Little Brother

"Christ," Dad said, his fists balling up on the table. Dad teaches in Berkeley three days a week, working with a few grad students in the library science program. The rest of the time he consults for clients in city and down the Peninsula, thirdwave dotcoms that are doing various things with archives. He's a mildmannered librarian by profession, but he'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 that angry now and again and he could seriously lose it when he was Hulking out. He once threw a swingset from Ikea across my granddad's whole lawn when it fell apart for the fiftieth time while he was assembling it.

"Barbarians," Mom said. She's been living in America since she was a teenager, but she still comes over all British when she encounters American cops, healthcare, airport security or homelessness. Then the word is "barbarians," and her accent comes back strong. We'd been to London twice to see her family and I can't say as it felt any more civilized than San 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." We had 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 have been out of their minds with worry. I was glad for a chance to change the subject. "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 antennae. I normally have a thing about Goat Hill Pizza as in, I can normally eat it like a goldfish eats his food, gobbling until it either runs out or I pop. I tried to smile. "I just don't feel like pizza," I said, lamely. "Let's order some curry, OK?" Thank heaven that San Francisco is takeout central.

Mom went to the drawer of takeout menus (more normalcy, feeling like a drink of water on a dry, sore throat) and riffled through them. We spent a couple of distracting minutes going through the menu from the halal Pakistani place on Valencia. I settled on a mixed tandoori grill and creamed spinach with farmer's cheese, a salted mango lassi (much better than it sounds) and little fried pastries in sugar syrup.

Once the food was ordered, the questions started again. They'd heard from Van's, Jolu's and Darryl's families (of course) and had tried to report us missing. The police were taking names, but there were so many "displaced persons" that they weren't going to open files on anyone unless they were still missing after seven days.

Meanwhile, millions of haveyouseen sites had popped up on the net. A couple of the sites were old MySpace clones that had run out of money and saw a new lease on life from all the attention. After all, some venture capitalists had missing family in the Bay Area. Maybe if they were recovered, the site would attract some new investment. I grabbed dad's laptop and looked through them. They were plastered with advertising, of course, and pictures of missing people, mostly grad photos, wedding pictures 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 for writing up notes about other missing people. I

Cory Doctorow/Little Brother/34

filled in the fields for me and Jolu and Van, and left Darryl blank.

"You forgot Darryl," Dad said. He didn't like Darryl much once he'd figured out that a couple inches were missing out of one of the bottles in his liquor cabinet, and to my enduring shame I'd blamed it on Darryl. In truth, of course, it had been both of us, just fooling around, trying out vodkaandCokes during an allnight gaming session.

"He wasn't with us," I said. The lie tasted bitter in my mouth.

"Oh my God," my mom said. She squeezed her hands together.

"We just 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 we never met up. He's probably just stuck over in Berkeley. He was going to take the BART over."

Mom made a whimpering sound. Dad shook his head and closed his eyes. "Don't you know about the BART?" he said.

I shook my head. I could see where this was going. I felt like the ground was rushing up to me.

"They blew it up," Dad said. "The bastards blew it up at the same time as the bridge."

That hadn't been on the front page of the Chronicle, but then, a BART blowout under the water wouldn't be nearly as picturesque as the images of the bridge hanging in tatters and pieces over the Bay. The BART tunnel from the Embarcadero in San Francisco to

the West Oakland station was submerged.

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