by Caleb Crain
The remark seemed a little dramatic, but Matthew knew better than to say so, and it wasn’t until they were in bed that night and he was staring at the ceiling, next to Leif, whose eyes were shut and who was curled up like a fist and whose body was nowhere touching his—it wasn’t until he was alone in the dark beside Leif that it occurred to him that he could have said that if Leif were to write down what he felt about the end of the world, it might do good even if no one did survive to read it later, even if no one but Matthew and Leif himself ever had a chance to appreciate what he was able to say.
* * *
—
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Leif’s arms, around Matthew, would quiver in his sleep, his legs would halfheartedly piston, and from his throat would come faint, half-swallowed cries. Whenever it happened, Matthew wondered if he should wake Leif up or if it was better for Leif to work through in his dream whatever he was working through.
And sometimes, from within a dream of his own, Matthew would hear the toneless whistle of a gas burner opened, the clicking of his stove’s igniter, and the thick flutter of a blossoming flame, and when he opened his eyes, he would see, across the room, a small purple thistle-bloom burnishing the underside of his teakettle. Invisible in the dark, Leif, having heard Matthew stir, would explain in a low voice that he hadn’t been able to sleep. Matthew would then get out of bed, too, despite a protest from Leif, and wrap himself in the blanket, and they would sit up for a while together in the window at the front of the apartment, looking down at the street.
In daylight Leif admitted that his dreams were violent. A murderer was chasing him with a power drill. He was in a house with boarded-up windows surrounded by creatures that wanted to catch him for food. It was absurd, he said. He wasn’t the kind of person who liked to go to horror movies. It was getting so that some nights he almost wished he didn’t have to sleep.
“Would you like to see someone?” Matthew asked.
“They’ll go away,” Leif said.
They were only dreams, Matthew told himself, because he didn’t know what to do.
“How much is it so far?” Leif asked. “Would you ask your father how much it is?”
Matthew told him not to think about that.
* * *
—
Usually when the doorbell rang now, they ignored it, but one afternoon it rang and rang, insistently, and maybe because Matthew had been thinking that morning that they needed to see people, if only he could think of someone Leif wanted to and was not forbidden to see, he put on his sneakers and walked downstairs. Standing in the foyer was Diana, in her orange jacket. She was holding a plastic Thank You bag from a bodega.
“Can I help you?” Matthew asked, the glass of the door still between them.
“Elspeth asked me to check on Leif,” she replied, projecting her voice through the barrier.
Matthew opened the door but stood in it. “Is it all right for him to talk to you?”
“I don’t know,” she said, smiling and not moving. “That’s got to be your call.”
“I mean because of the lawyers.”
“That’s your call,” she repeated.
“Come in.” He waited at the foot of the stairs for her to go up first. “Do you know how Raleigh’s doing?” he asked. Now that he was letting her in, he felt that he needed to make conversation.
“No idea.”
“So you haven’t checked on anyone else.”
“Elspeth thought Leif might have been upset by the news about Bresser’s server,” Diana explained. “She and Leif are sort of on each other’s wavelengths.”
“You have a visitor,” Matthew announced when he opened the apartment door.
“You brought me goldfish?” Leif exclaimed, when he looked into the bag from the bodega.
They embraced. “How are you, babe?” she asked, caroling her voice.
“Do you like our Christmas tree?” Leif asked.
Matthew had suggested it one day mostly as something to do. It blocked one of his bookshelves.
“Are you going to decorate it?”
“It’s more of a natural Christmas tree,” Leif claimed.
“It’s very nice.”
“Matthew even remembers to water it. Sit down, sit down.”
Matthew turned around his desk chair for Diana and offered her something to drink.
“Elspeth asked me to see how you’re doing,” Diana said.
“Oh fine,” Leif replied, with a dying fall. “I had a friend whose five-year-old started saying that, exactly that way. ‘I’m oh-fine, thanks.’ How is Elspeth?”
“She’s oh-fine, too. Maybe a little confused.”
“It’s not that confusing. I was an idiot.”
Diana hesitated.
“Isn’t that what they’re saying online?” Leif continued.
“I don’t know,” Diana replied. “I haven’t been—”
“Matthew reads it, but he won’t tell me. That’s what I’d say if I had believed in me. If I had wanted that badly to believe.”
“It doesn’t matter what anyone online says,” Matthew interposed.
“He keeps saying that. But I told everyone there was another world, ‘far other worlds, and other seas,’ even, and I was wrong, there’s just one, and furthermore, because there’s only one, what they say online is all there is.”
“It isn’t all there is,” Diana objected.
“What does Elspeth think we were doing?” Leif asked. “Does she have a theory? That’s my hobby now: trying to figure out if it was mania or an epileptic aura or did we just have very delicate mechanisms. Raleigh’s idea was always that we were responding to messages that we weren’t aware we were receiving, like that nineteenth-century horse that thought it could do math but was actually just watching its owner’s foot. Of course it might have been just nothing at all. There might not have been any real thing that was being referred to. After all, if there’s only one world . . . You know, I used to think that if a thing was able to appear in a real poem then it must have some kind of reality somewhere. The way that some mathematicians believe that numbers are real. It’s almost embarrassing even to say it out loud now.”
“The way I think of it,” Diana said, “you and Elspeth were playing a game.”
“We’re not supposed to talk about it, are we,” Leif said, with a glance at Matthew.
“Do whatever you want,” said Matthew.
“Does Elspeth think it was a game?” Leif asked.
“We don’t—she just asked me to get in touch and not drop too many bread crumbs along the way. She just wanted to send her love.”
“I see.”
“She was afraid that if you two don’t send messages back and forth somehow that you’ll lose track of where you are with each other.”
“We never thought it could work if you couldn’t get into the same room with each other,” Leif said.
“Well, I guess she’s trying to adjust to that, is why she sent me.”
“Tell her I send my love, too,” Leif said. He sat very still for a moment, as if concentrating, and Matthew realized that he, too, was no longer entitled to imagine that he knew what Leif or anyone else who didn’t speak was feeling.
“I think maybe I didn’t think enough about ‘annihilating,’” Leif resumed, “when I thought about ‘annihilating all that’s made.’ Maybe annihilating the world makes the world want to take revenge.”
“Do you mean in the poem that your forest comes from?” Diana asked, gesturing toward her own shoulder.
“Yes. The thing is, Marvell makes annihilation sound so pleasant: ‘A green thought in a green shade.’ I didn’t think anyone would mind.”
“Is it annihilation? It sounds like understanding.”
“It’s everything. That’s why I got it in ink.”
* * *
—
Matthew offered to walk Diana downstairs. “I think that was good for him,” he said. “Your visit.”
“Oh good.”
“Have you been able to get any work done?”
“I’m supposed to be writing my theory chapter, so I’ve been telling myself that I’m doing the thinking.”
“What’s it about?”
“My dissertation? Cigarette smoking, as a way of looking at the ideas people have about human nature. There’s sort of a whiteness studies angle. What happens to the rhetoric of moral disappointment now that large populations of white people are becoming newly subject to description by it.”
“I still have to make an effort not to think about cigarettes sometimes,” Matthew said.
“See, one of our questions when a person says something like that is whether he describing a weakness or a strength. Is he describing an inability to resist a cigarette once the thought occurs to him, or a resourcefulness in knowing how to circumvent that susceptibility? Whether you describe it one way or the other is like having a different operating system on your computer.”
“And where does the whiteness studies come in?”
“We’ve found that a smoker who wants to quit is more likely to succeed if he believes that character is universal but polyvalent. Not determinist, not a matter of essence. And even though blacks smoke more overall than other groups, they seem to be a little better at thinking that way, probably because they’ve had more practice with denaturalizing essentialist ideas. And your dissertation?”
“Poetic kingship,” he said. “This sense that people started to have in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that they were like dethroned kings, in a way that left them feeling sad but more like the sovereigns of their own lives.”
“So maybe the same thing a little.”
* * *
—
One morning, Matthew took the train alone to look for a Christmas present for Leif. Christmas was only a couple of weeks away. He said he was going to the library at his university, and when, long before the train reached the university, he alighted and walked upstairs, the street itself seemed galvanized by the lie—by the excitement of being where his boyfriend didn’t know he was.
At a chain clothing store decorated like a gentleman’s club from the 1940s—cherrywood and baize and taxidermy—he fingered the blue-and-white houndstooth shirts and the fawn-colored sweaters. It wasn’t a place he ever went to on his own account. As a graduate student he couldn’t afford it.
It was a weekday, and there were only a handful of other men in the store. They had the bland handsomeness and unself-doubting manner of people with corporate jobs—or perhaps, given that it was a weekday, of people between corporate jobs.
“Can I help you find anything?” it startled him to hear a salesman say. The salesman, two or three years younger than Matthew, reached over to space out more evenly the shirts hanging in front of Matthew. His touch on the shirts was proprietary, as if he were counting them.
“Just browsing,” Matthew said, with an angry smile, knowing that the salesman could see that he didn’t ordinarily wear such nice clothes and was shopping alone. The salesman could probably also tell that Matthew was gay, as the salesman himself obviously was, and gays were reputed to be light-fingered. An indignant part of Matthew wanted to explain that it was the prospect of spending that was making him jittery.
“Could I try these on?” one of the corporate-looking customers asked.
The salesman appropriated the shirts that the customer was holding and, draping them over his forearms like a muff, led the man to a dressing room.
The prettiest things in the store were the sweaters, but Matthew wasn’t sure he could afford one and didn’t know if Leif would like it. It had been clever of Diana to remember that he liked goldfish.
His phone trembled. “Am I disturbing you?” his mother asked.
“No.”
“Your father has a convention in Portland this weekend.”
“In Portland?” He had no idea where this was going.
“I know, at this time of year. But I think it’s so nice there, I want to go anyway, and I wondered, do you and Leif want to come look after Fosco?”
“Oh. Sure.”
“I thought it would be a chance for you to get away.”
“I think we have to ask someone before we can leave town,” he cautioned.
“Who?”
“I can find out.”
“Only if you’re interested. She loves Puppy Hideaway, and right now they do still have a slot.”
“I’ll ask Leif.”
“And another thing—I’m sorry to bother you with all this.”
“What?” he asked.
“Do you think you’ll be coming for Christmas?”
His mind raced. He didn’t want to commit to anything.
“I’m starting to plan,” she continued, apologetically.
“Leif might need to go see his mother.”
“Of course. It’s her turn, isn’t it. Well, we’d love to have you if for some reason he isn’t able to.”
“I don’t think he’ll be going to trial that soon.”
“Matthew, I wasn’t talking about that.”
“It’s something we have to think about,” Matthew said defensively.
“Is everything all right?”
“Everything’s fine.” It hadn’t occurred to him before that there was a finite number of days until Leif’s trial, no less finite for his ignorance of the number. “I guess they’re still having the grand jury. We haven’t heard anything lately.”
“You’ll let us know when you do.”
As the conversation ended, he surfaced into the store where he happened to be standing. He needed to buy presents for his parents, too, he realized. Maybe he could also buy his father a sweater? He picked up a second one, in a different color. But was it weird to buy your father a sweater if you were also buying your boyfriend one?
They were too expensive, anyway.
* * *
—
“You really don’t mind?” Matthew double-checked, even though it was too late to back out.
“I like it up there,” Leif replied. “It’s like stepping outside of one’s story, at least for me. Everything’s so taken care of. There’s peanut butter ice cream in the freezer. There’s a big TV.”
“Would you want to go for Christmas, too?”
A cloud passed over Leif’s face. “If I’m still here.”
“Or maybe you want us to see your mother.”
“She won’t be up to it. She told me she’s giving me books, and when I said remember they don’t allow hardcovers in prison, she said then don’t use the gift card to buy hardcovers. Which leads me to think she isn’t going to be putting up a tree or anything.”
“It’s up to you,” Matthew offered.
“Your parents must be sorry you met me,” Leif said.
“Why do you say things like that?”
They had to leave their Christmas plans unresolved because they needed to move quickly. Fosco was already locked up alone in the little clapboard house, waiting for Matthew and Leif to travel the hour and a half’s distance and take her out and feed her, and they had to meet Michael Gauden before they could even get on the road. Gauden hadn’t said what it was about.
In Gauden’s office, a curtain had been drawn away from what on previous visits Matthew hadn’t even been aware was a window. At this height, in the center of the city, the fraternity that obtained among the skyscrapers was evident—their shared distinction from the unimproved real estate below.
To enjoy the view for too long might have seemed unsophisticated. Matthew took a seat. Leif craned his neck for a few moments longer. “It’s like satellite view,” he said.
“And how are your spirits?” the lawyer asked.
“I threw my Ouija board out,” Leif said. “I thought I wasn’t supposed to contact them anymore.”
“Touché,” Gauden said.
Leif was making an effort, Matthew saw. Having dismissed Gauden and then reengaged him, having defied him and then put up with a scolding from him, he seemed to have come round to a recognition of what he and the lawyer owed each other. It disappointed Matthew a little to see that Leif had been tamed somewhat. But there was no other way out.
“Listen, I had a thought,” Gauden said, leaning forward in his chair, as if he wanted to ask a favor. “Maybe it’s even what your friend here would call a strategy,” he continued, pausing to glance at Matthew. He slid back in his chair. The pen in his hand wouldn’t launch into its revolutions until, in the effort of speaking, Gauden became unconscious of it, and for the moment he was still present, still awkwardly in the room. “It occurred to me, in the light of what we now know about Bresser’s cybersecurity, or rather the lack thereof, that I might have been hasty in saying that belief had no relevance. Or rather, the quality of belief.” The pen whirled once and stopped, a silent trill. “If I can put it that way.” Another whirl. “It surprised you, didn’t it, when you were able to get into Bresser’s server?”
Leif nodded.
“Did it surprise you?” Gauden asked again, in a louder voice.
“Yes,” Leif answered. He wouldn’t be able to nod on the stand.
“If we were to explain to the court that it surprised you, and that it surprised you because at heart you believe about this sort of thing what most people believe, and if we were to explain that what you said to the other members of your working group about your ability to ‘read,’ as you called it, held a truth-value for you, to the extent that it held any truth-value at all, like that of poetry, which you do, after all, write—”
“But I meant it,” Leif interrupted.
“You just told me you were surprised.”
“I was surprised,” Leif admitted.