by Caleb Crain
“Which means you didn’t expect to get in.”
“But I wanted to.”
“And I want to steal the Hope diamond, but if I don’t do anything that I believe would enable me to steal it . . .”
“I was lying?” Leif queried.
Gauden shook back a lock of blond bangs that had fallen across his forehead. “It may come to the point that we need to say something as bald as that in order to make the logic of our argument as clear as possible, but personally I think of the speech act in question as being more along the lines of a metaphor.” The pen again flashed into motion.
The lawyer, Matthew understood, had no idea how much it would hurt Leif even to pretend to believe that he had knowingly deceived his friends.
“The usual case,” Gauden continued, “is that the accused thought he was buying uranium, and he’s being tried for that intention even though the government agent who entrapped him delivered only pyrite. But here, you were holding a chunk of what you knew to be pyrite, and the government switched it out for uranium.”
Leif didn’t immediately respond.
“Well, I for one think it’s foolproof,” Gauden added. He smiled at his self-congratulation.
Leif nodded but still didn’t speak. He looked at Gauden and then at Matthew and then out the window, where sunlight was quivering on the glass scales of the nearest fellow skyscraper.
“And what does the monkey say?” Gauden asked. The lawyer was looking at Matthew.
“The monkey?” Matthew echoed.
“I mean, you know, what’s the opinion in the peanut gallery?”
“You mean, what do I think?” Matthew asked.
The lawyer nodded. He probably hadn’t meant for his scorn to slip out of his mouth.
“I don’t know why you’re taking away from him . . . ,” Matthew began.
“What?” the lawyer asked.
Leif, still silent, wouldn’t meet Matthew’s gaze.
“Never mind,” Matthew said.
“I don’t think I’m taking away anything that isn’t already gone,” the lawyer said. “I’m trying to prevent the loss of even more.”
“I see,” Matthew said.
Leif asked for a little time to think it over.
* * *
—
They had rented a car, since Matthew’s parents wouldn’t be there to pick them up from the train station. Matthew drove. When they set out, the road was chalky under the winter light. Along the shoulder, in the strips of turf and brakes of scrub pine, the green hues were flat and pale, almost whitened. Inside the envelope of the automobile, they were safe. Leif curled up in the passenger seat with his stocking feet perched above the glove compartment, near the windshield.
“Did I tell you I figured out the sonnets?” Leif asked. “I had read them before, but this time it was so obvious. You know there’s the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady, and the speaker’s in love with first one and then the other and then back and forth, and all the scholars think they were real people but no one knows who they really were?”
“I’m getting a PhD in sixteenth-century English literature.”
“I’m just checking. Anyway, you don’t know the answer because I’m the first person in history to figure it out. The Fair Youth is a boy who played women’s roles, and that’s how Shakespeare met him and they fell in love, and the Dark Lady is the Fair Youth after he’s started transitioning. She’s the Fair Youth once she’s become old enough to want to pass as a woman offstage as well as on.”
“Huh,” Matthew said, with the slow half mind that one has while driving.
“And once he has started taking clients, probably. But I’m not really sure about the social history of cross-dressing actors in that period.”
“Huh,” Matthew said again.
“You don’t believe me.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t believe you.”
“That’s why there’s all that negativity in the sonnets about makeup and female artifice and how the Dark Lady isn’t what she seems to be. The speaker of the poems is being all cis about everything.”
“I thought the speaker liked the Fair Youth’s ambiguity.”
“He likes the ambiguity. He doesn’t like the identity.”
“What about when the two loves of comfort and despair hook up with each other and leave him out?”
“Allegory,” Leif answered. “Allegory of the self.”
“I see.”
“I should be able to get a PhD for this, right?”
“Definitely,” Matthew said.
“It’s probably as much as most scholars hope to discover in a lifetime.”
“Are you really going to write about it?”
“No,” Leif replied, his voice suddenly hollow.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Leif said. “There’s not really time.”
“We don’t know that.”
“It’s just one of my ideas,” Leif said. “What are you doing?”
“My wallet was digging into my ass the way I was sitting on it, so I’m putting it in my coat pocket, but I want to zip the coat pocket shut so it doesn’t fall out later.” The wallet had been bothering him for half an hour, but suddenly the discomfort of it was in the forefront of his mind.
“Do you want me to do it for you?”
“I got it.” The steering wheel jiggled a little as he maneuvered. “What?”
“Nothing,” Leif replied.
“What is it?”
“I thought you’d be more interested.”
“In your idea? I’m totally interested. I want you to write it.”
“No, forget it. It’s too late. Now you’re being nice. It’s your thing, anyway.”
“It’s not my thing. I don’t own sixteenth-century literature.”
“I think maybe I was trying to get close to you somehow,” Leif said.
“That’s great,” Matthew replied. “I can tell you what editions to cite.”
“What do you mean?”
“About half of scholarship is that all your page numbers have to be to the canonical editions.”
“But I don’t think I really want to write it now,” Leif said.
“What do you mean, ‘now’?”
“Oh, maybe I thought you would whoop or something. And there isn’t really time, like I said.”
“I’m totally excited about it. I’m saying I’m excited about it. Why aren’t you listening to what I’m saying?”
“I’m sorry.”
The lane stripes, as they slipped past the car, flashed with a faint glow and seemed to hover slightly above the agate of the road. It was twilight, Matthew realized. What had been green along the roadside was now dusky and indistinct, like an aquarium that has been neglected and has gone murky. He switched on the headlights.
“I want you to write about it,” he repeated. “You have to write about it now.”
“But I don’t want to. Honestly. I was being stupid. I think maybe I just wanted to imagine what it was like to do what you do. Since I’m not writing poems anymore. Maybe that’s what I wanted you to be excited about.”
“Okay,” Matthew said.
“And you were moving your wallet around or whatever.” He was trying to make it all a joke. “I don’t even know anymore what’s going on in my head.”
Matthew nodded. “Do you want to watch a movie tonight?”
“Oh, sure.”
“There’s pay-per-view at my parents’ house.”
“Oh, that’s right.”
“Leif,” Matthew said.
“I’m fine.”
“Okay.”
“I just may not be in the mood for a movie.”
By now Matthew’s eyes had adjusted to seeing only as much of the road as the streetlights shon
e down on and the flares of the car’s headlights hit as they traveled forward. It was almost night. The defile of trees along the road was still legible but only as a silhouette. A silhouette with spindly, upward-reaching fingers.
* * *
—
“What did you think of what Gauden said?” Matthew asked, a little later. It was as dark now inside the car as outside. “Are you going to go along with it?”
“Why not?” Leif asked, looking out the window.
“Well, it’s not—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Leif interrupted.
“It’s not who you said you were,” Matthew finished saying.
“It doesn’t matter.”
* * *
—
After Richard II is unkinged, he is paraded through London by his usurper without his crown or royal raiments, according to the account given by Samuel Daniel in Civil Wars. When Isabel, Richard’s queen, catches sight of him from a window, she is at first distraught and even angry, but with an effort she checks her grief, and by the time she and her husband at last speak, she is ready to renew her pledge to him:
Thou still dost rule the kingdome of my hart:
If all be lost, that government doth stand;
And that shall never from thy rule depart:
And so thou be, I care not how thou bee:
Let Greatnes goe; so it goe without thee.
Matthew felt the pathos of the speech, and the nobility of it, but he didn’t know whether it was true—whether the lover of a dethroned king would really feel that way, or feel that way for very long.
* * *
—
After dinner Matthew started a movie on the television, in the hope of luring Leif onto the sofa beside him, but the movie wasn’t very good—in a theater the garishness and the violence might have radiated harmlessly away, but in his parents’ home the toxins seemed to accumulate—and after half an hour of watching alone he turned it off.
They were sleeping in his old bedroom again, even though the master bedroom was free. Fosco joined them, pacing counterclockwise four times before settling heavily to the floor. Though the house had two stories, plus a finished attic and a basement, all the animal life was focused that night in a single room.
“Do you think she sleeps here all the time?” Leif asked.
“I doubt it.”
When Leif got up in the middle of the night, Matthew was awakened not by him but by Fosco—by the thumps that she made on the stairs as she padded down after him to the kitchen. In the morning Matthew knocked wadded-up chamomile sachets out of two mugs that Leif had left in the kitchen sink.
“Nightmares?” Matthew asked.
Leif made a gesture as if to push away the question.
Leif had gotten so little sleep that when, a couple of hours later, Matthew set out for the grocery store, Leif stayed behind to try to take a nap.
It was so much warmer than it had been the night before that Matthew walked to the car in just his sweater, and it wasn’t until he came to the corner, where the traffic was always so heavy that it was tricky to turn left, that he realized he had forgotten his wallet, still in the pocket of his coat, hanging beside the refrigerator in the kitchen. He turned right instead of left and made his way around the long block. Back in his parents’ driveway he turned off the car but left the keys in the ignition and the door open. An alarm in the car mewed at him as he walked away from it.
“Forgot my wallet,” he called out in explanation as he grabbed his coat. Through the quilting he confirmed by feel the nub of the wallet.
There was no acknowledgment of his explanation. Leif probably hadn’t heard him—Matthew had waited so long at the corner for a break in the traffic that Leif was probably already asleep—but it was strange that Matthew didn’t hear the click of Fosco’s nails on the wooden floor, ambling her way toward him from wherever she was in the house. “Leif?” Matthew called out, listening also for Fosco.
No one was on the sofa in the living room or on the one in the sun porch.
“Leif?” he asked, at a lower volume, knowing that Leif must be nearby, and climbed the stairs. But the bedroom where they had slept was also empty, and so was his parents’ bedroom. He checked the one that had used to be Brian’s, too.
The door to the attic was ajar. “Leif, are you up there?” Matthew asked. He felt a little silly climbing yet another flight, while the driver’s-side door of the car and the kitchen door of the house were hanging wide open, down below—while the pealing of the car’s alarm was draining its battery and while the money that his parents spent heating their home was being squandered—merely to see what was probably going to be Leif already obliviously asleep in Brian’s displaced twin bed, with Fosco ensconced beside him. “Leif,” he said once more.
In the attic, Leif was sitting in an overstuffed sage-colored armchair that Matthew’s mother had retired from the living room ages ago, in the first turmoil when Brian went away to college. He seemed to be having trouble keeping his eyes open. Fosco was staring at him so attentively that at first Matthew thought they were playing a game.
“I forgot my wallet,” Matthew said.
“I made a mistake,” Leif replied slowly.
“What?”
“I thought I would get used to it in a few minutes,” Leif said, “but you came back first.”
What Fosco was paying so much attention to was an object in one of Leif’s hands. “What’s this?” Matthew asked.
“To put away.”
It was the smoky orange plastic vial of Fosco’s medicine. It was empty, Matthew saw when he took it.
“Where are they?” Matthew asked. “Where are the pills, Leif?” There was a glass with a little water still in it on the floor beside Leif’s feet. “Jesus Christ.”
“It was a mistake,” Leif said. “Everyone makes mistakes.”
“Can you walk?” Matthew asked. He pocketed the empty vial.
“I don’t feel so well.”
He didn’t seem to be able to rise on his own, so Matthew put his arms around him in a bear hug and lifted him up out of his chair. “Can you help me?” Matthew asked, as he shifted to Leif’s side so that they would be able to move forward.
Fosco barked at them because it was all so unusual.
“Shut up, Fosco,” Matthew said.
“Probably got the dose wrong,” Leif said, “because I couldn’t go online.”
“My parents mortgaged their house for you,” Matthew said.
“God,” Leif said, twisting in Matthew’s arms. “Don’t tell me that.”
But Matthew wanted to tie him to the world. He wanted him more than he wanted him to be perfectly free.
He tried to brace himself against the wall of the stairwell as they descended, so that if Leif stumbled, he wouldn’t be knocked down by him.
“Wasn’t going to have to think about it anymore,” Leif said.
“Yeah, you fucked up.”
The hospital where they usually took Matthew’s father, whenever he had indigestion and thought he was having a heart attack, was only seven minutes away. At the landing Matthew would be able to call an ambulance from his cell phone, but if he and Leif could manage the second flight of stairs, too, and he got Leif into the car, they would probably get there faster.
“How many did you take?” Matthew asked, planning what to tell the doctors.
“Thirty,” Leif said, holding up a hand with, nonsensically, five fingers.
When they reached the landing, Matthew tried to draw Leif along it a little more swiftly, since it was a flat surface.
“Poor Fosco,” Leif said. She had stopped barking, but she was following them closely.
“Why?”
“Won’t have any,” Leif explained.
“You should have thought of that,” Matthew agreed.
>
No walls hedged in the stairs down to the ground floor, and Matthew did his best to anchor himself with careful footing. He needed to let Leif hold the banister.
“I know,” Leif said. It took Matthew a moment to realize that Leif was still in the conversation about Fosco and was replying to the last thing Matthew had said. They were falling out of sync; Leif’s mind was slowing down. Matthew wondered whether choosing to drive Leif himself was the right decision. They weren’t even in the car yet. They weren’t even on the ground floor yet. Matthew felt panic flush his chest and neck and face, but he didn’t think Leif was alert enough to notice.
“I should’ve been paying more attention,” Matthew said.
“To read my mind?”
Fosco trotted ahead of them into the kitchen and then straight out the open kitchen door. “Fosco!” Matthew shouted.
“She’ll come,” Leif said hopefully.
Matthew pulled Leif through the kitchen. They didn’t have time for Leif’s coat.
Outside, Fosco was peeing in the neighbor’s roses, which at this time of year were no more than knotty vines with prickers.
“I’m sorry,” Leif said, as Matthew lowered him into the passenger seat. His skin was alabaster.
“It’s okay,” Matthew said. “Fosco, come,” he called, but she wouldn’t. “Look, Fosco,” Matthew tried, but not even the car appealed to her.
Leif had closed his eyes.
“Fosco, come!” Matthew called again. He got in the car himself, for encouragement, but the dog turned tail and cantered away.
“Fosco!” Matthew shouted hoarsely, scaring the dog into a gallop. The white tuffet of her tail bobbed above her as she crossed three lawns, four lawns, five.
Matthew slammed the door and turned the key in the ignition.
* * *
—
Since Matthew had never been to Leif’s apartment, Leif had given him instructions: the top lock wouldn’t be locked, unless the landlord had come by, but in order to turn the key in the bottom one, Matthew would need to pull the doorknob up and slightly to the left.
At first, however, the key still wouldn’t turn, until, in frustration, Matthew pulled harder—held the knob in both hands and tugged—and then the heavy shield of the door shifted in his grip, sitting back on its hinges, and after that the key rolled easily around.