day, they’ll come for us.
“I’m telling my parents that I was in one of those camps on the other side of the Bay. I came over to meet you guys there and we got stranded, and just got loose today. They said in the papers that people were still wandering home from them.”
“I can’t do that,” Vanessa said. “After what they did to you, how can you even think of doing that?”
“It happened to
“What’s your way?” Jolu said. “What’s your plan?”
“I don’t know yet,” I admitted. “Give me until tomorrow morning, give me that, at least.” I knew that once they’d kept it a secret for a day, it would have to be a secret forever. Our parents would be even more skeptical if we suddenly “remembered” that we’d been held in a secret prison instead of taken care of in a refugee camp.
Van and Jolu looked at each other.
“I’m just asking for a chance,” I said. “We’ll work out the story on the way, get it straight. Give me one day, just one day.”
The other two nodded glumly and we set off downhill again, heading back towards home. I lived on Potrero Hill, Vanessa lived in the North Mission and Jolu lived in Noe Valley — three wildly different neighborhoods just a few minutes’ walk from one another.
We turned onto Market Street and stopped dead. The street was barricaded at every corner, the cross-streets reduced to a single lane, and parked down the whole length of Market Street were big, nondescript 18-wheelers like the one that had carried us, hooded, away from the ship’s docks and to Chinatown.
Each one had three steel steps leading down from the back and they buzzed with activity as soldiers, people in suits, and cops went in and out of them. The suits wore little badges on their lapels and the soldiers scanned them as they went in and out — wireless authorization badges. As we walked past one, I got a look at it, and saw the familiar logo: Department of Homeland Security. The soldier saw me staring and stared back hard, glaring at me.
I got the message and moved on. I peeled away from the gang at Van Ness. We clung to each other and cried and promised to call each other.
The walk back to Potrero Hill has an easy route and a hard route, the latter taking you over some of the steepest hills in the city, the kind of thing that you see car chases on in action movies, with cars catching air as they soar over the zenith. I always take the hard way home. It’s all residential streets, and the old Victorian houses they call “painted ladies” for their gaudy, elaborate paint-jobs, and front gardens with scented flowers and tall grasses. Housecats stare at you from hedges, and there are hardly any homeless.
It was so quiet on those streets that it made me wish I’d taken the
I went up Goat Hill and walked past Goat Hill Pizza, which made me think of the jail I’d been held in, and I had to sit down on the bench out front of the restaurant until my shakes passed. Then I noticed the truck up the hill from me, a nondescript 18-wheeler with three metal steps coming down from the back end. I got up and got moving. I felt the eyes watching me from all directions.
I hurried the rest of the way home. I didn’t look at the painted ladies or the gardens or the housecats. I kept my eyes down.
Both my parents’ cars were in the driveway, even though it was the middle of the day. Of course. Dad works in the East Bay, so he’d be stuck at home while they worked on the bridge. Mom — well, who knew why Mom was home.
They were home for me.
Even before I’d finished unlocking the door it had been jerked out of my hand and flung wide. There were both of my parents, looking gray and haggard, bug-eyed and staring at me. We stood there in frozen tableau for a moment, then they both rushed forward and dragged me into the house, nearly tripping me up. They were both talking so loud and fast all I could hear was a wordless, roaring gabble and they both hugged me and cried and I cried too and we just stood there like that in the little foyer, crying and making almost-words until we ran out of steam and went into the kitchen.
I did what I always did when I came home: got myself a glass of water from the filter in the fridge and dug a couple cookies out of the “biscuit barrel” that mom’s sister had sent us from England. The normalcy of this made my heart stop hammering, my heart catching up with my brain, and soon we were all sitting at the table.
“Where have you been?” they both said, more or less in unison.
I had given this some thought on the way home. “I got trapped,” I said. “In Oakland. I was there with some friends, doing a project, and we were all quarantined.”
“For five days?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. It was really bad.” I’d read about the quarantines in the Chronicle and I cribbed shamelessly from the quotes they’d published. “Yeah. Everyone who got caught in the cloud. They thought we had been attacked with some kind of super-bug and they packed us into shipping containers in the docklands, like sardines. It was really hot and sticky. Not much food, either.”
“Christ,” Dad said, his fists balling up on the table. Dad teaches in Berkeley three days a week, working with a few grad students in the library science program. The rest of the time he consults for clients in the city and down the Peninsula, third-wave dotcoms that are doing various things with archives. He’s a mild-mannered librarian by profession, but he’d been a real radical in the sixties and wrestled a little in high school. I’d seen him get crazy angry now and again — I’d even made him that angry now and again — and he could seriously lose it when he was Hulking out. He once threw a swing-set from Ikea across my granddad’s whole lawn when it fell apart for the fiftieth time while he was assembling it.
