Overthrow

by Caleb Crain

  At the moment prudence seemed to Matthew like something that he was probably only capable of arriving at accidentally. The sun was peering down from an even sharper height. It would be lunchtime at Occupy soon. It was also going to be lunchtime here, and he was starving. He stood up.

  * * *

  —

  A peanut butter sandwich in hand, the arms of his shirt soaked from having biked so far, Matthew saw no sign of Leif but recognized Elspeth and her imperfectly bearded boyfriend at a folding table. “Is it like therapy?” they were being asked by a beautiful Mediterranean woman, about Matthew’s age, in a stylish peacoat with comically large brass buttons. “It almost sounds like the sort of thing my therapist would be happy to hear I had joined.”

  “Kind of,” said Elspeth.

  “By which she means no,” Raleigh glossed.

  On the tabletop beside Raleigh and Elspeth stood an empty pizza box that had been opened up as a trestle, on the forward-facing white bottom of which the word SECRETS had been inked in ballpoint pen, each letter traced three times for visibility, and then encircled and cross-barred in red marker to symbolize negation.

  “Are you recruiting?” Matthew asked.

  “Would you care to join our working group, sir?” asked Raleigh.

  “Go ahead and explain it to him,” the woman in the peacoat told Raleigh and Elspeth. “That’ll give me another chance.”

  “We’re the Working Group for the Refinement of the Perception of Feelings,” said Elspeth.

  “WTFRPF,” said Raleigh.

  “Oh, maybe it’s a joke,” the woman said, aloud but as if commenting only to herself. She caught Matthew’s eye. “I mean, their whole idea for the group could be a joke, couldn’t it?” She spoke as if a joke would be as disappointing to her as an activity that her therapist would approve of.

  Elspeth tried to explain. “The idea is what if people were to talk about their feelings and not be so careful to make sure that nothing happens on account of talking about them.”

  “You can’t just leave out the part about how we read each other’s minds,” Raleigh protested.

  “Sounds interesting,” said Matthew, playing his role as shill.

  “It does?” asked the woman. “I’m still quite confused.”

  “In fact I’ll join,” said Matthew.

  “Just like that?” asked the woman.

  “Actually, we’re just pretending not to know each other,” Matthew confessed, gesturing between himself and the young couple.

  “Oh, I’ve been deceived, I see,” she said.

  “But the thing is,” said Matthew, “we knew you’d see through us.”

  “You’ve lost me again.”

  “Because of our refinement of—what is it?”

  “Refinement of the Perception of Feelings,” Elspeth supplied.

  “RPTGIF.”

  “Stop it, Raleigh,” said Elspeth.

  “Is that the official name now?” Matthew asked.

  “I came up with it last night,” Elspeth replied. “I think it’s more precise.”

  “You’re psychics or something,” said the woman in the peacoat.

  “Not me,” said Raleigh. “I’m not any good at it.”

  “Our friend Leif is the only one who’s really any good,” said Elspeth.

  “You know, this is pretty batty,” said the woman.

  “Oh, we know!” Raleigh agreed.

  “What’s it for, even, if it is real?” she asked. “I mean, it’s a parlor trick, isn’t it?” She included Matthew in her question. She had a grand manner, and one could see that in her mind it exempted her from any suspicion of rudeness. “Will telepathy replace the people’s mic? It would be less roughhewn that way.”

  “One of the ideas is we’ll use it to break crypto, actually,” said Raleigh.

  “Crypto?” the woman echoed. “That’s like codes, right? Curiouser and curiouser.” She looked at their pizza box indulgently. “I so want to be in on this.” She sounded as if she were making an aside to a friend, though no friend of hers happened to be present.

  “Crypto, really?” asked Matthew.

  “That’s why I’m supposed to work on the number cards,” said Elspeth.

  “Is this Leif’s idea?”

  “It’s more that it’s Raleigh’s idea that it should be Leif’s idea,” Elspeth admitted.

  “No, Leif’s into it,” Raleigh insisted. “And Chris is really into it.”

  “What ‘crypto’ will you break, exactly?” the woman asked. “My Gmail account?”

  “Government secrets,” said Raleigh. “Corporate misdoings.”

  “Drones and Bank of America and so on,” the woman suggested.

  “Exactly.”

  “And you’ll do it with . . . mind waves.”

  “You make us sound crazy,” said Raleigh, who didn’t sound as if he minded.

  “You’re giving her the wrong impression,” Elspeth objected. She tried once more to convey the idea: “It’s about admitting that most of the time people are more aware than they’d like to let on of how other people are feeling. That’s all. And that it hurts to be aware, if you can’t talk about it.”

  “Fascinating,” said the woman politely.

  “You must have felt it sometimes,” said Elspeth. “You came over to our table.”

  “And you’re in on this, too?” the woman asked Matthew, appealing to him perhaps on the grounds that like her, he was a responsible age.

  “I’m a fellow traveler.”

  “He hooked up with Leif,” Raleigh revealed.

  “Raleigh,” Elspeth said reproachfully.

  “And Leif is the swami or whatever,” said the woman, arranging their story in her mind. “That makes you the groupie.” She pointed a finger at Matthew.

  “I’m a grad student in English, so . . .”

  “So you’re easy?” the woman finished for him. “Oh, I like you all so much, but you are crazy. Can I come to your meeting anyway? Even if I think so? Maybe I’ll turn out to be psychic, too.”

  “You might be,” said Raleigh.

  “You all look so suspiciously sane, is the thing,” the woman said. “Of course, I’m a poor judge.”

  “There seems to be a difference of opinion about what we’re supposed to be believing in, exactly,” noted Matthew.

  “You should definitely come,” Elspeth said, welcoming the woman. “It’s at my apartment. The apartment I share with my roommates. They’re not in it, by the way.”

  “He’s not your roommate?” asked the woman, indicating Raleigh.

  “He’s my boyfriend,” Elspeth explained.

  “Oh, I see.” She took down Elspeth’s address and gave her name as Julia.

  * * *

  —

  “What brings you to Occupy?” Raleigh asked as the dust stirred up by the beauty of their new recruit settled.

  “The peanut butter,” Matthew answered.

  “Leif’s not here.”

  “I know.”

  “Doing a background check?”

  “I did do some googling,” Matthew admitted. “I read a couple of his poems.”

  “There was a really great one in Fence last year,” said Raleigh. “A longer one. You should check it out.”

  “Are you a poet, too?” Matthew asked.

  “I only write code.”

  “Raleigh’s a hacktivist,” said Elspeth.

  “No, I’m just a coder. I admire those guys, though. When they’re not being complete assholes.”

  Now that the game of inducting Julia was over, the three of them were lapsing into politeness. Raleigh asked Matthew what he did for a living, and Matthew confessed he was in grad school.

  “What’s your dissertation about?” Raleigh asked.

 
“Oh god, really?”

  Raleigh pointed to the emblem on the pizza box.

  “There’s an old legal term, ‘reversion,’” Matthew began. “You possess something in reversion if another person has the use of it now but you’ll get it after they die. Someone from another branch of your family may be living in a manor, say, and it will be yours if you manage to outlive them. Sometimes Shakespeare uses the word metaphorically, to mean anything in your future, anything you’re looking forward to, but legally, technically, it’s something you might not live long enough to put your hands on. My thesis is that in the poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the individual is no longer thinking of himself as the subject of a king but as someone who himself has a kingship in reversion. The interesting thing is it starts to happen quite early. Half a century before the demise of Charles I.”

  Elspeth asked, “Charles is the one who—?”

  “They chopped off his head,” Raleigh told her.

  “That’s what I was going to say.”

  “There’s this fixation in the poetry on the metaphysics of kingship,” Matthew continued. “On how kingship can be transferred and how it can be incorporated into a particular person and what sort of thing it really is, and the fixation has something to do with anxiety over who will succeed the virgin queen, and something to do with anxiety over how to think about the Host now that England is no longer Catholic—”

  “Is this history or literature?” Raleigh interrupted.

  “It’s literature. I’m faking the history.”

  “Go on.”

  “It has something to do with succession and something to do with Communion wafers, but I think it has to be economic, too, because reversionary kingship is seeping in through the foundations of the self, the way economic alterations in structure do. It’s a paradoxical state. It’s something you’ve inherited, so it’s from the past, but it’s also something you don’t enjoy yet, so it’s in the future. It’s a premonition, but a premonition of something that’s your birthright.”

  “Do we have it today?” Elspeth asked.

  Matthew demurred. “Representative democracy works a little differently. . . .”

  “People don’t really want to be king anymore,” said Raleigh. “There aren’t even any lunatics in the asylums who want to be Napoleon anymore.”

  “Maybe they want to be reversionary one-percenters,” suggested Elspeth.

  “One-percenters are too boring,” Raleigh objected.

  “They have no charismatic virtues,” said Matthew.

  “They have no charismatic vices,” Raleigh corrected him. “They would be charming if they would only let us see them being greedy and trivial.”

  “I wouldn’t find them charming,” Elspeth said.

  “Yes you would,” Raleigh insisted. “They’d be like the millionaires in screwball comedies.”

  “So that’s it, basically,” Matthew concluded. “And then a chapter on Marlowe because, you know, I’m gay.”

  “Why Communion wafers?” asked Raleigh.

  “It’s complicated.”

  “I thought it might have to do with the ‘Was Shakespeare Catholic?’ thing.”

  “Yeah, no. I mean, maybe. But not in my dissertation.”

  “Huh.”

  “So is this what you think about all day?” asked Elspeth. “I have a friend who’s writing a dissertation, and she says it’s all she can think about.”

  “It should be,” Matthew replied. It was supposed to be. His penance and his opportunity.

  “I look forward to reading it,” said Raleigh.

  “Oh, me, too,” said Matthew.

  After such an exhibition, silence naturally followed. Matthew wished he had said nothing, as he always did after expounding. One’s thoughts about one’s dissertation were like a gall on a tree. A corky, distended mass, as large as a human head. That was the kind of revelation he felt he made of himself when he talked about it.

  But Marlowe wasn’t incidental, he silently amended. Edward II was the key to Richard II, as he would show if he ever got to that chapter.

  * * *

  —

  The next day, at the library—one of the libraries on his own campus, this time—Matthew looked up the longer poem of Leif’s that Raleigh had mentioned.

  Line breaks and alignments seemed to be important structurally, and it was studded with so many patterns and eye rhymes that at first Matthew was under the panicky impression that the fact of the poem’s visual orientation was as much sense as he was going to be able to make of it. After a stanza or two, though, he began to piece together a story.

  The owners of a small-town motel, immigrants from the subcontinent, had set aside a garden for their employees, out of sight of the motel’s swimming pool and parking lot. A hose from the pool’s service shed led downhill to it. As a subject for a poem, a garden was an indulgence, the poet admitted. For a gay, urban-dwelling poet, it was even a little bit affected, as well as a bit too aspirationally upper middle class, the conventions and associations of pastoral being what they are. Locavorism, etc. The poet felt he had a right to the material anyway, because he really had worked in such a garden, with his mother, who really had worked in just such a motel as a cleaner, in the employ of a couple very much like the motel’s owners in the poem. The poet had a Marxian right by labor, therefore, and a feudal one by descent. His relationship to the labor of gardening had been moody and authentic. He had resented having to weed, and he had exulted in the creation of a lumpy, engorged, celadon Hubbard squash. “Et in Arcadia teenager.” He knew, thanks to the experience, that a corn plant’s roots prog into the earth like the arced and stiffened fingers of a practitioner of yoga as she supports herself on them, and he thought he should be free to draw on the knowledge. Unfortunately, the touch of “nature,” in such an image, always came off as precious; mortification rather than death fenced the lost garden.

  Still, he wanted to be able to say that the scent of a plant was as strong in its stem and its leaves as in its fruit, even at the cost of sounding dandiacal. That particular garden was still his world, or rather, his memories of it were the components with which he still assembled the world. Through which he perceived it. “My vegetable empire.” In that garden he had learned how to work and how to be alone.

  The stagecoach-wheel-size chandeliers of the reading room were swaying slightly, almost imperceptibly, in the middle space of the great hall, Matthew saw when he looked up from the literary journal. This might be a real poem, Matthew thought, although he wanted so badly to believe that it was that he couldn’t trust his judgment. He was becoming the sort of person who would think this was a real poem whether or not an earlier version of himself might have thought so. He remembered the boy’s ghostly white body as it had appeared to him in the darkness of his bedroom. He was in danger of falling in love.

  * * *

  —

  Matthew laid his jacket down on Elspeth’s bed beside the slate gray toggle coat that was already dear to him. “Can I get on stack?” he heard Julia’s voice asking, somewhat stagily, in the parlor.

  “Do we have a stack?” he heard Raleigh ask, in turn.

  “We probably should,” said Elspeth. “Let me get paper.” She was in search of some when she and Matthew crossed paths in the hallway a moment later. “Oh, hi,” she said. They were too shy to greet each other any more demonstratively.

  “Thanks for having me over.”

  “Of course. I mean, it’s a working group meeting.” She excused herself to continue her search.

  In the parlor, Matthew found Leif rising from his chair to welcome him. He felt a twinge of almost pain in his chest at seeing Leif again and seeing how beautiful he was. Leif was wearing the shirt that he had been wearing the night they met, a red-and-white-plaid shirt with skinny arms that made him look even lankier than he was. It wasn’t t
he kind of detail that Matthew usually noticed or remembered. I haven’t lost him yet, Matthew heard himself think, as they kissed, and as Leif rested the palm of one hand almost forgetfully against him.

  Chris, the green-eyed man who had helped fill the tanks at Occupy with hot and cold water, nodded at Matthew with an upward jut of his head and gave up his seat so that Matthew could sit next to Leif.

  “You mind?” Chris said to Julia, taking the chair next to her. Against the sun-darkened skin of his face, the pink of his lips looked raw. He was holding a baseball cap with fingers that were knotty and looked ten years older than the rest of him. “You going to help us out?” he asked Julia sociably.

  “I’m here to learn more about you,” Julia replied. She looked at him with eyes open almost aggressively wide. She had nothing to hide; she had hidden everything already.

  “Matthew’s a new recruit, too,” Raleigh said to Chris.

  “I met Matthew at Occupy,” said Chris.

  “I’m not going to wear the T-shirt or anything,” Matthew said.

  “That’s what we need,” said Raleigh. “Can we have T-shirts, Leif?”

  Elspeth returned, waving a yellow legal pad. “Should I be stack taker?” Nobody objected. “Everyone, everyone,” she said, calling them to order. “It can just be all stack. Whatever comes up.”

  “Julia had her hand up,” Leif said.

  Raleigh made a trumpet out of the curled fingers of one hand and spoke through it in a self-consciously “loud” voice: “Welcome to the Working Group for the Refinement of the Perception of Feelings.”

  “I think Julia should go first,” Leif said.

  “You’re sort of the leader,” Raleigh protested.

  “We’re anarchists, remember?”

  “Let her go first,” Chris seconded.