Now it was too late.
I felt bad about that, or part of me did, but I reasoned that even if there was an afterlife, the spirits of my parents had probably forgotten all about me and had not even noticed that I’d never gone to visit their graves.
We would probably be as ignored by the dead as we were by the living.
Would we be ignored by God?
That was a question, and I almost brought it up, almost said it aloud, but Philipe was not here, and he was the only one who would have given it any serious thought, so I said nothing.
I glanced out the back window of the van. How would we find Thompson once we got to Phoenix? If the city was not on any map, if it really was as invisible to the world at large as we ourselves were, how could we hope to find it? Sympathetic vibrations?
I half wished that we had waited for Philipe and the others.
I stared out at the dark desert. Thompson was a suburb of Phoenix, that much we knew. But was it on one of the main roads, was it off one of the highways on a small dirt road? If the same streets that cut through Phoenix passed through this city, how could people not notice it? Surely ordinary drivers stopped there for gas or cold drinks or cigarettes. Surely cars sometimes broke down within the city limits. If there were streets in the city, money had to be provided for their maintenance by the federal and state governments. The real world could not completely bypass an entire city, no matter who its residents were.
Now I was getting off on tangents, bringing in things that did not really have anything to do with anything.
I closed my eyes, intending to rest them for a few moments.
I was awakened at dawn.
“We’re there,” James said.
PART THREE
Nowhere Land
ONE
We were parked on the side of an otherwise deserted two-lane road. Behind us were warehouses and railroad tracks, vacant lots filled with cacti and growing weeds and the detritus of old construction crews. Before us, shimmering in the clear sunlight of dawn, looking like the Emerald City to our tired desperate eyes, was Thompson.
I blinked, pulled apart my sticking eyelashes. “Are you sure that’s it?” I asked. “Are you sure that’s Thompson?” I knew the answer, but I had to ask anyway.
James nodded. “Check it out.” He pointed out the side window of the van at a green sign I had not noticed before.
THOMPSON, the sign said. 5 MILES.
“We’re home,” Mary said, and there was awe in her voice.
“What are we waiting for?” I asked. “Let’s move out.”
Jim put the car into gear, and we drove toward the shining vision before us.
I would have expected us to be wildly excited, enthusiastically talking nonstop, but instead we were quiet as we drove down the deserted road. It was like we were in the last act of a movie, when the heroes, having accomplished their goal, are heading home and will soon part to go their separate ways. The feeling in the van was like that. There was an air of sadness and melancholy, and though none of us knew why, we were all rather subdued. We should have been happy to finally find the city, but I suppose we all realized, at least subconsciously, that this meant that our current lifestyle was coming to an end, and that depressed us.
I stared through the front windshield as we drew closer. I was glad to finally find a society in which I would fit, in which I would belong. And I would not miss a lot of the morally questionable things we’d done with the terrorists. But I would miss the closeness, the camaraderie. For despite what we would say to each other, despite what we would promise ourselves and want to believe, that closeness would not be maintained. We would drift apart. It was inevitable. The intensity of our life would be dissipated as we were assimilated into the day-to-day life of Thompson. We would meet, for the first time in our lives, hundreds, perhaps thousands of others like ourselves, and we’d find new people we liked better than the old. We’d make new friends, and our old friends would gradually move to the periphery of our lives.
Another sign came up on the right, a city limits sign. Over it, we saw as we drove closer, someone had placed a poster: the white background and blue bar code of generic plain-wrap products. In place of the name THOMPSON was CITY, written in block computer letters.
At least someone here had a sense of humor.
“Is this going to be heaven or hell?” James asked quietly.
None of us answered.
We drove past two gas stations and a mini-mall and found ourselves in downtown Thompson.
The view from afar had been deceiving. Up close, this was without a doubt the most depressing city I had ever seen. It was not shabby, squalid, or run-down, it was not gaudy or in bad taste, it was just… average. Completely and totally average in every way. The houses were not alike, though they possessed the blocky sameness of suburbs everywhere. Attempts had obviously been made to decorate each house individually, but the sight was just pathetic. It was as though, knowing they were Ignored, each homeowner had tried desperately to be different. One house was painted shocking pink, another red, white, and blue. Still another was festooned with Christmas lights and Halloween decorations. But sadly, though the houses were different from one another, they were all equally nondescript, all equally forgettable.
And I knew that if I could tell, everyone else could, too.
That was really depressing.
Downtown looked neither tastefully planned nor eclectically jumbled but somehow put together in the most bland and inoffensive way possible. It had no character whatsoever.
We drove up and down the streets of the city. It was still early, and we saw very few people. A couple of cars were at a gas station, their owners tanking up, and here and there people were walking or driving to work, but for the most part the streets were empty.
We drove past a park, a public swimming pool, and there, in front of a square two-story building identified by a freestanding sign as THOMPSON CITY HALL, we saw a middle-aged man standing on the curb, waving us over. He was tall and somewhat heavyset, with a thick walrus mustache, and was smoking a pipe. “Here!” he called, pointing to the marked parking spot directly in front of him. “Park here!”
Jim looked at me, I shrugged, and he pulled into the space. We opened up the van doors and got out, stretching, our bodies cramped and tired after spending so much time in the vehicle. I walked up to the man, not sure of what to say.
He took the pipe out of his mouth, smiled at me. “You must be Bob,” he said.
I nodded.
“Dan called. Told me you’d be coming. I’m Ralph Johnson, mayor here.” He held out a thick hand, which I shook. “I’m also the welcoming committee and the adjustment coordinator, which means that it’s my responsibility to show you around, answer your questions, find you a place to live, and find you jobs if you intend to live here.”
“Questions, huh?” Don shook his head. “We have a lot of those.”
“Everyone always does.” He looked us over, each of us, nodding to himself as he did so and puffing on his pipe. “Dan said he was very impressed with you guys. And gal,” he added, nodding toward Mary. “He must have been. That’s the first time he’s called home since he left.”
“Really?” I said, surprised.
“I guess it was because you were all together. As you’ve probably noticed, people who are Ignored don’t tend to travel in packs. They don’t organize. But you guys…” He shook his head. “You guys are really something.”
“Philipe,” I said. “That would be Philipe.” I wanted to give credit where credit was due. “He’s the one who started the terrorists, got us all together.”
“The terrorists?”
“Terrorists for the Common Man. It was Philipe’s idea. He thought we’d been Ignored long enough. He thought we should act as terrorists on behalf of all the people who were Ignored, who couldn’t or wouldn’t stand up for themselves.”
Ralph shook his head admiringly. “This Philipe must be quite a man. Where
is he now?”
“He’ll be coming in the next day or so, with another group of us.” James looked over at me questioningly. I knew he was wondering if he should bring up what had happened. I shook my head.
“I’ll be looking forward to it,” Ralph said. “In the meantime, I guess we should start on your orientation. Why don’t you begin by telling me your names and where you’re from. Introduce yourselves.”
We gave our names and hometowns, brief bios.
The mayor took his pipe from his mouth when we were through, looked at us thoughtfully. “I don’t know quite how to put this,” he said. “There’s no way to say it except to just say it. Have you all, uh,—”
“Killed our bosses?” I asked.
He smiled, nodded, relieved. “Yes.”
“Yeah,” I told him. “We have.”
“Then welcome to Thompson.” He started walking slowly up the cement path toward the blocky building. “We’ll get you signed in and signed up and then we’ll be all ready to go.”
The mayor’s office, on the first floor of city hall, looked disconcertingly like a larger version of my office at Automated Interface. There was only one window—a small glass square overlooking the side parking lot. The rest of the room was blank, the walls bare, the desk covered with bureaucratic papers, no trace of personalization anywhere. We were given forms to fill out, generic questionnaires that looked like job applications but were supposedly “residency declarations.”
After a few minutes, Jim looked up from his form. “You guys have stores here, homes, a city hall. How come this place isn’t on any map?”
“Because this is not a real town. Not technically. It’s owned by Thompson Industries. They test-market their products here. If we don’t like them, then they figure the average American won’t like them. We get all the free products we want: food, clothes, electronic equipment, household appliances. We get it all.”
I felt a sudden hollowness in my gut. “You mean this city wasn’t founded by the Ignored for the Ignored?”
“Hell, no.”
“It’s not a real Ignored city then.”
“Sure it is. To a certain extent. I mean, we’re left alone here, we’re completely autonomous. It’s just that—”
“Just that Thompson owns the land and the buildings, and you work for the company instead of yourselves.” James put down his pen.
Ralph laughed heartily. “It’s not as bad as all that. I admit, the concept may take some getting used to, but after a while, you don’t even think about it. For all intents and purposes, this is our city.”
A thought occurred to me. “If you’re a subsidiary of Thompson here, if the corporation bankrolls you and supports you, that means you’re not Ignored. Thompson notices you. Thompson knows you exist.”
That seemed important to me somehow.
He shrugged. “Not really. The statisticians record the number of units of each product we consume, report the figures to their superiors, who forward them to the company’s analysts, who report their findings to their superiors, who relay the information to their superiors, until the data finally reaches someone who can make a decision. No one really knows who we are. The big cheeses at the company probably don’t even know this town exists.”
We were silent.
“We used to be owned solely by Thompson,” the mayor continued. “Well, we still are, but we’re not used solely by Thompson. Other companies pay Thompson for our use. Kind of an inter-business partnership. A whole host of corporations now provide us with their products. So we get everything free. We get free cable TV, all the movie channels, because they want to know what people want to watch. All of our food is free because they want to find out what people eat. Our stores are stocked with the latest fashions because they want to know what clothes people will buy. The Gallup people have a permanent office here. The random polls you hear about? They’re all conducted here, in Thompson.”
“Everything’s free?” Don said.
“Everything. You can take whatever you need. We like to joke that we have the only communist system that actually works. Of course, it’s bankrolled by money-grubbing, multi-billion-dollar capitalist corporations.”
“Does the government know about this place?”
Ralph sucked on his pipe. He leaned back in his chair. “I don’t think they do. You know, I’ve thought about that long and hard, and I don’t believe they’re aware of our existence. Otherwise, we probably would’ve been studied to death. Some military use probably would’ve been found for us in the Cold War days. No, I think we’re one of those corporate secrets that private enterprise keeps under wraps.”
“The reason Don asked,” I said, “is because men have been after us. Official government-looking guys.”
The mayor’s face clouded over. “National Research Associates. They’re hired by a consortium of companies who’re in with Thompson.”
“Why?”
“They don’t want any of us outside the city, don’t want us infiltrating the general population. Figure it’ll throw off their outside polls. Right now, see, they run parallel polls, question us, question the general population. We’re a big expense. Other companies have to pay through the nose for our services. Some of them don’t like it. They keep trying to trip us up, prove we’re out of sync.”
“And they’d kill us for that?”
He shrugged. “What are we to them? Nothing. Who would notice if we were gone? Who would care?” He smiled slightly. “Thing is, we screw ’em up every time. Either they can’t find us or they forget about us. We’re almost impossible to catch. Even people specifically looking for us don’t notice us.”
“They caught one of our guys,” I said. “Killed him. In Familyland.”
Ralph looked grave. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know that.” He was silent for a moment, then he looked up at the clock above his office door. “Look, it’s getting late. It’s almost nine. Places are starting to open. Finish those forms, and I’ll take you around. We’ve got a lot to go over today.”
We finished filling out the questionnaires, handed them back to him. He placed them in a folder on his desk, and stood. “Let’s take a walk.”
I had not noticed it before, but Thompson was modeled after all those Hollywood movie small towns. The park and the city hall/police station/fire station complex were at the center, the hub of the wheel, and everything spread out from that. The surrounding blocks contained businesses—grocery stores, offices, gas stations, department stores, auto dealerships, banks, movie theaters—and beyond that were homes and schools.
We walked through the business district, Ralph acting as tour guide. Nearly all of the stores were chains—Sears, Target, Montgomery Ward, Von’s, Safeway, Radio Shack, Circuit City—and even those that weren’t had display windows filled with brand-name items. I felt comfortable walking here. I was aware, intellectually, of the city’s complete and utter mediocrity, but I could not help but enjoy a pleasurably gratifying feeling of familiarity as I walked with the others down the sidewalk. It was as though the city and everything in it had been designed specifically with me in mind.
No, I told myself. My wants and needs and desires were not that common. I was not that generic.
But I was.
“Is everyone here Ignored?” I asked Ralph. “Aren’t there normal wives or husbands of Ignored people?”
“There were. Still are, sometimes. But if those marriages don’t break up, the couples leave.” He smiled. “Love really is blind. Turns out we’re not Ignored to those who love us. Somehow, though, on a practical level, on a day-to-day basis, those kinds of mixed relationships seem to work better in the normal world than our world. And before you ask, yes, all of our children are Ignored. It is passed on. By those of us who can have children. A lot of us seem to be sterile.”
“Has anyone made any attempt to find out what we are? Why we’re like this?”
“Sort of. I mean, we’re always being asked to fill out questionn
aires and take telephone polls. And once a year we’re all required to take a physical exam that’s totally unlike any physical I’ve ever had. But, no, probably not to the extent you mean. The corporations don’t care about us as people; they only care that we do what they want us to do. We do—and I think that’s good enough for them. They don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth.”
“How long has this place been here?” Mary asked.
“The town was founded in 1963, although it was called Gates then and was owned by Gates Manufacturing. Thompson Industries took it over in 1979, changed the name.”
“But has the city always corresponded with the mood of the country?”
“Of course. Why else would it exist? In the late sixties we even had riots here. You should’ve seen it. Young people said they were tired of being Ignored and wanted recognition. I don’t think, at that time, they fully realized what we were. They thought it was imposed on us or something, like we were a legitimate minority and were being oppressed by the system. There were protests at the Gates headquarters, and when that went nowhere there were riots here.” He stopped walking, looked around to make sure we were alone, lowered his voice. “Gates sent in troops to quell the unrest. Private troops. A hundred and ten people were shot and killed. No one ever saw it on the news—no one would’ve remembered it if they had seen it—but the troops came in and stood in formation and started taking out citizens. Didn’t matter who they were or what they were doing. The troops didn’t care. They just opened fire.” Again, he looked around to make sure we were alone. “Keep that under your hat, though. That’s not something that’s talked about around here.”
I nodded.
“We gained more autonomy after that, but that was because we’d been cowed into submission. We knew we were expendable. The company could exterminate us all and no one would notice. No one would care.” He shook his head. “Then times changed and we changed with them. We said no to Salty Surfers and yes to nacho-flavored Doritos.” He shrugged. “And here we are.”
The Ignored Page 30
