It had worked, Chris repeated to himself as he and Raleigh were shunted into a holding cell at Central Booking. There was a clang as the gate caught behind them, but Chris didn’t really mind. A few hours ago, just before he was arrested, he had been able to see fear in a security official’s eyes. Elspeth had seen it, too; Chris had shared a look with her when it had happened. Leif had done it.
The holding cell was capacious. Three of the walls were cement, painted lime green. Which is the color of shoots, Chris thought. Of spring, he silently joked.
In fact, flat light from fluorescents overhead denied any suggestion of a specific time of day, let alone season. A dull steel bench ran along the walls, and Raleigh pointed to an open stretch.
None of the men already sitting in the cell looked at them directly. They weren’t being sullen, Chris knew. Only cautious. They were making an effort not to show too much or too little face.
“They didn’t arrest the girls,” Raleigh said, in a studiedly normal tone of voice.
“They weren’t in the street,” Chris said. He had a clear memory of where the girls had been standing when the police had unrolled their orange webbing.
“At least not while we were with them,” Raleigh replied, staking his usual claim to know a little bit more and a little bit better. Chris didn’t mind that, either. Especially not today, when the members of their working group at last knew what they were capable of. What Elspeth and Leif were capable of, at least. And maybe the new guy, Matthew, though who knew because he never fully put his shoulder to the wheel. Chris himself didn’t have what they had, and that was yet another thing he didn’t mind. He had been given instead an opportunity to fall in love. You can only fall in love with people who have a greatness or beauty you don’t. You could say that what Chris himself had, instead of gifts like Leif’s or Elspeth’s, was the privilege of honesty. He saw how things were even when they didn’t take a form presentable enough to talk about out loud. He saw, for example, that he couldn’t help but love Elspeth and, in a different way, Leif.
And right now, he saw that what the other men in the cell were likely to resent about his comrade-in-arms Raleigh wasn’t Raleigh’s whiteness so much as his weakness. The way Raleigh nodded at one of their cellmates and then did a sort of air-drumming on one thigh. The weakness registered as a luxury that Raleigh’s whiteness had purchased for him. He came across as someone who had never really had to put on armor.
“That’s the phone,” Raleigh said, noticing a brown landline mounted on a post in the center of the cell. “We should be careful because it’ll be bugged. There was an article about it online a couple months ago. Do you want to call?”
“Go ahead.”
“I should call Elspeth.”
Raleigh said it as if he needed to call his mother. Chris watched him walk away. There wasn’t going to be any need for Chris to point anything out. All he was going to have to do was wait for Elspeth to see for herself.
He arched his back and stretched his arms. It wasn’t exactly a comfortable bench. He felt aware of the walls, the confinement. But he could pace if he had to, he told himself.
“Y’all aren’t really in-here in here, are you,” said a young black man in a mustard hoodie, not far away on the bench.
“What do you mean,” Chris said.
“Or maybe you are. I wasn’t trying to disrespect you.”
“We were at an Occupy protest.”
“I thought you might be in here for a school project, like.” He looked away, as if to signal that he didn’t need for Chris to respond.
“It was a protest against evictions,” Chris said. “Against banks. We had a camp downtown, until a few weeks ago. It was political, but not like Republican or Democrat political.”
“Hey,” the man said, leaning slightly toward Chris and lowering his voice. “In here you maybe shouldn’t tell nobody what you in for.” Louder: “Know what I’m saying?”
“We were standing in the street.”
“In here you might not know who you talking to.”
Chris nodded. “My friend says the phone there is bugged.”
“Not if you talking to your lawyer.”
“They stop listening then?”
The man laughed and nodded. “Yeah, they stop listening then.”
The man’s name was Calvin. He lived on this side of the river, he said, but far uptown. His girlfriend was still in school and wanted to be a nurse, and if he was arraigned quickly, he might not have to tell her what had happened to him this morning.
“So the National Lawyers Guild is going to have someone upstairs for us,” said Raleigh, returning.
“It’s not going to be serious,” Chris replied.
“Do you want to know or not?”
“Yeah, tell me.”
Raleigh proceeded to tell him in detail exactly how it was going to turn out not to be serious.
An hour and a half later, a guard called Chris’s name but not Raleigh’s.
Raleigh came with Chris to the gate anyway. “You’re not arraigning us at the same time?” Raleigh said. “We were arrested together.”
“Get back,” the guard ordered Raleigh. “Get back behind the line on the floor there. That’s right.” The guard opened the gate, cuffed Chris, snatched him out, and banged the gate shut. Chris didn’t say anything, because he was still chewing the last mouthful of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which he had had to bolt. He nodded good-bye to Raleigh and to Calvin. After he swallowed, he became aware that he wished he was able to wipe the corners of his mouth.
The guard didn’t make any small talk with Chris. The police lorded it over you when they had you, as if they thought it would make you forget about how free you were when they didn’t.
The guard directed Chris into the elevator that had originally brought him and Raleigh down. Inside it, in the silence, Chris thought of the first trip he had taken to New Orleans after Katrina, while it had still been raining. Storming, really. He and a friend of his, an anarchist from Galveston, had gotten the idea that they were going to help. They had bought first aid kits, bottled water, and protein bars, and they had driven a loop around the city in order to approach it from the east, first by car, and then in a johnboat that they had liberated from its tie-up. There hadn’t been any police in the area at the time. There hadn’t been any authority at all. He and his friend had got close enough to see people standing on roofs but had turned back when a few rednecks in retreat had warned that they would have to be willing to shoot with live ammunition if they went any further. They hadn’t quite believed the rednecks but hadn’t had the courage to disbelieve them. Chris hadn’t even owned a gun, at that point.
The water had been clear, at the place where they had made their decision. Dark green but clear. It should have been muddy from all the rain. The people standing on the roofs had kept waving, in the silence of distance, as Chris and his friend had wheeled their boat around.
“Get out,” the guard said as the elevator door opened.
He made Chris walk ahead of him. On this floor the walls were white, with a soft, intermittent gray stripe at waist level where the bumpers of cleaning trolleys, pushed by inmates, had rubbed against them. Mounted on the wall, halfway down the corridor, was a board the size of a door—maybe it had actually been a door at some point—with laminated photos of the Fallen, in three rows. ALL GAVE SOME, read a motto along the bottom. SOME GAVE ALL. In addition to police, guards, and inmates on cleaning duty, a few men in suits were in the corridor, probably lawyers. Chris wasn’t able to stop himself from feeling ashamed of being seen by them with his hands cuffed behind his back. He wished he could believe that he was feeling the shame of the men in suits rather than his own—their shame at their complicity, maybe—but he knew that he didn’t have Elspeth’s or Leif’s susceptibility.
The guard opened a door. “Go on.” Inside was a white room with chairs and a table. Set into the far wall was a window with mirrored glass. The guard uncuffed Chris and ordered him to sit. A viewer at the window would have a good vantage on him.
“I don’t have a lawyer yet,” said Chris.
“You don’t need a lawyer for this.” The guard left and shut the door.
Chris stood up, the way he did when left in an examining room to wait for a doctor. At least he was in his clothes and not in a backless surgical bib. The table and chairs were made out of a slightly wobbly plastic, like lawn furniture, so that they couldn’t be made dangerous. Chris had visited a friend in a locked ward once, and in the bathroom, water had come out of a blunt hole in the ceramic of the sink rather than out of a faucet.
He leaned his head close to the mirrored glass and shaded his eyes against it, to break its reflectivity. Under a smoky green haze, two cops were watching him from closer than he had expected.
There was nothing on the walls of the interrogation room other than a few scuffs and a patch of puckering where moisture appeared to have gotten trapped under the paint. Chris sat down in the wrong chair.
His back was therefore to the door when it opened. “All right, boss?” asked the guard. He was talking to the security official frightened by Leif a few hours ago.
“No, don’t get up,” the security official said to Chris. “All right,” he told the guard, who locked the two of them in the interrogation room alone.
Against the blankness of the room, it was hard to appraise the man’s size. He was wearing a dark blue suit, probably the same one he had been wearing when Leif had spooked him, and it hid him, the way suits do. He wasn’t losing his hair yet. Chris thought he remembered noticing that the man had been a little shorter than Leif.
The man patted the pockets of his suit coat until he confirmed by touch the presence of something he was looking for. “This isn’t official,” the man said. He was wearing a wedding ring. “I thought we might be able to help each other.”
Chris waited a moment, and then, because he didn’t want to be impolite before he had to be, he nodded.
“Was your friend looking for me?” the man asked. “The one who came after me.”
“He didn’t ‘come after’ you.”
“I think we mean the same guy,” the man said. “Your boyfriend.”
Chris shook his head. “We’re in a working group together.”
“What’s that.” The man delivered his questions as orders rather than requests.
“It’s an Occupy thing. Do I have to talk to you?”
“I asked to see you because I saw you’d helped out before.” He studied Chris’s eyes; Chris didn’t look away. “There are all these sharing things they’ve put up now, since 9/11. For the different agencies. So I can see this stuff now, whenever I’m working with the city.” He took out of one of his suit coat pockets a pair of reading glasses and out of his breast pocket a sheet of paper folded vertically. He put the glasses on his nose and made a show of looking at the paper. “There was New Orleans, and it looks like, after that, there was Toronto.” He said the word “Toronto” as if it were exotic.
A couple of weeks after the hurricane, Chris had returned to New Orleans alone and had joined a group of anarchists and socialists repairing houses and organizing food and medical care. The group had had to make its own decisions, and everyone by then had had guns. When the police returned, Chris, because he was not only white but from Texas, had been the one sent to warn the police that it would go better if they kept their distance for a little while longer. He had gotten to know a guy on the force, who had asked Chris to keep him up-to-date. The guy had said he thought it would help keep things calm, and it had, more or less.
Chris had kept the extent of the contact to himself.
“I could have asked your friends instead.”
“Could have asked them what?”
“I could have asked them first about your talking with the department in New Orleans, but sometimes people get the wrong idea.”
It wasn’t smoothly done. Chris saw that the man didn’t think it needed to be.
“And then what were you doing in Toronto,” the man went on.
“Fighting neoliberalism,” Chris answered.
The man smiled. “You talked to some interesting people.”
Chris had gone for the G20 protests. One night, at a communal dinner, the host, as soon as he heard that Chris had volunteered in New Orleans, had wanted to talk to him about a sort of counter-NAFTA he was setting up. His group had come up with a new strategy with explosives, the host had said, not very quietly. Chris hadn’t interrupted; he hadn’t wanted to be rude. Did he talk to you about it, too? another guest had asked Chris, afterward, in the street. The man asking had offered Chris a cigarette, and in his question there had been the same note of complicity in hardheadedness that the cop in New Orleans had always used. That was how Chris had been able to tell. A little stupidly he had told the man, as he accepted his cigarette, that he saw through his cover. Bright kid, the man had replied. It had immediately been tacit between them that Chris wasn’t going to give the man away. He had asked for Chris’s name, and Chris, even more stupidly, had told him. He was only there to protest, he had said. He wasn’t going to take part in the black bloc action. Which one is that? the man had asked. Chris realized he had said too much. When he didn’t say any more, the man had advised him to keep in mind that a Canadian like their dinner host was a foreigner, and to collaborate with even a Canadian in an attack on an American target would count as treason as well as whatever specific crime was being committed.
He had left Chris to finish the cigarette alone.
Chris hadn’t been sure that the man had been American because his accent had been hard to place, but evidently he had been. And evidently they always wrote it down whenever they talked to you.
“My name is Joe,” the interrogator said. “Tell me what your working group is about.”
“We just talk to people.”
“Like me?” the interrogator asked. “Like the way your friend talked to me?”
The interrogator had been standing beside and slightly behind two cops, four or five hours before, and maybe it had been on account of his suit, a little nicer than a bureaucrat in law enforcement usually wears, that Leif had singled him out. Had called on him without his name, the way Leif was able to. Chris had been standing in the road with Raleigh, waiting to be arrested for obstruction of the traffic that would, theoretically, have existed where they were standing if the police and protesters hadn’t. Matthew and Leif had been on the sidewalk with the women because Matthew had said that he didn’t want to be arrested. Leif had probably felt restless standing there on the sidelines and had started to banter with the man. Almost to flirt with him. I bet your password has something to do with boots, doesn’t it. You’re showing it to me by thinking of it right now, you know. Oh my god, you’re showing them to me. Boots twenty-four seven. Boots twenty-four seven Charlotte, or something like that. Is that it? Am I right? At the guess, there had been a flare of anger in the man’s eyes. Heterosexual realness for the win! Leif had crowed.
“There was more to it than talking,” the interrogator said now.
“Do you think he read your mind?” Chris asked.
The man watched Chris for a moment, as if weighing whether Chris was trying to insult him. “What kind of research on me had your friend done?”
“I don’t think he even knew your name.”
“It’s Joe.”
“Yeah, you said.”
“Can you tell me my last name?”
Chris wished he could, to fuck with him. “I’m not as good at it.”
“You think he read my mind,” the interrogator inferred. “You believe he can do that sort of thing.” The man was making an effort not to sound incredulous.
He waited for Chris to speak, as if he was hoping that Chris would volunteer an explanation of his faith in the phenomenon if not an explanation of the phenomenon itself. To keep himself from talking, Chris studied the man. He had the average, undistinguished features of a local news weatherman, of someone you would pass in the drugstore without noticing. Of someone who had never expected to live in a world that needed much explanation and was a little resentful about the discovery that he did.
“He’s a gay guy? Your leader?”
“You should ask him.”
“Have you slept with him?”
Chris let the question go.
The man tried another angle. “Do you know much about the law? You didn’t go to college.”
“I went for a year.”
“Your friends went all the way through, didn’t they. But I wonder how much more they know. It’s a funny part of the law. If I know your mother’s maiden name, I usually don’t even need your password, these days. If I know the name of your first pet or your kindergarten teacher.” His tone became reflective. “And is it wrong to know that kind of thing about someone? I think it’s something we’re still figuring out, as a society. Where to draw the line.”
“What are you figuring out? Why we’re not supposed to know each other’s secrets but you’re allowed to?”
“There are controls on us,” the man said. He had gone touchy, suddenly. “There are ethics.” He had to live up to the authority he had over someone like Chris, and he felt that he did live up to it. “We’re only trying to protect you, you know that, don’t you,” the man said. “Or do you not give a shit.”
Chris gave a shit. That was his whole problem. For example, he was acutely aware right now, even though it wasn’t in his interest to be, that the man was asking Chris to give him the benefit of the doubt. And a part of Chris, also against his interest, wanted to give it to him.
“I can’t help you, man,” Chris said.
“What does he want?”
The man still hadn’t asked for Leif’s name; probably he already knew it. “Peace and love,” Chris answered. “What does anyone want.”
The man pulled back from the table, looked at the ceiling, and made a sort of froglike face, as if he were judging Chris. He stood up, opened his wallet, hesitated, and then took out a business card. “If you want to get in touch . . .”
Chris stood, too. Maybe he was going to be able to go home now. He let the man hold the card out until the gesture became awkward. “No thanks,” Chris said. “If we want to find you, we’ll be able to.”
It was a line that the man could have used on him. The man grimaced. “Are you sure your friends are looking out for you, ‘Hyacinth’?” He said the flower name distinctly. He laid the card on the table before he left.
It wasn’t until after Chris had pocketed the card that it occurred to him that the cops behind the mirrored window had watched him do so.
“Did you read him?” Raleigh asked, when they brought Chris back to the holding cell.
“I can’t read people, Raleigh,” he answered.
During Chris’s absence, they had been joined by many more Occupiers, so many that it was easy to dodge Raleigh’s curiosity.
In the afternoon, for a few minutes, while Raleigh was on the phone, Chris was able to talk to Calvin. “How do you know,” Chris asked, “when somebody you’re with is talking?”
“You got a bad feeling?”
“This guy upstairs called me a name I never heard before. It was super gay.”
“Don’t let them get to you, man.”
“No, I mean, he made it sound like a name other people are calling me. That people I’m with are calling me behind my back.” Chris looked at his hands. “We haven’t done anything,” he added, in frustration.
“They got all kinds of laws.”
Chris doubted that they had laws for what he and his friends had been doing.
That night, as he lay under the unextinguished fluorescents, not far from Raleigh on the cement floor, which was cold, he mulled over the two pieces of evidence: The business card of Joseph P. Bresser, operational security consultant. The nickname Hyacinth. He would have told Raleigh about the business card if it hadn’t been for the nickname. The nickname probably had something to do with his looks.
Matthew and Julia were the new additions to the group, the ones the rest knew the least about. They were a little older, and with age, one accumulated compromises, which made one vulnerable—fissures where the establishment’s grappling hooks could catch.
Sometimes Chris wondered if it was really true that he couldn’t read people. Maybe it was just that he thought it would be rude to, that it would be unfair to try to go behind another person’s mask. He was willing to imagine undressing a woman. Was that different? He had undressed Julia in his mind, once he had become aware that she wanted him. He hadn’t taken advantage because he hadn’t been sure it would be possible in real life to fuck her hard enough to make himself actually present to her.
He was getting off track, but it seemed natural to consider the sexual side of people when trying to assess their capacity for betrayal.
Matthew seemed to want Chris, too. That was his m.o.; you were supposed to wonder. That was okay, fuck him. Matthew and Julia both had that go-for-broke attitude toward sex that people reach just as they’re about to age out of their years of being attractive. Almost all the encouragement that they were likely to receive in the course of their lives for being selfish about sex had come to them recently.
At the moment they were still so confident that Bresser would probably only have been able to turn them if he had found something to frighten them with. Something to knock them off their footings.
Chris turned his head to look at Raleigh, whose footing had never been very stable. Raleigh had taken off his glasses, folding them into his shirt pocket, and under the livid glare of the cell’s lighting, he seemed to be holding his eyes shut with an effort of will. Beneath his billy-goat-ish beard, his mouth was at work—chewing, or sucking—as he dreamed.
When Raleigh had first showed up in New Orleans on the socialists’ doorstep, he had annoyed everyone, including Chris. He had introduced himself as a coder from Tulsa, as if people trying to repair a broken-down society needed a coder, and they had been able to tell from the way he had said it that he thought that as a coder he had been too good for Tulsa, and would probably have considered himself too good for New Orleans, too, if it hadn’t become in its misery a worthy cause. He had worked hard, though, it turned out. That was the upside of Raleigh’s constant need to prove himself. Chris had eventually even grown fond of Raleigh’s geeky arrogance, once he got to know him. He had gradually become willing to overlook the air that all Raleigh’s efforts had of being done for the sake of a résumé that he was drafting in his mind, an inventory of his virtues that would someday cause him to be well regarded by a higher class of people—the ones that the rest of the people in the New Orleans group had been in the habit of referring to, not really joking, as the enemy.
Raleigh had been too angular for the South. His personality made more sense at Occupy, with its bickering and rulemaking. In New Orleans, they had had to do a lot of what they needed to do without being seen to have planned for it and in some cases without spelling out the nature of what they were doing. Such as continuing to talk to a guy in the force without letting anyone else know you were still talking to him. The people in the movement had had to become figures, Chris had tried to explain once to Raleigh, but Raleigh had objected to the word. He had seemed to think that it would be enough for them to be themselves.
He had always been sort of an idiot.
The city kept them overnight. What Chris wanted to do after they got out was go home, take a shower, and lie in bed.
After a shower, he did lie in bed, alone. It was the middle of the afternoon. He didn’t jack off. He studied his white ceiling and the white walls he hadn’t decorated. He listened to semis trundling past on the four-lane avenue that was half a block away. From time to time, in the space above him in the room, phrases that he had heard spoken in the past twenty-four hours repeated themselves almost aloud. It was pleasant not to have to account for himself to Raleigh or a policeman or Calvin or anyone else.
He dozed. When he woke up, in the afternoon, it came to him that he had been strong, as a person, and that it would be reasonable for him to feel a certain amount of pride. He had passed through an ordeal. He had stood up, and he had been sent to jail for it, and he hadn’t said anything.
The day began to die, and he got dressed and took the subway north to Elspeth’s, where the working group was meeting.
A slightly odd thing happened when he arrived. Raleigh opened the door but remained on the spot, eyeing him and blocking his way. Chris’s first interpretation was that Raleigh must want to establish that he was the one giving Chris permission to enter Elspeth’s home—that he held a priority, on the site of Elspeth’s apartment, that he wasn’t willing to surrender. Chris looked politely away, to Elspeth’s coat, hanging beside them in the entryway; the blue fingers of her wool gloves limply signaled from the pocket where they were trapped.
Chris’s second thought, however, was that Raleigh had somehow learned of the invitation that Bresser had extended. A little steam cloud of indignation rose through him—Raleigh had no right to suspect him—and for a few moments, he couldn’t speak.
“Hey,” Raleigh at last said, saluting Chris with a backward nod of the head that acknowledged that he had had to be the first to speak and that he noticed such signs of relative rank. There was a nervous appeal in his eyes, and Chris came up with a third understanding of what Raleigh wanted: he wanted Chris to testify to the backbone that Raleigh had shown in jail.
“Hey,” Chris replied. He put an arm over Raleigh’s shoulders and hugged him from the side, and Raleigh laughed, pleased, as Chris pushed past him.
The rest of the group were in the parlor, too excited to take seats. Chris reminded himself: There had been a new recognition of Leif’s power. And someone here had betrayed him.
He congratulated Leif.
“On what?” Leif asked. “You and Raleigh did the time.”
“You read that man’s password. That guy yesterday morning.”
“I startled him, maybe.”
“No, you read his password.” He gave Bresser’s business card to Leif. “He was so freaked out that he interrogated me about you at Central Booking.”
Raleigh scurried around to look over Leif’s shoulder. “What’s this?”
“Let me see,” said Julia. The others, too, crowded in.
The hand of Leif’s that was holding the business card drooped, but no one dared to take the card from him. Instead, they all crouched in order to be able to keep looking at it.
“You did it,” Chris told Leif. He and Leif were the only two in the room standing tall. He wanted Leif to realize what he had done. He wasn’t making any claim on it for himself. He never wanted to, when he was with Leif, which, if you thought about it, was a remarkable feeling to have about someone.
Leif turned the card over; the back was blank. “You must hate this,” he said to Matthew, who was sitting beside him. “You were hoping it would go away.”
Matthew shrugged.
“Who is he?” Raleigh asked. “Why did he want to talk to you?”
“Who’s Hyacinth?” Chris replied. He watched Raleigh’s eyes.
“Hyacinth?”
“Who is he,” Chris insisted.
Raleigh hesitated.
“Oh, Christopher,” broke in Julia, in a deliberately plummy voice.
He turned on her. “Did you talk about me?”
The silence in the room was heavy. “Are you snitch-jacketing her?” Raleigh asked, his voice cracking.
The members of the working group were waiting for Chris’s answer, but he felt as though he were holding not a grenade but only an antique colored-glass Christmas tree globe, too tightly.
“I did call you that a few times,” Julia admitted, “but I never ‘talked’ to anyone.” She adjusted her scarf, the way a bird rouses and then settles its feathers. “I think I called you Hyacinth out of fondness, really.”
“It’s from a Henry James novel,” Raleigh explained, a little sullenly.
“You make it sound like you’ve read it,” Julia said, amused.
Fuck them, Chris thought. As the wind rattled one of the parlor’s window sashes, his mind left and went again to his memory of New Orleans. In the silence between when he and his friend had cut their engine and when they had restarted it, rain had sprinkled the flat green surface around them, harmlessly.
Raleigh started talking, about how everyone makes mistakes sometimes, and sometimes they hurt each other’s feeling, but if everyone in the working group continued to stand together, as a working group, no one would be able to do anything to them, and no one would be able to stop them, because principles are more powerful and more important than individuals, and they could beat this guy, they could take him down, and as Chris listened, and realized that he didn’t believe, and sensed that no one else really believed, either, he decided that he would be perfectly happy to let Raleigh shove himself into the danger that Raleigh was pretending not to see.
“I think Bresser had us under surveillance,” Raleigh suggested. “I think that’s how he knew about this nickname.”
“You think he was watching us before Leif even saw him,” Elspeth said.
“And we should doxx him,” Raleigh proposed.
“Wouldn’t that be dangerous?” Matthew asked. “He works for the government.”
“No, he’s a contractor,” Raleigh said. “This isn’t dot-gov or dot-mil,” he said, tapping the email address on the business card.
“He’ll have a new password by now,” said Elspeth.
“Then Leif can read that one, too.”
“I don’t know if he can,” said Leif.
“I bet you can.”
Leif noticed Chris’s silence. “You’re doing your chthonic straight-boy thing.”
“My what?”
“That’s very close to a description of the character of Hyacinth, actually,” Julia said.
“Let Raleigh doxx him if he wants to,” Chris said. “Diversity of tactics.”
“You don’t want to?” Raleigh challenged him.
“Sure I want to,” Chris lied. If Raleigh needed the spur of competition, Chris was willing to give it to him. He was willing to sit right next to him. He was willing to hold his fucking hand.
“You’re going to break into this man’s email?” asked Elspeth.
“Let’s vote on it,” Raleigh suggested.
“You don’t vote on right or wrong,” Elspeth said.
“Why not? This is America.”
Instead of voting, however, they argued, for hours. During the argument, Chris wondered if it was right for him to be holding back some of his thoughts, but he didn’t think he could accuse himself of bad faith, exactly. A doxxing was the sort of thing that deserved to happen to someone like Bresser, and it wasn’t Chris who had planted the idea in Raleigh’s mind. The mere sight of Bresser’s card had seemed to place it there, and it was Julia who had seconded Raleigh’s motion. She was rich; to her, it probably always felt natural to reach into what belonged to other people and take.
He didn’t think they were likely to get caught. Every week he got spam from a friend whose email account had been hacked, and no one ever talked about catching the hackers or even trying to. If he thought, even secretly, that they weren’t going to get away with it, he wouldn’t be taking part himself. So that wasn’t what he was holding back.
Bresser had said get in touch. Well, they were going to get in touch all right.
Still, he might have ended up saying something if the individual members of the working group hadn’t, without his lifting a finger, taken the sides on the question that they did—Raleigh and Julia choosing to go after Bresser, Leif and Elspeth choosing not to. The ones Chris might have wished to protect were protecting themselves. Elspeth, in fact, became vehement. As a matter of ethics, she asserted, anarchists shouldn’t do anything that they didn’t want done to themselves, not even if it already had been done to them—and no one knew for sure, in this case, that it had been. It might just have been a coincidence, she argued, that Bresser had used the same nickname for Chris that Julia had. It was also possible that someone in the group had said the nickname aloud at Occupy one day and that it had been overheard by a plainclothes detective who had reported it to Bresser. Even if the nickname was upsetting (here Elspeth had glanced at Chris), the distress shouldn’t become a pretext for retaliation. They should be modeling a community of trust.
He didn’t let her know that he wanted to be able to agree with her; that much did go on his conscience. But it seemed to him that the only way he knew to get by in the world anymore was by drifting in it, like a spider hanging in the air from a silk that it has spun out of itself.
“He has to be monitoring us,” Raleigh claimed, of Bresser.
“Then he’s monitoring this,” Elspeth pointed out, gesturing to the room that contained them and their conversation.
“No, I think he’s monitoring our email, if anything,” Raleigh said.
“So is he or isn’t he, Raleigh.”
“My guess is he’s monitoring our email. I did call Chris ‘Hyacinth’ once in an email.”
Chris didn’t say anything. It was working so well to let them do the arguing, and he didn’t want to seem to have been waiting for a confession from Raleigh. He didn’t think that he had been waiting for one.
When Chris came back the next afternoon, when he knew Raleigh would be away at his IT job, it was for a second chance at being seen through.
It should have been easy for Elspeth to see through him. He had worked all morning at a move, from a basement to a second-floor apartment, sweating out the toxins and the obscurities in his system, drinking bottle after plastic bottle of spring water. At home afterward, he had showered and combed his hair, which was just beginning to be long enough to curl behind his ears. After so much exertion, he knew that he was fresh and that his mind was clear. It was the knotted-up part of Elspeth that was attached to Raleigh. The clear part, responding to Chris’s clarity, should be able to see him.
As he rang her buzzer, he remembered that Raleigh and Julia had left the meeting together the night before, claiming they wanted to talk tactics, which they had said Elspeth wouldn’t want to hear.
Elspeth flushed when she recognized Chris. He felt a little flutter of hope, even though he knew that her flush was probably because she still felt angry with him, or at best was embarrassed about having been so angry with him the night before. He wanted to imagine, instead, that she had hoped to see him and that her face was flushed because her wish had come true.
“I can’t talk long,” she warned. “I have a piece that I have to finish checking by tonight.” Around her laptop on the dining room table, pages were fanned out like the spokes of a wheel. “Do you want some tea? I have chamomile.”
“It doesn’t make you go to sleep?”
“Not me. I’m too anxious.”
“Sure, if you’re making it.”
“I’m always making it.” She vanished into the kitchen.
There was a little elephant, knitted out of pink yarn, on the dining room table next to her work. With a finely sharpened pencil, in a tidy italic script, she had written notes in the margins of the article that she was fact-checking. Her letter shapes were quick and peppery.
Once she put the kettle on, she leaned against a jamb of the kitchen doorway, her slender arms folded. “I can’t play cards today,” she told him.
“I didn’t think you’d be able to.”
The furthest she would have been able to see, in any attempt that she might have been making to see into his motives, was to a detection that it was against his own better judgment that he had taken Raleigh’s side the night before. Somewhat against his own nature, even. His choice might irritate her, but she wouldn’t be able to see why he had made it.
“Are you mad at me?” he asked.
“It wouldn’t matter if I were.”
She could probably tell that he was hiding, but he had to hide at least a little if he was going to have any chance with her.
She turned away, to pour the boiling water. When she returned to the dining room, she was carrying two mugs. She set one down on the table in front of him. “It’s hot,” she told him. “The mug itself.” Her fingers were so slender. How could she bear it if he couldn’t? She took the seat where she had been working, and he sat down in a chair facing her on the same side of the table. She held her mug in two hands and tossed her hair out of her eyes.
Do you want me to ask them not to, he asked her, mentally, as she watched him. “Do you want me to ask them not to?” he repeated, aloud.
“Who—Raleigh? What makes you think he’d listen?” she said. She looked away.
He poked at the sachet in his mug with an index finger, and the hot water stung a little. He wiped the finger on his pants.
“Leif is afraid,” she told him.
“Of what?”
“Because of the Hyacinth thing, he thinks maybe the government has caretakers on its side, too. People like us.”
Chris frowned.
“It’s possible,” she said.
“You don’t think Bresser’s one,” said Chris.
“I didn’t get a good read on him.”
“Well, he’s not one,” he said. “He’s not at all like you and Leif.”
“We don’t know that every caretaker is going to be like us.”
“Yes we do,” he insisted. He hadn’t wanted to hand Bresser the keys to his soul. Wanting to was how he recognized a caretaker.
They fell silent, and in the silence, after a while, his desire for her became so evident that it grew difficult for either of them to think of a natural-sounding way to talk about anything else. He was a beggar. He was begging for her love. She was able to see him, he knew. The rawness and the bloodiness of his heart were in front of her. The sky, seen through the warped old glass of the windows, was featureless.
“Could you do it?” he asked.
She stopped looking at him. “Raleigh thinks of me as a weapon, too, now.”
He repented sharply. “I’ll tell them not to do it,” he volunteered.
“No, I don’t want to owe anyone anything right now. Not even you.”
It wasn’t really him that she was angry at. That is, if she could see through him, it wasn’t.
“I’m not afraid of being caught,” Elspeth said.
“I know.”
“In case you thought that was why. I thought the whole point was that we understood that we had been damaged by knowing other people’s secrets. The whole point was that we had been hurt because we knew other people’s secrets without having asked to know them and without wanting to know them.”
He sat still. It would have been presumptuous to try to take her in his arms.
“And now Raleigh and Julia say they want to go looking for secrets,” she continued.
There’s a sweet pain in sitting next to someone who is tacitly forbidding you to speak. It occurred to Chris that under a strong impulse he was at last experiencing something like the intuition that was constant for Elspeth and Leif. This must be close to what the burden felt like that was always pressing on them.
Before he found the courage to speak, however, the silence was interrupted by the scrape of Raleigh’s keys in the door.
“Hello?” they heard Raleigh say.
“We’re in here,” said Elspeth patiently.
“Oh, hi, Chris,” Raleigh said as he came around the corner, without disguising his disappointment. Raleigh had passed beyond the wish for Chris’s support that he had been feeling the day before. He had a new ally now.
“Perfect timing,” Julia greeted Chris.
They had converged outside the not-quite-converted warehouse where Raleigh lived, which was a couple of subway stops beyond the neighborhood where Raleigh would probably have preferred to live if he could have afforded to. Across the street, there was a chicken processor, as windowless as a telephone company building, and at the end of the block there was a cement yard. Under the quivering sodium of the streetlamps, the asphalt was swirled with gray where workers had hosed off the troughs and undercarriages of the cement trucks, diluting the powder and dispersing it until the particles were no longer in any danger of consolidation.
When the buzzer sounded, Chris opened the door and held it for Julia. Was she pretending for his benefit? Had she left Raleigh’s apartment a few minutes earlier so that Chris could see her arriving? She smiled at him like a salesperson. If she was concerned about Chris’s impression of her, it didn’t push her as far as conversation with him.
He followed her down a blind, irregular white corridor. He remembered it from a party that Raleigh had invited him to, a week after they had run into each other at Occupy. When they had first seen each other, they had embraced. It had been four years, after all. It had been hard not to love everybody you met at Occupy in the early days, and if it was an old friend . . .
The corridor zigzagged between apartments that had been partitioned out of what had once been a factory floor. At each threshold, a family of boots and shoes waited.
Chris was pretending at least as much as Julia was. He was pretending that he wanted to help carry out something he in fact didn’t think they would be able to pull off. He was here to witness the vindication of an idea that Leif had presented in one of his blog posts, namely, that the capacity that interested them either was, or was inextricable from, a supersensitive variety of tact, and couldn’t be used to open any door that it wouldn’t be appropriate to open. Chris reasoned that it was only because Raleigh and Julia lacked the capacity that they were willing to try to open the door in this case. A curiosity like theirs was bound to be harmless. Almost by definition.
If there was any danger tonight, it was probably in Chris himself. Reading people had something to do with playing oneself false in order to accommodate the wishes of others, and he seemed to be doing more and more of that lately.
Behind the apartment door, a song was blaring. When Julia’s knock went unregarded, Chris stepped in front of her and pounded with the butt of his fist. “It’s open,” they heard Raleigh yell. The music was extinguished. Julia opened the door on Raleigh walking toward them. “Hey,” Raleigh said. He seemed wary.
“Hello,” Julia said, mostly to the high, empty space of the apartment, which she made a show of noticing, as she walked past Raleigh.
Raleigh lived with two roommates, posers like him. Since the apartment had few interior walls, the men used their possessions to establish individual zones for themselves. A metal rack that held LPs staked a claim in one corner; a garment rack on wheels marked turf in another. Worn magazines were stacked high on a desk, and when Chris got close, he saw that they were gay porn, decades old. The openness of their placement seemed to be part of the room’s sparring.
“Is this Debbie Harry?” Julia asked, about one of an array of what looked like Polaroids taped to the wall outside the bathroom.
“Those are Warhols, actually,” said Raleigh. “Philip’s gallery had a set of them in, and he stayed late one night and made color xeroxes.”
“Huh.”
“He gets away with murder.”
“Is it murder to make color xeroxes?” Julia wondered. “By the way, this is Debbie Harry.”
“Drinks?” Raleigh asked. He listed brands of liquor.
Chris didn’t know what any of them tasted like and asked for a beer.
“Take one of Jeremy’s,” Raleigh said. “He owes me.”
Beer, condiments, and a pizza box were all the fridge contained.
“Bachelorville,” Julia said. She took a beer, too.
The apartment was a profane place, Chris felt. Not like Elspeth’s. Everything in it seemed to be trying to make a statement. There was a machine that attached to an electric saw and vacuumed up sawdust while the saw was in operation. There was a plastic chair in the form of a smiling ladybug, probably hauled in off the street. The atmosphere in a room like this could never be subtle. The night of Raleigh’s party, several women and one man had come on to Chris. It had only been because of Occupy that someone like him had even been visible to them.
The gift could never be used here because the gift was like faith. If it hadn’t been given to you, the most you could feel was envy, and it would be a strange kind of envy, since it would be of something you couldn’t even honestly say you believed in. A kind of longing. But here the three of them were.
“So are we doing this?” asked Raleigh.
“Didn’t you use to not believe in it?” asked Julia. She had found a nonpornographic magazine and was leafing through it.
“I don’t think it’s what Leif thinks it is. I think it’s probably unconscious pattern recognition.” Raleigh perched on a stool at a high island table in the kitchen and flipped open a scuffed blue-and-gray laptop. Three heavy thesis clips held shut one of its edges. “Like maybe the cells of the brain that are supposed to solve the Fourier transforms in sound start to work on decryption for some reason.”
“You’re such a nerd,” Julia said.
The mild neg seemed to please him. “I’m just going to set up a proxy before we start so we’re not totally out in the open.”
Julia placed a stool so that she would be able to watch Raleigh’s screen over his right shoulder. “Who’s going to do the mind reading?” she asked. “I mean, with the three of us.”
“We’re not so bad at it,” Raleigh said.
“We are, actually,” she insisted.
Raleigh snorted in what might have been agreement.
Chris took up a position at the end of the island table, where he could see Raleigh’s and Julia’s faces but not the screen. He didn’t want to get any closer.
“Cybercrimes aren’t that riveting to watch, are they,” Julia observed, with a glance at Chris.
“We’re not the ones committing the real crimes,” said Raleigh.
When the doorbell sounded, however, they froze. “Shit,” said Raleigh. He hurriedly set about shutting down the machine. “Chris, could you see who it is? The middle button on the intercom beside the door here. Only the middle button. Don’t press anything else yet.”
When Chris pressed it, a small monitor flickered into life, revealing Leif, in pixelated chiaroscuro, captured by a fish-eye lens downstairs on the building’s stoop. Through the monitor, Chris watched as Leif, unaware that he was being watched, reached toward the fish-eye lens to ring the doorbell a second time.
Unprepared for the bell, the other two in the room with Chris were again shaken by it.
“It’s Leif,” Chris told them.
“Is he alone?”
“Yes.”
“Then let him in.”
“I already did.”
Raleigh shoved his laptop shut. “This stupid fucking thing.” He padded over to the apartment door, opened it, and left it ajar.
In the monitor, watched without his knowledge, Leif had seemed ordinary.
“Goodness,” said Julia, recovering. “Is there nothing to mix with that vodka you were telling us about?”
“Not really.”
She looked in the refrigerator herself. “Ketchup.”
“Knock knock,” Leif said, as he let himself in.
“What a lovely surprise,” said Julia, as if welcoming a visitor to a country house.
Leif’s eyes were glittering. “Have you started yet?” he asked.
It had been a mistake for Chris to expect that Leif would refuse to participate. It had been a mistake to count on that.
“So you changed your mind,” said Raleigh.
“I broke up with Matthew.”
“You did?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I wanted to be here if you were going to do it.” He was on edge.
“Awesome,” said Raleigh.
Maybe the gift was as amoral as the five conventional senses.
“You know what this is going to be?” Raleigh continued. “This is going to be justice.” He took up his place at his laptop again.
“‘Justice,’ really?” said Julia doubtfully, as she reclaimed the seat to his right. “We’re just taking a look. We’re not doing anything, really.”
“Did you read Bresser’s website?” asked Raleigh. “He runs a private company that does government surveillance.”
Chris wasn’t going to be able to protect Leif. But maybe Leif didn’t need protection. Maybe they would get away with what they were about to do. Chris scraped a thumbnail against the label of his beer.
“And then also, I thought, If Chris is going to be here . . . ,” said Leif.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re a rock,” said Leif. He put a hand on Chris’s shoulder as he crossed behind him, to stand on Raleigh’s left. Chris looked away and let Leif think he was looking away out of bashfulness.
Raleigh booted up his laptop again. “Let’s hope Bresser doesn’t have two-factor authentication.”
“So let’s do it,” said Chris impatiently.
“Hold on,” said Raleigh. “I have a little script I need to launch first.”
The group fell silent. Chris watched the faces of the three others as they studied the screen that they were going to try to enter. A wavering light dusted Raleigh’s fingers as he typed. Inside the machine, the hard drive clicked and burred. A fan switched on and began to whine.
“I didn’t even know you could do that with this kind of computer,” Julia commented.
“Do what?” asked Raleigh. “Unix?”
“I didn’t know you could just enter text like that. Is this ‘code’?”
“Oh, you mean command-line mode.”
“‘Command line,’” she echoed. “That sounds so executive.”
Leif pointed at the screen. “Here?”
“Not yet,” said Raleigh. “Let me do one more thing first.”
If they were thinking about Chris at all, they were probably imagining that he wasn’t looking because he was too stupid to understand what was happening on-screen.
“What?” Leif asked Chris, as if he had heard Chris’s thoughts.
Chris shrugged.
“I’m not always everything everyone thinks I am,” Leif said.
“I know,” Chris said.
“Here we are,” Raleigh announced.
“This is it?” asked Julia.
Leif closed his eyes. Was he going to be able to reach Bresser? Wouldn’t his mind be too full of the fight that he had just had with Matthew? Of the excitement of wrongdoing that was sparking between Raleigh and Julia, beside him? Of the disappointment that Chris felt? Unseeing, Leif raised his hands in front of him and held them there, without touching them together, as if something invisible was being woven between them.