“No one has ever blown up anything,” Mrs. Freeman said, “except in desperation.”
“There must have been tests?” The young man sounded hesitant, almost apologetic. “You must have known there were … glitches?”
“Do you know what happens,” Mrs. Freeman said, “when you try to bang in one those tiny, skinny nails — those finishing nails — with a full-size hammer?”
“I’ve never tried.”
With a glance at his hands, she could tell it was true.
“You smash your thumb,” she said. “And you bend the nail.”
“I see,” he said.
But she wasn’t convinced he did. “If we really were in control,” she said, “we wouldn’t need bombs to make such an unholy mess.”
“Maybe you’d prefer to speak off the record,” the young man offered, reading once again from the page. “If there’s information that’s … sensitive …”
Mrs. Freeman felt an urge to reach out and pat his knee.
“For years there’ve been allegations against your company. Environmental abuses, reneging on labor contracts, outsourcing.” The young man had found his voice. “The city gives you tax breaks, and in return it loses jobs and gets left with cleanup bills—”
“I have nothing to hide,” Mrs. Freeman said, and he seemed disappointed, or maybe just confused. Suddenly he was looking over her shoulder.
Mrs. Freeman realized her telephone was ringing.
Straightening her pants and blouse, Mrs. Freeman stood up from the sofa, and with what she knew to be the grace and dignity of the old woman she had become, she walked over to the desk. And even she did not know what she planned to do until the moment she pressed her fingernail against the tab of the cord, detaching it from her phone.
There was so much she wanted to say, so much that needed to be cleared up, and whatever his story, whoever he was, Mrs. Freeman wanted this young man to know, for she had decided he was someone she could trust.
But here was Tiphany, already knocking at the door. She had come to tell them their time was up. Tiphany had played her hand well, Mrs. Freeman decided, and she couldn’t help feeling a bit of pride. For decades Mrs. Freeman had held her tongue. She had quietly deferred. She had been a credit to the company but never to herself. Tiphany could be forgiven for not understanding what it had taken for her to get where she was. And Mrs. Freeman would not be the one to tell her. She envied Tiphany’s ignorance.
Mrs. Freeman would never fire her. Never.
Back at the sofa, the young man was gathering his things.
Mrs. Freeman said, “I wish I had been able to give you what you wanted.”
Eight
Some people ran into one another in coffee shops and bars. For McGee and April, it had been picket lines and rallies.
It was 1999. They were both in their second year of college, barely more than acquaintances. McGee’s plan had been to fill a bus with friends from various groups: environmentalists, pacifists, anarchists, unionists, vegans, conservationists, feminists, Buddhists, socialists, queers. But it was November, toward the end of the semester, and everyone had tests to take, papers to write, dogs to walk. McGee would’ve gone by herself, if she’d had to. She’d heard from people who knew that something big was going down in Seattle, a movement, a piece of history. She wasn’t going to miss it.
April was the first to sign on. “Why not?” she’d said. “Sounds like fun.”
McGee’s second recruit was Myles. At that point they’d been seeing each other for just a couple of months, a situation they liked to think of as casual, even though their weekends together had become automatic. Holmes came along because Myles had asked him to, not wanting to be the only person there who found his mind wandering whenever McGee or one of her friends mentioned globalization or the evils of international free trade.
Fitch came because he liked road trips and because he was trying to book gigs for his band, whose western tour had so far stalled out in Ann Arbor. Also, Fitch was trying to sleep with McGee’s friend Kirsten (the fourth recruit), and although his efforts were pitiful and exhausting, everyone put up with them because Fitch’s van was the only vehicle they had capable of driving five thousand miles without losing a wheel.
The seventh in the group was Inez, a dour, unsmiling friend of Kirsten’s whom no one else particularly liked, but they were still glad to have her, if only because seven somehow seemed like a more substantial number than six.
They drove nonstop, taking turns at the wheel, and they arrived in Seattle on a Monday night, crashing in the house of Kirsten’s older sister, seven bodies laid out on the carpeted basement floor.
McGee had been in contact with one of the local groups organizing the protests, and in the morning they met up in a park. It was only a little after sunrise, and the paths were already choked. There were placards taped to light posts, bedsheets hanging from apartment windows. THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING, one of them read.
The seven of them moved through the crowds as if they were rubber-banded together. Even April and Kirsten, just as experienced with protests as McGee was, wouldn’t leave her side. Myles and Holmes looked alternately overwhelmed and amazed.
On a platform at the edge of the park, a black man in a green dashiki stood above a crowd stretching farther than McGee could see. People before profit, he shouted into his microphone, and the crowd shouted the same thing back. Here alone there must have been a thousand people, and there were thousands more all around. The protests were expected to last five days, coinciding with a meeting in the city of superpowers, industrial nations intent on slicing up the globe into their own private markets. People had come from all around the world to make sure that didn’t happen. There were signs in French and Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Chinese. Alphabets McGee couldn’t even recognize.
“You didn’t tell me it was going to be like this,” Myles said.
McGee took his hand and led him through.
As they’d planned, McGee and the others (except for Fitch, who’d vaguely said he’d “catch up with them later”) fell in with a group of students marching into the city from the north. Someone said there were four thousand of them, but McGee would have believed twice that many. It was less like walking than like getting swept along by a wave.
When they reached the city center, the police were already there, waiting. The cops had set up cordons in anticipation, but they’d underestimated the scale of what was coming. All they could do was stand and watch as marchers descended, arms linked together. Almost immediately protesters blockaded the main intersection. The scene was surreal — drummers and dancers and a man breathing fire and human butterflies on Rollerblades. Another intersection was blocked by a papier-mâché whale. Three teenage girls stood on a street corner dressed in baggy suits, monocles, and pocket watches attached by gold chains. They were passing out handfuls of money, throwing it into the air like confetti. Everyone had flyers and picket signs. STOP EXPLOITING WORKERS. DEFEND OUR FORESTS. SAY NO TO FRANKEN FOOD. RESIST CORPORATE TYRANNY. CAPITALISM KILLS. SHUT IT DOWN. STOP THE NEW WORLD ORDER. A steel drum band laid down the beat for a troupe of clowns and stilt walkers, while a parade of older, sober-looking men in trucker hats pulled up the rear. Steelworkers and teamsters, according to their windbreakers. They carried a banner on which a coiled snake snapped at the words DON’T TRADE ON ME.
On the periphery of it all, completely unamused, units of riot troops huddled in Kevlar. And Myles wanted to know why.