by Caleb Crain
Chris shook his head. “We’re in a working group together.”
“What’s that.” The man delivered his questions as orders rather than requests.
“It’s an Occupy thing. Do I have to talk to you?”
“I asked to see you because I saw you’d helped out before.” He studied Chris’s eyes; Chris didn’t look away. “There are all these sharing things they’ve put up now, since 9/11. For the different agencies. So I can see this stuff now, whenever I’m working with the city.” He took out of one of his suit coat pockets a pair of reading glasses and out of his breast pocket a sheet of paper folded vertically. He put the glasses on his nose and made a show of looking at the paper. “There was New Orleans, and it looks like, after that, there was Toronto.” He said the word “Toronto” as if it were exotic.
A couple of weeks after the hurricane, Chris had returned to New Orleans alone and had joined a group of anarchists and socialists repairing houses and organizing food and medical care. The group had had to make its own decisions, and everyone by then had had guns. When the police returned, Chris, because he was not only white but from Texas, had been the one sent to warn the police that it would go better if they kept their distance for a little while longer. He had gotten to know a guy on the force, who had asked Chris to keep him up-to-date. The guy had said he thought it would help keep things calm, and it had, more or less.
Chris had kept the extent of the contact to himself.
“I could have asked your friends instead.”
“Could have asked them what?”
“I could have asked them first about your talking with the department in New Orleans, but sometimes people get the wrong idea.”
It wasn’t smoothly done. Chris saw that the man didn’t think it needed to be.
“And then what were you doing in Toronto,” the man went on.
“Fighting neoliberalism,” Chris answered.
The man smiled. “You talked to some interesting people.”
Chris had gone for the G20 protests. One night, at a communal dinner, the host, as soon as he heard that Chris had volunteered in New Orleans, had wanted to talk to him about a sort of counter-NAFTA he was setting up. His group had come up with a new strategy with explosives, the host had said, not very quietly. Chris hadn’t interrupted; he hadn’t wanted to be rude. Did he talk to you about it, too? another guest had asked Chris, afterward, in the street. The man asking had offered Chris a cigarette, and in his question there had been the same note of complicity in hardheadedness that the cop in New Orleans had always used. That was how Chris had been able to tell. A little stupidly he had told the man, as he accepted his cigarette, that he saw through his cover. Bright kid, the man had replied. It had immediately been tacit between them that Chris wasn’t going to give the man away. He had asked for Chris’s name, and Chris, even more stupidly, had told him. He was only there to protest, he had said. He wasn’t going to take part in the black bloc action. Which one is that? the man had asked. Chris realized he had said too much. When he didn’t say any more, the man had advised him to keep in mind that a Canadian like their dinner host was a foreigner, and to collaborate with even a Canadian in an attack on an American target would count as treason as well as whatever specific crime was being committed.
He had left Chris to finish the cigarette alone.
Chris hadn’t been sure that the man had been American because his accent had been hard to place, but evidently he had been. And evidently they always wrote it down whenever they talked to you.
“My name is Joe,” the interrogator said. “Tell me what your working group is about.”
“We just talk to people.”
“Like me?” the interrogator asked. “Like the way your friend talked to me?”
The interrogator had been standing beside and slightly behind two cops, four or five hours before, and maybe it had been on account of his suit, a little nicer than a bureaucrat in law enforcement usually wears, that Leif had singled him out. Had called on him without his name, the way Leif was able to. Chris had been standing in the road with Raleigh, waiting to be arrested for obstruction of the traffic that would, theoretically, have existed where they were standing if the police and protesters hadn’t. Matthew and Leif had been on the sidewalk with the women because Matthew had said that he didn’t want to be arrested. Leif had probably felt restless standing there on the sidelines and had started to banter with the man. Almost to flirt with him. I bet your password has something to do with boots, doesn’t it. You’re showing it to me by thinking of it right now, you know. Oh my god, you’re showing them to me. Boots twenty-four seven. Boots twenty-four seven Charlotte, or something like that. Is that it? Am I right? At the guess, there had been a flare of anger in the man’s eyes. Heterosexual realness for the win! Leif had crowed.
“There was more to it than talking,” the interrogator said now.
“Do you think he read your mind?” Chris asked.
The man watched Chris for a moment, as if weighing whether Chris was trying to insult him. “What kind of research on me had your friend done?”
“I don’t think he even knew your name.”
“It’s Joe.”
“Yeah, you said.”
“Can you tell me my last name?”
Chris wished he could, to fuck with him. “I’m not as good at it.”
“You think he read my mind,” the interrogator inferred. “You believe he can do that sort of thing.” The man was making an effort not to sound incredulous.
He waited for Chris to speak, as if he was hoping that Chris would volunteer an explanation of his faith in the phenomenon if not an explanation of the phenomenon itself. To keep himself from talking, Chris studied the man. He had the average, undistinguished features of a local news weatherman, of someone you would pass in the drugstore without noticing. Of someone who had never expected to live in a world that needed much explanation and was a little resentful about the discovery that he did.
“He’s a gay guy? Your leader?”
“You should ask him.”
“Have you slept with him?”
Chris let the question go.
The man tried another angle. “Do you know much about the law? You didn’t go to college.”
“I went for a year.”
“Your friends went all the way through, didn’t they. But I wonder how much more they know. It’s a funny part of the law. If I know your mother’s maiden name, I usually don’t even need your password, these days. If I know the name of your first pet or your kindergarten teacher.” His tone became reflective. “And is it wrong to know that kind of thing about someone? I think it’s something we’re still figuring out, as a society. Where to draw the line.”
“What are you figuring out? Why we’re not supposed to know each other’s secrets but you’re allowed to?”
“There are controls on us,” the man said. He had gone touchy, suddenly. “There are ethics.” He had to live up to the authority he had over someone like Chris, and he felt that he did live up to it. “We’re only trying to protect you, you know that, don’t you,” the man said. “Or do you not give a shit.”
Chris gave a shit. That was his whole problem. For example, he was acutely aware right now, even though it wasn’t in his interest to be, that the man was asking Chris to give him the benefit of the doubt. And a part of Chris, also against his interest, wanted to give it to him.
“I can’t help you, man,” Chris said.
“What does he want?”
The man still hadn’t asked for Leif’s name; probably he already knew it. “Peace and love,” Chris answered. “What does anyone want.”
The man pulled back from the table, looked at the ceiling, and made a sort of froglike face, as if he were judging Chris. He stood up, opened his wallet, hesitated, and then took out a business card. “If you want to get in
touch . . .”
Chris stood, too. Maybe he was going to be able to go home now. He let the man hold the card out until the gesture became awkward. “No thanks,” Chris said. “If we want to find you, we’ll be able to.”
It was a line that the man could have used on him. The man grimaced. “Are you sure your friends are looking out for you, ‘Hyacinth’?” He said the flower name distinctly. He laid the card on the table before he left.
It wasn’t until after Chris had pocketed the card that it occurred to him that the cops behind the mirrored window had watched him do so.
* * *
—
“Did you read him?” Raleigh asked, when they brought Chris back to the holding cell.
“I can’t read people, Raleigh,” he answered.
During Chris’s absence, they had been joined by many more Occupiers, so many that it was easy to dodge Raleigh’s curiosity.
In the afternoon, for a few minutes, while Raleigh was on the phone, Chris was able to talk to Calvin. “How do you know,” Chris asked, “when somebody you’re with is talking?”
“You got a bad feeling?”
“This guy upstairs called me a name I never heard before. It was super gay.”
“Don’t let them get to you, man.”
“No, I mean, he made it sound like a name other people are calling me. That people I’m with are calling me behind my back.” Chris looked at his hands. “We haven’t done anything,” he added, in frustration.
“They got all kinds of laws.”
Chris doubted that they had laws for what he and his friends had been doing.
That night, as he lay under the unextinguished fluorescents, not far from Raleigh on the cement floor, which was cold, he mulled over the two pieces of evidence: The business card of Joseph P. Bresser, operational security consultant. The nickname Hyacinth. He would have told Raleigh about the business card if it hadn’t been for the nickname. The nickname probably had something to do with his looks.
Matthew and Julia were the new additions to the group, the ones the rest knew the least about. They were a little older, and with age, one accumulated compromises, which made one vulnerable—fissures where the establishment’s grappling hooks could catch.
Sometimes Chris wondered if it was really true that he couldn’t read people. Maybe it was just that he thought it would be rude to, that it would be unfair to try to go behind another person’s mask. He was willing to imagine undressing a woman. Was that different? He had undressed Julia in his mind, once he had become aware that she wanted him. He hadn’t taken advantage because he hadn’t been sure it would be possible in real life to fuck her hard enough to make himself actually present to her.
He was getting off track, but it seemed natural to consider the sexual side of people when trying to assess their capacity for betrayal.
Matthew seemed to want Chris, too. That was his m.o.; you were supposed to wonder. That was okay, fuck him. Matthew and Julia both had that go-for-broke attitude toward sex that people reach just as they’re about to age out of their years of being attractive. Almost all the encouragement that they were likely to receive in the course of their lives for being selfish about sex had come to them recently.
At the moment they were still so confident that Bresser would probably only have been able to turn them if he had found something to frighten them with. Something to knock them off their footings.
Chris turned his head to look at Raleigh, whose footing had never been very stable. Raleigh had taken off his glasses, folding them into his shirt pocket, and under the livid glare of the cell’s lighting, he seemed to be holding his eyes shut with an effort of will. Beneath his billy-goat-ish beard, his mouth was at work—chewing, or sucking—as he dreamed.
When Raleigh had first showed up in New Orleans on the socialists’ doorstep, he had annoyed everyone, including Chris. He had introduced himself as a coder from Tulsa, as if people trying to repair a broken-down society needed a coder, and they had been able to tell from the way he had said it that he thought that as a coder he had been too good for Tulsa, and would probably have considered himself too good for New Orleans, too, if it hadn’t become in its misery a worthy cause. He had worked hard, though, it turned out. That was the upside of Raleigh’s constant need to prove himself. Chris had eventually even grown fond of Raleigh’s geeky arrogance, once he got to know him. He had gradually become willing to overlook the air that all Raleigh’s efforts had of being done for the sake of a résumé that he was drafting in his mind, an inventory of his virtues that would someday cause him to be well regarded by a higher class of people—the ones that the rest of the people in the New Orleans group had been in the habit of referring to, not really joking, as the enemy.
Raleigh had been too angular for the South. His personality made more sense at Occupy, with its bickering and rulemaking. In New Orleans, they had had to do a lot of what they needed to do without being seen to have planned for it and in some cases without spelling out the nature of what they were doing. Such as continuing to talk to a guy in the force without letting anyone else know you were still talking to him. The people in the movement had had to become figures, Chris had tried to explain once to Raleigh, but Raleigh had objected to the word. He had seemed to think that it would be enough for them to be themselves.
He had always been sort of an idiot.
* * *
—
The city kept them overnight. What Chris wanted to do after they got out was go home, take a shower, and lie in bed.
After a shower, he did lie in bed, alone. It was the middle of the afternoon. He didn’t jack off. He studied his white ceiling and the white walls he hadn’t decorated. He listened to semis trundling past on the four-lane avenue that was half a block away. From time to time, in the space above him in the room, phrases that he had heard spoken in the past twenty-four hours repeated themselves almost aloud. It was pleasant not to have to account for himself to Raleigh or a policeman or Calvin or anyone else.
He dozed. When he woke up, in the afternoon, it came to him that he had been strong, as a person, and that it would be reasonable for him to feel a certain amount of pride. He had passed through an ordeal. He had stood up, and he had been sent to jail for it, and he hadn’t said anything.
The day began to die, and he got dressed and took the subway north to Elspeth’s, where the working group was meeting.
A slightly odd thing happened when he arrived. Raleigh opened the door but remained on the spot, eyeing him and blocking his way. Chris’s first interpretation was that Raleigh must want to establish that he was the one giving Chris permission to enter Elspeth’s home—that he held a priority, on the site of Elspeth’s apartment, that he wasn’t willing to surrender. Chris looked politely away, to Elspeth’s coat, hanging beside them in the entryway; the blue fingers of her wool gloves limply signaled from the pocket where they were trapped.
Chris’s second thought, however, was that Raleigh had somehow learned of the invitation that Bresser had extended. A little steam cloud of indignation rose through him—Raleigh had no right to suspect him—and for a few moments, he couldn’t speak.
“Hey,” Raleigh at last said, saluting Chris with a backward nod of the head that acknowledged that he had had to be the first to speak and that he noticed such signs of relative rank. There was a nervous appeal in his eyes, and Chris came up with a third understanding of what Raleigh wanted: he wanted Chris to testify to the backbone that Raleigh had shown in jail.
“Hey,” Chris replied. He put an arm over Raleigh’s shoulders and hugged him from the side, and Raleigh laughed, pleased, as Chris pushed past him.
The rest of the group were in the parlor, too excited to take seats. Chris reminded himself: There had been a new recognition of Leif’s power. And someone here had betrayed him.
He congratulated Leif.
“On what?” L
eif asked. “You and Raleigh did the time.”
“You read that man’s password. That guy yesterday morning.”
“I startled him, maybe.”
“No, you read his password.” He gave Bresser’s business card to Leif. “He was so freaked out that he interrogated me about you at Central Booking.”
Raleigh scurried around to look over Leif’s shoulder. “What’s this?”
“Let me see,” said Julia. The others, too, crowded in.
The hand of Leif’s that was holding the business card drooped, but no one dared to take the card from him. Instead, they all crouched in order to be able to keep looking at it.
“You did it,” Chris told Leif. He and Leif were the only two in the room standing tall. He wanted Leif to realize what he had done. He wasn’t making any claim on it for himself. He never wanted to, when he was with Leif, which, if you thought about it, was a remarkable feeling to have about someone.
Leif turned the card over; the back was blank. “You must hate this,” he said to Matthew, who was sitting beside him. “You were hoping it would go away.”
Matthew shrugged.
“Who is he?” Raleigh asked. “Why did he want to talk to you?”
“Who’s Hyacinth?” Chris replied. He watched Raleigh’s eyes.
“Hyacinth?”
“Who is he,” Chris insisted.
Raleigh hesitated.
“Oh, Christopher,” broke in Julia, in a deliberately plummy voice.
He turned on her. “Did you talk about me?”
The silence in the room was heavy. “Are you snitch-jacketing her?” Raleigh asked, his voice cracking.
The members of the working group were waiting for Chris’s answer, but he felt as though he were holding not a grenade but only an antique colored-glass Christmas tree globe, too tightly.
“I did call you that a few times,” Julia admitted, “but I never ‘talked’ to anyone.” She adjusted her scarf, the way a bird rouses and then settles its feathers. “I think I called you Hyacinth out of fondness, really.”