The Ignored (43 page)

The mayor frowned. “Offensive?”

“We, the Ignored, have been abused and exploited for our entire history.
We have been at the mercy of the noticed, the powerful. And we have been unable
to fight back. Well, I suggest that it is time to fight back. It is time to
retaliate for all the injustices that have been perpetrated upon us.

“I am offering to train a crack fighting force of our best and most
capable men and mount a frontal assault on the White House.”

The room broke out in shouts and arguments. Philipe stood there
grinning. This was his milieu. This was what he loved, what he lived for, and I
could see the happiness on his face. Against my better judgment, I felt happy
for him, too.

The mayor, by this time, had lost all control of the meeting. Members of
the audience were cheering Philipe, arguing among themselves, yelling at
individual council people.

“They’ve had it their way for far too long!” Philipe shouted. “We can
attack, and they’ll never see us. Not until it’s too late! We’ll be in control
of the White House! We’ll stage the first successful coup in U.S. history! The
country will be ours!”

I could see the way this was going. Even if the mayor and the council
turned Philipe down, the public was behind him. If Ralph and the rest of them
wanted to keep their jobs, they’d have to go along with his proposals.

I turned off the TV.

Jane placed her head on my shoulder, held my hand. “What do you think’s
going to happen?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”

For the next several months, the Thompson channel was the preferred
source of news for everyone in the city. It must have really thrown off the
Nielson ratings. Our local cable newscaster, Glen Johnstone, provided nightly
updates on the training and equipment procurement of the militia. Because of our
unique status in relation to America’s top industries, all Philipe and his
followers had to do was fill out special order forms for the guns and vehicles
they wanted and wait for them to arrive. Someone, somewhere, keeping tabs on
orders, probably noted an increase in the demand for military supplies, and
someone somewhere probably ordered production increased. New jobs were probably
created.

I wondered, at first, why there was no crackdown, why no one from
Thompson or National Research Associates or one of the other corporations put a
stop to this, why no one from the FBI or the ATF conducted an investigation. On
television, Philipe made clear his intent, refusing to tone down his rhetoric.
“We will bring down the power elite!” he declared. “We will establish a new
government in this country!” I realized, though, that our broadcasts were
probably as ignored as everything else about us. The reason no one put a stop to
Philipe was because no one knew what he had planned—even though he came right
out and stated it over the airwaves.

I thought, for the first time, that his plan might actually work.

Two hundred men initially signed up for the military. There turned out
to be an unexpectedly high number of former army, air force, and marine officers
in Thompson, and these men were recruited by Philipe to train the initiates.
Philipe took fifty of the recruits himself and trained them as terrorists. These
were to be the advance guard, the ones who would infiltrate the White House and
pave the way for the others.

Two tanks were shipped to Thompson on the back of a semi truck.

Army jeeps arrived at the Jeep dealer.

Crates of automatic weapons were delivered.

Finally, after what seemed like forever, Philipe announced in a
prime-time meeting/rally in the city council chambers that the militia was ready
to start on its mission to Washington, D.C.

I had never seen such war fever, and it made me more than a little
uneasy. Jane felt the same way. So did most of our friends. So did James, Don,
Ralph, Mary, and Jim.

But the city was ready for this fight, ready to take on the known world,
and there was a big parade on Saturday to see our army off. Flags and banners
were waving; confetti was thrown; the high school marching band played. I stood
on the sidewalk with Jane, waiting for Philipe. What he had done had not been
erased from my mind—

swinging the knife, “My name is not David! It’s Philipe!”

—but it had been superceded by his unwavering dedication the past few
months, by his obvious commitment to what he perceived to be the betterment of
Thompson and the plight of the Ignored. I differed with Jane here. She saw this
as grandstanding; I saw it as an extension of the terrorists, proof of Philipe’s
belief in his cause.

The militia came marching down the street, in step, and I had to admit
they looked good, looked professional. Foot soldiers were preceded by jeeps and
trucks and the buses that would later carry them across country. Finally, at the
tail end of the parade, riding in an open tank, waving to the adults, throwing
candy to the kids, was Philipe.

I moved forward until I was standing on the curb. This was the Philipe I
had first met. This was the Philipe who had led us. Standing tall and proud as
the convoy rolled through the center of town, he glanced from one side of the
street to the other. As I’d expected, as I’d half hoped, he saw me, caught my
eye. He gave me a slight smile, then saluted. I nodded back. I felt a lump in my
throat, shivers on my arms as I watched them pull away. If this was a movie, I
thought, there would be stirring music and a sunset in the background. This was
dramatic stuff. This was heroic.

The parade continued to the edge of the city limits. The bands and the
marchers fell by the wayside. And the militia continued on.

They hit the White House Thursday night.

The Thompson channel had sent correspondents and cameramen along with
the soldiers to cover the event, and on Thursday evening every TV in the city
was turned to the station.

We saw our tanks and jeeps rolling down the capital’s streets, framed
dramatically in front of familiar landmarks, and though I still did not support
the war effort, I could not help feeling a surge of pride and something close to
patriotism as I realized that our men were successfully invading Washington,
D.C.

But while our people were Ignored, invisibility did not extend to their
equipment, and we should have known that such a blatant full-frontal assault
would not go unnoticed. Our military vehicles stood out in the civilian traffic
like Godzilla at a tea party, and as they turned a street corner, heading toward
the White House, they were halted by a blockaded street and a cadre of U.S.
soldiers.

The tanks and jeeps braked, rolled back a few feet, stopped. A standoff.
No one shouted, no one spoke; the two sides might have been communicating by
radio, but there were no bullhorns and the street was silent. The minutes
dragged on. Four. Five. Ten. There was no sound, no movement, and the
correspondent covering the event got on camera, admitted that he didn’t know
what was happening but would let us know as soon as he did.

The coverage shifted to the White House, where another reporter was
following Philipe’s advance force. They had successfully hopped the fence and
were dashing across the White House lawn, crouching black shapes against the
moonlit grass.

Suddenly, the station switched back to the street, where U.S. troops
were now firing on our men.

Our reporter was screaming incoherently, trying to explain what was
happening but doing a poor job of it.

We could see what was happening ourselves, though.

Our militia was being routed.

Even with all of their weapons, even with the training, our forces were
barely adequate, and going up against the best soldiers in the world, they
didn’t stand a chance.

Our tanks fired once each, hitting nothing, then blew up.

The men in the jeeps, now spread out across the street, fired at the
U.S. soldiers and their vehicles, but did not seem able to hit anyone or
anything. They began dropping like flies, picked off and taken down by military
sharpshooters, and then they abandoned their weapons and turned tail and ran.

The reporter and his cameraman beat feet as well.

The screen was black for several seconds.

Then we were back at the White House where Secret Service agents—the
only humans as bland and faceless as ourselves—were chasing Philipe and his
advance men back across the lawn. Security lights were on, trained on the area
in front of the building, and the Thompson correspondent explained even as he
retreated to the park across the street that one of Philipe’s men had set off an
alarm, alerting the President’s security forces to their presence.

One of our men was shot trying to climb the fence and escape.

Please, God, I thought, don’t let it be Philipe.

Then I saw Philipe running. I recognized his gait, his build, the
movement of his arms. He leaped, grabbed the bars of the fence, swung himself
over. There was the sound of gunfire, but if it was aimed at Philipe it missed
him, and he was running across the street, toward the camera.

Again the screen went blank.

“We’ve lost our feed,” Glen Johnstone, anchoring in Thompson, announced.

I quickly switched channels, expecting to see special bulletins on the
network stations, thinking that of course they’d break into regular programming
for an assault on the White House, an obvious attempt on the President’s life,
but there were only the usual sitcoms and police shows.

I turned to CNN, watched for an hour. Nothing. I waited until the eleven
o’clock news that night, flipped back and forth between ABC, CBS, and NBC.

The attack made the ABC news. Thirty-second footage right before a
commercial: a shot of the White House from a vantage point across the street,
Philipe and a handful of men running away, being chased by other men in suits.
The anchor allotted them one line: “In other news today, the Secret Service
repelled a small group of individuals attempting to break into the White House
grounds.”

Then they cut to a douche ad.

I sat there next to Jane in silence, staring at the commercial. That was
it? After all that preparation, after all the training, that was it? Over two
hundred men had left Thompson on Saturday, a trained militia, with tanks and
trucks and jeeps, in order to stage a coup.

And all they rated was one line on one newscast.

I turned off the television, crawled into bed. I realized, perhaps for
the first time, how truly pathetic we were. Philipe had organized a fighting
force, had come up with a workable plan, and it had all been for nothing.

Less than nothing.

I wondered how many members of our militia had been killed. I wondered
if they had been jailed.

Philipe returned to Thompson a week later, chastened and humiliated,
surrounded by the tattered remnants of his army.

The government had not even considered them enough of a threat to jail.
No charges had been pressed.

A hundred and fifty-three were dead.

We were more than willing to treat Philipe as a hero, but in his own
mind he was a failure, his grand schemes laughable, and from that point on, he
shunned the public eye and retreated into obscurity.

Glen Johnstone attempted to do a follow-up show, to interview Philipe
about what had happened, but for the first time in his life, Philipe turned down
free publicity.

I never saw him on television again.

The new year came. And went. Jane and I decided that we wanted a child,
and she threw away her pills and we tried for it. No luck. She wanted to consult
a doctor, but I said no, let’s just keep trying. I had a feeling it was my
fault, but I didn’t want to know for sure.

When I’d graduated from college, when I’d first gotten the job at
Automated Interface, it seemed like I had just been starting out, like I had my
whole life ahead of me. Now time was speeding by. Soon I’d be thirty. Then
forty. Then old. Then dead. The clich� was right: life
was
short.

And what was I doing with my life? What was the point of it? Would the
world be any different for my having lived? Or was the point that there was no
point, that we existed now and one day we wouldn’t and we might as well try to
have fun while we were here?

I didn’t know, and I realized I would probably never know.

James came over after work one day, and Jane invited him to stay for
dinner. Afterward, James and I retired to the back porch and reminisced about
the old days. I reminded him of the first time I’d gone out with the terrorists,
to the courthouse, and we both started laughing.

“I’ll never forget the judge’s face when you said, ‘Get a dick!’”

I was laughing so hard I was crying, and I wiped the tears from my eyes.
“Remember Buster? He just kept yelling, ‘Pussy!’”

We continued to laugh, but there was a sadness in it now, and I thought
of Buster. I remembered the way he’d looked, there in Old Town in Family land,
when the suits had shot him down.

We grew quiet and stared up at the stars. It was an Arizona night sky,
all of the major constellations visible against the clouded backdrop of the
Milky Way.

“Are you guys awake?” Jane called from the kitchen. “It’s so quiet out
there.”

“Just thinking,” I said.

James leaned back in his chair. “Are you happy here?” he asked.

I shrugged.

“I’ve heard there’s a land somewhere,” he said. “A country of Ignored.”

I snorted. “Atlantis or Mu?”

“I’m serious.” His voice grew wistful. “We could be free there. Really
free. Not just slaves for Thompson. Sometimes I feel like we’re pets now, like
trained animals, just doing what we’ve been told to do, over and over again.”

I was silent. I knew what he was feeling.

“I heard it was a town,” I said. “In Iowa.”