Overthrow

by Caleb Crain

  “This morning.”

  “But what time this morning?”

  “About eight thirty.”

  “They’re probably still in the bull pen, but the arraignment clerk will know. Room two nineteen.”

  “Is that the second floor?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Go right when you come out the elevator.”

  There was still about $1,700 of unused credit on Elspeth’s credit card. It might be enough to pay one person’s bail. She hoped she wouldn’t have to choose.

  She took a staircase in a corner of the building, despite a guard who offered to direct her to an elevator. It was a prettier building, with its facings of glittering, colored rock, than the one that Chris and Raleigh had passed through after the Occupy protest, but somehow the prettiness made it more sad. The prettiness and the solidity. We have a customary way of seeing people, the rock seemed to say. We have seen people of your type before.

  A couple of dozen people were waiting in the corridor outside room 219, and as Elspeth sidled through the crowd, she felt herself touched by their awareness of her, by their appraisal. There was something wrong, she heard them all but say.

  Of course there was. Most of them were here to rescue a loved one.

  “Is there a line?” she asked a Latina woman.

  “No line,” the woman said, smiling. She pointed to the office’s open door, and Elspeth noticed a sheet of paper taped to it. “Please, lady.” The woman gestured toward the sheet of paper.

  Beside a column of names, the sheet listed courtrooms and times. Elspeth’s friends were not on the list yet.

  A cell phone behind Elspeth chirped. “Can I call you back, Dan?” asked a tall woman with her hair pulled back in a scrunchie, in a quiet but public voice. The woman silenced her phone but did not put it away. Elspeth had the impression that the woman was focused on Elspeth even though the woman was not looking at her.

  The woman was a reporter, Elspeth realized.

  Elspeth walked into the clerk’s office. At a tall wooden counter, like a library service desk, she waited to be noticed by two women seated just beyond it. The women were talking about a birthday cake that one of them had ordered for her daughter. It had been ordered on a Tuesday and then was ready for pickup on Thursday. The decorations had been lovely, the frosting and everything. A computer screen faced Elspeth, and Elspeth could see that one of the women was inputting data into a spreadsheet as she and her friend talked.

  “Be with you in a minute, miss.”

  Silently several people from the corridor slipped into the office and assembled along the wall behind Elspeth. She felt that if she were to stamp a foot they would flutter away and then edge silently close to her again. She wished she could laugh. Every so often a fact-checker at her magazine was able to win permission to write and publish a short piece. If it hadn’t been her that this was happening to, maybe this could have been her chance.

  The woman inputting data at last came to the counter. “Can I help you, miss?”

  “What if a person’s name isn’t on the list on your door?” she asked in a soft voice.

  “What’s the arrest number?”

  “Oh. Where would I find that?”

  “Name?” the woman asked. Her tone was brusque, to offset the favor she was granting.

  “There are a few names? Can I write them down for you?”

  The woman looked at Elspeth over her glasses. She didn’t say yes or no, and as Elspeth looked around for something to write on and write with, the woman walked away, and Elspeth’s heart sank. The woman came back, however, with a ballpoint pen and a blank form.

  “Where should I write the names?”

  “Tchh. Anywhere, dear.”

  Elspeth wrote Raleigh’s, Leif’s, Chris’s, and Julia’s names across the top.

  “Are you family?” the clerk asked, as she took the piece of paper and studied it. When the paper began to tremble in her hands, the clerk folded it in order to disguise her tremor.

  “I’m a friend. I’m pretty sure Julia’s the only one who has family in the city.”

  Muttering broke out behind Elspeth.

  The clerk surveyed the reporters. “You have no business being in this office unless you have business in this office,” she declared.

  No one stirred.

  “Do you have business in this office?” the clerk asked, singling out a man with a steno pad. “If you can’t answer me, you better step outside, young man. Yes, you.” She glared at him until, reluctantly, he left the room.

  She didn’t soften the sternness of her look as she returned her attention to Elspeth. “They’re here, miss,” she said, of Elspeth’s friends. “They’re all here. Do they have legal representation?”

  “I think Julia does.”

  “They need representation, miss.”

  “I know.”

  The clerk explained that if Elspeth’s friends couldn’t afford representation, the state would provide it. Elspeth’s friends could call the public defender’s office from the phone in the holding area. She wrote down for Elspeth the common three-digit phone number for all city services.

  The audience was over. “Can I see them?” Elspeth asked. “Can I see my friends?”

  The clerk paused in her return to her desk. “Are any of them . . . injured?”

  “No,” Elspeth admitted.

  “You’d have to ask the district attorney.” She was washing her hands of Elspeth. “Room two-oh-four.” She exchanged a glance with her colleague, as she took her chair, and the two of them palpably began to wait for Elspeth to leave.

  * * *

  —

  “Could I ask you—,” the man with the steno pad began, putting himself in Elspeth’s way.

  She twisted past him and then sped up, with sliding steps. She felt the herd turn and follow her.

  “Are you a member of the cell?”

  “What were you after?”

  “Do you want to overthrow the government?”

  She hated the reporters for wanting to know about her friends now instead of a week ago. For rewarding catastrophe with attention instead of rewarding an effort at change.

  “Do you know Leaf?”

  “What was your official role in Occupy, personally?”

  “Do you have a website?

  She thought of the television footage of Raleigh bequilled with their questions, keeping himself visible but not answering. He hadn’t been willing to tell her, last night, why he had touched her so clumsily when he came to bed. He hadn’t been willing to say what his hands hadn’t been able to keep from saying. She wondered if the two of them would ever put their hands on each other again.

  But she wasn’t as defenseless as he was. “I’m not in handcuffs,” she said, rounding on the reporters as they caught up to her. The sentence had come out as a non sequitur. As if to explain it, she slapped the steno pad out of the hands of the man who had been browbeaten out of the arraignment clerk’s office and was at the head of the pack. It skidded across the marble floor.

  The reporters were startled.

  “Leave me the fuck alone!” she shouted, a little louder than she had meant to. “I’m just a person.”

  As she walked away, she felt, despite herself, a sense of loss as the pedicels of their attention detached and retracted. They would have let her feel human if she had been willing to give them the information they wanted.

  Two-oh-four, she thought, suppressing herself, focusing. Was it stupid to go to the district attorney’s office? She kept walking while she thought about it. She would look at the room. She would at least look at it.

  She was holding the world together by going over the pieces in her mind, like a dog licking a wound to will it to close. Some veins in the marble were the dark, translucent green of the crepe-like seaweed that clung at water level to the c
ity’s older piers.

  Just as she came to the district attorney’s office, a man in a suit but no tie walked out of it. His features were at first disorganized, but when he caught sight of her, they drew together into an expression. He had recognized her. It was Bresser. She could tell that he wanted his face to be neutral, but he was looking at her with anticipation despite himself. He might even have been looking at her with an expectation that he would be congratulated. Was that possible? She must be overreading. She knew that she was pushing to the limit her ability to perceive.

  “So you’re a fan of Henry James,” she said.

  He gave a half chuckle, meaninglessly. “You mean the hacker?” He was the kind of boy who thought that if he pretended to know a secret, the other boys on the playground would let him in.

  “Excuse me,” he said, and walked importantly away. He had remembered who he was.

  Elspeth wasn’t in any such danger. Where she was standing, the marble corridor was open on one side to the central hall below, and she drifted to the broad balustrade that looked out into the hall. The stone of the balustrade was cold to the touch. In the quadrangle below, there was no sign of Diana, Matthew, or Jeremy.

  There was only a television reporter in a vest and skirt, shaking her hair clear of her headset. The reporter laid the headset neatly on the floor beside her. She put an earpiece in her left ear. Her camera stood a few feet from her, independent, on an unfolded tripod. Her right hand held a microphone; her left hand, a small panel. From the skylight there fell soft and vague illumination, and a lamp on the prow of the camera gleamed at her, a guiding star, further smoothing her features. “Good morning,” the reporter began. But either she hadn’t been ready to continue or she hadn’t liked the way her first words sounded, and with her panel she clicked the gleaming light off. She looked down, looked up, hunched her shoulders, squared them, looked straight ahead, clicked the light back on, dropped the hand that held the control panel below the frame of what the camera was recording, and began again. “Good morning,” she resumed. “I’m on location at Central Booking, where authorities have not yet released the names of the four Occupy activists accused of breaking into a computer associated with the work of the city police and through them with that of the Department of Homeland Security. We were able to broadcast footage of one of the suspects earlier this morning, however, and several users of social media are now saying online that they recognize the individual and that he was known to be involved in a group that claimed—and this is a little unusual—that claimed to be able to uncover government secrets through ESP. That’s right—extrasensory perception. A photo currently being shared online shows the individual wearing a T-shirt that says—I hope you’re able to share the photo with our viewers, John, because in it you can read the motto pretty clearly—‘Government Transparency Now through ESP.’ We’re not sure what to make of it, and authorities have not confirmed the identification, but if it turns out to be the same individual, and it looks to me like it is, then this raises some very interesting questions. John?”

  Very interesting, indeed, thank you . . . A dew of fear had condensed under Elspeth’s palms, while she listened. She had told the reporters that she was a person, but they wouldn’t believe her now. A fool was not a person, for them.

  “I’m sorry,” said a woman’s voice. It was the tall woman with her hair in a scrunchie. She had also been watching the reporter make her video. She was standing at a careful distance from Elspeth. Her face was angular but well composed. “They’ll say anything until they get the story. I know you don’t want to talk right now, but you might at some point, and I’d like to give you my card, if that’s all right.”

  “I’m never going to want to talk,” said Elspeth, but she accepted the card. She wanted to tell the woman—to warn her—that everything the TV reporter had broadcast was true.

  “That’s all right,” the woman replied cheerfully. She was only doing her job. Often, by the time you meet someone, both they and you have already made all the decisions that will determine the encounter between the two of you, and the only freedom that remains to either of you is whether to be pleasant.

  For politeness’s sake, Elspeth thanked the woman for her card and then looked back out over the balustrade to signal that the conversation was over.

  * * *

  —

  When Elspeth turned to make sure that the woman was gone, she saw a cluster of other reporters studying her and murmuring. Noticing her glance, they approached.

  “I don’t want to talk to you.” She fumblingly pulled up the hood of her coat and walked to the stairwell.

  On the ground floor, she leaned against a pillar in an archway, hiding herself as deep as possible in her hood, and watched who was entering the building. She decided to wait here for her friends. Of course she was hidden no better than a horse is hidden by its blinders. Soon she was aware that the reporters were standing a few yards behind her, to her right. She could sense their presence even without turning to look, the way one used to be able to hear the high, tinnient whine of a non-flat-screen television even if its sound was off.

  She didn’t draw back her hood until Diana walked through the metal detector.

  “Baby,” Diana said, embracing her.

  “I shouldn’t be touching you,” said Elspeth.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The reporters will try to talk to you now.”

  “What reporters?” Diana asked.

  The palm of Diana’s hand felt very sweet and soft to Elspeth as she held it. It had in it all the humanity that Elspeth had been longing for and that she had been afraid she might have to ask the reporters to give to her.

  “Oh, I see,” Diana said.

  “They’re horrible,” said Elspeth.

  “Oh, baby.” She let Elspeth cry a little. “This is hard. Of course it’s hard. It’s much harder than before, isn’t it.” Even through her tears Elspeth was aware of Diana learning that she couldn’t look toward the reporters except at the risk of compromising the reprieve that Elspeth’s outburst of emotion was winning from them.

  “I need to wait here for Matthew and Jeremy,” Elspeth said.

  “That’s okay.”

  “I’m going to need to use your phone. I still haven’t talked to anyone. Not to Leif, not to Chris, not to Raleigh.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “I thought Raleigh had a lawyer, but now I don’t think any of them do except Julia.”

  “I took the liberty of calling a lawyer I know through Occupy. I hope that’s all right.”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  “He’s a little head-in-the-clouds,” Diana said. “He’s a little true-believer. But he’s willing to jump right in.”

  “Is he on his way?”

  “He will be if I call him.”

  “Who’s he for?”

  “I was thinking Leif?”

  “Oh yes, that makes sense.”

  “Didn’t you say Raleigh had a lawyer? But we can give him to Raleigh instead if you want.” Diana took out her phone, scrolled to the number, and tapped it. “This guy gave us a lot of good advice about the Kitchen. Right now he’s representing a couple of people against the city. He doesn’t work for free, but we’ll find the money somewhere.”

  The phone was already ringing; the money was already being spent. “We’ll find the money,” Elspeth echoed, remembering that if her mother had tried to reach her this morning, she wouldn’t have been able to.

  “I’ll give him my credit card for today,” said Diana. “Let’s just get him here.”

  “You’re a graduate student.”

  “But for a graduate student I have really good credit.” She put a finger in her phoneless ear. “Michael? I’m at the courthouse now.”

  “We should give him to Leif,” Elspeth said softly, but Diana was already negotiatin
g, and Elspeth couldn’t tell whether Diana had heard her. Elspeth resumed watching visitors to the courthouse unshoulder their backpacks and empty their pockets.

  “He’ll be here in an hour,” Diana said, once the call was finished.

  “You know how Leif can sometimes tell what someone is thinking?” Elspeth asked, almost in a whisper.

  Diana double-checked that she had hung up her phone. “I know he’s a sweet kid,” she replied quietly.

  “They know about it.”

  Diana nodded and looked away.

  “Someone gave the reporters a photo of one of Raleigh’s T-shirts,” Elspeth continued.

  “I thought the T-shirts were a joke.”

  “It was something we were working on,” said Elspeth. She was ashamed to be talking about it. She wanted to tell Diana that it was from the same part of Leif that made him a poet, but she couldn’t. Instead, she said, “It’s how they broke in.”

  “You shouldn’t tell me about it. You shouldn’t tell me or anyone anything about what they’re charged with.”

  Elspeth nodded. She watched Diana try to think of something to say that wouldn’t hurt Elspeth’s feelings. By talking about it when Diana didn’t want to hear, it was as if Elspeth had tried to pull Diana underwater with her.

  “Look, there’s Matthew,” Elspeth said, noticing Leif’s boyfriend as he took a place in line for the metal detector. “And there’s Jeremy, too.” The men were standing one in front of the other but didn’t realize it because they had never met before. Straight Jeremy in his pretty golden beard and gay Matthew in his muddy black one.

  After the security check, Jeremy crossed in front of Matthew, cutting him off. Yellow, pollen-like sawdust had been sifted in a neat parallelogram onto the stomach of his work shirt. “So the good news is Felix Penny says he’ll represent Raleigh for today. And for the duration, if he likes the case. The bad news is he won’t do it pro bono.”

  “Have you talked to Leif or Raleigh?” Elspeth asked Matthew, instead of responding to Jeremy’s news.

  Matthew nodded. She saw that he was bewildered, as she was, by the surrender that they were going to have to make not just to Diana and Jeremy but to strangers chosen by Diana and Jeremy. She and Matthew weren’t the sort who knew how to cold-bloodedly do what needed to be done. “Matthew,” he identified himself, not quite apologetically, to Jeremy.