Overthrow

by Caleb Crain

  A strange man asked for her.

  “How did you get this number?” she asked.

  “From Information.”

  “It’s not in Information. I pay an extra dollar and forty-five cents every month not to be listed. And I’m in the Do Not Call registry.” She hung up. “Jesus,” she said, allowing herself, now that she was in private at last, a note of exasperation.

  She dropped the space heater onto the sofa and tossed down beside it the mail that she had carried upstairs pinned under her elbow. She shut and locked the door. She flicked off the overhead light that she had flicked on when she had hurriedly entered, and she fumbled at the switch of the lamp beside her sofa, which gave a gentler light.

  There, she thought.

  In the kitchen, by the light of the open refrigerator, she made herself a vodka tonic. She stirred it with a spoon; she tasted the spoon. Returning to the sofa, she took pleasure in its being such a nice sofa, in its charcoal, minimalist way. Even tonight she was not sorry she had chosen not to have a cat, because thanks to the catlessness of her apartment, the sofa was still a nice sofa, two and a half years later. She sipped; she picked through the mail. There was a handwritten note from a woman she had known a little in college. The girl was producing a documentary; you could donate online.

  The door buzzed. At the intercom she hesitated but then, pressing Talk, asked, “Who is it?”

  “It’s me.” It was Raleigh.

  She scrambled down the upper flight of stairs, but at the landing, as she turned, she slowed. She wasn’t going to let him in if the reporters were still there. She didn’t want it to be a matter of public record. She loped down the lower flight of stairs more cautiously, in a syncopated two-step, knowing that on the lower flight she was visible from the sidewalk.

  But the reporters were gone. She looked past Raleigh, up the street and down the street, to be sure.

  “They left,” Raleigh said. “It’s completely safe.”

  “Just come in,” she replied impatiently.

  “I waited for them to leave.”

  Men were always more boyish when you had them on your hands than when you imagined them.

  “Would you like a drink?” she asked as they walked upstairs. She sounded like her father, she thought. She sounded public. She hadn’t known whether they were going to do this again. She hadn’t known whether she wanted to. In her apartment, once she turned the deadbolt, she left him in the living room and slipped into the bedroom for a moment, to look down at the street again from behind the curtains. They really did seem to have been left alone.

  “It’s okay,” Raleigh said when she returned. He seemed to be insisting that she agree with him.

  “There’s so much going on,” she said noncommittally.

  They hadn’t touched yet.

  “You didn’t wait,” she said, when she gave him his drink.

  “For what?”

  “At the courthouse.”

  “You wanted me to wait?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said.

  “Julia.”

  “What? Don’t tell me to be reasonable.”

  She rocked her glass in an attempt to make the ice cubes in it clink, but they would only swivel. She wanted to pick at them with a finger, but that would be unladylike. When they had first kissed, two weeks ago, on the very sofa where he was now sitting, he had said afterward, almost angrily, God I wish I hadn’t done that. And she had replied, with asperity, You weren’t the only one doing it.

  “We could go to that horrible diner,” he suggested.

  “It’s a nice diner. It’s only the food that’s horrible,” she said. “But we should stay here.” Which more or less sentenced them, but not yet, she told herself. Not just yet.

  * * *

  —

  As if there had been a gentle tug, the blinds of sleep scrolled up and let in her senses, even though it wasn’t light yet. Raleigh’s warmth beside her under the sheets was sweet, and she was aware of wanting, dangerously, to hold on to the sweetness. To have a younger man as a lover in late fall, and maybe early winter. Would it last that long? It was sweet now, whether or not it was going to last. The smell of his anxiety had softened over the course of the night to something like nutmeg.

  This much, even unto staying the night, hadn’t happened before. It might not happen again.

  He curled inward as he stretched. “You can’t have this, in jail,” he said.

  “Sex?”

  “Just, lying in bed with someone.” He brushed his knuckles across one of her breasts.

  “Raleigh,” she said.

  “We’re in so much trouble, aren’t we.”

  Would she put a scene like this in, or would it seem like too much? “We’re hardly Bonnie and Clyde,” she said. She got up.

  “Where are you going?”

  She slipped into her robe and peered down at the street. “They’re already here,” she said. “One of them, anyway.” A woman in terrible clothes.

  “I can’t be here,” he announced.

  She let the corner of the curtain fall.

  “Where are you going?” he asked again. “Why are we getting up?”

  “To make coffee.”

  “Come back,” he said.

  “But you can’t be here.”

  “Oh, don’t be like that.”

  She sat on the bed but didn’t get into it again.

  “You know what I mean,” he said. He began to stroke her.

  “Let me go ahead and make coffee,” she told him.

  She took the good beans out of the freezer and milled a handful in her little spice grinder. She filled the kettle and put it on to boil. She wondered if everything was going to be different now. Maybe she wouldn’t have time anymore to wonder how a day was going to pass and also whether it was passing too quickly. Whether she was putting up enough resistance to its passing. From now on, after all, there was going to be a lot to keep track of. She was going to have the inside story, when she finally wrote it, unlike the importuners downstairs.

  “What if I offered to give her a quote,” she suggested, when Raleigh, in underwear and a T-shirt, joined her in the kitchen. “In order to lead her away, so you could make a run for it.”

  “I doubt your lawyer would be crazy about that idea.”

  “Kenneth is a teddy bear. Don’t you have to get to work?”

  “Why? So they can fire me?”

  “Why would they do that? Do you want anything in it?” she asked as she poured.

  “Black is fine.”

  “You’re still innocent.”

  “I can’t do tech support if I’m not allowed to touch computers. But I do want to go in, actually. I want to hear how they put it. I want to be there when somebody has to try to figure out how to say it.”

  “If I gave her a quote, I wouldn’t say anything, really,” Julia reassured him. “I would just lead her on.”

  “Do you know about the mosaic theory?”

  “I think so.”

  “What is it?” he catechized her.

  “Oh, I don’t know, Raleigh.”

  “It’s the idea that you shouldn’t reveal even a little detail that seems unimportant, because if there’s someone on the other end collecting all the little details and fitting them together, the mosaic he assembles could give the whole picture away.”

  It must be very terrible, if he felt compelled to hector her about it.

  “Felix doesn’t even want me talking to anyone from the working group anymore,” he added.

  She didn’t give him a reaction. And all this time she had been afraid that she would lose him because of Elspeth.

  “Had you heard of Felix before this week?” Raleigh continued. “He wrote that op-ed a couple of months ago, about end-user agreements.”

 
“Was it good?”

  “He’s got a book coming out in May. Seeing Through Internet Privacy.”

  “That’s so great for you,” she said, smiling. She was going to hold on in her own way even if she lost him. She was going to learn everything about him—about all of them—and then she was going to write her account. She was even willing to read this vile Felix’s book if she had to.

  While he was showering she put out bowls, spoons, cereal, milk, and raspberries. She rinsed the raspberries without taking them out of their plastic clamshell. They didn’t keep.

  “You don’t have cable, do you?” Raleigh asked as he sat on one of the barstools at her kitchen counter. Like hay, his hair was darker when damp. He was apparently one of these men who don’t even need to comb their hair, let alone brush it.

  “I do.”

  “I wonder what they’re saying on TV now.”

  “It’s okay, right?” she asked as she tapped the On button of her remote. “My TV isn’t secretly a computer?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t think it is. How horrible would it be if one were sent back to jail because one hadn’t appreciated all the functionalities of one’s cable service.”

  With a jagged advent there issued from the television labored, modulated shouting. A number of people had allegedly been killed by an American drone on the other side of the world.

  “We’re not the news anymore,” Julia said.

  “That was fast.”

  She tried another channel. “Oh, wait, here we are,” she said.

  “‘I know you know I know you know I know your password,’” a news announcer read aloud. A chyron displayed this text, over a blue background, as the announcer was reading.

  “And this is from @OccupyESP, which seems to be a parody account,” reported the announcer’s co-host. “At this point we don’t know who, if anyone, is authorized to speak for the group, and an account like this is pretty much all we have to go on. Is that right, Jason?”

  “They can’t decide if we’re a joke or if we’re terrorists,” said Raleigh.

  “That’s not us, is it?” asked Julia.

  “Who would it be? Jeremy’s not that funny. I mean, that’s not funny, but Jeremy’s not even that not-funny.”

  “They’re usually little aspiring TV writers, aren’t they?” Julia commented. “The people who do these accounts. Who pretend to be the weasel escaped from the zoo or whatever.”

  “‘Yeah, we read your mind,’” read the announcer. “‘Sea salt and vinegar, amirite?’”

  “This is like the CIA’s Twitter account,” said Raleigh. “A little ‘irony,’ a little shit-eating knowingness.”

  “This doesn’t count as being online, does it? If we see social-media messages on TV?”

  “Elspeth is going to hate this. She got so mad about my T-shirts.”

  “But she liked mine, didn’t she?” Julia asked. “I mean, they were essentially hers.”

  “Everybody liked your T-shirts,” he reassured her, though they both knew that nobody would ever wear one again.

  On another channel, a man in a red tie said, “Kind of a misconception, to say we were hacked, and I want to get out in front of that.”

  “Is that Bresser?” Julia asked, just as CEO, BRESSER OPERATIONAL SECURITY unfurled on the screen.

  “The truth is, we were tracking them before they were aware of us,” Bresser said.

  “What do you mean, tracking?” asked the interviewer.

  “I can’t say too much because it’s something we’ve been coordinating with the authorities, but what I can say, I think, is that we’re a private company, and this has actually been a kind of proof of concept for us.”

  “This has been a good outcome for you? To be a security company hacked by Occupy?”

  “There’s a lot of data out there about people, public data, and what our company has is a new way of looking at it. A new way of putting it together.”

  “How does it work, Joe?”

  “You know, okay, if you have a big enough database of, say, the English language and the Spanish language, you no longer need anyone to tell you that five is the same as cinco. You can just tell the AI to look at the way five relates to all the other words in English, and then at the way cinco relates to all the other words in Spanish, and the AI will see that the patterns have the same shape. They match. They’re what we call homologies, and what we’re doing at Bresser is we train the AI to look for these homologies.”

  “In order to find people?” the interviewer prompted.

  “I shouldn’t say any more because we’re a business and I don’t want to give away the company store. But the other thing I wanted to get out in front of, in this conversation, is the idea that these young people are psychics, or whatever they want to call it. There’s no such thing. They’re hackers, and the other thing is a smoke screen. There are things they knew . . .” He trailed off.

  “Things about you?” asked the interviewer.

  “They were watching us the way we were watching them. That’s all it is. And they’re in jail now.”

  The interviewer thanked Bresser for speaking with her and swiveled to face a camera at a new angle. Julia clicked her off.

  “They were waiting for us?” Julia asked.

  The blank screen was still holding Raleigh’s gaze. “I don’t know. He’s selling his product.” He looked away from the TV. “Our names were on some of the folders we downloaded.”

  “What was inside?”

  “The files wouldn’t open. I was going to try to figure out the file extensions the next morning. Yesterday morning.”

  “We don’t even know what we did, do we,” Julia said.

  “Was I a sucker to believe in this shit?” Raleigh asked.

  She put their dishes in the sink and ran a little water into them. She didn’t like to leave dirty dishes for her cleaning lady, but she could, when she needed to. She made a mental note to remember to lay out the woman’s cash.

  * * *

  —

  From the bedroom window Raleigh and Julia watched the reporter below as she snapped and fluttered the pages of what was probably that morning’s edition of her newspaper.

  Ten minutes later, when Julia, strategically alone, opened the front door of the building, she saw that the woman had stowed the newspaper, folded, in a pocket of her backpack. The capitals on the front page were inches high.

  “What’s the headline?” Julia asked, from the top of the stoop.

  The woman hesitated. “We don’t write the heds.” She was wearing a fake-leather skirt trussed on one side with what looked like rope. The cuffs of her blouse peeking out of her coat sleeves seemed to be ruffled.

  “Who writes them?”

  “The editors.” Keeping her eyes on Julia, the woman unshipped her copy of the paper. FREAKS AND GEEKS. The woman was chewing gum, Julia noticed.

  “I liked that show, anyway,” it occurred to Julia to say. She restrained herself from glancing up to where Raleigh would be monitoring her progress. “Well, heading to the bus,” Julia said.

  “Where did you grow up?” the woman asked.

  “Oh, it’s not interesting.”

  “In the city?”

  Julia laughed, slightly, at the incivility of the woman’s persistence. As Julia began to walk down the street, the woman fell into step beside her. The decoy at least was working.

  “I want to know,” the woman continued.

  “It’s your job.”

  “No, this is an interesting story for me.”

  Julia laughed again. It was always pleasant to be flattered, even if one had the good fortune—or was it misfortune—to see through it. She took a deep breath of the November morning, and the air was cold enough and dry enough to have a menacing, almost diagnostic sharpness.
The chill traced an outline of the air’s passage into her.

  The reporter was holding a digital recorder halfheartedly extended between them. Its red LED pulsed silently. An invitation, a hazard. With the arrest, the authority that the group had given to Leif had been interrupted, and everyone in the group was free to have a voice of her own now.

  “But you went to school in the city?” the reporter tried again.

  “No one cares!” Julia said cheerfully.

  The arm holding the recorder drooped. “Do you not want to talk because you think we don’t believe you?”

  “Oh, I was never any good at it,” Julia said.

  “But I can tell you have it a little.”

  “Are you telling me that you have it?” How did we get here, Julia silently regretted.

  “I know when I know something.”

  “What are we even talking about?” Julia asked. “I need to catch the bus, you know.”

  They had reached the avenue, though Julia’s only real idea about the bus was that she would be able to look out the window.

  “I read some of your friends’ posts,” the reporter said.

  She wanted to hear the good news, Julia realized. She wanted to hear from the lips of one of the apostles that it would be all right if she let herself have feelings about everything she knew without being supposed to know.

  “A week ago I could have talked to you,” Julia said.

  “I know,” the woman replied. She shifted her backpack to her other shoulder. “Do you have any comment about Christopher Finn? He was released on his own recognizance.”

  It was a relief, probably to both of them, that the reporter had returned to her adversarial role. “Do you have his address?” Julia asked.

  “Me?”

  “You have all our addresses, don’t you?”

  In the end the reporter even mapped a route to the address on her phone. It didn’t make any sense to take a bus, Julia saw. She walked to the subway.

  * * *

  —

  A plastic potato chip bag that had been pulled into wiggly flaps—its delicate, oily inner pocket exposed—was drifting down the subway steps as Julia marched up them.