“And the name of your first pet,” the salesman prompted.
“I said I had a pet?” Raleigh replied.
“Looks like it.”
Raleigh tried to guess what he had been thinking of. “I had a guinea pig named Skywalker for about five minutes.”
“Awesome name.”
“It disappeared a week after we got it. My mother told me it died, but I’m pretty sure she took it back to the store.”
The salesman typed and then waited for the system to respond. “‘Skywalker’ works.”
“Are we all set?”
“Almost.” The salesman, reading instructions off his screen, began to punch activation codes into the new phone that Raleigh was purchasing. “It may be an hour or two before the new SIM populates in all the databases.”
“What happens to the old phone?”
“You won’t be able to make calls on it anymore. You said you lost it?”
“Will it be erased?”
“I don’t know, but you don’t have it anymore, right? So . . . whoa, you’re already getting a call.”
“I am?”
“Yeah, you’re live already. I have to finish one more thing, though.”
“Who’s calling?”
“Uh, nine-one-eight . . . ?”
“My mother,” Raleigh guessed.
“Maybe she’s sorry about Skywalker, man,” the salesman risked.
“I should talk to her,” Raleigh said.
He stepped with the phone into the dead space between the store’s plate-glass window and a rank of pedestals for sample phones.
“They gave you your phone back!” his mother exclaimed.
“I got a new one,” he said. The sun even through the window was hot on his face. “They can transfer the number, when you get a new phone.”
“Will that interfere?”
“With what?”
“With the investigation.”
“That’s not my problem, Mom.”
“But if they think you’re interfering, Raleigh.”
“Felix said to do it.”
“Oh. Well, you didn’t tell me that Felix said to do it.”
“What’s up, Mom.”
“Nothing. I just wanted to know how you’re doing.”
“I’m fine. I’m on my way to see Elspeth.”
“Did she get home safe?”
“Last night? I guess so.”
“Are her parents there?”
“Her parents?”
“I thought they might have flown in for Thanksgiving.”
“I forgot it’s going to be Thanksgiving.”
“They must be worried about her.”
“I guess Jeremy and Philip usually cook a turkey,” said Raleigh, thinking out loud.
“Oh, I see.”
“Mom, I can’t come to Oklahoma right now.”
“Oh, I know. I understand.” She paused to blow her nose. “You’re handling this so well.”
“It’s going to be fine. It’s mostly for show, I think, what the government’s doing. Security theater.”
“Honey, I don’t think you should talk about it on the phone. What if they’re listening? They’re saying that they’ve been listening to you all along.”
“Who’s saying? On TV?”
“They’re saying that that’s what you’re fighting, really. I don’t think I realized that.” There was a tremble in her voice. “That that’s what you’re fighting.”
She wanted to be reassured. “I’m not going to do anything stupid, Mom,” he said.
“Your father says that you’re taking a stand. You know you can always come home, if you think you’re going to be lonely.”
“Thanks, Mom. I know.”
“For the holiday, I mean.”
“I know what you mean.”
“I’m so proud of you.”
“Okay,” he said blankly.
She hung up. “Mom?” He looked down at the shiny keypad to find the End button, but he saw that the phone already knew that the call was over.
“Do you need the receipt?” the salesman asked.
Elspeth opened her door.
It was only now that he was sleeping with someone else that he could see clearly not only her beauty but the kind of beauty it was: plain and unadorned, like the heroine of one of those books about frontier life that girls read in elementary school.
“Where are your keys?” she asked.
“I still have them, but I didn’t think I should surprise you.”
She looked away. He followed her down the corridor.
“After all the surprises yesterday,” he explained.
On the dining room table, five tarot cards lay faceup in the pattern that dots have on the five side of a die.
“Were you doing a reading?” he asked. He knew the cards were only bright colors printed on heavy paper. One of the ones she had out was Death, who always looked to him more like a skinned raccoon than a person. Death was upside-down, flipping the figure’s black garden of severed hands and heads into a night sky where the hands and heads were constellations.
One by one the cards quilped as Elspeth returned them to the bottom of the deck. “I guess,” she said.
“They should have taken this deck when they confiscated the rest of our communication technology.”
Elspeth smiled politely.
“Did you meet someone?” she asked abruptly.
“Where—in jail?” It was a gamble, but he had the impression that she was moderating her scrutiny of him, maybe out of tact, maybe because she didn’t really want to know. “No,” he lied, more boldly. It wasn’t why they were breaking up, after all. Still, his heart raced with the excitement of lying. He thought it would be a tell if he looked away, so he didn’t. But maybe it was a tell that he didn’t.
“I’m sorry I was so useless yesterday,” she said. “I don’t know all the things you know. The technical things.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You were mad at me.”
“I was in jail.”
“And now you want to be free,” she said.
He didn’t answer.
“Everyone should always be free,” she continued. “We can be grown-ups about it.”
He nodded.
“It’s almost like I’m breaking up with you,” she observed.
“It’s a little of both,” he conceded.
“Would you mind holding me?” she asked. “For old times’ sake. Just for a minute.”
Her small bones, loose in the small satchel of her body, felt familiar, but there was nothing that was sharply especially for him in the touch between the two of them. He was doing her a favor; it didn’t feel like any more than that. Altruism wasn’t love, he noticed.
“I’ll miss you,” she said, as she pulled away.
“I’ll miss you, too,” he lied.
“We’ll still see each other, but I won’t be the same,” she told him.
“Be however you want to be.”
“No, I can’t do that. But I won’t forget you.”
Her words were so peremptory that he almost had second thoughts.
She excused herself.
In the alcove of the dining room where a dumbwaiter had once come through, Elspeth’s dictionary, style manual, and gazetteer were neatly arrayed. The pink yarn elephant that he had given her one year for her birthday was perched on top of the reference books, and her pencils lay beside them, aligned according to the crimped green metal bands that fastened the erasers to the stems.
He shouted down the hallway. “I should go.”
“You don’t have to go,” she called back. “Unless you want to.”
She had cried, but she had washed her face. She knew better than to show it if she was the loser. Was he the loser, then? It wasn’t something he should be wondering in her presence, but her mind was probably too clouded with emotions to be able to sense it.
She had guessed right, of course; he had met someone in jail. He and Julia had become cellmates there, in a way, and were aware now, even on the outside, that they might have to go back, aware as ordinary people weren’t that the context for their lives was provisional.
“Has anyone told you yet what they’re saying about you?” Elspeth asked.
“About me?”
“About all of you. You’re the Telepathy Four. ‘Free the Telepathy Four.’ You’re heroes online. ‘Revolutionaries.’ Diana was here till late last night, and we were reading on her phone.”
“We didn’t seem like heroes on TV this morning.”
“It’s different online. They think we knew Bresser was spying on us.”
“You and Leif might have sensed it,” Raleigh said. “When Leif read his password that first time, when Chris and I were arrested for standing in the street, Leif might have been picking up a signal.”
“No, be honest. We didn’t know anything until Bresser told Chris that somebody was calling him Hyacinth, and even then we only suspected. Online they think we knew-knew. They think we knew and were taking revenge, which they like because they hate Bresser. He keeps trying to talk to them. I think they hate him more because he keeps trying to talk to them.”
“They’re on our side,” Raleigh said.
“For now.”
“That matters, Elspeth. We need that.” The internet was still a force that hadn’t been understood. The only thing anyone knew for certain about it was that it was always on the side that didn’t lose. “The police haven’t seized our domain name, have they?”
“You mean our website? Can they do that?”
“Yeah, Elspeth, they can do that.”
“What? I don’t know these things.”
He wished he could see for himself the searches for their working group by the searchers who didn’t know its name, the comments by readers exchanging heated speculations about the motives of the group’s members, the name-calling, the praise, the stuttered exclamations—all the electronic correlates of attention, which, unable to see, he imagined as a white network, floating distinct from the world, like light that had been abruptly disembodied somehow from the knotted sheaf of fiber-optic cables in which it had been coursing and pulsing.
“You have to take care of it because I can’t take care of it anymore,” he said. “It could change everything.”
“Oh, Raleigh.”
“What?” he asked.
A phone burred against the table. It was a throwaway candy-bar phone. The ringtone was primitive. “It’s my mother,” Elspeth said, to excuse herself, as she picked it up.
She turned her head away. “I’m okay. I slept okay,” she said into the phone.
She rose, walked into the parlor, and stood at a window.
“We watched a DVD for a while and then she went home.”
He hadn’t realized that Diana had brought Elspeth back from the courthouse.
“He’s here now,” Elspeth said. “He’s fine.”
“. . .”
“I haven’t asked him yet.”
“. . .”
“This afternoon.”
“. . .”
“I hope so.”
The staccato lines resonated through the twinned rooms. It occurred to Raleigh that if he went into the kitchen, he would be able to give Elspeth some privacy, but he didn’t go.
“I hope it’s not too expensive.”
“. . .”
“I wish you could. Bye, Mom.” She depressed a button on the device, effortfully because it was still new to her.
“Is she worried about how much your lawyer is going to cost?” he asked.
“She’s having somebody come today to look at the retaining wall. The basement keeps flooding.”
She set down the phone and shoved it a little away from her. She had never really liked even her old phone, he knew, on account of the interruptions it made, and this one was uglier and even louder.
“I should get ready to visit my lawyer,” she said.
“Is he anyone?”
“She. A friend of my mother’s recommended her. She’s somebody’s daughter.”
“What were you about to say before?” Raleigh asked. “When your mother called.”
She hesitated. “It doesn’t matter,” she finally said.
Her thoughts weren’t his to know anymore. Because he lacked any aptitude for intuiting them, discretion on her part protected her like a wall, high and featureless. He was less because of it.
“No, you were going to say something.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
She had been going to say something about the two of them, he realized, but now she would never do that again.
He waited, but she waited him out.
“Oh fuck,” said Raleigh, half aloud.
Three television vans were besieging the café where Leif worked. One was parked with its two left wheels up in the middle of the sidewalk. The van’s sliding door was open, and as Raleigh edged past it, the skirt of his coat swirled a short arc into and out of its amber interior, where banks of heavy equipment were blinking silently, protected by nothing but the forbidding importance of being useful to television.
“Hey,” a man said, and Raleigh was startled, as if the man had been able to detect in the incursion of Raleigh’s coat a wish on Raleigh’s part to commit sabotage. The man was wearing a baseball cap and holding a cigarette between fingers in fingertipless gloves. “Do you know him? Do you know what his tattoo means? Aren’t you—?”
Raleigh went inside before the man could remember Raleigh’s name.
Inside, it was standing room only. A few tables were held by regulars, and the floor around them was empty, as if the other tables and chairs, unanchored, had been carried away by a flood.
They had washed up on the shores of three islands of television people. At the center of each stood a reporter, almost clownishly well groomed. Other crew members, comparatively gray, were wearing hats, coats, and headsets in case they might need to rush outside. Next to their coffees lay their cameras, like derringers set down by tippling cowboys in a movie-set saloon.
Raleigh caught Greg’s eye. “Hey, man,” Raleigh said. He waited for Greg to serve a mint tea to the customer in front of him. “Matthew said Leif was here?”
“Down below. We used up all the Ecuadorean and he’s getting another sack.”
“These guys are buying coffee?”
“Anyone who wants to stay has to buy one coffee an hour. New rule.”
A camera somewhere in the room softly wheezed twice.
“Excuse me?” Greg said. “No photography on the premises today.”
“Sorry.”
“You need to take the camera off and leave it on the table if you want to stay,” Greg ordered. He watched until the man sullenly unlooped the camera from his neck.
“You’re good,” Raleigh said.
“You want anything?”
“A latte, maybe?”
“Coming up. Do you want a peanut butter cookie? On the house. They sent us too many.”
“Sweet.”
“Literally,” Greg said. With tongs, he put a cookie onto a small plate for Raleigh. He surveyed the mostly silent, mostly still crowd before turning his back on them to make the coffee.
Eyes in the crowd shifted hungrily to Raleigh as soon as Greg couldn’t see them.
A reporter, a woman in royal blue, leaned her head into a colleague’s whisper. “Raleigh Evans?” she then said. She picked her high-heeled steps carefully as she crossed the room to reach him. “What’s it like to work with Felix Penny? You’ve been a fan of his for a while now, haven’t you? How exciting is that.”
Greg turned and frowned, but he was pinned in place by the need to hold the milk, in its small steel tankard, around the spout that was noisily frothing it.
“I’m just here to meet a friend,” said Raleigh.
“I won’t take any of your time.”
“He said no,” Greg told her.
She didn’t look at Greg. “If you and I could step outside for just two seconds . . . ,” she suggested.
“Not today, thanks,” said Raleigh.
“Well, think about it. I’ll be right over here. I’ve been really looking forward to getting to talk with you.” She turned to Greg. “Could I get one of those peanut butter cookies, too? They sound so good.” She left a five on the counter and stalked back to her team, turning herself off as she walked.
Standing at the counter, Raleigh broke his cookie along a chord, broke a tip off the broken-off segment, and popped the tip into his mouth.
Outside, something creaked, and the café fell silent. The hush came on so quickly and was so absolute that one of the regulars, who had been lost in his book, looked up. Everyone in the café listened as one panel of the basement’s metal door fell to, with a clank. Then, more softly, the other panel was also lowered into place. The arm of a lock rattled as it was threaded through the eyes of the door’s handles.
Undisguisedly everyone watched the entrance.
“The Ecuadoran was under a whole dogpile of Brazilians,” Leif said, when he appeared. He was hugging a dark plastic sack of coffee beans. He was wearing only a T-shirt and jeans, despite the cold, and his face was nearly as pale as the triangle of sky visible through the door behind him.
“Hey, it’s Raleigh,” Leif called out, when he saw him, and to Raleigh it almost felt for a moment like being greeted from the stage at a concert. A new interest in Raleigh rippled across the room.
In his excitement Leif coughed, gutturally, angrily, for almost a full minute.
“What are you doing here, man?” Raleigh asked, when the cough died down.
“Working.”
“Why?” Raleigh asked, laughing at the assholishness of his own question.
Leif ducked under the counter with the sack of coffee and surfaced again behind it. “I don’t know. I wanted to still have a life.”
“You could have called me,” Raleigh said. He came up to the counter so they wouldn’t be too much overheard. “There’s supposed to be a new ramp down near the canal I want to check out.”
“I can write poems here sometimes, when it’s slow.”
“Are you writing one? Should I leave you alone?”
“No. It turns out it’s not slow today. Greg is making them order all these coffees.”
Greg, at that moment presenting Raleigh with his latte, let his head drop as if under the burden of the reproach.
“How’s Elspeth?” Leif asked.
“We broke up.”
“When?”
“Just now.”
“Maybe you didn’t really break up.”
“No, we broke up,” Raleigh insisted.
Raleigh glanced at Greg and saw that Greg had buckled his lips in a sympathetic grimace.
“It’s okay,” Raleigh told Greg.
There was a sink at the back of the baristas’ work space, with a little dishwasher beside it, and Leif began rinsing cups and saucers that were stacked in the sink and loading them quietly into the dishwasher. “I should have gone to see her this morning,” Leif said.
“Did you and Matthew break up?” Raleigh asked.
“No,” Leif replied. He stopped rinsing for a moment but left the water running. “No no no no no.”
“It’s all right,” Raleigh reassured him.
Leif resumed rinsing. “It’s not all right.”
“It is,” Raleigh said. He watched Leif’s eyes, but Leif wasn’t crying. The counter was between them, and Raleigh didn’t want to do anything that the television people wouldn’t be able to resist photographing.
“We’re torturing them, aren’t we,” Leif said of the television crews.
“We’re talking about his tattoo,” Raleigh announced, in a loud voice.
Leif shook his head and coughed again.
“They’re so into your tattoo,” Raleigh commented.
“It’s a nice tattoo,” Leif said, with pretend pretend-modesty. He added, in a voice whose volume briefly matched that of Raleigh’s announcement, “It illustrates an Andrew Marvell poem.”
There was murmuring.
“I’m actually writing a poem about it,” Leif continued, more quietly. “About Marvell’s trees. You know how there weren’t any trees at Occupy?”
“There were trees.”
“I’m trying to tell you about my poem.”
“I know, but there were trees at Occupy. Remember that tree that the Media Working Group tied a corner of their tent to, and the cops made them untie it? Before the cops gave up on tents?”
“That doesn’t count. That wasn’t a real tree.”
“Okay,” said Raleigh, who knew about himself that he was capable of being a dick sometimes about what was a fact and what wasn’t.
“I’m serious. That wasn’t a real tree.”
“It wasn’t an artificial tree.”
“They probably had to build a special container for its roots or something. It was like an office tree that happened to be outside.”
“Okay. If you want.”
“Just let me have this.”
“I said okay,” Raleigh repeated.
“Instead of trees there was this.” Leif thumbed a circle in the air.
“‘This’ what?”
“The people watching. The police, the journalists, bystanders. A paradise is a garden, and there have to be trees. ‘This yet green, yet growing ark.’”
“You think Occupy needed the police?” Raleigh asked. “You think we wanted the police?”
“Don’t get hung up on the police, per se. There aren’t borders anywhere anymore, is what I’m saying. ‘This’ is how we make borders now—with the way people are looking. With the direction they’re looking, and with the looking itself.”
Raleigh wondered why and how it was that Leif always managed to put himself in the wrong with every group that he was part of and yet remain liked by it. It was his version of negative capability, maybe. Raleigh used to wonder if he should be writing down what Leif was saying when he talked like this, so that there would be a record when one day Leif became famous. Now Leif was famous, and if Leif were to speak up just a little, the world was ready not only to record but also to transmit everything he said. In the end it wasn’t as a poet, though, that he had become famous.
“I thought the reason you liked that poem was because it was about being alone,” Raleigh said.
“There have to be trees if you want to be alone. There has to be something alive that is protecting you but isn’t watching you.”
“So are we in ‘paradise’ now? If paradise is a ring of ‘trees’?” Raleigh asked, looking back at the journalists.
“No,” Leif said, annoyed that he wasn’t being understood. “We weren’t in paradise then, either.”
Leif didn’t want to leave, so he and Raleigh kept talking where they stood, leaning toward each other across the counter. Greg patrolled the café, retrieving an empty coffee cup here, wiping down a tabletop there.
Their talk was interrupted every so often by Leif’s cough, which his night in jail seemed to have brought back. He was having trouble sleeping. Maybe it was the steroid they had put him back on. He wondered if it was making him a little manic. He kept coming up with ideas for poems, faster than he could come up with the words for them. But maybe he was just trying not to think about what he had done to his friends.
One idea, for example, was that all of Marvell’s poems were really a single poem. There was only one garden, protected by only one wall of trees. There was only one beloved, who was either a little girl or a woman who wasn’t quite ready to be in love. Or maybe it was the poet himself who wasn’t quite ready—or who was, if he was honest with himself, a little girl. He would rather stay in the garden, was what he kept finding different ways of saying, because everything outside had been built on a foundation under one corner of which a severed head has been rolled. Everything outside stood upright only because the forces striving on either side to topple it happened to be in matched opposition, “fastening the contignation which they thwart,” as Marvell put it.
Another idea was about a rule the British navy had in the eighteenth century requiring warships to stay in line while fighting. It made maneuvering clumsier than it had to be, but it also made it easier to spot any captain hanging back to save his own neck. Leif thought that today the authorities did the same thing with information. A government employee pretended not to know the contents of State Department cables released by Wikileaks—he stayed in line. Half a dozen newspapers ran articles about a conference call that all of them had had with the same government official, and none of the newspapers named the official—they stayed in line.
His talk seemed to get faster the longer he kept talking. “Maybe you are a little manic,” Raleigh said.
“Just listen. Then there’s confusion. The ostensibly democratic confusion of the internet.” The energy in his voice—the speed and the note of panic in it—was running a current between the two of them. As if instead of Leif’s ring of trees there were for the moment an electric fence. “A true statement can be reliably distinguished from a false one only by someone knowledgeable about the subject matter, and since no one can become knowledgeable about more than two or three fields, everyone who wants to understand the world has to depend on experts. The internet makes it easy for everyone everywhere to say anything, which is too many people to control, but because it’s hard to become an expert, there are only ever a limited number of them, which makes them easier to control. Experts can’t function as experts unless they can speak under their own names. A name is just a shortcut, but without it, you have to become an expert yourself every time you want to know whether someone claiming to be an expert really is. So if the authorities can keep a few experts in line and discredit the rest with witch hunts or personal attacks, information becomes indistinguishable from misinformation. Telling them apart becomes too much work. It doesn’t matter if the secrets get told because almost no one can recognize them.
“Which leads me to my fourth idea, which is that a person who still does tell the truth, when there’s so little point, is probably going to have something wrong with him. Because it’s such a stupid thing to do. He’s going to be damaged somehow. Not an insider, because an insider knows better. And not an outsider, either, because that takes a kind of strength that’s too easy to recognize. No one on the inside would make the mistake of giving an outsider a secret. It’s always going to be someone awkward, not quite realized, not fully assembled. A little broken. Someone easy to ignore, without anyone even making a conscious decision to ignore him. A throwaway person.”
“You should write all this down,” said Raleigh.
“The point is they’re not going to listen to us even if we’re not wrong.”
The room was silent when the murmur of Leif’s talk stopped. Some of the television crew members were still watching Leif and Raleigh, fixedly. Leif should add a theory about how sometimes you couldn’t tell somebody something because they wanted to know it for the wrong reason. Unfortunately, once Leif was convicted, no reporter was ever going to seek him out for his ideas again. It probably wasn’t his ideas that they wanted even now.
“But you got through,” Raleigh said. “And you weren’t supposed to be able to. There has to be something to it.”
“To what?”
“To whatever we’re calling it. The refinement of the perception of feelings.”
Leif seemed not to want to join Raleigh in the acknowledgment.
“You know they’re on our side online?” Raleigh continued. “That’s what Elspeth told me.”
“Are they?” Leif asked. He looked from Raleigh to the television crew members as if it hadn’t occurred to him that any of them might harbor goodwill.
Raleigh wondered, while Leif looked, why Leif thought of himself as broken. Thought of all of them as broken.
“It’s because they know we won’t make it,” Leif said, after having studied the ring of watchers for a little while. “If they’re on our side, it’s because that way there will be more pathos for them to feel when we go down.”
After Raleigh left, it occurred to him that Elspeth would have wanted him to ask whether Leif had spoken with his mother yet and whether he liked his lawyer and how things were with Matthew more specifically. But he wasn’t going back to Elspeth’s. He was just taking the subway home.
There hadn’t been a subway running between Elspeth’s apartment and his when they had started dating. Later, during a yearlong spate of construction, the authorities had rerouted a line so that it did run between them. It turned out that there was an appetite for travel between Elspeth’s establishment neighborhood and Raleigh’s edgy one, and the authorities had recently decided to continue the connection indefinitely. But Raleigh might not ever make the trip again. Unless he came back now and then to see Leif at his café.
He walked along the platform to the position where his staircase would be waiting when he exited at his station.
A train rumbled in—one of the boxy, rattly older trains. The breeze that it forced into the station brushed Raleigh, and then the air grew still. It was the middle of the day on a weekday, and there were plenty of seats. The other passengers looked quiet. People who rode the subway at this hour usually were. The elderly. The unemployed. People who had gotten themselves excused from their jobs for an hour or two in order to respond to death, illness, or some lesser misfortune.
Raleigh wished he had asked Leif what they were going to do, but maybe they had both sensed that the topic hadn’t been safe to talk about.
He shut his eyes. He hadn’t slept that much the night before; he and Julia had tossed and turned. Between stations, rocked by the train, he dropped briefly into sleep. At the next station he opened his eyes and without focusing on anything in particular watched the doors scroll open, stand empty, and scroll shut. He let his eyes close again, and as the train was urged forward by its engines, he fell asleep more deeply.
He dreamt that he was in the emergency room at the end of Elspeth’s block. He had been injured, but the injury had happened in another timeline, and no one could see it yet in this one. It was only just starting to cross over. It was like an exposure on undeveloped film. Greg was at the triage desk, pretending to be a doctor. He was addicted to a drug that he could get at the ER; that was why he was pretending. A trapdoor to the cellar was propped open behind him. The drug was inside, under green shadows. It was just mint tea, Greg said. Did Raleigh want any? But they had only given Raleigh aspirin last time Raleigh protested.
“We weren’t in paradise then,” Greg said.
Raleigh tore himself awake.
He was aware of stiffness in his lips, as if in his dream he had been trying to speak but hadn’t been able to. He rubbed his mouth.
The subway car shuddered and clacked as it continued to carry him. In its yellow light, the triage desk, the figure who must have been Greg, and the trapdoor began to lose their substance.
He had slept through a few stops, but he hadn’t missed the one nearest his apartment. In real life he had never been to that emergency room.
The fear he had felt in his dream, strangely, didn’t go away. At first he couldn’t figure out why. In his dream, the fear had had something to do with a shadow that was still developing.
Suddenly he remembered: he had been charged with a crime. In waking life. He felt himself blush. Whenever he woke up now he was going to have to remember.
When Raleigh opened the door to his apartment, he saw Jeremy sitting at the island table in the kitchen, tapping the keyboard of his laptop with one hand while the other hand played with his beard. His golden young-patriarch’s beard. It took a moment for him to look up and greet Raleigh; he must have been trying to finish a thought. “Where’ve you been?” he asked.
“Out.”
Jeremy’s attention dropped back to whatever he was writing. He was drinking a mug of herbal tea with a pungent, grandmotherly smell.
It was late afternoon, and Raleigh still hadn’t eaten. In the refrigerator there was only the same white pizza box that had been there since Sunday. “This is a week old.”
“Go get something, then,” Jeremy replied.
“Can I have some of this soda?”
“It’s not mine.”
“Where’s Philip?”
“He’s trying to score with a reporter.”
Raleigh took the soda. “That’s so wrong.”
“They’re just people.”
“Who, gays?”
Jeremy sat back from the table. “Reporters. Reporters are just people.”
Raleigh took a swig. “Does that mean you’re talking to them?”
“I’m not not talking to them.”
“Why?” Raleigh asked.
“Because you and your friends are going to be on trial and I imagine you’re going to want to keep the public on your side.”
Raleigh took another swig, a longer one. The soda sloshed and fizzed noisily. “I really appreciate what you’re doing.”
“You’re such an asshole.”
“I’m serious,” Raleigh said. Then he belched, with mildly ironized shamelessness.
“I’m putting up a website for you,” Jeremy said.
“For me or for all of us?”
“All of you.” He twiddled a pencil stub. “I can’t interview you directly, but your lawyers can tell me things sometimes.”
“I’ll ask Felix.”
“He wanted you to go in and see him today.”
“He did?”
“He called this morning.”
Raleigh checked the clock on the stove. “Fuck.”
“And your mother called last night. I told her you were at Elspeth’s.”
“I wasn’t at Elspeth’s.”
“Well, I didn’t know that, man.”
It was probably all right. If Elspeth and his mother had compared notes, one of them would have said something to him this morning, so they must not have.
“I’m thinking we could sell those T-shirts,” Jeremy suggested.
“My T-shirts?”
“Didn’t Elspeth make some?”
“That was actually Julia. You should talk to her about it.”
Jeremy added an item to a to-do list. It was strange to see him taking note of something Raleigh said. Raleigh was pretty sure he had never done it before.
“You could post one of Leif’s poems,” said Raleigh. “He’s working on one right now that’s going to be great. It’s going to synthesize a lot of what’s going on.”
“My idea is the website will be more about advocacy.”
“Well, he’s probably going to want to send it somewhere like n+1, anyway.”
“Does n+1 print poetry?” Jeremy asked.
Jeremy’s phone whirred on the tabletop, like an insect against glass. “Oklahoma,” Jeremy said. He unlocked the phone and handed it to Raleigh.
“Dad, you can call my old number now,” Raleigh said as he walked to the loft’s front windows. “Didn’t Mom tell you?” The windows went down almost to the floor, and you could look down through them at the tops of the heads of pedestrians. At their tonsures.
“Did she?” his father wondered.
“What’s up?”
“Oh, nothing.” He never liked to rush into a conversation.
“Is everything all right?” Raleigh asked.
“You know, I’ve been thinking, as I’ve been watching this . . . I’ve been watching all day.” He preferred to back into his ideas, as cautiously as if he were parallel-parking.
“Thinking what, Dad?”
“Do you think it’s accurate, the way they’re talking about it? They’re talking about it as a privacy issue.”
“I haven’t been watching.”
“Because it occurred to me that it could be secrets, that’s the other way of looking at it. It could be that your group doesn’t want the government to have secrets.”
“The idea of the group was honesty.”
“See? See?” his father said. “But the media make it about themselves. About their concerns.”
“I think the media worry about secrets, too, Dad.”
“If you were to give an interview . . .”
“I don’t think Felix would want me to do that.”
“Well, he’s a lawyer, isn’t he. You know, it’s overwhelming, if you’re watching, and I’ve been watching since yesterday. They show your picture over and over, but we never hear you say anything.”
“I think I should listen to Felix.”
“But if this is bigger than that . . . ,” his father hinted.
A placard near the ceiling listed salads and sandwiches. He had brought Elspeth here once, before they had figured out that they liked her neighborhood better, and she had ordered the barley and arugula.
“You go ahead,” he told the woman behind him in line.
“Oh,” she said. She seemed embarrassed by his offer.
When he tried again to read the placard, he became aware that he was doing so self-consciously. A woman ahead of him in line was eyeing him sideways while playing with the lapels of her boyfriend’s coat. A man in glasses, waiting for his meal, had shifted to get a better view of Raleigh’s face. The reporters in Leif’s café had known who Raleigh was, of course, but because it had been their job to know and because Leif had been their primary interest, Raleigh had been somewhat shielded from the uncanniness of this kind of attention.
It was like moving in a field of static. Was there anything he could get out of it? Maybe the number of the girl he had just let skip his place in line?
A man with curly hair held up a cell phone and took Raleigh’s picture.
“What the fuck,” Raleigh said, with sudden rage. Everyone in this part of the city was supposed to be too cool to be obvious. Everyone in the city was supposed to be too cool.
The man glanced at Raleigh and then back at his phone.
“Seriously, what the fuck,” Raleigh said.
The man pocketed his phone and blinked.
“Dude, you could be a little more gracious,” said the man whose girlfriend had been playing with his lapels.
“Are you talking to me or him?” Raleigh asked.
The man with the girlfriend shook his head and faced forward.
When Raleigh’s turn came, he gave his order in the same public tone of voice in which he had challenged the man who had photographed him.
At a shallow counter where you could eat standing up if you had nowhere to go, he unlocked his phone. Julia at least was an adult. “Should I come over?” he asked when she picked up. Let them wonder.
“Do you want to? Actually, there’s something I need to tell you.”
“Can you just tell me now?”
“Aren’t they listening?”
“Who?” he asked.
“The people who took our phones. The people who have our phones.”
“So it isn’t about us.”
“This thing isn’t,” she answered.
“But another thing is?”
“I haven’t made up my mind.”
“Is it a good thing or a bad thing?” he asked.
“About us? I think it’s bad.”
“You’re so brutal.”
“Not because I mean to be,” she said. The nice thing about cheating was that there were no shoulds, at least between the two doing the cheating. There were only feelings, so everyone had to be lighthearted about them.
He remembered, though, that officially he wasn’t cheating anymore. “I have something to tell you, too,” he said.
“Raleigh?” said the counter guy. Raleigh’s sandwich was ready. He found that as long as he stayed on the phone, he didn’t care that much about the staring at him.
On Julia’s block, a couple of buildings in from the corner, there was a ledge that had caught Raleigh’s eye—a lip of concrete around a flight of stairs down to a basement dry cleaner’s. From the sidewalk to the ledge was a little high, but high in an interesting way, as Leif liked to say. Of course, the drop on the inside of the lip was even steeper.
It was hard to find a good spot in the city that hadn’t already been skated to death, and Raleigh was always on the lookout. He hadn’t seen videos of anyone skating this one. You’d have to wait until after business hours, though, if you didn’t want to deal with people from the dry cleaner’s yelling. He didn’t use to worry about that. He used to carry his board with him more, too.
That was how it happened: gradually and then all at once.
He rang Julia’s buzzer. He looked through the glass of her front door at the green carpet accordioned over the treads and risers of the stairs and at the squat and dowdy newel, like the rook in an old chess set. It would only be poetic justice if Julia broke up with him now that he had broken up with Elspeth. She owed him at least a mercy fuck if she did, though.
As she came downstairs, his first sight was of her feet, in socks, and he suddenly remembered the way she had given herself to him the night before, and he wanted her again. It was a class thing, maybe. People of her class, when they fucked, fucked absolutely.
He was so stupid about her.
“Did you grow up with horses?” he asked, when she opened the door.
“In the city?” she asked. “I mean, I know how to ride.”
“Yeah, that’s what I mean.”
“But that’s like knowing how to swim,” she protested.
“No it’s not.”
Even while walking up a flight of stairs she seemed to be thinking about her posture.
“So what did you want to tell me?” he asked.
“Wait till we get inside. I can put on music.”
“I don’t need music.”
“Don’t we need it in case we’re bugged?”
“I don’t think they can bug us after we’ve been arrested.”
Inside the apartment she stopped beside the door.
“What?” he asked.
“I just wanted to say hello.”
Usually she held him off for a while, but she played these games.
“I do have a few things to tell you,” she said, after a minute.
She took ice cubes and vodka out of her freezer. It always felt as if they were getting away with something. Or as if they were forcing a mechanism that it wouldn’t be possible to force for very much longer.
She poured drinks.
“Are you breaking up with me?” he asked.
“Is there a going out that would need to be broken up?”
“We’re seeing each other.”
“I don’t remember saying that.”
“It’s what we’ve been doing.”
“Oh, facts,” she said dismissively.
They sat in opposite corners of the same sofa. She slipped a foot out of its shoe and stretched it toward him.
“What I wanted to tell you—well, it’s one of the things I wanted to tell you—is that I’m writing about this.”
“About us?”
“Oh, I hadn’t thought about us.” She looked at the ceiling. “You know, if ‘us’ comes into it, I might change ‘us’ a little. I might . . . time-shift ‘us.’”
“Then what are you writing about?”
“All of it,” she answered.
“Does your lawyer know?”
“I’m not writing about it now,” she said. “I’m making a point of knowing about it now, for the sake of writing,” she continued. “Of experiencing as much of it as I can. Does that sound crazy?”
“I broke up with Elspeth this morning,” he volunteered.
“Why?”
“‘Why?’?”
“Yes,” she said. “No.” She retracted her foot.
“I can’t say to her that I love her anymore.” His voice sounded more vulnerable than he had expected it to.
“How sad,” she said with polite pity.
“What was it you wanted to tell me?” he asked.
“I visited Chris.” Her ice cubes had melted into the grooves of her glass, and she shook the glass to swing the cubes around, loop the loop. “He said he’s working for the police or whoever it is.”
“Did he say anything else?” Raleigh asked.
“You knew?” she asked.
“It doesn’t surprise me.”
“In other words, you didn’t know. You shouldn’t pretend to know if you don’t know.”
“I wasn’t pretending anything.”
“Are you mad about something?” she asked. “I said it was sad,” she continued, going back to the subject of Elspeth. “My Wellbutrin seems to be getting in the way of this vodka. Do you want a refill?”
The freezer door thunked. “Did you see Leif’s lawyer on TV?” she called to him. “He gave—I guess it was a press conference. It’s so stupid that we can’t go on the internet. But they might still be recycling it on TV, if you want me to try to find it.”
“What did he say?”
“It was very sweet, really. He thinks there’s a right to play. He was just maybe a little too optimistic, for a lawyer.”
“To play?”
“The way children do. As part of our common human inheritance.”
“Oh no.”
“A right to learn about the world by not taking it seriously. What? I think it’s really sweet.”
“Diana found him, didn’t she. He’s an Occupy guy.”
“He’s blond, and he has these cheekbones. As if he spends most of his day talking to elves or something. Although he’s not talking to any now. Whenever they run the clip on TV, they cut to the DA saying in a deep voice that there’s no right to play with the safety and privacy of others.”
“Fuck.”
“Oh, it’s not that bad. He says it’s because of Occupy. The elf says. Even just six months ago we might not have been able to see that we have a right to play. We’re living at a historical advent.”
“Is Diana a lesbian?” Raleigh asked.
“Diana?”
“Jeremy said something about it as if everybody knew.”
“She seems so nice,” Julia commented.
“She’s great.”
“Are you afraid she’s making a move on Elspeth?”
“No. Jesus.”
“You could have feelings about it,” said Julia.
“That’s not why I asked.”
“Maybe you have feelings, though.”
“I don’t have feelings.”
Maybe he and Julia were beginning to drift apart. Like boats that by virtue of being just a few feet away from each other are subject to slightly different currents and breezes. He reminded himself that even if he was admitting to himself that he was still in love with Elspeth, he might still want to spend the night with Julia. He might for that reason want to spend it with her all the more.
“Your friend Jeremy called,” Julia said. “The Committee to Save the Telepathy Four wants to sell my T-shirts.”
“Is that what he’s calling it?”
“It sounds very superhero, doesn’t it.”
“We were a working group, not a committee,” Raleigh objected.
“That moment may have passed.”
“It’s getting colder now, but Occupy will come back.”
“Colder?” She was puzzled. “Oh, you mean colder for people who want to sleep outside.”
“It’s going to come back in the spring,” he insisted.
The law school was in a white high-rise. Raleigh expected there to be a rampart-like desk in the lobby where he would have to present his driver’s license, but there were only students, streaming across an empty, speckled-marble floor, untalkative perhaps because it was morning.
The absence of a desk didn’t put Raleigh at ease. The authority that would have belonged to it devolved to the students, who weren’t paying any attention to him. They were dressed like students anywhere; they weren’t wearing suits, as Raleigh realized he had more than half expected them to. They were only a little younger than he was. Probably they weren’t any smarter, but in a few years they would be making serious money, from positions inside the machine. He was inside a machine, too, when he went to his job, but he tried also to be outside it. Tried a little too hard, maybe.
In the elevator, which his fellow passengers rode in silence, Raleigh wondered why Matthew had chosen graduate school in English literature instead of law. It was probably the sort of mistake that someone gay was more likely to make—pursuing the aura left behind by power instead of power itself.
He himself didn’t envy the law students, he was pretty sure. He was part of a cause, and none of them was ever likely to be. At the courthouse, the day before yesterday, Felix had said he was excited about the case. It raised important First Amendment issues.
The carpeting on the fourteenth floor muffled the chime of the departing elevator. Along a corridor, tall oak doors, flanked by columnar panes of frosted green glass, marked off each office. In the tech support department where Raleigh worked, no one had a private or even a designated work space anymore—you checked out a desk for the day only—but disruption didn’t seem to have stripped any perquisites from law professors yet. On a bench, a few students were reading, pens in hand, while they waited. One looked up at Raleigh and grimaced not because she recognized him but because she didn’t.
When he had stopped in at his job to explain the restrictions the judge had imposed, a co-worker had been sitting at the desk where Raleigh usually sat, which had a direct sight line to a window. By next week he would have lost dibs on it.
Taped to the lawyer’s door was his most recent op-ed. The column of text was punctuated by a small black-and-white square photo of the lawyer’s distinctive curly hair and heavy-frame glasses.
“It’s open,” Raleigh heard Felix call, from deeper inside the office than Raleigh had guessed that it extended.
The distinctive curls and glasses rose to greet him. Famous people had to continue to be who they were. The constraint was one reason they were so widely trusted and liked.
Raleigh’s eye picked out a dozen identical bright spines on a bookshelf—copies of Felix’s book. Nearby, in twos and threes, were the Italian, French, and German editions. On a credenza sat a boxy plexiglas-and-aluminum apparatus, which Raleigh recognized as a device for digitizing ink-on-paper books. It didn’t look as if it had ever been used, but maybe you wouldn’t be able to tell.
“Sorry I didn’t get your message in time yesterday,” Raleigh said.
Felix waved off the apology.
“Yesterday morning I ported my old number to a new phone, and I think maybe I thought—”
“Do I have that number?” the law professor interrupted. He looked into his phone. “I have a number for Jeremy and a number for your mother and a number for someone named Elspeth.”
“I’m probably not going to be at Elspeth’s much anymore.”
Felix nodded, deleting her number.
“We’re maybe not a couple anymore,” Raleigh explained.
“A trial can put a lot of stress on a relationship,” Felix said. He paused in case Raleigh was going to say more. “Listen, thanks for coming in. I wanted to talk with you a little about where my thinking is on the case and where I see us going with it.”
The lawyer got up again to close and lock the door. They were protected by attorney-client privilege now, Raleigh suspected. He needed to pee, but he had just got there.
“The law that you’re accused of breaking covers access to computers,” the lawyer continued, as he returned to his desk, “and I’d like to argue that that’s what this case is about. There’s a lot of talk right now about what you and your friends may have thought you were doing, but in this particular case I think your thoughts matter much less to the law than what you actually were doing. Your thoughts would really only be relevant if we were going to try to prove your motives—which, by the way, I see as an intention to carry out a kind of protest, and I think we should accept and even embrace the link that social media and the press have been making between your group and the Occupy movement more generally.”
Felix had already taken a kind of left turn in what he was saying, which Raleigh hadn’t quite followed, but Felix would probably come back to the main road before long, and Raleigh would be able to catch up then. He shouldn’t slow Felix down with his not understanding any more than he should slow him down with his having to pee or with his no longer having the same girlfriend.
“Your state of mind would really only be a useful defense if we were going to argue that you were influenced. Influence has crossed my mind. I do worry about it. I’d probably worry more if you were to, say, insist on holding on to a particular construction of what you were doing. Because that would be a sign, wouldn’t it? If you were so attached to an unusual construction that had been put on things that you were willing to compromise your defense.”
“An unusual construction,” Raleigh murmured, as if he understood.
“Am I missing something? Did you give your friend money, for instance?”
“Who? Elspeth?”
“Leif Saunderson. Did he take part of your paycheck every two weeks, did you pay his rent for him, anything like that.”
“Leif would never ask for money.”
“Because he doesn’t need it? Because he’s above money?”
“He has a job.”
“Did he ever ask you not to communicate with a friend or a family member?”
“No,” said Raleigh.
“Yeah, see, it’s something to think about, but I don’t think there’s anything there. And so we can just set your friends to one side, as far as I’m concerned, and say, ‘This is a story about the internet and whether you can make a protest on the internet.’ And the person at the center of the story, if we tell it this way, is you, which has some risks but gives us a little more control. You were the one with the computer skills to do what you did.”
It would be almost rude at this point to say that he had to pee, because it would suggest that he hadn’t been giving Felix his full attention. “But we didn’t . . . ,” Raleigh began. He uncrossed his legs, which helped. “I didn’t . . .”
“Go on,” Felix prompted. He was always very amiable, Raleigh noticed, even if he knew you were about to contradict him.
“I didn’t do anything that required any special skills,” said Raleigh.
“It may not have seemed extraordinary to someone with your experience, but . . . Listen. The rules for discovery in this state are tremendously unfair to defendants, so if they were making a log or record on the server side or if they were able to extract one from your laptop, I may not be able to get copies of that until literally the last minute. Until literally the day of. So it might be a surprise how much they know. For some categories of evidence they have to give notice before the trial and with those categories we may have a chance to kick the tires a little in hearings, and sometimes I can get quite a bit that way. And then if there are federal charges, the rules in the federal courts are a little better for discovery. Technically a federal case is a separate legal matter, by the way, and if you’re going to want me to represent you there as well we’re going to need for your parents to sign another letter of understanding, but we can do all that electronically, like last time. . . . Are you all right? You look a little pale.”
“I’m fine,” Raleigh said, and he nodded vaguely but he hoped reassuringly. He didn’t want his personal discomfort to delay Felix or trip him up in any way. He himself was making an effort to think his way past it. “I really didn’t do anything,” he said. He was repeating himself, but it was starting to feel urgent to him to tell Felix the whole story. He had been holding in the details, he realized, waiting for Felix to ask about them, and he couldn’t hold them in any longer; he needed to get them out. “I accessed the login page through a proxy, just to be on the safe side. And then Leif read Bresser’s password. That’s what we called it, reading. Which just means that Leif guessed the password, you could say. That’s all there was to it. There was no brute-force attack. There was no exploit. We didn’t do an SQL injection or anything. It was just—we walked in, through the front door.”
“Your friend knew the password,” said the lawyer.
“No, I mean, well, yes, somehow he knew it,” said Raleigh.
The lawyer’s smile was frozen.
“You don’t believe that,” Raleigh said.
“What’s important is that I believe you,” Felix replied. “What’s important is that I believe that you’re telling me what you think is the truth.”
“Okay.” This wasn’t going so well, Raleigh suddenly felt. Not going so well entirely apart from the problem of his mind filling up with unpeed pee. He looked out the window behind Felix’s head. They were high up, and it seemed to be an empty vista, which was unusual for the city. Almost no grand buildings had gone up in the neighborhoods that the window overlooked, because until recently only people of color had lived there, and it was only in the past few years that money had seen anything to gain in taking their houses from them.
“By the way, it’s too late now, of course, but if you ever pass this way again, next time don’t just give the cop your password when he asks for it,” Felix said. “That was a rampart we probably could have defended for at least a little while. But onward. How did you know Bresser’s company was tracking you?”
“We didn’t, really.”
“Don’t tell the internet,” said the lawyer. “They think this is Hack Counterhack.”
It might turn out to be difficult to be something other than what the internet thought you were. Especially if the internet thought you represented a cause, and if a belief that you did represent one was one of the few reasons you still liked yourself. “I think mostly we just wanted to see how much we could do.” It was safe for him to confess to Felix, wasn’t it? “We were just being assholes, really.”
Felix folded his hands and hid his mouth behind them. “Chris Finn is cooperating with the DA’s team now,” the lawyer said.
“I know,” Raleigh replied.
“You know?”
“Julia told me.”
“You had a recent conversation with Julia?” the lawyer asked.
Raleigh nodded. He was keeping his pee in now only with an effort of will that he had to keep willing, consciously. Straightening his spine helped, the way that uncrossing his legs had helped, but only if he didn’t straighten it too much.
“In this conversation with Julia,” the lawyer asked, “did you tell her anything about the case? Mention anything about what you did or what you think happened?”
“I don’t know. No.”
“Raleigh, it’s not a good idea for you to talk with your co-defendants right now.”
“It isn’t?”
“What if Chris Finn isn’t the only one cooperating?” the lawyer suggested.
Raleigh nodded. He had to consider the possibility that he was a fool, of course. “The whole idea of our group was that we talk about things,” he said, in order to explain himself, and as he said it, he peed himself a little, just a tiny bit, but not enough, he was pretty sure, for any to actually come out.
“That can’t be your idea anymore. Not right now. Not for a little while.”
He was alone, Felix was telling him. Everyone from the working group was alone now, separately. “I saw Leif, too, yesterday,” he confessed.
Felix dipped his head toward his desk, as if Raleigh had aimed a blow at him and he were accepting it.
“Leif would never work for the other side,” Raleigh added.
“When you say something like that, what I understand is that you care about him,” Felix commented.
“I don’t have the gift he has,” Raleigh went on.
“I wouldn’t be able to represent you if you thought you did.”
“I mean, I can’t show it to you, is what I mean,” Raleigh explained. “I can’t make you believe it. Do I need to tell you if I keep seeing my friends?”
“I’ll continue to represent you for as long as it’s possible for me to, ethically speaking,” Felix replied. “Your friend Jeremy seems like a good guy.”
Raleigh was getting tired of Jeremy.
“He’s your roommate, is that right? He has everyone’s ear right now. You know how the internet is. His website is a source people trust right now. We should make use of it.”
“We should?”
“Carefully, but we should make use of it.”
“But I thought you don’t want me to talk to people.”
“I don’t. Don’t talk to him. I think the ideal, as far as this kind of thing goes, is when a site like his is running while a defendant is in jail and really can’t communicate. But you can talk to me, and I can talk to Jeremy. And with a friend like Jeremy, you can talk to him directly so long as you don’t talk about the case.”
With a friend like Jeremy. With a vulture whom they could trust because he shared the professional interest that all vultures have. The professional interest in carcasses.
“Can I tell you what I like about your case, Raleigh?” Felix continued. “It’s that you knew without knowing how you knew, and that’s where everybody is right now. Everybody in America. That’s where the government has put us. I think we’re going to find out how you knew, of course. I think we’re going to find out that because of the participation of Chris Finn or someone else there was something very much like entrapment going on, quite early. But the thing is, you felt like you knew, and I don’t see how anyone could get from that feeling to actually knowing, unless they did what you did. You did what you did in protest. That, after all, is the definition of protest: you broke a small law in order to make a large point.”
“I heard that Leif’s lawyer thinks there’s a right of play.”
“No no no. There’s no right of play. No. But there’s a right to privacy. And there’s a right to be free of government search in the absence of a warrant. Those rights were violated by the government, and whenever we’ve come close to catching the government at this kind of violation, in the past, one of the government’s defenses has always been that if a citizen like you doesn’t know that your privacy is being violated, then how can you be said to be harmed? But in this case you were harmed. The violation caused you unease. It did reach you somehow. I’m not saying it’s a mystery. As I say, I think we’re going to find out that somebody somewhere told somebody something that they shouldn’t have. But we have to expect that that’s what’s always going to happen, if the government is free to track anyone it wants to. It’s the sort of thing that’s bound to happen.”
The restroom was probably on this floor somewhere. Did he have time to ask where? Did he have time not to ask where? But what he said was, “There’s a symmetry,” as if he had all the time in the world.
“Exactly. A symmetry.”
“So should we countersue?”
“Countersue! I love it. No no. We’re probably going to lose, Raleigh.”
There. There, for a second. For almost a whole second he hadn’t been able to stop the unstopping. But if Raleigh didn’t look down then maybe Felix wouldn’t look down, either.
Felix was still talking. “I think there’s a reasonable chance that we’ll be able to avoid more than minimal prison time, more than symbolic prison time, but the letter of the law was against you when you made that move from feeling to knowing. You had to go against the letter of the law, in order to make that move. So be it. What’s great about this case is that we’re going to establish some principles and answer some questions and put some facts on the record, even if we don’t prevail.”
“Is there a restroom on this floor?” Raleigh asked.
“A restroom?” Felix echoed.
Raleigh stood up. “I have to go.”
“To the right, past the elevators,” Felix told him.
“To the right, past the elevators,” Raleigh echoed.
“It’ll be on your left.”
“To the right, on my left.”
The bench of law students looked up as he loped past. It wasn’t safe to run.
His hands struggled flurryingly with his fly, and as he at last splashed into the porcelain, in the harbor of the well-appointed, faculty-grade men’s room, all blue tiles and frosted aqua glass, he found himself speaking aloud, questioningly, between sighs, the words “Prison time?”