by Caleb Crain
She had cried, but she had washed her face. She knew better than to show it if she was the loser. Was he the loser, then? It wasn’t something he should be wondering in her presence, but her mind was probably too clouded with emotions to be able to sense it.
She had guessed right, of course; he had met someone in jail. He and Julia had become cellmates there, in a way, and were aware now, even on the outside, that they might have to go back, aware as ordinary people weren’t that the context for their lives was provisional.
“Has anyone told you yet what they’re saying about you?” Elspeth asked.
“About me?”
“About all of you. You’re the Telepathy Four. ‘Free the Telepathy Four.’ You’re heroes online. ‘Revolutionaries.’ Diana was here till late last night, and we were reading on her phone.”
“We didn’t seem like heroes on TV this morning.”
“It’s different online. They think we knew Bresser was spying on us.”
“You and Leif might have sensed it,” Raleigh said. “When Leif read his password that first time, when Chris and I were arrested for standing in the street, Leif might have been picking up a signal.”
“No, be honest. We didn’t know anything until Bresser told Chris that somebody was calling him Hyacinth, and even then we only suspected. Online they think we knew-knew. They think we knew and were taking revenge, which they like because they hate Bresser. He keeps trying to talk to them. I think they hate him more because he keeps trying to talk to them.”
“They’re on our side,” Raleigh said.
“For now.”
“That matters, Elspeth. We need that.” The internet was still a force that hadn’t been understood. The only thing anyone knew for certain about it was that it was always on the side that didn’t lose. “The police haven’t seized our domain name, have they?”
“You mean our website? Can they do that?”
“Yeah, Elspeth, they can do that.”
“What? I don’t know these things.”
He wished he could see for himself the searches for their working group by the searchers who didn’t know its name, the comments by readers exchanging heated speculations about the motives of the group’s members, the name-calling, the praise, the stuttered exclamations—all the electronic correlates of attention, which, unable to see, he imagined as a white network, floating distinct from the world, like light that had been abruptly disembodied somehow from the knotted sheaf of fiber-optic cables in which it had been coursing and pulsing.
“You have to take care of it because I can’t take care of it anymore,” he said. “It could change everything.”
“Oh, Raleigh.”
“What?” he asked.
A phone burred against the table. It was a throwaway candy-bar phone. The ringtone was primitive. “It’s my mother,” Elspeth said, to excuse herself, as she picked it up.
She turned her head away. “I’m okay. I slept okay,” she said into the phone.
She rose, walked into the parlor, and stood at a window.
“We watched a DVD for a while and then she went home.”
He hadn’t realized that Diana had brought Elspeth back from the courthouse.
“He’s here now,” Elspeth said. “He’s fine.”
“. . .”
“I haven’t asked him yet.”
“. . .”
“This afternoon.”
“. . .”
“I hope so.”
The staccato lines resonated through the twinned rooms. It occurred to Raleigh that if he went into the kitchen, he would be able to give Elspeth some privacy, but he didn’t go.
“I hope it’s not too expensive.”
“. . .”
“I wish you could. Bye, Mom.” She depressed a button on the device, effortfully because it was still new to her.
“Is she worried about how much your lawyer is going to cost?” he asked.
“She’s having somebody come today to look at the retaining wall. The basement keeps flooding.”
She set down the phone and shoved it a little away from her. She had never really liked even her old phone, he knew, on account of the interruptions it made, and this one was uglier and even louder.
“I should get ready to visit my lawyer,” she said.
“Is he anyone?”
“She. A friend of my mother’s recommended her. She’s somebody’s daughter.”
“What were you about to say before?” Raleigh asked. “When your mother called.”
She hesitated. “It doesn’t matter,” she finally said.
Her thoughts weren’t his to know anymore. Because he lacked any aptitude for intuiting them, discretion on her part protected her like a wall, high and featureless. He was less because of it.
“No, you were going to say something.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
She had been going to say something about the two of them, he realized, but now she would never do that again.
He waited, but she waited him out.
* * *
—
“Oh fuck,” said Raleigh, half aloud.
Three television vans were besieging the café where Leif worked. One was parked with its two left wheels up in the middle of the sidewalk. The van’s sliding door was open, and as Raleigh edged past it, the skirt of his coat swirled a short arc into and out of its amber interior, where banks of heavy equipment were blinking silently, protected by nothing but the forbidding importance of being useful to television.
“Hey,” a man said, and Raleigh was startled, as if the man had been able to detect in the incursion of Raleigh’s coat a wish on Raleigh’s part to commit sabotage. The man was wearing a baseball cap and holding a cigarette between fingers in fingertipless gloves. “Do you know him? Do you know what his tattoo means? Aren’t you—?”
Raleigh went inside before the man could remember Raleigh’s name.
Inside, it was standing room only. A few tables were held by regulars, and the floor around them was empty, as if the other tables and chairs, unanchored, had been carried away by a flood.
They had washed up on the shores of three islands of television people. At the center of each stood a reporter, almost clownishly well groomed. Other crew members, comparatively gray, were wearing hats, coats, and headsets in case they might need to rush outside. Next to their coffees lay their cameras, like derringers set down by tippling cowboys in a movie-set saloon.
Raleigh caught Greg’s eye. “Hey, man,” Raleigh said. He waited for Greg to serve a mint tea to the customer in front of him. “Matthew said Leif was here?”
“Down below. We used up all the Ecuadorean and he’s getting another sack.”
“These guys are buying coffee?”
“Anyone who wants to stay has to buy one coffee an hour. New rule.”
A camera somewhere in the room softly wheezed twice.
“Excuse me?” Greg said. “No photography on the premises today.”
“Sorry.”
“You need to take the camera off and leave it on the table if you want to stay,” Greg ordered. He watched until the man sullenly unlooped the camera from his neck.
“You’re good,” Raleigh said.
“You want anything?”
“A latte, maybe?”
“Coming up. Do you want a peanut butter cookie? On the house. They sent us too many.”
“Sweet.”
“Literally,” Greg said. With tongs, he put a cookie onto a small plate for Raleigh. He surveyed the mostly silent, mostly still crowd before turning his back on them to make the coffee.
Eyes in the crowd shifted hungrily to Raleigh as soon as Greg couldn’t see them.
A reporter, a woman in royal blue, leaned her head into a colleague’s whisper. “Raleigh Evans?” she then said. She pick
ed her high-heeled steps carefully as she crossed the room to reach him. “What’s it like to work with Felix Penny? You’ve been a fan of his for a while now, haven’t you? How exciting is that.”
Greg turned and frowned, but he was pinned in place by the need to hold the milk, in its small steel tankard, around the spout that was noisily frothing it.
“I’m just here to meet a friend,” said Raleigh.
“I won’t take any of your time.”
“He said no,” Greg told her.
She didn’t look at Greg. “If you and I could step outside for just two seconds . . . ,” she suggested.
“Not today, thanks,” said Raleigh.
“Well, think about it. I’ll be right over here. I’ve been really looking forward to getting to talk with you.” She turned to Greg. “Could I get one of those peanut butter cookies, too? They sound so good.” She left a five on the counter and stalked back to her team, turning herself off as she walked.
Standing at the counter, Raleigh broke his cookie along a chord, broke a tip off the broken-off segment, and popped the tip into his mouth.
* * *
—
Outside, something creaked, and the café fell silent. The hush came on so quickly and was so absolute that one of the regulars, who had been lost in his book, looked up. Everyone in the café listened as one panel of the basement’s metal door fell to, with a clank. Then, more softly, the other panel was also lowered into place. The arm of a lock rattled as it was threaded through the eyes of the door’s handles.
Undisguisedly everyone watched the entrance.
“The Ecuadoran was under a whole dogpile of Brazilians,” Leif said, when he appeared. He was hugging a dark plastic sack of coffee beans. He was wearing only a T-shirt and jeans, despite the cold, and his face was nearly as pale as the triangle of sky visible through the door behind him.
“Hey, it’s Raleigh,” Leif called out, when he saw him, and to Raleigh it almost felt for a moment like being greeted from the stage at a concert. A new interest in Raleigh rippled across the room.
In his excitement Leif coughed, gutturally, angrily, for almost a full minute.
“What are you doing here, man?” Raleigh asked, when the cough died down.
“Working.”
“Why?” Raleigh asked, laughing at the assholishness of his own question.
Leif ducked under the counter with the sack of coffee and surfaced again behind it. “I don’t know. I wanted to still have a life.”
“You could have called me,” Raleigh said. He came up to the counter so they wouldn’t be too much overheard. “There’s supposed to be a new ramp down near the canal I want to check out.”
“I can write poems here sometimes, when it’s slow.”
“Are you writing one? Should I leave you alone?”
“No. It turns out it’s not slow today. Greg is making them order all these coffees.”
Greg, at that moment presenting Raleigh with his latte, let his head drop as if under the burden of the reproach.
“How’s Elspeth?” Leif asked.
“We broke up.”
“When?”
“Just now.”
“Maybe you didn’t really break up.”
“No, we broke up,” Raleigh insisted.
Raleigh glanced at Greg and saw that Greg had buckled his lips in a sympathetic grimace.
“It’s okay,” Raleigh told Greg.
There was a sink at the back of the baristas’ work space, with a little dishwasher beside it, and Leif began rinsing cups and saucers that were stacked in the sink and loading them quietly into the dishwasher. “I should have gone to see her this morning,” Leif said.
“Did you and Matthew break up?” Raleigh asked.
“No,” Leif replied. He stopped rinsing for a moment but left the water running. “No no no no no.”
“It’s all right,” Raleigh reassured him.
Leif resumed rinsing. “It’s not all right.”
“It is,” Raleigh said. He watched Leif’s eyes, but Leif wasn’t crying. The counter was between them, and Raleigh didn’t want to do anything that the television people wouldn’t be able to resist photographing.
“We’re torturing them, aren’t we,” Leif said of the television crews.
“We’re talking about his tattoo,” Raleigh announced, in a loud voice.
Leif shook his head and coughed again.
“They’re so into your tattoo,” Raleigh commented.
“It’s a nice tattoo,” Leif said, with pretend pretend-modesty. He added, in a voice whose volume briefly matched that of Raleigh’s announcement, “It illustrates an Andrew Marvell poem.”
There was murmuring.
“I’m actually writing a poem about it,” Leif continued, more quietly. “About Marvell’s trees. You know how there weren’t any trees at Occupy?”
“There were trees.”
“I’m trying to tell you about my poem.”
“I know, but there were trees at Occupy. Remember that tree that the Media Working Group tied a corner of their tent to, and the cops made them untie it? Before the cops gave up on tents?”
“That doesn’t count. That wasn’t a real tree.”
“Okay,” said Raleigh, who knew about himself that he was capable of being a dick sometimes about what was a fact and what wasn’t.
“I’m serious. That wasn’t a real tree.”
“It wasn’t an artificial tree.”
“They probably had to build a special container for its roots or something. It was like an office tree that happened to be outside.”
“Okay. If you want.”
“Just let me have this.”
“I said okay,” Raleigh repeated.
“Instead of trees there was this.” Leif thumbed a circle in the air.
“‘This’ what?”
“The people watching. The police, the journalists, bystanders. A paradise is a garden, and there have to be trees. ‘This yet green, yet growing ark.’”
“You think Occupy needed the police?” Raleigh asked. “You think we wanted the police?”
“Don’t get hung up on the police, per se. There aren’t borders anywhere anymore, is what I’m saying. ‘This’ is how we make borders now—with the way people are looking. With the direction they’re looking, and with the looking itself.”
Raleigh wondered why and how it was that Leif always managed to put himself in the wrong with every group that he was part of and yet remain liked by it. It was his version of negative capability, maybe. Raleigh used to wonder if he should be writing down what Leif was saying when he talked like this, so that there would be a record when one day Leif became famous. Now Leif was famous, and if Leif were to speak up just a little, the world was ready not only to record but also to transmit everything he said. In the end it wasn’t as a poet, though, that he had become famous.
“I thought the reason you liked that poem was because it was about being alone,” Raleigh said.
“There have to be trees if you want to be alone. There has to be something alive that is protecting you but isn’t watching you.”
“So are we in ‘paradise’ now? If paradise is a ring of ‘trees’?” Raleigh asked, looking back at the journalists.
“No,” Leif said, annoyed that he wasn’t being understood. “We weren’t in paradise then, either.”
* * *
—
Leif didn’t want to leave, so he and Raleigh kept talking where they stood, leaning toward each other across the counter. Greg patrolled the café, retrieving an empty coffee cup here, wiping down a tabletop there.
Their talk was interrupted every so often by Leif’s cough, which his night in jail seemed to have brought back. He was having trouble sleeping. Maybe it was the steroid they had put him back on.
He wondered if it was making him a little manic. He kept coming up with ideas for poems, faster than he could come up with the words for them. But maybe he was just trying not to think about what he had done to his friends.
One idea, for example, was that all of Marvell’s poems were really a single poem. There was only one garden, protected by only one wall of trees. There was only one beloved, who was either a little girl or a woman who wasn’t quite ready to be in love. Or maybe it was the poet himself who wasn’t quite ready—or who was, if he was honest with himself, a little girl. He would rather stay in the garden, was what he kept finding different ways of saying, because everything outside had been built on a foundation under one corner of which a severed head has been rolled. Everything outside stood upright only because the forces striving on either side to topple it happened to be in matched opposition, “fastening the contignation which they thwart,” as Marvell put it.
Another idea was about a rule the British navy had in the eighteenth century requiring warships to stay in line while fighting. It made maneuvering clumsier than it had to be, but it also made it easier to spot any captain hanging back to save his own neck. Leif thought that today the authorities did the same thing with information. A government employee pretended not to know the contents of State Department cables released by Wikileaks—he stayed in line. Half a dozen newspapers ran articles about a conference call that all of them had had with the same government official, and none of the newspapers named the official—they stayed in line.
His talk seemed to get faster the longer he kept talking. “Maybe you are a little manic,” Raleigh said.
“Just listen. Then there’s confusion. The ostensibly democratic confusion of the internet.” The energy in his voice—the speed and the note of panic in it—was running a current between the two of them. As if instead of Leif’s ring of trees there were for the moment an electric fence. “A true statement can be reliably distinguished from a false one only by someone knowledgeable about the subject matter, and since no one can become knowledgeable about more than two or three fields, everyone who wants to understand the world has to depend on experts. The internet makes it easy for everyone everywhere to say anything, which is too many people to control, but because it’s hard to become an expert, there are only ever a limited number of them, which makes them easier to control. Experts can’t function as experts unless they can speak under their own names. A name is just a shortcut, but without it, you have to become an expert yourself every time you want to know whether someone claiming to be an expert really is. So if the authorities can keep a few experts in line and discredit the rest with witch hunts or personal attacks, information becomes indistinguishable from misinformation. Telling them apart becomes too much work. It doesn’t matter if the secrets get told because almost no one can recognize them.