I'd never really thought of myself as
lucky
for being where I had been after the DHS took over San Francisco, but now that I looked at it from Darryl's point of view, I had to admit that yeah, it could have been a lot worse. I tried to imagine what it would have been like to be totally helpless and alone, instead of with all these amazing friends and people who looked up to me and hailed me.
"I'm sorry, D," I said.
"It's not your fault," he said. "I don't want to put this on you. It's my own damned problem." He swallowed a couple times. "It's partly why I hadn't been around much for you lately. Didn't want to say something, you know, ugly. Because I know you did what you did for me." Had I? Maybe a little. But I also did it for me, for the humiliation and suffering and fear, to try and get past all that. "But when Jolu told me about the darknet, when I saw those documents, I felt, like, all right, now it's my turn. Now I can finally
do
something about all the nastiness and corruption and evil in the world.
"But Van, she's not down for that. She just wants me to be safe. I get that. But she doesn't understand how being 'safe' means that I can't be
whole
again, can't get demons out of my head. I need to make something right, I need to be the star of my own movie for a change."
"Jeez, D, man --" I couldn't really find the words. I guess I'd suspected some of this, but I don't think I'd ever imagined that Darryl would ever say these words to me. It wasn't the kind of thing that guys said to each other -- not even guys who were as close as brothers, the way we had been.
"Yeah," he said. "It sure is a bitch, isn't it?"
"So what do you want to do?" I said.
"What do
I
want to do?"
"Yeah," I said. "Yeah. What do
you
want to do? Not 'What do you think I should do?' or 'What do you think is the safest thing to do?' What does Darryl Glover want to do, right now, today?"
He looked down at his hands. His fingernails were chewed ragged, his cuticles dotted with little scabs from where he'd chewed them bloody. He'd done that as a kid, but he'd stopped when we were both fourteen. I didn't know he'd started again.
"I want to release the whole thing. Today. Now."
"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, that sounds about right. Let's fucking do it."
The BOO-YAH interlude
Boo-yah, right? Let's do it.
I loved writing this part of the book. There's days when writing comes like pulling teeth, and days when it just
flows
. I used to think that I could only write on the good days, which made me pretty miserable. Then I had a breakthrough when I noticed that I couldn't tell the difference between the "good day" stuff and the "bad day" stuff after the fact. That may have been the most liberating realization in my life, the one that made me believe that I could go pro -- quit my day-job and write full time.
That's what I do. I'm a freelance writer, a member of the precariat, dependent on my ability to amuse you on the long slog from the cradle and the grave, and to do so sufficiently that you voluntarily part with your cash. I am one of the lucky ones -- a one percenter in the world of the arts -- and there isn't a day that goes by that I don't realize just how amazing that is.
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Van didn't like it, but she got in the car with us. Darryl drove carefully and slowly, but I was in the passenger seat and I could see how his hands were shaking. We snarled in traffic in SoMa, and Darryl showed off his encyclopedic knowledge of the alleyways of the neighborhood to beat it, popping out on Market Street from an alleyway that was so narrow we scraped up a couple of plastic recycling wheelie-bins on our way out. He was in Hayes Valley a few minutes later, pulling up in front of Ange's house. I knew she didn't have any classes that afternoon, but she hadn't answered her phone when I called her. I thumped on her door.
She came down in track pants and the T-shirt she'd slept in the night before, her eyes swollen and red. She folded her arms when she saw me and glared. "Get dressed, okay?" I said. "You can be pissed at me later. Get dressed." She looked over my shoulder at Darryl, who waved at her. Van gave a half-assed, unenthusiastic wave, too.
"You're kidding me," she said.
"Get dressed," I said. "It's happening."
She gave me a long, searching look. I looked back at her, thinking,
Come on, Ange, argue later, do this now before I lose my nerve.
My heart was fluttering in my chest like a pigeon trapped in a store, beating against the windows and trying to break out.
She turned on her heel and disappeared into the house. I heard her run up the stairs to her room. A minute later, her little sister, Tina, appeared in the hallway. "You remember when I told you if you broke her heart I'd pull your scrotum over your head?" She was two years younger than Ange, and tall and skinny where Ange was short and curvy, but they were unmistakably sisters, with nearly the same voice and facial expressions.
"I remember, Tina. Can we save the scrotal reconfiguration for later? We're kind of into something more important than me or Ange or any of us."
She cocked her head. "I'll think about it."
Ange came pelting down the stairs, toothpaste on the corner of her mouth. She was wearing a long electric-blue raincoat I loved and hand-painted Keds and huge, squarish Japanese pants she'd sewn herself from a pattern, all clothes that had been strewn on the floor of her room the last time I'd been in it, a hundred years ago, the night before.
"Tina, enough with the scrotums, already," Ange said as she reached us. Tina made an exaggerated, monkey-like face at her and then gave her a kiss on the cheek. "Come on," Ange said to me, whisking past me toward Darryl's car, hesitating for a second before yanking open the back door and sliding into the seat next to Van. I brought up the rear and got into the passenger seat, checking out whether Van and Ange were ready to kill each other while trying to look like I wasn't checking it out at all.
Inside the car, the tension was as thick as the fog on a wet night on Twin Peaks.
"You know where Jolu's office is, right?" I said to Darryl.
"We're going to see Jolu?" Ange said.
"I told you," I said. "It's happening. And if it's going to happen, we should all be there, in person. Better than worrying about our computers or phones being tapped."
Ange took her phone out of her purse and switched it off. I did the same, and so did Van. Darryl dug his phone out and handed it to me, and I did the same for him.
"Okay," Ange said.
Darryl said, "Yeah, I know where he works." We were halfway there already. Darryl had an almost mystical knack for beating San Francisco traffic. He could have been the world's greatest cab driver or getaway man.
"What's the plan?" Ange said as we got closer.
Van said, "They don't have a
plan
. They just got in the car and started driving."
I looked over my shoulder at Ange, who was nodding. "Yeah," she said. "That sounds like them."
The two women looked at each other for a moment. I tried not to hold my breath. They'd disliked each other since eighth grade, and while I'd never gotten the whole story, I assumed that it was one of those old grievances that takes on a life of its own, so that the reason you don't get along is that you don't get along.
They stopped looking. I turned back around. A few seconds later, Van said, conversationally, "You got a lawyer?"
Ange said, "Not really. There was the public defender and that guy from the ACLU, back in the Gitmo-by-the-Bay days, but no one who's really
my
lawyer."
"Yeah," Van said. "Did you have the woman from ACLU, or the guy?"
"Both. But the woman really seemed like she knew her stuff. What was her name?"
"Alyssa? Alanna?"
"Elana," Ange said. "She was great."
"So I was thinking we should write a lawyer's number on our arms, you know, just in case. One phone call, right? Don't want to waste it calling directory assistance."
"I'm pretty sure I've got her number in my email." I heard Ange open her computer, enter her password.
"Here's a Sharpie."
There was some mutual arm-scribbling.
"Not so big," Ange said.
"If I write it this big, the rest of us will be able to read it from across the room, even if ours has been washed off or, you know, whatever."
"Good point," Ange said. "Here, roll up your sleeve."
"You really think if we get busted anyone's going to let us talk to a lawyer?" I asked, secretly pleased at how civilized the two of them were being to each other.
"You shut up," Ange said. "Wouldn't you feel like a total moron if we
did
get a phone call and you didn't have a number? Idiot."
"Yeah, dude," Darryl said.
"You shut up, too," Van said. "And hold your arm out at the next red light."
I rolled up my sleeve and twisted to stick my arm into the back seat. Ange's fingers grabbed around my wrist and yanked painfully. I yelped, and she made a disgusted noise. "Silence," she said, and I felt the tickle of the Sharpie moving over my arm. It seemed to be taking an awfully long time. When I finally got my arm back, I saw that she'd made sour faces of the 0s and skulls out of the 8s. I decided that this was a gesture of affection. At least, it comforted me to think of it that way.
Jolu's little startup was three guys and a woman sharing two desks in the back of a bigger, richer startup, crammed together four broken down Aeron chairs that looked like they'd been in continuous use since the dot-com boom of the last century, more duct tape than original mesh. Jolu noticed us as we threaded our way down the office, past the desks of people from the bigger startup -- some kind of analytics company that I'd vaguely heard of -- toward him. He took a moment to assess the fact that all four of us were together, and quietly tapped one of his co-workers, the woman, on the shoulder, stood and moved to intercept us.
"Let's go to the meeting room," he said, pointing back the way we'd come.
The meeting room was barely big enough for all of us to fit in, and the meeting table was a converted ping-pong table (there was a net and paddles tucked onto one of the room's crowded shelves). But it had a door, and Jolu closed it.
"Everyone, this is Kylie Deveau," he said, pointing to his co-worker, a pretty black woman a little older than us, with short hair and red-framed round-lensed wire-rim glasses. She smiled and shook hands all around.
"You must be the darknet," she said. "Pleased to meet you in the flesh."
"Kylie started the company," Jolu said. "I couldn't do darknet without letting her in on it."
"Yeah," I said. "I guess it wouldn't be fair."
"No," Jolu said. "Well, yeah. But I told Kylie because I figured that she was smarter than the rest of us put together." Kylie made a small pretend-bow. "She's the one who found the Zyz stuff in the first place. I assume that's why you are all here, right? Or is there some other enormous, terrible conspiracy I'm about to expose that I should know about."
"No, I said. "Just that one. Nice to meet you, Kylie. Let me tell you about some people I ran into last night. Well, I say people, but the first batch could have been ghosts or super-intelligent LOLCats for all I know, and the second batch were more like gorillas or possibly hyenas."
"I can tell this is going to be good," Jolu said, and sat down.
Kylie said, "Well, I can see why you want to get this out now."
Darryl said, "You do? Because I keep feeling like it's suicidal." I winced when he used the word, thinking of all the shrinks who'd felt the need to keep Darryl under observation for all that time.
Kylie smiled. "It just might be. But doing nothing is entirely suicidal, isn't it? It's not like these characters are going to ignore the fact that you're still out here, not forever. I'm guessing that they only let you go because they'd had to act fast and hadn't had a chance to figure out how to put you away without sticking out their own necks. But from what we've seen, they've got a lot of juice with a lot of different agencies, enough to take away city attorneys' houses, anyway. I don't suppose it'd be hard for them to figure out a way to get the police to take a special interest in you."
"You know," I said, "I hadn't even thought about that until now. I'd only gotten as far as them putting a bag over my head and sticking me in a plane to Yemen or something."
Kylie said, "That sounds expensive. You know what jet-fuel costs, these days? Much cheaper to get someone else to bear the expense. These guys are the world's biggest welfare queens, after all -- suck up government money in military contracts, use it to issue bonds, get the government to pass laws that make your bonds into safer bets, then go after even bigger and better laws. I'm guessing they never spend a penny if they can get Uncle Sucker to foot the bill.