Little Brother

  > I’m not jamming. Not this week. Maybe not next. It’s not because I’m scared. It’s because I’m smart enough to know that I’m better free than in prison. They figured out how to stop our tactic, so we need to come up with a new tactic. I don’t care what the tactic is, but I want it to work. It’s _stupid_ to get arrested. It’s only jamming if you get away with it.

  > There’s another reason not to jam. If you get caught, they might use you to catch your friends, and their friends, and their friends. They might bust your friends even if they’re not on Xnet, because the DHS is like a maddened bull and they don’t exactly worry if they’ve got the right guy.

  > I’m not telling you what to do.

  > But the DHS is dumb and we’re smart. Jamming proves that they can’t fight terrorism because it proves that they can’t even stop a bunch of kids. If you get caught, it makes them look like they’re smarter than us.

  > THEY AREN’T SMARTER THAN US! We are smarter than them. Let’s be smart. Let’s figure out how to jam them, no matter how many goons they put on the streets of our city.

  I posted it. I went to bed.

  I missed Ange.

  Ange and I didn’t speak for the next four days, including the weekend, and then it was time to go back to school. I’d almost called her a million times, written a thousand unsent emails and IMs.

  Now I was back in Social Studies class, and Mrs. Andersen greeted me with voluble, sarcastic courtesy, asking me sweetly how my “holiday” had been. I sat down and mumbled nothing. I could hear Charles snicker.

  She taught us a class on Manifest Destiny, the idea that the Americans were destined to take over the whole world (or at least that’s how she made it seem) and seemed to be trying to provoke me into saying something so she could throw me out.

  I felt the eyes of the class on me, and it reminded me of M1k3y and the people who looked up to him. I was sick of being looked up to. I missed Ange.

  I got through the rest of the day without anything making any kind of mark on me. I don’t think I said eight words.

  Finally it was over and I hit the doors, heading for the gates and the stupid Mission and my pointless house.

  I was barely out the gate when someone crashed into me. He was a young homeless guy, maybe my age, maybe a little older. He wore a long, greasy overcoat, a pair of baggy jeans and rotting sneakers that looked like they’d been through a wood chipper. His long hair hung over his face, and he had a pubic beard that straggled down his throat into the collar of a no-color knit sweater.

  I took this all in as we lay next to each other on the sidewalk, people passing us and giving us weird looks. It seemed that he’d crashed into me while hurrying down Valencia, bent over with the burden of a split backpack that lay beside him on the pavement, covered in tight geometric doodles in Magic Marker.

  He got to his knees and rocked back and forth, like he was drunk or had hit his head.

  “Sorry buddy,” he said. “Didn’t see you. You hurt?”

  I sat up, too. Nothing felt hurt.

  “Um. No, it’s okay.”

  He stood up and smiled. His teeth were shockingly white and straight, like an ad for an orthodontic clinic. He held his hand out to me and his grip was strong and firm.

  “I’m really sorry.” His voice was also clear and intelligent. I’d expected him to sound like the drunks who talked to themselves as they roamed the Mission late at night, but he sounded like a knowledgeable bookstore clerk.

  “It’s no problem,” I said.

  He stuck out his hand again.

  “Zeb,” he said.

  “Marcus,” I said.

  “A pleasure, Marcus,” he said. “Hope to run into you again sometime!”

  Laughing, he picked up his backpack, turned on his heel and hurried away.

  I walked the rest of the way home in a bemused fog. Mom was at the kitchen table and we had a little chat about nothing at all, the way we used to do, before everything changed.

  I took the stairs up to my room and flopped down in my chair. For once, I didn’t want to log in to the Xnet. I’d checked in that morning before school to discover that my note had created a gigantic controversy among people who agreed with me and people who were righteously pissed that I was telling them to back off from their beloved sport.

  I had three thousand projects I’d been in the middle of when it had all started. I was building a pinhole camera out of legos, I’d been playing with aerial kite photography using an old digital camera with a trigger hacked out of silly putty that was stretched out at launch and slowly snapped back to its original shape, triggering the shutter at regular intervals. I had a vacuum tube amp I’d been building into an ancient, rusted, dented olive oil tin that looked like an archaeological find—once it was done, I’d planned to build in a dock for my phone and a set of 5.1 surround-sound speakers out of tuna fish cans.

  I looked over my workbench and finally picked up the pinhole camera. Methodically snapping legos together was just about my speed.

  I took off my watch and the chunky silver two-finger ring that showed a monkey and a ninja squaring off to fight and dropped them into the little box I used for all the crap I load into my pockets and around my neck before stepping out for the day: phone, wallet, keys, wifinder, change, batteries, retractable cables…I dumped it all out into the box, and found myself holding something I didn’t remember putting in there in the first place.

  It was a piece of paper, gray and soft as flannel, furry at the edges where it had been torn away from some larger piece of paper. It was covered in the tiniest, most careful handwriting I’d ever seen. I unfolded it and held it up. The writing covered both sides, running down from the top left corner of one side to a crabbed signature at the bottom right corner of the other side.

  The signature read, simply: ZEB.

  I picked it up and started to read.

  Dear Marcus

  You don’t know me but I know you. For the past three months, since the Bay Bridge was blown up, I have been imprisoned on Treasure Island. I was in the yard on the day you talked to that Asian girl and got tackled. You were brave. Good on you.

  I had a burst appendix the day afterward and ended up in the infirmary. In the next bed was a guy named Darryl. We were both in recovery for a long time and by the time we got well, we were too much of an embarrassment to them to let go.

  So they decided we must really be guilty. They questioned us every day. You’ve been through their questioning, I know. Imagine it for months. Darryl and I ended up cell-mates. We knew we were bugged, so we only talked about inconsequentialities. But at night, when we were in our cots, we would softly tap out messages to each other in Morse code (I knew my HAM radio days would come in useful sometime).

  At first, their questions to us were just the same crap as ever, who did it, how’d they do it. But after a little while, they switched to asking us about the Xnet. Of course, we’d never heard of it. That didn’t stop them asking.

  Darryl told me that they brought him arphid cloners, Xboxes, all kinds of technology and demanded that he tell them who used them, where they learned to mod them. Darryl told me about your games and the things you learned.

  Especially: The DHS asked us about our friends. Who did we know? What were they like? Did they have political feelings? Had they been in trouble at school? With the law?

  We call the prison Gitmo-by-the-Bay. It’s been a week since I got out and I don’t think that anyone knows that their sons and daughters are imprisoned in the middle of the Bay. At night we could hear people laughing and partying on the mainland.

  I got out last week. I won’t tell you how, in case this falls into the wrong hands. Maybe others will take my route.

  Darryl told me how to find you and made me promise to tell you what I knew when I got back. Now that I’ve done that I’m out of here like last year. One way or another, I’m leaving this country. Screw America.

  Stay strong. They’re scared of you. Kick them for me. Don
’t get caught.

  Zeb

  There were tears in my eyes as I finished the note. I had a disposable lighter somewhere on my desk that I sometimes used to melt the insulation off of wires, and I dug it out and held it to the note. I knew I owed it to Zeb to destroy it and make sure no one else ever saw it, in case it might lead them back to him, wherever he was going.

  I held the flame and the note, but I couldn’t do it.

  Darryl.

  With all the crap with the Xnet and Ange and the DHS, I’d almost forgotten he existed. He’d become a ghost, like an old friend who’d moved away or gone on an exchange program. All that time, they’d been questioning him, demanding that he rat me out, explain the Xnet, the jammers. He’d been on Treasure Island, the abandoned military base that was halfway along the demolished span of the Bay Bridge. He’d been so close I could have swam to him.

  I put the lighter down and reread the note. By the time it was done, I was weeping, sobbing. It all came back to me, the lady with the severe haircut and the questions she’d asked and the reek of piss and the stiffness of my pants as the urine dried them into coarse canvas.

  “Marcus?”

  My door was ajar and my mother was standing in it, watching me with a worried look. How long had she been there?

  I armed the tears away from my face and snorted up the snot. “Mom,” I said. “Hi.”

  She came into my room and hugged me. “What is it? Do you need to talk?”

  The note lay on the table.

  “Is that from your girlfriend? Is everything all right?”

  She’d given me an out. I could just blame it all on problems with Ange and she’d leave my room and leave me alone. I opened my mouth to do just that, and then this came out:

  “I was in jail. After the bridge blew. I was in jail for that whole time.”

  The sobs that came then didn’t sound like my voice. They sounded like an animal noise, maybe a donkey or some kind of big cat noise in the night. I sobbed so my throat burned and ached with it, so my chest heaved.

  Mom took me in her arms, the way she used to when I was a little boy, and she stroked my hair, and she murmured in my ear, and rocked me, and gradually, slowly, the sobs dissipated.

  I took a deep breath and Mom got me a glass of water. I sat on the edge of my bed and she sat in my desk chair and I told her everything.

  Everything.

  Well, most of it.

  Chapter 16

  At first Mom looked shocked, then outraged, and finally she gave up altogether and just let her jaw hang open as I took her through the interrogation, pissing myself, the bag over my head, Darryl. I showed her the note.

  “Why—?”

  In that single syllable, every recrimination I’d dealt myself in the night, every moment that I’d lacked the bravery to tell the world what it was really about, why I was really fighting, what had really inspired the Xnet.

  I sucked in a breath.

  “They told me I’d go to jail if I talked about it. Not just for a few days. Forever. I was—I was scared.”

  Mom sat with me for a long time, not saying anything. Then, “What about Darryl’s father?”

  She might as well have stuck a knitting needle in my chest. Darryl’s father. He must have assumed that Darryl was dead, long dead.

  And wasn’t he? After the DHS has held you illegally for three months, would they ever let you go?

  But Zeb got out. Maybe Darryl would get out. Maybe me and the Xnet could help get Darryl out.

  “I haven’t told him,” I said.

  Now Mom was crying. She didn’t cry easily. It was a British thing. It made her little hiccoughing sobs much worse to hear.

  “You will tell him,” she managed. “You will.”

  “I will.”

  “But first we have to tell your father.”

  Dad no longer had any regular time when he came home. Between his consulting clients—who had lots of work now that the DHS was shopping for data-mining start-ups on the peninsula—and the long commute to Berkeley, he might get home any time between 6 P.M. and midnight.

  Tonight Mom called him and told him he was coming home right now. He said something and she just repeated it: right now.

  When he got there, we had arranged ourselves in the living room with the note between us on the coffee table.

  It was easier to tell, the second time. The secret was getting lighter. I didn’t embellish, I didn’t hide anything. I came clean.

  I’d heard of coming clean before but I’d never understood what it meant until I did it. Holding in the secret had dirtied me, soiled my spirit. It had made me afraid and ashamed. It had made me into all the things that Ange said I was.

  Dad sat stiff as a ramrod the whole time, his face carved of stone. When I handed him the note, he read it twice and then set it down carefully.

  He shook his head and stood up and headed for the front door.

  “Where are you going?” Mom asked, alarmed.

  “I need a walk,” was all he managed to gasp, his voice breaking.

  We stared awkwardly at each other, Mom and me, and waited for him to come home. I tried to imagine what was going on in his head. He’d been such a different man after the bombings and I knew from Mom that what had changed him were the days of thinking I was dead. He’d come to believe that the terrorists had nearly killed his son and it had made him crazy.

  Crazy enough to do whatever the DHS asked, to line up like a good little sheep and let them control him, drive him.

  Now he knew that it was the DHS that had imprisoned me, the DHS that had taken San Francisco’s children hostage in Gitmo-by-the-Bay. It made perfect sense, now that I thought of it. Of course it had been Treasure Island where I’d been kept. Where else was a ten-minute boat ride from San Francisco?

  When Dad came back, he looked angrier than he ever had in his life.

  “You should have told me!” he roared.

  Mom interposed herself between him and me. “You’re blaming the wrong person,” she said. “It wasn’t Marcus who did the kidnapping and the intimidation.”

  He shook his head and stamped. “I’m not blaming Marcus. I know exactly who’s to blame. Me. Me and the stupid DHS. Get your shoes on, grab your coats.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To see Darryl’s father. Then we’re going to Barbara Stratford’s place.”

  I knew the name Barbara Stratford from somewhere, but I couldn’t remember where. I thought that maybe she was an old friend of my parents, but I couldn’t exactly place her.

  Meantime, I was headed for Darryl’s father’s place. I’d never really felt comfortable around the old man, who’d been a Navy radio operator and ran his household like a tight ship. He’d taught Darryl Morse code when he was a kid, which I’d always thought was cool. It was one of the ways I knew that I could trust Zeb’s letter. But for every cool thing like Morse code, Darryl’s father had some crazy military discipline that seemed to be for its own sake, like insisting on hospital corners on the beds and shaving twice a day. It drove Darryl up the wall.

  Darryl’s mother hadn’t liked it much, either, and had taken off back to her family in Minnesota when Darryl was ten—Darryl spent his summers and Christmases there.

  I was sitting in the back of the car, and I could see the back of Dad’s head as he drove. The muscles in his neck were tense and kept jumping around as he ground his jaws.

  Mom kept her hand on his arm, but no one was around to comfort me. If only I could call Ange. Or Jolu. Or Van. Maybe I would when the day was done.

  “He must have buried his son in his mind,” Dad said, as we whipped up through the hairpin curves leading up Twin Peaks to the little cottage that Darryl and his father shared. The fog was on Twin Peaks, the way it often was at night in San Francisco, making the headlamps reflect back on us. Each time we swung around a corner, I saw the valleys of the city laid out below us, bowls of twinkling lights that shifted in the mist.

  “Is this
the one?”

  “Yes,” I said. “This is it.” I hadn’t been to Darryl’s in months, but I’d spent enough time here over the years to recognize it right off.

  The three of us stood around the car for a long moment, waiting to see who would go and ring the doorbell. To my surprise, it was me.

  I rang it and we all waited in held-breath silence for a minute. I rang it again. Darryl’s father’s car was in the driveway, and we’d seen a light burning in the living room. I was about to ring a third time when the door opened.

  “Marcus?” Darryl’s father wasn’t anything like I remembered him. Unshaven, in a housecoat and bare feet, with long toenails and red eyes. He’d gained weight, and a soft extra chin wobbled beneath the firm military jaw. His thin hair was wispy and disordered.

  “Mr. Glover,” I said. My parents crowded into the door behind me.

  “Hello, Ron,” my mother said.

  “Ron,” my father said.

  “You, too? What’s going on?”

  “Can we come in?”

  His living room looked like one of those news segments they show about abandoned kids who spend a month locked in before they’re rescued by the neighbors: frozen meal boxes, empty beer cans and juice bottles, moldy cereal bowls and piles of newspapers. There was a reek of cat piss and litter crunched underneath our feet. Even without the cat piss, the smell was incredible, like a bus station toilet.

  The couch was made up with a grimy sheet and a couple of greasy pillows and the cushions had a dented, much-slept-upon look.

  We all stood there for a long silent moment, embarrassment overwhelming every other emotion. Darryl’s father looked like he wanted to die.

  Slowly, he moved aside the sheet from the sofa and cleared the stacked, greasy food trays off of a couple of the chairs, carrying them into the kitchen, and, from the sound of it, tossing them on the floor.

  We sat gingerly in the places he’d cleared, and then he came back and sat down, too.

  “I’m sorry,” he said vaguely. “I don’t really have any coffee to offer you. I’m having more groceries delivered tomorrow so I’m running low—”