Why is she pounding on our door? Elspeth wondered, from inside what must have been a dream, as the pounding woke her up. In the dream, as in real life, she had been in bed with Raleigh. But in real life Julia wouldn’t pound like that.
“Raleigh,” Elspeth said. He was still sleeping. A margin of rumpled bedclothes ran between the two of them. They had had an argument about of all things sex after Raleigh had come in the night before. “Raleigh, who do you think it is?” The clock told her that it was almost eight thirty. She didn’t like the idea of being caught by a stranger in her T-shirt and underwear so late on a weekday morning.
“Who?”
She put on yesterday’s jeans and a sweatshirt. “At the door.” She stepped into her slippers and tugged them on as she walked. “Just a minute,” she called out.
Her landlord had been supposed to send a repairman to look at the radiator in the dining room, which leaked, but she had asked for the repair two months ago, and she had given up expecting it. She had gotten used to the leak, which was a slow one. In the early morning and at bedtime, a few drops of water trickled out, and a ramekin of hers was under the grille now, to catch the drops. All she had to do was try to remember to empty the ramekin every few days.
Under the pounding, the edges of the door were shuddering. In her heart, she knew by now who it was, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it. Would they want her, too, or only Raleigh? “Just a minute,” she repeated. She threw the deadbolt.
“Morning,” said one of two policemen in uniform. A third man, not in uniform, stood behind them; under a winter coat he was wearing the gray smock of a technician. “We have a warrant for the arrest of a Mr. Raleigh Evans for fraudulent access to a protected computer, and we have a warrant for all the internet-enabled equipment in this apartment,” the first policeman continued. He stepped into the corridor and surveyed the shut doors of the three bedrooms.
“He’s still in bed,” said Elspeth.
The cop followed her eyes as they singled out the bedroom door that was hers. “Anyone else here this morning?” he asked, lowering his voice as if he were concerned about waking people up.
She shook her head.
“Is that a no, ma’am?”
“Yes, no. No one but us.”
“Do you know whether Mr. Evans is armed.”
“No, of course he isn’t.”
The cop quickly opened the two doors of her roommates’ two empty bedrooms and left them open. Then he nodded his head sideways toward Elspeth’s door. The second uniformed cop took the signal and stepped past Elspeth. He had a raised gun.
“We’re gonna need all your computers and all your phones,” said the first cop, placing himself between Elspeth and her bedroom as the second cop turned the knob with the hand not holding a gun.
As the cops walked through the socially defined barriers within the apartment, they seemed to topple them out of existence.
“Raleigh Evans? Rise and shine,” Elspeth heard the second cop say. “You’re under arrest, Mr. Evans, for fraudulent access to a protected computer.”
“Who are you?” Elspeth asked the first cop.
“Seventy-second Precinct, ma’am. Are you sure there’s no one else in the apartment with us? Anyone I don’t know about?”
“I don’t—,” she began. “Raleigh—,” she began again.
“I need you to stay where you are, ma’am, and I need you to remain calm. Take a breath. One breath at a time.”
The cop was about thirty. His badge read DILEO. His chin was shadowy with a beard even though he had shaved. From overeating, it was beginning to swim in his face. She wasn’t able to read him. His true self was hidden like the soft body of a beetle inside its chitin.
“I don’t consent to this search,” she said, remembering a piece of advice from an Occupy workshop.
“We don’t need you to, ma’am. We have all the warrants we need.”
She heard the second cop give Raleigh permission to put on pants and a shirt so long as the cop was able to check them first. They were going to take Raleigh away in a minute, she realized.
Her phone was in a pocket of her jeans, and she took it out. “I’m going to record you,” she announced, holding it up. Her hands were trembling.
“Can’t let you do that,” said Officer Dileo.
“I have the right to record you.”
“Not with that phone. The judge wants that phone.”
The man in the smock spoke up. “We’re responsible for preserving the integrity of the evidence, ma’am.”
She made a conscious effort not to jerk her hands away as Dileo took the phone out of them. “What about the integrity of people,” she said. What a weak retort, she admitted to herself, silently.
The technician slid it into a dark gray bag.
“I need it,” she said a moment later, as she thought ahead to the next few hours. “I don’t have a landline.”
“You can take that up with the phone company,” Dileo said.
“Are you laughing at me?”
“No, ma’am,” said Dileo, with a glance at the man in the smock.
“I’m going to need a lawyer, Elspeth,” came Raleigh’s voice.
“You dressed, then, sir?” said the second policeman. Elspeth heard the click of handcuffs closing on Raleigh.
“Is that necessary?” she asked. No one answered her.
“Okay, John,” Dileo said, nodding to the man in the smock, who now slipped into the bedroom, too.
“You all right here?” the second cop asked the first, as he pushed Raleigh to the bedroom door. Raleigh was wearing his glasses instead of his contacts, and the lenses were filthy. “I’ll take him down to the car.”
“Good-bye,” Raleigh told Elspeth, more as if he were quoting a valediction than saying one. His hands were cuffed behind his back, and the second cop pushed him forward by lifting the cuffs, so he wasn’t able to stop when he came abreast of her. It didn’t seem right to touch him.
“Hold on,” said the technician, emerging from the bedroom. He had found Raleigh’s laptop and was holding it open on one palm, waiter style. “Password?”
“Whippoorwill. Two p’s, two o’s.”
“Raleigh,” said Elspeth. Why was he giving them that.
“What? We didn’t do anything. Everything we downloaded was about us. If you had looked—”
“You don’t have a lawyer yet,” she reminded him.
“They’re not recording.”
“They’re remembering.”
“Are there different passwords on any of these partitions?” the technician asked, tracing on the mousepad with the index finger of his free hand.
Helpful again, Raleigh shook his head. His job, after all, consisted of answering questions that people asked about computers.
“All right, then,” the second cop said, and pushed Raleigh out the apartment’s front door.
Officer Dileo told Elspeth that her cell phone would no doubt be returned to her in a day or so, and it wasn’t until after he had left with not only Raleigh’s phone and hers but also their laptops, her router, and the laptops of both her roommates that it occurred to her that he had almost certainly been lying, in order to make her more amenable to surrendering them.
Without the internet and without her cell phone—without any way to communicate that did not begin with walking downstairs and out of the building—it felt very quiet in the apartment. Would it be heartless to take a shower? For the moment what she felt most urgently was that she was unsupervised.
She undressed and stepped into the apartment’s old tub and let the water run over her. In old stop-motion animations, water was sometimes represented by crinkled strips of aluminum foil, but when it ran over your skin maybe it looked more like cling wrap. Through the moving film of it she inspected herself for signs of age that hadn’t yet come, playing for consolation a familiar game against herself.
It was a relief to her that her latest fact-checking assignment was safely finished, she thought, as she dried herself in a yellow towel. She had to find a lawyer for Raleigh. She didn’t want to fail him, whether or not she and he were going to stay together. She also had to find a new phone for herself before her mother tried to call. What a nerd she was, to be relieved about having finished her fact-checking. But it was harmless that she was a nerd. It wasn’t because of that that she and Raleigh were going to break up, if in fact they were going to.
The wife in the couple who lived across the landing was a stay-at-home mom, and after getting dressed, Elspeth knocked on her door. She looked down at the gray house slippers that she had put on over her socks, wondering if they were respectful enough. The woman’s baby was a girl, she reminded herself. She didn’t think she’d ever been told its name.
The door of her own apartment was ajar, she noticed. She stepped back over and pulled the door to. In case the police came back.
She should probably lie about why she needed to borrow a phone. She heard a soft thunk, as an appliance of some kind inside her neighbor’s apartment reached the end of one of its cycles. Maybe no one was home.
“Who is it, please?” came a small, brittle voice, very near. The woman must have been studying Elspeth through the peephole.
“It’s your neighbor. I’m your neighbor,” Elspeth said. “I wonder if I could borrow your phone? I can’t find mine.” She was a terrible liar.
“I could call it for you,” the woman offered, not opening her door.
“I think it’s dead?” Elspeth said. “And the thing is, I need to call a friend.”
The woman opened the door. She had a triangular face and a small mouth. She was holding her baby and joggling it.
“I hope I didn’t wake her up,” Elspeth said.
The woman frowned a no. “Come in.” She padded down a dim corridor, a mirror image of the one in Elspeth’s apartment. The floor of the woman’s kitchen had brick-colored tiles where Elspeth’s had linoleum. The woman nodded at a phone on the wall beside her refrigerator and sat down at her dining table to watch.
Fortunately Elspeth knew Leif’s number by heart. The call went to voicemail, however. She tried Raleigh’s even though she knew there would be no answer; there was no answer. She tried Leif’s again, and again the call went to voicemail.
She was aware, as she listened to Leif’s voice inviting her to leave a message, that she was losing time.
“Not picking up?” the woman asked.
“Let me try one more time.” She didn’t know what else to do; she didn’t know anyone else’s number by heart. If she went to the jail by herself, without a phone, she might wait there all day in the wrong place without knowing any better.
With a look of alarm, the woman abruptly rose and stalked out of the room, leaving Elspeth momentarily alone. “There’s someone at your door,” she said when she returned.
“My door?” asked Elspeth. Was it the police again?
“It’s a man,” the woman said. “Are you in trouble?”
“No,” Elspeth said. “No,” she repeated, trying to sound more convincing.
The man knocking muffled knocks on Elspeth’s door, with a fist that was clutching a wool cap, was Matthew. He turned around and showed her the thick but even features of his face. She was proud of always being polite with Leif’s lovers. He didn’t seem surprised that she hadn’t been in her own apartment.
“This is my neighbor,” Elspeth said, gesturing to the woman on the threshold behind her. She still didn’t know the woman’s name. “I was just trying to call Leif,” Elspeth explained to Matthew.
“They took him.”
“But I didn’t think he—”
“He changed his mind.”
“Do you still need my phone?” Elspeth’s neighbor asked.
“Oh, thank you,” said Elspeth. “I guess not. Thank you so much.”
“Wait,” Matthew said, but the woman shut her door, and bolted it. “They took my phone, too.”
“She has a baby,” Elspeth said. “Let me put on some shoes.”
She should wear her sneakers, she decided, trying to think ahead. Matthew followed her into the apartment. She had never been alone with him before. It was like being followed by a pet bear; there was a reason they used that word.
On the sofa in the parlor, she laced the sneakers up. The tarot deck waited primly on the coffee table for a reading that might never happen again. They had probably arrested Chris too. It was too bad that he had been mixed up in this. It was especially wrong to keep someone like him in jail, but then he was the sort of person who usually got put in jail. A person who mostly knew himself through action.
That was her mistake, she thought, catching herself. Thinking that men wanted her to help them understand themselves.
“Did they arrest Julia?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Should we go to the courthouse? It isn’t the same one as before.”
Elspeth took out the slip of paper where Officer Dileo had written down the address. It was on this side of the river this time. “What did they do, do you know?”
“Downloaded something,” Matthew said.
“Raleigh said it was about us.”
“Well, it’s gone now.”
Every night, a script on Raleigh’s laptop backed up the contents of his hard drive to the cloud. He had set the script up on Elspeth’s computer, too, and they shared a password because Raleigh had bought the family rate. So the file probably wasn’t gone; there was almost certainly a copy in the cloud. Elspeth found that she didn’t want to tell Matthew about this backup, though. She felt possessive, the way mourners sometimes do. Anyway, the copy virtually didn’t exist so long as she was the only one who knew that it existed.
“I should call Raleigh’s parents at some point,” she said. “I guess from a pay phone? I could call Leif’s mother for you, too, if you want.”
“I can call her,” said Matthew. “If you have her number,” he added.
There was a knock on the front door by an unfamiliar hand. Elspeth thought, as she walked toward it, that she wasn’t going to be able to resist this kind of summons anymore. She had lost any chance of acting on her own volition for the foreseeable future. Every step she took was going to be fated.
It was only her mouse-faced neighbor again. The baby, still in the woman’s arms, glared at Elspeth sleeplessly. “It’s on TV,” the woman said. “There’s a story about your friend.”
“What’s on TV?”
“You’re in Occupy or something, they’re saying,” the woman explained.
Elspeth retreated to her dining room, neighbor and baby following, and turned on the little TV on the sideboard.
“It’s channel ten twenty-six,” the neighbor said.
“We don’t have cable.”
“Can you get the local news?”
The burble of daytime television suddenly coated the room. Elspeth picked up the remote and made the machine chunk from channel to channel, each one angry and total.
OCCUPY HACKS HOMELAND SECURITY, read a headline on the screen.
“Wait,” said Matthew.
“—tell us what that means exactly, Jim, a ‘protected computer,’” said a blond woman in a navy blazer. “It’s a little confusing.”
“It sure is, Vera,” said an expert standing in front of a scrim. “‘Protected computer’ is a legal term. It means, ‘protected by this law.’ By the CFAA. It doesn’t mean anyone has necessarily done anything to protect or guard the computer in question.”
“What’s going on?” asked Elspeth.
Matthew read the crawl aloud: “‘Four arrested for breaching computer of city police/DHS contractor.’”
“For those just joining us, a breaking story this morning. We don’t as yet know their names, but a short while ago our camera team was able to film one suspect as he arrived downtown for processing.”
Elspeth could see even through the television that Raleigh had decided that as a matter of principle he wasn’t going to hide his face because he shouldn’t need to. His exposed face was stiff with the effort of not looking at the prongs of the camera lenses aimed at him. There were calls for him to say a word or two, and though the calls were faint in the soundtrack, they were probably harsh in real life.
It was unfair of Elspeth to feel angry at Raleigh for relaying to her the pain that he was in.
“Where will we go if they come here?” she asked Matthew.
“They did come here,” said her neighbor.
“I mean the newspeople.”
The woman’s baby squirmed impatiently, and the woman expertly rotated it so that its flailing limbs could grab only air. “I don’t want them here,” she told Elspeth.
“No, of course not,” Elspeth agreed.
The woman said she needed to take her daughter back into her apartment. “Good luck,” the woman added at the last minute, as if deciding that her curiosity had in the end committed her to Elspeth’s side.
“Can I turn it off?” Elspeth asked Matthew.
“Please,” Matthew said.
Being instantly deprived of the television’s sounds and images, even though she hated them, felt to Elspeth like an amputation. She laid her palms over her eyes.
“Latte,” Greg, one of Leif’s fellow baristas, said to Elspeth, predictively, from his station behind the counter, when he saw Elspeth walk into the café with Matthew.
“No, I—,” Elspeth began. But she changed her mind: “Well, to go, maybe. Did Leif call?”
Greg shook his head. He was a short, heavy, quiet man, with a wispy beard. He was already balding even though he was Leif and Elspeth’s age, but his baldness, even from under the cyclist’s cap that he always wore in the café, made him look younger, not older. “You?” he asked Matthew, as he began, on Elspeth’s behalf, the rhythms of his practiced routine at the espresso maker.
“He wouldn’t have been calling from his own number,” Elspeth said.
Greg met Elspeth’s eyes again. “I’ll check,” he said. She knew he would never tell her that he thought she was pretty, so she always wanted to be considerate with him, but not in a way that might make it seem as if she were making an effort to be considerate. He took the café’s cordless phone from its charging stand and paged through its small screen. “There is a message,” he said. He listened to a few seconds, while staring at the middle distance. “It’s actually for you,” he told Elspeth, pressing a button in the phone to replay it.
“Greg, is it your shift today, or Juniper’s? This is Leif. . . .” The recorded Leif seemed to forget for a moment what he wanted to say. People were talking in the background. “Listen, if my friend Elspeth comes by, could you give her a message? Tell her to call Raleigh’s parents. Call her boyfriend’s parents. And also I guess tell her we’re fine? Raleigh is all figured out. Her boyfriend. We haven’t figured me out, but that’s okay. I’m just going to sit here for a while.” The recorded Leif laughed. “There’s not any rush.” Leif’s voice was too fast. He didn’t sound like himself. “So, to call Raleigh’s parents. That’s the message.” Then, as if to himself: “What a—.” And the message ended. To replay this message, press one. To save, press—
Elspeth handed the phone back to Greg. “It’s from Leif,” she told Matthew.
“Can I listen?” he asked.
Leif shouldn’t be in there. He had recently been claiming that he was learning how to understand what he sensed, how to place it even while he was in the middle of hearing it, but sometimes it was hard to tell whether a voice was coming from inside or outside, especially if you and other people were contained together in a bounded space. In an elevator, for example. Or in a subway car. When she and Leif were in college, the tram that had run through their urban campus had begun its journeys underground, and it had always been a relief to both of them, and they had used to comment on it, when the tram had emerged into the light and air, like spring parting from winter, and the attentions boxed up in the car with them had become free to scatter out the windows into the surrounding city.
“Can we call him back?” Matthew asked.
Greg found a number in the phone, and Elspeth tried it, but it connected only to an error message.
“You don’t want to call anyone else?” Greg offered. He pointed at Matthew: “You want anything, while I’m making the latte?”
Matthew checked his wallet and then asked for one of the hard-boiled eggs perched in a small steel tree beside the cash register.
“I’d have to call Information,” Elspeth said.
Greg shrugged.
“It was the police who took our phones,” she disclosed to him. Someone at a table looked up from his book.
Greg handed Matthew a saucer and then an egg. “Seventy-five cents.”
“That’s all?” asked Matthew.
“It’s an egg,” Greg said. “You could also use my phone,” he suggested to Elspeth. He dug it out of his pocket and wiped it off on the forearm of his shirt. It was a couple of models old, and the glass was crazed in one corner. A pudgy, grizzled black Lab was the wallpaper.
She shook her head. She couldn’t do it to him.
Matthew understood. “Fuck,” he said.
“Or am I being paranoid?” Elspeth asked him.
“I don’t know. I kind of don’t think so.”
“Here,” Greg said, taking the café’s cordless phone from its cradle and holding it out to her again. “What are they gonna do. I could have let anyone borrow it.”
She left Matthew to his egg and stepped out the front door.
The café was in a brick building from the late nineteenth century, at the intersection of a street and an avenue. At the entrance, a shallow triangular porch had been carved out of the ground floor, exposing a thin, cast-iron column that supported the corner of the building. Elspeth sat down on a bench whose paint was molting. A shadow ran away from the column in a sharp stripe.
It was a quarter past ten, and she was still in her own neighborhood. At least it would be an hour earlier in Oklahoma. The bars on the phone’s screen were steady. She asked Information for the number of Raleigh’s mother.
Raleigh’s father answered. Maybe Raleigh’s mother wasn’t listed? Twenty years ago, a newly divorced woman in Oklahoma might not have wanted to list her landline under her own name. It was like doing archaeology, having to make one’s way through the pre–cell phone system.
“How is he?” Raleigh’s father asked. He had a dry, curling voice.
“I’m not downtown yet.”
“Ohh,” piped the voice.
“We don’t have our phones. They took our phones. I just got the message to call you.”
“He’s on TV,” Raleigh’s father told her.
“I saw a little of it.”
“I imagine he wants to say why he did it, but his mother is talking about a lawyer.”
“Did she find one?”
“I imagine he wants to blow the whistle. That’s why he did this, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know.”
A woman’s voice in the background murmured, and Raleigh’s mother took the phone.
“I thought this was your number,” said Elspeth.
“How is my son?” It was like a line in a play.
“I haven’t talked to him yet. They took my phone.”
“Your phone?”
“We can’t talk to him unless he calls us, and they took our phones.”
“Even if you go? To where he is?”
“That’s how it was last time. Remember? There’s no way to see him.”
“Oh,” she said. “I was sure you saw him last time.”
“Not until they brought him to the courtroom.”
“So you did see him.”
“When they arraigned him.”
“Sweetheart, I think somebody needs to be there.”
“We got a message to call you? You found a lawyer?”
“We did. You know, Raleigh said he thought you were probably going to have to get a separate lawyer for yourself.”
The fingers of Elspeth’s that were holding the phone were aglow with cold. She switched to her other hand.
“I don’t know why he would say that,” Raleigh’s mother continued.
“Maybe it would be safer that way,” Elspeth suggested.
“Maybe so, dear.”
“Could I get his lawyer’s phone number, anyway?”
“His roommate Jeremy found the lawyer. He’s a professor. Isn’t that lucky?”
“The lawyer is a professor?”
“From Jeremy’s college.”
“Do you have Jeremy’s number? I don’t even have that.”
“I wrote it down. Raleigh had me call Jeremy’s workshop, and then Jeremy called me back. His workshop is called a gym, apparently. Did you ever hear?”
“It’s a thing,” Elspeth said.
She blew on her fingers while she waited for Kimberly Evans to find the piece of paper where she had written down Jeremy’s number.
“Who is Julia Di Matteo?” Raleigh’s mother asked, when she returned to the phone.
“She’s a friend of ours. A new friend. She’s in our group.”
“Her lawyer is already on television,” she told Elspeth. “I think you need to go there, sweetheart.”
“Did they say what his name was? The name of Julia’s lawyer?”
“Jim, what does it say? Can you read it? Kenneth something. Did you see it, Jim?”
“That’s okay,” said Elspeth.
“We missed it. I’m so sorry. We weren’t thinking.”
“You were thinking great.”
“He was just saying no comment, the way lawyers do. He seems to be there at the courthouse.”
“Did you . . . ?” Elspeth began, but faltered. These weren’t even her parents, but it was still hard to ask. She began again: “Did the lawyer say anything about bail?”
“The lawyer,” Kim repeated. “Do you mean Jeremy’s lawyer? But we haven’t talked to him yet. We didn’t need bail last time.”
“Occupy was just a protest.”
“Well, what did Raleigh do? Do you know what he did?”
“I wasn’t there.”
“You let him go by himself?”
Elspeth didn’t say anything.
“It’s not right between the two of you, is it,” said Raleigh’s mother.
Elspeth remained silent.
“I shouldn’t say that. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Elspeth told her.
“It’s just that I don’t know what my son did.”
Elspeth let Raleigh’s mother enjoy for a minute the sorrow that it seemed to console her to feel, and then Elspeth excused herself from the phone.
At the foot of the courthouse stairs, Elspeth said an interim good-bye to Matthew, who had decided to buy a new cell phone and try to port his old number to it. Nearby, white vans from several television stations were parked illegally, their doors thrown open, the mouthless gray flowers of their transmitters raised high on tall white metal arms. Elspeth tried to pretend that she didn’t care that Matthew was leaving.
“I’ll be quick,” he said, as he walked away.
She headed up the weathered stone stairs alone, at a deliberate pace, tightening around her shoulder the strap of her purse. Jeremy had promised to come to the courthouse as soon as he could, and Diana was bound to come once she picked up the message they had left with her department’s secretary.
There was still no lawyer for Raleigh. Raleigh’s parents and Leif had been mistaken about that. All Jeremy had been able to do so far was leave a message with an old comp-sci professor of his, who had been in the habit of boasting, in his lectures, about a friend at the law school who was making a name for himself by writing about ethics on the internet. Jeremy thought the law professor might want to take Raleigh on pro bono, but not even the comp-sci professor had called back yet. As for Julia’s lawyer, Greg had found his name and number by googling, but he had been out when they called, and they hadn’t been able to give his receptionist a number where they could be reached.
She and Matthew had come to the courthouse even though they hadn’t really solved anything. Even though they lacked the means of solving anything. They had come at Elspeth’s insistence, because she had felt guilty about her shower, guilty about her latte, guilty about not knowing what to do. Any more delay had seemed unbearable. But now, as she came close enough to the courthouse to see which of the gray arches was for entrance rather than merely for display, she realized that she had come too soon. She had distrusted her instincts. She was going to fail.
Well, maybe. As she fell into line for the metal detector, however, her mind switchbacked on her yet again, and she realized that you could never be ready for a place like this, not with all the cell phones and all the lawyers in the world. It would never be any easier, whether sooner or later. She set her purse in a beige tray, conscious of having no phone to set beside it. Let alone a gun. A group of court police officers, conspicuously armed, were joking with one another behind a row of framed rectangles of lightly smoked plexiglas. One of them motioned impatiently for her to step through the gray portal, whose signal light had blinked to green without her noticing it. “Come on, miss.” After she passed through, she stood stupidly still for a minute, not knowing where to go, until she noticed that the tray carrying her purse was being buffeted by later trays at the end of the conveyor belt.
The building had a grand interior. Its marble floors had been polished by the traffic of a century of citizens. In a central hall, under a vaulted dome, a processional staircase broke like a wave into smaller flights before it reached the ground, though almost no one was walking up or down its steps. There was probably a dismal, overburdened elevator tucked away in a corner.
From an archway, a male and a female police officer studied Elspeth without interrupting a conversation that they were having. It was hard to be observed. Once, on the street, a homeless woman had flinched under Elspeth’s glance, as sensitive to observation as Elspeth herself, and had recovered by asking for the time. The question put them on an equal footing; everyone is subject to time.
Elspeth caught the female police officer’s eye. “How do you find out when someone is going to see a judge?”
“When was the individual arrested?”
“This morning.”
“But what time this morning?”
“About eight thirty.”
“They’re probably still in the bull pen, but the arraignment clerk will know. Room two nineteen.”
“Is that the second floor?”
“Yes, ma’am. Go right when you come out the elevator.”
There was still about $1,700 of unused credit on Elspeth’s credit card. It might be enough to pay one person’s bail. She hoped she wouldn’t have to choose.
She took a staircase in a corner of the building, despite a guard who offered to direct her to an elevator. It was a prettier building, with its facings of glittering, colored rock, than the one that Chris and Raleigh had passed through after the Occupy protest, but somehow the prettiness made it more sad. The prettiness and the solidity. We have a customary way of seeing people, the rock seemed to say. We have seen people of your type before.
A couple of dozen people were waiting in the corridor outside room 219, and as Elspeth sidled through the crowd, she felt herself touched by their awareness of her, by their appraisal. There was something wrong, she heard them all but say.
Of course there was. Most of them were here to rescue a loved one.
“Is there a line?” she asked a Latina woman.
“No line,” the woman said, smiling. She pointed to the office’s open door, and Elspeth noticed a sheet of paper taped to it. “Please, lady.” The woman gestured toward the sheet of paper.
Beside a column of names, the sheet listed courtrooms and times. Elspeth’s friends were not on the list yet.
A cell phone behind Elspeth chirped. “Can I call you back, Dan?” asked a tall woman with her hair pulled back in a scrunchie, in a quiet but public voice. The woman silenced her phone but did not put it away. Elspeth had the impression that the woman was focused on Elspeth even though the woman was not looking at her.
The woman was a reporter, Elspeth realized.
Elspeth walked into the clerk’s office. At a tall wooden counter, like a library service desk, she waited to be noticed by two women seated just beyond it. The women were talking about a birthday cake that one of them had ordered for her daughter. It had been ordered on a Tuesday and then was ready for pickup on Thursday. The decorations had been lovely, the frosting and everything. A computer screen faced Elspeth, and Elspeth could see that one of the women was inputting data into a spreadsheet as she and her friend talked.
“Be with you in a minute, miss.”
Silently several people from the corridor slipped into the office and assembled along the wall behind Elspeth. She felt that if she were to stamp a foot they would flutter away and then edge silently close to her again. She wished she could laugh. Every so often a fact-checker at her magazine was able to win permission to write and publish a short piece. If it hadn’t been her that this was happening to, maybe this could have been her chance.
The woman inputting data at last came to the counter. “Can I help you, miss?”
“What if a person’s name isn’t on the list on your door?” she asked in a soft voice.
“What’s the arrest number?”
“Oh. Where would I find that?”
“Name?” the woman asked. Her tone was brusque, to offset the favor she was granting.
“There are a few names? Can I write them down for you?”
The woman looked at Elspeth over her glasses. She didn’t say yes or no, and as Elspeth looked around for something to write on and write with, the woman walked away, and Elspeth’s heart sank. The woman came back, however, with a ballpoint pen and a blank form.
“Where should I write the names?”
“Tchh. Anywhere, dear.”
Elspeth wrote Raleigh’s, Leif’s, Chris’s, and Julia’s names across the top.
“Are you family?” the clerk asked, as she took the piece of paper and studied it. When the paper began to tremble in her hands, the clerk folded it in order to disguise her tremor.
“I’m a friend. I’m pretty sure Julia’s the only one who has family in the city.”
Muttering broke out behind Elspeth.
The clerk surveyed the reporters. “You have no business being in this office unless you have business in this office,” she declared.
No one stirred.
“Do you have business in this office?” the clerk asked, singling out a man with a steno pad. “If you can’t answer me, you better step outside, young man. Yes, you.” She glared at him until, reluctantly, he left the room.
She didn’t soften the sternness of her look as she returned her attention to Elspeth. “They’re here, miss,” she said, of Elspeth’s friends. “They’re all here. Do they have legal representation?”
“I think Julia does.”
“They need representation, miss.”
“I know.”
The clerk explained that if Elspeth’s friends couldn’t afford representation, the state would provide it. Elspeth’s friends could call the public defender’s office from the phone in the holding area. She wrote down for Elspeth the common three-digit phone number for all city services.
The audience was over. “Can I see them?” Elspeth asked. “Can I see my friends?”
The clerk paused in her return to her desk. “Are any of them . . . injured?”
“No,” Elspeth admitted.
“You’d have to ask the district attorney.” She was washing her hands of Elspeth. “Room two-oh-four.” She exchanged a glance with her colleague, as she took her chair, and the two of them palpably began to wait for Elspeth to leave.
“Could I ask you—,” the man with the steno pad began, putting himself in Elspeth’s way.
She twisted past him and then sped up, with sliding steps. She felt the herd turn and follow her.
“Are you a member of the cell?”
“What were you after?”
“Do you want to overthrow the government?”
She hated the reporters for wanting to know about her friends now instead of a week ago. For rewarding catastrophe with attention instead of rewarding an effort at change.
“Do you know Leaf?”
“What was your official role in Occupy, personally?”
“Do you have a website?
She thought of the television footage of Raleigh bequilled with their questions, keeping himself visible but not answering. He hadn’t been willing to tell her, last night, why he had touched her so clumsily when he came to bed. He hadn’t been willing to say what his hands hadn’t been able to keep from saying. She wondered if the two of them would ever put their hands on each other again.
But she wasn’t as defenseless as he was. “I’m not in handcuffs,” she said, rounding on the reporters as they caught up to her. The sentence had come out as a non sequitur. As if to explain it, she slapped the steno pad out of the hands of the man who had been browbeaten out of the arraignment clerk’s office and was at the head of the pack. It skidded across the marble floor.
The reporters were startled.
“Leave me the fuck alone!” she shouted, a little louder than she had meant to. “I’m just a person.”
As she walked away, she felt, despite herself, a sense of loss as the pedicels of their attention detached and retracted. They would have let her feel human if she had been willing to give them the information they wanted.
Two-oh-four, she thought, suppressing herself, focusing. Was it stupid to go to the district attorney’s office? She kept walking while she thought about it. She would look at the room. She would at least look at it.
She was holding the world together by going over the pieces in her mind, like a dog licking a wound to will it to close. Some veins in the marble were the dark, translucent green of the crepe-like seaweed that clung at water level to the city’s older piers.
Just as she came to the district attorney’s office, a man in a suit but no tie walked out of it. His features were at first disorganized, but when he caught sight of her, they drew together into an expression. He had recognized her. It was Bresser. She could tell that he wanted his face to be neutral, but he was looking at her with anticipation despite himself. He might even have been looking at her with an expectation that he would be congratulated. Was that possible? She must be overreading. She knew that she was pushing to the limit her ability to perceive.
“So you’re a fan of Henry James,” she said.
He gave a half chuckle, meaninglessly. “You mean the hacker?” He was the kind of boy who thought that if he pretended to know a secret, the other boys on the playground would let him in.
“Excuse me,” he said, and walked importantly away. He had remembered who he was.
Elspeth wasn’t in any such danger. Where she was standing, the marble corridor was open on one side to the central hall below, and she drifted to the broad balustrade that looked out into the hall. The stone of the balustrade was cold to the touch. In the quadrangle below, there was no sign of Diana, Matthew, or Jeremy.
There was only a television reporter in a vest and skirt, shaking her hair clear of her headset. The reporter laid the headset neatly on the floor beside her. She put an earpiece in her left ear. Her camera stood a few feet from her, independent, on an unfolded tripod. Her right hand held a microphone; her left hand, a small panel. From the skylight there fell soft and vague illumination, and a lamp on the prow of the camera gleamed at her, a guiding star, further smoothing her features. “Good morning,” the reporter began. But either she hadn’t been ready to continue or she hadn’t liked the way her first words sounded, and with her panel she clicked the gleaming light off. She looked down, looked up, hunched her shoulders, squared them, looked straight ahead, clicked the light back on, dropped the hand that held the control panel below the frame of what the camera was recording, and began again. “Good morning,” she resumed. “I’m on location at Central Booking, where authorities have not yet released the names of the four Occupy activists accused of breaking into a computer associated with the work of the city police and through them with that of the Department of Homeland Security. We were able to broadcast footage of one of the suspects earlier this morning, however, and several users of social media are now saying online that they recognize the individual and that he was known to be involved in a group that claimed—and this is a little unusual—that claimed to be able to uncover government secrets through ESP. That’s right—extrasensory perception. A photo currently being shared online shows the individual wearing a T-shirt that says—I hope you’re able to share the photo with our viewers, John, because in it you can read the motto pretty clearly—‘Government Transparency Now through ESP.’ We’re not sure what to make of it, and authorities have not confirmed the identification, but if it turns out to be the same individual, and it looks to me like it is, then this raises some very interesting questions. John?”
Very interesting, indeed, thank you . . . A dew of fear had condensed under Elspeth’s palms, while she listened. She had told the reporters that she was a person, but they wouldn’t believe her now. A fool was not a person, for them.
“I’m sorry,” said a woman’s voice. It was the tall woman with her hair in a scrunchie. She had also been watching the reporter make her video. She was standing at a careful distance from Elspeth. Her face was angular but well composed. “They’ll say anything until they get the story. I know you don’t want to talk right now, but you might at some point, and I’d like to give you my card, if that’s all right.”
“I’m never going to want to talk,” said Elspeth, but she accepted the card. She wanted to tell the woman—to warn her—that everything the TV reporter had broadcast was true.
“That’s all right,” the woman replied cheerfully. She was only doing her job. Often, by the time you meet someone, both they and you have already made all the decisions that will determine the encounter between the two of you, and the only freedom that remains to either of you is whether to be pleasant.
For politeness’s sake, Elspeth thanked the woman for her card and then looked back out over the balustrade to signal that the conversation was over.
When Elspeth turned to make sure that the woman was gone, she saw a cluster of other reporters studying her and murmuring. Noticing her glance, they approached.
“I don’t want to talk to you.” She fumblingly pulled up the hood of her coat and walked to the stairwell.
On the ground floor, she leaned against a pillar in an archway, hiding herself as deep as possible in her hood, and watched who was entering the building. She decided to wait here for her friends. Of course she was hidden no better than a horse is hidden by its blinders. Soon she was aware that the reporters were standing a few yards behind her, to her right. She could sense their presence even without turning to look, the way one used to be able to hear the high, tinnient whine of a non-flat-screen television even if its sound was off.
She didn’t draw back her hood until Diana walked through the metal detector.
“Baby,” Diana said, embracing her.
“I shouldn’t be touching you,” said Elspeth.
“What do you mean?”
“The reporters will try to talk to you now.”
“What reporters?” Diana asked.
The palm of Diana’s hand felt very sweet and soft to Elspeth as she held it. It had in it all the humanity that Elspeth had been longing for and that she had been afraid she might have to ask the reporters to give to her.
“Oh, I see,” Diana said.
“They’re horrible,” said Elspeth.
“Oh, baby.” She let Elspeth cry a little. “This is hard. Of course it’s hard. It’s much harder than before, isn’t it.” Even through her tears Elspeth was aware of Diana learning that she couldn’t look toward the reporters except at the risk of compromising the reprieve that Elspeth’s outburst of emotion was winning from them.
“I need to wait here for Matthew and Jeremy,” Elspeth said.
“That’s okay.”
“I’m going to need to use your phone. I still haven’t talked to anyone. Not to Leif, not to Chris, not to Raleigh.”
“That’s okay.”
“I thought Raleigh had a lawyer, but now I don’t think any of them do except Julia.”
“I took the liberty of calling a lawyer I know through Occupy. I hope that’s all right.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“He’s a little head-in-the-clouds,” Diana said. “He’s a little true-believer. But he’s willing to jump right in.”
“Is he on his way?”
“He will be if I call him.”
“Who’s he for?”
“I was thinking Leif?”
“Oh yes, that makes sense.”
“Didn’t you say Raleigh had a lawyer? But we can give him to Raleigh instead if you want.” Diana took out her phone, scrolled to the number, and tapped it. “This guy gave us a lot of good advice about the Kitchen. Right now he’s representing a couple of people against the city. He doesn’t work for free, but we’ll find the money somewhere.”
The phone was already ringing; the money was already being spent. “We’ll find the money,” Elspeth echoed, remembering that if her mother had tried to reach her this morning, she wouldn’t have been able to.
“I’ll give him my credit card for today,” said Diana. “Let’s just get him here.”
“You’re a graduate student.”
“But for a graduate student I have really good credit.” She put a finger in her phoneless ear. “Michael? I’m at the courthouse now.”
“We should give him to Leif,” Elspeth said softly, but Diana was already negotiating, and Elspeth couldn’t tell whether Diana had heard her. Elspeth resumed watching visitors to the courthouse unshoulder their backpacks and empty their pockets.
“He’ll be here in an hour,” Diana said, once the call was finished.
“You know how Leif can sometimes tell what someone is thinking?” Elspeth asked, almost in a whisper.
Diana double-checked that she had hung up her phone. “I know he’s a sweet kid,” she replied quietly.
“They know about it.”
Diana nodded and looked away.
“Someone gave the reporters a photo of one of Raleigh’s T-shirts,” Elspeth continued.
“I thought the T-shirts were a joke.”
“It was something we were working on,” said Elspeth. She was ashamed to be talking about it. She wanted to tell Diana that it was from the same part of Leif that made him a poet, but she couldn’t. Instead, she said, “It’s how they broke in.”
“You shouldn’t tell me about it. You shouldn’t tell me or anyone anything about what they’re charged with.”
Elspeth nodded. She watched Diana try to think of something to say that wouldn’t hurt Elspeth’s feelings. By talking about it when Diana didn’t want to hear, it was as if Elspeth had tried to pull Diana underwater with her.
“Look, there’s Matthew,” Elspeth said, noticing Leif’s boyfriend as he took a place in line for the metal detector. “And there’s Jeremy, too.” The men were standing one in front of the other but didn’t realize it because they had never met before. Straight Jeremy in his pretty golden beard and gay Matthew in his muddy black one.
After the security check, Jeremy crossed in front of Matthew, cutting him off. Yellow, pollen-like sawdust had been sifted in a neat parallelogram onto the stomach of his work shirt. “So the good news is Felix Penny says he’ll represent Raleigh for today. And for the duration, if he likes the case. The bad news is he won’t do it pro bono.”
“Have you talked to Leif or Raleigh?” Elspeth asked Matthew, instead of responding to Jeremy’s news.
Matthew nodded. She saw that he was bewildered, as she was, by the surrender that they were going to have to make not just to Diana and Jeremy but to strangers chosen by Diana and Jeremy. She and Matthew weren’t the sort who knew how to cold-bloodedly do what needed to be done. “Matthew,” he identified himself, not quite apologetically, to Jeremy.
“Hey. I just put your number in my phone,” Jeremy replied.
“Felix Penny is sort of famous, isn’t he,” said Diana. She waved to Matthew.
“He had a book about privacy last year,” said Jeremy. “Raleigh’s calling his parents right now to see if they can afford him.”
“And Diana found a lawyer for Leif,” Elspeth told the men.
“His name is Michael Gauden,” said Diana.
Merely to the names Elspeth was already beginning to feel that they had responsibilities. That for the lawyers’ sakes, there were selves that they were going to have to be careful from now on to be. “We’re going to have so many lawyers,” she said.
“I don’t think this would be a good time to cheap out,” Jeremy said.
As if expense were what made her anxious. As if it would be willful of her if it were. “How are they all doing?” she asked Matthew.
“Chris isn’t sitting with them.”
He was blaming himself, Elspeth thought.
“Your friend Chris went upstairs,” Jeremy said. “Even though Raleigh told him not to.”
“Did he have any choice?” Diana asked.
“You can always tell them you want to talk to your lawyer first,” said Jeremy.
“But he doesn’t have a lawyer yet,” said Elspeth. “Is Leif all right?”
“He’s a little . . .” Matthew raised his hands but didn’t know what gesture to make.
“How’s Julia?” Elspeth asked, making an effort to be fair.
Neither Jeremy nor Matthew answered.
“She’ll be by herself, on the women’s side,” Diana suggested.
“Oh, that’s right,” said Elspeth.
“Can we talk about bail?” Jeremy asked. His impatience, she foresaw, was going to be one of the instruments working to conform their irregular selves.
They hadn’t been paying attention to the reporters.
“How many of you have ESP?”
“Can you tell me what color I’m thinking of right now?”
“Were you acting on instructions from the spokes council?”
Elspeth muttered, “We didn’t even go to Occupy that much.”
“Don’t, honey,” Diana cautioned her.
“Could you repeat that? I didn’t catch that.”
A reporter swung a microphone from one friend’s mouth to another’s, tracing in the air a map of his fluctuating hope. The friends were backed up against the pillar that Elspeth had chosen half an hour ago to lean against.
“Go on, shoo,” Diana said, not quite in earnest.
“Shoo yourself,” a reporter in back answered her.
A wider crescent was gathering, drawn by the burnt-match smell of conflict.
In a loud monotone Jeremy declared that they had no comment.
“When are you going to leak the files?”
“What are you going to do to protect the privacy of government officials named in the files?”
“How many networks have you broken into using ESP?”
Under his breath Jeremy asked, “What is this ESP horseshit?”
While alone Elspeth had felt powerless, but in the company of her friends, she no longer quite believed in the reporters’ capacity to pen her in. Now that her side had cell phones, she didn’t need to keep standing where she was. Raleigh and Leif were sure to call Matthew’s new phone in a minute. She was going to ask to talk to Chris, too. She was going to figure it all out.
Across the vestibule she recognized the leonine white hair of Julia’s lawyer.
“Sir! Sir!” she cried.
“Elspeth!” Jeremy shouted, as she darted away.
The reporters, too, pivoted.
The lawyer was even taller than the headshot in Greg’s phone had led Elspeth to expect. “You’re Julia’s lawyer,” she accosted him.
He looked at the parade raggedly trailing her, and his eyes seemed to make a calculation. “I didn’t catch your name, sweetheart.” He extended his hand.
“Elspeth Farrell.”
“Kenneth Montague,” he told her. He took his time shaking her hand, as if no one were closing in on them. As if they were alone. “Pleased to meet you.” He studied her eyes. “Hey,” he then said, looking up, as if he were only just now noticing her pursuers. “Hey, I already talked to you assholes. And that’s not on the record, by the way, my calling you assholes, because you know I love you guys. Officially. Nah, just kidding. Of course I love you guys. But seriously, we’re trying to have a confidential conversation here, so back the fuck off. I don’t mean to use language, but could you give us a little space? I’ll have more for you later. I always do, don’t I? You know I do. Thank you. I love you guys.” He showily winked. And then took Elspeth under one of his wings and turned.
She stopped him. “These are my friends.”
“Which ones, sweetheart?” he asked.
“These three.”
“One, two, three, then,” Montague said, and returned to motion. “It’s rude to count, I know,” he apologized over his shoulder, “but I have to make sure we’re not bringing any fucking journalists with us. Mind if we talk outside? For just a minute. On the steps? They won’t go outside; it’s too cold for them. The dirty so-and-so’s, as my mother used to say. I hope you don’t mind, I happen to be on my way to get a sandwich.”
The police didn’t search you as you left the building, and in a moment they were standing in the midday sun of late November.
“So how can I help you?” Montague asked. He looked almost through them when he looked, but his eyes, though hooded, were incapable of hiding. That was why he talked the way he did.
“Why can’t you just represent everybody?” Elspeth asked.
“That’s a tall order,” Montague replied, as if she were joking.
“Wait a minute, Elspeth,” said Jeremy.
“I know you found someone,” she told Jeremy, “but he’s not here yet.”
“Who’d ya find?” Montague asked. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
“Felix Penny,” Jeremy said, as if the name itself were a more precious coin.
“Don’t know him,” said Montague affably. “He a trial lawyer?”
“He’s a law professor,” said Jeremy. “He writes about computer ethics.”
“Computers. That’ll be useful. You got somebody on the way, then.”
“Two lawyers on the way, actually,” said Diana.
“Oh yeah? Who else? Out of curiosity.”
“Michael Gauden?” said Diana.
The lawyer nodded.
“Do you know him?” Elspeth asked.
“He’s a young guy, isn’t he?”
Diana defended him: “I think he’s been in practice for several years.”
“He’ll be great. I’m sure both of them will be.”
“But we don’t have a lawyer for Chris,” said Elspeth.
Montague gave her friends an opportunity to respond to her, but they didn’t take it.
“Could you help him?” Elspeth asked.
Montague looked at her almost tenderly. “I can’t, sweetheart. I can’t. I told the Di Matteos that I would represent their daughter, and I can’t do anything to dilute that.”
“What do you mean, ‘dilute’?”
“I can’t represent a person unless I can promise her my first loyalty, and in this case, I’ve already given it to Julia. That’s me. That’s who I am. But even if I wanted to try to split my loyalty—even if I were willing to do that—this judge would never waive the conflict.”
“You know who the judge is going to be?” asked Matthew.
“This one’s sharp, isn’t he. It’s the quiet ones you have to watch out for. I know who the judge usually is when this kind of case happens at this time of day on this day of the week, but no, I don’t know for certain who the judge will be. But it doesn’t matter. None of the judges here want to bother with a conflict.”
“Where would the conflict be?” Elspeth asked.
“Conflict of interest,” said Montague. “Between the accused.”
“But they’re all accused of the same thing.”
“Well, as your friend here will probably tell you”—Montague glanced at Matthew—“we won’t know for sure what your friends are accused of until the grand jury issues its indictments, and that may not be for a little while. A lot can happen between now and then.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What don’t you understand, sweetheart?”
“Why would they be in conflict? They’re all together.”
“But they might not stay together,” Montague softly said. “They might choose different defense strategies.”
“What difference would that make?” she persisted. But it was beginning to dawn on her.
“The strategies might not be compatible.”
“How could that happen if everyone tells the truth?”
“Elspeth,” Matthew cautioned her.
“It’s better if everyone has his own lawyer,” said Montague. “Trust me. It’s always better.”
He meant, she realized, that one of the accused might decide to testify against the others. “It’s better for criminals, maybe,” she said. She turned away.
“I’m sorry,” Montague said.
She didn’t reply. She needed, at the moment, to be unfair to him.
“How much do you think bail will be?” Matthew asked.
“Hard to say, with all the excitement.”
“You mean it could be high? What if we can’t find the money right away?”
“You know the island the city ships people to? Technically it won’t affect the case, but can I be honest with you? You don’t want your friends to go there. It’s not a nice place. It’s not a happy place. I’m saying this because people like you—no offense—it’s because your lives are blessed, and I mean that—people like you don’t know how bad it is. People like you may think you have an idea, but you don’t have an idea.”
“Thank you,” said Matthew.
“And I shouldn’t say this, either,” Montague continued, “but when you’re looking for someone for your friend, ask for someone with federal trial experience. Don’t get hung up on it, but: if you can.”
“Federal trial experience,” Matthew repeated.
“You didn’t hear it from me, but the word is there are going to be federal charges.”
Matthew nodded.
“Good luck.” He shook all their hands and clasped Elspeth’s.
“What does that mean?” Matthew asked, after he was gone.
“Fuck,” said Jeremy.
Matthew’s phone rang. “It’s jail,” he said, and handed the phone to Elspeth.
“Hello?” Elspeth said.
“Hey.”
“Raleigh? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“Are Leif and Chris all right?”
“They’re having a little trouble, but they’re all right.”
“What do you mean, trouble?”
“Leif is, one minute he says it’s all his fault, and five minutes later it’s ridiculous that he can’t just walk out of here.”
“It is ridiculous.”
“You know they listen to these calls.”
“He’s so innocent he wouldn’t even know how to do anything wrong, assholes,” she said to the listeners.
“Assholes,” Raleigh echoed admiringly.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize to me,” he told her. There was a simulation of no more than camaraderie between them, and she couldn’t tell if they were faking the camaraderie for the benefit of eavesdroppers or out of some idea of not, for the moment at least, disappointing each other. Of not reckoning with too many big questions at once.
“How’s Chris?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t worry too much about him.”
“He’s okay?”
“I don’t think he’s worrying about us.”
“Jeremy said he’s not sitting with you.”
“He went upstairs after I told him not to, and when he came back and I asked what he told them, he said, ‘Do you think I’m stupid?’ And I said, ‘That’s what you told them?’ And he said, ‘No, that’s what I’m telling you.’”
“He’s mad.”
“But why’s he mad at me?”
It was a boy thing of some kind. “Can I talk to Leif?”
“Sure. Yeah. Let me get Leif.”
She pictured the handset of the jail telephone left to hang alone upside down from its cable, swaying. She remembered Leif sitting on a windowsill in her dining room at a party in the spring, wearing what he called a peasant frock, of blue-and-white gingham, and kicking his crossed legs while he smoked.
Raleigh returned. “Do you know how Julia’s doing?” he asked.
“We talked to her lawyer.”
“Did he say how she’s doing?”
“No.” It embarrassed her that it hadn’t occurred to her to ask.
“She’s by herself,” he said.
“I know. It must be awful.”
“Did you get my messages, by the way?”
“I still don’t have a phone.”
“You can call your messages even if you don’t have your phone.”
“You can?”
“Forget it,” he said. “It would have saved some time.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s fine.” He was holding his breath; he was keeping even that back from her. “I miss you,” he unexpectedly said.
Did he want her back? It startled her to realize that she already thought of him as gone. Or of herself as gone.
“Are you going to say anything?” he asked.
“I miss you, too,” she said clumsily.
“I’m in jail, Elspeth.”
“I know.”
He passed the phone to Leif.
“Elspeth?” Leif’s voice seemed very bright, after Raleigh’s caution. “I’m going to have to become a celebrity.”
“That’s great.”
“No it isn’t.” He laughed as if he had meant for her to misunderstand. “I mean become a celebrity the way John Clare became Byron.” She and Leif had decided, one afternoon, that the impoverished poet of birds’ nests and unfenced meadows must have been one of their kind and that it must have been partly under the strain of failing to understand his gift that he had begun to confuse himself with his more famous, more wealthy, and more libertine rival. His greedier rival.
“No, don’t do that,” she said. “Stay yourself.”
Greed for life being a sign of sturdiness.
“I’d only do it consciously,” he said.
“You’ll be out soon.”
“FYI, I won’t come back, once I get out. I just won’t.”
“You won’t have to. It’s just till they set bail. They’ll set it tomorrow at the latest but probably by the end of the day today.”
“I’m having these thoughts. I’m going to have to write a poem, I’m having so many of them.”
“What kind of thoughts?”
“Thoughts about thoughts. I was thinking that everything a person says is really a synecdoche, for one thing. There! ‘For one thing,’ for one thing. A part for the whole. And often an atypical, misrepresentative part.”
“You mean sometimes people don’t tell the truth.”
“I mean they can’t tell it. If only because you can’t say everything. If only because you can only say one thing at a time.”
“That’s interesting.”
“No. It’s just a way for me not to think about this. This place that I’m in. I’m gesturing toward it, but you can’t see.”
“Do you have something to focus on? Can you focus on Raleigh?”
“No.” He laughed, but it was a forced-sounding laugh, and it irritated her instead of stirring her pity. He wasn’t taking care of himself. “What’s funny,” he continued, “is there are all these not-stories down here, in addition to the stories. These sort of snowclones that aren’t anybody’s experience but that we all feel they want us to fit ourselves into. They’re so ludicrous. How bad we are, for example. How weak we are. How good the king is to be willing to pardon us if we confess our sins. The not-stories are all so weepy. They’re not dangerous because we hold them at bay. We spangle them with little particles of hate. With little pearlescent antibodies of hate.”
“Up here there’s this pretty marble on the walls, and I’ve been focusing on it sometimes.”
“We just have cinder blocks.”
“It won’t be too much longer,” she assured him.
“I don’t think I can be a cinder block right now.”
He had looked very pretty, when he had showed up for her party in his peasant frock. He hadn’t looked like a man passing but like a girl too young to need makeup.
“I’m so sorry, Elspeth,” he said.
“You haven’t done anything.”
“I don’t think I have, but then sometimes I think maybe I have.”
“Don’t say that. I mean, don’t say that, but also I mean this phone is bugged.”
“I don’t care. I’m so sorry. I’m so ridiculously sorry. I’m sorry even for the versions of the story that aren’t true. I’m synoptically sorry.”
It was too much, and she felt another twinge of irritation. As well as another twinge of self-reproach at the injustice of her irritation.
“Talk about something else. Talk about your idea for a poem again.”
“I am talking about it.”