Little Brother

by Cory Doctorow

  But who said that these people would ever put me in front of a judge.

  “We know where you live, we know who your friends are. We know how you operate and how you think.”

  It dawned on me then. They were about to let me go. The room seemed to brighten. I heard myself breathing, short little breaths.

  “We just want to know one thing: what was the delivery mechanism for the bombs on the bridge?”

  I stopped breathing. The room darkened again.

  “What?”

  “There were ten charges on the bridge, all along its length. They weren’t in car trunks. They’d been placed there. Who placed them there, and how did they get there?”

  “What?” I said it again.

  “This is your last chance, Marcus,” she said. She looked sad. “You were doing so well until now. Tell us this and you can go home. You can get a lawyer and defend yourself in a court of law. There are doubtless extenuating circumstances that you can use to explain your actions. Just tell us this thing, and you’re gone.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” I was crying and I didn’t even care. Sobbing, blubbering. “I have no idea what you’re talking about!”

  She shook her head. “Marcus, please. Let us help you. By now you know that we always get what we’re after.”

  There was a gibbering sound in the back of my mind. They were insane. I pulled myself together, working hard to stop the tears. “Listen, lady, this is nuts. You’ve been into my stuff, you’ve seen it all. I’m a seventeen-year-old high school student, not a terrorist! You can’t seriously think—”

  “Marcus, haven’t you figured out that we’re serious yet?” She shook her head. “You get pretty good grades. I thought you’d be smarter than that.” She made a flicking gesture and the guards picked me up by the armpits.

  Back in my cell, a hundred little speeches occurred to me. The French call this esprit d’escalier—the spirit of the staircase, the snappy rebuttals that come to you after you leave the room and slink down the stairs. In my mind, I stood and delivered, telling her that I was a citizen who loved my freedom, which made me the patriot and made her the traitor. In my mind, I shamed her for turning my country into an armed camp. In my mind, I was eloquent and brilliant and reduced her to tears.

  But you know what? None of those fine words came back to me when they pulled me out the next day. All I could think of was freedom. My parents.

  “Hello, Marcus,” she said. “How are you feeling?”

  I looked down at the table. She had a neat pile of documents in front of her, and her ubiquitous go-cup of Starbucks beside her. I found it comforting somehow, a reminder that there was a real world out there somewhere, beyond the walls.

  “We’re through investigating you, for now.” She let that hang there. Maybe it meant that she was letting me go. Maybe it meant that she was going to throw me in a pit and forget that I existed.

  “And?” I said finally.

  “And I want to impress on you again that we are very serious about this. Our country has experienced the worst attack ever committed on its soil. How many 9/11s do you want us to suffer before you’re willing to cooperate? The details of our investigation are secret. We won’t stop at anything in our efforts to bring the perpetrators of these heinous crimes to justice. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes,” I mumbled.

  “We are going to send you home today, but you are a marked man. You have not been found to be above suspicion—we’re only releasing you because we’re done questioning you for now. But from now on, you belong to us. We will be watching you. We’ll be waiting for you to make a misstep. Do you understand that we can watch you closely, all the time?”

  “Yes,” I mumbled.

  “Good. You will never speak of what happened here to anyone, ever. This is a matter of national security. Do you know that the death penalty still holds for treason in time of war?”

  “Yes,” I mumbled.

  “Good boy,” she purred. “We have some papers here for you to sign.” She pushed the stack of papers across the table to me. Little Post-its with SIGN HERE printed on them had been stuck throughout them. A guard undid my cuffs.

  I paged through the papers and my eyes watered and my head swam. I couldn’t make sense of them. I tried to decipher the legalese. It seemed that I was signing a declaration that I had been voluntarily held and submitted to voluntary questioning, of my own free will.

  “What happens if I don’t sign this?” I said.

  She snatched the papers back and made that flicking gesture again. The guards jerked me to my feet.

  “Wait!” I cried. “Please! I’ll sign them!” They dragged me to the door. All I could see was that door, all I could think of was it closing behind me.

  I lost it. I wept. I begged to be allowed to sign the papers. To be so close to freedom and have it snatched away, it made me ready to do anything. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard someone say, “Oh, I’d rather die than do something-or-other”—I’ve said it myself now and again. But that was the first time I understood what it really meant. I would have rather died than go back to my cell.

  I begged as they took me out into the corridor. I told them I’d sign anything.

  She called out to the guards and they stopped. They brought me back. They sat me down. One of them put the pen in my hand.

  Of course, I signed, and signed and signed.

  My jeans and T-shirt were back in my cell, laundered and folded. They smelled of detergent. I put them on and washed my face and sat on my cot and stared at the wall. They’d taken everything from me. First my privacy, then my dignity. I’d been ready to sign anything. I would have signed a confession that said I’d assassinated Abraham Lincoln.

  I tried to cry, but it was like my eyes were dry, out of tears.

  They got me again. A guard approached me with a hood, like the hood I’d been put in when they picked us up, whenever that was, days ago, weeks ago.

  The hood went over my head and cinched tight at my neck. I was in total darkness and the air was stifling and stale. I was raised to my feet and walked down corridors, up stairs, on gravel. Up a gangplank. On a ship’s steel deck. My hands were chained behind me, to a railing. I knelt on the deck and listened to the thrum of the diesel engines.

  The ship moved. A hint of salt air made its way into the hood. It was drizzling and my clothes were heavy with water. I was outside, even if my head was in a bag. I was outside, in the world, moments from my freedom.

  They came for me and led me off the boat and over uneven ground. Up three metal stairs. My wrists were unshackled. My hood was removed.

  I was back in the truck. Severe haircut woman was there, at the little desk she’d sat at before. She had a Ziploc bag with her, and inside it were my phone and other little devices, my wallet and the change from my pockets. She handed them to me wordlessly.

  I filled my pockets. It felt so weird to have everything back in its familiar place, to be wearing my familiar clothes. Outside the truck’s back door, I heard the familiar sounds of my familiar city.

  A guard passed me my backpack. The woman extended her hand to me. I just looked at it. She put it down and gave me a wry smile. Then she mimed zipping up her lips and pointed to me, and opened the door.

  It was daylight outside, gray and drizzling. I was looking down an alley toward cars and trucks and bikes zipping down the road. I stood transfixed on the truck’s top step, staring at freedom.

  My knees shook. I knew now that they were playing with me again. In a moment, the guards would grab me and drag me back inside, the bag would go over my head again, and I would be back on the boat and sent off to the prison again, to the endless, unanswerable questions. I barely held myself back from stuffing my fist in my mouth.

  Then I forced myself to go down one stair. Another stair. The last stair. My sneakers crunched down on the crap on the alley’s floor, broken glass, a needle, gravel. I took a step. Another. I reache
d the mouth of the alley and stepped onto the sidewalk.

  No one grabbed me.

  I was free.

  Then strong arms threw themselves around me. I nearly cried.

  Chapter 5

  But it was Van, and she was crying, and hugging me so hard I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t care. I hugged her back, my face buried in her hair.

  “You’re okay!” she said.

  “I’m okay,” I managed.

  She finally let go of me and another set of arms wrapped themselves around me. It was Jolu! They were both there. He whispered, “You’re safe, bro,” in my ear and hugged me even tighter than Vanessa had.

  When he let go, I looked around. “Where’s Darryl?” I asked.

  They both looked at each other. “Maybe he’s still in the truck,” Jolu said.

  We turned and looked at the truck at the alley’s end. It was a nondescript white 18-wheeler. Someone had already brought the little folding staircase inside. The rear lights glowed red, and the truck rolled backwards toward us, emitting a steady eep, eep, eep.

  “Wait!” I shouted as it accelerated toward us. “Wait! What about Darryl?” The truck drew closer. I kept shouting. “What about Darryl?”

  Jolu and Vanessa each had me by an arm and were dragging me away. I struggled against them, shouting. The truck pulled out of the alley’s mouth and reversed into the street and pointed itself downhill and drove away. I tried to run after it, but Van and Jolu wouldn’t let me go.

  I sat down on the sidewalk and put my arms around my knees and cried. I cried and cried and cried, loud sobs of the sort I hadn’t done since I was a little kid. They wouldn’t stop coming. I couldn’t stop shaking.

  Vanessa and Jolu got me to my feet and moved me a little ways up the street. There was a Muni bus stop with a bench and they sat me on it. They were both crying, too, and we held each other for a while, and I knew we were crying for Darryl, whom none of us ever expected to see again.

  We were north of Chinatown, at the part where it starts to become North Beach, a neighborhood with a bunch of neon strip clubs and the legendary City Lights counterculture bookstore, where the Beat poetry movement had been founded back in the 1950s.

  I knew this part of town well. My parents’ favorite Italian restaurant was here and they liked to take me here for big plates of linguine and huge Italian ice cream mountains with candied figs and lethal little espressos afterward.

  Now it was a different place, a place where I was tasting freedom for the first time in what seemed like an enternity.

  We checked our pockets and found enough money to get a table at one of the Italian restaurants, out on the sidewalk, under an awning. The pretty waitress lighted a gas heater with a barbecue lighter, took our orders and went inside. The sensation of giving orders, of controlling my destiny, was the most amazing thing I’d ever felt.

  “How long were we in there?” I asked.

  “Six days,” Vanessa said.

  “I got five,” Jolu said.

  “I didn’t count.”

  “What did they do to you?” Vanessa said. I didn’t want to talk about it, but they were both looking at me. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. I told them everything, even when I’d been forced to piss myself, and they took it all in silently. I paused when the waitress delivered our sodas and waited until she got out of earshot, then finished. In the telling, it receded into the distance. By the end of it, I couldn’t tell if I was embroidering the truth or if I was making it all seem less bad. My memories swam like little fish that I snatched at, and sometimes they wriggled out of my grasp.

  Jolu shook his head. “They were hard on you, dude,” he said. He told us about his stay there. They’d questioned him, mostly about me, and he’d kept on telling them the truth, sticking to a plain telling of the facts about that day and about our friendship. They had gotten him to repeat it over and over again, but they hadn’t played games with his head the way they had with me. He’d eaten his meals in a mess hall with a bunch of other people, and been given time in a TV room where they were shown last year’s blockbusters on video.

  Vanessa’s story was only slightly different. After she’d gotten them angry by talking to me, they’d taken away her clothes and made her wear a set of orange prison coveralls. She’d been left in her cell for two days without contact, though she’d been fed regularly. But mostly it was the same as Jolu: the same questions, repeated again and again.

  “They really hated you,” Jolu said. “Really had it in for you. Why?”

  I couldn’t imagine why. Then I remembered.

  You can cooperate, or you can be very, very sorry.

  “It was because I wouldn’t unlock my phone for them, that first night. That’s why they singled me out.” I couldn’t believe it, but there was no other explanation. It had been sheer vindictiveness. My mind reeled at the thought. They had done all that as a mere punishment for defying their authority.

  I had been scared. Now I was angry. “Those bastards,” I said, softly. “They did it to get back at me for mouthing off.”

  Jolu swore and then Vanessa cut loose in Korean, something she only did when she was really, really angry.

  “I’m going to get them,” I whispered, staring at my soda. “I’m going to get them.”

  Jolu shook his head. “You can’t, you know. You can’t fight back against that.”

  None of us much wanted to talk about revenge then. Instead, we talked about what we would do next. We had to go home. Our phones’ batteries were dead and it had been years since this neighborhood had any pay phones. We just needed to go home. I even thought about taking a taxi, but there wasn’t enough money between us to make that possible.

  So we walked. On the corner, we pumped some quarters into a San Francisco Chronicle newspaper box and stopped to read the front section. It had been five days since the bombs went off, but it was still all over the front cover.

  Severe haircut woman had talked about “the bridge” blowing up, and I’d just assumed that she was talking about the Golden Gate bridge, but I was wrong. The terrorists had blown up the Bay Bridge.

  “Why the hell would they blow up the Bay Bridge?” I said. “The Golden Gate is the one on all the postcards.” Even if you’ve never been to San Francisco, chances are you know what the Golden Gate looks like: it’s that big orange suspension bridge that swoops dramatically from the old military base called the Presidio to Sausalito, where all the cutesy wine-country towns are with their scented candle shops and art galleries. It’s picturesque as hell, and it’s practically the symbol for the state of California. If you go to the Disneyland California Adventure park, there’s a replica of it just past the gates, with a monorail running over it.

  So naturally I assumed that if you were going to blow up a bridge in San Francisco, that’s the one you’d blow.

  “They probably got scared off by all the cameras and stuff,” Jolu said. “The National Guard’s always checking cars at both ends and there’s all those suicide fences and junk all along it.” People have been jumping off the Golden Gate since it opened in 1937—they stopped counting after the thousandth suicide in 1995.

  “Yeah,” Vanessa said. “Plus the Bay Bridge actually goes somewhere.” The Bay Bridge goes from downtown San Francisco to Oakland and thence to Berkeley, the East Bay townships that are home to many of the people who live and work in town. It’s one of the only parts of the Bay Area where a normal person can afford a house big enough to really stretch out in, and there’s also the university and a bunch of light industry over there. The BART goes under the Bay and connects the two cities, too, but it’s the Bay Bridge that sees most of the traffic. The Golden Gate was a nice bridge if you were a tourist or a rich retiree living out in wine country, but it was mostly ornamental. The Bay Bridge is—was—San Francisco’s workhorse bridge.

  I thought about it for a minute. “You guys are right,” I said. “But I don’t think that’s all of it. We keep acting like terrorists attack landmarks
because they hate landmarks. Terrorists don’t hate landmarks or bridges or airplanes. They just want to screw stuff up and make people scared. To make terror. So of course they went after the Bay Bridge after the Golden Gate got all those cameras—after airplanes got all metal-detectored and X-rayed.” I thought about it some more, staring blankly at the cars rolling down the street, at the people walking down the sidewalks, at the city all around me. “Terrorists don’t hate airplanes or bridges. They love terror.” It was so obvious I couldn’t believe I’d never thought of it before. I guess that being treated like a terrorist for a few days was enough to clarify my thinking.

  The other two were staring at me. “I’m right, aren’t I? All this crap, all the X-rays and ID checks, they’re all useless, aren’t they?”

  They nodded slowly.

  “Worse than useless,” I said, my voice going up and cracking. “Because they ended up with us in prison, with Darryl—” I hadn’t thought of Darryl since we sat down and now it came back to me: my friend, missing, disappeared. I stopped talking and ground my jaws together.

  “We have to tell our parents,” Jolu said.

  “We should get a lawyer,” Vanessa said.

  I thought of telling my story. Of telling the world what had become of me. Of the videos that would no doubt come out, of me weeping, reduced to a groveling animal.

  “We can’t tell them anything,” I said, without thinking.

  “What do you mean?” Van said.

  “We can’t tell them anything,” I repeated. “You heard her. If we talk, they’ll come back for us. They’ll do to us what they did to Darryl.”

  “You’re joking,” Jolu said. “You want us to—”

  “I want us to fight back,” I said. “I want to stay free so that I can do that. If we go out there and blab, they’ll just say that we’re kids, making it up. We don’t even know where we were held! No one will believe us. Then, one day, they’ll come for us.