It was a few days after the clocks had fallen back for the end of daylight saving time, during the interval when people have adjusted their schedules but not yet their habits. A graduate student in English named Matthew Fisher was walking home from the subway. Dusk had caught the houses along the street with their blinds still undrawn, and living room after living room was exposed, glowing in bright display. Was it wrong to look into them? It was like looking into lives that one wasn’t going to get to live. Matthew saw a toy sailboat on top of a television. He saw a sweater folded over the back of a chair. When he saw a pinecone on a mantelpiece, for a moment he seemed to see the room that contained the pinecone from the pinecone’s point of view, as if he, too, were surrounded by the bright yellow cheer that belonged to the family that lived there.
And then he was himself again, outside in the dark, walking.
He had a beard, which he had grown after he had turned thirty, just over a year ago, in the hope that it would make him a little harder to read. He was pretty sure that he did now look a little bearish. In one of his online profiles he claimed to have a boxer’s build, which wasn’t completely misrepresentative. According to a man he had recently picked up in a bar, he looked like the sort of person who could work for a long time without getting sick.
He hadn’t called the man again, afterward. He was a little alone in the world at the moment, as it happened. He had fallen behind in writing his dissertation, and his close friends in the program, including a man he’d been seeing, hadn’t. They had finished in the spring and then left for jobs and fellowships in other parts of the country over the summer. He had stayed in touch with some of them by email, and he and the now amicably former boyfriend talked now and then by phone. He hadn’t foreseen how hard it would be to replace a number of friends at once, exactly when one was supposed to be conserving one’s energies for research and writing. Nor had he foreseen that not having people in one’s life would make it much more difficult to take in new ones. Under the circumstances, any single new person seemed to carry somehow too much presence.
Tonight, though, he noticed that he seemed able to send some of himself out into the world. Halfway down the block, he became aware of a young man on a skateboard, pushing down the sidewalk toward him. Twenty-three? Twenty-four? The boy was wearing a gray toggle coat. Against the dim evening, his face and bare hands were almost luminous. He had a sort of elfin beauty, Matthew saw as the boy came nearer. A fine nose. Thin lips. Eyes like little candies. A few yards from Matthew, the boy kicked up his skateboard and carried it. The dismounting might have been no more than urban politeness, but when his eyes met Matthew’s, they had a sly look, and Matthew heard himself saying hi.
“Oh, hi,” the skateboarder replied, stopping in his tracks.
It was always startling that it turned out to be so easy. For a moment Matthew didn’t know what to say. The boy was taller than Matthew was.
“You can say it,” said the skateboarder.
“Say what?” Matthew wondered aloud.
“I’m on my way to a friend’s. Do you want to come?”
“Is he a skater like you?”
“She. No.”
“She.”
“She’s straight, even.”
“I remember straight people,” said Matthew.
The boy continued to carry his skateboard, and Matthew, reversing direction, fell into step beside him. The skateboarder said his name was Leif. He had been skating at the late-nineteenth-century monument at the park entrance a block away. Matthew was familiar with it. A marble ledge at the back served as a bench, and skaters liked to pop their boards into the air and surf along the bench’s edge, as if filing it down by skidding along it. The marble was soft, and Matthew had noticed that they were in fact filing it down, unevenly. He always felt a little protective of a thing if it spoke of the past.
The city had trained him to be a connoisseur, and he could tell that this boy, with his nonchalance and moonglow complexion, outclassed him. Still, he was used to getting more than he deserved, and there wasn’t any evidence of unwillingness. In a few minutes, he might be grabbing the tousled hair at the back of the boy’s head and kissing him.
He was aware, however, that as they walked, his own apartment was receding behind them, along with the prospect of dinner.
“Where are you taking me?” Matthew asked.
“Down the rabbit hole.”
“Uh-oh.”
“No, not really.”
“‘Drink me,’ I hope,” Matthew hinted.
“Subtle!”
“I mean, drink you, as it were,” Matthew clarified. “That you’re a tall drink of water or whatever.”
“‘As it were,’” the young man echoed.
“Not that that’s any more subtle,” Matthew admitted. He didn’t believe in dignity, at least not where the pursuit of boys was concerned. The skateboarder, for his part, accepted the compliment without acknowledgment, and Matthew realized that he knew he wanted the boy without knowing yet whether he liked him. The boy might be stringing Matthew along merely for the pleasure of manifesting the power of his own beauty.
“You’re sweet,” the boy offered.
“No, I’m not,” Matthew replied.
In pickups, there were always small frustrations and disappointments, such as delay, that one had to decide what to do with. If they added up too quickly, one could decide to set against them not only the pleasure that, if all went well, one was about to have, but also the revenge of never seeing the man again, afterward. In case he might want to see the man again, however—in case the latest boy might turn out to be the one for whom he was willing to break the pattern of solitude that he had fallen into—Matthew always tried, for as long as he could (for a while, anyway), to turn aside any verdict that negative impressions of the boy might have led him to by sorting them, along with positive ones, into a picture or story that was, at least tentatively, worth holding on to. That is, he tried, as he assembled the picture or story, to see in it someone he might be interested in or even able to fall for. Someone he could imagine looking back at the picture with.
They turned onto one of the quiet residential avenues.
“What do you do?” the skateboarder asked.
“Do you skateboard a lot?” Matthew countered, because he didn’t feel like explaining about kingship in early modern English poetry yet.
The boy coughed. It began almost as a hiccup but sank quickly into a rough hacking, low in the chest, and the boy had trouble mastering it. “Sorry,” he said, when he had his breath again. “I meant to laugh at you, not cough at you.” He took a plastic water bottle out of his coat pocket and swigged from it.
“Do you smoke?”
“I caught pneumonia at Occupy. I’m just getting over it.”
“Should you be out in the cold? Are you even wearing a sweater under that?”
“I thought you weren’t sweet. Here it is.”
They had come to one of the stolid corner-lot apartment buildings—prewar, gray stone, with elegant cornices—that were still just a little too large for the rich to convert to single-family residences and persisted therefore as refuges for young strivers. The best part of picking people up, Matthew sometimes thought, was seeing the insides of strangers’ homes, the apartments of people that a grad student in English might otherwise not even get to talk to.
“It’s me,” the skateboarder told the intercom.
At the back of a black-and-white-tiled lobby, a staircase twisted up tightly and steeply, and on the first landing, Matthew caught up to the skateboarder—his name was Leif, Matthew reminded himself—and kissed him. The boy gave more than the porcelain delicacy of his looks suggested that he would. Afterward, his face was flushed, Matthew saw; they kissed again.
“You’re perfect,” Matthew said.
The boy smiled with concern. He had a girl’s eyelashes and very faint freckles. “Are you drunk?” he asked Matthew, unseriously.
On the third floor, a door had been left ajar, and the skateboarder walked in without knocking and without waiting to see if Matthew followed him. “I brought someone,” he hollered as he strode down a dark, narrow corridor, which, according to a paradoxical layout typical of prewar buildings in the neighborhood, revealed the private spaces of the apartment before the public ones, leading past the open doors of a bathroom and three bedrooms—onto the dainty pink-and-white quilt of one of whose beds, carefully made, the young man possessively threw his toggle coat—before reaching a dining room and a parlor. The skateboarder and Matthew paused on the near side of the threshold between the two rooms, which were connected by pocket doors trundled away into their pockets.
Beyond the threshold, a petite young woman with straight chestnut hair unfolded her legs from a lotus-style perch on a sofa. She was sitting next to a scruffy, fair-haired man who seemed to be her boyfriend. She rose to give Leif a hug.
“Matthew here wanted to see what we’re doing,” said Leif, by way of introduction. “He’s perfectly safe.”
Somewhat sheepishly, the woman inspected Matthew. “He looks safe.”
“Elspeth and I went to college together,” Leif told Matthew. “That’s Raleigh,” he added, of the man still on the sofa. “He’s a skater like me. I mean, not like me, not in my league.”
“Why are you such a dick?” Raleigh said. Then, looking Matthew over, “Does this guy skate?”
“No!” Matthew admitted.
“Did you just pick him up?” Raleigh asked Leif.
“I think actually he picked me up? Can I offer him a glass of water without you giving him the third degree?”
“Oh, there’s juice, too, I think,” said Elspeth. Speed-sliding in her slippers, as if they were cross-country skis, she took Leif with her to the kitchen.
Left alone with the straight man, Matthew nodded, as if to acknowledge that the man had a right to be suspicious, and became aware of holding his winter hat in his hands and worrying it as if he were a Dickens character. He shoved it into a coat pocket. How embarrassing to be older and to be here so obviously as a supplicant.
He looked around in what he hoped was an innocuous manner. The dining room, behind him, was bare, somewhat severely so. The only decoration was a black-and-white photo-poster, blown up so large that grains of half-toning were visible. In the photo, a chair had been knocked over, on what seemed to be a stage. A microphone lay on the floor beside the chair; a black cable snaked away.
By contrast, the parlor, where Elspeth and Raleigh had been sitting, was a jumble. It was in the cluttered style, reminiscent of respectable Victorian living rooms, that had become fashionable among people with somewhat unconventional ambitions. There was a smoke-damaged oil of a landscape. There was a birdless subfusc birdcage. On a coffee table, a glass pitcher held half a dozen dried hydrangea clusters, of a mothlike grayish lavender. The sofa had been reupholstered in white and chartreuse stripes sometime in the past decade, but cracks in its dark, carved frame had been repaired with a glue that had turned mustard and opaque and had begun to crumble. Only in a listing Ikea bookcase was fresh color visible—red, orange, and blue on the dust jackets of essay collections and volumes of poets’ correspondence, the fogeyish new hardcovers that young people who work in publishing are tempted into bringing home from the giveaway table but then never read. In such a setting, with its allusions to a tradition that it hadn’t quite inherited, Matthew thought he knew where he was. He might know even better than the people who lived here, he thought, with a confidence whose force triggered in him, as suddenly, a reconsideration: What if his confidence was a way of keeping from himself an awareness of how out of place he really was?
When Elspeth and Leif returned with a glass of water, Elspeth waved at Raleigh, as if shooing away his vigilance. “It’s fine,” she insisted.
“I thought we were supposed to try to find people,” Leif said, in his own defense. “I actually do think he has . . .”
“Has what?” Matthew asked.
“If that’s what this is about,” Raleigh said.
“Sometimes we do experiments?” Leif said to Matthew. “With tarot cards?”
“Tarot cards,” Matthew repeated.
“I know, right?”
“No, no,” Matthew said. Magic was a thing that one had to reckon with when trying to understand kingship. It existed in Spenser’s fairy world; it existed in Shakespeare in even his earliest plays, the ones not really much by Shakespeare. In the course of his reading and note-taking, Matthew had been learning the scholarly way of discussing it, which neither reified nor underestimated.
“Leif,” Elspeth pleaded.
“It’s tarot cards not because we think we can predict the future,” Leif said. “It’s tarot cards because Elspeth doesn’t have any feelings about card cards.”
“I don’t understand why anyone would have feelings about them,” she said.
“If you’d had a childhood, for instance.”
“We used to do it at school,” Elspeth told Matthew, “and when we started going to Occupy, it seemed like we should take it up again. As an alternative means of communication.”
“A new world is possible,” Leif said. “You don’t have to tell us you don’t believe because we’ve already read your mind about that.” The irony in his voice suggested that he was setting up a test less of Matthew’s credulity than of his willingness to be carried along.
“It’s not really a joke,” Elspeth said.
Matthew was bewildered, but he nodded. Sometimes during a pickup it was advisable to be as parsimonious as a diplomat with statements of how much one believed or didn’t believe.
Through the cotton of the skateboarder’s upper right shirt sleeve, Matthew thought he saw a figure, and he pointed at the boy’s arm. “Is this a tattoo?”
Leif rolled up his sleeve to show off the image: a small thicket of lightly stylized trees, somewhere between depictions of trees and emblems of them. While Matthew was admiring the trees, Leif did, too, looking over his own right shoulder at them while his left hand held back the fabric. “A green thought,” he said, in explanation. The lines were drawn so boldly that Matthew wondered if they were legible by touch.
Elspeth dropped onto the sofa and pulled Raleigh down beside her.
“Like it’s so hard to read this guy’s mind,” Raleigh commented.
“Does he have a boyfriend?” Leif asked Elspeth, as he let his sleeve fall.
“No,” Elspeth answered tentatively.
“True,” Matthew admitted. Maybe it was a game. Or a way for the girl to keep a hold on her gay friend, or vice versa.
“Is he trouble?” Leif asked.
Elspeth paused. “Yes.”
“I’m not trouble!” Matthew said.
“He’s sad,” Elspeth said. “He’s that kind of trouble.” She was willing to look at him only dartingly. Under her eyes there were shadows that appeared to be part of the structure of her face, as in the face of a child born prematurely who hasn’t quite, as grandparents say, “filled out.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “I think actually you’re right and he knows. That’s why you brought him, isn’t it.”
“Don’t freak him out,” said Leif.
Elspeth shrugged. She looked at her boyfriend, who gave no sign of either approval or warning, and then back at Leif. “I don’t think he’s stupid, is all I’m saying.”
“Do you want to try?” Leif offered to Matthew.
For the first time Matthew noticed a deck of cards on the coffee table. Perhaps the hydrangeas had been hiding it from his angle of vision. On the backs of the cards was printed a yellow sun on a black background—sol d’or, on a field sable, the symbol of sovereignty, which almost never appeared in the arms of a house except in exercises of the imagination.
Matthew looked again at Leif. There was something unstable in the air between them. He stepped, and Leif stepped with him, from the dining room into the parlor. They took seats across from the straight couple.
“I don’t think I have any feelings even about tarot cards,” said Matthew.
“You don’t have to,” said Leif. “All you need to do is feel Elspeth’s feelings. Just say what you feel, and I’ll tell you what card it is.”
“What I feel?”
“The feeling you get from Elspeth.” Leif leaned back as he lazily shuffled the deck overhand in his long fingers. “Actually, you better shuffle,” he said to Elspeth, “so he doesn’t get the idea it’s a card trick or something.” He delivered his instructions to Matthew as if giving the rules of a parlor game: “It’ll be that thing that for you is always right there but that you’ve learned not to talk about because you’ve come to realize it’s not there for other people. You know what I mean, don’t you? You can still feel it, right?”
So the boy was a kind of shaman. A pretty, casually seductive shaman. Cautiously: “Yes.”
“Most people can’t anymore. That’s why it’s easier for them.”
“Why what’s easier?” asked Matthew.
“You know. Everything, really.”
“Now you are creeping me out a little.”
“Three cards?” asked Elspeth.
Next to her, Raleigh fidgeted. “Why do you guys always do three, anyway?”
“Makes it easier,” said Leif.
“It does triple your odds,” Raleigh growled. He glanced at Matthew as if to make sure that he was being credited for his skepticism.
“I can’t really do the number cards,” said Elspeth, “and if I draw three, there’s almost always an atout or at least a face card in there.”
“A what?” asked Matthew.
“The Moon or the Papess or a card like that. A picture card. The instructions that came with the deck are in French. I guess I could have googled for the English word, but I wanted us to be using the cards in our own way. In a made-up way.”
“A scientific way,” said Leif. “Numbers are kind of our Achilles’ heel.”
“Why do you need them? Do you want to work the casinos?”
Leif frowned. “I wish.”
Elspeth drew a hand. “Aww,” she murmured, as if the cards she had pulled were somehow endearing. Then she flipped them facedown onto her lap.
“What do you see?” Leif asked Matthew.
Did he see anything? Nothing had happened. He had heard Elspeth’s soft exclamation, and he had watched her compose her face afterward, for the sake of the experiment, into a pleasant neutrality. Had there been anything else? He tried to revisit the sequence of his perceptions. He had also been aware of a strength that Elspeth seemed to draw from the proximity of the man beside her on the couch, and it had occurred to him, very briefly and somewhat inchoately, that the apparent contrast in the demeanors of the two, the disparity between Raleigh’s truculence and Elspeth’s readiness to accommodate, probably reflected a deeper harmony, the basis of which he hadn’t yet seen but without which they wouldn’t have felt comfortable being so unlike each other in the presence of a stranger. They were awfully young to have achieved such a harmony, but Matthew’s own parents had been even younger when they had met, he knew. He didn’t know the basis of his parents’ harmony, either. He had always associated it with concern for his brother and him, but it must have been something more general; it had preceded his brother and him, after all. For a long time, it had seemed to enable his parents to look out at the world with a kind of doubled attentiveness. As instruments of perception, they seemed to have been calibrated, or maybe a better word was tuned, by their contact with each other, though lately the process might have begun to falter a little.
“Parents?” Matthew said aloud. “But that doesn’t make any sense.”
“What are these parents like?” Leif asked.
“Mild-mannered. A little worried.”
“Are they kind of . . . ?” Leif folded his hands and leaned forward, as if he were playacting the word he was looking for. “Organized? But that’s not what I mean exactly.”
“Sensible,” said Matthew, accepting Leif’s image.
“The king and queen of money,” Leif guessed.
Elspeth turned the cards over onto the coffee table. The third card was a three of cups.
“But my parents aren’t rich,” said Matthew.
“Tarot isn’t like that,” Leif said.
“I always think these two cards are so cute,” said Elspeth. “They’re so tidy. Look.”
The man and woman had large eyes and dainty fingers. They looked nothing like Matthew’s parents. They wore royal robes, and each carried an enormous coin. “The rulers of this world,” Matthew commented.
“Because the suit is money?” Elspeth said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Marxist tarot,” Raleigh said appreciatively. “There could be a reference to Britain, since it’s a French deck.”
“Oh, I think the designs are older than—,” Elspeth began.
“Than British capitalism?” Raleigh asked, cutting her off.
“Maybe you’re right,” she conceded.
“‘Phlegmatic’ is the word I was looking for,” said Leif, shuffling the deck again.
“For the king and queen of money?” asked Matthew.
“Or for you. You look like you sit down and read whole books.”
There was a compliment in having been studied. “Don’t you read books?” Matthew asked.
“I try not to give the impression of being someone who reads them.”
“I’m pretentious, you mean.”
“No, phlegmatic,” Leif insisted. “So do you believe now?”
“No,” Matthew replied. “How does it work?”
“By metaphor?” Leif hazarded. “But it’s a funny kind of metaphor, where you know the tenor but not the vehicle.”
“It’s shut-eye,” Raleigh interrupted. “He’s cheating, but he’s so into it he doesn’t realize.”
“Raleigh believes in his own way,” said Leif.
“I believe it works. I just don’t believe there’s anything to it.”
“Can I talk to you a minute?” Matthew asked Leif.
“We’re going to have a homo moment,” Leif told the others.
“Of course,” Elspeth replied, to excuse them.
Matthew rose first, and in the dance that he and Leif fell into, he was expected to lead, though since he didn’t know the apartment, he had to look over his shoulder to Leif for guidance. In this awkward fashion, they made their way back into the corridor where they had come in, until, beside a row of coats hung on pegs, Matthew rounded on Leif, pushed him against the wall, and kissed him again.
“Can I see you?” asked Matthew. “But not to play cards.”
Leif looked away. “Are we going to be fuckbuddies?”
“I thought we could go on a date.”
Leif shrugged. “Okay.”
“What?”
“You’re good at it,” Leif said. He looked Matthew full in the eye.
Matthew called his phone, so they would have each other’s numbers. Leif’s phone was as dumb as his. In another clinch, Matthew felt his cock stiffen, but he broke away. As he turned to descend the stairs, he heard Leif shout back along the corridor to his friends: “So was I wrong about him?”
It was a case of exactly the kind of boy he liked to fuck, was the way Matthew put it to himself as he unlocked his dark apartment. He liked to think through such matters a little brutally, in order to keep clear the distinction between what he wanted and what he thought he ought to want. The latter had a way of creeping in. While he was being brutal, he had to admit that even though he wanted Leif, he wasn’t sure, now that he was beyond reach of the spell cast by Leif’s immediate presence, that he was going to call him. There was an etiquette conformed to in most hookups, and in the months since his cohort of friends from grad school had moved away, Matthew had become used to the way it rendered disappointments as well as rewards foreseeable. Leif didn’t appear to be the sort of person who would abide by even an ungentleman’s agreement.
There was only one window—as, aside from the lavatory, there was only one room—to Matthew’s apartment, but it was a generous one, a bow window that spanned the front wall and looked out, from the fourth story, over an avenue block; below were a bodega, a dry cleaner, a pizzeria, a tattoo parlor. The window faced southwest, and by day it was lit fiercely by sun. Tonight it was no more than faintly salted by a glare reflected upward from the pavement, and the room lay in a blue darkness, out of which were resolved, as Matthew crossed it, the familiar shadows of the card table where he ate his meals, the futon that he folded up every morning and unfolded every night, and the desk, just beside the window, where he didn’t write his dissertation. In the darkness his things looked impersonal, as if he were returning home to them after a long stay in a hospital and had forgotten, or at least misplaced for a while, the roles they played in his life.
Because he used the windowsill as a shelf for library books, he had to guide the blinds, as he lowered them, into a channel that he had left open between the backs of the books and the window sash. As his desk lamp flickered on, the spines of institutional buckram shifted from apparent grays to actual olives, crimsons, and browns, the white impress of the call numbers remaining constant. He sat down to check his email. There were only the usual notifications from his department, which he was free to delete because it was his writing year and he wasn’t teaching or taking any classes.
It was too late to do more than wash greens for a salad and scramble some eggs, and as he began to tear leaves into his colander, he thought about the game that he and the boy had played with the tarot cards. Seeing into other people’s minds was something a literary scholar tried to do every day, hoping to perceive, across centuries, meanings that in some cases people might not even have been aware that they were giving away. But to read a living person’s secret thoughts, while sitting in the same room with him . . . That was impossible, and Matthew had been asked to believe he could do it, which was the sort of game that only a young person would insist on. A test for lovers. In their first years of adjusting to an open sexuality, gays seemed to like to tell stories about themselves that were elaborate. Matthew’s explanation was that it took time to learn to do without the machinery of hiding, and for a while one’s story remained encumbered with unnecessary structure. He guessed that Leif’s myth of himself had such a character. To protect himself, Leif had probably accreted a layer of self-regard, like a shell, which he was soon going to find it convenient to break. It would fracture along the seam of its implausibility.
If the guess was accurate, the future that was possible between Matthew and Leif was less likely to resemble a conversation than attendance at a performance, a division of roles that Matthew didn’t ordinarily have much patience for.
But the boy was so beautiful. Maybe Matthew could muster up a week or two of patience.
The next morning, with a promptness that most of the men Matthew knew would have avoided as a defect of strategy, Leif called.
“I said I would help out the Kitchen with serving lunch today at Occupy.”
“Is this a date?” Matthew asked.
“You and dates.”
The protesters were encamped across the river, Matthew knew, in a part of the city he rarely went to. Though their camp was almost two months old, he hadn’t yet visited. He agreed with most of the reforms that the protesters were demanding—or rather, making a point of not demanding—but he had the usual aesthetic problems with the left, and he didn’t think of himself as political. He may have been writing on kingship, but in twenty-first-century America, he told himself, kingship was merely historical. If he gave the puzzle in his dissertation the name sovereignty, he couldn’t as easily justify his lack of curiosity, but no one pressed him to justify it, and if they had, he would have pointed out that graduate students with unfinished dissertations are famously vulnerable to distractions that take the form of purposes. To give even a little of oneself to a cause so undefined would bring too many questions too close to the surface.
But now that a pretty boy had invited him . . .
He rode his bicycle into the city. It was one of those late fall days that the warming of the world has rendered so temperate and brilliant. An undeserved mercy. On the bridge, the wire diamonds of the suicide barrier fluttered past like frames of movie film, and he looked down through them at the water below, which was jade in color that day and textured like alligator skin with white caps. The sight of salt water always brought a kind of equilibrium to some inner part of him. So much water was so unfakably a thing of nature. Danger was part of its appeal. He felt alive.
Before leaving, he had looked at a map on the internet for the specific block and for a way to approach it on the downtown’s one-way streets. He locked up to a street sign while still a few blocks away.
He had been too cautious, he saw as soon as he walked a block further. There were plenty of empty posts to lock a bike to. Was he nervous? He tried to check his reflection in a store window but saw only a hollow shadow in the center of the bright street scene. The crowd around him on the sidewalk didn’t seem too unusual. Ponderous tourists. Straight men in shapeless suits. Maybe there were a few more of the city’s young people than were usually to be found in such a charmless neighborhood. Is there a reason they’re all walking so slow? he wondered with reflexive urban irritation.
There was; he had reached the encampment. There wasn’t a vista. In fact, all he could see, at first, was a row of half a dozen people, in ordinary dress, some cheery, some solemn, holding up sheets of oaktag painted with facts and slogans. A few, instead of holding their signs, had laid them on the cement and were squatting or kneeling beside them. The important thing, evidently, was to have a human face next to every sign and a human hand ready to touch it. Police were trying to hurry pedestrians through a narrow defile between the sign holders and a mirroring palisade, a few feet away, of tourists and businesspeople taking photographs with their cell phones. It might have been a diagram in a biochemistry textbook, Matthew thought: a transfer of ions along the osculation of two membranes.
A few steps down, and Matthew was standing on the granite pavement of the occupied park, which in this corner was sunk a few feet below the sidewalk that ringed it. The occupation was surrounded, Matthew realized upon looking up. Policemen stationed along the bordering sidewalk were scanning the park’s interior. Matthew watched as one shifted his gaze from spot to spot in a professional simulation of curiosity. In a far corner, a crane had raised a white metal observation cabin, which had the gleam of a new device. It must have been bought with the city’s share of antiterrorism money. Its windows were darkened with the apparent intention of preventing those on the ground from knowing exactly when they were being observed.
Well, so Matthew would show up in a database. To mind too much about the surveillance would be a form of surrender to it.
Leif hadn’t specified which part of the encampment, and Matthew was a few minutes early, so he went for a wander. There were signs about student loans, carbon emissions, and a recent case of police brutality. At the People’s Library, which was an array of transparent plastic bins full of books and hand-stapled pamphlets, he didn’t see any scholarship on Renaissance England. Further along, under the kind of square canopy that Latino families bring to the park for quinceañeras, a few protesters were working at computers. Otherwise the infrastructure seemed to consist of tarps, pizza boxes, folding plastic tables, duct tape, and the granite pavement of the park itself. He had expected to be one of many lookers-on, but most people were in conversations that supplied them with a visible and ongoing context of belonging, in twos, threes, or larger circles, and Matthew felt the absence of such a context in his own case. The longer he went without speaking to anyone, the more aware he became of his isolation. He saw people signaling with frilly hand gestures that he had read about online, which meant “Agree,” “Disagree,” or “Louder, please,” and he admired their shamelessness but didn’t think he would ever be able to make the gestures himself. Similarly, when he walked across the path of a speech being transmitted by human microphone—a relay of people amplifying a speech by shouting it, phrase by phrase, as it reached them—he couldn’t bring himself to participate. He had a history of not joining things. He hoped his reticence wasn’t registering with the people around him. He didn’t want to seem unsympathetic. He didn’t want to be mistaken for a cop.
He came to the drum circle, but on the matter of aggressive noisemaking, he was for better or worse a conventional homosexual, and he moved on.
In one zone, nothing rose higher than his waist. Though it was midday, young men and women lay resting on sleeping bags, their hands mittened, their necks scarved, their eyes intermittently closed. A few were spooning each other, indifferent to observation. Many had waterproofed the underside of their sleeping bags with blue tarps or with black plastic garbage bags that they had cut open and unfolded into sheets, and a number of them lay beside a roll of clothes and possessions wrapped in a matching sheet of blue tarp or black plastic. Here and there a roll was the length and shape of a person and resembled a bagged corpse. While Matthew was watching, one of these apparent corpses uncovered a living face; a man was shifting in his sleep.
As Matthew stood at the edge of this dormitory, he noticed Leif sauntering toward him, shading his eyes in the sharp sun. Come here, Matthew silently summoned him. In Leif’s company Matthew wouldn’t feel so cut off from the people around him. What he was standing in the middle of was a kind of celebration, but until he spotted Leif, he hadn’t been aware of wishing so badly to be able to respond to the invitation to join it. What a dangerous wish.
“How old are you again?” Matthew asked.
“Twenty-four. But I never told you.”
They studied each other. It would have been less awkward if they had already gone to bed together, Matthew thought. There was a reservation in Leif’s manner, and it was probably the reservation usual with attractive men who think of themselves as serious—a hunch that Matthew wouldn’t be. In most cases, Matthew knew from experience, the reservation was little more than a pretext for shifting onto Matthew the responsibility for light-mindedness, a burden Matthew was happy to shoulder. But the attraction of Leif, perhaps, was something in him that was genuinely refractory to routine.
“For the record,” Leif said, “you’re fairly transparent to me right now.”
“We could go to my place.”
Leif took up one of Matthew’s hands in both of his, in a manner that suggested that Matthew’s assertion of lust was a gift that he found overwhelming and was therefore going to put off. He turned Matthew’s hand palm up, and Matthew opened it. “You have a long lifeline,” Leif said. “That’s how the reading always starts, isn’t it.”
“You would know.”
“I actually wouldn’t?”
Matthew tightened his hand around one of Leif’s.
“Ow,” Leif said without meaning it. A text arrived on his phone. “It’s time to go unpack the lunch of the revolutionaries. Do you want to come?”
Leif led Matthew across the park to three folding tables that had been lined up end to end. A black woman in a quilted sleeveless traffic-orange down jacket was spraying the tabletops and wiping them. When Leif greeted her, she merely paused, while still bent over the table, and craned her neck to exchange kisses with him until she noticed that he meant to introduce a friend, at which point she drew herself up to full height and pulled off a latex glove. “Diana,” she named herself, as they shook hands. She seemed to be Matthew’s age. Behind her, in a work space protected by a tarp strung between two trees, a heavyset woman with pronounced eyeglasses waved at Leif, twinkling her fingers.
“Where’s the dolly?” Leif asked Diana.
“It’s been a while since you’ve been here, hasn’t it.”
“I’m a bad boy.”
“No, no, no. Not unless you want to be. I just mean, you don’t know the latest. The police have stopped letting them in.”
“Dollies? Are you serious?”
“They say they’re vehicles. No bicycles, either.” She let Leif enjoy a few moments of outrage. “Exactly,” she said, of the faces he made.
“I should have brought my board,” said Leif.
“They’re vehicles, too, now.”
A hatless man with close-cropped hair and green eyes had approached them, and he now struck Leif on the shoulder. “I’ll carry one, you carry one,” he said.
“Uh, no?” Leif replied.
“What are we carrying?” Matthew asked.
There were two large insulated plastic tanks—a brown rectangular one for hot drinking water and a yellow barrel-shaped one for cold—that had to be filled up in the back kitchen of a diner with an indulgent owner a block and a half away.
“Chris is in our working group,” Leif said of the green-eyed man.
“The food group?” Matthew asked.
“The other one.”
But the man didn’t look like someone who would be interested in the interior of another person’s mind. He looked confident rather than sensitive, and so radiantly and abundantly straight that in an earlier era, Matthew imagined, his was the type who would have been happy to let you blow him so long as he had a chance to beat you up for it afterward. “You helping us out?” the man asked.
“With lunch?” Matthew asked in return. He had to hope that the man couldn’t in fact read minds. “Between you and me we could probably carry one of these,” he suggested to Leif.
In fact, the tanks when empty weighed little, and Matthew was easily able to carry one by himself while the green-eyed Chris carried the other. “Coming through,” Chris warned. The visibility of their task, Matthew felt as the three of them edged gently through the crowd, conferred a distinction. Pride in it wasn’t perhaps a very Occupy sentiment to be having, but considering that Matthew had been insisting to himself a moment ago that he never belonged to groups of any kind, it seemed forgivable to hold on for a minute or two to a pleasure not quite orthodox. There were several elements compounded in it. There was the glamour of usefulness—what a child feels when asked to fold cloth napkins into hats for a party that his parents are throwing. There was the clemency of an arranger of a picnic who forbears to lord it over the mere picnickers; they were performing their errand gladly and mildly. And then there was the simple tension of muscle. Matthew felt as male and as strong as Chris and as gay as Leif, identification between the three of them, however brief their acquaintance, having become unfussy through collaboration.
In the steel-and-white-tile kitchen of the diner, the cooks didn’t attempt English and only Chris attempted a few words of Spanish, but meaning was evident. The cooks were brusque, jolly, and magnanimous. The palm of one held the boys off while with practiced aim the grip of another deftly tipped a pot of boiling water into the square brown tank as it sat in a deep sink. Once the cook had poured the water, he clicked the lid shut with fasteners whose mechanism Matthew hadn’t yet had a chance to understand, and when Matthew and Leif bent to pick the tank up, he tapped on a brim just under the top to show them where it would be easier to get a handhold.
“You got it?” Chris asked. Matthew and Leif shuffled in order to be sure of the synchronization of their steps. Chris, meanwhile, having fist-bumped the cooks, held his tank by its strap with one hand, canting against its weight, which he arced his arm and his shoulders to distribute. “You got it?” he repeated. To watch the parade that the three of them were making, the patrons of the restaurant looked away from their conversations and up from their coffees. To watch the clowns, a.k.a. the heroes of the moment, go by. Chris and Leif sang out thanks.
Hurried by the strain of his burden, Chris soon left Leif and Matthew behind. Once he was safely out of earshot, and Matthew and Leif were tottering together alone, knocking the tank into the sides of each other’s knees with every third step, Leif asked Matthew where he grew up. Matthew described the suburb to the northwest of the city where his parents still lived and where little ever happened, apart from the coarsening successions typical in such places: a bank building converted into a drugstore, a church at the town’s old crossroads pulled down for the sake of a mall, and then the mall falling into neglect upon the advent of a second mall positioned, more strategically, next to the throughway.
“Your parents are still together?” Leif asked.
“Yeah.”
“It sounds nice,” said Leif. “Snug.”
The comment didn’t seem to be ironic. “What about you?” Matthew asked.
“Oh.” The weight of the tank wouldn’t let him shrug. “My mother lives in a little ranch house with vinyl siding in Vermont. It’s on top of a hill.” He seemed to glance at the landscape with his mind’s eye. “So we didn’t spook you last night?”
“You don’t seem to have,” Matthew said.
“Would you be willing to try it again?”
“Maybe.”
“Not here,” Leif said. “Almost everyone here has it a little. If you tuned in on all of that . . .”
“You make it sound dangerous,” Matthew said.
The boy didn’t reply.
They set the tank down, to rest for a moment. Matthew realized that he was hoping that the implausible fantasy was something he could wait out. Matthew’s advantage, in being older, was that he was more familiar with waiting.
The boy combed his hair with his fingers.
“Is Chris really in your mind-reading group?” Matthew asked, as they picked the tank up again.
“He’s not any good, but he’s really into it.”
“He’s something.”
“Raleigh knows him from New Orleans,” Leif replied. “All us girls had a crush on him at first.” He glanced at Matthew. “You don’t like that, do you.”
“That you think he’s hot?”
“No,” said Leif. “‘Us girls.’ But you’re not allowed to be square about gender identity here. At the start of an assembly, when a person says their name, they also say their pronouns.”
“Which ones do you ask for?”
“I don’t usually get all Ursula K. Le Guin about it.” They set the tank down to take another break, and Leif shook a finger at Matthew: “It’s a matter of human dignity, you know.”
“In the Arcadia . . . ,” Matthew began. At this point he still hadn’t disclosed that he was a graduate student.
“In the Arcadia,” Leif prompted. “Go on.”
“After one of the heroes dresses as a woman, Sidney calls him by his new name from then on.”
“Her new name,” Leif corrected.
“Have you read it?”
“No, but.”
“It’s a little confusing. He’s so consistent about it. The least he could do is slip up.”
“Slipping up can be fun, too,” said Leif.
It was another of the boasts that Leif’s beauty allowed him to make, Matthew decided. Any quality that went so high would partake of both aspects.
By the time they returned to the Kitchen, as the serving area of the encampment was somewhat aspirationally called, Chris’s tank was in place and Chris himself had moved on. Matthew and Leif sat down with the women, and after rubbing their hands with sanitizer, flapping them dry, and slipping on latex gloves, they prepared lunch. It was the least impressive meal of the day, Leif explained. A local pizzeria usually delivered pizzas that strangers had donated by phone or online—the number ebbed and flowed with the mysterious tides of news coverage and of the internet generally—but the rest of the meal was often cold, unlike breakfast and dinner.
The health department required the volunteers to wear hats, and they had agreed among themselves—consensed, as they called it—to minimize, in their presentation of the food, the number of surfaces that were communally touched. Leif stood an array of small paper cups on the table in front of him and into each one placed a single baby carrot and a single cherry tomato. Matthew set about making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on grocery store bread, and with assembly-line efficiency, the glasses-wearing woman tucked these sandwiches into plastic baggies, which she sealed with red twist ties. There was a debate about a large bowl of popcorn, the kernels of which Leif saw as just so many fomites and lobbied for portioning into paper cups like the vegetables, but there wasn’t enough time and there didn’t seem to be enough paper cups; instead, one cup was deputized scoop. There was no time even to debate a carton of cheddar-flavored goldfish crackers, and at the very last minute, a woman in a bandanna ran up with an enormous plastic tub of what she identified as tuna salad with sauce gribiche, along with half a dozen loaves that she called peasant bread. The peasant bread had a thick, almost black crust. It was to go with the tuna gribiche, the woman said, in the voice of someone whose suggestions were customarily followed. The volunteers were able to find a ladle for the tuna, but no one had a bread knife. To the woman donating the tuna, the members of the Food Working Group were all smiles, but “I sometimes think the bane of my existence is unsliced bread,” was Diana’s mutter. A young man stepped up, fortunately, who was willing to have his hands sanitized and to hack away at the tough loaves with an unserrated, not very sharp knife, which was all they had, and he did hack away at them, just as the hungry were precipitating out of the crowd into a line behind him. The consequences were no worse than raggedy, distorted slices.
For a while the line seemed to bring almost as much food as it took away: apples in an orchard’s white-and-green paper sack, a family pack of individual-size bags of corn chips, a bowl of pink-shelled, hard-boiled eggs. Matthew and Leif made plates for themselves and seceded a little, finding a few feet of empty ledge.
Matthew felt the cold of the stone through the seat of his jeans while, on his face, he felt the touch of the sun as its light fell through the tracery of a tree’s bare branches. When one thinks about how far away the sun is and realizes that one is feeling its touch nonetheless . . . He took off his wool hat and tucked it under his butt. “Have you slept out here?”
Leif nodded. “I learned that water-resistant isn’t actually the same thing as waterproof.”
Matthew imagined the boy on his side in the dark, twisting in a sleeping bag wet with the plaza’s runoff. The Leif who sat presently beside him, meanwhile, sprinkled goldfish on his tuna salad and fastidiously matched exactly one goldfish to each forkful of tuna. “It means something to you here,” Matthew hazarded.
The boy coughed and then pounded his own chest to clear it.
The place was another test for Matthew. Was he passing? Did he need to believe in it any more than in Leif’s psychology experiments? He had felt uncomfortable when, for a few moments, Leif had spoken of unfastening his gender identity, but he knew that in any environment where such an unfastening was imaginable, they were safe. They were protected here by the only bulwark that homosexuals ever really believe in: a temporary rebellion of pleasure against order. And there was something else here, too, the scent of which Matthew recognized from having hunted for ideas about kingship in seventeenth-century pamphlets and transcripts. The scent of new governance, it might be called. People here felt that they were getting in at the beginning. Everything was going to be rebuilt from scratch; there was so much to be done. Acts had to be fresh and arbitrary, like a gardener’s with seedlings, tender at one moment and cruel the next. Free of history and also pregnant with it. In this sunlight it seemed like it could all be done without money. Without the Democratic Party. Without proper names, even. It was so early that one recognized that there was no place for personal ambition, yet one felt the excitement nonetheless of one’s almost personal recruitment by the new power. The growing power. Whether one was an idealist or an opportunist—and maybe one was still too young to know which career one was looking forward to—being here might make all the difference.
A great menace to the writing of dissertations.
“This place makes me feel like I’m not wrong to think that it’s all coming together,” Leif said.
Matthew set aside his plate. He leaned back on his arms to catch a little more of the sun as it came through the tree and to show himself off a little.
“It’s one thing,” Leif continued, “to keep it to yourself that you’re aware what other people are thinking and feeling. It’s another to hold in upon yourself that the world is ending.”
It was pleasant to hear the end mentioned so matter-of-factly, as if they were dispensing with preliminary arguments that most people never found their way to the other side of.
“I don’t necessarily mean a meteor hitting the earth or anything,” Leif went on. “It might just be ending the way it ended in 1914 or 1939. But I think it’s because the world is ending that what’s different about people like Elspeth and me has become so hard for us to ignore.” He had a musical voice, and despite the banter and cachinnation near them, and the drumming and chanting in the distance, his words took up an unassuming but distinct order in the air, as if they were sparrows assembling in the empty branches of the tree that Matthew had been looking up into.
“I don’t get it,” Matthew said. “What does knowing how people feel have to do with knowing that the world is ending?”
“It’s ending in them,” said Leif. “They have feelings about it.”
“Why don’t they know, then?”
“They do know, in a way, just not a way they can talk about.”
“You’re going to talk about their feelings for them,” Matthew said.
“We’re going to talk about our feelings, which have a relation to theirs.”
“How do you get politics out of that?”
“You don’t, maybe? I just want to understand it a little. To help people understand it. I get worried that it becomes overwhelming for some people. For someone like you, for instance.”
He was honest about not knowing, Matthew saw. And the power that Matthew was curious about must exist, even if, as Matthew had to believe, Leif himself misunderstood the nature of it. Matthew could feel its real force as it acted on his own person; he was being seduced by it. Into antres vast and deserts idle. Matthew had wanted to go to bed with the boy, and he was being led to a plane even more tenuous than utopia.
It was a strange gift. Matthew was meeting Leif just as Leif was in the process of discovering what it was. He was still trying it out. How it would develop, what he would do with it, what it really was, and what he would come to think that it was—those were in the future. At present Leif’s gift was as fluid as the congregation in the park around them. A potential rather than a quantity. It was hard to give a name to, but Matthew suspected that it would be even less nameable later, once Leif had finished talking his way out of the framework of expectations that he had been born into. At the moment it was still early but not too early. Maybe Matthew was even in time to save Leif from it.
When, in the artificial gloaming of Matthew’s room, an hour or so after midnight, Leif got up from Matthew’s futon, it was the sight of the boy’s pale shoulders, seen from behind as he loped away into the blue darkness, that brought home to Matthew his innocence.
“Do you have to be up for anything?” Matthew asked, the alarm clock in his hand, when Leif returned.
“Rich people have always been tacky, haven’t they,” Leif said, as he stalked ahead of Matthew into a room of eighteenth-century panels. Women with doll-like faces and all-too-human bodies were sitting in bowers and in swings, accompanied by men with complexions as sugary as theirs.
Over breakfast, Matthew had taxed himself to come up with a parallel to Leif’s invitation to Occupy: a city sight that Leif ought to have seen but hadn’t. They were as a result visiting a mansion and art collection that had been left to the public by one of the point-oh-one percent a century ago.
“It’s just ladies and their beaux,” said Matthew. “I don’t think they’re as tacky as a glitter skull.” A human skull sequined with diamonds had recently been auctioned as an artwork for a very high amount.
“Are they whores?” Leif asked.
“You know, it’s the French Enlightenment. Everyone looks like a whore, everyone talks like a philosopher.”
“Can I tweet that?”
“One night together, and you want to tweet me?”
“Only the funny parts,” said Leif. He took out of a back pocket a pencil stub and a little red notebook the size and shape of a passport. “Don’t look.”
“Why not?” Matthew made as if to look anyway. “That’s so cute.”
Leif turned his back. “It’s private. There are other things in here besides the table talk of Matthew Fisher.”
“Is it for your poetry?” Matthew asked in a more tactful voice.
“If a line comes to me.”
They had had their confessions. Matthew had admitted to graduate school, and Leif, to writing poetry, or, as he preferred to characterize it, “poetry.” He worked in a coffee shop by day to pay his rent, but he had published in a few journals. It was part of Matthew’s snobbishness as a scholar that he didn’t believe real poetry was still being written, but the disbelief wasn’t too serious, and he was willing to suspend it. They were having such a good day. And at least Leif wrote his poetry, which was more than Matthew could say for his scholarship. Today Matthew even felt willing to read the poetry, and he had said so, not too convincingly.
“This is the room,” Matthew said, as they walked into what had been the millionaire’s parlor.
Leif followed Matthew’s sight line. “Is this it?” he asked.
Matthew had told Leif that his favorite painting in the world was in the museum. Faced with Leif’s question, the painting, when Matthew himself looked at it, seemed flat and, if not small, because it wasn’t small, then limited. Contained. Matthew hadn’t seen it in a while. It was just a painting. A saint in a rocky landscape. The rock, which might have been limestone, was green for some reason. Matthew had permitted himself to have a favorite painting because he didn’t know much about art, and he had chosen this one probably because it didn’t have anything to do with what he studied. There were no kings and no parliaments in it. It was early modern, but it was Italian. It looked as if it was set somewhere in Tuscany. There was a rabbit hidden behind the saint, watching—the rabbit was something Matthew could point out, if he had to find something to say—and small plants were painted against the pale jade rock so distinctly that one felt one ought to be able to recognize them and say their names. Matthew didn’t know the names. Nothing in the painting was the sort of thing that he was supposed to know or care about, and he was far enough along in grad school that for him his ignorance made for a feeling of liberty. In liking it he was being a bit of a tourist. And maybe, since he was taking pleasure and perhaps even a kind of pride in his ignorance, a philistine. Was it a good painting as a painting? He didn’t really know.
He checked on Leif. Leif was still studying the work.
The saint was alone. Was the solitude what Matthew liked about it? On the saint’s desk, just outside the cave where he slept, there was a book. The Bible, probably. Near it was a skull, the traditional reminder to pay attention. One had the impression that the moment before, the saint had been reading the Bible, in the sunlight. Maybe the implied scene of reading was what Matthew liked.
“It’s beautiful,” Leif quietly said.
Matthew knew that he had set himself up for the feeling he now had, but he was surprised by it anyway: a sense, in sharing an image of solitude, of no longer being alone.
“It’s a green sunlight instead of a green shade,” Leif continued.
“I think it’s the rocks that are green.”
“But somehow the light is coming through that laurel.”
“I didn’t know it was a laurel,” Matthew admitted.
“Well, he was a poet.”
“Who was?”
“Francis. It is Francis, isn’t it?”
Was the saint looking at the laurel? He seemed actually to be looking through it. The viny branches of the laurel, which held together like a gathered bouquet, were bending down toward the saint, responsive to him as nothing else in the painting was. The saint wasn’t alone, Matthew realized. He was seeing and feeling the sun, the way Matthew had felt it in the park yesterday. Its touch. Every other thing in the painting stood still in its place as if giving testimony of its independent being. Even the skull on the saint’s desk registered a distinct life.
Not knowing exactly what it was was part of the charm. Not knowing what it was, not having to say, not having to justify oneself. To do something that no one had managed to define yet and to do it without permission—to represent the potential for that was what it was for, to a great extent, Matthew saw.
It lay between them, though, something of an embarrassment. Matthew hung back for a while from asking about it, because he didn’t want to focus Leif’s attention on it any more than necessary. Left untouched, it might fall away like a crush gone stale. Matthew could hope, anyway.
The trouble was that Matthew found it difficult to keep even his own mind away. There was something noble about exactly its silliness—about exactly the part that Matthew found most embarrassing. Moreover, to show no curiosity at all would have been, in this case, as awkward as the repeated turning away of a compliment, because Leif understood some of his attraction to Matthew in terms of it. Matthew had a share of it, Leif believed, and he kept repeating that he believed in Matthew’s share. Maybe Leif was too young to be able to understand attraction more simply; maybe this belief made it easier for him. It really was how he saw the world, at any rate, and it had the merit, even in Matthew’s eyes, of being distinctively Leif’s own way of seeing it. As such it called out to be answered by Matthew somehow. Met by him.
If Matthew could see lower motives for their going to bed together, there was no need to be cruel about higher ones, even if they might be imaginary. That much was simple diplomacy. Not that diplomacy was going to be enough.
Matthew found himself wanting to ask a question about it the afternoon of their third day together. They had put their boxers back on and were sitting up on the opened futon. Leif hadn’t volunteered his own apartment yet; roommates, was his excuse. The bare skin of their backs was clammy against the white paint of Matthew’s wall. They were playing a game where Matthew would pick up with his left hand a hand of Leif’s, drop it into his right, and then pick it up with his left again. It took a few iterations before Leif understood that he should let his hand fall freely. It would have been tactless of Matthew to ask what he most wanted to know, namely, how much Leif himself actually believed. For purposes that even Matthew was able to see, Leif didn’t need to believe everything. Instead, Matthew therefore asked when it had started.
“Didn’t you ever play with a Ouija board when you were a kid?” Leif countered.
“I didn’t believe it,” Matthew answered.
“But it said something.”
“It wouldn’t shut up. My friend was cheating.”
“What if he wasn’t,” Leif suggested.
“Then I should look him up right now on Facebook and apologize. It was a big fight, and we stopped speaking. Edward Rocket. I used to make fun of his name. Irvine, California. We were in second grade. It would have been 1987.”
“I was born that year.”
“Oh, fuck you,” said Matthew.
“I was,” Leif insisted. “Were you scared?”
“Well, dead people.”
“It wasn’t dead people.”
“Uh . . .”
“It was my fetus, trying to reach you. Let me try something. Close your eyes.”
Matthew closed them. Leif climbed astraddle him.
“What are you doing?”
“Keep them shut. Do you feel it?” Leif asked.
“What are you doing?” Matthew asked again.
“Do you feel it?” Leif repeated.
“You’re holding something in front of my forehead.”
“But how do you know?” Leif asked. “Your eyes are shut.”
It was as if Matthew were feeling an indentation or a concentration of some kind in the air half an inch in front of his face. “X-rays,” Matthew said.
“It’s your third eye,” Leif said, mock-significantly, as Matthew opened his two worldly ones again.
“What are you talking about.”
“That’s where your third eye is, you know. In the middle of your forehead. That’s the kind of game I played in second grade.”
Leif stepped off him, knee by knee. Matthew felt that he ought to give Leif a confession in return. He thought of the mistake he sometimes made, at the front door of a building, of saying the greeting that another person was about to say to him. Hello, Matthew. Or Thank you, even when he was the one holding the door. It came, he thought, from a wish to meet the other person halfway that somehow overreached.
Leif tried another way of explaining himself: “What if the thing you always hear—‘Oh, his wife says she sort of knew, all along’—is true? Of every feeling. Dislike. A crush. Mistrust.”
Was Leif trying to say something about the two of them? But if he sensed Matthew’s reservations, he must also have sensed Matthew’s reluctance to talk about them.
“If we never really fool anyone,” Leif said, “why not just say?”
“I have these, by the way?” said Leif, before he left on their fourth morning. “I didn’t have time to wash them.”
The two of them had had a long weekend, a movable one that hadn’t coincided with any weekend recorded in the calendar, as is possible when a poet-barista gets together with a grad student in his dissertation year, but now they had to return to their separate storylines, at least for a while. Leif had a double shift at the café coming up, and Matthew had reading to do, as a grad student always does.
Leif was offering up a plastic grocery bag. Inside were a T-shirt, a pair of underwear, and a pair of socks that he had borrowed the morning after he first stayed over.
“Why thank you,” said Matthew.
“Is it pervy?”
“Not on your part.”
After Leif was gone, when Matthew was unwrapping the clothes to throw them into his hamper, he did wonder and he brought them to his nose. The only perversity was in his thought that if Leif were hit by a car while the two of them were apart there would be no other way to experience his presence one last time. The smell was of cotton that has been against skin. Like bread, but less than that. Like a drawer that one used to keep bread in.
It occurred to Matthew that in his finicky wish to pin down the right metaphor, he was like a courtly lover refining his sonnet about the sweetness of his lady’s breath.
Southeast of the park that was near Matthew’s apartment, a broad nineteenth-century avenue ran to the sea, and about a mile down it, there was a campus of the city’s system of colleges. Sometimes Matthew worked in its library when he needed a quiet place away from home and didn’t have the patience for the subway ride to his own university. He put a Samuel Daniel volume, his current notebook, and two pens into his shoulder bag, and he unlocked his bike from the basement.
The elms and plane trees that raised their branches above the bike path were still losing the last of their leaves. Wind, or at any rate eddies from the cars rushing angrily past on the avenue, kept the cement of the path mostly clear, but leaves were lodged decoratively edgewise in the grass of its margin. Matthew had been hoping that he would be able to think about Leif while he biked—that he would be carried forward in his thoughts about him by the sensations of progress and perspective that came when one was moving quickly and unprotectedly—but the path wasn’t level, and he had to study the seams of its cement panels, which the freezings and thawings of previous years had shoved into each other and out of alignment, plate-tectonically. At the end of each block, too, the path dipped into and out of a crossroad, and he had to keep a lookout for spasms of territoriality and resentment by drivers. He held his thoughts off.
In the library they came back to him. He sat in his usual carrel, a solitaire hidden from its peers by three rows of bookshelves that undergraduates no longer even went through the motions of consulting. He sat down in his customary, vaguely Danish-looking chair, took off his shoes, tucked his wind-chilled feet under him, and thought, What have I got myself into? He opened his book, and he opened his notebook, but they seemed to belong to a life he only faintly remembered. Did he really want a lover right now? How far had it gone? Was there already an expectation of fidelity? Did he want there to be? Was he proud of Leif, as a conquest?
He could start there. He thought he might be proud of the conquest, but he had no one to show Leif off to. He couldn’t call his ex. There was no question that what was between them was over; they had never even attempted a nostalgic and fraternal session of sex by Skype. But they hadn’t, on the other hand, reached the point of telling each other about new dates, and Matthew didn’t think his ex was likely to want to hear that Matthew was dating a beautiful poet. A conjurer. A leader of men.
Matthew remembered having kissed the boy a few hours ago. He had sucked on his tongue. Sucked at the pleasure that was at the root of the world. God! It was so enjoyable to think about the strangeness of the fact of a new lover. It was like the ache in muscles the day after one has gone for a run for the first time in a long time. He remembered suddenly that Leif had written down for him Elspeth’s address so that they could find each other there two nights from now. He took the slip out of his wallet. The paper was smooth and cream-colored; Leif had torn it from his little red poetry notebook. It wasn’t even Leif’s address; Matthew still didn’t know Leif’s address. But it was Leif’s handwriting. A loosened version of architects’ capitals. The strokes of the letters were as impersonal as spiders’ legs. Matthew thought he saw that the impersonality was one of Leif’s jokes, one of his masks. The paper had no aura other than a trace of the eel skin of Matthew’s own wallet.
No sight line could fall on Matthew in the carrel where he was sitting, and experimentally he held the slip of paper over his book and notebook, as if his attention were a dog that could be trained by association and shifted. It didn’t shift; he put the slip of paper away. He stared at his book and at the notes he had made from it almost a week before—
What, are they of so fatal a degree,
That they cannot descend from that, and live?
Unless they still be Kings can they not be?
—and after half an hour he became aware that the sunlight was hitting the wall beyond the blinders of his carrel at a steeper angle. The morning was losing its subtlety and turning into mere day, and he was still in the same chair. He was nearly invisible on his own campus, now that he wasn’t teaching and had lost his friends, and here in the city university’s library he existed only liminally, as a body, and not at all as a person. It felt slightly unreal to be so full of Leif and of sex with Leif in such a place. Glass, pinewood louvers, and muted carpeting. He had grown up in educational institutions built in the forward-looking architectural style of the 1970s, or knockoffs thereof. Maybe this carpet hadn’t been so muted when first installed. To still be sitting in a setting like this one past thirty, still technically a student . . . There were days when the academic way of life suited him, when, in fact, he took pride in his ability to accommodate himself to it. He went for weeks sometimes, for example, without reading the news, because what would the news be able to tell him about kingship in early modern Britain? He was setting himself outside the history of his own time in order to immerse himself in the history of Elizabeth I’s, or Richard II’s, or Charles I’s, depending on the chapter he was working on, and it was the ferocity of his asceticism—this is where pride came in—that would win him a professorship someday. Probably not this year, though, since no department had replied to any of his applications.
There was a sort of historical jet lag in his topic, an inadvertent thematization of his own predicament. Sometimes he was almost guilty of trying to, say, explain Shakespeare by reference to the events of the Commonwealth, declared half a century later. But he saw the mistake and hoped that he would be credited with being too clever to make it unknowingly. He was careful to qualify his interpretations, and his advisers said not to worry. The more cynical one joked that anyway, in this job market, there was such a thing as too fine a specialization, chronologically speaking, and a little anachronism might be prudent.
At the moment prudence seemed to Matthew like something that he was probably only capable of arriving at accidentally. The sun was peering down from an even sharper height. It would be lunchtime at Occupy soon. It was also going to be lunchtime here, and he was starving. He stood up.
A peanut butter sandwich in hand, the arms of his shirt soaked from having biked so far, Matthew saw no sign of Leif but recognized Elspeth and her imperfectly bearded boyfriend at a folding table. “Is it like therapy?” they were being asked by a beautiful Mediterranean woman, about Matthew’s age, in a stylish peacoat with comically large brass buttons. “It almost sounds like the sort of thing my therapist would be happy to hear I had joined.”
“Kind of,” said Elspeth.
“By which she means no,” Raleigh glossed.
On the tabletop beside Raleigh and Elspeth stood an empty pizza box that had been opened up as a trestle, on the forward-facing white bottom of which the word SECRETS had been inked in ballpoint pen, each letter traced three times for visibility, and then encircled and cross-barred in red marker to symbolize negation.
“Are you recruiting?” Matthew asked.
“Would you care to join our working group, sir?” asked Raleigh.
“Go ahead and explain it to him,” the woman in the peacoat told Raleigh and Elspeth. “That’ll give me another chance.”
“We’re the Working Group for the Refinement of the Perception of Feelings,” said Elspeth.
“WTFRPF,” said Raleigh.
“Oh, maybe it’s a joke,” the woman said, aloud but as if commenting only to herself. She caught Matthew’s eye. “I mean, their whole idea for the group could be a joke, couldn’t it?” She spoke as if a joke would be as disappointing to her as an activity that her therapist would approve of.
Elspeth tried to explain. “The idea is what if people were to talk about their feelings and not be so careful to make sure that nothing happens on account of talking about them.”
“You can’t just leave out the part about how we read each other’s minds,” Raleigh protested.
“Sounds interesting,” said Matthew, playing his role as shill.
“It does?” asked the woman. “I’m still quite confused.”
“In fact I’ll join,” said Matthew.
“Just like that?” asked the woman.
“Actually, we’re just pretending not to know each other,” Matthew confessed, gesturing between himself and the young couple.
“Oh, I’ve been deceived, I see,” she said.
“But the thing is,” said Matthew, “we knew you’d see through us.”
“You’ve lost me again.”
“Because of our refinement of—what is it?”
“Refinement of the Perception of Feelings,” Elspeth supplied.
“RPTGIF.”
“Stop it, Raleigh,” said Elspeth.
“Is that the official name now?” Matthew asked.
“I came up with it last night,” Elspeth replied. “I think it’s more precise.”
“You’re psychics or something,” said the woman in the peacoat.
“Not me,” said Raleigh. “I’m not any good at it.”
“Our friend Leif is the only one who’s really any good,” said Elspeth.
“You know, this is pretty batty,” said the woman.
“Oh, we know!” Raleigh agreed.
“What’s it for, even, if it is real?” she asked. “I mean, it’s a parlor trick, isn’t it?” She included Matthew in her question. She had a grand manner, and one could see that in her mind it exempted her from any suspicion of rudeness. “Will telepathy replace the people’s mic? It would be less roughhewn that way.”
“One of the ideas is we’ll use it to break crypto, actually,” said Raleigh.
“Crypto?” the woman echoed. “That’s like codes, right? Curiouser and curiouser.” She looked at their pizza box indulgently. “I so want to be in on this.” She sounded as if she were making an aside to a friend, though no friend of hers happened to be present.
“Crypto, really?” asked Matthew.
“That’s why I’m supposed to work on the number cards,” said Elspeth.
“Is this Leif’s idea?”
“It’s more that it’s Raleigh’s idea that it should be Leif’s idea,” Elspeth admitted.
“No, Leif’s into it,” Raleigh insisted. “And Chris is really into it.”
“What ‘crypto’ will you break, exactly?” the woman asked. “My Gmail account?”
“Government secrets,” said Raleigh. “Corporate misdoings.”
“Drones and Bank of America and so on,” the woman suggested.
“Exactly.”
“And you’ll do it with . . . mind waves.”
“You make us sound crazy,” said Raleigh, who didn’t sound as if he minded.
“You’re giving her the wrong impression,” Elspeth objected. She tried once more to convey the idea: “It’s about admitting that most of the time people are more aware than they’d like to let on of how other people are feeling. That’s all. And that it hurts to be aware, if you can’t talk about it.”
“Fascinating,” said the woman politely.
“You must have felt it sometimes,” said Elspeth. “You came over to our table.”
“And you’re in on this, too?” the woman asked Matthew, appealing to him perhaps on the grounds that like her, he was a responsible age.
“I’m a fellow traveler.”
“He hooked up with Leif,” Raleigh revealed.
“Raleigh,” Elspeth said reproachfully.
“And Leif is the swami or whatever,” said the woman, arranging their story in her mind. “That makes you the groupie.” She pointed a finger at Matthew.
“I’m a grad student in English, so . . .”
“So you’re easy?” the woman finished for him. “Oh, I like you all so much, but you are crazy. Can I come to your meeting anyway? Even if I think so? Maybe I’ll turn out to be psychic, too.”
“You might be,” said Raleigh.
“You all look so suspiciously sane, is the thing,” the woman said. “Of course, I’m a poor judge.”
“There seems to be a difference of opinion about what we’re supposed to be believing in, exactly,” noted Matthew.
“You should definitely come,” Elspeth said, welcoming the woman. “It’s at my apartment. The apartment I share with my roommates. They’re not in it, by the way.”
“He’s not your roommate?” asked the woman, indicating Raleigh.
“He’s my boyfriend,” Elspeth explained.
“Oh, I see.” She took down Elspeth’s address and gave her name as Julia.
“What brings you to Occupy?” Raleigh asked as the dust stirred up by the beauty of their new recruit settled.
“The peanut butter,” Matthew answered.
“Leif’s not here.”
“I know.”
“Doing a background check?”
“I did do some googling,” Matthew admitted. “I read a couple of his poems.”
“There was a really great one in Fence last year,” said Raleigh. “A longer one. You should check it out.”
“Are you a poet, too?” Matthew asked.
“I only write code.”
“Raleigh’s a hacktivist,” said Elspeth.
“No, I’m just a coder. I admire those guys, though. When they’re not being complete assholes.”
Now that the game of inducting Julia was over, the three of them were lapsing into politeness. Raleigh asked Matthew what he did for a living, and Matthew confessed he was in grad school.
“What’s your dissertation about?” Raleigh asked.
“Oh god, really?”
Raleigh pointed to the emblem on the pizza box.
“There’s an old legal term, ‘reversion,’” Matthew began. “You possess something in reversion if another person has the use of it now but you’ll get it after they die. Someone from another branch of your family may be living in a manor, say, and it will be yours if you manage to outlive them. Sometimes Shakespeare uses the word metaphorically, to mean anything in your future, anything you’re looking forward to, but legally, technically, it’s something you might not live long enough to put your hands on. My thesis is that in the poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the individual is no longer thinking of himself as the subject of a king but as someone who himself has a kingship in reversion. The interesting thing is it starts to happen quite early. Half a century before the demise of Charles I.”
Elspeth asked, “Charles is the one who—?”
“They chopped off his head,” Raleigh told her.
“That’s what I was going to say.”
“There’s this fixation in the poetry on the metaphysics of kingship,” Matthew continued. “On how kingship can be transferred and how it can be incorporated into a particular person and what sort of thing it really is, and the fixation has something to do with anxiety over who will succeed the virgin queen, and something to do with anxiety over how to think about the Host now that England is no longer Catholic—”
“Is this history or literature?” Raleigh interrupted.
“It’s literature. I’m faking the history.”
“Go on.”
“It has something to do with succession and something to do with Communion wafers, but I think it has to be economic, too, because reversionary kingship is seeping in through the foundations of the self, the way economic alterations in structure do. It’s a paradoxical state. It’s something you’ve inherited, so it’s from the past, but it’s also something you don’t enjoy yet, so it’s in the future. It’s a premonition, but a premonition of something that’s your birthright.”
“Do we have it today?” Elspeth asked.
Matthew demurred. “Representative democracy works a little differently. . . .”
“People don’t really want to be king anymore,” said Raleigh. “There aren’t even any lunatics in the asylums who want to be Napoleon anymore.”
“Maybe they want to be reversionary one-percenters,” suggested Elspeth.
“One-percenters are too boring,” Raleigh objected.
“They have no charismatic virtues,” said Matthew.
“They have no charismatic vices,” Raleigh corrected him. “They would be charming if they would only let us see them being greedy and trivial.”
“I wouldn’t find them charming,” Elspeth said.
“Yes you would,” Raleigh insisted. “They’d be like the millionaires in screwball comedies.”
“So that’s it, basically,” Matthew concluded. “And then a chapter on Marlowe because, you know, I’m gay.”
“Why Communion wafers?” asked Raleigh.
“It’s complicated.”
“I thought it might have to do with the ‘Was Shakespeare Catholic?’ thing.”
“Yeah, no. I mean, maybe. But not in my dissertation.”
“Huh.”
“So is this what you think about all day?” asked Elspeth. “I have a friend who’s writing a dissertation, and she says it’s all she can think about.”
“It should be,” Matthew replied. It was supposed to be. His penance and his opportunity.
“I look forward to reading it,” said Raleigh.
“Oh, me, too,” said Matthew.
After such an exhibition, silence naturally followed. Matthew wished he had said nothing, as he always did after expounding. One’s thoughts about one’s dissertation were like a gall on a tree. A corky, distended mass, as large as a human head. That was the kind of revelation he felt he made of himself when he talked about it.
But Marlowe wasn’t incidental, he silently amended. Edward II was the key to Richard II, as he would show if he ever got to that chapter.
The next day, at the library—one of the libraries on his own campus, this time—Matthew looked up the longer poem of Leif’s that Raleigh had mentioned.
Line breaks and alignments seemed to be important structurally, and it was studded with so many patterns and eye rhymes that at first Matthew was under the panicky impression that the fact of the poem’s visual orientation was as much sense as he was going to be able to make of it. After a stanza or two, though, he began to piece together a story.
The owners of a small-town motel, immigrants from the subcontinent, had set aside a garden for their employees, out of sight of the motel’s swimming pool and parking lot. A hose from the pool’s service shed led downhill to it. As a subject for a poem, a garden was an indulgence, the poet admitted. For a gay, urban-dwelling poet, it was even a little bit affected, as well as a bit too aspirationally upper middle class, the conventions and associations of pastoral being what they are. Locavorism, etc. The poet felt he had a right to the material anyway, because he really had worked in such a garden, with his mother, who really had worked in just such a motel as a cleaner, in the employ of a couple very much like the motel’s owners in the poem. The poet had a Marxian right by labor, therefore, and a feudal one by descent. His relationship to the labor of gardening had been moody and authentic. He had resented having to weed, and he had exulted in the creation of a lumpy, engorged, celadon Hubbard squash. “Et in Arcadia teenager.” He knew, thanks to the experience, that a corn plant’s roots prog into the earth like the arced and stiffened fingers of a practitioner of yoga as she supports herself on them, and he thought he should be free to draw on the knowledge. Unfortunately, the touch of “nature,” in such an image, always came off as precious; mortification rather than death fenced the lost garden.
Still, he wanted to be able to say that the scent of a plant was as strong in its stem and its leaves as in its fruit, even at the cost of sounding dandiacal. That particular garden was still his world, or rather, his memories of it were the components with which he still assembled the world. Through which he perceived it. “My vegetable empire.” In that garden he had learned how to work and how to be alone.
The stagecoach-wheel-size chandeliers of the reading room were swaying slightly, almost imperceptibly, in the middle space of the great hall, Matthew saw when he looked up from the literary journal. This might be a real poem, Matthew thought, although he wanted so badly to believe that it was that he couldn’t trust his judgment. He was becoming the sort of person who would think this was a real poem whether or not an earlier version of himself might have thought so. He remembered the boy’s ghostly white body as it had appeared to him in the darkness of his bedroom. He was in danger of falling in love.
Matthew laid his jacket down on Elspeth’s bed beside the slate gray toggle coat that was already dear to him. “Can I get on stack?” he heard Julia’s voice asking, somewhat stagily, in the parlor.
“Do we have a stack?” he heard Raleigh ask, in turn.
“We probably should,” said Elspeth. “Let me get paper.” She was in search of some when she and Matthew crossed paths in the hallway a moment later. “Oh, hi,” she said. They were too shy to greet each other any more demonstratively.
“Thanks for having me over.”
“Of course. I mean, it’s a working group meeting.” She excused herself to continue her search.
In the parlor, Matthew found Leif rising from his chair to welcome him. He felt a twinge of almost pain in his chest at seeing Leif again and seeing how beautiful he was. Leif was wearing the shirt that he had been wearing the night they met, a red-and-white-plaid shirt with skinny arms that made him look even lankier than he was. It wasn’t the kind of detail that Matthew usually noticed or remembered. I haven’t lost him yet, Matthew heard himself think, as they kissed, and as Leif rested the palm of one hand almost forgetfully against him.
Chris, the green-eyed man who had helped fill the tanks at Occupy with hot and cold water, nodded at Matthew with an upward jut of his head and gave up his seat so that Matthew could sit next to Leif.
“You mind?” Chris said to Julia, taking the chair next to her. Against the sun-darkened skin of his face, the pink of his lips looked raw. He was holding a baseball cap with fingers that were knotty and looked ten years older than the rest of him. “You going to help us out?” he asked Julia sociably.
“I’m here to learn more about you,” Julia replied. She looked at him with eyes open almost aggressively wide. She had nothing to hide; she had hidden everything already.
“Matthew’s a new recruit, too,” Raleigh said to Chris.
“I met Matthew at Occupy,” said Chris.
“I’m not going to wear the T-shirt or anything,” Matthew said.
“That’s what we need,” said Raleigh. “Can we have T-shirts, Leif?”
Elspeth returned, waving a yellow legal pad. “Should I be stack taker?” Nobody objected. “Everyone, everyone,” she said, calling them to order. “It can just be all stack. Whatever comes up.”
“Julia had her hand up,” Leif said.
Raleigh made a trumpet out of the curled fingers of one hand and spoke through it in a self-consciously “loud” voice: “Welcome to the Working Group for the Refinement of the Perception of Feelings.”
“I think Julia should go first,” Leif said.
“You’re sort of the leader,” Raleigh protested.
“We’re anarchists, remember?”
“Let her go first,” Chris seconded.
“Me? Really?” Julia let a hand drop onto her chest. Her voice had a rich color, Matthew noticed. It wouldn’t have been suitable to speak too hurriedly with it. “I wanted to ask Leif a question about his power.”
It wasn’t inaccurate to call Leif’s gift a power; no one corrected her. But there was something off about it. Julia spoke, Matthew sensed, from what she understood to be a position of some kind. Maybe it was her voice itself that gave it to her. Really fine things are usually strong as well as elegant. “Can he do it through the TV?” she asked.
She couldn’t help but be condescending, Matthew saw. He sort of liked her for it; it was her way of being authentic.
“Did I say the wrong thing?” she asked when no one responded.
“It’s a point of information,” said Elspeth. “It’s a valid point of information.”
“No, of course,” said Leif. “I don’t have a television, so I don’t really know. But I think I have to be there in person.”
“Why?” Matthew asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know how it works. Maybe there’s something I have to smell? That would be gross, wouldn’t it.”
“So we need to get ourselves in the same room with them, somehow,” said Raleigh.
“With who?” Elspeth asked.
“With the people we want to crack.”
“You’re so dramatic,” Leif said.
“We could get them to arrest us,” Chris suggested. He was studying Leif.
“They’re doing a lot of that, I hear,” Julia said cheerfully.
“Can you read people through a TV?” Leif asked her.
“I don’t get anything at all from people, not even in person,” she said, a little gleefully, like someone turning her pockets inside out for a beggar.
“You came to us.”
“Oh, when people lose their keys, I know where to find them. I see them, usually. Sitting in a little heap, the way keys do, wherever they are. But that’s so trivial.”
“You see what the person who lost the keys is showing you,” Leif suggested.
“That could be,” she said.
“I bet you could see other things.”
“How scary!” she said brightly.
Leif seemed to consider.
“Is it scary, boss?” asked Chris.
Matthew abruptly remembered having been frightened by a dream that he had had the night before. He couldn’t remember any details. Only the fact that there had been something menacing came back to him. The unspecific fact of the menace, now, functioned as a shield that protected him from the thing itself that had frightened him in his sleep.
“That’s why I wanted for us to have a group,” said Leif. “To talk about it.”
“So this is a kind of therapy group,” said Julia.
“It’s whatever we want it to be.”
For a few moments they seemed to listen to and focus on one another silently. Chris, Raleigh, Elspeth, Julia, Matthew, Leif. Brutal, clumsy, earnest, proud, sorrowful, troubling. It was awkward. For a few moments, they were so aware of one another, even those who were more or less strangers to each other, that no one knew what to say.
There was a loud crack.
“What was that?” asked Julia.
“Our brain waves in alignment,” joked Raleigh.
Elspeth hopped out of her chair. “I think it came from the bookshelf.” She removed a handful of anthologies and looked into the gap. “It was the veneer panel in back. I knew we nailed it on wrong.”
“There was probably a fair amount of torque on it,” said Raleigh. “The way the bookcase is leaning.”
“Come on,” said Chris.
“Come on what?” Raleigh replied.
“I, officially, don’t believe in this kind of thing,” said Leif.
“What do you mean, ‘officially’?” asked Julia.
“Officially as in for the record.”
“In other words, you do.”
“Secretly everyone does.”
“You’re all north by northwest about this, aren’t you,” said Julia. “Except you,” she added, turning to Chris. “You’re north. In a way, you’re the only one who takes it absolutely seriously.”
“Oh, Chris, you’re blushing,” said Elspeth.
“I don’t blush.” The gold of his skin didn’t completely hide it.
“Dinner,” announced Matthew, a couple of nights later, in his apartment.
Leif, who was sitting on Matthew’s folded-up futon, looked up from his laptop. They had agreed that the evening wouldn’t be a date, so that they could spend in each other’s company the time that they needed to devote to reading and writing. Matthew had cooked a simple meal, dal with wilted spinach and caramelized onions. After setting two bowls of it on the table, he untied his apron and went to take a piss.
He heard Leif knock. “I need to wash my hands,” Leif explained through the door, which Matthew hadn’t pulled all the way to.
“Come in.”
“Oh, I have to pee, too, actually,” said Leif.
Matthew made room for him, and Leif took out his long, thin cock, floppy like a new-landed fish. He was pee-shy, at first. “I always think of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom crossing streams,” said Leif. “Is that hopeless?”
While Matthew was washing his hands, Leif put his hands into the sink, too, but it was an obstruction rather than a pleasure, and Leif apologized. “I was an only child, so I don’t know how to share.”
“You don’t share. You struggle brutally for survival.”
As they returned together to the table, Matthew briefly had the fantasy that the table had been set not by him but by people they couldn’t see. They were happening upon the meal, in the course of a quest of some kind.
“How’s your post going?” Matthew asked, once they sat down.
Raleigh had set up a blog for the working group, and Leif was trying to write something for it. “Did you ever see Escape to Witch Mountain? It’s an old, very bad Disney movie. There’s a little girl in it who can open locks with her mind, but only when it’s morally right for her to do so. I want to say that we could have something like that for codebreaking. We could develop the ability to find out any secret that it’s morally right for us to know.”
“Why not secrets you shouldn’t know?”
“This is humanities, not science. There isn’t a button you push.”
“What if you wrote it as a poem?” Matthew suggested. “Instead of a blog post.”
“I’m writing a manifesto,” Leif replied scornfully.
They gave their attention to eating. There were still questions that Matthew hadn’t found a way to ask: If the world was ending, what was the point in Leif’s giving so much of himself away to strangers? If it was possible to know people’s hearts without words, why didn’t Leif know Matthew’s?
Leif set down his fork. “It’s very secure here,” he said, surveying Matthew’s bookshelves. “It’s very sturdy. Here in your life.”
“I could tear it down,” said Matthew. He felt a yen for a cigarette even though it had been more than a year since he had quit.
“Tear it down for me?”
“For me, too, maybe.”
“Don’t do that,” said Leif. Studying his empty bowl, he added, “We probably shouldn’t get too attached.”
“No,” agreed Matthew. “I just want to be able to fuck you now and then.”
It wasn’t exactly distrust between them. It was as if each of them were warning the other.
“What if you try to take what you want for yourself,” Matthew suggested. He had decided that that was his own policy.
“I don’t know how to want anything just for myself,” Leif replied. “I always want it with someone.”
“Just not with me.”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Leif said.
“Hurt me a little,” Matthew said. “I bet you can’t.”
“Oh, I can.”
“Come on, try.” Matthew kneeled in front of Leif’s chair and held down Leif’s arms with his own.
The invitation led them to the futon, where their greed surprised them.
They showered afterward. They read for a while. When they went to sleep, they slept fitfully and without any pattern, because they were still struggling with each other over which way to face and how much to intertwine. How much to insist and how much to defer.
A little before one, Leif’s phone gave the black-fly buzz that signaled its receipt of a text. They didn’t get out of bed. A few minutes later, they ignored a second text, too. “You’re blowing up,” Matthew said, when a third one came in.
“It’s happening,” Leif said as he read. “The police are evicting everyone.”
Matthew switched on his desk lamp and shielded his eyes from it. “Do you want to go?”
“We won’t even be able to get close enough to see,” Leif replied, still reading his small screen. “The police are using their clubs.” Another text arrived. “Raleigh’s going,” he reported.
“Is Elspeth?”
“He didn’t say. He’s getting on his bike now.”
“What about Chris?”
“He’s two blocks south of it. The first text was from him.”
Leif hunched over to write his friends back, which on his dumbphone sometimes required laborious repetition of the number keys to bring up the right letters. At the sink, Matthew poured two glasses of water. The edge of the circle of light cast by his desk lamp bisected Leif across his pale chest. The geometry of the scene suggested to Matthew that Leif would never be fully held by any claim of Matthew’s. The stillness of the circle of light and the unsteady working of Leif’s breath in his slender rib cage added to the impression.
“Do you have any earplugs?” asked Leif. “The police have bought some kind of new sound weapon with their 9/11 money.”
“Are you going?”
“You don’t have to go.”
“I just didn’t realize you were going.”
“I want to see how far I can get.”
Matthew took a bag of foam earplugs out of the top drawer of his desk. “This is so end times. A sound weapon.”
“It’s a war of the senses,” Leif said. He stood up, pulled on his pants, and started buttoning his shirt. “It’s a war over perceiving. Over what we’re allowed to perceive, still. You don’t have any swimming goggles, do you?”
“The strap broke last year,” said Matthew. “I’ll go, too.”
“Why? It’s not your thing.”
“I won’t get in your way,” Matthew promised. “I’m going to go, okay?”
They walked their bikes down the stairwell of Matthew’s building. Outside, by a trick of the light, the asphalt of the street looked wet even though it wasn’t. They set off, Leif in the lead. The streets were mostly empty. It was quiet, and they were alone and unwatched. As the black-and-white city scrolled past, Matthew felt terribly free, as one does when one understands that one has lost touch with one’s old life.
The city was like a sleeping dragon; they were coasting past it almost noiselessly, so as not to wake it up. The only sound was the creak of their pedals, echoing off the facades. As each streetlamp passed, the burnish of its reflected light rolled up alongside them on the asphalt, like a dolphin curious about a new boat in her waters, and then veered away.
It was so quiet that Matthew had the impression that he and Leif had survived something. They were touring the aftermath.
“Look,” said Leif, pointing below them as they mounted the bridge. “They’ve shut the bridge to car traffic.”
Two police cars, lights flashing, were slanted across the bridge’s car lanes, and beyond the police cars, the gray pavement was empty.
After looking down, Matthew by reflex looked up, into the beautiful double rigging of the old bridge, which was unusual in that it was both a cable-stayed and a suspension bridge, doubly supported because its builders had meant for it to stand for all time. Cables that spread at an angle crossed cables that fell straight down, interlacing like fingers and creating diamonds that in their sequence of gradually varying dimensions seemed to be unfolding as Leif and Matthew rode past them.
They crossed the water; they descended into downtown. Tonight it didn’t seem like misplaced prudence for them to lock up their bikes long before their destination, and while the chants and the sirens were still faint, they chose a No Parking sign on an empty street. As they threaded their locks and cables through their wheels, three curly-haired men with backpacks walked up with nervous speed.
“Any news?” asked one.
“We just got here,” said Leif.
“We heard they have water cannons,” said another.
The shapes of the men’s noses didn’t match; they weren’t brothers. Leif told them the rumor he had heard about the sound weapon, and he gave them three pairs of Matthew’s earplugs. “I don’t know if they’ll work,” Leif cautioned.
“They might be handy in Central Booking, anyway.”
“Don’t they make you empty your pockets at Central Booking?” asked the third curly-haired man.
“I think they just take your belt and shoelaces,” replied the first.
The men hurried on.
“I don’t want to go to jail,” said Matthew.
“Do you want to go home?”
“No, let’s just not get arrested.”
As they walked north, toward the site of the encampment, they began to notice small groups of others headed in the same direction. They passed a row of glossy white SUVs bearing medallions that identified them as the property of the Department of Homeland Security. The trucks were backed up diagonally onto the sidewalk, their engines idling. They were as yet unscratched by the city. Matthew wondered where the Department of Homeland Security was kept when there wasn’t any civil unrest. Outside of airports, he had never seen any sign of it before.
“Raleigh says to go one block west,” Leif said, reading his cell phone.
When they did, they found sidewalks that were at last a little populated. There was a chant—“Whose streets? Our streets”—which built for half a dozen iterations, but after a few more, the voices in it fell out of entrainment, and in the end only one persisted, almost scoldingly. It was the middle of the night, after all. At the next intersection, a file of police, in helmets and black plastic armor, stood abreast to block the way to the park that the occupiers no longer occupied. Behind the police was parked a paddy wagon, one of its back doors open, the corner of a bench inside it visible. From every officer’s belt there dangled an insect-like furl of disposable plastic manacles. It was the multiplicity as much as the shape of them that suggested insects. Professional dog walkers sometimes carried a dispenser of baggies in the same place.
To pick up the shit that is us, Matthew thought.
“If you step into the street, you will be arrested,” a policeman warned the crowd through a megaphone.
“What’s that about?” Matthew asked.
“It’s their rule,” said Leif.
“If you don’t color inside the lines, you go to jail? Don’t we have a right of assembly?”
Leif didn’t meet Matthew’s eye, as if wary of Matthew’s simple anger. He waved; he had spotted Raleigh, Elspeth, and Chris on the sidewalk opposite. Diana was with them. Matthew and Leif made their way to the crosswalk in order to join them safely.
“You made it,” Raleigh said. He clapped a hand against one of Leif’s. “Diana says the police are pulling everyone out of the park.”
She gestured with her phone. “That’s what I hear.”
“We will arrest you if you are obstructing the flow of traffic,” repeated the police officer with the megaphone.
“They keep saying that, and they’re blocking a whole street,” said Raleigh, and to Matthew it sounded reckless of Raleigh, under the circumstances, to give voice even to a mild statement of fact. No wonder Leif had been wary of Matthew’s anger a few minutes earlier. There was risk in letting one’s temperature get too high.
“I can’t be here,” said Diana. “I have a meeting with my adviser first thing in the morning.”
“Oh, are you in grad school?” asked Matthew.
“Sociology.”
“English,” Matthew identified himself.
“Nice.”
A new chant began and staggered across the sparse crowd. As it passed through their group, Raleigh and Chris seemed to compete in giving voice to it.
“This will make Occupy even bigger,” said Raleigh, perhaps a little heady from the shouting. “The way the first arrests did. The way the pepper spray did.”
His hopes hung in the air, unseconded.
“What if we walk down to the water,” Leif suggested.
“Y’all are going to do your witchy thing, aren’t you,” said Diana. “I’ll have to leave you to it.” She gave out hugs.
“Peace,” Chris told her, unselfconsciously.
Another chant started. “Are we really going to just walk away?” asked Raleigh.
“What’re you gonna do, man,” Chris replied.
Across the street, Matthew saw the three curly-haired men standing on the curb, glaring at five policemen who seemed to be daring them to step off it. As if to suggest an answer to Chris’s not-quite-question, one of the curly-haired men did step off the curb, his jaw out, and the police at once rained down blows on him with their clubs, as if he were a nail that they were competing to hammer. As the man’s friends grabbed at him ineffectually, the man crumpled to his knees, and the police bent him forward, twisted his arms behind him, and fastened his wrists. The police had done this many times before, Matthew saw, and the curly-haired man never had. They knew where to hit so that his body gave out quickly.
The police took the man’s friends, too, for having reached out to him. “Let’s go for a walk,” Leif repeated.
“Tell us again about our great powers, Leif,” Elspeth said, as they walked alongside a steel balustrade that edged the river, which was black and glittering.
“What do you want to hear?”
“How we’re going to save the world.”
There were no chants or sirens in the air anymore, just gray sighs from cars on a highway that they had had to cross to reach the water. The river itself was silent.
“We’re going to save the world by being beautiful together,” said Leif.
Matthew wanted to button Leif’s coat for him. He himself had put on his wool hat and bike gloves. “Like in a Ryan McGinley photo shoot?” Matthew asked.
“Beautiful in our souls,” Leif specified.
“You make it sound easy,” said Raleigh.
“Easy as pie,” said Leif.
The city’s light fractured on the disturbed surface of the river, each of its thousand glancing reflections taking for a moment the spiculate shape of a skate’s egg sac and then bouncing into a frame of open jawbones and then reverting to an egg sac again. CGI avant la lettre, thought Matthew.
“Tell us,” Raleigh insisted.
“It’ll be easy because of the meaning of life,” Leif said, his voice cracking a little under the strain of finding a tone that acknowledged his grandiosity but did seek nonetheless to be a little bit believed. The meaning of a life wasn’t assigned, he explained. Most people dodged the challenge by referring it to their children, still mute and unable to object, so that the question of this generation had to be answered by the next. If people began to recognize, however, that survival generally was in jeopardy, postponement became impossible. Through anticipating their children’s deaths, parents became acutely aware again of their own, and once aware, became unable to shift their attention away. To survive their parents’ distraction, some of the children became caretakers. They learned to solve problems that children shouldn’t have to or even be able to solve, becoming so sensitive to the fears and needs of those around them that something in them was broken. An inner ear that in an ordinary childhood was trained on the child’s inner self was turned away, in their case, to others. It was a sort of generational fail-safe mechanism. An injury became a gift. That is, the injured themselves became the gift, though they soon learned that they had to hide their nature in order to get through daily life.
“And you think that’s us,” Elspeth said, when Leif paused, his elaboration having reached a height that he didn’t seem to know how to climb down from. “You think we’re the caretakers, and you think we’ll reform the political system.”
“Oh, maybe,” Leif said.
“Don’t we save the world?”
“It might be more a matter of helping people become able to talk about the ending.”
“That’s so dark,” said Raleigh.
In the absence of a moon, Matthew noticed that he seemed to have set himself the task of scanning the shadows beyond the radiance of the walkway’s lamps. He could see best when the friends were between lamps, almost part of the dark themselves. The glare directly under a lamp slightly blinded one.
“Really, you think the world is ending?” asked Chris.
“I don’t know. It looks like it.”
“You have this gift, and you could use it.”
“What’s my gift?”
“You see things.”
“I guess things.”
“You see everything you were just talking about.”
“I’m just making things up. I can’t do anything about anything.”
“Why do you say that?” asked Chris.
He asked it with a note of sorrow so real that Leif was unable to continue with his persiflage, if that’s what it had been. They had just seen people like themselves being beaten. An experiment in optimism was coming to an end. It was cold. It was late. Matthew had briefly worried, when Leif had begun to talk, that the talk would feed the folie that Leif and his friends had been sharing, at a moment when it might have been natural, and as painless as it ever would be, for them to leave the folie behind. But his harboring of this worry, Matthew had to acknowledge, felt too much like siding with the forces that he had seen in action a few minutes ago, a few blocks away, and he found, to his surprise, that he not only felt no relief over the modesty of Leif’s claim for his abilities but that he even shared Chris’s disappointment: he, too, evidently, wanted to hear from Leif that soon there would be a better world, that Leif and his friends would be the cadres, that the poor would be fed without humiliation, that governments would invest in the health and well-being of citizens, that henceforth ingenuity would be directed into the creation of art, the discovery of new energy sources, and the preservation of the environment rather than into efforts to confuse consumers into making choices against their interests.
Matthew, too, was a utopian, hopelessly. Meaning, he was ungroundedly hopeful. Where was he? They had walked to the end of the city, to the tip where the ferries ran, though none were running now. There was so much he was going to have to give up on, Matthew realized, before he would be able to return to the life he had thought worth living.
The despair of that night turned out to be only momentary; the members of Leif’s circle recovered their spirits surprisingly fast. There seemed to be something restorative, in fact, about the blow they had received. It might even have been the case that awareness of failure—the now demonstrated certainty of it—liberated their energies. If, in the end, their effort was going to be crushed, then they could cause no harm even if they were mistaken, and they might as well pour into their cause the selves that they now, definitively, didn’t know what to do with. Matthew, as usual, held back; he limited himself to the role of fellow traveler. But he attended the meetings, because he couldn’t bear to be away from Leif, and the meetings were held more and more often. The police reopened the once-occupied park, and though they strictly forbade any rebuilding of the occupiers’ infrastructure, the place was more pleasant to visit than ever. The site of defeat felt strangely like one of victory. Did it cheer the occupiers to know that the powers that be had been afraid enough to insist on stopping them? They were free now to feel the approaching chill of winter as provocative rather than menacing; they weren’t going to be sleeping in it. The members of Leif’s working group returned to the park to recruit. They were now sans pizza box. Their recruiting stand could no longer consist of anything more than a few people standing together, in a configuration that they hoped would seem welcoming. No one took advantage of their welcome, however. Maybe they now seemed, despite their intentions, too much like a completed and therefore closed circle.
It hardly mattered. This smaller setback, too, seemed not to dismay but to enliven them. It reinforced the sense they had of being set apart, misunderstood by the blundering world, and they let the recruiting effort subside into a bit of a joke. Through a website, Raleigh had a T-shirt printed with the words GOVERNMENT TRANSPARENCY NOW in large type, and the words THROUGH ESP below, in smaller print. A second T-shirt read, more simply, OCCUPY TELEPATHY. A third: LOOK INTO MY EYES . . . YOU ARE GETTING SLEEPY, VERY SLEEPY . . . YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO JOIN THE WORKING GROUP FOR THE REFINEMENT OF THE PERCEPTION OF FEELINGS. Which was all fine if you were Raleigh, declared Julia, who claimed for a few days to be vexed at the others for not having texted her the night of the eviction and who made a show, accordingly, of her right to be free with criticism. But it wasn’t fine if one wanted to be taken seriously, she continued, with her usual ruthless aplomb. She, for one, was an admirer of a design that Elspeth had shared with her, a mandorla of a white dove flying and a white dolphin leaping, the arcs and shapes of their bodies mirroring each other across a choppy horizon that divided blue sky from green sea. A fin of the dolphin and a wing of the dove seemed, loosely, to correspond, though each animal remained distinctly itself—a remarkable achievement for someone who was no artist, as Julia bluntly put it. (“No, that’s okay,” said Elspeth, when the others nervously laughed at Julia’s inadvertent cruelty. “I mean, I’m not an artist, she’s right.”) Julia decided to have T-shirts silk-screened with the design and with the discreet triliteral RPF, and she requested people’s sizes. No self-serve website for Julia.
Only Raleigh wore Raleigh’s T-shirts, but when the box of Julia’s arrived, one afternoon at Elspeth’s apartment, everyone tried on her shirts. Even Matthew was a good sport. “A little culty,” was Raleigh’s verdict, once they had donned their new uniforms. They stood in a circle, pulling forward the hems of the shirts and looking down at the colorful symbol upside-down on the fabric in front of them. The shirts rendered all their bodies shapeless in the same way.
“We could sell flowers at an airport,” Matthew suggested.
“Why?” asked Elspeth.
“It’s something cults used to do before 9/11.”
“I’m glad you bought them for us,” Elspeth said to Julia, as if afraid that Julia might take Matthew’s joke in bad part.
“It’s not very Occupy, though,” Raleigh said.
“Why not?” Julia asked.
“It’s kind of a commodification.”
“It’s just something to wear, Raleigh,” Julia said. “And you started it. They are culty, but there’s usually an effect of alienation, I think, when a number of people dress alike. Uniformity suggests ritual. Suggests the submerging of the individual in a higher cause.”
“A warpath,” said Raleigh. “A human sacrifice.”
“But the blue is so soothing, isn’t it?” Julia continued. “I was very particular with them about getting the blue right.”
“And doves and dolphins are soothing,” said Leif.
“That’s why I drew them,” Elspeth mildly insisted.
“Not to mention psychic,” said Raleigh. “Everyone knows dolphins are psychic.”
Matthew excused himself, and in the bedroom of one of Elspeth’s roommates, he changed back into his own shirt. He folded the T-shirt carefully—the uniform that he had said he was never going to wear. So the campaign had colors now. He should have shown Leif the bearings of Richard II: a white hart, lodged, its front hooves delicately crossed, beneath a sky of starlike suns—the sign of a king who was to be unkinged. The numerousness of the suns undermined their celestial majesty, and so did the hart, because a hart implies hounds. A hart brings to mind the hunter who became, by love’s enchantment, the hunted. White for purity. Noli me tangere.
Was Leif the hart, or was Matthew? The first to declare love makes the other responsible for reply—makes the other the caretaker, to use Leif’s word—and Matthew didn’t want to do that to Leif. He believed that much, at least: he believed that Leif needed to be spared a moral burden if there was any hope of his someday setting his feelings free. He wanted Leif that badly already: he wanted him with his feelings free. He had a suspicion, sometimes, that Leif continued to entangle his feelings in his folie in order to keep them from Matthew. The folie, in this understanding, was a kind of secondary enchantment, with the purpose of holding Matthew at bay, in counteraction to the first, the original charm of attraction cast by Leif’s mere self.
“There’s always one thing you can’t see,” Leif was saying, when Matthew returned to the parlor. “One kind of thing. It’s because you can’t see it that you became so good at seeing all the others.”
Since the eviction, Leif seemed to hold forth more often about his theories. “What is the thing for you?” Matthew asked.
“He won’t be able to say, probably,” said Raleigh.
“A reader of people could get round his blind spot by dead reckoning, maybe,” Leif speculated.
Matthew picked up the tarot deck and shuffled it.
“He could get round it the way an autistic person memorizes the rules that normals follow,” Leif continued. “My blind spot is something about you, probably,” he said to Matthew.
“You think so?” In Leif’s inability to see was Matthew’s safety. The convention of their talk was still that Leif was the innocent and Matthew the roué. I’m going to be the Daisy to your Steerforth, aren’t I, was how Leif had put it at one point.
“And another thing,” Leif continued. “It’s no biggie to read someone you like. Skill is in reading someone antipathetic.”
“That’s like academia,” said Matthew. “You don’t win any points for paying attention to a text that’s interesting.”
“Are we supposed to be writing these down?” Raleigh asked.
“Have a little respect,” Chris ordered sharply.
Raleigh paused before answering. “We’re not a cult yet, Chris.”
“Boys, boys,” said Leif.
Julia interposed: “It would be skill, in other words, if Raleigh were to read Chris’s mind at the moment.”
“That’s why gays are better at this sort of thing, I think,” said Leif. “We aren’t really capable of not imagining what the other person is thinking, even if we don’t like him.”
“That’s racist,” said Raleigh.
“It’s not ‘racist.’ I think it’s a survival thing.”
“You know what I mean. But anyway, Chris and I love each other. We’re just having a disagreement.”
“I was just beating up on him a little,” Chris confirmed.
“It’s interesting that he’s a writer.” Julia made confidences in Matthew from time to time, with the air of having discovered a capacity for disloyalty in him. They were complicit, her manner implied, in the way of slummers who in the depths of the slums have recognized each other, seeing in each other the desire that isn’t visible to the natives around them. “I should have expected it but didn’t.”
“You thought you would be the writer.”
“Well, I did come downtown with that idea. And we can both be, can’t we? All of us, even. But the truth is that I did think I would ‘find’ something. It sounds so awful, doesn’t it, when I put it like that. What I find is that he’s writing it himself.”
“I don’t think he writes poems about it. I wish he did.”
“Because they would be so fascinating?”
“No,” Matthew replied. “I mean, they would be, but what I think I hope is that if he did write poems about it, maybe less of it would need to actually happen.”
“Oh, see, now you’re problematizing my search for ‘experience.’”
“Is Leif here?” Matthew called into Elspeth’s apartment one afternoon, after he had failed to find Leif behind the counter at his café.
“He’ll be here later,” Elspeth’s answer came down the hall. “He had a cough again.”
Elspeth was sitting at the dining room table with, unexpectedly, Chris, the tarot deck between them. “I have to get as good at it as the rest of you guys,” Chris explained, grinning at Matthew over his shoulder.
“I’m no good,” Matthew said.
“Don’t say that, man.”
“You can stay if you don’t transmit anything,” Elspeth told Matthew.
Maybe she thought Matthew’s presence could function as a sort of psychic Wi-Fi relay station. Matthew had his satchel with him, and he decided to sit in the parlor until Leif arrived. “Is Chris reading you or you him?”
“She can read me like I’m talking.”
“He’s trying to read me.” She was keeping a tally of some kind on a scratch pad.
The weak-backed sofa protested as Matthew sat down. He set a book on his lap, and on the lumpy seat cushion beside him he set the corresponding notebook, half full of notes. It would be more efficient to take notes on a laptop, but he liked the sight of his own jittery handwriting, a record of his industriousness even if nothing more came of it.
He read a few lines of sixteenth-century poetry. They happened to belong to an ode to “solitariness,” ambiguous in the usual way: solitude isn’t worth having without the right person to share it with. In the next room, Elspeth drew three cards. Chris was sitting hunched forward in his chair, arms folded, elbows on knees, his bristly gold head angled at her fixedly. Like a raccoon or a small bear, fond of its keeper.
“Death?” Chris suggested.
“Do you see anything?” Elspeth asked. “Maybe close your eyes.”
On the sofa Matthew decided to close his eyes, too.
“It’s dark,” Chris said.
“How is it dark.”
There was silence as Chris struggled. It was dark as a symbol, Matthew thought, in his own darkness. The dark that he and Chris were looking at was the dark of eyes closed in a north-facing room in a cluttered apartment on a late fall afternoon—a mild and susceptible dark. It stood for another dark, by a sort of metonymy. One couldn’t ever actually see this other dark, though one was going to be alone with it before too long. With it and in it. The world was ending, after all. One of the chosen cards was probably a one of swords, Matthew guessed. A threat or a distinction. A line drawn.
“Well, tell me what you mean by death,” Elspeth coaxed.
“Maybe there’s something I’m afraid to see.”
Matthew opened his eyes. Chris’s were still shut, and in looking at him, Matthew felt the mixture of envy and scorn that one feels when watching people with their eyes shut, as for example when they’re praying.
“Is there an arrow?” Chris asked.
Elspeth looked again at the pictures on the cards. “No arrows.”
“Oh, fuck it,” said Chris, opening his eyes.
“No,” said Elspeth pityingly.
“I suck.”
“You don’t let the images in.”
“Death means change, doesn’t it?” It sounded like something he had heard Leif or Elspeth say.
“It isn’t usually death death. But I didn’t have the death card out.” She shuffled her hand into the deck without showing him what the cards had been.
Matthew realized that he had almost forgotten that straights have love-dramas of their own. Though it might be that an attention like Chris’s was the one thing that in Elspeth’s case, Elspeth couldn’t see. “Where’s Raleigh?” Matthew asked from the sofa.
“He took Julia to a spokes council,” Elspeth answered. “She wanted to ‘see.’”
So Elspeth had also noticed Julia’s scare quotes. Unlike Matthew, Julia made no attempt to discard or naturalize her status as an interloper. “Where do you think her money comes from?” Matthew asked.
Elspeth looked startled. “She does have nice clothes, doesn’t she.”
“She has an office,” Chris volunteered. Two blocks from her house, he reported. Chris worked for a moving company, and he said that she had asked him how much it would cost to have a few bookcases moved, along with the books they held. “You could do it with only one man, but you would need a truck,” Chris said now, repeating the calculation he had made for her.
What came into Matthew’s mind, and, he suspected, into Elspeth’s and Chris’s own, was that it might have been Chris’s beauty and the angry heat that always seemed to be rising from him that had prompted Julia to consider hiring him. It would be hard for anyone who liked to sleep with men to look at Chris and not wish to see him put to work. It would have been indecent, though, to joke about Chris’s beauty at the moment, or even to mention it, given the steadiness with which Chris was watching Elspeth.
Perhaps this is how it ends, Matthew thought. The occupation, no longer instantiated, would disperse, and the members of the littler groups that comprised it would break up into new pairings. Matthew was willing to assist in betrayal if unbinding the others would free Leif for him.
It had to end, after all; even the silence in the room now supported that conclusion. The silence was an example of the great flaw in Leif’s scheme, which Leif himself, whenever he felt confident enough to tackle it, referred to as the Problem of Democracy and Feelings. Also known as the Problem of Secrets. If feelings could be made generally audible, was anyone safe? There were cruel people in the world, after all; in a state of perfect knowledge, not everyone would forbear to take advantage. And even between those who had power to harm but would do none, if you knew that I wanted to go to bed with you, and I knew that you didn’t want to go to bed with me, would anything be gained by a license to say what we knew? What if people have come to prefer not speaking their intuitions, and even not knowing them, for a reason?
With more talk might come more understanding, Leif hoped. One might be able to learn to tolerate close handling of awarenesses that had previously seemed too painful, including even perhaps an awareness of not being loved where one badly wanted to be. That was Leif’s hope, at any rate. Matthew wasn’t sure that Leif had any experience of what such a disillusionment might feel like.
“Well, she isn’t defined by her money, is she,” Elspeth commented. “I think she’s genuinely interested in what we’re doing. It’s too bad we didn’t text her the other night.”
“We had other things on our minds,” Chris said.
A few steps over the threshold of Matthew’s apartment, Leif halted for a moment, as if he were waiting, even after so many visits, for Matthew to renew the invitation to make himself at home. “I’ve been thinking of having an action.”
“What kind?” Matthew asked.
“Like an Occupy action. I don’t know. Chain ourselves to something. Hold a public séance.” He studied Matthew for a response. When there wasn’t one, he consolidated a few stacks of books in the windowsill and sat down beside them. “It’s so hard to figure out what the action would be, though, that I wonder if it’s a philosophical problem.” He looked out the window, down into the street, where the brief day was folding itself up and taking itself away, an impatient employee.
Matthew switched on his desk lamp.
“Maybe the problem is,” Leif continued, “that an action will always be an imposition of feelings rather than a perception of them. Even if you want the action to be about perceiving them.”
“It can’t express them?”
“To express them, it would have to come out of feelings that people were having in the moment, and you can’t plan for those. So you can’t plan that kind of action. It’s the problem of monogamy, really. The problem of making promises about feelings.”
“You don’t think it’s possible.”
“Do you think it is?”
Their reflected selves were now floating beyond the window, in the dark, two stories above the level of the street. Escapees. Matthew went to make tea, and while the water came to a boil, he stood watching the kettle and tried to reason with himself. If he got out now, he would free himself of the need to make allowances. He would free himself of the need to be considerate. He could just say that he didn’t think any of it was possible. And it wasn’t possible. The trouble was that he wanted Leif anyway. They were probably going to have each other again tonight, though nothing was certain. He was looking forward to it. Not knowing for certain made him look forward to it even more. He had never been able to walk away from a hunt.
Afterward, as Matthew lay in bed next to Leif, having gotten what he wanted one more time, and feeling no freer, feeling in fact even more deeply held, he felt confronted by the realization that he didn’t understand. What if it’s fatal, he wondered, using a word he wished he hadn’t thought of. The word, in this case, meant fated, he told himself.
He got out of bed quietly and sat naked at his desk, in the dark, the slats of the folding chair at first cold under his buttocks. He wanted Leif and he liked him, even though he thought Leif was a little grandiose at times and perhaps a bit crazy, but there was something uncanny and imperious about the way he wanted him. The wanting almost seemed to come from outside Matthew.
An axle creaked once in the chair beneath him, as if a cricket had found enough daring for one stridulation. Matthew held still; Leif didn’t wake up. Had he wanted Leif to wake up? Had he twisted in his chair deliberately? Did he know anything about his own intentions anymore? He told himself that he was brave enough to be in love, if that’s what this was. He wasn’t the sort of person who needed to be in control for its own sake; he wasn’t a tyrant or a prude or a stuffed shirt.
He looked at Leif. In the dark, Leif’s features, just beyond the threshold of visibility, seemed to billow and alter, under the strain of Matthew’s attempt to see them, until Leif coughed, in his sleep, and in the motion of the spasm became distinct to Matthew’s sight: Leif’s frame curled forward, and his arms shifted apart, like a dog acting out a dream.
Matthew was a little afraid of the warmth that he knew was in the bed with Leif now, mantling him. If Matthew joined it, it would keep Matthew from minding that he didn’t understand. What had he given to Leif that he couldn’t get back except by keeping him? If it were a tarot card, which card would it be? The Fool, the Lover, the Hermit?
He got back into bed and folded Leif in his arms. The Sun, he remembered, was the sign of sovereignty as well as the light to see it by.