The Ignored (30 page)

“Where are you going?” Philipe said.

I turned reluctantly toward him. “To find someplace to sleep.”

“You’re going to sleep here with us.”

I shook my head.

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to.”

“This isn’t rape,” Philipe said. “You can’t have any objections to this.
We’re all consenting adults here.”

“I’m not consenting.”

“I’m telling you to consent.”

“But—”

“No buts. You’re still hung up on your old morality. You still don’t
seem to realize that we’ve moved on, we’ve left all that behind. The normal
rules don’t apply to us. We’re beyond all that.”

But I was not beyond all that.

I shook my head, backed out of the room.

I spent the night downstairs on the couch.

It was now November. We’d had some of our cars for nearly half a year by
this time, and the newness of them had worn off. We were even starting to get a
little tired of them. So Philipe decided that we would junk the ones we had and
get some more.

And get some publicity in the process.

We held a demolition derby with the Jeep, the Mercedes, and three of the
sports cars. Stealing roadblocks from the police, we closed off a stretch of the
405 Freeway near Long Beach one Wednesday night, illuminated the site with
flares, and three at a time pretended to be on a bumper car course, speeding
forward, throwing the vehicles into reverse, sideswiping whichever car we could.
The Porsche was the first to crap out, pummeled from all sides by Philipe in the
Mercedes and me in the Jeep, and Junior and his car were replaced by Steve in
the 280Z. This time they both ganged up on me, and though I put up a brave
fight, forcing Steve onto an off-ramp and ramming Philipe almost into a light
pole, I was eventually slammed into the center divider, and the Jeep died.

Philipe was the winner of the derby, and though that qualified him under
our quickly made-up rules to keep the Mercedes, he elected to leave it on the
freeway with the others. He pointed it down the empty middle lane, put on the
cruise control, and hopped out of the car.

The Mercedes drove straight for a few moments, then drifted sharply to
the right and went over a small asphalt bump and then down an embankment. We
heard it crash and die, and we waited for an explosion but there was none.

“That’s it,” he said. “Game over. Let’s go home.”

Behind the line of flares was a massive traffic jam, and we walked past
the roadblocks, between the honking cars, and over the center divider to where
we’d left our getaway vehicles.

We drove home in a good mood.

Our little exploit made the local news, and we gathered in Philipe’s
house and cheered when film footage of the wrecked cars came on TV.

“The reason for the unauthorized roadblock and the origin of the
automobiles is described as a mystery by police,” the reporter said.

Mary, sitting on the arm of Don’s chair tonight, was grinning. “This is
great,” she said. “This is really great.”

I dutifully videotaped the newscast.

Afterward, the male anchor made a joke about our cars to his female
co-anchor, and then the weather report came on.

The other terrorists were talking excitedly about both the demolition
derby and the newscast, but I stood there with the video remote in my hand,
watching the weather forecast. We were not Terrorists for the Common Man, I
realized. We were nothing so noble or romantic. Nothing so important. We were a
pathetic group of unknowns trying desperately, in any way we could think of,
using any means at our disposal, to leave a mark on society, to let people know
that we were here, to get publicity for ourselves.

We were clowns. Comic relief for the real news.

It was a rather stunning realization, and not one for which I was really
prepared. I had not given this terrorist business much thought since those first
few weeks. I had simply bought into Philipe’s concept and assumed that what we
were doing was real, legitimate, worthwhile. I had never stopped to analyze what
exactly we were accomplishing. But now I looked back on everything we’d done and
saw for the first time how little that actually was, and how embarrassingly
pitiful were our delusions of grandeur.

Philipe was angry at what he was, and it was this anger that drove him,
that fueled his passion and his efforts to do something big, something important
with his life. But the rest of us had no such driving force. We were sheep. All
of us. Myself included. I might have been angry myself at first, but I no longer
felt that way. I no longer felt anything, and whatever fleeting pleasure I had
derived from our exploits had long since faded.

What was the point to it all?

I turned off the VCR, put the tape back in its box, and wandered back
home alone. I took a long, hot shower, then put on a robe and walked into the
bedroom. Mary, wearing only a pair of white silk panties, was lying on the bed
waiting for me.

“Not tonight,” I said tiredly.

“I want you,” she said, in a husky voice filled with false lust.

I sighed, took off my robe. “Fine.”

I stretched out on the bed next to her, and she climbed on top of me,
began kissing me.

A moment later I felt pressure at the foot of the bed. Rough hands
suddenly reached up, held my penis.

Male hands.

I squirmed, trying to get away. I felt sickened. I knew I should be more
open-minded, but I wasn’t.

I felt a mouth on my organ.

I was tangled up in Mary, and I tried to get away, but her arms and legs
were wrapped around me and I could not struggle out of her embrace.

There was a muffled male grunt, a grunt I recognized, and I realized
that it was Philipe at the end of the bed, working on me.

I closed my eyes, filled with a deep black despair.

Jane, I thought.

Philipe’s mouth moved off of me, and a second later Mary stiffened,
moaned, increased the pressure against my body. The pressure increased,
decreased, increased, decreased, and then she jerked forward with a gasp,
slumping against me.

Now I did roll over and away, feeling lower than I ever had in my life.
I hated Philipe, and part of me wanted to kill him, wanted to sit up, take his
neck in my hands, and squeeze the life out of him.

I wanted him to go away, did not want to look at him, but he stood next
to the bed and stared down at me.

“Get out,” I said.

“It wasn’t that bad. I could tell you enjoyed it.”

“That’s an automatic response.”

Philipe crouched down next to me. There was something like desperation
in his eyes, and I understood that deep down, despite all his talk of freedom
from conventional morality and beliefs, he felt the same way I did.

I thought of his old-lady house.

“You might’ve hated it,” he said. “But you felt alive, didn’t you? It
made you feel alive?”

I looked at him, nodded slowly. It wasn’t true, and we both knew it
wasn’t true, but we both pretended that it was.

He nodded back. “That’s what’s important,” he said. “That’s what’s
really important.”

“Yeah,” I said. I turned away from him, closing my eyes, pulling the
covers up around me. I heard him talking to Mary after that, but I could not
hear what either of them said, and I didn’t want to.

I closed my eyes tightly, kept myself wrapped in the covers, and somehow
I fell asleep.

I wondered sometimes what had happened to Jane.

No. Not sometimes.

All the time.

There was still not a day that went by that I did not think about her.

It had been over a year and a half now since we’d broken up, since she’d
left me, and I wondered if, in that time, she’d found someone else.

I wondered if she ever thought about me.

God knows I thought about her. But I had to admit that as time passed,
her image in my memory began to fade. I could no longer recall the precise color
of her eyes, could no longer call to mind the unique details of her smile, the
specific mannerisms that were hers and hers alone. Everywhere I looked, in every
crowd, there seemed to be at least one young woman who looked like Jane, and I
found myself wondering whether I would recognize her if I saw her again.

If she’d changed her hairstyle or was wearing a different type of
clothes, I could probably pass right by her and not notice.

The thought of that made me incredibly sad.

God, I hated being Ignored.

I hated it.

I don’t mean to say that I disliked my fellow terrorists or that I
didn’t enjoy being with them. I did. It was just that… I didn’t
want
to like being with them. I didn’t want to enjoy the things I enjoyed. I didn’t
want to be who I was.

But that was something I would never be able to change.

After the experience with Mary and Philipe, I gave up on sex. I took
myself out of the loop. Mary still spent different nights at different houses,
but her trips to my house were limited to John’s and James’ bedrooms. She was
polite to me, and I was polite to her, but for the most part we tried to ignore
each other and stay out of one another’s way.

Philipe’s attitude toward me seemed to have changed as well. We were not
as close as we had been. If we had had hierarchical ranks, I would probably
still be his second in command—but he would resent me for it.

As with Mary, Philipe and I were polite, outwardly friendly, but
whatever real camaraderie we had once shared was gone. Philipe also seemed
harder now, more businesslike, less inclined to joke around or have fun. And it
was not just with me. He was that way with everybody. Even Junior remarked upon
it.

But of course no one dared say anything to his face.

I got the impression that Philipe had come to the same conclusions about
the efficacy of our organization as I had. He spent most of the next week by
himself, locked in his room, in his house. We did go out to a few Garden Grove
car dealerships on Saturday and pick up some new vehicles, but other than that
we laid low, and Philipe we saw only at dinner.

He called us together the next Thursday for a meeting in the sales
office. He sent Paul around to the different houses with written invitations for
each person, and he made it clear that this was a mandatory meeting, that he had
something important to announce.

At eight o’clock, the appointed time, I walked across the street with
James and John. Apparently, Philipe or Paul or Tim had stolen a key or found
some way to pick the lock because the door to the office was open, and all the
lights were on. On a table in the middle of the room, spread over a map of the
subdivision, was a map of Orange County. Around the table were thirteen chairs.

We sat next to Tim and Paul and Mary, waiting for the others.

Philipe did not begin speaking until we had all arrived and were seated.
Then he jumped right in. “You know why we’re together,” he said. “You know our
purpose. But lately we seem to have lost sight of that purpose.” He looked
around the room. “What have we been doing? We call ourselves terrorists, but who
have we terrorized? What terrorist acts have we actually performed? We’ve been
playing at being terrorists, having fun, doing what we wanted with the liberty
afforded us and pretending that our actions have meaning.”

The liberty afforded us.

Philipe had practiced this. He had written it out ahead of time. A wave
of cold passed through me. I suddenly knew what was coming next.

“We need to take our roles seriously. If we’re going to call ourselves
terrorists, then we need to act like terrorists. We need to draw attention to
our cause in the way we originally planned. We need to make a statement. A bold
statement that will capture the attention of the country.” He paused, and there
was an excited sparkle in his sharp eyes. “I think we should blow up
Familyland.”

There was a sick sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as I heard the
name of the amusement park. I looked around our group and I saw that James and
Tim and Buster and Don felt the same way. But on the faces of the others, Steve
and Junior in particular, I saw looks of excited anticipation.

Philipe pointed down at the map on the table in front of us. “I’ve
devised a plan, and I think it will work.”

He outlined his idea. Explosives, he said, would be obtained from the
road construction crew currently blasting through south county hills in an
effort to build a new highway. We would then arrive at Familyland, in teams of
two, coming at different times, in different cars, from different entrances. We
would each be equipped with explosives and remote detonators, and at a
prearranged time we would get on different rides, plant the explosives, and then
meet on the train, where, while passing through Dinosaur Country, we would
detonate the explosives simultaneously. We would get off the train at the Old
Town entrance and then walk calmly and individually out to our respective cars
before driving home.

He would, ahead of time, send letters to the police and the media,
taking credit for the attack in the name of the Terrorists for the Common Man.

“Wow!” Steve said, grinning. “Killer idea!”

There was no discussion of the plan. Philipe announced that that was
all, the meeting was over, and like a general, he nodded brusquely to us and,
hands clasped stiffly behind his back, walked off alone into the night.

The rest of us looked at each other, looked at the map on the table, but
said nothing.

We split up.

And we, too, walked alone into the night.

It was almost as if I were in a trance, as if I had no will of my own.

For the next two weeks, the other terrorists and I prepared for the
attack on Familyland. I didn’t want to, I thought it was wrong, but I was a
sheep and said nothing, and I followed Philipe’s directions and did as I was
told. At night, alone in my bed, I told myself that I wanted to leave, that I
wanted to get away from the terrorists, that I just wanted to go back to the way
things were before and live out my anonymous life in peace.