Epilogue

This chapter is dedicated to Hudson Booksellers, the booksellers that arein practically every airport in the USA. Most of the Hudson stands havejust a few titles (though those are often surprisingly diverse), but the bigones, like the one in the AA terminal at Chicago's O'Hare, are as goodas any neighborhood store. It takes something special to bring a personaltouch to an airport, and Hudson's has saved my mind on more than onelong Chicago layover.
Hudson BooksellersBarbara called me at the office on July 4th weekend. I wasn't the onlyone who'd come into work on the holiday weekend, but I was the onlyone whose excuse was that my day-release program wouldn't let meleave town.
In the end, they convicted me of stealing Masha's phone. Can you be-lieve that? The prosecution had done a deal with my lawyer to drop allcharges related to "Electronic terrorism" and "inciting riots" in exchangefor my pleading guilty to the misdemeanor petty theft charge. I got threemonths in a day-release program with a half-way house for juvenile de-fenders in the Mission. I slept at the halfway house, sharing a dorm witha bunch of actual criminals, gang kids and druggie kids, a couple of realnuts. During the day, I was "free" to go out and work at my "job.""Marcus, they're letting her go," she said.
"Who?""Johnstone, Carrie Johnstone," she said. "The closed military tribunalcleared her of any wrongdoing. The file is sealed. She's being returned toactive duty. They're sending her to Iraq."Carrie Johnstone was Severe Haircut Woman's name. It came out inthe preliminary hearings at the California Superior Court, but that wasjust about all that came out. She wouldn't say a word about who she tookorders from, what she'd done, who had been imprisoned and why. Shejust sat, perfectly silent, day after day, in the courthouse.
The Feds, meanwhile, had blustered and shouted about the Governor's"unilateral, illegal" shut-down of the Treasure Island facility, and theMayor's eviction of fed cops from San Francisco. A lot of those cops hadended up in state prisons, along with the guards from Gitmo-by-the-Bay.
295Then, one day, there was no statement from the White House, nothingfrom the state capitol. And the next day, there was a dry, tense press-conference held jointly on the steps of the Governor's mansion, wherethe head of the DHS and the governor announced their "understanding."The DHS would hold a closed, military tribunal to investigate"possible errors in judgment" committed after the attack on the BayBridge. The tribunal would use every tool at its disposal to ensure thatcriminal acts were properly punished. In return, control over DHS opera-tions in California would go through the State Senate, which would havethe power to shut down, inspect, or re-prioritize all homeland security inthe state.
The roar of the reporters had been deafening and Barbara had gottenthe first question in. "Mr Governor, with all due respect: we have incon-trovertible video evidence that Marcus Yallow, a citizen of this state, nat-ive born, was subjected to a simulated execution by DHS officers, appar-ently acting on orders from the White House. Is the State really willing toabandon any pretense of justice for its citizens in the face of illegal, bar-baric torture?" Her voice trembled, but didn't crack.
The Governor spread his hands. "The military tribunals will accom-plish justice. If Mr Yallow — or any other person who has cause to faultthe Department of Homeland Security — wants further justice, he is, ofcourse, entitled to sue for such damages as may be owing to him fromthe federal government."That's what I was doing. Over twenty thousand civil lawsuits werefiled against the DHS in the week after the Governor's announcement.
Mine was being handled by the ACLU, and they'd filed motions to get atthe results of the closed military tribunals. So far, the courts were prettysympathetic to this.
But I hadn't expected this.
"She got off totally Scot-free?""The press release doesn't say much. 'After a thorough examination ofthe events in San Francisco and in the special anti-terror detention centeron Treasure Island, it is the finding of this tribunal that Ms Johnstone'sactions do not warrant further discipline.' There's that word, 'further' —like they've already punished her."I snorted. I'd dreamed of Carrie Johnstone nearly every night since Iwas released from Gitmo-by-the-Bay. I'd seen her face looming overmine, that little snarly smile as she told the man to give me a "drink."296"Marcus —" Barbara said, but I cut her off.
"It's fine. It's fine. I'm going to do a video about this. Get it out over theweekend. Mondays are big days for viral video. Everyone'll be comingback from the holiday weekend, looking for something funny to forwardaround school or the office."I saw a shrink twice a week as part of my deal at the halfway house.
Once I'd gotten over seeing that as some kind of punishment, it had beengood. He'd helped me focus on doing constructive things when I wasupset, instead of letting it eat me up. The videos helped.
"I have to go," I said, swallowing hard to keep the emotion out of myvoice.
"Take care of yourself, Marcus," Barbara said.
Ange hugged me from behind as I hung up the phone. "I just readabout it online," she said. She read a million newsfeeds, pulling themwith a headline reader that sucked up stories as fast as they ended up onthe wire. She was our official blogger, and she was good at it, snippingout the interesting stories and throwing them online like a short ordercook turning around breakfast orders.
I turned around in her arms so that I was hugging her from in front.
Truth be told, we hadn't gotten a lot of work done that day. I wasn't al-lowed to be out of the halfway house after dinner time, and she couldn'tvisit me there. We saw each other around the office, but there were usu-ally a lot of other people around, which kind of put a crimp in our cud-dling. Being alone in the office for a day was too much temptation. It washot and sultry, too, which meant we were both in tank-tops and shorts, alot of skin-to-skin contact as we worked next to each other.
"I'm going to make a video," I said. "I want to release it today.""Good," she said. "Let's do it."Ange read the press-release. I did a little monologue, synched overthat famous footage of me on the water-board, eyes wild in the harshlight of the camera, tears streaming down my face, hair matted andflecked with barf.
"This is me. I am on a waterboard. I am being tortured in a simulatedexecution. The torture is supervised by a woman called Carrie Johnstone.
She works for the government. You might remember her from thisvideo."I cut in the video of Johnstone and Kurt Rooney. "That's Johnstone andSecretary of State Kurt Rooney, the president's chief strategist."297"The nation does not love that city. As far as they're concerned, it is a Sodomand Gomorrah of fags and atheists who deserve to rot in hell. The only reasonthe country cares what they think in San Francisco is that they had the good for-tune to have been blown to hell by some Islamic terrorists.""He's talking about the city where I live. At last count, 4,215 of myneighbors were killed on the day he's talking about. But some of themmay not have been killed. Some of them disappeared into the same pris-on where I was tortured. Some mothers and fathers, children and lovers,brothers and sisters will never see their loved ones again — because theywere secretly imprisoned in an illegal jail right here in the San FranciscoBay. They were shipped overseas. The records were meticulous, but Car-rie Johnstone has the encryption keys." I cut back to Carrie Johnstone, thefootage of her sitting at the board table with Rooney, laughing.
I cut in the footage of Johnstone being arrested. "When they arrestedher, I thought we'd get justice. All the people she broke and disappeared.
But the president —" I cut to a still of him laughing and playing golf onone of his many holidays "— and his Chief Strategist —" now a still ofRooney shaking hands with an infamous terrorist leader who used to beon "our side" "— intervened. They sent her to a secret military tribunaland now that tribunal has cleared her. Somehow, they saw nothingwrong with all of this."I cut in a photomontage of the hundreds of shots of prisoners in theircells that Barbara had published on the Bay Guardian's site the day wewere released. "We elected these people. We pay their salaries. They'resupposed to be on our side. They're supposed to defend our freedoms.
But these people —" a series of shots of Johnstone and the others who'dbeen sent to the tribunal "— betrayed our trust. The election is fourmonths away. That's a lot of time. Enough for you to go out and find fiveof your neighbors — five people who've given up on voting becausetheir choice is 'none of the above.'
"Talk to your neighbors. Make them promise to vote. Make thempromise to take the country back from the torturers and thugs. Thepeople who laughed at my friends as they lay fresh in their graves at thebottom of the harbor. Make them promise to talk to their neighbors.
"Most of us choose none of the above. It's not working. You have tochoose — choose freedom.
"My name is Marcus Yallow. I was tortured by my country, but I stilllove it here. I'm seventeen years old. I want to grow up in a free country.
I want to live in a free country."298I faded out to the logo of the website. Ange had built it, with help fromJolu, who got us all the free hosting we could ever need on Pigspleen.
The office was an interesting place. Technically we were called Coali-tion of Voters for a Free America, but everyone called us the Xnetters.
The organization — a charitable nonprofit — had been co-founded byBarbara and some of her lawyer friends right after the liberation ofTreasure Island. The funding was kicked off by some tech millionaireswho couldn't believe that a bunch of hacker kids had kicked the DHS'sass. Sometimes, they'd ask us to go down the peninsula to Sand HillRoad, where all the venture capitalists were, and give a little presenta-tion on Xnet technology. There were about a zillion startups who weretrying to make a buck on the Xnet.
Whatever — I didn't have to have anything to do with it, and I got adesk and an office with a storefront, right there on Valencia Street, wherewe gave away ParanoidXbox CDs and held workshops on building bet-ter WiFi antennas. A surprising number of average people dropped in tomake personal donations, both of hardware (you can run ParanoidLinuxon just about anything, not just Xbox Universals) and cash money. Theyloved us.
The big plan was to launch our own ARG in September, just in timefor the election, and to really tie it in with signing up voters and gettingthem to the polls. Only 42 percent of Americans showed up at the pollsfor the last election — nonvoters had a huge majority. I kept trying to getDarryl and Van to one of our planning sessions, but they kept on declin-ing. They were spending a lot of time together, and Van insisted that itwas totally nonromantic. Darryl wouldn't talk to me much at all, thoughhe sent me long emails about just about everything that wasn't aboutVan or terrorism or prison.
Ange squeezed my hand. "God, I hate that woman," she said.
I nodded. "Just one more rotten thing this country's done to Iraq," Isaid. "If they sent her to my town, I'd probably become a terrorist.""You did become a terrorist when they sent her to your town.""So I did," I said.
"Are you going to Ms Galvez's hearing on Monday?""Totally." I'd introduced Ange to Ms Galvez a couple weeks before,when my old teacher invited me over for dinner. The teacher's union hadgotten a hearing for her before the board of the Unified School District toargue for getting her old job back. They said that Fred Benson was299coming out of (early) retirement to testify against her. I was looking for-ward to seeing her again.
"Do you want to go get a burrito?""Totally.""Let me get my hot-sauce," she said.
I checked my email one more time — my PirateParty email, which stillgot a dribble of messages from old Xnetters who hadn't found my Coali-tion of Voters address yet.
The latest message was from a throwaway email address from one ofthe new Brazilian anonymizers.
>
Found her, thanks. You didn't tell me she was so h4wt.
"Who's that from?"I laughed. "Zeb," I said. "Remember Zeb? I gave him Masha's email ad-dress. I figured, if they're both underground, might as well introducethem to one another.""He thinks Masha is cute?""Give the guy a break, he's clearly had his mind warped bycircumstances.""And you?""Me?""Yeah — was your mind warped by circumstances?"I held Ange out at arm's length and looked her up and down and upand down. I held her cheeks and stared through her thick-framed glassesinto her big, mischievous tilted eyes. I ran my fingers through her hair.
"Ange, I've never thought more clearly in my whole life."She kissed me then, and I kissed her back, and it was some time beforewe went out for that burrito.

The End