Blake pulled up to a gas station and filled his tank, then moved his car to a parking spot. He bought a pack of pastries and walked around the parking lot eating it. Two-story buildings lay wreathed in darkness; only the sidewalk was illuminated by orange streetlights. A cool wind blustered through the streets. It felt like the middle of the night. A man walked up to him and asked for a cigarette. Blake said he didn’t smoke, but gave him a few dollars.

  This man had a weathered face, leathery skin, and a playful twist of the lips. He wore a windbreaker. “This is Berkeley,” he said. “A colony of the Illuminati and the Freemasons. Look carefully at the symbolism. The geometry. The sun and the moon. This town is a monument to power and control. This is stolen land, you know. My land. I’m Indian. I’m Ohlone. My people still live here.” He didn’t seem to care what Blake thought; he was just letting him know.

  “That’s why I’m here,” said Blake. “Have you heard of ‘First They Came For The Homeless’?”

  “Ah yes,” said the Ohlone man, “I know them. They’re good folks. You’ll like them.”

  “I heard they needed help. They’re at Adeline and Oregon, right?”

  “Yeah, they’re not far. You’ll see them when you get down there.”

  “I missed them the first time. I got on the bridge by accident and went to Treasure Island. They’ve got a bunch of white buses there, unmarked, surrounded by cops…”

  “You think that’s for us?”

  “It better not be.” Blake normally acted oblique or grim, but sometimes he spoke with a snarl in the tone of a cornered animal. It made him feel alive, like his life mattered. He was ready to die.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said the man, “You’re welcome here. Tell them you met Ezekiel.” Then he began to tell a story: “Since long ago, this place has been a vortex or a nexus of energy that comes from the Earth. My people have always known this. We buried our dead here, at the Shell Mound. This is a sacred place. That’s why the Freemasons built the university here. They used streets and buildings like a sigil to channel the power of the Earth. They thought it would make them powerful and wise, but look around you: it hasn’t worked. They’re poisoning themselves. The rulers of this town are all psychopaths and schizophrenics. You’ll be safe as long as you don’t believe anything they tell you.”

  Blake shook his hand and said, “Thank you.” After taking his leave, he got back in his car and drove down to the intersection of Adeline and Oregon. In the median of Adeline Street, he saw a cluster of tents, so he parked half a block away on Oregon. Adeline was a broad street with two lanes on each side of the median, and the median was fifteen or twenty feet across, flat and grassy. There were about twelve tents there and a few collapsed banners. Blake walked into the center of the camp and found it empty.

  Someone asked, “Are you a supporter?” A man in a wheelchair appeared like a ghost from behind the tents, rolling carefully across the grass. He was tall, lean, and tanned, with an alert glance and a grim frown. He wore a casual jacket and camouflage pants.

  Blake replied, “Yeah, I guess. I mean, that’s what I’m here for. I heard they were coming for you.”

  ` “You can sleep on the couch if you want. Talk to Merlon in the morning.” Blake introduced himself. The young man replied, “I’m Luther. This is Ranger.” They shook hands. Luther was tall and stoic, Klamath, but he could have passed for white.

  Ranger had materialized out of the darkness. He was thinner than Luther, and walked with a swaggering slouch. When he got close, Blake could see that he was smirking constantly. Ranger was Navajo. He asked, “Are you a cop?”

  “No,” said Blake, although he couldn’t offer much evidence. His hair was close-cropped and his jaw cleanshaven. He wore flannel and boots and had no history of activism. He had an angry, desperate look in his eyes. At any rate, Blake didn’t want to sleep on the couch beneath the night sky. The camp was expecting a police raid at any moment, and Blake didn’t want to be caught in the middle of it, nor did he want the police to look at his car. His registration had expired and he couldn’t afford to pass an emissions test. He went back to his car and curled up in the back seat with a blanket. Every time he heard a voice outside, he woke up immediately.

  In the morning, he ate two sandwiches of peanut butter and honey, then went back over to the camp. It was a cool, clear day and the grass shone with dew. Cars and trucks drove through the streets, apparently taking no notice of the bright tents and banners. The police had not come.

  “Just so you know,” said Merlon, when Blake finally met him, “We don’t need any more politicians.” Merlon squatted in a tiny tent, face and hair like a shipwreck survivor, but he was wearing a blue tracksuit and playing Patricia Majalisa’s “Independent” on his phone. He was probably mostly white, but deeply tanned and weathered. He smirked and smiled at times, but he looked tired like a revenant, already dead.

  “That’s fine,” said Blake. “I can just move things. I have a car.”

  “Oh, you have a car? That’s good.”

  Merlon was gaunt and short. He had long, straight hair and a beard, all of it turning gray. He looked sixty, but he was about forty. He’d been homeless all his life. One day a cop kicked him while he was sleeping on the sidewalk and he decided to dedicate his life to protest. Merlon’s entire life was about revenge, it seemed. He had emphysema and COPD and he could barely stand. He spent all of his time sitting cross-legged in his tent, calling activists and journalists, playing strategy games, and listening to music.

  “We’re here,” said Merlon, “because they chased us away from the Post Office. Probably spent ten grand to do it. We went there to remind them that they couldn’t have saved the Post Office without us. Back in 2016, I organized the protest. We were all homeless. That was Occupy. We saved the Post Office for them. Some office supply company was going to buy it.”

  “They used cops?”

  “Yeah, a few dozen. They use three cops for every protestor. Probably working overtime. Fifteen vehicles. We did the math. It’s $10,000 at least. We came here because it’s outside the Berkeley Bowl.” Merlon gestured across the street, to the parking lot of an independent grocery store. “We’ve been resting up and collecting food. We’re going to the Hub next.”

  “What’s the Hub?”

  “It’s the ‘one-stop-shop for all housing services,’ except it doesn’t work. When the cops wake you up and steal your shit, they’ll tell you to go to the Hub so you can get on a waitlist for a leaky efficiency in six months. If you’re lucky.”

  “They sound smarmy.”

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  “The cops in Berkeley are extra smarmy. Very professional.”

  “Roan thinks I’m a cop.”

  “You’re not a cop. I can tell. Don’t worry about what anyone says. You’re welcome here.”

  “All right. Fine. What do you need me to do?”

  “Just wait until the cops show up, then help us move our stuff. Do you have a phone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Keep it charged. You’ll need it.”

  “To record the cops?”

  “Yeah. That’s how we win. When everybody sees how they treat us, we’ll win.”

  Merlon talked at length. He told Blake everything he wanted to know and a great deal more. The City of Berkeley was incubating a new style of low-intensity urban class warfare and disseminating it across California, while the Occupy veterans were struggling to expose it. New policies across the country squeezed homeless people toward death: housing shortages, vagrancy laws, and militarized police. Berkeley was key. It functioned like a policy incubator: depraved professors proposed new horrors, then concerned homeowners critiqued the rough edges. In the forge of Fascism, Conservatism is the fire and Liberalism is the crucible. The end of homelessness was a military campaign hiding behind a policy debate. Operation Red River. The technique was nearly complete, and it was already being exported to the entire world. First They Came For The Homeless was also spreading around the world, with protests in Los Angeles, New York, and Paris.

  Blake helped hang up the fallen banners. An old man woke up and stretched. His name was Iago and he complained about his back for fifteen minutes. A married couple started laughing quietly in their tent. They got food out of the tent behind the couch, where pastries and loaves of bread were stored in plastic bins. Using a portable stove, they made oatmeal and coffee. Their names were Adelaide and Star. They showed Blake around the food tent, then he ate a handful of blueberries and a bagel with cream cheese. It revitalized him at once.

  Shoppers from the grocery store dropped off burritos and packaged salads along with their best wishes. Ranger started playing Rage Against the Machine and pacing the median. A tall woman with gray hair came to Merlon’s tent and crouched there for half an hour, speaking quietly with him. Blake guessed they knew each other well, but Merlon repeated many of the things he’d said before.

  Berkeley for years had prided itself on being “the most liberal city in America,” but had slowly implemented a mesh of regulations that effectively criminalized homelessness. One such law was “Sit-Lie,” an ordinance which prohibited sitting and lying on sidewalks. It had recently been struck down by a federal court as an unconstitutional form of cruel and unusual punishment, since it criminalized behavior that homeless people could not avoid. The Berkeley City Council and the City Manager’s Office were struggling to reformulate the law in a way which would be constitutional, while the police continued to enforce multiple illegal rules at random.

  The City Council appointed the City Manager to run Berkeley in their name. The City Manager could not control the Police Chief, who was appointed separately. If the Council were to terminate the contract of either, the contract would oblige the City to pay an enormous fee.

  That afternoon, two squad cars arrived bearing four cops, who distributed laminated sheets of paper declaring the camp an “unlawful lodging” and announcing a “removal” some time in the next three days. The paper cited California Penal Code 647e, which prohibited “squatting” as a form of “disorderly conduct.” Apparently, it was a misdemeanor to lodge “in any building, structure, vehicle, or place, whether public or private, without the permission of the owner or person entitled to the possession or in control of it.” This was precisely the statute which had earlier been declared unconstitutional. Blake thought it atrocious and manifestly illegal that a protest should be prosecuted in such a way, but the police naturally did not care. They were just doing their jobs. Merlon held that the people of the United States were the rightful owners of public property, and therefore they could give themselves permission to camp there, and the application of the statute was doubly illegal.

  All of the officers were white, of course. The youngest had the sides of his head shaved and the top knotted in a bun. Blake spoke to another, a white-bearded old man, who said he was happily anticipating retirement. The criminalization of homelessness, he said, was the fault of the city council and perhaps the state. He encouraged Blake to attend city council meetings. Blake asked him when the police would arrive to remove the camp, and the cop just said they should leave immediately. Blake told him to enjoy his retirement. The old man grumbled and talked about abstract guilt, as if he was no longer responsible. Rogue later warned Blake of the dangers of speaking with police at a protest.

  Suddenly a trumpet sounded and a wheelchair jumped the curb and landed on the median. Its driver was a ruddy man with blue hair, grimacing in frustration. He held a cellphone in his hand and was already filming the police. That was the moment Blake knew that he had discovered something wondrous. The man’s name was Harmon, a local celebrity. He had run for mayor several times, satirically.

  The police left and supporters trickled through the camp throughout the day. They brought cake, pizza, trail mix, catering trays, sleeping bags, tents, jackets, and jeans. Most of them knew Merlon personally. After a few hours, Blake ran out of work to do. He went to the food tent and made himself a sandwich of mozzarella cheese, basil leaves, and honey-baked ham, then started lounging around on the couch and watching many strange scenes unfold. Journalists surveyed the scene. Merlon conferred with a nice old lady, while Harmon reminisced with Adelaide. Star produced banners continually, while Luther and Rogue patrolled the perimeter. That afternoon, the restaurant in Modesto called Blake and said they weren’t interested. Blake was relieved. He told Merlon that he could stay for a few more days. When Merlon heard that he hadn’t gotten the job, he said, “Congratulations.”

  Blake had to move his car several times to avoid the two-hour parking rules. Eventually, Iago informed him that there was unrestricted parking three blocks away on the residential streets that ran parallel to Adeline. Blake left his car there and brought a backpack to the camp. Everyone was sure that the cops would raid around two or three AM, when the supporters were least likely to be awake and there was little traffic in the streets. Blake ate cold pizza for dinner and went to sleep in his car. By this time, he had perfected a method of stretching a tarp over the back seat. This protected him from the headlights of passing cars, but he was constantly afraid that he would be awoken by a knock on his window. Luckily, he was too tired to be kept awake by fear.

  Around two AM, he got a call from Merlon, who said, “They’re here.”

  “I’m coming. Should I bring anything?”

  “Bring your car.”

  Blake packed up his tarp and started the engine. He drove over to Adeline and parked on a side-street. The police had cordoned off the camp and blocked one lane of traffic flowing in either direction. They asked Blake a few questions, which he declined to answer. They had forty officers, eight patrol cars, two vans, and a helicopter. Merlon sat still in his tent, surrounded by cops and social workers, loudly protesting that he was too weak to move. Some of the middle-class supporters were helping to load people’s belongings into their pickups and sedans, while the protestors themselves were taking down their tents and gathering their possessions. Blake felt dazed, giddy with the moment’s gravity.

  City workers milled about behind the police lines. They drove white vans and wore reflective vests. With gloves and giant orange trash bags, they collected anything that wasn’t nailed down and tossed it into the back of a truck. They took food, clothing, tents, bikes, and cookware. They took the stove and everything in the food tent. Adelaide and Star were streaming, narrating events into a phone camera, inserting a great deal of profanity, critiquing each cop in turn. Star said, “Do they really let cops have man-buns? You look like you only eat artisanal donuts. Do you eat them with a fork?” The cops never laughed, but he got a few thousand views.

  Since Blake couldn’t enter the cordon, he called Merlon, who sent Roan and Adelaide. Roan was an old white man with a graying beard and a slow gait, but carried two backpacks, a tent, and a bin of food. Adelaide was a trans woman, medium-brown, who relied on a wheelchair most of the time. She had already loaded her gear into someone’s truck. She rolled under the cordon and continued streaming. They loaded Lil Ol Blue’s trunk and squeezed the wheelchair into her back seat, then Roan guided them to the site of the new camp, two blocks away.

  When Blake got there, supporters had already unloaded a lot of the protestors’ gear and delivered coffee and donuts. Blake helped them set up their tents. They built their camp on a spacious plaza outside the HUB, the city’s homeless services center. When Merlon arrived, he announced, “We just cost the city $100,000! Not bad for a bunch of homeless people!” He was keeping score. Luther never said anything. He spent the whole time scanning the streets.