Overthrow

by Caleb Crain

  “Wait,” Matthew interrupted. “Are you suggesting that if they had Leif under surveillance without a warrant, before he did anything, the court should throw out the arrest?”

  “How much television have you been watching, young man?” the lawyer asked. “That almost never happens, first of all. And they did have a warrant, and no court is going to care how they knew how to find Leif if the warrant was properly written.”

  Matthew didn’t respond.

  “What I wonder,” the lawyer continued, having cleared Matthew out of the way, “and it’s a line of thought that I haven’t fully worked out yet, is, if the government puts too many people under surveillance, puts together all this personal data in one place, maybe it’s not wrong for the government, qua the government, to have done so, but once they have, maybe it’s incumbent on them to make sure it’s very difficult for anyone to get to it. There’s this concept of an ‘attractive nuisance.’ If you own a swimming pool, you have to expect that the neighbors’ children will try to drown themselves in it and you have to put up a fence. Otherwise it’s your fault if they do drown in it.”

  “So we should have put up a fence?” asked Leif. “We were actually inviting people to our working group.”

  “No no no. You’re the ones who fell in and drowned, is what I’m thinking. If the data on this server was private, as the government is claiming, then the government created a hazard by assembling it and failing to protect it. It shouldn’t have been so easy for you to fall in. To take another example, if one slab of concrete in the sidewalk is half a foot higher than the next one, and you trip, you can sue the city: that’s what I mean, but what was out of alignment wasn’t one slab of concrete with another but the expectation of privacy with the ease of publication. Or maybe what I mean is that they were too well aligned. Too conveniently aligned.”

  “But we weren’t children,” Leif said.

  “Well, that’s a problem,” the lawyer acknowledged.

  “You’re saying,” Matthew said, “that it was irresponsible of the government not to try harder to keep us out.”

  “You weren’t there, were you? You just said ‘us.’”

  “He wasn’t there,” Leif said.

  “Were you there?”

  “No, I was just trying to understand your argument,” Matthew said.

  “I see. Well, it’s a big argument. Maybe it’s the wrong tool for the job. Maybe it’s a wrench and I need pliers. But I like to think about all the possibilities.”

  “I have a big argument,” Leif said.

  “Oh, you do?” Gauden said, not encouragingly.

  “I think there’s no such thing as human rights,” Leif said. “I think there’s only power, and it goes more smoothly for the powerful if most of the time people act as if human rights do exist. But once per generation, there has to be an ‘accident,’ on purpose, to remind everyone what’s really happening. To remind everyone that the rights are only granted on sufferance. That they shouldn’t be taken too seriously. That they only exist because at the moment it isn’t in the interest of the powerful to take them away.”

  “I see,” the lawyer said, nodding, twirling his pen again.

  “It’s just an idea,” Leif said.

  “No, it’s very interesting,” Gauden said, still nodding.

  * * *

  —

  “I have another idea,” said Leif, when they got downstairs.

  “Are you having too many ideas?” Matthew asked. He threaded his way between two parked cars and in the open street raised a hand. When he looked back at Leif, still on the curb, he smiled as if to say that he wasn’t asking in order to hurt Leif, but his smile therefore also necessarily meant that he knew that asking did hurt Leif.

  Bundled up in an old coat of Matthew’s, which was too short for him, Leif looked like an invalid being taken to see his doctor. Which reminded Matthew that they needed to make a follow-up appointment. He wouldn’t still be coughing the way he was if the steroid was doing what it was supposed to.

  A cab stopped, and they got in. A screen set into the back of the front seat began to hector them as the car pulled away.

  “Can you turn it off?” Leif asked. “I think it’s the sort of thing I’m not allowed to touch.”

  “Buckle your seat belt,” Matthew said, as he left off buckling his own.

  It turned out to be possible to turn off the show that was auto-playing but not the screen itself.

  “I shouldn’t have said that,” Matthew said, once the car was silent. “About your idea.”

  Leif looked down at his hands. “Do you want to hear it?”

  “Of course.”

  “It used to be possible—and it used to be important that it was possible—for writing to have a secret meaning,” Leif said. He spoke as if he didn’t believe Matthew really wanted to hear but couldn’t see any other way forward. “It could signal that it had a secret meaning by making an oddly weak argument, or by bringing up an example that made a hash of what it was supposed to be evidence for.”

  At the foot of a hill, in sight of the water, the driver shunted the taxi into a narrow, canal-like street, hedged on both sides with Jersey barriers that blinded it. Abruptly the canal street fed into three lanes of a six-lane highway, the cars in which didn’t slow, let alone stop, so that the challenge of merging drew a burst of adrenaline out of all three men in the car—their bodies’ involuntary acknowledgment that survival was at stake.

  “Jesus,” said Matthew quietly, as the driver gunned the engine and swerved, to seize a place in the ungiving flow.

  Once the car was inside the flow, however, one felt impregnable.

  “But you can’t signal a hidden meaning on the internet,” Leif continued. “If there’s weakness or inconsistency in a piece of writing now, it goes unnoticed because of the general sloppiness of expression. A writer’s ambivalence registers at most as a flaw that has kept a message from going viral. A handicap. Not as an instance of someone saying something almost despite himself. Or literally despite himself.”

  “You should write this down.”

  “Like Julia? For a rainy day?”

  They rose on the highway’s ribbon of concrete into a bend in the sky where two of the great bridges that spanned the harbor came into view. Maybe Matthew wasn’t any good at pretending to welcome Leif’s ideas because with each idea that Leif had, it was as if the air that the two of them breathed when they were together became that much thinner, as if they found themselves further up a mountain they hadn’t planned on climbing, further away from the path that they had set out to follow. Leif seemed to be propelling himself forward through his days with mere willpower now, as if he were trying not to think about his body and what might happen to it, as if he were deliberately leaving his physical self out of the reckoning, while Matthew became more and more aware that it was only through their bodies that they were connected. Aware the way that, with each cigarette, if you fall back into that habit, you become more aware of the minutes since the last cigarette, of time as something that has to be counted off and paid for in cigarettes, which your health even less than your budget can afford.

  Beneath the angle that the driver could see in the rearview mirror, he took Leif’s hand. It was cold and knotty.

  * * *

  —

  No reporter had pursued Leif to Matthew’s parents’ house, which he and Leif had attributed to the holiday. By the time they got back to the city, the news cycle must have completed a revolution or two, because no reporters were waiting at Matthew’s apartment, either. Nor were any waiting outside Michael Gauden’s office the next day. Was it over? The coast seemed to be clear, too, at the café where Leif worked, according to the wife of the couple who owned it, who called Tuesday morning. Over the long weekend she had covered for Leif, as had Greg and another co-worker. Leif decided to go in for a shift.
>
  He put on his bike cap and flipped up the brim. Matthew volunteered to walk over with him. He wanted to make sure Leif wasn’t inflicting on himself some kind of penance. In many of Leif’s ideas lately there was a theme of punishment—of deserving punishment, of being found out as deserving punishment. Sometimes what Leif had done was tell. Sometimes all he had done was know—about the end of the world, about the sorrow that a sense of the end brings to people, about the susceptibility of caretakers to sorrow. If Matthew challenged the logic, Leif fell silent and Matthew worried that the snake was returning to earth by a different hole. It seemed to be becoming difficult for Leif to conceive of himself as existing in the world except as a trespasser in it. He had lost the swan’s-neck nonchalance that he had had when Matthew had fallen for him.

  “What if they’re after me because they know that I know?” he had asked one night.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if they don’t want me to realize that we really are a threat?”

  “I don’t think that’s what the charge against you is going to be,” Matthew had said.

  Was he literally feverish? Maybe the pneumonia, or the steroids he was taking by inhalant to treat it, were giving his thoughts these qualities of abstraction, perseveration, and astringency—giving his thoughts themselves nearly the character of punishments.

  Or maybe the thoughts came because Leif had in fact glimpsed the future and really was being punished for it. It would have been easier if Matthew had been able to believe in the folie in a simple and straightforward way, and he hated himself, a little, for his skepticism, even though he knew that skepticism was one of the components of his personality that made him a caretaker, if not quite a caretaker of the kind described in Leif’s philosophy. He felt that it was in part the mismatch between them—the almost-but-not-quite nature of Matthew’s faith—that had attracted Leif, that held him.

  One night, not long after they had met, when they had been hanging out with some of the other members of the working group in Elspeth’s apartment, one of Elspeth’s roommates had come home with a vintage-store find—a green tulle gown—and Leif had pleaded, and the roommate hadn’t been able to say no, and when Leif had tiptoed back into the living room, wearing the gown, Peter Pannishly, and had sat down beside Matthew, he had asked for a kiss, which Matthew had only been able to deliver awkwardly, gingerly, prompting Leif to ask, Don’t you believe in any of my magic? There had been a note of gratification in his voice, Matthew felt. There had been disappointment, too, of course, but it hadn’t been a very serious disappointment. He had been proud, in some corner of himself, of having gone further than Matthew could. And in that corner, Matthew suspected, Leif didn’t entirely want Matthew to believe. At any rate, that’s what Matthew had to hope. Because he couldn’t believe. Just as he couldn’t pretend that his interest didn’t center on what had been lolling, factually, under the green gauze that had draped Leif’s lap. Matthew was the sort of person who couldn’t hear the lines

  And by addition me of thee defeated,

  By adding one thing to my purpose nothing

  as if they were serious. The best he could do was pretend not to notice that he was meeting halfway what he was being asked to believe.

  He put a book, notebook, and two pens in his backpack.

  There was no one in the café but Leif’s co-worker Juniper and a handful of regulars, typing into laptops and paging through cram books. A man with gelled hair and a dimpled chin, probably an actor between roles, was reading an ink-on-paper newspaper. Matthew took a seat in the corner. Leif looped an apron over his head and ducked under the bar.

  Juniper kissed Leif, and he hugged her. He pinched the foil pouches beside the espresso machine to find out how much coffee was still in them.

  Matthew opened his notebook and tucked the written-on half of it under the book that he was going to try to read.

  “Are you Leif Saunderson?” the man who was probably an actor asked.

  Leif nodded.

  “That’s cool, man,” the actor said.

  “Can I get you anything?”

  “A refill? This is an Americano.”

  “Coming up,” Leif said.

  It turned out to be easy to surrender one’s celebrity. Patrons with earbuds, having sensed the exchange but not having heard it, looked around frowningly, like seagulls.

  * * *

  —

  The book that Matthew had brought was a collection of meditations written in the voice of Charles I by a priest loyal to him. The king had revised and approved the meditations shortly before he was executed; they were published shortly after. As a defense of kingship they were almost painfully unpersuasive. Charles, or the priest writing as Charles, asserted over and over again that the king had never cared for his power or been solicitous of it, as if this were a virtue. He complained that democrats seemed to think that the king was the one person in England who could be required to sacrifice the free will and political conscience that belonged to every individual. Yet despite the distaste he claimed to feel for kingship personally, he refused to “consent to put out the sun of sovereignty” in his own case.

  The sun of sovereignty, Matthew carefully printed in his notebook. The day had grown so short, he noticed, that the windows of the café were already gray even though it hardly qualified yet as late afternoon.

  How like a winter hath my absence been

  From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year.

  He couldn’t really imagine what it would be like to be without Leif, which is what would happen if Leif were to lose his case. He didn’t want to think about it. Things had gone so quickly between the two of them that that possibility was already unbearable. In the past few days, being with Leif had sometimes been like not being with him, because of Leif’s preoccupation, and that had been bad enough. It had been a few days, for example, since anything had happened between them—since the time in his parents’ attic, in fact. Here in the café, now, too, they were together without really being together: Leif toweling dry the saucers and cups that he clankingly removed from the dishwasher, Matthew hunched forward over a seventeenth-century text he wasn’t reading.

  But then the quiet and the early darkness always gave this time of day, at this time of year, a cloistered feeling.

  Leif came to his table.

  “Do you need me here?” Matthew asked, on an impulse.

  “No,” Leif said. Then he hesitated. “Maybe it’s better if you go, actually.”

  “Okay,” said Matthew.

  “I want to see how I am.”

  “Okay.”

  “Are you all right?” Leif asked.

  “Me? Fine.”

  “Don’t be like that.”

  “Like what? You’re telling me to leave, and I’ll leave,” Matthew said.

  “You asked to leave.”

  Matthew couldn’t bring himself to say that that wasn’t what he’d meant to ask. He couldn’t bear to reveal himself as so weak. He looked down at the words that filled up his book’s pages, words that had abruptly become strange and remote, a meal for which he had suddenly lost his appetite. Why would anyone ever care what he or anyone else thought about these old dead words?

  “It’s hard for me to find out how I am, right now,” Leif continued. “What I’m feeling.”

  Leif was so full of his sad self, Matthew angrily thought. So full of his sad, wounded self. “It’s easier for me to read in a library, anyway,” Matthew said, shutting his unreadable book.

  “Matthew—”

  “It’s fine,” Matthew insisted. When had he become the clingy one? He strategized: he could try to read for an hour or two in the city college library, where he could buy a sandwich at the food court if he got hungry. Maybe he and Leif had gone too fast. Maybe neither one of them knew how he was on his own anymore, and maybe both of them needed
to know that. “It’s really fine. I understand.”

  After Matthew finished packing his bag, they embraced and kissed, stiffly.

  “What was that?” Leif asked.

  “Tough love, tough kiss,” Matthew said.

  * * *

  —

  Matthew walked back to his apartment for his bike. As soon as he got it downstairs, he realized he had forgotten his bike lights, but he had already wasted enough time. The day was ending, and the point of it was supposed to have been to make a little progress toward returning to the life that a month and a half ago he had thought worth living. He biked, therefore, in the dark, unilluminated, recklessly, angry at himself, on top of everything else, for running a stupid, needless, and not even pleasant risk.

  As he locked up his bike, he made up his mind to be angry at everyone he saw—to be the one true scholar, indignant and monastic—but the lamps suspended above the work-study students at the checkout desk cast them in gold light and fat textbooks were opened across their knees and he had to accept that they had been here learning all day when he hadn’t been and that if anything he should try to emulate them in doing uncomplainingly the work that one was given to do.

  His usual carrel was unoccupied. So much of academia was about coming back to things—coming back to the same room, the same chair, the same text—while one grew older. Did the outside world really matter compared to this return, which was not just to a chair in a library but to an eternal, silent conversation? Maybe the outside world only existed to bring one here, to this seat. Maybe the outside world was only a scaffolding, meant to fall away. Of course to live a life whose meaning lay outside the life itself would tend to make one melancholy.

  This was the story he had given most of his youth to.

  He opened his book, but it was still unreadable. He would have to convince himself that Leif would forgive him before he would be able to read it. He was actually pretty sure that Leif was going to forgive him, which made his task easier.