The Ignored (21 page)

“When?” Pete asked.

“Tuesday.”

I looked around the group, nodded. “Tuesday it is,” I said.

We drove to the meeting separately. Philipe didn’t want us all riding
together.

There were cars in the parking lot when I arrived, and the other
terrorists were milling around by the building’s back door, where Philipe had
told us to meet. Only Philipe himself was missing, and I parked my car, got out,
and walked over to the group. None of us spoke, and there was a feeling of
hushed expectancy among us.

Buster had brought a friend, a man also in his mid to late sixties who
was wearing the uniform of a Texaco attendant. The name tag on the old man’s
uniform read “Junior,” and I couldn’t help smiling at the incongruity of the
name and the face. The old man smiled back at me, happy to be noticed in even
this small way, and I immediately felt sorry for laughing at him.

“My friend Junior,” Buster explained. “He’s one of us.”

Apparently Junior had not yet been introduced to the others, because at
this announcement they all gathered around, shaking his hand, welcoming him, the
artificially imposed silence of a few moments before effectively broken. I did
the same. It felt strange to be on the inside looking out. I had been in
Junior’s shoes only recently, and it seemed weird and slightly disorienting to
view all this from the opposite angle.

Junior ate it up. He had apparently been told by Buster beforehand about
the terrorists—he did not seem confused or surprised upon meeting us—and
there was a smile on his face and tears in his eyes as he shook our hands and
repeated our names.

It was at that moment that Philipe arrived. Resplendent in an
expensively tailored suit, his hair neatly trimmed, he looked almost
presidential, the model of a modern leader, and he strode across the parking lot
with the air and authority of one used to being in charge.

The rest of us grew quiet as he approached. I felt a strange excited
shiver pass through me as Philipe stepped confidently up the curb. It was the
type of moment I’d experienced before only as an observer, not as a participant.
I felt the way I had in movies when the music swelled and the hero performed
heroically. For the first time, I think, I realized that we were part of
something big, something important.

Terrorists for the Common Man.

It was more than just a concept to me now. I finally understood what
Philipe had been trying so hard to explain.

He looked at me and smiled, and it was as if he knew what I was
thinking. Taking out his key and security card, he inserted both into the
electronic slot on the wall next to the door, and the door clicked. He pushed it
open.

“Let’s go in,” he said.

We followed him inside the building. He paused, closed and locked the
door behind us, and we proceeded down a darkened corridor to an elevator.
Philipe pushed the Up button, and the metal doors instantly slid open, the light
inside the elevator cubicle seeming harsh and far too bright after the darkness.

“Second floor,” Philipe announced, pushing the button.

The second floor was even darker than the first, but Philipe forged
ahead and turned on a bank of lights and a series of recessed fluorescents
winked on, illuminating a huge room fronted by a built-in counter and
partitioned off into smaller sections by modular wall segments.

“This way!” he said.

He led us behind the counter, through the modular maze of workstations,
to a closed wooden door in the far wall. He opened the door, turned on the
lights.

I had a queasy momentary sense of déjà vu. We were in a conference room,
bare save for a long table with a television and VCR on a metal stand at its
head. It looked almost exactly like the room in which I’d been introduced to
Automated Interface.

“This looks just like the conference room at my old firm,” Don said.

“It looks like the training room at Ward’s.” Tommy.

“It looks like the county’s multipurpose room.” Bill.

Philipe held up his hands. “I know,” he said. He paused, looked around
the room at the rest of us. “We are Ignored,” he said. He looked around the
table. His gaze landed on Junior, and though he said nothing, he smiled,
silently welcoming the old man to the fold. Then he continued, “We are of a
kind. Our lives have traveled along parallel paths.

“There is a reason for this. It is not by chance or accident that our
experiences echo each other’s, and it is not by chance or accident that we met
and joined together. It is by design. We have been chosen for a special purpose,
and we have been given this talent to use.

“Most of you did not realize at first that it was a talent. You thought
it was a curse. But you’ve seen what we can do together. You’ve seen the places
we can go, the actions we can perform. You’ve seen the opportunities available
to us.” He paused. “We are not the only people who are Ignored. There are other
Ignoreds whom we don’t know and may never know, living out their lives of quiet
desperation, and it is for those people, as much as for ourselves, that we must
fight. For we have the opportunity, the ability, and the obligation to claim
rights for a minority that the rest of the world does not even know exists. We
are here tonight not only because of what we are, but because of what we have
chosen to be: Terrorists for the Common Man!”

Again, a tingle of excitement ran through me. I almost felt like
cheering, and I knew the others did, too. Yes, I thought. Yes!

“What does that mean? Terrorists for the Common Man? It means that it is
our responsibility to act on behalf of the forgotten and the disregarded, the
unknown and the unappreciated. We will give a voice to the people who have no
voice. We will bring recognition to the people who aren’t recognized. We have
been ignored all our lives, but we will be ignored no more! We will make the
world sit up and take notice and we will shout to anyone who will listen, ‘We
are here! We are here! We are here!’”

Steve pumped his fist in the air. “Yeah!”

I felt like doing the same.

Philipe smiled. “How do we accomplish this? How do we grab the attention
of a society that has so far paid no attention to us at all? Violence. Creative,
constructive violence. We kidnap and take hostages, we blow up buildings, we do
anything we have to do to get our point across and make Middle America sit up
and take notice. Playtime’s over, kiddies. We’re in the big leagues now. And
it’s time for us to get to work.”

From the inside of his expensive suit, Philipe withdrew a hammer.
Calmly, coolly, he turned around and smashed the screen on the TV. There was a
loud pop, and glass shattered outward, accompanied by a small shower of sparks.

He used the hammer to smash the VCR as well.

“This will get in the
Orange City News
,” he said. “There will be
a short blurb of an article stating that a person or persons unknown broke into
City Hall and destroyed audiovisual equipment. That’s it.” He knocked the TV
onto the floor. “All of our previous attempts have been amateurish and
unfocused. We have not gotten the attention we deserve because we did not choose
our targets wisely and did not properly identify ourselves.” Once again, he
reached into his jacket. “I have had cards made up. Professionally typeset
business cards that list the name of our organization. We’ll leave these at the
scenes of our crimes so they’ll know who we are.”

He passed the cards around, and we all got a look at them. White with
red lettering, they said:

THIS IS A BLOW FOR THE IGNORED

TERRORISTS FOR THE COMMON MAN

“Yes!” Steve said. “Yes!”

“Now the more damage we do, of course, the bigger the articles about us
will be, the more attention our acts will get.” He walked around the table, past
us. “Come on.”

We followed him out to the room with the workstations. He bent down to
turn on a computer terminal that was sitting atop a desk. “They forgot about
me,” he said. “They didn’t think to change my password. Their mistake.” He
pulled up an initial security screen, typed in an ID and password, and a list of
property records appeared on the screen. In one column were the names of the
parcel owners, in another the assessed valuation of each property.

Philipe pressed two keys.

The records were deleted.

“Gone,” he said. “Now we’ll be portrayed as expert computer hackers who
deleted hundreds of important government records. It’ll probably make the
Register.
Maybe the Orange County edition of the
Times
.”

He straightened up, pulling the terminal onto the floor, where it fell
with a crash. He kicked in the screen, then used his arm to clear the top of the
desk, sweeping everything onto the floor.

“We can do anything we want,” he said, “and they’ll never be able to
catch us!” He jumped on top of the desk, held his hammer high. “Let’s tear this
fucking place apart!”

Like Willard’s rats, we set about following his order. I tipped over one
of the modular walls, smashed a terminal myself. I pulled open file drawers,
yanking out anything I could lay my hands on. It felt good, this destruction,
invigorating, and we spread out, taking out our aggression and frustrations on
the anonymous inanimate objects of Orange City Hall.

We trashed the entire floor.

A half hour later, sweaty and out of breath, huffing and puffing, we met
by the elevator.

Philipe surveyed the damage, grinned hugely. “This will be noticed,” he
said. “This will be reported. This will be investigated. We’re off to a good
start.” He pressed the elevator button, the metal doors opened, and we stepped
inside.

In the instant before the doors slid shut, he threw his key and security
card out onto the second-floor carpet.

“There’s no turning back now.”

I was like an adolescent who suddenly becomes enormously wealthy or an
ordinary man who becomes dictator. I was drunk with possibilities, greedy to use
my newfound power.

We all felt that way, I guess, but we didn’t really talk about it. The
feeling was too new, too strong and pure, and I don’t think any of us wanted to
dilute its potency by discussing it. For my part, I felt excited and absurdly
happy, almost intoxicated. I felt invincible, as though I could do anything. As
Philipe had predicted, our trashing of Orange’s city hall made not only the
Orange city paper but the
Times
and the
Register.
Although our
fingerprints were all over everything from the back door of the building to the
vandalized workstations, although Philipe had tossed his key and security card
on the floor in front of the elevator, although we had scattered our new
business cards about the area, each of the articles clearly stated that the
police had no suspects and no clues.

We had been ignored once again.

I should have felt remorse, I suppose. I had been brought up to have
respect for other people’s property, and until now I had never even thought
about destroying something that did not belong to me. But Philipe was right.
Breaking the law was justified if it led to the eradication of an even greater
wrong. Thoreau had known this. So had Martin Luther King. And Malcolm X. Civil
disobedience was an American tradition, and we were just the latest soldiers in
a long battle against hypocrisy and injustice.

I wanted to vandalize someplace else.

Anyplace. I didn’t care where.

I just wanted to smash and break things.

We met the next day at my apartment. Everyone was talking about what
we’d done, each man rehashing his own personal contribution. No one seemed more
hyped than Junior, our newest terrorist. He kept giggling, the laugh of a
schoolboy, not an old man, and it was obvious that this was the most exciting
thing to have happened to him in years.

Philipe stood by himself, next to the doorway to the kitchen, and I
moved next to him. “What are we going to do next?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Who knows? You got any ideas?”

I shook my head slowly, surprised not only by his answer but his
attitude. The rest of us were pumped up, high from our first outing and ready
for more, but Philipe seemed… I don’t know. Bored? Disappointed?
Disillusioned? All of those and none of them. I looked at him, and the thought
crossed my mind that he was manic depressive. That didn’t fit, though. Manic
depressives were either up or down; there was no middle ground. Philipe was more
even-keeled than that.

Maybe, I thought, he was feeling remorse.

Maybe he was feeling what I was supposed to feel.

I still wanted to hit someplace else, to strike another blow against the
empire, but I decided that maybe this wasn’t the time to bring it up. On the
table to my left was the Show section of the
Register
, the entertainment
section, and I picked it up, glancing at the top article on the front page.
Fashion Island, in Newport Beach, was hosting its annual jazz concert series.
I’d been there last spring, with Jane. Throughout March and April each year,
jazz artists gave free Thursday evening concerts in an outdoor stage area set up
near The Broadway.

“Let me see that,” Philipe said. He took the paper from me. He had been
reading over my shoulder and had obviously found something that caught his
interest. He looked over the front page, and a grin spread across his face. His
eyes, dull a few moments before, were animated and excited. “Yes,” he said.

He strode into the middle of the room, held up the newspaper.
“Tomorrow,” he announced, “we’re going to a jazz concert!”

We’d planned to arrive early, but by the time we battled the work
traffic on the freeway and made it to Fashion Island, it was five-fifty. The
concert was scheduled to start at six.

Bleachers and folding chairs had been set up for the audience, but both
were filled and people were starting to stand around the periphery of the
concert area. We stood in front of a men’s clothing store, watching the people
pass by. It was an upscale crowd of beautiful people, the type of people I’d
always hated. The women were all model-thin with short skintight dresses and
designer sunglasses, the men blond and athletic and young and successful. Most
of them were talking business.