I felt a mouth on my organ.
I was tangled up in Mary, and I tried to get away, but her arms and legs were wrapped around me and I could not struggle out of her embrace.
There was a muffled male grunt, a grunt I recognized, and I realized that it was Philipe at the end of the bed, working on me.
I closed my eyes, filled with a deep black despair.
Jane, I thought.
Philipe’s mouth moved off of me, and a second later Mary stiffened, moaned, increased the pressure against my body. The pressure increased, decreased, increased, decreased, and then she jerked forward with a gasp, slumping against me.
Now I did roll over and away, feeling lower than I ever had in my life. I hated Philipe, and part of me wanted to kill him, wanted to sit up, take his neck in my hands, and squeeze the life out of him.
I wanted him to go away, did not want to look at him, but he stood next to the bed and stared down at me.
“Get out,” I said.
“It wasn’t that bad. I could tell you enjoyed it.”
“That’s an automatic response.”
Philipe crouched down next to me. There was something like desperation in his eyes, and I understood that deep down, despite all his talk of freedom from conventional morality and beliefs, he felt the same way I did.
I thought of his old-lady house.
“You might’ve hated it,” he said. “But you felt alive, didn’t you? It made you feel alive?”
I looked at him, nodded slowly. It wasn’t true, and we both knew it wasn’t true, but we both pretended that it was.
He nodded back. “That’s what’s important,” he said. “That’s what’s really important.”
“Yeah,” I said. I turned away from him, closing my eyes, pulling the covers up around me. I heard him talking to Mary after that, but I could not hear what either of them said, and I didn’t want to.
I closed my eyes tightly, kept myself wrapped in the covers, and somehow I fell asleep.
Ten
I wondered sometimes what had happened to Jane.
No. Not sometimes.
All the time.
There was still not a day that went by that I did not think about her.
It had been over a year and a half now since we’d broken up, since she’d left me, and I wondered if, in that time, she’d found someone else.
I wondered if she ever thought about me.
God knows I thought about her. But I had to admit that as time passed, her image in my memory began to fade. I could no longer recall the precise color of her eyes, could no longer call to mind the unique details of her smile, the specific mannerisms that were hers and hers alone. Everywhere I looked, in every crowd, there seemed to be at least one young woman who looked like Jane, and I found myself wondering whether I would recognize her if I saw her again.
If she’d changed her hairstyle or was wearing a different type of clothes, I could probably pass right by her and not notice.
The thought of that made me incredibly sad.
God, I hated being Ignored.
I hated it.
I don’t mean to say that I disliked my fellow terrorists or that I didn’t enjoy being with them. I did. It was just that… I didn’t
But that was something I would never be able to change.
After the experience with Mary and Philipe, I gave up on sex. I took myself out of the loop. Mary still spent different nights at different houses, but her trips to my house were limited to John’s and James’ bedrooms. She was polite to me, and I was polite to her, but for the most part we tried to ignore each other and stay out of one another’s way.
Philipe’s attitude toward me seemed to have changed as well. We were not as close as we had been. If we had had hierarchical ranks, I would probably still be his second in command — but he would resent me for it.
As with Mary, Philipe and I were polite, outwardly friendly, but whatever real camaraderie we had once shared was gone. Philipe also seemed harder now, more businesslike, less inclined to joke around or have fun. And it was not just with me. He was that way with everybody. Even Junior remarked upon it.
But of course no one dared say anything to his face.
I got the impression that Philipe had come to the same conclusions about the efficacy of our organization as I had. He spent most of the next week by himself, locked in his room, in his house. We did go out to a few Garden Grove car dealerships on Saturday and pick up some new vehicles, but other than that we laid low, and Philipe we saw only at dinner.
He called us together the next Thursday for a meeting in the sales office. He sent Paul around to the different houses with written invitations for each person, and he made it clear that this was a mandatory meeting, that he had something important to announce.
At eight o’clock, the appointed time, I walked across the street with James and John. Apparently, Philipe or Paul or Tim had stolen a key or found some way to pick the lock because the door to the office was open, and all the lights were on. On a table in the middle of the room, spread over a map of the subdivision, was a map of Orange County. Around the table were thirteen chairs.
We sat next to Tim and Paul and Mary, waiting for the others.
Philipe did not begin speaking until we had all arrived and were seated. Then he jumped right in. “You know why we’re together,” he said. “You know our purpose. But lately we seem to have lost sight of that purpose.” He looked around the room. “What have we been doing? We call ourselves terrorists, but who have we terrorized? What terrorist acts have we actually performed? We’ve been playing at being terrorists, having fun, doing what we wanted with the liberty afforded us and pretending that our actions have meaning.”
Philipe had practiced this. He had written it out ahead of time. A wave of cold passed through me. I suddenly knew what was coming next.
“We need to take our roles seriously. If we’re going to call ourselves terrorists, then we need to act like terrorists. We need to draw attention to our cause in the way we originally planned. We need to make a statement. A bold statement that will capture the attention of the country.” He paused, and there was an excited sparkle in his sharp eyes. “I think we should blow up Familyland.”
There was a sick sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as I heard the name of the amusement park. I looked around our group and I saw that James and Tim and Buster and Don felt the same way. But on the faces of the others, Steve and Junior in particular, I saw looks of excited anticipation.
Philipe pointed down at the map on the table in front of us. “I’ve devised a plan, and I think it will work.”
He outlined his idea. Explosives, he said, would be obtained from the road construction crew currently blasting through south county hills in an effort to build a new highway. We would then arrive at Familyland, in teams of two, coming at different times, in different cars, from different entrances. We would each be equipped with explosives and remote detonators, and at a prearranged time we would get on different rides, plant the explosives, and then meet on the train, where, while passing through Dinosaur Country, we would detonate the explosives simultaneously. We would get off the train at the Old Town entrance and then walk calmly and individually out to our respective cars before driving home.
