Homeland

by Doctorow, Cory

  Chapter 3

  All day long, people had been telling me that the weather man said we were in for a dust storm, but I just assumed that “dust storm” meant that I’d have to tuck my scarf under the lower rim of my goggles, the way I had been doing every time it got windy on the playa.

  But the dust storm that blew up after we left Zeb behind and returned to the nonstop circus was insane. The night turned white with flying dust, and our lights just bounced back in our faces, creating gloomy gray zones in front of us that seemed to go on forever. It reminded me of really bad fog, the kind of thing you get sometimes in San Francisco, usually in the middle of summer, reducing all the tourists in their shorts and T-shirts to hypothermia candidates. But fog made it hard to see, and the dust storm made it hard—nearly impossible—to breathe. Our eyes and noses streamed, our mouths were caked with dust, every breath triggered a coughing fit. We stumbled and staggered and clutched each other’s hands because if we let go, we’d be swallowed by the storm.

  Ange pulled my ear down to her mouth and shouted, “We have to get inside!”

  “I know!” I said. “I’m just trying to figure out how to get back to camp; I think we’re around Nine O’Clock and B.” The ring roads that proceeded concentrically from center camp were lettered in alphabetical order. We were at Seven Fifteen and L, way out in the hinterlands. Without the dust, the walk would have taken fifteen minutes, and been altogether pleasant. With the dust … well, it felt like it might take hours.

  “Screw that,” Ange said. “We have to get inside somewhere now.” She started dragging me. I tripped over a piece of rebar hammered into the playa and topped with a punctured tennis ball—someone’s tent stake. Ange’s iron grip kept me from falling, and she hauled me along.

  Then we were at a structure—a hexayurt, made from triangular slabs of flat styrofoam, duct-taped on its seams. The outside was covered with an insulating layer of silver-painted bubble wrap. We felt our way around to the “door” (a styro slab with a duct-tape hinge on one edge and a pull-loop). Ange was about to yank this open when I stopped her and knocked instead. Storm or no storm, it was weird and wrong to just walk into some stranger’s home.

  The wind howled. If someone was coming, I couldn’t hear them over its terrible moaning whistle. I raised my hand to knock again, and the door swung open. A bearded face peered out at us and shouted, “Get in!”

  We didn’t need to be asked twice. We dove through the door and it shut behind us. I could still hardly see; my goggles were nearly opaque with caked-on dust, and the light in the hexayurt was dim, provided by LED lanterns draped with gauzy scarves.

  “Look at what the storm blew in,” said a gravelly, jovial voice from the yurt’s shadows. “Better hose ’em off before you bring ’em over here, John, those two’ve got half the playa in their ears.”

  “Come on,” said the bearded man. He was wearing tie-dyes and had beads braided into his long beard and what was left of his hair. He grinned at us from behind a pair of round John Lennon glasses. “Let’s get you cleaned up. Shoes first, thanks.”

  Awkwardly, we bent down and unlaced our shoes. We did have half the playa in them. The other half was caught in the folds of our clothes and our hair and our ears.

  “Can I get you two something to wear? We can beat the dust out of your clothes once the wind dies down.”

  My first instinct was to say no, because we hadn’t even been introduced, plus it seemed like more hospitality than even the gift economy demanded. On the other hand, we weren’t doing these people any kindness by crapping up their hexayurt. On the other other hand—

  “That’d be so awesome,” Ange said. “Thank you.”

  That’s why she’s my girlfriend. Left to my own devices, I’d be on-the-other-handing it until Labor Day. “Thanks,” I said.

  The man produced billowy bundles of bright silk. “They’re salwar kameez,” he said. “Indian clothes. Here, these are the pants, and you wrap the tops around like so.” He demonstrated. “I get them on eBay from women’s clothing collectives in India. Straight from the source. Very comfortable and practically one size fits all.”

  We stripped down to our underwear and wound the silk around us as best we could. We helped each other with the tricky bits, and our host helped, too. “That’s better,” he said, and gave us a package of baby wipes, which are the playa’s answer to a shower. We went through a stack of them wiping the dust off each other’s faces and out of each other’s ears and cleaning our hands and bare feet—the dust had infiltrated our shoes and socks!

  “And that’s it,” the man said, clasping his hands together and beaming. He had a soft, gentle way of talking, but you could tell by the twinkle of his eyes that he didn’t miss anything and that something very interesting was churning away in his mind. Either he was a Zen master or an axe murderer—no one else was that calm and mirthful. “I’m John, by the way.”

  Ange shook his hand. “Ange,” she said.

  “Marcus,” I said.

  Lots of people used “playa names,” cute pseudonyms that let them assume new identities while they were at Burning Man. I’d had enough of living with my notorious alter ego, M1k3y, and didn’t feel the need to give myself another handle. I hadn’t talked it over with Ange, but she, too, didn’t seem to want or need a temporary name.

  “Come on and meet the rest.”

  “The rest” turned out to be three more guys, sitting on low cushions around a coffee table that was littered with paper, dice, and meticulously painted lead figurines. We’d interrupted an old-school gaming session, the kind you play with a dungeon master and lots of role-playing. I’m hardly in any position to turn up my nose at someone else’s amusements—after all, I spent years doing live-action role-play—but this was seriously nerdy. The fact that they were playing in the middle of a dust storm on the playa just made it more surreal.

  “Hi!” Ange said. “That looks like fun!”

  “It certainly is,” said a gravelly voice, and I got a look at its owner. He had a lined and seamed face, kind eyes, and a slightly wild beard, and he was wearing a scarf around his neck with a turquoise pin holding it in place. “Are you initiated in the mysteries of this particular pursuit?”

  I slipped my hand into Ange’s and did my best not to be shy or awkward. “I’ve never played, but I’m willing to learn.”

  “An admirable sentiment,” said another man. He was also in his fifties or sixties, with a neat gray Vandyke beard and dark rimmed glasses. “I’m Mitch, this is Barlow, and this is Wil, our dungeon master.”

  The last man was a lot younger than the other three—maybe a youthful forty—and clean-shaven, with apple cheeks and short hair. “Hey, folks,” he said. “You’re just in time. Are you going to sit in? I’ve got some pre-rolled characters you can play. We’re just doing a minidungeon while we wait out the storm.”

  John brought us some cushions from the hexayurt’s recesses and sat down with crossed legs and perfect, straight yoga posture. We settled down beside him. Wil gave us our character sheets—I was a half-elf mage, Ange was a human fighter with an enchanted sword—and dug around in a case until he found hand-painted figurines that matched the descriptions. “My son paints them,” he said. “I used to help, but the kid’s a machine—I can’t keep up with him.” I looked closely at the figs. They were, well, they were beautiful. They’d been painted in incredible detail, more than I could actually make out in the dim light of the yurt. My character’s robes had been painted with mystical silver sigils, and Ange’s character’s chain mail had each ring picked out in tarnished silver, with tiny daubs of black paint in the center of each minute ring.

  “These are amazing,” I said. I’d always thought of tabletop RPGs as finicky and old-fashioned, but these figs had been painted by someone very talented who really loved the game, and if someone that talented thought this was worth his time, I’d give it a chance, too.

  Wil was a great game master, spinning the story of our quest in a dra
matic voice that sucked me right in. The other guys listened intently, though they interjected from time to time with funny quips that cracked one another up. I got the feeling they’d known one another for a long time, and when we took a break for fresh mint tea—these guys knew how to live!—I asked how they knew one another.

  They all smiled kind of awkwardly at one another. “It’s kind of a reunion,” Mitch said. “We all worked together a long time ago.”

  “Did you do a start-up together?”

  They laughed again. I could tell that I was missing something. Wil said, “You ever hear of the Electronic Frontier Foundation?” I sure had. I figured it out a second before he said it: “These guys founded it.”

  “Wait, wait,” I said. “You’re John Perry Barlow?” The guy in the kerchief nodded and grinned like a pirate. “And you’re John Gilmore?” John shrugged and raised his eyebrows. “And you’re Mitch Kapor?” The guy with the Vandyke gave a little wave. Ange was looking slightly left out. “Ange, these guys founded EFF. That one started the first ISP in San Francisco; that one commercialized spreadsheets; and that one wrote the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.”

  Barlow laughed like a cement mixer. “And turned teraliters of sewage into gigaliters of diesel fuel with tailored algae. I also wrote a song or two. Since we’re on the subject.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “Barlow also wrote songs for the Grateful Dead.”

  Ange shook her head. “You make them sound like the elder gods of the Internet.”

  “Enough with the ‘elder’ stuff,” Mitch said, and sipped his tea. “You certainly seem to know your Internet trivia, young man.”

  I blushed. A couple of times on the playa, people had recognized me as M1k3y and come over to tell me how much they admired me and so on, and it had embarrassed me, but now I wanted these guys to know about that part of my life and I couldn’t figure out how to get it out without sounding like I was boasting to three of the all-time heroes of the Internet. Again, Ange saved me. “Marcus and I worked with some EFF people a couple years ago. He started Xnet.”

  Wil laughed aloud at that. “That was you?” he said. He put on a hard-boiled detective voice: “Of all the yurts in all the playa, they had to walk into mine.”

  Mitch held out his hand. “It’s an honor, sir,” he said. I shook his hand, tongue-tied. The others followed suit. I was in a daze, and when John told me that he “really admired the work” I’d done, I thought I’d die from delight.

  “Enough!” Ange said. “I won’t be able to get his head out of the door if it gets any more swollen. Now, are we here to talk or to roll some goddamned dice?”

  “I like your attitude,” Wil said, and thumbed through his notebook and set down some terrain tiles on the graph paper in front of us. Ange turned out to be a master strategist—which didn’t surprise me, but clearly impressed everyone else—and she arrayed our forces such that we sliced through the trash hordes, beat the minibosses, and made it to the final boss without suffering any major losses. She was a born tank, and loved bulling through our adversaries while directing our forces. Wil gave her tons of extra XP for doing it all in character—barbarian swordmistress came easily to her—and her example led us all, so by the time we got to the dragon empress in her cavern at the middle of the dungeon, we were all talking like a fantasy novel. Barlow was a master at this, improvising heroic poetry and delivering it in that whiskey voice of his. Meanwhile, Mitch and John kept catching little hints that Wil dropped in his narration, discovering traps and hidden treasures based on the most obscure clues. I can’t remember when we’d had a better time.

  Mitch and Barlow kept shifting on their cushions, and just as we broke through into the main cavern, they called for a stretch break, and got to their feet and rubbed vigorously at their lower backs, groaning. Wil stretched, too, and checked the yurt’s door. “Storm’s letting up,” he called. It was coming on to midnight, and when Wil opened the door, a cool, refreshing breeze blew in, along with the sound of distant music.

  Part of me wanted to rush back out into the night and find some music to dance to, and part of me wanted to stay in the yurt with my heroes, playing D&D. That was the thing about Burning Man—there was so much I wanted to do!

  Wil came over and handed me another cup of mint tea, the leaves floating in the hot water. “Pretty awesome. Can’t believe these guys let me DM their game. And I can’t believe I ran into you.” He shook his head. “This place is like nerdstock.”

  “Have you known them for long?”

  “Not really. I met Barlow and Gilmore awhile back, when I did a fund-raiser for EFF. I ran into Gilmore at random today and I told him I’d brought my D&D stuff along and the next thing I knew, I was running a game for them.”

  “What kind of fund-raiser were you doing?” Wil looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him.

  “Oh,” he said, and stuck his hands in his pockets. “They brought me in to pretend-fight a lawyer in a Barney the Purple Dinosaur costume. It was because the Barney people had been sending a lot of legal threats out to websites and EFF had been defending them, and, well, it was a lot of fun.”

  I knew him from somewhere. It was driving me crazy. “Look, do I know you? You look really familiar—”

  “Ha!” he said. “I thought you knew. I made some movies when I was a kid, and I was on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and—”

  My jaw dropped so low I felt like it was in danger of scraping my chest. “You’re Wil Wheaton?”

  He looked embarrassed. I’ve never been much of a Trek fan, but I’d seen a ton of the videos Wheaton had done with his comedy troupe, and of course, I knew about Wheaton’s Law: Don’t be a dick.

  “That’s me,” he said.

  “You were the first person I ever followed on Twitter!” I said. It was a weird thing to say, sure, but it was the first thing that came to mind. He was a really funny tweeter.

  “Well, thank you!” he said. No wonder he was such a good narrator—he’d been acting since he was like seven years old. Being around all these people made me wish I had access to Wikipedia so I could look them all up.

  We sat back down to play against the megaboss, the dragon empress. She had all kinds of fortifications, and a bunch of lethal attacks. I figured out how to use an illusion spell to trick her into moving into a side corridor that gave her less room to maneuver, and this made it possible for the fighters to attack her in waves while I used a digging spell to send chunks of the cave roof onto her head. This seemed like a good idea to me (and everyone else, I swear it!), right up to the time that I triggered a cave-in that killed us all.

  But no one was too angry with me. We’d all cheered every time I rolled a fifteen or better and one of my spells brought some roof down on the dragon’s head, and no one had bothered too much about all those dice rolls Wil was making behind his screen. Besides, it was nearly 1 A.M., and there was a party out there! We changed out of John’s beautiful silk clothes and back into our stiff, dust-caked playa-wear and switched on all our EL wire and fit our goggles over our eyes and said a million thanks and shook everyone’s hands and so on. Just as I was about to go, Mitch wrote an email address on my arm with a Sharpie (there was plenty of stuff there already—playa coordinates of parties and email addresses of people I planned on looking up).

  “Ange tells me you’re looking for a job. That’s the campaign manager for Joseph Noss. I hear she’s looking for a webmaster. Tell her I sent you.”

  I was speechless. After months of knocking on doors, sending in résumés, emailing and calling, an honest-to-goodness job—with a recommendation from an honest-to-goodness legend! I stammered out my thanks and as soon as we were outside, I kissed Ange and bounced up and down and dragged her off to the playa, nearly crashing into a guy on a dusty Segway tricked out with zebra-striped fun fur. He gave us a grin and a wave.

  * * *

  We didn’t see Masha or Zeb again until the temple burn on Sunday night, the last night.

&n
bsp; We’d burned The Man the night before, and it had been in-freaking-sane. Hundreds of fire-dancers executing precision maneuvers, tens of thousands of burners sitting in ranks on the playa, screaming our heads off as fireballs and mushroom clouds of flame rose out of The Man’s pyramid, then the open-throated roar as it collapsed and the Rangers dropped their line and we all rushed forward to the fire, everyone helping everyone else along, like the world’s most courteous stampede. I flashed on the crush of bodies in the BART station after the Bay Bridge blew, the horrible feeling of being forced by the mass of people to step on those who’d fallen, the sweat and the stink and the noise. Someone had stabbed Darryl in that crowd, given him the wound that started us on our awful adventure.

  This crowd was nothing like that mob, but my internal organs didn’t seem to know that, and they did slow flip-flops in my abdomen, and my legs turned to jelly, and I found myself slowly sliding to the playa. There were tears pouring down my face, and I felt like I was floating above my body as Ange grabbed me under my armpits, struggling to get me to my feet as she spoke urgent, soothing words into my ears. People stopped and helped, one tall woman steering traffic around us, a small older man grabbing me beneath my armpits with strong hands, pulling me upright.

  I snapped back into my body, felt the jellylegged feeling recede, and blinked away the tears. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Sorry.” I was so embarrassed I felt like digging a hole and pulling the playa in over my head. But neither of the people who’d stopped to help seemed surprised. The woman told me where to find the nearest medical camp and the man gave me a hug and told me to take it easy.

  Ange didn’t say anything, just held me for a moment. She knew that I sometimes got a little wobbly in crowds, and she knew I didn’t like to talk about it. We made our way to the fire and watched it for a moment, then went back out into the playa for the parties and the dancing and forgetting. I reminded myself that I was in love, at Burning Man, and that there might be a job waiting for me when I got back to San Francisco, and kicked myself in the ass every time I felt the bad feeling creeping up on me.