Overthrow

by Caleb Crain

  “I don’t think they know I have it.”

  “They’ll find out. You should tell Anonymous.”

  “How do you tell Anonymous?”

  “Or you could upload a ransom file, if you think they’re going to come for you. Before they come for you.”

  “What’s a ransom file?”

  “It’s when you upload a file in encrypted form to a site where anyone can get it so that later, if you need to release it suddenly, all you have to do is shout the password.”

  “I want to give it to the lawyers, and I want your permission before I give it to them.”

  “Why? If it’s your copy.”

  “I don’t want to repeat their violation.”

  “Can you afford to be so high-minded?”

  “It’s how I want to do it.”

  Julia considered. “The reason I called Chris Hyacinth is because I thought you were going to end up playing the Princess Casamassima to him,” she declared. “You’ll probably hear that if you keep listening.”

  “I haven’t read the book.”

  “But you know what I mean. Maybe I said it because I thought I was the one who should have gotten that role. Oh, never mind,” she broke off. “You have my permission.”

  * * *

  —

  “Can we go for a walk?” Elspeth asked Raleigh, a few hours later, after she recognized his knock and opened her apartment door.

  “Outside?”

  “In the park,” she said. She had been inside since Julia had left and she didn’t care that it was February. She laced up her boots.

  “Julia says you know,” he said, in an almost by-the-way tone of voice, as he followed her down the stairwell. “I’m sorry. I know I fucked up.

  “I said I’m sorry,” he said with a more personal emphasis when they reached the sidewalk.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Are you going to get Chris’s permission, too?”

  “I don’t know. I’m asking you first.”

  “The price of my permission is going to be that you forgive me.”

  “The price?”

  “And you have to really mean it.”

  “Raleigh . . . ,” she began, but broke off.

  “Julia and I aren’t a couple, by the way,” he said.

  They entered the park at the monument along whose back ledge Leif had used to skate. On the front, set into the pink marble, was a brass sculpture of a Revolutionary War general. A man in relief was holding the head of the general’s horse, and the man was black; Elspeth wondered who he had been—who the man depicted had been and who the model had been.

  No one was skating the ledge today. A mortar of week-old snow had gummed up many of the bricks in the pavement.

  “I just want to hear you say it,” Raleigh said. “That you forgive me.”

  The snow had receded unevenly from the asphalt of the walkway and from the dark sockets where the boles of trees were joined to the earth. Here and there arms of snow seemed to reach toward the walkway with cupped, downward-facing hands.

  “Does it have to be tit for tat?” she asked. The hurt part of her was more stubborn than she had realized it would be.

  * * *

  —

  At dusk the sky was still blank, and Elspeth walked the few blocks between her apartment and Matthew’s under its strange glow. The tunnels that she had dreamed about might have been hiding behind the scrim of it; they might have been somehow fueling its luminosity. Matthew’s window was dark, but a few seconds after she rang his buzzer, a light in his apartment blinked on, and soon he was standing in the building’s doorway.

  “Look at that,” he said, looking up. “It’s like the sky in a movie before the aliens land.”

  He had been unpacking his laundry, and his open futon was littered with small bricks of folded T-shirts, folded socks, and folded underwear, held together with rubber bands. Because he was gay, the intimacy of these items of clothing made them charged objects; they were suspect. Before long, if she went ahead with being a lesbian herself, people would be performing this kind of supererogatory noticing on the appurtenances of her life, too.

  “You don’t have to do that,” she said, as he began shifting the bricks of clothing to the tops of columns of books on his desk.

  “I just got in,” he apologized. When he had finished clearing the futon he folded it up into its sofa form. Then he brought her a glass of water. “How are you?” he asked.

  She should have asked first. “I’m fine,” she said.

  She watched him sit down and then immediately get up again and walk over to his desk. At the back of it, near the window, there was a potted geranium, and he twisted off a small yellowed broom that had once borne florets. A few whitened petals fluttered away from the forked stalk as he carried it to the trash.

  If all along she had felt the need to keep Matthew at a remove, then all along he must have sensed the need in her. Matthew had always been able to enter into their games.

  A dog howled somewhere outside. “He must hear thunder,” Matthew said.

  “I want to see Leif,” she said. “I need to ask him something. Do you see him every day?”

  “I take the train to the train. At first I was going to bike, but it’s too far.” He sat down again.

  “Should I bring something?” she asked. “Maybe something for him to read?”

  “The trouble with that is he doesn’t like finding his bookmark further along than he remembers having read.”

  How disconcerting that would be. As if a section of tunnel that one had passed through had been not only closed but erased. She took a sip of colorless water from the colorless glass that Matthew had given her.

  “How is the new place?” she asked.

  “We’re still getting to know the doctors and nurses. In the elevator people have burned their names in the ceiling with lighters but that’s just the elevator. The man he shares his room with has a thing where he needs to know the title of every song he hears, even if it’s just a scrap of song playing in the background on television in the next room, but other than that he’s pretty quiet. If there’s not a song to talk about, sometimes the three of us just sit there and listen to the air blowing out of the vent underneath the window.”

  “Is he mad at me?”

  “Why would he be mad at you?”

  “For talking to Somerville. I thought I was going to change Somerville’s mind. I was so stupid.”

  “Why don’t you come with me tomorrow,” Matthew said. “He loves you. He’s Leif. He still Leif.”

  She wondered if he would give permission. She wondered if he was still willing to fight, regardless of whether he still believed. The new order had revealed to them that poems didn’t have to be published in order to have meaning as poems, but apparently the same order was also going to require the publication of all the prose of one’s life.

  The thunder was sounding now even to their merely human ears. The dog was still crying, no longer sharply.

  “It’s almost purple,” Elspeth said, of the sky, which had darkened.

  “The color of congealed blood,” Matthew said. “That’s why purple is royal, according to Pliny. That’s its ‘glory.’”

  “Does green mean anything?” she asked.

  “I think it’s always just life.”

  There was clatter as it started to hail.

  * * *

  —

  Elspeth walked home when it let up. Once she was dry, she pulled one card from her tarot deck. The Fool. He was upside down, as if he had been hanged that way for a lesson. Last summer she had seen a man in the park hang himself upside down like a bat, his knees over the limb of a tree. The man’s cell phone had plummeted out of one of his pockets and hit the ground, cracking its glass screen. In the tarot card a little gray fox was paw
ing the upside-down Fool’s pocket, which in the Middle Ages was not a pouch sewn into one’s clothes but a separate item of clothing that could be tied to the skirts of one’s jacket.

  The card made her want to check something online.

  While she waited for her laptop to boot up, she reviewed her plan. The next morning, on the train ride to the hospital, she was going to tell Matthew that she was now with Diana, and at the hospital, she was going to tell Leif the same thing and also tell him that he hadn’t been wrong to sense that people in the government’s side had been reading him, because in a more prosaic way than he had imagined, they had been. Once he knew, maybe he wouldn’t need to think of himself as crazy anymore. In a day or two, either she would relent or Raleigh would, and once she had permission from three out of four, it was too bad about Chris, but she was going to release the files to the lawyers and everyone was going to know everything and it would all change.

  In the interim she wanted to look inside Raleigh’s backup app one more time. She hadn’t taken any screenshots, and screenshots might help her establish the files’ provenance. On the backup program’s website, she entered the username and password. A page loaded that was mostly blank, as sometimes happens—one of the intermittent hiccups that the internet is prone to. Her attempt to log in must have failed for some reason. She moved her cursor to the top of the screen, with the intention of trying a second time to log in, but the button there said Logout. Which meant she was logged in, actually. She reloaded the page, but the fresh version of it that appeared was still mostly blank, as if there were no files even in Raleigh’s root directory on the backup. Had the government wiped Raleigh’s hard drive? No, that couldn’t be; if the drive had been wiped, there would have been no software on it to do the syncing; she wouldn’t see any change at all. And where was the backup of her old laptop? In a dialog box at the bottom of the page, she changed the date to a year ago and asked to see what had been backed up as of then. In the backup for that date, too, the root directory was empty. She tried a few more dates, also without success.

  There was nothing in Raleigh’s backup account anymore. Nothing of his, nothing of hers. Even the past had been deleted.

  They had finally found out.

  On her desktop she still had the copy of the RPF-Dove-Shark folder that she had downloaded and decompressed two nights ago. Had they compromised it somehow? The files inside looked untouched. To make sure, she double-clicked open a folder and double-clicked open a folder inside it and double-clicked open a file.

  “Dude, where are you?” Raleigh asked.

  “One block south of the southwest corner, in front of the old church,” said Chris. “You know where I mean? I’m looking at where the drum circle was. I see three garbage trucks, and cops throwing everything into the backs of the garbage trucks.”

  “Everything? What do you mean everything?”

  She halted the audio player.

  She saw the Fool upside down, his pockets emptied of what he had meant to keep to himself.

  To the left of her breastbone, decentered, her heart punched into and punched into and punched into itself. Into a search bar, she typed, “How to upload a ransom file.”

  Against her hip, her cell phone vibrated, startling her.

  It was Diana. “Hello?”

  Elspeth was going to have to lie better than Raleigh or anyone else had ever lied to her. She was going to have to be as deceitful as only a thing wholly in the world could be.

  * * *

  —

  She lied so well that at seven the next morning, when there was a rap on her door, she was alone.

  She was showered and dressed, though still barefoot. She had been waiting for them.

  The three men were in dress shirts and blazers. The leader seemed to be the one not wearing a tie.

  “Elspeth Farrell?” he queried.

  “Come in,” she said.

  “How are you doing this morning?” he asked, trying to put a lock on her eyes, relying on his colleagues to scan the cluttered corridor and the doorways into empty bedrooms that she led them past.

  “There’s nobody here but me,” she said.

  “You probably know why we’re here,” he said. On the nape of his neck, she saw, as they reached the dining room and he swiveled to survey it and the parlor, was the delicate mottling of stork bites. His hair there was cut like a duck’s ass, but otherwise there was nothing obviously military or police-like about him.

  One of the other men took a large camera out of a satchel and began photographing her laptop, which before answering the door she had stowed in the dumbwaiter’s nook. It was balanced on top of her reference collection.

  “You didn’t take pictures last time,” she said.

  “Last time?” the lead officer asked.

  “When you arrested Raleigh.”

  “That wasn’t us. This time you’re getting the professionals.”

  “Are you FBI?”

  “He and I are,” he said, pointing to himself and the cameraman, “and he’s Secret Service. A lot of people don’t realize that the Secret Service takes care of computers now almost more than they take care of presidents. It’s typical in a case like this for us first to photograph the disposition of items.”

  The FBI agent with the camera had noticed that her power cable was still twisted through the handle of a coffee mug on the dining room table, and he took a picture.

  “That’s where the laptop was when you knocked,” Elspeth said. “I moved it before I answered the door.”

  “That’s okay,” the lead agent said, “but if you could put it back for us.”

  She complied but didn’t turn the computer back on.

  “Is there a router?” the Secret Service agent asked her.

  “In the broom closet,” she said.

  “You must have a lot of questions,” the lead FBI agent suggested. “You probably want to know where we are with things.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Maybe while they’re doing this, maybe you and I could sit down and talk a little, before things go any further. I know a little about what you’ve been going through, but I’d like to hear it from you.”

  “Your already knowing is sort of what it’s about, isn’t it,” she said.

  “It’s really put you behind the eight ball, I can see that.”

  He couldn’t see it, she reminded herself. Nobody could. “That’s okay,” she said again.

  “A lot of times, people in your situation want to be able to explain what they’ve been going through.”

  “Did you bring the garbage bags?” the Secret Service agent asked the photographer, evidently afraid that he had been supposed to.

  “In my satchel,” the photographer said, handing it over.

  “It’s not actually a garbage bag, that’s just what he calls it,” the lead agent said. “It’s actually a protection against Wi-Fi and RFID and all that. Is this your kitchen? Maybe we could talk in here for a minute.”

  “That’s okay,” she said, once more.

  “I know the judge that this is going to go in front of, and she’s always very appreciative when people cooperate. Do you mind if I get a drink of water?”

  “Go ahead,” Elspeth said.

  From the dining room she listened as in the kitchen he opened one cabinet and then another and then took down a glass. She heard him rinse it out before he filled it.

  “We don’t have to do this the hard way,” the lead agent said when, since she hadn’t followed him into the kitchen, he returned to the doorway.

  “Am I free to go?” she asked.

  “Not just yet,” he said, before taking a sip.

  8.

  There had been a white—had it been a goat? No, a deer. It had charged him. He hadn’t realized it was dangerous. He should have. It had had strange eyes, wit
h vertical irises, the shape of almonds standing on their ends, like in a cat.

  In real life Joe always took a competitor seriously; conflict spurred growth.

  He felt the coffee that he was drinking warming the flower inside him, opening it to the day.

  He was well prepared for the day’s meetings, with two potential investors. There had been some setbacks, but Your luck has been completely changed today, as the fortune cookie says. The idea behind his business was, after all, the forging of a weapon. He was never afraid of a fight, and that was why he was going to—

  His phone. “Thomas Somerville of the United States Attorneys’ Office would like to speak with you, can you hold.”

  The woman put him on hold before she could hear his yes.

  “Mr. Joseph P. Bresser,” came Somerville’s voice, with its tone of put-on raillery, slightly bitter.

  “Hey, Tom.”

  “Calling to keep you apprised. As you’re no doubt aware, we are up to Telepathy Five now, and Samantha Rinehart Peabody, the abundantly named new lawyer of the new girl, is claiming that we tampered with the evidence—thereby admitting, by the by, that her client was trying to access a protected file, which is what we arrested her for, but that seems to be neither here nor there in anyone’s eyes—and in reply I could take the step of assuring the judge that that’s not quite what happened and that a digital proxy of the material formerly on the seized laptop remains intact, but if I were to give that assurance there is a risk that eventually I’d have to produce the files in question and as you know we need to protect the program. Or rather, programs.”

  “Yes.”

  “So we’re protecting the programs and losing the cases. That’s the course of action I’m letting you know about in this phone call and that we are going to be signaling this afternoon.”

  “You can’t,” Joe said.

  “Well, I can, Joe. These are my cases. And anyway, as far as I can tell, we’re doing this for you, if we’re doing it for anyone.”

  “You just said you’re going to signal. That means you’re not really going to do this, are you.”