“No, I don’t. And how do you know my name?”
He laughed, but strangely enough there didn’t seem to be any maliciousness in the laugh. “Come on. You know I’ve been following you, and you know why.”
“No, I don’t know why.”
“You’ve passed the initiation ceremony. You’re in.”
The fear returned. I suddenly wished I hadn’t dropped the knife. “In?”
“You’re one of us.”
It was like I’d suddenly figured out how to do a complicated math problem that had been frustrating me. I knew what he was. “You’re Ignored,” I said.
He nodded. “But I prefer to call myself a terrorist. A Terrorist for the Common Man.”
I felt strange, unlike I’d ever felt before, and I didn’t know if the feeling was good or bad. “Are… are there more of you?”
He laughed again. “Oh, yes. There are more of us.” He stressed the word “us.”
“But — ”
“We want you to join us.” He moved forward, next to me. “You’re free now. You’ve cut off your ties to their world. You’re part of our world now. You never were one of them, but you thought you had to play by their rules. Now you know you don’t. No one knows you; no one will remember you. You can do what you want.” His sharp eyes focused on mine. “We’ve all done the same thing. We’ve all done what you’ve done, I offed my boss and his boss. I thought I was all alone then, but… well, I found out that I wasn’t. I found others. And I decided that we should band together. When I saw you that first time, at South Coast Plaza, I knew you were one of us, too. But I could tell that you were still searching. You hadn’t found yourself yet. So I waited for you.”
“You don’t even know me.”
“I know you. I know what foods you like; I know your taste in clothes; I know everything about you. And you know everything about me.”
“Except your name.”
“Philipe.” He grinned. “Now you know everything.”
It was true. He was right. And as I stood there and looked at him and that strange feeling settled inside me, I knew that the feeling was good.
“Are you in?” he asked.
I looked back down the street, toward the mirrored facade of the Automated Interface building, and I nodded slowly. “I’m in,” I said.
Philipe pumped his fist in the air. “Yes!” His smile grew broader. “You’re a victor now, not a victim. You won’t regret this.” He spread his arms wide. “The town,” he crowed, “is ours!”
PART TWO
We Are Here
One
I felt no guilt. That was the weird thing. Aside from those first few initial qualms, I felt no guilt over what I’d done. I wanted to; I tried to. I even attempted to analyze why I didn’t. Murder was wrong. I’d been taught that since I was a child, and I believed it. No human being had the right to take the life of another. To do so was… evil.
So why didn’t I feel bad?
I suppose it was because deep down, despite my surface reservations against murder, I felt that Stewart had deserved it. How I could think that, how I could believe that arrogance toward an underling qualified one for the death penalty, I could not rationally say. It was an instinctive feeling, a gut reaction, and whether it was Philipe’s persuasive arguments or my own rationalizations, I soon came to think, to believe, that what I had done was not wrong. It might have been illegal, but it was fair, it was just.
Legality and illegality.
Did such concepts apply to me?
I thought not. I began to think that perhaps, like Philipe said, I had been put on this earth for a purpose, that my anonymity was not a curse but a blessing, that my invisibility protected me from the mundane morality that ruled the lives of everyone else. I was average, Philipe kept telling me, but that made me special, that gave me rights and licenses that went far beyond those accorded to the people who’d surrounded me all my life.
I was born to be a Terrorist for the Common Man.
Terrorist for the Common Man.
It was an attractive concept, and it was obviously something to which Philipe had given a lot of thought. He introduced me to my fellow terrorists that first day. I was still stunned, still not fully functioning, but he led me back to my car and had me drive, following his directions, to a Denny’s coffee shop in Orange. The other terrorists were already there, taking up two pushed-together tables in the back of the restaurant and being completely ignored by both the waitresses and the other customers. We walked over to where they sat. There were eight of them, not counting Philipe. All men. Four of them, like Philipe and myself, appeared to be in their twenties. Three of them looked to be in their thirties, and one was an old man who could not have been a day under sixty-five.
I looked at the men and I realized what had struck me before about Philipe, why there had been something familiar about him. He looked like me. They all looked like me. I don’t mean that we had the same physical features, the same-sized noses or the same color hair, but there was a similarity in our expressions, in our attitudes, an undefinable quality that marked us as being of a kind. We were all Caucasian. I noticed that immediately. There were no minorities among us. But our similarity went far deeper than mere race.
We were all Ignored.
Philipe introduced me to the others. “This is the man I’ve been telling you about,” he said, gesturing toward me. “The one I’ve been cultivating. He finally did his boss today. Now he’s one of us.”
Nervous, embarrassed, I looked down at my hands. I saw dried blood in the short lines of my knuckles, around the edges of my fingernails. I realized I was still wearing the clown suit.
The others stood, all smiling and talking excitedly, and they shook my hand and congratulated me one by one as Philipe introduced them. Buster was the old man, a former janitor. The young guys were John, James, Steve, and Tommy. John and Tommy had both worked for chain department stores before hooking up with Philipe. James had been a circulation manager for the Pennysaver. Steve had been a file clerk working for a temporary agency. Two of the thirtysomethingers, Bill and Don, had both held middle-management positions — Bill with the County of Orange, Don with a private investment firm. The other, Pete, had been a construction worker.
These, then, were my peers.
“Sit down,” Philipe said. He pulled out a chair, looked at me. “You hungry? Want something to eat?”
I nodded, sitting down in the chair next to him. I was hungry, I realized. I hadn’t eaten breakfast or lunch, and all of this… excitement had left me with a huge appetite. But none of the waitresses had even looked in this direction since we’d walked in.
“Don’t worry,” Philipe said, as if reading my thoughts. He walked to the middle of the room and stood directly in front of a plump older waitress who was heading back toward the kitchen. She stopped just before running into him, an expression of surprise crossing her features as she saw him for the first time. “Could we get some service?” Philipe said loudly. He pointed to our table, and the waitress’ gaze followed his finger.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I — ” She caught herself. “Are you ready to order?”
“Yes.”
She followed Philipe back to our table. He ordered a patty melt and a cup of coffee, I ordered a cheeseburger, onion rings, and a large Coke. The other men had already eaten but asked for refills of their drinks.
I looked around the table at my fellow Ignored. Everything was happening so fast. My brain was registering the information, but my emotions were lagging a beat or two behind. I knew what was happening but not how to feel about it. I found myself staring at John and Tommy, or Tommy and John — I couldn’t remember who was who — trying to recall if I’d seen either of them on the streets of Irvine during the days I’d ditched work. There was something about them that made them seem more familiar to me than the others.