Overthrow

by Caleb Crain

  “Leif,” said Matthew.

  “Leif,” said Elspeth.

  “He said his say, and I want to say mine,” Leif continued, still in a voice pitched slightly louder than what would have been needed to address only his friends. “Are you listening?” He didn’t try to single any of the journalists out with his eyes; he simply waited, with the patient confidence that beauty has never even had to recognize as one of its strengths.

  The patter of talk in the room grew thinner. Suddenly only one reporter was still speaking, and then in self-conscious embarrassment he, too, stopped.

  “Leif, let’s go home,” said Matthew.

  “You guys probably think this is like any other case, and that’s why I want to warn you. I’m sorry if that sounds a little crazy.”

  Glowing red dots of handheld recording devices constellated the crowd, which had re-centered itself on Leif. Bresser, who had got halfway to the elevator bank, turned to watch.

  “There was this thing that we discovered we had,” Leif said. The faces of the listening journalists were solemn, perhaps out of pity for the harm that they knew Leif was doing to himself, perhaps entrained by Leif’s own calm, uncanny seriousness. “We had been told all our lives that it was impossible to have it, but we did have it and we knew that we did and we decided to accept that we did. You know what I mean. I’m not going to say what it was. We didn’t think it was special that we had it, but we thought it was special that we let ourselves know that we had it, and what I realized today, while listening to that man, is that that’s what we got wrong. That’s what he’s trying to tell you without telling you. What he means is that they had it, too. Maybe not him personally. But there were people on their side who could also do it. What happened to us—the way we were ‘caught’—couldn’t have come about any other way. I don’t know why anybody would do it for them—we thought the whole point of doing it, or rather, of deciding to be aware that you could do it—was to be free. To be making a choice. But we were wrong—that’s what he’s telling you. Or not telling you. It’s actually only because he hasn’t really told you yet that I can still talk to you. He walked away and left us here together because he thinks we can’t speak anymore, but we can still speak, for at least a little while longer. We can speak, up until we understand how the blackmail is going to work, and he hasn’t finished explaining it. Even then we’re still going to be able to speak but only without saying words or hearing them, which is going to be difficult. It’ll be like what I’m trying to do now, talk without saying what I’m talking about, which I have to do because if I were to say out loud everything that I’m trying to say, you wouldn’t be able to hear me.”

  “Mr. Saunderson,” asked one of the journalists, not the drunk one, “are you accusing the government of being psychic?”

  Leif stared at the man, almost longingly, and Matthew knew that Leif was saying to the man, without words, that even when we can no longer speak in words, we’ll find a way to know what’s in each other’s hearts.

  * * *

  —

  “What have I done?” Leif said to Matthew.

  The caretaker of the caretaker, Matthew pulled Leif out of the building and into the street. He shoved out of the way a reporter who tried to come between them and the open back door of a taxi.

  “It’s okay, go,” he told the driver, who instead of going studied the reporters flooding into the street around his car and studied Leif and Matthew in his rearview mirror. “I think at this hour we should take the tunnel,” Matthew advised, as if he and Leif were an ordinary fare, and the suggestion of routine was powerful enough that the driver let his car creep forward. After three blocks, the car turned onto a highway, and their pursuers were left behind.

  “Is it true?” Matthew asked. “About the government?”

  “I thought I had to say it.”

  “Were you reading it?”

  “I had to say it the way each generation of poet has to say explicitly what was implicit the generation before. Bringing to the surface what used to be just beneath the surface, like a snake molting its skin. Becoming less subtle and more obvious.”

  “Are you warm?” Matthew asked, putting a hand on Leif’s forehead.

  “Am I?”

  “Yes.” His forehead was still wet.

  “Don’t be mad at me,” Leif said.

  “I thought you were mad at me.”

  The car dipped into one of the preliminary tunnels that came before the deep one that would take them under the river. “That was before I decided to save the world,” Leif said. “Did I fuck up?”

  “I don’t know. It probably doesn’t matter.”

  “It feels true. It might as well be true.”

  “Maybe it is,” Matthew said.

  The pale, tiled vault of the tunnel abruptly hooded them, and they fell silent.

  When they reached Matthew’s apartment, Matthew made dinner while Leif, sitting in the front window, peeked around the edge of the blinds at the street below, where the television vans were once again assembling.

  * * *

  —

  “I see your friends are here again,” a lanky man, one of Matthew’s neighbors, said the next morning, curtly, when they crossed paths with him in the corridor. From the stoop, reporters were waving and smiling in at them insinuatingly.

  Matthew and Leif braved the press and made their way back across the river to Michael Gauden’s office. He had summoned them. When they reached his office, he rose not to greet them but to shut the door securely behind them.

  “Am I in the doghouse?” Leif asked.

  “The media at least seem to be responding positively to your apparent sincerity.”

  “My apparent sincerity,” Leif echoed.

  “That’s how they’re taking it.” Gauden put reading glasses on his nose and slapped at his computer’s keyboard. “‘All in His Head? Cops Read Minds, Warns Hacker.’ For example.” Gauden looked over his glasses at Leif. Then he looked at Matthew: “You couldn’t have tried to stop him?”

  “I—,” Matthew began.

  “And how is it that you all came to be together in one place?” Gauden interrupted. “Was there a touch of the supernatural there, too?”

  “That’s just how it happened,” Leif said.

  “I’d like it if you were to promise me it won’t happen again and we leave it at that.”

  “Why are you so angry?” Leif asked.

  “I’m not angry,” Gauden said, with a wide, false smile. “It’s your neck. It’s my job to try to save it.”

  “Was it really a hanging offense?” Leif asked.

  “Prosecutors and judges often fail to respond well when the defendant takes threatening action against the victim of the alleged crime.”

  “I was just talking.”

  “There’s actually very little talking that qualifies as just talking for someone in your situation, if the talking is being done to someone who stands in the relation to you that Bresser happens to occupy.” Gauden took off and pocketed his glasses, pinched the bridge of his nose, and kneaded his left eye. “I’m in a difficult enough place as it is with the pressure to cooperate that I’m getting from some of the other defense counsel in this case, who seem to be unaware that the justice system in this country is adversarial.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Matthew.

  “Do you know where your friend Elspeth found this”—he produced the glasses again and scrutinized an email on his screen—“Dominique Blount? She seems to be operating on the theory that she and Somerville are going to be friends. Perhaps because she was such good friends with the state’s district attorney.”

  “They were friends?”

  “I’m being ironic. I mean the state didn’t charge Elspeth, and now Ms. Blount seems to think the feds won’t charge her, either, if only she’s nice enough to Somer
ville.”

  “Elspeth didn’t do anything,” Leif said.

  Gauden didn’t seem to hear. “Ms. Blount doesn’t seem to be aware if you give someone like Somerville a slice of the carcass, it doesn’t make him any less likely to demand a leg or a haunch.”

  “Is there something she wants us to do for Elspeth?” Leif asked.

  “Wrap you in a bow and leave you on Somerville’s doorstep.”

  “Would that help?” Leif asked.

  “Right now Elspeth’s not in any legal peril, and you are,” Gauden said. He picked up his pen and whirligigged it, leaning sideways into the arm of his chair. “There is one piece of relatively good news, though I’m not entirely sure how you’ll take it. It came out yesterday morning during a hearing in the Evans case about a motion that Penny filed to suppress the server log. It’s probably been leaked online by now. Bresser seems to have called his press conference because he thought it would get out.”

  “What is it?” Leif asked.

  “You don’t know?”

  Leif shook his head.

  “The server was rigged to open to any attempted login from certain IP addresses,” Gauden said.

  “I don’t understand,” Leif said.

  “Well, the apparent IP address of Raleigh’s laptop was one of those addresses. Penny asked a question that brought it out. I think he must have been tipped off, but I can’t figure out who did it. He was kind enough to let us know.”

  “I don’t understand,” Leif repeated.

  “You didn’t have to say open sesame for it to open,” said Gauden.

  “You mean, I didn’t read anything.”

  “Well, I can’t speak to whether you ‘read’ anything, as you call it, or heard anything or saw anything, but whether you did or not wouldn’t have affected your ability to log in.”

  “Does that mean he’s innocent?” Matthew asked.

  “If I leave the door of my car open with the engine running and the key in the ignition, it’s still a crime if someone drives off in it without my permission. But it puts us in a slightly better bargaining position.”

  “Doesn’t this make it entrapment?” Matthew asked.

  “It’s not entrapment,” said Gauden. “In real life, as opposed to television, entrapment is the defense you make when you’ve lost, basically. Because if you argue entrapment, you’re saying you did it, but.”

  “Then how is this good news?”

  “Because you’re not very dangerous criminals if there’s no evidence that you could do what you thought you could do. That’s why Bresser wanted to get out in front of it, I suspect. It makes what he did look like overkill.”

  “They were waiting for us,” Leif said.

  “But you knew that,” said Gauden. “You told me you saw files with your names on them. They don’t seem to want to enter those as evidence, by the way, which is going to make it hard for them to prove their gravamen. I think we have a shot now at avoiding not only jail time but even having to plead to a felony, which you don’t want to do if there’s any way you can avoid it because in a number of states it means you can never vote or hold office, and you’re young and it closes some careers to you, such as the law, for example.”

  “I don’t think we have to worry about my law career,” Leif said.

  “You never know,” said Gauden. “But you won’t even have the chance to turn the law down if you don’t stay away from the press. The more public a case is, the more unrelenting someone like Somerville feels he has to be. Please don’t make any more statements.”

  “Maybe they knew we were coming because they had read me,” Leif said.

  “Have you considered talking to a therapist?”

  Leif shook his head.

  “There might be more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in my philosophy, as they say, but I have to restrict myself to thinking about what can and can’t be proved in court.”

  “Of course,” said Leif.

  “Not everyone has to operate under such restriction, is what I’m trying to convey. I can get you a name and number if you’re interested.”

  * * *

  —

  On the subway back to Matthew’s apartment, a bearded man in a plaid shirt cruised Matthew. The man was sitting across the car and three seats to the left. At first Matthew wasn’t sure. Cruising was one of the analog practices that the internet was rendering obsolete. Maybe it was only that Matthew wanted to think he was being cruised? The man’s eyebrows were almost black, and his beard was as richly dark. His eyes suggested that he was telling a story about himself in which he didn’t mind that he was misbehaving. He looked away to give Matthew a chance to look at him and then looked back to catch him at it.

  Leif didn’t seem to notice. Maybe he was choosing to be tactful.

  The man’s coat was sprawled behind him on his seat. He seemed to be proud of his shoulders and arms and was leaning forward to show them off. Matthew would have liked to be wrestled down by them. Leif had winced and twisted away the last time Matthew had tried to touch him. It isn’t your fault, Leif had said, as if Matthew had asked about assigning blame.

  “Is it safe to talk to a therapist if you’re going to be on trial?” Leif asked.

  Matthew swiveled in his seat, to make a show of facing Leif as he talked to him, demonstrating his attachment to Leif for the bearded man’s benefit. “We should have asked.”

  “What?” Leif asked, reacting to the swivel.

  “Nothing,” Matthew said. He thought of confessing that there was a boy down the car staring at him.

  It was never exciting unless the man cruising you seemed a little better than you could expect to get. It was possible that the man was looking their way because of Leif—because Leif was the one he really wanted, because the presence of Leif somehow ratified Matthew as an object choice, proving, perhaps, that Matthew met at least the minimal requirements for dating. But the man didn’t look like he was thinking about dating. Maybe he liked the challenge of taking a stranger away from his boyfriend.

  “I don’t think Gauden would have suggested therapy if there weren’t some kind of legal privilege,” Matthew said.

  The bearded man caught Matthew’s next glance and let Matthew see him looking Matthew up and down. Matthew looked away to avoid committing himself.

  “The thing is that if it’s not what I thought it was, then I don’t know what it is,” Leif said.

  “What what is?” Matthew asked.

  “My secret grove,” said Leif. “My secret grief. The one I wear on my tattoo sleeve.”

  “Gauden said the news about the server didn’t necessarily mean you weren’t picking up on something,” Matthew said.

  “Don’t pretend to believe now. What is it your dog has?”

  “My mother’s dog. She has epilepsy.”

  “Maybe I can see a vet instead of a therapist. I don’t think it would occur to anyone to subpoena a vet.”

  The man was burning a hole in Matthew’s peripheral vision, but Matthew made a decision not to look at him again. Leif was more beautiful, after all. When he took off his shirt, there was that cross grain of down at the top of his breastbone.

  “What?” Leif asked again, perceiving the new shift in Matthew’s aspect.

  “Nothing,” Matthew said again. The trouble was that beauty alone wasn’t enough, because close handling eventually made it common. In a tumble with someone like this bearded man, Matthew would be more free, for the brief time it lasted. The bearded man belonged to the animal life of the city. Matthew, however, had chosen to have a name and to be part of a story.

  It could be reassuring, perhaps, simply to know that animal life was still running through the city. He could make an effort to think of it as reassuring. His hands were trembling, and he hid them in his coat pockets.

  * * *

 
—

  All the lawyers came down hard against fraternization among the defendants, which left Leif with no one but Matthew to talk the disillusioning news over with.

  “Did you think all along that I was making it up?” Leif asked.

  “No,” Matthew said.

  “You must have wondered. You’re not an idiot.”

  “I could have been wrong.”

  The bitterness that was settling on them compounded the difficulty. It seemed to Matthew that everything was getting worse so rapidly that the pace interfered with the way that one parceled out one’s caring along the axis of time. It was becoming hard to rest in any one moment long enough to mourn the misfortune that belonged to it and ought to have been sufficient to it, because one knew that a worse misfortune was probably about to come next. One became distracted from one’s present unhappiness by one’s likely future unhappiness.

  An email from Matthew’s adviser warned that Matthew had missed a chapter deadline, and at first, at the prospect of burying himself in reading and note-taking, Matthew’s spirits not quite paradoxically lifted, but they fell again as soon as it occurred to him that if he were to immerse himself in the seventeenth century he would leave Leif too much to his own devices. It had become impossible again for Leif to work at the café—the journalists were swarming—and Leif sharply refused when Matthew suggested poetry.

  “Your old grad school friends were right. It’s just creative-writing faculty talking about each other.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Maybe I’ll take up knitting.”

  “What about the dark poem?” Matthew asked. “Can’t you write that?”

  “It’s not a poem.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s just the way the world is,” Leif said. “It can’t be made into anything.”

  “You could write that down.”

  “There’s no one to write it down for. That’s what being at the end means.”