Overthrow

by Caleb Crain

  With a friend like Jeremy. With a vulture whom they could trust because he shared the professional interest that all vultures have. The professional interest in carcasses.

  “Can I tell you what I like about your case, Raleigh?” Felix continued. “It’s that you knew without knowing how you knew, and that’s where everybody is right now. Everybody in America. That’s where the government has put us. I think we’re going to find out how you knew, of course. I think we’re going to find out that because of the participation of Chris Finn or someone else there was something very much like entrapment going on, quite early. But the thing is, you felt like you knew, and I don’t see how anyone could get from that feeling to actually knowing, unless they did what you did. You did what you did in protest. That, after all, is the definition of protest: you broke a small law in order to make a large point.”

  “I heard that Leif’s lawyer thinks there’s a right of play.”

  “No no no. There’s no right of play. No. But there’s a right to privacy. And there’s a right to be free of government search in the absence of a warrant. Those rights were violated by the government, and whenever we’ve come close to catching the government at this kind of violation, in the past, one of the government’s defenses has always been that if a citizen like you doesn’t know that your privacy is being violated, then how can you be said to be harmed? But in this case you were harmed. The violation caused you unease. It did reach you somehow. I’m not saying it’s a mystery. As I say, I think we’re going to find out that somebody somewhere told somebody something that they shouldn’t have. But we have to expect that that’s what’s always going to happen, if the government is free to track anyone it wants to. It’s the sort of thing that’s bound to happen.”

  The restroom was probably on this floor somewhere. Did he have time to ask where? Did he have time not to ask where? But what he said was, “There’s a symmetry,” as if he had all the time in the world.

  “Exactly. A symmetry.”

  “So should we countersue?”

  “Countersue! I love it. No no. We’re probably going to lose, Raleigh.”

  There. There, for a second. For almost a whole second he hadn’t been able to stop the unstopping. But if Raleigh didn’t look down then maybe Felix wouldn’t look down, either.

  Felix was still talking. “I think there’s a reasonable chance that we’ll be able to avoid more than minimal prison time, more than symbolic prison time, but the letter of the law was against you when you made that move from feeling to knowing. You had to go against the letter of the law, in order to make that move. So be it. What’s great about this case is that we’re going to establish some principles and answer some questions and put some facts on the record, even if we don’t prevail.”

  “Is there a restroom on this floor?” Raleigh asked.

  “A restroom?” Felix echoed.

  Raleigh stood up. “I have to go.”

  “To the right, past the elevators,” Felix told him.

  “To the right, past the elevators,” Raleigh echoed.

  “It’ll be on your left.”

  “To the right, on my left.”

  The bench of law students looked up as he loped past. It wasn’t safe to run.

  His hands struggled flurryingly with his fly, and as he at last splashed into the porcelain, in the harbor of the well-appointed, faculty-grade men’s room, all blue tiles and frosted aqua glass, he found himself speaking aloud, questioningly, between sighs, the words “Prison time?”

  6.

  Blades of grass trembled as they were struck by the rain, like tines plucked by the rotor of a music box. It was warm, for Thanksgiving. A fecund and unpretty day. Maybe winter was going to be replaced by a rainy season, Matthew thought, and maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Rain seemed to make the world gentle and indirect.

  Fosco, the three-year-old yellow lab that belonged to his parents, suddenly lost patience with walking on Matthew’s left and crossed in front of him, surprising him with the purposive force with which she yanked against the leash. She padded obliviously through and across a stream of rainwater purling in the gutter and clambered up into the lawn that they happened to be walking beside. There she snorted three times, burying her snout deep in the wet grass with each whiff before lowering her hips and affixing the seal of her satisfaction.

  As Matthew waited, drops of rainwater wavered and associated on the brim of his cap. In case she was about to answer one call of nature with another, he touched the folded plume of plastic bag in his back pocket, as if he were doing so absentmindedly, the plastic constituting the flag of his good intentions as a dog walker in the neighborhood.

  He had left Leif asleep, unfolded in the bed that he himself had used to sleep in as a child. The room itself wasn’t Matthew’s anymore. Years ago he had prised out the thumbtacks that had held up his movie posters and his mother had repainted. A framed print of a peach-and-blue-colored lighthouse now hung above the spot where his desk had been. The desk had moved into what had once been his brother’s bedroom, next door, which was now his mother’s office. His brother’s bedroom had been repurposed, and his had been “staged,” like the homes of his mother’s clients if they moved before she was able to find a purchaser—lightened of its memories, furnished with an almost impersonal representation of habitability. The redecorating was a way for his mother to pretend to herself that she didn’t mind that her sons had left and a way for her to make a show of convincing them that she didn’t mind.

  The bed that had used to be his brother’s had gone to the attic, which had been the playroom when he and his brother were little, and hadn’t changed, except for a dormer window, which had never shut right and according to their mother had been letting in bats. It had had to be replaced.

  “Would Leif like to sleep in the attic?” his mother had asked, the night before, in the car, when she and Matthew’s father had picked Leif and him up at the train station.

  “No, he can have my bed,” Matthew had replied, “and I’ll set up the air bed on the floor. You still have the air bed, don’t you?”

  He had been aware of his father listening to the conversation from the driver’s seat; he had been aware of Leif, beside him, listening just as carefully. Neither Matthew nor his brother had ever brought anyone home before. No one in the family doubted that Brian would bring a girlfriend home one day, but at the moment domesticity wasn’t Brian’s style, and for once it was up to Matthew, the younger one, to be the pioneer. Matthew didn’t want Leif to know how nervous he was about it—about bringing into his parents’ house a living, breathing sign that their younger son fucked and liked fucking and liked for the partner of his fucking to be another man. He tried to tell himself that it probably wasn’t that different for straight people, the first time they brought someone to their parents’ house, except he knew that when the time came Brian wouldn’t give it a second thought.

  For an hour or two after saying good night, he and Leif had tried to share the twin bed. The darkness mantling the room had been familiar. As a teenager, Matthew had jacked off in it, in careful silence, so many times that the possibility of having sex in it now felt, unexpectedly, like a continuation rather than a departure. But Leif had been too shy to follow through, and when both of them were in the bed it had been impossible even to turn over without lurching and nearly knocking each other out of it. With two bodies so close under one blanket it had soon become uncomfortably warm. “You’re like a little furnace,” Leif had reproached him. In the end Matthew had given up on both sex and co-sleep, got into the air bed alone, and turned away, cradling his genitals in his fist for a while, under the covers, for consolation.

  Leif’s cough had kept him awake until it didn’t, and then Matthew had slept like the dead, for the first time in a long time.

  In the morning, he had been woken by Fosco snuffling repeatedly into the crack at the foot o
f the closed door. To give Leif more time to sleep, he had dressed and taken the dog out. Neither of his parents had emerged yet.

  And so here he and Fosco were, with the street to themselves, gray rain pittering dispersedly around them. Even when it wasn’t raining, children no longer played outdoors in the neighborhood. Maybe video games kept them inside; maybe the families on the street had simply grown older. The lawns were more fussily kept than Matthew remembered—the yews more vigilantly pruned, the velvety shingles of mulch more consistently confined within the borders of flower beds.

  The visit was going pretty well so far, in his estimation. Last night, in his parents’ kitchen, he and Leif had eaten bowls of cereal, for a snack, his mother checking the level inside the cereal box as she put it back in the pantry, to be sure that there was still enough left over for the morning. She had remarked that she and her husband understood that Leif worked in a coffee shop, and Leif had let go of his spoon and replied that he did, it was true, and Matthew’s father had asked what kind of coffee, and Leif had listed as many national origins of coffee served in his café as he could remember, Matthew’s mother and father nodding with cautious, stilted encouragement. “He’s really a poet,” Matthew had blurted out, and Leif had rolled his eyes, but Matthew’s father had taken the cue and had stolidly asked for names of the journals where Leif’s poems had appeared.

  “Your parents must be so proud,” Matthew’s mother had said. Matthew had watched Leif fail to answer, not sure how to respond, evidently not wanting to explain so soon after meeting Matthew’s parents that he wasn’t in touch with his father.

  Matthew had then watched his parents interpret Leif’s silence as modesty, which in a way it was.

  Leif’s charm, Matthew thought, was working. Or maybe it was only the opportunity that the visit gave his parents to see how Matthew himself looked at Leif. Did they appreciate Leif’s beauty? Were they able to? Matthew knew he had to be patient; they might still be suspicious of the beauty as a kind of superior force. They might still be suspicious of Leif himself. Leif tried at one point to thank them. “I’m so grateful—,” he had begun, awkwardly.

  “We know it’s the right thing to do,” Matthew’s mother had said, cutting him short.

  Matthew sensed, however, that his father would have liked to hear Leif’s thanks in full.

  It was all right. It was going to be all right.

  Matthew’s phone rang, and he fished it out of his pocket with the hand not holding the leash. “I’m walking the dog,” he told Elspeth. “Leif’s still inside asleep.”

  “A dog! What kind?”

  “A yellow lab. Dumb and selfish and greedy.”

  “Don’t say that about your dog.”

  “She’s not mine,” he said. “She’s the empty-nest dog.” Heedless of the discussion, Fosco froze and then lowered her head, having sighted a rabbit taking shelter in the dark skirts of a cypress. “I’ll tell Leif to call you back when he wakes up.”

  “No, I need to talk to you,” she said. “Michael Gauden charged Diana’s credit card.”

  “Diana’s?”

  “She gave it to him that first day. She doesn’t know I’m calling. I was there when she noticed it on her bill, and she said she guessed it would be her contribution, is the only reason I know about it. I know your parents are already being so generous.”

  “How much was it?”

  “About twenty-eight hundred dollars.”

  For a couple of days’ work. The side of town where Matthew’s parents lived was built on a hill, up which he and Fosco were gradually proceeding, a long, slow hill that, as was always explained to new arrivals in town, served as an objective correlative of the relative financial net worth of the households along it. Blocks ahead, at the top, were mansions with a view of the distant city. Matthew’s parents lived more than halfway down, where the houses were still faced with brick and perfectly respectable but not grand.

  “Let me talk to my parents,” Matthew said. “Thank you for telling me.”

  Was he going to ruin them?

  “You don’t think Diana will be offended, do you?” Elspeth worried. “If she’s thinking of it as her gift to him and if we take it away from her? She only knows Leif through Occupy, but I think she really likes him.”

  “Let me make sure my parents can do it first.”

  “Okay, I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you for telling me,” he said again, as if he were confident. He put on the manner not in order to fool her—this was Elspeth—but to save himself and his parents face and to signal that the awkwardness of not knowing whether they could bear the burden was not for Elspeth to worry about.

  He pocketed the phone. How stupid he had been to go to grad school. He was thirty-one, and he could do nothing to take care of his lover but hope that his parents would take care of him.

  * * *

  —

  A hollow-eyed Leif was sitting up on the edge of the bed, still in his T-shirt and boxers.

  “What’s going on?” Matthew asked.

  “I deserve it.”

  “You don’t deserve anything,” Matthew said. Leif had begun to have these spells, and it was hard to know what to say during them.

  “I led my friends into danger,” Leif said.

  “People make their own decisions.”

  “I’m not going to be able to pay your parents back. I’m a waiter, and my mother cleans the houses of summer people.”

  “They’re not expecting you to pay them back.”

  “I should just get a public defender.”

  “Like Chris?” Matthew asked.

  Leif returned to staring at the middle distance. “What if I stop wanting to go out with you?” he asked.

  Matthew held his breath. They had had this conversation a few times now, too. “Do you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t do this,” Matthew said.

  “I’m not a loyal person. I’m not a one-dog man or whatever. There have been a lot of dogs. A history of short-term dogs.”

  “I have to give Fosco her meds,” Matthew remembered. “Do you want to come downstairs and have breakfast?”

  “Shouldn’t I shower?”

  “Before breakfast? It’s just my parents.”

  “I’ll wash my face.”

  Matthew waited on the bed beside the snug dimple that Leif’s buttocks had left in the comforter. He listened to the white shivering of the tap water in the next room as it ran over Leif’s face and hands. He wondered what his parents thought of his having chosen a boyfriend so much younger. He wondered what they thought of his inability to provide any more than just barely enough for himself, let alone for Leif. Whether they thought these facts said anything about him.

  In the kitchen, his mother was wearing her morning kimono. She offered to make eggs so he and Leif wouldn’t have to eat cereal twice in a row.

  “But that’s our fault,” Leif said.

  “I really don’t mind. Do you like eggs?”

  “I need to give Fosco her meds,” Matthew said.

  “Oh, would you?” said his mother. “She takes point-one milliliters of the bromide. You squirt it in at the back of her throat.”

  “I remember.”

  “And the other is a pill that goes in a little dab of peanut butter. I usually put it on one of the tea saucers. A whole pill.”

  “A whole pill?”

  “We had to go up. She started seeing things.” She explained to Leif: “That’s her symptom.”

  “Her symptom?” Leif asked.

  “Her prodrome,” Matthew said. “It’s the sign that a seizure is coming on.”

  “What does she see?” Leif asked.

  “Things that aren’t there,” Matthew’s mother replied. “Flies, we think, from the way she looks around, but of course she can’t
tell us.”

  “Maybe I should take some of these pills,” said Leif.

  Matthew’s mother didn’t acknowledge the joke. “It caused so much suspicion, when I asked to raise the dose,” she said. “It’s so regulated now. It’s all tracked.”

  “That’s so paranoid,” Matthew said.

  “Prescription drug abuse is a big thing in Vermont now, too,” said Leif.

  “Is it?” Matthew’s mother asked. “I remember there was a vogue for barbiturates back when I was a girl. Mother warned us not to ever let a doctor prescribe them to us. But I have to say, they’re wonderful for Fosco. She hasn’t had a seizure in almost a year.” She cut a thick chunk of butter into a sauté pan. It was an old stove, and when she lit one of the burners, she used a wooden match from a box. Very gradually the butter swiveled in the pan as its foot began to melt. “Do you like to watch the news?” she asked.

  “Not in the morning, Mom,” said Matthew.

  “Not in the morning. What a nice policy. Then do you want me to buy you a paper?”

  “I can still go online. It’s only Leif who can’t go online.”

  “Oh, I see,” she said.

  “I read the headlines to him,” Matthew said.

  “But that’s a good idea, buying a paper,” said Leif.

  “We can buy one from Sam here on the corner. Let me call and ask him to keep one for us. He’s a sweetheart.”

  “Okay,” agreed Leif.

  “Let me just do that right now,” Matthew’s mother said, rinsing and drying her hands before she picked up the telephone. “His real name is Osama, but he doesn’t go by that anymore.”

  Matthew thumbed open Fosco’s snout with one hand and depressed the syringe’s plunger with the other. “Say aah.” Fosco choked on the fluid, shook her head, and sneezed.

  “Poor thing,” said Matthew’s mother. “Every morning. But she likes the peanut butter.”

  While Matthew prepared the day’s saucer of medicated peanut butter, his mother called the corner convenience store, which was attached to a gas station, and asked in a musical voice for a newspaper to be put aside for her.