I missed having time to myself.
I would have time to myself today, I decided. I was going to take a vacation from being a Terrorist for the Common Man. I was going to be plain old Ignored me.
I jogged back to the model homes, ran up Philipe’s walk, let myself in. He and Paul were watching Good Morning America, eating Eggo waffles on the couch.
“Hey,” Philipe said. “What’s up?”
“I’m going to take off by myself today,” I said. “I want to be alone. I need some time to think.”
“Okay. We had nothing earth-shattering planned anyway. When’ll you be back?”
“I don’t know.”
“See you then.”
I went back to my house, grabbed my wallet and keys, and took off in the Buick.
I just drove. All day, I drove. When I needed gas I stopped and got some. When I was hungry I stopped at Burger King for lunch. But otherwise I kept moving. I went up Pacific Coast Highway all the way to Santa Monica, then cut inland and followed the foothills and mountains clear to Pomona. It felt good to be alone and on the road, and I cranked up the radio and rolled down the windows and sped down the highway, the breeze in my face, pretending I was not Ignored but normal and a part of the world through which I was driving and not just an invisible shadow at its fringes.
It was late when I got home, and though there were still lights on in two of the other homes, my house was dark. It was just as well. I didn’t feel like chatting with James or John tonight. I just wanted to go to bed.
I slipped quietly through the front door and up the stairs to my bedroom.
Where Mary and Philipe sat, naked, on my bed.
I started to leave the room.
“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.
NINE
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.<
br />
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.
TEN
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.
ELEVEN
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.
I told myself that.
But it wasn’t true.
I was opposed to Philipe’s plan; I really thought that what we intended to do was wrong, but I also enjoyed being part of a group effort, having a role in such a project.
I still enjoyed being a terrorist.
I ma
de my opposition known, tried to convert the other Ignored to my point of view, but I had no sway with Philipe anymore and the others were not brave enough to buck him.
We set the date for the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Familyland would be crowded that day. It would be big news. We would get lots of publicity.
On Thursday, Mary made Thanksgiving dinner, and we ate it at Philipe’s house, wasting most of the day watching TV, alternating between football games and the Twilight Zone marathon. Philipe joined us for dinner, but spent the rest of the time upstairs, alone, working.
Friday evening, the night before the attack, we met again in the sales office—or as Philipe referred to it, the War Room. This time he had spread out a map of Familyland, and he had marked specific points in the amusement park with red pins.
He wasted no time with pleasantries or formalities. “Here are the assignments,” he said. “Steve and Mary, Bill and Paul, Junior and Tim, ‘Tommy and Buster, Don and James, Pete and John, Bob and me. Here are the cars we’re going to take, and the routes, and the rides we’re going to go on….”
He described in detail the plan, then made each of us repeat our part aloud. I was to accompany Philipe in the Mercedes. We were to arrive at noon, then walk in through the reentry gate, me carrying the explosive pack, Philipe the detonator. We were to hang around for two hours, going on rides, going in shops, pretending to be normal tourists, then at precisely two-fifteen we were to get on Mr. Badger’s Crazy Journey. Near the end of the ride, while the car was maneuvering through hell, I was to jump quickly out of the car, place the explosives behind one of the little devil figures, then hop back in. We would finish the ride, walk to the train station near the roller coaster, and get on the train. We would stay on the train, circling the park, until all of the terrorists were on board. Then Philipe would detonate our explosives, the others assigned detonators would set off theirs, and we would get off the train at Old Town and leave the park.
The Ignored Page 23
