Overthrow

by Caleb Crain

  She noticed that she was breathing in violent gulps, as if she wasn’t confident that she would remember to breathe if she didn’t make sharp efforts.

  A passerby impatiently sighed. Stationary over her phone, Elspeth had obliged the man to step outside the narrow lane of sidewalk that had been shoveled. “Sorry,” she murmured. It was the internet’s fault for taking her away from her body, as the internet tended to do.

  If only she were able to talk again with Leif for a minute or two with their old freedom.

  * * *

  —

  When she got home to her empty apartment—her roommates seemed to have decided to sleep every night at their boyfriends’, visiting only when they remembered an item of clothing or a bottle of prescription medicine that they needed—she took off her coat and her hat and her wet shoes and socks and the heavy wool skirt-suit, and knowing that she wanted to be away from the world for a while turned off her phone. In her underwear she carried a chair into the utility closet and stood on it to unplug her Wi-Fi, too.

  It was strange the way, once she had done these things, the silence of the apartment came to the surface. Or rather, its faint, homely sounds: the taps of the chair’s feet as she set it back under the dining room table, the whelk-shell echo of the shape of the rooms, the whir from behind the refrigerator, the one loose window sash that from time to time was joggled in its frame by a flaw of air. It was like the blank solitude one finds when one gets up in the middle of the night. She was alone; no one could address a word to her. There would be no thoughts in her head but her own unless she happened to open a book.

  She waited for the shower to run warm and then hot. When she stepped in, she began to cry, and then the wetness of the water somehow stopped her, as if like cured like.

  Afterward, she dressed in a clean set of underwear and in her own clothes again.

  She was able to work for a while without needing access to the internet because the piece she had been assigned to check was fairly esoteric and the writer had depended mostly on printed books for his sourcing. She unpacked the books, notes, and printouts onto the dining room table, brewed herself a cup of tea, and then disappeared, reassuringly, into the deliberateness of the task of reconstructing the writer’s footsteps. Methodically she retraced the paths that she figured out he must have taken as he carried his facts into his manuscript. It was a history piece; it had almost nothing to do with the world one now lived in.

  In the middle of the afternoon, the buzzer startled her.

  By now she knew that the police, like mailmen, were somehow able to let themselves through the building door, so it probably wasn’t them. She guessed it was a reporter. When she tiptoed out of her apartment and down the building stairs, however, and leaned around the curve of the last flight to peek into the lobby, she saw Julia on the other side of the door’s glass. Julia didn’t at first see Elspeth. Her eyes were hollow, and she was wearing the eccentric-looking beret that she had adopted since the arrests. The beret seemed to come from outside the ordinary vocabulary of clothes; it was marked as strange, like an item of clothing from a child’s dress-up bin, or an item in a thrift store that is a little too obviously the property of someone recently deceased.

  Elspeth opened the door.

  Julia hesitated. “I wasn’t sure you’d want to talk to me.”

  “Is this for your project?”

  “I got a tip about you.”

  “Come in,” Elspeth said.

  As they made their way upstairs, gratitude or nervousness drew from Julia a flood of words: “I came as soon as I could so that I could get here before your lawyer told you not to talk but as I was thinking about it, as I walked over, I realized perhaps that’s not fair to you. Perhaps you shouldn’t talk. Perhaps I shouldn’t be asking you to. But I thought to myself that I could always ‘go meta’ and ask about what went into your decision to talk. About where you are, as it were, rather than what you would say.”

  “Did your lawyer give you the tip?”

  “Oh, Kenneth usually hears about these things from me now, if he hears about them at all.”

  “I didn’t make a deal,” Elspeth said, bringing Julia into the parlor. “I didn’t mean to, anyway.”

  “Are they saying you made a deal? I don’t know, remember, because I can’t go online.”

  “Not going online sounds so nice. Would you like some tea? I have gingerbread cookies.” It occurred to her that she had a routine now for entertaining the press.

  “It is nice, in a way. I’d love something.” Julia scanned the room, but there was nothing for her to notice; there wasn’t anything in the parlor that Elspeth had changed. A few more of the hydrangeas’ dried petals had dropped onto the coffee table. That was all. The petals looked like the little moth wings one finds in the sill when one first opens one’s windows in the spring. “People can’t be mean to me,” Julia continued. “Or rather, I’m sure they are being mean, but I don’t know anything about it if they are, so they might as well not be being mean.”

  Of the Telepathy Four, the one the internet’s commenters were hardest on was in fact Julia. She was a woman, for one thing, and in her manner she was oblivious to the small conformities, for another. On social media, people were almost as hard on her as they were on Bresser, but perhaps because of the judge’s order she really didn’t know this.

  While the water was boiling Elspeth brought out a plate of the cookies. “Someone attacked me today online,” Elspeth volunteered.

  “Was it very bad?” Julia asked.

  “People get so angry now when they see someone paying more attention to thoughts and feelings than they think thoughts and feelings deserve. It’s like there’s a new sumptuary law against introspection.”

  “It’s a new world,” Julia said vaguely, which stopped Elspeth from continuing her theory.

  Elspeth went back to the kitchen for the tea. “I don’t have a lawyer anymore,” she announced when she returned with it.

  “Is that safe?” Julia asked.

  “Is it safe for you to be here?” Elspeth countered.

  “So long as I don’t leave any trace. Unless a thing is recorded, now, it doesn’t happen. I mean, I know that’s not strictly true, but anything unrecorded is now so much harder to prove than the many things that are recorded, it might as well be true. Hard memory drives out soft. I don’t even call or text anymore. I knock on doors.”

  “How did you hear about me talking?”

  “My source told me. I haven’t read it yet myself because for some reason I missed it when I was reading today’s paper.”

  “Oh, you mean the interview. That’s in tomorrow’s paper.”

  “That explains why I didn’t see it.”

  So she didn’t know about the proffer meeting. Maybe no one knew yet but Elspeth, Somerville, and Blount. Elspeth didn’t really want Julia to be the first person she told. She had always thought Raleigh had probably been interested in Julia, but that wasn’t the reason.

  “Is there something else?” Julia asked.

  “I talked to Somerville,” Elspeth said, giving in.

  “Oh, so did Chris, you know. He went before the grand jury yesterday.”

  For Julia to be nonchalant about it was somehow worse. “I did it because I thought I was going to change his mind.”

  “Oh, poor thing,” Julia said. She was trying in her clumsy way to show pity, but she didn’t know how to.

  The cookies were untouched.

  “I guess I can’t ask what you said,” Julia commented.

  “I only told him what I told the newspaper. That we had a blog. That we had a theory. I didn’t realize he didn’t know.”

  “We had a blog?”

  “It was mostly Leif and me.”

  “I guess Somerville isn’t the only one who didn’t know about it. I hope I get to read it someday.” Jul
ia had tears in her eyes. “I know that sounds dumb, but I mean it.” Julia found a tissue in her purse. “I know you probably don’t want to hear this, but sometimes I think that all of this is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me or will ever happen to me. I know of course that it’s all horrible, but even during the horrible parts I feel so alive.”

  * * *

  —

  It soon got into the news that Elspeth had met with Somerville. Elspeth didn’t think Blount had talked, but the information might have leaked backward through Julia to one of her sources, or Somerville might have disclosed it himself, off the record. He had a motive to, after all. The grand jury seemed to be nearing the end of its work, and if there were any plea bargains to be struck before the arraignments, it was in Somerville’s interest to improve his negotiating position by frightening the three defendants who weren’t yet cooperating.

  The revelation further blackened Elspeth’s name online. She had been widely accused, after Temple’s interview was published, of inappropriate boasting. Didn’t she know her friends were in serious trouble? How could she fail to understand how modest her ability to defend her site really was? And now she had told Somerville about the working group’s blog. It was the internet’s opinion that she must have told him much more.

  She hadn’t, and she hadn’t been boasting, and of course she knew her friends were in trouble, and of course she knew her web security skills were negligible, and telling Somerville about the blog had been a stupid accident, but when she considered posting these disclaimers and disavowals on the RPF website, every draft she came up with sounded defensive—worse than saying nothing at all—and in the end she kept silent. After Temple’s interview, the RPF site was heavily quoted by supporters as well as critics of the Telepathy Four, and one day word spread among its new readers that it was possible to send Elspeth an email through a contact form on the site, and in half an hour, before she disabled the form, a score of strangers wrote her that she was a stupid anarchist slut who would get what was coming to her and she should visualize being hit every time she considered uttering a word and she was in their sights now and they would pay her back someday they hoped soon and above all an ugly bitch like her should learn that her place in society was to shut up. Most of the writers seemed to be motivated by hatred of RPF and of Occupy generally and were therefore relatively easy to dismiss from her mind once she had absorbed and metabolized the mere menace of them, which did take a few days. A week later, however, when she made the experiment of turning the contact form back on, there was a new surge of hate mail and these writers presented themselves as partisans of the Telepathy Four who felt called upon to punish her for her betrayals of the cause. These wasps left their stingers behind in the wounds they made.

  She answered now whenever she saw that it was Raleigh calling. When he first heard her explanation for her disclosure, he was unable to stop himself from saying that surely she could have done a little more research about what this kind of conversation with a prosecutor usually means, seeing as how, unlike the rest of them, she was still allowed to go on the internet. She didn’t hold the small cruelty of this reproach against him because, as she told Diana, he was right. “So tiresomely,” Diana had replied. Perhaps so, but Elspeth felt that it was her duty now to be bullied and bored a little by the kind of reproach Raleigh had made. It was her duty as the one who had fucked up, and to some lesser extent, in her conversations with Raleigh, as the one who didn’t want to get back together.

  She needed to make sure that Leif, too, knew what she had done and the limits of it. She called his lawyer, Michael Gauden, and told him everything she could remember about her meeting with Somerville.

  When she finished speaking, there was silence on the other end of the line. “Hello?” she queried.

  “I’m not sure what the point of this call is,” the lawyer said. “There’s nothing to prevent you from speaking to Somerville again.”

  “If he asks again, I’ll refuse to,” she said.

  “I don’t know what I can do with this, but thank you, I suppose.”

  From Leif himself—or rather, from Matthew on Leif’s behalf—she heard nothing. Maybe he wasn’t well. Some days, she was sure that if he knew, and if he was well enough to understand what had happened, he was bound to forgive her. He had to. Probably he already had forgiven her. On other days, however, she worried that in his isolation and his illness a suspicion of even her could have crystallized in him. How could he know what her motive had been in talking to Somerville? Only the effect of her meeting and a secondhand report of it would have been able to reach him. She imagined visiting the locked ward and sitting at the games table in the dayroom with him again. You didn’t think I was angry, did you? she would say, and he would reply, It would have been all right if you had been. But the imagined conversation didn’t reassure her. It didn’t ring true. Leif wouldn’t speak so lightly about something that had really hurt him. Nonetheless her mind rehearsed the scene over and over, unable to leave it and unable to make it more plausible. Sometimes her mind even went so far as to imagine that Leif, too, apologized.

  In this way the silence—the actual silence—between her and Leif became as time passed more definitive. She told herself that she should approach him rather than wait for him to signal that he was able to pardon her. But from day to day there were always other things for her to do. She had her fact-checking work. She still needed to find a new lawyer for herself—a subpoena from the grand jury could come at any time. Whenever she began to research lawyers, however, the task itself, as she got into the details of it, brought home to her that unlike her friends, she wasn’t facing charges, and she stalled, aware that she was guilty of having been spared and wondering whether, since she had been spared, she really deserved a defense and shouldn’t try instead to save her mother from having to pay for it.

  She was at fault on both sides of the equation: she hadn’t been with her friends when they had made their mistake, and she had been away from them when she had made her own. She hadn’t been bold enough, and then she had been too bold. Certainly she wasn’t “good” anymore; the internet had taken care of that. Maybe she never had been, a thought that liberated her a little from her own caution. The feeling of liberation came and went in spasms, as late liberations do, and it was during one of these throes, one night when she had stayed home (having explained to Diana that she needed to work through the evening in order to finish checking an article that closed the next morning), that she finally logged on to the server of the company that had backed up her and Raleigh’s hard drives, whose password she and Raleigh had chosen so that it would be impossible for anyone else to guess but easy for them to remember. There, in a blue folder, the blue of the sky from a Cape Cod sailboat, was the past that had belonged to her before the arrests. The past that the government had taken from her. Raleigh’s past lay waiting and blinking in an identical folder, just beside it. When she double-clicked on hers, she saw recipes, and photos that she had forgotten that she had kept copies of, and drafts of, embarrassingly, poems, and other fragments that she hadn’t been able to recover merely by logging back into her old email account. Almost without thinking she dragged the folder, marked ELSPETHS_, onto her desktop. The scorn that she felt for Somerville’s failure even to know about the working group’s blog must have had something to do with it. A small window popped up to tell her that of 383,402 files to be copied, an at first small but quickly rising number had so far been copied. She watched for a minute or so as the digits wheeled higher. Then she pushed back her chair and, leaving her computer running, went to bed.

  She expected to have a moral hangover the next morning, but she didn’t. Maybe she was changing. Was it unlike her that she still hadn’t told her mother that she had let Dominique Blount go? Or had Elspeth not known until now what she was like? A couple of days later, her most recent fact-checking assignment out of the way, she spent a pleasant afternoo
n distributing the recovered files into the hierarchy of folders that she had improvised from memory when she had first set up her new laptop. Putting them in the electronic cubbyholes proper to them gave her a sense of tidiness and accomplishment. It was like going through a bureau drawer and throwing out all the socks that have lost their twins. She felt like she knew where she was again, once she had finished.

  * * *

  —

  “They’re going to be arrested again,” Jeremy called to tell her, a week later.

  “Arrested?”

  “For the federal case. The grand jury has returned its indictment. The other time was for the state case.”

  “Leif, too? Can he leave the place where he is?”

  “I don’t know how they’ll handle that.”

  “Are you at the courthouse now?” she asked.

  “They’re letting them go by themselves to the court tomorrow morning, and they’ll be arrested when they get there.” He gave her the address of the federal courthouse. It was down the street from where she had met Somerville and around the corner from the state court where the four had been arraigned in November. “We’re keeping where Leif is out of the press,” he reminded her.

  She called Diana, and they agreed to meet the next morning on the courthouse steps.

  Then she called Raleigh, whom she probably ought to have called before Diana. He said his parents weren’t able to book a flight from Oklahoma on such short notice. “You don’t want to come, do you?” he asked.

  It had never occurred to her that she had the option of not going. “Don’t you want me to?”

  His hesitation in answering seemed to her a little maudlin. She reminded herself that it couldn’t be easy to go back to jail.

  “You’ll be strong,” she said.

  “I wish I knew that.”

  After she got off the phone, she sat down to her fact-checking work for a few hours, a little heartlessly. Even if her friends were convicted and sent away, her life was going to continue, and it was going to continue to have to be paid for. For intervals she was able to blank herself out in the work.