In a way it was like the scene at the Chinese consulate, or the scene he’d hoped for, anyway. He’d been suing for peace, that was what he’d been doing, but the Chinese were aliens and the aliens were the new hostiles and they saw it as an act of war. Unfortunately. Because when you’re fired upon, you fire back, don’t you? That was a no-brainer. Fight fire with fire, come out swinging and may the best man win. What he’d done was drive across the Golden Gate Bridge and into San Francisco where he’d been all those times with Cody and some of his other buds when they were still his buds, cruising North Beach, scoring drugs, watching totally nude women on a little stage shaking their big tits and not-so-big tits, eating what, pot stickers, Chinese dumplings, and washing it down with Tsingtao and that weird Chinese liquor that smelled like dirty underwear. This time he was alone. And it must have been before the playground thing because he still had his car then.
The idea he had was to make peace with them, the Chinese, so he could get them to divulge their secrets, which must have involved some kind of portal (okay, maybe he wasn’t thinking absolutely as clearly as the shrink with his meds would have wanted him to, and maybe it was kind of sci-fi, but then the whole slithering browned-out world was sci-fi, wasn’t it?). Plus, they were ninjas and he had a ninja suit he’d got as a kid for Halloween one year and he figured he’d return that to them, along with the Chinese Communist stars he’d made out of cardboard with red foil stretched over it, as a gesture. As a peace offering. If they took it, there was no need to go to war, no need to run naked across the plain. Save your spears. Save your war whoops. Lock up the pigs.
So what he did, late, very late, was drive around till he found a parking spot, which had to be in somebody’s driveway because that city goes to bed early and every parking spot on every street is gone and done by eleven o’clock and how anybody could live with that, with the crowding and shitting and the noise, was beyond anything he could imagine. He was dressed in black. He was wearing a black watchcap too and he’d used greasepaint under his eyes. The wall was a wall. And no, he wasn’t going to scale it, though he could have gone right up and over it as if it wasn’t even there at all. No need for that—and he was thinking clearly at that point—because who knew how they would take it. You didn’t just blow into a Blackfoot village and expect them to like it, especially if you weren’t an alien but just somebody interested in what, communication? He tossed the ninja suit (pajamas, really) and the stars over the wall, the stars in several places, all the way around, and that would have been it except they had their cameras going and before he knew it the pigs were there with their patrol cars and their guns drawn and Down on the ground and Show me your hands. So it wasn’t peaceful. And that, right there, went a long way to explaining how things had come to this pass, to war, all-out war. Take no prisoners. Or if you did, make sure you skinned them alive.
And then there was a day after a night when he’d seen and heard things he didn’t really like and the tarp over the bunker kept changing shape on him and it rained again and he woke up feeling sick, not giardia sick, but with something like what they called a general malaise, and wasn’t he an officer in the Union Army, General Malaise? That was what he used to joke to Cody when he was reading about the Union troops after the war who went out to take on the hostiles a whole lifetime after Colter was gone—Hey, he’d say, I’m General Malaise, who are you? It was a whole routine, something you could act out when you were stoned. And they were always stoned. At least in high school. After that, he was on his own, because Cody was away in college and he was living with his grandmother because his father was a pain in the ass and his mother was his mother.