We had been dormant in his absence, not sure if he was coming back, not sure what we would do if he didn’t. I hadn’t realized until that point how dependent we’d all been on him. Despite our arguments and disagreements, despite my periodic attempts to distance myself from him, I was just as reliant upon Philipe as the others were, and I knew that none of us had the vision or leadership qualities needed to fill his shoes and take charge of the organization.
Then, just as it was starting to look as though we really would have to start making some decisions on our own, Philipe was back, acting as though nothing unusual had occurred, once again laying out plans and telling everyone what to do.
I wanted to talk to him about what had happened, wanted to talk to the others as well, but for some reason I didn’t.
Joe was our liaison with the real world. He was definitely Ignored, but somehow, whether by virtue of his nature or his position, he could get non-Ignored to pay attention to him. He could communicate with them and they would listen.
After his return, the first thing Philipe asked Joe to do was to look for any Ignored who might already be working for the city and promote them to positions of power. “They’ll never be promoted from within their own departments because they’re not noticed. No one pays attention to them and no one considers them when positions are open.”
“I’m not sure I can tell who’s Ignored,” Joe said hesitantly.
“I can,” Philipe told him. “Get me a printout of all city employees and their personnel histories. We’ll start out that way, narrow it down. Then you can call them all into the council chambers for a meeting, introduce me as an efficiency expert or something, give me a chance to look them over. If we find any, we’ll talk to them, decide where to put them.”
“But what do we do after that?”
“We’ll see.”
There was no one Ignored working at city hall, it turned out. A canvass of the company to whom the city contracted out tree-trimming and park maintenance service likewise proved futile.
We were rarer than we’d thought.
But none of this deterred Philipe. He got us all together, asked us pages upon pages of questions that he’d written out on a variety of basic topics, and from our answers he devised a test that he called the EAP, the Educational Aptitude and Proficiency exam. He got Joe to get the city council to pass an ordinance requiring the school district to administer the exam in all Desert Palms schools before the end of the current school year.
“We’ll be able to catch them young,” Philipe explained.
In the meantime, he and Joe pored over stacks of personnel printouts and labor distribution reports in order to determine which city employees were the most average and unexceptional in the amount of hours they put into their jobs and the amount of work that they produced. Philipe’s goal was to eventually, through attrition, get rid of those employees with poor performance records, demote those with high performance records, letting them carry the heaviest load and do the majority of the work, and promote those who were the most average, the most ordinary, the most like us.
“Mediocrity should be rewarded,” he said. “It’s the only way we’ll ever be able to get any respect.”
For the rest of us, our days became less structured. Without a specific short-term goal toward which we were working, we began to drift. Once again, we started going to movies in the afternoon, hanging out at malls. We walked into expensive five-star resorts, swimming in their luxurious pools. In the evenings, we’d hit the nightclubs. We found that it was fun to annoy celebrities, tripping them as they danced, watching them fall and flail awkwardly to the secretly delighted stares of the ordinary men and women around them. We flipped up celebrity women’s skirts and pantsed the more pretentious men, exposing who wore underwear and who didn’t. I’d always thought of the Palm Springs area as sort of a retirement community for old-line celebrities, but it was surprising how many young movie actors and soap opera stars and contemporary entertainers frequented the local clubs on weekends.
In the women’s restroom of one club, Steve and Paul raped a blond bimbo who was currently starring in a Saturday night CBS sitcom. Afterward, showing off her silk thong panties as a trophy, Steve said, “She wasn’t that great. Mary’s as good as her any day.”
“Famous people are no different than us,” Paul agreed. “I don’t see why people treat them like they are.”
I said nothing.
Philipe and Joe, when they heard about the rape, were furious. Philipe lectured all of us about committing crimes in Desert Palms. “You don’t shit where you eat,” he said. “Do you think you assholes can comprehend that?”
It was interesting to note the change in Philipe since “the action.” He’d become downright conservative lately, eschewing the tools of terrorism that he’d championed in the past and opting for maneuvering within the strict boundaries of the system.
I had to admit, I liked this conventional approach.
It was about a month later that I was walking back from a bookstore down a nearly empty street and a woman bumped into me. She let out a short startled cry, then stood there, puzzled and frightened, looking around.
She didn’t see me.
At all.
My first thought was that she was blind. But almost immediately I realized that that was not the case. She was simply unable to see me — I was completely invisible to her. I stood there, watching as she continued to look frantically around, then hurried away, continuing to glance over her shoulder for the invisible intruder.
I was stunned, not sure how to react. I thought for a moment, then looked up and down the street, searching for someone else. I saw a derelict sitting at a bus stop farther up the block and hurried over. He was a heavily bearded man in a dirty overcoat and was staring straight out at the street, eyes focused on the building opposite. I licked my lips, took a deep breath, and began walking back and forth in front of him. His eyes did not follow me.
I stopped. “Hello,” I said.
No response.
I clapped my hands loudly next to his ears.
Nothing.
I pushed his shoulder.
He jumped up, startled, and let out a sharp exhalation, looking wildly around.
He could not see me either.
Or hear me.
“They’re back!” he screamed crazily, and ran up the street away from me.
I sat down hard on the bench.
We’d graduated to the next step.
When had this occurred? Had it happened overnight, or had we been gradually fading away from public view?
A bus passed by. The driver did not see me on the bench, did not stop.
We were, I realized, completely free. Even the minor restrictions imposed on us by our extremely limited visibility had now been lifted. We could do anything, whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted, and no one would ever know.
But…
But I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell the others. I wasn’t sure I wanted them to know this. I had the sense that it might set us back, that wherever we were now, whatever point we had reached in our evolution, would be forgotten and we would have to redo what we had already done. We would try desperately to take advantage of our invisibility and end up playing pointless games.
Besides, I had to admit the prospect of having the freedom that I now possessed frightened me. I did not like flying without a net, did not trust myself.
And I trusted the others even less.
Were we responsible enough to possess such unchecked autonomy?
I walked back to Joe’s, still not sure what I was going to say, still not sure if I was going to say anything. John and Bill and Don were gone, but Philipe, thank God, was home for lunch. The others were lounging around the living room, talking, reading magazines, watching TV.