The Ignored

themselves with their jobs. Without their jobs, they’re lost. That’s the source of their identity. That’s who they are. A lot of them don’t know anything but work. They need that sort of structure to give their lives purpose, to feel fulfilled. But how fulfilling can a job as a secretary be? With free time, you can do anything! Your limits are those of your imagination. Most people don’t have any meaning in their lives. They don’t know why they’re here, and they don’t care. But we have a chance to be different. We don’t need to just keep busy, to put in our time until we die. We can live!”

I thought of my long weekends, my boring vacations. I’d always been one of those people who were lost without imposed structure. I looked around the table, at the faces of my fellow Ignored. They, I knew, were that way, too.

But Philipe was right. This was a chance to break out. We had already killed. Each of us at the table, as nice as we seemed, as friendly as we looked, had murdered someone. What else was left after that? What other taboo could there be? We had already proved that we were not bound by the strictures of society.

I nodded at Philipe.

He smiled at me. “We’re freer than everyone else,” he said. “Most people think that what they do is important, that they matter. But we know better. There are sales clerks who come back to work immediately after they have a baby because they’re convinced that their work is so important and valuable, their contribution so unique, that things could not go on without them. The truth is that they’re just cogs in the machine. If they quit or died, someone else would immediately take their place and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference to anybody.

“That’s why we’ve been blessed. We’ve been shown that we are disposable, dispensable, unimportant. We’ve been freed for other, greater things.”

“So what do we do?” I asked. “I mean as terrorists, what do we do?”

“Whatever we want,” Buster said.

“Yeah, but what do we want?”

Again, all eyes turned to Philipe.

He straightened in his seat, obviously enjoying the attention. This was his idea, his baby, and he was proud of it. He leaned forward, elbows on the table, talking in the furtive yet passionately committed manner of a rebel leader giving a pep talk to his troops. He saw our role as that of avengers, he explained. We had experienced the persecution of the known, of the intellectual and physical elite. We knew what it was like to be overlooked and disregarded and unseen. Because of that, he said, because of our experiences, because of our oppression, because we had seen society from the yoke end of the plow, we knew what needed to be done. And he knew how to do it. With planning, with organization, we could bring about changes, great changes.

Everyone nodded enthusiastically, like true believers at a tent revival, and I, too, felt a proud stirring inside myself. But at the same time I found myself wondering if we all truly had such Utopian goals in our hearts.

Or if we just wanted to be a part of something for once in our lives.

“But are we really… terrorists?” I asked. “Do we blow things up and kidnap people and… perform terrorist acts?”

Philipe nodded excitedly. “We’re starting small, working our way up. We haven’t been together that long, but we’ve already vandalized a McDonald’s, a K-Mart, a Crown Books, and Blockbuster Video, some of the most recognized and well-known franchises in the country. Originally, as I said, our intention was to strike a blow against our oppressors, to cause financial damage to name brands, those who extol the known over the unknown, but we realized almost immediately that terrorism is nothing more than guerilla PR. What it does is draw attention to an issue. Individual acts of terrorism can’t bring about any permanent, lasting change, but they can alert the masses to a problem and focus public attention on it. To answer your question, in our case the word ‘terrorists’ is perhaps an overstatement. We haven’t actually blown anything up or hijacked an airplane or anything.” He grinned. “Yet.”

“Yet?”

“As I said, we’re working our way up, conducting a campaign of gradual escalation.”

“And what do we hope to accomplish by this?”

Philipe leaned back in his chair with a satisfied smile. “We’ll become known.”

The waitress came with food and drinks, and I hungrily scarfed down my lunch while the conversation between everyone else drifted back from the rhetoric they’d been spouting for my benefit to more everyday topics of trivial personal matters.

Philipe did not participate in the conversation. He stayed out of it, above it, and I thought that he seemed so much more knowing and sophisticated than the rest of us.

I finished my pie. Two of the waitresses pulled Venetian blinds over the windows on the west side of the restaurant. I looked up at the wall clock above the cash register. It was after three.

There was still one thing I did not know, that I had not asked and that no one had voluntarily answered. I put down my fork, took a deep breath. “So what are we?” I asked. “Were we born this way? Did we become this way over the years? What… what are we?” I looked around the table, but no one would meet my eyes. They all looked uncomfortable.

“We’re different,” Philipe said.

“But what are we?”

There was silence. Even Philipe, for the first time since he’d called out my name on the street, looked unsure of himself.

“We’re Ignored,” Buster said.

“I know that — ” I began. Then I stopped, thought, looked at him. “Where did you get that word, ‘Ignored’? Who told you that?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Philipe saw what I was getting at. “Yes!” he said excitedly. “We all thought of that word, didn’t we? It occurred to each of us independently.”

“I’m not sure what that means,” I said. “Or if it means anything. But it seems too weird to just be a coincidence.”

“It means we were meant for this,” Philipe said. “It means we were meant to be terrorists.”

“Manifest Destiny!” said Tommy or John.

I felt uneasy with this kind of talk. I did not feel as though I had been chosen for anything, I did not think God had picked the ten of us for some special purpose, and the idea that there was a power guiding us, a reason and a will dictating our actions, made me very uncomfortable.

Philipe looked at his watch. “It’s getting late,” he said. “I think we’d better hit the road.” He pulled a twenty out of his pocket and tossed it on the table.

“Will that cover it?” I asked.

Philipe smiled. “It doesn’t matter. They won’t notice if it doesn’t.”

We split up in the parking lot, agreeing to meet again the next morning at the municipal courthouse in Santa Ana. Philipe said he had a plan to throw a monkey wrench into the American legal system, and he wanted to start small, with a test, to see if it would work.

Philipe was planning to get a ride home with Steve, but he turned back to me as he headed across the asphalt toward Steve’s Toyota. “Are you coming with us?” he asked.

“Of course,” I said.

Of course.

I had killed a man this morning and then spent my afternoon casually hanging out with a group of people I didn’t know from Adam who called themselves terrorists, and I was already thinking of myself as one of them, was already taking part in their activities as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“Pick you up at seven-thirty, then,” Philipe said. “We’ll grab some breakfast first.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

I drove home.

They were at my apartment at seven-fifteen the next morning. All of them. Waiting on my doorstep. I’d just finished taking my shower and was getting dressed, and I answered the door wearing only my jeans. I was glad to see them. I’d spent most of the night tossing and turning, trying to figure out why I wasn’t more suspicious or more curious or more… something, why I had just accepted the terrorists and fell into step with them; but when I saw them again, all that worrying and speculation seemed irrelevant. I was one of them. That was why I felt this way. I