by Caleb Crain
“Me? Really?” Julia let a hand drop onto her chest. Her voice had a rich color, Matthew noticed. It wouldn’t have been suitable to speak too hurriedly with it. “I wanted to ask Leif a question about his power.”
It wasn’t inaccurate to call Leif’s gift a power; no one corrected her. But there was something off about it. Julia spoke, Matthew sensed, from what she understood to be a position of some kind. Maybe it was her voice itself that gave it to her. Really fine things are usually strong as well as elegant. “Can he do it through the TV?” she asked.
She couldn’t help but be condescending, Matthew saw. He sort of liked her for it; it was her way of being authentic.
“Did I say the wrong thing?” she asked when no one responded.
“It’s a point of information,” said Elspeth. “It’s a valid point of information.”
“No, of course,” said Leif. “I don’t have a television, so I don’t really know. But I think I have to be there in person.”
“Why?” Matthew asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know how it works. Maybe there’s something I have to smell? That would be gross, wouldn’t it.”
“So we need to get ourselves in the same room with them, somehow,” said Raleigh.
“With who?” Elspeth asked.
“With the people we want to crack.”
“You’re so dramatic,” Leif said.
“We could get them to arrest us,” Chris suggested. He was studying Leif.
“They’re doing a lot of that, I hear,” Julia said cheerfully.
“Can you read people through a TV?” Leif asked her.
“I don’t get anything at all from people, not even in person,” she said, a little gleefully, like someone turning her pockets inside out for a beggar.
“You came to us.”
“Oh, when people lose their keys, I know where to find them. I see them, usually. Sitting in a little heap, the way keys do, wherever they are. But that’s so trivial.”
“You see what the person who lost the keys is showing you,” Leif suggested.
“That could be,” she said.
“I bet you could see other things.”
“How scary!” she said brightly.
Leif seemed to consider.
“Is it scary, boss?” asked Chris.
Matthew abruptly remembered having been frightened by a dream that he had had the night before. He couldn’t remember any details. Only the fact that there had been something menacing came back to him. The unspecific fact of the menace, now, functioned as a shield that protected him from the thing itself that had frightened him in his sleep.
“That’s why I wanted for us to have a group,” said Leif. “To talk about it.”
“So this is a kind of therapy group,” said Julia.
“It’s whatever we want it to be.”
For a few moments they seemed to listen to and focus on one another silently. Chris, Raleigh, Elspeth, Julia, Matthew, Leif. Brutal, clumsy, earnest, proud, sorrowful, troubling. It was awkward. For a few moments, they were so aware of one another, even those who were more or less strangers to each other, that no one knew what to say.
There was a loud crack.
“What was that?” asked Julia.
“Our brain waves in alignment,” joked Raleigh.
Elspeth hopped out of her chair. “I think it came from the bookshelf.” She removed a handful of anthologies and looked into the gap. “It was the veneer panel in back. I knew we nailed it on wrong.”
“There was probably a fair amount of torque on it,” said Raleigh. “The way the bookcase is leaning.”
“Come on,” said Chris.
“Come on what?” Raleigh replied.
“I, officially, don’t believe in this kind of thing,” said Leif.
“What do you mean, ‘officially’?” asked Julia.
“Officially as in for the record.”
“In other words, you do.”
“Secretly everyone does.”
“You’re all north by northwest about this, aren’t you,” said Julia. “Except you,” she added, turning to Chris. “You’re north. In a way, you’re the only one who takes it absolutely seriously.”
“Oh, Chris, you’re blushing,” said Elspeth.
“I don’t blush.” The gold of his skin didn’t completely hide it.
* * *
—
“Dinner,” announced Matthew, a couple of nights later, in his apartment.
Leif, who was sitting on Matthew’s folded-up futon, looked up from his laptop. They had agreed that the evening wouldn’t be a date, so that they could spend in each other’s company the time that they needed to devote to reading and writing. Matthew had cooked a simple meal, dal with wilted spinach and caramelized onions. After setting two bowls of it on the table, he untied his apron and went to take a piss.
He heard Leif knock. “I need to wash my hands,” Leif explained through the door, which Matthew hadn’t pulled all the way to.
“Come in.”
“Oh, I have to pee, too, actually,” said Leif.
Matthew made room for him, and Leif took out his long, thin cock, floppy like a new-landed fish. He was pee-shy, at first. “I always think of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom crossing streams,” said Leif. “Is that hopeless?”
While Matthew was washing his hands, Leif put his hands into the sink, too, but it was an obstruction rather than a pleasure, and Leif apologized. “I was an only child, so I don’t know how to share.”
“You don’t share. You struggle brutally for survival.”
As they returned together to the table, Matthew briefly had the fantasy that the table had been set not by him but by people they couldn’t see. They were happening upon the meal, in the course of a quest of some kind.
“How’s your post going?” Matthew asked, once they sat down.
Raleigh had set up a blog for the working group, and Leif was trying to write something for it. “Did you ever see Escape to Witch Mountain? It’s an old, very bad Disney movie. There’s a little girl in it who can open locks with her mind, but only when it’s morally right for her to do so. I want to say that we could have something like that for codebreaking. We could develop the ability to find out any secret that it’s morally right for us to know.”
“Why not secrets you shouldn’t know?”
“This is humanities, not science. There isn’t a button you push.”
“What if you wrote it as a poem?” Matthew suggested. “Instead of a blog post.”
“I’m writing a manifesto,” Leif replied scornfully.
They gave their attention to eating. There were still questions that Matthew hadn’t found a way to ask: If the world was ending, what was the point in Leif’s giving so much of himself away to strangers? If it was possible to know people’s hearts without words, why didn’t Leif know Matthew’s?
Leif set down his fork. “It’s very secure here,” he said, surveying Matthew’s bookshelves. “It’s very sturdy. Here in your life.”
“I could tear it down,” said Matthew. He felt a yen for a cigarette even though it had been more than a year since he had quit.
“Tear it down for me?”
“For me, too, maybe.”
“Don’t do that,” said Leif. Studying his empty bowl, he added, “We probably shouldn’t get too attached.”
“No,” agreed Matthew. “I just want to be able to fuck you now and then.”
It wasn’t exactly distrust between them. It was as if each of them were warning the other.
“What if you try to take what you want for yourself,” Matthew suggested. He had decided that that was his own policy.
“I don’t know how to want anything just for myself,” Leif replied. “I always want it with someone.”
&nb
sp; “Just not with me.”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Leif said.
“Hurt me a little,” Matthew said. “I bet you can’t.”
“Oh, I can.”
“Come on, try.” Matthew kneeled in front of Leif’s chair and held down Leif’s arms with his own.
* * *
—
The invitation led them to the futon, where their greed surprised them.
They showered afterward. They read for a while. When they went to sleep, they slept fitfully and without any pattern, because they were still struggling with each other over which way to face and how much to intertwine. How much to insist and how much to defer.
A little before one, Leif’s phone gave the black-fly buzz that signaled its receipt of a text. They didn’t get out of bed. A few minutes later, they ignored a second text, too. “You’re blowing up,” Matthew said, when a third one came in.
“It’s happening,” Leif said as he read. “The police are evicting everyone.”
Matthew switched on his desk lamp and shielded his eyes from it. “Do you want to go?”
“We won’t even be able to get close enough to see,” Leif replied, still reading his small screen. “The police are using their clubs.” Another text arrived. “Raleigh’s going,” he reported.
“Is Elspeth?”
“He didn’t say. He’s getting on his bike now.”
“What about Chris?”
“He’s two blocks south of it. The first text was from him.”
Leif hunched over to write his friends back, which on his dumbphone sometimes required laborious repetition of the number keys to bring up the right letters. At the sink, Matthew poured two glasses of water. The edge of the circle of light cast by his desk lamp bisected Leif across his pale chest. The geometry of the scene suggested to Matthew that Leif would never be fully held by any claim of Matthew’s. The stillness of the circle of light and the unsteady working of Leif’s breath in his slender rib cage added to the impression.
“Do you have any earplugs?” asked Leif. “The police have bought some kind of new sound weapon with their 9/11 money.”
“Are you going?”
“You don’t have to go.”
“I just didn’t realize you were going.”
“I want to see how far I can get.”
Matthew took a bag of foam earplugs out of the top drawer of his desk. “This is so end times. A sound weapon.”
“It’s a war of the senses,” Leif said. He stood up, pulled on his pants, and started buttoning his shirt. “It’s a war over perceiving. Over what we’re allowed to perceive, still. You don’t have any swimming goggles, do you?”
“The strap broke last year,” said Matthew. “I’ll go, too.”
“Why? It’s not your thing.”
“I won’t get in your way,” Matthew promised. “I’m going to go, okay?”
They walked their bikes down the stairwell of Matthew’s building. Outside, by a trick of the light, the asphalt of the street looked wet even though it wasn’t. They set off, Leif in the lead. The streets were mostly empty. It was quiet, and they were alone and unwatched. As the black-and-white city scrolled past, Matthew felt terribly free, as one does when one understands that one has lost touch with one’s old life.
The city was like a sleeping dragon; they were coasting past it almost noiselessly, so as not to wake it up. The only sound was the creak of their pedals, echoing off the facades. As each streetlamp passed, the burnish of its reflected light rolled up alongside them on the asphalt, like a dolphin curious about a new boat in her waters, and then veered away.
It was so quiet that Matthew had the impression that he and Leif had survived something. They were touring the aftermath.
“Look,” said Leif, pointing below them as they mounted the bridge. “They’ve shut the bridge to car traffic.”
Two police cars, lights flashing, were slanted across the bridge’s car lanes, and beyond the police cars, the gray pavement was empty.
After looking down, Matthew by reflex looked up, into the beautiful double rigging of the old bridge, which was unusual in that it was both a cable-stayed and a suspension bridge, doubly supported because its builders had meant for it to stand for all time. Cables that spread at an angle crossed cables that fell straight down, interlacing like fingers and creating diamonds that in their sequence of gradually varying dimensions seemed to be unfolding as Leif and Matthew rode past them.
They crossed the water; they descended into downtown. Tonight it didn’t seem like misplaced prudence for them to lock up their bikes long before their destination, and while the chants and the sirens were still faint, they chose a No Parking sign on an empty street. As they threaded their locks and cables through their wheels, three curly-haired men with backpacks walked up with nervous speed.
“Any news?” asked one.
“We just got here,” said Leif.
“We heard they have water cannons,” said another.
The shapes of the men’s noses didn’t match; they weren’t brothers. Leif told them the rumor he had heard about the sound weapon, and he gave them three pairs of Matthew’s earplugs. “I don’t know if they’ll work,” Leif cautioned.
“They might be handy in Central Booking, anyway.”
“Don’t they make you empty your pockets at Central Booking?” asked the third curly-haired man.
“I think they just take your belt and shoelaces,” replied the first.
The men hurried on.
“I don’t want to go to jail,” said Matthew.
“Do you want to go home?”
“No, let’s just not get arrested.”
As they walked north, toward the site of the encampment, they began to notice small groups of others headed in the same direction. They passed a row of glossy white SUVs bearing medallions that identified them as the property of the Department of Homeland Security. The trucks were backed up diagonally onto the sidewalk, their engines idling. They were as yet unscratched by the city. Matthew wondered where the Department of Homeland Security was kept when there wasn’t any civil unrest. Outside of airports, he had never seen any sign of it before.
“Raleigh says to go one block west,” Leif said, reading his cell phone.
When they did, they found sidewalks that were at last a little populated. There was a chant—“Whose streets? Our streets”—which built for half a dozen iterations, but after a few more, the voices in it fell out of entrainment, and in the end only one persisted, almost scoldingly. It was the middle of the night, after all. At the next intersection, a file of police, in helmets and black plastic armor, stood abreast to block the way to the park that the occupiers no longer occupied. Behind the police was parked a paddy wagon, one of its back doors open, the corner of a bench inside it visible. From every officer’s belt there dangled an insect-like furl of disposable plastic manacles. It was the multiplicity as much as the shape of them that suggested insects. Professional dog walkers sometimes carried a dispenser of baggies in the same place.
To pick up the shit that is us, Matthew thought.
“If you step into the street, you will be arrested,” a policeman warned the crowd through a megaphone.
“What’s that about?” Matthew asked.
“It’s their rule,” said Leif.
“If you don’t color inside the lines, you go to jail? Don’t we have a right of assembly?”
Leif didn’t meet Matthew’s eye, as if wary of Matthew’s simple anger. He waved; he had spotted Raleigh, Elspeth, and Chris on the sidewalk opposite. Diana was with them. Matthew and Leif made their way to the crosswalk in order to join them safely.
“You made it,” Raleigh said. He clapped a hand against one of Leif’s. “Diana says the police are pulling everyone out of the park.”
She gestured with her phon
e. “That’s what I hear.”
“We will arrest you if you are obstructing the flow of traffic,” repeated the police officer with the megaphone.
“They keep saying that, and they’re blocking a whole street,” said Raleigh, and to Matthew it sounded reckless of Raleigh, under the circumstances, to give voice even to a mild statement of fact. No wonder Leif had been wary of Matthew’s anger a few minutes earlier. There was risk in letting one’s temperature get too high.
“I can’t be here,” said Diana. “I have a meeting with my adviser first thing in the morning.”
“Oh, are you in grad school?” asked Matthew.
“Sociology.”
“English,” Matthew identified himself.
“Nice.”
A new chant began and staggered across the sparse crowd. As it passed through their group, Raleigh and Chris seemed to compete in giving voice to it.
“This will make Occupy even bigger,” said Raleigh, perhaps a little heady from the shouting. “The way the first arrests did. The way the pepper spray did.”
His hopes hung in the air, unseconded.
“What if we walk down to the water,” Leif suggested.
“Y’all are going to do your witchy thing, aren’t you,” said Diana. “I’ll have to leave you to it.” She gave out hugs.
“Peace,” Chris told her, unselfconsciously.
Another chant started. “Are we really going to just walk away?” asked Raleigh.
“What’re you gonna do, man,” Chris replied.
Across the street, Matthew saw the three curly-haired men standing on the curb, glaring at five policemen who seemed to be daring them to step off it. As if to suggest an answer to Chris’s not-quite-question, one of the curly-haired men did step off the curb, his jaw out, and the police at once rained down blows on him with their clubs, as if he were a nail that they were competing to hammer. As the man’s friends grabbed at him ineffectually, the man crumpled to his knees, and the police bent him forward, twisted his arms behind him, and fastened his wrists. The police had done this many times before, Matthew saw, and the curly-haired man never had. They knew where to hit so that his body gave out quickly.