Little Brother

I barked a laugh at the table. “I told her to answer your questions. I told her to cooperate.”

“So do you give the orders?”

I felt the blood sing in my ears. “Oh come on,” I said. “We play a game together, it’s called Harajuku Fun Madness. I’m the team captain. We’re not terrorists, we’re high school students. I don’t give her orders. I told her that we needed to be honest with you so that we could clear up any suspicion and get out of here.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment.

“How is Darryl?” I said.

“Who?”

“Darryl. You picked us up together. My friend. Someone had stabbed him in the Powell Street BART. That’s why we were up on the surface. To get him help.”

“I’m sure he’s fine, then,” she said.

My stomach knotted and I almost threw up. “You don’t know? You haven’t got him here?”

“Who we have here and who we don’t have here is not something we’re going to discuss with you, ever. That’s not something you’re going to know. Marcus, you’ve seen what happens when you don’t cooperate with us. You’ve seen what happens when you disobey our orders. You’ve been a little cooperative, and it’s gotten you almost to the point where you might go free again. If you want to make that possibility into a reality, you’ll stick to answering my questions.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You’re learning, that’s good. Now, your email passwords, please.”

I was ready for this. I gave them everything: server address, login, password. This didn’t matter. I didn’t keep any email on my server. I downloaded it all and kept it on my laptop at home, which downloaded and deleted my mail from the server every sixty seconds. They wouldn’t get anything out of my mail — it got cleared off the server and stored on my laptop at home.

Back to the cell, but they cut loose my hands and they gave me a shower and a pair of orange prison pants to wear. They were too big for me and hung down low on my hips, like a Mexican gang-kid in the Mission. That’s where the baggy-pants-down-your-ass look comes from, you know that? From prison. I tell you what, it’s less fun when it’s not a fashion statement.

They took away my jeans, and I spent another day in the cell. The walls were scratched cement over a steel grid. You could tell, because the steel was rusting in the salt air, and the grid shone through the green paint in red-orange. My parents were out that window, somewhere.

They came for me again the next day.

“We’ve been reading your mail for a day now. We changed the password so that your home computer couldn’t fetch it.”

Well, of course they had. I would have done the same, now that I thought of it.

“We have enough on you now to put you away for a very long time, Marcus. Your possession of these articles —” she gestured at all my little gizmos — “and the data we recovered from your phone and memory sticks, as well as the subversive material we’d no doubt find if we raided your house and took your computer. It’s enough to put you away until you’re an old man. Do you understand that?”

I didn’t believe it for a second. There’s no way a judge would say that all this stuff constituted any kind of real crime. It was free speech, it was technological tinkering. It wasn’t a crime.

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