The Ignored (36 page)

“And if he isn’t?”

“We’ll take him out. And we’ll put Jim in his place. Just like the money
men originally planned.”

Three days later, Jim showed up at the mayor’s office. He was not only
cowed and humbled but frightened, and we had a hard time convincing him that we
did not blame him for anything.

He had called Philipe to ask for the meeting, had called from a pay
phone because he thought we were going to track him down and kill him for his
affiliation with Harrington and Lambert and the power elite. He wanted a truce,
he said. He wanted to meet with us, get things straightened out.

There was no truce to be called, nothing to be straightened out, but
Philipe agreed to meet with him, and set the time and place.

“Don’t tell Joe,” he told me as he hung up the phone.

“Why?”

“Because.”

“Because why?”

“Because.”

When Jim stepped into the mayor’s office the next morning at the
appointed time, he looked bad. He’d obviously been living hand-to-mouth, and
he’d obviously been under a lot of strain. His clothes were dirty, his face
gaunt. He smelled as though he hadn’t bathed in quite some time.

Philipe told him about the terrorists, explained what we did and who we
were. He put no pressure on Jim, but he made it clear that Jim was free to join
us if he so desired.

It was then that Joe walked into the room.

The mayor stood in the doorway for a moment, stunned and unmoving. Then
he rushed forward, his face crimson with anger. “Get the hell out of my office!”
he demanded, pointing toward the door. “Get the hell out of my city!”

“This is Jim,” Philipe said conversationally. “Our newest terrorist.”

Joe looked from Philipe to Jim and back again. “Do you know who that
is?”

“I just told you. He’s the newest Terrorist for the Common Man.”

“That’s the son of a bitch Harrington was going to put in my place!” The
mayor moved in front of Jim, faced him. “Who are you and where are you from?”

“My name’s Jim Caldwell. I’m from San Francisco.”

“Why were you going to sell us out?”

“I wasn’t going to sell you out. Those guys found me working in a gas
station and asked me if I wanted to be mayor. What was I supposed to say?”

“Don’t be so hard on him,” I said. “You know how it is.”

“I know how it is? I know he was going to take over my job!” He
confronted the new man. “Why did you come here?”

“I had to leave San Francisco because I killed my supervisor in the
plant where—”

Philipe held up a tired hand. “Save it. We know the story.”

“I want him out of here!” Joe roared.

“I don’t give a fuck what you want.” Philipe’s voice was low and cold,
the way it had been when he’d spoken to Harrington. He fixed the mayor with a
steely stare.

Joe backed off a little, but his tone was no less belligerent. “
I’m
mayor
here,” he said. “Not you.”

“That’s right,” Philipe said, moving slowly toward him. “You’re mayor
here. You’re mayor of this shitty little Palm Springs suburb and you have the
power to widen streets and build baseball diamonds.” He brought his hand down
flat on the top of the desk. The slap sounded like a bullwhip. “Don’t try to
tell me who the fuck you are. You’d be nothing if we hadn’t taken up your
cause.” He pointed to Jim. “You’d be him!”

“I thank you for what you’ve done. But I’m afraid this is my town. I’m
mayor—”

“Yes. You’re mayor. You’re not king.”

“I want you all out of my office.”

Philipe stood for a moment, shook his head slowly, then reached into his
pocket and withdrew his revolver. “I knew it would come to this. You’re so
fucking predictable.”

Now there was a quaver in Joe’s voice. “What do you think you’re doing?”

I glanced toward Tim, toward James. None of us knew where this was
going. My mouth felt dry.

“Jim’s mayor here now,” Philipe said. He calmly checked the chambers of
the gun. “How do you like that? I’m not even going to bother making you resign
or sign a piece of paper. I’m just going to remove you from office and replace
you.”

“You can’t do that! The people elected me!”

“And I’m un-electing you.” Philipe smiled coldly. “You think anyone’s
going to know the fucking difference?”

I felt chilled. This was a Philipe I had not seen before. This was not
the idealist who’d recruited me into the terrorists or who’d quixotically
decided to save Joe Horth’s job. This was not the desperate seeker who’d had sex
with Mary and me and everyone else. This was not even the half-crazed fanatic
who’d wanted to blow up Familyland, or the dispassionate killer who had murdered
his supervisors and gunned down Joe’s tormentors. This was a Philipe on the
edge, a Philipe with no motive, no plan, a Philipe with no reason behind his
actions, a Philipe flying blind, acting on instinct, and it scared the shit out
of me.

“Philipe,” I said.

“Shut up.”

Jim backed away. “I don’t want to be mayor,” he said. “I just came up
here to make sure you all weren’t after me. I didn’t want—”

“You shut up, too.” He stared Joe down. “Well, what’s it going to be,
mayor
?”

Joe cracked. “I’m sorry,” he said. He licked his lips. “I was just…
I…” He stared helplessly at Philipe.

Philipe remained impassive for a moment. He blinked hard a few times,
then he nodded. “Okay,” he said. “All right.” He replaced the gun in his pocket.
“Does that mean it’s agreeable with you if we recruit Jim to our side?”

“Go right ahead.” The mayor faced Jim, held out a hand, forced himself
to smile. “I’m sorry,” he said. “No hard feelings?”

“No hard feelings.”

“That’s what I like to see.” There was still something strange about
Philipe’s behavior, something unsettling about the way he was acting. I
remembered how I’d once thought he might be manic depressive.

Mentally ill?

I looked at James, he looked at me, and I knew he was thinking the same
thing I was. He looked away.

Philipe continued nodding. “Friends again. That’s what I like to see.
Friends again.”

We spent the day with Jim, hanging out, telling him about our old lives
and our new ones. He hit it off instantly with Mary, and the attraction was
obviously mutual. James and I shared knowing smiles as the two found
not-so-subtle ways to stand or sit next to one another. I had the feeling that
the rest of the terrorists were going to be seeing a lot less of Mary in their
beds in the near future.

Philipe remained tense, seemed coiled like a snake. All day long, he was
hyper, moving around, walking in and out of where we were, popping abruptly into
conversations and just as abruptly out. He seemed to be waiting for something,
anxious for its arrival.

After dinner, after dark, there was a windstorm, and we were all sitting
in Joe’s living room, watching TV, when Philipe suddenly jumped to his feet and
hurried over to the front door, yanking it open. He stood for several seconds in
the doorway, breathing heavily. He shook his head. “I have to go,” he said. “I
have to get out of here.”

I got up, frowning, and went over to him. “Go where? What are you
talking about?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me.”

He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Thanks,” he said.
“But… no.” He started outside, turned around on the porch.
“Don’t follow me,” he said. “Don’t anyone try to
follow me.”

And then he was gone, into the night, into the dark, and I was left
staring at the open doorway where he had stood, hearing only his retreating
footfalls as they were overtaken by the sounds of the desert wind.

Philipe did not return for a week.

When he did, he was his old self again, cheerful, enthusiastic, filled
with plans for what Joe could do to simultaneously aid the Ignored and further
his own political career.

We had been dormant in his absence, not sure if he was coming back, not
sure what we would do if he didn’t. I hadn’t realized until that point how
dependent we’d all been on him. Despite our arguments and disagreements, despite
my periodic attempts to distance myself from him, I was just as reliant upon
Philipe as the others were, and I knew that none of us had the vision or
leadership qualities needed to fill his shoes and take charge of the
organization.

Then, just as it was starting to look as though we really would have to
start making some decisions on our own, Philipe was back, acting as though
nothing unusual had occurred, once again laying out plans and telling everyone
what to do.

I wanted to talk to him about what had happened, wanted to talk to the
others as well, but for some reason I didn’t.

Joe was our liaison with the real world. He was definitely Ignored, but
somehow, whether by virtue of his nature or his position, he could get
non-Ignored to pay attention to him. He could communicate with them and they
would listen.

After his return, the first thing Philipe asked Joe to do was to look
for any Ignored who might already be working for the city and promote them to
positions of power. “They’ll never be promoted from within their own departments
because they’re not noticed. No one pays attention to them and no one considers
them when positions are open.”

“I’m not sure I can tell who’s Ignored,” Joe said hesitantly.

“I can,” Philipe told him. “Get me a printout of all city employees and
their personnel histories. We’ll start out that way, narrow it down. Then you
can call them all into the council chambers for a meeting, introduce me as an
efficiency expert or something, give me a chance to look them over. If we find
any, we’ll talk to them, decide where to put them.”

“But what do we do after that?”

“We’ll see.”

There was no one Ignored working at city hall, it turned out. A canvass
of the company to whom the city contracted out tree-trimming and park
maintenance service likewise proved futile.

We were rarer than we’d thought.

But none of this deterred Philipe. He got us all together, asked us
pages upon pages of questions that he’d written out on a variety of basic
topics, and from our answers he devised a test that he called the EAP, the
Educational Aptitude and Proficiency exam. He got Joe to get the city council to
pass an ordinance requiring the school district to administer the exam in all
Desert Palms schools before the end of the current school year.

“We’ll be able to catch them young,” Philipe explained.

In the meantime, he and Joe pored over stacks of personnel printouts and
labor distribution reports in order to determine which city employees were the
most average and unexceptional in the amount of hours they put into their jobs
and the amount of work that they produced. Philipe’s goal was to eventually,
through attrition, get rid of those employees with poor performance records,
demote those with high performance records, letting them carry the heaviest load
and do the majority of the work, and promote those who were the most average,
the most ordinary, the most like us.

“Mediocrity should be rewarded,” he said. “It’s the only way we’ll ever
be able to get any respect.”

For the rest of us, our days became less structured. Without a specific
short-term goal toward which we were working, we began to drift. Once again, we
started going to movies in the afternoon, hanging out at malls. We walked into
expensive five-star resorts, swimming in their luxurious pools. In the evenings,
we’d hit the nightclubs. We found that it was fun to annoy celebrities, tripping
them as they danced, watching them fall and flail awkwardly to the secretly
delighted stares of the ordinary men and women around them. We flipped up
celebrity women’s skirts and pantsed the more pretentious men, exposing who wore
underwear and who didn’t. I’d always thought of the Palm Springs area as sort of
a retirement community for old-line celebrities, but it was surprising how many
young movie actors and soap opera stars and contemporary entertainers frequented
the local clubs on weekends.

In the women’s restroom of one club, Steve and Paul raped a blond bimbo
who was currently starring in a Saturday night CBS sitcom. Afterward, showing
off her silk thong panties as a trophy, Steve said, “She wasn’t that great.
Mary’s as good as her any day.”

“Famous people are no different than us,” Paul agreed. “I don’t see why
people treat them like they are.”

I said nothing.

Philipe and Joe, when they heard about the rape, were furious. Philipe
lectured all of us about committing crimes in Desert Palms. “You don’t shit
where you eat,” he said. “Do you think you assholes can comprehend that?”

It was interesting to note the change in Philipe since “the action.”
He’d become downright conservative lately, eschewing the tools of terrorism that
he’d championed in the past and opting for maneuvering within the strict
boundaries of the system.

I had to admit, I liked this conventional approach.

It was about a month later that I was walking back from a bookstore down
a nearly empty street and a woman bumped into me. She let out a short startled
cry, then stood there, puzzled and frightened, looking around.

She didn’t see me.

At all.

My first thought was that she was blind. But almost immediately I
realized that that was not the case. She was simply unable to see me—I was
completely invisible to her. I stood there, watching as she continued to look
frantically around, then hurried away, continuing to glance over her shoulder
for the invisible intruder.

I was stunned, not sure how to react. I thought for a moment, then
looked up and down the street, searching for someone else. I saw a derelict
sitting at a bus stop farther up the block and hurried over. He was a heavily
bearded man in a dirty overcoat and was staring straight out at the street, eyes
focused on the building opposite. I licked my lips, took a deep breath, and
began walking back and forth in front of him. His eyes did not follow me.