The Ignored

One

We were parked on the side of an otherwise deserted two-lane road. Behind us were warehouses and railroad tracks, vacant lots filled with cacti and growing weeds and the detritus of old construction crews. Before us, shimmering in the clear sunlight of dawn, looking like the Emerald City to our tired desperate eyes, was Thompson.

I blinked, pulled apart my sticking eyelashes. “Are you sure that’s it?” I asked. “Are you sure that’s Thompson?” I knew the answer, but I had to ask anyway.

James nodded. “Check it out.” He pointed out the side window of the van at a green sign I had not noticed before.

THOMPSON, the sign said. 5 MILES.

“We’re home,” Mary said, and there was awe in her voice.

“What are we waiting for?” I asked. “Let’s move out.”

Jim put the car into gear, and we drove toward the shining vision before us.

I would have expected us to be wildly excited, enthusiastically talking nonstop, but instead we were quiet as we drove down the deserted road. It was like we were in the last act of a movie, when the heroes, having accomplished their goal, are heading home and will soon part to go their separate ways. The feeling in the van was like that. There was an air of sadness and melancholy, and though none of us knew why, we were all rather subdued. We should have been happy to finally find the city, but I suppose we all realized, at least subconsciously, that this meant that our current lifestyle was coming to an end, and that depressed us.

I stared through the front windshield as we drew closer. I was glad to finally find a society in which I would fit, in which I would belong. And I would not miss a lot of the morally questionable things we’d done with the terrorists. But I would miss the closeness, the camaraderie. For despite what we would say to each other, despite what we would promise ourselves and want to believe, that closeness would not be maintained. We would drift apart. It was inevitable. The intensity of our life would be dissipated as we were assimilated into the day-to-day life of Thompson. We would meet, for the first time in our lives, hundreds, perhaps thousands of others like ourselves, and we’d find new people we liked better than the old. We’d make new friends, and our old friends would gradually move to the periphery of our lives.

Another sign came up on the right, a city limits sign. Over it, we saw as we drove closer, someone had placed a poster: the white background and blue bar code of generic plain-wrap products. In place of the name THOMPSON was CITY, written in block computer letters.

At least someone here had a sense of humor.

“Is this going to be heaven or hell?” James asked quietly.

None of us answered.

We drove past two gas stations and a mini-mall and found ourselves in downtown Thompson.

The view from afar had been deceiving. Up close, this was without a doubt the most depressing city I had ever seen. It was not shabby, squalid, or run-down, it was not gaudy or in bad taste, it was just… average. Completely and totally average in every way. The houses were not alike, though they possessed the blocky sameness of suburbs everywhere. Attempts had obviously been made to decorate each house individually, but the sight was just pathetic. It was as though, knowing they were Ignored, each homeowner had tried desperately to be different. One house was painted shocking pink, another red, white, and blue. Still another was festooned with Christmas lights and Halloween decorations. But sadly, though the houses were different from one another, they were all equally nondescript, all equally forgettable.

And I knew that if I could tell, everyone else could, too.

That was really depressing.

Downtown looked neither tastefully planned nor eclectically jumbled but somehow put together in the most bland and inoffensive way possible. It had no character whatsoever.

We drove up and down the streets of the city. It was still early, and we saw very few people. A couple of cars were at a gas station, their owners tanking up, and here and there people were walking or driving to work, but for the most part the streets were empty.

We drove past a park, a public swimming pool, and there, in front of a square two-story building identified by a freestanding sign as THOMPSON CITY HALL, we saw a middle-aged man standing on the curb, waving us over. He was tall and somewhat heavyset, with a thick walrus mustache, and was smoking a pipe. “Here!” he called, pointing to the marked parking spot directly in front of him. “Park here!”

Jim looked at me, I shrugged, and he pulled into the space. We opened up the van doors and got out, stretching, our bodies cramped and tired after spending so much time in the vehicle. I walked up to the man, not sure of what to say.

He took the pipe out of his mouth, smiled at me. “You must be Bob,” he said.

I nodded.

“Dan called. Told me you’d be coming. I’m Ralph Johnson, mayor here.” He held out a thick hand, which I shook. “I’m also the welcoming committee and the adjustment coordinator, which means that it’s my responsibility to show you around, answer your questions, find you a place to live, and find you jobs if you intend to live here.”

“Questions, huh?” Don shook his head. “We have a lot of those.”

“Everyone always does.” He looked us over, each of us, nodding to himself as he did so and puffing on his pipe. “Dan said he was very impressed with you guys. And gal,” he added, nodding toward Mary. “He must have been. That’s the first time he’s called home since he left.”

“Really?” I said, surprised.

“I guess it was because you were all together. As you’ve probably noticed, people who are Ignored don’t tend to travel in packs. They don’t organize. But you guys…” He shook his head. “You guys are really something.”

“Philipe,” I said. “That would be Philipe.” I wanted to give credit where credit was due. “He’s the one who started the terrorists, got us all together.”

“The terrorists?”

“Terrorists for the Common Man. It was Philipe’s idea. He thought we’d been Ignored long enough. He thought we should act as terrorists on behalf of all the people who were Ignored, who couldn’t or wouldn’t stand up for themselves.”

Ralph shook his head admiringly. “This Philipe must be quite a man. Where is he now?”

“He’ll be coming in the next day or so, with another group of us.” James looked over at me questioningly. I knew he was wondering if he should bring up what had happened. I shook my head.

“I’ll be looking forward to it,” Ralph said. “In the meantime, I guess we should start on your orientation. Why don’t you begin by telling me your names and where you’re from. Introduce yourselves.”

We gave our names and hometowns, brief bios.

The mayor took his pipe from his mouth when we were through, looked at us thoughtfully. “I don’t know quite how to put this,” he said. “There’s no way to say it except to just say it. Have you all, uh, — ”

“Killed our bosses?” I asked.

He smiled, nodded, relieved. “Yes.”

“Yeah,” I told him. “We have.”

“Then welcome to Thompson.” He started walking slowly up the cement path toward the blocky building. “We’ll get you signed in and signed up and then we’ll be all ready to go.”

The mayor’s office, on the first floor of city hall, looked disconcertingly like a larger version of my office at Automated Interface. There was only one window — a small glass square overlooking the side parking lot. The rest of the room was blank, the walls bare, the desk covered with bureaucratic papers, no trace of personalization anywhere. We were given forms to fill out, generic questionnaires that looked like job applications but were supposedly “residency declarations.”

After a few minutes, Jim looked up from his form. “You guys have stores here, homes, a city hall. How come this place isn’t on any map?”

“Because this is not a real town. Not technically. It’s owned by Thompson Industries. They test-market their products here. If we don’t like them, then they figure the average American won’t like them. We get all the free products we want: food, clothes, electronic equipment, household appliances. We get it all.”

I felt a sudden hollowness in my gut. “You mean this city wasn’t founded by the Ignored for the Ignored?”

“Hell, no.”

“It’s not a real Ignored city then.”

“Sure it is. To a certain extent. I mean, we’re left alone here, we’re completely autonomous. It’s just that — ”

“Just that Thompson owns the land and the buildings, and you work for the company instead of yourselves.” James put down his pen.

Ralph laughed heartily. “It’s not as bad as all that. I admit, the concept may take some getting used to, but after a while, you don’t even think about it. For all intents and purposes, this is our city.”

A thought occurred to me. “If you’re a subsidiary of Thompson here, if the corporation bankrolls you and supports you, that means you’re not Ignored. Thompson notices you. Thompson knows you exist.”

That seemed important to me somehow.

He shrugged. “Not really. The statisticians record the number of units of each product we consume, report the figures to their superiors, who forward them to the company’s analysts, who report their findings to their superiors, who relay the information to their superiors, until the data finally reaches someone who can make a decision. No one really knows who we are. The big cheeses at the company probably don’t even know this town exists.”

We were silent.

“We used to be owned solely by Thompson,” the mayor continued. “Well, we still are, but we’re not used solely by Thompson. Other companies pay Thompson for our use. Kind of an inter-business partnership. A whole host of corporations now provide us with their products. So we get everything free. We get free cable TV, all the movie channels, because they want to know what people want to watch. All of our food is free because they want to find out what people eat. Our stores are stocked with the latest fashions because they want to know what clothes people will buy. The Gallup people have a permanent office here. The random polls you hear about? They’re all conducted here, in Thompson.”

“Everything’s free?” Don said.

“Everything. You can take whatever you need. We like to joke that we have the only communist system that actually works. Of course, it’s bankrolled by money-grubbing, multi-billion-dollar capitalist corporations.”

“Does the government know about this place?”

Ralph sucked on his pipe. He leaned back in his chair. “I don’t think they do. You know, I’ve thought about that long and hard, and I don’t believe they’re aware of our existence. Otherwise, we probably would’ve been studied to death. Some military use probably would’ve been found for us in the Cold War days. No, I think we’re one of those corporate secrets that private enterprise keeps under wraps.”

“The reason Don asked,” I said, “is because men have been after us. Official government-looking guys.”

The mayor’s face clouded over. “National Research Associates. They’re hired by a consortium of companies who’re in with Thompson.”

“Why?”

“They don’t want any of us outside the city, don’t want us infiltrating the general population. Figure it’ll throw off their outside polls. Right now, see, they run parallel polls, question us, question the general population. We’re a big expense. Other companies have to pay through the nose for our services. Some of them don’t like it. They keep trying to trip us up, prove we’re out of sync.”

“And they’d kill us for that?”

He shrugged. “What are we to them? Nothing. Who would notice if we were gone? Who would care?” He smiled slightly. “Thing is, we screw ’em up every time. Either they can’t find us or they forget about us. We’re almost impossible to catch. Even people specifically looking for us don’t notice us.”

“They caught one of our guys,” I said. “Killed him. In Familyland.”

Ralph looked grave. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know that.” He was silent for a moment, then he looked up at the clock above his office door. “Look, it’s getting late. It’s almost nine. Places are starting to open. Finish those forms, and I’ll take you around. We’ve got a lot to go over today.”

We finished filling out the questionnaires, handed them back to him. He placed them in a folder on his desk, and stood. “Let’s take a walk.”

I had not noticed it before, but Thompson was modeled after all those Hollywood movie small towns. The park and the city hall/police station/fire station complex were at the center, the hub of the wheel, and everything spread out from that. The surrounding blocks contained businesses — grocery stores, offices, gas stations, department stores, auto dealerships, banks, movie theaters — and beyond that were homes and schools.

We walked through the business district, Ralph acting as tour guide. Nearly all of the stores were chains — Sears, Target, Montgomery Ward, Von’s, Safeway, Radio Shack, Circuit City — and even those that weren’t had display windows filled with brand-name items. I felt comfortable walking here. I was aware, intellectually, of the city’s complete and utter mediocrity, but I could not help but enjoy a pleasurably gratifying feeling of familiarity as I walked with the others down the sidewalk. It was as though the city and everything in it had been designed specifically with me in mind.

No, I told myself. My wants and needs and desires were not that common. I was not that generic.

But I was.

“Is everyone here Ignored?” I asked Ralph. “Aren’t there normal wives or husbands of Ignored people?”

“There were. Still are, sometimes. But if those marriages don’t break up, the couples leave.” He smiled. “Love really is blind. Turns out we’re not Ignored to those who love us. Somehow, though, on a practical level, on a day-to-day basis, those kinds of mixed relationships seem to work better in the normal world than our world. And before you ask, yes, all of our children are Ignored. It is passed on. By those of us who can have children. A lot of us seem to be sterile.”

“Has anyone made any attempt to find out what we are? Why we’re like this?”

“Sort of. I mean, we’re always being asked to fill out questionnaires and take telephone polls. And once a year we’re all required to take a physical exam that’s totally unlike any physical I’ve ever had. But, no, probably not to the extent you mean. The corporations don’t care about us as people; they only care that we do what they want us to do. We do — and I think that’s good enough for them. They don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth.”

“How long has this place been here?” Mary asked.

“The town was founded in 1963, although it was called Gates then and was owned by Gates Manufacturing. Thompson Industries took it over in 1979, changed the name.”

“But has the city always corresponded with the mood of the country?”

“Of course. Why else would it exist? In the late sixties we even had riots here. You should’ve seen it. Young people said they were tired of being Ignored and wanted recognition. I don’t think, at that time, they fully realized what we were. They thought it was imposed on us or something, like we were a legitimate minority and were being oppressed by the system. There were protests at the Gates headquarters, and when that went nowhere there were riots here.” He stopped walking, looked around to make sure we were alone, lowered his voice. “Gates sent in troops to quell the unrest. Private troops. A hundred and ten people were shot and killed. No one ever saw it on the news — no one would’ve remembered it if they had seen it — but the troops came in and stood in formation and started taking out citizens. Didn’t matter who they were or what they were doing. The troops didn’t care. They just opened fire.” Again, he looked around to make sure we were alone. “Keep that under your hat, though. That’s not something that’s talked about around here.”

I nodded.

“We gained more autonomy after that, but that was because we’d been cowed into submission. We knew we were expendable. The company could exterminate us all and no one would notice. No one would care.” He shook his head. “Then times changed and we changed with them. We said no to Salty Surfers and yes to nacho-flavored Doritos.” He shrugged. “And here we are.”

We continued walking, no one saying anything for a while. We came to a Mrs. Fields cookie counter, sandwiched in a hole in the wall between Standard Brands Paints and Standard Shoes. Ralph stopped walking. “Oh, you have to try one of these cookies. They’re the best in the world.”

We stood in front of the window, looking in at tray after tray of fresh cookies. I could smell the scent of baking, a full, sugary, chocolaty delicious odor.

The counter was not yet open, but Ralph rapped loudly on the glass, and an elderly woman in a red-and-white uniform slid the window aside, peeking out. “Yes?”

“We have some new recruits here, Glenda. Think you could spare a few?”

The woman looked at us, smiled hello, then turned back to the mayor. “Sure,” she said. “For them. You have to wait until regular business hours.”

“Oh, Glenda — ”

“Don’t ‘Oh, Glenda’ me. You know very well that the only reason you wanted them to try my cookies is because you wanted one, too.”

“I can’t help it. I love your — ”

“Oh, here. Take one and shut up.”

She handed Ralph an oversized cookie, passed others out to us as we stepped up to the window.

I bit into the cookie. I wanted to hate it, to prove to myself, if no one else, that I was not typical, not ordinary, not average, not exactly the same as Ralph in my likes and dislikes. But I loved the cookie. The taste was wonderful, a blend of chocolate and peanut butter that was like a concoction out of my dreams. The taste was so perfect that it seemed as though it had been created especially for me.

That was frightening.

Especially since I knew everyone else in town felt exactly the same way.

We stood there eating, making stupid small talk about how good the cookies were, and I looked around me. I’d thought Thompson would be a real town, a real community, not a corporate testing ground, and part of me wished I were back in Desert Palms. Part of me wished I were back in my apartment in Brea.

Part of me loved it here.

We continued walking, ending up back at city hall around lunchtime. Other people were in the building now — secretaries, clerks — and Ralph grabbed the file folder from his desk and took it and us upstairs, handing the folder to a woman standing behind a counter marked HOUSING AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT.

“Denise, here, will assist you in finding housing,” Ralph said. “She’ll assign someone to take you around until you find a place that’s suitable. I assume you’ll all need furnished places?”

We nodded.

“No problem.” He turned toward me. “I’d like you to come with me, if you don’t mind. I’ll help you find a place to live.”

I nodded. “All right.” I turned toward the others. “See you guys later.”

“Later,” James said.

“Bye.” Mary smiled at me. “I think we’re all going to be very happy here.” Her hand found Jim’s and held it.

“I hope so,” I said.

I nodded good-bye to Don and followed Ralph back downstairs.

In the lobby, the mayor turned to face me. “I like you,” he said. “I trust you. I have a good feeling about you. That’s why I want you to tell me about this Philipe.”

“What about him?” I wasn’t sure what he was after.

“Something’s been bothering me all morning. I couldn’t figure out what it was. I mean, he’s supposed to be your leader, he’s this brilliant guy, and he’s coming in sometime in the next few days, and you guys act like he doesn’t exist. Did you have some type of falling out?”

“Yeah,” I admitted.

“Is there… something wrong with Philipe? Something I should know before he gets here?”

I hesitated. “I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

“How can I put this? Certain people who are Ignored are… shall we say, disturbed. Something happened to them. Some short circuit in their brain. I’ve seen it before. We had one guy here who was a pyromaniac. Seemed like a perfectly normal guy, but he felt compelled to burn houses because he said giant spiders lived in them. There was another guy who thought he was communicating with an alien race that expected him to repopulate the world by impregnating dogs. We caught him mounting an Irish Setter. These people are few and far between, but they cause us a lot of problems.”

I tried to keep my voice light, noncommittal. “What makes you think Philipe’s like that?”

“I don’t know. Something about the way you guys seem all hush-hush about him. I might add that those other men were also very charismatic men. Leaders. One was a popular high school teacher. The other was my predecessor, the former mayor.”

“Which one was he?”

“The alien dog-fucker.”

“Philipe’s not like that,” I said.

He looked at me for a moment, studying my face, then nodded, satisfied. He clapped a hand on my back. “Okay, then. Let’s get you settled.”

I followed Ralph outside. Why hadn’t I told him about Philipe? About seeing him kill those two girls? About his “hunches” and his mood swings and his spells? Was it because I was more loyal to Philipe than to my conscience? Or was it because…

Was it because somewhere down in my superstitious heart of hearts I believed that Philipe was right, that if he had not killed those girls something would have happened to one of us?

No. That was stupid.

But Philipe’s “hunches” had always been right, hadn’t they?

Ralph was walking across the parking lot, toward a white city vehicle. “We have plenty of jobs for you if you want them,” he was saying. “Recessions never affect us here.”

I nodded, pretended as though I’d been listening.

“Take a few days off if you need to. Get adjusted. Then come and see me if you want to work.”

We got into the car, and he started talking about the furnished condo that was going to be mine. He broke off in mid-sentence as we turned onto a street festooned with banners.

“What’s all this?” I asked.

“The Andy Warhol Day parade. It’s coming up this weekend.”

I noticed that the banners hanging from the streetlights and telephone poles were celebrity portraits, the Warhol photo-paintings of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Fonda and James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor.

“Andy Warhol?” I said.

“It’s one of our most important holidays.”

“Important?”

“To be famous for fifteen minutes,” Ralph said. “To be noticed for fifteen minutes. That’s what we pray for. That’s all we ask.”

I was about to say something else, something sarcastic, but I stopped myself. What was I doing? Why was I putting down these people for desiring recognition, these people who had never in their lives been noticed by anyone? We had had our day in the sun. We had had our fifteen minutes of fame. Even if the Terrorists for the Common Man had never been recognized, our deeds were taken note of. We had the newspaper clippings and the videotaped newscasts to prove it. I recalled my own rage, my own desperation before I teamed up with Philipe, and I could not find it in my heart to condemn these pathetic souls for wanting the same thing I had wanted, the same thing all of us had wanted.

I found myself looking up at a giant poster of Warhol hanging from a temporary grandstand set up on the side of the street. “Hasn’t anyone Ignored ever been famous?” I asked.

“In 1970, we had a rock group from here that had a top ten hit. The Peppertree Conspiracy. ‘Sunshine World’.”

“I have that record!” I said. “I loved it! It was the first record my parents ever bought for me!”

He smiled sadly. “We all have it. We all loved it. Everybody loved it for a week. Now I don’t think you could find anyone who isn’t Ignored who has a copy. There may be a few forty-fives buried in boxes in garages here and there, but most of the records that were bought were probably tossed or given to the Goodwill or Salvation Army. I bet you couldn’t find anyone who even remembers the song now.”

“What happened to the group?”

“Teddy Howard’s our minister.”

“What about the rest of them?”

“Roger died of a drug overdose in 1973; Paul’s our local morning shock jock on the radio.” He paused. “And I was the drummer.”

“Wow.” I was impressed, really impressed, and I looked at him with renewed respect. I remembered sitting on my bed when I was little, two pencils in my hands, pretending to drum with the record, imagining myself on stage in front of thousands of screaming girls. I wanted to tell him this, but the funny/sad/nostalgic look on the mayor’s face told me that that might best be left for another time.

He turned down another street. “Come on,” he said. “It’s getting late. Let’s go see your condo.”

Two

I found a job in the planning department of city hall, processing building permit applications. It was a boring job, but I was boring and I was surrounded by other boring people, so I guess, theoretically, I should have enjoyed it.

I did not.

That surprised me. My likes and dislikes, moods and rhythms had always been so perfectly in sync with those of Philipe and the other terrorists that I’d automatically assumed that life in Thompson would be relaxed and fun, that I’d be happy.

That was not the case.

It was not the fault of my coworkers, who welcomed me with open arms and even invited me out for happy hour at a Mexican restaurant at the end of my first day of work. It was my fault. Maybe I’d been expecting too much, had had my hopes up too high, but I was disappointed. The magic simply wasn’t there. I guess I’d thought that once I came to Thompson everything would be perfect, everything would fall into place — but it hadn’t happened. I was surrounded by a city of people exactly like myself, and I felt as alone and out of it as I always had.

My condo was nice, I had to admit. Ralph had set me up in a furnished two-bedroom split-level in a community called The Lakes, and I was next to a winding man-made waterway bordered by a fifteen-foot greenbelt. I had no complaints there. But somehow having so much room completely to myself seemed awkward, strange, and a little unsettling after spending so much time living in such close proximity to the other terrorists.

The other terrorists.

As I’d feared, as I’d known, we saw very little of each other after that first week. I invited James and Don and Jim and Mary to see my condo, and I went over to visit their new homes, but, intentionally or unintentionally, we were placed far away from each other, at opposite ends of the city, and none of us found jobs in the same area.

I had the feeling that this was planned, that it was done on purpose, but I could think of no reason why that would be the case. We were here among our own people. Why would we be purposely separated? It didn’t make any sense.

After all that time with the terrorists, I was probably just paranoid.

Whatever the reason, though, it was inconvenient for us to see each other.

And we started spending more time with our new coworkers and less time with each other.

I heard, third-hand, that Philipe and the others had arrived a few days after we ourselves had and, like us, had settled into the Thompson lifestyle, but I saw none of them and did not make any effort to look them up.

The Thompson lifestyle was different. As Ralph had said, everything was free. As far as I could tell, no money ever exchanged hands within the city. I saw no coins or dollar bills. If I wanted something, I simply walked into a store and took it. A shelf inventory was later taken, I suppose, and the results forwarded to the corporation.

Taking things from shelves was not new to me, but being seen was. I was used to walking through stores unnoticed, and it took me a while to get reacquainted with the fact that people could see me. I felt self-conscious in the midst of so much visibility, and it was several weeks before I felt at ease in public.

In addition to movies, videotapes, and cable TV, there was a museum in Thompson, filled with the most mundane art imaginable. There were also pop concerts each Friday in the convention center. And community theater productions of The Fantastiks and Annie.

I loved it all.

Everyone did.

But something was wrong. I was provided with everything I needed, surrounded by all the things that should have made me happy. Yet something was missing. I knew what that something was, but I didn’t want to admit it, didn’t want to think about it.

There was a rumor in Thompson that there was a real town somewhere in Iowa, a city founded by Ignored people for Ignored people, and I told myself that if I could find that place I would be happy.

I told myself that.

And every so often I could almost make myself believe it.

Three

It was the first Sunday in June. June 5, to be exact. During the past month, I’d invited James over for a barbecue and he’d canceled, and he’d invited me to meet him for drinks one Friday and I’d canceled, so I figured it was my turn again, and I went to Von’s to pick up some steaks. I thought I’d ask again if James wanted to come over for grill and grog. If not, I planned to ask Susan, this girl from the office who seemed to be showing a little interest in me.

I was pushing my cart through the supermarket, heading toward the meat counter at the rear of the store. I’d just dropped three boxes of Rice-A-Roni into the basket and I turned the corner at the end of the aisle.

And there she was.

Jane.

My first reaction was to hide, to duck quickly back down my aisle, pulling the cart with me, like a hermit crab retreating into its shell. My heart was pounding crazily, and I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. I was thrown totally off balance. I had imagined variations of this scenario hundreds of times in my dreams, in my fantasies, and I should have known what to do, how to react, but the sight was such a shock that I was at a complete loss, and I stood there, at the head of the aisle, holding too tightly to my shopping cart, staring. I’d thought I’d forgotten the way she looked, the specifics of her face. I’d thought time and memory had blurred her into the generic. But I had not forgotten, not deep down, not where it counts, and it was painful to look upon her. That face, those eyes, those lips, they brought back a rush of memory. All the time we’d spent together returned in a flood of sensory overload. The good times, the bad times, everything.

She was wearing tight new jeans and a T-shirt, her hair was pulled into a ponytail, and she looked achingly beautiful to me. I was suddenly conscious of the fact that I was wearing the same ratty clothes I’d worn while washing the car this morning. She started to turn her head in my direction, and without thinking I backed behind a display stack of Tide boxes. My heart was thumping, my hands shaking. I was afraid. Afraid she still didn’t want to see me, afraid she would hate me, afraid she would be indifferent.

Afraid she was changed.

That was the big fear, that she was not the same Jane I had known. It had been nearly three years since we’d last seen each other, and a lifetime of experience had occurred during that period. We were different people than we had been, both of us, and maybe we weren’t compatible anymore.

Maybe she had met someone else.

That was the other big fear, the one I didn’t want to acknowledge.

I peeked around the boxes, inched my cart forward. Part of me wanted to run away and leave her to memory, convinced that meeting again would only shatter my long-held illusions. Nothing could possibly ever be as it was before.

But part of me wanted to talk to her, touch her, be with her again.

I watched her sort through packages of chicken breasts. I hadn’t thought I’d remembered her this clearly, but I had. I remembered everything about her: the way she blinked her eyes, the way she picked up meat, the way she pursed her lips. It was all there, in my mind and in the flesh, and at that moment I realized how much I truly loved her.

As if responding to some signal or vibration, she suddenly looked up, looked in my direction.

And saw me.

We both stood there dumbly, staring at each other, unmoving. I watched her put the package of chicken breasts she’d been holding into her cart. Her hands were shaking as badly as mine were. She licked her lips, hesitantly opened her mouth as if to say something, closed it.

“Hi,” she finally said.

That voice. I hadn’t heard it in three years, but I remembered it perfectly and it was like music to me. There was a lump in my throat. My eyes were suddenly moist, and I wiped them with my fingers so the moisture wouldn’t turn to tears.

“Hi,” I said.

And then I was crying, and she was crying, and she was holding me, hugging me, kissing my wet cheeks.

“I missed you so much,” she said through her sobs. “I missed you so much.”

I held her tightly. “I missed you, too.”

After several moments, I pulled back, grasped her by the shoulders, and for the first time looked at her closely. She truly was prettier than ever. Whatever she had gone through during the past few years, whatever had happened to her, it had left her even more radiantly beautiful than ever.

I realized that I had not really thought of her as beautiful before, when we’d been living together. I’d been attracted to her, of course, but I had not seen in her this exquisite objective loveliness. She was beautiful now, though.

She was also Ignored.

That had not really sunk in yet. I knew it, recognized it, but somehow it didn’t quite register.

It also didn’t matter at this moment.

I looked closely at her face, at her mouth, at her lips. I looked into her eyes. I didn’t know what to say, didn’t know how to bring up what I was thinking, what I was feeling. What were we now? Just friends? Old close friends who had met again after a long absence? Or was she feeling the same thing I was feeling? Did she want to jump back into a relationship, take up where we’d left off? There was so much to go over, so much to talk about. Yet as close as we were at that moment, as close as I felt to her, there was still a barrier between us. We’d been apart for a long time, almost as long as we’d been together, and we couldn’t read each other the way we once could.

Then I looked into her eyes, and I knew how to cut through it all. I said what I wanted to say, what I felt: “I love you.”

And she answered the way I wanted her to, the way I hoped she would: “I love you, too.”

And all that uncertainty was gone. We knew where we stood now. We knew what the other one was feeling, what the other one was thinking.

The words flowed freely from us then, bubbling out and over each other, colliding, overlapping, weaving an interconnected tapestry of two unconnected stories. She said she’d regretted walking out but had been too stubborn to come back and apologize. I told her I’d been willing to crawl but had been too afraid to approach her. I told her I quit Automated Interface, and I told her about meeting Philipe and the Terrorists for the Common Man, but I left out my murder of Stewart and the acts the terrorists had later performed. She told me she’d discovered on her own that she was Ignored, and while working as a waitress had met another woman who was Ignored, an older woman, and had come with her here to Thompson.

Both of us expressed our amazement that we had found each other again. And here of all places.

“We were meant to be together,” Jane said, and there was only a hint of playfulness in her voice.

“Maybe we were,” I said.

We got our groceries and went to her house, a one-story tract home near Main Street. I was surprised to see a lot of her old furniture, the furniture she’d taken from our apartment, arranged in the spacious living room. She’d obviously felt no need to prove anything to anybody. There’d been no attempt to make the room look unique or outrageous; there were only the furnishings she liked arranged in the way she liked them. I felt comfortable here, instantly at ease, and though I now recognized intellectually the anonymous homogeneity of Jane’s taste, it still pleased me. It felt right.

How could I not have noticed that she was Ignored?

Why hadn’t I figured it out before this?

Stupidity, I guess.

She made dinner — baked chicken and Rice-A-Roni — and it was just like the old days. I lay on our couch and watched TV while she worked in the kitchen, and we ate in the living room while Jeopardy! was on, and it was like we were married and had never been apart. The rhythms were there, our habits and speech patterns and little personal traits all unchanged, and we kept the conversation current, superficial, and I could not remember when I’d ever been this happy.

After dinner, I helped with the dishes. I grew quiet as Jane scrubbed the last of the silverware, and she must have noticed because she looked up. “What is it?”

“What?”

“Why are you so quiet?”

I looked at her, nervously licked my dry lips. “Are we going to — ”

“ — make love?” she finished for me.

“ — have sex?” I said.

We both laughed.

She looked up at me, and her lips looked red and full and infinitely sensuous. “Yes,” she told me. She put her soapy hands on my cheeks and stood on her tiptoes and kissed me.

We needed no foreplay that night. By the time our clothes were off, I was hard and she was wet, and I got on top of her and she spread her legs and guided me in.

I fell asleep afterward, a blissful sleep, free of dreams, and sometime in the middle of the night she woke me up and we did it again.

I called in sick the next morning, talking to Marge Lang, the personnel assistant, and I could almost hear her smile over the phone as she spoke. “We figured you’d be calling in today.”

Big Brother was watching me.

I kept my voice nonchalant. “Really?”

“It’s okay. You haven’t seen each other for a long time.”

Such intimate knowledge of my movements and motives and private life should have offended me, but somehow it did not, and I found myself smiling into the phone. “Thank you, Marge,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”

“Bye.”

I glanced through the sheer curtains of the living room and saw outside the bright blue Arizona sky, and I knew that nothing could ruin this day.

I crawled back into bed, where Jane was waiting.

Four

I moved into her house the next weekend.

I took only the clothes and personal belongings I’d brought with me to Thompson. Everything else stayed with the condo for the next inhabitant.

Unpacking my box on the floor of the living room, I came across the pair of Jane’s panties I’d taken with me when I’d left the apartment. I presented them to her, and she turned them over in her hands. “I can’t believe you kept these,” she said. She grinned. “What did you do? Sniff them?”

“No,” I admitted. “I just… carried them with me. I just kept them.”

“To remind you of me?”

I nodded. “To remind me of you.”

“Wait here a minute.” She went into the bedroom, was gone a few moments, and returned with an old T-shirt of mine, a promotional Jose Cuervo T-shirt I’d gotten free at UC Brea and that I used to wear while washing my car. “I stole it,” she said. “I wanted something to remember you by.”

“I didn’t even notice it was gone.”

“You wouldn’t.” She sat down next to me, put her head on my shoulder. “I never stopped thinking about you.”

Then why did you leave me? I wanted to ask.

But I said nothing, only bent down, lifted her chin, kissed her.

I was happy, truly, and honestly happy. What Jane and I had together was average, I suppose — how could it be otherwise? — the same feeling millions of people across America, across the world, had every day — but to me, it felt wonderful and unique, and I was filled with a deep contentment.

We got along better now than we had before. The wall that had existed between us prior to our separation was gone. We communicated intimately and openly — without the miscommunications, misinterpretations, and misunderstandings that had once marred our relationship.

Our sex life was more active than it had ever been. Morning, night, and on weekends, noon, we made love. Some of the old fears and anxieties, however, had not gone away, and even as I enjoyed the pleasures of our newly energized love life, I found myself wondering if Jane was really as blindly and uncritically satisfied as I myself was. One Sunday morning, as I lay on the couch reading the newspaper, Jane pulled open my robe and gave my penis a squeeze and a quick kiss. I put down the paper, looked at her, decided to voice what I was thinking. “Is it big enough for you?” I said.

She looked up at me. “That again?”

“That again.”

She shook her head, smiled, but there was no sign of the old impatience or annoyance on her features. “It’s perfect,” she said. “It’s like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. You know, one bowl of porridge was too hot, one was too cold, and one was just right? Well, some are too big, some are too small — and yours is just right.”

I put down the paper, pulled her up and on top of me.

We did it there on the couch.

I wondered sometimes about the other aspects of Jane’s life, her friends, her family, everything else she had left behind when she’d come to Thompson. I asked her once, out of curiosity, “How’s your mom?”

She shrugged.

“How’s your dad?”

“I don’t know.”

I was surprised. “You don’t keep in contact with them?”

She shook her head and looked away, far away, into the distance. She blinked her eyes rapidly, held them open wide, and I could tell she was about to cry. “They ignore me. They can’t see me anymore. I’m invisible to them.”

“But you were always so close.”

“Were. I don’t think they even remember who I am.”

And she did cry. I put my arms around her, held her close, held her tight. “Of course they do,” I said. But I was not so sure. I wanted to know what had happened, how they had drifted apart, what it had been like, but I sensed that this was not the time to ask, and I kept quiet and held her and let her sob.

Five

The days flowed into weeks, the weeks into months. Spring drifted past, became summer, became fall. A year went by. Each day was like another, and though the routine was established and unchanging, I didn’t mind. Truth to tell, I liked it. We worked and played and shopped and slept, made friends, made love. Lived. I rose in the hierarchy of city hall according to the Peter Principle, and Jane became a supervisor at the day care center where she worked. At night, we stayed home and watched TV. Television shows I liked were moved to different time slots, then canceled, but it didn’t really matter because others took their places and I liked them, too.

Time passed.

I had a good life. It was boring and mundane, but I was content with it.

That was the weirdest thing about Thompson. The weirdest and most horrifying thing. Intellectually, I could see how pathetic everything was, how desperately ineffectual were the attempts at distinction and originality: the sad efforts to dress and behave outrageously, the endeavors to be different that only ended up drab and gray. I could see the strings; I could see the man behind the curtain. But emotionally, I loved the place. The city was perfect. I had never been happier, and I fit right in.

This was my kind of town.

The range of occupational skills here was staggering. We had not only accountants and office workers — the most prevalent occupations — but scientists and garbage men and lawyers and plumbers and dentists and teachers and carpenters. People who were either unable to distinguish themselves at their work or who lacked the ability to hype themselves in their jobs. Many were more than competent — bright men, intelligent women — they had simply been outclassed in their chosen fields.

At first, I’d thought it was our jobs that made us faceless, then I’d thought it was our personalities, then I’d wondered if it had something to do with our genetic makeup. Now I had no idea. We were not all bureaucrats — though a disproportionate number of us were — nor were we all possessed of the same bland character. Here in Thompson I found that, once again, citizens were separating into gradations of visibility.

I wondered if perhaps there were people who would fade into the background here as well, if there were the ignored of the Ignored.

That idea frightened me.

Did I miss the old days? Did I miss the Terrorists for the Common Man? Did I miss the adventures, the camaraderie —

— the rapes, the murders?

I can’t say that I did. I thought about it now and then, but it seemed so long ago that it was as though it had happened to someone else. Already those days seemed like ancient history, and when my thoughts turned in that direction I felt like an old man looking back on his rebellious youth.

I wondered what Jane would think if she knew about what I’d done with Mary, if she knew about the woman I’d almost raped.

If she knew I’d killed a man.

Men.

I never asked about her missing years, about what she’d done between the time she dumped me and the time I found her again.

I didn’t want to know.

Exactly a year and a month from the day we had met again in the supermarket, Jane and I were married in a short civil ceremony at city hall. James was there, and Don, and Jim and Mary, and Ralph, and Jane’s friends from work and my friends from work. Afterward we had a reception at the community center in the park.

I had invited only the terrorists who had come with me to Thompson in the van, but as we danced and partied, I felt guilty that I had not sent invitations to Philipe and the others. Somehow, despite all that had happened, I still felt closer to them than I did to many of the people here, and in spite of our rift, I found myself wishing that they were here to share this moment with me. They were my family, or the closest thing to it, and I regretted not sending them invitations.

It was too late now, though. There was nothing I could do about it.

I pushed the thought out of my mind, poured Jane some more champagne, and the celebration continued.

We spent our honeymoon in Scottsdale, staying for a week at the resorts. I used my old terrorist tricks to get us poolside suites at La Posada and Mountain Shadows and the Camelback Inn.

That first night, our wedding night, I snagged the keys to La Posada’s honeymoon suite, and I opened the door to our room, then picked up Jane and carried her across the threshold. She was laughing, and I was laughing, and I struggled not to drop her, finally throwing her, screaming, onto the bed. Her dress flipped up over her head, exposing her white panties and gartered legs, and though we were both still laughing, I became immediately aroused. We’d been planning to wait, have a long bath, a sensuous massage, work our way up to the lovemaking, but I wanted to take her now, and I asked her if she was really sure that she wanted to slowly build up to it.

In answer, she grinned, pulled down her panties, spread her legs, opened her arms for me.

Afterward, lying there, I rubbed my hand between her legs, feeling our mingled wet stickiness. “Don’t you think we should do something different?” I asked. “Don’t you think we should try some new positions?”

“Why?”

“Because we always do it in the missionary position.”

“So what? You like it that way, don’t you? I do. It’s my favorite. Why should we force ourselves to meet other people’s expectations? Why should we conform to other people’s ideas about sex?”

“We are conforming,” I told her. “We’re average.”

“It’s not average to me,” she said. “It’s great.”

She was right, I realized. It was great for me, too. Why did we have to vary our lovemaking just because other people did, just because other people said we were supposed to?

We didn’t.

We spent the week swimming in the resort pools, eating at Scottsdale’s most expensive restaurants, and having the kind of ordinary, straight, traditional sex we loved so well.

We returned to Thompson tanned and happy, our minds rested and our crotches sore. But something had changed. The city was the same, the people were the same, it was just that… I was not. I had been back in the real world, and I found that I missed that world. Instead of returning home after a vacation, it felt to me as though we were returning to prison after a weeklong furlough.

I went back to work and Jane went back to work, and after a few days we became reacclimatized, readjusted. Only…

Only that sense of being stifled did not entirely go away. I felt it, in the back of everything, a presence even in my happiest moments, and it made me uneasy. I thought about discussing it with Jane, thought I should discuss it with Jane — I didn’t want our old communication problems to start again — but she seemed so happy, so blissfully unaware of this malaise that I was feeling, that I was reluctant to drag her into this. Maybe it was just me. Postnuptial depression or something. It wasn’t fair to burden her with my paranoid craziness.

I forced myself to push aside all feelings of dissatisfaction. What was wrong with me? I’d gotten everything I’d wanted. I was with Jane again. And we were living in a city, a society where we were not ignored but noticed, where we were not oppressed minorities but members of the ruling class.

Life was good, I told myself.

And I made myself believe it!

Six

City hall and the police department had separate personnel departments but shared databases, and I was reading the joint lists of new hirees that was sent monthly to each division when I came across Steve’s name. He had been hired as a police recruit, and an asterisk by his name indicated that he had previous law enforcement experience and was on an accelerated promotional track.

Steve? Previous law enforcement experience?

He’d been a file clerk.

When he was with the terrorists, he’d been a rapist.

But it was not my place to bring this up, not my job to question the hiring practices of the police department, and I said nothing. Maybe Steve had changed. Maybe he’d mellowed out, turned over a new leaf.

I posted the list on our bulletin board.

Although I worked at city hall and lived in Thompson and was therefore personally affected by the actions of the city council, I had little or no interest in local politics. Council meetings were held on the first Monday of each month and were televised live on our local community access cable station, but I neither went to them nor watched them.

Ordinarily.

But on the last day of August, Ralph suggested to me that I might want to catch September’s meeting.

We were eating lunch at KFC, and I tossed the bones of my drumstick into the box, wiping my hands on a napkin. “Why?” I asked.

He looked at me. “Your old friend Philipe is going to come before the council with a request.”

Philipe.

I had not heard from him or seen him since coming to Thompson over a year ago. I had half wondered if he had left, gone back to Palm Springs, gone across the country to recruit new terrorists. It wasn’t like him to be so quiet, to maintain such a low profile. He liked power, liked being the center of attention. He craved the spotlight, and I could not see him settling down into anonymity. Not even here in Thompson.

I tried to appear disinterested. “Really?”

The mayor nodded. “I think you’ll find it interesting. You might even want to come down, attend the proceedings.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

But I was curious as to what was going on, what Philipe was up to, and one night I turned the TV to the Thompson channel.

The camera was stationary, and was trained directly on the mayor and the council at the front of the chambers. I could not see anybody in the audience, and I watched for a half hour, waiting through discussions of old business and protocol, before the mayor tabled the discussion and moved on to new business.

“The first item on the agenda,” he said, “is a request by Philipe Anderson.”

Susan Lee, our only female council member, adjusted her glasses. “Request for what?”

“We’ll let the requestor explain that himself. Mr. Anderson?”

I recognized him even from the back as he passed before the camera and took his place in front of the podium. He stood straight and tall and confident, his charisma obvious against the blandness of the laid back mayor and lackluster council, and I saw what had attracted the terrorists to him in the first place. I saw —

— Philipe, covered with blood, hacking at the two unmoving children.

“That’s Philipe?” Jane asked.

I nodded.

“He’s more average-looking than I imagined.”

“He’s Ignored. What did you expect?”

On TV, Philipe cleared his throat. “Mayor. Ladies and gentlemen of the council. The proposal I wish to make is one that will benefit all of Thompson and is in the best interests of not just the community but of all Ignored everywhere. I have here a detailed list of requirements that I will pass out to each of you. It provides an item-by-item accounting of all proposed requisitions, and you can look at it at your leisure and we can discuss it more fully at the next meeting.”

He looked down at the paper on the podium in front of him. “The broad outline of my plan is this: Thompson needs its own military, its own militia. We are, for all intents and purposes, a nation unto ourselves. We have a police force to take care of disturbances within our borders, but I believe that we need an armed force to protect our sovereignty and our interests.”

Two of the council members were whispering to each other. I could hear excited discussion from the audience.

Jane looked at me, shook her head. “Militarization of the city?” she said. “I don’t like it.”

“Let’s settle down here,” the mayor said. He faced Philipe. “What makes you think we need a militia? This sounds like a major expense: uniforms, weapons, training. We have never been threatened; we have never been attacked. I don’t see any real justification for this.”

Philipe chuckled. “Expense? It’s all free. Thompson picks up the tab. All we have to do is request it.”

“But it is the responsibility of this council to determine whether such requests are reasonable or unreasonable.”

“And this is a reasonable request. You say we’ve never been attacked, but Oates sent troops in here in 1970 and killed a hundred and ten people.”

“That was in 1970.”

“It could happen again.” He paused. “Besides, in my proposal I suggest that our militia have offensive as well as defensive capabilities.”

The mayor frowned. “Offensive?”

“We, the Ignored, have been abused and exploited for our entire history. We have been at the mercy of the noticed, the powerful. And we have been unable to fight back. Well, I suggest that it is time to fight back. It is time to retaliate for all the injustices that have been perpetrated upon us.

“I am offering to train a crack fighting force of our best and most capable men and mount a frontal assault on the White House.”

The room broke out in shouts and arguments. Philipe stood there grinning. This was his milieu. This was what he loved, what he lived for, and I could see the happiness on his face. Against my better judgment, I felt happy for him, too.

The mayor, by this time, had lost all control of the meeting. Members of the audience were cheering Philipe, arguing among themselves, yelling at individual council people.

“They’ve had it their way for far too long!” Philipe shouted. “We can attack, and they’ll never see us. Not until it’s too late! We’ll be in control of the White House! We’ll stage the first successful coup in U.S. history! The country will be ours!”

I could see the way this was going. Even if the mayor and the council turned Philipe down, the public was behind him. If Ralph and the rest of them wanted to keep their jobs, they’d have to go along with his proposals.

I turned off the TV.

Jane placed her head on my shoulder, held my hand. “What do you think’s going to happen?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”

For the next several months, the Thompson channel was the preferred source of news for everyone in the city. It must have really thrown off the Nielson ratings. Our local cable newscaster, Glen Johnstone, provided nightly updates on the training and equipment procurement of the militia. Because of our unique status in relation to America’s top industries, all Philipe and his followers had to do was fill out special order forms for the guns and vehicles they wanted and wait for them to arrive. Someone, somewhere, keeping tabs on orders, probably noted an increase in the demand for military supplies, and someone somewhere probably ordered production increased. New jobs were probably created.

I wondered, at first, why there was no crackdown, why no one from Thompson or National Research Associates or one of the other corporations put a stop to this, why no one from the FBI or the ATF conducted an investigation. On television, Philipe made clear his intent, refusing to tone down his rhetoric. “We will bring down the power elite!” he declared. “We will establish a new government in this country!” I realized, though, that our broadcasts were probably as ignored as everything else about us. The reason no one put a stop to Philipe was because no one knew what he had planned — even though he came right out and stated it over the airwaves.

I thought, for the first time, that his plan might actually work.

Two hundred men initially signed up for the military. There turned out to be an unexpectedly high number of former army, air force, and marine officers in Thompson, and these men were recruited by Philipe to train the initiates. Philipe took fifty of the recruits himself and trained them as terrorists. These were to be the advance guard, the ones who would infiltrate the White House and pave the way for the others.

Two tanks were shipped to Thompson on the back of a semi truck.

Army jeeps arrived at the Jeep dealer.

Crates of automatic weapons were delivered.

Finally, after what seemed like forever, Philipe announced in a prime-time meeting/rally in the city council chambers that the militia was ready to start on its mission to Washington, D.C.

I had never seen such war fever, and it made me more than a little uneasy. Jane felt the same way. So did most of our friends. So did James, Don, Ralph, Mary, and Jim.

But the city was ready for this fight, ready to take on the known world, and there was a big parade on Saturday to see our army off. Flags and banners were waving; confetti was thrown; the high school marching band played. I stood on the sidewalk with Jane, waiting for Philipe. What he had done had not been erased from my mind —

swinging the knife, “My name is not David! It’s Philipe!”

— but it had been superceded by his unwavering dedication the past few months, by his obvious commitment to what he perceived to be the betterment of Thompson and the plight of the Ignored. I differed with Jane here. She saw this as grandstanding; I saw it as an extension of the terrorists, proof of Philipe’s belief in his cause.

The militia came marching down the street, in step, and I had to admit they looked good, looked professional. Foot soldiers were preceded by jeeps and trucks and the buses that would later carry them across country. Finally, at the tail end of the parade, riding in an open tank, waving to the adults, throwing candy to the kids, was Philipe.

I moved forward until I was standing on the curb. This was the Philipe I had first met. This was the Philipe who had led us. Standing tall and proud as the convoy rolled through the center of town, he glanced from one side of the street to the other. As I’d expected, as I’d half hoped, he saw me, caught my eye. He gave me a slight smile, then saluted. I nodded back. I felt a lump in my throat, shivers on my arms as I watched them pull away. If this was a movie, I thought, there would be stirring music and a sunset in the background. This was dramatic stuff. This was heroic.

The parade continued to the edge of the city limits. The bands and the marchers fell by the wayside. And the militia continued on.

They hit the White House Thursday night.

The Thompson channel had sent correspondents and cameramen along with the soldiers to cover the event, and on Thursday evening every TV in the city was turned to the station.

We saw our tanks and jeeps rolling down the capital’s streets, framed dramatically in front of familiar landmarks, and though I still did not support the war effort, I could not help feeling a surge of pride and something close to patriotism as I realized that our men were successfully invading Washington, D.C.

But while our people were Ignored, invisibility did not extend to their equipment, and we should have known that such a blatant full-frontal assault would not go unnoticed. Our military vehicles stood out in the civilian traffic like Godzilla at a tea party, and as they turned a street corner, heading toward the White House, they were halted by a blockaded street and a cadre of U.S. soldiers.

The tanks and jeeps braked, rolled back a few feet, stopped. A standoff. No one shouted, no one spoke; the two sides might have been communicating by radio, but there were no bullhorns and the street was silent. The minutes dragged on. Four. Five. Ten. There was no sound, no movement, and the correspondent covering the event got on camera, admitted that he didn’t know what was happening but would let us know as soon as he did.

The coverage shifted to the White House, where another reporter was following Philipe’s advance force. They had successfully hopped the fence and were dashing across the White House lawn, crouching black shapes against the moonlit grass.

Suddenly, the station switched back to the street, where U.S. troops were now firing on our men.

Our reporter was screaming incoherently, trying to explain what was happening but doing a poor job of it.

We could see what was happening ourselves, though.

Our militia was being routed.

Even with all of their weapons, even with the training, our forces were barely adequate, and going up against the best soldiers in the world, they didn’t stand a chance.

Our tanks fired once each, hitting nothing, then blew up.

The men in the jeeps, now spread out across the street, fired at the U.S. soldiers and their vehicles, but did not seem able to hit anyone or anything. They began dropping like flies, picked off and taken down by military sharpshooters, and then they abandoned their weapons and turned tail and ran.

The reporter and his cameraman beat feet as well.

The screen was black for several seconds.

Then we were back at the White House where Secret Service agents — the only humans as bland and faceless as ourselves — were chasing Philipe and his advance men back across the lawn. Security lights were on, trained on the area in front of the building, and the Thompson correspondent explained even as he retreated to the park across the street that one of Philipe’s men had set off an alarm, alerting the President’s security forces to their presence.

One of our men was shot trying to climb the fence and escape.

Please, God, I thought, don’t let it be Philipe.

Then I saw Philipe running. I recognized his gait, his build, the movement of his arms. He leaped, grabbed the bars of the fence, swung himself over. There was the sound of gunfire, but if it was aimed at Philipe it missed him, and he was running across the street, toward the camera.

Again the screen went blank.

“We’ve lost our feed,” Glen Johnstone, anchoring in Thompson, announced.

I quickly switched channels, expecting to see special bulletins on the network stations, thinking that of course they’d break into regular programming for an assault on the White House, an obvious attempt on the President’s life, but there were only the usual sitcoms and police shows.

I turned to CNN, watched for an hour. Nothing. I waited until the eleven o’clock news that night, flipped back and forth between ABC, CBS, and NBC.

The attack made the ABC news. Thirty-second footage right before a commercial: a shot of the White House from a vantage point across the street, Philipe and a handful of men running away, being chased by other men in suits. The anchor allotted them one line: “In other news today, the Secret Service repelled a small group of individuals attempting to break into the White House grounds.”

Then they cut to a douche ad.

I sat there next to Jane in silence, staring at the commercial. That was it? After all that preparation, after all the training, that was it? Over two hundred men had left Thompson on Saturday, a trained militia, with tanks and trucks and jeeps, in order to stage a coup.

And all they rated was one line on one newscast.

I turned off the television, crawled into bed. I realized, perhaps for the first time, how truly pathetic we were. Philipe had organized a fighting force, had come up with a workable plan, and it had all been for nothing.

Less than nothing.

I wondered how many members of our militia had been killed. I wondered if they had been jailed.

Philipe returned to Thompson a week later, chastened and humiliated, surrounded by the tattered remnants of his army.

The government had not even considered them enough of a threat to jail. No charges had been pressed.

A hundred and fifty-three were dead.

We were more than willing to treat Philipe as a hero, but in his own mind he was a failure, his grand schemes laughable, and from that point on, he shunned the public eye and retreated into obscurity.

Glen Johnstone attempted to do a follow-up show, to interview Philipe about what had happened, but for the first time in his life, Philipe turned down free publicity.

I never saw him on television again.

Seven

The new year came. And went. Jane and I decided that we wanted a child, and she threw away her pills and we tried for it. No luck. She wanted to consult a doctor, but I said no, let’s just keep trying. I had a feeling it was my fault, but I didn’t want to know for sure.

When I’d graduated from college, when I’d first gotten the job at Automated Interface, it seemed like I had just been starting out, like I had my whole life ahead of me. Now time was speeding by. Soon I’d be thirty. Then forty. Then old. Then dead. The cliché was right: life was short.

And what was I doing with my life? What was the point of it? Would the world be any different for my having lived? Or was the point that there was no point, that we existed now and one day we wouldn’t and we might as well try to have fun while we were here?

I didn’t know, and I realized I would probably never know.

James came over after work one day, and Jane invited him to stay for dinner. Afterward, James and I retired to the back porch and reminisced about the old days. I reminded him of the first time I’d gone out with the terrorists, to the courthouse, and we both started laughing.

“I’ll never forget the judge’s face when you said, ‘Get a dick!’”

I was laughing so hard I was crying, and I wiped the tears from my eyes. “Remember Buster? He just kept yelling, ‘Pussy!’”

We continued to laugh, but there was a sadness in it now, and I thought of Buster. I remembered the way he’d looked, there in Old Town in Family land, when the suits had shot him down.

We grew quiet and stared up at the stars. It was an Arizona night sky, all of the major constellations visible against the clouded backdrop of the Milky Way.

“Are you guys awake?” Jane called from the kitchen. “It’s so quiet out there.”

“Just thinking,” I said.

James leaned back in his chair. “Are you happy here?” he asked.

I shrugged.

“I’ve heard there’s a land somewhere,” he said. “A country of Ignored.”

I snorted. “Atlantis or Mu?”

“I’m serious.” His voice grew wistful. “We could be free there. Really free. Not just slaves for Thompson. Sometimes I feel like we’re pets now, like trained animals, just doing what we’ve been told to do, over and over again.”

I was silent. I knew what he was feeling.

“I heard it was a town,” I said. “In Iowa.”

“I heard it was a country. Somewhere in the Pacific, between Hawaii and Australia.”

Inside, I heard the rattle of dishes.

“I’m thinking of leaving,” James said. “There’s nothing for me here. I feel like I’m just putting in time. I’m thinking of looking for that other country.” He paused. “I was wondering if maybe you wanted to come along with me.”

Part of me wanted to. Part of me missed the excitement and adventure of being on the road. Part of me also felt stifled here in Thompson. But Jane loved it here. And I loved Jane. And I would never again do anything to jeopardize our relationship.

And part of me loved it here, too.

I tried to turn it into a joke. “You just haven’t found any poon here,” I said.

James nodded solemnly. “That’s part of it.”

I shook my head slowly. “I can’t go,” I said. “This is where I live now. This is my home.”

He nodded, as if this was the answer he’d been expecting.

“Have you asked any of the other terrorists?”

“No. But I will.”

“You like it here, though, don’t you?” I looked at him. “I know what you think of this place. But you still like it here, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” he admitted.

“What the fuck are we? We’re like robots. Push the right buttons and you’ll get the response you want.”

“We’re Ignored.”

I looked up at the sky. “But what does that mean? What is that? Even being Ignored isn’t consistent. It’s not an absolute. There was a guy at the place I worked, a friend of mine, who could see me, who noticed me when no one else did. And what about Joe?”

“Magic has no laws,” James said. “Science has laws. You keep trying to think of this in scientific terms. It’s not genetics; it’s not physics; it doesn’t conform to any set of rules. It just is. Alchemists tried to codify magic and they came up with science, but magic just exists. There’s no rational reason for it, no cause and effect.”

I shook my head. “Magic.”

“I’ve done a lot of reading on the subject. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me.”

“Magic?”

“Maybe that’s the wrong word.” He leaned forward, the front legs of his chair coming down on the porch. “All I know is that whatever makes us this way cannot be measured or quantified or explained. It’s not physics, it’s metaphysics.”

“Maybe we’re crystals that have been astral-projected into human form.”

He stood, laughed. “Maybe.” He looked at his watch. “Look, it’s getting late; I gotta go. I have to work tomorrow.”

“Me, too. For no pay.”

“It’s a weird world.”

We walked through the house, he said good-bye to Jane, and I accompanied him out the front door to his car. “Are you really leaving?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Probably.”

“Let me know when you decide.”

“Of course.”

I watched him pull away, watched his taillights disappear around the corner. I was not tired, and I didn’t feel like staying inside and watching TV. Neither did Jane, and when she finished washing the dishes, we went for a walk. We ended up in my old neighborhood, standing on a small dock to which was anchored a child’s sailboat.

We looked out over the small man-made lake that wound between the condos. Jane put an arm around me, leaned against my shoulder. “Remember when we used to go out to the pier at Newport?”

“And eat at Ruby’s?”

“Cheeseburger and onion rings,” she said, smiling. “That sounds good right now.”

“Clam chowder at the Crab Cooker sounds better.”

We were silent for a moment.

“I guess we’ll never live in Laguna Beach,” she said quietly.

A mosquito buzzed by my head, and I slapped at it. The condos across the water looked cheap to me all of a sudden, the lake pathetic. I thought of the deep darkness of the ocean night, the clusters of lights that marked the beach towns visible from the pier, and I felt unaccountably sad. I felt almost like crying. More than anything else, I wished things were different, wished we were back in our old life in our old apartment and none of this had ever happened.

I wished we weren’t Ignored.

I turned, pulled her with me back toward the sidewalk. “Come on,” I said. “It’s getting late. Let’s go home.

Eight

The murderer came into the office in the middle of the morning, getting off the elevator and walking calmly over to the front desk.

I caught him out of the corner of my eye, a brightly colored blur, and I glanced up to see a short, heavyset man in a clown suit and mime makeup open the small swinging gate that separated the public waiting area from our work area.

My stomach lurched; my mouth suddenly went dry. Even before I saw the knife in the clown’s hands, I knew why he was here. My first thought was that someone had been allowed into Thompson who hadn’t yet killed his boss and that that person was going to kill whoever was his boss here. But I didn’t recognize the clown, and I knew he didn’t work on this floor.

And then I noticed that no one was looking at him.

No one saw him.

All this I thought in the space of a few seconds, the time it took the clown to walk up to Ray Lang’s desk, put a hand over Ray’s mouth, and draw the knife across his throat.

I lurched to my feet, knocking over my chair, trying to scream but unable to get out any sound at all.

He drew the knife slowly, expertly. The blood did not shoot, did not squirt, but oozed and flowed from the thin opening, spreading down over Ray’s white shirt in a continuous wave. Hand still holding Ray’s mouth shut, the man quickly shoved his knife first in one of Ray’s eyes, then the other. The blade emerged with pieces of white and green goo stuck to the otherwise red steel.

The man wiped the blade off on Ray’s hair before taking his hand from the planning inspector’s mouth. The noise that issued from Ray’s bloody throat was more a gurgle than a scream, but by now he was flailing around wildly enough that he had gotten the attention of everyone in the office.

The clown grinned at me, did a little jig. I looked into his eyes, and I knew that he was insane. Even beneath the clown makeup, I could see the craziness. This was not the temporary insanity of Philipe. This was the real thing. And it scared the shit out of me.

“There he is!” I cried, pointing, finally able to move, to act, to speak. People were running over to where Ray was slipping bloodily out of his chair, but no one heard me, no one paid any attention to me.

And no one saw the murderer.

“You’re almost there,” the man said, and his voice was a crazed raspy whisper. He laughed, a sound like fingernails grating on a chalkboard. “Oh, the things you’ll see….”

And then he was gone. Vanished. Where he had been there was nothing, only clear space.

The air felt heavy, filled with the burnt-rubber smell of drilled teeth.

I looked around wildly, ran to the elevator, waited for it to open, all the while scanning the room. But there was nothing. And when the elevator door did not open, when it was obvious that the murderer had not simply turned invisible and made for the exit but had actually disappeared, I hurried back behind the counter to where Ray lay dying.

Paramedics arrived, performed emergency lifesaving procedures, rushed Ray to the hospital, but he was dead even before he left the floor, and they were unable to revive him.

After Ray’s departure, I became the center of attention. The police were there, photographing the chair, taking down statements, and a crowd gathered as I gave my story. The same people who had been ignoring me as I screamed and pointed at the murderer were now all ears as I related what I’d seen, what had happened. I recalled what the clown had said to me: “You’re almost there.”

What did that mean?

But I knew what that meant.

I was becoming Ignored here in Thompson.

Like he was.

The Ignored of the Ignored.

I remembered as a child going on a ride at Disneyland called Adventures Through Inner Space. On the ride, you were supposed to feel as though you had been shrunk by the Mighty Microscope and were entering the invisible world of the atom. I wondered now if I was in just such an invisible world, a world that most people couldn’t see, that existed concurrently with the visible universe.

Maybe the murderer was a ghost.

I wondered about that, too. People throughout the years, throughout the centuries, who claimed to have seen ghosts? Maybe they’d just seen an Ignored Ignored. A man like that would be two steps removed from normal human life. Perhaps there were no ghosts. Perhaps there was no afterlife. Maybe we just ceased to exist when we died. Maybe the whole concept of life after death had originated with a misinterpretation of Ignored sightings.

I wished there was a history of our people, a history of the Ignored.

Ralph got off the elevator and hurried immediately over to where I was talking to the police. “I was at the bank when I heard. What happened?” he demanded.

The cop questioning me gave him a brief overview of what had occurred.

Ralph looked at me. “You’re the only one who saw anything?”

“I guess so.”

“We need you,” the mayor said. “For whatever reason, you can see this guy. You can help us track him.”

For whatever reason.

I knew the reason, and I was frightened. It was getting worse. Like some progressive disease. At one time, I had had normal friends, participated in normal society. But I had faded into the ranks of the Ignored. Now I seemed to be fading even more. At the moment, I appeared able to bridge the gap between the regular Ignored and this guy — whoever, whatever he was. But would I eventually become like him, invisible to everybody? Would James and Jane and everyone else I knew stop thinking about me, stop noticing me, and one day look around and find that I was not there, that they could no longer see me?

No, I told myself. It didn’t work that way. I wouldn’t become invisible. I wouldn’t let myself become invisible.

“He’s crazy,” I said. “He’s insane.”

“Don’t worry. You won’t be in any danger. Someone will always be with you. You don’t have to hunt him down, just track him. Like a bloodhound.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about.”

“We’ll take him out,” the cop said. “He won’t kill again.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about,” I said.

“Then what are you worried about?”

I looked away from them, unable or unwilling to share with them my true fears. “I don’t know,” I lied.

Nine

He struck again, an hour later, killing Teddy Howard in the church and leaving the reverend’s slit-open body to flop around on the altar like a gutted fish until unmerciful death arrived.

Ten

The mood of the city changed overnight. Instantly, everyone became tense, nervous, on edge. It was like the Night Stalker days back in Southern California. Thompson had never had serial killings before. There was a crime rate, of course — with rape and domestic violence statistically on a par with the national average. But there had never been anything like this, and when the police composite based on my description was printed in the paper and shown on the Thompson channel, the fear factor jumped up considerably. The clown costume struck a chord in everyone, and the fact that there was an Ignored out there who was ignored even by us, who was trapped in that boss-killing initiation mode, scared everyone. Gun sales shot through the roof. Even Jane started sleeping with a baseball bat next to the bed.

And yet…

And yet I could not get as worked up about the killer as everyone else. I had seen him, I knew how dangerously deranged he was, but it was not the fact that he was a murderer that disturbed me.

It was the fact that no one but me had seen him.

You’re almost there.

I had been Ignored at Automated Interface, at UC Brea, perhaps for my entire life. I could deal with that. I had accepted the fact that I was different from normal people. But I could not accept the idea that I was different from the other Ignored.

That I was getting worse.

I went to work the next day, and I noticed for the first time that the nods and smiles I had once gotten from my coworkers at city hall were no longer forthcoming. How long had this been going on? Had I been fading away for a while now and just not noticed it?

I tried to think about what I discussed with my coworkers and friends. Was it any more boring than the conversational topics of others? Was I that forgettable even here? Again, my thoughts on being Ignored were swinging back again. Maybe I wasn’t average because I was Ignored. Maybe I was Ignored because I was average. Maybe I had brought this on myself. Maybe there was something I could do, some way I could change my behavior or personality, that would reverse the process.

I was temporarily transferred from the planning department to the police department. Here I was not ignored. I was an important detecting device in the eyes of the mayor and the chief, and I was treated as though I were Hercule Poirot.

The only problem was that there was really nothing to go on, nothing that could be done to facilitate the capture of this lunatic. I could only walk around town, followed by two detectives, and see if I could spot him anywhere. For an entire week, I spent my days walking through offices and stores and shopping centers, my eyes peeled for the clown or for someone who looked like he could be the clown. I rode with patrolmen up and down neighborhoods. I looked through books of mug shots.

Nothing.

And I became more and more uneasy. Even while walking, I noticed that I was not noticed, and the feeling was eerily reminiscent of those early days when I’d first discovered that I was Ignored. I thought of Paul and the way we’d found him at Yosemite, naked and crazy and yelling obscenities into crowds of people at the top of his lungs. Was that what had happened to the clown? Had he just snapped under the pressure of such unremitting isolation?

Was that what would happen to me?

You’re almost there.

I said nothing of my fears to Jane. I knew that was wrong. I knew I was falling into the same pattern as last time. I should be sharing everything with her. We should be facing all problems together. But for some reason I could not bring myself to confide in her. She would probably be even more frantic than I was. And I didn’t want her to go through the hell I was going through.

But at the same time, I did want to talk to her. Desperately.

I didn’t know what was the matter with me.

I told her I had witnessed the murder and had been the only one to see the murderer. But I did not tell her why. I did not tell her what had really happened.

The creepiest thing that week was my meeting with Steve. He was a full-fledged lieutenant now, and the chief had put him in charge of coordinating security at city hall. On the off chance that the murderer might strike again at the scene of his original crime, the chief was asking for a maximum ten-second response time to a disturbance anywhere in the building. This way he figured the murderer could be caught in the act.

Steve was asked to implement this policy, and he met with me in order to more accurately determine how quickly the murderer had moved from the elevator to Ray’s desk, how distracted he had been by the other people in the office, how quickly he had disappeared after being spotted. He gave me a no-nonsense official phone call on Thursday asking me to meet him in the planning department before lunch, and after spending the morning on neighborhood patrol, I arrived on the second floor at eleven-thirty. Steve was already there.

And he didn’t recognize me.

I knew it instantly, although it took a few moments of by-the-book Q&A for the fact to really sink in.

He did not know who I was.

We had spent all that time together as terrorists, as colleagues, friends, brothers, and now he did not even remember me. He thought he was meeting me for the first time, that I was simply a faceless bureaucrat from city hall, and it was unnerving to speak to him, to know him so intimately when he obviously didn’t know me at all. I was tempted to tell him, to remind him, to prod his memory, but I did not, and he left without realizing who I was.

There were no more murders, no assaults, no sightings, and gradually the police began to lose interest in me. I was transferred back to city hall, told to keep my eyes open and report anything suspicious, and was promptly forgotten about. In the planning department, my return was not noticed or remarked upon.

I had completed my first week of work since returning when I saw the mayor coming toward me across the first-floor lobby on my way out. I waved to him. “How’s the search going?” I asked. “Any leads?”

He said nothing, looked at me, past me, through me, and continued walking.

Eleven

When I awoke the next morning, there was a new tree outside our bedroom window.

I stood in front of the window, staring, a clenched, tight feeling in my chest. The tree was not a small sapling or a potted palm that someone had placed in our front yard. It was a full-sized sycamore, taller than our house, growing, deep-rooted, in the center of the lawn.

It had purple leaves.

I didn’t know what it was or what it meant, I only knew that it frightened me to the bone. I stood there, unable to take my eyes off the sight, and as I stared I saw the front door of the house open and Jane walk across the lawn to get the newspaper from the front sidewalk.

She walked through the tree, as if it weren’t there.

The clenched feeling grew, spreading within me, and I realized that I was holding my breath. I forced myself to breathe. Jane picked up the paper, walked back through the tree and into the house.

Was it an optical illusion? No, the tree was too clear and definite, too there, for it to be a mere image.

Was I crazy? Maybe. But I didn’t think so.

Oh, the things you’ll see….

I quickly pulled on a pair of jeans and hurried outside. The tree was still there, big as life and twice as colorful, and I walked up to it, reached out to touch it.

And my hand passed through the bark.

I felt nothing, no warmness, no coldness, no displacement of air. It was as if the tree weren’t there at all. I gathered my courage, walked through it. It looked solid, not transparent or translucent, and while walking through I saw only blackness. Like I really was inside a tree. But I felt nothing.

What the hell was it?

I stood there, staring up at the purple leaves.

“What are you doing?” Jane called from the kitchen.

I looked back at her. She was watching me through the open window with a puzzled expression, as though I was behaving incredibly stupidly, which I suppose to her I was. I walked around the tree, then across the grass to the front door. I went into the kitchen, where she was mixing batter for blueberry muffins.

“What were you doing out there?”

“Looking at something.”

“What?”

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

She stopped stirring, glanced at me. “You’ve been behaving strangely ever since that murder. Are you sure you’re all right?”

I nodded. “I’m fine.”

“You know, a lot of people who witness violent acts, even policemen, go to counseling to work through what they’re feeling.”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Don’t get so worked up. I’m just worried about you.”

“I’m fine.”

“I — ”

“I’m fine.”

She looked at me, looked away, went back to mixing the batter.

The tree was still there after breakfast, still there after I took my shower. Jane wanted to go to the store and pick up some groceries for dinner, and I happily volunteered to go for her. She said fine, she had a lot of work to do around the house anyway, and I took the list she gave me and drove off.

I’d been acting as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, but I saw other purple trees in the park, red and black bushes growing in the center of Main Street, a silver stream passing through the Montgomery Ward’s parking lot, and it was obvious that overnight something really bizarre had happened.

Had happened to me.

No one else in town seemed to see these manifestations.

Jane had asked me to go to the IGA — she liked their produce better than Von’s of Safeway — and while inside the supermarket I saw another tree, identical to the one in my yard, growing out of the meat counter, its branches passing through the ceiling.

I stood there staring at the tree as other shoppers passed around me. There was no way I could live with this day in and day out, no way I could pretend to live a normal life while fantasy forests were popping up around me in the midst of my ordinary surroundings.

Was this what had happened to the murderer?

I quickly got what I came for and hurried home. I found Jane mopping the kitchen floor, and I put the sack of groceries on the table and came right out and said it: “Something is wrong.”

She looked up, not surprised. “I was hoping you’d tell me what it was.”

I licked my lips. “I… see things,” I said. I looked into her eyes, hoping to see a hint of recognition, but there was nothing. “Do you know what I mean?”

She shook her head slowly.

“There. Outside.” I pointed through the window. “Do you see that tree? The one with the purple leaves?”

Again she shook her head. “No,” she said softly. “I don’t.”

Did she think I was crazy?

“Come here.” I led her into the front yard, stopped at the base of the tree. “You don’t see anything there?”

“No.”

I took her hand, pulled her through the tree. “Still nothing?”

She shook her head.

I took a deep breath. “I’m fading away,” I said.

I told her everything. About the clown, the police, Steve, Ralph, the people at work who no longer saw me. About the trees and bushes and streams I’d seen on my way to the store today. She was silent when I was through, and I saw tears in her eyes.

“I’m not going crazy,” I told her.

“I don’t think you are.”

“Then why —?”

“I don’t want to lose you.”

I put my arms around her and held her tightly, and she cried into my shoulder. My own eyes were overflowing. Oh, God. Was I going to be separated from her again? Was I destined to be parted from her once more?

I pulled back from her, tilted her chin up until she was looking in my eyes. “Do you still see me?” I asked.

“Yes.” Her nose was running, and she wiped it with the back of her hand.

“Am I… different at all? Do you think about me less often? Do you forget I live here?”

She shook her head, began to cry again.

I hugged her. That was something. But it was only a temporary respite, I knew. She loved me. I was important to her. No wonder I would linger longer in her consciousness. But eventually, inevitably, I would fade from her sight, too. I would move in and out of focus. Maybe one day I’d be home and she wouldn’t know it. I’d be sitting on the couch and she’d pass right by me, calling my name, and I’d answer and she wouldn’t hear me.

I’d kill myself if that happened.

She grasped my hand firmly. “We’ll find someone,” she said. “A doctor. Someone who’ll be able to reverse it.”

I turned on her. “How?” I demanded. “Don’t you think if there was a way to do that it would’ve been done already? You think everyone likes living here? You think they all wouldn’t want to be normal if they could, if there was a way to do it? Christ!”

“Don’t yell at me. I just thought — ”

“No, you didn’t. You didn’t think.”

“I didn’t mean they could actually reverse the process, but I thought they could slow it, stop it from progressing. I thought — ” She burst into tears and ran away from me, across the grass, into the house.

I followed her, caught up to her in the kitchen. “I’m sorry,” I said, holding her, kissing the top of her head. “I don’t know what got into me. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get mad at you.”

She hugged me back. “I love you,” she said.

“I love you, too.”

We stood like that for a long time, not moving, saying nothing, just holding tightly to each other as if that embrace could keep me anchored so I wouldn’t fade away.

I called James that night. I wanted to talk to him, wanted to tell him what was happening. The more people I brought into this, the more people who knew, the more heads we had working on the problem, the more likely it was that something could be done about it.

He answered on the fourth ring. “Hello?”

“James!” I said. “It’s me!”

“Hello?”

“James?”

“Who’s there?”

He couldn’t hear me.

“James!”

“Hello?” He was becoming annoyed. “Who is this?”

I hung up the phone.

I had not seen Philipe since the day of his departure for the White House assault, had not heard a word about him since his return. But I wanted to talk to him. I needed to talk to him. If anybody could understand what had happened to me, if anybody could do something about it, it was Philipe. He might be psychotic, but he was also the most competent, ambitious, and farsighted person I knew, and though I had a lot of reservations about contacting him again, I had to do it.

I just hoped he could see me.

I tracked him down through city hall’s computer. I found him living in a small one-bedroom apartment in the run-down west side of town. Here, amidst the less well tended residences of the city, the attempts to individualize houses, duplexes, and apartments were not as visible, not as obvious, and the entire area seemed especially nondescript. It took three passes for me to even find his apartment building.

Once I did locate where he lived, I parked on the street and sat for a few moments in my car, trying to gather up enough courage to knock on the door. Jane had wanted to come, but I’d vetoed that idea, telling her that Philipe and I had not parted on the best of terms and that it was probably better if I went alone. Now I wished that she had come with me. Or at least that I’d called Philipe ahead of time to let him know that I wanted to see him.

I got out of the car, walked up to apartment 176. I knew if I waited any longer, I would probably talk myself out of doing it, so I just forced myself to go up to his door and ring the bell.

My heart was pounding as the door opened, my mouth suddenly drained of saliva. I took an involuntary step backward.

And there stood Philipe.

My fear disappeared, replaced by a strange, heartrending sense of loss. The Philipe who stood in the doorway before me was not the Philipe I had known, not the boundlessly forward-looking man who had recruited me into the terrorists, not the take-charge leader who had led us through our adventures, not the crazed delusional psycho of the sandstorm night, not even the defeated would-be hero who had returned from Washington, D.C. The Philipe who stood before me was a pathetically average man. No more, no less. The seeker and searcher who had once seemed so bold and charismatic now looked gray and nondescript. The brightness was gone from his eyes, the spark that had once animated his features apparently extinguished. He looked exhausted, and much older than he had the last time I’d seen him. He was a nobody here in Thompson, and I could see how that weighed on him.

I tried not to let the shock show on my face. “Hey, Philipe,” I said. “Long time no see.”

“David,” he said tiredly. “My real name’s David. I just called myself Philipe.”

My name is not David! It’s Philipe!

“Oh.” I nodded, as if agreeing with him, but there was nothing for me to agree with. We looked at each other, studied each other. He saw me, I realized. He noticed me. I was not ignored by him. But that was small consolation. I wished I had not come.

He remained in the doorway, not inviting me in. “What do you want?” he asked. “Why are you here?”

I didn’t want to just jump right in, but I didn’t know what to say to him. I cleared my throat nervously. “I got married. Remember me telling you about Jane? I found her here. She’s Ignored, too.”

“So?”

I looked at him, took a deep breath. “Something’s happening,” I said. “Something’s gone wrong. I need your help.”

His eyes held mine for a moment, and it was as if he was searching within me to see if I was telling the truth, as though he was somehow testing me. I must have passed the test, because he nodded slowly. He moved away from the door, back into the apartment. “Come on in,” he said. “We’ll talk.”

The inside of his apartment had the same stultifying old-lady look his house had had, and it felt a little creepy to walk into the small living room and sit down on the tan flowered couch underneath the cheap oil painting of a mountain lake.

“You want anything to drink?” he asked.

I shook my head, but he went into the kitchen and got two beers anyway, putting one open can in front of me. I thanked him.

I still didn’t know what to say, still didn’t know how to bring up what I’d come here to talk with him about. “Do you still see any of the terrorists?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“What about Joe? Do you ever hear from him?”

“I think he’s crossed over. I don’t think he’s Ignored anymore.”

Not Ignored anymore.

Was that possible? Sure it was. I thought of myself, of my own situation, and I felt chilled.

“It’s not a static situation,” he said. “You can move one way or the other.” He took a long, loud sip of his beer. “We’re moving the other way.”

I looked sharply over at him.

“Yeah. I know why you’re here. I can see what’s going on. I know what’s happening.”

I leaned forward on the couch. “What is happening?”

“We’re fading away.”

The fear I felt was tempered with relief. I felt the same way I had when I’d found out that there were other Ignored: scared, but grateful that I would not have to face the situation alone. Once again, Philipe had come through for me.

“No one sees me anymore,” I said.

He smiled wryly. “Tell me about it.”

I looked at him, at his pallid complexion, his ordinary clothes, and I started to laugh. He began laughing, too, and all of a sudden it was like the old days, like Mary had never happened, like Familyland had never happened, like Desert Palms had never happened, like we were in my old apartment, hanging out, friends, brothers forever.

The ice was broken between us, and we started talking. He told me about his quick fade into obscurity after the White House fiasco, about the long months of living here, in this apartment all alone. I told him about my life with Jane, and then about the murderer and about my discovery that I was becoming as Ignored here as I had been in the outside world.

I took a swig of beer. “I also… see things,” I said.

“See things?”

“There,” I said, pointing out the window. “I see a meadow with red grass. There’s a black tree at the far end that looks kind of like a cactus with leaves and branches.”

“I see it,” Philipe said.

“You do?”

He nodded sadly. “I wasn’t going to say anything. I didn’t want to alarm you. I wasn’t sure you’d progressed as far as I had.”

“What is it?” I asked. “What’s happening? Why are we seeing these things?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I have some theories. But that’s all they are. Theories.”

I looked at him. “Do you think it’s reversible, our condition? Or do you think we’ll just keep fading away forever?”

He stared out the window, at the red meadow, at the black cactus tree. “I don’t think it’s reversible,” he said softly. “And I don’t think there’s anything we can do about it.”

Twelve

The murderer struck again on Thursday.

I don’t know why I continued to go to work, but I did. I could have done what I’d done at Automated Interface, just stopped showing up. I could have, and probably should have, spent my remaining time with Jane. But I kept setting that alarm each morning, kept going in to city hall each day.

And on Thursday the murderer returned to the scene of his crime.

He was not wearing a clown suit this time, so I did not recognize him. I was not really working, but was sitting at my desk, staring distractedly at the fluorescent pink rock formation that had grown through the window since yesterday, thinking for the millionth time of what I would do when I became invisible to Jane, when the elevator door opened and he stepped onto the floor.

I took no notice of him until it was almost too late. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him walk across the lobby toward the front desk, and there was something familiar about the way he moved, but it didn’t really register in my brain.

Suddenly the air felt heavy, smelled of drilled teeth.

I stood, instantly on the alert, my mind putting together the guy getting off the elevator, the familiar way he moved, the clown.

He jumped me from behind.

I was grabbed around the neck, and I saw for a brief second a flash of knife metal. Instantly, instinctively, before my conscious mind even realized what I was doing or why I was doing it, I twisted to the side and simultaneously threw myself to the ground, missing the attempted stab and landing on top of the murderer. He hit the ground with a muffled oomph, lost his grip around my neck, and I rolled away, climbing to my knees and then my feet, grabbing a pair of scissors from the top of my desk.

He was as crazy as he had been before, and I saw the look of disconnected dementia on his face as he grinned at me, knife held forward. “I know you’ve been looking for me, fucker. I saw you out there.”

I backed slowly around the edge of my desk, putting it between us. I did not like the way he looked. He was bald and middle-aged, with a bulbous, naturally clownish nose, and there was a disturbing shifting quality to the cast of his features that somehow made him seem saner with the makeup on.

“I don’t want you here,” he said. “You can’t come in.” He stopped on a low blue bush that was growing up from the floor, and his foot disturbed the leaves, knocking a few of them off.

He could touch these manifestations.

With a sudden flying leap, he flung himself at me, lunging over the desk, knife arm outstretched. He was off balance and missed my stomach by a wide margin, but he was already righting himself and I jumped to the side and slashed at him with the scissors. I hit him across the face, one scissor blade puncturing his cheek. He let out a primal cry of rage and pain that distorted his already distorted features, and I pulled the scissors out and stabbed lower, embedding the twin halves into his chest. I felt the blades hit bone, felt a rush of hot blood spill over my hand, and again I pulled the scissors out, shoved them hard into his stomach.

I backed away.

No longer screaming, making only a low pitiful strangled crying sound, he staggered off the side of the desk and onto the floor. His blood spattered both the city hall tile and the blades of orange grass growing up from it. He was losing a lot of blood, and his skin looked gray and pale, as though he was dying.

I prayed to God that he was.

The entire encounter had passed unnoticed in front of the eyes of my coworkers and the two contractors applying for permits at the counter. Around us, the normal office routine of the planning department continued on as usual.

A secretary carrying blueprints to Xerox stepped into a puddle of blood, did not see it, did not leave footprints.

The murderer looked at me, glassy-eyed. “You…” he began, then trailed off. He lurched to his left, past another desk —

— and through the wall.

I blinked. I could see the wall behind the desk, but suddenly I could see a meadow behind the wall, sloping ground leading away from the hill atop which I was standing. I rushed forward, tried to follow him, tried to chase after him, but though I could see the path on which the murderer was running, it was not there for me. I did not go into the meadow. I ran into hard stucco, hitting my head.

I staggered back, staring through the transparent wall as, wounded, bleeding, crying piteously, the murderer limped off, down the sloped meadow, across the orange grass, into the purple trees.

Thirteen

The nightmare was over, but no one knew it.

I had single-handedly saved Thompson from what would have probably been an unending string of serial murders.

And Jane was the only one who was aware of it.

I tried telling Ralph, tried telling the police chief, but neither one of them could see me. I even wrote an anonymous letter, sending copies to the mayor, the chief, the paper, anyone I could think of who might be able to get the word out, but no one paid any attention, and the official search for the murderer continued blindly along.

I spent the next week in the bedroom with the shades drawn, coming out only to eat and go to the bathroom. It wasn’t the lack of recognition that was bothering me. It was not even the fact that I had killed another man.

It was the intrusion of this… other world.

For that was what it was. Another world. I knew that now. More and more often, I saw unfamiliar horizons, alien plant life and geologic formations, color schemes not of this earth. I did not know if they were part of another dimension that shared the same space as our own or if there was some other explanation, all I knew was that this other world was intruding on my space with greater frequency and greater intensity. Even locking myself in the bedroom did no good, because more often than not these days, the rug wasn’t the rug but was a carpet of orange grass, the walls weren’t solid white but were transparent windows on strange landscapes, the ceiling a skylight through which I could watch brown clouds float across a gold sky.

I could have withdrawn entirely into myself, pulled away from Jane, but I did not. I tried to fight these visions or manifestations or whatever they were, but I did not push Jane away from me as I probably would have done in the past. Instead, I kept her close, told her everything I saw, everything I felt, and it seemed that when I was with her, when we were together, that other world faded a little and I was more fully in Thompson.

I saw the creature on Sunday.

Until now, my glimpses into this alternate universe had been limited to landscapes, to plant life and rocks. I had seen nothing animate, nothing alive. But on Sunday morning I awoke, opened the bedroom drapes, looked outside, and saw the creature. It was staring at me from across an orange meadow. I watched it move sideways across the tall grass. It was like a spider, only it was as big as a horse, and there was in its face, visible even from this distance, a look of sly knowledge that chilled me to the bone. I saw its hairy mouth open, heard a loud sibilant whisper, and I quickly let the drapes drop, stepping back and away from them. I did not know what the creature had said and I did not want to know, but something told me that if I continued staring at it, watching it, I would be able to make out what it was saying.

I crawled back into bed, pulled the covers over my head.

Later that day, I went again to see Philipe. Jane wanted to come, but I told her she couldn’t. I said Philipe would be spooked, that he would not want her with us, and though she didn’t like that at all, she believed it. It wasn’t true — I’m sure Philipe would have loved to meet her — but for some reason I did not want her to meet Philipe, and I did not feel bad lying to her about it.

He opened the door to his apartment before I was halfway up the walk, and I was shocked by the change in him. It had been less than two weeks since I’d seen him last, but in that time he had deteriorated badly. It was nothing specific, nothing I could put my finger on. He wasn’t thinner than he had been, he hadn’t lost all his hair, he had just… faded. Whatever had set Philipe apart from everyone else, whatever had made him unique, an individual, seemed to have gone, and the person standing before me was as bland and unremarkable as a department store mannequin.

Had the same thing happened to me?

Then he spoke, called my name, and some of his old self was back. I recognized the voice, heard in it the intelligence and drive that had once drawn me to him, and I followed him into his apartment. The floor was covered with dirt and beer bottles and uprooted alien plants, and I looked at him. “You can… touch those things?” I asked.

He nodded.

I reached for a blue branch lying on his coffee table, and my hand passed through it. I was filled with an overwhelming sense of relief.

“You’ll be there soon,” he said sadly.

You’re almost there.

I nodded. I looked around at the damage, at the destroyed plants and shrubs. I cleared my throat. “Do you still have those, uh…?” I trailed off.

He knew what I was getting at. “Not since that last time. Not since the terrorists broke up.”

“You haven’t… killed anyone?”

He smiled slightly. “Not that I’m aware of.”

There was a question that had been bugging me since that night of the sandstorm, since I’d followed him into that house, and I figured that now was the time to ask it. “You were talking to someone,” I said. “That night. Answering questions. Who were you talking to?”

“God, I thought.”

“You thought?”

“It was the same voice that had named me Philipe. I’d heard it a long time ago. In my dreams. Even before I knew I was Ignored. It told me to call myself Philipe, told me to put together the terrorists. It told me… other things, too.”

“Your hunches?”

He nodded. “I thought I saw it once, in one of those dreams, hiding in the shadows in a forest, and even though it scared me, it impressed me.” He paused, looked far away. “No, that’s not exactly true. It didn’t just impress me. It filled me with awe. I know it sounds crazy, but I thought it was God.”

“And now?”

“Now? Now I think it was someone — something — from the other side.”

The other side.

I looked through the window at the purple forest across the street, and a chill passed through me.

His voice grew quiet. “I thought I saw it the other day. Outside.”

I didn’t want to hear what he’d seen or what he thought he’d seen, but I knew he was going to tell me anyway.

“It was hiding in the background, in the trees, and there were a lot of spider things in front of it, spider things the size of camels. But I could see its eyes, its eyebrows, its teeth. I saw hair, fur, and hooves. And it knew me. It recognized me.”

The goose bumps were all over my body. I was afraid to even look in the direction of the window.

“I used to think we were God’s chosen,” Philipe said. “I thought we were closer to God than everyone else because we were so obviously average. I believed in the Golden Mean, and I thought that mediocrity was perfection. This was what God meant man to be. Man had the potential to go farther or fall shorter, but it was this perfection of the median that would bring us into God’s graces.

“Now — ” he looked out the window. “Now I just think we’re more receptive to the vibrations, the messages, the… whatever it is that’s coming from that place.” He turned toward me. “Have you ever read a story called ‘The Great God Pan’?”

I shook my head.

“It talks about ‘lifting the veil’, about contacting a world that sounds like the one we’ve been seeing.” He walked across the room to an end table piled with library books and picked one out, handing it to me. “Here. Read it.”

I looked at the cover. Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. One of the pages was marked, and I opened it to that spot. “‘The Great God Pan’ by Arthur Machen.”

“Read it,” he said again.

I looked at him. “Now?”

“You have something better to do? It’ll only take you a half hour or so. I’ll watch TV while you read.”

“I can’t — ”

“Why did you come here today?”

I blinked. “What?”

“Why did you come here?”

“To… talk to you.”

“About what?”

“About — ”

“About what you’ve seen. You’ve seen the thing I’ve described, haven’t you?”

I shook my head.

“Then you’ve seen the spider things.”

I looked at him, nodded slowly.

“Read.”

I sat down on his couch. I didn’t know what bearing he thought a fictional horror story could have on the situation we faced, but I found out almost immediately. Indeed, the situation in the work was eerily similar to what I had experienced with the murderer, uncomfortably close to what Philipe had described. A mad scientist finds a way to breach the gap between this world and “the other world.” He sends a woman through, and she returns completely and utterly mad. She has seen the awesome, godlike power of a creature the ancients inadequately referred to as the great god Pan. She has also been impregnated there, and when her daughter grows up, the daughter possesses the ability to pass between the two worlds at will. In this world, our world, the daughter is a murderer, courting men, then letting them see her true face and driving them to suicide. She is finally discovered and killed.

Throughout the story, Philipe had underlined several passages. One in which the daughter is walking through a meadow and suddenly disappears. One noting the strange, heavy feeling left in the air after she passes between the two worlds. One describing the “secret forces,” the unspeakable, unnamable, unimaginable forces that lay at the heart of existence and are far too powerful for human comprehension. And the final line of the story, stating that the daughter, the creature, was now permanently in that other world and with her true companions.

It was this last that sent a chill through me. I thought of the murderer, mortally wounded, running toward the safety of the purple trees.

Philipe was looking at me as I closed the book. “Sound familiar?”

“It’s a story,” I said.

“But it’s truer than people think. Truer, maybe, than the author knew. We’ve seen that world, you and I.” He paused. “I have heard the voice of the great god Pan.”

I looked at him. I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t disbelieve him, either.

“What we are,” he said, “are transmitters to that world. We can see it; we can hear it; we can carry messages from it. That’s our purpose. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we were put on this earth. It even explains the gradations of Ignored. You and I can communicate with the powers there. We can tell it to the other Ignored. They can tell it to the half-and-halfs like Joe. Joe and his kind can tell the rest of the world.”

“But the other Ignored don’t hear us anymore,” I pointed out. “And I thought you said Joe was no longer Ignored.”

He waved away my objection.

“Besides, that can’t be all we are, transmitters. That wouldn’t make us average; that has nothing to do with being ordinary — ”

“No one is only one thing. A black man is not just black. He’s also a man. A son. Maybe a brother, a husband, a father. He might like rap or rock or classical music. He might be an athlete or a scholar. There are different facets to everyone. No one is so one-dimensional that they can be described by a single word.” He paused. “Not even us.”

I did not know whether I believed him. I did not know whether I wanted to believe him. It would be nice to think that being Ignored was not the sole attribute of my existence, that it was not the defining feature of my being. But for my purpose in life to be entirely unrelated to that, to have nothing whatsoever to do with my individual talents or collective identity… I couldn’t buy that. I didn’t want to buy it.

Philipe leaned forward. “Maybe this is where the human race is going; maybe this is where it’s all been heading. Maybe we’re the goal, the ultimate byproducts of this Ignored evolution. Maybe one day everyone will be able to pass back and forth between worlds. Maybe we are Helen’s companions,” he said, pointing to the book.

I thought of the murderer, of his obvious insanity, and though it did remind me of the daughter in the story, I shook my head. “No,” I said.

“Why not?”

“We’re not evolving into higher beings who can move at will between worlds or dimensions or whatever the hell this is. We’re fading out of this world and into that other one. We’re being sucked into it. And then we’ll be gone. That’s the purpose of evolution? For people to be dragged away from their loved ones to live with monster spiders? I don’t think so.”

“You’re looking at it from a short-sighted — ”

“No, I’m not.” I shook my head. “Besides, I don’t care. I don’t want to go there. I don’t even want to be able to see it. I want to stay right here with Jane. If you spent as much time thinking about how we can stop this process as you’ve spent thinking about what it is, we could probably survive.”

“No, we couldn’t,” he said.

No, we couldn’t.

I stared at Philipe. I had not realized until that moment how much I had been counting on him to get me out of this mess, to save me, and his flat negation of hope was like a stake through my heart. All of a sudden, I saw that his elaborate theories, his weaving of our facts into Machen’s fiction, were merely attempts to deal with the certain knowledge that we were not going to be able to come back, that we were doomed. Philipe, I saw, was just as frightened of the unknown as I was.

“What are we going to do about it? I asked.

“Nothing. There’s nothing we can do.”

“Bullshit!” I slammed my hand down on the coffee table. “We can’t just fade away without a fight.”

Philipe looked at me. No, David looked at me. Philipe was gone, and in his place was a tired, resigned, and defeated man. “We can,” he said. “And we will.”

I stood up angrily and walked without speaking out of his apartment. He said something behind me, but I could not hear what it was and I did not care. Tears of anger burned my eyes, and I strode through the purple trees to my car. Philipe could not help me, I knew now. No one could help me. I wanted to believe that a miracle would occur, that something would stop this inevitable progression before it claimed me entirely, but I could not.

I drove away, through Thompson and through that other world.

I did not look back.

Fourteen

Magic.

I clung to James’ idea, wanting desperately to believe that what afflicted me was not irreversible, was not the inevitable result of a logical progression but could disappear overnight with the wave of a wand or the application of some as yet undiscovered power.

Hadn’t Philipe been hinting about that? Magic?

I tried to sustain my belief in the days that followed. But even if it had been the vagaries of magic that had made me this way and not the deliberate building blocks of genetics, the fact remained that I was getting worse. In the mirror, when I looked at myself, I saw someone older-looking than me, someone duller. Around the house, Thompson was disappearing, being taken over by orange grass and silver streams and pink rocks and purple trees and hissing spiders the size of horses.

I began praying to God to make that other world disappear, to make me normal, but He — or She — ignored my pleas.

Were we ignored by God?

The only time I felt all right was when I was with Jane. Even the imposition of that other world faded somewhat in her presence, the inside of the house, at least, remaining free from its influence, and I kept Jane with me as much as possible. I did not know if it was my imagination or if Jane really did protect me from those alien views, but I believed in her, believed that she was my talisman, my amulet, and I took advantage of what she could give me.

We tried to figure out why she might have this power — if it was a power — and what we could do to harness it, amplify it, but neither of us could think of anything, and the only thing we knew to do was stay with each other and hope that would stave everything off.

It didn’t, though.

She quit her job to stay home with me. It didn’t really matter — everything in Thompson was free, anyway, and she could just go to the store and pick up what we needed when we needed it.

I don’t want to make it sound like we just sat around waiting for the end, feeling sorry for ourselves. We didn’t. But neither did we pretend that nothing was wrong. We faced the truth — and tried to make the best of things under the circumstances.

We talked a lot.

We made love several times a day.

We’d been living for the most part off our usual junk food staples — hot dogs, hamburgers, tacos, macaroni and cheese — but Jane decided that we might as well take advantage of the time we had left together in an epicurean way as well, and she went to the store to get steaks and lobsters, crabs and caviar. None of these things were to our taste, or at least to my taste, but the idea of living it up at the end definitely appealed to Jane, and I didn’t want to rain on her parade.

Time was too short to waste it arguing.

I was sitting in the living room watching a rerun of Gilligan’s Island when she returned from the store, carrying two huge sacks of food in her arms. I stood to help her. She looked around the room. “Bob?” she said.

My heart lurched in my chest.

She didn’t see me.

“I’m here!” I screamed.

She jumped at the sound of my voice, dropping one of the sacks, and I ran over to her. I took the other sack from her arms, put it down on the floor, and threw my arms around her, hugging her tightly, squeezing her. I pressed my face into her hair and let the tears come. “I thought it was over,” I said. “I thought you couldn’t see me anymore.”

“I see you. I can see you.” She held on to me as hard as I held on to her, as though I were perched at the edge of a crumbling cliff and she was trying to keep me from slipping away. There was fear in her voice, and I knew that for those first few seconds before I’d screamed, when she was scanning the living room, she hadn’t been able to see me.

I was going to lose her.

Milk was draining onto the carpet from a split and overturned carton, but we didn’t care. We held on to each other, not letting go, not saying anything, not needing to, as the afternoon shadows lengthened on the orange grass outside.

I was awakened in the middle of the night by a voice calling my name. It was not a low voice, a hushed voice, a whispered voice, as those sorts of voices always are in movies. Rather it was shouted but muffled by distance, like someone yelling to me from across a field.

“Bob!”

I sat up in bed. Next to me, Jane was still asleep, oblivious.

“Bob!”

I pushed off the covers and got out of bed. I pulled open the drapes and looked outside.

Thompson was gone.

I was staring out at an orange field. At the opposite end grew a forest of purple trees. Beyond that, in the haze of distance, were pink mountains. A dark black sun hung lightlessly in an illuminated gold sky.

“Bob!”

The voice seemed to be coming from within the trees. I looked in that direction and saw, moving within the forest, hints of blackness that looked like the spider things. Beyond that, darker and more indistinct, was a larger unmoving object that I somehow knew was alive. This was where the voice was coming from.

How did it know my name?

“Bob!”

“What?” I called back.

“Join us!”

I was not scared, although I knew I should have been. That dark shape in the forest should have terrified the hell out of me. But the voice was warm and comforting, and something about the fact that this had finally happened, that the waiting was over, made me feel relieved.

“Come!” the voice called. “We’re waiting for you!”

Before me, the window and wall dissolved. As though in a dream, as though hypnotized, I walked through what had been the wall and felt different breezes blowing my hair, different air in my lungs. Even the temperature felt not the same. It was not hotter or colder, it was just… different.

I was in another world.

I was filled with a strange sense of well-being, a lethargic sort of contentment that persisted despite legitimate warnings and concerns that were being brought up intellectually by my mind.

I moved forward.

“No!”

Jane’s voice, shrill and desperate, filled with a hopeless, helpless, agonized despair, cut through the warm fuzziness of my feelings, and I snapped my head around to look at her. For a brief fraction of a second, I was standing in the front yard of our house and she was screaming at me through the window, then I was again in the field and she was yelling at me from a wall less room that looked like it had been plunked down in Oz by a tornado from Kansas.

“Bob!” that other voice called. It was no longer so warm and comforting. In fact, it seemed nearly as threatening as its origin, that huge black shape in the trees, and I tried to walk back toward Jane, toward our bedroom, but my feet would not move in that direction.

“Bob!” Jane screamed.

The scene flickered again. I saw the yard, the house.

“Jane!” I called.

“I see you!” she cried. “I notice you! I love you!”

I don’t know what made her yell that, what made her think of that, what led her to believe that those words would do any good, but they elicited a deep rumble of rage from the shape in the trees, and I was suddenly able to move again. I turned and ran toward her, and that other world, that strange world, began to recede, fading slowly from sight until it was entirely gone. I ended up naked, outside, on the grass, pressing my hands and face against the bedroom window as, on the other side of the glass, Jane did the same. I did not know what had just happened or how, but I knew that she had pulled me back from the brink. She had saved me.

I ran around to the kitchen door and waited until Jane unlocked it, and then we were in each others’ arms.

“I heard you yell something and then I saw you outside and you were… fading!” Jane sobbed. “You were disappearing!”

“Shhh,” I said, holding her. “It’s all right.”

And it was. There was no gold sky, no orange grass, no purple trees. There was only our house and Thompson and the Arizona night sky. If this were a movie, it would have been her love for me that brought me back, that saved me from disappearing into that other world, but somehow I knew that that was not what had done it. It was a part of it, but only a part. It was also the fact that she saw me. That she did not ignore me.

And that she said those words. In that order.

“I see you — I notice you — I love you.”

Magic.

“I love you,” she said again.

We’re not Ignored to those who love us.

I clutched her tightly. “I love you, too,” I said. “And I see you. And I notice you. And I will never stop noticing you. Never.”

Fifteen

I went out the next day and I was invisible. Completely invisible. No one saw me, no one heard me. I was not just ignored. I did not exist.

I’d thought it was over. I’d thought I could go back to work, that my condition had reversed itself, that everything would be back to normal, but as I got out of the car and walked up the steps of city hall, I noticed that no one looked at me. I went inside, walked past the mayor’s secretary, and she did not see me. I stood in the doorway of Ralph’s office. He looked right through me.

“Ralph!” I said.

No response.

I considered playing with him, fucking with his mind, picking up objects and moving them around the room. But what was the point? I turned around, left. I realized for the first time that even if I had been able to do so, I would not have wanted to go back to work.

I no longer wanted to be here.

I no longer wanted to live in Thompson.

I got into my car, drove back home.

I thought about what I was, about who I was, about what I wanted as I drove. Test-marketing products? Being a human guinea pig? Was there any meaning in that? Was that a legitimate reason for existence? Perhaps. As Ralph had told me once, “Someone’s gotta do it.”

But that someone was not me.

Maybe living and working in Thompson did give some of the Ignored a sense of purpose. Maybe products did get made because they went over well in Thompson, and maybe people were then hired to make those products, creating jobs, and maybe the people who bought those products were made happy by them, and maybe part of the responsibility for that did go to the Ignored of Thompson.

But that wasn’t enough for me.

Thompson was Automated Interface all over again. I was a nobody here. I was nothing.

And I wanted to be somebody. I wanted to be something.

I pulled up in front of the house, and I sat there for a moment. I watched Jane through the front window, watched her vacuum the living room.

It had all turned to shit. All of it. Everything. The road I had taken had come to a dead end. The Terrorists for the Common Man had disintegrated in an orgy of blood, and in a city of my own people I had turned into what I had tried to escape.

What could I do next? Where was I to go?

What about Jane?

I sat there for a few moments more, then I went inside and told Jane everything. I had her call her friends.

None of them could hear her.

We went downtown, walked through the mall. No one saw us. Either of us. We were invisible. Jane had pulled me back, but I had pulled her forward, and now both of us were trapped in this no-man’s-land, ignored by the Ignored.

Jane grew quieter and quieter as it became increasingly obvious what had happened.

“I don’t see any of those weird things,” she told me in Nordstrom.

“Neither do I,” I said. “Anymore. I think that part of it’s over.”

“So we’re just stuck here. This way.”

I nodded.

She dropped her purse and ripped open her blouse.

“What are you doing?” I said.

She unfastened her bra, kicked off her shoes, unzipped and pulled down her pants.

“Knock it off!” I was starting to get scared.

“Why? No one can see me.”

She pulled down her panties.

“Jane!”

She ran up to an older couple, took the man’s right hand and put it on her breasts. “Feel my tits!”

The old man looked shocked, pulled away, but though he obviously could feel her, he could not see her, he could not hear her.

“Jane!”

“Eat me! Eat my hot pussy!”

She stood naked in the center of the store, screaming obscenities, but no one looked at her, no one paid any attention at all, and I took a bathrobe from the lingerie department and put it around her shoulders and led her out of the mall and back to the car.

I drove her home.

Sixteen

Jane spent the next two days in bed. I was worried at first that she would not snap out of it. I had not expected her to react this way, and it scared me.

But on the third morning she awoke before I did, and by the time I got up she was already making breakfast.

“Temporary insanity,” she said sheepishly as I walked into the kitchen.

I sat down at the table, poured myself a glass of orange juice, pretending that nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. “Is that what happened when you first found out you were Ignored?”

“No. Just this time. Delayed stress syndrome, I suppose. I guess I stored it all up.”

“But you’re okay now?”

“I’m okay.”

I looked at her. “So what are we going to do?”

“What do you want to do?”

I realized that there was nothing tying us down, nothing holding us here. We had no responsibilities or obligations anywhere. We were free to do anything we chose. “I don’t know,” I admitted.

She walked over to the table, frying pan in hand, and slid two eggs onto my plate. “I don’t want to stay here,” she said. “That’s for sure.”

“I don’t either.” I looked at her. “Do you have any idea where you would like to go?”

She smiled shyly. “The beach?”

I nodded, grinned. “The beach it is.”

I called Philipe that afternoon while Jane was packing. I wasn’t sure if he was still here or if he had passed over to the other side. I wasn’t sure if he would be able to hear me or see me. But he was here, and he could hear me, and he promised to come over immediately. I gave him directions to our house.

He arrived in fifteen minutes, looking even more pale and washed-out than he had the last time, if that was possible. But I could still see him, and Jane could see him, and despite all that had happened, I felt warm and good as I finally introduced my friend and my wife to each other.

Philipe spent the night with us.

During dinner, I explained exactly what had happened, exactly what I had seen, exactly what Jane had done.

He nodded. “So you think it’s recognition by others that keeps us anchored here, huh?”

“It’s possible.”

“Then why am I still here?”

“Because I know you.” I took a deep breath. “Because I see you. I notice you. I love you.”

He grinned. “Worth a try, huh?”

“Can’t hurt.”

“What about when you’re gone?”

I was silent.

He laughed. “Don’t worry. I’m not bucking for an invitation.”

“It’s not that — ” I hastened to explain.

“I know,” he said. “I know.”

As a matter of fact, I had been thinking of asking him to accompany us. But I’d wanted to talk it over with Jane first.

“Why don’t you come with us?” Jane asked. I met her eyes, nodded my thanks.

He shook his head. “This is where I belong. These are my people.”

“But — ”

“No buts. I think I have enough faith and belief in myself to fight off any onslaught. No one’s going to tell me I don’t exist.”

I smiled, nodded, but I was worried.

In the morning, Philipe helped me pack the car. Jane finished cleaning the house. She did not want to leave a mess for the next tenants.

“Are you sure you don’t want to bring your furniture?” I asked her. “We could always get a U-Haul truck.”

She shook her head. “No.”

Then we were ready to go.

Jane got into the car, buckled her seat belt. I turned to Philipe. Despite our differences, despite our disagreements, despite everything that had happened, I felt sad to be saying good-bye. We had been through a lot together, good and bad, and those experiences had created a bond between us that could never be broken. I looked at him, and his once-sharp eyes that were now not so sharp were wet at the edges.

“Come with us,” I said.

He shook his head. “I’m not fading anymore. I’m coming back. In a few weeks I’ll be stronger than ever. Don’t worry about me.”

I looked into his eyes, and I knew he knew that it was not true. An understanding passed between us.

“So where’re you going to go?” he asked. “Back to Palm Springs? You might be able to recruit some new terrorists.”

“That isn’t me,” I said. I gestured around me, at Thompson. “And this isn’t me, either. I don’t know what is me. That’s what I need to find out. But you stay here. You start up the terrorists again. You fight the fights for our people. You keep the faith.”

“I will,” he said, and his voice was soft. “Take care.”

I wanted to cry, and a tear did escape down my cheek before I could wipe it off. I looked at Philipe, and on impulse I gave him a quick hug. “Youtake care,” I said.

“Yeah.”

I got into the car.

“Good-bye,” he said to Jane. “I haven’t spent much time with you, but I feel like I know you anyway. Bob did nothing but talk about you the whole time we were traveling together. He loves you very much.”

She smiled. “I know.”

They shook hands.

I started the car, backed out of the driveway. I looked toward Philipe. He waved, smiled.

I waved back.

“Good-bye,” I said.

He ran after us as we pulled away, and he jogged behind us as we pulled onto the road out of the city. He stood there, in the middle of the street, waving, as we left Thompson.

I honked back at him.

And we continued east until Philipe was lost to sight and Thompson was only a tiny irregular speck in the distance.

Seventeen

We lived in motels while we locked for a home.

There was no property available in Laguna Beach, no uninhabited houses for sale, so we moved up the coast to Corona del Mar.

I suggested that, since we were invisible, we should just pick the house we liked and live there. We shouldn’t worry about finding a place all to ourselves. There was no reason we couldn’t find some big house and co-exist with the owners. We’d be like ghosts. It would be fun.

So we lived for a time with a rich couple, in a too-large mansion on a bluff overlooking the ocean. We took the guest room and the guest bathroom; we used the kitchen when the owners were gone or asleep.

But it was unsettling to live that close and that intimately with others, to be privy to their privacies. I felt uncomfortable seeing people when they thought they were alone, watching them scratch themselves and mutter to themselves and let their true feelings show on their faces, and we moved up the coast, to Pacific Palisades, finally finding a white elephant belonging to a has-been entertainer no longer able to keep up with the payments. It had been on the market for the past two years.

We moved in.

The days flowed from one to the next. We’d get up late, spend most of the day on the beach, read and watch TV at night. It was pleasant, I suppose, but I had to wonder: what was the point of it all? I had never really bought into Philipe’s idea that we had a specific destiny, that fate had some plan in mind for us, but I had thought that my life would eventually lead somewhere, that it would have a purpose, that it would mean something.

And it didn’t.

There was no point. We lived, we died, we tried to make the best of things in between. That was it. Period. No pattern had emerged from the series of disjointed events that were my existence because there was no pattern. It had made no difference to anyone that I had been born.

And then Jane announced that she was pregnant.

Overnight, everything changed.

This was the point, I thought. Maybe I would make a mark upon the world and maybe I wouldn’t. But I would leave behind a child, and how that child turned out would depend on me and Jane. And maybe that child would make a significant mark upon the world. And maybe not. But maybe his or her child would. And whatever happened, however far down the line it might be, it would be because of me. I was a link in that chain.

I had a purpose.

I remembered Ralph telling me that the children of Ignored people were always Ignored themselves, and I told Jane, but she didn’t care and neither did I. She said that she didn’t like the lifestyle in Pacific Palisades, that she wanted our son or daughter to grow up in a different environment, and once again we moved up the coast, settling in a beachfront house in Carmel.

The first trimester passed, and Jane was showing, and both of us were happier than we’d ever been in our lives. We tried contacting her parents, but they could neither see us nor hear us, and though it was expected, that was a disappointment. But it didn’t last long. There were too many other things to do, too many other things to be grateful for. We pored through books of names. We read manuals on parenting. We stole baby food and furniture and clothes.

We had been taking long daily walks along the beach, but when Jane began to get bigger and to tire more quickly and easily, she switched her allegiance to indoor exercise equipment. She told me to keep up the walks, however, and though I protested at first, I soon agreed. She said she didn’t want me to balloon up to her size. And, she admitted, she wanted to have some time alone, without me always hovering around.

I understood.

I even grew to like my solitary walks along the beach.

And then it happened.

I had walked a mile or so down the sand and was on my way back when I saw a strange disturbance in the air some ways ahead. I jogged forward, squinting.

Flickering across the sand was the faint outline of a purple forest.

My heart leaped in my chest. I was cold all over, and I could not seem to catch my breath. Terrified, I ran back toward the house. I reached it, bolted up the steps.

Jane shrieked my name.

I had never heard her scream that way before, had never heard the sound of pure abject terror in her voice, but I heard it now and it caused my insides to squeeze painfully in a viselike cramp of fear. I doubled over, barely able to move for the pain, but I forced myself to keep running.

“Bob!!”she cried.

I dashed down the hall into the bedroom.

And there was the murderer.

He was on our bed. He had ripped off all of Jane’s clothes and was straddling her, holding a knife to her neck. He had survived somehow. He was alive and had come back and had tracked us down.

He saw me out of the corner of his eye, and he turned to face me.

His zipper was down, his penis out.

He had an erection.

“Oh, here you are.” He grinned. “I was wondering when you’d show up. I wanted you to watch your wife blow me.” He reached next to him, picked up her torn panties, held them delicately to his nose, sniffing loudly. “Mmmmmm,” he said. “Nice and fresh.”

I took an angry step forward, and he pressed the knife against her skin, drawing blood. She screamed in pain.

“Don’t try anything,” he said. “Or I’ll slit her fucking throat.”

I stood in the doorway, paralyzed, not knowing what to do. In some hopeful, overly imaginative part of my brain, I thought that maybe Philipe had faded into that other world by now and that he would pop out of nowhere and save us and drag this guy back where he had come from.

But that didn’t happen.

The murderer leaned forward. His erect penis pressed against Jane’s closed lips. “Open your fucking mouth,” he ordered. “Or I’m going to cut that baby out of your stomach.”

She opened her mouth.

And he pushed his penis in.

Instinct took over. If I had thought about it, I would not have done what I did. I would have been afraid for the life of both Jane and our unborn child, and I would have done nothing. But I did not think. I saw his erection slide into Jane’s mouth, and I reacted instantly, crazily. I lunged forward, leaped, and landed against his back, my hands on his head. He probably would have shoved the knife into Jane’s throat, but at that second she bit down, hard, and he screamed in agony, temporarily losing control. I yanked back on his head, pulling him off Jane, and grabbed for the knife. It sliced through my palm, and I can’t say that I didn’t feel the pain, but I did not stop, and I twisted his neck as far as I could to the right until I heard it crack. His screams were silenced and he went limp, but he was still holding on to the knife, and Jane pulled it out of his hand and shoved it through his crotch. A wash of blood poured over her distended stomach, cascading onto the sheets.

She pulled it out and shoved it through his chest.

I rolled over, still twisting his neck, and both of us fell off the bed onto the floor.

I jumped to my feet, waiting for him to get up again, but this time he was dead.

Really dead.

I looked around, saw no orange grass, no purple trees, nothing from that other place.

Jane was still holding the knife, and she was shaking like a leaf, sobbing uncontrollably, looking down in horror at the blood that covered her body. She kept spitting, and a line of saliva dribbled from her lower lip.

I could feel the knife cut on my palm now, and my own blood was pouring around the side of my hand and dripping onto the floor, but I ignored the pain and walked over to her, gently removing the knife from her hand and lifting her to her feet, taking her into another bedroom.

“Are they sending people after us?” Jane cried. “Are they after us because I wouldn’t let them take you?”

“No,” I said, stroking her hair and helping her down onto the bed. “That’s it. It’s over. It was just that one guy. And he was after me. Not you.”

“Maybe they’ll send more of them.”

“No,” I said. “That’s it.”

I didn’t know how I knew that that was true, but I did. One of Philipe’s “hunches,” maybe.

“It’s all over,” I said.

And for once I was right.

It was.

Eighteen

I buried the body that afternoon.

I chopped it into pieces first.

The next day, we packed up what we owned and moved up to Mendocino.

Nineteen

Four months later, Jane gave birth to a nine-pound boy.

We named him Philipe.

Twenty

I think, sometimes, that I have been lucky. That I am fortunate to be Ignored. I may be average in my makeup, but I have not been average in my experiences. I have seen things normal men have never seen. I have done things normal men have never done. I have lived a good life.

It is a wonderful world in which we live. I have come to realize that. A world that is truly filled with miracles. And though my nature may preclude me from fully appreciating those miracles, at least I know that they exist.

And I try to teach that to my son.

I cannot be forgiven for the evil I have done in my life. For I have been evil. I believe that now. I know that now. Murder is an inherently evil act, no matter what the circumstances, no matter how convincing the rationalizations. Murder is evil no matter who does it or for what reason.

If there is a God, only He or She will be able to forgive me for what I have done.

The one thing I can say for myself is that I have learned from my mistakes. All that I have experienced and gone through has not been for nothing. The person I am now is not the person I once was.

So maybe there was a point to all of my journeys and side trips, to the meandering series of disconnected events that has been my life.

I still wonder what we are. Descendants of aliens? Genetic mutations? Government experiments? I wonder, but I am not obsessed by the question the way I once was. It is not the focus of my existence.

My son is.

Philipe is.

I don’t know if I believe in God or the devil or heaven or hell, but I can’t help thinking that there is a reason why we are the way we are. I do believe that we were put on this earth for a purpose. I don’t think that purpose is merely to exist. I don’t think that purpose is to be noticed like everyone else. I don’t think that purpose is test-marketing products for the mass consumption of middle America.

But I don’t know what the purpose might be.

Maybe I will find out someday.

Maybe my son will find out.

And what about that world that I glimpsed, that I almost entered? I think about it often. What was it? Heaven? Hell? Nirvana? Was it the place mystics and gurus see when they meditate for so long that they supposedly lose all sense of individual self? Or was it another dimension, existing concurrently with our own? I have read and reread “The Great God Pan,” and somehow I can’t buy that interpretation.

But I can’t offer an alternate theory.

Whatever it is, whether its origin is mystical or scientific, the existence of that glimpsed world somehow set to rest any anxieties I might have had about death and the afterlife. I don’t know that I was ever really bothered or worried about what might happen after death, but I must have been concerned at some level because I feel lighter now, more at ease. I don’t know if there is something after death — no one can know for certain — but I’m pretty sure there is, and it does not frighten me.

We still live here in Mendocino, by the ocean. In the mornings I write, while Jane watches Philipe and works in her garden.

We spend the afternoons together.

It is a good life, and we are happy, but I sense even now that we may eventually want more. I think sometimes of what James told me in Thompson, about there being a country of the Ignored, a land across the sea, an island or a peninsula where people like us live free and peacefully in a sovereign nation of our own.

And I think that it would be nice to raise children there.

And I stare at the water and I think to myself that someday, perhaps, I will learn to sail.