The Ignored

I went into the kitchen, pulled a beer out of the refrigerator, opened it, drank. My face felt warm, hot, and I stood in front of the open refrigerator door, letting the cool air wash over me.

Steve walked into the kitchen. “Can I get one of those?”

I pulled out a beer, handed it to him.

He stood there for a moment, twisting the bottle in his hands, fidgeting indecisively. “Look,” he said finally, “I know how you feel about it, but I think you should change your mind.”

I looked at him over the refrigerator door. “About what?”

“About rape.” He held up his hand to ward off my response. “I know what you’re going to say, but I’m just asking you to see it from our side. It’s been a long time since most of us have had sex. Not that we ever got a lot to begin with. And I know you know what I’m talking about there. You know how it is.” He paused. “All I’m saying is… well, don’t cut off our only chance. You’re close to Philipe. He listens to you. And right now he’s put the kibosh on the sex because you don’t like it.”

I sighed. I really didn’t feel like getting into this right now. “It’s not sex I don’t like. It’s rape.”

“Well, you don’t have to do it. You don’t even have to know about it when we do it. We’ll keep you completely in the dark, if that’s what you want. Just don’t… just don’t try to make us behave exactly the way you behave.” He was silent for a moment. “Some women like to be raped, you know. Some fat chick, she knows she’s not going to get sex on her own. She’d be grateful if we gave it to her. She’d love it.”

“Then ask her if she wants to. If she consents, there’s no problem.”

“But she won’t consent. The rest of the world… they’re not as uninhibited as we are. They’re not as free. They can’t say what they feel; they have to say what’s expected of them. But that fat girl? She probably fantasizes about being reamed by a group of healthy young studs like us.” He grinned. He tried to make his smile winning, but it came out rather sickly and pathetic.

I looked at Steve and I felt sorry for him. He was serious about what he was saying, about the arguments he was putting forth. To him, Philipe’s elaborate theories about our existence and our purpose in life were nothing more than justifications for his own petty actions and small desires. His mind, his world, his worldview were that limited.

Maybe none of it did have a purpose, I thought. Maybe there was no reason for anything. Maybe the others were right and we should do whatever we wanted to merely because we had the ability to do so. Maybe there should be no brakes on our behavior, no artificially imposed boundaries.

Steve was still fidgeting with his beer bottle, anxiously awaiting my response. He really believed that my opposition to rape was the reason he wasn’t getting any sex. I looked at him. There were differences between us. Big differences. We were both Ignored and were alike in a lot of ways — in most ways, perhaps — but there were definitely differences in our value systems, in what we believed.

On the other hand, here I was: murderer, thief, terrorist. Who was I to moralize? Who was I to tell the others what they could and couldn’t do, what they should and shouldn’t do? I closed the refrigerator door. “Go ahead,” I told Steve. “Rape away.”

He stared at me, surprised. “What? You mean it?”

“Fuck whoever you want. It’s none of my business.”

He grinned, clapped a hand on my shoulder. “You’re a hero and a he-man.”

I smiled wanly. “I know.”

Together, we walked back out into the living room.

We woke up late the next morning, all of us, and after a hurried catch-as-catch-can breakfast, we cruised over to the mall and caught a matinee of a bad science-fiction movie. After the flick ended, we walked out into the sunlight. Philipe blinked back the brightness, drew a pair of sunglasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on. He was silent for a moment. “Let’s go to my place,” he said.

We were suddenly silent.

His place.

Philipe’s place.

I could tell the others were as surprised as I was. Over the past months, we’d gradually gotten around to visiting everyone’s house or condo or apartment. Everyone’s, that is, except Philipe’s. There’d been reasons, of course. Good reasons. Logical reasons. But I’d always had the feeling that Philipe had arranged for it to be inconvenient to stop by his house, that he had, for some strange reason, not wanted us to see where he lived, and I suspected that everyone else felt the same way.

Philipe looked at me archly. “Or not,” he said. “If you don’t want to, we can go to your place instead.”

“No,” I told him hurriedly. “Your place is fine.”

He chuckled, obviously enjoying my shocked surprise. “I thought so.”

We followed him to his house.

I don’t know what I expected, but it was certainly not the bland tract home in which he lived. The house was in Anaheim, in a typically average neighborhood, surrounded by rows of other houses that looked exactly the same. Philipe pulled into the driveway, parked, and I pulled in next to him. The other cars parked on the street.

I was… disappointed. After all the waiting, after all the secrecy, I had expected something else. Something more. Something better. Something that was actually worth keeping secret.

But maybe that’s why he had kept it secret.

Without waiting for us, Philipe got out of the car, strode up the front walk, unlocked the front door of the house, and went inside. I hurried after him.

The interior of the house was as disappointing as the outside. More so, if that was possible. The large, drab living room contained depressingly few pieces of furniture. There was a clock and lamp on a plain wooden end table, a nondescript couch, a long, unadorned coffee table, and a television set in a wooden cabinet. Period. There was one picture on one wall, a standard come-with-the-frame print of a young boy walking down a country lane with a fishing pole in his hand and a dog at his side. Other than that, the room was devoid of decoration. The entire scene looked unnervingly like something out of my grandparents’ old house.

I said nothing, tried not to let the feelings show on my face, but I felt a strange hollowness inside me. And a nasty little unbidden twinge of superiority. I’d thought that Philipe’s taste would be… different. Bolder, newer, younger. More extravagant, more flamboyant. Something. Not this quiet old lady’s home with its June Cleaver furniture and its stultifying ordinariness.

“I have to take a whiz,” Philipe said, heading into the hall. I nodded as the other terrorists filtered in behind me. They were silent as they entered the house. Only Buster spoke, commenting on how much he liked the place. I saw James roll his eyes.

Philipe returned. “Make yourselves at home,” he said. “There’s food and drink in the fridge. I just have to do a few things.” He disappeared again into the hallway, and Junior, Tommy, and Pete crossed into the kitchen. John turned on the TV, found a daytime talk show. I sat down on the couch.

Next to me on the floor, half hidden under the end table, was a pile of lined notebook paper, filled with writing. The top sheet looked like the rough draft of a term paper or report. I reached down, picked up the paper, glanced at the corrections and crossed out lines, read what was written: “We’ve been blessed. We’ve been shown that we are disposable, dispensable, unimportant. We’ve been freed for other, greater things.”

It was the speech Philipe had made at Denny’s that first day. The brilliant, stirring, spontaneous talk he had given.

He’d written it all out ahead of time and memorized it.

I reached down, picked up a handful of papers, quickly scanned the sheets: “We are of a kind. Our lives have traveled along parallel paths”… “Rape is a legitimate weapon”… “It’s places like this that have made us what we are. These are the places we need to strike against.”

Almost everything he’d ever said to us, every argument he’d propounded, every idea he’d described, every theory he’d explained, was there, in that pile of papers, worked out and written down.

Junior, Tommy, and Pete came out of the kitchen, Coke cans in hand. “No beer,” Junior said. “We got what we could.”

Carefully, surreptitiously, I put the papers back on the floor where I’d found them. I felt cold, empty. I still respected Philipe, still thought he was the only one among us with vision and ideas and the will and courage to carry them out and see them through, but there was something sad and rather pathetic about those worked-over