Overthrow

by Caleb Crain

“About us?”

  “Oh, I hadn’t thought about us.” She looked at the ceiling. “You know, if ‘us’ comes into it, I might change ‘us’ a little. I might . . . time-shift ‘us.’”

  “Then what are you writing about?”

  “All of it,” she answered.

  “Does your lawyer know?”

  “I’m not writing about it now,” she said. “I’m making a point of knowing about it now, for the sake of writing,” she continued. “Of experiencing as much of it as I can. Does that sound crazy?”

  “I broke up with Elspeth this morning,” he volunteered.

  “Why?”

  “‘Why?’?”

  “Yes,” she said. “No.” She retracted her foot.

  “I can’t say to her that I love her anymore.” His voice sounded more vulnerable than he had expected it to.

  “How sad,” she said with polite pity.

  “What was it you wanted to tell me?” he asked.

  “I visited Chris.” Her ice cubes had melted into the grooves of her glass, and she shook the glass to swing the cubes around, loop the loop. “He said he’s working for the police or whoever it is.”

  “Did he say anything else?” Raleigh asked.

  “You knew?” she asked.

  “It doesn’t surprise me.”

  “In other words, you didn’t know. You shouldn’t pretend to know if you don’t know.”

  “I wasn’t pretending anything.”

  “Are you mad about something?” she asked. “I said it was sad,” she continued, going back to the subject of Elspeth. “My Wellbutrin seems to be getting in the way of this vodka. Do you want a refill?”

  The freezer door thunked. “Did you see Leif’s lawyer on TV?” she called to him. “He gave—I guess it was a press conference. It’s so stupid that we can’t go on the internet. But they might still be recycling it on TV, if you want me to try to find it.”

  “What did he say?”

  “It was very sweet, really. He thinks there’s a right to play. He was just maybe a little too optimistic, for a lawyer.”

  “To play?”

  “The way children do. As part of our common human inheritance.”

  “Oh no.”

  “A right to learn about the world by not taking it seriously. What? I think it’s really sweet.”

  “Diana found him, didn’t she. He’s an Occupy guy.”

  “He’s blond, and he has these cheekbones. As if he spends most of his day talking to elves or something. Although he’s not talking to any now. Whenever they run the clip on TV, they cut to the DA saying in a deep voice that there’s no right to play with the safety and privacy of others.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Oh, it’s not that bad. He says it’s because of Occupy. The elf says. Even just six months ago we might not have been able to see that we have a right to play. We’re living at a historical advent.”

  “Is Diana a lesbian?” Raleigh asked.

  “Diana?”

  “Jeremy said something about it as if everybody knew.”

  “She seems so nice,” Julia commented.

  “She’s great.”

  “Are you afraid she’s making a move on Elspeth?”

  “No. Jesus.”

  “You could have feelings about it,” said Julia.

  “That’s not why I asked.”

  “Maybe you have feelings, though.”

  “I don’t have feelings.”

  Maybe he and Julia were beginning to drift apart. Like boats that by virtue of being just a few feet away from each other are subject to slightly different currents and breezes. He reminded himself that even if he was admitting to himself that he was still in love with Elspeth, he might still want to spend the night with Julia. He might for that reason want to spend it with her all the more.

  “Your friend Jeremy called,” Julia said. “The Committee to Save the Telepathy Four wants to sell my T-shirts.”

  “Is that what he’s calling it?”

  “It sounds very superhero, doesn’t it.”

  “We were a working group, not a committee,” Raleigh objected.

  “That moment may have passed.”

  “It’s getting colder now, but Occupy will come back.”

  “Colder?” She was puzzled. “Oh, you mean colder for people who want to sleep outside.”

  “It’s going to come back in the spring,” he insisted.

  * * *

  —

  The law school was in a white high-rise. Raleigh expected there to be a rampart-like desk in the lobby where he would have to present his driver’s license, but there were only students, streaming across an empty, speckled-marble floor, untalkative perhaps because it was morning.

  The absence of a desk didn’t put Raleigh at ease. The authority that would have belonged to it devolved to the students, who weren’t paying any attention to him. They were dressed like students anywhere; they weren’t wearing suits, as Raleigh realized he had more than half expected them to. They were only a little younger than he was. Probably they weren’t any smarter, but in a few years they would be making serious money, from positions inside the machine. He was inside a machine, too, when he went to his job, but he tried also to be outside it. Tried a little too hard, maybe.

  In the elevator, which his fellow passengers rode in silence, Raleigh wondered why Matthew had chosen graduate school in English literature instead of law. It was probably the sort of mistake that someone gay was more likely to make—pursuing the aura left behind by power instead of power itself.

  He himself didn’t envy the law students, he was pretty sure. He was part of a cause, and none of them was ever likely to be. At the courthouse, the day before yesterday, Felix had said he was excited about the case. It raised important First Amendment issues.

  The carpeting on the fourteenth floor muffled the chime of the departing elevator. Along a corridor, tall oak doors, flanked by columnar panes of frosted green glass, marked off each office. In the tech support department where Raleigh worked, no one had a private or even a designated work space anymore—you checked out a desk for the day only—but disruption didn’t seem to have stripped any perquisites from law professors yet. On a bench, a few students were reading, pens in hand, while they waited. One looked up at Raleigh and grimaced not because she recognized him but because she didn’t.

  When he had stopped in at his job to explain the restrictions the judge had imposed, a co-worker had been sitting at the desk where Raleigh usually sat, which had a direct sight line to a window. By next week he would have lost dibs on it.

  Taped to the lawyer’s door was his most recent op-ed. The column of text was punctuated by a small black-and-white square photo of the lawyer’s distinctive curly hair and heavy-frame glasses.

  “It’s open,” Raleigh heard Felix call, from deeper inside the office than Raleigh had guessed that it extended.

  The distinctive curls and glasses rose to greet him. Famous people had to continue to be who they were. The constraint was one reason they were so widely trusted and liked.

  Raleigh’s eye picked out a dozen identical bright spines on a bookshelf—copies of Felix’s book. Nearby, in twos and threes, were the Italian, French, and German editions. On a credenza sat a boxy plexiglas-and-aluminum apparatus, which Raleigh recognized as a device for digitizing ink-on-paper books. It didn’t look as if it had ever been used, but maybe you wouldn’t be able to tell.

  “Sorry I didn’t get your message in time yesterday,” Raleigh said.

  Felix waved off the apology.

  “Yesterday morning I ported my old number to a new phone, and I think maybe I thought—”

  “Do I have that number?” the law professor interrupted. He looked into his phone. “I have a number for Jeremy and a number for your mother and a number
for someone named Elspeth.”

  “I’m probably not going to be at Elspeth’s much anymore.”

  Felix nodded, deleting her number.

  “We’re maybe not a couple anymore,” Raleigh explained.

  “A trial can put a lot of stress on a relationship,” Felix said. He paused in case Raleigh was going to say more. “Listen, thanks for coming in. I wanted to talk with you a little about where my thinking is on the case and where I see us going with it.”

  The lawyer got up again to close and lock the door. They were protected by attorney-client privilege now, Raleigh suspected. He needed to pee, but he had just got there.

  “The law that you’re accused of breaking covers access to computers,” the lawyer continued, as he returned to his desk, “and I’d like to argue that that’s what this case is about. There’s a lot of talk right now about what you and your friends may have thought you were doing, but in this particular case I think your thoughts matter much less to the law than what you actually were doing. Your thoughts would really only be relevant if we were going to try to prove your motives—which, by the way, I see as an intention to carry out a kind of protest, and I think we should accept and even embrace the link that social media and the press have been making between your group and the Occupy movement more generally.”

  Felix had already taken a kind of left turn in what he was saying, which Raleigh hadn’t quite followed, but Felix would probably come back to the main road before long, and Raleigh would be able to catch up then. He shouldn’t slow Felix down with his not understanding any more than he should slow him down with his having to pee or with his no longer having the same girlfriend.

  “Your state of mind would really only be a useful defense if we were going to argue that you were influenced. Influence has crossed my mind. I do worry about it. I’d probably worry more if you were to, say, insist on holding on to a particular construction of what you were doing. Because that would be a sign, wouldn’t it? If you were so attached to an unusual construction that had been put on things that you were willing to compromise your defense.”

  “An unusual construction,” Raleigh murmured, as if he understood.

  “Am I missing something? Did you give your friend money, for instance?”

  “Who? Elspeth?”

  “Leif Saunderson. Did he take part of your paycheck every two weeks, did you pay his rent for him, anything like that.”

  “Leif would never ask for money.”

  “Because he doesn’t need it? Because he’s above money?”

  “He has a job.”

  “Did he ever ask you not to communicate with a friend or a family member?”

  “No,” said Raleigh.

  “Yeah, see, it’s something to think about, but I don’t think there’s anything there. And so we can just set your friends to one side, as far as I’m concerned, and say, ‘This is a story about the internet and whether you can make a protest on the internet.’ And the person at the center of the story, if we tell it this way, is you, which has some risks but gives us a little more control. You were the one with the computer skills to do what you did.”

  It would be almost rude at this point to say that he had to pee, because it would suggest that he hadn’t been giving Felix his full attention. “But we didn’t . . . ,” Raleigh began. He uncrossed his legs, which helped. “I didn’t . . .”

  “Go on,” Felix prompted. He was always very amiable, Raleigh noticed, even if he knew you were about to contradict him.

  “I didn’t do anything that required any special skills,” said Raleigh.

  “It may not have seemed extraordinary to someone with your experience, but . . . Listen. The rules for discovery in this state are tremendously unfair to defendants, so if they were making a log or record on the server side or if they were able to extract one from your laptop, I may not be able to get copies of that until literally the last minute. Until literally the day of. So it might be a surprise how much they know. For some categories of evidence they have to give notice before the trial and with those categories we may have a chance to kick the tires a little in hearings, and sometimes I can get quite a bit that way. And then if there are federal charges, the rules in the federal courts are a little better for discovery. Technically a federal case is a separate legal matter, by the way, and if you’re going to want me to represent you there as well we’re going to need for your parents to sign another letter of understanding, but we can do all that electronically, like last time. . . . Are you all right? You look a little pale.”

  “I’m fine,” Raleigh said, and he nodded vaguely but he hoped reassuringly. He didn’t want his personal discomfort to delay Felix or trip him up in any way. He himself was making an effort to think his way past it. “I really didn’t do anything,” he said. He was repeating himself, but it was starting to feel urgent to him to tell Felix the whole story. He had been holding in the details, he realized, waiting for Felix to ask about them, and he couldn’t hold them in any longer; he needed to get them out. “I accessed the login page through a proxy, just to be on the safe side. And then Leif read Bresser’s password. That’s what we called it, reading. Which just means that Leif guessed the password, you could say. That’s all there was to it. There was no brute-force attack. There was no exploit. We didn’t do an SQL injection or anything. It was just—we walked in, through the front door.”

  “Your friend knew the password,” said the lawyer.

  “No, I mean, well, yes, somehow he knew it,” said Raleigh.

  The lawyer’s smile was frozen.

  “You don’t believe that,” Raleigh said.

  “What’s important is that I believe you,” Felix replied. “What’s important is that I believe that you’re telling me what you think is the truth.”

  “Okay.” This wasn’t going so well, Raleigh suddenly felt. Not going so well entirely apart from the problem of his mind filling up with unpeed pee. He looked out the window behind Felix’s head. They were high up, and it seemed to be an empty vista, which was unusual for the city. Almost no grand buildings had gone up in the neighborhoods that the window overlooked, because until recently only people of color had lived there, and it was only in the past few years that money had seen anything to gain in taking their houses from them.

  “By the way, it’s too late now, of course, but if you ever pass this way again, next time don’t just give the cop your password when he asks for it,” Felix said. “That was a rampart we probably could have defended for at least a little while. But onward. How did you know Bresser’s company was tracking you?”

  “We didn’t, really.”

  “Don’t tell the internet,” said the lawyer. “They think this is Hack Counterhack.”

  It might turn out to be difficult to be something other than what the internet thought you were. Especially if the internet thought you represented a cause, and if a belief that you did represent one was one of the few reasons you still liked yourself. “I think mostly we just wanted to see how much we could do.” It was safe for him to confess to Felix, wasn’t it? “We were just being assholes, really.”

  Felix folded his hands and hid his mouth behind them. “Chris Finn is cooperating with the DA’s team now,” the lawyer said.

  “I know,” Raleigh replied.

  “You know?”

  “Julia told me.”

  “You had a recent conversation with Julia?” the lawyer asked.

  Raleigh nodded. He was keeping his pee in now only with an effort of will that he had to keep willing, consciously. Straightening his spine helped, the way that uncrossing his legs had helped, but only if he didn’t straighten it too much.

  “In this conversation with Julia,” the lawyer asked, “did you tell her anything about the case? Mention anything about what you did or what you think happened?”

  “I don’t know. No.”

 
; “Raleigh, it’s not a good idea for you to talk with your co-defendants right now.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “What if Chris Finn isn’t the only one cooperating?” the lawyer suggested.

  Raleigh nodded. He had to consider the possibility that he was a fool, of course. “The whole idea of our group was that we talk about things,” he said, in order to explain himself, and as he said it, he peed himself a little, just a tiny bit, but not enough, he was pretty sure, for any to actually come out.

  “That can’t be your idea anymore. Not right now. Not for a little while.”

  He was alone, Felix was telling him. Everyone from the working group was alone now, separately. “I saw Leif, too, yesterday,” he confessed.

  Felix dipped his head toward his desk, as if Raleigh had aimed a blow at him and he were accepting it.

  “Leif would never work for the other side,” Raleigh added.

  “When you say something like that, what I understand is that you care about him,” Felix commented.

  “I don’t have the gift he has,” Raleigh went on.

  “I wouldn’t be able to represent you if you thought you did.”

  “I mean, I can’t show it to you, is what I mean,” Raleigh explained. “I can’t make you believe it. Do I need to tell you if I keep seeing my friends?”

  “I’ll continue to represent you for as long as it’s possible for me to, ethically speaking,” Felix replied. “Your friend Jeremy seems like a good guy.”

  Raleigh was getting tired of Jeremy.

  “He’s your roommate, is that right? He has everyone’s ear right now. You know how the internet is. His website is a source people trust right now. We should make use of it.”

  “We should?”

  “Carefully, but we should make use of it.”

  “But I thought you don’t want me to talk to people.”

  “I don’t. Don’t talk to him. I think the ideal, as far as this kind of thing goes, is when a site like his is running while a defendant is in jail and really can’t communicate. But you can talk to me, and I can talk to Jeremy. And with a friend like Jeremy, you can talk to him directly so long as you don’t talk about the case.”