The Ignored

She was right, I realized. It was great for me, too. Why did we have to vary our lovemaking just because other people did, just because other people said we were supposed to?

We didn’t.

We spent the week swimming in the resort pools, eating at Scottsdale’s most expensive restaurants, and having the kind of ordinary, straight, traditional sex we loved so well.

We returned to Thompson tanned and happy, our minds rested and our crotches sore. But something had changed. The city was the same, the people were the same, it was just that… I was not. I had been back in the real world, and I found that I missed that world. Instead of returning home after a vacation, it felt to me as though we were returning to prison after a weeklong furlough.

I went back to work and Jane went back to work, and after a few days we became reacclimatized, readjusted. Only…

Only that sense of being stifled did not entirely go away. I felt it, in the back of everything, a presence even in my happiest moments, and it made me uneasy. I thought about discussing it with Jane, thought I should discuss it with Jane — I didn’t want our old communication problems to start again — but she seemed so happy, so blissfully unaware of this malaise that I was feeling, that I was reluctant to drag her into this. Maybe it was just me. Postnuptial depression or something. It wasn’t fair to burden her with my paranoid craziness.

I forced myself to push aside all feelings of dissatisfaction. What was wrong with me? I’d gotten everything I’d wanted. I was with Jane again. And we were living in a city, a society where we were not ignored but noticed, where we were not oppressed minorities but members of the ruling class.

Life was good, I told myself.

And I made myself believe it!

Six

City hall and the police department had separate personnel departments but shared databases, and I was reading the joint lists of new hirees that was sent monthly to each division when I came across Steve’s name. He had been hired as a police recruit, and an asterisk by his name indicated that he had previous law enforcement experience and was on an accelerated promotional track.

Steve? Previous law enforcement experience?

He’d been a file clerk.

When he was with the terrorists, he’d been a rapist.

But it was not my place to bring this up, not my job to question the hiring practices of the police department, and I said nothing. Maybe Steve had changed. Maybe he’d mellowed out, turned over a new leaf.

I posted the list on our bulletin board.

Although I worked at city hall and lived in Thompson and was therefore personally affected by the actions of the city council, I had little or no interest in local politics. Council meetings were held on the first Monday of each month and were televised live on our local community access cable station, but I neither went to them nor watched them.

Ordinarily.

But on the last day of August, Ralph suggested to me that I might want to catch September’s meeting.

We were eating lunch at KFC, and I tossed the bones of my drumstick into the box, wiping my hands on a napkin. “Why?” I asked.

He looked at me. “Your old friend Philipe is going to come before the council with a request.”

Philipe.

I had not heard from him or seen him since coming to Thompson over a year ago. I had half wondered if he had left, gone back to Palm Springs, gone across the country to recruit new terrorists. It wasn’t like him to be so quiet, to maintain such a low profile. He liked power, liked being the center of attention. He craved the spotlight, and I could not see him settling down into anonymity. Not even here in Thompson.

I tried to appear disinterested. “Really?”

The mayor nodded. “I think you’ll find it interesting. You might even want to come down, attend the proceedings.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

But I was curious as to what was going on, what Philipe was up to, and one night I turned the TV to the Thompson channel.

The camera was stationary, and was trained directly on the mayor and the council at the front of the chambers. I could not see anybody in the audience, and I watched for a half hour, waiting through discussions of old business and protocol, before the mayor tabled the discussion and moved on to new business.

“The first item on the agenda,” he said, “is a request by Philipe Anderson.”

Susan Lee, our only female council member, adjusted her glasses. “Request for what?”

“We’ll let the requestor explain that himself. Mr. Anderson?”

I recognized him even from the back as he passed before the camera and took his place in front of the podium. He stood straight and tall and confident, his charisma obvious against the blandness of the laid back mayor and lackluster council, and I saw what had attracted the terrorists to him in the first place. I saw —

— Philipe, covered with blood, hacking at the two unmoving children.

“That’s Philipe?” Jane asked.

I nodded.

“He’s more average-looking than I imagined.”

“He’s Ignored. What did you expect?”

On TV, Philipe cleared his throat. “Mayor. Ladies and gentlemen of the council. The proposal I wish to make is one that will benefit all of Thompson and is in the best interests of not just the community but of all Ignored everywhere. I have here a detailed list of requirements that I will pass out to each of you. It provides an item-by- item accounting of all proposed requisitions, and you can look at it at your leisure and we can discuss it more fully at the next meeting.”

He looked down at the paper on the podium in front of him. “The broad outline of my plan is this: Thompson needs its own military, its own militia. We are, for all intents and purposes, a nation unto ourselves. We have a police force to take care of disturbances within our borders, but I believe that we need an armed force to protect our sovereignty and our interests.”

Two of the council members were whispering to each other. I could hear excited discussion from the audience.

Jane looked at me, shook her head. “Militarization of the city?” she said. “I don’t like it.”

“Let’s settle down here,” the mayor said. He faced Philipe. “What makes you think we need a militia? This sounds like a major expense: uniforms, weapons, training. We have never been threatened; we have never been attacked. I don’t see any real justification for this.”

Philipe chuckled. “Expense? It’s all free. Thompson picks up the tab. All we have to do is request it.”

“But it is the responsibility of this council to determine whether such requests are reasonable or unreasonable.”

“And this is a reasonable request. You say we’ve never been attacked, but Oates sent troops in here in 1970 and killed a hundred and ten people.”

“That was in 1970.”

“It could happen again.” He paused. “Besides, in my proposal I suggest that our militia have offensive as well as defensive capabilities.”

The mayor frowned. “Offensive?”

“We, the Ignored, have been abused and exploited for our entire history. We have been at the mercy of the noticed, the powerful. And we have been unable to fight back. Well, I suggest that it is time to fight back. It is time to retaliate for all the injustices that have been perpetrated upon us.

“I am offering to train a crack fighting force of our best and most capable men and mount a frontal assault