The Ignored (23 page)

I took him into the bathroom.

It was weird being back again. The body was gone, of course, and the
blood was cleaned up, but the place still seemed tainted to me, dirty. With
trembling hands, I opened the door to the first stall. Philipe made me go over
the whole thing, in detail, and he nodded, touching the metal wall into which
I’d slammed Stewart, crouching down to examine the toilet where I’d fallen.

When I finished, he said, “Don’t feel bad; you did everything you were
supposed to.”

I didn’t buy that, but I nodded.

He pushed me gently out of the stall. “Excuse me,” he said.

“What?”

“I have to take a piss.”

He closed the door to the stall. I heard the sound of a zipper going
down, heard piss hitting the toilet water.

That did it.

Coming here, seeing everything, going over it all again—none of that
had done anything to erase the unease I felt. But hearing Philipe taking a leak
in the same stall where I’d killed Stewart, that put those feelings to rest. In
some bizarre way, it made me realize that the past was over, the future was
here, and the future was good.

The future was us.

I was grinning when Philipe flushed the toilet and came out.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“Everything’s fine,” I told him.

“Let’s check out your office.”

I led him down the hall. Like Stewart’s office, mine was empty. A
replacement for me had not been found yet. Hell, maybe they hadn’t even noticed
that I was gone. The papers on top of my desk were untouched, exactly the way
I’d left them a month ago.

He looked around the small cubicle. “God, this is depressing.”

“Yeah,” I agreed.

“Didn’t you hate working here?”

I nodded.

He looked at me, tossed me a book of matches. “Do something about it.”

I understood what he wanted me to do, and the thought made my blood pump
faster. Yes, I thought. This was right.

He backed out of the office, into the hallway.

This is something I had to do on my own.

I stood there for a moment, then lit a match, touched it to the edge of
a memo, the edge of a procedural manual. The flames spread slowly, from one
paper to another across the top of the desk. I thought of my cards, my business
cards, and I quickly opened the drawer where I’d put them and took them out. The
entire top of the desk was burning now, and I turned over the box and dumped the
cards on the fire. They caught and curled and blackened and were gone.

My old life was over.

Really over.

I could not go home again.

I moved back into the hallway, nodded to Philipe, and the two of us
walked slowly and calmly down the hallway, dropping terrorist cards, as around
us fire alarms sounded and sprinklers went off.

Again I wondered what I was. What we were. Did we possess different
genes or chromosomes than everyone else? Was there a scientific explanation for
all of this? Were we descendants of aliens or a separate race of being? It
seemed silly to think that we were not human, particularly since we were so
prototypically, so stereo-typically, average in every way, but there was
obviously something that set us apart from those around us. Could it be that
individually, coincidentally, we had so conformed to the norms of society, our
backgrounds and environments had so shaped us, that we had collectively turned
out this way and were now ignored by a culture trained to look for the unusual
and overlook the obvious? Or were we truly of a kind—did we send out some
sort of subliminal psychic signal that was picked up by those around us and
caused us to be ignored?

I had no answers, only questions.

I was not sure that the others thought about this as much as I did. They
didn’t seem to. Philipe probably did. He was deeper than the rest of us,
brighter, more ambitious, more serious, more philosophical. The others, in a
way, were almost like children, and it seemed to me that as long as they had
Philipe to be their parent and do their thinking and planning for them, they
were happy. Philipe kept insisting that because we were Ignored, because we fell
through the cracks, we did not have to conform to other people’s perceptions or
standards or ideas of what we should be. We were free to be ourselves; we were
free to be individuals. But the other terrorists were not individuals. Instead
of defining themselves in terms of their jobs, they now defined themselves as
terrorists. They’d simply switched one group identity for another.

But I dared not tell Philipe that.

I let him think we were what he wanted us to be.

After our trip to Automated Interface, Philipe and I were closer. There
was no official hierarchy among the terrorists—Philipe was the leader and the
rest of us were his followers—but if there had been, I would have been vice
president or second in command. I was the one he asked when he wanted a second
opinion on something; I was the one whose advice he heeded most often. All of
the other terrorists, all of them except Junior, had been with Philipe longer
than I had, but it was pretty well accepted that, among equals, I was somewhat
more equal. There was no resentment of this, just acceptance, and everything
continued along smoothly the way it always had.

During the next few weeks, we went to all of the terrorists’ former
places of work.

We vandalized them big-time.

But though we left our cards everywhere we went, we received no credit.

We did get several more news articles for our scrap-book, though. And
while we didn’t make the television news, Philipe assured us that we would get
there eventually, and I had no doubt that he was right.

I started taking walks. After a busy day, after the other terrorists had
left or had dropped me off at my place, I was often still not tired. And I
usually did not feel like being cooped up alone in my apartment. So I began
taking walks. I had never really walked much before. The frat-rat neighborhood
in which my apartment was located was not the best in the world, for one thing,
and I would have felt exposed and rather self-conscious walking by myself. But
now that I knew that no one noticed me, that no one saw me, I felt safe and
comfortable strolling about the streets of Brea.

Walking relaxed me.

One night, I walked all the way to Jane’s parents’ house, on the other
side of town. I don’t know what I expected—Jane’s car in the driveway,
perhaps; a glimpse of her through an open window—but when I reached the house
it was dark, the driveway empty.

I stood across the street for what seemed like hours, thinking about the
first time I’d picked up Jane for a date, about the time we’d spent afterward in
my car, parked two doors down, out of sight of her parents’ windows. At one
point in our relationship, before we’d moved in together, this house had been
almost like a second home to me. I’d spent as much time here as I had at my own
apartment.

Now it seemed like the house of a stranger.

I stood there, waiting, watching, trying to gather up enough courage to
walk up to the front door and knock.

Was she living with her parents again? Or was she staying somewhere
else? Even if she was living in another city, another state, her parents would
know where she was.

It didn’t look like her parents were home, though.

And if they came home and I asked them about Jane, would they tell me?
Would they recognize me? Would they even see me?

I stood there for a while longer. The night was chilly, and my arms
began to get cold. I wished I’d brought a jacket.

Finally I decided to leave. Jane’s parents still had not come back, and
I did not know when they would. Maybe they’d gone on a vacation. Maybe they’d
gone to visit Jane.

I turned away from the house, began walking back the way I’d come. The
streets were empty, there was no one outside, but the drapes of the houses I
passed were backlit with the blue glow of television. What was it that Karl Marx
had said? Religion was the opiate of the masses? Wrong. Television was the
opiate of the masses. No religion had ever been able to command as large and
loyal an audience as that electronic box. No pope had ever had the pulpit of
Johnny Carson.

I realized that I had not watched TV since I’d become a terrorist.

Did that mean that no one was watching TV? Or did that mean I was no
longer average?

There were so many things that I did not know and would probably never
know. I thought, fleetingly, that perhaps our time would be better spent trying
to find out the answers to these questions rather than trying to draw attention
to ourselves. But then I thought, no, drawing attention to our cause, letting
people know we existed would eventually attract the interest of other, greater
minds. People who might be able to change us, rescue us from our plight.

Rescue us.

Was that still how I thought? Despite Philipe’s assertion that we were
special, chosen, luckier than everyone else, despite my adamant professions of
belief, would I still trade it all instantly to be like everyone else, to fit in
with the rest of the world?

Yes.

It was after midnight when I arrived back at my apartment. I’d done a
lot of thinking on my way home, run through a lot of scenarios in my head, made
a lot of plans. Before I could change my mind, before I could chicken out, I
dialed the number of Jane’s parents. The phone rang. Once. Twice. Thrice.

On the thirtieth ring, I hung up.

I took off my clothes and got into bed. For the first time in a long
time, I masturbated.

I fell asleep afterward and dreamed of Jane.

The night after we trashed the body shop where Junior had worked—pouring oil and transmission fluid onto the cement floor, smashing windows and
equipment, sledge hammering cars—Philipe decided that we should take some
time off, enjoy some R & R. We deserved it. John suggested that we go to a
movie, and that idea was greeted with unanimous approval.

We met the next day at the theater complex.

There were a total of four movies playing on six screens, and though
ordinarily we were in agreement on almost everything, we could not seem to
decide what movie to see. Tommy, Junior, Buster, James, and Don wanted to watch
a new comedy. The rest of us wanted to check out a horror flick.

My guess was that two movies would tie for first place in the box office
rankings this weekend.

Philipe bought a movie ticket, and while the usher at the door tore his
stub, the rest of us filed silently past, unnoticed, into the multiplex. The
horror movie had started a few minutes ago, the comedy was not scheduled to be
shown for another ten minutes, so we split up, going into our respective
theaters.

The movie was okay, not great, although Bill seemed to like it quite a
bit. I found myself wondering what the results of
Entertainment Tonight’s
movie track poll would be.

I had a feeling that one out of four people would rate the movie “above
average or outstanding.”

After we got out, the four of us hung around outside the theater,
waiting. Bill said he was hungry, so we looked at the schedule mounted in the
ticket booth to see how long it would be until the comedy got out. When we found
out that it would be another twenty minutes we walked slowly down the block to a
Baskin-Robbins. Two blond bimbos, giggling and talking in Valleyspeak, moved
around us, past us.

“I’d like to feed that girl my ice-cream cone,” Steve said.

“Which girl?” John asked.

“Either. Both.”

We laughed.

Philipe stopped walking. “Rape,” he said, “is power.”

The rest of us stopped walking, looked at each other. We couldn’t tell
if he was joking or serious.

“Rape is a weapon.”

He was serious. I stared at him in disgust.

“Don’t give me that Holy Joe look. That’s what this is all about. Power.
It’s what we, as Ignored, don’t have. It’s what we have to learn to take.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Besides, when’s the last time you had some pussy?”

“Great idea,” I said sarcastically. “That’s how you can get women to
notice you. Rape them.”

“We’ve done it before.” Philipe stared at me calmly.

That stopped me. I looked from Philipe to Steve to the rest of them,
shocked. I had killed; I had assaulted; I had vandalized. But all of that had
seemed perfectly justifiable to me, perfectly legitimate. This, however…
This seemed wrong. And the fact that my friends, my brothers, my fellow
terrorists had actually raped women made me see them in a different light. For
the first time, I felt that I did not know these men. For the first time, I felt
out of sync with them.

Philipe must have sensed my discomfort. Maybe it showed on my face. He
smiled at me gently, put an arm around my shoulder. “We’re terrorists,” he said.
“You know that. This is one of the things terrorists do.”

“But we’re Terrorists for the Common Man. How is this going to help the
common man? How is this going to advance our cause?”

“It lets these bitches know who we are,” Steve said.

“It gives us power,” Philipe said.

“We don’t need that kind of power.”

“Yes, we do.” Philipe squeezed my shoulder. “I think it’s time for your
initiation.”

I pulled away. “No.”

“Yes.”

Philipe glanced around. “How about her?” He pointed down the sidewalk to
where an Asian woman was stepping out of a lingerie shop, carrying a small bag.
The woman was gorgeous: model-tall, with finely sculpted features, dark
almond-shaped eyes offset by luscious red lipstick, long straight black hair
that hung almost to her waist. Her thin shiny pants were purple and skintight,
and I could clearly see the outline of French-cut panties beneath.

Philipe saw the look on my face. “Take her down, bud.”