The Ignored

I nodded. Slowly. I was, I supposed. I had no choice. “Yeah,” I said.

He grinned, put an arm around my shoulder. “One for all and all for one,” he said. “Like the Three Musketeers.”

I forced myself to smile, though it felt sickly and anemic on my face. I felt soiled and dirty and unclean and I didn’t like his arm around me, but I said nothing.

I was with them. I was one of them.

Who else did I have?

What else could I be?

We walked down the sidewalk to the theater.

Five

We lived in our own world, a netherworld that occupied the same space as the normal one but existed a beat or two behind. It reminded me of an old Outer Limits episode I once saw, where time stood still and everyone in the world remained frozen in place except a man and woman who were somehow unaffected, untrapped, living outside of time, between the seconds.

Only the people we ran into weren’t frozen in time.

They just didn’t notice us.

It was a weird feeling, not being seen by the people with whom I came into contact. I’d been conscious of being Ignored for quite a while, but this feeling was different. It was as if I were really invisible, a ghost. Before, I’d felt a part of the world. I was unnoticed, but I existed. Now, though… Now, it was as though I did not exist, not on the same level as everyone else. It was as if normal life was a movie and I was a viewer: I could see it but not participate in it.

The only time I honestly felt alive was when I was with the other terrorists. We seemed to validate each other’s existence. We were a pocket of reality in an unreal world, and as this feeling of alienation from human society grew within me, I began to spend more and more time with the terrorists, less and less time by myself. It was comforting to have the others around, reassuring to know that I was not alone, and as the days and weeks passed, we began sleeping over more often at each other’s houses and apartments, not splitting up at night but staying together twenty-four hours a day.

It was not just the eleven of us huddling against a cold, hostile world, though. We had fun together. And there were perks, small advantages to being Ignored. We could go to restaurants, order whatever we wanted, eat to our heart’s content, stay as long as we wanted, and we never had to pay. We could go to stores, take what we needed in food and goods. We could go to movies and concerts for free.

But there was still something unsettling about it all, still something missing — in my life, at least — and despite our best attempts to believe otherwise, despite our earnest efforts to reassure ourselves that we were happy, that we were luckier than everyone else, I don’t think any of us really thought that was the case.

We were never bored, however, and we did not lack for things to do. We were the national average and America was made for us. We loved shopping at malls. We loved eating at restaurants. Amusement parks amused us, tourist attractions attracted us, popular music was popular with us, hit movies were a hit with us. Everything was aimed at our level.

And when we tired of legitimate ways of whiling away our hours, we could always rob, steal, and vandalize.

We could always be terrorists.

After the rape, we laid low for a couple of weeks. There was no mention of the rape in the papers or on the TV news — I was not even sure it had been reported — but it was not the possibility of getting caught that compelled Philipe to make us take time off anyway.

It was because he wanted to win back my confidence.

It was stupid, but it was true. My opinion was important to him. Most of the others were thrilled by what had happened. They had already snagged Playboys and Penthouses, Hustlers, and Cavaliers, and were busily picking out the types of women they wanted to take down next, but Philipe made it clear that there were to be no more sexual assaults. At least not for a while. Instead, he attempted to convince me that rape was a legitimate weapon at our disposal. He seemed aware of the fact that my opinion of him had dropped, that I no longer had the respect for him that I’d previously had, and he seemed desperately anxious to reinstate himself in my eyes.

That was an ego boost, of course. Such personal attention made me feel important. And, I had to admit, his arguments were persuasive. I understood where he was coming from, and I even agreed with him — on a purely theoretical level. But I also believed that it was wrong to punish innocent individuals for general wrongs perpetuated by the group to which they belonged, and I think I made him see my point. I got him to agree that the rape of the Asian woman had been only peripherally political, and he said that from now on we would only use rape if it would legitimately and specifically accomplish one of our goals.

If we just wanted to get ourselves off, we’d go to prostitutes or something.

We both thought that was fair.

It was in July that we performed our first big terrorist act, that we finally got on TV.

We were staying at Bill’s place, a comfortable three-bedroom house in Fountain Valley, and we were awakened by the sound of a chain saw. The noise was loud, outrageously so, and frighteningly close. Instinctively scared, my heart pounding, I jumped out of my sleeping bag and opened the door of the bedroom.

Philipe stood in the hallway, wielding a gas-powered chain saw that smelled of burning oil, and waving it above his head like Leatherface. He saw me and grinned.

James emerged from the bedroom behind me, wide-eyed and frightened. The others came into the hall from the living room and the other bedrooms.

Philipe lowered his chain saw, turned it off. His grin grew wider. “Get dressed, kiddies. We’re going into town.”

At his feet, I saw hammers and screwdrivers, a tire iron, an ax, a baseball bat. My ears were still ringing from the chain saw noise. “What?” I said.

“Get dressed and get ready,” he said. “I have a plan.”

We drove into L.A. in a caravan of three cars, Philipe’s Dodge leading the way. It was Sunday, and the traffic was light. There’d been wind the night before, and for once we could see both the San Gabriel Mountains and the Hollywood Hills. The Los Angeles skyline looked the way it did in movies and on TV, backed by pale blue sky, only a faint haze of smog obscuring the details of the buildings.

We followed Philipe’s car off the freeway and down Vermont Avenue, through gang-graffitied neighborhoods, past run-down grocery stores and dilapidated hooker hotels. We turned left on Sunset and headed through Hollywood to Beverly Hills. The chain saw and tools had been put in my trunk, and they rattled as I bumped over each dip in the road, shifted as I turned each corner. Buster, next to me in the passenger seat, held his Nikon camera on his lap. Philipe had told him to bring it.

“What do you think he has planned?” Buster asked.

I shrugged. “Who knows?”

“Isn’t this great? Don’t you love it?” The old man chuckled. “If anyone’d told me that at my age I’d be cruising around with a… a gang, kicking ass and raising hell, I’d’ve thought… well, I’d’ve said they were full of horse pucky.”

I laughed.

“I feel so… so young. You know?”

Truth to tell, I felt the same way myself. I was young — compared to Buster, at least — but being a terrorist made me feel excited, exhilarated, exuberant. I felt good this morning, jazzed, almost giddy, and I knew the others felt the same way.

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “I know what you mean.”

We passed a brown WELCOME TO BEVERLY HILLS sign, passed several import car dealers. Philipe’s right-