by Caleb Crain
“Which leads me to my fourth idea, which is that a person who still does tell the truth, when there’s so little point, is probably going to have something wrong with him. Because it’s such a stupid thing to do. He’s going to be damaged somehow. Not an insider, because an insider knows better. And not an outsider, either, because that takes a kind of strength that’s too easy to recognize. No one on the inside would make the mistake of giving an outsider a secret. It’s always going to be someone awkward, not quite realized, not fully assembled. A little broken. Someone easy to ignore, without anyone even making a conscious decision to ignore him. A throwaway person.”
“You should write all this down,” said Raleigh.
“The point is they’re not going to listen to us even if we’re not wrong.”
The room was silent when the murmur of Leif’s talk stopped. Some of the television crew members were still watching Leif and Raleigh, fixedly. Leif should add a theory about how sometimes you couldn’t tell somebody something because they wanted to know it for the wrong reason. Unfortunately, once Leif was convicted, no reporter was ever going to seek him out for his ideas again. It probably wasn’t his ideas that they wanted even now.
“But you got through,” Raleigh said. “And you weren’t supposed to be able to. There has to be something to it.”
“To what?”
“To whatever we’re calling it. The refinement of the perception of feelings.”
Leif seemed not to want to join Raleigh in the acknowledgment.
“You know they’re on our side online?” Raleigh continued. “That’s what Elspeth told me.”
“Are they?” Leif asked. He looked from Raleigh to the television crew members as if it hadn’t occurred to him that any of them might harbor goodwill.
Raleigh wondered, while Leif looked, why Leif thought of himself as broken. Thought of all of them as broken.
“It’s because they know we won’t make it,” Leif said, after having studied the ring of watchers for a little while. “If they’re on our side, it’s because that way there will be more pathos for them to feel when we go down.”
* * *
—
After Raleigh left, it occurred to him that Elspeth would have wanted him to ask whether Leif had spoken with his mother yet and whether he liked his lawyer and how things were with Matthew more specifically. But he wasn’t going back to Elspeth’s. He was just taking the subway home.
There hadn’t been a subway running between Elspeth’s apartment and his when they had started dating. Later, during a yearlong spate of construction, the authorities had rerouted a line so that it did run between them. It turned out that there was an appetite for travel between Elspeth’s establishment neighborhood and Raleigh’s edgy one, and the authorities had recently decided to continue the connection indefinitely. But Raleigh might not ever make the trip again. Unless he came back now and then to see Leif at his café.
He walked along the platform to the position where his staircase would be waiting when he exited at his station.
A train rumbled in—one of the boxy, rattly older trains. The breeze that it forced into the station brushed Raleigh, and then the air grew still. It was the middle of the day on a weekday, and there were plenty of seats. The other passengers looked quiet. People who rode the subway at this hour usually were. The elderly. The unemployed. People who had gotten themselves excused from their jobs for an hour or two in order to respond to death, illness, or some lesser misfortune.
Raleigh wished he had asked Leif what they were going to do, but maybe they had both sensed that the topic hadn’t been safe to talk about.
He shut his eyes. He hadn’t slept that much the night before; he and Julia had tossed and turned. Between stations, rocked by the train, he dropped briefly into sleep. At the next station he opened his eyes and without focusing on anything in particular watched the doors scroll open, stand empty, and scroll shut. He let his eyes close again, and as the train was urged forward by its engines, he fell asleep more deeply.
He dreamt that he was in the emergency room at the end of Elspeth’s block. He had been injured, but the injury had happened in another timeline, and no one could see it yet in this one. It was only just starting to cross over. It was like an exposure on undeveloped film. Greg was at the triage desk, pretending to be a doctor. He was addicted to a drug that he could get at the ER; that was why he was pretending. A trapdoor to the cellar was propped open behind him. The drug was inside, under green shadows. It was just mint tea, Greg said. Did Raleigh want any? But they had only given Raleigh aspirin last time Raleigh protested.
“We weren’t in paradise then,” Greg said.
Raleigh tore himself awake.
He was aware of stiffness in his lips, as if in his dream he had been trying to speak but hadn’t been able to. He rubbed his mouth.
The subway car shuddered and clacked as it continued to carry him. In its yellow light, the triage desk, the figure who must have been Greg, and the trapdoor began to lose their substance.
He had slept through a few stops, but he hadn’t missed the one nearest his apartment. In real life he had never been to that emergency room.
The fear he had felt in his dream, strangely, didn’t go away. At first he couldn’t figure out why. In his dream, the fear had had something to do with a shadow that was still developing.
Suddenly he remembered: he had been charged with a crime. In waking life. He felt himself blush. Whenever he woke up now he was going to have to remember.
* * *
—
When Raleigh opened the door to his apartment, he saw Jeremy sitting at the island table in the kitchen, tapping the keyboard of his laptop with one hand while the other hand played with his beard. His golden young-patriarch’s beard. It took a moment for him to look up and greet Raleigh; he must have been trying to finish a thought. “Where’ve you been?” he asked.
“Out.”
Jeremy’s attention dropped back to whatever he was writing. He was drinking a mug of herbal tea with a pungent, grandmotherly smell.
It was late afternoon, and Raleigh still hadn’t eaten. In the refrigerator there was only the same white pizza box that had been there since Sunday. “This is a week old.”
“Go get something, then,” Jeremy replied.
“Can I have some of this soda?”
“It’s not mine.”
“Where’s Philip?”
“He’s trying to score with a reporter.”
Raleigh took the soda. “That’s so wrong.”
“They’re just people.”
“Who, gays?”
Jeremy sat back from the table. “Reporters. Reporters are just people.”
Raleigh took a swig. “Does that mean you’re talking to them?”
“I’m not not talking to them.”
“Why?” Raleigh asked.
“Because you and your friends are going to be on trial and I imagine you’re going to want to keep the public on your side.”
Raleigh took another swig, a longer one. The soda sloshed and fizzed noisily. “I really appreciate what you’re doing.”
“You’re such an asshole.”
“I’m serious,” Raleigh said. Then he belched, with mildly ironized shamelessness.
“I’m putting up a website for you,” Jeremy said.
“For me or for all of us?”
“All of you.” He twiddled a pencil stub. “I can’t interview you directly, but your lawyers can tell me things sometimes.”
“I’ll ask Felix.”
“He wanted you to go in and see him today.”
“He did?”
“He called this morning.”
Raleigh checked the clock on the stove. “Fuck.”
“And your mother called last night. I told her you were at Elspeth’s.”
“Well, I didn’t know that, man.”
It was probably all right. If Elspeth and his mother had compared notes, one of them would have said something to him this morning, so they must not have.
“I’m thinking we could sell those T-shirts,” Jeremy suggested.
“My T-shirts?”
“Didn’t Elspeth make some?”
“That was actually Julia. You should talk to her about it.”
Jeremy added an item to a to-do list. It was strange to see him taking note of something Raleigh said. Raleigh was pretty sure he had never done it before.
“You could post one of Leif’s poems,” said Raleigh. “He’s working on one right now that’s going to be great. It’s going to synthesize a lot of what’s going on.”
“My idea is the website will be more about advocacy.”
“Well, he’s probably going to want to send it somewhere like n+1, anyway.”
“Does n+1 print poetry?” Jeremy asked.
Jeremy’s phone whirred on the tabletop, like an insect against glass. “Oklahoma,” Jeremy said. He unlocked the phone and handed it to Raleigh.
“Dad, you can call my old number now,” Raleigh said as he walked to the loft’s front windows. “Didn’t Mom tell you?” The windows went down almost to the floor, and you could look down through them at the tops of the heads of pedestrians. At their tonsures.
“Did she?” his father wondered.
“What’s up?”
“Oh, nothing.” He never liked to rush into a conversation.
“Is everything all right?” Raleigh asked.
“You know, I’ve been thinking, as I’ve been watching this . . . I’ve been watching all day.” He preferred to back into his ideas, as cautiously as if he were parallel-parking.
“Thinking what, Dad?”
“Do you think it’s accurate, the way they’re talking about it? They’re talking about it as a privacy issue.”
“I haven’t been watching.”
“Because it occurred to me that it could be secrets, that’s the other way of looking at it. It could be that your group doesn’t want the government to have secrets.”
“The idea of the group was honesty.”
“See? See?” his father said. “But the media make it about themselves. About their concerns.”
“I think the media worry about secrets, too, Dad.”
“If you were to give an interview . . .”
“I don’t think Felix would want me to do that.”
“Well, he’s a lawyer, isn’t he. You know, it’s overwhelming, if you’re watching, and I’ve been watching since yesterday. They show your picture over and over, but we never hear you say anything.”
“I think I should listen to Felix.”
“But if this is bigger than that . . . ,” his father hinted.
* * *
—
A placard near the ceiling listed salads and sandwiches. He had brought Elspeth here once, before they had figured out that they liked her neighborhood better, and she had ordered the barley and arugula.
“You go ahead,” he told the woman behind him in line.
“Oh,” she said. She seemed embarrassed by his offer.
When he tried again to read the placard, he became aware that he was doing so self-consciously. A woman ahead of him in line was eyeing him sideways while playing with the lapels of her boyfriend’s coat. A man in glasses, waiting for his meal, had shifted to get a better view of Raleigh’s face. The reporters in Leif’s café had known who Raleigh was, of course, but because it had been their job to know and because Leif had been their primary interest, Raleigh had been somewhat shielded from the uncanniness of this kind of attention.
It was like moving in a field of static. Was there anything he could get out of it? Maybe the number of the girl he had just let skip his place in line?
A man with curly hair held up a cell phone and took Raleigh’s picture.
“What the fuck,” Raleigh said, with sudden rage. Everyone in this part of the city was supposed to be too cool to be obvious. Everyone in the city was supposed to be too cool.
The man glanced at Raleigh and then back at his phone.
“Seriously, what the fuck,” Raleigh said.
The man pocketed his phone and blinked.
“Dude, you could be a little more gracious,” said the man whose girlfriend had been playing with his lapels.
“Are you talking to me or him?” Raleigh asked.
The man with the girlfriend shook his head and faced forward.
When Raleigh’s turn came, he gave his order in the same public tone of voice in which he had challenged the man who had photographed him.
At a shallow counter where you could eat standing up if you had nowhere to go, he unlocked his phone. Julia at least was an adult. “Should I come over?” he asked when she picked up. Let them wonder.
“Do you want to? Actually, there’s something I need to tell you.”
“Can you just tell me now?”
“Aren’t they listening?”
“Who?” he asked.
“The people who took our phones. The people who have our phones.”
“So it isn’t about us.”
“This thing isn’t,” she answered.
“But another thing is?”
“I haven’t made up my mind.”
“Is it a good thing or a bad thing?” he asked.
“About us? I think it’s bad.”
“You’re so brutal.”
“Not because I mean to be,” she said. The nice thing about cheating was that there were no shoulds, at least between the two doing the cheating. There were only feelings, so everyone had to be lighthearted about them.
He remembered, though, that officially he wasn’t cheating anymore. “I have something to tell you, too,” he said.
“Raleigh?” said the counter guy. Raleigh’s sandwich was ready. He found that as long as he stayed on the phone, he didn’t care that much about the staring at him.
* * *
—
On Julia’s block, a couple of buildings in from the corner, there was a ledge that had caught Raleigh’s eye—a lip of concrete around a flight of stairs down to a basement dry cleaner’s. From the sidewalk to the ledge was a little high, but high in an interesting way, as Leif liked to say. Of course, the drop on the inside of the lip was even steeper.
It was hard to find a good spot in the city that hadn’t already been skated to death, and Raleigh was always on the lookout. He hadn’t seen videos of anyone skating this one. You’d have to wait until after business hours, though, if you didn’t want to deal with people from the dry cleaner’s yelling. He didn’t use to worry about that. He used to carry his board with him more, too.
That was how it happened: gradually and then all at once.
He rang Julia’s buzzer. He looked through the glass of her front door at the green carpet accordioned over the treads and risers of the stairs and at the squat and dowdy newel, like the rook in an old chess set. It would only be poetic justice if Julia broke up with him now that he had broken up with Elspeth. She owed him at least a mercy fuck if she did, though.
As she came downstairs, his first sight was of her feet, in socks, and he suddenly remembered the way she had given herself to him the night before, and he wanted her again. It was a class thing, maybe. People of her class, when they fucked, fucked absolutely.
He was so stupid about her.
“Did you grow up with horses?” he asked, when she opened the door.
“In the city?” she asked. “I mean, I know how to ride.”
“Yeah, that’s what I mean.”
“But that’s like knowing how to swim,” she protested.
“No it’s not.”
Even while walking up a flight of stairs she seemed to be thinking about her posture.
“So what did you want to tell me?” he asked.
“Wait till we get inside. I can put on music.”
“I don’t need music.”
“Don’t we need it in case we’re bugged?”
“I don’t think they can bug us after we’ve been arrested.”
Inside the apartment she stopped beside the door.
“What?” he asked.
“I just wanted to say hello.”
Usually she held him off for a while, but she played these games.
“I do have a few things to tell you,” she said, after a minute.
She took ice cubes and vodka out of her freezer. It always felt as if they were getting away with something. Or as if they were forcing a mechanism that it wouldn’t be possible to force for very much longer.
She poured drinks.
“Are you breaking up with me?” he asked.
“Is there a going out that would need to be broken up?”
“We’re seeing each other.”
“I don’t remember saying that.”
“It’s what we’ve been doing.”
“Oh, facts,” she said dismissively.
They sat in opposite corners of the same sofa. She slipped a foot out of its shoe and stretched it toward him.
“What I wanted to tell you—well, it’s one of the things I wanted to tell you—is that I’m writing about this.”