Homeland (24 page)

"Hi, this is Darryl. Leave a message, or better yet, send me a text or an email."

I hung up.

It was funny how I could feel all alone and under surveillance at the same time. I had ParanoidAndroid installed, but that didn't mean that my phone wasn't rooted -- just that it would be harder to root. Had it been in my line of sight the whole time I'd been in the car with Knothead and Timmy had control over it? Had the creeps who'd taken over my laptop taken a run or two at my phone?

It was all for the best. Waking someone up at three in the morning while you're having a meltdown is no way to restart a friendship --

My phone rang. Darryl.

"Hey, man."

"Are you okay, Marcus?" He sounded so genuinely concerned I wanted to cry again.

Sorry, dude, just pressed the wrong button -- butt-dialing. Sorry. Go back to sleep.
The words were on the tip of my tongue. They wouldn't come.

"No," I said. "No, I'm not." A siren screamed past me, a fire engine, and I jumped and gave a little squeak.

"Where are you?" he said.

I looked up at the street signs. "Market and Guerrero."

"Stay there," he said. "Be there in fifteen."

Friends.

Darryl's dad hadn't lost his job in the Berkeley layoffs, though he'd taken a "voluntary" pay cut. But things weren't so bad that they'd sold their car, a ten-year-old Honda that Darryl had his own keys for. It was fuggly and held together with bondo and good thoughts, but it was a car, and capable of getting from Twin Peaks to downtown in fifteen minutes at 3 A.M., though I'm guessing that Darryl blew through a few yellow lights and maybe a red or two to make that time.

It pulled up to the curb and the locks popped, and I opened the door and slid in, my nose filling with the familiar smell of the car, which I'd ridden in a million times before: old coffee, a hint of McDonald's breakfast sandwich, the baked/mildewed smell of a vehicle that had spent a lot of time with its windows rolled up in the alternating scorching heat and misty cool of the Berkeley campus.

He was wearing track pants and a T-shirt, and his feet were bare in his unlaced Converse, big toe poking through a hole in the right one. Darryl had humongous feet, and his shoes were always going out at the toes.

The first words he said weren't "What's wrong?" or "Do you know what time it is?" or "You owe me, buddy, big time."

The first words he said were, "It's great to see you again, bud."

It was the best thing he could have said. "Yeah," I said. "Yeah, it's great to see you, too."

I tried to find some words, some place to start the story. He knew about the darknet, had been going through the docs. Presumably, he'd seen the Zyz docs, helped to assemble them. But there was so much to say, and I couldn't figure out where to begin. I closed my eyes to think and the next thing I knew, he was shaking me awake. I ungummed my eyelids and looked around. We were outside his dad's place, which had once been as familiar to me as my own home.

"Come on, bud," he said, "up you go."

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 grey 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 super-hot 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 semi-human 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 the 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."