Then I looked into her eyes, and I knew how to cut through it all. I said what I wanted to say, what I felt: “I love you.”
And she answered the way I wanted her to, the way I hoped she would: “I love you, too.”
And all that uncertainty was gone. We knew where we stood now. We knew what the other one was feeling, what the other one was thinking.
The words flowed freely from us then, bubbling out and over each other, colliding, overlapping, weaving an interconnected tapestry of two unconnected stories. She said she’d regretted walking out but had been too stubborn to come back and apologize. I told her I’d been willing to crawl but had been too afraid to approach her. I told her I quit Automated Interface, and I told her about meeting Philipe and the Terrorists for the Common Man, but I left out my murder of Stewart and the acts the terrorists had later performed. She told me she’d discovered on her own that she was Ignored, and while working as a waitress had met another woman who was Ignored, an older woman, and had come with her here to Thompson.
Both of us expressed our amazement that we had found each other again. And here of all places.
“We were meant to be together,” Jane said, and there was only a hint of playfulness in her voice.
“Maybe we were,” I said.
We got our groceries and went to her house, a one-story tract home near Main Street. I was surprised to see a lot of her old furniture, the furniture she’d taken from our apartment, arranged in the spacious living room. She’d obviously felt no need to prove anything to anybody. There’d been no attempt to make the room look unique or outrageous; there were only the furnishings she liked arranged in the way she liked them. I felt comfortable here, instantly at ease, and though I now recognized intellectually the anonymous homogeneity of Jane’s taste, it still pleased me. It felt right.
How could I not have noticed that she was Ignored?
Why hadn’t I figured it out before this?
Stupidity, I guess.
She made dinner—baked chicken and Rice-A-Roni—and it was just like the old days. I lay on our couch and watched TV while she worked in the kitchen, and we ate in the living room while Jeopardy! was on, and it was like we were married and had never been apart. The rhythms were there, our habits and speech patterns and little personal traits all unchanged, and we kept the conversation current, superficial, and I could not remember when I’d ever been this happy.
After dinner, I helped with the dishes. I grew quiet as Jane scrubbed the last of the silverware, and she must have noticed because she looked up. “What is it?”
“What?”
“Why are you so quiet?”
I looked at her, nervously licked my dry lips. “Are we going to—”
“—make love?” she finished for me.
“—have sex?” I said.
We both laughed.
She looked up at me, and her lips looked red and full and infinitely sensuous. “Yes,” she told me. She put her soapy hands on my cheeks and stood on her tiptoes and kissed me.
We needed no foreplay that night. By the time our clothes were off, I was hard and she was wet, and I got on top of her and she spread her legs and guided me in.
I fell asleep afterward, a blissful sleep, free of dreams, and sometime in the middle of the night she woke me up and we did it again.
I called in sick the next morning, talking to Marge Lang, the personnel assistant, and I could almost hear her smile over the phone as she spoke. “We figured you’d be calling in today.”
Big Brother was watching me.
I kept my voice nonchalant. “Really?”
“It’s okay. You haven’t seen each other for a long time.”
Such intimate knowledge of my movements and motives and private life should have offended me, but somehow it did not, and I found myself smiling into the phone. “Thank you, Marge,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”
“Bye.”
I glanced through the sheer curtains of the living room and saw outside the bright blue Arizona sky, and I knew that nothing could ruin this day.
I crawled back into bed, where Jane was waiting.
FOUR
I moved into her house the next weekend.
I took only the clothes and personal belongings I’d brought with me to Thompson. Everything else stayed with the condo for the next inhabitant.
Unpacking my box on the floor of the living room, I came across the pair of Jane’s panties I’d taken with me when I’d left the apartment. I presented them to her, and she turned them over in her hands. “I can’t believe you kept these,” she said. She grinned. “What did you do? Sniff them?”
“No,” I admitted. “I just… carried them with me. I just kept them.”
“To remind you of me?”
I nodded. “To remind me of you.”
“Wait here a minute.” She went into the bedroom, was gone a few moments, and returned with an old T-shirt of mine, a promotional Jose Cuervo T-shirt I’d gotten free at UC Brea and that I used to wear while washing my car. “I stole it,” she said. “I wanted something to remember you by.”
“I didn’t even notice it was gone.”
“You wouldn’t.” She sat down next to me, put her head on my shoulder. “I never stopped thinking about you.”
Then why did you leave me? I wanted to ask.
But I said nothing, only bent down, lifted her chin, kissed her.
I was happy, truly, and honestly happy. What Jane and I had together was average, I suppose—how could it be otherwise?—the same feeling millions of people across America, across the world, had every day—but to me, it felt wonderful and unique, and I was filled with a deep contentment.
We got along better now than we had before. The wall that had existed between us prior to our separation was gone. We communicated intimately and openly—without the miscommunications, misinterpretations, and misunderstandings that had once marred our relationship.
Our sex life was more active than it had ever been. Morning, night, and on weekends, noon, we made love. Some of the old fears and anxieties, however, had not gone away, and even as I enjoyed the pleasures of our newly energized love life, I found myself wondering if Jane was really as blindly and uncritically satisfied as I myself was. One Sunday morning, as I lay on the couch reading the newspaper, Jane pulled open my robe and gave my penis a squeeze and a quick kiss. I put down the paper, looked at her, decided to voice what I was thinking. “Is it big enough for you?” I said.
She looked up at me. “That again?”
“That again.”
She shook her head, smiled, but there was no sign of the old impatience or annoyance on her features. “It’s perfect,” she said. “It’s like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. You know, one bowl of porridge was too hot, one was too cold, and one was just right? Well, some are too big, some are too small—and yours is just right.”
I put down the paper, pulled her up and on top of me.
We did it there on the couch.
I wondered sometimes about the other aspects of Jane’s life, her friends, her family, everything else she had left behind when she’d come to Thompson. I asked her once, out of curiosity, “How’s your mom?”
She shrugged.
“How’s your dad?”
“I don’t know.”
I was surprised. “You don’t keep in contact with them?”
She shook her head and looked away, far away, into the distance. She blinked her eyes rapidly, held them open wide, and I could tell she was about to cry. “They ignore me. They can’t see me anymore. I’m invisible to them.”
“But you were always so close.”
“Were. I don’t think they even remember who I am.”
And she did cry. I put my arms around her, held her close, held her tight. “Of course they do,” I said. But I was not so sure. I wanted to know what had happened, how they had drifted apart, what it had been like, but I sensed that this was not the time to ask, and I kept quiet and held her and
let her sob.
FIVE
The days flowed into weeks, the weeks into months. Spring drifted past, became summer, became fall. A year went by. Each day was like another, and though the routine was established and unchanging, I didn’t mind. Truth to tell, I liked it. We worked and played and shopped and slept, made friends, made love. Lived. I rose in the hierarchy of city hall according to the Peter Principle, and Jane became a supervisor at the day care center where she worked. At night, we stayed home and watched TV. Television shows I liked were moved to different time slots, then canceled, but it didn’t really matter because others took their places and I liked them, too.
Time passed.
I had a good life. It was boring and mundane, but I was content with it.
That was the weirdest thing about Thompson. The weirdest and most horrifying thing. Intellectually, I could see how pathetic everything was, how desperately ineffectual were the attempts at distinction and originality: the sad efforts to dress and behave outrageously, the endeavors to be different that only ended up drab and gray. I could see the strings; I could see the man behind the curtain. But emotionally, I loved the place. The city was perfect. I had never been happier, and I fit right in.
This was my kind of town.
The range of occupational skills here was staggering. We had not only accountants and office workers—the most prevalent occupations—but scientists and garbage men and lawyers and plumbers and dentists and teachers and carpenters. People who were either unable to distinguish themselves at their work or who lacked the ability to hype themselves in their jobs. Many were more than competent—bright men, intelligent women—they had simply been outclassed in their chosen fields.
At first, I’d thought it was our jobs that made us faceless, then I’d thought it was our personalities, then I’d wondered if it had something to do with our genetic makeup. Now I had no idea. We were not all bureaucrats—though a disproportionate number of us were—nor were we all possessed of the same bland character. Here in Thompson I found that, once again, citizens were separating into gradations of visibility.
I wondered if perhaps there were people who would fade into the background here as well, if there were the ignored of the Ignored.
That idea frightened me.
Did I miss the old days? Did I miss the Terrorists for the Common Man? Did I miss the adventures, the camaraderie—
—the rapes, the murders?
I can’t say that I did. I thought about it now and then, but it seemed so long ago that it was as though it had happened to someone else. Already those days seemed like ancient history, and when my thoughts turned in that direction I felt like an old man looking back on his rebellious youth.
I wondered what Jane would think if she knew about what I’d done with Mary, if she knew about the woman I’d almost raped.
If she knew I’d killed a man.
Men.
I never asked about her missing years, about what she’d done between the time she dumped me and the time I found her again.
I didn’t want to know.
Exactly a year and a month from the day we had met again in the supermarket, Jane and I were married in a short civil ceremony at city hall. James was there, and Don, and Jim and Mary, and Ralph, and Jane’s friends from work and my friends from work. Afterward we had a reception at the community center in the park.
I had invited only the terrorists who had come with me to Thompson in the van, but as we danced and partied, I felt guilty that I had not sent invitations to Philipe and the others. Somehow, despite all that had happened, I still felt closer to them than I did to many of the people here, and in spite of our rift, I found myself wishing that they were here to share this moment with me. They were my family, or the closest thing to it, and I regretted not sending them invitations.
It was too late now, though. There was nothing I could do about it.
I pushed the thought out of my mind, poured Jane some more champagne, and the celebration continued.
We spent our honeymoon in Scottsdale, staying for a week at the resorts. I used my old terrorist tricks to get us poolside suites at La Posada and Mountain Shadows and the Camelback Inn.
That first night, our wedding night, I snagged the keys to La Posada’s honeymoon suite, and I opened the door to our room, then picked up Jane and carried her across the threshold. She was laughing, and I was laughing, and I struggled not to drop her, finally throwing her, screaming, onto the bed. Her dress flipped up over her head, exposing her white panties and gartered legs, and though we were both still laughing, I became immediately aroused. We’d been planning to wait, have a long bath, a sensuous massage, work our way up to the lovemaking, but I wanted to take her now, and I asked her if she was really sure that she wanted to slowly build up to it.
In answer, she grinned, pulled down her panties, spread her legs, opened her arms for me.
Afterward, lying there, I rubbed my hand between her legs, feeling our mingled wet stickiness. “Don’t you think we should do something different?” I asked. “Don’t you think we should try some new positions?”
“Why?”
“Because we always do it in the missionary position.”
“So what? You like it that way, don’t you? I do. It’s my favorite. Why should we force ourselves to meet other people’s expectations? Why should we conform to other people’s ideas about sex?”
“We are conforming,” I told her. “We’re average.”
“It’s not average to me,” she said. “It’s great.”
She was right, I realized. It was great for me, too. Why did we have to vary our lovemaking just because other people did, just because other people said we were supposed to?
We didn’t.
We spent the week swimming in the resort pools, eating at Scottsdale’s most expensive restaurants, and having the kind of ordinary, straight, traditional sex we loved so well.
We returned to Thompson tanned and happy, our minds rested and our crotches sore. But something had changed. The city was the same, the people were the same, it was just that… I was not. I had been back in the real world, and I found that I missed that world. Instead of returning home after a vacation, it felt to me as though we were returning to prison after a weeklong furlough.
I went back to work and Jane went back to work, and after a few days we became reacclimatized, readjusted. Only…
Only that sense of being stifled did not entirely go away. I felt it, in the back of everything, a presence even in my happiest moments, and it made me uneasy. I thought about discussing it with Jane, thought I should discuss it with Jane—I didn’t want our old communication problems to start again—but she seemed so happy, so blissfully unaware of this malaise that I was feeling, that I was reluctant to drag her into this. Maybe it was just me. Postnuptial depression or something. It wasn’t fair to burden her with my paranoid craziness.
I forced myself to push aside all feelings of dissatisfaction. What was wrong with me? I’d gotten everything I’d wanted. I was with Jane again. And we were living in a city, a society where we were not ignored but noticed, where we were not oppressed minorities but members of the ruling class.
Life was good, I told myself.
And I made myself believe it!
SIX
City hall and the police department had separate personnel departments but shared databases, and I was reading the joint lists of new hirees that was sent monthly to each division when I came across Steve’s name. He had been hired as a police recruit, and an asterisk by his name indicated that he had previous law enforcement experience and was on an accelerated promotional track.
Steve? Previous law enforcement experience?
He’d been a file clerk.
When he was with the terrorists, he’d been a rapist.
But it was not my place to bring this up, not my job to question the hiring practices of the police department, and I said nothing. Maybe Steve had changed. Maybe he’d mellowed out, turned
over a new leaf.
I posted the list on our bulletin board.
Although I worked at city hall and lived in Thompson and was therefore personally affected by the actions of the city council, I had little or no interest in local politics. Council meetings were held on the first Monday of each month and were televised live on our local community access cable station, but I neither went to them nor watched them.
Ordinarily.
But on the last day of August, Ralph suggested to me that I might want to catch September’s meeting.
We were eating lunch at KFC, and I tossed the bones of my drumstick into the box, wiping my hands on a napkin. “Why?” I asked.
He looked at me. “Your old friend Philipe is going to come before the council with a request.”
Philipe.
I had not heard from him or seen him since coming to Thompson over a year ago. I had half wondered if he had left, gone back to Palm Springs, gone across the country to recruit new terrorists. It wasn’t like him to be so quiet, to maintain such a low profile. He liked power, liked being the center of attention. He craved the spotlight, and I could not see him settling down into anonymity. Not even here in Thompson.
I tried to appear disinterested. “Really?”
The mayor nodded. “I think you’ll find it interesting. You might even want to come down, attend the proceedings.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
But I was curious as to what was going on, what Philipe was up to, and one night I turned the TV to the Thompson channel.
The camera was stationary, and was trained directly on the mayor and the council at the front of the chambers. I could not see anybody in the audience, and I watched for a half hour, waiting through discussions of old business and protocol, before the mayor tabled the discussion and moved on to new business.
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