Little Brother

ve about what it stocks, and every time I walk in, I walk out withthree or four collections I'd never heard of under my arm. It's like theowners,

dash; wireless authorization badges.As we walked past one, I got a look at it, and saw the familiar logo: De-partment of Homeland Security. The soldier saw me staring and staredback hard, glaring at me.I got the message and moved on. I peeled away from the gang at VanNess. We clung to each other and cried and promised to call each other.The walk back to Potrero Hill has an easy route and a hard route, thelatter taking you over some of the steepest hills in the city, the kind ofthing that you see car chases on in action movies, with cars catching air68as they soar over the zenith. I always take the hard way home. It's all res-idential streets, and the old Victorian houses they call "painted ladies" fortheir gaudy, elaborate paint-jobs, and front gardens with scented flowersand tall grasses. Housecats stare at you from hedges, and there arehardly any homeless.It was so quiet on those streets that it made me wish I'd taken the otherroute, through the Mission, which is… raucous is probably the best wordfor it. Loud and vibrant. Lots of rowdy drunks and angry crack-headsand unconscious junkies, and also lots of families with strollers, oldladies gossiping on stoops, lowriders with boom-cars going thumpa-thumpa-thumpa down the streets. There were hipsters and mopey emoart-students and even a couple old-school punk-rockers, old guys withpot bellies bulging out beneath their Dead Kennedys shirts. Also dragqueens, angry gang kids, graffiti artists and bewildered gentrifiers tryingnot to get killed while their real-estate investments matured.I went up Goat Hill and walked past Goat Hill Pizza, which made methink of the jail I'd been held in, and I had to sit down on the bench outfront of the restaurant until my shakes passed. Then I noticed the truckup the hill from me, a nondescript 18-wheeler with three metal stepscoming down from the back end. I got up and got moving. I felt the eyeswatching me from all directions.I hurried the rest of the way home. I didn't look at the painted ladies orthe gardens or the housecats. I kept my eyes down.Both my parents' cars were in the driveway, even though it was themiddle of the day. Of course. Dad works in the East Bay, so he'd be stuckat home while they worked on the bridge. Mom — well, who knew whyMom was home.They were home for me.Even before I'd finished unlocking the door it had been jerked out ofmy hand and flung wide. There were both of my parents, looking grayand haggard, bug-eyed and staring at me. We stood there in frozentableau for a moment, then they both rushed forward and dragged meinto the house, nearly tripping me up. They were both talking so loudand fast all I could hear was a wordless, roaring gabble and they bothhugged me and cried and I cried too and we just stood there like that inthe little foyer, crying and making almost-words until we ran out ofsteam and went into the kitchen.I did what I always did when I came home: got myself a glass of waterfrom the filter in the fridge and dug a couple cookies out of the "biscuit69barrel" that mom's sister had sent us from England. The normalcy of thismade my heart stop hammering, my heart catching up with my brain,and soon we were all sitting at the table."Where have you been?" they both said, more or less in unison.I had given this some thought on the way home. "I got trapped," I said."In Oakland. I was there with some friends, doing a project, and we wereall quarantined.""For five days?""Yeah," I said. "Yeah. It was really bad." I'd read about the quarantinesin the Chronicle and I cribbed shamelessly from the quotes they'd pub-lished. "Yeah. Everyone who got caught in the cloud. They thought wehad been attacked with some kind of super-bug and they packed us intoshipping containers in the docklands, like sardines. It was really hot andsticky. Not much food, either.""Christ," Dad said, his fists balling up on the table. Dad teaches inBerkeley three days a week, working with a few grad students in the lib-rary science program. The rest of the time he consults for clients in cityand down the Peninsula, third-wave dotcoms that are doing variousthings with archives. He's a mild-mannered librarian by profession, buthe'd been a real radical in the sixties and wrestled a little in high school.I'd seen him get crazy angry now and again — I'd even made him thatangry now and again — and he could seriously lose it when he wasHulking out. He once threw a swing-set from Ikea across my granddad'swhole lawn when it fell apart for the fiftieth time while he was assem-bling it."Barbarians," Mom said. She's been living in America since she was ateenager, but she still comes over all British when she encounters Amer-ican cops, health-care, airport security or homelessness. Then the word is"barbarians," and her accent comes back strong. We'd been to Londontwice to see her family and I can't say as it felt any more civilized thanSan Francisco, just more cramped."But they let us go, and ferried us over today." I was improvising now."Are you hurt?" Mom said. "Hungry?""Sleepy?""Yeah, a little of all that. Also Dopey, Doc, Sneezy and Bashful." Wehad a family tradition of Seven Dwarfs jokes. They both smiled a little,but their eyes were still wet. I felt really bad for them. They must have70been out of their minds with worry. I was glad for a chance to change thesubject. "I'd totally love to eat.""I'll order a pizza from Goat Hill," Dad said."No, not that," I said. They both looked at me like I'd sprouted anten-nae. I normally have a thing about Goat Hill Pizza — as in, I can nor-mally eat it like a goldfish eats his food, gobbling until it either runs outor I pop. I tried to smile. "I just don't feel like pizza," I said, lamely. "Let'sorder some curry, OK?" Thank heaven that San Francisco is take-outcentral.Mom went to the drawer of take-out menus (more normalcy, feelinglike a drink of water on a dry, sore throat) and riffled through them. Wespent a couple of distracting minutes going through the menu from thehalal Pakistani place on Valencia. I settled on a mixed tandoori grill andcreamed spinach with farmer's cheese, a salted mango lassi (much betterthan it sounds) and little fried pastries in sugar syrup.Once the food was ordered, the questions started again. They'd heardfrom Van's, Jolu's and Darryl's families (of course) and had tried to re-port us missing. The police were taking names, but there were so many"displaced persons" that they weren't going to open files on anyone un-less they were still missing after seven days.Meanwhile, millions of have-you-seen sites had popped up on the net.A couple of the sites were old MySpace clones that had run out of moneyand saw a new lease on life from all the attention. After all, some venturecapitalists had missing family in the Bay Area. Maybe if they were re-covered, the site would attract some new investment. I grabbed dad'slaptop and looked through them. They were plastered with advertising,of course, and pictures of missing people, mostly grad photos, weddingpictures and that sort of thing. It was pretty ghoulish.I found my pic and saw that it was linked to Van's, Jolu's, and Darryl's.There was a little form for marking people found and another one forwriting up notes about other missing people. I filled in the fields for meand Jolu and Van, and left Darryl blank."You forgot Darryl," Dad said. He didn't like Darryl much — once he'dfigured out that a couple inches were missing out of one of the bottles inhis liquor cabinet, and to my enduring shame I'd blamed it on Darryl. Intruth, of course, it had been both of us, just fooling around, trying outvodka-and-Cokes during an all-night gaming session."He wasn't with us," I said. The lie tasted bitter in my mouth.71"Oh my God," my mom said. She squeezed her hands together. "Wejust assumed when you came home that you'd all been together.""No," I said, the lie growing. "No, he was supposed to meet us but wenever met up. He's probably just stuck over in Berkeley. He was going totake the BART over."Mom made a whimpering sound. Dad shook his head and closed hiseyes. "Don't you know about the BART?" he said.I shook my head. I could see where this was going. I felt like theground was rushing up to me."They blew it up," Dad said. "The bastards blew it up at the same timeas the bridge."That hadn't been on the front page of the Chronicle, but then, a BARTblowout under the water wouldn't be nearly as picturesque as the im-ages of the bridge hanging in tatters and pieces over the Bay. The BARTtunnel from the Embarcadero in San Francisco to the West Oakland sta-tion was submerged.I went back to Dad's computer and surfed the headlines. No one wassure, but the body count was in the thousands. Between the cars thatplummeted 191 feet to the sea and the people drowned in the trains, thedeaths were mounting. One reporter claimed to have interviewed an"identity counterfeiter" who'd helped "dozens" of people walk awayfrom their old lives by simply vanishing after the attacks, getting new IDmade up, and slipping away from bad marriages, bad debts and badlives.Dad actually got tears in his eyes, and Mom was openly crying. Theyeach hugged me again, patting me with their hands as if to assure them-selves that I was really there. They kept telling me they loved me. I toldthem I loved them too.We had a weepy dinner and Mom and Dad had each had a coupleglasses of wine, which was a lot for them. I told them that I was gettingsleepy, which was true, and mooched up to my room. I wasn't going tobed, though. I needed to get online and find out what was going on. Ineeded to talk to Jolu and Vanessa. I needed to get working on findingDarryl.I crept up to my room and opened the door. I hadn't seen my old bedin what felt like a thousand years. I lay down on it and reached over tomy bedstand to grab my laptop. I must have not plugged it in all the72way — the electrical adapter needed to be jiggled just right — so it hadslowly discharged while I was away. I plugged it back in and gave it aminute or two to charge up before trying to power it up again. I used thetime to get undressed and throw my clothes in the trash — I neverwanted to see them again — and put on a clean pair of boxers and afresh t-shirt. The fresh-laundered clothes, straight out of my drawers, feltso familiar and comfortable, like getting hugged by my parents.I powered up my laptop and punched a bunch of pillows into placebehind me at the top of the bed. I scooched back and opened mycomputer's lid and settled it onto my thighs. It was still booting, andman, those icons creeping across the screen looked good. It came all theway up and then it started giving me more low-power warnings. Ichecked the power-cable again and wiggled it and they went away. Thepower-jack was really flaking out.In fact, it was so bad that I couldn't actually get anything done. Everytime I took my hand off the power-cable it lost contact and the computerstarted to complain about its battery. I took a closer look at it.The whole case of my computer was slightly misaligned, the seamsplit in an angular gape that started narrow and widened toward theback.Sometimes you look at a piece of equipment and discover somethinglike this and you wonder, "Was it always like that?" Maybe you just nev-er noticed.But with my laptop, that wasn't possible. You see, I built it. After theBoard of Ed issued us all with SchoolBooks, there was no way my par-ents were going to buy me a computer of my own, even though technic-ally the SchoolBook didn't belong to me, and I wasn't supposed to installsoftware on it or mod it.I had some money saved — odd jobs, Christmases and birthdays, alittle bit of judicious ebaying. Put it all together and I had enough moneyto buy a totally crappy, five-year-old machine.So Darryl and I built one instead. You can buy laptop cases just likeyou can buy cases for desktop PCs, though they're a little more special-ized than plain old PCs. I'd built a couple PCs with Darryl over theyears, scavenging parts from Craigslist and garage sales and orderingstuff from cheap chea