by Caleb Crain
“What if it’s all true?” Leif asked.
“It is all true,” Matthew said.
“That’s not what I mean.”
* * *
—
“You shouldn’t be doing this,” Matthew told his father, the next morning, through the kitchen window.
“I’m fine.”
“Stand behind him in case he falls,” Matthew told Leif.
“The only problem with my back is if I lean over,” his father said. He was standing on a flimsy, stackable lawn chair, his arms up and out and slightly wandering. It would have been safer to pull the air conditioner into the house, but the upper sash was jammed, and so Matthew was pushing it out of the window and lowering it toward his father.
“I don’t think he should be on that chair,” said Matthew’s mother, from the next window. “Oh!” she exclaimed.
“I’m not going to fall,” Matthew’s father declared, his arms trembling as he held the machine.
“Let Leif hold it, too,” Matthew ordered.
“Got it,” Leif said. “I’ve got it.”
The lawn chair wobbled as Matthew’s father stepped off.
“Where is that stepladder you bought,” said his mother.
His father had cut his palm, but he insisted nonetheless on taking most of the weight. He and Leif shuffled around the house, through the back door, and down into the basement.
A loaf of bread had to be purchased if there were going to be sandwiches for lunch, so Matthew left Leif reading a book on the glassed-in back porch, which was a little chilly but out of range of the television, and drove to the supermarket in his parents’ sedan.
If you turned, before the roundabout that was the hollow center of the town, onto the street that had both of the town’s funeral homes, there was an unmarked entrance to the grocery store—a dogleg that came in alongside its loading dock. As Matthew took the shortcut, he thought, with satisfaction, that at least as far as this little geographical matter was concerned, he was still a native and an insider.
Inside the supermarket, however, the light was a different color than he remembered, a palatable amber where there had once been an almost clinical jade. The vegetable aisle had been shifted aside to make room for chafing dishes of rice pilaf and three-bean salad and shredded lettuce, in carefully tended mounds. Would there be people to eat all this, the day after Thanksgiving? Matthew walked down the aisle of flours and sugars, down the aisle of soda and pet food. He didn’t recognize the boys working as shelvers now, but they wouldn’t even have been in grade school when he had left. They didn’t have the air of menace that he remembered high school boys as having. Their skin was pale and irritated, like paper that has been heavily erased. A few were working as cashiers, a job that students hadn’t used to be allowed to do.
He chose a line where the boy at the register was a little bit cute. His phone buzzed. “Hey, Matt,” said a man familiarly.
He didn’t recognize the number or the voice. “Hey!” he replied.
“You don’t know who this is, do you?” the man said.
“Of course I do.”
The boy who was the cashier scanned Matthew’s one item and in deference to his phone conversation pronounced the price quietly.
“Hold on, I’m paying,” Matthew said. Maybe it was Philip, a man he’d seen a few times and sometimes thought of.
“You’ll pay, all right. This is Adam.”
“Oh, Adam, of course, hi.” He glanced at the cashier, who pointed at the credit-card reader. Matthew swiped. He always forgot about Adam, but he always liked seeing him. Of course, it was different now.
“What are you buying?” Adam asked.
“Bread.”
The receipt uncoiled and sliced itself clean. The cashier asked in mime whether Matthew wanted the receipt in the bag with the bread or in his hand. There was something a little airy about the boy’s questioning gesture; maybe he had recognized the kind of phone call it was.
“Are you in town?” Adam asked.
“Went home for the holiday.” The sliding doors bumbled open. He didn’t have a free hand, but the car wasn’t far, and he thought he could get away with not buttoning his coat.
“Too bad,” Adam said. Evidently Matthew’s number had come up in rotation.
“Too bad,” Matthew agreed. It wasn’t such a bad world, the one that he had left, the one that the call was beckoning him back into.
“We should have dinner when you get back.”
“I’m sort of involved with somebody,” Matthew admitted.
“Oh, man, again?”
“Again.”
“Seven nights a week?”
“Pretty much.”
“You should have called me when you were between gigs,” Adam said.
“I think I did.”
“What if we got coffee,” Adam suggested.
“You know what coffee is, and so do I.”
“So it’s serious.”
Matthew got into the car, which was still warm.
Adam was a lawyer who was bored with his job at a hedge fund but couldn’t bring himself to quit. They had picked each other up at a party a couple of years before. Adam had been walking out of the host’s bathroom and Matthew had pushed him back into it, but Adam had said he wasn’t that kind of girl and had asked for Matthew’s number. A few times, the dates carefully spaced apart, they had watched movies together at Adam’s downtown apartment on his television, larger than any that a graduate student could afford. A few times, Adam had come uptown to see him. Once, before going out to dinner, Adam had offered him a sweater, claiming that he had bought a medium by mistake but had lost the receipt and couldn’t return it, and only later had it occurred to Matthew that the story had been a way of giving Matthew a gift while sparing his pride.
Matthew still had both the sweater and the little flat cardboard spindle of extra yarn that had come with it, in case the sweater frayed and one knew how to darn it up. It was cranberry heather.
“Is being involved with somebody good for your dissertation?”
“Not really.” Matthew had forgotten that he had told Adam that he was at the dissertation stage.
“Remember when I helped you carry your books home from the library?” Adam continued.
“Oh, that’s right.” As recently as a year and a half ago, it hadn’t been possible to do semester renewals online.
“‘Oh, that’s right.’”
“It was very sweet of you,” Matthew said. It had been sweet, being with Adam, not taking each other seriously. That it hadn’t been meant to last or to contribute to anything but their own pleasure had been a large part of the sweetness.
“So you’ll have coffee with me,” Adam said. “A study break.”
“There’s a lot going on right now.”
“Seven nights a week!”
Matthew laughed. But then a panic ripped through him. “You haven’t heard about what’s going on, have you?”
“Why, what’s going on?”
No, he couldn’t have. Matthew’s name hadn’t been in the news. “Nothing,” Matthew said. “It’s a stupid legal thing.”
“Tell Daddy. Daddy’s a lawyer.”
“It’s not your kind of law.”
“Now I’m curious,” Adam said.
The car had grown cold while Matthew had been sitting in it, and Matthew shivered.
“Are you in trouble, Matt?” Adam asked.
“I better not talk about it.”
“Is it this new boy?”
“No. I shouldn’t talk about it.”
“I won’t ask if you don’t want me to,” Adam said, his voice taking on, suddenly, a blankness.
It was a part of the code of the world where they had met: one accepted limits quickly. And of course the acceptance was a
t the same time a brotherly weapon. A way of punishing Matthew for failing to be open still to the bond that he and Adam had used to share. A punishment of omission. All right, then, Adam was saying, he would let Matthew be. Knowing that a part of Matthew didn’t want to be let be, that a part of him wanted to be called Matt again, that he wanted to be able to talk about what was happening to him as if, at least while he was talking about it, he wasn’t trapped inside it. He wanted a friend, and he didn’t seem to know how to have one anymore if he and the friend didn’t go to bed together. A defect of character that left him alone. Even if he stayed with Leif and went on to give Leif everything he had and was, he was going to be left, to a certain extent, alone.
“But if you ever do want to tell me . . . ,” Adam suggested.
“Okay, thanks.”
“Or if you decide you need a study break.”
“Yeah, got it.” Maybe this was just how friendship was, once you had an adult sexuality.
* * *
—
Smoked glass hid the walls of the elevator that carried Leif and Matthew to Michael Gauden’s law office, the day after they returned to the city. A red digital number flickered slowly higher.
“It was going to be Revolution through the Perception of Feelings,” Leif said.
“What was?” asked Matthew.
“It wasn’t going to be Refinement.”
“Who changed it?”
“I don’t remember,” Leif said. “I mean, it’s good that we changed it. How stupid would that have been.”
Now that the folie was dying, Matthew almost wished it weren’t. According to Leif, this wasn’t the first time in his life that he had become depressed. He described depression as a little like having a worm inside one’s mind at first so small that one didn’t initially perceive it as a thought with substance of its own but merely as a twist in the substance of other thoughts. The swiveling, corkscrewing motion is what one came to recognize it by.
Matthew had never experienced anything like that. A part of him wondered if Leif was exaggerating.
“You don’t have to agree with me,” Leif said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
They stepped off the elevator into a long corridor, glassed-in at the ends, full of nothing but beautifully temperate air. Thousands of such corridors floated now above the city, like vacant space stations. They had been rendered architecturally superfluous—emptied of guards and left unwatched by receptionists—when security screening had shifted to the ground floor in every building in the city following 9/11.
Just as Matthew and Leif reached the set of glass doors to the north, they heard behind them, at the southern end of the corridor, Michael Gauden calling out, “Over here.”
He was a pale, almost skeletally thin man. His suit was slender and unfashionably long, a wizard’s gown stripped of its moon and stars. There was something lupine about his face—lean and dolichocephalic—that wasn’t softened by his loosely curling blond hair, and Matthew wondered if maybe he didn’t smile so as not to show his teeth. Matthew kept hoping that he would come around to the lawyer once he got to know him better.
“Did you have any trouble finding it?” Gauden asked. At a stately pace, with the smile of a precocious boy, he led them down a hall. “So this is Finch Claypoole,” he said. A colleague of his, also in a dark, slim suit, trotted swiftly, greetinglessly by. The premise of Gauden’s remark seemed to be that the law firm was one of the city’s attractions, something people came to see.
“You shouldn’t be disturbed in here,” Gauden said, when they came to a windowless conference room.
“Is this your safe room?” Matthew asked.
“Safe?” Gauden echoed.
“No windows, no eavesdropping.”
“They check every square inch of the whole office for listening devices once a month.”
“Wow,” Leif said.
“More often than they check for bedbugs, I think,” Gauden mused.
“Do they ever find anything?” Matthew asked.
“You know that old joke about the little girl on the train who’s tearing up pieces of paper and says she’s doing it to keep the tigers away?” Gauden said. “‘It seems to be working.’ Or maybe they find bugs and tigers and don’t tell us. I don’t really know. There are bottles of water in that little refrigerator there. Help yourself. I’ll bring Leif back when we’re done. Half an hour?”
“Oh,” Matthew said.
The wolf smiled.
“Matthew can’t come with us?” Leif asked, catching on.
“It wouldn’t be best practices, in terms of attorney-client privilege.”
“I can completely stay here,” Matthew told Leif.
“If you were married . . . ,” Gauden protasized. It had become possible six months ago for gays to get married in the state.
“Yeah, I’ll stay here,” Matthew again volunteered.
“Would it be wrong to have Matthew with us?” Leif asked.
“Not ‘wrong.’”
“Then maybe he can come.”
“Oh, of course. What happens, though, in that case, is, anything you say to me in the presence of a third party, technically the third party could be required to testify about it.”
“But his parents are paying, even. Doesn’t that make him part of the team?”
“That could give us a little gray. A color of gray, as I like to say. It isn’t safe by any means, but if that’s what you want and if you understand what you’re doing, I’m not here to stop you.”
“I want him to be with me.”
“It’s your choice. My role is to let you know and give you options.”
“Leif, I don’t think—,” Matthew began.
“I want you to come.” He was frightened, Matthew saw. For some reason it was now that Leif had become frightened. “‘O if I am to have so much, let me have more!’” Leif said.
“Is that a quote?” Gauden asked.
“Whitman,” Leif told him.
“I should go back and read more Whitman,” Gauden said, resuming his stately walk.
* * *
—
Gauden leaned into one armrest of a high-backed chair behind his desk and with the hand that was pinned to the armrest twirled a pen, which fluttered and stopped, fluttered and stopped, unfurling into a pinwheel and then condensing into a pen again. The lawyer’s blond hair, Matthew realized, was to be thought of as movie-star hair. As a gift, as an effect. It always took Matthew a little longer to become aware of the vanity of straight men. For some reason he always failed to expect it.
“I’m not representing you, by the way, am I?” Gauden asked Matthew, as Matthew and Leif draped their coats over the backs of their chairs.
“I still need to get a lawyer,” Matthew admitted. At the back of his mind he hoped that if he put it off long enough, he could save his parents the money.
There was news, Gauden said. The federal prosecutor’s office for the district had filed charges. In deference, the state was now dropping its case, and the judicial process was going to start all over again, from the beginning, this time in federal court. The state’s grand jury was going to suspend its work on the case; a federal one would soon be calling witnesses and reviewing evidence. For the moment, though, Leif’s participation was not required.
“A federal case can be a little showier, unfortunately,” he said. “It takes place on a more visible stage. Sometimes a federal attorney is thinking more about how a thing plays.”
“How it plays?” Leif asked.
“To other courts, to voters. I think it’s always in their minds that sometimes people in their position go on to run for higher office. Sometimes they see themselves as on a ‘crusade,’ though I guess that’s a word we’re not supposed to use anymore.”
“Who’s the prosecutor?” Matthew
asked.
Gauden swiveled in his chair and with a long arm drew a page from a sheaf on his desk. “Thomas Somerville, assistant US attorney. Do you know him?”
“No.”
“I almost thought maybe you knew his office, the way you asked. What is it you do again?”
“I’m in grad school for English.”
“Oh, that’s right.”
“Do I need to plead guilty again?” Leif asked.
“You’re pleading not guilty, I believe,” Gauden said.
“Oh yeah.”
“Not yet. But as long as the grand jury is still sitting, and sometimes longer, there’s an opportunity for plea bargaining, and we should be thinking about that possibility. Just in the back of your mind.”
“And then there wouldn’t be a trial?” asked Leif.
“Not for you, if they make an offer and you decide to agree to it.”
“What would they want?”
“It can be a bit of a game, because they know that we’ll read the boldness of their offer as an indication of how strong and solid their evidence is.”
“Do you have a strategy?” Matthew asked.
“A strategy?” Gauden looked amused. “You don’t always have a strategy. You try to have ideas, I think, and you try to keep learning about the case, and you’re not always sure where the things you’re learning are going to take you. Like a novelist who starts writing without knowing where his book is going to end.” He drew a filigree in the air with his capped pen. “For example, this morning I was trying to figure out, and maybe you can help me”—he was addressing Leif—“how did they know to arrest you at his house?”
“They had us under some kind of surveillance,” said Leif. “Didn’t they?”
“Don’t ask me! But they couldn’t have put that in place overnight. The city police, overnight? Had you given them any reason to put you under surveillance before the incident with their computer system?”
“I did tell Bresser I could read his password, that day I saw him at Occupy,” Leif said.