folder to a woman standing behind a counter marked HOUSING AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT.
“Denise, here, will assist you in finding housing,” Ralph said. “She’ll assign someone to take you around until you find a place that’s suitable. I assume you’ll all need furnished places?”
We nodded.
“No problem.” He turned toward me. “I’d like you to come with me, if you don’t mind. I’ll help you find a place to live.”
I nodded. “All right.” I turned toward the others. “See you guys later.”
“Later,” James said.
“Bye.” Mary smiled at me. “I think we’re all going to be very happy here.” Her hand found Jim’s and held it.
“I hope so,” I said.
I nodded good-bye to Don and followed Ralph back downstairs.
In the lobby, the mayor turned to face me. “I like you,” he said. “I trust you. I have a good feeling about you. That’s why I want you to tell me about this Philipe.”
“What about him?” I wasn’t sure what he was after.
“Something’s been bothering me all morning. I couldn’t figure out what it was. I mean, he’s supposed to be your leader, he’s this brilliant guy, and he’s coming in sometime in the next few days, and you guys act like he doesn’t exist. Did you have some type of falling out?”
“Yeah,” I admitted.
“Is there… something wrong with Philipe? Something I should know before he gets here?”
I hesitated. “I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“How can I put this? Certain people who are Ignored are… shall we say, disturbed. Something happened to them. Some short circuit in their brain. I’ve seen it before. We had one guy here who was a pyromaniac. Seemed like a perfectly normal guy, but he felt compelled to burn houses because he said giant spiders lived in them. There was another guy who thought he was communicating with an alien race that expected him to repopulate the world by impregnating dogs. We caught him mounting an Irish Setter. These people are few and far between, but they cause us a lot of problems.”
I tried to keep my voice light, noncommittal. “What makes you think Philipe’s like that?”
“I don’t know. Something about the way you guys seem all hush-hush about him. I might add that those other men were also very charismatic men. Leaders. One was a popular high school teacher. The other was my predecessor, the former mayor.”
“Which one was he?”
“The alien dog-fucker.”
“Philipe’s not like that,” I said.
He looked at me for a moment, studying my face, then nodded, satisfied. He clapped a hand on my back. “Okay, then. Let’s get you settled.”
I followed Ralph outside. Why hadn’t I told him about Philipe? About seeing him kill those two girls? About his “hunches” and his mood swings and his spells? Was it because I was more loyal to Philipe than to my conscience? Or was it because…
Was it because somewhere down in my superstitious heart of hearts I believed that Philipe was right, that if he had not killed those girls something would have happened to one of us?
No. That was stupid.
But Philipe’s “hunches” had always been right, hadn’t they?
Ralph was walking across the parking lot, toward a white city vehicle. “We have plenty of jobs for you if you want them,” he was saying. “Recessions never affect us here.”
I nodded, pretended as though I’d been listening.
“Take a few days off if you need to. Get adjusted. Then come and see me if you want to work.”
We got into the car, and he started talking about the furnished condo that was going to be mine. He broke off in mid-sentence as we turned onto a street festooned with banners.
“What’s all this?” I asked.
“The Andy Warhol Day parade. It’s coming up this weekend.”
I noticed that the banners hanging from the streetlights and telephone poles were celebrity portraits, the Warhol photo-paintings of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Fonda and James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor.
“Andy Warhol?” I said.
“It’s one of our most important holidays.”
“Important?”
“To be famous for fifteen minutes,” Ralph said. “To be
I was about to say something else, something sarcastic, but I stopped myself. What was I doing? Why was I putting down these people for desiring recognition, these people who had never in their lives been noticed by anyone? We had had our day in the sun. We had had our fifteen minutes of fame. Even if the Terrorists for the Common Man had never been recognized, our deeds were taken note of. We had the newspaper clippings and the videotaped newscasts to prove it. I recalled my own rage, my own desperation before I teamed up with Philipe, and I could not find it in my heart to condemn these pathetic souls for wanting the same thing I had wanted, the same thing all of us had wanted.
I found myself looking up at a giant poster of Warhol hanging from a temporary grandstand set up on the side of the street. “Hasn’t anyone Ignored ever been famous?” I asked.
“In 1970, we had a rock group from here that had a top ten hit. The Peppertree Conspiracy. ‘Sunshine World’.”
“I have that record!” I said. “I loved it! It was the first record my parents ever bought for me!”
He smiled sadly. “We all have it. We all loved it. Everybody loved it for a week. Now I don’t think you could find anyone who isn’t Ignored who has a copy. There may be a few forty-fives buried in boxes in garages here and there, but most of the records that were bought were probably tossed or given to the Goodwill or Salvation Army. I bet you couldn’t find anyone who even remembers the song now.”
“What happened to the group?”
“Teddy Howard’s our minister.”
“What about the rest of them?”
“Roger died of a drug overdose in 1973; Paul’s our local morning shock jock on the radio.” He paused. “And I was the drummer.”
“Wow.” I was impressed, really impressed, and I looked at him with renewed respect. I remembered sitting on my bed when I was little, two pencils in my hands, pretending to drum with the record, imagining myself on stage in front of thousands of screaming girls. I wanted to tell him this, but the funny/sad/nostalgic look on the mayor’s face told me that that might best be left for another time.
He turned down another street. “Come on,” he said. “It’s getting late. Let’s go see your condo.”
Two
I found a job in the planning department of city hall, processing building permit applications. It was a boring job, but I was boring and I was surrounded by other boring people, so I guess, theoretically, I should have enjoyed it.
I did not.
That surprised me. My likes and dislikes, moods and rhythms had always been so perfectly in sync with those of Philipe and the other terrorists that I’d automatically assumed that life in Thompson would be relaxed and fun, that I’d be happy.
That was not the case.
It was not the fault of my coworkers, who welcomed me with open arms and even invited me out for happy hour at a Mexican restaurant at the end of my first day of work. It was my fault. Maybe I’d been expecting too
