Notes From the Internet Apocalypse (7 page)

“Ya think there’s a way in through the roof?” he asked.

“No, but it has a front door, jackass. The center’s open to all New Yorkers.”

We walked into the spacious and inviting lobby. White walls reflecting all the sunlight that streamed in from the glass doors and walls of the center’s lowest level. After a moment, we started gathering intelligence, which basically meant trying to walk around unnoticed while gawking for clues. Not the easiest thing to do for a punk Aussie, fedora-sporting Jew, and dick-joke idiot-savant Caucasian. Basically, we just kept moving. After a while we reached the gym, and Tobey soon found himself in a pick-up basketball game with three Egyptian exchange students from NYU. Then it was just Oz and me.

“Ooh, a Middle Eastern cooking class is about to start,” she said, pulling a flier off a table.

“Z’oh my God! No way!”

“Fuck off. It sounds fun.”

“Yes, Oz,” I said. “It totally does, but we’ll probably get more done if we split up. So why don’t you hit the class and I’ll check out the café area? We’ll meet Tobes in the lobby in an hour or so.”

“Suit yourself,” she said. “But don’t come crying to me when you’re dying for my kick-ass baba ghanoush recipe.”

“It’s a promise.”

I followed the familiar smells of caffeine all the way to the café. For all its Halal and Middle-Eastern influence, it wasn’t too different from a Starbucks. Had the Wi-Fi been working, I’m sure there would have been more laptops in effect. And, as it were, there were still a few insufferable writers at work, presumably hacking away at high-concept comedies about Saudi Arabian princes forced to live with suburban Jewish families.

I got a coffee and started updating my journal while perched at a long stretch of counter two seats down from an Arab man, about my age, charting algorithms on a notepad while cross-referencing information in
The Wall Street Journal.
He wore an expensive and meticulously maintained white buttoned shirt with the sleeves rolled up. It looked like it fit him perfectly fifteen years or pounds ago. Now it hugged a bit too much, but he sat with such immaculate posture and moved with such purpose, it still bestowed a certain elegance. Occasionally, it seemed he might have been eyeing my journal and smiling. Not in a haughty way. Just quietly amused or maybe interested.

“May I ask,” he said finally, “are you a writer?”

“No, not really.”

He was disappointed, but unwilling to give up so quickly.

“But you are writing…?”

“Well, sometimes I sing in the shower, too, but, y’know?”

A smile. “Ah. An analogy. Not so different from metaphor. Suitable for a writer. Or a lawyer, perhaps.”

“I’m not quite either,” I said, extending my hand. “Nice to meet you.”

“Yes, pleasure,” he said. “My name is Khalil. I’m visiting from Egypt.”

“Gladstone. I’m visiting from Brooklyn.”

My new friend and I got to talking. About his brief stay in the United States. during his early twenties. His return to Egypt to assist in his father’s business. And how much New York had changed in his time away.

“There’s a distrust I did not see sixteen years ago,” he said. “Sure, I was a foreigner. A strange dark-skinned man with funny ways. Contempt, racism, even hatred. But there was no fear. Now I just don’t understand.”

“Well, you do understand, though, right?” I said. “It was no small thing that happened.”

“Please. I apologize. I’m not minimizing 9/11. But had I stayed in New York, I could have very well been working in the Towers that day. I would have certainly been downtown. And now all Muslims are always the first against the wall. Like this foolishness with the Internet outage.”

Okay. Now we were getting somewhere, I thought. Having an intelligent discussion with an honest-to-goodness Muslim right in the heart of the detected terrorist transmissions. Perhaps this exercise wasn’t just an excuse to maintain a Scotch-based buzz while I roamed Manhattan.

“I don’t disagree, Khalil, but given the detected transmissions, the animus of the Muslim world against America, and the history right here in New York, do you really have to be a bigot to be nervous about a solitary Muslim man crunching numbers five blocks from Ground Zero?”

A slow smile spread across Khalil’s face. He was remembering someone, and it brought a happiness, especially now that the years had wrapped the memories in the comfort of wax paper. “You’re a Jew,” he said. “Yes?”

“Why so sure?” I asked.

“Only a Jew would be open-minded enough to come to a Muslim community center, while still opinionated enough to risk offending the people inside.”

I sipped at my coffee and thought for a moment. “Well, if that’s your definition of a Jew, then I kinda take that as a compliment, Khalil.”

“Good,” he said, and raised his spiced date-juice tea or whatever he was drinking.

“Oh, are we toasting?” I asked, removing my flask. “Well, as long as we’re doing so much for international relations, maybe we should get the Scots involved.” He offered his glass, and I spiked both our drinks.

“I wasn’t sure if you drank…” I said.

“Yeah, I’m not too observant,” Khalil said, taking a sip. Then he paused. “Did you say Scotch? This tastes like Jameson?”

“Yeah.”

“But Jameson is Irish whiskey…”

“I know, but … I know.”

“Anyway, Gladstone,” he said. “Explain this to me. Some terrorists stole the Internet for their own purposes. Evil purposes?”

“That’s the theory.”

“So they can have old YouTube videos all to themselves?”

“I would think the greatest advantage of stealing the Internet would be maintaining all its communications power while depriving those advantages to your enemies. Also, Khalil, you’re the one with
The Wall Street Journal
in front of you. Just the loss of the Net itself is helping tank our economy. Need there be more?”

“Economic terrorism. That’s a bit more compelling.”

“Yeah.”

“But you don’t really believe that, do you?”

“No,” I said with a laugh. “Not even a little. But why don’t you tell me why.”

“Because,” Khalil said, “America is at war with radical Muslim fundamentalists, not robots.”

“Meaning?”

“Muslims like the Internet too. What terrorist group could win the hearts and minds of the Muslim people if it deprived them of Facebook and Twitter? Osama Bin Laden might have been holed up in an Abbottabad compound without the Internet, but his neighbor Tweeted the whole U.S. tactical assault. And how about the riots in Egypt when they took the Net away? That did not work out so well for the government.”

Khalil had been dying to make this point, and I was happy not only to receive such a logical argument, but to have given him the chance to articulate it.

“I’m sold, Khalil,” I said. “But tell me more about these robots.”

Khalil hunched over with a laugh that creased the midsection of his lovely shirt. It was nice to end on a high note.

*   *   *

Tobey and Oz were already in the lobby when I arrived, and it was clear that after some time here even Tobey didn’t believe Park51 was the hotbed of terrorist activity Glenn Beck had led him to believe. And even if it were, we hadn’t found any trace of the Internet. We were about to grab our things and get wrecked at the Heartland Brewery when we heard it. Something I hadn’t heard in at least ten years. An old-school modem with all its crackles and buzz.

“Fuck, I knew it!” Tobey said.

“Knew what?” I said.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t hear that modem. That’s the sounds of the Internet.”

“Yeah, I heard something, but why would anyone be using a dial-up modem now?”

“Dial-up?” Oz asked.

“Yeah, that’s what that terrible crunching beeping noise is.”

“I thought Chef Abdul was just mashing some more dates?”

“It’s coming from outside,” Tobey said.

We looked out through the glass of the lobby doors to see twenty soldiers in riot gear. The black stormtroopers from the park had returned. And that modem we’d heard appeared to be merely dispatcher crackles over walkie-talkies. But I didn’t process that then. At that moment, all I could think of was the force of twenty troops plowing into the lobby, flowing like violence and filling it with screams for everyone to hit the floor.

Oz broke for a side door and was taken down instantly. I sprung forward as if the knee pressing into her back were actually driving mine, but a trooper blocked my way, screaming, “Get down!
Now!
”

Before I could even decide to comply, another guard screamed, “He’s getting away!” I looked and saw Tobey slipping through the door that Oz had failed to reach before sprinting uptown with two troopers following after. They labored under the weight of their riot gear, but Tobey bounced off pedestrians all legs and elbows like an ‘80s video-game character.

I heard a familiar voice in protest. “What is the meaning of this?”

It was Khalil, standing right beside me and demanding an explanation from one of the troopers.

“Hit the floor. Now!”

“No, sir. I will not,” Khalil said. “Under what authority do you come here and do this?”

It was a fair question, but not one the trooper was prepared to answer. It wasn’t one he’d even thought to ask. He searched for an answer in his memory, in his training, but, ultimately, found it in the butt end of the rifle he jabbed into Khalil’s face. Khalil dropped to his knees, pressing at the blood that flowed through his useless fingers onto the lobby floor and his pretty white shirt until the trooper restrained him from behind, cuffing him and laying him flat in the mess he’d made.

It felt like my moment. Greatness being thrown upon me by inequity. But that’s only because I was looking through my eyes. In another instant, I was thrown to the floor just like everybody else. My own trooper for my back. My face inches from Oz. She looked at me, hoping for something I could not give, and I watched them drag her to the car outside and take her away. Her hand on the glass. Reaching for me or maybe waving good-bye.

Interrogation

Arrests weren’t just something for other people, and narrating events into my journal didn’t keep them from happening to me. After the raid, my journal and the things in my backpack were confiscated, along with my flask. I was placed in a van and taken to what seemed to be a conventional downtown office building. I didn’t know why I was under arrest, or if I was under arrest, actually. Once sequestered, my cuffs were removed and I was asked to sit in a tiny conference room. The door wasn’t locked, and when I poked my head outside, a woman at a cubicle politely requested that I sit back down. I looked at the exit sign over the stairs. There was nothing keeping me here.

“Please, sir. Have a seat. The agent will be with you in a minute. Can I get you some water?”

I closed the door on myself without a response and sat back down. After another twenty minutes a man in his early forties, devoid of body fat or whimsy, entered the room. He had my things.

“Mr. Gladstone,” he said, pulling a chair from the small conference table between us. “My name is Agent Rowsdower. Do you mind if I have a seat?”

“Am I under arrest?”

Rowsdower sat and smiled. His teeth were too small or there were too many. Maybe both. Not sure. Something was wrong and less than human.

“Why? Have you done something wrong?” he asked.

“Good one. Where’s Oz?”

Even a man with a deficient sense of humor would have quipped something about the Yellow Brick Road, but Rowsdower seemed to have removed any trace of the impractical by sheer force of will. He unzipped my backpack and tossed my journal on the table.

“Oz,” he said with a smile. “Would that be the Australian webcam girl you write about?”

“What gives you the right to read my journal?”

“What gives me the right? What’s the matter, Gladstone? Bright guy like you doesn’t read the papers?”

“I used to get my news online.”

“Right. Of course you did. HuffPo? Slate? Oh, probably something international for a less biased point of view. BBC. Al Jazeera, perhaps? Anyway, you might want to acquaint yourself with the NET Recovery Act.”

He pulled my flask from the bag. “Here. Go ahead,” he said. “You’re not gonna like this.”

I took a swig and felt the numbing warmth tingle to my arms while Rowsdower proceeded to tell me about the National Emergency Technical Recovery Act. Drafted by Obama’s White House and passed by an overwhelming majority in both houses across party lines, the government had been granted additional state of emergency powers if used “in the direct furtherance” of restoring the Internet. This power allowed officials to interrogate and even detain “persons of interest” indefinitely without charges or representation by counsel.

“And how the hell did I become a person of interest?”

“Well, you tell me, Gladstone. Do you think in the last few days most New Yorkers have been consorting with Anonymous at covert 4Chan gatherings and visiting downtown mosques amid rumors of terrorist Internet chatter emanating from downtown?”

“Still doesn’t make me a threat to national security.”

“The government, not you, decides what makes you a threat.”

I wasn’t naïve. I’d worn a suit. Worked in an office. Voted in several elections. I knew the way the world worked and the dark things people accepted in silence. But Rowsdower was talking about them in a brightly lit room without a trace of shame. I must have looked very young to him.

“By the way, this Oz,” he said. “You wouldn’t happen to have her real name, would you?”

“No.”

“Well, don’t worry, Mr. Gladstone,” he said, turning vaguely avuncular with his established power. “The government tends to believe you. I ran your background check. Law school dropout. New York Workers’ Compensation employee out on psychiatric disability for the last two years. Not exactly the prime suspect for hijacking the world’s technology.”

“Two years? Check your stats. More like two weeks. No wonder Anonymous kicked ass in your counterintelligence wars. You guys are a mess.”

Rowsdower remained calm. I was fairly certain everything he’d ever attained in life was gained from this ability not to react. To not say the things a more honest man would say. But there was something else at play I couldn’t discern. Not quite empathy, but something. He took a breath.