country. Originally, as I said, our intention was
to strike a blow against our oppressors, to cause financial damage to name
brands, those who extol the known over the unknown, but we realized almost
immediately that terrorism is nothing more than guerilla PR. What it does is
draw attention to an issue. Individual acts of terrorism can’t bring about any
permanent, lasting change, but they can alert the masses to a problem and focus
public attention on it. To answer your question, in our case the word
‘terrorists’ is perhaps an overstatement. We haven’t actually blown anything up
or hijacked an airplane or anything.” He grinned. “Yet.”

“Yet?”

“As I said, we’re working our way up, conducting a campaign of gradual
escalation.”

“And what do we hope to accomplish by this?”

Philipe leaned back in his chair with a satisfied smile. “We’ll become
known.”

The waitress came with food and drinks, and I hungrily scarfed down my
lunch while the conversation between everyone else drifted back from the
rhetoric they’d been spouting for my benefit to more everyday topics of trivial
personal matters.

Philipe did not participate in the conversation. He stayed out of it,
above it, and I thought that he seemed so much more knowing and sophisticated
than the rest of us.

I finished my pie. Two of the waitresses pulled Venetian blinds over the
windows on the west side of the restaurant. I looked up at the wall clock above
the cash register. It was after three.

There was still one thing I did not know, that I had not asked and that
no one had voluntarily answered. I put down my fork, took a deep breath. “So
what are we?” I asked. “Were we born this way? Did we become this way over the
years? What… what
are
we?” I looked around the table, but no one
would meet my eyes. They all looked uncomfortable.

“We’re different,” Philipe said.

“But what are we?”

There was silence. Even Philipe, for the first time since he’d called
out my name on the street, looked unsure of himself.

“We’re Ignored,” Buster said.

“I know that—” I began. Then I stopped, thought, looked at him. “Where
did you get that word, ‘Ignored’? Who told you that?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”