Overthrow

by Caleb Crain

  There was a musical scraping as the oven yawned and Diana put in the pie. Elspeth handed over the phone.

  “Happy New Year, Mama,” Diana said.

  Elspeth ran the faucet and began to wash dishes.

  “Apple raspberry, with bitters and lemon zest,” Diana told her mother, as she sat on the sofa still in her apron, with a look of concentration on her face. “Well, this is a different recipe,” she said, turning away as if to shield the conversation somewhat.

  It was almost sad, Elspeth thought, the way parents continue to care about matters they no longer have a say in. It wasn’t a holiday on which Elspeth’s own mother made a point of calling.

  “She is,” she heard Diana say.

  “Some of which young people?” she heard Diana ask.

  Elspeth held the sponge under running water, to rinse away a leaf of flour that had caked up in it.

  “I did,” Diana said. And then: “I would be. Of course. You have a good New Year’s, too, Mama.” Diana carried the receiver to its cradle and set it in place.

  “Is she worried?” Elspeth asked.

  “She worries.” Diana retrieved her drink.

  “She asked about my upbringing.”

  “She was trying to figure out what kind of a Christian you are.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Elspeth to identify her denomination. “We were Lutheran. What about you?”

  “She’s a Pentecostal accountant. It’s probably why I’m a sociologist. I had to figure out what it meant when she spoke in tongues.”

  “Could you understand her?”

  “People can only understand if they’re inspired, too. But my theory at the time was that it was mathematics.”

  “Because she was an accountant?”

  “I had a teacher who told me it was the language of God. I think I think of it now as a way of beginning certain kinds of conversations. Of licensing certain conversations. Like with your group.”

  “With us? At Occupy?”

  “When you were all witchy together. I mean conversations that need to seem to come out of nowhere, conversations that don’t work unless they seem to fall out of the sky.”

  “I see,” Elspeth said. She wet the sponge again and swabbed the counter a second time. She returned the sponge to its little holster in the sink.

  “Sometimes describing an experience from the outside can seem cold to someone who knows it from the inside,” Diana said.

  “No, maybe they are similar,” Elspeth considered.

  “It may be just that they’re both experiences that I’m not going to share.”

  “Is your mother all right with your being—?”

  “She’s been informed. She’s waiting for the phase to pass. She’s always willing to forgive.”

  Elspeth nodded. “Wait—did we—what time is it?”

  In fact, they hadn’t missed midnight. Diana hadn’t set the timer for the pie, either, but she checked on it through the window in the front of the oven until she guessed that it was time to lower the temperature and shift the pie to the center rack. Elspeth found a radio station broadcasting the countdown and turned the volume low but not so low that they wouldn’t be able to hear when the chanting of the crowd became rhythmic.

  At midnight, as the white noise of the crowd resolved into pulses, they toasted and shyly kissed.

  “It’s nicer when a girl kisses a girl,” Elspeth observed.

  “New year indeed,” Diana commented.

  “Oh, that’s not what I mean.”

  “Careful, then.”

  “It’s just that I never tried it before.”

  “Didn’t you ever experiment?” Diana asked.

  “I thought it would be taking advantage.”

  “Of who?”

  But that night it didn’t go any further.

  * * *

  —

  On Monday, the first working day of the New Year, Elspeth took on a new fact-checking assignment, and by the end of the week, her replacement laptop, which she had financed by credit card, was full of galleys of the article to be checked and PDFs of the writer’s sources, and her dining room table was littered with thesis-clipped printouts and books whose pages were flagged with orange, pink, and blue stickies—a colonization of the common space that was her prerogative as the roommate with the most seniority, the only one of the original tenants still on the lease. As a courtesy, however, because she still thought her roommates were likely to return any day now, she collapsed the array into a stack every evening, placing each set of pages at a ninety-degree angle to the set beneath for ease of disarticulation the next morning, and stored the stack in the nook that had once been a dumbwaiter. Many nights she rode the subway to Diana’s, where they took turns cooking dinner. Afterward, there was sometimes a TV show; then, oblivion on Diana’s sofa. She slept so deeply that it was as though for an interval she was deleted.

  She went so often in part because she didn’t want to be alone if she woke up again vacated by her soul. She needed that much help—a thread around her pinky that was tied at the other end around someone else’s. Diana didn’t seem to mind, at least so far. Elspeth knew she needed to keep in mind that Diana was a lesbian. She also needed to guard against assuming that as a white person she had an automatic right to Diana’s attention. But if she asked too often whether it was okay to visit, she risked sounding uncomfortable with leaning so heavily on someone who wasn’t straight and wasn’t white. Raleigh kept calling, meanwhile, asking for coffee or lunch. She kept putting him off, but she sometimes wondered whether, if she couldn’t otherwise find a way to maintain her balance, it was becoming something like her duty to try returning to him.

  She continued whenever she had a spare hour or two to sort through the files on the server of the working group’s hacked and still-shuttered blog, where Leif and she and very occasionally the others had once tried to explain themselves to the world. She reread what they had written; she excised what had been contaminated; she rebuilt what had been damaged. It was an available penance, even if it wasn’t clear that anyone but she felt that it was called for. It was a way, too, of maintaining a connection to her friends and what they had been together. As tasks go, it wasn’t as difficult as Raleigh and Jeremy had made out that it would be. It was tedious, but it was like doing one’s taxes oneself: one had to investigate every ramification, but in most cases the liability turned out to be zero, and even when it was nonzero every individual step in the remedy was simple and easily taken, so long as one took no more than one step at a time. When one didn’t understand, one googled; there was always a support forum where the question at issue had been asked and answered; eventually, one understood. She put the site in a “sandbox.” She set about “hardening” it. And then, at last, she went “live” with it again, moving in metaphor from childhood through the tempering of steel to resurrection—well, either resurrection or eyewitness news. Although to a casual browser of the web the restored site looked the same, it had been invisibly fortified.

  She was pleased with her work, and she couldn’t think of any reason not to talk about it, even to the press. The site was public, after all. Even while it had been down, conspiracy-minded commenters had been able to spider and quote from a partial mirror captured long ago in an internet archive. Her refurbishment didn’t expose anything new. She thought that by talking to reporters about it she might be able to win the members of the working group some goodwill. She told Diana that she was thinking of calling the print reporter with the scrunchie, the one who had been less of an ambulance chaser than the others.

  Elspeth was innocent, after all. She was so innocent that every morning, the backup program that Raleigh had installed on his and Elspeth’s old laptops sent her an email warning that it had been forty-nine days since the last successful backup of their hard drives—fifty days—fifty-one days—and she never click
ed. The government had taken her laptop, and she respected their seizure even when it came to the laptop’s digital reflection. Her restraint didn’t have anything to do with the authorities’ threats. They didn’t even know that she almost certainly still had access, through the backup program, to the files that had caused all the trouble, the ones that Raleigh, Leif, Julia, and Chris had downloaded that night from Bresser’s server. They didn’t know that every morning she chose again not to look at the files.

  She never drew on her gift for her own advantage, either, and it, too, was invisible to them and always there.

  She was like a winged creature proud of having made a promise to herself that even if hunted she will not take to the skies. She lived by her own choice in a world that they didn’t even know it was possible to escape.

  * * *

  —

  She offered Stacey Temple a seat on her great-aunt’s sofa. For the last dozen years of her great-aunt’s life, the thermostat had been turned up so high that the sofa’s frame had cracked, and when Elspeth’s mother had the sofa reupholstered, the fractures in the frame had been soldered together clumsily, and the sofa now existed, confusingly, in a limbo between decay and repair, lacking many of the associations that had once made it dear but not quite elevated to the anonymous functionality that would have made it respectable.

  Elspeth brought out a tray with two mugs of chamomile tea and a small plate of store-bought gingerbread cookies. The journalist was already taking notes on her steno pad. She seemed to be studying what she was sitting on.

  “Are you writing about the furniture?” Elspeth asked.

  “Just scene-setting.”

  “Oh, of course,” Elspeth granted. She knew the kinds of shortcuts writers took; she had fact-checked so many of them. It was a good thing she had put away the tarot deck. “Thank you, you know. For advising me, before.”

  “Oh,” the woman said. “You’re welcome.” She remembered to smile. “So none of it is new?”

  “The furniture?”

  “The website.”

  “Had you read all of it before?” Elspeth asked.

  “My concern is whether I’ll be able to convince my editor that there’s a story here.”

  “I see,” Elspeth said.

  “But let’s talk for now, since I’m here,” the woman said. She set her digital recorder on the coffee table and lit its light. “Where were you when you discovered you had been hacked?”

  She had been at Diana’s. “I don’t remember,” Elspeth lied. “Here, I guess.”

  “And how did you feel? It must have been so upsetting.”

  “Oh, I was angry,” Elspeth said. “But they were like naughty children.” She took a cookie for herself and broke off one of its stubby paws. “They probably won’t like my saying that. What I mean is, it was hard to stay angry at them.” The woman wrote steadily in her pad even though the recorder continued to signal unblinkingly that it was listening. She wasn’t writing prose but was positioning individual words on the page in a pattern that must have been meaningful to her. “You take notes, too?” Elspeth asked.

  “It helps me think,” Temple said. “And, you know, in case. And you dehacked—do you think that’s the word?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You dehacked the site yourself?”

  “I was given some guidance by Jeremy, who runs the other website.”

  “‘Free the Telepathy Four’?”

  “Is that what it’s called now?” Elspeth asked.

  “I think the URL is something about a working group.”

  “That sounds more like it.”

  “Do you have a background in computers?”

  “They weren’t super malicious or anything. It wasn’t that hard. Especially if you’re a nerd. Diana says I should have been an engineer.”

  “Who’s Diana?”

  “Just a friend,” Elspeth said. “Don’t put her in, please.”

  “Are you not out?”

  “Oh, that’s not it. But she’s been helping me because she’s a friend not because she was in the working group.”

  “I see,” the journalist said.

  “I mean, she was in a different working group with me. It probably doesn’t matter. But if you could leave her out.”

  “What if I describe her without naming her? Is she one of your roommates?”

  “No. She lives in the city, uptown. Although I have been staying with her a lot, lately, to be honest.”

  “But I can’t use any of this.”

  “No. Sorry.”

  Temple drew a vertical line along the left-hand side of the page. “So tell me something I can use,” she said.

  “Well, I think something very interesting is the paradox that when the hackers put up their message calling us ‘nothingfags’—can you print that?”

  “The copy desk will come up with a write-around.”

  “I wonder what it will be,” Elspeth said. “‘An expletive suggesting overfondness without a motive.’”

  “Something like that,” the journalist admitted.

  “But ‘overfondness’ could be ‘whore,’” Elspeth said.

  “They’ll leave it if it’s integral.”

  “The paradox,” Elspeth tried again, “is that when they, the hackers, put up their message accusing us of standing for nothing, they put it up over the messages where we had tried to spell out what we thought we stood for.”

  “About telepathy,” Temple suggested.

  “The posts weren’t about telepathy.”

  “I don’t know if that’s strictly—”

  “Well, to say what we meant, maybe sometimes we said a little more than we meant,” Elspeth replied.

  The journalist took the time to write down Elspeth’s answer word for word.

  “I thought you were—,” Elspeth began, but broke off.

  “What?” Temple asked.

  “Forget it.”

  “I can take it. I’m a journalist.”

  “No, you’re right,” Elspeth said. “You have to be able to be challenging.”

  “This website was up before, and what I’m wondering is, if they didn’t hear you the first time, why do you think they’ll hear you now?”

  “Maybe they didn’t want to hear it before,” Elspeth said.

  “And why will they now?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they won’t. But isn’t it news, what we actually meant? Everyone keeps saying they wish they knew what we actually meant.”

  “You just said you didn’t mean it literally.”

  “A lot of it is literal,” Elspeth protested. “The part where we said everyone probably knows more about what each other are feeling than we usually let on, and if we let ourselves know that we know, the world would probably be a better place—that was literal.”

  “But I don’t know if it’s news.” Temple drew a double line in her steno pad. “I mean, it’ll be up to my editor.”

  * * *

  —

  “It’s lucky,” said Elspeth’s lawyer, Dominique Blount. “One of our paralegals is your size.” Someone’s dry cleaning was hanging on the back of the door to her office. The lawyer slid up the plastic wrapper that ensleeved the clothes.

  “You want me to wear it?” Elspeth asked.

  It was a gray wool skirt-suit. “Wouldn’t it look a little more formal?” Blount asked.

  Elspeth felt bad for the woman it had been taken from, whoever she was, who had been told that her outfit looked as appropriate for an object of the law as for a subject of it. The least Elspeth could do was try it on.

  In the handicapped stall of the echoing women’s room, she clicked the hanger onto a coat hook. The fabric of the suit was heavy but limp and had the mildly tangy, olive-like smell of cleaning solvents. She wondered if she would hav
e been offered a stranger’s clothes if she had been a man. But maybe if she had been a man she would already own an outfit that was in the genre of a uniform, and someone like Dominique Blount would be confident that society had trained her to wear it in such situations unprompted.

  No, she realized. They would tell a man like Chris what to wear. He probably didn’t own a suit, either.

  Once she had struggled into the gray wool, she faced the mirror over the bathroom’s sinks. The shoulders were a little boxy. The waist of the skirt was right, but she didn’t quite fill the bell of it; the woman it had been stripped from must have a bit more figure in the rear. Oh well. Tugged askew by the heavier fabric of the jacket, her own blouse looked weak and shapeless.

  She shrugged off the jacket; she wriggled out of the skirt. Maybe something would happen between now and tomorrow morning that would save her from having to wear it.

  Any of the women who smiled at her as she carried it back to her lawyer’s office could have been its owner.

  “It doesn’t fit?” Blount asked, when she saw Elspeth in her own clothes. Blount herself was wearing slate blue that day.

  “No, it fits.”

  The lawyer considered Elspeth and the suit in Elspeth’s hands. “I think it could be helpful,” she said.

  Elspeth nodded, folding the suit over her arm. They stood in awkward silence for a moment.

  “So we’re all set for tomorrow?” the lawyer asked. Blount had set up a meeting with Somerville where Elspeth would be able to tell him her side of the story. Elspeth was even going to be given immunity. “The US Attorneys’ Office is just five hundred yards from our front door, so if we meet here at nine fifteen, that should give us plenty of time to take the elevator down and pass through security and so forth. If you bring your phone, remember you’ll have to leave it here.”

  “Why are they doing this for us, again?”

  “They want to find out what you know,” the lawyer said. “They’re willing to see if they can work something out.”

  “But I don’t know anything.”