Overthrow

by Caleb Crain

  The tall panes of the library windows, now that it was night, had a slatelike opacity.

  The trouble with the book he was trying to read was that the most interesting question about it couldn’t be answered by it. The question didn’t even have to do with the book proper but with an appendix. In the appendix, the priest who had compiled the book had printed a prayer of Charles’s that happened to be identical to a prayer uttered by a lovestruck princess in Sidney’s Arcadia, as if kingship were so much a thing of make-believe that even a priest—or perhaps even Charles himself, it was impossible to know—saw no reason not to pass off a sacrament of one realm as a sacrament of the other. John Milton, after Charles’s execution, detected the borrowing. Milton was outraged. The prayer in Sidney’s poem was pagan! How dare a Christian king address it to his god? But Matthew, isolated in his carrel and cozy, for the moment, in his isolation, couldn’t decide whether what needed to be explained was the priest’s dreamy willingness to confuse fact with fiction, and himself with Charles, and both with Sidney’s princess, or Milton’s intolerant insistence on distinguishing them. It was hard to remember what the way of the world was, when one wasn’t at the moment in it. What was strange here? Was confusion unacceptable? Was it always necessary to be a single, real person?

  * * *

  —

  He read until late. When he got back to his apartment, its lights were off and its blinds were still up. Emanations from the streetlamps below crossed into it in long, faint rectangles as neat as shadows.

  A note was on the table and the boxers that Leif usually slept in weren’t on Leif’s pillow, their resting place during the day.

  As Matthew lowered the blinds, he was aware that he was only papering over the night, not separating himself from it.

  Gone home to do laundry, the note read.

  Matthew called the cell that he and Leif had bought for Leif a few days before, whose number they had so far managed to keep secret.

  “I told Gauden I’m going to go with a public defender,” Leif said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “All I do is take,” Leif said. “Take take take.”

  “Slow down.”

  “You don’t even like him,” Leif pointed out.

  The books on Matthew’s desk, Matthew noticed, hadn’t much shifted lately. The apartment got on his nerves now whenever Leif wasn’t there. Everything in it remained so eternally where they had last left it. Everything seemed prepared for years to pass by with no dislodgement or disruption other than the fine invisible pinpricks by which time introduces brittleness, dryness, and weakness. “Leif, it’s okay,” he said. “I’m going to be here for you.” He needed to say something whether or not it was true. He had to hope that making a commitment always felt a little like making one up.

  “It’s supposed to be money for your future. I don’t think my own father even knows that any of this is happening.”

  “I’m here for you,” Matthew repeated. Before last week he hadn’t ever thought of his parents’ house as someday a future inheritance of his, which maybe made it easier to give away.

  “But what if I leave you? What if I’m like, I can’t be with you, I’m a poet, and I have to be able to hear my voice.”

  “Is that how you feel?”

  There was silence on Leif’s end of the phone.

  “I’m helping you right now,” Matthew said. “That’s all it is. You don’t ever need to pay me back.”

  While he waited Leif out, he noticed that his little red Cambridge edition of the Sonnets wasn’t balanced on top of the microwave anymore, where Leif had left it the other day. Its slot on the bookcase was still empty, too, though the slot had narrowed slightly, because the volumes on either side had taken breaths in, once they could. Matthew scanned the apartment. His eyes jumped from shelf to shelf. The book wasn’t anywhere.

  Which meant Leif still had it with him.

  “Why do you put up with me?” Leif asked.

  “Because fucking you makes me feel alive.”

  * * *

  —

  Leif apologized to his lawyer and recanted his dismissal of him. Over the weekend he worked a few more shifts, and Matthew managed to do a little reading. On Monday, the buzzer rang in the middle of the day.

  It was Raleigh. “Do you mind if I come up?” he asked through the intercom. “I was in the neighborhood.”

  Leif put on a sweater. Matthew picked up a wad of dirty clothes off the floor, and when Raleigh reached their landing, it was still in his hands.

  “Your apartment’s already neat by my standards,” Raleigh said.

  “You’re straight,” Matthew replied.

  Raleigh hadn’t shaved, and under his fair beard, patches of his skin had broken out.

  “Sit down,” Leif said, folding himself into a corner of the futon.

  “Do you want a glass of water?” Matthew offered.

  “Sure,” Raleigh said. He perched on the futon’s edge. “So how is it all going for you guys?”

  “Elspeth said your lawyer didn’t want you to talk about anything,” Leif said.

  “He doesn’t know I’m here. I took the battery out of my phone.”

  “Can’t you just turn it off?”

  “I’m pretty sure they can track you now even when it’s off. Although maybe not with a phone like mine.”

  “Felix Penny is tracking you?” Matthew asked, as he handed Raleigh a glass of water.

  “No. I mean, I don’t know. We don’t know who’s tracking us anymore, do we.” He took a sip. “We don’t have to talk about anything, if you don’t want to.”

  “Our news is that Leif is coughing too much,” Matthew said. “And not getting enough sleep.”

  “Why are you telling him that?” Leif asked.

  “He’s your friend.”

  “Okay, and I don’t always feel ‘real,’” Leif admitted, marking the quotes in the air.

  “I have this recurring dream,” Raleigh said, “that another timeline is crossing into mine.”

  “Someone else’s timeline?”

  “No, mine, but from a different universe. All the possible universes are layered on top of each other, like in sedimentary rock, but they’ve slipped out of alignment and I’m crossing on the diagonal. Which I experience as another reality surfacing into mine.”

  “I don’t know if I follow,” Leif admitted.

  “There’s a lot of geometry,” Raleigh acknowledged. “Has Elspeth said anything?”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. Can I ask you something? Did you have porn on your laptop? Can they mention that, if they find it?”

  “What kind of porn?” Leif asked.

  “You know, normal.”

  “You mean, ladies?”

  “Yeah, ‘ladies.’”

  “Did you at least hide it good?”

  “It was in a folder called ‘Porn.’ But can they mention it for no reason? Aren’t there rules?”

  “I have no idea,” said Leif. “Why are you worried about this?”

  “I don’t think they can just talk about your personal life,” Raleigh said. “I think there must be rules.”

  “Did you ask Penny?”

  “No. I was just thinking yesterday, they have all our emails, too, if they have our laptops.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Everything we wrote to each other. They can just grep our brains, essentially.”

  “Did you have porn?” Leif asked Matthew.

  “Of gentlemen,” Matthew replied.

  “Elspeth’s not seeing anyone, is she?” Raleigh asked.

  “She hasn’t told me anything,” Leif said. “Why?”

  “She’s changed her mind about me, hasn’t she.”

  “I thought you broke up with
her.”

  “But it was a mistake.” He looked down at the floor. “You couldn’t say anything, could you?”

  “To her?”

  “Never mind.” He bottoms-upped his empty water glass. “You don’t understand. It’s probably easier for gays.”

  “What, breaking up or being arrested?”

  “No, I didn’t mean that.” He blushed.

  “What did you mean?”

  “I mean, with the other guy also being a guy.”

  “You mean it’s easier if it’s two men for the other person to know what you’re thinking,” Leif said.

  “Isn’t that a good thing?”

  “Maybe it used to be.”

  * * *

  —

  The buzzer rang again. “It’s me,” said Elspeth, from downstairs.

  “Raleigh’s here,” Matthew disclosed, through the intercom.

  “Well—okay,” she said.

  “Shit, can I use your bathroom?” Raleigh asked. He slammed the door in his hurry to tidy himself up.

  “There’s a problem,” said Elspeth, after she kissed Leif hello. She shuffled off her backpack. “I brought my new computer because I don’t want Matthew to use his when he looks at it. I was hacked. I mean, the RPF site was hacked.”

  “By who?” asked Raleigh, emerging from the bathroom, his wet hair pointed starfish-like in all directions away from his face.

  “I don’t know. By hackers.” She sat down on Matthew’s folded-up futon and powered on her laptop.

  “Don’t be mad,” said Raleigh.

  “I’m not mad at you. Don’t let them look, Matthew, because neither of them should be looking at a computer.”

  “Sit at the dining table,” Matthew ordered Leif and Raleigh.

  “I’m sorry I’m a hard-ass, but all my lawyer ever talks about to me is am I doing everything I can to convince the government that I have no interest in trying to obstruct or sabotage the government’s work,” Elspeth said while she waited for her machine to boot up.

  “Don’t worry,” Raleigh said. “You’d come across as law-abiding even if you were trying not to.”

  “This is what you see now, if you go to the site,” Elspeth, ignoring Raleigh, said to Matthew. “I’m sorry I’m bringing you this,” she said to Leif. “It’s so ugly.”

  “What does it say?” Leif asked.

  “Usually when they hack a website they put up porn,” Raleigh said.

  The page, when it came up, was black, and the writing on it was in a font that was green and fixed-width, like on an old terminal. Matthew read the new text aloud:

  Rest In Peace

  the

  Republic of Precious Feeleengz

  They weren’t moralfags. They weren’t even stupidfags. They were NOTHINGFAGZ!!!

  (FYI, we don’t mind feeleengz. This is teh Internet, after all—if you’re not at least a little bit ghey, you haven’t been paying attention. It’s just, have a point, plz. So, we haz hacked you.)

  The cursor, over the text, was flickering. “It looks like you can click,” Matthew observed.

  “Oh no, don’t,” said Elspeth. “If you do, there’s this little elephant that flies around and”—Matthew clicked, and there was a sound—“farts.”

  “And leaves swastikas.”

  “Oh, I hadn’t noticed that they were swastikas.”

  “Well, they’re all smushed on top of each other, so they’re hard to see.”

  “I’m really sorry I can’t see that,” Raleigh said.

  “It’s actually pretty upsetting, Raleigh,” Elspeth said.

  “I’m just saying I wish I could see it. Is moralfags one word or two?”

  “Why does that matter?” Elspeth asked. “It’s hate speech.”

  “It has a different meaning when it’s one word.”

  “What does it mean?” Leif asked.

  “You use the suffix –fag to say what somebody’s gay for. What somebody’s into. So a moralfag is someone who’s really into being moral, being righteous.”

  “Oh, like queen in real gay slang,” said Leif. “A muscle queen is into guys with muscles; a size queen is into—you know.”

  “Yeah, like queen, but for hacking,” Raleigh said. “What you’re a fag for is your motive for hacking. So if we’re nothingfags, they’re saying we didn’t have any reason at all for doing what we did.”

  “But we weren’t hackers,” Elspeth said.

  “I thought the internet was on your side,” Matthew said.

  “Not these guys, apparently,” Raleigh said.

  “It’s so full of hate,” Elspeth said.

  “But maybe also just a little bit funny?” suggested Raleigh.

  “With swastikas?” she replied. “And where is our site now? Where is everything we wrote?”

  “Didn’t we have a backup? I thought with this build there was auto backup.”

  “No,” said Elspeth. “That cost extra, so we didn’t do it, remember? And the cops still have our old hard drives.”

  “Can you still log in as an admin?”

  “I can, but the hackers are still in there, and I can see them. It creeps me out.”

  “What do you mean you can see them?” Raleigh asked.

  “When I tried to delete the splashpage they put up, they put it back, while I was watching.”

  “Did you change your password?”

  “That was the first thing I did,” Elspeth said.

  “You probably need to re-salt the hashes.”

  “Okay, whatever that means. Where do I do that?”

  “I can’t remember. It’s probably under Settings, but I’d have to be looking at the dashboard.”

  “Do you know how they got in?” Leif asked.

  Elspeth shook her head.

  “Did you get an email recently asking you to reset your password?” Raleigh asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “Maybe your password wasn’t strong enough.”

  “It probably wasn’t,” she said. “I know I’m the weak link. I know that absolutely anybody else would be doing it better.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” said Raleigh. “What if you took it to Jeremy and he helped you.”

  Elspeth executed a few commands. “I think they put in a back door,” she said to Matthew, pointing at a list of filenames on the screen that meant nothing to him. Matthew saw that she was making an effort not to cry.

  “You might have updated a plug-in without realizing that the update was compromised,” Raleigh continued. “That happened to me once. It can happen if the developer sells out to the wrong kind of people.”

  Elspeth continued working, without responding to Raleigh.

  “Is there anything that you can want, in the world these people live in, without being a fag for it?” Leif asked. “I mean, if you don’t want anything and that makes you a nothingfag, that’s pretty comprehensive.”

  “Lulz, I think,” Raleigh said. “‘Lulzfag’ is a compliment.”

  * * *

  —

  After half an hour, Elspeth gave up, and they called a car service to take them to see Jeremy. Elspeth sat in front, next to the driver, and stowed her offending laptop, shut asleep, at her feet. In the back, next to Matthew, as the car mounted the elevated highway that snaked above the city, Raleigh and Leif a little too loudly debated whether it was Anonymous who had done them the honor of hacking them. Matthew heard Elspeth quietly call someone to report that she was going to Raleigh and Jeremy’s apartment. Outside, dark windows of apartments wheeled by, succeeding one another like notches in a turning gear, strangely close because the apartments had been built long before anyone knew that a highway would one day hang in the air a few yards away, four or five stories above the ground.

  They were
met at the door of Jeremy and Raleigh’s apartment by Philip, who was wearing an open kimono over a pair of swim briefs, displaying his knotted chest and stomach. “Oh my god, you’re all together again,” he said.

  “We were hacked,” Raleigh told him.

  “Why would anyone bother to hack you? You’re last week’s news. When I’m out with Oliver, you don’t even come up as a conflict of interest anymore.”

  “Did you tell the press I’m from Kansas?” Raleigh asked. “You’re the only person I know who gets Oklahoma and Kansas confused.”

  “Kansas, R-Kansas, O-Kansas. There’s only one letter’s difference between any of them.”

  There was nowhere to gather except around the island table in the kitchen.

  “Scene of the crime,” Raleigh said to Elspeth.

  “It’s so stupid, being here, isn’t it,” she replied.

  Matthew hadn’t previously thought of the act that had got them in trouble as having taken place in any particular location. On the night itself, he had been too angry at Leif to picture where Leif had been when it had happened, and later the events had become a sort of myth.

  “You and Leif can’t sit where you can see,” Elspeth told Raleigh.

  “I know.” He pulled two stools over to in front of the refrigerator.

  Leif clambered backward up onto one of them. “Dunces in the corner.”

  “I’m so happy I can help you out, Elspeth,” Jeremy said. He held up a power cable and let it untwist. “There’s a fresh six-pack of energy drinks in the fridge, if anyone’s thirsty.”

  “I thought only newspaper articles actually called them energy drinks,” Raleigh commented.

  Jeremy tapped the table beside him to indicate that Elspeth should set her laptop there. He ran a hand through his hair. “Can I ask you a question? Have you been adding to the site? Are you writing new posts?”

  “It’s more of a historical record at this point.”

  Jeremy leaned forward over his folded, powerful arms. “And are you getting traffic? What if I took it off your hands.”

  She looked frightened. “Please don’t take it away. Just because I was attacked.”