It was late when I got home, and though there were still lights on in two of the other homes, my house was dark. It was just as well. I didn’t feel like chatting with James or John tonight. I just wanted to go to bed.
I slipped quietly through the front door and up the stairs to my bedroom.
Where Mary and Philipe sat, naked, on my bed.
I started to leave the room.
“Where are you going?” Philipe said.
I turned reluctantly toward him. “To find someplace to sleep.”
“You’re going to sleep here with us.”
I shook my head.
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to.”
“This isn’t rape,” Philipe said. “You can’t have any objections to this. We’re all consenting adults here.”
“I’m not consenting.”
“I’m telling you to consent.”
“But — ”
“No buts. You’re still hung up on your old morality. You still don’t seem to realize that we’ve moved on, we’ve left all that behind. The normal rules don’t apply to us. We’re beyond all that.”
But I was not beyond all that.
I shook my head, backed out of the room.
I spent the night downstairs on the couch.
Nine
It was now November. We’d had some of our cars for nearly half a year by this time, and the newness of them had worn off. We were even starting to get a little tired of them. So Philipe decided that we would junk the ones we had and get some more.
And get some publicity in the process.
We held a demolition derby with the Jeep, the Mercedes, and three of the sports cars. Stealing roadblocks from the police, we closed off a stretch of the 405 Freeway near Long Beach one Wednesday night, illuminated the site with flares, and three at a time pretended to be on a bumper car course, speeding forward, throwing the vehicles into reverse, sideswiping whichever car we could. The Porsche was the first to crap out, pummeled from all sides by Philipe in the Mercedes and me in the Jeep, and Junior and his car were replaced by Steve in the 280Z. This time they both ganged up on me, and though I put up a brave fight, forcing Steve onto an off-ramp and ramming Philipe almost into a light pole, I was eventually slammed into the center divider, and the Jeep died.
Philipe was the winner of the derby, and though that qualified him under our quickly made-up rules to keep the Mercedes, he elected to leave it on the freeway with the others. He pointed it down the empty middle lane, put on the cruise control, and hopped out of the car.
The Mercedes drove straight for a few moments, then drifted sharply to the right and went over a small asphalt bump and then down an embankment. We heard it crash and die, and we waited for an explosion but there was none.
“That’s it,” he said. “Game over. Let’s go home.”
Behind the line of flares was a massive traffic jam, and we walked past the roadblocks, between the honking cars, and over the center divider to where we’d left our getaway vehicles.
We drove home in a good mood.
Our little exploit made the local news, and we gathered in Philipe’s house and cheered when film footage of the wrecked cars came on TV.
“The reason for the unauthorized roadblock and the origin of the automobiles is described as a mystery by police,” the reporter said.
Mary, sitting on the arm of Don’s chair tonight, was grinning. “This is great,” she said. “This is really great.”
I dutifully videotaped the newscast.
Afterward, the male anchor made a joke about our cars to his female co-anchor, and then the weather report came on.
The other terrorists were talking excitedly about both the demolition derby and the newscast, but I stood there with the video remote in my hand, watching the weather forecast. We were not Terrorists for the Common Man, I realized. We were nothing so noble or romantic. Nothing so important. We were a pathetic group of unknowns trying desperately, in any way we could think of, using any means at our disposal, to leave a mark on society, to let people know that we were here, to get publicity for ourselves.
We were clowns. Comic relief for the real news.
It was a rather stunning realization, and not one for which I was really prepared. I had not given this terrorist business much thought since those first few weeks. I had simply bought into Philipe’s concept and assumed that what we were doing was real, legitimate, worthwhile. I had never stopped to analyze what exactly we were accomplishing. But now I looked back on everything we’d done and saw for the first time how little that actually was, and how embarrassingly pitiful were our delusions of grandeur.
Philipe was angry at what he was, and it was this anger that drove him, that fueled his passion and his efforts to do something big, something important with his life. But the rest of us had no such driving force. We were sheep. All of us. Myself included. I might have been angry myself at first, but I no longer felt that way. I no longer felt anything, and whatever fleeting pleasure I had derived from our exploits had long since faded.
What was the point to it all?
I turned off the VCR, put the tape back in its box, and wandered back home alone. I took a long, hot shower, then put on a robe and walked into the bedroom. Mary, wearing only a pair of white silk panties, was lying on the bed waiting for me.
“Not tonight,” I said tiredly.
“I want you,” she said, in a husky voice filled with false lust.
I sighed, took off my robe. “Fine.”
I stretched out on the bed next to her, and she climbed on top of me, began kissing me.
A moment later I felt pressure at the foot of the bed. Rough hands suddenly reached up, held my penis.
Male hands.
I squirmed, trying to get away. I felt sickened. I knew I should be more open-minded, but I wasn’t.
I felt a mouth on my organ.
I was tangled up in Mary, and I tried to get away, but her arms and legs were wrapped around me and I could not struggle out of her embrace.
There was a muffled male grunt, a grunt I recognized, and I realized that it was Philipe at the end of the bed, working on me.
I closed my eyes, filled with a deep black despair.
Jane, I thought.
Philipe’s mouth moved off of me, and a second later Mary stiffened, moaned, increased the pressure against my body. The pressure increased, decreased, increased, decreased, and then she jerked forward with a gasp, slumping against me.
Now I did roll over and away, feeling lower than I ever had in my life. I hated Philipe, and part of me wanted to kill him, wanted to sit up, take his neck in my hands, and squeeze the life out of him.
I wanted him to go away, did not want to look at him, but he stood next to the bed and stared down at me.
“Get out,” I said.
“It wasn’t that bad. I could tell you enjoyed it.”
“That’s an automatic response.”
Philipe crouched down next to me. There was something like desperation in his eyes, and I understood that deep down, despite all his talk of freedom from conventional morality and beliefs, he felt the same way I did.
I thought of his old-lady house.
“You might’ve hated it,” he said. “But you felt alive, didn’t you? It made you feel alive?”
I looked at him, nodded slowly. It wasn’t true, and we both knew it wasn’t true, but we both pretended that it was.
He nodded back. “That’s what’s important,” he said. “That’s what’s really important.”
“Yeah,” I said. I turned away from him, closing my eyes, pulling the covers up around me. I heard him talking to Mary after that, but I could not hear what either of them said, and I didn’t want to.
I closed my eyes tightly, kept myself wrapped in the covers, and somehow I fell asleep.