5.
DAY 27. POLITICS IN THE APOCALYPSE
Picking locks isn’t like the movies. It’s a two-hand job because locks only open under pressure. You can poke at the spring-loaded tumblers all day and they will snap and fire back to position as soon as you run your pick over them unless the other hand is keeping it tight. A tension wrench primed and ready to turn so the tumblers stay depressed. I didn’t expect to learn that in law school, but it was more interesting than the rule against perpetuities, and Martin, a student from Oregon, was eager to teach.
He also instructed me in the basics of making burglar tools out of everyday objects. If you place pennies on your thumb and forefinger, you can bend a paper clip into a zig-zag pick. And if you snap the metal clip off one of those cool leaky pens I’m so partial to and then bend it into an L, it makes quite the serviceable tension wrench. It was important that these things be inconspicuous because, as we learned in Crim Law, the mere possession of burglar tools was a crime, and we were, y’know, studying to be lawyers and all.
I’d sit on the radiator in my Fordham dorm room for hours, learning how to work the window locks. In their bolted state, they pulled back only a few inches into the room, allowing a mere sliver of air to enter at the very top. A safety/suicide precaution that succeeded only in providing an incentive to sharpen my skills, because if you popped the lock along the bottom, and turned the handle sideways, the entire window opened like a door. Romaya loved that. Not only because it was wrong, but because it brought the stories that much closer.
That’s what she called the people living in the luxury apartments across the way. Each in their own boxed reality and on display for us. Grown-ups. Some pulled the blinds, but others probably believed in the anonymity of New York. The privacy of living in the sky, surrounded by concrete. They were unaware two kids in their early twenties were committing a minor crime solely for the joy of sitting up in a darkened bed, smoking, and watching them live for our amusement.
There was a single man in his thirties who watched TV for four hours every night. An aging woman who did her face and hair endlessly, and another room that was impeccably furnished, lit, and exposed, but never occupied. No actor ever took the stage. But we watched anyway, content to witness the real world from the safety of youth. It couldn’t find us there. Not in the dark. But just to be sure, we’d snuff the glow of our cigarettes and lock the window before going to sleep.
* * *
To my credit or shame, Oz feels safe sharing the bed with me. It helps that we keep something between us—her sleeping under both the sheet and comforter and me sandwiched between the two with only a sheer layer of cotton separating my broken desire from her body. The last few mornings, I woke first and had a few moments to watch the covers rise and fall with her breathing. I stare at the flush two blankets bring to her cheek and try to divine her dreams. But the peace Oz finds in her sleep makes her inscrutable.
We’ve been spending time downtown based on that crumb of Internet intelligence from Anonymous. It seems Occupy Wall Street’s numbers are growing again. Almost as strong as when they made the world sit up and take notice of their constitutional right to take a dump in Zuccotti Park.
It was unseasonably cold this morning and we ducked into the white-tiled lobby of Deutsche Bank, looking for some coffee. Apparently, it had become OWS headquarters.
“Fuck me. Did someone wash a goat in a bucket of patchouli?” Oz said, holding her nose.
Tobey shook his head. “Smells like a pair of Birkenstocks took a shit in here.”
Mostly college-aged kids, but some older folks, were milling about in clusters, clearly in regrouping mode. Each was talking about what was really going on, what it meant, and what they had to do. At first, I thought recent changes had revitalized their economic protest. Without competition from the Net, shop owners had been free to fan the flames of inflation. And while that might have been good news for those businesses, computer and gadget sales had tanked along with all the tech and marketing jobs that go with that. Firms and businesses kept laying off IT people too. After all, how many guys do you need to fix your Excel spreadsheet or document management program? But one look at their signs and I could see this was no longer about the economy: GIVE US BACK THE NET; YOU CAN TAKE THE WEB, BUT NOT OUR FREE SPEECH, and one of what I’m guessing was Che Guevara wearing a Guy Fawkes mask?
“Who are these signs addressing?” I asked. “The man? They’re acting like they know who took the Net.”
“Time to investigate,” Tobey said. “I’ll kneel down behind that white guy with the dreads. You push him over and we’ll beat the truth out of him.”
I had a better idea. There was a girl with big nerd glasses, striped stockings, and a purple bob.
“How about her?” I said, pointing.
Oz shook her head. “You really can’t help yourself, can you?”
“Excuse me,” I said, walking over to the girl. “I couldn’t help but notice your sign.”
She dropped a sandwich bag of what appeared to be weed at the sound of my voice.
“It’s not mine!” she protested.
Tobey nearly pissed himself laughing.
“I don’t care about your shwag,” I said. “I wanted to ask you about your sign.”
I pointed down to her posterboard, which read, GIVE IT BACK, to make it clear I wasn’t talking about astrology. “Who exactly do you think took the Net?”
“Who do you think?” she said. “The government.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Where ya been? Remember SOPA? The government’s in cahoots with the entertainment industry. They want to shut down the Web. They shut down Megaupload and BTJunkie. Now they’re like, fuck it, let’s shut down the whole damn thing.”
She kneeled to recover her stash, so I directed my question downward. “Obama wants to appease Hollywood so much he just flipped some gigantic kill switch?”
“Well, I don’t know how he did it,” she said, pushing her weed into her skirt pocket. “But yeah. Is that so hard to believe? Look how the government cracks down on us. Arresting us for sleeping on public property!”
“Well, Zuccotti Park was private property, and even if it weren’t, I mean there are laws. If you were allowed to just set up camp everywhere we could solve the homeless problem in America by just passing out tents.”
She looked at me with a kind of confused distrust. A touch of fear. Then she threw the weed out of her pocket again. “Why did I just pick that up? It’s not mine!”
“Again, I’m not a cop. And I’m not even picking on your protest. I mean, it’s good that there are laws. I mean, you want the cops to arrest you, right? Isn’t that the point of civil disobedience? To get arrested for what you believe in? To prove a point?”
The look returned, but without fear this time. She retrieved her weed again and asked, “Who the fuck wants to get arrested?” before walking away.
“Smooth, G-Stone,” Tobey said.
“I don’t get it. If OWS thinks Washington took the Net, why are they protesting on Wall Street?”
Oz wasn’t confused. “Because who wants to be stuck in D.C. without the Internet?”
She was right. I’d forgotten that while the exits had opened and people were free to leave, Manhattan’s entrances remained closed as a security measure. Twenty-five percent of the city’s population has now fled. And just like before the Apocalypse, all the most frightened and boring people took off for New Jersey.
That’s why the three of us had decided to hole up at Oz’s hotel in the Village. Going back to Brooklyn would have locked us out of our chances of finding the Internet. I kicked in some money for Oz’s room, and Tobey offered Oz his last fifty bucks to watch her shower. It’s probably for the best she declined, considering I’m fairly certain he just wanted to make more lame Australia jokes. “Crikey, that’s not a rack. Now that’s a rack!”
“Well, what now?” I asked.
“Whaddya mean, what now?” T
obey barked. “We didn’t even come down here for OWS, remember? We’re following my dream.”
“To be the most sexually retarded blogger the Net has ever seen?”
“Not that dream. The one I told you this morning.”
Tobey claimed he’d woken from a vision: that we were well on our way to discovering who stole the Internet. I was skeptical and paid no attention. After all, most of Tobey’s inspiring dreams involved jokes about how hot he still is for Demi Moore. (“If my right arm got sheared off in an industrial accident while Demi Moore was blowing me, my only concern would be losing consciousness before she finished.”)
Furthermore, while I was clearly uncomfortable with the knee-jerk liberal OWS crowd, Tobey was also falling prey to the Right’s growing influence. The Apocalypse had been hard on the political left. TV ratings and radio listenership were way up, and that’s where the Right thrives. NPR is no match for the multipronged attack of Republican talk radio, and MSNBC can’t compete with Fox. The Internet was the only thing that the Left was almost kind of good at. And while it’s refreshing not to have my inbox flooded with sophomoric MoveOn.org vids comparing Sarah Palin to Hitler, it’s a little frightening that even with a Democrat in office, the public influence war is over. All we have is The New York Times, and who’s shelling out two bucks for a paper in this economy?
Tobey had got up from his couch, wiping sleep out of his eyes and holding court in the hotel room. “Gladstone,” he said. “I’ve seen it. Why are we making this so hard? Terrorist Internet chatter intercepted somewhere downtown. Duh? Why don’t we go to the Ground Zero mosque?”
“Park51? For the same reason we’re not going to the Olive Garden in Times Square. It’s a stupid idea. Plus, the mosque doesn’t even come with bread sticks.”
Tobey and I went back and forth until Oz threw off the covers to interrupt. “I know you guys think I’m just some chick from a country filled with crocodile hunters and baby-eating dingos, but if I could…”
“And Vegemite sandwiches,” Tobey added.
“Yes. Vegemite sandwiches. Thank you. But it doesn’t really matter who’s right. We’re out of ideas. Terrorist sympathizers or slandered Muslims, the mosque is downtown and we’ve got fuck-all intelligence so, y’know, why not?”
The Mosque Not at Ground Zero
The three of us left the OWS crowd and headed down Rector Street still carrying the supplies we’d gathered that morning. Like any mission composed of people who didn’t know what they were doing, we decided the first thing we needed to do was pack. The Kmart in Penn Station gave us plenty of opportunities to fill our arms without reason. Swiss army knives, compasses, backpacks, and even a self-inflatable raft. It wasn’t until we were done shopping that we realized our purchases were gleaned more from old MacGyver episodes than anything we might need in the Apocalypse. But seeing as we didn’t know what that was exactly, who’s to say they weren’t the same thing. Besides, the whole MacGyver thing reminded me of Martin, and that made me happy. I liked remembering him from before he became a lawyer. Unlike me, he’d finished law school and settled in Alaska as a public defender. It didn’t agree with him. He shot himself years later, sometime after we stopped acknowledging each other’s birthdays even with the help of Facebook reminders.
I was surprised to find Park51 was still just occupying space in the abandoned Burlington Coat Factory while trying to raise construction money amid a sea of bad press. Tobey adopted a stealthy Spider-Man creep fifty yards from the destination.
“Ya think there’s a way in through the roof?” he asked.
“No, but it has a front door, jackass. The center’s open to all New Yorkers.”
We walked into the spacious and inviting lobby. White walls reflecting all the sunlight that streamed in from the glass doors and walls of the center’s lowest level. After a moment, we started gathering intelligence, which basically meant trying to walk around unnoticed while gawking for clues. Not the easiest thing to do for a punk Aussie, fedora-sporting Jew, and dick-joke idiot-savant Caucasian. Basically, we just kept moving. After a while we reached the gym, and Tobey soon found himself in a pick-up basketball game with three Egyptian exchange students from NYU. Then it was just Oz and me.
“Ooh, a Middle Eastern cooking class is about to start,” she said, pulling a flier off a table.
“Z’oh my God! No way!”
“Fuck off. It sounds fun.”
“Yes, Oz,” I said. “It totally does, but we’ll probably get more done if we split up. So why don’t you hit the class and I’ll check out the café area? We’ll meet Tobes in the lobby in an hour or so.”
“Suit yourself,” she said. “But don’t come crying to me when you’re dying for my kick-ass baba ghanoush recipe.”
“It’s a promise.”
I followed the familiar smells of caffeine all the way to the café. For all its Halal and Middle-Eastern influence, it wasn’t too different from a Starbucks. Had the Wi-Fi been working, I’m sure there would have been more laptops in effect. And, as it were, there were still a few insufferable writers at work, presumably hacking away at high-concept comedies about Saudi Arabian princes forced to live with suburban Jewish families.
I got a coffee and started updating my journal while perched at a long stretch of counter two seats down from an Arab man, about my age, charting algorithms on a notepad while cross-referencing information in The Wall Street Journal. He wore an expensive and meticulously maintained white buttoned shirt with the sleeves rolled up. It looked like it fit him perfectly fifteen years or pounds ago. Now it hugged a bit too much, but he sat with such immaculate posture and moved with such purpose, it still bestowed a certain elegance. Occasionally, it seemed he might have been eyeing my journal and smiling. Not in a haughty way. Just quietly amused or maybe interested.
“May I ask,” he said finally, “are you a writer?”
“No, not really.”
He was disappointed, but unwilling to give up so quickly.
“But you are writing…?”
“Well, sometimes I sing in the shower, too, but, y’know?”
A smile. “Ah. An analogy. Not so different from metaphor. Suitable for a writer. Or a lawyer, perhaps.”
“I’m not quite either,” I said, extending my hand. “Nice to meet you.”
“Yes, pleasure,” he said. “My name is Khalil. I’m visiting from Egypt.”
“Gladstone. I’m visiting from Brooklyn.”
My new friend and I got to talking. About his brief stay in the United States. during his early twenties. His return to Egypt to assist in his father’s business. And how much New York had changed in his time away.
“There’s a distrust I did not see sixteen years ago,” he said. “Sure, I was a foreigner. A strange dark-skinned man with funny ways. Contempt, racism, even hatred. But there was no fear. Now I just don’t understand.”
“Well, you do understand, though, right?” I said. “It was no small thing that happened.”
“Please. I apologize. I’m not minimizing 9/11. But had I stayed in New York, I could have very well been working in the Towers that day. I would have certainly been downtown. And now all Muslims are always the first against the wall. Like this foolishness with the Internet outage.”
Okay. Now we were getting somewhere, I thought. Having an intelligent discussion with an honest-to-goodness Muslim right in the heart of the detected terrorist transmissions. Perhaps this exercise wasn’t just an excuse to maintain a Scotch-based buzz while I roamed Manhattan.
“I don’t disagree, Khalil, but given the detected transmissions, the animus of the Muslim world against America, and the history right here in New York, do you really have to be a bigot to be nervous about a solitary Muslim man crunching numbers five blocks from Ground Zero?”
A slow smile spread across Khalil’s face. He was remembering someone, and it brought a happiness, especially now that the years had wrapped the memories in the comfort of wax paper. “You’re a Jew,” he said
. “Yes?”
“Why so sure?” I asked.
“Only a Jew would be open-minded enough to come to a Muslim community center, while still opinionated enough to risk offending the people inside.”
I sipped at my coffee and thought for a moment. “Well, if that’s your definition of a Jew, then I kinda take that as a compliment, Khalil.”
“Good,” he said, and raised his spiced date-juice tea or whatever he was drinking.
“Oh, are we toasting?” I asked, removing my flask. “Well, as long as we’re doing so much for international relations, maybe we should get the Scots involved.” He offered his glass, and I spiked both our drinks.
“I wasn’t sure if you drank…” I said.
“Yeah, I’m not too observant,” Khalil said, taking a sip. Then he paused. “Did you say Scotch? This tastes like Jameson?”
“Yeah.”
“But Jameson is Irish whiskey…”
“I know, but … I know.”
“Anyway, Gladstone,” he said. “Explain this to me. Some terrorists stole the Internet for their own purposes. Evil purposes?”
“That’s the theory.”
“So they can have old YouTube videos all to themselves?”
“I would think the greatest advantage of stealing the Internet would be maintaining all its communications power while depriving those advantages to your enemies. Also, Khalil, you’re the one with The Wall Street Journal in front of you. Just the loss of the Net itself is helping tank our economy. Need there be more?”
“Economic terrorism. That’s a bit more compelling.”
“Yeah.”
“But you don’t really believe that, do you?”
“No,” I said with a laugh. “Not even a little. But why don’t you tell me why.”
“Because,” Khalil said, “America is at war with radical Muslim fundamentalists, not robots.”
“Meaning?”
“Muslims like the Internet too. What terrorist group could win the hearts and minds of the Muslim people if it deprived them of Facebook and Twitter? Osama Bin Laden might have been holed up in an Abbottabad compound without the Internet, but his neighbor Tweeted the whole U.S. tactical assault. And how about the riots in Egypt when they took the Net away? That did not work out so well for the government.”
Notes From the Internet Apocalypse Page 5
