Chapter 14

This chapter is dedicated to the incomparable Mysterious Galaxy in SanDiego, California. The Mysterious Galaxy folks have had me in to signbooks every time I've been in San Diego for a conference or to teach (theClarion Writers' Workshop is based at San Diego State University innearby La Jolla, CA), and every time I show up, they pack the house.
This is a store with a loyal following of die-hard fans who know thatthey'll always be able to get great recommendations and great ideas atthe store. In summer 2007, I took my writing class from Clarion downto the store for the midnight launch of the final Harry Potter book andI've never seen such a rollicking, awesomely fun party at a store.
Mysterious Galaxy: 7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd., Suite #302 SanDiego, CA USA 92111 +1 858 268 4747The Xnet wasn't much fun in the middle of the school-day, when allthe people who used it were in school. I had the piece of paper folded inthe back pocket of my jeans, and I threw it on the kitchen table when Igot home. I sat down in the living room and switched on the TV. I neverwatched it, but I knew that my parents did. The TV and the radio andthe newspapers were where they got all their ideas about the world.
The news was terrible. There were so many reasons to be scared.
American soldiers were dying all over the world. Not just soldiers,either. National guardsmen, who thought they were signing up to helprescue people from hurricanes, stationed overseas for years and years ofa long and endless war.
I flipped around the 24-hour news networks, one after another, aparade of officials telling us why we should be scared. A parade of pho-tos of bombs going off around the world.
I kept flipping and found myself looking at a familiar face. It was theguy who had come into the truck and spoken to Severe-Haircut womanwhen I was chained up in the back. Wearing a military uniform. The180caption identified him as Major General Graeme Sutherland, RegionalCommander, DHS.
"I hold in my hands actual literature on offer at the so-called concert inDolores Park last weekend." He held up a stack of pamphlets. There'dbeen lots of pamphleteers there, I remembered. Wherever you got agroup of people in San Francisco, you got pamphlets.
"I want you to look at these for a moment. Let me read you their titles.
WITHOUT THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED: A CITIZEN'S GUIDETO OVERTHROWING THE STATE. Here's one, DID THE SEPTEMBER11TH BOMBINGS REALLY HAPPEN? And another, HOW TO USETHEIR SECURITY AGAINST THEM. This literature shows us the truepurpose of the illegal gathering on Saturday night. This wasn't merely anunsafe gathering of thousands of people without proper precaution, oreven toilets. It was a recruiting rally for the enemy. It was an attempt tocorrupt children into embracing the idea that America shouldn't protectherself.
"Take this slogan, DON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER 25. What betterway to ensure that no considered, balanced, adult discussion is ever in-jected into your pro-terrorist message than to exclude adults, limitingyour group to impressionable young people?
"When police came on the scene, they found a recruitment rally forAmerica's enemies in progress. The gathering had already disrupted thenights of hundreds of residents in the area, none of whom had been con-sulted in the planning of this all night rave party.
"They ordered these people to disperse — that much is visible on allthe video — and when the revelers turned to attack them, egged on bythe musicians on stage, the police subdued them using non-lethal crowdcontrol techniques.
"The arrestees were ring-leaders and provocateurs who had led thethousands of impressionistic young people there to charge the policelines. 827 of them were taken into custody. Many of these people hadprior offenses. More than 100 of them had outstanding warrants. Theyare still in custody.
"Ladies and gentlemen, America is fighting a war on many fronts, butnowhere is she in more grave danger than she is here, at home. Whetherwe are being attacked by terrorists or those who sympathize with them."181A reporter held up a hand and said, "General Sutherland, surely you'renot saying that these children were terrorist sympathizers for attending aparty in a park?""Of course not. But when young people are brought under the influ-ence of our country's enemies, it's easy for them to end up over theirheads. Terrorists would love to recruit a fifth column to fight the war onthe home front for them. If these were my children, I'd be gravelyconcerned."Another reporter chimed in. "Surely this is just an open air concert,General? They were hardly drilling with rifles."The General produced a stack of photos and began to hold them up.
"These are pictures that officers took with infra-red cameras before mov-ing in." He held them next to his face and paged through them one at atime. They showed people dancing really rough, some people gettingcrushed or stepped on. Then they moved into sex stuff by the trees, a girlwith three guys, two guys necking together. "There were children asyoung as ten years old at this event. A deadly cocktail of drugs, propa-ganda and music resulted in dozens of injuries. It's a wonder thereweren't any deaths."I switched the TV off. They made it look like it had been a riot. If myparents thought I'd been there, they'd have strapped me to my bed for amonth and only let me out afterward wearing a tracking collar.
Speaking of which, they were going to be pissed when they found outI'd been suspended.
They didn't take it well. Dad wanted to ground me, but Mom and Italked him out of it.
"You know that vice-principal has had it in for Marcus for years,"Mom said. "The last time we met him you cursed him for an hour after-ward. I think the word 'asshole' was mentioned repeatedly."Dad shook his head. "Disrupting a class to argue against the Depart-ment of Homeland Security —""It's a social studies class, Dad," I said. I was beyond caring anymore,but I felt like if Mom was going to stick up for me, I should help her out.
"We were talking about the DHS. Isn't debate supposed to be healthy?""Look, son," he said. He'd taking to calling me "son" a lot. It made mefeel like he'd stopped thinking of me as a person and switched to think-ing of me as a kind of half-formed larva that needed to be guided out of182adolescence. I hated it. "You're going to have to learn to live with the factthat we live in a different world today. You have every right to speakyour mind of course, but you have to be prepared for the consequencesof doing so. You have to face the fact that there are people who are hurt-ing, who aren't going to want to argue the finer points of Constitutionallaw when their lives are at stakes. We're in a lifeboat now, and onceyou're in the lifeboat, no one wants to hear about how mean the captainis being."I barely restrained myself from rolling my eyes.
"I've been assigned two weeks of independent study, writing one pa-per for each of my subjects, using the city for my background — a his-tory paper, a social studies paper, an English paper, a physics paper. Itbeats sitting around at home watching television."Dad looked hard at me, like he suspected I was up to something, thennodded. I said goodnight to them and went up to my room. I fired upmy Xbox and opened a word-processor and started to brainstorm ideasfor my papers. Why not? It really was better than sitting around at home.
I ended up IMing with Ange for quite a while that night. She was sym-pathetic about everything and told me she'd help me with my papers if Iwanted to meet her after school the next night. I knew where her schoolwas — she went to the same school as Van — and it was all the way overin the East Bay, where I hadn't visited since the bombs went.
I was really excited at the prospect of seeing her again. Every nightsince the party, I'd gone to bed thinking of two things: the sight of thecrowd charging the police lines and the feeling of the side of her breastunder her shirt as we leaned against the pillar. She was amazing. I'd nev-er been with a girl as… aggressive as her before. It had always been meputting the moves on and them pushing me away. I got the feeling thatAnge was as much of a horn-dog as I was. It was a tantalizing notion.
I slept soundly that night, with exciting dreams of me and Ange andwhat we might do if we found ourselves in a secluded spot somewhere.
The next day, I set out to work on my papers. San Francisco is a goodplace to write about. History? Sure, it's there, from the Gold Rush to theWWII shipyards, the Japanese internment camps, the invention of thePC. Physics? The Exploratorium has the coolest exhibits of any museumI've ever been to. I took a perverse satisfaction in the exhibits on soil li-quefaction during big quakes. English? Jack London, Beat Poets, science183fiction writers like Pat Murphy and Rudy Rucker. Social studies? TheFree Speech Movement, Cesar Chavez, gay rights, feminism, anti-warmovement…I've always loved just learning stuff for its own sake. Just to be smarterabout the world around me. I could do that just by walking around thecity. I decided I'd do an English paper about the Beats first. City Lightsbooks had a great library in an upstairs room where Alan Ginsberg andhis buddies had created their radical druggy poetry. The one we'd readin English class was Howl and I would never forget the opening lines,they gave me shivers down my back:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hyster-ical naked,dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angryfix,angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to thestarry dynamo in the machinery of night…I liked the way he ran those words all together, "starving hysterical na-ked." I knew how that felt. And "best minds of my generation" made methink hard too. It made me remember the park and the police and the gasfalling. They busted Ginsberg for obscenity over Howl — all about a lineabout gay sex that would hardly have caused us to blink an eye today. Itmade me happy somehow, knowing that we'd made some progress.
That things had been even more restrictive than this before.
I lost myself in the library, reading these beautiful old editions of thebooks. I got lost in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, a novel I'd been meaningto read for a long time, and a clerk who came up to check on me noddedapprovingly and found me a cheap edition that he sold me for six bucks.
I walked into Chinatown and had dim sum buns and noodles withhot-sauce that I had previously considered to be pretty hot, but whichwould never seem anything like hot ever again, not now that I'd had anAnge special.
As the day wore on toward the afternoon, I got on the BART andswitched to a San Mateo bridge shuttle bus to bring me around to theEast Bay. I read my copy of On the Road and dug the scenery whizzingpast. On the Road is a semi-autobiographical novel about Jack Kerouac, adruggy, hard-drinking writer who goes hitchhiking around America,working crummy jobs, howling through the streets at night, meetingpeople and parting ways. Hipsters, sad-faced hobos, con-men, muggers,184scumbags and angels. There's not really a plot — Kerouac supposedlywrote it in three weeks on a long roll of paper, stoned out of his mind —only a bunch of amazing things, one thing happening after another. Hemakes friends with self-destructing people like Dean Moriarty, who gethim involved in weird schemes that never really work out, but still itworks out, if you know what I mean.
There was a rhythm to the words, it was luscious, I could hear it beingread aloud in my head. It made me want to lie down in the bed of apickup truck and wake up in a dusty little town somewhere in the cent-ral valley on the way to LA, one of those places with a gas station and adiner, and just walk out into the fields and meet people and see stuff anddo stuff.
It was a long bus ride and I must have dozed off a little — staying uplate IMing with Ange was hard on my sleep-schedule, since Mom stillexpected me down for breakfast. I woke up and changed buses and be-fore long, I was at Ange's school.
She came bounding out of the gates in her uniform — I'd never seenher in it before, it was kind of cute in a weird way, and reminded me ofVan in her uniform. She gave me a long hug and a hard kiss on thecheek.
"Hello you!" she said.
"Hiya!""Whatcha reading?"I'd been waiting for this. I'd marked the passage with a finger. "Listen:
'They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after asI've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the onlypeople for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad totalk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the onesthat never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn likefabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the starsand in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes"Awww!"'"She took the book and read the passage again for herself. "Wow,dingledodies! I love it! Is it all like this?"I told her about the parts I'd read, walking slowly down the sidewalkback toward the bus-stop. Once we turned the corner, she put her armaround my waist and I slung mine around her shoulder. Walking downthe street with a girl — my girlfriend? Sure, why not? — talking about185this cool book. It was heaven. Made me forget my troubles for a littlewhile.
"Marcus?"I turned around. It was Van. In my subconscious I'd expected this. Iknew because my conscious mind wasn't remotely surprised. It wasn't abig school, and they all got out at the same time. I hadn't spoken to Vanin weeks, and those weeks felt like months. We used to talk every day.
"Hey, Van," I said. I suppressed the urge to take my arm off of Ange'sshoulders. Van seemed surprised, but not angry, more ashen, shaken.
She looked closely at the two of us.
"Angela?""Hey, Vanessa," Ange said.
"What are you doing here?""I came out to get Ange," I said, trying to keep my tone neutral. I wassuddenly embarrassed to be seen with another girl.
"Oh," Van said. "Well, it was nice to see you.""Nice to see you too, Vanessa," Ange said, swinging me around,marching me back toward the bus-stop.
"You know her?" Ange said.
"Yeah, since forever.""Was she your girlfriend?""What? No! No way! We were just friends.""You were friends?"I felt like Van was walking right behind us, listening in, though at thepace we were walking, she would have to be jogging to keep up. I res-isted the temptation to look over my shoulder for as long as possible,then I did. There were lots of girls from the school behind us, but no Van.
"She was with me and Jose-Luis and Darryl when we were arrested.
We used to ARG together. The four of us, we were kind of best friends.""And what happened?"I dropped my voice. "She didn't like the Xnet," I said. "She thought wewould get into trouble. That I'd get other people into trouble.""And that's why you stopped being friends?""We just drifted apart."186We walked a few steps. "You weren't, you know, boyfriend/girlfriendfriends?""No!" I said. My face was hot. I felt like I sounded like I was lying,even though I was telling the truth.
Ange jerked us to a halt and studied my face.
"Were you?""No! Seriously! Just friends. Darryl and her — well, not quite, butDarryl was so into her. There was no way —""But if Darryl hadn't been into her, you would have, huh?""No, Ange, no. Please, just believe me and let it go. Vanessa was agood friend and we're not anymore, and that upsets me, but I was neverinto her that way, all right?
She slumped a little. "OK, OK. I'm sorry. I don't really get along withher is all. We've never gotten along in all the years we've known eachother."Oh ho, I thought. This would be how it came to be that Jolu knew herfor so long and I never met her; she had some kind of thing with Vanand he didn't want to bring her around.
She gave me a long hug and we kissed, and a bunch of girls passed usgoing woooo and we straightened up and headed for the bus-stop. Aheadof us walked Van, who must have gone past while we were kissing. I feltlike a complete jerk.
Of course, she was at the stop and on the bus and we didn't say aword to each other, and I tried to make conversation with Ange all theway, but it was awkward.
The plan was to stop for a coffee and head to Ange's place to hang outand "study," i.e. take turns on her Xbox looking at the Xnet. Ange's momgot home late on Tuesdays, which was her night for yoga class and din-ner with her girls, and Ange's sister was going out with her boyfriend, sowe'd have the place to ourselves. I'd been having pervy thoughts about itever since we'd made the plan.
We got to her place and went straight to her room and shut the door.
Her room was kind of a disaster, covered with layers of clothes and note-books and parts of PCs that would dig into your stocking feet like cal-trops. Her desk was worse than the floor, piled high with books andcomics, so we ended up sitting on her bed, which was OK by me.
187The awkwardness from seeing Van had gone away somewhat and wegot her Xbox up and running. It was in the center of a nest of wires, somegoing to a wireless antenna she'd hacked into it and stuck to the windowso she could tune in the neighbors' WiFi. Some went to a couple of oldlaptop screens she'd turned into standalone monitors, balanced onstands and bristling with exposed electronics. The screens were on bothbedside tables, which was an excellent setup for watching movies orIMing from bed — she could turn the monitors sidewise and lie on herside and they'd be right-side-up, no matter which side she lay on.
We both knew what we were really there for, sitting side by sidepropped against the bedside table. I was trembling a little and super-con-scious of the warmth of her leg and shoulder against mine, but I neededto go through the motions of logging into Xnet and seeing what email I'dgotten and so on.
There was an email from a kid who liked to send in funny phone-camvideos of the DHS being really crazy — the last one had been of themdisassembling a baby's stroller after a bomb-sniffing dog had shown aninterest in it, taking it apart with screwdrivers right on the street in theMarina while all these rich people walked past, staring at them and mar-veling at how weird it was.
I'd linked to the video and it had been downloaded like crazy. He'dhosted it on the Internet Archive's Alexandria mirror in Egypt, wherethey'd host anything for free so long as you'd put it under the CreativeCommons license, which let anyone remix it and share it. The US archive— which was down in the Presidio, only a few minutes away — hadbeen forced to take down all those videos in the name of national secur-ity, but the Alexandria archive had split away into its own organizationand was hosting anything that embarrassed the USA.
This kid — his handle was Kameraspie — had sent me an even bettervideo this time around. It was at the doorway to City Hall in CivicCenter, a huge wedding cake of a building covered with statues in littlearchways and gilt leaves and trim. The DHS had a secure perimeteraround the building, and Kameraspie's video showed a great shot oftheir checkpoint as a guy in an officer's uniform approached and showedhis ID and put his briefcase on the X-ray belt.
It was all OK until one of the DHS people saw something he didn't likeon the X-ray. He questioned the General, who rolled his eyes and saidsomething inaudible (the video had been shot from across the street,188apparently with a homemade concealed zoom lens, so the audio wasmostly of people walking past and traffic noises).
The General and the DHS guys got into an argument, and the longerthey argued, the more DHS guys gathered around them. Finally, theGeneral shook his head angrily and waved his finger at the DHS guy'schest and picked up his briefcase and started to walk away. The DHSguys shouted at him, but he didn't slow. His body language really said,"I am totally, utterly pissed."Then it happened. The DHS guys ran after the general. Kameraspieslowed the video down here, so we could see, in frame-by-frame slo-mo,the general half-turning, his face all like, "No freaking way are you aboutto tackle me," then changing to horror as three of the giant DHS guardsslammed into him, knocking him sideways, then catching him at themiddle, like a career-ending football tackle. The general — middle aged,steely grey hair, lined and dignified face — went down like a sack ofpotatoes and bounced twice, his face slamming off the sidewalk andblood starting out of his nose.
The DHS hog-tied the general, strapping him at ankles and wrists. Thegeneral was shouting now, really shouting, his face purpling under theblood streaming from his nose. Legs swished by in the tight zoom.
Passing pedestrians looked at this guy in his uniform, getting tied up,and you could see from his face that this was the worst part, this was theritual humiliation, the removal of dignity. The clip ended.
"Oh my dear sweet Buddha," I said looking at the screen as it faded toblack, starting the video again. I nudged Ange and showed her the clip.
She watched wordless, jaw hanging down to her chest.
"Post that," she said. "Post that post that post that post that!"I posted it. I could barely type as I wrote it up, describing what I'dseen, adding a note to see if anyone could identify the military man inthe video, if anyone knew anything about this.
I hit publish.
We watched the video. We watched it again.
My email pinged.
>
I totally recognize that dude — you can find his bio on Wikipedia.
He's General Claude Geist. He commanded the joint UN peacekeepingmission in Haiti.
189I checked the bio. There was a picture of the general at a press confer-ence, and notes about his role in the difficult Haiti mission. It was clearlythe same guy.
I updated the post.
Theoretically, this was Ange's and my chance to make out, but thatwasn't what we ended up doing. We crawled the Xnet blogs, looking formore accounts of the DHS searching people, tackling people, invadingthem. This was a familiar task, the same thing I'd done with all the foot-age and accounts from the riots in the park. I started a new category onmy blog for this, AbusesOfAuthority, and filed them away. Ange keptcoming up with new search terms for me to try and by the time her momgot home, my new category had seventy posts, headlined by GeneralGeist's City Hall takedown.
I worked on my Beat paper all the next day at home, reading the Ker-ouac and surfing the Xnet. I was planning on meeting Ange at school,but I totally wimped out at the thought of seeing Van again, so I textedher an excuse about working on the paper.
There were all kinds of great suggestions for AbusesOfAuthority com-ing in; hundreds of little and big ones, pictures and audio. The memewas spreading.
It spread. The next morning there were even more. Someone started anew blog called AbusesOfAuthority that collected hundreds more. Thepile grew. We competed to find the juiciest stories, the craziest pictures.
The deal with my parents was that I'd eat breakfast with them everymorning and talk about the projects I was doing. They liked that I wasreading Kerouac. It had been a favorite book of both of theirs and itturned out there was already a copy on the bookcase in my parents'
room. My dad brought it down and I flipped through it. There were pas-sages marked up with pen, dog-eared pages, notes in the margin. Mydad had really loved this book.
It made me remember a better time, when my Dad and I had been ableto talk for five minutes without shouting at each other about terrorism,and we had a great breakfast talking about the way that the novel wasplotted, all the crazy adventures.
But the next morning at breakfast they were both glued to the radio.
"Abuses of Authority — it's the latest craze on San Francisco's notori-ous Xnet, and it's captured the world's attention. Called A-oh-A, the190movement is composed of 'Little Brothers' who watch back against theDepartment of Homeland Security's anti-terrorism measures, document-ing the failures and excesses. The rallying cry is a popular viral videoclip of a General Claude Geist, a retired three-star general, being tackledby DHS officers on the sidewalk in front of City Hall. Geist hasn't made astatement on the incident, but commentary from young people who areupset with their own treatment has been fast and furious.
"Most notable has been the global attention the movement has re-ceived. Stills from the Geist video have appeared on the front pages ofnewspapers in Korea, Great Britain, Germany, Egypt and Japan, andbroadcasters around the world have aired the clip on prime-time news.
The issue came to a head last night, when the British BroadcastingCorporation's National News Evening program ran a special report onthe fact that no American broadcaster or news agency has covered thisstory. Commenters on the BBC's website noted that BBC America's ver-sion of the news did not carry the report."They brought on a couple of interviews: British media watchdogs, aSwedish Pirate Party kid who made jeering remarks about America'scorrupt press, a retired American newscaster living in Tokyo, then theyaired a short clip from Al-Jazeera, comparing the American press recordand the record of the national news-media in Syria.
I felt like my parents were staring at me, that they knew what I wasdoing. But when I cleared away my dishes, I saw that they were lookingat each other.
Dad was holding his coffee cup so hard his hands were shaking. Momwas looking at him.
"They're trying to discredit us," Dad said finally. "They're trying tosabotage the efforts to keep us safe."I opened my mouth, but my mom caught my eye and shook her head.
Instead I went up to my room and worked on my Kerouac paper. OnceI'd heard the door slam twice, I fired up my Xbox and got online.
>
Hello M1k3y. This is Colin Brown. I'm a producer with the CanadianBroadcasting Corporation's news programme The National. We're doinga story on Xnet and have sent a reporter to San Francisco to cover it fromthere. Would you be interested in doing an interview to discuss yourgroup and its actions?
191I stared at the screen. Jesus. They wanted to interview me about "mygroup"?
>
Um thanks no. I'm all about privacy. And it's not "my group." Butthanks for doing the story!
A minute later, another email.
>
We can mask you and ensure your anonymity. You know that the De-partment of Homeland Security will be happy to provide their ownspokesperson. I'm interested in getting your side.
I filed the email. He was right, but I'd be crazy to do this. For all Iknew, he was the DHS.
I picked up more Kerouac. Another email came in. Same request,different news-agency: KQED wanted to meet me and record a radio in-terview. A station in Brazil. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Deutsche Welle. All day, the press requests came in. All day, I politelyturned them down.
I didn't get much Kerouac read that day.
"Hold a press-conference," is what Ange said, as we sat in the cafe nearher place that evening. I wasn't keen on going out to her school anymore,getting stuck on a bus with Van again.
"What? Are you crazy?""Do it in Clockwork Plunder. Just pick a trading post where there's noPvP allowed and name a time. You can login from here."PvP is player-versus-player combat. Parts of Clockwork Plunder wereneutral ground, which meant that we could theoretically bring in a ton ofnoob reporters without worrying about gamers killing them in themiddle of the press-conference.
"I don't know anything about press conferences.""Oh, just google it. I'm sure someone's written an article on holding asuccessful one. I mean, if the President can manage it, I'm sure you can.
He looks like he can barely tie his shoes without help."We ordered more coffee.
"You are a very smart woman," I said.
"And I'm beautiful," she said.
192"That too," I said.