Overthrow

by Caleb Crain

  Alone in her bed that night, she dreamed again about the tunnels in the sky. This time they reminded her of the tunnels behind glass in a child’s ant farm. While she was watching them, she opened her eyes and also saw the white frame that the plaster molding made around the white plane of her bedroom ceiling.

  She was sane as long as she could see both. It was the third time her body had lost contact with her soul. It still felt strange, but she couldn’t be afraid of it forever. She couldn’t keep calling Diana. It might be that this feeling of non-feeling was from now on going to be part of her life.

  She closed her eyes, to listen for the voice inside that she still believed would someday speak. She still knew where to listen for it even though it still never had.

  She had been floating on her sorrow and anger as if her life depended on her ability to tread water and stay on top of them, but she couldn’t do it forever. When she decided to stop struggling, the sorrow and anger rose into and through her as if she were a meadow being flooded.

  * * *

  —

  There were no steps per se in front of the federal courthouse; the building was handicapped-accessible. Instead there was a plaza, palisadoed with cement bollards spaced widely enough to admit pedestrians but closely enough to keep out any trucks or cars that were being driven as weapons. Elspeth spotted the traffic-hazard orange of Diana’s jacket, and she was so eager to tell Diana that the night before she had been able to do without her that her heart took a puppyish leap.

  Hatless despite the cold, Diana was reading something on her cell phone.

  “I woke up again last night,” Elspeth said. “This time I let myself be afraid, and it was just fear, which is terrifying, but that’s all it was.”

  “You fact-checked it,” Diana said.

  They approached the cylindrical glass atrium at the courthouse’s entrance. The name of the courthouse was spelled out along the drum of steel and glass in large chrome letters, with the showiness of a wealthy suburban high school or a convention hotel in a midsize city.

  The only tragedy they might not survive, Elspeth at that moment felt, was if the law made them say they hadn’t felt what they had felt. She suddenly wanted to take Diana’s hand even though only a moment ago she had been proud of having been able to do without her.

  “Nothing metal in your pockets, people,” a guard said in a singsong voice, while clunking plastic trays into a stack. “Keys, coins, into the trays. You must check your cell phones in at the desk behind me unless you’re a registered attorney.”

  “No cell phones?” someone asked.

  “You a registered attorney?” the guard replied.

  When Diana took hers out of her pocket, she saw that her mother had tried to call. “It’s not like her to call so early. Let me catch up to you.”

  Elspeth told herself that she would be all right alone here, too. She walked through the magnetometer.

  * * *

  —

  In the bright halls, the reflecting slaps of her footfalls clattered at her like static.

  When she reached the second floor, a man with his shirt pronouncedly unbuttoned stopped in front of her. “I know you,” he said. It was Philip, Jeremy and Raleigh’s roommate. “We’re this way.”

  Around a corner she saw a long line of people.

  “Jeremy wanted a show of force,” Philip explained.

  “Will the courtroom even hold this many?”

  “I’m sure Jeremy will let you come wait with us in front,” he said. “Look who I found,” he called out.

  Jeremy was wearing a black suit and carrying a navy blue overcoat, and with the new sobriety and formality of his wardrobe came an air of consequence. “Elspeth,” he said, embracing her. “It’s a difficult and important day.”

  “Didn’t we know it was going to happen?” she asked. Matthew was standing behind Jeremy. It was his place in line she was cutting. “I’ll get behind you,” she suggested.

  But behind him, guarded by him, were a gray-haired man and woman who seemed to be making an effort to hold themselves still, like birds conscious of being under observation. Elspeth remembered the neatly dressed, cautious-looking king and queen of money. “Are these your parents?” she asked Matthew.

  The man and woman smiled without offering their hands.

  “They are,” he said.

  “Thank you for . . . ,” she began, but they were waiting for their son’s lover’s arraignment, and she faltered, not sure that they would want to talk.

  “The marshals wouldn’t let us ride with Leif,” Matthew said, “but we’ll be able to drive him back, after.”

  “That’s good,” Elspeth said, nodding. It would be hard, it occurred to her, for someone in Matthew’s position not to seem either to exceed his place or not live up to it.

  “Is Raleigh inside already?” he asked her.

  “He said he would be, but I haven’t talked to him since last night.”

  They fell silent, awkwardly. She took in the corridor’s white ceiling and white floor and white walls. As discreetly as she could she surveyed the crowd in line. Jeremy had summoned more people than the Working Group for the Refinement of the Perception of Feelings had ever been able to. Most were in their twenties, but a few looked older; there seemed to be slightly more women than men. Some seemed to be focusing on her, the newcomer, returning her gaze, when it landed on them, with studiedly beneficent expressions, as if to signal that they recognized from Jeremy’s body language that she had a place with the leader of their group even if they themselves didn’t happen to know what her place was. Her eye was caught by Greg, the barista from Leif’s café, standing a dozen yards back. He nodded when she noticed him and then looked away so as not to seem to be demanding any acknowledgment. He had pocketed his cap. The hair that was still on his head was downy and almost blond.

  “It’s nicer than the state courthouse,” she observed to Matthew. It seemed less ancient and corrupt, though she knew she was probably responding to nothing more substantive than its light fixtures.

  “It’s newer, anyway.”

  “Are you Leif’s roommate?” Matthew’s mother asked.

  “We went to college together,” Elspeth replied.

  “Oh, that’s right. Matthew told us about you—didn’t you, Matthew. You’re also a writer.”

  “Maybe someday,” Elspeth said.

  “Don’t you work for a magazine?”

  “I’m just a freelancer.”

  “We’ve subscribed for years, but I always seem to be four or five issues behind.”

  “Oh, me too.”

  “My god,” exclaimed a woman in a blue skirt over what seemed to be a slightly longer black petticoat, as she strode toward the head of the line. “Don’t you know nothing ever happens at an arraignment?”

  “They’ll read the charges, won’t they?” Jeremy asked.

  “Not necessarily, no. But even if they do, that takes twenty seconds. Twenty-five seconds, max.”

  “We thought we should be here for our friends,” Jeremy said.

  “But there’s not gonna be a jury here to see that you’re being here for them.”

  “You’re here, Jan,” Jeremy pointed out.

  “I have to be. You need to save your ammo, Jeremy. You need to husband your troops. If you drop from exhaustion, it won’t be good for my story. I guess I’ll get some quotes, since there are so many of you. Not from you, though, Jeremy. You’re already too canned.” She wandered down the hall.

  Jeremy told the people standing near him the name of Jan Ridgely’s newspaper. “She’s good,” he said. “She’s very good.”

  Leif’s arraignment, which was going to be the first, was scheduled to begin at ten a.m., and at three minutes before the hour, Elspeth and the rest of the audience were still out in the corridor, not yet admitted, when Julia and h
er parents rounded the corner. All three members of the Di Matteo family were walking with the quick, carefully aligned strides of people who know they are late but don’t think they should run. Elspeth didn’t know where Julia was supposed to be, but she knew she wasn’t supposed to be in the corridor. Her presence was strangely terrifying. It was like seeing the bride alone in the parking lot when one can already hear the organ inside the church beginning to sound.

  Julia’s charcoal suit was tailored to her, as the one that Elspeth had borrowed hadn’t been. Her beret was tucked under her left elbow even though it was brown to her suit’s gray. Her eyes darted nervously through the crowd. “Nobody’s seen Kenneth?” The smell of fear was coming from her, but she was vivid and beautiful, Elspeth had to acknowledge, with her olive skin and her dark hair.

  “He might be waiting for you in the basement, at the Marshals’ Office,” Jeremy said. “I think that’s where you’re supposed to surrender.”

  “They told us it was going to be a voluntary appearance,” Julia’s mother said. It seemed to be a line that she had prepared to say; on people who weren’t in any position of authority it was wasted. “We don’t have our phones,” she added.

  “I think what they say about a voluntary appearance is that it’s a courtesy but not a thing,” Jeremy replied.

  “Let’s go downstairs,” Julia’s father suggested.

  “Momma, will you take this,” Julia said, removing a leather notebook from her purse and handing it to her mother.

  “I think we should go downstairs,” the father repeated.

  “We heard you,” Julia said.

  “We’ll save you seats,” Jeremy called out to the Di Matteos, who were already retreating. The only member of the family to turn her head in acknowledgment was Julia, whose face twisted with the confused, late recognition that she herself wasn’t going to be able to sit in any seat that Jeremy saved.

  Soon after, the bailiffs opened the doors.

  * * *

  —

  There was still no sign of Diana, and so when Elspeth took a seat, she arranged her empty coat beside her on the settle as if around an absent person.

  Leif was already sitting at the defendants’ table, in the corral at the front of the room. His back was to the door that Elspeth and the others had come in through, but he was turned sideways in his chair and was watching the procession into the courtroom out of the corner of one eye, as if he wasn’t sure it would be appropriate to look at the visitors directly. His attorney, whose blond hair tumbled down rather showily, was looking at papers. Somerville, meanwhile, stood at the butt of the prosecution’s table, arms folded, making silent appraisals of the members of the audience, the tuft of his forelock nodding as he did so. A slight freezing of his features revealed to Elspeth the moment when he took note of her, even though nothing in his face departed from his mask of general complacence.

  The flannel shirt that Leif was wearing seemed, incongruously, to have been starched as well as ironed.

  Everyone rose at the appearance of the judge, a short man with a folded-in face. The shape of his body was hidden by his robe, but his cheeks were round. He gathered his skirts behind him with both hands before he sat down. Once he sat, everyone else in the room took their seats again, too, in rumbling, rough synchrony, as in a church, though the attorneys, Leif, and several bailiffs and court officials remained standing, the way a lector stays up when it is time for him to read a lesson.

  “The United States of America versus Leif Lewis Saunderson,” the bailiff declared, as if he were the prologue in an Elizabethan play.

  “Good morning, Your Honor. Thomas Somerville for the United States.”

  “Good morning. Michael Gauden for Mr. Saunderson.”

  The judge’s lips drew into a line. “Mr. Gauden, in this court it’s customary to declare the presence or absence of the defendant.”

  “I’m sorry, Your Honor. I’m not familiar with—”

  “Don’t make excuses for yourself.”

  “Your Honor, Mr. Saunderson is present in the courtroom.”

  “It’s for the benefit of the record,” the judge said. “Defendants have been known to be shy.” From his high desk he now for the first time looked down over his glasses at Leif.

  The judge was bored, Elspeth sensed. How could he help it? On the only paths he walked, he was never challenged. It was upsetting and in a way confusing that so much was going to depend on someone on whom most of it was going to be lost.

  She wasn’t able to read much from Leif, who was facing away, toward the judge. He was in a place where he couldn’t talk, but she reminded herself that that didn’t mean he wasn’t there.

  Diana at this point edged her way down the row toward the seat that Elspeth had saved for her, holding her purse aloft so that it wouldn’t bump anyone. Elspeth slid her coat out of the seat and around herself, and Diana unholstered one arm from her jacket and then the other.

  “Is everything all right?”

  “She wanted my salad dressing recipe.”

  Once Diana was sitting spine straight beside Elspeth, there was an amplification in Elspeth of the understanding of what was happening in the room. It was an experience that Elspeth had sometimes had with Raleigh when they had first started being together, so long ago that she had almost forgotten what it felt like. The hum that was always in her seemed to begin to hum at a higher number of revolutions per minute.

  As a result, in Leif’s pretty shoulders, pinched upward together, she became able to read an anxiety not to bring into further harm the friends he had led this far. He was coming back to them. She knew he was going to come back to them. She was aware, too, suddenly, of Matthew, sitting next to his parents in the row ahead of her, to her right. She was able to see into his heart as clearly as if it were a cavern and she were tossing flares down onto its floor. She could see distinctly his gemlike indifference as to whether Leif was going to stand by his friends or sell them out. All he wanted was for Leif to survive. He might not even be wishing Elspeth well, an indifference understandable to her, considering her disclosure to Somerville.

  She couldn’t unmake her mistakes. She could only try to understand them.

  “Mr. Saunderson, please raise your right hand. Do you solemnly swear that the testimony you give will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”

  “I’ll tell the truth.”

  “You don’t need to put it in your own words, Mr. Saunderson,” the judge remarked. “The law provides all the words. Your full name?”

  “Leif Lewis Saunderson.”

  “And how old are you?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “How long were you in school?”

  “Um,” Leif said, adding in his head. “Sixteen. Plus kindergarten? Seventeen?”

  “A bachelor’s degree? Or beyond?”

  “A bachelor’s, sir.”

  “Have you had anything alcoholic to drink or taken any recreational drugs recently?”

  Leif shook his head.

  “Speak up for the benefit of the court reporter.”

  “No.”

  “No alcohol at all.”

  “Not since December.”

  “And are you or have you been under the care of a psychologist or physician?”

  Leif pulled himself up. He was deciding not to be ashamed of it. “Yes. A psychiatrist.”

  “What was it regarding?”

  “I was a danger to myself.”

  “How did that manifest itself?”

  “I took drugs that I shouldn’t have.”

  “Are you saying you’re in treatment for narcotics addiction?”

  “No, I was trying to kill myself with the drugs.”

  “I’m sorry to pry, Mr. Saunderson, but I have to ask you these questions in order to find out if you’re competent to make
a plea today. Are you taking any psychiatric drugs now that might affect your state of mind? Or are you going through a withdrawal from any drug?”

  “I think I’m on an SSRI.”

  “And is your mind clouded by this SSRI?”

  “No, it’s very clear,” he said, touching his temples, as if to make sure. “Your mind is clear, too,” he added.

  “My mind is clear, Mr. Saunderson?”

  “What you’re communicating is very clear.”

  “The court on its own motion orders a hearing on competency,” the judge said.

  “Your Honor, if I may,” Gauden interjected. “We’d like to request that the examination take place at the facility where Mr. Saunderson is currently being held, which right now is a voluntary commitment. It’s an environment that he’s familiar with and where he feels secure. It’s a private facility, I know, but if—”

  “The difficulty isn’t that it’s a private facility but that it’s out of state. I’ve been given to understand that there isn’t anyone there that we here are in the habit of working with.”

  “We’re willing to forgo any hearing on psychological competency if—”

  The judge cut Gauden off. “I’m not giving you the hearing, Mr. Gauden. I’m ordering it.”

  “It’s not safe,” Leif said.

  “The facility here is very secure, Mr. Saunderson, as I’m sure you noticed when you passed through it this morning.”

  “I want to make a statement.”

  “There’s no call for you to make a statement right now, Mr. Saunderson.”

  “I just want to say that I did used to think that I could read people’s minds sometimes. I just want to put that on the record.”

  “Mr. Gauden, look to your client.”

  “That’s all I wanted to say. It’s been troubling me.”

  “I’m committing Mr. Saunderson to custody for the course of the examination. Mr. Saunderson,” the judge said, raising his voice as if he were addressing a child, “you’re going to be in the care of the state for thirty days or until the doctors examining you no longer require your cooperation, whichever comes first. Do you understand that?”