“You can take that resignation and shove it up your ass,” Philipe said.
He’d spoken softly, but his voice seemed loud in the room. All eyes turned toward him, and I realized with a start that this was the first time the power brokers had noticed him. The antipathy we’d felt, the disgust, had all been directed at Joe. The men had not even noticed us until now.
“And who, may I ask, are you?” Harrington’s voice was also low, but it was filled with a sense of coiled menace.
“It’s none of your fucking business, you pig-eyed sack of shit.”
Harrington turned his attention back toward Joe. “Aren’t you going to introduce us to your friends, Mayor Horth?” The threat had not left his voice.
Joe was obviously frightened, but he held his ground. “No.”
“I see.”
The man with the cigar stood. “You’re through, Horth. You’re an ineffectual know-nothing nobody. We want a new mayor. We want a real mayor. We’re tired of putting up with your incompetence.”
Harrington pushed one of a panel of buttons on his desk. Through what I’d thought was the bathroom door strode two men, a tall, good-looking banker type in his mid-forties, and an average-looking man of approximately the same age. Harrington pointed toward the nondescript man. “We’re running Jim this time. This is the new mayor of Desert Palms.”
Jim was one of us.
Jim was Ignored.
I stared at Jim. He stared back. He knew I knew what he was, and I’m sure he knew Philipe and Steve did, too, but there was no way in hell that Jim was going to do anything to screw up his chances here. This was his shot, his opportunity to be someone, and he wasn’t about to fuck it up just to align himself with us. I knew how he felt, and I couldn’t blame him, but I also knew something he didn’t know. Something that Joe had found out the hard way.
No matter what happened, he would still be Ignored.
“We’ll finally have a real mayor,” Cigar said. “Someone who can get things done.”
“Come on,” Philipe said. “We’ve heard enough. Let’s go.”
Joe looked as though he’d been about to say something, but he apparently changed his mind and turned toward the door.
“You haven’t signed — ”
“And he’s not going to,” Philipe said.
Harrington’s red face was turning even redder. “Who the hell do you think you are?”
“I’m Philipe. Terrorist for the Common Man.”
“You don’t know who you’re dealing with here!”
“No,” Philipe said. “You don’t.”
We hurried out the door. My heart was pounding, and I was shaking like a leaf. I was scared and angry at the same time, pumped up with adrenaline. I half expected the men to come after us and beat the shit out of us. I half expected a phalanx of armed guards to come running down the hallway. But none of this happened. The elevator doors opened when we pushed the button, we rode the elevator downstairs, went through the lobby, out into the parking lot, and got into Joe’s car.
The mayor was nervous as he fumbled with his keys. “Shit!” he said. “Shit!”
“Calm down,” Philipe told him.
“They know where I live!”
“We’ll move to a motel. They’ll never find us.”
“You don’t know them. They will find us.”
“They didn’t even see us until I spoke. We’ll just blend into the woodwork and they’ll never be able to track us down.”
“You think so?” Joe sounded hopeful.
“I know so.”
Joe started the car, put it into gear, and we sped out of the parking lot, bouncing onto the street.
Philipe nodded to himself. “We can get these guys,” he said, and there was genuine excitement in his voice. “We can nail their asses to the wall.”
“Terrorists for the Common Man!” Steve pumped his fist in the air.
I, too, felt the excitement. “Yeah!” I said.
Joe let out an enthusiastic whoop, caught up in the moment.
Philipe grinned. “We’re gonna get those fuckers.”
The other terrorists were all waiting when we got home. Philipe gathered everyone into the living room and described what had happened at the meeting.
“So what do we do?” Don asked.
“We kill them,” Philipe said.
There was silence, I was remembering Familyland. I knew the others were, too.
“We take them out of the picture. We let the people of this city actually vote for the best candidate. We restore democracy to Desert Palms.”
James looked at Tim. Both looked at me. I wanted to be able to stand up and articulate their obvious misgivings, but I did not share those misgivings. I had been in that office with Philipe. I knew where he was coming from. I agreed with him.
“We’ll find a motel in Palm Springs or one of the other nearby cities, lay low for a week, let them think we left. Then we’ll strike.” He withdrew a gun from his inside jacket pocket. It was silver and gleamed in the room’s refracted light.
“Yeah!” Joe said excitedly. “Blow those fuckers away!”
Steve grinned.
“We all need to be armed.”
“What’s with all this killing?” Tim asked. “I don’t see why we need to kill anybody. Violence won’t solve — ”
“It’s a tool,” Philipe said. “The primary tool used by terrorists.”
“It’s the only thing they’ll understand,” Joe said. “It’s the only way to stop them.”
“I say we put it to a vote,” James said.
Philipe shook his head. “We’re going to get those fuckers. You can choose to help or not. But we’re going to do it.”
“Not,” Tim said.
Philipe shrugged. “That’s your right.”
Tim looked at me, but I could not meet his eyes. I keep my gaze focused on Philipe.
“Pack everything up,” Philipe ordered. “Like Joe said, they know where he lives. They’ll be after us soon. We have to get out of here.”
That night, sleeping alone in my spacious hotel room bed, I found myself mentally replaying everything that had happened in Harrington’s office. I remembered what Philipe had told Steve that morning in the car, about how people voted not on issues but name recognition.
Was all politics this way? I had the feeling that it was. I tried to think of the name of my congressman but could not. I could name only one of California’s two senators, I realized, although both of them sent me biannual “Senate Updates” and both did their damnedest to get their names in the newspaper at any opportunity.
I felt chilled. Was this democracy? This sham, this substanceless pretext of power supposedly in the hands of the people?
I fell asleep, and I dreamed that we flew to Washington, D.C., and went to the White House and walked right in. No security guards saw us; we were ignored by the Secret Service men.
I was in the lead, and I pushed open the door to the Oval Office. The President was meeting with his advisers, only it wasn’t really a meeting. They were telling him what to say, what to do, what to think. The President was surrounded by a platoon of men who were lecturing him from all sides, and he looked toward us and his eyes were wide and frightened, and I knew that he was one of us.
I awoke with my pillow drenched with sweat.
Fourteen
We spent Christmas in Palm Springs, at the Holiday Inn.
The place didn’t matter so much to us, but the rituals did — we were all uniformly in agreement on that — and on December 24, we hit the Palm Springs Mall and picked up presents for each other. Philipe set a limit: each of us could get only one gift per terrorist. There was to be no favoritism.