We All Looked Up (22 page)

“Okay then! See you soon!”

Sunny started to close the door.

“Wait!” Andy said.

“What?”

“You don't know where it is.”

Sunny laughed. “Oh yeah!”

“We'll be at the old navy base at Sand Point, right by Magnuson Park.”

“Cool. I'll round up some folks and try to get there in a couple hours. And hey, I'm sorry if I seem scattered. I'm, like,
super
high right now.” She giggled, then shut the door.

“If there's still a
Guinness Book of World Records
a month from now, this shit should definitely go down as the smallest protest of all time,” Andy said.

Anita nodded glumly. They'd been camped outside of the navy base for almost five hours, holding up signs they'd made over at Peter's house:
ARDOR FOR AMNESTY
(Anita),
FREE SEATTLE'S KIDS
(Peter), and
THIS IS BULLCRAP!
(Andy). But though they'd gotten a few friendly honks from passing cars, nobody else had joined the cause.

They were set up just in front of a wide gate in the chain-link fence that surrounded the base, centered so as to prevent any cars from getting past them. There was an empty gatehouse on the other side of the fence, guarding a huge cracked canvas of weed-choked tarmac. The actual navy base was a good half-mile away—too far for anyone inside to have noticed their tiny protest. The gate itself was held shut by a heavy-duty padlock, and the fence was topped with a sparkling helix of barbed wire.

Andy stood up and put his face up to the rusty diamonds of the fence. “Wait, I think I see something.”

A car was moving across the tarmac. It came toward them, stopping a few dozen feet away from the gate. The driver's-side door opened up and a man in full camouflage stepped down. He had a jagged ball of keys in his hand.

“What the hell you all think you're doing?”

“Blocking the gate!” Anita shouted. “None of you get to leave until everyone does.”

The soldier chuckled. “Are you crazy? Those are criminals in there. You want them out on the street?”

“They're just kids.”

“Oh yeah? Well, so far this week,
kids
have shot at me twice. Believe me, every
kid
in there did something to deserve getting put away.” He unlocked the padlock on the gate, then swung it wide open. “Don't even think about coming in here, by the way. We got snipers covering the lot.”

“My ass you do,” Andy said.

“Try it, punk. It's your funeral. I'd love to see your guts splattered all over—”

“Excuse me,” someone said. “Are you threatening these civilians?”

Andy turned to find a clutch of strangers propping up their bicycles across the street. Most of them were wearing an inordinate amount of hemp and beaded jewelry, marking them as friends of Sunny's, but the one who'd spoken was dressed in a natty black suit and tie, as if he'd just come from a business meeting. He advanced on the soldier with a confident, professional stride.

“These
civilians
used threatening language themselves,” the soldier said.

“Well, I look forward to telling your superior officer about that”—the well-dressed man read the soldier's name off his uniform—­“Corporal Hastings.”

“Knock yourself out.” Hastings climbed back into his truck and restarted the engine. He revved it a few times, threateningly, but when the car finally moved again, it was in reverse, back toward the base.

“That was badass,” Andy said.

The well-dressed man grinned. “Every good sit-in requires one guy in a nice suit. It lends an air of sophistication to the proceedings. Now let's talk strategy.”

And with that, their protest had really begun.

A
nita

BY THE TIME SHE WENT
to sleep that night, there were fifty or sixty people sitting in front of the navy-base gate, with more coming all the time. They were black and white and Hispanic, toddlers and teenagers and grandparents. Most of them were friends of the commune, but some just happened to be driving or walking by and decided to join up. Those without sleeping bags or toothbrushes were provided for by Sunny's friends, who must have ripped off a camping store on the way to the protest, given all the supplies they “happened” to have on hand. They also prepared a delicious barbecue of veggie burgers, veggie hot dogs, and grilled vegetables, and someone even brought out a stumpy sugar cake that had been cooked in a wood-fire oven. Around midnight, a few police cars pulled up, lights flashing and sirens blaring, scaring everyone out of sleep. Someone on a megaphone ordered them to disperse, but when nobody moved, the cops gave up and left without a fight.

The next day was a Saturday, and the ranks of the protesters continued to swell: a hundred people, then two. Every few hours someone would go on a grocery run, collecting money with a hat or just taking the hit themselves. The protest was quickly becoming a community.

While Sunny's besuited friend Michael pounded the pavement to bring in new recruits, Anita took charge of managing the people who were already there. Food had to be fairly distributed. The drunk and disorderly had to be calmed down or else asked to leave. One guy showed up with a sawn-off shotgun and started screaming about how he was going to blow away whoever was responsible for imprisoning his son. It took an hour to convince him to hand over his weapon in exchange for a slice of pizza.

Anita had hoped that Andy and Peter would share in the responsibilities of leadership, but that turned out to be a pipe dream. In Andy's case, this was really a question of character—he just wasn't the administrative type (perhaps best exemplified by the fact that Anita had caught him sharing a joint with the hippie contingent first thing that morning). She put him on full-time sign-making duty, where his stoner creativity could really shine.

Peter, on the other hand, didn't seem to have the energy to do much of anything. Though Anita didn't know him very well, she could recognize the signs of a heavy heart. Late in the day, she found him standing alone at the chain-link fence, staring through the trees in the direction of the navy base. Night was beginning to fall, though the clouds were so thickly clustered that you could only track the setting sun as a vague sinking luminescence.

“What are you looking at?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Are you in love with her?” The boldness of her question surprised Anita more than it seemed to surprise Peter, who didn't even pretend not to understand.

“I don't even know her. I didn't think she was the kind of person who could . . .” He shook his head.

Anita came closer and grabbed hold of the fence, digging the toe of her sneaker into one of the holes and raising herself up off the ground. She could make out a pale-green light shining in a top-floor window of one of the buildings across the tarmac.

“Who could do what?”

“I thought that she wanted to be with me, that's all. But I was wrong.”

Sadness looked strange on Peter—too small, almost—like a sweater that reached only halfway down the forearm, that pulled up and exposed an awkward strip of midriff. With a word, she could eradicate that sadness. All she'd have to do was tell him the truth. Only then she'd be breaking trust with Andy, who was her best friend in the world. It was the lesser of two evils, then, to keep silent.

“And what about you?” Peter asked.

“What about me?”

“Are you in love?”

“Me? Who would I be in love with?”

Peter laughed.

“I'm serious. Who would I be in love with?” Anita let go of the fence, falling back to the hard earth. She really didn't know who Peter was talking about, but before she could press him, one of Sunny's friends came running from the direction of the main gate. Apparently, someone had tossed a whole bag of charcoal briquettes over the fence, and now they had no way to run the barbecue.

“To be continued,” Anita said, but that first errand soon became a dozen others, and pretty soon she'd forgotten about Peter's question.

On Sunday spirits began to turn, and by Monday, a definitive mass depression had set in. The morning fog coalesced into Seattle's infamous drizzle, and there was a bite to the breeze that found the chinks in your clothing and led the rain inside. People had set up their tents just a few minutes too late to keep their stuff dry. Everything felt that way now—just a little bit too late. There were only two weeks left before Ardor was scheduled to arrive, and what were they all doing? Sitting around in the cold and the damp, waiting.

Anita watched the tarmac around the navy base turn slick and dark with rain. She'd hoped things would move more quickly than this; no one had so much as
tried
to get out of the gate since Corporal Hastings that first day.

Anita popped her head inside Andy's tent.

“Do you think there's some other way off the base?” she asked.

Andy sat up, blinking the sleep out of his eyes. “Anita? Why are you . . . who are you talking about?”

“The navy base! Do you think there's another way to get off it?”

“We already checked.”

“Well, let's check again.”

Anita let the tent flap drop, though she could still hear Andy whining. “You mean right now?”

Peter, who'd just gotten back from a visit with his parents, was eating a bowl of steaming oatmeal over in their makeshift kitchen area.

“Up for a walk?” Anita asked.

“Sure.”

A few minutes later they were on their way, tromping down to the trail that led through Magnuson Park and all the way to Lake Washington. Anita was grateful for the chance to get away from the crowd, which had begun to smell like one collective wet dog. The once festive strum of acoustic guitars had turned grating, and even Michael looked bedraggled and listless.

The three of them followed the chain-link fence around the outskirts of the base. The rain made conversation for them, pattering everywhere, filling the silence.

“Which do you like better, sun or rain?” Anita asked, hoping to kickstart a little communication.

“Rain, definitely,” Andy said.

“Peter?”

“Sun. That's why I'm going to California. I mean,
if
I'm going to California.”

Silence again. Well, it had been worth a try.

The tension between Peter and Andy was palpable, and it seemed to be getting worse by the hour. Every conversation had become a byzantine exercise in avoiding the subject of Eliza. And the truth was, it sort of sucked to spend all your time with two boys who were both in love with some other girl. Peter got a pass—he and Eliza actually had a history together—but Anita found herself more and more annoyed with Andy. Why was this stupid quest so important to him? He had to know that Eliza was totally wrong for him. Why couldn't he just drop the bullshit and let her be with Peter already?

“Remind me why we don't just cut a hole in the fence,” Andy said, giving the chain-link a karate kick.

“We need to keep the driveway blocked off,” Anita said.

“Yeah, but one person could do that. What if the rest of us went inside and got right up in their faces?”

“It doesn't matter if we're on this side or the other,” Peter said. “It's not like we can just walk into the building. Plus, I'd rather not get shot.”

The path they were walking on turned muddy; it darkened the white soles of Anita's sneakers. Fat globs of water fell off the branches of the evergreens, landing heavy as hailstones. Across the street, a building called the Western Fisheries Research Center stood dark and empty as a mausoleum. Anita wondered how many millions of things had stopped mattering in the last month. How many employees of the Western Fisheries Research Center were sitting at home right now, just praying they'd get another chance to continue their fishy research?

They reached the end of the fence, having failed to locate any secret exit off the navy base. They kept walking, though, following the pavement all the way down to where it met the lake. A wide parking lot gave onto a small lawn, where an old oaken park bench had been stained to mahogany by the rain. They sat down on the wet wood and watched the chop of the water for a while.

“Andy,” Anita said suddenly, “say something nice about Peter.”

“What?”

“Just do it. Right now. Don't think.”

It was a trick that Anita's fifth-grade teacher had used whenever two of his students got in a fight. Andy probably wouldn't have played along if he'd had more time to think about it, but she'd caught him by surprise.

“Uh, you seem like a really good guy. Like, for real, though. Not like some kind of act.”

“Thanks,” Peter said, made shy by the compliment.

“Your turn,” Anita prompted.

“Okay.” Peter looked down at his hands. “You don't know this, Andy, but I heard you and Anita practicing once, in the Hamilton music room. You're really talented.”

“Oh yeah? Thanks.”

Anita exhaled heavily, letting her stomach unclench. She felt as if she'd just finished defusing a bomb. It was movement, anyway, which felt good after three days of total paralysis. But even turning Peter and Andy into best friends wouldn't turn their protest into a success.

She looked back out over the lake. “What do we do if this doesn't work?”

“It has to work,” Andy said. And he surprised her by putting his hand over hers. She hadn't realized how cold her fingers were; now the warmth spread down her arm and out across her body, inexplicably fast. A moment passed; then Andy seemed to realize what he'd done. He pulled his hand away.

“It has to work,” he repeated.

The next day Anita was taking an afternoon nap (more out of boredom than fatigue), when she was woken by a loud mechanical screech. She unzipped her tent and saw that a crowd had gathered around the fence near the gate. A lot of new protesters seemed to have arrived in the last couple of hours, and they were a very different animal from Sunny's commune crew. In fact, they looked like the kind of people who'd been at Andy and Bobo's gig a few weeks back—covered in piercings and tattoos, reeking of alcohol and cigarette smoke.

An enormous clang, as of a large piece of metal falling to the dirt, and the screeching abruptly stopped. A huge cheer went up, then ­people were lining up to crawl through the newly cut hole in the fence.

Anita pushed through the crowd and found Andy embroiled in some kind of argument with Sunny and Michael.

“But I talked to them about that!” Andy said. “They'll stay in line.”

“You can't know that,” Michael said.

“Maybe not. But we had to do
something
. It's been five days.”

“You should have been patient. Given enough time, the ocean can turn a mountain to sand.”

“It's the end of the fucking world, man! We don't have time to be the ocean.”

“We won't be part of any happening that encourages violence,” Sunny said. “I'm sorry.” She took Michael by the arm and walked off in a huff.

“No one's encouraging violence!” Andy called after them. He turned to Anita. “Can you believe this? She's saying they're all going to leave.”

“Andy, who are all these new people?”

“I brought them,” he said, sounding both proud and guilty at once. “After you and Peter went to sleep last night, I biked over to the Independent. It's this apartment building that Bobo moved into a couple weeks back, 'cause Golden lives there.”

“Does that mean Golden's here right now?”

“These people get shit done, Anita. And we need that now. But don't worry. I'll make sure nothing gets out of hand.”