The Ignored (27 page)

Without waiting for us, Philipe got out of the car, strode up the front
walk, unlocked the front door of the house, and went inside. I hurried after
him.

The interior of the house was as disappointing as the outside. More so,
if that was possible. The large, drab living room contained depressingly few
pieces of furniture. There was a clock and lamp on a plain wooden end table, a
nondescript couch, a long, unadorned coffee table, and a television set in a
wooden cabinet. Period. There was one picture on one wall, a standard
come-with-the-frame print of a young boy walking down a country lane with a
fishing pole in his hand and a dog at his side. Other than that, the room was
devoid of decoration. The entire scene looked unnervingly like something out of
my grandparents’ old house.

I said nothing, tried not to let the feelings show on my face, but I
felt a strange hollowness inside me. And a nasty little unbidden twinge of
superiority. I’d thought that Philipe’s taste would be… different. Bolder,
newer, younger. More extravagant, more flamboyant. Something. Not this quiet old
lady’s home with its June Cleaver furniture and its stultifying ordinariness.

“I have to take a whiz,” Philipe said, heading into the hall. I nodded
as the other terrorists filtered in behind me. They were silent as they entered
the house. Only Buster spoke, commenting on how much he liked the place. I saw
James roll his eyes.

Philipe returned. “Make yourselves at home,” he said. “There’s food and
drink in the fridge. I just have to do a few things.” He disappeared again into
the hallway, and Junior, Tommy, and Pete crossed into the kitchen. John turned
on the TV, found a daytime talk show. I sat down on the couch.

Next to me on the floor, half hidden under the end table, was a pile of
lined notebook paper, filled with writing. The top sheet looked like the rough
draft of a term paper or report. I reached down, picked up the paper, glanced at
the corrections and crossed out lines, read what was written: “We’ve been
blessed. We’ve been shown that we are disposable, dispensable, unimportant.
We’ve been freed for other, greater things.”

It was the speech Philipe had made at Denny’s that first day. The
brilliant, stirring, spontaneous talk he had given.

He’d written it all out ahead of time and memorized it.

I reached down, picked up a handful of papers, quickly scanned the
sheets: “We are of a kind. Our lives have traveled along parallel paths”…
“Rape is a legitimate weapon”… “It’s places like this that have made us
what we are. These are the places we need to strike against.”

Almost everything he’d ever said to us, every argument he’d propounded,
every idea he’d described, every theory he’d explained, was there, in that pile
of papers, worked out and written down.

Junior, Tommy, and Pete came out of the kitchen, Coke cans in hand. “No
beer,” Junior said. “We got what we could.”

Carefully, surreptitiously, I put the papers back on the floor where I’d
found them. I felt cold, empty. I still respected Philipe, still thought he was
the only one among us with vision and ideas and the will and courage to carry
them out and see them through, but there was something sad and rather pathetic
about those worked-over speeches in that old-lady house, and I couldn’t help
feeling depressed.

A few minutes later, Philipe emerged from the hallway with two packed
suitcases. “All right,” he said. “I’m ready. Let’s go.”

“Go?” I said. “Go where?”

“Anywhere. I’m through with this dump. It’s time to move on.”

I glanced toward James, Steve, the others. They seemed just as surprised
and taken aback by this as I was. I turned again toward Philipe. “You want to
move? Get a new house?”

“Not a bad idea. But, no. I want to travel.”

“Travel?”

“I think we need to go on a trip.”

“Why?”

“We’ve been a little too active lately. I think we need to take a
breather, let things cool down. We’re starting to attract attention.”

“I thought attracting attention was what we wanted.”

“This is the wrong kind of attention.”

“What does that mean?”

He looked at me solemnly, evenly, and I understood from that look that
he did not want to talk about this in front of the others. “It means we need to
take a vacation for a while.”

“How long is a while?” Buster asked.

Philipe shook his head. “I don’t know.”

We were silent then. I imagined us taking off, moving away from the city
to some small town in the great Northwest, some little logging community where
the pace of life was slow and everybody knew everybody else. Would we blend into
the background everywhere, I wondered, or just in cities? Would people in a
small town eventually get to know us? Would we be noticed?

Probably not.

“Let’s go,” Philipe said. “We’ll stop by everyone’s place. Pick up what
you need and what we can carry in the cars, and we’ll hit the road.”

“Where?” Pete asked.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“North,” I said.

Philipe nodded agreeably. “North it is.”

We decided to limit everyone to two suitcases—the amount we could fit
easily into the trunks of the cars—and we stopped by Tommy’s, James’,
John’s, and Junior’s places before we got to my apartment. I didn’t know what I
wanted to bring, but I didn’t want to waste time thinking, trying to decide, so
I quickly looked through the cupboards and closets, dug through the dresser,
picking up shampoo and underwear and shirts and socks. In the dresser, I came
across Jane’s old pair of panties, and a feeling of nostalgia or déjà vu or
melancholy or something flashed through me, and I had to sit down on the bed for
a moment. I held the panties in my hand, turned them in my fingers. I still
didn’t know where Jane was. I’d tried calling her parents the week after my walk
to their house, but when her father had answered the phone I’d hung up.

I wanted to get in touch with her now, to let her know I was leaving. It
was stupid, but for some reason, it seemed important to me.

“Almost done?” Bill called from the living room.

“Almost!” I called back. I stood, dropped the panties into the suitcase
and closed it.

I took a last look around my bedroom. I didn’t know if we were really
going on a vacation, if we would be gone only until things cooled down, or if we
were going to be gone for good and I would never see this place again. An absurd
sadness came over me at the thought that we might not be coming back. A lot of
my memories were here, and I suddenly felt like crying.

“Bob?” John called.

“Coming!” I took a last look around the bedroom, closed the second
suitcase, picked both suitcases up, and walked quickly out the door.

We were gone for three months.

We traveled north, through California, stopping at tourist spots along
the way. We went to San Simeon, tagging along for free with a group of paying
customers. We visited the Winchester Mystery House, leaving the tour group
unseen and spending several nights in that spooky old mansion. We went to Santa
Cruz to ride the roller coaster, stopped by Bodega Bay to see the birds.

We lived for the most part in motels, those glorious monuments to
facelessness. We never saw the chefs who cooked our meals nor the purveyors of
room service who brought them. We were gone when the maids made our beds and
exchanged our dirty towels for clean ones.

The rooms themselves were interchangeable, decorated by anonymous firms
who dealt in bulk with the stylishly sensible. There were always twin double
beds separated by adjoining nightstands topped with securely anchored
night-lights, a long dresser atop which perched a swivel television, bolted in
place. There was always a Gideon Bible.

I wanted to hate living this way, knew that I should, but I did not. I
loved it. We all did. We did not tire of either the food or the accommodations.
This was our milieu, this was our native element, and we basked in it. The
ordinary, the average, the standardized, this was what we felt comfortable with,
and though we avoided five-star inns and stayed primarily in moderately priced
motels, from our point of view we were in hog heaven.

We did not pay for food or lodgings, but aside from that and a few
five-finger discounts on souvenirs, we suspended our illegal activities. We
really were on vacation—from both our regular lives and our roles as
terrorists—and it felt great.

We moved up into Oregon, through Washington, into Canada, before finally
starting back down again. I had never before been out of California, and it
seemed exciting to me to leave the state. I was seeing things I had never seen
before, that I had only read about, and it made me feel more sophisticated, more
cosmopolitan, and gave me a sense of satisfaction.

I loved traveling, loved going to all these places, but it was our
nightly bull sessions that I really looked forward to, that gave me a sense of
purpose. For it was here, for the first time, that we discussed who we were,
what we were, how we felt, what it meant to be Ignored. We tried to find meaning
in our existence, and for once it was not Philipe telling us how we were
supposed to feel, but all of us expressing our thoughts and emotions and trying
together to make some sense of our lives.

I had never before been a part of a group, had never before belonged to
any clique or circle, and it felt good. I knew now what people saw in teams and
fraternal organizations, the bonding they felt being with like-minded
individuals, and it was wonderful. I was free to be myself because I was with
others who were just like me. The atmosphere was relaxed and easygoing. We
talked seriously and honestly, but we were not solemn, and we had fun together.
We would often brag to each other about our sexual prowess, a juvenile, junior
high school kind of exaggeration. We all knew none of it was true, and I suppose
it should have seemed pathetic, as old as we were, but somehow it made us feel
better. Philipe would tug on his pant leg just below the knee, pretending that
his penis hung that far down, and say, “Why did God bless me so?”

Buster would say, “Is that all you’ve got? When I lie down, dogs mistake
it for a fire hydrant.”

And all of us would laugh.

We were together so often, so rarely apart, that for a long time I did
not have the opportunity to speak with Philipe alone about why he’d really
wanted us to get away from Southern California. I was tempted to ask him on
several occasions, but we were always within earshot of the others, and I
remembered that look he’d given me in his house, and I always decided to wait
for a more opportune time.

That time finally came when we were at Mt. Shasta. For once,
all
of the others had started up the self-guided tour trail while Philipe was still
sitting in the car, looking at a map to try to figure out where we should go
next, so I stayed with him, waiting until the others were out of sight before
bringing it up.

“So,” I said, “why did we really go on this trip?”

He folded the map, looked up at me. “I was wondering when you were going
to ask about that.”

“I’m asking now.”

He shook his head slowly, thoughtfully. “I don’t know.”

“You know.”

“No, I don’t. Not really. I just had this feeling—” He broke off. “Do
you ever have, like hunches or intuition or… premonitions? Things that you
know are going to come true and do come true?”

I shook my head.

He licked his lips. “I do. I don’t know if it’s just coincidence or
what, but I get these feelings sometimes…. Like when I killed my boss: I
knew months ahead of time that I was going to kill him, even before I wanted to,
and of course it came true. And when I met you. Something just told me to go to
South Coast Plaza that day. I don’t know why. And when I got there, I had the
hunch that I was supposed to look for somebody. It was like… like I was
being guided or something.”

I laughed. “You’re getting a messiah complex.”

“Maybe I am,” he admitted.

My smile faded. “I was just joking.”

“I’m not.” He looked up at me. “I feel that way sometimes. Like I’m a
man thrust into a god’s role—and I’m not prepared for it.” He dropped the map
on the seat next to him and got out of the car. He closed the door, locking it.
“Anyway, that’s how I decided on this trip. Something just told me it was time
to go. I had this vague feeling that we were being watched, that someone was
closing in on us, and we had to get out of there. I didn’t know for how long. I
just knew we had to leave. Fast.”

“Who do you think’s after us? The cops?”

“Maybe.” He shrugged.

“But you don’t think so.”

He looked at me. “I don’t think so.”

“Are we ever going back?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Soon. I think it’s blowing over. I think it’ll be safe
again in a few weeks.”

We walked down the guide trail where the others had gone. I glanced over
at Philipe as we started down a series of log-and-gravel steps. “Your house,” I
said.

He looked at me.

“Was it your mother’s?”

“No. Mine. I bought it.”

“I’m sorry. It just kind of looked like it might be your parents’
place.”

We were silent for a moment.

“Where is your mother?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, when’s the last time you saw her?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about your father?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

We were quiet then, the only sound the crunching of the gravel on the
path beneath our feet and the occasional far-off cry of a bird.

“I’m Ignored,” Philipe said. “You’re Ignored. We’ve always been that
way; we’ll always be that way. Don’t try to look for answers in childhood or
family histories. They’re not there.”

I nodded, said nothing.

Ahead, on the path, we saw the others, and we hurried to catch up to
them.