Overthrow

by Caleb Crain

  “It’s from a Henry James novel,” Raleigh explained, a little sullenly.

  “You make it sound like you’ve read it,” Julia said, amused.

  Fuck them, Chris thought. As the wind rattled one of the parlor’s window sashes, his mind left and went again to his memory of New Orleans. In the silence between when he and his friend had cut their engine and when they had restarted it, rain had sprinkled the flat green surface around them, harmlessly.

  Raleigh started talking, about how everyone makes mistakes sometimes, and sometimes they hurt each other’s feeling, but if everyone in the working group continued to stand together, as a working group, no one would be able to do anything to them, and no one would be able to stop them, because principles are more powerful and more important than individuals, and they could beat this guy, they could take him down, and as Chris listened, and realized that he didn’t believe, and sensed that no one else really believed, either, he decided that he would be perfectly happy to let Raleigh shove himself into the danger that Raleigh was pretending not to see.

  “I think Bresser had us under surveillance,” Raleigh suggested. “I think that’s how he knew about this nickname.”

  “You think he was watching us before Leif even saw him,” Elspeth said.

  “And we should doxx him,” Raleigh proposed.

  “Wouldn’t that be dangerous?” Matthew asked. “He works for the government.”

  “No, he’s a contractor,” Raleigh said. “This isn’t dot-gov or dot-mil,” he said, tapping the email address on the business card.

  “He’ll have a new password by now,” said Elspeth.

  “Then Leif can read that one, too.”

  “I don’t know if he can,” said Leif.

  “I bet you can.”

  Leif noticed Chris’s silence. “You’re doing your chthonic straight-boy thing.”

  “My what?”

  “That’s very close to a description of the character of Hyacinth, actually,” Julia said.

  “Let Raleigh doxx him if he wants to,” Chris said. “Diversity of tactics.”

  “You don’t want to?” Raleigh challenged him.

  “Sure I want to,” Chris lied. If Raleigh needed the spur of competition, Chris was willing to give it to him. He was willing to sit right next to him. He was willing to hold his fucking hand.

  “You’re going to break into this man’s email?” asked Elspeth.

  “Let’s vote on it,” Raleigh suggested.

  “You don’t vote on right or wrong,” Elspeth said.

  “Why not? This is America.”

  * * *

  —

  Instead of voting, however, they argued, for hours. During the argument, Chris wondered if it was right for him to be holding back some of his thoughts, but he didn’t think he could accuse himself of bad faith, exactly. A doxxing was the sort of thing that deserved to happen to someone like Bresser, and it wasn’t Chris who had planted the idea in Raleigh’s mind. The mere sight of Bresser’s card had seemed to place it there, and it was Julia who had seconded Raleigh’s motion. She was rich; to her, it probably always felt natural to reach into what belonged to other people and take.

  He didn’t think they were likely to get caught. Every week he got spam from a friend whose email account had been hacked, and no one ever talked about catching the hackers or even trying to. If he thought, even secretly, that they weren’t going to get away with it, he wouldn’t be taking part himself. So that wasn’t what he was holding back.

  Bresser had said get in touch. Well, they were going to get in touch all right.

  Still, he might have ended up saying something if the individual members of the working group hadn’t, without his lifting a finger, taken the sides on the question that they did—Raleigh and Julia choosing to go after Bresser, Leif and Elspeth choosing not to. The ones Chris might have wished to protect were protecting themselves. Elspeth, in fact, became vehement. As a matter of ethics, she asserted, anarchists shouldn’t do anything that they didn’t want done to themselves, not even if it already had been done to them—and no one knew for sure, in this case, that it had been. It might just have been a coincidence, she argued, that Bresser had used the same nickname for Chris that Julia had. It was also possible that someone in the group had said the nickname aloud at Occupy one day and that it had been overheard by a plainclothes detective who had reported it to Bresser. Even if the nickname was upsetting (here Elspeth had glanced at Chris), the distress shouldn’t become a pretext for retaliation. They should be modeling a community of trust.

  He didn’t let her know that he wanted to be able to agree with her; that much did go on his conscience. But it seemed to him that the only way he knew to get by in the world anymore was by drifting in it, like a spider hanging in the air from a silk that it has spun out of itself.

  “He has to be monitoring us,” Raleigh claimed, of Bresser.

  “Then he’s monitoring this,” Elspeth pointed out, gesturing to the room that contained them and their conversation.

  “No, I think he’s monitoring our email, if anything,” Raleigh said.

  “So is he or isn’t he, Raleigh.”

  “My guess is he’s monitoring our email. I did call Chris ‘Hyacinth’ once in an email.”

  Chris didn’t say anything. It was working so well to let them do the arguing, and he didn’t want to seem to have been waiting for a confession from Raleigh. He didn’t think that he had been waiting for one.

  * * *

  —

  When Chris came back the next afternoon, when he knew Raleigh would be away at his IT job, it was for a second chance at being seen through.

  It should have been easy for Elspeth to see through him. He had worked all morning at a move, from a basement to a second-floor apartment, sweating out the toxins and the obscurities in his system, drinking bottle after plastic bottle of spring water. At home afterward, he had showered and combed his hair, which was just beginning to be long enough to curl behind his ears. After so much exertion, he knew that he was fresh and that his mind was clear. It was the knotted-up part of Elspeth that was attached to Raleigh. The clear part, responding to Chris’s clarity, should be able to see him.

  As he rang her buzzer, he remembered that Raleigh and Julia had left the meeting together the night before, claiming they wanted to talk tactics, which they had said Elspeth wouldn’t want to hear.

  Elspeth flushed when she recognized Chris. He felt a little flutter of hope, even though he knew that her flush was probably because she still felt angry with him, or at best was embarrassed about having been so angry with him the night before. He wanted to imagine, instead, that she had hoped to see him and that her face was flushed because her wish had come true.

  “I can’t talk long,” she warned. “I have a piece that I have to finish checking by tonight.” Around her laptop on the dining room table, pages were fanned out like the spokes of a wheel. “Do you want some tea? I have chamomile.”

  “It doesn’t make you go to sleep?”

  “Not me. I’m too anxious.”

  “Sure, if you’re making it.”

  “I’m always making it.” She vanished into the kitchen.

  There was a little elephant, knitted out of pink yarn, on the dining room table next to her work. With a finely sharpened pencil, in a tidy italic script, she had written notes in the margins of the article that she was fact-checking. Her letter shapes were quick and peppery.

  Once she put the kettle on, she leaned against a jamb of the kitchen doorway, her slender arms folded. “I can’t play cards today,” she told him.

  “I didn’t think you’d be able to.”

  The furthest she would have been able to see, in any attempt that she might have been making to see into his motives, was to a detection that it was against his own better judgment that he had taken Rale
igh’s side the night before. Somewhat against his own nature, even. His choice might irritate her, but she wouldn’t be able to see why he had made it.

  “Are you mad at me?” he asked.

  “It wouldn’t matter if I were.”

  She could probably tell that he was hiding, but he had to hide at least a little if he was going to have any chance with her.

  She turned away, to pour the boiling water. When she returned to the dining room, she was carrying two mugs. She set one down on the table in front of him. “It’s hot,” she told him. “The mug itself.” Her fingers were so slender. How could she bear it if he couldn’t? She took the seat where she had been working, and he sat down in a chair facing her on the same side of the table. She held her mug in two hands and tossed her hair out of her eyes.

  Do you want me to ask them not to, he asked her, mentally, as she watched him. “Do you want me to ask them not to?” he repeated, aloud.

  “Who—Raleigh? What makes you think he’d listen?” she said. She looked away.

  He poked at the sachet in his mug with an index finger, and the hot water stung a little. He wiped the finger on his pants.

  “Leif is afraid,” she told him.

  “Of what?”

  “Because of the Hyacinth thing, he thinks maybe the government has caretakers on its side, too. People like us.”

  Chris frowned.

  “It’s possible,” she said.

  “You don’t think Bresser’s one,” said Chris.

  “I didn’t get a good read on him.”

  “Well, he’s not one,” he said. “He’s not at all like you and Leif.”

  “We don’t know that every caretaker is going to be like us.”

  “Yes we do,” he insisted. He hadn’t wanted to hand Bresser the keys to his soul. Wanting to was how he recognized a caretaker.

  They fell silent, and in the silence, after a while, his desire for her became so evident that it grew difficult for either of them to think of a natural-sounding way to talk about anything else. He was a beggar. He was begging for her love. She was able to see him, he knew. The rawness and the bloodiness of his heart were in front of her. The sky, seen through the warped old glass of the windows, was featureless.

  “Could you do it?” he asked.

  She stopped looking at him. “Raleigh thinks of me as a weapon, too, now.”

  He repented sharply. “I’ll tell them not to do it,” he volunteered.

  “No, I don’t want to owe anyone anything right now. Not even you.”

  It wasn’t really him that she was angry at. That is, if she could see through him, it wasn’t.

  “I’m not afraid of being caught,” Elspeth said.

  “I know.”

  “In case you thought that was why. I thought the whole point was that we understood that we had been damaged by knowing other people’s secrets. The whole point was that we had been hurt because we knew other people’s secrets without having asked to know them and without wanting to know them.”

  He sat still. It would have been presumptuous to try to take her in his arms.

  “And now Raleigh and Julia say they want to go looking for secrets,” she continued.

  There’s a sweet pain in sitting next to someone who is tacitly forbidding you to speak. It occurred to Chris that under a strong impulse he was at last experiencing something like the intuition that was constant for Elspeth and Leif. This must be close to what the burden felt like that was always pressing on them.

  Before he found the courage to speak, however, the silence was interrupted by the scrape of Raleigh’s keys in the door.

  “Hello?” they heard Raleigh say.

  “We’re in here,” said Elspeth patiently.

  “Oh, hi, Chris,” Raleigh said as he came around the corner, without disguising his disappointment. Raleigh had passed beyond the wish for Chris’s support that he had been feeling the day before. He had a new ally now.

  * * *

  —

  “Perfect timing,” Julia greeted Chris.

  They had converged outside the not-quite-converted warehouse where Raleigh lived, which was a couple of subway stops beyond the neighborhood where Raleigh would probably have preferred to live if he could have afforded to. Across the street, there was a chicken processor, as windowless as a telephone company building, and at the end of the block there was a cement yard. Under the quivering sodium of the streetlamps, the asphalt was swirled with gray where workers had hosed off the troughs and undercarriages of the cement trucks, diluting the powder and dispersing it until the particles were no longer in any danger of consolidation.

  When the buzzer sounded, Chris opened the door and held it for Julia. Was she pretending for his benefit? Had she left Raleigh’s apartment a few minutes earlier so that Chris could see her arriving? She smiled at him like a salesperson. If she was concerned about Chris’s impression of her, it didn’t push her as far as conversation with him.

  He followed her down a blind, irregular white corridor. He remembered it from a party that Raleigh had invited him to, a week after they had run into each other at Occupy. When they had first seen each other, they had embraced. It had been four years, after all. It had been hard not to love everybody you met at Occupy in the early days, and if it was an old friend . . .

  The corridor zigzagged between apartments that had been partitioned out of what had once been a factory floor. At each threshold, a family of boots and shoes waited.

  Chris was pretending at least as much as Julia was. He was pretending that he wanted to help carry out something he in fact didn’t think they would be able to pull off. He was here to witness the vindication of an idea that Leif had presented in one of his blog posts, namely, that the capacity that interested them either was, or was inextricable from, a supersensitive variety of tact, and couldn’t be used to open any door that it wouldn’t be appropriate to open. Chris reasoned that it was only because Raleigh and Julia lacked the capacity that they were willing to try to open the door in this case. A curiosity like theirs was bound to be harmless. Almost by definition.

  If there was any danger tonight, it was probably in Chris himself. Reading people had something to do with playing oneself false in order to accommodate the wishes of others, and he seemed to be doing more and more of that lately.

  Behind the apartment door, a song was blaring. When Julia’s knock went unregarded, Chris stepped in front of her and pounded with the butt of his fist. “It’s open,” they heard Raleigh yell. The music was extinguished. Julia opened the door on Raleigh walking toward them. “Hey,” Raleigh said. He seemed wary.

  “Hello,” Julia said, mostly to the high, empty space of the apartment, which she made a show of noticing, as she walked past Raleigh.

  Raleigh lived with two roommates, posers like him. Since the apartment had few interior walls, the men used their possessions to establish individual zones for themselves. A metal rack that held LPs staked a claim in one corner; a garment rack on wheels marked turf in another. Worn magazines were stacked high on a desk, and when Chris got close, he saw that they were gay porn, decades old. The openness of their placement seemed to be part of the room’s sparring.

  “Is this Debbie Harry?” Julia asked, about one of an array of what looked like Polaroids taped to the wall outside the bathroom.

  “Those are Warhols, actually,” said Raleigh. “Philip’s gallery had a set of them in, and he stayed late one night and made color xeroxes.”

  “Huh.”

  “He gets away with murder.”

  “Is it murder to make color xeroxes?” Julia wondered. “By the way, this is Debbie Harry.”

  “Drinks?” Raleigh asked. He listed brands of liquor.

  Chris didn’t know what any of them tasted like and asked for a beer.

  “Take one of Jeremy’s,” Raleigh said. “He o
wes me.”

  Beer, condiments, and a pizza box were all the fridge contained.

  “Bachelorville,” Julia said. She took a beer, too.

  The apartment was a profane place, Chris felt. Not like Elspeth’s. Everything in it seemed to be trying to make a statement. There was a machine that attached to an electric saw and vacuumed up sawdust while the saw was in operation. There was a plastic chair in the form of a smiling ladybug, probably hauled in off the street. The atmosphere in a room like this could never be subtle. The night of Raleigh’s party, several women and one man had come on to Chris. It had only been because of Occupy that someone like him had even been visible to them.

  The gift could never be used here because the gift was like faith. If it hadn’t been given to you, the most you could feel was envy, and it would be a strange kind of envy, since it would be of something you couldn’t even honestly say you believed in. A kind of longing. But here the three of them were.

  “So are we doing this?” asked Raleigh.

  “Didn’t you use to not believe in it?” asked Julia. She had found a nonpornographic magazine and was leafing through it.

  “I don’t think it’s what Leif thinks it is. I think it’s probably unconscious pattern recognition.” Raleigh perched on a stool at a high island table in the kitchen and flipped open a scuffed blue-and-gray laptop. Three heavy thesis clips held shut one of its edges. “Like maybe the cells of the brain that are supposed to solve the Fourier transforms in sound start to work on decryption for some reason.”

  “You’re such a nerd,” Julia said.

  The mild neg seemed to please him. “I’m just going to set up a proxy before we start so we’re not totally out in the open.”

  Julia placed a stool so that she would be able to watch Raleigh’s screen over his right shoulder. “Who’s going to do the mind reading?” she asked. “I mean, with the three of us.”

  “We’re not so bad at it,” Raleigh said.

  “We are, actually,” she insisted.

  Raleigh snorted in what might have been agreement.