by Caleb Crain
Chris took up a position at the end of the island table, where he could see Raleigh’s and Julia’s faces but not the screen. He didn’t want to get any closer.
“Cybercrimes aren’t that riveting to watch, are they,” Julia observed, with a glance at Chris.
“We’re not the ones committing the real crimes,” said Raleigh.
When the doorbell sounded, however, they froze. “Shit,” said Raleigh. He hurriedly set about shutting down the machine. “Chris, could you see who it is? The middle button on the intercom beside the door here. Only the middle button. Don’t press anything else yet.”
When Chris pressed it, a small monitor flickered into life, revealing Leif, in pixelated chiaroscuro, captured by a fish-eye lens downstairs on the building’s stoop. Through the monitor, Chris watched as Leif, unaware that he was being watched, reached toward the fish-eye lens to ring the doorbell a second time.
Unprepared for the bell, the other two in the room with Chris were again shaken by it.
“It’s Leif,” Chris told them.
“Is he alone?”
“Yes.”
“Then let him in.”
“I already did.”
Raleigh shoved his laptop shut. “This stupid fucking thing.” He padded over to the apartment door, opened it, and left it ajar.
In the monitor, watched without his knowledge, Leif had seemed ordinary.
“Goodness,” said Julia, recovering. “Is there nothing to mix with that vodka you were telling us about?”
“Not really.”
She looked in the refrigerator herself. “Ketchup.”
“Knock knock,” Leif said, as he let himself in.
“What a lovely surprise,” said Julia, as if welcoming a visitor to a country house.
Leif’s eyes were glittering. “Have you started yet?” he asked.
It had been a mistake for Chris to expect that Leif would refuse to participate. It had been a mistake to count on that.
“So you changed your mind,” said Raleigh.
“I broke up with Matthew.”
“You did?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I wanted to be here if you were going to do it.” He was on edge.
“Awesome,” said Raleigh.
Maybe the gift was as amoral as the five conventional senses.
“You know what this is going to be?” Raleigh continued. “This is going to be justice.” He took up his place at his laptop again.
“‘Justice,’ really?” said Julia doubtfully, as she reclaimed the seat to his right. “We’re just taking a look. We’re not doing anything, really.”
“Did you read Bresser’s website?” asked Raleigh. “He runs a private company that does government surveillance.”
Chris wasn’t going to be able to protect Leif. But maybe Leif didn’t need protection. Maybe they would get away with what they were about to do. Chris scraped a thumbnail against the label of his beer.
“And then also, I thought, If Chris is going to be here . . . ,” said Leif.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re a rock,” said Leif. He put a hand on Chris’s shoulder as he crossed behind him, to stand on Raleigh’s left. Chris looked away and let Leif think he was looking away out of bashfulness.
Raleigh booted up his laptop again. “Let’s hope Bresser doesn’t have two-factor authentication.”
“So let’s do it,” said Chris impatiently.
“Hold on,” said Raleigh. “I have a little script I need to launch first.”
The group fell silent. Chris watched the faces of the three others as they studied the screen that they were going to try to enter. A wavering light dusted Raleigh’s fingers as he typed. Inside the machine, the hard drive clicked and burred. A fan switched on and began to whine.
“I didn’t even know you could do that with this kind of computer,” Julia commented.
“Do what?” asked Raleigh. “Unix?”
“I didn’t know you could just enter text like that. Is this ‘code’?”
“Oh, you mean command-line mode.”
“‘Command line,’” she echoed. “That sounds so executive.”
Leif pointed at the screen. “Here?”
“Not yet,” said Raleigh. “Let me do one more thing first.”
If they were thinking about Chris at all, they were probably imagining that he wasn’t looking because he was too stupid to understand what was happening on-screen.
“What?” Leif asked Chris, as if he had heard Chris’s thoughts.
Chris shrugged.
“I’m not always everything everyone thinks I am,” Leif said.
“I know,” Chris said.
“Here we are,” Raleigh announced.
“This is it?” asked Julia.
Leif closed his eyes. Was he going to be able to reach Bresser? Wouldn’t his mind be too full of the fight that he had just had with Matthew? Of the excitement of wrongdoing that was sparking between Raleigh and Julia, beside him? Of the disappointment that Chris felt? Unseeing, Leif raised his hands in front of him and held them there, without touching them together, as if something invisible was being woven between them.
3.
Why is she pounding on our door? Elspeth wondered, from inside what must have been a dream, as the pounding woke her up. In the dream, as in real life, she had been in bed with Raleigh. But in real life Julia wouldn’t pound like that.
“Raleigh,” Elspeth said. He was still sleeping. A margin of rumpled bedclothes ran between the two of them. They had had an argument about of all things sex after Raleigh had come in the night before. “Raleigh, who do you think it is?” The clock told her that it was almost eight thirty. She didn’t like the idea of being caught by a stranger in her T-shirt and underwear so late on a weekday morning.
“Who?”
She put on yesterday’s jeans and a sweatshirt. “At the door.” She stepped into her slippers and tugged them on as she walked. “Just a minute,” she called out.
Her landlord had been supposed to send a repairman to look at the radiator in the dining room, which leaked, but she had asked for the repair two months ago, and she had given up expecting it. She had gotten used to the leak, which was a slow one. In the early morning and at bedtime, a few drops of water trickled out, and a ramekin of hers was under the grille now, to catch the drops. All she had to do was try to remember to empty the ramekin every few days.
Under the pounding, the edges of the door were shuddering. In her heart, she knew by now who it was, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it. Would they want her, too, or only Raleigh? “Just a minute,” she repeated. She threw the deadbolt.
“Morning,” said one of two policemen in uniform. A third man, not in uniform, stood behind them; under a winter coat he was wearing the gray smock of a technician. “We have a warrant for the arrest of a Mr. Raleigh Evans for fraudulent access to a protected computer, and we have a warrant for all the internet-enabled equipment in this apartment,” the first policeman continued. He stepped into the corridor and surveyed the shut doors of the three bedrooms.
“He’s still in bed,” said Elspeth.
The cop followed her eyes as they singled out the bedroom door that was hers. “Anyone else here this morning?” he asked, lowering his voice as if he were concerned about waking people up.
She shook her head.
“Is that a no, ma’am?”
“Yes, no. No one but us.”
“Do you know whether Mr. Evans is armed.”
“No, of course he isn’t.”
The cop quickly opened the two doors of her roommates’ two empty bedrooms and left them open. Then he nodded his head sideways toward Elspeth’s door. The second uniformed cop took the signal and stepped past Elspeth. He had a raised gun.
“We’re gonna need all your computers and all your phones,” said the first cop, placing himself between Elspeth and her bedroom as the second cop turned the knob with the hand not holding a gun.
As the cops walked through the socially defined barriers within the apartment, they seemed to topple them out of existence.
“Raleigh Evans? Rise and shine,” Elspeth heard the second cop say. “You’re under arrest, Mr. Evans, for fraudulent access to a protected computer.”
“Who are you?” Elspeth asked the first cop.
“Seventy-second Precinct, ma’am. Are you sure there’s no one else in the apartment with us? Anyone I don’t know about?”
“I don’t—,” she began. “Raleigh—,” she began again.
“I need you to stay where you are, ma’am, and I need you to remain calm. Take a breath. One breath at a time.”
The cop was about thirty. His badge read DILEO. His chin was shadowy with a beard even though he had shaved. From overeating, it was beginning to swim in his face. She wasn’t able to read him. His true self was hidden like the soft body of a beetle inside its chitin.
“I don’t consent to this search,” she said, remembering a piece of advice from an Occupy workshop.
“We don’t need you to, ma’am. We have all the warrants we need.”
She heard the second cop give Raleigh permission to put on pants and a shirt so long as the cop was able to check them first. They were going to take Raleigh away in a minute, she realized.
Her phone was in a pocket of her jeans, and she took it out. “I’m going to record you,” she announced, holding it up. Her hands were trembling.
“Can’t let you do that,” said Officer Dileo.
“I have the right to record you.”
“Not with that phone. The judge wants that phone.”
The man in the smock spoke up. “We’re responsible for preserving the integrity of the evidence, ma’am.”
She made a conscious effort not to jerk her hands away as Dileo took the phone out of them. “What about the integrity of people,” she said. What a weak retort, she admitted to herself, silently.
The technician slid it into a dark gray bag.
“I need it,” she said a moment later, as she thought ahead to the next few hours. “I don’t have a landline.”
“You can take that up with the phone company,” Dileo said.
“Are you laughing at me?”
“No, ma’am,” said Dileo, with a glance at the man in the smock.
“I’m going to need a lawyer, Elspeth,” came Raleigh’s voice.
“You dressed, then, sir?” said the second policeman. Elspeth heard the click of handcuffs closing on Raleigh.
“Is that necessary?” she asked. No one answered her.
“Okay, John,” Dileo said, nodding to the man in the smock, who now slipped into the bedroom, too.
“You all right here?” the second cop asked the first, as he pushed Raleigh to the bedroom door. Raleigh was wearing his glasses instead of his contacts, and the lenses were filthy. “I’ll take him down to the car.”
“Good-bye,” Raleigh told Elspeth, more as if he were quoting a valediction than saying one. His hands were cuffed behind his back, and the second cop pushed him forward by lifting the cuffs, so he wasn’t able to stop when he came abreast of her. It didn’t seem right to touch him.
“Hold on,” said the technician, emerging from the bedroom. He had found Raleigh’s laptop and was holding it open on one palm, waiter style. “Password?”
“Whippoorwill. Two p’s, two o’s.”
“Raleigh,” said Elspeth. Why was he giving them that.
“What? We didn’t do anything. Everything we downloaded was about us. If you had looked—”
“You don’t have a lawyer yet,” she reminded him.
“They’re not recording.”
“They’re remembering.”
“Are there different passwords on any of these partitions?” the technician asked, tracing on the mousepad with the index finger of his free hand.
Helpful again, Raleigh shook his head. His job, after all, consisted of answering questions that people asked about computers.
“All right, then,” the second cop said, and pushed Raleigh out the apartment’s front door.
* * *
—
Officer Dileo told Elspeth that her cell phone would no doubt be returned to her in a day or so, and it wasn’t until after he had left with not only Raleigh’s phone and hers but also their laptops, her router, and the laptops of both her roommates that it occurred to her that he had almost certainly been lying, in order to make her more amenable to surrendering them.
Without the internet and without her cell phone—without any way to communicate that did not begin with walking downstairs and out of the building—it felt very quiet in the apartment. Would it be heartless to take a shower? For the moment what she felt most urgently was that she was unsupervised.
She undressed and stepped into the apartment’s old tub and let the water run over her. In old stop-motion animations, water was sometimes represented by crinkled strips of aluminum foil, but when it ran over your skin maybe it looked more like cling wrap. Through the moving film of it she inspected herself for signs of age that hadn’t yet come, playing for consolation a familiar game against herself.
It was a relief to her that her latest fact-checking assignment was safely finished, she thought, as she dried herself in a yellow towel. She had to find a lawyer for Raleigh. She didn’t want to fail him, whether or not she and he were going to stay together. She also had to find a new phone for herself before her mother tried to call. What a nerd she was, to be relieved about having finished her fact-checking. But it was harmless that she was a nerd. It wasn’t because of that that she and Raleigh were going to break up, if in fact they were going to.
The wife in the couple who lived across the landing was a stay-at-home mom, and after getting dressed, Elspeth knocked on her door. She looked down at the gray house slippers that she had put on over her socks, wondering if they were respectful enough. The woman’s baby was a girl, she reminded herself. She didn’t think she’d ever been told its name.
The door of her own apartment was ajar, she noticed. She stepped back over and pulled the door to. In case the police came back.
She should probably lie about why she needed to borrow a phone. She heard a soft thunk, as an appliance of some kind inside her neighbor’s apartment reached the end of one of its cycles. Maybe no one was home.
“Who is it, please?” came a small, brittle voice, very near. The woman must have been studying Elspeth through the peephole.
“It’s your neighbor. I’m your neighbor,” Elspeth said. “I wonder if I could borrow your phone? I can’t find mine.” She was a terrible liar.
“I could call it for you,” the woman offered, not opening her door.
“I think it’s dead?” Elspeth said. “And the thing is, I need to call a friend.”
The woman opened the door. She had a triangular face and a small mouth. She was holding her baby and joggling it.
“I hope I didn’t wake her up,” Elspeth said.
The woman frowned a no. “Come in.” She padded down a dim corridor, a mirror image of the one in Elspeth’s apartment. The floor of the woman’s kitchen had brick-colored tiles where Elspeth’s had linoleum. The woman nodded at a phone on the wall beside her refrigerator and sat down at her dining table to watch.
Fortunately Elspeth knew Leif’s number by heart. The call went to voicemail, however. She tried Raleigh’s even though she knew there would be no answer; there was no answer. She tried Leif’s again, and again the call went to voicemail.
She was aware, as she listened to Leif’s voice inviting her to leave a message, that she was losing time.
“Not picking up
?” the woman asked.
“Let me try one more time.” She didn’t know what else to do; she didn’t know anyone else’s number by heart. If she went to the jail by herself, without a phone, she might wait there all day in the wrong place without knowing any better.
With a look of alarm, the woman abruptly rose and stalked out of the room, leaving Elspeth momentarily alone. “There’s someone at your door,” she said when she returned.
“My door?” asked Elspeth. Was it the police again?
“It’s a man,” the woman said. “Are you in trouble?”
“No,” Elspeth said. “No,” she repeated, trying to sound more convincing.
The man knocking muffled knocks on Elspeth’s door, with a fist that was clutching a wool cap, was Matthew. He turned around and showed her the thick but even features of his face. She was proud of always being polite with Leif’s lovers. He didn’t seem surprised that she hadn’t been in her own apartment.
“This is my neighbor,” Elspeth said, gesturing to the woman on the threshold behind her. She still didn’t know the woman’s name. “I was just trying to call Leif,” Elspeth explained to Matthew.
“They took him.”
“But I didn’t think he—”
“He changed his mind.”
“Do you still need my phone?” Elspeth’s neighbor asked.
“Oh, thank you,” said Elspeth. “I guess not. Thank you so much.”
“Wait,” Matthew said, but the woman shut her door, and bolted it. “They took my phone, too.”
“She has a baby,” Elspeth said. “Let me put on some shoes.”
She should wear her sneakers, she decided, trying to think ahead. Matthew followed her into the apartment. She had never been alone with him before. It was like being followed by a pet bear; there was a reason they used that word.
On the sofa in the parlor, she laced the sneakers up. The tarot deck waited primly on the coffee table for a reading that might never happen again. They had probably arrested Chris too. It was too bad that he had been mixed up in this. It was especially wrong to keep someone like him in jail, but then he was the sort of person who usually got put in jail. A person who mostly knew himself through action.