Overthrow

by Caleb Crain

“You know what happened to you,” Blount said. “There might be a part of it that’s useful.”

  Everyone wanted her to be useful. “I want him to see that there’s no reason for any of this.”

  “Well, it’s a chance for him to hear your side of things.”

  “So there’s a risk but maybe also a benefit. Like talking to a reporter.”

  Blount laughed. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “I talked to one this morning.”

  “You did what.”

  “Stacey Temple interviewed me this morning.”

  The lawyer’s eyes shifted to a stack of manila folders on her desk. The cover of the folder on top arced and draped gracefully, and a little revealingly of the documents inside.

  “Is that all right?” Elspeth asked.

  Blount had turned so pale that the blush on her face was visible as only paint and seemed to float over and somewhat apart from the surface of her skin. “If it already happened . . .”

  “She’s probably not going to run it,” Elspeth said. “She didn’t think it was really news. Their standards are very high over there.”

  “He calls and yells,” Blount said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh god,” Blount continued, to herself, apparently contemplating the things that were going to be yelled at her.

  “Why does he care if I talk?” Elspeth asked. “I thought he wanted me to talk.”

  “It’s his case,” the lawyer said.

  * * *

  —

  Elspeth’s soul became disengaged from her body again that night. When she realized that it had happened, she was in the middle of dreaming that transparent tunnels were being dug through the sky. She felt Diana’s hand on her wrist, which woke her up. She must have cried out in her sleep. “Can you see them?” she asked Diana.

  “Do you want me to turn on a light?”

  “I won’t be able to still see them if you turn on the light.”

  Diana waited while Elspeth finished staring up at the sky that wasn’t in the ceiling above Diana’s sofa. In the dream, she had been in one of the tunnels at the same time that she was looking at them from below. Were they the timelines in the recurring dream of Raleigh’s that Matthew had told her about? She didn’t like the idea that she was still receiving thoughts of Raleigh’s so strongly. But maybe the tunnels or something like them were nowadays in many people’s minds. In the dream she had understood that no one who was in a tunnel ever left it. Each one came to an end with its digger still inside.

  * * *

  —

  In her nervousness she had put on espadrilles, even though it was January, and her feet, under the table, were now wet and cold, soaked through by slush.

  “There’s you,” Thomas Somerville, the assistant US attorney, was saying, “and there are the defendants, and there’s me and there’s the government, but there’s also the law, and there’s the fact that we may be setting precedents here, and I don’t want any more than you do to do anything that would limit or impair the protections that the law will continue to be able to offer to free speech in the future. Agreed?”

  She was afraid that the point of his question might be to get her into the habit of agreement. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Do you agree?”

  Somerville as a man was a figure blossoming into middle age. He was plethoric and had broad shoulders and was beginning to be heavy. His teeth were arranged in almost military order, his new weight pushed out tight what would have been wrinkles in a less glossy complexion, and his head of hair was still full enough, his forelock still sufficiently jaillissant, that Elspeth thought he would be able to carry himself under the device of it without embarrassment for another ten years, at least, though not, there were signs, forever.

  It was patent that he wasn’t the sort of person who is ever persuaded by being shown the other side of an issue.

  “Do you agree?” Blount, seated to Elspeth’s right, unhelpfully repeated.

  “I’m not sure I understand what I’m being asked to agree with.”

  “Look,” Somerville said. “What I’ve got in mind here is that a settlement would not create a precedent. It would not make case law that would force anyone’s hand later, and maybe that’s something that all of us agree we would prefer.”

  “Why are you asking me about this?” Elspeth asked. “I’m not accused of anything, am I?”

  Though Elspeth and he had only just started talking, his eyes were wide with exasperation. While deciding how to reply, he left his mouth open. “A case like this is always evolving,” he said quietly.

  “If your office is contemplating charges against my client—,” Blount began.

  “No, come on, look. I don’t rule that out, I can’t. It’s my job. We’ll get to that later if we need to, but maybe we won’t need to, okay? Right now what I’m trying to talk about is the larger picture, because my read on you, Elzbeth, is that you’re an idealist.”

  Like many people with an uncommon name, she had trained herself not to correct mispronunciations.

  “Can you agree with me on that at least?” he asked.

  “It’s kind of you to say that.”

  “‘It’s kind of me to say that’?” he repeated, as if he wanted her to believe that her reply had wounded him.

  “I’d like to talk about the larger picture, too,” Elspeth said. “This whole case is a—it’s a—”

  “Go on,” he prompted.

  “It’s a show trial and a witch hunt.”

  “Really. Interesting. According to what I’ve been reading online lately, I’m an ogre of fantastical proportions. So if there’s a witch hunt, then I’m the object of it, Ms. Farrell. And there’s definitely not a show trial here. What I’ve been trying to explain to you for the past fifteen minutes is that I for one would like for there not to be any more show, if possible, than there has already been.”

  “I haven’t commented on the case online.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. There’s been entirely too much comment already. And I can tell you I’m not the only one who feels that way.”

  It was fortunate that no article about her by Stacey Temple had yet appeared in the newspaper.

  “What do you really even think that the accused did?” Elspeth asked.

  “You want to know my theory of the case?” he asked. “Sorry, Elzbeth. We are here today for you to tell me what you know they did.”

  “I wasn’t there.”

  “But you felt confident lecturing me a moment ago about what they didn’t do? I hope you’ve got a little more for me than games with words, Elzbeth, because those can be very dangerous for someone in your position. This is our chance to talk. Our one chance. Shall we get started?”

  Elspeth shrugged.

  “Let me amend that,” he said. “This is your one chance. I’m still giving you the benefit of the doubt, by the way, for the record. And it’s very kind of me to say that to you, under the circumstances.”

  “We’re very appreciative that you’re willing to give us this meeting, Tom,” Blount said.

  “Thank you for that, Dominique,” Somerville replied.

  He rather demonstratively opened a manila folder, full of printouts. Elspeth was capable of reading text upside down, but the table between them was so large that the words were too far away for her to pick them out.

  “Maybe we could begin by establishing how long you’ve known Leif Saunderson.”

  “What does that have to do with the case?” Elspeth challenged him.

  Somerville sighed. He leaned forward. “Do you know what this meeting is for?”

  “It’s reasonable,” Blount intervened, “if we try to narrow the scope a little, in the interest of Elspeth’s privacy.”

  “But does she know what the meeting is for?” Somervi
lle asked. “This is called a proffer meeting, what we’re having,” he told Elspeth, his voice raised, “because you’re proffering to me your evidence—you’re offering to let me use it in court, if I’m interested—but it’s impossible for me to figure out whether I am interested unless and until I get to see what it is you’re trying to sell. That’s the situation between us right now.”

  “I thought . . . ,” Elspeth began.

  “What did you think?”

  “I thought it was so we could talk.”

  “Exactly. We’re talking.”

  “I thought that if we talked you’d see that we were just kids.”

  “Last time I checked, all the defendants were competent adults.” Somerville took his phone out of his pocket and without apologizing for the interruption started typing. He seemed to be sending a text. “When did you first meet Leif Saunderson?” he resumed.

  “Our sophomore year,” Elspeth said helplessly. Blount had sold her out.

  “College or high school?”

  “College.”

  “What year was this?”

  “Two thousand six? We were in the same ceramics class.”

  “Ceramics—like, pottery?”

  “Like pottery,” she confirmed. The detail didn’t seem to be to his liking, which was a small consolation.

  “So you were both artists.”

  “Well, no, we both discovered we weren’t. Our bowls kept blowing up in the kiln.”

  “Blowing up?”

  “If there are any air pockets in the clay, it blows up when you fire it. It’s normal. It’s not a terrorist thing.”

  “‘Not a terrorist thing,’ did you get that?” Somerville asked a voiceless assistant of his, who was taking notes on a yellow legal pad at the end of the table.

  “They can’t use any of this, right?” Elspeth asked Blount.

  Somerville answered for her: “Only if you try to give any testimony in court that contradicts what you say to us today.”

  “That’s accurate, yes,” Blount murmured.

  “I thought you said I had immunity. What if I say in court, Oops, actually I took ceramics in two thousand seven?”

  There was a sharp rap at the door. “Come in,” Somerville ordered.

  “Pardon me, sir,” said a young man in a suit and tie. “I had a feeling you’d want to be made aware of this.”

  Somerville didn’t get up. His face took on an impassive expression, which Elspeth sensed was somehow for her benefit, as the man, who must have been on Somerville’s staff, leaned over, bracing himself against his thigh with one hand and with the other shielding his mouth as he spoke inaudibly into one of Somerville’s ears. The man’s tie slipped away from him and dangled.

  “When did this come in?” Somerville asked.

  Stacey Temple must have published her article after all.

  “Just now.”

  Somerville’s eyes were on Elspeth. “Mm-hmm,” he said.

  She was watching a playlet, she sensed. It didn’t matter that she could tell because it was almost certainly fooling Blount and because as a play it was capable of moving its audience even if the audience was cognizant of the artifice of it.

  “So apparently,” Somerville resumed, “the person I should be asking you about is Raleigh Evans.” He watched Elspeth for a reaction.

  “Raleigh who was my boyfriend?” Elspeth asked. Raleigh’s name sounded so unfamiliar coming out of Somerville’s mouth.

  “I’m willing to keep talking with the understanding that we have,” Somerville said, “but it’s probably my responsibility to tell you that according to what my people are telling me, Ms. Farrell here may well have exposed herself to a charge of accessory before the fact.”

  “How? By sleeping with my boyfriend?” She was a little surprised by herself. It wasn’t like her to be so intemperate.

  “If there’s new testimony concerning Mr. Evans . . . ,” Blount interjected.

  “We have reason to believe he was using Ms. Farrell’s provision for wireless internet access when he was planning his attack.”

  “Using my Wi-Fi?” Elspeth asked. “That’s supposed to be a thing? Are you serious?”

  “Maybe you’d enjoy the challenge of explaining to a jury of your peers what it means to run a private wireless internet server in your own home?”

  “Everybody has Wi-Fi,” Elspeth said.

  “I think you’ll find that everybody doesn’t.”

  “Elspeth, I would advise that we—,” Blount began.

  “He’s bluffing,” Elspeth said. “It’s just Wi-Fi, and anyway there was never any ‘attack.’ Our working group’s whole philosophy was that there couldn’t be an attack from people like us, for the very reason that we were able to perceive what we were able to perceive. Instead of the old idea of privacy, there has to be a new moral understanding, which people like us have to feel our way into. That’s what we believed. We didn’t believe in ‘attacks.’”

  “This was your personal philosophy?”

  “It was the working group’s,” Elspeth said. She saw Somerville glance at his assistant to check that he was getting down what Elspeth was saying; she sensed Blount wishing to restrain her. “I’m not telling you anything new. All of this is on our blog.”

  “Which blog is that?”

  “The working group’s blog. The one that was hacked after the arrests and that I spent the last few weeks fixing.”

  “Your working group kept a blog?” Somerville reached down to the floor to draw a laptop out of his satchel.

  “Elspeth . . . ,” Blount softly warned, too late.

  They waited in silence for Somerville’s laptop to boot up. It chimed, hummed, whirred.

  He tilted his head up in order to look at the screen through the bottom of his glasses.

  “You mean you’ve been investigating us all this time,” Elspeth said, “and you didn’t know until I said it just now that we had a blog?”

  “Who wrote it?” Somerville asked. “It looks very interesting.”

  “It was mostly Leif’s.”

  “It’s his philosophy?” Somerville asked, but he didn’t insist on an answer from her. From the darting of his eyes it was evident that he was now looking at the website himself. “‘The New Morality of Privacy.’ Is that what I should be looking at?”

  She didn’t reply.

  “Here,” he said, pointing at the screen. “‘The idea of privacy isn’t logical anymore.’ Oh this is good, Elzbeth. This is really good, thank you. ‘We’re in relation, so in order to say my truth, I also have to say yours, or at least a face of yours.’ That’s gold, right there. That’s him saying the laws don’t apply to him.”

  “That’s not what he’s saying.”

  “He’s saying he has the right to any information that speaks to him. That’s justifying the crime before the fact.”

  “That’s not the way he meant it. He says ‘face of yours.’”

  “It seems pretty clear to me.”

  “He didn’t even think it would be possible for one of us to read something unless we were part of what we were reading somehow and it was right for us to be part of it.”

  “So if you’re able to read it,” Somerville said, “then you have the right to read it, and it doesn’t matter what the law says.”

  “No, it’s not like that.”

  Somerville smiled and didn’t respond.

  * * *

  —

  “I’m letting you go,” Elspeth said when she and Blount reached the sidewalk.

  “You should consider retaining my services until you’ve secured new representation.”

  “No, I’m going to let you go right now.”

  “I respect your decision.”

  As the lawyer walked away, leaving Elspeth alone, her toes beginning to
burn with the return to cold, wearing under her coat the paralegal’s forgotten suit, it seemed to Elspeth that it was her mother’s help that she was rejecting. It was after all her mother who had paid for Blount, whose only offense at the end of the day was that she had worked within rules that an older generation had come up with for themselves in their navigation of an earlier version of the world. It was no one’s fault that in the changed world there wasn’t and never had been anything for Elspeth to fall back on but her own rage and perspicacity.

  The snow along the street was granular and translucent; it was already old snow. Elspeth wondered whether she or someone else would be the one to tell Leif that she had betrayed him.

  She checked her phone. There was a new email, announcing that she had been tagged in a status update by someone whose name she didn’t recognize, and when she clicked, she saw that the update linked to a post about her that before she quite knew what she was doing she was in the middle of reading.

  Her heart pounded. She shouldn’t be reading this now.

  She was an attention whore. She treated Occupy like an accessory that she wore while starring in a personal reality show of her own imagining. Everyone was sick of letting her and her fellow showboats distract from the struggles of people who didn’t have the luxury of having their nervous breakdowns acclaimed as world-historical. Most people couldn’t take for granted a surplus of privilege so great that they could make an elaborate drama out of their inability to focus on issues larger than themselves.

  Evidently Stacey Temple had published her interview. This was one of the first online reactions.

  The ranter indignantly refused to reward Temple’s interview with a link, but the interview was easy to find on the newspaper’s homepage. Elspeth read it quickly, not for itself but to see whether it appeared to justify the rant.

  It was hard to say. Elspeth was, after all, even more of a traitor to the ideals of Occupy than the ranter knew. The only cruelty she knew for sure to be gratuitous was that of the stranger who had taken it upon himself to tag her. The tag suggested an unknown number of people capable of finding the near-anonymous direction of malice against her casually entertaining.