The Ignored (42 page)

We did it there on the couch.

I wondered sometimes about the other aspects of Jane’s life, her
friends, her family, everything else she had left behind when she’d come to
Thompson. I asked her once, out of curiosity, “How’s your mom?”

She shrugged.

“How’s your dad?”

“I don’t know.”

I was surprised. “You don’t keep in contact with them?”

She shook her head and looked away, far away, into the distance. She
blinked her eyes rapidly, held them open wide, and I could tell she was about to
cry. “They ignore me. They can’t see me anymore. I’m invisible to them.”

“But you were always so close.”

“
Were.
I don’t think they even remember who I am.”

And she did cry. I put my arms around her, held her close, held her
tight. “Of course they do,” I said. But I was not so sure. I wanted to know what
had happened, how they had drifted apart, what it had been like, but I sensed
that this was not the time to ask, and I kept quiet and held her and let her
sob.

The days flowed into weeks, the weeks into months. Spring drifted past,
became summer, became fall. A year went by. Each day was like another, and
though the routine was established and unchanging, I didn’t mind. Truth to tell,
I liked it. We worked and played and shopped and slept, made friends, made love.
Lived. I rose in the hierarchy of city hall according to the Peter Principle,
and Jane became a supervisor at the day care center where she worked. At night,
we stayed home and watched TV. Television shows I liked were moved to different
time slots, then canceled, but it didn’t really matter because others took their
places and I liked them, too.

Time passed.

I had a good life. It was boring and mundane, but I was content with it.

That was the weirdest thing about Thompson. The weirdest and most
horrifying thing. Intellectually, I could see how pathetic everything was, how
desperately ineffectual were the attempts at distinction and originality: the
sad efforts to dress and behave outrageously, the endeavors to be different that
only ended up drab and gray. I could see the strings; I could see the man behind
the curtain. But emotionally, I loved the place. The city was perfect. I had
never been happier, and I fit right in.

This was my kind of town.

The range of occupational skills here was staggering. We had not only
accountants and office workers—the most prevalent occupations—but
scientists and garbage men and lawyers and plumbers and dentists and teachers
and carpenters. People who were either unable to distinguish themselves at their
work or who lacked the ability to hype themselves in their jobs. Many were more
than competent—bright men, intelligent women—they had simply been
outclassed in their chosen fields.

At first, I’d thought it was our jobs that made us faceless, then I’d
thought it was our personalities, then I’d wondered if it had something to do
with our genetic makeup. Now I had no idea. We were not all bureaucrats—though a disproportionate number of us were—nor were we all possessed of the
same bland character. Here in Thompson I found that, once again, citizens were
separating into gradations of visibility.

I wondered if perhaps there were people who would fade into the
background here as well, if there were the ignored of the Ignored.

That idea frightened me.

Did I miss the old days? Did I miss the Terrorists for the Common Man?
Did I miss the adventures, the camaraderie—

—the rapes, the murders?

I can’t say that I did. I thought about it now and then, but it seemed
so long ago that it was as though it had happened to someone else. Already those
days seemed like ancient history, and when my thoughts turned in that direction
I felt like an old man looking back on his rebellious youth.

I wondered what Jane would think if she knew about what I’d done with
Mary, if she knew about the woman I’d almost raped.

If she knew I’d killed a man.

Men.

I never asked about her missing years, about what she’d done between the
time she dumped me and the time I found her again.

I didn’t want to know.

Exactly a year and a month from the day we had met again in the
supermarket, Jane and I were married in a short civil ceremony at city hall.
James was there, and Don, and Jim and Mary, and Ralph, and Jane’s friends from
work and my friends from work. Afterward we had a reception at the community
center in the park.

I had invited only the terrorists who had come with me to Thompson in
the van, but as we danced and partied, I felt guilty that I had not sent
invitations to Philipe and the others. Somehow, despite all that had happened, I
still felt closer to them than I did to many of the people here, and in spite of
our rift, I found myself wishing that they were here to share this moment with
me. They were my family, or the closest thing to it, and I regretted not sending
them invitations.

It was too late now, though. There was nothing I could do about it.

I pushed the thought out of my mind, poured Jane some more champagne,
and the celebration continued.

We spent our honeymoon in Scottsdale, staying for a week at the resorts.
I used my old terrorist tricks to get us poolside suites at La Posada and
Mountain Shadows and the Camelback Inn.

That first night, our wedding night, I snagged the keys to La Posada’s
honeymoon suite, and I opened the door to our room, then picked up Jane and
carried her across the threshold. She was laughing, and I was laughing, and I
struggled not to drop her, finally throwing her, screaming, onto the bed. Her
dress flipped up over her head, exposing her white panties and gartered legs,
and though we were both still laughing, I became immediately aroused. We’d been
planning to wait, have a long bath, a sensuous massage, work our way up to the
lovemaking, but I wanted to take her now, and I asked her if she was really sure
that she wanted to slowly build up to it.

In answer, she grinned, pulled down her panties, spread her legs, opened
her arms for me.

Afterward, lying there, I rubbed my hand between her legs, feeling our
mingled wet stickiness. “Don’t you think we should do something different?” I
asked. “Don’t you think we should try some new positions?”

“Why?”

“Because we always do it in the missionary position.”

“So what? You like it that way, don’t you? I do. It’s my favorite. Why
should we force ourselves to meet other people’s expectations? Why should we
conform to other people’s ideas about sex?”

“We
are
conforming,” I told her. “We’re average.”

“It’s not average to me,” she said. “It’s great.”

She was right, I realized. It was great for me, too. Why
did
we
have to vary our lovemaking just because other people did, just because other
people said we were supposed to?

We didn’t.

We spent the week swimming in the resort pools, eating at Scottsdale’s
most expensive restaurants, and having the kind of ordinary, straight,
traditional sex we loved so well.

We returned to Thompson tanned and happy, our minds rested and our
crotches sore. But something had changed. The city was the same, the people were
the same, it was just that… I was not. I had been back in the real world,
and I found that I missed that world. Instead of returning home after a
vacation, it felt to me as though we were returning to prison after a weeklong
furlough.

I went back to work and Jane went back to work, and after a few days we
became reacclimatized, readjusted. Only…

Only that sense of being stifled did not entirely go away. I felt it, in
the back of everything, a presence even in my happiest moments, and it made me
uneasy. I thought about discussing it with Jane, thought I
should
discuss
it with Jane—I didn’t want our old communication problems to start again—but she seemed so happy, so blissfully unaware of this malaise that I was
feeling, that I was reluctant to drag her into this. Maybe it was just me.
Postnuptial depression or something. It wasn’t fair to burden her with my
paranoid craziness.

I forced myself to push aside all feelings of dissatisfaction. What was
wrong with me? I’d gotten everything I’d wanted. I was with Jane again. And we
were living in a city, a society where we were not ignored but noticed, where we
were not oppressed minorities but members of the ruling class.

Life was good, I told myself.

And I made myself believe it!

City hall and the police department had separate personnel departments
but shared databases, and I was reading the joint lists of new hirees that was
sent monthly to each division when I came across Steve’s name. He had been hired
as a police recruit, and an asterisk by his name indicated that he had previous
law enforcement experience and was on an accelerated promotional track.

Steve? Previous law enforcement experience?

He’d been a file clerk.

When he was with the terrorists, he’d been a rapist.

But it was not my place to bring this up, not my job to question the
hiring practices of the police department, and I said nothing. Maybe Steve had
changed. Maybe he’d mellowed out, turned over a new leaf.

I posted the list on our bulletin board.

Although I worked at city hall and lived in Thompson and was therefore
personally affected by the actions of the city council, I had little or no
interest in local politics. Council meetings were held on the first Monday of
each month and were televised live on our local community access cable station,
but I neither went to them nor watched them.

Ordinarily.

But on the last day of August, Ralph suggested to me that I might want
to catch September’s meeting.

We were eating lunch at KFC, and I tossed the bones of my drumstick into
the box, wiping my hands on a napkin. “Why?” I asked.

He looked at me. “Your old friend Philipe is going to come before the
council with a request.”

Philipe.

I had not heard from him or seen him since coming to Thompson over a
year ago. I had half wondered if he had left, gone back to Palm Springs, gone
across the country to recruit new terrorists. It wasn’t like him to be so quiet,
to maintain such a low profile. He liked power, liked being the center of
attention. He craved the spotlight, and I could not see him settling down into
anonymity. Not even here in Thompson.

I tried to appear disinterested. “Really?”

The mayor nodded. “I think you’ll find it interesting. You might even
want to come down, attend the proceedings.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

But I was curious as to what was going on, what Philipe was up to, and
one night I turned the TV to the Thompson channel.

The camera was stationary, and was trained directly on the mayor and the
council at the front of the chambers. I could not see anybody in the audience,
and I watched for a half hour, waiting through discussions of old business and
protocol, before the mayor tabled the discussion and moved on to new business.

“The first item on the agenda,” he said, “is a request by Philipe
Anderson.”

Susan Lee, our only female council member, adjusted her glasses.
“Request for what?”

“We’ll let the requestor explain that himself. Mr. Anderson?”

I recognized him even from the back as he passed before the camera and
took his place in front of the podium. He stood straight and tall and confident,
his charisma obvious against the blandness of the laid back mayor and lackluster
council, and I saw what had attracted the terrorists to him in the first place.
I saw—

—Philipe, covered with blood, hacking at the two unmoving children.

“That’s Philipe?” Jane asked.

I nodded.

“He’s more average-looking than I imagined.”

“He’s Ignored. What did you expect?”

On TV, Philipe cleared his throat. “Mayor. Ladies and gentlemen of the
council. The proposal I wish to make is one that will benefit all of Thompson
and is in the best interests of not just the community but of all Ignored
everywhere. I have here a detailed list of requirements that I will pass out to
each of you. It provides an item-by-item accounting of all proposed
requisitions, and you can look at it at your leisure and we can discuss it more
fully at the next meeting.”

He looked down at the paper on the podium in front of him. “The broad
outline of my plan is this: Thompson needs its own military, its own militia. We
are, for all intents and purposes, a nation unto ourselves. We have a police
force to take care of disturbances within our borders, but I believe that we
need an armed force to protect our sovereignty and our interests.”

Two of the council members were whispering to each other. I could hear
excited discussion from the audience.

Jane looked at me, shook her head. “Militarization of the city?” she
said. “I don’t like it.”

“Let’s settle down here,” the mayor said. He faced Philipe. “What makes
you think we need a militia? This sounds like a major expense: uniforms,
weapons, training. We have never been threatened; we have never been attacked. I
don’t see any real justification for this.”

Philipe chuckled. “Expense? It’s all free. Thompson picks up the tab.
All we have to do is request it.”

“But it is the responsibility of this council to determine whether such
requests are reasonable or unreasonable.”

“And this is a reasonable request. You say we’ve never been attacked,
but Oates sent troops in here in 1970 and killed a hundred and ten people.”

“That was in 1970.”

“It could happen again.” He paused. “Besides, in my proposal I suggest
that our militia have offensive as well as defensive capabilities.”