“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.
SEVENTEEN
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 gre
at. 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.
I stopped. “Hello,” I said.
No response.
I clapped my hands loudly next to his ears.
Nothing.
I pushed his shoulder.
He jumped up, startled, and let out a sharp exhalation, looking wildly around.
He could not see me either.
Or hear me.
“They’re back!” he screamed crazily, and ran up the street away from me.
I sat down hard on the bench.
We’d graduated to the next step.
When had this occurred? Had it happened overnight, or had we been gradually fading away from public view?
A bus passed by. The driver did not see me on the bench, did not stop.
We were, I realized, completely free. Even the minor restrictions imposed on us by our extremely limited visibility had now been lifted. We could do anything, whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted, and no one would ever know.
But…
But I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell the others. I wasn’t sure I wanted them to know this. I had the sense that it might set us back, that wherever we were now, whatever point we had reached in our evolution, would be forgotten and we would have to redo what we had already done. We would try desperately to take advantage of our invisibility and end up playing pointless games.
Besides, I had to admit the prospect of having the freedom that I now possessed frightened me. I did not like flying without a net, did not trust myself.
And I trusted the others even less.
Were we responsible enough to possess such unchecked autonomy?
I walked back to Joe’s, still not sure what I was going to say, still not sure if I was going to say anything. John and Bill and Don were gone, but Philipe, thank God, was home for lunch. The others were lounging around the living room, talking, reading magazines, watching TV.
I had to tell them something, I decided. But I would soft-pedal it.
“I don’t want to frighten anybody,” I said. “But I was just walking back from the bookstore and I bumped into this woman, and she didn’t see me.”
Paul snickered, looked up from his Time. “Big revelation.”
“No. I mean she didn’t see me at all. It wasn’t that she didn’t notice me. She could look right through me.” I glanced around the room. I cleared my throat nervously. “Doesn’t it seem like we’re getting… worse? James said one time that we could be like invisible superheroes, catching crooks and all that. Don’t you think we could do that now? Or am I the only one who’s noticed this?”
Silence greeted my words. Philipe looked uncomfortable.
I told them about my experiment with the derelict.
“I’ve noticed a difference, too,” Pete said quietly. “I didn’t want to say anything, I thought it might be just my imagination, but ever since we offed those power guys it’s felt different to me.”
Tommy faced Philipe. “Is this like a progressive disease? Is that what we have?”
Philipe sighed. “I don’t know. I’ve noticed it, too, though. I just didn’t want to say anything. I didn’t want to frighten anyone.”
Mary, on the couch, reached for Jim’s hand, held it. On TV, a commercial for a new brand of tampon came on. This was going in a different direction than I’d thought. On the street, I’d felt as though I’d been let out of a cage and forced to fly in open, unrestricted air. Now I felt as though the walls of a prison were closing in on me. I felt isolated; alone, despite the presence of the others.
“What are we going to do?” Tommy asked.
Philipe stood. “What can we do?” He took a deep breath. “I have to get back to work. I’ll talk to Joe, see what he thinks. He’s half-and-half, maybe he has a different perspective on this.”
“Maybe he won’t be able to see us for much longer, either,” Mary suggested.
Philipe walked out of the living room, not looking at us. “I have to go to work,” he said.
We were invisible, but it didn’t seem to matter much. At least not as much as I’d thought it would. Here, in the sun, amidst the wealth, with Joe as our go-between to normal society, that lost sense of alienation I’d felt temporarily disappeared.
Joe could see us as well as he always could.
We were not fading away to him.
Not yet.
Philipe continued working full-time on legislative ways to better our position and bring us attention. The rest of us fell into our old patterns.
One night after we’d gone to Sizzler and loaded up on all we could eat at the salad, taco, and pasta bar, we were walking back along the crowded sidewalk to Tower Records to steal some tapes and CDs when Philipe pulled me aside. “I need to talk to you,” he said.
“About what?”
He stopped walking, letting the others get a little further ahead of us. “We’re being followed,” he said. There was a pause. “I think they’re on to us.”
“Who’s on to us?”
“The suits.”
Goose bumps spread down my arms. “They’ve found us?”
“I think so.”
“When did you discover this?”
“A week ago, maybe.”
“Did you just ‘feel’ it, or did you see them?”
“I saw them.”
“Why haven’t they done anything? Why haven’t they captured us or killed us?”
“I don’t know.”
I looked around to see if any were near us now, but saw only casually dressed tourists and locals. “Who do you think they are?”
He shrugged. “Who knows? The government, maybe. The FBI or CIA. We’d be great spies for them. For all I know, they created us. Maybe our parents were given some sort of drug, exposed to some type of radiation—”
“Do you think so? Do you think that’s why we’re Ignored?” I should have been horrified, angry at the idea, but instead I felt excited, thinking that finally there was a chance I might get a concrete explanation for why we were the way we were.
He shook his head slowly. “No. But I do think that they found out about us. I think they know what we are and who we are and I think they’re watching us.” He was silent for a moment. “I think we should take them out.”
“No,” I said. “No more. I’ve done enough killing for two lifetimes. I’m n
ot going to—”
“You liked it when we took out the money men. Don’t deny it.”
“That was different.”
“Yeah. Those guys wanted to fire Joe and put in a new mayor. These guys killed Buster. And they’re going to kill us. That’s the difference.”
“Look, I don’t—”
“Shh!” Philipe said quietly, harshly. “Keep your voice down.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want the others to hear.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to worry them.”
“Worrythem? After all they’ve been through?”
“Because. That’s why. Is that a good enough reason for you?” He looked at me. “I told you I get feelings? Hunches? Well, right now I have this feeling that we shouldn’t tell the others.”
We were quiet for a moment. “What are these ‘hunches’?” I asked. “What are they really? Are they like… ESP or something?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He was silent. “Yeah, I guess they are like ESP,” he said finally. “Or maybe more like fortune-telling. They’re always about the future and they always come true. I don’t see pictures or images. I don’t get coherent messages read to me. I just… know things.”
“Why did you go off into that sandstorm last month? Why did you disappear for a week?”
“I had to.”
“What did you do while you were gone?”
“It’s none of your business.”
“It is my business.”
He looked at me, his eyes boring into my own. “No. It’s not.”
“It’s related, isn’t it? It has something to do with your ‘hunches’.”
He sighed. “Let’s just say that I had to go out and… do something. If I didn’t, something really bad would have happened to us. To all of us. It wouldn’t make any sense to you if I told you the specifics—it doesn’t make any sense to me—but it’s true, and I know it’s true, and… it’s just something that happened.”
“Why don’t you talk to the rest of us about this stuff? We—”
“Because you wouldn’t understand. And because it’s none of your business.”
The Ignored Page 28