The Ignored

nodded slowly. “I’m in,” I said.

Philipe pumped his fist in the air. “Yes!” His smile grew broader. “You’re a victor now, not a victim. You won’t regret this.” He spread his arms wide. “The town,” he crowed, “is ours!”

PART TWO We Are Here

One

I felt no guilt. That was the weird thing. Aside from those first few initial qualms, I felt no guilt over what I’d done. I wanted to; I tried to. I even attempted to analyze why I didn’t. Murder was wrong. I’d been taught that since I was a child, and I believed it. No human being had the right to take the life of another. To do so was… evil.

So why didn’t I feel bad?

I suppose it was because deep down, despite my surface reservations against murder, I felt that Stewart had deserved it. How I could think that, how I could believe that arrogance toward an underling qualified one for the death penalty, I could not rationally say. It was an instinctive feeling, a gut reaction, and whether it was Philipe’s persuasive arguments or my own rationalizations, I soon came to think, to believe, that what I had done was not wrong. It might have been illegal, but it was fair, it was just.

Legality and illegality.

Did such concepts apply to me?

I thought not. I began to think that perhaps, like Philipe said, I had been put on this earth for a purpose, that my anonymity was not a curse but a blessing, that my invisibility protected me from the mundane morality that ruled the lives of everyone else. I was average, Philipe kept telling me, but that made me special, that gave me rights and licenses that went far beyond those accorded to the people who’d surrounded me all my life.

I was born to be a Terrorist for the Common Man.

Terrorist for the Common Man.

It was an attractive concept, and it was obviously something to which Philipe had given a lot of thought. He introduced me to my fellow terrorists that first day. I was still stunned, still not fully functioning, but he led me back to my car and had me drive, following his directions, to a Denny’s coffee shop in Orange. The other terrorists were already there, taking up two pushed-together tables in the back of the restaurant and being completely ignored by both the waitresses and the other customers. We walked over to where they sat. There were eight of them, not counting Philipe. All men. Four of them, like Philipe and myself, appeared to be in their twenties. Three of them looked to be in their thirties, and one was an old man who could not have been a day under sixty-five.

I looked at the men and I realized what had struck me before about Philipe, why there had been something familiar about him. He looked like me. They all looked like me. I don’t mean that we had the same physical features, the same-sized noses or the same color hair, but there was a similarity in our expressions, in our attitudes, an undefinable quality that marked us as being of a kind. We were all Caucasian. I noticed that immediately. There were no minorities among us. But our similarity went far deeper than mere race.

We were all Ignored.

Philipe introduced me to the others. “This is the man I’ve been telling you about,” he said, gesturing toward me. “The one I’ve been cultivating. He finally did his boss today. Now he’s one of us.”

Nervous, embarrassed, I looked down at my hands. I saw dried blood in the short lines of my knuckles, around the edges of my fingernails. I realized I was still wearing the clown suit.

The others stood, all smiling and talking excitedly, and they shook my hand and congratulated me one by one as Philipe introduced them. Buster was the old man, a former janitor. The young guys were John, James, Steve, and Tommy. John and Tommy had both worked for chain department stores before hooking up with Philipe. James had been a circulation manager for the Pennysaver. Steve had been a file clerk working for a temporary agency. Two of the thirtysomethingers, Bill and Don, had both held middle-management positions — Bill with the County of Orange, Don with a private investment firm. The other, Pete, had been a construction worker.

These, then, were my peers.

“Sit down,” Philipe said. He pulled out a chair, looked at me. “You hungry? Want something to eat?”

I nodded, sitting down in the chair next to him. I was hungry, I realized. I hadn’t eaten breakfast or lunch, and all of this… excitement had left me with a huge appetite. But none of the waitresses had even looked in this direction since we’d walked in.

“Don’t worry,” Philipe said, as if reading my thoughts. He walked to the middle of the room and stood directly in front of a plump older waitress who was heading back toward the kitchen. She stopped just before running into him, an expression of surprise crossing her features as she saw him for the first time. “Could we get some service?” Philipe said loudly. He pointed to our table, and the waitress’ gaze followed his finger.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I — ” She caught herself. “Are you ready to order?”

“Yes.”

She followed Philipe back to our table. He ordered a patty melt and a cup of coffee, I ordered a cheeseburger, onion rings, and a large Coke. The other men had already eaten but asked for refills of their drinks.

I looked around the table at my fellow Ignored. Everything was happening so fast. My brain was registering the information, but my emotions were lagging a beat or two behind. I knew what was happening but not how to feel about it. I found myself staring at John and Tommy, or Tommy and John — I couldn’t remember who was who — trying to recall if I’d seen either of them on the streets of Irvine during the days I’d ditched work. There was something about them that made them seem more familiar to me than the others.

Had I seen them before?

Had one of them stolen the Coors from the 7-Eleven?

“Okay.” Philipe smiled at me. “I know this is all new to you, so instead of me trying to explain everything, why don’t you just ask what you want to ask.”

I looked from one face to another. I saw no unfriendliness there, no suspicion, no superiority, only sympathetic understanding. They all knew what I was going through, what I was feeling. They’d been there themselves.

None of them looked like terrorists, I found myself thinking. Philipe was probably the hardest among them, but even he did not look mean enough or sufficiently fanatic enough to be a true terrorist. They were like kids, I thought. Pretending. Playacting.

I realized that, as they’d introduced themselves to me, they’d all told me what they had been doing, what their jobs had been, but none of them had said what they were doing now. I cleared my throat. “Where do you, uh, work?” I asked. “Do you… do you all work together someplace?”

“Work?” Buster laughed. “We don’t work. We’re through with that shit.”

“We don’t need to work,” Steve said. “We’re terrorists.”

“Terrorists? What does that mean? What do you do? Do you all live together someplace, like a commune? Or do you guys meet, like, once a week, or what?”

I was facing Steve when I asked the question, but he immediately looked toward Philipe. They were all looking toward Philipe.

“It’s not like a job,” Philipe said. “It’s not what we do. It’s what we are.”

The others nodded in agreement, but none of them volunteered to expand on that.

“You asked what we did,” Philipe continued, “where we work. That’s the problem. Most people identify