Overthrow

by Caleb Crain

  That was her mistake, she thought, catching herself. Thinking that men wanted her to help them understand themselves.

  “Did they arrest Julia?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Should we go to the courthouse? It isn’t the same one as before.”

  Elspeth took out the slip of paper where Officer Dileo had written down the address. It was on this side of the river this time. “What did they do, do you know?”

  “Downloaded something,” Matthew said.

  “Raleigh said it was about us.”

  “Well, it’s gone now.”

  Every night, a script on Raleigh’s laptop backed up the contents of his hard drive to the cloud. He had set the script up on Elspeth’s computer, too, and they shared a password because Raleigh had bought the family rate. So the file probably wasn’t gone; there was almost certainly a copy in the cloud. Elspeth found that she didn’t want to tell Matthew about this backup, though. She felt possessive, the way mourners sometimes do. Anyway, the copy virtually didn’t exist so long as she was the only one who knew that it existed.

  “I should call Raleigh’s parents at some point,” she said. “I guess from a pay phone? I could call Leif’s mother for you, too, if you want.”

  “I can call her,” said Matthew. “If you have her number,” he added.

  There was a knock on the front door by an unfamiliar hand. Elspeth thought, as she walked toward it, that she wasn’t going to be able to resist this kind of summons anymore. She had lost any chance of acting on her own volition for the foreseeable future. Every step she took was going to be fated.

  It was only her mouse-faced neighbor again. The baby, still in the woman’s arms, glared at Elspeth sleeplessly. “It’s on TV,” the woman said. “There’s a story about your friend.”

  “What’s on TV?”

  “You’re in Occupy or something, they’re saying,” the woman explained.

  Elspeth retreated to her dining room, neighbor and baby following, and turned on the little TV on the sideboard.

  “It’s channel ten twenty-six,” the neighbor said.

  “We don’t have cable.”

  “Can you get the local news?”

  The burble of daytime television suddenly coated the room. Elspeth picked up the remote and made the machine chunk from channel to channel, each one angry and total.

  OCCUPY HACKS HOMELAND SECURITY, read a headline on the screen.

  “Wait,” said Matthew.

  “—tell us what that means exactly, Jim, a ‘protected computer,’” said a blond woman in a navy blazer. “It’s a little confusing.”

  “It sure is, Vera,” said an expert standing in front of a scrim. “‘Protected computer’ is a legal term. It means, ‘protected by this law.’ By the CFAA. It doesn’t mean anyone has necessarily done anything to protect or guard the computer in question.”

  “What’s going on?” asked Elspeth.

  Matthew read the crawl aloud: “‘Four arrested for breaching computer of city police/DHS contractor.’”

  “For those just joining us, a breaking story this morning. We don’t as yet know their names, but a short while ago our camera team was able to film one suspect as he arrived downtown for processing.”

  Elspeth could see even through the television that Raleigh had decided that as a matter of principle he wasn’t going to hide his face because he shouldn’t need to. His exposed face was stiff with the effort of not looking at the prongs of the camera lenses aimed at him. There were calls for him to say a word or two, and though the calls were faint in the soundtrack, they were probably harsh in real life.

  It was unfair of Elspeth to feel angry at Raleigh for relaying to her the pain that he was in.

  “Where will we go if they come here?” she asked Matthew.

  “They did come here,” said her neighbor.

  “I mean the newspeople.”

  The woman’s baby squirmed impatiently, and the woman expertly rotated it so that its flailing limbs could grab only air. “I don’t want them here,” she told Elspeth.

  “No, of course not,” Elspeth agreed.

  The woman said she needed to take her daughter back into her apartment. “Good luck,” the woman added at the last minute, as if deciding that her curiosity had in the end committed her to Elspeth’s side.

  “Can I turn it off?” Elspeth asked Matthew.

  “Please,” Matthew said.

  Being instantly deprived of the television’s sounds and images, even though she hated them, felt to Elspeth like an amputation. She laid her palms over her eyes.

  * * *

  —

  “Latte,” Greg, one of Leif’s fellow baristas, said to Elspeth, predictively, from his station behind the counter, when he saw Elspeth walk into the café with Matthew.

  “No, I—,” Elspeth began. But she changed her mind: “Well, to go, maybe. Did Leif call?”

  Greg shook his head. He was a short, heavy, quiet man, with a wispy beard. He was already balding even though he was Leif and Elspeth’s age, but his baldness, even from under the cyclist’s cap that he always wore in the café, made him look younger, not older. “You?” he asked Matthew, as he began, on Elspeth’s behalf, the rhythms of his practiced routine at the espresso maker.

  “He wouldn’t have been calling from his own number,” Elspeth said.

  Greg met Elspeth’s eyes again. “I’ll check,” he said. She knew he would never tell her that he thought she was pretty, so she always wanted to be considerate with him, but not in a way that might make it seem as if she were making an effort to be considerate. He took the café’s cordless phone from its charging stand and paged through its small screen. “There is a message,” he said. He listened to a few seconds, while staring at the middle distance. “It’s actually for you,” he told Elspeth, pressing a button in the phone to replay it.

  “Greg, is it your shift today, or Juniper’s? This is Leif. . . .” The recorded Leif seemed to forget for a moment what he wanted to say. People were talking in the background. “Listen, if my friend Elspeth comes by, could you give her a message? Tell her to call Raleigh’s parents. Call her boyfriend’s parents. And also I guess tell her we’re fine? Raleigh is all figured out. Her boyfriend. We haven’t figured me out, but that’s okay. I’m just going to sit here for a while.” The recorded Leif laughed. “There’s not any rush.” Leif’s voice was too fast. He didn’t sound like himself. “So, to call Raleigh’s parents. That’s the message.” Then, as if to himself: “What a—.” And the message ended. To replay this message, press one. To save, press—

  Elspeth handed the phone back to Greg. “It’s from Leif,” she told Matthew.

  “Can I listen?” he asked.

  Leif shouldn’t be in there. He had recently been claiming that he was learning how to understand what he sensed, how to place it even while he was in the middle of hearing it, but sometimes it was hard to tell whether a voice was coming from inside or outside, especially if you and other people were contained together in a bounded space. In an elevator, for example. Or in a subway car. When she and Leif were in college, the tram that had run through their urban campus had begun its journeys underground, and it had always been a relief to both of them, and they had used to comment on it, when the tram had emerged into the light and air, like spring parting from winter, and the attentions boxed up in the car with them had become free to scatter out the windows into the surrounding city.

  “Can we call him back?” Matthew asked.

  Greg found a number in the phone, and Elspeth tried it, but it connected only to an error message.

  “You don’t want to call anyone else?” Greg offered. He pointed at Matthew: “You want anything, while I’m making the latte?”

  Matthew checked his wallet and then asked for one of the hard-boiled eggs perched in a small steel tree beside the cash re
gister.

  “I’d have to call Information,” Elspeth said.

  Greg shrugged.

  “It was the police who took our phones,” she disclosed to him. Someone at a table looked up from his book.

  Greg handed Matthew a saucer and then an egg. “Seventy-five cents.”

  “That’s all?” asked Matthew.

  “It’s an egg,” Greg said. “You could also use my phone,” he suggested to Elspeth. He dug it out of his pocket and wiped it off on the forearm of his shirt. It was a couple of models old, and the glass was crazed in one corner. A pudgy, grizzled black Lab was the wallpaper.

  She shook her head. She couldn’t do it to him.

  Matthew understood. “Fuck,” he said.

  “Or am I being paranoid?” Elspeth asked him.

  “I don’t know. I kind of don’t think so.”

  “Here,” Greg said, taking the café’s cordless phone from its cradle and holding it out to her again. “What are they gonna do. I could have let anyone borrow it.”

  She left Matthew to his egg and stepped out the front door.

  The café was in a brick building from the late nineteenth century, at the intersection of a street and an avenue. At the entrance, a shallow triangular porch had been carved out of the ground floor, exposing a thin, cast-iron column that supported the corner of the building. Elspeth sat down on a bench whose paint was molting. A shadow ran away from the column in a sharp stripe.

  It was a quarter past ten, and she was still in her own neighborhood. At least it would be an hour earlier in Oklahoma. The bars on the phone’s screen were steady. She asked Information for the number of Raleigh’s mother.

  Raleigh’s father answered. Maybe Raleigh’s mother wasn’t listed? Twenty years ago, a newly divorced woman in Oklahoma might not have wanted to list her landline under her own name. It was like doing archaeology, having to make one’s way through the pre–cell phone system.

  “How is he?” Raleigh’s father asked. He had a dry, curling voice.

  “I’m not downtown yet.”

  “Ohh,” piped the voice.

  “We don’t have our phones. They took our phones. I just got the message to call you.”

  “He’s on TV,” Raleigh’s father told her.

  “I saw a little of it.”

  “I imagine he wants to say why he did it, but his mother is talking about a lawyer.”

  “Did she find one?”

  “I imagine he wants to blow the whistle. That’s why he did this, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  A woman’s voice in the background murmured, and Raleigh’s mother took the phone.

  “I thought this was your number,” said Elspeth.

  “How is my son?” It was like a line in a play.

  “I haven’t talked to him yet. They took my phone.”

  “Your phone?”

  “We can’t talk to him unless he calls us, and they took our phones.”

  “Even if you go? To where he is?”

  “That’s how it was last time. Remember? There’s no way to see him.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I was sure you saw him last time.”

  “Not until they brought him to the courtroom.”

  “So you did see him.”

  “When they arraigned him.”

  “Sweetheart, I think somebody needs to be there.”

  “We got a message to call you? You found a lawyer?”

  “We did. You know, Raleigh said he thought you were probably going to have to get a separate lawyer for yourself.”

  The fingers of Elspeth’s that were holding the phone were aglow with cold. She switched to her other hand.

  “I don’t know why he would say that,” Raleigh’s mother continued.

  “Maybe it would be safer that way,” Elspeth suggested.

  “Maybe so, dear.”

  “Could I get his lawyer’s phone number, anyway?”

  “His roommate Jeremy found the lawyer. He’s a professor. Isn’t that lucky?”

  “The lawyer is a professor?”

  “From Jeremy’s college.”

  “Do you have Jeremy’s number? I don’t even have that.”

  “I wrote it down. Raleigh had me call Jeremy’s workshop, and then Jeremy called me back. His workshop is called a gym, apparently. Did you ever hear?”

  “It’s a thing,” Elspeth said.

  She blew on her fingers while she waited for Kimberly Evans to find the piece of paper where she had written down Jeremy’s number.

  “Who is Julia Di Matteo?” Raleigh’s mother asked, when she returned to the phone.

  “She’s a friend of ours. A new friend. She’s in our group.”

  “Her lawyer is already on television,” she told Elspeth. “I think you need to go there, sweetheart.”

  “Did they say what his name was? The name of Julia’s lawyer?”

  “Jim, what does it say? Can you read it? Kenneth something. Did you see it, Jim?”

  “That’s okay,” said Elspeth.

  “We missed it. I’m so sorry. We weren’t thinking.”

  “You were thinking great.”

  “He was just saying no comment, the way lawyers do. He seems to be there at the courthouse.”

  “Did you . . . ?” Elspeth began, but faltered. These weren’t even her parents, but it was still hard to ask. She began again: “Did the lawyer say anything about bail?”

  “The lawyer,” Kim repeated. “Do you mean Jeremy’s lawyer? But we haven’t talked to him yet. We didn’t need bail last time.”

  “Occupy was just a protest.”

  “Well, what did Raleigh do? Do you know what he did?”

  “I wasn’t there.”

  “You let him go by himself?”

  Elspeth didn’t say anything.

  “It’s not right between the two of you, is it,” said Raleigh’s mother.

  Elspeth remained silent.

  “I shouldn’t say that. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Elspeth told her.

  “It’s just that I don’t know what my son did.”

  Elspeth let Raleigh’s mother enjoy for a minute the sorrow that it seemed to console her to feel, and then Elspeth excused herself from the phone.

  * * *

  —

  At the foot of the courthouse stairs, Elspeth said an interim good-bye to Matthew, who had decided to buy a new cell phone and try to port his old number to it. Nearby, white vans from several television stations were parked illegally, their doors thrown open, the mouthless gray flowers of their transmitters raised high on tall white metal arms. Elspeth tried to pretend that she didn’t care that Matthew was leaving.

  “I’ll be quick,” he said, as he walked away.

  She headed up the weathered stone stairs alone, at a deliberate pace, tightening around her shoulder the strap of her purse. Jeremy had promised to come to the courthouse as soon as he could, and Diana was bound to come once she picked up the message they had left with her department’s secretary.

  There was still no lawyer for Raleigh. Raleigh’s parents and Leif had been mistaken about that. All Jeremy had been able to do so far was leave a message with an old comp-sci professor of his, who had been in the habit of boasting, in his lectures, about a friend at the law school who was making a name for himself by writing about ethics on the internet. Jeremy thought the law professor might want to take Raleigh on pro bono, but not even the comp-sci professor had called back yet. As for Julia’s lawyer, Greg had found his name and number by googling, but he had been out when they called, and they hadn’t been able to give his receptionist a number where they could be reached.

  She and Matthew had come to the courthouse even though they hadn’t really solved anything. Even though they
lacked the means of solving anything. They had come at Elspeth’s insistence, because she had felt guilty about her shower, guilty about her latte, guilty about not knowing what to do. Any more delay had seemed unbearable. But now, as she came close enough to the courthouse to see which of the gray arches was for entrance rather than merely for display, she realized that she had come too soon. She had distrusted her instincts. She was going to fail.

  Well, maybe. As she fell into line for the metal detector, however, her mind switchbacked on her yet again, and she realized that you could never be ready for a place like this, not with all the cell phones and all the lawyers in the world. It would never be any easier, whether sooner or later. She set her purse in a beige tray, conscious of having no phone to set beside it. Let alone a gun. A group of court police officers, conspicuously armed, were joking with one another behind a row of framed rectangles of lightly smoked plexiglas. One of them motioned impatiently for her to step through the gray portal, whose signal light had blinked to green without her noticing it. “Come on, miss.” After she passed through, she stood stupidly still for a minute, not knowing where to go, until she noticed that the tray carrying her purse was being buffeted by later trays at the end of the conveyor belt.

  The building had a grand interior. Its marble floors had been polished by the traffic of a century of citizens. In a central hall, under a vaulted dome, a processional staircase broke like a wave into smaller flights before it reached the ground, though almost no one was walking up or down its steps. There was probably a dismal, overburdened elevator tucked away in a corner.

  From an archway, a male and a female police officer studied Elspeth without interrupting a conversation that they were having. It was hard to be observed. Once, on the street, a homeless woman had flinched under Elspeth’s glance, as sensitive to observation as Elspeth herself, and had recovered by asking for the time. The question put them on an equal footing; everyone is subject to time.

  Elspeth caught the female police officer’s eye. “How do you find out when someone is going to see a judge?”

  “When was the individual arrested?”