Overthrow

by Caleb Crain

  “You don’t let the images in.”

  “Death means change, doesn’t it?” It sounded like something he had heard Leif or Elspeth say.

  “It isn’t usually death death. But I didn’t have the death card out.” She shuffled her hand into the deck without showing him what the cards had been.

  Matthew realized that he had almost forgotten that straights have love-dramas of their own. Though it might be that an attention like Chris’s was the one thing that in Elspeth’s case, Elspeth couldn’t see. “Where’s Raleigh?” Matthew asked from the sofa.

  “He took Julia to a spokes council,” Elspeth answered. “She wanted to ‘see.’”

  So Elspeth had also noticed Julia’s scare quotes. Unlike Matthew, Julia made no attempt to discard or naturalize her status as an interloper. “Where do you think her money comes from?” Matthew asked.

  Elspeth looked startled. “She does have nice clothes, doesn’t she.”

  “She has an office,” Chris volunteered. Two blocks from her house, he reported. Chris worked for a moving company, and he said that she had asked him how much it would cost to have a few bookcases moved, along with the books they held. “You could do it with only one man, but you would need a truck,” Chris said now, repeating the calculation he had made for her.

  What came into Matthew’s mind, and, he suspected, into Elspeth’s and Chris’s own, was that it might have been Chris’s beauty and the angry heat that always seemed to be rising from him that had prompted Julia to consider hiring him. It would be hard for anyone who liked to sleep with men to look at Chris and not wish to see him put to work. It would have been indecent, though, to joke about Chris’s beauty at the moment, or even to mention it, given the steadiness with which Chris was watching Elspeth.

  Perhaps this is how it ends, Matthew thought. The occupation, no longer instantiated, would disperse, and the members of the littler groups that comprised it would break up into new pairings. Matthew was willing to assist in betrayal if unbinding the others would free Leif for him.

  It had to end, after all; even the silence in the room now supported that conclusion. The silence was an example of the great flaw in Leif’s scheme, which Leif himself, whenever he felt confident enough to tackle it, referred to as the Problem of Democracy and Feelings. Also known as the Problem of Secrets. If feelings could be made generally audible, was anyone safe? There were cruel people in the world, after all; in a state of perfect knowledge, not everyone would forbear to take advantage. And even between those who had power to harm but would do none, if you knew that I wanted to go to bed with you, and I knew that you didn’t want to go to bed with me, would anything be gained by a license to say what we knew? What if people have come to prefer not speaking their intuitions, and even not knowing them, for a reason?

  With more talk might come more understanding, Leif hoped. One might be able to learn to tolerate close handling of awarenesses that had previously seemed too painful, including even perhaps an awareness of not being loved where one badly wanted to be. That was Leif’s hope, at any rate. Matthew wasn’t sure that Leif had any experience of what such a disillusionment might feel like.

  “Well, she isn’t defined by her money, is she,” Elspeth commented. “I think she’s genuinely interested in what we’re doing. It’s too bad we didn’t text her the other night.”

  “We had other things on our minds,” Chris said.

  * * *

  —

  A few steps over the threshold of Matthew’s apartment, Leif halted for a moment, as if he were waiting, even after so many visits, for Matthew to renew the invitation to make himself at home. “I’ve been thinking of having an action.”

  “What kind?” Matthew asked.

  “Like an Occupy action. I don’t know. Chain ourselves to something. Hold a public séance.” He studied Matthew for a response. When there wasn’t one, he consolidated a few stacks of books in the windowsill and sat down beside them. “It’s so hard to figure out what the action would be, though, that I wonder if it’s a philosophical problem.” He looked out the window, down into the street, where the brief day was folding itself up and taking itself away, an impatient employee.

  Matthew switched on his desk lamp.

  “Maybe the problem is,” Leif continued, “that an action will always be an imposition of feelings rather than a perception of them. Even if you want the action to be about perceiving them.”

  “It can’t express them?”

  “To express them, it would have to come out of feelings that people were having in the moment, and you can’t plan for those. So you can’t plan that kind of action. It’s the problem of monogamy, really. The problem of making promises about feelings.”

  “You don’t think it’s possible.”

  “Do you think it is?”

  Their reflected selves were now floating beyond the window, in the dark, two stories above the level of the street. Escapees. Matthew went to make tea, and while the water came to a boil, he stood watching the kettle and tried to reason with himself. If he got out now, he would free himself of the need to make allowances. He would free himself of the need to be considerate. He could just say that he didn’t think any of it was possible. And it wasn’t possible. The trouble was that he wanted Leif anyway. They were probably going to have each other again tonight, though nothing was certain. He was looking forward to it. Not knowing for certain made him look forward to it even more. He had never been able to walk away from a hunt.

  * * *

  —

  Afterward, as Matthew lay in bed next to Leif, having gotten what he wanted one more time, and feeling no freer, feeling in fact even more deeply held, he felt confronted by the realization that he didn’t understand. What if it’s fatal, he wondered, using a word he wished he hadn’t thought of. The word, in this case, meant fated, he told himself.

  He got out of bed quietly and sat naked at his desk, in the dark, the slats of the folding chair at first cold under his buttocks. He wanted Leif and he liked him, even though he thought Leif was a little grandiose at times and perhaps a bit crazy, but there was something uncanny and imperious about the way he wanted him. The wanting almost seemed to come from outside Matthew.

  An axle creaked once in the chair beneath him, as if a cricket had found enough daring for one stridulation. Matthew held still; Leif didn’t wake up. Had he wanted Leif to wake up? Had he twisted in his chair deliberately? Did he know anything about his own intentions anymore? He told himself that he was brave enough to be in love, if that’s what this was. He wasn’t the sort of person who needed to be in control for its own sake; he wasn’t a tyrant or a prude or a stuffed shirt.

  He looked at Leif. In the dark, Leif’s features, just beyond the threshold of visibility, seemed to billow and alter, under the strain of Matthew’s attempt to see them, until Leif coughed, in his sleep, and in the motion of the spasm became distinct to Matthew’s sight: Leif’s frame curled forward, and his arms shifted apart, like a dog acting out a dream.

  Matthew was a little afraid of the warmth that he knew was in the bed with Leif now, mantling him. If Matthew joined it, it would keep Matthew from minding that he didn’t understand. What had he given to Leif that he couldn’t get back except by keeping him? If it were a tarot card, which card would it be? The Fool, the Lover, the Hermit?

  He got back into bed and folded Leif in his arms. The Sun, he remembered, was the sign of sovereignty as well as the light to see it by.

  2.

  It had worked, Chris repeated to himself as he and Raleigh were shunted into a holding cell at Central Booking. There was a clang as the gate caught behind them, but Chris didn’t really mind. A few hours ago, just before he was arrested, he had been able to see fear in a security official’s eyes. Elspeth had seen it, too; Chris had shared a look with her when it had happened. Leif had done it.

  The holding cell was cap
acious. Three of the walls were cement, painted lime green. Which is the color of shoots, Chris thought. Of spring, he silently joked.

  In fact, flat light from fluorescents overhead denied any suggestion of a specific time of day, let alone season. A dull steel bench ran along the walls, and Raleigh pointed to an open stretch.

  None of the men already sitting in the cell looked at them directly. They weren’t being sullen, Chris knew. Only cautious. They were making an effort not to show too much or too little face.

  “They didn’t arrest the girls,” Raleigh said, in a studiedly normal tone of voice.

  “They weren’t in the street,” Chris said. He had a clear memory of where the girls had been standing when the police had unrolled their orange webbing.

  “At least not while we were with them,” Raleigh replied, staking his usual claim to know a little bit more and a little bit better. Chris didn’t mind that, either. Especially not today, when the members of their working group at last knew what they were capable of. What Elspeth and Leif were capable of, at least. And maybe the new guy, Matthew, though who knew because he never fully put his shoulder to the wheel. Chris himself didn’t have what they had, and that was yet another thing he didn’t mind. He had been given instead an opportunity to fall in love. You can only fall in love with people who have a greatness or beauty you don’t. You could say that what Chris himself had, instead of gifts like Leif’s or Elspeth’s, was the privilege of honesty. He saw how things were even when they didn’t take a form presentable enough to talk about out loud. He saw, for example, that he couldn’t help but love Elspeth and, in a different way, Leif.

  And right now, he saw that what the other men in the cell were likely to resent about his comrade-in-arms Raleigh wasn’t Raleigh’s whiteness so much as his weakness. The way Raleigh nodded at one of their cellmates and then did a sort of air-drumming on one thigh. The weakness registered as a luxury that Raleigh’s whiteness had purchased for him. He came across as someone who had never really had to put on armor.

  “That’s the phone,” Raleigh said, noticing a brown landline mounted on a post in the center of the cell. “We should be careful because it’ll be bugged. There was an article about it online a couple months ago. Do you want to call?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I should call Elspeth.”

  Raleigh said it as if he needed to call his mother. Chris watched him walk away. There wasn’t going to be any need for Chris to point anything out. All he was going to have to do was wait for Elspeth to see for herself.

  He arched his back and stretched his arms. It wasn’t exactly a comfortable bench. He felt aware of the walls, the confinement. But he could pace if he had to, he told himself.

  “Y’all aren’t really in-here in here, are you,” said a young black man in a mustard hoodie, not far away on the bench.

  “What do you mean,” Chris said.

  “Or maybe you are. I wasn’t trying to disrespect you.”

  “We were at an Occupy protest.”

  “I thought you might be in here for a school project, like.” He looked away, as if to signal that he didn’t need for Chris to respond.

  “It was a protest against evictions,” Chris said. “Against banks. We had a camp downtown, until a few weeks ago. It was political, but not like Republican or Democrat political.”

  “Hey,” the man said, leaning slightly toward Chris and lowering his voice. “In here you maybe shouldn’t tell nobody what you in for.” Louder: “Know what I’m saying?”

  “We were standing in the street.”

  “In here you might not know who you talking to.”

  Chris nodded. “My friend says the phone there is bugged.”

  “Not if you talking to your lawyer.”

  “They stop listening then?”

  The man laughed and nodded. “Yeah, they stop listening then.”

  The man’s name was Calvin. He lived on this side of the river, he said, but far uptown. His girlfriend was still in school and wanted to be a nurse, and if he was arraigned quickly, he might not have to tell her what had happened to him this morning.

  “So the National Lawyers Guild is going to have someone upstairs for us,” said Raleigh, returning.

  “It’s not going to be serious,” Chris replied.

  “Do you want to know or not?”

  “Yeah, tell me.”

  Raleigh proceeded to tell him in detail exactly how it was going to turn out not to be serious.

  * * *

  —

  An hour and a half later, a guard called Chris’s name but not Raleigh’s.

  Raleigh came with Chris to the gate anyway. “You’re not arraigning us at the same time?” Raleigh said. “We were arrested together.”

  “Get back,” the guard ordered Raleigh. “Get back behind the line on the floor there. That’s right.” The guard opened the gate, cuffed Chris, snatched him out, and banged the gate shut. Chris didn’t say anything, because he was still chewing the last mouthful of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which he had had to bolt. He nodded good-bye to Raleigh and to Calvin. After he swallowed, he became aware that he wished he was able to wipe the corners of his mouth.

  The guard didn’t make any small talk with Chris. The police lorded it over you when they had you, as if they thought it would make you forget about how free you were when they didn’t.

  The guard directed Chris into the elevator that had originally brought him and Raleigh down. Inside it, in the silence, Chris thought of the first trip he had taken to New Orleans after Katrina, while it had still been raining. Storming, really. He and a friend of his, an anarchist from Galveston, had gotten the idea that they were going to help. They had bought first aid kits, bottled water, and protein bars, and they had driven a loop around the city in order to approach it from the east, first by car, and then in a johnboat that they had liberated from its tie-up. There hadn’t been any police in the area at the time. There hadn’t been any authority at all. He and his friend had got close enough to see people standing on roofs but had turned back when a few rednecks in retreat had warned that they would have to be willing to shoot with live ammunition if they went any further. They hadn’t quite believed the rednecks but hadn’t had the courage to disbelieve them. Chris hadn’t even owned a gun, at that point.

  The water had been clear, at the place where they had made their decision. Dark green but clear. It should have been muddy from all the rain. The people standing on the roofs had kept waving, in the silence of distance, as Chris and his friend had wheeled their boat around.

  “Get out,” the guard said as the elevator door opened.

  He made Chris walk ahead of him. On this floor the walls were white, with a soft, intermittent gray stripe at waist level where the bumpers of cleaning trolleys, pushed by inmates, had rubbed against them. Mounted on the wall, halfway down the corridor, was a board the size of a door—maybe it had actually been a door at some point—with laminated photos of the Fallen, in three rows. ALL GAVE SOME, read a motto along the bottom. SOME GAVE ALL. In addition to police, guards, and inmates on cleaning duty, a few men in suits were in the corridor, probably lawyers. Chris wasn’t able to stop himself from feeling ashamed of being seen by them with his hands cuffed behind his back. He wished he could believe that he was feeling the shame of the men in suits rather than his own—their shame at their complicity, maybe—but he knew that he didn’t have Elspeth’s or Leif’s susceptibility.

  The guard opened a door. “Go on.” Inside was a white room with chairs and a table. Set into the far wall was a window with mirrored glass. The guard uncuffed Chris and ordered him to sit. A viewer at the window would have a good vantage on him.

  “I don’t have a lawyer yet,” said Chris.

  “You don’t need a lawyer for this.” The guard left and shut the door.

  Chris stood up, the
way he did when left in an examining room to wait for a doctor. At least he was in his clothes and not in a backless surgical bib. The table and chairs were made out of a slightly wobbly plastic, like lawn furniture, so that they couldn’t be made dangerous. Chris had visited a friend in a locked ward once, and in the bathroom, water had come out of a blunt hole in the ceramic of the sink rather than out of a faucet.

  He leaned his head close to the mirrored glass and shaded his eyes against it, to break its reflectivity. Under a smoky green haze, two cops were watching him from closer than he had expected.

  There was nothing on the walls of the interrogation room other than a few scuffs and a patch of puckering where moisture appeared to have gotten trapped under the paint. Chris sat down in the wrong chair.

  His back was therefore to the door when it opened. “All right, boss?” asked the guard. He was talking to the security official frightened by Leif a few hours ago.

  “No, don’t get up,” the security official said to Chris. “All right,” he told the guard, who locked the two of them in the interrogation room alone.

  Against the blankness of the room, it was hard to appraise the man’s size. He was wearing a dark blue suit, probably the same one he had been wearing when Leif had spooked him, and it hid him, the way suits do. He wasn’t losing his hair yet. Chris thought he remembered noticing that the man had been a little shorter than Leif.

  The man patted the pockets of his suit coat until he confirmed by touch the presence of something he was looking for. “This isn’t official,” the man said. He was wearing a wedding ring. “I thought we might be able to help each other.”

  Chris waited a moment, and then, because he didn’t want to be impolite before he had to be, he nodded.

  “Was your friend looking for me?” the man asked. “The one who came after me.”

  “He didn’t ‘come after’ you.”

  “I think we mean the same guy,” the man said. “Your boyfriend.”