The Ignored (24 page)

“But…”

“If you don’t, we will.”

The others nodded enthusiastically.

“It’s broad daylight.”

“No one will see you.”

He was right, I knew. I would be as ignored raping a woman as I was at
everything else. The woman began walking away from us, past the Baskin-Robbins,
toward an alley in the center of the block.

But that didn’t make it okay.

“That woman’s going to be raped,” Philipe said. “Either you do it or we
do it. The decision’s yours.”

I fell for the argument, believing in my arrogance that being raped by
me was somehow preferable to being raped by Philipe or Steve or John. I was a
nice person, I rationalized, a good person performing a bad act. It was less
horrible to be raped by me than one of the others.

John giggled. “Pork her. And throw her a hump for me.”

I took a deep breath and walked casually down the sidewalk toward the
woman. She did not see me until I was upon her, did not react until I had
grabbed her arm and pulled her into the alley, my hand held over her mouth. She
dropped her bag. Black lace panties and a red silk teddy spilled out.

I felt horrible. I suppose somewhere deep down in the dark, unexplored
recesses of my macho heart of hearts I’d thought she might enjoy it just a
little bit, that even if the experience was emotionally wrenching, it might
still somehow be physically pleasurable. But she was crying and terrified and
obviously in anguish, and I knew even as I pressed against her that she would
hate it and hate me.

I stopped.

I couldn’t go through with it.

I let the woman go, and she fell onto the asphalt, sobbing, sucking in
air with great gasps. I moved away from her, stood, and leaned back against the
alley wall. I felt like shit, like the criminal I was. My stomach was churning,
and I felt like throwing up. What in the hell was wrong with me? How could I
have ever consented to something like this? How could I be so morally weak, so
pitifully unable to stand up for my beliefs?

I was not the person I’d thought I was.

In my mind, I saw Jane, yanked into an alley, raped by some stranger.

Did this woman have a boyfriend? A husband? Did she have children? She
had parents.

“You had your chance,” Philipe said. He was running into the alley,
unbuckling his pants.

I lurched toward him, felt dizzy, felt like throwing up, had to lean
against the wall again for support. “No!”

He looked at me. “You knew the rules of the game.”

He grabbed the front of her pants, pulled, and a snap flew off.

The other terrorists were laughing. The woman was whimpering pitifully,
struggling on the ground, trying desperately to keep her pants from being pulled
down, trying to reclaim some of her stolen dignity, but Philipe dropped to his
knees and roughly shoved her legs apart. I heard the sound of material ripping.
She was screaming, crying, tears streaming down her reddened face, and she
looked for all the world like a frightened little girl. There was terror in her
eyes. Pure, abject terror.

“Let her go!” I said.

“No.”

“I’m next!” Steve said.

“Me,” Bill said.

I staggered out of the alley. Behind me, I heard their laughter, heard
her screams.

I couldn’t fight them. There was nothing I could do.

I walked down the sidewalk to the left, sat down on the narrow ledge
beneath the Baskin-Robbins window. The glass felt cool against my back. I
realized that my hands were shaking. I could still hear the woman’s screams, but
they were muffled by city sounds, by traffic, by people. The door to the ice
cream parlor opened, and Bill walked out, a huge chocolate sugar cone in his
hand.

“Done?” he asked me.

I shook my head.

He frowned. “No?”

“I couldn’t do it,” I said, sickened.

“Where is everybody?”

“There.”

“Oh.” He licked his ice cream, then headed toward the alley.

I closed my eyes, tried to concentrate on the noise of the traffic. Was
Philipe evil? Were we all evil? I didn’t know. I’d been taught my entire life
that evil was banal. It was the Nazis and their institutionalized horror that
had given rise to such a theory, and during my life I’d heard ad nauseum that
evil was not brilliant and spectacular and grandiose, but small and mundane and
ordinary.

We were small and mundane and ordinary.

Were we evil?

Philipe thought we were good, believed we could do anything that we
wanted and that it was all right. There was no moral authority to which we had
to answer, no system of ethics to which we were obliged to adhere. We were above
all that. We decided what was right for us, what was wrong.

I had decided that this was wrong.

Why didn’t we all agree on this? Why were our beliefs different? In
almost everything else, we thought, we felt, as one. But at this moment, I felt
as estranged from my fellow Ignored as I ever had from normal men and women.

Philipe would say that I was still holding on to the mores and
conventions of the society that I had left behind.

Maybe he was right.

They emerged from the alley a few minutes later. I wanted to go back
there, check on the woman, make sure she was all right, but I stayed where I
was, leaned my head back against the Baskin-Robbins window.

“Their movie’s probably out by now,” Philipe said, adjusting his belt.
“We’d better get back to the theater.”

I nodded, stood, and we started walking back down the street the way
we’d come. I peeked into the alley as we walked past but saw nothing. She must
have run out the other end.

“You’re one of us,” Philipe said. “You were part of it, too.”

“Did I say anything?”

“No, but you’re thinking it.” He looked at me. “I need you with us.”

I did not respond.

“You’ll murder but you won’t rape?”

“That was different. That was personal.”

“It’s all personal! We’re not fighting individuals, we’re fighting an
entire system. We have to strike where and when we can.”

“That’s not how I see it,” I told him.

He stopped walking. “You’re against us, then.”

I shook my head. “I’m not against you.”

“Then you’re with us.”

I said nothing.

“You’re with us,” he repeated.

I nodded. Slowly. I was, I supposed. I had no choice. “Yeah,” I said.

He grinned, put an arm around my shoulder. “One for all and all for
one,” he said. “Like the Three Musketeers.”

I forced myself to smile, though it felt sickly and anemic on my face. I
felt soiled and dirty and unclean and I didn’t like his arm around me, but I
said nothing.

I was with them. I was one of them.

Who else did I have?

What else could I be?

We walked down the sidewalk to the theater.

We lived in our own world, a netherworld that occupied the same space as
the normal one but existed a beat or two behind. It reminded me of an old
Outer Limits
episode I once saw, where time stood still and everyone in the
world remained frozen in place except a man and woman who were somehow
unaffected, untrapped, living outside of time, between the seconds.

Only the people we ran into weren’t frozen in time.

They just didn’t notice us.

It was a weird feeling, not being seen by the people with whom I came
into contact. I’d been conscious of being Ignored for quite a while, but this
feeling was different. It was as if I were really invisible, a ghost. Before,
I’d felt a part of the world. I was unnoticed, but I existed. Now, though…
Now, it was as though I did not exist, not on the same level as everyone else.
It was as if normal life was a movie and I was a viewer: I could see it but not
participate in it.

The only time I honestly felt alive was when I was with the other
terrorists. We seemed to validate each other’s existence. We were a pocket of
reality in an unreal world, and as this feeling of alienation from human society
grew within me, I began to spend more and more time with the terrorists, less
and less time by myself. It was comforting to have the others around, reassuring
to know that I was not alone, and as the days and weeks passed, we began
sleeping over more often at each other’s houses and apartments, not splitting up
at night but staying together twenty-four hours a day.

It was not just the eleven of us huddling against a cold, hostile world,
though. We had fun together. And there were perks, small advantages to being
Ignored. We could go to restaurants, order whatever we wanted, eat to our
heart’s content, stay as long as we wanted, and we never had to pay. We could go
to stores, take what we needed in food and goods. We could go to movies and
concerts for free.

But there was still something unsettling about it all, still something
missing—in my life, at least—and despite our best attempts to believe
otherwise, despite our earnest efforts to reassure ourselves that we were happy,
that we were luckier than everyone else, I don’t think any of us really thought
that was the case.

We were never bored, however, and we did not lack for things to do. We
were the national average and America was made for us. We loved shopping at
malls. We loved eating at restaurants. Amusement parks amused us, tourist
attractions attracted us, popular music was popular with us, hit movies were a
hit with us. Everything was aimed at our level.

And when we tired of legitimate ways of whiling away our hours, we could
always rob, steal, and vandalize.

We could always be terrorists.

After the rape, we laid low for a couple of weeks. There was no mention
of the rape in the papers or on the TV news—I was not even sure it had been
reported—but it was not the possibility of getting caught that compelled
Philipe to make us take time off anyway.

It was because he wanted to win back my confidence.

It was stupid, but it was true. My opinion was important to him. Most of
the others were thrilled by what had happened. They had already snagged
Playboys
and
Penthouses
,
Hustlers
, and
Cavaliers
,
and were busily picking out the types of women they wanted to take down next,
but Philipe made it clear that there were to be no more sexual assaults. At
least not for a while. Instead, he attempted to convince me that rape was a
legitimate weapon at our disposal. He seemed aware of the fact that my opinion
of him had dropped, that I no longer had the respect for him that I’d previously
had, and he seemed desperately anxious to reinstate himself in my eyes.

That was an ego boost, of course. Such personal attention made me feel
important. And, I had to admit, his arguments were persuasive. I understood
where he was coming from, and I even agreed with him—on a purely theoretical
level. But I also believed that it was wrong to punish innocent individuals for
general wrongs perpetuated by the group to which they belonged, and I think I
made him see my point. I got him to agree that the rape of the Asian woman had
been only peripherally political, and he said that from now on we would only use
rape if it would legitimately and specifically accomplish one of our goals.

If we just wanted to get ourselves off, we’d go to prostitutes or
something.

We both thought that was fair.

It was in July that we performed our first big terrorist act, that we
finally got on TV.

We were staying at Bill’s place, a comfortable three-bedroom house in
Fountain Valley, and we were awakened by the sound of a chain saw. The noise was
loud, outrageously so, and frighteningly close. Instinctively scared, my heart
pounding, I jumped out of my sleeping bag and opened the door of the bedroom.

Philipe stood in the hallway, wielding a gas-powered chain saw that
smelled of burning oil, and waving it above his head like Leatherface. He saw me
and grinned.

James emerged from the bedroom behind me, wide-eyed and frightened. The
others came into the hall from the living room and the other bedrooms.

Philipe lowered his chain saw, turned it off. His grin grew wider. “Get
dressed, kiddies. We’re going into town.”

At his feet, I saw hammers and screwdrivers, a tire iron, an ax, a
baseball bat. My ears were still ringing from the chain saw noise. “What?” I
said.

“Get dressed and get ready,” he said. “I have a plan.”

We drove into L.A. in a caravan of three cars, Philipe’s Dodge leading
the way. It was Sunday, and the traffic was light. There’d been wind the night
before, and for once we could see both the San Gabriel Mountains and the
Hollywood Hills. The Los Angeles skyline looked the way it did in movies and on
TV, backed by pale blue sky, only a faint haze of smog obscuring the details of
the buildings.

We followed Philipe’s car off the freeway and down Vermont Avenue,
through gang-graffitied neighborhoods, past run-down grocery stores and
dilapidated hooker hotels. We turned left on Sunset and headed through Hollywood
to Beverly Hills. The chain saw and tools had been put in my trunk, and they
rattled as I bumped over each dip in the road, shifted as I turned each corner.
Buster, next to me in the passenger seat, held his Nikon camera on his lap.
Philipe had told him to bring it.

“What do you think he has planned?” Buster asked.

I shrugged. “Who knows?”

“Isn’t this great? Don’t you love it?” The old man chuckled. “If
anyone’d told me that at my age I’d be cruising around with a… a gang,
kicking ass and raising hell, I’d’ve thought… well, I’d’ve said they were
full of horse pucky.”

I laughed.

“I feel so… so young. You know?”

Truth to tell, I felt the same way myself. I
was
young—compared to Buster, at least—but being a terrorist made me feel excited,
exhilarated, exuberant. I felt good this morning, jazzed, almost giddy, and I
knew the others felt the same way.