“Yeah,” another kid said. “This sounds like you’re saying that national security is more important than the Constitution.”
I was so proud of my fellow students then. I said, “How can you protect freedom by suspending the Bill of Rights?”
She shook her head at us like we were being very stupid. “The ‘revolutionary’ founding fathers shot traitors and spies. They didn’t believe in absolute freedom, not when it threatened the Republic. Now you take these Xnet people—”
I tried hard not to stiffen.
“—these so-called jammers who were on the news this morning. After this city was attacked by people who’ve declared war on this country, they set about sabotaging the security measures set up to catch the bad guys and prevent them from doing it again. They did this by endangering and inconveniencing their fellow citizens—”
“They did it to show that our rights were being taken away in the name of protecting them!” I said. Okay, I shouted. God, she had me so steamed. “They did it because the government was treating everyone like a suspected terrorist.”
“So they wanted to prove that they shouldn’t be treated like terrorists,” Charles shouted back, “so they acted like terrorists? So they committed terrorism?”
I boiled.
“Oh for Christ’s sake. Committed terrorism? They showed that universal surveillance was more dangerous than terrorism. Look at what happened in the park last weekend. Those people were dancing and listening to music. How is that terrorism?”
The teacher crossed the room and stood before me, looming over me until I shut up. “Marcus, you seem to think that nothing has changed in this country. You need to understand that the bombing of the Bay Bridge changed everything. Thousands of our friends and relatives lie dead at the bottom of the Bay. This is a time for national unity in the face of the violent insult our country has suffered—”
I stood up. I’d had enough of this “everything has changed” crapola. “National unity? The whole point of America is that we’re the country where dissent is welcome. We’re a country of dissidents and fighters and university dropouts and free speech people.”
I thought of Ms. Galvez’s last lesson and the thousands of Berkeley students who’d surrounded the police van when they tried to arrest a guy for distributing civil rights literature. No one tried to stop those trucks when they drove away with all the people who’d been dancing in the park. I didn’t try. I was running away.
Maybe everything had changed.
“I believe you know where Mr. Benson’s office is,” she said to me. “You are to present yourself to him immediately. I will not have my classes disrupted by disrespectful behavior. For someone who claims to love freedom of speech, you’re certainly willing to shout down anyone who disagrees with you.”
I picked up my SchoolBook and my bag and stormed out. The door had a gas-lift, so it was impossible to slam or I would have slammed it.
I went fast to Mr. Benson’s office. Cameras filmed me as I went. My gait was recorded. The arphids in my student ID broadcast my identity to sensors in the hallway. It was like being in jail.
“Close the door, Marcus,” Mr. Benson said. He turned his screen around so that I could see the video feed from the social studies classroom. He’d been watching.
“What do you have to say for yourself?”
“That wasn’t teaching, it was propaganda. She told us that the Constitution didn’t matter!”
“No, she said it wasn’t religious doctrine. And you attacked her like some kind of fundamentalist, proving her point. Marcus, you of all people should understand that everything changed when the bridge was bombed. Your friend Darryl—”
“Don’t you say a goddamned word about him,” I said, the anger bubbling over. “You’re not fit to talk about him. Yeah, I understand that everything’s different now. We used to be a free country. Now we’re not.”
“Marcus, do you know what ‘zero tolerance’ means?”
I backed down. He could expel me for “threatening behavior.” It was supposed to be used against gang kids who tried to intimidate their teachers. But of course he wouldn’t have any compunction about using it on me.
“Yes,” I said. “I know what it means.”
“I think you owe me an apology,” he said.
I looked at him. He was barely suppressing his sadistic smile. A part of me wanted to grovel. It wanted to beg for his forgiveness for all my shame. I tamped that part down and decided that I would rather get kicked out than apologize.
“Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.” I remembered it word for word.
He shook his head. “Remembering things isn’t the same as understanding them, sonny.” He bent over his computer and made some clicks. His printer purred. He handed me a sheet of warm Board letterhead that said I’d been suspended for two weeks.
“I’ll email your parents now. If you are still on school property in thirty minutes, you’ll be arrested for trespassing.”
I looked at him.
“You don’t want to declare war on me in my own school,” he said. “You can’t win that war. GO!”
I left.
Chapter 14
The Xnet wasn’t much fun in the middle of the school day, when all the people who used it were in school. I had the piece of paper folded in the back pocket of my jeans, and I threw it on the kitchen table when I got home. I sat down in the living room and switched on the TV. I never watched it, but I knew that my parents did. The TV and the radio and the 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 help rescue people from hurricanes, stationed overseas for years and years of a long and endless war.
I flipped around the 24-hour news networks, one after another, a parade of officials telling us why we should be scared. A parade of photos of bombs going off around the world.
I kept flipping and found myself looking at a familiar face. It was the guy who had come into the truck and spoken to severe haircut lady when I was chained up in the back. Wearing a military uniform. The caption identified him as Major General Graeme Sutherland, Regional Commander, DHS.
“I hold in my hands actual literature on offer at the so-called concert in Dolores Park last weekend.” He held up a stack of pamphlets. There’d been lots of pamphleteers there, I remembered. Wherever you got a group 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 Guide to Overthrowing the State.’ Here’s one: ‘Did the September 11th Bombings Really Happen?’ And another: ‘How To Use Their Security Against Them.’ This literature shows us the true purpose of the illegal gathering on Saturday night. This wasn’t merely an unsafe gathering of thousands of people without proper precaution, or even toilets. It was a recruiting rally for the enemy. It was an attempt to corrupt children into embracing the idea that America shouldn’t protect herself.
“Take this slogan: ‘Don’t Trust Anyone Over 25.’ What better way to ensure that no considered, balanced, adult discussion is ever injected into your pro-terrorist message than to exclude adults, limiting your group to impressionable young people?
“When police came on the scene, they found a recruitment rally for America’s enemies in progress. The gathering had already disrupted the nights of hundreds of residents in the area, none of whom had been consulted in the planning of this all-night rave party.
“They ordered these peopl
e to disperse—that much is visible on all the video—and when the revelers turned to attack them, egged on by the musicians on stage, the police subdued them using nonlethal crowd control techniques.
“The arrestees were ringleaders and provocateurs who had led the thousands of impressionistic young people there to charge the police lines. Eight hundred and twenty-seven of them were taken into custody. Many of these people had prior offenses. More than a hundred of them had outstanding warrants. They are still in custody.
“Ladies and gentlemen, America is fighting a war on many fronts, but nowhere is she in more grave danger than she is here, at home. Whether we are being attacked by terrorists or those who sympathize with them.”
A reporter held up a hand and said, “General Sutherland, surely you’re not saying that these children were terrorist sympathizers for attending a party in a park?”
“Of course not. But when young people are brought under the influence of our country’s enemies, it’s easy for them to end up over their heads. Terrorists would love to recruit a fifth column to fight the war on the home front for them. If these were my children, I’d be gravely concerned.”
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 infrared cameras before moving in.” He held them next to his face and paged through them one at a time. They showed people dancing really rough, some people getting crushed or stepped on. Then they moved into sex stuff by the trees, a girl with three guys, two guys necking together. “There were children as young as ten years old at this event. A deadly cocktail of drugs, propaganda and music resulted in dozens of injuries. It’s a wonder there weren’t any deaths.”
I switched the TV off. They made it look like it had been a riot. If my parents thought I’d been there, they’d have strapped me to my bed for a month and only let me out afterward wearing a tracking collar.
Speaking of which, they were going to be pissed when they found out I’d been suspended.
They didn’t take it well. Dad wanted to ground me, but Mom and I talked 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 afterward. I think the word ‘asshole’ was mentioned repeatedly.”
Dad shook his head. “Disrupting a class to argue against the Department 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 taken to calling me “son” a lot. It made me feel like he’d stopped thinking of me as a person and switched to thinking of me as a kind of half-formed larva that needed to be guided out of adolescence. I hated it. “You’re going to have to learn to live with the fact that we live in a different world today. You have every right to speak your mind of course, but you have to be prepared for the consequences of doing so. You have to face the fact that there are people who are hurting, who aren’t going to want to argue the finer points of Constitutional law when their lives are at stake. We’re in a lifeboat now, and once you’re in the lifeboat, no one wants to hear about how mean the captain is being.”
I barely restrained myself from rolling my eyes.
“I’ve been assigned two weeks of independent study, writing one paper for each of my subjects, using the city for my background—a history paper, a social studies paper, an English paper, a physics paper. It beats sitting around at home watching television.”
Dad looked hard at me, like he suspected I was up to something, then nodded. I said good night to them and went up to my room. I fired up my Xbox and opened a word processor and started to brainstorm ideas for 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 sympathetic about everything and told me she’d help me with my papers if I wanted to meet her after school the next night. I knew where her school was—she went to the same school as Van—and it was all the way over in the East Bay, where I hadn’t visited since the bombs went.
I was really excited at the prospect of seeing her again. Every night since the party, I’d gone to bed thinking of two things: the sight of the crowd charging the police lines and the feeling of the side of her breast under her shirt as we leaned against the pillar. She was amazing. I’d never been with a girl as…aggressive as her before. It had always been me putting the moves on and them pushing me away. I got the feeling that Ange 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 and what 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 good place to write about. History? Sure, it’s there, from the Gold Rush to the World War Two shipyards, the Japanese internment camps, the invention of the PC. Physics? The Exploratorium has the coolest exhibits of any museum I’ve ever been to. I took a perverse satisfaction in the exhibits on soil liquefaction during big quakes. English? Jack London, Beat Poets, science fiction writers like Pat Murphy and Rudy Rucker. Social studies? The Free Speech Movement, Cesar Chavez, gay rights, feminism, the antiwar movement….
I’ve always loved just learning stuff for its own sake. Just to be smarter about the world around me. I could do that just by walking around the city. I decided I’d do an English paper about the Beats first. City Lights books had a great library in an upstairs room where Allen Ginsberg and his buddies had created their radical druggy poetry. The one we’d read in 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 hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night….
I liked the way he ran those words all together, “starving hysterical naked.” I knew how that felt. And “best minds of my generation” made me think hard, too. It made me remember the park and the police and the gas falling. They busted Ginsberg for obscenity over Howl—all about a line about gay sex that would hardly have caused us to blink an eye today. It made 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 the books. I got lost in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, a novel I’d been meaning to read for a long time, and a clerk who came up to check on me nodded approvingly and found me a cheap edition that he sold me for six bucks.
I walked into Chinatown and had dim sum buns and noodles with hot sauce that I had previously considered to be pretty hot, but which would never seem anything like hot ever again, not now that I’d had an Ange special.
As the day wore on toward afternoon, I got on the BART and switched to a San Mateo bridge shuttle bus to bring me around to the East Bay. I read my copy of On the Road and dug the scenery whizzing past. On the Road is a semiautobiographical novel about Jack Kerouac, a druggy, hard-drinking writer who goes hitchhiking around America, working crummy jobs, howling through the streets at night, meeting people and parting ways. Hipsters, sad-faced hobos, con men, muggers, scumbags and angels. There’s not really a plot—Kerouac supposedly wrote 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. He makes friends with self-destructing people like Dean Moriarty, who get him involved in weird schemes that never really work out, but still it works out, if you know what I mean.
There was a rhythm
to the words, it was luscious, I could hear it being read aloud in my head. It made me want to lie down in the bed of a pickup truck and wake up in a dusty little town somewhere in the central valley on the way to LA, one of those places with a gas station and a diner, and just walk out into the fields and meet people and see stuff and do stuff.
It was a long bus ride and I must have dozed off a little—staying up late IMing with Ange was hard on my sleep schedule, since Mom still expected me down for breakfast. I woke up and changed buses and before long, I was at Ange’s school.
She came bounding out of the gates in her uniform—I’d never seen her in it before, it was kind of cute in a weird way, and reminded me of Van in her uniform. She gave me a long hug and a hard kiss on the cheek.
“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 as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and 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 sidewalk back toward the bus stop. Once we turned the corner, she put her arm around my waist and I slung mine around her shoulder. Walking down the street with a girl—my girlfriend? Sure, why not?—talking about this cool book. It was heaven. Made me forget my troubles for a little while.
“Marcus?”
I turned around. It was Van. In my subconscious I’d expected this. I knew because my conscious mind wasn’t remotely surprised. It wasn’t a big school, and they all got out at the same time. I hadn’t spoken to Van in weeks, and those weeks felt like months. We used to talk every day.
Little Brother Page 19
