We spent that week on vacation, having fun while Philipe formulated plans for upcoming terrorist projects, and I thought that it was the best week I’d ever had in my life. There was a short January heat wave, and we went to the beach. Since no one noticed us, Philipe said, we could stare to our hearts’ content, and there were women galore, all available for our visual enjoyment. We compared breasts and bikini lines, rated postures and posteriors. We would pick out one woman and all concentrate on her, watch her swim and sunbathe, watch her adjust her top, watch her surreptitiously scratch her crotch when she thought no one was looking. All this time, one or another of us would provide running commentary on her each and every move. On a dare and in a mood of lunatic bravery, Buster ran down the beach and pulled loose the bikini ties of all women who were sitting alone on their blankets.
We went to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm, sneaking in the reentry gates one by one while the guards were looking in another direction. We went to malls and shoplifted, daring each other to steal bigger and bulkier items, running like hell and laughingly losing ourselves in the crowd when Buster was spotted carrying a monstrous boom box out of Radio Shack. We went to movies, one person paying, then opening the exit door so the rest of us could sneak in. It was like being a kid again, or like being the kid I never was, never had the guts to be, and it was wonderful.
Through it all, we talked. We talked about our families and our lives and our work, about what it was like to be Ignored, about what we could do as Terrorists for the Common Man. Only Buster and Don had ever been married, it turned out. Buster’s wife had died and Don’s had run off with a securities consultant. Of the others, only Philipe and Bill had even had girlfriends. The rest had been as ignored by women as they had been by society at large.
I still didn’t believe that Manifest Destiny crap, but I had started to think that, yeah, maybe there was a reason we’d been created like this. Maybe some higher power did have a special purpose for us, although whether that purpose was to initiate greatness or merely to serve as comic relief to the footnotes of contemporary culture remained to be seen.
We always met at my place. I offered to drive, to pick up Philipe at his house, but he always said no. Ditto for the others. I didn’t know if they weren’t ready to completely trust me yet, if this was some type of security measure or paranoia on their part, or if things just happened to work out this way, but that first week I never saw where any of my fellow terrorists lived. They seemed to like my apartment, though, to find it comfortable, and that made me feel good. A couple of times we rented videotapes, and we watched them in my living room, and once they all stayed overnight, crashing on my couch and on the living room and bedroom floors.
It felt good to be a part of something.
It was on the second Saturday that Philipe suggested that we begin another vandalism campaign in an attempt to draw attention to our plight. We were at my place again, chewing down on a Taco Bell lunch, and I pushed my chair back onto two legs, steadying myself with one foot. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it. What’s the plan?”
Philipe shook his head. “Not now. This isn’t a social outing we’re going on. This is terrorism. I need time to make some preparations.”
“What are we going to hit? Where are we going to start?”
“Where? City Hall. Orange City Hall.”
“Why there?”
“It’s where I used to work. I still have a key and a security card. We can get in.”
“You used to work for the city of Orange?”
“I was one of the assistant city managers,” he said.
That surprised me. I was not sure what I’d thought Philipe had done before becoming a Terrorist for the Common Man, but it was not that. I guess I’d seen him doing something more glamorous or more dangerous. Something in the movie business maybe. Or working for a detective agency. This made more sense, though. Philipe might seem like a leader to us, but he was still Ignored, a faceless nonentity to the rest of the world.
“When?” Pete asked.
“Tuesday.”
I looked around the group, nodded. “Tuesday it is,” I said.
We drove to the meeting separately. Philipe didn’t want us all riding together.
There were cars in the parking lot when I arrived, and the other terrorists were milling around by the building’s back door, where Philipe had told us to meet. Only Philipe himself was missing, and I parked my car, got out, and walked over to the group. None of us spoke, and there was a feeling of hushed expectancy among us.
Buster had brought a friend, a man also in his mid to late sixties who was wearing the uniform of a Texaco attendant. The name tag on the old man’s uniform read “Junior,” and I couldn’t help smiling at the incongruity of the name and the face. The old man smiled back at me, happy to be noticed in even this small way, and I immediately felt sorry for laughing at him.
“My friend Junior,” Buster explained. “He’s one of us.”
Apparently Junior had not yet been introduced to the others, because at this announcement they all gathered around, shaking his hand, welcoming him, the artificially imposed silence of a few moments before effectively broken. I did the same. It felt strange to be on the inside looking out. I had been in Junior’s shoes only recently, and it seemed weird and slightly disorienting to view all this from the opposite angle.
Junior ate it up. He had apparently been told by Buster beforehand about the terrorists — he did not seem confused or surprised upon meeting us — and there was a smile on his face and tears in his eyes as he shook our hands and repeated our names.
It was at that moment that Philipe arrived. Resplendent in an expensively tailored suit, his hair neatly trimmed, he looked almost presidential, the model of a modern leader, and he strode across the parking lot with the air and authority of one used to being in charge.
The rest of us grew quiet as he approached. I felt a strange excited shiver pass through me as Philipe stepped confidently up the curb. It was the type of moment I’d experienced before only as an observer, not as a participant. I felt the way I had in movies when the music swelled and the hero performed heroically. For the first time, I think, I realized that we were part of something big, something important.
Terrorists for the Common Man.
It was more than just a concept to me now. I finally understood what Philipe had been trying so hard to explain.
He looked at me and smiled, and it was as if he knew what I was thinking. Taking out his key and security card, he inserted both into the electronic slot on the wall next to the door, and the door clicked. He pushed it open.
“Let’s go in,” he said.
We followed him inside the building. He paused, closed and locked the door behind us, and we proceeded down a darkened corridor to an elevator. Philipe pushed the Up button, and the metal doors instantly slid open, the light inside the elevator cubicle seeming harsh and far too bright after the darkness.
“Second floor,” Philipe announced, pushing the button.
The second floor was even darker than the first, but Philipe forged ahead and turned on a bank of lights and a series of recessed fluorescents winked on, illuminating a huge room fronted by a built-in counter and partitioned off into smaller sections by modular wall segments.
“This way!” he said.
He led us behind the counter, through the modular maze of workstations, to a closed wooden door in the far wall. He opened the door, turned on the lights.
I had a queasy momentary sense of deja vu. We were in a conference room, bare save for a long table with a television and VCR on a metal stand at its head. It looked almost exactly like the room in which I’d been introduced to Automated Interface.
“This looks just like the conference room at my old firm,” Don said.
“It looks like the training room at Ward’s.” Tommy.
“It looks like the county’s multipurpose room.” Bill.
Philipe held up his hands. “I know,” he said. He paused, looked around the room at the rest of us. “We are
