Homeland

by Doctorow, Cory

  The first clue I had as to my total vincibility, my utter vulnerability, was when the eyes of the prisoners behind me on the bus widened in unison, turning to comical expressions of horror that made them all look like they were somehow related, cousins in a family of genetically frightened people.

  The next clue was the terrified squeak from the girl behind me, and then the final clue a bare instant later: the phone knocked out of my hands, my wrists grabbed by a gloved hand and yanked so high and so fast that I barely had time to lever myself out of the seat, bending almost double, forehead impacting painfully with the floor as I sought to escape the wrenching, tearing agony in my shoulders.

  Then there was a face beside mine, so close I heard the click of its teeth in my ear, so close I could smell the gum on its breath. It belonged to my tormentor, who said, “Kid, no one likes a smart-ass.” My hands were released and I whimpered as my arms snapped back, my fists kind of bouncing off my butt, my face grinding into the dirty floor of the bus.

  Before I could get my breath, the same hands had my ankles and the familiar, dread sound of plastic handcuffs being ratcheted along their closure mechanism ripped through the air as one ankle, then the other, were cinched tight enough to hurt. The hands kept moving. My wrists were jerked back as the plastic between them was caught and hauled back up, the man working over me grunting softly—a curiously tender sound—and another set of cuffs were attached to the plastic between them. Then my ankles were hauled up toward my wrists and my fogged-over brain realized that I was about to be hogtied.

  I kicked and bucked and shouted something, I don’t know what—maybe not even words. Just a kind of howl, a NO that ripped from my guts to my throat. I began to worm my way down the length of the bus, trying to get away from the tormentor and his hands. The other prisoners got their feet out of the way, giving me passage, and I heard them shout things at the guard who was pursuing me: “Shame!” in a dozen voices.

  I reached the cage at the back of the bus and squirmed and wormed my way around on it, turning to face back up the aisle. The police officer—a young white guy whose hat had been knocked off, a look on his face like a vengeful god—was trying to come after me, but the other prisoners on the bus had stretched their ankles back into the aisles, making a forest of legs that the cop had to bull past. He reached for the nightstick on his belt, had it halfway out of its ring, when he seemed to think better of it and shifted his grip to his can of Mace.

  He lifted it up like bug spray, shifting the mask around his neck over his face as he did, settling the goggles around his eyes with gloved fingers. The prisoners who saw what he was doing retracted their legs, one by one, until the way between the guard and me was open.

  He blinked twice at me.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll sit quietly. You don’t have to tie me up—”

  He took two steps toward me, holding the Mace in front of him like a vampire hunter holding up a crucifix. Like a vampire, I shrank away from it. My world telescoped down to the nozzle of the Mace bottle, the square aperture with the little round nozzle within. “Please,” I said. His finger tightened on the trigger. The bottle was inches from my face, aimed right at a spot midway between my mouth and nose.

  “Tom,” a voice called from the front of the bus. “What the hell is going on here?”

  The guard’s finger froze. He slipped the bottle back into its pouch on his Batman belt, turned around on his heel, looked up the length of the bus at an older cop with a couple stripes on his shoulder, an inspector.

  The guard walked the length of the bus to his boss and the two of them had a quiet, intense conversation. Every pair of eyes on the bus was glued to them, every ear cocked for them. Tom’s back was to me, and I could see from where I stood that his shoulders were as tight as a tennis racket. It was clear to me that he was getting some kind of dressing-down. I confess that I felt a little smug to see this guy get told off, but mostly I was still crapping myself with residual fear.

  Tom got off the bus, and the inspector marched down the bus without a word, grabbed me by the arm, and half dragged me back to my seat, while I tried to keep upright by shuffling my bound feet in a frantic penguin-gait. He pushed me impersonally into my seat and turned on his heel without a word.

  “You should have called the lawyers first,” the guy beside me said.

  I didn’t say anything. The lights in the bus went off and the engine roared to life and we were off.

  * * *

  The girl in front of me apologized over the bump and the growl of the bus as we rattled through the night. The irony was that her mom had been so freaked out that the girl hadn’t managed to convey anything useful to her. On the plus side, the girl—whose name was Dalia—managed to retrieve my phone after Officer Friendly knocked it out of my hands. She’d managed to drop it into one of her boot cuffs, and promised to get it back to me as soon as she had the chance. I wasn’t too optimistic about such a chance coming up, being bound hand and foot as I was, but I appreciated the thought. In the meantime, I gave her my name and told her that if she wouldn’t mind googling me and getting my email address to get me the phone back when the time came, I’d appreciate it an awful lot.

  The bus wasn’t going very fast or very far. Out the window, it was all a confusion of traffic—lots of other police buses—and long delays. Several times we stopped for long periods—it felt like hours, and certainly my arms and shoulders told me it was an eternity—before moving on. I dozed several times, once flopping onto the guy with the broken arm, who made a weak whimper that was worse than a scream.

  We got to where we were going just as the sun was coming up. It was a nondescript warehouse-type building, swarming with cops. They took us off the bus two at a time, spaced out by ten or twenty minutes. I guessed that this must be “processing.” They left the people who couldn’t walk until last. Two burly cops carried me off the bus like a sack of garbage, then went back for my seatmate. I shouted that he needed medical attention. They pretended they didn’t hear.

  No one asked me why I was bound at the ankles, and no one moved to release me. I was hefted from one station to the next. First I was propped up in a chair in front of a trestle table where a couple of bleary cops with ruggedized laptops—about one millionth as cool and military-looking as the ones that Timmy and Knothead had—fingerprinted me, retina-scanned me, swabbed my cheek for DNA, and then took my name and address and Social Security number. I told them I declined to answer any further questions. I told them I wanted to see a lawyer. I told them I needed to pee. I asked them what I was under arrest for. (I’d drilled this routine a zillion times, but it was a lot harder to do in handcuffs than it was in front of the bedroom mirror when I was having what Mom called collywobbles about the thought of being arrested some day.)

  They weren’t impressed. Their responses, in order, were “Spell Yallow again?” “We don’t have any further questions,” “Later,” “Later,” and “Disorderly conduct and conspiracy to disturb the peace.”

  They called out to someone else and then I was picked up—the whole chair came with me this time—and taken to a fingerprinting station.

  Then they took me indoors and led me to a cold, bright room that looked like it had once been a supervisor’s office, or maybe a foreman’s room, and strip-searched me. At least they cut loose my cuffs for this. I chafed at my wrists and ankles, doing my best not to whimper as the blood started to flow to them again. There were fifteen or twenty other guys in there, and we avoided one another’s eyes as we stripped off our clothes and stood shivering and naked while more bored cops went from one person to the next, searching our clothes with hands clad in surgical gloves, like we were infected with some kind of vermin or virus. They looked in our armpits, under our testicles, up our butts. It was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life, partly because it was so bored and clinical. These guys had nothing personal against us. They could have been government health workers inspecting beef on the way to market.
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  It’s surprising how philosophical being shivering, terrified, and naked in police custody can make you. If you’d have asked me how I’d have felt about these guys beforehand, I would have told you that I hated them, thought they were gutless cowards and worse. They were traitors to humanity, people who made their living defending the interests of the wealthy and corrupt and powerful from everyone else. I’d seen them commit violence, seen them arrive at a peaceful protest dressed up like science fiction super-soldiers, seen them bristling with (supposedly) nonlethal weapons and treating people who were scared and upset about the world like vermin.

  But there we were, two groups of human beings in a cold room, one group naked, one group wearing overblown Halloween costumes, and none of us wanted to be there. We had parts we’d been given by some weird, unimaginable authority, “the system,” and now we had to act them out. I could see that the cops in the room would rather have been pretty much anywhere else, doing pretty much anything else. But there they were, looking up our buttholes and getting ready to throw us into cages.

  There was a knife-edged moment where I felt like I could just pull on my underwear and walk up to the nearest cop and say, “Come on, dude, let’s be reasonable about this,” and we could have talked it over like real people who lived in the same city with the same problems. This guy might have kids who were going to get stuck paying off a quarter million bucks’ worth of student debt or he’d lose his house; that guy was young enough that he might actually be living with his parents and trying to pay off that debt.

  The moment stretched and broke. Our clothes were patted down and shaken out, then we were allowed to dress again. They cuffed us again, too. I silently begged the universe to keep me free from ankle cuffs and thought I’d made it, when the cop who was trussing me up seemed to remember that I’d been ankle-cuffed and reached for his belt again.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to do that.”

  He pretended he didn’t hear me, but grabbed one of my ankles and started to cinch the zip strip around it.

  “Come on, man,” I said, wheedling and whining now, hating the sound of it in my voice. “It’s really not necessary.”

  The guy made eye contact with me and grunted. “You did something to earn those cuffs. Not my job to figure out whether it’s time to get rid of ’em.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. This guy had no idea why I’d been cuffed, but because I’d been cuffed, I obviously deserved to be cuffed. Tom was long gone, and so was the inspector who’d rescued me. I could imagine wearing leg cuffs all the way to the courthouse and the judge, and being denied bail because I was the kind of dangerous offender who got leg bindings.

  I shuffled out of the foreman’s office and into the main building. The cavernous space had been fitted with mesh cages, stretching in corridors as far as I could see. The cages were made of chain-link and steel poles, the poles bolted to the floor and ceiling at precise intervals, slicing the room into little pens. Each one had an electric lock fitted to its hasp, an open-air chemical toilet, and a collection of grim-looking prisoners. Men were on one side of the central aisle, women on the other.

  One by one, the cops tossed us into different “cells,” following instructions on their hardened, tactical handheld computers. I decided that “tactical” was the world’s most boring fashion statement. Sometimes, they put guys into cells that were so full there was no room to sit, other guys went into cells where they were virtually on their own. Several cells sat empty. Whatever sorting and packing algorithm was being used to incarcerate us, it had a sense of humor.

  I ended up in one of the nearly empty ones, and was glad that my hands had been cuffed in front of me, because I was finally able to take the piss that had been trying to batter its way to freedom for the past several hours, sitting down on the exposed toilet and hunching over for privacy, then fumbling my underwear and pants back up.

  Within a few hours, the cell had gone from empty to full. Yes, I said hours. More hours went by. It felt like we’d been there for a day, though there was no daylight, and everyone had had their watches and phones confiscated. I got to know some of the guys in my cell, and someone tried a mic check and gave a little speech about how much it sucked that we were being held this way and asked the cops to uphold the law and give us our phone calls and food and water. He got cheers from the other protesters in the cells, and the cops pretended they didn’t hear.

  Hours oozed past.

  * * *

  People had come and gone for so long that I stopped paying attention. I was hungry and thirsty, and the toilet was overflowing and making revolting smells and starting to ooze a sickening chemical slick that reduced the space in the cell. Finally, I realized that the whole place was quieter and emptier than it had been before. More people were going than coming. They weren’t coming back. So they were going somewhere, possibly to get their phone calls and their hearings.

  Finally, officers came for me, two of them. They sliced the middle of the cuffs around my ankles so that I could walk, and I saw that nearly all the cells toward the front of the building were empty. A tingle of hope came into my belly, joining the hunger growls and the pasty, parched thirst.

  We came out to the same foreman’s room where I’d been searched. A woman police officer, older, black, took my fingerprints again, read notes off a screen, typed, didn’t say anything. It’s a good thing she didn’t, because I kept forgetting that I wasn’t going to say anything to her unless I had a lawyer present.

  She nodded at the guys who’d brought me out and they gripped my arms and walked me to the door. I emerged to cold, gray daylight and a light drizzle. There were thousands of people standing across the street, holding signs and chanting. The officers brought me to the curb, then let go.

  “You’re done,” one said.

  “What?” I said.

  “Go,” the other one said. “You’re done.”

  “What about the charges?”

  “What charges? You want us to press charges?”

  After all that, they were just going to let me go. Some part of me wanted to say, “Hell yeah, I want you to press charges. Otherwise, what the hell just happened here? A kidnapping?”

  The people across the street with the signs and banners were angry. Now I understood why.

  “What a load of bullshit,” I said, with feeling.

  The cops’ faces slammed shut. I stood my ground. I was scared as hell, but I stood my ground. Let ’em grab me, chain me up, arrest me, put me in jail, waterboard me, try me, find me guilty, send me up for life. That was a load of bullshit, and I had every right to say it.

  We stared at each other like dogs about to fight. I noticed that the people across the street had gotten quieter, then louder. I was peripherally aware of a lot of people with a lot of cameraphones maneuvering into position near me. I guess the cops were, too. One of them turned and walked back. Then the other one.

  I was shaking, my fists clenched so hard my fingernails actually broke the skin on my palms in a couple of places.

  The protesters patted me on the back. It seemed that they knew what I was freaking out about. There was a table laden with free food—someone had brought down a whole crapton of lentils and rice and PB&J sandwiches and hot pizzas—and five different people asked if I had any money to get home and whether I needed to talk to a doctor.

  I sat down on the curb amid the shouting, jostling people and wolfed down about a hundred thousand calories’ worth of food, eating mechanically, stopping only once I’d run out of food. Then I got up, dusted off my filthy clothes, and walked away, finding my way home, though I couldn’t even tell you how I got there.

  Chapter 14

  Mom and Dad were gray-faced when I knocked on the door. I tried to make a joke of it. “I’d have thought that you guys’d be used to this by now.” My voice cracked a little on the last couple words, and they gave me enormous hugs. They’d figured out where I was, and confirmed it by calling my phone, which Dali
a had answered, telling them all about what had happened on the bus. Mom and Dad had dipped into their line of credit to pay a lawyer to start shouting at the SFPD about me, but she was only one of hundreds of lawyers so employed and my parents had had no idea that I was released until I stumbled up the walk.

  I wanted to shower for a hundred years. I wanted to sleep for a millennium. But before I did anything, I wanted to find Ange.

  “She got home ten hours ago,” Mom said. “But her mother said she went right back out to the chicken farm.” That was what the press was calling the place we’d all been held, down in South San Francisco, the name coming from the cameraphone photos that had already appeared online, making the place look like some kind of nightmarish poultry factory.

  No doubt Ange was waiting for me there and I’d missed her in the horde. How the hell did people live before phones?

  “Can I borrow your phone?” I said.

  Mom handed it to me, and I spent a couple moments unfogging my brain enough to get it to cough up Ange’s phone number, which had been my first speed-dial for years. “Have you heard from him?” she said as soon as she picked up.

  “Kind of,” I said.

  “Where the hell are you?”

  “Home,” I said.

  “What the hell are you doing there?”

  “Preparing to estivate,” I said. Estivate is a very handy verb: it’s a kind of hibernation, “a prolonged state of torpor or dormancy.” Just where I was heading.

  “Not until I get there. How dare you get out of jail without my finding you?”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m a rotter. Sorry, darling.”