The Ignored

Please, God, I thought, don’t let it be Philipe.

Then I saw Philipe running. I recognized his gait, his build, the movement of his arms. He leaped, grabbed the bars of the fence, swung himself over. There was the sound of gunfire, but if it was aimed at Philipe it missed him, and he was running across the street, toward the camera.

Again the screen went blank.

“We’ve lost our feed,” Glen Johnstone, anchoring in Thompson, announced.

I quickly switched channels, expecting to see special bulletins on the network stations, thinking that of course they’d break into regular programming for an assault on the White House, an obvious attempt on the President’s life, but there were only the usual sitcoms and police shows.

I turned to CNN, watched for an hour. Nothing. I waited until the eleven o’clock news that night, flipped back and forth between ABC, CBS, and NBC.

The attack made the ABC news. Thirty-second footage right before a commercial: a shot of the White House from a vantage point across the street, Philipe and a handful of men running away, being chased by other men in suits. The anchor allotted them one line: “In other news today, the Secret Service repelled a small group of individuals attempting to break into the White House grounds.”

Then they cut to a douche ad.

I sat there next to Jane in silence, staring at the commercial. That was it? After all that preparation, after all the training, that was it? Over two hundred men had left Thompson on Saturday, a trained militia, with tanks and trucks and jeeps, in order to stage a coup.

And all they rated was one line on one newscast.

I turned off the television, crawled into bed. I realized, perhaps for the first time, how truly pathetic we were. Philipe had organized a fighting force, had come up with a workable plan, and it had all been for nothing.

Less than nothing.

I wondered how many members of our militia had been killed. I wondered if they had been jailed.

Philipe returned to Thompson a week later, chastened and humiliated, surrounded by the tattered remnants of his army.

The government had not even considered them enough of a threat to jail. No charges had been pressed.

A hundred and fifty-three were dead.

We were more than willing to treat Philipe as a hero, but in his own mind he was a failure, his grand schemes laughable, and from that point on, he shunned the public eye and retreated into obscurity.

Glen Johnstone attempted to do a follow-up show, to interview Philipe about what had happened, but for the first time in his life, Philipe turned down free publicity.

I never saw him on television again.

Seven

The new year came. And went. Jane and I decided that we wanted a child, and she threw away her pills and we tried for it. No luck. She wanted to consult a doctor, but I said no, let’s just keep trying. I had a feeling it was my fault, but I didn’t want to know for sure.

When I’d graduated from college, when I’d first gotten the job at Automated Interface, it seemed like I had just been starting out, like I had my whole life ahead of me. Now time was speeding by. Soon I’d be thirty. Then forty. Then old. Then dead. The cliche was right: life was short.

And what was I doing with my life? What was the point of it? Would the world be any different for my having lived? Or was the point that there was no point, that we existed now and one day we wouldn’t and we might as well try to have fun while we were here?

I didn’t know, and I realized I would probably never know.

James came over after work one day, and Jane invited him to stay for dinner. Afterward, James and I retired to the back porch and reminisced about the old days. I reminded him of the first time I’d gone out with the terrorists, to the courthouse, and we both started laughing.

“I’ll never forget the judge’s face when you said, ‘Get a dick!’”

I was laughing so hard I was crying, and I wiped the tears from my eyes. “Remember Buster? He just kept yelling, ‘Pussy!’”

We continued to laugh, but there was a sadness in it now, and I thought of Buster. I remembered the way he’d looked, there in Old Town in Family land, when the suits had shot him down.

We grew quiet and stared up at the stars. It was an Arizona night sky, all of the major constellations visible against the clouded backdrop of the Milky Way.

“Are you guys awake?” Jane called from the kitchen. “It’s so quiet out there.”

“Just thinking,” I said.

James leaned back in his chair. “Are you happy here?” he asked.

I shrugged.

“I’ve heard there’s a land somewhere,” he said. “A country of Ignored.”

I snorted. “Atlantis or Mu?”

“I’m serious.” His voice grew wistful. “We could be free there. Really free. Not just slaves for Thompson. Sometimes I feel like we’re pets now, like trained animals, just doing what we’ve been told to do, over and over again.”

I was silent. I knew what he was feeling.

“I heard it was a town,” I said. “In Iowa.”

“I heard it was a country. Somewhere in the Pacific, between Hawaii and Australia.”

Inside, I heard the rattle of dishes.

“I’m thinking of leaving,” James said. “There’s nothing for me here. I feel like I’m just putting in time. I’m thinking of looking for that other country.” He paused. “I was wondering if maybe you wanted to come along with me.”

Part of me wanted to. Part of me missed the excitement and adventure of being on the road. Part of me also felt stifled here in Thompson. But Jane loved it here. And I loved Jane. And I would never again do anything to jeopardize our relationship.

And part of me loved it here, too.

I tried to turn it into a joke. “You just haven’t found any poon here,” I said.

James nodded solemnly. “That’s part of it.”

I shook my head slowly. “I can’t go,” I said. “This is where I live now. This is my home.”

He nodded, as if this was the answer he’d been expecting.

“Have you asked any of the other terrorists?”

“No. But I will.”

“You like it here, though, don’t you?” I looked at him. “I know what you think of this place. But you still like it here, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” he admitted.

“What the fuck are we? We’re like robots. Push the right buttons and you’ll get the response you want.”

“We’re Ignored.”

I looked up at the sky. “But what does that mean? What is that? Even being Ignored isn’t consistent. It’s not an absolute. There was a guy at the place I worked, a friend of mine, who could see me, who noticed me when no one else did. And what about Joe?”

“Magic has no laws,” James said. “Science has laws. You keep trying to think of this in scientific terms. It’s not genetics; it’s not physics; it doesn’t conform to any set of rules. It just is. Alchemists tried to codify magic and they came up with science, but magic just exists. There’s no rational reason for it, no cause and effect.”

I shook my head. “Magic.”

“I’ve done a lot of reading on the subject. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me.”

“Magic?”