Overthrow

by Caleb Crain

  She emerged onto a treeless avenue. Sun-faded stuffed animals were wired to the metal frame of a drugstore’s raised security grille. A trestle sign promised a sale. Two blocks away, an expressway was whining in its artificial canyon. Years of exhaust soot, cast off by the expressway, stippled the ledges and crevices of the drugstore and neighboring buildings. The soot had aged the facades the way a flashlight pointed upward at a raking angle appears to age a young person’s face.

  Julia had decided to interview Chris. He was the member of the working group she knew the least about. There was something arbitrary about assigning herself the task, but she would never do any of the research she needed to do unless she made an effort to will herself to.

  Chris’s street was slightly less grim than the avenue that led to it, the usual ratio between streets and avenues. At the edge of the sidewalk stood a row of brick tenements, their shoulders hunched. Surprisingly, the bricks were umber rather than the garish coral that were what one mostly saw through a taxi’s window on the way to the airport. Julia checked building numbers as she walked, but because three unremarkable-looking people were waiting halfway down the block, she knew which building it would turn out to be.

  “We don’t know how late he sleeps,” one of the reporters said, as Julia pulled open the outer door.

  “That’s very thoughtful of you,” she replied, and let the door shut behind her.

  The reporter tugged it open again. “We had agreed to wait until nine or until he came down himself.”

  “I’m a friend,” she said, into the glass of the inner door.

  “Who?” he asked.

  “Even if you ask nicely, I don’t think I’d like to say.”

  A door slammed upstairs.

  “What do his tattoos mean?” the reporter blurted.

  “Does Chris even have—?”

  “I mean Leif Saunderson,” the reporter interrupted. “What do his tattoos mean?”

  “I never thought about it.”

  As Chris approached the door, in his heavy male way, a glow of anger reddening the dark-honey bur of his skull, the reporter withdrew.

  Chris opened the door at first only enough to talk. “Who sent you?”

  “It was my own idea.”

  He eyed the reporters beyond her. She remembered how badly she had wanted to see Raleigh after her arraignment. She had had the primitive fear then that while locked away from her he might have changed. That the fairies might have switched him. They had switched Chris, she saw.

  He opened the door a little further. “I have to leave for a job in a few minutes.”

  “I just wanted to say hi.”

  He trudged up the stairs. His T-shirt hugged his skin, and under his broad shoulders, his narrow back had a snakelike compactness. The linoleum on his landing, she saw when they reached it, was that wretched, ancient, common pattern, the one that looks like a cross-section of gray-pink pavlova, the color of hamburger meat just slightly cooked. The pattern was scumbled by heavy wear. Chris picked his way past a basketball, a heap of cleats, spattered cans of paint, a full trash bag, and a bicycle. She could smell that he had just showered.

  “Sorry,” he said, unemphatically, of the debris. He unlocked the door at the end of the landing. There wasn’t room for her to step past him, so he stepped inside first and yanked a ceiling light’s beaded chain.

  Nothing in the tiny room stood independent from anything else. Flush in a corner against two walls was a twin bed, which touched a dresser, which in turn touched a small desk. The chair that belonged to the desk was backed up against the doors of a wardrobe.

  A plain navy blue quilt had been pulled square with the corners of the bed that it covered. Its fabric had begun to pill. Had it been worn rough by Chris’s unshaven chin? By time, merely? Julia imagined that if she were to lie down on the quilt, it would powder her throat with house dust, but she didn’t know, journalistically speaking, whether she could write about what she imagined unless she actually did lie down on it.

  “I’ve never been out here,” she said.

  “What do you want?”

  “To see how you’re doing?”

  To imagine that one was going to write about the same moments that one was living through—it was like treading water. One made flurrying gestures, but with one’s mind, and kept an inch or two above the surface.

  “And no one sent you.”

  “I don’t think anyone’s in a position to ‘send’ anyone anymore,” she told him. She couldn’t help delivering her lines as if she were on a larger, brighter stage than Chris’s bedroom afforded. She leaned over Chris’s desk toward the one narrow window, in part because to peer out the window was to not be studying Chris’s bedroom, which it would have been tactless to seem too observant of.

  “You’re just here for yourself,” he said.

  “I have this idea, Chris. I know it’s a little . . .” She had the gingerly feeling that artists have when they first mention to another person a new work they hope to begin. “I’m going to write a book about all this. Someday. About what’s happening to us. It’s a project, I guess. Maybe it’s just a way for me to, you know, process all of this.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  She was so startled that she almost laughed. “Yes.” She shut her mouth, which she realized was hanging open. “I mean, no. I don’t know. How is it for you?” she asked vaguely. “All of this?”

  “Do you know how I got out?”

  For a wild moment she thought he was going to tell her he had made a jailbreak. “Didn’t the judge . . . ?” she began, but she faltered.

  “None of you threw me a line.”

  Neither for Chris nor for any of the others would there have been a father who knew at once the name of the attorney he wanted for the case.

  “I watched Raleigh on the phone,” Chris continued. “I watched Leif on the phone.”

  “Chris,” she said pityingly.

  “Chris what?”

  “You had to get on the phone yourself.”

  “You think I don’t know that none of you wanted to talk to me?”

  “But I thought you weren’t able to . . . ,” she began, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it. What she couldn’t now bring herself to say had been the ground that they had met on. It had all been nonsense, of course. She hadn’t ever thought that any of them did have it, not really. Now that she acknowledged her disbelief, she saw that there had never been a ground for them to meet on where they could in fact have met. They had never really met. Her inability to say flatly now what she and Chris were talking about meant that they had never even really spoken. It had all been a misunderstanding. But did he have to be so horrible about it?

  So horrible and so magnificent. Because, look at him. His face was like a war mask, of chased gold. She folded her hands.

  “You’re such a fucking idiot,” he said, shaking his head—a little showily, she thought. “You don’t even know what I’m saying.”

  It stung, but this was experience; she had wanted experience. “Then tell me what you’re saying.”

  “I’m cooperating with the prosecution,” he told her. “You shouldn’t even be talking to me.”

  “Oh, Chris.” She realized, as she waited for him to say more, that she wanted to hear that it hadn’t been her fault. Which was stupid of her.

  “At least the people on the other side know what they’re talking about,” he said, speaking softly because, she sensed, his voice was in danger of breaking. “At least they know where they are.

  “You haven’t talked to Elspeth?” he added, still more quietly.

  She shook her head.

  “I have to go,” he said. “I’m gonna be late.”

  * * *

  —

  Chris’s apartment was far enough from the center of the city that on the s
ubway going back Julia was able to find a seat. From station to station, the car filled up with commuters—underslept, vaguely put upon, purposive. They assembled in a silent forest around her, unspeaking because they were nursing for as long as they could the privacy they were soon going to have to surrender when they began their workdays. Their presence was required somewhere, unlike hers.

  Talking to whom she shouldn’t was what she had most wanted to save. Once she confessed to Kenneth, there would be a long, boring conversation in which she would be gently guided. There would be an appeal to the pride she took in being sensible. But what if she didn’t want to be sensible anymore? What if she understood that this was her last chance?

  The postman always came early to her parents’ apartment, and Julia carried the mail upstairs. “Is somebody getting married?” her mother asked, as Julia took out of the pile a heavy cream envelope, hand-addressed to herself.

  “I don’t know, Momma. I haven’t opened it yet. Is there any grapefruit?”

  “I didn’t think it was in season yet, so I didn’t get any. I could make you an egg, or maybe Robbie would let you have some of his cream of wheat?”

  “No,” said Robbie.

  “Do you want an egg?” asked her mother.

  “I need the cream of wheat,” Robbie explained.

  “I understand, sweetie,” Julia reassured him.

  “Will you play Life with me?”

  “Oh, I can’t today. Isn’t Thanksgiving coming up? Maybe we can play on Thanksgiving.”

  “It’s in two days,” said Robbie.

  “Is it really? I’d forgotten all about it.”

  “How can you forget about Thanksgiving?” he asked skeptically, as if he suspected that she might be making a joke.

  “I’ve just been losing track of things lately,” she apologized. She resheathed the invitation. “It’s a dinner slash fund-raiser,” she told her mother. “For a friend’s art space slash gallery.” Rich people were so continually asking one another for money. Maybe it was to distinguish themselves from people who would be ashamed to ask for it. From people who lived in rooms so small that all the furniture touched.

  5.

  “And the name of your first pet,” the salesman prompted.

  “I said I had a pet?” Raleigh replied.

  “Looks like it.”

  Raleigh tried to guess what he had been thinking of. “I had a guinea pig named Skywalker for about five minutes.”

  “Awesome name.”

  “It disappeared a week after we got it. My mother told me it died, but I’m pretty sure she took it back to the store.”

  The salesman typed and then waited for the system to respond. “‘Skywalker’ works.”

  “Are we all set?”

  “Almost.” The salesman, reading instructions off his screen, began to punch activation codes into the new phone that Raleigh was purchasing. “It may be an hour or two before the new SIM populates in all the databases.”

  “What happens to the old phone?”

  “You won’t be able to make calls on it anymore. You said you lost it?”

  “Will it be erased?”

  “I don’t know, but you don’t have it anymore, right? So . . . whoa, you’re already getting a call.”

  “I am?”

  “Yeah, you’re live already. I have to finish one more thing, though.”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “Uh, nine-one-eight . . . ?”

  “My mother,” Raleigh guessed.

  “Maybe she’s sorry about Skywalker, man,” the salesman risked.

  “I should talk to her,” Raleigh said.

  He stepped with the phone into the dead space between the store’s plate-glass window and a rank of pedestals for sample phones.

  “They gave you your phone back!” his mother exclaimed.

  “I got a new one,” he said. The sun even through the window was hot on his face. “They can transfer the number, when you get a new phone.”

  “Will that interfere?”

  “With what?”

  “With the investigation.”

  “That’s not my problem, Mom.”

  “But if they think you’re interfering, Raleigh.”

  “Felix said to do it.”

  “Oh. Well, you didn’t tell me that Felix said to do it.”

  “What’s up, Mom.”

  “Nothing. I just wanted to know how you’re doing.”

  “I’m fine. I’m on my way to see Elspeth.”

  “Did she get home safe?”

  “Last night? I guess so.”

  “Are her parents there?”

  “Her parents?”

  “I thought they might have flown in for Thanksgiving.”

  “I forgot it’s going to be Thanksgiving.”

  “They must be worried about her.”

  “I guess Jeremy and Philip usually cook a turkey,” said Raleigh, thinking out loud.

  “Oh, I see.”

  “Mom, I can’t come to Oklahoma right now.”

  “Oh, I know. I understand.” She paused to blow her nose. “You’re handling this so well.”

  “It’s going to be fine. It’s mostly for show, I think, what the government’s doing. Security theater.”

  “Honey, I don’t think you should talk about it on the phone. What if they’re listening? They’re saying that they’ve been listening to you all along.”

  “Who’s saying? On TV?”

  “They’re saying that that’s what you’re fighting, really. I don’t think I realized that.” There was a tremble in her voice. “That that’s what you’re fighting.”

  She wanted to be reassured. “I’m not going to do anything stupid, Mom,” he said.

  “Your father says that you’re taking a stand. You know you can always come home, if you think you’re going to be lonely.”

  “Thanks, Mom. I know.”

  “For the holiday, I mean.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “I’m so proud of you.”

  “Okay,” he said blankly.

  She hung up. “Mom?” He looked down at the shiny keypad to find the End button, but he saw that the phone already knew that the call was over.

  “Do you need the receipt?” the salesman asked.

  * * *

  —

  Elspeth opened her door.

  It was only now that he was sleeping with someone else that he could see clearly not only her beauty but the kind of beauty it was: plain and unadorned, like the heroine of one of those books about frontier life that girls read in elementary school.

  “Where are your keys?” she asked.

  “I still have them, but I didn’t think I should surprise you.”

  She looked away. He followed her down the corridor.

  “After all the surprises yesterday,” he explained.

  On the dining room table, five tarot cards lay faceup in the pattern that dots have on the five side of a die.

  “Were you doing a reading?” he asked. He knew the cards were only bright colors printed on heavy paper. One of the ones she had out was Death, who always looked to him more like a skinned raccoon than a person. Death was upside-down, flipping the figure’s black garden of severed hands and heads into a night sky where the hands and heads were constellations.

  One by one the cards quilped as Elspeth returned them to the bottom of the deck. “I guess,” she said.

  “They should have taken this deck when they confiscated the rest of our communication technology.”

  Elspeth smiled politely.

  “Did you meet someone?” she asked abruptly.

  “Where—in jail?” It was a gamble, but he had the impression that she was moderating her scrutiny of him, maybe out of tact, maybe becaus
e she didn’t really want to know. “No,” he lied, more boldly. It wasn’t why they were breaking up, after all. Still, his heart raced with the excitement of lying. He thought it would be a tell if he looked away, so he didn’t. But maybe it was a tell that he didn’t.

  “I’m sorry I was so useless yesterday,” she said. “I don’t know all the things you know. The technical things.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “You were mad at me.”

  “I was in jail.”

  “And now you want to be free,” she said.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Everyone should always be free,” she continued. “We can be grown-ups about it.”

  He nodded.

  “It’s almost like I’m breaking up with you,” she observed.

  “It’s a little of both,” he conceded.

  “Would you mind holding me?” she asked. “For old times’ sake. Just for a minute.”

  Her small bones, loose in the small satchel of her body, felt familiar, but there was nothing that was sharply especially for him in the touch between the two of them. He was doing her a favor; it didn’t feel like any more than that. Altruism wasn’t love, he noticed.

  “I’ll miss you,” she said, as she pulled away.

  “I’ll miss you, too,” he lied.

  “We’ll still see each other, but I won’t be the same,” she told him.

  “Be however you want to be.”

  “No, I can’t do that. But I won’t forget you.”

  Her words were so peremptory that he almost had second thoughts.

  She excused herself.

  In the alcove of the dining room where a dumbwaiter had once come through, Elspeth’s dictionary, style manual, and gazetteer were neatly arrayed. The pink yarn elephant that he had given her one year for her birthday was perched on top of the reference books, and her pencils lay beside them, aligned according to the crimped green metal bands that fastened the erasers to the stems.

  He shouted down the hallway. “I should go.”

  “You don’t have to go,” she called back. “Unless you want to.”