I got through the rest of the day without anything making any kind of mark on me. I don’t think I said eight words.
Finally it was over and I hit the doors, heading for the gates and the stupid Mission and my pointless house.
I was barely out the gate when someone crashed into me. He was a young homeless guy, maybe my age, maybe a little older. He wore a long, greasy overcoat, a pair of baggy jeans, and rotting sneakers that looked like they’d been through a wood-chipper. His long hair hung over his face, and he had a pubic beard that straggled down his throat into the collar of a no-color knit sweater.
I took this all in as we lay next to each other on the sidewalk, people passing us and giving us weird looks. It seemed that he’d crashed into me while hurrying down Valencia, bent over with the burden of a split backpack that lay beside him on the pavement, covered in tight geometric doodles in magic-marker.
He got to his knees and rocked back and forth, like he was drunk or had hit his head.
“Sorry buddy,” he said. “Didn’t see you. You hurt?”
I sat up too. Nothing felt hurt.
“Um. No, it’s OK.”
He stood up and smiled. His teeth were shockingly white and straight, like an ad for an orthodontic clinic. He held his hand out to me and his grip was strong and firm.
“I’m really sorry.” His voice was also clear and intelligent. I’d expected him to sound like the drunks who talked to themselves as they roamed the Mission late at night, but he sounded like a knowledgeable bookstore clerk.
“It’s no problem,” I said.
He stuck out his hand again.
“Zeb,” he said.
“Marcus,” I said.
“A pleasure, Marcus,” he said. “Hope to run into you again sometime!”
Laughing, he picked up his backpack, turned on his heel and hurried away.
I walked the rest of the way home in a bemused fug. Mom was at the kitchen table and we had a little chat about nothing at all, the way we used to do, before everything changed.
I took the stairs up to my room and flopped down in my chair. For once, I didn’t want to login to the Xnet. I’d checked in that morning before school to discover that my note had created a gigantic controversy among people who agreed with me and people who were righteously pissed that I was telling them to back off from their beloved sport.
I had three thousand projects I’d been in the middle of when it had all started. I was building a pinhole camera out of legos, I’d been playing with aerial kite photography using an old digital camera with a trigger hacked out of silly putty that was stretched out at launch and slowly snapped back to its original shape, triggering the shutter at regular intervals. I had a vacuum tube amp I’d been building into an ancient, rusted, dented olive-oil tin that looked like an archaeological find — once it was done, I’d planned to build in a dock for my phone and a set of 5.1 surround-sound speakers out of tuna-fish cans.
I looked over my workbench and finally picked up the pinhole camera. Methodically snapping legos together was just about my speed.
I took off my watch and the chunky silver two-finger ring that showed a monkey and a ninja squaring off to fight and dropped them into the little box I used for all the crap I load into my pockets and around my neck before stepping out for the day: phone, wallet, keys, wifinder, change, batteries, retractable cables… I dumped it all out into the box, and found myself holding something I didn’t remember putting in there in the first place.
It was a piece of paper, grey and soft as flannel, furry at the edges where it had been torn away from some larger piece of paper. It was covered in the tiniest, most careful handwriting I’d ever seen. I unfolded it and held it up. The writing covered both sides, running down from the top left corner of one side to a crabbed signature at the bottom right corner of the other side.
The signature read, simply: ZEB.
I picked it up and started to read.
> Dear Marcus
> You don’t know me but I know you. For the past three months, since the Bay Bridge was blown up, I have been imprisoned on Treasure Island. I was in the yard on the day you talked to that Asian girl and got tackled. You were brave. Good on you.
> I had a burst appendix the day afterward and ended up in the infirmary. In the next bed was a guy named Darryl. We were both in recovery for a long time and by the time we got well, we were too much of an embarrassment to them to let go.
> So they decided we must really be guilty. They questioned us every day. You’ve been through their questioning, I know. Imagine it for months. Darryl and I ended up cell-mates. We knew we were bugged, so we only talked about inconsequentialities. But at night, when we were in our cots, we would softly tap out messages to each other in Morse code (I knew my HAM radio days would come in useful sometime).
> At first, their questions to us were just the same crap as ever, who did it, how’d they do it. But after a little while, they switched to asking us about the Xnet. Of course, we’d never heard of it. That didn’t stop them asking.
> Darryl told me that they brought him arphid cloners, Xboxes, all kinds of technology and demanded that he tell them who used them, where they learned to mod them. Darryl told me about your games and the things you learned.
> Especially: The DHS asked us about our friends. Who did we know? What were they like? Did they have political feelings? Had they been in trouble at school? With the law?
> We call the prison Gitmo-by-the-Bay. It’s been a week since I got out and I don’t think that anyone knows that their sons and daughters are imprisoned in the middle of the Bay. At night we could hear people laughing and partying on the mainland.
> I got out last week. I won’t tell you how, in case this falls into the wrong hands. Maybe others will take my route.
> Darryl told me how to find you and made me promise to tell you what I knew when I got back. Now that I’ve done that I’m out of here like last year. One way or another, I’m leaving this country. Screw America.
> Stay strong. They’re scared of you. Kick them for me. Don’t get caught.
> Zeb
There were tears in my eyes as I finished the note. I had a disposable lighter somewhere on my desk that I sometimes used to melt the insulation off of wires, and I dug it out and held it to the note. I knew I owed it to Zeb to destroy it and make sure no one else ever saw it, in case it might lead them back to him, wherever he was going.
