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.He hit it off instantly with Mary, and the attraction was obviously mutual.James and I shared knowing smiles as the two found not-so-subtle ways to stand or sit next to one another.I had the feeling that the rest of the terrorists were going to be seeing a lot less of Mary in their beds in the near future.Philipe remained tense, seemed coiled like a snake.All day long, he was hyper, moving around, walking in and out of where we were, popping abruptly into conversations and just as abruptly out.He seemed to be waiting for something, anxious for its arrival.After dinner, after dark, there was a windstorm, and we were all sitting in Joe’s living room, watching TV, when Philipe suddenly jumped to his feet and hurried over to the front door, yanking it open.He stood for several seconds in the doorway, breathing heavily.He shook his head.“I have to go,” he said.“I have to get out of here.”I got up, frowning, and went over to him.“Go where? What are you talking about?”“You wouldn’t understand.”“Try me.”He thought for a moment, then shook his head.“Thanks,” he said.“But… no.” He started outside, turned around on the porch.“Don’t follow me,” he said.“Don’t anyone try to follow me.”And then he was gone, into the night, into the dark, and I was left staring at the open doorway where he had stood, hearing only his retreating footfalls as they were overtaken by the sounds of the desert wind.SEVENTEENPhilipe did not return for a week.When he did, he was his old self again, cheerful, enthusiastic, filled with plans for what Joe could do to simultaneously aid the Ignored and further his own political career.We had been dormant in his absence, not sure if he was coming back, not sure what we would do if he didn’t.I hadn’t realized until that point how dependent we’d all been on him.Despite our arguments and disagreements, despite my periodic attempts to distance myself from him, I was just as reliant upon Philipe as the others were, and I knew that none of us had the vision or leadership qualities needed to fill his shoes and take charge of the organization.Then, just as it was starting to look as though we really would have to start making some decisions on our own, Philipe was back, acting as though nothing unusual had occurred, once again laying out plans and telling everyone what to do.I wanted to talk to him about what had happened, wanted to talk to the others as well, but for some reason I didn’t.Joe was our liaison with the real world.He was definitely Ignored, but somehow, whether by virtue of his nature or his position, he could get non-Ignored to pay attention to him.He could communicate with them and they would listen.After his return, the first thing Philipe asked Joe to do was to look for any Ignored who might already be working for the city and promote them to positions of power.“They’ll never be promoted from within their own departments because they’re not noticed.No one pays attention to them and no one considers them when positions are open.”“I’m not sure I can tell who’s Ignored,” Joe said hesitantly.“I can,” Philipe told him.“Get me a printout of all city employees and their personnel histories.We’ll start out that way, narrow it down.Then you can call them all into the council chambers for a meeting, introduce me as an efficiency expert or something, give me a chance to look them over.If we find any, we’ll talk to them, decide where to put them.”“But what do we do after that?”“We’ll see.”There was no one Ignored working at city hall, it turned out.A canvass of the company to whom the city contracted out tree-trimming and park maintenance service likewise proved futile.We were rarer than we’d thought.But none of this deterred Philipe.He got us all together, asked us pages upon pages of questions that he’d written out on a variety of basic topics, and from our answers he devised a test that he called the EAP, the Educational Aptitude and Proficiency exam.He got Joe to get the city council to pass an ordinance requiring the school district to administer the exam in all Desert Palms schools before the end of the current school year.“We’ll be able to catch them young,” Philipe explained.In the meantime, he and Joe pored over stacks of personnel printouts and labor distribution reports in order to determine which city employees were the most average and unexceptional in the amount of hours they put into their jobs and the amount of work that they produced.Philipe’s goal was to eventually, through attrition, get rid of those employees with poor performance records, demote those with high performance records, letting them carry the heaviest load and do the majority of the work, and promote those who were the most average, the most ordinary, the most like us.“Mediocrity should be rewarded,” he said.“It’s the only way we’ll ever be able to get any respect.”For the rest of us, our days became less structured.Without a specific short-term goal toward which we were working, we began to drift.Once again, we started going to movies in the afternoon, hanging out at malls.We walked into expensive five-star resorts, swimming in their luxurious pools.In the evenings, we’d hit the nightclubs.We found that it was fun to annoy celebrities, tripping them as they danced, watching them fall and flail awkwardly to the secretly delighted stares of the ordinary men and women around them.We flipped up celebrity women’s skirts and pantsed the more pretentious men, exposing who wore underwear and who didn’t.I’d always thought of the Palm Springs area as sort of a retirement community for old-line celebrities, but it was surprising how many young movie actors and soap opera stars and contemporary entertainers frequented the local clubs on weekends.In the women’s restroom of one club, Steve and Paul raped a blond bimbo who was currently starring in a Saturday night CBS sitcom.Afterward, showing off her silk thong panties as a trophy, Steve said, “She wasn’t that great.Mary’s as good as her any day
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