Overthrow

by Caleb Crain

  At the end of its swing, the opening door bounced against a running shoe on its side that the door had obviously stubbed its toe on many times before. Just beyond, along one wall, began a bookshelf. The books that Matthew had been asked to fetch, however, were near Leif’s desk, which Matthew could already see a corner of, in the room ahead. If you sit at the desk, Leif had said, they’ll be here, and he had mimed stretching out a hand to touch them. Leif had added that the patterns on the covers looked like dimity. Blake and the Metaphysical Poets were the ones he wanted. Plus a novel about a medieval nunnery, which didn’t look like dimity and was on a different shelf—Leif hadn’t been able to remember which one.

  Behind Matthew, after he stepped inside, the heavy door clicked shut. The light in the apartment was gray and indirect; the shapes revealed by it, quiet and precise. The shapes, for example, of Leif’s three skateboards—tar-papered escutcheons, horned with wheels, that were propped against the entry corridor’s wall.

  As Matthew walked, he was conscious of the clops that his footfalls made and of the floorboards creaking. He was conscious of being in an apartment that he had never been invited into.

  There were two windows. The bed lay under the one on the left; a desk, under the one on the right. Beside the bed there was a green rocking chair. If you turned around, you saw a kitchenette, with a side door leading to a bathroom.

  Up to the panes of the windows, which overlooked the street, rose the muted lilt of a man and a woman talking as they strode by on the sidewalk below.

  In the cement front yard, brown leaves, curled like closed hands, were rattling against ironwork where they were trapped. In a week or two, a fall of snow would overlay the leaves, and they would be held down, rotting, until spring.

  Matthew set his backpack on the floor. On the desk a pale jade hen and chicks was growing in a shallow terra-cotta tray. The toothed whorls looked out at oblique angles. Leif hadn’t said anything about it, but Matthew was pretty sure that even a plant like this needed watering sometimes.

  The apartment did have his delicate smell, or nonsmell. Of a rubbed penny, a penny old enough to be real copper. Was that it? And also the smell of fresh milk, maybe, if fresh milk even has a smell. The smell of cut skin and of a kind of blank richness.

  It would only be for two weeks, initially, the doctor who had admitted Leif had said. Then they could revisit the decision, see where they were. The facility was one town over from Matthew’s parents’ house. A nurse in the ER had assured Matthew that she had seen many patients sent there over the years, and it had been easier to accept her advice than to try to arrange to have Leif transported all the way back into the city, where, the nurse had warned, beds were in short supply. Easier and probably cheaper. Matthew would be able to stay nearby, with his parents. After all, on Sunday it was already going to be Christmas. Why go back to the city? And then a week after Christmas the two weeks would be up. The first two weeks, anyway. Matthew wondered whether on Christmas Day the doctors would be willing to let Leif out for a few hours.

  He knew as an intellectual matter that it was natural to be angry at someone who had done what Leif had done, but he thought it was possible that he had used up all his anger on the effort of locking Leif up. While he had been telling the nurse that yes, he did believe that Leif continued to be a danger to himself, he had had to not look at Leif’s eyes, and then, as soon as the nurse had begun to loop cloth restraints around Leif’s wrists and ankles, he had wondered if that had been the right thing to say, because maybe saying it would make what Leif had tried to do more real and more plausible; maybe therefore it would have been better not to say it, in order to encourage Leif to forget about it—to live around it rather than pigheadedly through it.

  Institutions weren’t subtle.

  Matthew walked into Leif’s kitchenette and opened the cold-water tap. In a building as old as this one, lead seeped into water that sat for any length of time in the pipes, so Matthew let the water run. He opened a cabinet: cereal, canned tomatoes, a bag of lentils, boxes of tea. In a second cabinet he found a glass.

  He held a finger under the water, waiting for it to run cold.

  The facility itself had turned out not to be terrible. It was disconcerting, whenever Matthew visited, to have to wait between two locked sets of steel-plated doors for an orderly to pat him down. And the food, the times he had shared it, had been farinaceous and had been served on cardboard without even plastic utensils—everything had had to be eaten with fingers. Leif was allowed to wear his own clothes, though, except for belts and shoestrings, and there was a dayroom with a large window where he and Matthew were able to sit and talk and, if they felt like it, play Scrabble. They had to play at a rather desperate pace—the clock was always ticking—and unfortunately the televisions in the dayroom had cable and were almost always showing something violent, something crudely male—a car crash, a slashing—even though there seemed to be as many women as men in the ward. Leif was developing an ability to ignore the television, but Matthew couldn’t master it.

  The water having turned cold, Matthew poured himself a glass.

  Everything couldn’t be perfect, but maybe it would turn out to be good enough.

  There wasn’t much choice about drugs. Leif said the consensus was that if you were in there, it was inconsiderate to the people who were paying to keep you there for you to say you wanted to try to do without them.

  The green of Leif’s rocking chair was a practical, civic green—a shade of green that a water pump in a town square might be painted. It didn’t seem full-size, but it was too large to be a child’s; maybe it was an antique, scaled to an era when people were smaller. Matthew sat down in it, and it sprang forward and slapped his back, but then he found his center of gravity. The blanket on the bed beside it was a black-and-red tartan, cheerful even in the room’s dim, hooded atmosphere. He took a sip of the water he had poured. Could Leif get a drink of water at any hour, if he wanted one? Matthew didn’t know. Maybe they locked the door to his room at night. But no, they couldn’t. None of the interior doors in the facility had locks, not even the bathrooms.

  Why had Leif said he had roommates? Something else he had been hiding.

  On a dresser beside the rocking chair there was a child’s microscope, a solid one, of gunmetal. Solid in a way that gave Matthew the impression that it had been a father’s or a grandfather’s gift. Next to it was a small pinewood box, and when Matthew flicked up a little brass clasp on the box’s front and lifted the lid, inside he found an array of glass slides, shelved in parallel on their sides, making a puzzle of even the diffuse light that fell into their honeycomb.

  The trick was to convince Leif to think of the treatment as a gift. It would even be preferable for him to think of it as a gift he hadn’t asked for and didn’t want, if that would discourage him from worrying about how to repay it. The danger came when Leif was seeing himself as a cost that he could try to cut. If he were gone, he was in the habit of saying, the charges against the others would almost certainly be dropped. He shouldn’t be saying this. Even if it was true, saying it was part of the disease.

  In the Arcadia, when the hero tries to kill himself, his lover can’t believe that he’s sincere in thinking she’ll be better off without him, but in real life maybe this is what a suicide always thinks, if any thought goes to another person at all.

  Matthew drew one of the slides out of the box at random. Kidney cells (human), read the label. He filed it back into its grooved place.

  After a little searching, he was able to find the books that Leif had asked for. He also found one of Leif’s little red passport-size notebooks, one that still had blank pages. He added it and the books to his backpack, which already held books and changes of clothes for himself, as well as the presents for both of them that his mother had mailed to his apartment in the city—needlessly, it had turned out—the week before.

  If Leif had
died, Matthew thought, without intending to let himself think it, as he pulled out the dresser’s middle drawer and a stack of Leif’s folded white T-shirts briefly wobbled—if Leif had died, Matthew would have had to come here anyway, to choose clothes for Leif.

  Maybe he hadn’t used up absolutely all his anger.

  What he had been watching all this time was Leif trying to destroy himself. He didn’t mean his taking Fosco’s medicine, or not just that. He meant the whole effort that Leif had made to open himself to the world and keep himself open to it. Leif had taken off his armor in the middle of battle—in the middle of a war. It probably had something to do with being gay—with not being a man the way men usually were—with having had to learn the rules of combat artificially, the way that autistics have to learn social niceties. It was easy to make a terrible mistake if you weren’t by nature a killer, if you were deducing it all from first principles.

  Matthew halted his thoughts. It probably wasn’t a good idea to do too much thinking here alone, he advised himself.

  The hen and chicks—he had almost forgotten. He picked the plant up and ran it quickly under the faucet as if it were an ice cube tray that he was filling. Water beaded up on the pebbles in the medium and on the leaf clusters’ indifferent, ingrown faces. He suddenly wondered: Should he not be watering it? There were plants that didn’t like to be touched with water directly. Would some of the stiff spikes now fur over?

  He returned the plant to Leif’s desk. He sat down, and with his handkerchief he started to dab away the small mirrored spheres that were now lodged in the folds between the lames of the plant’s armor. There were dozens of the spheres, and each one dissolved at the lightest touch of the handkerchief, as soon as its cotton fibers interrupted the integrity of a water-pearl’s surface.

  This was something he could do, he told himself, as he kept dabbing. This was the sort of task he could safely spend his anger on. Even if he didn’t save the plant and even if the plant didn’t in fact need saving.

  7.

  Outside, in the snow, children from the neighborhood were barking taunts at one another. Their plastic sleds quacked beneath them as they sat down, squirmingly, on the hardpack at the heads of the trails. The slope behind the Farrells’ backyard ran downhill so steeply that no one had ever built on its few acres, and in neglect the land was so heavily and erratically wooded that to ride down through and between its black trees was genuinely dangerous and enlivening. Back when Elspeth and her brother had run with the neighborhood children, their father had periodically attempted to forbid sledding on the slope as too risky, and it was a legacy of his attempts that the subdivision’s children, long after Elspeth and Sam’s father had moved away, still skirted along the edges of the Farrells’ backyard, instead of tramping diagonally through it, and never looked up at the windows of the house.

  With her back to these windows, Elspeth had laid out five cards on her mother’s dining room table.

  The ace of money The ace of cups, inverted

  The eight of staves

  The five of money The six of staves

  To turn over only number cards was like a commentary on the recent undeceiving, the working group’s great public failure, which shouldn’t, strictly speaking, have shaken Elspeth’s faith, since she had never thought that she could do anything with numbers.

  Because she had never thought they could read the future, either, she had never bothered to learn how most people who used tarot cards actually used them. She had a vague memory that in the configuration she had just laid out one card was supposed to represent old love and one card new, but she didn’t know which was which, and she didn’t recognize anyone, having had the bad luck to turn over instead of personalities only statistics.

  Did it mean anything that the ace of cups was upside down? Of course the other four cards might also be. It was only because the figure on the ace of cups was asymmetrical that its orientation showed. On closer scrutiny, the ace looked less like a cup than like a castle—a miniature castle with seven turrets—a chatelet so diminutive that it could be held in a single hand. A gilded container for the self, in this case upended. Or maybe it looked more like a throne? An unyielding, high-backed bishop’s throne.

  There was now always another puzzle for Elspeth under the evident puzzle. Under the question of what a hand of tarot meant there now lay the question of what she thought she was doing. Maybe she was ceding away from herself her own will. Maybe she was hoping to let things say for her what she didn’t want to have to say herself. It shouldn’t be possible to have a private religion, but maybe a private one was the only honest kind in an era when faith had to be sheltered from so much knowing. From even one’s own knowing.

  The eight staves that were depicted on the eight of staves card were interwoven as if they constituted a net connecting the cards around it. It would take only six lines to connect four points, however, and it would take ten to connect five. You really are a fact-checker, Diana kidded whenever Elspeth overexplained—when, for example, she had overexplained that it made more sense to freeze soup in portions that were the size of a single serving than the size of a meal.

  Maybe there were eight staves because eight was the smallest number that could be split in half three times: man from woman, mind from body, self from other.

  “When’s your bus, honey?” her mother asked as she came down the house’s narrow central stairs.

  “Three seventeen,” Elspeth replied, gathering up her cards, to hide them. Her brother had already left, the night before.

  “So we should leave here at two forty-five,” her mother said.

  Her brother had claimed he had a report to write, and Elspeth was going back early in case it was going to be possible to visit Leif in the locked ward. Leif hadn’t emailed her back yet. There was a computer in the ward that the residents could take turns using.

  It occurred to Elspeth that she should tell Diana she was on her way. Elspeth had been making an effort, which Diana probably hadn’t even noticed, not to need to tell Diana everything, but it would be all right to tell her the bus schedule.

  “I wish there was something I could do for you,” her mother said.

  “There’s nothing wrong with me, Mom. Nothing has happened to me.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re paying for my lawyer,” Elspeth pointed out.

  “That’s not what I mean,” her mother replied. “How will you get to your friend?”

  “There’s a train. Matthew can meet me at the station.”

  “Matthew is his . . . ?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “D’you find it?” one of the boys outside yelled.

  Elspeth’s mother’s eyes strayed to the windows.

  “I’m surprised they still go sledding,” Elspeth said, looking over her shoulder at them. “I thought kids only played video games now.”

  “They take movies,” her mother explained, and stuck out a stiff arm as if she were holding up a phone.

  * * *

  —

  As her bus reached one of the lime green metal bridges that join the city to the continent, Elspeth decided it made more sense to go back to her own apartment. Diana hadn’t retracted her invitation, but the holiday had made its interruption, and Elspeth felt she could no longer presume that in Diana’s eyes she still stood in quite so dire a need of succor.

  She checked her phone, in the look-busy way that one does when returning to civilization. Leif still hadn’t emailed.

  Her roommates were still at their families’ houses. In the refrigerator, there was a carton of eggs she had left behind because she had known they would keep. Or she could have peanut butter for dinner. There were two heels of bread in the freezer.

  She hadn’t sensed anything when it had happened. She had cast back into and combed through her memories pretty thoroughly afterward, hoping to turn up a sliver, at leas
t, of awareness that she could reproach herself for not having paid more attention to, but there hadn’t been one. She had been out shopping that day for a Christmas present for Diana, something sincere that wasn’t too much. It couldn’t be food, which she herself might end up eating. She had found a porcelain tumbler with a streaked, opalescent glaze, but to buy just one would have seemed to say too clearly that she saw Diana as alone. In the end, she had bought a candle.

  In return, when they exchanged gifts, Diana had handed over a black-and-white snapshot: a sparrow perched at an angle on a wooden banister. The shadowed grooves of the wood grain were in sharp focus, but the sparrow itself was blurred, the stipples and smudges of its coat faintly doubled. The shutter must have startled it into the intake of breath that precedes flight.

  It had been while Elspeth had been buying the stupid candle that Leif had done it.

  She decided on peanut butter. She was only good at taking care of other people, not herself. She had to use a knife to pry apart the slices of bread, scattering, as she did so, some of the crystals of rime with which the bread was diamonded. On the counter the crystals wilted, dissolved. The pith of each slice of bread had been bleached to an uncanny, filamentous white by the long storage. She set the toaster to Frozen.

  Her phone. “What happened to you?” Diana asked.

  “Oh, I came back here,” Elspeth said. “To my place.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  It was easy for Diana either way. Elspeth turned on the public radio station at a volume audible but not quite intelligible, a known lonely person’s strategy.

  The thing about what Leif had done, she thought as she sat down at the dining room table with her dry toast and its gluey covering, was that she could just as easily have been the one to try it first. If you didn’t know how to take care of yourself, it was the obvious way of taking care of yourself, she thought, and as she had the thought, a surge of self-pity constricted her throat and she had to thump herself on the chest and slip-slide back into the kitchen for a glass of water, which she ought to have poured for herself in the first place.