Homeland

  I stumbled after him, scuffing my boots on the ground, kicking them off in the doorway, trailing after him up to the bedroom.

  I barely registered that Van was in his bed, sitting up in the dark, wearing a T-shirt, hair in a crazy anime-spray. “Hey, Van,” I said, as Darryl steered me to the narrow camping mattress that was already laid out at the foot of the bed. I flopped down on it, eyes closing before my head hit the pillow. Someone—Darryl—tried to make me roll off the bed so that he could pull the spare blanket out from under me and cover me with it, but I wasn’t budging. I was made of lead. My body knew that it was somewhere safe, with people I could trust, and it was not going to allow me to keep it awake one second longer. A half-formed thought about setting an alarm so I wouldn’t be late for work crossed my mind, but my hands were as heavy as cinder blocks, and my phone was a million miles away in my pocket. Besides, I was already asleep.

  * * *

  I woke to the smells of bacon and eggs and toast and, most of all, coffee. The bedroom was empty, filled with gray light filtering through the heavy blinds. I pulled them aside and saw that it was broad daylight. I checked my phone, noting the ache as I pulled it out—I’d slept on it—and saw that it was 11:24. I was incredibly late for work. My adrenals tried to fire and fill me with panic, but I was empty. Instead, I felt a kind of low-grade anxiety as I had a quick pee and headed downstairs into the sunny kitchen.

  The light dazzled me and I shaded my eyes, provoking laughter from Darryl and Van, who were dancing around the kitchen in a clatter of pans and plates and glasses and mugs.

  “Told you that’d get him up,” Darryl said. “The boy thinks with his stomach.”

  Van giggled. “That’s a good six inches higher than most boys’ thought-centers.” They smooched. Were Ange and I this sickening? Probably, I decided.

  “Guys,” I said. “I really, really owe you, but I can’t stay for breakfast. I’m late—”

  “For work,” Darryl said. “I know. Which is why I called your mom and she called your boss and told him you were feeling poorly and would work from home for the morning and try to come in this afternoon. You’re covered, bro. Sit and eat.”

  Friends! Did it get any better? I poked my nose toward the stove where a little caffettiera was starting to bubble. If you have to make coffee, a caffettiera isn’t the worst way to do it, but they’re tricky to get right. They’re basically a double boiler: you fill the bottom part with water, the top with ground coffee, and you put it straight on the stove. The water heats up and expands and the pressure forces it through the coffee and into the top of the pot. But they have a tendency to get too hot, and the superhot water extracts all the worst, most bitter acids, making a cup of strong, nasty coffee that needs a gallon of milk and a pound of sugar to drown out the ick.

  “Let me in,” I said, twisting the burner off, grabbing a kitchen towel and running it under the cold tap and then wrapping it around the boiler, cooling down the water and stopping the extraction. I gave it a three-count, then unscrewed the top section. Ideally, you’d want to cool it all off even faster, but caffettiera have a tendency to crack if they change temperature too fast. I’d found that out the hard way in an adventure involving a bowl full of ice water, a caffettiera, and a mess that took most of the day to clean up. At least I didn’t blow my hand off when the cast-iron boiler shattered.

  “Marcus,” Darryl said, “it’s only coffee.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s only coffee. What’s your point?” I reached for the cupboard where the little espresso cups I’d given Darryl for Christmas years ago were kept, automatically remembering which cupboard that was, and I fished down three cups and poured out the coffee. I tasted mine. It wasn’t terrible. It was almost good.

  Darryl grabbed another and had a sip, then nodded. “Okay, that’s better than anything I make.”

  Van tried hers. “Darryl, that’s amazing. Come on, give the man credit where credit’s due.”

  Darryl faked a little bow at me. “Sir, you astound me with your coffee prowess. Prithee, place thine butt in yonder chair so that I might proffer you a repast of finest fried victuals.”

  Van swatted him on the ass and I sat down and food appeared before me, with knife and fork and Tabasco—which reminded me of Ange and sent a knife through my heart—and even a multivitamin.

  Darryl and Van sat, too, and we turned food into dirty dishes and then I turned the dirty dishes into clean ones while Darryl found some tunes and put them on and Van had a shower, coming back down with her hair wrapped in a towel, dressed in a little skirt and a loose, floppy cotton top that hung down as low as the skirt. She looked amazing, and I found myself staring for longer than was polite. She caught me at it and gave me a weird look and I looked away.

  “You ready to talk about it?” Darryl said.

  “Not really,” I said. “But I guess I’d better.”

  * * *

  Telling it again, the day after, with a full stomach, felt a little like I was recounting the plot of a movie I’d seen and less like I was telling the story of something that had happened to me. I found myself discoursing on weird details I’d noticed, like the Zyz guys’ tactical gear obsession, which provoked comforting hoots of laughter from Van, making it all seem more like a well-worn story of my life, rather than a source of imminent doom. Darryl and Van knew about Zyz, so I was able to skip over that part of my talk with Ange, which left me with the part where she’d told me I was a coward and a jerk for not putting my life at risk. Or at least, that’s how it came out.

  They made sympathetic faces and noises, and I felt better in a way that was also kind of bad. Like I knew that I’d made myself to be the hero of a story that I didn’t deserve to be the hero of.

  “Jesus, Marcus, what a frigging nightmare,” Van said.

  “So what are you going to do?” Darryl said.

  Van gave him an impatient look. “What do you think? He’s going to walk away from this. He’s right: this is too risky for him. It’s not his fight.”

  Darryl had been holding her hand, and he let go of it. “Come on, he can’t do that. For one thing, there’s other people involved now. Even if he stops, they won’t.”

  Van folded her arms. “Jolu will shut it down if Marcus tells him to. Problem solved.”

  It was amazing. They’d gone from being a cuddly couple to furious in seconds. It made me realize how infrequently I bickered with Ange, and how little I knew about their relationship. I tried to say something, but Darryl was already speaking.

  “No, he won’t. He can’t and he shouldn’t. The stuff about Zyz, all that other stuff, it needs to come out.”

  “Oh really? And why does it need to come out? Is it going to solve anything? Don’t you think that everyone already knows that the whole system is rotten? Do you think a bunch of anonymous, unverified Internet rumors are going to make people rise up and take action? Throw off their chains and free the world? Come on, Darryl. After everything you’ve been through—”

  Darryl stood up abruptly. “Going for a walk,” he said. He was out the door before I could say anything. Darryl had had it worse than me, had been in Gitmo-by-the-Bay for months. They’d held him in solitary, messed with his mind, hurt him in ways that showed and ways that didn’t. He’d spent a month in the hospital under observation before they let him out. No one ever said it out loud, but I knew they’d had him on suicide watch.

  Van had tears in her eyes. “He is such an idiot sometimes,” she said. “What’s wrong with wanting to be safe? Where does he get off making you take the risk for someone else’s principles?”

  I didn’t have anything to say to that. Of course, they weren’t someone else’s principles, they were mine. Or they had been, before I’d had the principles terrorized out of me. How was it that Darryl had gone through so much more than I had but had emerged so fearless? Was he the broken one, or was I?

  Van was crying now. I gave her a half-assed hug and she put her face on my shoulder and really cried,
hard. She’d kissed me, just once, hard on the mouth, when she’d come through for me and helped me get a message through to Barbara Stratford at the Bay Guardian. That’s when she’d confessed to me that she had a thing for me, and we’d never spoken about it since. At that moment, it was all I could think about. Between the fight with Ange and the events of the past few days and the strain, I felt like I was about to do something really, really stupid, like kiss her again.

  I let go of her and stood up. My shoulder was wet with her tears. She looked up at me, tears streaking her face. I felt like I might cry, too. “I’m going to go find Darryl,” I said. “He shouldn’t be alone.”

  It was only once I was out the door that I wondered how Van felt about being alone.

  * * *

  I found Darryl exactly where I expected to find him: a little dog run up the hill from his house that had a commanding view of a valley bowl that swept back up the hills on the other side, to more hills, set below the weird semihuman shape of Sutro Tower, the broadcast antenna that looked like an alien with its hands held up in surrender. It’s where we’d always snuck off to when we were up to no good—a covert joint or an illicit bottle of something, even a couple of epic firecracker experiments, which had miraculously failed to blind or maim us. Judging by the number of times we’d found roaches, bottles, and used-up firecrackers up there, we were hardly the only ones.

  Darryl was sitting on the graffiti-carved bench looking down at the valley and the cars below, staring into the middle distance and seeing nothing, I guessed. I sat down next to him.

  “I don’t know how you can be so brave,” I said. “I really don’t. I wish I could do it.”

  He made a noise that sounded a bit like a laugh, but with no humor in it. “Brave? Marcus, I’m not brave. I’m pissed. All the time, do you understand that? A hundred times a day, I feel like I could beat someone’s head in. Mostly hers.” I didn’t have to ask who “her” was—Carrie Johnstone, the woman of my nightmares. Darryl’s, too. “I get so angry, so fast. It’s like I’m watching myself from outside myself.

  “You got to do something. I was locked away. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t help spread the Xnet, or go to big demonstrations, or jam with the other Xnetters. I sat in that room, naked, alone, for hours and hours and hours, nothing in there but my thoughts, my voices.”

  I’d never really thought of myself as lucky for being where I had been after the DHS took over San Francisco, but now that I looked at it from Darryl’s point of view, I had to admit that yeah, it could have been a lot worse. I tried to imagine what it would have been like to be totally helpless and alone, instead of with all these amazing friends and people who looked up to me and hailed me.

  “I’m sorry, D,” I said.

  “It’s not your fault,” he said. “I don’t want to put this on you. It’s my own damned problem.” He swallowed a couple times. “It’s partly why I hadn’t been around much for you lately. Didn’t want to say something, you know, ugly. Because I know you did what you did for me.” Had I? Maybe a little. But I also did it for me, for the humiliation and suffering and fear, to try and get past all that. “But when Jolu told me about the darknet, when I saw those documents, I felt, like, all right, now it’s my turn. Now I can finally do something about all the nastiness and corruption and evil in the world.

  “But Van, she’s not down for that. She just wants me to be safe. I get that. But she doesn’t understand how being ‘safe’ means that I can’t be whole again, can’t get demons out of my head. I need to make something right, I need to be the star of my own movie for a change.”

  “Jeez, D, man—” I couldn’t really find the words. I guess I’d suspected some of this, but I don’t think I’d ever imagined that Darryl would ever say these words to me. It wasn’t the kind of thing that guys said to each other—not even guys who were as close as brothers, the way we had been.

  “Yeah,” he said. “It sure is a bitch, isn’t it?”

  “So what do you want to do?” I said.

  “What do I want to do?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. What do you want to do? Not ‘What do you think I should do?’ or ‘What do you think is the safest thing to do?’ What does Darryl Glover want to do, right now, today?”

  He looked down at his hands. His fingernails were chewed ragged, his cuticles dotted with little scabs from where he’d chewed them bloody. He’d done that as a kid, but he’d stopped when we were both fourteen. I didn’t know he’d started again.

  “I want to release the whole thing. Today. Now.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, that sounds about right. Let’s fucking do it.”

  * * *

  Van didn’t like it, but she got in the car with us. Darryl drove carefully and slowly, but I was in the passenger seat and I could see how his hands were shaking. We snarled in traffic in SoMa, and Darryl showed off his encyclopedic knowledge of the alleyways of the neighborhood to beat it, popping out on Market Street from an alleyway that was so narrow we scraped up a couple of plastic recycling wheelie-bins on our way out. He was in Hayes Valley a few minutes later, pulling up in front of Ange’s house. I knew she didn’t have any classes that afternoon, but she hadn’t answered her phone when I called her. I thumped on her door.

  She came down in track pants and the T-shirt she’d slept in the night before, her eyes swollen and red. She folded her arms when she saw me and glared. “Get dressed, okay?” I said. “You can be pissed at me later. Get dressed.” She looked over my shoulder at Darryl, who waved at her. Van gave a half-assed, unenthusiastic wave, too.

  “You’re kidding me,” she said.

  “Get dressed,” I said. “It’s happening.”

  She gave me a long, searching look. I looked back at her, thinking, Come on, Ange, argue later, do this now before I lose my nerve. My heart was fluttering in my chest like a pigeon trapped in a store, beating against the windows and trying to break out.

  She turned on her heel and disappeared into the house. I heard her run up the stairs to her room. A minute later, her little sister, Tina, appeared in the hallway. “You remember when I told you if you broke her heart I’d pull your scrotum over your head?” She was two years younger than Ange, and tall and skinny where Ange was short and curvy, but they were unmistakably sisters, with nearly the same voice and facial expressions.

  “I remember, Tina. Can we save the scrotal reconfiguration for later? We’re kind of into something more important than me or Ange or any of us.”

  She cocked her head. “I’ll think about it.”

  Ange came pelting down the stairs, toothpaste on the corner of her mouth. She was wearing a long electric-blue raincoat I loved and hand-painted Keds and huge, squarish Japanese pants she’d sewn herself from a pattern, all clothes that had been strewn on the floor of her room the last time I’d been in it, a hundred years ago, the night before.

  “Tina, enough with the scrotums, already,” Ange said as she reached us. Tina made an exaggerated, monkeylike face at her and then gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Come on,” Ange said to me, whisking past me toward Darryl’s car, hesitating for a second before yanking open the back door and sliding into the seat next to Van. I brought up the rear and got into the passenger seat, checking out whether Van and Ange were ready to kill each other while trying to look like I wasn’t checking it out at all.

  Inside the car, the tension was as thick as the fog on a wet night on Twin Peaks.

  “You know where Jolu’s office is, right?” I said to Darryl.

  “We’re going to see Jolu?” Ange said.

  “I told you,” I said. “It’s happening. And if it’s going to happen, we should all be there, in person. Better than worrying about our computers or phones being tapped.”

  Ange took her phone out of her purse and switched it off. I did the same, and so did Van. Darryl dug his phone out and handed it to me, and I did the same for him.

  “Okay,” Ange said.

  Darryl said, “Yeah
, I know where he works.” We were halfway there already. Darryl had an almost mystical knack for beating San Francisco traffic. He could have been the world’s greatest cab driver or getaway man.

  “What’s the plan?” Ange said as we got closer.

  Van said, “They don’t have a plan. They just got in the car and started driving.”

  I looked over my shoulder at Ange, who was nodding. “Yeah,” she said. “That sounds like them.”

  The two women looked at each other for a moment. I tried not to hold my breath. They’d disliked each other since eighth grade, and while I’d never gotten the whole story, I assumed that it was one of those old grievances that takes on a life of its own, so that the reason you don’t get along is that you don’t get along.

  They stopped looking. I turned back around. A few seconds later, Van said, conversationally, “You got a lawyer?”

  Ange said, “Not really. There was the public defender and that guy from the ACLU, back in the Gitmo-by-the-Bay days, but no one who’s really my lawyer.”

  “Yeah,” Van said. “Did you have the woman from ACLU, or the guy?”

  “Both. But the woman really seemed like she knew her stuff. What was her name?”

  “Alyssa? Alanna?”

  “Elana,” Ange said. “She was great.”

  “So I was thinking we should write a lawyer’s number on our arms, you know, just in case. One phone call, right? Don’t want to waste it calling directory assistance.”

  “I’m pretty sure I’ve got her number in my email.” I heard Ange open her computer, enter her password.

  “Here’s a Sharpie.”

  There was some mutual arm-scribbling.

  “Not so big,” Ange said.

  “If I write it this big, the rest of us will be able to read it from across the room, even if ours has been washed off or, you know, whatever.”

  “Good point,” Ange said. “Here, roll up your sleeve.”

  “You really think if we get busted anyone’s going to let us talk to a lawyer?” I asked, secretly pleased at how civilized the two of them were being to each other.