Overthrow

by Caleb Crain

  Once their tea was ready, they sat down together on the sofa in the parlor. “Hi,” Diana said.

  “I don’t really know anything,” Elspeth warned her.

  Later, when she opened her eyes, she saw Diana’s ongoing observation of her.

  “You can still run away if you need to,” Diana said.

  * * *

  —

  In the middle of the night Elspeth slipped out of bed and returned to the laptop, which was on the dining room table. It booted up without chiming, since she had thought to mute it earlier.

  She opened once more the backup program that Raleigh had set up for himself and her, the one that had quietly captured and recorded the selves that they had had in those days, the ones they were never going back to. A rainbow pinwheel revolved as the password was verified.

  She knew what she was about to do even though she also knew that she shouldn’t do it. She wondered when she had decided, or rather, when she had become unable to stop herself. When Chris had walked away from her? When Raleigh had? When she had realized that Leif had not looked in her direction once during his arraignment? She couldn’t blame any of them. If you betray someone, you have no right to ask them to stay with you and understand why you betrayed them. But if she could leave her friends for Diana, she could leave Diana, too, for them. In her own way. She had no heart not because she was heartless but because that part of her was always breaking and falling away into other people and she was never able to recover all the pieces.

  She opened Raleigh’s folder. She opened the folder inside it that represented his desktop. The file taken from Bresser was still there, on top, the most recent; no one had visited this imaginary room since the night of the friends’ break-in into Bresser’s account. RPF-dove-shark.zip was the filename.

  She clicked and dragged.

  At least Bresser had recognized the dove, she thought, while she waited for it to download.

  * * *

  —

  Now she was a criminal, too. She felt her neck and shoulders flush with shame, even though no one could see her. She had wanted to be with her friends again, and now she was with them.

  As Raleigh had described, inside the package she downloaded there were folders named for every member of the working group. In fact, for most members there were multiple folders, each containing what seemed to be a different kind of data. There were also a number of folders with titles that looked like gibberish to Elspeth, whose contents she could not immediately identify.

  Though Raleigh had said he had had trouble opening some of the files, the first half dozen that she tried popped open when she double-clicked. In a folder with her own name on it, for example, she found an archived webpage containing every Facebook post of hers less than three months old that would have been visible to a friend of a friend—in other words, almost all her recent posts. In the same folder was a spreadsheet containing two months of tweets by someone named Beth Farrell, who seemed to be a fan of all things Occupy and had even tweeted once about the Working Group for the Refinement of the Perception of Feelings, but who was unknown to Elspeth. It seemed likely, given the nature of these files, that the ones she couldn’t immediately understand the significance of were also records of some kind of surveillance.

  She tried to peek into some of them with a plain-text editor, but she saw only hexadecimal pi. It then occurred to her to google for the three-letter extension at the end of the name of one of the troublesome files; that revealed the software program that had created it. Maybe decipherment wouldn’t be so hard, after all. She was reminded of the process of dehacking the RPF website, which had been mystifying only until one saw how to break each large task down into smaller ones.

  The name of the software program seemed to refer to the exploration of caves—a metaphor, apparently, for investigation in the dark. In order to download a free copy, she registered under her own name. Almost as soon as she registered, it occurred to her that it was stupid to expose her name, but it was too late. It was very late even just by the clock. She tried to put the error out of her mind.

  The files that the cave-metaphor software was able to open were charts: the contents of numbered categories were represented as fluctuating over time. Elspeth couldn’t tell for sure what the categories were, but she suspected that they were the numerical addresses that lie beneath the human-language names of websites. The period of time covered by the charts was, again, the months prior to the break-in.

  The chief obstacle she faced, it seemed, wasn’t that she wasn’t able to get files to open but that she often didn’t know what she was looking at.

  In one of the folders not named after a member of the working group, there were a number of extremely large files, which her trick of googling the file extension revealed to be audio, compressed in a codec that wasn’t native to the operating system on her computer. It took a little searching before she was able to find a plug-in that would play the codec, and before she could use the plug-in, she also had to find, download, and install an open-source audio and video player compatible with it. Once plug-in and player were installed, however, the icons of all the audio files that were compressed in the codec changed in her finder from dog-eared blank pages to triplets of eighth-notes on wavy staffs. It was like turning over matching cards in Concentration.

  She stood up. She didn’t know how loud the files would be and she didn’t want to wake Diana up, and her headphones were on the bureau beside her bed.

  The bedroom wasn’t so dark that she needed to turn on a lamp. Light wherever it falls gives off a secondary light, and in the bedroom Elspeth was able to see by the secondary brightness that was diffused from the light that fell into the corridor from the dining room. Diana was so still. On the wall, tucked into the corner of a poster of the Lake District that Elspeth had had framed last year, was the snapshot of a sparrow that Diana had given her for Christmas. Elspeth clasped the headphones to her chest quickly and tightly so that the jack at the end of the cable wouldn’t be able to swing free and rap against the side of the bureau.

  Once she was seated in front of her laptop again, she double-clicked.

  “Hey,” Raleigh said.

  “Are you downstairs?” a woman asked. It was Julia.

  “I’m at work.”

  “But it’s Saturday,” Julia said. “Why can’t you be downstairs? I want to see you again.”

  Elspeth halted the file. It was dated November 19, two days before the break-in, three days before the arrests. It wasn’t as if Elspeth hadn’t at some level known.

  She heard Diana padding down the hallway, and she closed the window of the audio player, even though it had showed no more than the waveform of what she had been listening to, which wasn’t parsable by the human eye.

  “What are you doing, sweetheart?” Diana asked. “It’s almost two.”

  “Trying to figure something out,” Elspeth replied. What she had learned wasn’t really any more painful than fresh water on a scraped knee. It stung a little.

  “Come to bed. The internet is bad for young girls.”

  “I know,” she admitted. She should have stopped as soon as she knew the files contained surveillance. Now it was her responsibility to understand and live through, alone and silently, the shame of eavesdropping and the hurt of Raleigh’s betrayal. She couldn’t involve Diana. Maybe the creation of a secret was a reflex when one was new to having a lover of one’s own sex and wasn’t yet sure how to differentiate oneself.

  She let Diana take her hand and draw her up out of the chair.

  “No one knows we’re here together, do they?” Elspeth asked. “Since we don’t have our phones.”

  “I guess they don’t.”

  “Let’s not tell anybody,” Elspeth proposed. “For now.”

  “Sure,” Diana said. “Let’s keep it to ourselves.”

  * * *

  —
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  There was a diner a block from Elspeth’s apartment, mildly ironic about being a diner. Because it was late on a weekday morning, the waitress let them have a booth even though there were only two of them. The night before it had seemed urgent to Elspeth that they should hide what was going on between them, in order to protect Diana, but in daylight her alarm seemed excessive. After all, if the government knew about the backup program on Raleigh’s laptop, they would have shut it down long ago. They hadn’t even known about the RPF blog. So they had no idea; there was no need to worry. The files she had downloaded had no more existence than did any thought in her mind that she alone had.

  There was a subway entrance just outside one of the diner’s plate-glass windows. A pretty woman with bright red hair was walking up its stairs. Elspeth’s eyes were drawn to her.

  “I wonder if I’m a lesbian now,” she said, from behind her laminated menu.

  “I’d say you have some tendencies.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “That’s one of the signs,” Diana said. “Am I your first?”

  “I watched it once,” Elspeth said. “Online.” It was disinhibiting to answer while looking at a list of waffles and pancakes, without being able to see one’s questioner. “Maybe it’s not binary for girls.” She put down her menu.

  “Do you know what you’re getting?”

  “Either waffles or pancakes? It’s such a constraint to have to choose.”

  * * *

  —

  They rode to the courthouse afterward to recover their phones. On the subway home, Elspeth, alone again, wondered if the faint, pretty pain in her chest that she experienced when she didn’t know when she was next going to see Diana again was the point. The old-fashioned, almost Victorian pit-a-pat. Maybe it could be the point even if the world was going to end. The way a poem could still mean something even if it was never published—even if the reader or hearer knew that someday it would be completely forgotten.

  She knew it would be better for her if she didn’t think about the folder she had downloaded from Raleigh’s backup. She was still innocent so long as she didn’t think about it. But what if she had jumped to the wrong conclusion about what she had heard? The conversation between Raleigh and Julia might have taken place more recently and Bresser or someone else might have forged the date and time on the file, in order to upset her. Anything was possible, if you didn’t know how far ahead of you they might be. The backup app kept a log, and even if someone had been clever enough to change the date of the audio file, no one would have been able to change the date in the log of the backup software, too. If she looked again, and verified that according to the log the file was at least as old as Raleigh’s capture of it, she would know for sure. She would look one more time—one last time—and then she would be able to stop thinking about it.

  That, at any rate, was what she told herself, without really believing that it was anything but a pretext. She wanted to return to the scene of the crime.

  It was gone, she found when she logged in. There was no longer a copy of RPF-dove-shark.zip in the latest backup of Raleigh’s laptop.

  She checked her own hard drive; she still had her copy.

  And the other items that had been on Raleigh’s desktop were still there.

  Did they know about her?

  She closed the app. She shut down her laptop. She walked to the kitchen. She poured a glass of water. She drank it. For a minute, she stared out the window into the light well.

  She walked back into the dining room and logged in again.

  This time she looked more carefully. The backup app had made a new sync with Raleigh’s laptop at 9:43 that morning. What if she opened the app’s snapshot of Raleigh’s desktop as it had appeared yesterday? It turned out that in the copy of yesterday that was stored in the cloud, RPF-dove-shark.zip was still there.

  Which meant they didn’t know. They still didn’t know about the backup program at all. Whoever had custody of Raleigh’s laptop had deleted the folder of surveillance materials unaware that within the hour the backup program would sync with the copy of the laptop that Elspeth still had access to.

  She had been given proof that the government had tried to destroy its copy of what it was accusing the working group of stealing.

  * * *

  —

  The consequences, she reasoned, were like the legal paradox that Raleigh had talked about, of forcing the discovery of evidence in order to find grounds for suppressing it, but backward: if the government was improperly attempting to hide the surveillance folder, then the fact of the government’s surveillance became newly pertinent to the case. Until the attempted suppression, the particular contents of the stolen folder hadn’t all that much mattered, legally speaking. They could have been lists of batting averages, for all the law officially cared. Whether the government should have been engaged in such surveillance had no bearing on whether it was against the law for the working group to break into Bresser’s protected computer. Until the suppression, the surveillance had merely been the honey in the honeypot.

  The tricky part was that Elspeth couldn’t share her proof of the government’s attempt to hide evidence without admitting to her own snooping, nor could she do it without jeopardizing the privacy of her friends. She knew the remedy at once: she would ask her friends’ permission. She would ask everyone to give up all their secrets, for all their sakes.

  She didn’t tell Diana.

  It wasn’t because she was ashamed. Shame simply wasn’t a logical response anymore, she thought, that night, when she and Diana were kneeling face-to-face on Diana’s bed. All the lights in the bedroom were on. What she was fighting was like blackmail, which couldn’t be fought unless one accepted one’s exposure. In the new world everything was always going to be exposed anyway. In the universal light everyone was going to have to come to better, more forgiving understandings of one another.

  She wasn’t going to tell Diana because she was going to protect her.

  The radiators had gone cold for the night, they noticed after they finished. They pulled Diana’s sheets and coverlet over themselves.

  * * *

  —

  The sky the next morning was so uniformly gray that it seemed to have no feature, neither cloud nor sun. Elspeth felt less bold than she had the night before about challenging her friends to let her publish their secrets, and she might not have taken steps to see any of them if she hadn’t, upon turning the corner onto her street, found Julia, swaddled up and pacing, in front of her stoop.

  “I told myself to count to a hundred Mississippi, and here you are,” Julia said.

  Elspeth’s uncharitable first thought was that on prior occasions Julia had had the advantage over her of greater knowledge and that this time she had it. She didn’t want to invite Julia inside, but she couldn’t leave her out on the street. “Come in,” she said curtly.

  Julia paused in the doorway to unwind her scarf, unselfconsciously. Elspeth reminded herself that she didn’t have a live claim on Raleigh anymore, and that there was no such thing as a retrospective one. It could be that the only thing that was nettling her was pride.

  “Was there anything particular on your mind?” Elspeth asked, when they reached her landing, as she fished in the side pocket of her backpack for her keys.

  “I wanted to hear your impression of the arraignments. You’re the only one who saw us all. And from the outside, as it were.”

  “Didn’t your friend the reporter see it all?”

  “Her perceptions aren’t fine.”

  Elspeth put in the key. “I actually didn’t see your arraignment or Chris’s,” she admitted. “We left after Leif’s and didn’t come back until the middle of Raleigh’s.”

  “Oh, Elspeth, you abandoned me,” Julia said, with a smile of complicity that Elspeth didn’t acknowledge.

  In her hallway
Elspeth threw her keys down with her backpack and stepped out of her boots. In the dining room she pulled back her hair, but there was nothing on hand to fix it with and she had to let it fall again.

  “You must have had some thoughts, though, about what you did see,” Julia resumed, when she had joined Elspeth in the dining room. “I myself had the impression, for example, that although the journalists are as devoted to us as ever, the people, except for the crusadey ones, may be losing the thread.”

  There was a certain pathos about a project like Julia’s of gathering and holding on to one’s impressions, which like cerements were bound in time to obscure, with their accumulating pallor and shapelessness, the body of life that they were intended to preserve and commemorate.

  “I know about you and Raleigh, Julia,” Elspeth said.

  “I’m not sure what you’re referring to.”

  “I’m not the sort of person who minds the way most people mind. I mind in the way that I can’t help but mind, but I don’t really mind.”

  Julia didn’t reply.

  “Everything has turned out different than I thought it was going to,” Elspeth continued.

  “It’s the way people are,” Julia said. “I wouldn’t wait for me to apologize.”

  “I’m not waiting for anything.”

  “I’m not going to apologize for finally being someone,” Julia said. Her face flinched and she looked away. “Did he tell you?”

  “It’s in the surveillance they were doing of us.”

  “What surveillance?”

  “I have a copy of the folder that was on Bresser’s server.”

  “How did you get it?” When Elspeth didn’t answer, Julia asked, “What’s in it?”

  “I stopped listening. I assume everything’s in it.”

  “You’re probably in danger,” Julia observed.