Homeland

by Doctorow, Cory

  Chapter 13

  He was only a few yards behind where I’d been. Close enough to keep a good eye on me, if that’s what he’d been doing there. Far enough away that he couldn’t have quite reached out and grabbed me, if that was his goal.

  I took a step backwards, landing on someone’s fingers, jerking my foot up, nearly skidding on a slick of used food and toxic chemicals. I caught my balance, took another step. Knothead hadn’t spotted me yet. He wasn’t wearing tactical black, but I saw that his blue jeans had a couple of bulging cargo pockets, and there were a few little bulges around his waistline.

  I took another step and looked carefully around me. Would Knothead have been here alone? Would he have had Timmy with him? Zyz didn’t strike me as the kind of organization that sent its goons out on their own. I looked all around me, finding new reservoirs of panic and fear, searching the crowd for guys who could be Timmy, wondering if he might be wearing a wig or some other disguise. I didn’t see him, but I did spot Lemmy helping an older guy who was limping, his arm around Lemmy’s shoulders. I started to move toward him, and then I felt a hand take mine. For a glorious moment, I thought Ange had crept up on me and grabbed my hand—somehow, I could feel that these were a woman’s fingers.

  Then the fingers grabbed hold of my thumb and did something awful and painful to it, something that made my head snap back in pain. I cried out, the sound muffled by my mask, and tried to squirm away from the terrible, wrenching pain. That only made it worse. I went up on my tiptoes, in agony, and managed to twist around and see who was the author of my suffering.

  It was Carrie Johnstone, dressed like a sitcom housewife doing the grocery shopping in track pants, a loose SFSU sweatshirt, her hair tied back in a scrunchie. It was such a great disguise, so utterly unlike her efficient, ruthless persona, that I couldn’t figure out where I knew that stern face from at first. When I did, I gasped harder. “Hello, Marcus,” she said, and relaxed her grip on my thumb, just a little, so that I could catch my breath and focus for a moment. She watched my eyes carefully and when she was convinced that I was paying full attention, she brought her other hand out from beneath her sweatshirt. In it, she held a little two-pronged, pistol-gripped tactical black gizmo. A Taser.

  “I’d prefer not to use this,” she said. “Because then I’d have to carry you. That would be conspicuous. And I might have to drop you. You wouldn’t like that. Am I being clear?” I nodded and swallowed a few times behind my mask. She made the Tazer vanish. “Smart boy. Come along now. We’ve got to move.”

  It was full night now, and as the people around us regained their feet, there was chaos—shoving and pushing in the dark, crying and some screams and retching. Every now and again, I’d hear someone shout, “Mic check,” and some weak echoes as people tried to establish order, but Carrie Johnstone always steered me away from those places, pushing me ahead of her like a battering ram, still gripping my thumb but hardly twisting it. Instead, she pulled it this way and that, steering me with it as if it were a joystick.

  Somewhere behind us, I could hear the police bullhorns giving orders to sit down and put your hands on your head, and then I heard Johnstone curse, and she started pushing me faster.

  The night blurred past, but something was nagging at me. Carrie Johnstone and Knothead had been at the protest, looking for me, I suppose, and they’d have been caught in the HERF burst. They were all about tactical this and tactical that, but would they have thought to put their clever devices inside Faraday pouches? Johnstone said the reason she hadn’t Tased me was that she didn’t want to carry me, but really, would it be that hard for her to drag me out of the crowd? Would it be that conspicuous? I was willing to bet that Johnstone could bench-press a water buffalo.

  And the million-dollar question: was there enough electronic circuitry in a dumb little Taser to make it vulnerable to a HERF blast?

  I crashed into an old man whose face was streaked with dirt and tears, his face looming out of the night, eyes wide and surprised. He barely had time to register the fact that I was about to collide with him before we were going down in a tangle. As we fell, I felt Carrie Johnstone’s grip tighten on my thumb, try to wrench it into that special configuration of torment, and slip.

  I coiled my legs under me and sprang into the night like a jackrabbit, scrambling to get away, using hands and feet to get through the crowd, running blindly in the darkness. Behind me, I heard outraged cries and wondered if they were from the people I’d hurtled past, or from people who were being tossed aside by the vengeful hands of Carrie Johnstone. I ran so hard I lost my breath and couldn’t catch it, couldn’t get even a sip of air to pass my throat, but I forced myself to run on, even as my vision blackened around the edges, telescoping again.

  I had been running west, and something about the buildings around me made me think I was getting away from the protest’s center, out toward the edge. Soon I might escape to the real world, a place away from relentless pursuers and gas and crowds. Keeping that in my mind, I forced one foot in front of the other, gulping like a fish in my wet, claustrophobic mask.

  It wasn’t going to work. I wasn’t going to make it. Any second now, I was going to fall to my knees and a second after that, Carrie Johnstone would have me. Even without the Taser, she was going to have to carry me—things inside me were wearing out, bursting, breaking, and once I stopped moving, I wouldn’t be able to start again.

  But there was the edge of the crowd, I could see it. See the place where the wall of people ended and the city began. Just a few more steps. The lights ahead glittered in my foggy, steamed-up goggles. I was so fixated on them, I didn’t even see the police line that divided the protest from the real world, a line of helmeted men wearing bouquets of plastic handcuffs at their waists, hard-faced, hands encased in black gloves. I almost stopped myself then, but I didn’t. Maybe I couldn’t have. In any event, I was pretty sure that Carrie Johnstone couldn’t kidnap me from jail.

  One step, two steps, and then I was crashing into a policeman—I actually smelled his cologne and the hamburger on his breath as he absorbed the weak momentum of my last stumbling rush. He steadied me, took in my mask and goggles, spotted the plastic handcuff around one wrist, grabbed hold of the loose cuff, jerked my arm around, grabbed my other arm, and cuffed it. I was handled as impersonally as a sack of potatoes as another cop stepped forward out of the line and directed me to one of the waiting buses I’d spotted from the sky.

  Before he put me inside, he patted me down, reaching for my phone, then stopping when his gloved hand encountered some of the vomit I’d been spattered with. He said, “That a cell phone?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s dead, though.”

  “Right,” he said. “They’ll take it from you when you get processed anyway.”

  There were already a couple dozen people in the darkness and quiet of the bus. Some were young, some were old, some were brown or Asian, some were white. It was laid out like a school bus, the kind of thing I’d ridden a thousand times on school trips, except for the steel mesh separating the driver’s seat and back of the bus from the rest of the interior. Each seat held two people, and they were loading us from the back forward. I was halfway down the bus’s length, and I had a seatmate, a guy in black jeans and sweatshirt. He was unconscious and breathing shallowly. The officer who led me to him didn’t say anything as he guided me down into the seat, with an impersonal air that was neither hostile nor friendly. I jostled the guy and he made a whimpering noise, like a hurt animal.

  “I think this guy needs medical help,” I said, squirming in my seat to find a comfortable way of sitting with my arms lashed together behind me.

  “He’ll get it,” the cop said. “Soon as he’s processed.”

  There were murmured conversations around me, the voices tight and scared, like the voices of kids hiding from a killer in a slasher movie. I stared out the windows, looking for any sign of Carrie Johnstone or Knothead—or Ange or Lemmy, for that matter. At five-minute inter
vals, I remembered that I had forgotten to write a lawyer’s phone number on my arm and thought about what an idiot I was. Against all odds, I actually drifted off to sleep for a while, leaning forward with my head against the back of the seat in front of mine. I guess my body had used up so much adrenaline that there just wasn’t anything left to keep me awake. On top of everything else, I had the mother of all caffeine-withdrawal headaches. I would have happily eaten a pound of espresso beans and asked for seconds.

  I woke up when someone was plunked down in the seat in front of mine. I looked up groggily and saw that it was a girl about my age. She was Middle Eastern–looking, with designer clothes and long hair that had mostly escaped from its ponytail. She had a look of utter, grim determination.

  “Hey,” I said to the cop. “Hey, are we going to get to go to the bathroom soon?”

  “After you’re processed,” the cop said.

  “When’s that?”

  “Later.”

  “Come on, we’ve been in here forever. Could you at least take my cuffs off?”

  “No.” The cop turned on his heel and left. The weird thing was how impersonal the whole thing had been. The guy could have been telling a panhandler that he didn’t have any spare change.

  “How long have you been in here?” the girl said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I nodded off. A while. Do you know what time it is?”

  She shrugged. “I think it must be after eleven.”

  “What’s going on out there?”

  “Oh,” she said. “They’re questioning everyone. If they don’t like your answers, you go behind the fence.”

  “The fence?”

  “You didn’t see it? There’s a big area, a block square. All fenced in with movable barriers. They don’t like you, they put you there. Then they talk to you some more. If they still don’t like you, they bring you here. You didn’t go to the fence, huh?”

  I thought about explaining that I’d been chased into a cop by a psychotic war-criminal merc. I said, “Nope. Just got grabbed and put here.”

  She shook her head. “Not me. They grabbed me, checked my ID, penned me in, checked my ID again, put me here. Bastards.”

  “Why do you think they grabbed you?”

  She shrugged again. “I don’t know. Racism? These days, having an Egyptian last name is like being called Jasmina Bin Terrorist Al Jihad. Or maybe it’s because I belong to ECWR.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Women’s group,” she said. “The Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights. Solidarity with women in the Middle East. The women came out for the revolutions, helped overthrow the dictators, spilled their blood. Then the new ‘revolutionary’ governments sent them back home, started running around talking about ‘modesty’ and ‘a women’s place.’ So we talk about it here, have discussion groups, produce literature about what the Koran actually says about women. We call them out for their bullshit.” She shrugged again. “So maybe that’s it. I don’t know. I tried to call my family when I was in the fenced area, but my phone didn’t work. No one’s did.”

  Huh. “Do you have a lawyer you could call?”

  “No,” she said. “But my mother would know someone—once she got over having a heart attack about me being arrested. What does it matter, though?”

  I dropped my voice to a whisper. “I have a working phone.”

  The unconscious guy next to me stirred. He cracked one eyelid and said something indistinct.

  “What?” I said, leaning in.

  “415-285-1011,” he said. “National Lawyers Guild number for San Francisco. If you’ve got a phone, I’d appreciate it if you’d call them for me.”

  There was a guard sitting at the front of the bus, on the other side of the heavy wire mesh that enclosed us. He wasn’t paying much attention. Or maybe he had a hidden mic and was listening to every word through a headphone in the ear I couldn’t see.

  “Right,” I said. “Do you think you could get your fingers in my pocket if I move around so you can reach?”

  He shifted, made a hissing noise like a teakettle. “Don’t think so. I expect my arm’s busted.”

  I looked more closely. The arm closest to me was definitely at a funny angle. He must have been in agony. I turned back to the girl ahead of me. “Do you think you could get the phone out of my pocket?”

  She craned around to look at me. “Maybe,” she said, doubtfully. “How are we going to dial it?”

  “Dunno,” I said. “Let’s burn that bridge when we come to it.”

  I twisted around to get my hip to stick out in the vicinity of the girl’s bound hands. I jostled the guy with the broken arm in the process and he made another hissing sound, but didn’t say anything when I said “Sorry.”

  The next part was really hard. We had both moved so we were sitting on the seats with our legs in the aisle. My phone was in my front pocket, so to get it close to her, I had to turn around so I wasn’t facing her anymore and scootch backwards to where her hands had been. Then she had to find my pocket with her bound hands, working blind, facing away from me.

  “Ew,” she said.

  “It’s not mine,” I said. “Someone puked on me.”

  “That’s so much more comforting, thanks.”

  She got her thumb and forefinger into my pocket, pushed in farther, gripped my phone, started to tug it out of my pocket. She got it most of the way out and lost her grip and I thought the phone was going to fall on the floor, but I kind of twisted my hip so that it ended up slipping back. She tried again and this time, she got it out.

  “Give me a sec,” she said. “These cuffs are so tight I can barely move my hands, and wriggling like that didn’t help.”

  “Take your time,” I said. “Can you get the phone into my hand?” I backed up until my fingers brushed hers and she pressed the phone into my hand.

  While she flexed her fingers and wrists, trying to get the blood to circulate, I turned my phone around in my hands behind my back. I remembered the days when phones had actual buttons you could find by touch and dial without seeing them. I could feel the phone in my hand, in its familiar grip, my thumb over the power button. I turned it on and ran my finger over the screen, feeling the familiar haptic buzz—the little vibrations the phone emitted each time my finger brushed over a “hot” region on the screen to let me know that I was in a spot that could make the phone do something. Running my fingertip up the screen, I carefully counted out the four buzzes from bottom to top, and the three from left to right, trying to figure out where the number pad layout was drawn. This was the lock screen for my phone, which I’d configured to take a superstrong eight-digit password. Because, you know, I’m paranoid like that.

  Gee, thanks, paranoid me. I was going to have to try to key in eight numbers correctly, blind, with half-numb hands. Without alerting the police.

  “What are you doing?” the girl in front of me asked.

  “I think my finger is on the number one. Is that right?”

  “I don’t know, you’re holding the phone upside down.”

  Oh, this was going to be great. I rotated my wrists around so that the screen was facing her. Incidentally, this also made my fingers feel like I was trying to do the world’s stupidest and hardest magic trick.

  “Your fingers are on the one, the nine, the three, and the six.”

  Now I rearranged my hand again so that only one of my index fingers was on the glass. So now I had my hands in the stupid-magic-trick pose, and was gripping the phone only by its edges.

  “Now your finger is on the one.”

  I moved it. “Three, right?”

  “Right, but you got the two on the way.”

  I bit my tongue and started to count in my head. When I got to twenty, she said, “Okay, it’s reset.”

  It took six tries. After the fifth try, the phone locked itself and we had to wait for ten tense minutes until it unlocked itself. Security is awesome.

  “Okay, you’ve done it,” she said. I
could barely feel my hands.

  “Who do we call first?”

  “My mom,” she said. “She knows a crapload of lawyers.”

  It took more fumbling to press the button that brought up the dialer and then an eternity to get her mom’s number keyed in correctly. At least the dialer let me press the backspace button when I screwed up.

  “You’ve done it!” she said, loud enough that people in the other seats shifted and looked around. I closed my hand around my phone, trying to hide it without inadvertently pressing any of the buttons. We waited until everyone had gone back to their solitary misery, and then I said, “Okay, how do we do this?”

  “Do what?”

  “I’m going to call your mom, right? How are you going to talk to her from up there, when the phone is down here?”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How high can you get your arms?”

  I tried. It actually felt good to lift them some, working the kinks out of my shoulder blades, but I was left wishing I’d gone to more yoga classes with Ange. The woman—I still didn’t know her name, isn’t that funny?—shifted behind me, and I felt her prod the call button with her nose or tongue, and then my fingertips tingled with the sound of the phone ringing. From where I sat, I saw several of my fellow prisoners watching with expressions ranging from bemusement to delight to fear. I heard/felt someone answer, a kind of buzz-buzz? that my fingers translated as Hello? and then the girl whispered, “Mama,” and started to talk in a low, urgent whisper, speaking a language I didn’t know—Arabic, I guess? Is that what they speak in Egypt?

  The bus was brightly lit, but we had been locked in it for ages—hours, it felt like—since the last prisoners were brought in. Surely the guard at the front was half asleep or bored stupid, or maybe he was stupid to begin with. Either way, I felt a welcome sense of superiority. They might be heavily armed, they might be able to arrest us and stick us in their plastic cuffs, they might be able to jail us and try us for crimes they’d invented just for the occasion, but they couldn’t control us utterly and totally. Here we were, right in the belly of the beast, and we’d cooperated to establish a channel to the outside world. Between the gas and the violence and the sleep deprivation, I felt a strange madness creep over me, a sense that I was invulnerable and invincible, that I was destined to win, because I was able to do the things that the hero of a story would do, and don’t heroes always win?