The Ignored (34 page)

“Something like that.”

“You must’ve done something else besides vote for a softball diamond,” I
said. “They couldn’t want you out just because of that.”

“It’s the only thing I can think of.”

Steve shook his head. “I don’t understand how they can tell you you
can’t be mayor anymore. The people around here voted for you. What if they want
to vote for you again? You should just tell these guys to beat off, you don’t
need them.”

“But I do need them.”

“Why?”

Philipe snorted derisively. “Are you kidding? How do you think someone
gets elected in these small elections? You think candidates personally meet all
the people in their districts? You think voters know where the candidates stand
on all the issues? Be serious. People vote on name recognition. Candidates
get
name recognition through ads and posters and newspaper exposure. Money
buys
ads and posters and newspaper exposure. You get it? If these guys
back you, you’re in. That’s it. Your name’s plastered on red, white, and blue
poster board on every telephone pole in the city.”

Joe nodded. “Exactly.”

“But he must have name recognition already. He’s been mayor for a long
time.”

“Who’s the mayor of Santa Ana?”

“I don’t know.”

“See? You’re from Santa Ana and you don’t even know. Besides that, Joe’s
Ignored. You honestly think people are going to remember who he is?”

“Oh,” Steve said. He nodded. “I understand.”

We drove back to the mayor’s house. The meeting was scheduled for eleven
o’clock in one of the corporate offices we’d passed on our tour. Philipe told
the others they could hang around, go shopping, do whatever they wanted, but
they had to be back by one o’clock because we were going to have a strategy
meeting to decided on our next course of action.

Joe changed into nice clothes—a suit and tie—and Philipe, Steve,
and I piled into his car. The four of us drove downtown.

The office building into which we walked reminded me uncomfortably of
Automated Interface and I found myself thinking of Stewart’s dead, bloodied
body, but I forced myself to push those thoughts aside, and we followed Joe
through the lobby, to an elevator. He pushed the button for the fifth floor.

The metal doors opened on a long, plushly carpeted hallway. We walked
down the hall to an office. The plaque on the wooden double doors read: TERENCE
HARRINGTON, CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD.

Joe knocked timidly.

Philipe reached over, rapped more loudly.

The mayor licked his lips. “Let me do the talking.”

Philipe shrugged, nodded.

The door swung open. There was no one behind it; it had been opened
electronically. We stepped into what looked like an unusually opulent doctor’s
waiting room. Another set of doors immediately opened at the room’s far end.
Through the doorway, we could see an extraordinarily large desk, behind which
sat one of the business-suited men from the foundation dinner.

“Obviously designed to be intimidating,” Philipe whispered.

“It is,” Joe replied.

We walked through the waiting room into the office beyond. All three
power brokers from last night were there, two of them sitting in high-backed
chairs flanking the man behind the desk. Three other equally important-looking
men sat on a couch to the left of us.

The office itself was like something out of a movie. One wall had a
fully stocked bar next to a partially opened door that led into what I assumed
was a bathroom. The opposite wall was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase into which was
set a combination high-tech stereo/television. Behind the desk was all window, a
breathtaking panoramic view of the desert and Mount San Jacinto.

“Come in.” The man behind the desk smiled, but there was no warmth or
humor in it. “Sit down.”

There were no chairs for us to sit in.

The man laughed.

The man—Terence Harrington, I assumed—was big, tall, with a florid
face and the jowls of a bulldog. He wore his thinning gray hair long, combed
across the bald spot on his head. I looked from him to the two men flanking him,
both of whom were staring at us. The one on the left had a military brush cut
and was chewing on the end of a huge unlit cigar. The one on the right had a
thick white mustache and was rattling some sort of hard candy between his teeth.

The antipathy between us was immediate and was born full-blown. It was
like we were magnets with opposing fields—we hated each other instantly. I
looked at Philipe, at Steve, and for the first time in a long time we were in
tandem. We knew instantly what each other was thinking, feeling. We knew what
each other wanted because we all wanted the same thing.

We wanted these fuckers dead.

It was an unsettling realization, a frightening realization. I wanted to
be able to get on my moral high horse and say that I could not condone violence,
that I did not wish to harm anyone ever again, but that was not true, and we all
knew it. The reaction within us was animal, instinctive.

We wanted to kill these men.

I glanced toward the three other men on the couch. They were obviously
very powerful, obviously very rich, but they looked to me like members of an old
movie comedy team: one was short, one was fat, one was bald with an unusually
shiny head. All were staring at us disinterestedly.

Joe faced Harrington. “You wanted to see me?”

“I want you to give us your resignation. We already have one typed up.
All you have to do is sign it. We’re going to hold a special election in
mid-January and install our new mayor, and we need your resignation by the end
of this week.”

“You can take that resignation and shove it up your ass,” Philipe said.

He’d spoken softly, but his voice seemed loud in the room. All eyes
turned toward him, and I realized with a start that this was the first time the
power brokers had noticed him. The antipathy we’d felt, the disgust, had all
been directed at Joe. The men had not even noticed us until now.

“And who, may I ask, are you?” Harrington’s voice was also low, but it
was filled with a sense of coiled menace.

“It’s none of your fucking business, you pig-eyed sack of shit.”

Harrington turned his attention back toward Joe. “Aren’t you going to
introduce us to your friends, Mayor Horth?” The threat had not left his voice.

Joe was obviously frightened, but he held his ground. “No.”

“I see.”

The man with the cigar stood. “You’re through, Horth. You’re an
ineffectual know-nothing nobody. We want a new mayor. We want a real mayor.
We’re tired of putting up with your incompetence.”

Harrington pushed one of a panel of buttons on his desk. Through what
I’d thought was the bathroom door strode two men, a tall, good-looking banker
type in his mid-forties, and an average-looking man of approximately the same
age. Harrington pointed toward the nondescript man. “We’re running Jim this
time. This is the new mayor of Desert Palms.”

Jim was one of us.

Jim was Ignored.

I stared at Jim. He stared back. He knew I knew what he was, and I’m
sure he knew Philipe and Steve did, too, but there was no way in hell that Jim
was going to do anything to screw up his chances here. This was his shot, his
opportunity to be someone, and he wasn’t about to fuck it up just to align
himself with us. I knew how he felt, and I couldn’t blame him, but I also knew
something he didn’t know. Something that Joe had found out the hard way.

No matter what happened, he would still be Ignored.

“We’ll finally have a real mayor,” Cigar said. “Someone who can get
things done.”

“Come on,” Philipe said. “We’ve heard enough. Let’s go.”

Joe looked as though he’d been about to say something, but he apparently
changed his mind and turned toward the door.

“You haven’t signed—”

“And he’s not going to,” Philipe said.

Harrington’s red face was turning even redder. “Who the hell do you
think you are?”

“I’m Philipe. Terrorist for the Common Man.”

“You don’t know who you’re dealing with here!”

“No,” Philipe said. “
You
don’t.”

We hurried out the door. My heart was pounding, and I was shaking like a
leaf. I was scared and angry at the same time, pumped up with adrenaline. I half
expected the men to come after us and beat the shit out of us. I half expected a
phalanx of armed guards to come running down the hallway. But none of this
happened. The elevator doors opened when we pushed the button, we rode the
elevator downstairs, went through the lobby, out into the parking lot, and got
into Joe’s car.

The mayor was nervous as he fumbled with his keys. “Shit!” he said.
“Shit!”

“Calm down,” Philipe told him.

“They know where I live!”

“We’ll move to a motel. They’ll never find us.”

“You don’t know them. They will find us.”

“They didn’t even see us until I spoke. We’ll just blend into the
woodwork and they’ll never be able to track us down.”

“You think so?” Joe sounded hopeful.

“I know so.”

Joe started the car, put it into gear, and we sped out of the parking
lot, bouncing onto the street.

Philipe nodded to himself. “We can get these guys,” he said, and there
was genuine excitement in his voice. “We can nail their asses to the wall.”

“Terrorists for the Common Man!” Steve pumped his fist in the air.

I, too, felt the excitement. “Yeah!” I said.

Joe let out an enthusiastic whoop, caught up in the moment.

Philipe grinned. “We’re gonna get those fuckers.”

The other terrorists were all waiting when we got home. Philipe gathered
everyone into the living room and described what had happened at the meeting.

“So what do we do?” Don asked.

“We kill them,” Philipe said.

There was silence, I was remembering Familyland. I knew the others were,
too.

“We take them out of the picture. We let the people of this city
actually vote for the best candidate. We restore democracy to Desert Palms.”

James looked at Tim. Both looked at me. I wanted to be able to stand up
and articulate their obvious misgivings, but I did not share those misgivings. I
had been in that office with Philipe. I knew where he was coming from. I agreed
with him.

“We’ll find a motel in Palm Springs or one of the other nearby cities,
lay low for a week, let them think we left. Then we’ll strike.” He withdrew a
gun from his inside jacket pocket. It was silver and gleamed in the room’s
refracted light.

“Yeah!” Joe said excitedly. “Blow those fuckers away!”

Steve grinned.

“We all need to be armed.”

“What’s with all this killing?” Tim asked. “I don’t see why we need to
kill anybody. Violence won’t solve—”

“It’s a tool,” Philipe said. “The primary tool used by terrorists.”

“It’s the only thing they’ll understand,” Joe said. “It’s the only way
to stop them.”

“I say we put it to a vote,” James said.

Philipe shook his head. “We’re going to get those fuckers. You can
choose to help or not. But we’re going to do it.”

“Not,” Tim said.

Philipe shrugged. “That’s your right.”

Tim looked at me, but I could not meet his eyes. I keep my gaze focused
on Philipe.

“Pack everything up,” Philipe ordered. “Like Joe said, they know where
he lives. They’ll be after us soon. We have to get out of here.”

That night, sleeping alone in my spacious hotel room bed, I found myself
mentally replaying everything that had happened in Harrington’s office. I
remembered what Philipe had told Steve that morning in the car, about how people
voted not on issues but name recognition.

Was all politics this way? I had the feeling that it was. I tried to
think of the name of my congressman but could not. I could name only one of
California’s two senators, I realized, although both of them sent me biannual
“Senate Updates” and both did their damnedest to get their names in the
newspaper at any opportunity.

I felt chilled. Was this democracy? This sham, this substanceless
pretext of power supposedly in the hands of the people?

I fell asleep, and I dreamed that we flew to Washington, D.C., and went
to the White House and walked right in. No security guards saw us; we were
ignored by the Secret Service men.

I was in the lead, and I pushed open the door to the Oval Office. The
President was meeting with his advisers, only it wasn’t really a meeting. They
were telling him what to say, what to do, what to think. The President was
surrounded by a platoon of men who were lecturing him from all sides, and he
looked toward us and his eyes were wide and frightened, and I knew that he was
one of us.

I awoke with my pillow drenched with sweat.

We spent Christmas in Palm Springs, at the Holiday Inn.

The place didn’t matter so much to us, but the rituals did—we were
all uniformly in agreement on that—and on December 24, we hit the Palm
Springs Mall and picked up presents for each other. Philipe set a limit: each of
us could get only one gift per terrorist. There was to be no favoritism.

That night, Mary prepared roast beef and mashed potatoes with gravy, and
we drank mulled wine and watched videotapes of
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
and
A Charlie Brown Christmas
and
Scrooge
and
It’s a Wonderful
Life.

We went to sleep with visions of sugar plums dancing in our heads.

The next morning, we opened our presents. I received books and cassettes
and videotapes and clothes and, from Philipe, an automatic rifle.

Mary prepared a turkey dinner, which we ate sometime in the
mid-afternoon.

I could not help thinking of my previous Christmas, spent alone in my
apartment. I felt better here with the others, but I still found myself thinking
of even earlier Christmases, those spent with Jane and my parents. Then I had
been really, truly happy. I had not realized it then, but I knew it now, and
that knowledge depressed me. Not for the first time, I wished that I could turn
back the clock and return to those days, that I could know then what I knew now,
and that I could do everything over again.