Blades of grass trembled as they were struck by the rain, like tines plucked by the rotor of a music box. It was warm, for Thanksgiving. A fecund and unpretty day. Maybe winter was going to be replaced by a rainy season, Matthew thought, and maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Rain seemed to make the world gentle and indirect.
Fosco, the three-year-old yellow lab that belonged to his parents, suddenly lost patience with walking on Matthew’s left and crossed in front of him, surprising him with the purposive force with which she yanked against the leash. She padded obliviously through and across a stream of rainwater purling in the gutter and clambered up into the lawn that they happened to be walking beside. There she snorted three times, burying her snout deep in the wet grass with each whiff before lowering her hips and affixing the seal of her satisfaction.
As Matthew waited, drops of rainwater wavered and associated on the brim of his cap. In case she was about to answer one call of nature with another, he touched the folded plume of plastic bag in his back pocket, as if he were doing so absentmindedly, the plastic constituting the flag of his good intentions as a dog walker in the neighborhood.
He had left Leif asleep, unfolded in the bed that he himself had used to sleep in as a child. The room itself wasn’t Matthew’s anymore. Years ago he had prised out the thumbtacks that had held up his movie posters and his mother had repainted. A framed print of a peach-and-blue-colored lighthouse now hung above the spot where his desk had been. The desk had moved into what had once been his brother’s bedroom, next door, which was now his mother’s office. His brother’s bedroom had been repurposed, and his had been “staged,” like the homes of his mother’s clients if they moved before she was able to find a purchaser—lightened of its memories, furnished with an almost impersonal representation of habitability. The redecorating was a way for his mother to pretend to herself that she didn’t mind that her sons had left and a way for her to make a show of convincing them that she didn’t mind.
The bed that had used to be his brother’s had gone to the attic, which had been the playroom when he and his brother were little, and hadn’t changed, except for a dormer window, which had never shut right and according to their mother had been letting in bats. It had had to be replaced.
“Would Leif like to sleep in the attic?” his mother had asked, the night before, in the car, when she and Matthew’s father had picked Leif and him up at the train station.
“No, he can have my bed,” Matthew had replied, “and I’ll set up the air bed on the floor. You still have the air bed, don’t you?”
He had been aware of his father listening to the conversation from the driver’s seat; he had been aware of Leif, beside him, listening just as carefully. Neither Matthew nor his brother had ever brought anyone home before. No one in the family doubted that Brian would bring a girlfriend home one day, but at the moment domesticity wasn’t Brian’s style, and for once it was up to Matthew, the younger one, to be the pioneer. Matthew didn’t want Leif to know how nervous he was about it—about bringing into his parents’ house a living, breathing sign that their younger son fucked and liked fucking and liked for the partner of his fucking to be another man. He tried to tell himself that it probably wasn’t that different for straight people, the first time they brought someone to their parents’ house, except he knew that when the time came Brian wouldn’t give it a second thought.
For an hour or two after saying good night, he and Leif had tried to share the twin bed. The darkness mantling the room had been familiar. As a teenager, Matthew had jacked off in it, in careful silence, so many times that the possibility of having sex in it now felt, unexpectedly, like a continuation rather than a departure. But Leif had been too shy to follow through, and when both of them were in the bed it had been impossible even to turn over without lurching and nearly knocking each other out of it. With two bodies so close under one blanket it had soon become uncomfortably warm. “You’re like a little furnace,” Leif had reproached him. In the end Matthew had given up on both sex and co-sleep, got into the air bed alone, and turned away, cradling his genitals in his fist for a while, under the covers, for consolation.
Leif’s cough had kept him awake until it didn’t, and then Matthew had slept like the dead, for the first time in a long time.
In the morning, he had been woken by Fosco snuffling repeatedly into the crack at the foot of the closed door. To give Leif more time to sleep, he had dressed and taken the dog out. Neither of his parents had emerged yet.
And so here he and Fosco were, with the street to themselves, gray rain pittering dispersedly around them. Even when it wasn’t raining, children no longer played outdoors in the neighborhood. Maybe video games kept them inside; maybe the families on the street had simply grown older. The lawns were more fussily kept than Matthew remembered—the yews more vigilantly pruned, the velvety shingles of mulch more consistently confined within the borders of flower beds.
The visit was going pretty well so far, in his estimation. Last night, in his parents’ kitchen, he and Leif had eaten bowls of cereal, for a snack, his mother checking the level inside the cereal box as she put it back in the pantry, to be sure that there was still enough left over for the morning. She had remarked that she and her husband understood that Leif worked in a coffee shop, and Leif had let go of his spoon and replied that he did, it was true, and Matthew’s father had asked what kind of coffee, and Leif had listed as many national origins of coffee served in his café as he could remember, Matthew’s mother and father nodding with cautious, stilted encouragement. “He’s really a poet,” Matthew had blurted out, and Leif had rolled his eyes, but Matthew’s father had taken the cue and had stolidly asked for names of the journals where Leif’s poems had appeared.
“Your parents must be so proud,” Matthew’s mother had said. Matthew had watched Leif fail to answer, not sure how to respond, evidently not wanting to explain so soon after meeting Matthew’s parents that he wasn’t in touch with his father.
Matthew had then watched his parents interpret Leif’s silence as modesty, which in a way it was.
Leif’s charm, Matthew thought, was working. Or maybe it was only the opportunity that the visit gave his parents to see how Matthew himself looked at Leif. Did they appreciate Leif’s beauty? Were they able to? Matthew knew he had to be patient; they might still be suspicious of the beauty as a kind of superior force. They might still be suspicious of Leif himself. Leif tried at one point to thank them. “I’m so grateful—,” he had begun, awkwardly.
“We know it’s the right thing to do,” Matthew’s mother had said, cutting him short.
Matthew sensed, however, that his father would have liked to hear Leif’s thanks in full.
It was all right. It was going to be all right.
Matthew’s phone rang, and he fished it out of his pocket with the hand not holding the leash. “I’m walking the dog,” he told Elspeth. “Leif’s still inside asleep.”
“A dog! What kind?”
“A yellow lab. Dumb and selfish and greedy.”
“Don’t say that about your dog.”
“She’s not mine,” he said. “She’s the empty-nest dog.” Heedless of the discussion, Fosco froze and then lowered her head, having sighted a rabbit taking shelter in the dark skirts of a cypress. “I’ll tell Leif to call you back when he wakes up.”
“No, I need to talk to you,” she said. “Michael Gauden charged Diana’s credit card.”
“Diana’s?”
“She gave it to him that first day. She doesn’t know I’m calling. I was there when she noticed it on her bill, and she said she guessed it would be her contribution, is the only reason I know about it. I know your parents are already being so generous.”
“How much was it?”
“About twenty-eight hundred dollars.”
For a couple of days’ work. The side of town where Matthew’s parents lived was built on a hill, up which he and Fosco were gradually proceeding, a long, slow hill that, as was always explained to new arrivals in town, served as an objective correlative of the relative financial net worth of the households along it. Blocks ahead, at the top, were mansions with a view of the distant city. Matthew’s parents lived more than halfway down, where the houses were still faced with brick and perfectly respectable but not grand.
“Let me talk to my parents,” Matthew said. “Thank you for telling me.”
Was he going to ruin them?
“You don’t think Diana will be offended, do you?” Elspeth worried. “If she’s thinking of it as her gift to him and if we take it away from her? She only knows Leif through Occupy, but I think she really likes him.”
“Let me make sure my parents can do it first.”
“Okay, I’m sorry.”
“Thank you for telling me,” he said again, as if he were confident. He put on the manner not in order to fool her—this was Elspeth—but to save himself and his parents face and to signal that the awkwardness of not knowing whether they could bear the burden was not for Elspeth to worry about.
He pocketed the phone. How stupid he had been to go to grad school. He was thirty-one, and he could do nothing to take care of his lover but hope that his parents would take care of him.
A hollow-eyed Leif was sitting up on the edge of the bed, still in his T-shirt and boxers.
“What’s going on?” Matthew asked.
“I deserve it.”
“You don’t deserve anything,” Matthew said. Leif had begun to have these spells, and it was hard to know what to say during them.
“I led my friends into danger,” Leif said.
“People make their own decisions.”
“I’m not going to be able to pay your parents back. I’m a waiter, and my mother cleans the houses of summer people.”
“They’re not expecting you to pay them back.”
“I should just get a public defender.”
“Like Chris?” Matthew asked.
Leif returned to staring at the middle distance. “What if I stop wanting to go out with you?” he asked.
Matthew held his breath. They had had this conversation a few times now, too. “Do you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t do this,” Matthew said.
“I’m not a loyal person. I’m not a one-dog man or whatever. There have been a lot of dogs. A history of short-term dogs.”
“I have to give Fosco her meds,” Matthew remembered. “Do you want to come downstairs and have breakfast?”
“Shouldn’t I shower?”
“Before breakfast? It’s just my parents.”
“I’ll wash my face.”
Matthew waited on the bed beside the snug dimple that Leif’s buttocks had left in the comforter. He listened to the white shivering of the tap water in the next room as it ran over Leif’s face and hands. He wondered what his parents thought of his having chosen a boyfriend so much younger. He wondered what they thought of his inability to provide any more than just barely enough for himself, let alone for Leif. Whether they thought these facts said anything about him.
In the kitchen, his mother was wearing her morning kimono. She offered to make eggs so he and Leif wouldn’t have to eat cereal twice in a row.
“But that’s our fault,” Leif said.
“I really don’t mind. Do you like eggs?”
“I need to give Fosco her meds,” Matthew said.
“Oh, would you?” said his mother. “She takes point-one milliliters of the bromide. You squirt it in at the back of her throat.”
“I remember.”
“And the other is a pill that goes in a little dab of peanut butter. I usually put it on one of the tea saucers. A whole pill.”
“A whole pill?”
“We had to go up. She started seeing things.” She explained to Leif: “That’s her symptom.”
“Her symptom?” Leif asked.
“Her prodrome,” Matthew said. “It’s the sign that a seizure is coming on.”
“What does she see?” Leif asked.
“Things that aren’t there,” Matthew’s mother replied. “Flies, we think, from the way she looks around, but of course she can’t tell us.”
“Maybe I should take some of these pills,” said Leif.
Matthew’s mother didn’t acknowledge the joke. “It caused so much suspicion, when I asked to raise the dose,” she said. “It’s so regulated now. It’s all tracked.”
“That’s so paranoid,” Matthew said.
“Prescription drug abuse is a big thing in Vermont now, too,” said Leif.
“Is it?” Matthew’s mother asked. “I remember there was a vogue for barbiturates back when I was a girl. Mother warned us not to ever let a doctor prescribe them to us. But I have to say, they’re wonderful for Fosco. She hasn’t had a seizure in almost a year.” She cut a thick chunk of butter into a sauté pan. It was an old stove, and when she lit one of the burners, she used a wooden match from a box. Very gradually the butter swiveled in the pan as its foot began to melt. “Do you like to watch the news?” she asked.
“Not in the morning, Mom,” said Matthew.
“Not in the morning. What a nice policy. Then do you want me to buy you a paper?”
“I can still go online. It’s only Leif who can’t go online.”
“Oh, I see,” she said.
“I read the headlines to him,” Matthew said.
“But that’s a good idea, buying a paper,” said Leif.
“We can buy one from Sam here on the corner. Let me call and ask him to keep one for us. He’s a sweetheart.”
“Okay,” agreed Leif.
“Let me just do that right now,” Matthew’s mother said, rinsing and drying her hands before she picked up the telephone. “His real name is Osama, but he doesn’t go by that anymore.”
Matthew thumbed open Fosco’s snout with one hand and depressed the syringe’s plunger with the other. “Say aah.” Fosco choked on the fluid, shook her head, and sneezed.
“Poor thing,” said Matthew’s mother. “Every morning. But she likes the peanut butter.”
While Matthew prepared the day’s saucer of medicated peanut butter, his mother called the corner convenience store, which was attached to a gas station, and asked in a musical voice for a newspaper to be put aside for her.
She was cracking eggs into a Pyrex by the time Matthew’s father came downstairs. “How did you sleep, dear?” she asked.
“Great,” he answered. He wasn’t going to say otherwise in front of someone he didn’t yet know very well.
“I’m making eggs. Is that all right?”
“Is there a vegetable?”
“A vegetable! How about toast?”
“Toast, then. We’re not turning this on?”
“I think it’s nice not having it on, for a change,” said Matthew’s mother.
“Don’t not turn it on for us,” said Leif.
“Whatever you want, Dad,” said Matthew.
“It’ll be all nonsense today, anyway,” his father replied. He poured himself a coffee. As an afterthought, he added, “I mean, because of the holiday.”
“Do you usually watch the parade?” Leif asked.
“Would you like to see it?” Matthew’s mother asked.
“No, I just wondered if it was a tradition.”
“Would you say it’s a tradition with us, Jack?”
“No. Did I hear you ask Sam to save us a paper?”
“I did ask him to.”
“Do I have time to go get it?”
“Well, the eggs will be ready in a minute.”
He sank into his chair. “Oh, all right.”
“Can I do anything?” Leif offered.
Matthew’s mother put Leif in charge of making the toast, and she and Matthew’s father were soon lecturing him about the toaster’s idiosyncrasies. Matthew, for his part, poured glasses of water and set the table.
“Is there room for you there?” Matthew’s father asked Leif, when at last they were ready to sit down.
They had to move the kitchen table farther away from the wall before there was enough room for Leif to get into the seat on the fourth side.
“Matthew, when you say that you go online,” his mother asked, “does that mean you have your laptop back?”
“My downstairs neighbor is letting me borrow her old one.”
“Is she the one with the rabbit? But wasn’t your thesis on the laptop they took?”
“I had emailed my adviser the chapters I’d finished, and he emailed them back to me.”
“So you haven’t lost anything. How lucky.”
“The eggs are very good, Mom.” His father and Leif also complimented her on them.
“Thank you, dear.”
In fact, he had lost a dozen pages of chapter three, as well as his outline for the dissertation as a whole. The lost pages had been about the stanzas of Samuel Daniel’s Civil Wars that Coleridge disliked, the ones that interrupt the old plainsong chronicle with of all things a theory of history. A theory about the alteration that printing and gunpowder made in the fifteenth century to the pattern of life. Tongues became able to speak unlicensed; cowards became able to kill from afar. Matthew had hinted in the lost pages that what the internet and drone warfare today further, printing and gunpowder had begun. It was maybe because Daniel was aware that literature had become subject to modernity—had become prey to the marketplace, among other things—that he was so defensive and depressive, in some of his shorter poems, about the chance that a new work of true literature would be recognized and survive. Daniel had been between two worlds. He had looked back a little more than he had looked forward.
It occurred to Matthew that he should write that down, the part about Daniel as a depressive, because he hadn’t thought of it quite that way before. There was a pad on the refrigerator door for grocery lists, and there would be ballpoint pens in the drawer next to the refrigerator, the drawer where his father kept batteries and his mother stuffed spare plastic bags for Fosco’s walks. He had withdrawn his attention when his mind turned to his dissertation, but now that he was coming back to himself—now that, having made his note, he folded it and slipped it into his wallet—he noticed that his parents and Leif were chatting amiably. Everyone was making an effort, of course, but it seemed as if maybe his parents and Leif actually did like each other.
The landline rang just as Matthew’s father was explaining that in the late fall, he put the snowblower into the same corner of the garage where in the summer he kept the lawn mower.
“If every year I kept track of the date I make the swap, you could track climate change,” his father said, hurried into his punchline by the ringing.
“I’ll get it,” Matthew volunteered, rising before his father could. He had expected a reprieve from reporters. But maybe it was his brother?
“I’m sorry,” Leif said. He, too, thought it was a reporter.
“What are you apologizing for?” said Matthew’s mother, lightly gripping and shaking Leif’s forearm, which slightly startled Leif.
“Fisher residence,” Matthew said into the phone.
“This is Elaine Saunderson,” said a woman’s thin voice. “I hope it’s all right to call now. My son gave me this number, and I’m going to be stepping out in a minute.”
“Oh, hi, Mrs. Saunderson. This is Matthew.”
“Oh, I thought you were your father. Good to meet you! Or, talk to you, I guess. I’ve heard so much about you.”
“I’ve heard so much about you,” he replied, which wasn’t quite true.
“You’ve really been there for Leif,” she said abruptly.
“It’s a crazy time.”
“I’ll say,” she agreed. “And your parents are so kind. Is your mother there? I want to thank your mother.”
“Do you want to take this in Jack’s study?” his mother was asking Leif.
“She’d like to talk to you, Mom,” Matthew told his mother.
“To me?” His mother rose, with one hand gathering her kimono together at the neck and the other accepting the receiver. “This is Sharon Fisher,” she said, in the professional manner that she spoke in when handling real estate. Her manner with peers.
Stock-still, she listened to Leif’s mother.
“Well, we’re so glad to have him here with us,” she burst out, a moment later, back in her family manner again.
They don’t tell you when you come out as gay, Matthew thought to himself, that someday you’ll be riveted by even the most banal interaction between your in-laws and your own parents.
“We’re happy that we’re able to, and I will let you know, I promise,” Matthew’s mother said. She put a hand over the mouthpiece. “There’s a phone in Jack’s office,” she told Leif. “At the top of the stairs on the right. You’ll have a little more privacy there.”
Matthew and his parents waited in silence as Leif mounted the stairs. When they heard him say the words “Hi, Mom,” half muted by the distance and the plaster shield of the ceiling, Matthew’s mother replaced the receiver.
“She’s very grateful, Jack,” his mother told his father.
His father nodded.
“She said her house isn’t hers or she would do more herself.”
“Whose is it?” his father asked.
“I think she rents,” Matthew said.
“She shouldn’t have felt obliged to tell me that,” his mother said.
His father grunted.
“Is she from Vermont?” his mother asked.
“I think she’s from Virginia, originally,” Matthew answered.
“See, I didn’t think she sounded quite like a New Englander. She seems very nice. Very outgoing. And so is Leif. I think I was afraid he was going to be a little, I don’t know, mysterious.”
“Everyone’s a little mysterious,” Matthew’s father said.
“You know what I mean. But he’s right there when you’re talking to him. He’s very present.” She liked it when people weren’t locked away from her, as her younger son sometimes was.
“I appreciate that you’re helping with the lawyer,” Matthew said.
“You’re welcome, dear,” his mother said.
His mother and father exchanged a look.
“Is it all right?” he asked.
“We’re helping you,” his father said, “because you told us that this is very important to you. But you know, this is going to be a fair amount of money, and your mother and I have been talking about it, and we think it wouldn’t be fair to Brian unless we make an adjustment to what you’ll receive in terms of your share of the value of the house, after we go.”
Matthew felt a flush rising into his face. “That’s okay,” he said.
“I didn’t mean to tell you until later,” his father said. “I wasn’t going to tell you on the holiday.”
“It’s okay. That makes sense.” Matthew listened for Leif, who still seemed to be on the phone. “Well, while we’re on the subject.”
“What?” his father asked.
“Gauden already charged the credit card of one of Leif’s friends, and she’s a graduate student and can’t really afford it.”
“How much?” asked his father.
“Twenty-eight hundred.”
“Your mother and I will take care of that, too, but it’ll be a few weeks before we have the cash.”
“I told them,” his mother said, “that I have someone who can do an appraisal for me in twenty-four hours, but the bank always wants to use their own person.”
“Sharon,” his father admonished her.
“I don’t think there should be any secrets, Jack.”
“The bank?” Matthew wondered aloud.
“A mortgage is just the easiest way to arrange it,” his father said. “That’s all it is. It’s just easier than messing around with the retirement accounts. It’s the same thing, really. Taking it out of X instead of Y. It’s just math.”
“Are you taking out a second mortgage for this?” Matthew asked.
“We paid off our first first mortgage two years ago,” his mother said. “So this is another first mortgage, technically. A second first mortgage.”
“Should you be doing this?”
“Oh, the rates are really good right now, dear. I work with this sort of thing all the time.”
“You can keep track of the numbers, too,” his father said, “if you want to try to pay us back. If you want to do it that way instead of as an adjustment to the estate. If it’ll make you feel better.”
At the sound of Leif’s footfalls on the stairs, Fosco staggered to her feet and waddled toward the door, grinning.
“My mother wishes happy Thanksgiving to all of you,” Leif said.
“And we wish her the same,” Matthew’s mother firmly replied. “How is she going to be celebrating?”
“She’s having dinner with a couple of girlfriends. I mean, friends of hers who are girls. Who are women.”
“I understand,” said Matthew’s mother.
After the great meal, after loading the dishwasher for Matthew’s mother and scrubbing and toweling dry her pots and pans, Leif and Matthew lay down in Matthew’s bedroom for a nap, Matthew falling asleep almost as soon as his head was cradled by the pillow. When he awoke, it felt as if a week had gone by. Sleep at his parents’ house was so much deeper than in the city. He saw that he was alone in the room, which was shadowy, Leif having removed himself and dusk having fallen while his soul had been away. Outside, a soft, blanched glare lay on the lawns and the pavement, resembling in its flatness the glare on snow. He looked at his watch on the bedside table. It would be time to eat now, he saw, if they hadn’t just finished eating an hour and a half ago. Next to his watch, in a V, was a folded sheet of paper, striped with dark lines because it came from the pad for grocery lists on the refrigerator door. He had written a note about Samuel Daniel, he remembered. But what if there wasn’t anything special about Samuel Daniel? What if he was interested in Daniel and touched by Daniel’s devotion to his vocation only because he himself, in choosing to write literary criticism, was making a mistake like Daniel’s—giving his life to a kind of writing that was about to pass out of the world? To a modern equivalent of Daniel’s poeticized, aestheticized history?
He picked up the forked paper, to read over the note, but the handwriting wasn’t his.
“You can read it,” said Leif, appearing at the door.
“I thought it was mine.”
“It’s the devil,” Leif said. “It’s one of his voices.”
“I don’t need to read it.”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter. I can’t use any of these ideas unless I want to sound like I’m writing a ‘cry for help.’”
That made Matthew think that Leif did want him to read it. It was in the form of a letter, though there was no salutation or valediction:
There have always been people like you, whatever you are. And so there have never really been any secrets, not from your kind. And there aren’t any now. It’s no secret, for example, that the world is being poisoned and cooked, and that there’s only a generation or two left before chaos. What’s changed now isn’t changed because of you. It’s changed because of the amount of sideways communication that’s now possible. We’re doing what we can to quarantine you. Do you think it’s an accident that the social media companies are working so hard to hold everyone’s attention? Do you think the government isn’t watching, in case these and other corporations fail to establish—to reestablish, really—sufficient control? It looks, fortunately, as if they’ll be able to capture enough of you. Enough of the souls of enough of you. And by soul I mean voice. The voice will be our handle. Our grip. We can’t any longer prevent everyone from knowing, not because there are more of you than in the past or because you are any smarter or more numerous or better than your kind has ever been, but because it’s become easier for you to tell others. And so what we have to do is draw a new line, not between knowing and not knowing but between knowing and being able to say that you know. That’s the future. That’s what order will consist of—not of keeping people in the dark but of keeping them from talking about the light. The voice is what we will darken, from now on. It’ll be a little awkward, at first, to live this way, but you’ll get used to it.
“It’s just a voice,” Leif said, when he saw that Matthew had finished. “One voice in a poem.”
“What poem?”
“The one I can’t write. The dark poem.”
“Does the devil have a name?”
“It’s not that kind of devil.”
“Come here,” Matthew said, from the bed.
“What?” Leif asked sulkily, without approaching.
Matthew watched him roll the back of his head against the jamb of the doorway.
“Why would even the devil care about enslaving people if the world is going to end in a few years?” Matthew asked.
“You’d have to ask the devil that.”
“Are you all right?”
“What do you mean?” Leif asked.
“I mean, you’re writing about the voice of the devil.”
“What do you think poetry is?”
“No, you’re right,” Matthew agreed.
“If you mean, Is it alarming to sometimes hear these voices talking almost as if they were talking to one personally, then the answer is yes. But do I think these voices are real, no.”
He was standing on only one foot, stepping on it with the other, and to keep his balance flexing his long spine against the jamb.
“I want to show you the attic,” Matthew said.
“I saw the attic.”
“But I want to show it to you.”
In the hallway, he could hear the television going downstairs in the den, where his parents must still be sitting. He opened the closet-like door to the attic and flicked on the Charlie-Brown’s-shirt-yellow light in the alcove where the stairs turned to go up.
It was a finished attic—hardwood floors under an upside-down origami flower of white-painted walls. It was crammed with things his parents hadn’t yet been able to bring themselves to part with: a rocking chair, an ice cream maker, a foosball table, a superseded printer, Brian’s bed, and his and Brian’s board games and childhood books.
“You had an encyclopedia?” Leif asked.
“They still had them then.”
“You are old.”
“We bought it used,” Matthew said, as if that were a mitigation. “At a garage sale the Peloskis had after their twins went to college.”
Leif touched a ceramic kachina wind chime that Matthew had bought one summer when the family took a trip to New Mexico. It had a funny cowlike snout. It gave a resonant and musical little clonk.
“It’s so funny to have you here,” Matthew said.
“It must be. Your gay lover.”
“Can you tell that this is where I grew up?”
“What do you mean?” Leif asked.
“The way you can tell things.”
Heavily, methodically came the thumping footfalls of Fosco as she climbed the narrow staircase to join them.
“Come here,” Matthew said again.
“What?” Leif replied again, but this time he came over to Matthew.
“So you have the devil in you,” Matthew said.
“Evidently I’m not the only one.”
“Take it out.”
“And play foosball with it?”
“Take it out. I want to see it.”
Fosco settled butt-first onto a braided rug and sighed stagily.
“Were you unhappy here?” Leif asked.
“I had to hide,” Matthew said. “It wasn’t that long ago, but it was different then and you had to hide.”
“I hid, too, for a while.”
“For a few weeks,” Matthew kidded him.
“You’re not that much older than me,” Leif said.
“I thought I was.”
Leif unzipped his fly without unbuttoning and with his finger and thumb unlooped his cock and took it out for Matthew. The clapper in his wind chime. A yearning monk in a plump cowl.
“What if it’s all true?” Leif asked.
“It is all true,” Matthew said.
“That’s not what I mean.”
“You shouldn’t be doing this,” Matthew told his father, the next morning, through the kitchen window.
“I’m fine.”
“Stand behind him in case he falls,” Matthew told Leif.
“The only problem with my back is if I lean over,” his father said. He was standing on a flimsy, stackable lawn chair, his arms up and out and slightly wandering. It would have been safer to pull the air conditioner into the house, but the upper sash was jammed, and so Matthew was pushing it out of the window and lowering it toward his father.
“I don’t think he should be on that chair,” said Matthew’s mother, from the next window. “Oh!” she exclaimed.
“I’m not going to fall,” Matthew’s father declared, his arms trembling as he held the machine.
“Let Leif hold it, too,” Matthew ordered.
“Got it,” Leif said. “I’ve got it.”
The lawn chair wobbled as Matthew’s father stepped off.
“Where is that stepladder you bought,” said his mother.
His father had cut his palm, but he insisted nonetheless on taking most of the weight. He and Leif shuffled around the house, through the back door, and down into the basement.
A loaf of bread had to be purchased if there were going to be sandwiches for lunch, so Matthew left Leif reading a book on the glassed-in back porch, which was a little chilly but out of range of the television, and drove to the supermarket in his parents’ sedan.
If you turned, before the roundabout that was the hollow center of the town, onto the street that had both of the town’s funeral homes, there was an unmarked entrance to the grocery store—a dogleg that came in alongside its loading dock. As Matthew took the shortcut, he thought, with satisfaction, that at least as far as this little geographical matter was concerned, he was still a native and an insider.
Inside the supermarket, however, the light was a different color than he remembered, a palatable amber where there had once been an almost clinical jade. The vegetable aisle had been shifted aside to make room for chafing dishes of rice pilaf and three-bean salad and shredded lettuce, in carefully tended mounds. Would there be people to eat all this, the day after Thanksgiving? Matthew walked down the aisle of flours and sugars, down the aisle of soda and pet food. He didn’t recognize the boys working as shelvers now, but they wouldn’t even have been in grade school when he had left. They didn’t have the air of menace that he remembered high school boys as having. Their skin was pale and irritated, like paper that has been heavily erased. A few were working as cashiers, a job that students hadn’t used to be allowed to do.
He chose a line where the boy at the register was a little bit cute. His phone buzzed. “Hey, Matt,” said a man familiarly.
He didn’t recognize the number or the voice. “Hey!” he replied.
“You don’t know who this is, do you?” the man said.
“Of course I do.”
The boy who was the cashier scanned Matthew’s one item and in deference to his phone conversation pronounced the price quietly.
“Hold on, I’m paying,” Matthew said. Maybe it was Philip, a man he’d seen a few times and sometimes thought of.
“You’ll pay, all right. This is Adam.”
“Oh, Adam, of course, hi.” He glanced at the cashier, who pointed at the credit-card reader. Matthew swiped. He always forgot about Adam, but he always liked seeing him. Of course, it was different now.
“What are you buying?” Adam asked.
“Bread.”
The receipt uncoiled and sliced itself clean. The cashier asked in mime whether Matthew wanted the receipt in the bag with the bread or in his hand. There was something a little airy about the boy’s questioning gesture; maybe he had recognized the kind of phone call it was.
“Are you in town?” Adam asked.
“Went home for the holiday.” The sliding doors bumbled open. He didn’t have a free hand, but the car wasn’t far, and he thought he could get away with not buttoning his coat.
“Too bad,” Adam said. Evidently Matthew’s number had come up in rotation.
“Too bad,” Matthew agreed. It wasn’t such a bad world, the one that he had left, the one that the call was beckoning him back into.
“We should have dinner when you get back.”
“I’m sort of involved with somebody,” Matthew admitted.
“Oh, man, again?”
“Again.”
“Seven nights a week?”
“Pretty much.”
“You should have called me when you were between gigs,” Adam said.
“I think I did.”
“What if we got coffee,” Adam suggested.
“You know what coffee is, and so do I.”
“So it’s serious.”
Matthew got into the car, which was still warm.
Adam was a lawyer who was bored with his job at a hedge fund but couldn’t bring himself to quit. They had picked each other up at a party a couple of years before. Adam had been walking out of the host’s bathroom and Matthew had pushed him back into it, but Adam had said he wasn’t that kind of girl and had asked for Matthew’s number. A few times, the dates carefully spaced apart, they had watched movies together at Adam’s downtown apartment on his television, larger than any that a graduate student could afford. A few times, Adam had come uptown to see him. Once, before going out to dinner, Adam had offered him a sweater, claiming that he had bought a medium by mistake but had lost the receipt and couldn’t return it, and only later had it occurred to Matthew that the story had been a way of giving Matthew a gift while sparing his pride.
Matthew still had both the sweater and the little flat cardboard spindle of extra yarn that had come with it, in case the sweater frayed and one knew how to darn it up. It was cranberry heather.
“Is being involved with somebody good for your dissertation?”
“Not really.” Matthew had forgotten that he had told Adam that he was at the dissertation stage.
“Remember when I helped you carry your books home from the library?” Adam continued.
“Oh, that’s right.” As recently as a year and a half ago, it hadn’t been possible to do semester renewals online.
“‘Oh, that’s right.’”
“It was very sweet of you,” Matthew said. It had been sweet, being with Adam, not taking each other seriously. That it hadn’t been meant to last or to contribute to anything but their own pleasure had been a large part of the sweetness.
“So you’ll have coffee with me,” Adam said. “A study break.”
“There’s a lot going on right now.”
“Seven nights a week!”
Matthew laughed. But then a panic ripped through him. “You haven’t heard about what’s going on, have you?”
“Why, what’s going on?”
No, he couldn’t have. Matthew’s name hadn’t been in the news. “Nothing,” Matthew said. “It’s a stupid legal thing.”
“Tell Daddy. Daddy’s a lawyer.”
“It’s not your kind of law.”
“Now I’m curious,” Adam said.
The car had grown cold while Matthew had been sitting in it, and Matthew shivered.
“Are you in trouble, Matt?” Adam asked.
“I better not talk about it.”
“Is it this new boy?”
“No. I shouldn’t talk about it.”
“I won’t ask if you don’t want me to,” Adam said, his voice taking on, suddenly, a blankness.
It was a part of the code of the world where they had met: one accepted limits quickly. And of course the acceptance was at the same time a brotherly weapon. A way of punishing Matthew for failing to be open still to the bond that he and Adam had used to share. A punishment of omission. All right, then, Adam was saying, he would let Matthew be. Knowing that a part of Matthew didn’t want to be let be, that a part of him wanted to be called Matt again, that he wanted to be able to talk about what was happening to him as if, at least while he was talking about it, he wasn’t trapped inside it. He wanted a friend, and he didn’t seem to know how to have one anymore if he and the friend didn’t go to bed together. A defect of character that left him alone. Even if he stayed with Leif and went on to give Leif everything he had and was, he was going to be left, to a certain extent, alone.
“But if you ever do want to tell me . . . ,” Adam suggested.
“Okay, thanks.”
“Or if you decide you need a study break.”
“Yeah, got it.” Maybe this was just how friendship was, once you had an adult sexuality.
Smoked glass hid the walls of the elevator that carried Leif and Matthew to Michael Gauden’s law office, the day after they returned to the city. A red digital number flickered slowly higher.
“It was going to be Revolution through the Perception of Feelings,” Leif said.
“What was?” asked Matthew.
“It wasn’t going to be Refinement.”
“Who changed it?”
“I don’t remember,” Leif said. “I mean, it’s good that we changed it. How stupid would that have been.”
Now that the folie was dying, Matthew almost wished it weren’t. According to Leif, this wasn’t the first time in his life that he had become depressed. He described depression as a little like having a worm inside one’s mind at first so small that one didn’t initially perceive it as a thought with substance of its own but merely as a twist in the substance of other thoughts. The swiveling, corkscrewing motion is what one came to recognize it by.
Matthew had never experienced anything like that. A part of him wondered if Leif was exaggerating.
“You don’t have to agree with me,” Leif said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
They stepped off the elevator into a long corridor, glassed-in at the ends, full of nothing but beautifully temperate air. Thousands of such corridors floated now above the city, like vacant space stations. They had been rendered architecturally superfluous—emptied of guards and left unwatched by receptionists—when security screening had shifted to the ground floor in every building in the city following 9/11.
Just as Matthew and Leif reached the set of glass doors to the north, they heard behind them, at the southern end of the corridor, Michael Gauden calling out, “Over here.”
He was a pale, almost skeletally thin man. His suit was slender and unfashionably long, a wizard’s gown stripped of its moon and stars. There was something lupine about his face—lean and dolichocephalic—that wasn’t softened by his loosely curling blond hair, and Matthew wondered if maybe he didn’t smile so as not to show his teeth. Matthew kept hoping that he would come around to the lawyer once he got to know him better.
“Did you have any trouble finding it?” Gauden asked. At a stately pace, with the smile of a precocious boy, he led them down a hall. “So this is Finch Claypoole,” he said. A colleague of his, also in a dark, slim suit, trotted swiftly, greetinglessly by. The premise of Gauden’s remark seemed to be that the law firm was one of the city’s attractions, something people came to see.
“You shouldn’t be disturbed in here,” Gauden said, when they came to a windowless conference room.
“Is this your safe room?” Matthew asked.
“Safe?” Gauden echoed.
“No windows, no eavesdropping.”
“They check every square inch of the whole office for listening devices once a month.”
“Wow,” Leif said.
“More often than they check for bedbugs, I think,” Gauden mused.
“Do they ever find anything?” Matthew asked.
“You know that old joke about the little girl on the train who’s tearing up pieces of paper and says she’s doing it to keep the tigers away?” Gauden said. “‘It seems to be working.’ Or maybe they find bugs and tigers and don’t tell us. I don’t really know. There are bottles of water in that little refrigerator there. Help yourself. I’ll bring Leif back when we’re done. Half an hour?”
“Oh,” Matthew said.
The wolf smiled.
“Matthew can’t come with us?” Leif asked, catching on.
“It wouldn’t be best practices, in terms of attorney-client privilege.”
“I can completely stay here,” Matthew told Leif.
“If you were married . . . ,” Gauden protasized. It had become possible six months ago for gays to get married in the state.
“Yeah, I’ll stay here,” Matthew again volunteered.
“Would it be wrong to have Matthew with us?” Leif asked.
“Not ‘wrong.’”
“Then maybe he can come.”
“Oh, of course. What happens, though, in that case, is, anything you say to me in the presence of a third party, technically the third party could be required to testify about it.”
“But his parents are paying, even. Doesn’t that make him part of the team?”
“That could give us a little gray. A color of gray, as I like to say. It isn’t safe by any means, but if that’s what you want and if you understand what you’re doing, I’m not here to stop you.”
“I want him to be with me.”
“It’s your choice. My role is to let you know and give you options.”
“Leif, I don’t think—,” Matthew began.
“I want you to come.” He was frightened, Matthew saw. For some reason it was now that Leif had become frightened. “‘O if I am to have so much, let me have more!’” Leif said.
“Is that a quote?” Gauden asked.
“Whitman,” Leif told him.
“I should go back and read more Whitman,” Gauden said, resuming his stately walk.
Gauden leaned into one armrest of a high-backed chair behind his desk and with the hand that was pinned to the armrest twirled a pen, which fluttered and stopped, fluttered and stopped, unfurling into a pinwheel and then condensing into a pen again. The lawyer’s blond hair, Matthew realized, was to be thought of as movie-star hair. As a gift, as an effect. It always took Matthew a little longer to become aware of the vanity of straight men. For some reason he always failed to expect it.
“I’m not representing you, by the way, am I?” Gauden asked Matthew, as Matthew and Leif draped their coats over the backs of their chairs.
“I still need to get a lawyer,” Matthew admitted. At the back of his mind he hoped that if he put it off long enough, he could save his parents the money.
There was news, Gauden said. The federal prosecutor’s office for the district had filed charges. In deference, the state was now dropping its case, and the judicial process was going to start all over again, from the beginning, this time in federal court. The state’s grand jury was going to suspend its work on the case; a federal one would soon be calling witnesses and reviewing evidence. For the moment, though, Leif’s participation was not required.
“A federal case can be a little showier, unfortunately,” he said. “It takes place on a more visible stage. Sometimes a federal attorney is thinking more about how a thing plays.”
“How it plays?” Leif asked.
“To other courts, to voters. I think it’s always in their minds that sometimes people in their position go on to run for higher office. Sometimes they see themselves as on a ‘crusade,’ though I guess that’s a word we’re not supposed to use anymore.”
“Who’s the prosecutor?” Matthew asked.
Gauden swiveled in his chair and with a long arm drew a page from a sheaf on his desk. “Thomas Somerville, assistant US attorney. Do you know him?”
“No.”
“I almost thought maybe you knew his office, the way you asked. What is it you do again?”
“I’m in grad school for English.”
“Oh, that’s right.”
“Do I need to plead guilty again?” Leif asked.
“You’re pleading not guilty, I believe,” Gauden said.
“Oh yeah.”
“Not yet. But as long as the grand jury is still sitting, and sometimes longer, there’s an opportunity for plea bargaining, and we should be thinking about that possibility. Just in the back of your mind.”
“And then there wouldn’t be a trial?” asked Leif.
“Not for you, if they make an offer and you decide to agree to it.”
“What would they want?”
“It can be a bit of a game, because they know that we’ll read the boldness of their offer as an indication of how strong and solid their evidence is.”
“Do you have a strategy?” Matthew asked.
“A strategy?” Gauden looked amused. “You don’t always have a strategy. You try to have ideas, I think, and you try to keep learning about the case, and you’re not always sure where the things you’re learning are going to take you. Like a novelist who starts writing without knowing where his book is going to end.” He drew a filigree in the air with his capped pen. “For example, this morning I was trying to figure out, and maybe you can help me”—he was addressing Leif—“how did they know to arrest you at his house?”
“They had us under some kind of surveillance,” said Leif. “Didn’t they?”
“Don’t ask me! But they couldn’t have put that in place overnight. The city police, overnight? Had you given them any reason to put you under surveillance before the incident with their computer system?”
“I did tell Bresser I could read his password, that day I saw him at Occupy,” Leif said.
“Wait,” Matthew interrupted. “Are you suggesting that if they had Leif under surveillance without a warrant, before he did anything, the court should throw out the arrest?”
“How much television have you been watching, young man?” the lawyer asked. “That almost never happens, first of all. And they did have a warrant, and no court is going to care how they knew how to find Leif if the warrant was properly written.”
Matthew didn’t respond.
“What I wonder,” the lawyer continued, having cleared Matthew out of the way, “and it’s a line of thought that I haven’t fully worked out yet, is, if the government puts too many people under surveillance, puts together all this personal data in one place, maybe it’s not wrong for the government, qua the government, to have done so, but once they have, maybe it’s incumbent on them to make sure it’s very difficult for anyone to get to it. There’s this concept of an ‘attractive nuisance.’ If you own a swimming pool, you have to expect that the neighbors’ children will try to drown themselves in it and you have to put up a fence. Otherwise it’s your fault if they do drown in it.”
“So we should have put up a fence?” asked Leif. “We were actually inviting people to our working group.”
“No no no. You’re the ones who fell in and drowned, is what I’m thinking. If the data on this server was private, as the government is claiming, then the government created a hazard by assembling it and failing to protect it. It shouldn’t have been so easy for you to fall in. To take another example, if one slab of concrete in the sidewalk is half a foot higher than the next one, and you trip, you can sue the city: that’s what I mean, but what was out of alignment wasn’t one slab of concrete with another but the expectation of privacy with the ease of publication. Or maybe what I mean is that they were too well aligned. Too conveniently aligned.”
“But we weren’t children,” Leif said.
“Well, that’s a problem,” the lawyer acknowledged.
“You’re saying,” Matthew said, “that it was irresponsible of the government not to try harder to keep us out.”
“You weren’t there, were you? You just said ‘us.’”
“He wasn’t there,” Leif said.
“Were you there?”
“No, I was just trying to understand your argument,” Matthew said.
“I see. Well, it’s a big argument. Maybe it’s the wrong tool for the job. Maybe it’s a wrench and I need pliers. But I like to think about all the possibilities.”
“I have a big argument,” Leif said.
“Oh, you do?” Gauden said, not encouragingly.
“I think there’s no such thing as human rights,” Leif said. “I think there’s only power, and it goes more smoothly for the powerful if most of the time people act as if human rights do exist. But once per generation, there has to be an ‘accident,’ on purpose, to remind everyone what’s really happening. To remind everyone that the rights are only granted on sufferance. That they shouldn’t be taken too seriously. That they only exist because at the moment it isn’t in the interest of the powerful to take them away.”
“I see,” the lawyer said, nodding, twirling his pen again.
“It’s just an idea,” Leif said.
“No, it’s very interesting,” Gauden said, still nodding.
“I have another idea,” said Leif, when they got downstairs.
“Are you having too many ideas?” Matthew asked. He threaded his way between two parked cars and in the open street raised a hand. When he looked back at Leif, still on the curb, he smiled as if to say that he wasn’t asking in order to hurt Leif, but his smile therefore also necessarily meant that he knew that asking did hurt Leif.
Bundled up in an old coat of Matthew’s, which was too short for him, Leif looked like an invalid being taken to see his doctor. Which reminded Matthew that they needed to make a follow-up appointment. He wouldn’t still be coughing the way he was if the steroid was doing what it was supposed to.
A cab stopped, and they got in. A screen set into the back of the front seat began to hector them as the car pulled away.
“Can you turn it off?” Leif asked. “I think it’s the sort of thing I’m not allowed to touch.”
“Buckle your seat belt,” Matthew said, as he left off buckling his own.
It turned out to be possible to turn off the show that was auto-playing but not the screen itself.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” Matthew said, once the car was silent. “About your idea.”
Leif looked down at his hands. “Do you want to hear it?”
“Of course.”
“It used to be possible—and it used to be important that it was possible—for writing to have a secret meaning,” Leif said. He spoke as if he didn’t believe Matthew really wanted to hear but couldn’t see any other way forward. “It could signal that it had a secret meaning by making an oddly weak argument, or by bringing up an example that made a hash of what it was supposed to be evidence for.”
At the foot of a hill, in sight of the water, the driver shunted the taxi into a narrow, canal-like street, hedged on both sides with Jersey barriers that blinded it. Abruptly the canal street fed into three lanes of a six-lane highway, the cars in which didn’t slow, let alone stop, so that the challenge of merging drew a burst of adrenaline out of all three men in the car—their bodies’ involuntary acknowledgment that survival was at stake.
“Jesus,” said Matthew quietly, as the driver gunned the engine and swerved, to seize a place in the ungiving flow.
Once the car was inside the flow, however, one felt impregnable.
“But you can’t signal a hidden meaning on the internet,” Leif continued. “If there’s weakness or inconsistency in a piece of writing now, it goes unnoticed because of the general sloppiness of expression. A writer’s ambivalence registers at most as a flaw that has kept a message from going viral. A handicap. Not as an instance of someone saying something almost despite himself. Or literally despite himself.”
“You should write this down.”
“Like Julia? For a rainy day?”
They rose on the highway’s ribbon of concrete into a bend in the sky where two of the great bridges that spanned the harbor came into view. Maybe Matthew wasn’t any good at pretending to welcome Leif’s ideas because with each idea that Leif had, it was as if the air that the two of them breathed when they were together became that much thinner, as if they found themselves further up a mountain they hadn’t planned on climbing, further away from the path that they had set out to follow. Leif seemed to be propelling himself forward through his days with mere willpower now, as if he were trying not to think about his body and what might happen to it, as if he were deliberately leaving his physical self out of the reckoning, while Matthew became more and more aware that it was only through their bodies that they were connected. Aware the way that, with each cigarette, if you fall back into that habit, you become more aware of the minutes since the last cigarette, of time as something that has to be counted off and paid for in cigarettes, which your health even less than your budget can afford.
Beneath the angle that the driver could see in the rearview mirror, he took Leif’s hand. It was cold and knotty.
No reporter had pursued Leif to Matthew’s parents’ house, which he and Leif had attributed to the holiday. By the time they got back to the city, the news cycle must have completed a revolution or two, because no reporters were waiting at Matthew’s apartment, either. Nor were any waiting outside Michael Gauden’s office the next day. Was it over? The coast seemed to be clear, too, at the café where Leif worked, according to the wife of the couple who owned it, who called Tuesday morning. Over the long weekend she had covered for Leif, as had Greg and another co-worker. Leif decided to go in for a shift.
He put on his bike cap and flipped up the brim. Matthew volunteered to walk over with him. He wanted to make sure Leif wasn’t inflicting on himself some kind of penance. In many of Leif’s ideas lately there was a theme of punishment—of deserving punishment, of being found out as deserving punishment. Sometimes what Leif had done was tell. Sometimes all he had done was know—about the end of the world, about the sorrow that a sense of the end brings to people, about the susceptibility of caretakers to sorrow. If Matthew challenged the logic, Leif fell silent and Matthew worried that the snake was returning to earth by a different hole. It seemed to be becoming difficult for Leif to conceive of himself as existing in the world except as a trespasser in it. He had lost the swan’s-neck nonchalance that he had had when Matthew had fallen for him.
“What if they’re after me because they know that I know?” he had asked one night.
“What do you mean?”
“What if they don’t want me to realize that we really are a threat?”
“I don’t think that’s what the charge against you is going to be,” Matthew had said.
Was he literally feverish? Maybe the pneumonia, or the steroids he was taking by inhalant to treat it, were giving his thoughts these qualities of abstraction, perseveration, and astringency—giving his thoughts themselves nearly the character of punishments.
Or maybe the thoughts came because Leif had in fact glimpsed the future and really was being punished for it. It would have been easier if Matthew had been able to believe in the folie in a simple and straightforward way, and he hated himself, a little, for his skepticism, even though he knew that skepticism was one of the components of his personality that made him a caretaker, if not quite a caretaker of the kind described in Leif’s philosophy. He felt that it was in part the mismatch between them—the almost-but-not-quite nature of Matthew’s faith—that had attracted Leif, that held him.
One night, not long after they had met, when they had been hanging out with some of the other members of the working group in Elspeth’s apartment, one of Elspeth’s roommates had come home with a vintage-store find—a green tulle gown—and Leif had pleaded, and the roommate hadn’t been able to say no, and when Leif had tiptoed back into the living room, wearing the gown, Peter Pannishly, and had sat down beside Matthew, he had asked for a kiss, which Matthew had only been able to deliver awkwardly, gingerly, prompting Leif to ask, Don’t you believe in any of my magic? There had been a note of gratification in his voice, Matthew felt. There had been disappointment, too, of course, but it hadn’t been a very serious disappointment. He had been proud, in some corner of himself, of having gone further than Matthew could. And in that corner, Matthew suspected, Leif didn’t entirely want Matthew to believe. At any rate, that’s what Matthew had to hope. Because he couldn’t believe. Just as he couldn’t pretend that his interest didn’t center on what had been lolling, factually, under the green gauze that had draped Leif’s lap. Matthew was the sort of person who couldn’t hear the lines
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing
as if they were serious. The best he could do was pretend not to notice that he was meeting halfway what he was being asked to believe.
He put a book, notebook, and two pens in his backpack.
There was no one in the café but Leif’s co-worker Juniper and a handful of regulars, typing into laptops and paging through cram books. A man with gelled hair and a dimpled chin, probably an actor between roles, was reading an ink-on-paper newspaper. Matthew took a seat in the corner. Leif looped an apron over his head and ducked under the bar.
Juniper kissed Leif, and he hugged her. He pinched the foil pouches beside the espresso machine to find out how much coffee was still in them.
Matthew opened his notebook and tucked the written-on half of it under the book that he was going to try to read.
“Are you Leif Saunderson?” the man who was probably an actor asked.
Leif nodded.
“That’s cool, man,” the actor said.
“Can I get you anything?”
“A refill? This is an Americano.”
“Coming up,” Leif said.
It turned out to be easy to surrender one’s celebrity. Patrons with earbuds, having sensed the exchange but not having heard it, looked around frowningly, like seagulls.
The book that Matthew had brought was a collection of meditations written in the voice of Charles I by a priest loyal to him. The king had revised and approved the meditations shortly before he was executed; they were published shortly after. As a defense of kingship they were almost painfully unpersuasive. Charles, or the priest writing as Charles, asserted over and over again that the king had never cared for his power or been solicitous of it, as if this were a virtue. He complained that democrats seemed to think that the king was the one person in England who could be required to sacrifice the free will and political conscience that belonged to every individual. Yet despite the distaste he claimed to feel for kingship personally, he refused to “consent to put out the sun of sovereignty” in his own case.
The sun of sovereignty, Matthew carefully printed in his notebook. The day had grown so short, he noticed, that the windows of the café were already gray even though it hardly qualified yet as late afternoon.
How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year.
He couldn’t really imagine what it would be like to be without Leif, which is what would happen if Leif were to lose his case. He didn’t want to think about it. Things had gone so quickly between the two of them that that possibility was already unbearable. In the past few days, being with Leif had sometimes been like not being with him, because of Leif’s preoccupation, and that had been bad enough. It had been a few days, for example, since anything had happened between them—since the time in his parents’ attic, in fact. Here in the café, now, too, they were together without really being together: Leif toweling dry the saucers and cups that he clankingly removed from the dishwasher, Matthew hunched forward over a seventeenth-century text he wasn’t reading.
But then the quiet and the early darkness always gave this time of day, at this time of year, a cloistered feeling.
Leif came to his table.
“Do you need me here?” Matthew asked, on an impulse.
“No,” Leif said. Then he hesitated. “Maybe it’s better if you go, actually.”
“Okay,” said Matthew.
“I want to see how I am.”
“Okay.”
“Are you all right?” Leif asked.
“Me? Fine.”
“Don’t be like that.”
“Like what? You’re telling me to leave, and I’ll leave,” Matthew said.
“You asked to leave.”
Matthew couldn’t bring himself to say that that wasn’t what he’d meant to ask. He couldn’t bear to reveal himself as so weak. He looked down at the words that filled up his book’s pages, words that had abruptly become strange and remote, a meal for which he had suddenly lost his appetite. Why would anyone ever care what he or anyone else thought about these old dead words?
“It’s hard for me to find out how I am, right now,” Leif continued. “What I’m feeling.”
Leif was so full of his sad self, Matthew angrily thought. So full of his sad, wounded self. “It’s easier for me to read in a library, anyway,” Matthew said, shutting his unreadable book.
“Matthew—”
“It’s fine,” Matthew insisted. When had he become the clingy one? He strategized: he could try to read for an hour or two in the city college library, where he could buy a sandwich at the food court if he got hungry. Maybe he and Leif had gone too fast. Maybe neither one of them knew how he was on his own anymore, and maybe both of them needed to know that. “It’s really fine. I understand.”
After Matthew finished packing his bag, they embraced and kissed, stiffly.
“What was that?” Leif asked.
“Tough love, tough kiss,” Matthew said.
Matthew walked back to his apartment for his bike. As soon as he got it downstairs, he realized he had forgotten his bike lights, but he had already wasted enough time. The day was ending, and the point of it was supposed to have been to make a little progress toward returning to the life that a month and a half ago he had thought worth living. He biked, therefore, in the dark, unilluminated, recklessly, angry at himself, on top of everything else, for running a stupid, needless, and not even pleasant risk.
As he locked up his bike, he made up his mind to be angry at everyone he saw—to be the one true scholar, indignant and monastic—but the lamps suspended above the work-study students at the checkout desk cast them in gold light and fat textbooks were opened across their knees and he had to accept that they had been here learning all day when he hadn’t been and that if anything he should try to emulate them in doing uncomplainingly the work that one was given to do.
His usual carrel was unoccupied. So much of academia was about coming back to things—coming back to the same room, the same chair, the same text—while one grew older. Did the outside world really matter compared to this return, which was not just to a chair in a library but to an eternal, silent conversation? Maybe the outside world only existed to bring one here, to this seat. Maybe the outside world was only a scaffolding, meant to fall away. Of course to live a life whose meaning lay outside the life itself would tend to make one melancholy.
This was the story he had given most of his youth to.
He opened his book, but it was still unreadable. He would have to convince himself that Leif would forgive him before he would be able to read it. He was actually pretty sure that Leif was going to forgive him, which made his task easier.
The tall panes of the library windows, now that it was night, had a slatelike opacity.
The trouble with the book he was trying to read was that the most interesting question about it couldn’t be answered by it. The question didn’t even have to do with the book proper but with an appendix. In the appendix, the priest who had compiled the book had printed a prayer of Charles’s that happened to be identical to a prayer uttered by a lovestruck princess in Sidney’s Arcadia, as if kingship were so much a thing of make-believe that even a priest—or perhaps even Charles himself, it was impossible to know—saw no reason not to pass off a sacrament of one realm as a sacrament of the other. John Milton, after Charles’s execution, detected the borrowing. Milton was outraged. The prayer in Sidney’s poem was pagan! How dare a Christian king address it to his god? But Matthew, isolated in his carrel and cozy, for the moment, in his isolation, couldn’t decide whether what needed to be explained was the priest’s dreamy willingness to confuse fact with fiction, and himself with Charles, and both with Sidney’s princess, or Milton’s intolerant insistence on distinguishing them. It was hard to remember what the way of the world was, when one wasn’t at the moment in it. What was strange here? Was confusion unacceptable? Was it always necessary to be a single, real person?
He read until late. When he got back to his apartment, its lights were off and its blinds were still up. Emanations from the streetlamps below crossed into it in long, faint rectangles as neat as shadows.
A note was on the table and the boxers that Leif usually slept in weren’t on Leif’s pillow, their resting place during the day.
As Matthew lowered the blinds, he was aware that he was only papering over the night, not separating himself from it.
Gone home to do laundry, the note read.
Matthew called the cell that he and Leif had bought for Leif a few days before, whose number they had so far managed to keep secret.
“I told Gauden I’m going to go with a public defender,” Leif said.
“What are you talking about?”
“All I do is take,” Leif said. “Take take take.”
“Slow down.”
“You don’t even like him,” Leif pointed out.
The books on Matthew’s desk, Matthew noticed, hadn’t much shifted lately. The apartment got on his nerves now whenever Leif wasn’t there. Everything in it remained so eternally where they had last left it. Everything seemed prepared for years to pass by with no dislodgement or disruption other than the fine invisible pinpricks by which time introduces brittleness, dryness, and weakness. “Leif, it’s okay,” he said. “I’m going to be here for you.” He needed to say something whether or not it was true. He had to hope that making a commitment always felt a little like making one up.
“It’s supposed to be money for your future. I don’t think my own father even knows that any of this is happening.”
“I’m here for you,” Matthew repeated. Before last week he hadn’t ever thought of his parents’ house as someday a future inheritance of his, which maybe made it easier to give away.
“But what if I leave you? What if I’m like, I can’t be with you, I’m a poet, and I have to be able to hear my voice.”
“Is that how you feel?”
There was silence on Leif’s end of the phone.
“I’m helping you right now,” Matthew said. “That’s all it is. You don’t ever need to pay me back.”
While he waited Leif out, he noticed that his little red Cambridge edition of the Sonnets wasn’t balanced on top of the microwave anymore, where Leif had left it the other day. Its slot on the bookcase was still empty, too, though the slot had narrowed slightly, because the volumes on either side had taken breaths in, once they could. Matthew scanned the apartment. His eyes jumped from shelf to shelf. The book wasn’t anywhere.
Which meant Leif still had it with him.
“Why do you put up with me?” Leif asked.
“Because fucking you makes me feel alive.”
Leif apologized to his lawyer and recanted his dismissal of him. Over the weekend he worked a few more shifts, and Matthew managed to do a little reading. On Monday, the buzzer rang in the middle of the day.
It was Raleigh. “Do you mind if I come up?” he asked through the intercom. “I was in the neighborhood.”
Leif put on a sweater. Matthew picked up a wad of dirty clothes off the floor, and when Raleigh reached their landing, it was still in his hands.
“Your apartment’s already neat by my standards,” Raleigh said.
“You’re straight,” Matthew replied.
Raleigh hadn’t shaved, and under his fair beard, patches of his skin had broken out.
“Sit down,” Leif said, folding himself into a corner of the futon.
“Do you want a glass of water?” Matthew offered.
“Sure,” Raleigh said. He perched on the futon’s edge. “So how is it all going for you guys?”
“Elspeth said your lawyer didn’t want you to talk about anything,” Leif said.
“He doesn’t know I’m here. I took the battery out of my phone.”
“Can’t you just turn it off?”
“I’m pretty sure they can track you now even when it’s off. Although maybe not with a phone like mine.”
“Felix Penny is tracking you?” Matthew asked, as he handed Raleigh a glass of water.
“No. I mean, I don’t know. We don’t know who’s tracking us anymore, do we.” He took a sip. “We don’t have to talk about anything, if you don’t want to.”
“Our news is that Leif is coughing too much,” Matthew said. “And not getting enough sleep.”
“Why are you telling him that?” Leif asked.
“He’s your friend.”
“Okay, and I don’t always feel ‘real,’” Leif admitted, marking the quotes in the air.
“I have this recurring dream,” Raleigh said, “that another timeline is crossing into mine.”
“Someone else’s timeline?”
“No, mine, but from a different universe. All the possible universes are layered on top of each other, like in sedimentary rock, but they’ve slipped out of alignment and I’m crossing on the diagonal. Which I experience as another reality surfacing into mine.”
“I don’t know if I follow,” Leif admitted.
“There’s a lot of geometry,” Raleigh acknowledged. “Has Elspeth said anything?”
“About what?”
“I don’t know. Can I ask you something? Did you have porn on your laptop? Can they mention that, if they find it?”
“What kind of porn?” Leif asked.
“You know, normal.”
“You mean, ladies?”
“Yeah, ‘ladies.’”
“Did you at least hide it good?”
“It was in a folder called ‘Porn.’ But can they mention it for no reason? Aren’t there rules?”
“I have no idea,” said Leif. “Why are you worried about this?”
“I don’t think they can just talk about your personal life,” Raleigh said. “I think there must be rules.”
“Did you ask Penny?”
“No. I was just thinking yesterday, they have all our emails, too, if they have our laptops.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Everything we wrote to each other. They can just grep our brains, essentially.”
“Did you have porn?” Leif asked Matthew.
“Of gentlemen,” Matthew replied.
“Elspeth’s not seeing anyone, is she?” Raleigh asked.
“She hasn’t told me anything,” Leif said. “Why?”
“She’s changed her mind about me, hasn’t she.”
“I thought you broke up with her.”
“But it was a mistake.” He looked down at the floor. “You couldn’t say anything, could you?”
“To her?”
“Never mind.” He bottoms-upped his empty water glass. “You don’t understand. It’s probably easier for gays.”
“What, breaking up or being arrested?”
“No, I didn’t mean that.” He blushed.
“What did you mean?”
“I mean, with the other guy also being a guy.”
“You mean it’s easier if it’s two men for the other person to know what you’re thinking,” Leif said.
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
“Maybe it used to be.”
The buzzer rang again. “It’s me,” said Elspeth, from downstairs.
“Raleigh’s here,” Matthew disclosed, through the intercom.
“Well—okay,” she said.
“Shit, can I use your bathroom?” Raleigh asked. He slammed the door in his hurry to tidy himself up.
“There’s a problem,” said Elspeth, after she kissed Leif hello. She shuffled off her backpack. “I brought my new computer because I don’t want Matthew to use his when he looks at it. I was hacked. I mean, the RPF site was hacked.”
“By who?” asked Raleigh, emerging from the bathroom, his wet hair pointed starfish-like in all directions away from his face.
“I don’t know. By hackers.” She sat down on Matthew’s folded-up futon and powered on her laptop.
“Don’t be mad,” said Raleigh.
“I’m not mad at you. Don’t let them look, Matthew, because neither of them should be looking at a computer.”
“Sit at the dining table,” Matthew ordered Leif and Raleigh.
“I’m sorry I’m a hard-ass, but all my lawyer ever talks about to me is am I doing everything I can to convince the government that I have no interest in trying to obstruct or sabotage the government’s work,” Elspeth said while she waited for her machine to boot up.
“Don’t worry,” Raleigh said. “You’d come across as law-abiding even if you were trying not to.”
“This is what you see now, if you go to the site,” Elspeth, ignoring Raleigh, said to Matthew. “I’m sorry I’m bringing you this,” she said to Leif. “It’s so ugly.”
“What does it say?” Leif asked.
“Usually when they hack a website they put up porn,” Raleigh said.
The page, when it came up, was black, and the writing on it was in a font that was green and fixed-width, like on an old terminal. Matthew read the new text aloud:
Rest In Peace
the
Republic of Precious Feeleengz
They weren’t moralfags. They weren’t even stupidfags. They were NOTHINGFAGZ!!!
(FYI, we don’t mind feeleengz. This is teh Internet, after all—if you’re not at least a little bit ghey, you haven’t been paying attention. It’s just, have a point, plz. So, we haz hacked you.)
The cursor, over the text, was flickering. “It looks like you can click,” Matthew observed.
“Oh no, don’t,” said Elspeth. “If you do, there’s this little elephant that flies around and”—Matthew clicked, and there was a sound—“farts.”
“And leaves swastikas.”
“Oh, I hadn’t noticed that they were swastikas.”
“Well, they’re all smushed on top of each other, so they’re hard to see.”
“I’m really sorry I can’t see that,” Raleigh said.
“It’s actually pretty upsetting, Raleigh,” Elspeth said.
“I’m just saying I wish I could see it. Is moralfags one word or two?”
“Why does that matter?” Elspeth asked. “It’s hate speech.”
“It has a different meaning when it’s one word.”
“What does it mean?” Leif asked.
“You use the suffix –fag to say what somebody’s gay for. What somebody’s into. So a moralfag is someone who’s really into being moral, being righteous.”
“Oh, like queen in real gay slang,” said Leif. “A muscle queen is into guys with muscles; a size queen is into—you know.”
“Yeah, like queen, but for hacking,” Raleigh said. “What you’re a fag for is your motive for hacking. So if we’re nothingfags, they’re saying we didn’t have any reason at all for doing what we did.”
“But we weren’t hackers,” Elspeth said.
“I thought the internet was on your side,” Matthew said.
“Not these guys, apparently,” Raleigh said.
“It’s so full of hate,” Elspeth said.
“But maybe also just a little bit funny?” suggested Raleigh.
“With swastikas?” she replied. “And where is our site now? Where is everything we wrote?”
“Didn’t we have a backup? I thought with this build there was auto backup.”
“No,” said Elspeth. “That cost extra, so we didn’t do it, remember? And the cops still have our old hard drives.”
“Can you still log in as an admin?”
“I can, but the hackers are still in there, and I can see them. It creeps me out.”
“What do you mean you can see them?” Raleigh asked.
“When I tried to delete the splashpage they put up, they put it back, while I was watching.”
“Did you change your password?”
“That was the first thing I did,” Elspeth said.
“You probably need to re-salt the hashes.”
“Okay, whatever that means. Where do I do that?”
“I can’t remember. It’s probably under Settings, but I’d have to be looking at the dashboard.”
“Do you know how they got in?” Leif asked.
Elspeth shook her head.
“Did you get an email recently asking you to reset your password?” Raleigh asked.
“No,” she said.
“Maybe your password wasn’t strong enough.”
“It probably wasn’t,” she said. “I know I’m the weak link. I know that absolutely anybody else would be doing it better.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” said Raleigh. “What if you took it to Jeremy and he helped you.”
Elspeth executed a few commands. “I think they put in a back door,” she said to Matthew, pointing at a list of filenames on the screen that meant nothing to him. Matthew saw that she was making an effort not to cry.
“You might have updated a plug-in without realizing that the update was compromised,” Raleigh continued. “That happened to me once. It can happen if the developer sells out to the wrong kind of people.”
Elspeth continued working, without responding to Raleigh.
“Is there anything that you can want, in the world these people live in, without being a fag for it?” Leif asked. “I mean, if you don’t want anything and that makes you a nothingfag, that’s pretty comprehensive.”
“Lulz, I think,” Raleigh said. “‘Lulzfag’ is a compliment.”
After half an hour, Elspeth gave up, and they called a car service to take them to see Jeremy. Elspeth sat in front, next to the driver, and stowed her offending laptop, shut asleep, at her feet. In the back, next to Matthew, as the car mounted the elevated highway that snaked above the city, Raleigh and Leif a little too loudly debated whether it was Anonymous who had done them the honor of hacking them. Matthew heard Elspeth quietly call someone to report that she was going to Raleigh and Jeremy’s apartment. Outside, dark windows of apartments wheeled by, succeeding one another like notches in a turning gear, strangely close because the apartments had been built long before anyone knew that a highway would one day hang in the air a few yards away, four or five stories above the ground.
They were met at the door of Jeremy and Raleigh’s apartment by Philip, who was wearing an open kimono over a pair of swim briefs, displaying his knotted chest and stomach. “Oh my god, you’re all together again,” he said.
“We were hacked,” Raleigh told him.
“Why would anyone bother to hack you? You’re last week’s news. When I’m out with Oliver, you don’t even come up as a conflict of interest anymore.”
“Did you tell the press I’m from Kansas?” Raleigh asked. “You’re the only person I know who gets Oklahoma and Kansas confused.”
“Kansas, R-Kansas, O-Kansas. There’s only one letter’s difference between any of them.”
There was nowhere to gather except around the island table in the kitchen.
“Scene of the crime,” Raleigh said to Elspeth.
“It’s so stupid, being here, isn’t it,” she replied.
Matthew hadn’t previously thought of the act that had got them in trouble as having taken place in any particular location. On the night itself, he had been too angry at Leif to picture where Leif had been when it had happened, and later the events had become a sort of myth.
“You and Leif can’t sit where you can see,” Elspeth told Raleigh.
“I know.” He pulled two stools over to in front of the refrigerator.
Leif clambered backward up onto one of them. “Dunces in the corner.”
“I’m so happy I can help you out, Elspeth,” Jeremy said. He held up a power cable and let it untwist. “There’s a fresh six-pack of energy drinks in the fridge, if anyone’s thirsty.”
“I thought only newspaper articles actually called them energy drinks,” Raleigh commented.
Jeremy tapped the table beside him to indicate that Elspeth should set her laptop there. He ran a hand through his hair. “Can I ask you a question? Have you been adding to the site? Are you writing new posts?”
“It’s more of a historical record at this point.”
Jeremy leaned forward over his folded, powerful arms. “And are you getting traffic? What if I took it off your hands.”
She looked frightened. “Please don’t take it away. Just because I was attacked.”
“No one’s taking anything away!” Jeremy laughed, looking around the room.
“I want to keep it.”
“I’m just suggesting we coordinate the sites. The site you’re running with the one I’m doing. It could be really useful.”
“I don’t want to be useful,” Elspeth said. The heartache, now that they had come together again, was something that maybe later they could take turns carrying, but for the moment it was hers.
“I get it,” Jeremy said.
“You’re still going to let him help you clean it up, though, right?” Raleigh asked.
“It can’t be that different from fact-checking,” Elspeth said.
“That’s a good analogy,” said Jeremy.
“Just tell me what to do,” she said, eyes forward, unfolding her screen.
Jeremy squatted to plug in his power cable and then, standing beside her, issued instructions. Distrustfully, a little combatively, she obeyed: She rebooted in recovery mode. She let him connect his laptop to hers and allowed his security software to scan her hard drive for viruses. She logged on via FTP to the server that hosted the website and under his coaching began to weed out suspect files.
It was an exorcism. The ritual was long and tedious.
“Should we stay?” Matthew asked Leif, after an hour had passed.
“Why not?”
“Do you need to be here? And if everyone’s here together . . .”
“Why is that a problem?” Leif asked. “It’s okay for me to see Raleigh. It’s okay for me to see Elspeth.”
“I’m not saying it because I mind,” Matthew explained.
“Then why are you saying it?”
Matthew nodded as if he accepted this and, taking one of Philip’s celebrity lifestyle magazines, went to sit in a chair by the apartment’s front window.
Jeremy and Elspeth were still working when Julia appeared in the apartment’s doorway. “Knock knock,” she said. “Is Raleigh here?”
She was wearing a burnt umber beret at a jaunty angle: she was a little girl, she was an adventuress.
“Why, it’s everyone!” she cried. “Elspeth, how are you?” She was overdoing it. That and the beret suggested to Matthew that she had lost her balance.
“Not Chris,” said Elspeth.
“No, I guess not Chris,” Julia agreed. “Well, I have some news,” she said, looking around. “Bresser’s having a press conference at five.”
“Today?” asked Raleigh.
“Something has leaked, apparently,” Julia said.
“Did your lawyer tell you?” Elspeth asked.
“I have a source. I’m making a study of our case.”
“I could go to a press conference,” Jeremy volunteered.
“Well, I’m going myself,” Julia quickly clarified.
“Do they let just anyone in?” Raleigh asked.
“You guys are on trial,” Matthew said.
“Do we know what leaked?” Leif asked.
“My source told me because she hoped I would know,” Julia said.
“What do you mean ‘your source’?” Elspeth asked. She was the only one who hadn’t heard about Julia’s project.
“Oh, it’s silly, really. You have to promise not to laugh. I want to write about all this someday, so I need to know about it now.”
“I see,” Elspeth said.
“It’s silly.”
“No, it’s not silly.”
“I’ll go with you,” Leif said. “Where is it?”
“The lobby of Bresser’s office building.” The building was in a downtown neighborhood across the river that had once housed light industry and was becoming fashionable.
“Leif, please don’t,” Matthew said.
“Why not?” Leif asked. He shrugged on the coat Matthew had given him. Maybe he, too, wanted to know about the press conference so that one day he could write about it, in which case what Matthew was trying to prevent was a poem, from being written.
“What if you see him and you read something again?” Matthew asked.
“It’s not against the law.”
“It shouldn’t be, anyway,” said Raleigh.
“Leif, people are very upset,” Elspeth said.
“Why do they get to be the ones who have press conferences? Why do they get to be the ones who describe what’s happening?”
“I’m going, too, then,” said Elspeth.
“So we’ll have a really big posse,” Julia said. “But we have to leave right now if we’re going to make it.”
They called two cars this time, and after a skirmish on the sidewalk, Leif, Jeremy, and Julia got into the first one and Elspeth, Raleigh, and Matthew into the second.
“You don’t have to go,” Elspeth said to Raleigh, as Matthew pulled shut the door.
“Why shouldn’t I?” Raleigh asked.
She was right to try to stop him. There seemed to be nothing Matthew could do to stop Leif, who had become feverish with what Matthew referred to in his dissertation as insulted kingship. His senses were stopped up, like a Shakespeare monarch who has shut his ears to any question about whether his dukes are still loyal. Like Alice after she has been turned into a Wonderland chess piece and is blinded by the crown that has queened her, which slips down over her eyes.
Matthew had been cast in the role of loyal but ineffectual adviser. Beside him, Raleigh and Elspeth were trying to keep themselves distinct from each other, trying not to touch. Elspeth took out her phone and held it in her hands in front of her, as a focus of her attention, but didn’t unlock it.
They rode onto a bridge, the seams in whose asphalt were so pronounced that the car thrummed like a heartbeat as the front and then the rear tires passed over them. It wasn’t clear to Matthew what Leif was still king of. It wasn’t clear what Leif was ordering his knights and ladies into battle to defend.
“Do you still read things from people?” Matthew asked Elspeth.
“I don’t do experiments anymore—is that what you mean?”
“I guess I was wondering whether it’s still there to hear,” he said. “Whether anyone is still broadcasting on those frequencies.”
Her eyes wavered on him. It will always be there, she seemed to say, in reply, in a voice without words. The awareness that he knew what she was saying was uncomfortable to him.
It was dark when they reached Bresser’s office. The scene of people gathered in the lobby shone out through the plate glass of the building’s facade like a play being performed for passersby in the street. There was an air of expectancy and also of exclusivity. Anyone on the sidewalk could have walked in, but everyone all knew that no one who didn’t belong was going to.
Julia was the first to push her way in through the revolving door. Matthew came last. When the rubber blades of the door unsealed and released him into the lobby, he found himself immersed in a roar that mirroring by glass and marble had made of the gathered people’s talk.
“We’re here for the Bresser Security press conference,” he heard Julia say, above the roar, to a blond, unshaven man in a blue porter’s uniform.
“It’s not anywhere else,” said the man.
“This is the right place?” Julia asked.
“He’s gonna have it here, anyways.”
Julia drifted toward the crowd.
“Who are you looking for?” Matthew called out to her, but she didn’t answer. “Are we meeting someone?” he asked the others, but they didn’t answer, either.
Jeremy strode forward as if he knew where Julia was headed, but the confidence with which he followed her may have been founded on nothing more than his personal history of having almost always been welcomed wherever he went.
An ungainly woman clopped toward them on loud heels. The belt that was lashed around her skirt seemed to be a length of rope. “Are these your friends?” she asked Julia. “I’m Jan Ridgely,” she introduced herself. She said that she worked for one of the city’s tabloids.
“Jan, thank you for this,” Julia said.
“Who has more of a right to know about it?”
“And that’s all we can do, or try to do, isn’t it.”
“Have you heard anything?” Ridgely asked.
“Not a word.”
“Maybe he’ll say.”
“Maybe!” Julia agreed.
Ridgely appraised the friends. Of course Leif was hard not to look at, burning with fury as he was. “Do you regret any of it?” she asked him softly.
“Oh, we’re off the record, Jan,” Julia said, on Leif’s behalf.
“Anyone can ask,” Leif corrected her. “It’s a free country, for now.”
They had been spotted; other reporters were raking them with looks. Two or three seemed about to approach when Bresser appeared from behind a row of ficuses, brushing out of his face the irritation of their varnished leaves. He was wearing a camel suit that stretched tight across his back. He paused at a crimson rope, and a pale, gawky man with an aquiline nose and floppy dark hair rushed up to unhitch it. The deputy was taller than Bresser was. He was nervously clicking a pen attached to his clipboard.
Leif was impatient. “Is Bresser going to say anything?”
“‘One of the accused, Leif Saunderson, wondered aloud,’” Raleigh said.
With a glance Leif acknowledged the warning. Ridgely made a note.
Bresser’s deputy stepped back over the crimson rope and sprinted to the building’s security desk to ask the porter something. The porter shrugged and handed over a small metal dustbin. Inside the crimson rope again, the deputy set the dustbin on the floor upside down, and stepped onto it, a hand momentarily flying out and touching Bresser’s shoulder as he tried to steady himself. Bresser reflexively brushed the hand away; the pale man teetered. Bresser silently shook his head. No.
The deputy stepped down, righted the dustbin, and slid it behind a ficus.
“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming,” the deputy announced. For a few seconds the journalists continued to murmur, and then the murmuring flickered and went out. “I’d like to introduce Joseph P. Bresser of the Joseph P. Bresser Operational Security Consultancy, who will say a few words.”
As the reporters fanned out in search of open sight lines, a clear view opened for the first time between Bresser and the members of the sometime working group, and recognition came into his eyes.
“Good evening,” he said. With an effort he scattered his gaze across the room. “As some of you may know, Bresser Operational has been a resource in a case that is currently before a federal grand jury. It would be improper for me to comment on an ongoing investigation. But when the press takes an interest in a case, as they have with this one, their leaks and disclosures often present a very partial picture, a picture unfair in this case to the very innovative suite of products we have here. It does not do justice either to the product or to the considerable commitment that our team has made to bringing this product to market.”
It was a solid voice. It was the voice of someone who had never doubted that he had the right and capacity to address his peers.
“So what I want to do today is describe for you that suite of products, so that even if you do hear different, going forward, you’ll know what the product really is.”
“Is it a honeypot, Joe?” someone asked.
There was nervous laughter.
“I’ll tell you what,” Bresser said. “I’m not going to answer questions from people who don’t respect the integrity of the grand jury process. You can laugh if you want, but that’s how I feel about it.”
“Jesus,” a journalist near the friends muttered.
Bresser scanned the room as if looking for challengers. “I don’t even understand how one of you could ask me that after I just finished saying that it would not be appropriate for me to discuss the methods used in a case that is now before a grand jury.”
“What the fuck did he call a press conference for then?” muttered the journalist who had muttered before.
“Is this funny to some of you?” Bresser asked. “Do you think this is funny?” He wasn’t able to tell which journalists were talking and laughing.
“This is like fucking gym class,” said Raleigh, covering his mouth as if he had to cough, and then in fact coughing, fakely.
“Shh,” warned Elspeth.
“I know you guys consider yourselves pretty clever,” Bresser continued, “but keep in mind that you’re operating with more axes of freedom than are available to someone in my position. My people and I have to move within constraints you aren’t even aware of.”
“So tell us about them,” someone hollered.
“I’d like to, believe me. But I can’t do that. What I can do is tell you about the algorithm we have.”
“Oh, come on,” jeered someone else.
Bresser hesitated. “There would be some very unhappy people if I did tell you. Some very surprised and unhappy and angry people.”
To this conspiratorial note no heckling came because it raised hopes that Bresser might say something he shouldn’t.
“What’s he even doing?” Matthew asked.
“Gathering them in,” Leif said.
“What I want to communicate,” Bresser at last proceeded to say, “is that Bresser Opsec offers a suite of security solutions, not all of which, by any means, have been deployed in the case under investigation, which was, I can probably say this much, both more complex and simpler than many of you have been led to believe. The important thing I want to convey here is that if it weren’t for our participation, the district attorney probably wouldn’t even have been aware of the danger. Let alone the federal prosecutor.”
A journalist near the front raised a hand. “Mr. Bresser, are you saying the US Attorneys’ Office is under a misconception about the case?”
“Not at all. In fact, I concur wholeheartedly with Mr. Somerville’s assessment that there was a grave threat of wide unauthorized release of personal identifying information and that the authorities had no choice but to step in when we did.”
A humming started up, and the journalists began to jostle one another.
“What kind of personal information, Mr. Bresser?” one shouted.
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Is this Somerville’s assessment of the Telepathy Four’s capabilities?”
“Not at liberty to say.”
“Is it Somerville’s understanding that the principal charge against the Telepathy Four is going to be identity theft?”
“I didn’t say identity theft, and I didn’t say it was Mr. Somerville’s understanding. I’m not talking about his understanding. I’m talking about the understanding. The general understanding.”
“The general understanding that there was a risk. An imminent risk.”
“That’s correct. An imminent risk.”
“How were you able to find out about it in time? How did you start tracking the Four?”
“Again, I’m not at liberty to say,” Bresser replied. His deputy leaned down and said something into his ear, which Bresser brushed away like a fly. “This is my understanding that we’re talking about. I’m not speaking for Somerville.”
“He’s a fucking idiot,” said the muttering journalist, a little louder than sotto voce. It occurred to Matthew that the journalist might be drunk.
“Why this group, Mr. Bresser?” asked another journalist, up near the front, who had a TV voice. “Why was this group seen as a particular danger?”
It was strange to hear the journalists falling in almost unconsciously with the idea that the friends had posed a threat and setting aside for the moment, if not longer, a portion of their professional skepticism in order to win Bresser’s trust.
“Weren’t they just kids?” It was the drunk.
“No,” Bresser said sharply, focusing on the man at last and, without leaving his precinct of crimson rope, seeming to round on him. “No. We identified RPF because it was brought to our attention that a group of people at Occupy were boasting that they had new decryption methods and new surveillance methods, which could have been destabilizing. We had no choice but to look into the claims.”
The deputy began swallowing air spasmodically, like an unwell guppy.
“You’re saying you became aware of the danger because you already had them under surveillance?”
“Initially these were statements that they made out in the open.”
“Then are you saying you believed in their telepathic powers?”
“I didn’t fall for that, and I advise you not to.”
The deputy extended a monitory hand toward Bresser, but before he could touch him, Bresser snapped, “No further questions at this time.”
The humming redoubled and again became a roar.
“Elspeth?” queried a tall woman in black whose hair was pulled tight to her head. “We spoke briefly at the courthouse.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Elspeth replied.
“Do your lawyers know you’re here?” the woman asked.
“We seem to be improvising,” said Elspeth.
“You should go,” the woman said.
“Who is this?” Raleigh asked.
“She’s a reporter,” Elspeth said.
“Do you know why he called this press conference?” Jan Ridgely asked her colleague.
“He seems concerned for his company’s reputation, doesn’t he,” the tall woman replied. “Do you still have my card?” she asked Elspeth. “If you stay here, I’ll have to report anything you say, but I hope for your sake you’ll go. Just because Bresser is making an—”
“Oh, it’s not that bad,” interrupted Ridgely.
“Excuse me,” said Leif, speaking generally, waving his arms semaphore-style. Still in Matthew’s coat, and warmed by the excitement, he was flushed, and there was a lick of fresh sweat across his forehead.
“Leif,” said Matthew.
“Leif,” said Elspeth.
“He said his say, and I want to say mine,” Leif continued, still in a voice pitched slightly louder than what would have been needed to address only his friends. “Are you listening?” He didn’t try to single any of the journalists out with his eyes; he simply waited, with the patient confidence that beauty has never even had to recognize as one of its strengths.
The patter of talk in the room grew thinner. Suddenly only one reporter was still speaking, and then in self-conscious embarrassment he, too, stopped.
“Leif, let’s go home,” said Matthew.
“You guys probably think this is like any other case, and that’s why I want to warn you. I’m sorry if that sounds a little crazy.”
Glowing red dots of handheld recording devices constellated the crowd, which had re-centered itself on Leif. Bresser, who had got halfway to the elevator bank, turned to watch.
“There was this thing that we discovered we had,” Leif said. The faces of the listening journalists were solemn, perhaps out of pity for the harm that they knew Leif was doing to himself, perhaps entrained by Leif’s own calm, uncanny seriousness. “We had been told all our lives that it was impossible to have it, but we did have it and we knew that we did and we decided to accept that we did. You know what I mean. I’m not going to say what it was. We didn’t think it was special that we had it, but we thought it was special that we let ourselves know that we had it, and what I realized today, while listening to that man, is that that’s what we got wrong. That’s what he’s trying to tell you without telling you. What he means is that they had it, too. Maybe not him personally. But there were people on their side who could also do it. What happened to us—the way we were ‘caught’—couldn’t have come about any other way. I don’t know why anybody would do it for them—we thought the whole point of doing it, or rather, of deciding to be aware that you could do it—was to be free. To be making a choice. But we were wrong—that’s what he’s telling you. Or not telling you. It’s actually only because he hasn’t really told you yet that I can still talk to you. He walked away and left us here together because he thinks we can’t speak anymore, but we can still speak, for at least a little while longer. We can speak, up until we understand how the blackmail is going to work, and he hasn’t finished explaining it. Even then we’re still going to be able to speak but only without saying words or hearing them, which is going to be difficult. It’ll be like what I’m trying to do now, talk without saying what I’m talking about, which I have to do because if I were to say out loud everything that I’m trying to say, you wouldn’t be able to hear me.”
“Mr. Saunderson,” asked one of the journalists, not the drunk one, “are you accusing the government of being psychic?”
Leif stared at the man, almost longingly, and Matthew knew that Leif was saying to the man, without words, that even when we can no longer speak in words, we’ll find a way to know what’s in each other’s hearts.
“What have I done?” Leif said to Matthew.
The caretaker of the caretaker, Matthew pulled Leif out of the building and into the street. He shoved out of the way a reporter who tried to come between them and the open back door of a taxi.
“It’s okay, go,” he told the driver, who instead of going studied the reporters flooding into the street around his car and studied Leif and Matthew in his rearview mirror. “I think at this hour we should take the tunnel,” Matthew advised, as if he and Leif were an ordinary fare, and the suggestion of routine was powerful enough that the driver let his car creep forward. After three blocks, the car turned onto a highway, and their pursuers were left behind.
“Is it true?” Matthew asked. “About the government?”
“I thought I had to say it.”
“Were you reading it?”
“I had to say it the way each generation of poet has to say explicitly what was implicit the generation before. Bringing to the surface what used to be just beneath the surface, like a snake molting its skin. Becoming less subtle and more obvious.”
“Are you warm?” Matthew asked, putting a hand on Leif’s forehead.
“Am I?”
“Yes.” His forehead was still wet.
“Don’t be mad at me,” Leif said.
“I thought you were mad at me.”
The car dipped into one of the preliminary tunnels that came before the deep one that would take them under the river. “That was before I decided to save the world,” Leif said. “Did I fuck up?”
“I don’t know. It probably doesn’t matter.”
“It feels true. It might as well be true.”
“Maybe it is,” Matthew said.
The pale, tiled vault of the tunnel abruptly hooded them, and they fell silent.
When they reached Matthew’s apartment, Matthew made dinner while Leif, sitting in the front window, peeked around the edge of the blinds at the street below, where the television vans were once again assembling.
“I see your friends are here again,” a lanky man, one of Matthew’s neighbors, said the next morning, curtly, when they crossed paths with him in the corridor. From the stoop, reporters were waving and smiling in at them insinuatingly.
Matthew and Leif braved the press and made their way back across the river to Michael Gauden’s office. He had summoned them. When they reached his office, he rose not to greet them but to shut the door securely behind them.
“Am I in the doghouse?” Leif asked.
“The media at least seem to be responding positively to your apparent sincerity.”
“My apparent sincerity,” Leif echoed.
“That’s how they’re taking it.” Gauden put reading glasses on his nose and slapped at his computer’s keyboard. “‘All in His Head? Cops Read Minds, Warns Hacker.’ For example.” Gauden looked over his glasses at Leif. Then he looked at Matthew: “You couldn’t have tried to stop him?”
“I—,” Matthew began.
“And how is it that you all came to be together in one place?” Gauden interrupted. “Was there a touch of the supernatural there, too?”
“That’s just how it happened,” Leif said.
“I’d like it if you were to promise me it won’t happen again and we leave it at that.”
“Why are you so angry?” Leif asked.
“I’m not angry,” Gauden said, with a wide, false smile. “It’s your neck. It’s my job to try to save it.”
“Was it really a hanging offense?” Leif asked.
“Prosecutors and judges often fail to respond well when the defendant takes threatening action against the victim of the alleged crime.”
“I was just talking.”
“There’s actually very little talking that qualifies as just talking for someone in your situation, if the talking is being done to someone who stands in the relation to you that Bresser happens to occupy.” Gauden took off and pocketed his glasses, pinched the bridge of his nose, and kneaded his left eye. “I’m in a difficult enough place as it is with the pressure to cooperate that I’m getting from some of the other defense counsel in this case, who seem to be unaware that the justice system in this country is adversarial.”
“What do you mean?” asked Matthew.
“Do you know where your friend Elspeth found this”—he produced the glasses again and scrutinized an email on his screen—“Dominique Blount? She seems to be operating on the theory that she and Somerville are going to be friends. Perhaps because she was such good friends with the state’s district attorney.”
“They were friends?”
“I’m being ironic. I mean the state didn’t charge Elspeth, and now Ms. Blount seems to think the feds won’t charge her, either, if only she’s nice enough to Somerville.”
“Elspeth didn’t do anything,” Leif said.
Gauden didn’t seem to hear. “Ms. Blount doesn’t seem to be aware if you give someone like Somerville a slice of the carcass, it doesn’t make him any less likely to demand a leg or a haunch.”
“Is there something she wants us to do for Elspeth?” Leif asked.
“Wrap you in a bow and leave you on Somerville’s doorstep.”
“Would that help?” Leif asked.
“Right now Elspeth’s not in any legal peril, and you are,” Gauden said. He picked up his pen and whirligigged it, leaning sideways into the arm of his chair. “There is one piece of relatively good news, though I’m not entirely sure how you’ll take it. It came out yesterday morning during a hearing in the Evans case about a motion that Penny filed to suppress the server log. It’s probably been leaked online by now. Bresser seems to have called his press conference because he thought it would get out.”
“What is it?” Leif asked.
“You don’t know?”
Leif shook his head.
“The server was rigged to open to any attempted login from certain IP addresses,” Gauden said.
“I don’t understand,” Leif said.
“Well, the apparent IP address of Raleigh’s laptop was one of those addresses. Penny asked a question that brought it out. I think he must have been tipped off, but I can’t figure out who did it. He was kind enough to let us know.”
“I don’t understand,” Leif repeated.
“You didn’t have to say open sesame for it to open,” said Gauden.
“You mean, I didn’t read anything.”
“Well, I can’t speak to whether you ‘read’ anything, as you call it, or heard anything or saw anything, but whether you did or not wouldn’t have affected your ability to log in.”
“Does that mean he’s innocent?” Matthew asked.
“If I leave the door of my car open with the engine running and the key in the ignition, it’s still a crime if someone drives off in it without my permission. But it puts us in a slightly better bargaining position.”
“Doesn’t this make it entrapment?” Matthew asked.
“It’s not entrapment,” said Gauden. “In real life, as opposed to television, entrapment is the defense you make when you’ve lost, basically. Because if you argue entrapment, you’re saying you did it, but.”
“Then how is this good news?”
“Because you’re not very dangerous criminals if there’s no evidence that you could do what you thought you could do. That’s why Bresser wanted to get out in front of it, I suspect. It makes what he did look like overkill.”
“They were waiting for us,” Leif said.
“But you knew that,” said Gauden. “You told me you saw files with your names on them. They don’t seem to want to enter those as evidence, by the way, which is going to make it hard for them to prove their gravamen. I think we have a shot now at avoiding not only jail time but even having to plead to a felony, which you don’t want to do if there’s any way you can avoid it because in a number of states it means you can never vote or hold office, and you’re young and it closes some careers to you, such as the law, for example.”
“I don’t think we have to worry about my law career,” Leif said.
“You never know,” said Gauden. “But you won’t even have the chance to turn the law down if you don’t stay away from the press. The more public a case is, the more unrelenting someone like Somerville feels he has to be. Please don’t make any more statements.”
“Maybe they knew we were coming because they had read me,” Leif said.
“Have you considered talking to a therapist?”
Leif shook his head.
“There might be more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in my philosophy, as they say, but I have to restrict myself to thinking about what can and can’t be proved in court.”
“Of course,” said Leif.
“Not everyone has to operate under such restriction, is what I’m trying to convey. I can get you a name and number if you’re interested.”
On the subway back to Matthew’s apartment, a bearded man in a plaid shirt cruised Matthew. The man was sitting across the car and three seats to the left. At first Matthew wasn’t sure. Cruising was one of the analog practices that the internet was rendering obsolete. Maybe it was only that Matthew wanted to think he was being cruised? The man’s eyebrows were almost black, and his beard was as richly dark. His eyes suggested that he was telling a story about himself in which he didn’t mind that he was misbehaving. He looked away to give Matthew a chance to look at him and then looked back to catch him at it.
Leif didn’t seem to notice. Maybe he was choosing to be tactful.
The man’s coat was sprawled behind him on his seat. He seemed to be proud of his shoulders and arms and was leaning forward to show them off. Matthew would have liked to be wrestled down by them. Leif had winced and twisted away the last time Matthew had tried to touch him. It isn’t your fault, Leif had said, as if Matthew had asked about assigning blame.
“Is it safe to talk to a therapist if you’re going to be on trial?” Leif asked.
Matthew swiveled in his seat, to make a show of facing Leif as he talked to him, demonstrating his attachment to Leif for the bearded man’s benefit. “We should have asked.”
“What?” Leif asked, reacting to the swivel.
“Nothing,” Matthew said. He thought of confessing that there was a boy down the car staring at him.
It was never exciting unless the man cruising you seemed a little better than you could expect to get. It was possible that the man was looking their way because of Leif—because Leif was the one he really wanted, because the presence of Leif somehow ratified Matthew as an object choice, proving, perhaps, that Matthew met at least the minimal requirements for dating. But the man didn’t look like he was thinking about dating. Maybe he liked the challenge of taking a stranger away from his boyfriend.
“I don’t think Gauden would have suggested therapy if there weren’t some kind of legal privilege,” Matthew said.
The bearded man caught Matthew’s next glance and let Matthew see him looking Matthew up and down. Matthew looked away to avoid committing himself.
“The thing is that if it’s not what I thought it was, then I don’t know what it is,” Leif said.
“What what is?” Matthew asked.
“My secret grove,” said Leif. “My secret grief. The one I wear on my tattoo sleeve.”
“Gauden said the news about the server didn’t necessarily mean you weren’t picking up on something,” Matthew said.
“Don’t pretend to believe now. What is it your dog has?”
“My mother’s dog. She has epilepsy.”
“Maybe I can see a vet instead of a therapist. I don’t think it would occur to anyone to subpoena a vet.”
The man was burning a hole in Matthew’s peripheral vision, but Matthew made a decision not to look at him again. Leif was more beautiful, after all. When he took off his shirt, there was that cross grain of down at the top of his breastbone.
“What?” Leif asked again, perceiving the new shift in Matthew’s aspect.
“Nothing,” Matthew said again. The trouble was that beauty alone wasn’t enough, because close handling eventually made it common. In a tumble with someone like this bearded man, Matthew would be more free, for the brief time it lasted. The bearded man belonged to the animal life of the city. Matthew, however, had chosen to have a name and to be part of a story.
It could be reassuring, perhaps, simply to know that animal life was still running through the city. He could make an effort to think of it as reassuring. His hands were trembling, and he hid them in his coat pockets.
All the lawyers came down hard against fraternization among the defendants, which left Leif with no one but Matthew to talk the disillusioning news over with.
“Did you think all along that I was making it up?” Leif asked.
“No,” Matthew said.
“You must have wondered. You’re not an idiot.”
“I could have been wrong.”
The bitterness that was settling on them compounded the difficulty. It seemed to Matthew that everything was getting worse so rapidly that the pace interfered with the way that one parceled out one’s caring along the axis of time. It was becoming hard to rest in any one moment long enough to mourn the misfortune that belonged to it and ought to have been sufficient to it, because one knew that a worse misfortune was probably about to come next. One became distracted from one’s present unhappiness by one’s likely future unhappiness.
An email from Matthew’s adviser warned that Matthew had missed a chapter deadline, and at first, at the prospect of burying himself in reading and note-taking, Matthew’s spirits not quite paradoxically lifted, but they fell again as soon as it occurred to him that if he were to immerse himself in the seventeenth century he would leave Leif too much to his own devices. It had become impossible again for Leif to work at the café—the journalists were swarming—and Leif sharply refused when Matthew suggested poetry.
“Your old grad school friends were right. It’s just creative-writing faculty talking about each other.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Maybe I’ll take up knitting.”
“What about the dark poem?” Matthew asked. “Can’t you write that?”
“It’s not a poem.”
“What is it?”
“It’s just the way the world is,” Leif said. “It can’t be made into anything.”
“You could write that down.”
“There’s no one to write it down for. That’s what being at the end means.”
The remark seemed a little dramatic, but Matthew knew better than to say so, and it wasn’t until they were in bed that night and he was staring at the ceiling, next to Leif, whose eyes were shut and who was curled up like a fist and whose body was nowhere touching his—it wasn’t until he was alone in the dark beside Leif that it occurred to him that he could have said that if Leif were to write down what he felt about the end of the world, it might do good even if no one did survive to read it later, even if no one but Matthew and Leif himself ever had a chance to appreciate what he was able to say.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Leif’s arms, around Matthew, would quiver in his sleep, his legs would halfheartedly piston, and from his throat would come faint, half-swallowed cries. Whenever it happened, Matthew wondered if he should wake Leif up or if it was better for Leif to work through in his dream whatever he was working through.
And sometimes, from within a dream of his own, Matthew would hear the toneless whistle of a gas burner opened, the clicking of his stove’s igniter, and the thick flutter of a blossoming flame, and when he opened his eyes, he would see, across the room, a small purple thistle-bloom burnishing the underside of his teakettle. Invisible in the dark, Leif, having heard Matthew stir, would explain in a low voice that he hadn’t been able to sleep. Matthew would then get out of bed, too, despite a protest from Leif, and wrap himself in the blanket, and they would sit up for a while together in the window at the front of the apartment, looking down at the street.
In daylight Leif admitted that his dreams were violent. A murderer was chasing him with a power drill. He was in a house with boarded-up windows surrounded by creatures that wanted to catch him for food. It was absurd, he said. He wasn’t the kind of person who liked to go to horror movies. It was getting so that some nights he almost wished he didn’t have to sleep.
“Would you like to see someone?” Matthew asked.
“They’ll go away,” Leif said.
They were only dreams, Matthew told himself, because he didn’t know what to do.
“How much is it so far?” Leif asked. “Would you ask your father how much it is?”
Matthew told him not to think about that.
Usually when the doorbell rang now, they ignored it, but one afternoon it rang and rang, insistently, and maybe because Matthew had been thinking that morning that they needed to see people, if only he could think of someone Leif wanted to and was not forbidden to see, he put on his sneakers and walked downstairs. Standing in the foyer was Diana, in her orange jacket. She was holding a plastic Thank You bag from a bodega.
“Can I help you?” Matthew asked, the glass of the door still between them.
“Elspeth asked me to check on Leif,” she replied, projecting her voice through the barrier.
Matthew opened the door but stood in it. “Is it all right for him to talk to you?”
“I don’t know,” she said, smiling and not moving. “That’s got to be your call.”
“I mean because of the lawyers.”
“That’s your call,” she repeated.
“Come in.” He waited at the foot of the stairs for her to go up first. “Do you know how Raleigh’s doing?” he asked. Now that he was letting her in, he felt that he needed to make conversation.
“No idea.”
“So you haven’t checked on anyone else.”
“Elspeth thought Leif might have been upset by the news about Bresser’s server,” Diana explained. “She and Leif are sort of on each other’s wavelengths.”
“You have a visitor,” Matthew announced when he opened the apartment door.
“You brought me goldfish?” Leif exclaimed, when he looked into the bag from the bodega.
They embraced. “How are you, babe?” she asked, caroling her voice.
“Do you like our Christmas tree?” Leif asked.
Matthew had suggested it one day mostly as something to do. It blocked one of his bookshelves.
“Are you going to decorate it?”
“It’s more of a natural Christmas tree,” Leif claimed.
“It’s very nice.”
“Matthew even remembers to water it. Sit down, sit down.”
Matthew turned around his desk chair for Diana and offered her something to drink.
“Elspeth asked me to see how you’re doing,” Diana said.
“Oh fine,” Leif replied, with a dying fall. “I had a friend whose five-year-old started saying that, exactly that way. ‘I’m oh-fine, thanks.’ How is Elspeth?”
“She’s oh-fine, too. Maybe a little confused.”
“It’s not that confusing. I was an idiot.”
Diana hesitated.
“Isn’t that what they’re saying online?” Leif continued.
“I don’t know,” Diana replied. “I haven’t been—”
“Matthew reads it, but he won’t tell me. That’s what I’d say if I had believed in me. If I had wanted that badly to believe.”
“It doesn’t matter what anyone online says,” Matthew interposed.
“He keeps saying that. But I told everyone there was another world, ‘far other worlds, and other seas,’ even, and I was wrong, there’s just one, and furthermore, because there’s only one, what they say online is all there is.”
“It isn’t all there is,” Diana objected.
“What does Elspeth think we were doing?” Leif asked. “Does she have a theory? That’s my hobby now: trying to figure out if it was mania or an epileptic aura or did we just have very delicate mechanisms. Raleigh’s idea was always that we were responding to messages that we weren’t aware we were receiving, like that nineteenth-century horse that thought it could do math but was actually just watching its owner’s foot. Of course it might have been just nothing at all. There might not have been any real thing that was being referred to. After all, if there’s only one world . . . You know, I used to think that if a thing was able to appear in a real poem then it must have some kind of reality somewhere. The way that some mathematicians believe that numbers are real. It’s almost embarrassing even to say it out loud now.”
“The way I think of it,” Diana said, “you and Elspeth were playing a game.”
“We’re not supposed to talk about it, are we,” Leif said, with a glance at Matthew.
“Do whatever you want,” said Matthew.
“Does Elspeth think it was a game?” Leif asked.
“We don’t—she just asked me to get in touch and not drop too many bread crumbs along the way. She just wanted to send her love.”
“I see.”
“She was afraid that if you two don’t send messages back and forth somehow that you’ll lose track of where you are with each other.”
“We never thought it could work if you couldn’t get into the same room with each other,” Leif said.
“Well, I guess she’s trying to adjust to that, is why she sent me.”
“Tell her I send my love, too,” Leif said. He sat very still for a moment, as if concentrating, and Matthew realized that he, too, was no longer entitled to imagine that he knew what Leif or anyone else who didn’t speak was feeling.
“I think maybe I didn’t think enough about ‘annihilating,’” Leif resumed, “when I thought about ‘annihilating all that’s made.’ Maybe annihilating the world makes the world want to take revenge.”
“Do you mean in the poem that your forest comes from?” Diana asked, gesturing toward her own shoulder.
“Yes. The thing is, Marvell makes annihilation sound so pleasant: ‘A green thought in a green shade.’ I didn’t think anyone would mind.”
“Is it annihilation? It sounds like understanding.”
“It’s everything. That’s why I got it in ink.”
Matthew offered to walk Diana downstairs. “I think that was good for him,” he said. “Your visit.”
“Oh good.”
“Have you been able to get any work done?”
“I’m supposed to be writing my theory chapter, so I’ve been telling myself that I’m doing the thinking.”
“What’s it about?”
“My dissertation? Cigarette smoking, as a way of looking at the ideas people have about human nature. There’s sort of a whiteness studies angle. What happens to the rhetoric of moral disappointment now that large populations of white people are becoming newly subject to description by it.”
“I still have to make an effort not to think about cigarettes sometimes,” Matthew said.
“See, one of our questions when a person says something like that is whether he describing a weakness or a strength. Is he describing an inability to resist a cigarette once the thought occurs to him, or a resourcefulness in knowing how to circumvent that susceptibility? Whether you describe it one way or the other is like having a different operating system on your computer.”
“And where does the whiteness studies come in?”
“We’ve found that a smoker who wants to quit is more likely to succeed if he believes that character is universal but polyvalent. Not determinist, not a matter of essence. And even though blacks smoke more overall than other groups, they seem to be a little better at thinking that way, probably because they’ve had more practice with denaturalizing essentialist ideas. And your dissertation?”
“Poetic kingship,” he said. “This sense that people started to have in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that they were like dethroned kings, in a way that left them feeling sad but more like the sovereigns of their own lives.”
“So maybe the same thing a little.”
One morning, Matthew took the train alone to look for a Christmas present for Leif. Christmas was only a couple of weeks away. He said he was going to the library at his university, and when, long before the train reached the university, he alighted and walked upstairs, the street itself seemed galvanized by the lie—by the excitement of being where his boyfriend didn’t know he was.
At a chain clothing store decorated like a gentleman’s club from the 1940s—cherrywood and baize and taxidermy—he fingered the blue-and-white houndstooth shirts and the fawn-colored sweaters. It wasn’t a place he ever went to on his own account. As a graduate student he couldn’t afford it.
It was a weekday, and there were only a handful of other men in the store. They had the bland handsomeness and unself-doubting manner of people with corporate jobs—or perhaps, given that it was a weekday, of people between corporate jobs.
“Can I help you find anything?” it startled him to hear a salesman say. The salesman, two or three years younger than Matthew, reached over to space out more evenly the shirts hanging in front of Matthew. His touch on the shirts was proprietary, as if he were counting them.
“Just browsing,” Matthew said, with an angry smile, knowing that the salesman could see that he didn’t ordinarily wear such nice clothes and was shopping alone. The salesman could probably also tell that Matthew was gay, as the salesman himself obviously was, and gays were reputed to be light-fingered. An indignant part of Matthew wanted to explain that it was the prospect of spending that was making him jittery.
“Could I try these on?” one of the corporate-looking customers asked.
The salesman appropriated the shirts that the customer was holding and, draping them over his forearms like a muff, led the man to a dressing room.
The prettiest things in the store were the sweaters, but Matthew wasn’t sure he could afford one and didn’t know if Leif would like it. It had been clever of Diana to remember that he liked goldfish.
His phone trembled. “Am I disturbing you?” his mother asked.
“No.”
“Your father has a convention in Portland this weekend.”
“In Portland?” He had no idea where this was going.
“I know, at this time of year. But I think it’s so nice there, I want to go anyway, and I wondered, do you and Leif want to come look after Fosco?”
“Oh. Sure.”
“I thought it would be a chance for you to get away.”
“I think we have to ask someone before we can leave town,” he cautioned.
“Who?”
“I can find out.”
“Only if you’re interested. She loves Puppy Hideaway, and right now they do still have a slot.”
“I’ll ask Leif.”
“And another thing—I’m sorry to bother you with all this.”
“What?” he asked.
“Do you think you’ll be coming for Christmas?”
His mind raced. He didn’t want to commit to anything.
“I’m starting to plan,” she continued, apologetically.
“Leif might need to go see his mother.”
“Of course. It’s her turn, isn’t it. Well, we’d love to have you if for some reason he isn’t able to.”
“I don’t think he’ll be going to trial that soon.”
“Matthew, I wasn’t talking about that.”
“It’s something we have to think about,” Matthew said defensively.
“Is everything all right?”
“Everything’s fine.” It hadn’t occurred to him before that there was a finite number of days until Leif’s trial, no less finite for his ignorance of the number. “I guess they’re still having the grand jury. We haven’t heard anything lately.”
“You’ll let us know when you do.”
As the conversation ended, he surfaced into the store where he happened to be standing. He needed to buy presents for his parents, too, he realized. Maybe he could also buy his father a sweater? He picked up a second one, in a different color. But was it weird to buy your father a sweater if you were also buying your boyfriend one?
They were too expensive, anyway.
“You really don’t mind?” Matthew double-checked, even though it was too late to back out.
“I like it up there,” Leif replied. “It’s like stepping outside of one’s story, at least for me. Everything’s so taken care of. There’s peanut butter ice cream in the freezer. There’s a big TV.”
“Would you want to go for Christmas, too?”
A cloud passed over Leif’s face. “If I’m still here.”
“Or maybe you want us to see your mother.”
“She won’t be up to it. She told me she’s giving me books, and when I said remember they don’t allow hardcovers in prison, she said then don’t use the gift card to buy hardcovers. Which leads me to think she isn’t going to be putting up a tree or anything.”
“It’s up to you,” Matthew offered.
“Your parents must be sorry you met me,” Leif said.
“Why do you say things like that?”
They had to leave their Christmas plans unresolved because they needed to move quickly. Fosco was already locked up alone in the little clapboard house, waiting for Matthew and Leif to travel the hour and a half’s distance and take her out and feed her, and they had to meet Michael Gauden before they could even get on the road. Gauden hadn’t said what it was about.
In Gauden’s office, a curtain had been drawn away from what on previous visits Matthew hadn’t even been aware was a window. At this height, in the center of the city, the fraternity that obtained among the skyscrapers was evident—their shared distinction from the unimproved real estate below.
To enjoy the view for too long might have seemed unsophisticated. Matthew took a seat. Leif craned his neck for a few moments longer. “It’s like satellite view,” he said.
“And how are your spirits?” the lawyer asked.
“I threw my Ouija board out,” Leif said. “I thought I wasn’t supposed to contact them anymore.”
“Touché,” Gauden said.
Leif was making an effort, Matthew saw. Having dismissed Gauden and then reengaged him, having defied him and then put up with a scolding from him, he seemed to have come round to a recognition of what he and the lawyer owed each other. It disappointed Matthew a little to see that Leif had been tamed somewhat. But there was no other way out.
“Listen, I had a thought,” Gauden said, leaning forward in his chair, as if he wanted to ask a favor. “Maybe it’s even what your friend here would call a strategy,” he continued, pausing to glance at Matthew. He slid back in his chair. The pen in his hand wouldn’t launch into its revolutions until, in the effort of speaking, Gauden became unconscious of it, and for the moment he was still present, still awkwardly in the room. “It occurred to me, in the light of what we now know about Bresser’s cybersecurity, or rather the lack thereof, that I might have been hasty in saying that belief had no relevance. Or rather, the quality of belief.” The pen whirled once and stopped, a silent trill. “If I can put it that way.” Another whirl. “It surprised you, didn’t it, when you were able to get into Bresser’s server?”
Leif nodded.
“Did it surprise you?” Gauden asked again, in a louder voice.
“Yes,” Leif answered. He wouldn’t be able to nod on the stand.
“If we were to explain to the court that it surprised you, and that it surprised you because at heart you believe about this sort of thing what most people believe, and if we were to explain that what you said to the other members of your working group about your ability to ‘read,’ as you called it, held a truth-value for you, to the extent that it held any truth-value at all, like that of poetry, which you do, after all, write—”
“But I meant it,” Leif interrupted.
“You just told me you were surprised.”
“I was surprised,” Leif admitted.
“Which means you didn’t expect to get in.”
“But I wanted to.”
“And I want to steal the Hope diamond, but if I don’t do anything that I believe would enable me to steal it . . .”
“I was lying?” Leif queried.
Gauden shook back a lock of blond bangs that had fallen across his forehead. “It may come to the point that we need to say something as bald as that in order to make the logic of our argument as clear as possible, but personally I think of the speech act in question as being more along the lines of a metaphor.” The pen again flashed into motion.
The lawyer, Matthew understood, had no idea how much it would hurt Leif even to pretend to believe that he had knowingly deceived his friends.
“The usual case,” Gauden continued, “is that the accused thought he was buying uranium, and he’s being tried for that intention even though the government agent who entrapped him delivered only pyrite. But here, you were holding a chunk of what you knew to be pyrite, and the government switched it out for uranium.”
Leif didn’t immediately respond.
“Well, I for one think it’s foolproof,” Gauden added. He smiled at his self-congratulation.
Leif nodded but still didn’t speak. He looked at Gauden and then at Matthew and then out the window, where sunlight was quivering on the glass scales of the nearest fellow skyscraper.
“And what does the monkey say?” Gauden asked. The lawyer was looking at Matthew.
“The monkey?” Matthew echoed.
“I mean, you know, what’s the opinion in the peanut gallery?”
“You mean, what do I think?” Matthew asked.
The lawyer nodded. He probably hadn’t meant for his scorn to slip out of his mouth.
“I don’t know why you’re taking away from him . . . ,” Matthew began.
“What?” the lawyer asked.
Leif, still silent, wouldn’t meet Matthew’s gaze.
“Never mind,” Matthew said.
“I don’t think I’m taking away anything that isn’t already gone,” the lawyer said. “I’m trying to prevent the loss of even more.”
“I see,” Matthew said.
Leif asked for a little time to think it over.
They had rented a car, since Matthew’s parents wouldn’t be there to pick them up from the train station. Matthew drove. When they set out, the road was chalky under the winter light. Along the shoulder, in the strips of turf and brakes of scrub pine, the green hues were flat and pale, almost whitened. Inside the envelope of the automobile, they were safe. Leif curled up in the passenger seat with his stocking feet perched above the glove compartment, near the windshield.
“Did I tell you I figured out the sonnets?” Leif asked. “I had read them before, but this time it was so obvious. You know there’s the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady, and the speaker’s in love with first one and then the other and then back and forth, and all the scholars think they were real people but no one knows who they really were?”
“I’m getting a PhD in sixteenth-century English literature.”
“I’m just checking. Anyway, you don’t know the answer because I’m the first person in history to figure it out. The Fair Youth is a boy who played women’s roles, and that’s how Shakespeare met him and they fell in love, and the Dark Lady is the Fair Youth after he’s started transitioning. She’s the Fair Youth once she’s become old enough to want to pass as a woman offstage as well as on.”
“Huh,” Matthew said, with the slow half mind that one has while driving.
“And once he has started taking clients, probably. But I’m not really sure about the social history of cross-dressing actors in that period.”
“Huh,” Matthew said again.
“You don’t believe me.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t believe you.”
“That’s why there’s all that negativity in the sonnets about makeup and female artifice and how the Dark Lady isn’t what she seems to be. The speaker of the poems is being all cis about everything.”
“I thought the speaker liked the Fair Youth’s ambiguity.”
“He likes the ambiguity. He doesn’t like the identity.”
“What about when the two loves of comfort and despair hook up with each other and leave him out?”
“Allegory,” Leif answered. “Allegory of the self.”
“I see.”
“I should be able to get a PhD for this, right?”
“Definitely,” Matthew said.
“It’s probably as much as most scholars hope to discover in a lifetime.”
“Are you really going to write about it?”
“No,” Leif replied, his voice suddenly hollow.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Leif said. “There’s not really time.”
“We don’t know that.”
“It’s just one of my ideas,” Leif said. “What are you doing?”
“My wallet was digging into my ass the way I was sitting on it, so I’m putting it in my coat pocket, but I want to zip the coat pocket shut so it doesn’t fall out later.” The wallet had been bothering him for half an hour, but suddenly the discomfort of it was in the forefront of his mind.
“Do you want me to do it for you?”
“I got it.” The steering wheel jiggled a little as he maneuvered. “What?”
“Nothing,” Leif replied.
“What is it?”
“I thought you’d be more interested.”
“In your idea? I’m totally interested. I want you to write it.”
“No, forget it. It’s too late. Now you’re being nice. It’s your thing, anyway.”
“It’s not my thing. I don’t own sixteenth-century literature.”
“I think maybe I was trying to get close to you somehow,” Leif said.
“That’s great,” Matthew replied. “I can tell you what editions to cite.”
“What do you mean?”
“About half of scholarship is that all your page numbers have to be to the canonical editions.”
“But I don’t think I really want to write it now,” Leif said.
“What do you mean, ‘now’?”
“Oh, maybe I thought you would whoop or something. And there isn’t really time, like I said.”
“I’m totally excited about it. I’m saying I’m excited about it. Why aren’t you listening to what I’m saying?”
“I’m sorry.”
The lane stripes, as they slipped past the car, flashed with a faint glow and seemed to hover slightly above the agate of the road. It was twilight, Matthew realized. What had been green along the roadside was now dusky and indistinct, like an aquarium that has been neglected and has gone murky. He switched on the headlights.
“I want you to write about it,” he repeated. “You have to write about it now.”
“But I don’t want to. Honestly. I was being stupid. I think maybe I just wanted to imagine what it was like to do what you do. Since I’m not writing poems anymore. Maybe that’s what I wanted you to be excited about.”
“Okay,” Matthew said.
“And you were moving your wallet around or whatever.” He was trying to make it all a joke. “I don’t even know anymore what’s going on in my head.”
Matthew nodded. “Do you want to watch a movie tonight?”
“Oh, sure.”
“There’s pay-per-view at my parents’ house.”
“Oh, that’s right.”
“Leif,” Matthew said.
“I’m fine.”
“Okay.”
“I just may not be in the mood for a movie.”
By now Matthew’s eyes had adjusted to seeing only as much of the road as the streetlights shone down on and the flares of the car’s headlights hit as they traveled forward. It was almost night. The defile of trees along the road was still legible but only as a silhouette. A silhouette with spindly, upward-reaching fingers.
“What did you think of what Gauden said?” Matthew asked, a little later. It was as dark now inside the car as outside. “Are you going to go along with it?”
“Why not?” Leif asked, looking out the window.
“Well, it’s not—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Leif interrupted.
“It’s not who you said you were,” Matthew finished saying.
“It doesn’t matter.”
After Richard II is unkinged, he is paraded through London by his usurper without his crown or royal raiments, according to the account given by Samuel Daniel in Civil Wars. When Isabel, Richard’s queen, catches sight of him from a window, she is at first distraught and even angry, but with an effort she checks her grief, and by the time she and her husband at last speak, she is ready to renew her pledge to him:
Thou still dost rule the kingdome of my hart:
If all be lost, that government doth stand;
And that shall never from thy rule depart:
And so thou be, I care not how thou bee:
Let Greatnes goe; so it goe without thee.
Matthew felt the pathos of the speech, and the nobility of it, but he didn’t know whether it was true—whether the lover of a dethroned king would really feel that way, or feel that way for very long.
After dinner Matthew started a movie on the television, in the hope of luring Leif onto the sofa beside him, but the movie wasn’t very good—in a theater the garishness and the violence might have radiated harmlessly away, but in his parents’ home the toxins seemed to accumulate—and after half an hour of watching alone he turned it off.
They were sleeping in his old bedroom again, even though the master bedroom was free. Fosco joined them, pacing counterclockwise four times before settling heavily to the floor. Though the house had two stories, plus a finished attic and a basement, all the animal life was focused that night in a single room.
“Do you think she sleeps here all the time?” Leif asked.
“I doubt it.”
When Leif got up in the middle of the night, Matthew was awakened not by him but by Fosco—by the thumps that she made on the stairs as she padded down after him to the kitchen. In the morning Matthew knocked wadded-up chamomile sachets out of two mugs that Leif had left in the kitchen sink.
“Nightmares?” Matthew asked.
Leif made a gesture as if to push away the question.
Leif had gotten so little sleep that when, a couple of hours later, Matthew set out for the grocery store, Leif stayed behind to try to take a nap.
It was so much warmer than it had been the night before that Matthew walked to the car in just his sweater, and it wasn’t until he came to the corner, where the traffic was always so heavy that it was tricky to turn left, that he realized he had forgotten his wallet, still in the pocket of his coat, hanging beside the refrigerator in the kitchen. He turned right instead of left and made his way around the long block. Back in his parents’ driveway he turned off the car but left the keys in the ignition and the door open. An alarm in the car mewed at him as he walked away from it.
“Forgot my wallet,” he called out in explanation as he grabbed his coat. Through the quilting he confirmed by feel the nub of the wallet.
There was no acknowledgment of his explanation. Leif probably hadn’t heard him—Matthew had waited so long at the corner for a break in the traffic that Leif was probably already asleep—but it was strange that Matthew didn’t hear the click of Fosco’s nails on the wooden floor, ambling her way toward him from wherever she was in the house. “Leif?” Matthew called out, listening also for Fosco.
No one was on the sofa in the living room or on the one in the sun porch.
“Leif?” he asked, at a lower volume, knowing that Leif must be nearby, and climbed the stairs. But the bedroom where they had slept was also empty, and so was his parents’ bedroom. He checked the one that had used to be Brian’s, too.
The door to the attic was ajar. “Leif, are you up there?” Matthew asked. He felt a little silly climbing yet another flight, while the driver’s-side door of the car and the kitchen door of the house were hanging wide open, down below—while the pealing of the car’s alarm was draining its battery and while the money that his parents spent heating their home was being squandered—merely to see what was probably going to be Leif already obliviously asleep in Brian’s displaced twin bed, with Fosco ensconced beside him. “Leif,” he said once more.
In the attic, Leif was sitting in an overstuffed sage-colored armchair that Matthew’s mother had retired from the living room ages ago, in the first turmoil when Brian went away to college. He seemed to be having trouble keeping his eyes open. Fosco was staring at him so attentively that at first Matthew thought they were playing a game.
“I forgot my wallet,” Matthew said.
“I made a mistake,” Leif replied slowly.
“What?”
“I thought I would get used to it in a few minutes,” Leif said, “but you came back first.”
What Fosco was paying so much attention to was an object in one of Leif’s hands. “What’s this?” Matthew asked.
“To put away.”
It was the smoky orange plastic vial of Fosco’s medicine. It was empty, Matthew saw when he took it.
“Where are they?” Matthew asked. “Where are the pills, Leif?” There was a glass with a little water still in it on the floor beside Leif’s feet. “Jesus Christ.”
“It was a mistake,” Leif said. “Everyone makes mistakes.”
“Can you walk?” Matthew asked. He pocketed the empty vial.
“I don’t feel so well.”
He didn’t seem to be able to rise on his own, so Matthew put his arms around him in a bear hug and lifted him up out of his chair. “Can you help me?” Matthew asked, as he shifted to Leif’s side so that they would be able to move forward.
Fosco barked at them because it was all so unusual.
“Shut up, Fosco,” Matthew said.
“Probably got the dose wrong,” Leif said, “because I couldn’t go online.”
“My parents mortgaged their house for you,” Matthew said.
“God,” Leif said, twisting in Matthew’s arms. “Don’t tell me that.”
But Matthew wanted to tie him to the world. He wanted him more than he wanted him to be perfectly free.
He tried to brace himself against the wall of the stairwell as they descended, so that if Leif stumbled, he wouldn’t be knocked down by him.
“Wasn’t going to have to think about it anymore,” Leif said.
“Yeah, you fucked up.”
The hospital where they usually took Matthew’s father, whenever he had indigestion and thought he was having a heart attack, was only seven minutes away. At the landing Matthew would be able to call an ambulance from his cell phone, but if he and Leif could manage the second flight of stairs, too, and he got Leif into the car, they would probably get there faster.
“How many did you take?” Matthew asked, planning what to tell the doctors.
“Thirty,” Leif said, holding up a hand with, nonsensically, five fingers.
When they reached the landing, Matthew tried to draw Leif along it a little more swiftly, since it was a flat surface.
“Poor Fosco,” Leif said. She had stopped barking, but she was following them closely.
“Why?”
“Won’t have any,” Leif explained.
“You should have thought of that,” Matthew agreed.
No walls hedged in the stairs down to the ground floor, and Matthew did his best to anchor himself with careful footing. He needed to let Leif hold the banister.
“I know,” Leif said. It took Matthew a moment to realize that Leif was still in the conversation about Fosco and was replying to the last thing Matthew had said. They were falling out of sync; Leif’s mind was slowing down. Matthew wondered whether choosing to drive Leif himself was the right decision. They weren’t even in the car yet. They weren’t even on the ground floor yet. Matthew felt panic flush his chest and neck and face, but he didn’t think Leif was alert enough to notice.
“I should’ve been paying more attention,” Matthew said.
“To read my mind?”
Fosco trotted ahead of them into the kitchen and then straight out the open kitchen door. “Fosco!” Matthew shouted.
“She’ll come,” Leif said hopefully.
Matthew pulled Leif through the kitchen. They didn’t have time for Leif’s coat.
Outside, Fosco was peeing in the neighbor’s roses, which at this time of year were no more than knotty vines with prickers.
“I’m sorry,” Leif said, as Matthew lowered him into the passenger seat. His skin was alabaster.
“It’s okay,” Matthew said. “Fosco, come,” he called, but she wouldn’t. “Look, Fosco,” Matthew tried, but not even the car appealed to her.
Leif had closed his eyes.
“Fosco, come!” Matthew called again. He got in the car himself, for encouragement, but the dog turned tail and cantered away.
“Fosco!” Matthew shouted hoarsely, scaring the dog into a gallop. The white tuffet of her tail bobbed above her as she crossed three lawns, four lawns, five.
Matthew slammed the door and turned the key in the ignition.
Since Matthew had never been to Leif’s apartment, Leif had given him instructions: the top lock wouldn’t be locked, unless the landlord had come by, but in order to turn the key in the bottom one, Matthew would need to pull the doorknob up and slightly to the left.
At first, however, the key still wouldn’t turn, until, in frustration, Matthew pulled harder—held the knob in both hands and tugged—and then the heavy shield of the door shifted in his grip, sitting back on its hinges, and after that the key rolled easily around.
At the end of its swing, the opening door bounced against a running shoe on its side that the door had obviously stubbed its toe on many times before. Just beyond, along one wall, began a bookshelf. The books that Matthew had been asked to fetch, however, were near Leif’s desk, which Matthew could already see a corner of, in the room ahead. If you sit at the desk, Leif had said, they’ll be here, and he had mimed stretching out a hand to touch them. Leif had added that the patterns on the covers looked like dimity. Blake and the Metaphysical Poets were the ones he wanted. Plus a novel about a medieval nunnery, which didn’t look like dimity and was on a different shelf—Leif hadn’t been able to remember which one.
Behind Matthew, after he stepped inside, the heavy door clicked shut. The light in the apartment was gray and indirect; the shapes revealed by it, quiet and precise. The shapes, for example, of Leif’s three skateboards—tar-papered escutcheons, horned with wheels, that were propped against the entry corridor’s wall.
As Matthew walked, he was conscious of the clops that his footfalls made and of the floorboards creaking. He was conscious of being in an apartment that he had never been invited into.
There were two windows. The bed lay under the one on the left; a desk, under the one on the right. Beside the bed there was a green rocking chair. If you turned around, you saw a kitchenette, with a side door leading to a bathroom.
Up to the panes of the windows, which overlooked the street, rose the muted lilt of a man and a woman talking as they strode by on the sidewalk below.
In the cement front yard, brown leaves, curled like closed hands, were rattling against ironwork where they were trapped. In a week or two, a fall of snow would overlay the leaves, and they would be held down, rotting, until spring.
Matthew set his backpack on the floor. On the desk a pale jade hen and chicks was growing in a shallow terra-cotta tray. The toothed whorls looked out at oblique angles. Leif hadn’t said anything about it, but Matthew was pretty sure that even a plant like this needed watering sometimes.
The apartment did have his delicate smell, or nonsmell. Of a rubbed penny, a penny old enough to be real copper. Was that it? And also the smell of fresh milk, maybe, if fresh milk even has a smell. The smell of cut skin and of a kind of blank richness.
It would only be for two weeks, initially, the doctor who had admitted Leif had said. Then they could revisit the decision, see where they were. The facility was one town over from Matthew’s parents’ house. A nurse in the ER had assured Matthew that she had seen many patients sent there over the years, and it had been easier to accept her advice than to try to arrange to have Leif transported all the way back into the city, where, the nurse had warned, beds were in short supply. Easier and probably cheaper. Matthew would be able to stay nearby, with his parents. After all, on Sunday it was already going to be Christmas. Why go back to the city? And then a week after Christmas the two weeks would be up. The first two weeks, anyway. Matthew wondered whether on Christmas Day the doctors would be willing to let Leif out for a few hours.
He knew as an intellectual matter that it was natural to be angry at someone who had done what Leif had done, but he thought it was possible that he had used up all his anger on the effort of locking Leif up. While he had been telling the nurse that yes, he did believe that Leif continued to be a danger to himself, he had had to not look at Leif’s eyes, and then, as soon as the nurse had begun to loop cloth restraints around Leif’s wrists and ankles, he had wondered if that had been the right thing to say, because maybe saying it would make what Leif had tried to do more real and more plausible; maybe therefore it would have been better not to say it, in order to encourage Leif to forget about it—to live around it rather than pigheadedly through it.
Institutions weren’t subtle.
Matthew walked into Leif’s kitchenette and opened the cold-water tap. In a building as old as this one, lead seeped into water that sat for any length of time in the pipes, so Matthew let the water run. He opened a cabinet: cereal, canned tomatoes, a bag of lentils, boxes of tea. In a second cabinet he found a glass.
He held a finger under the water, waiting for it to run cold.
The facility itself had turned out not to be terrible. It was disconcerting, whenever Matthew visited, to have to wait between two locked sets of steel-plated doors for an orderly to pat him down. And the food, the times he had shared it, had been farinaceous and had been served on cardboard without even plastic utensils—everything had had to be eaten with fingers. Leif was allowed to wear his own clothes, though, except for belts and shoestrings, and there was a dayroom with a large window where he and Matthew were able to sit and talk and, if they felt like it, play Scrabble. They had to play at a rather desperate pace—the clock was always ticking—and unfortunately the televisions in the dayroom had cable and were almost always showing something violent, something crudely male—a car crash, a slashing—even though there seemed to be as many women as men in the ward. Leif was developing an ability to ignore the television, but Matthew couldn’t master it.
The water having turned cold, Matthew poured himself a glass.
Everything couldn’t be perfect, but maybe it would turn out to be good enough.
There wasn’t much choice about drugs. Leif said the consensus was that if you were in there, it was inconsiderate to the people who were paying to keep you there for you to say you wanted to try to do without them.
The green of Leif’s rocking chair was a practical, civic green—a shade of green that a water pump in a town square might be painted. It didn’t seem full-size, but it was too large to be a child’s; maybe it was an antique, scaled to an era when people were smaller. Matthew sat down in it, and it sprang forward and slapped his back, but then he found his center of gravity. The blanket on the bed beside it was a black-and-red tartan, cheerful even in the room’s dim, hooded atmosphere. He took a sip of the water he had poured. Could Leif get a drink of water at any hour, if he wanted one? Matthew didn’t know. Maybe they locked the door to his room at night. But no, they couldn’t. None of the interior doors in the facility had locks, not even the bathrooms.
Why had Leif said he had roommates? Something else he had been hiding.
On a dresser beside the rocking chair there was a child’s microscope, a solid one, of gunmetal. Solid in a way that gave Matthew the impression that it had been a father’s or a grandfather’s gift. Next to it was a small pinewood box, and when Matthew flicked up a little brass clasp on the box’s front and lifted the lid, inside he found an array of glass slides, shelved in parallel on their sides, making a puzzle of even the diffuse light that fell into their honeycomb.
The trick was to convince Leif to think of the treatment as a gift. It would even be preferable for him to think of it as a gift he hadn’t asked for and didn’t want, if that would discourage him from worrying about how to repay it. The danger came when Leif was seeing himself as a cost that he could try to cut. If he were gone, he was in the habit of saying, the charges against the others would almost certainly be dropped. He shouldn’t be saying this. Even if it was true, saying it was part of the disease.
In the Arcadia, when the hero tries to kill himself, his lover can’t believe that he’s sincere in thinking she’ll be better off without him, but in real life maybe this is what a suicide always thinks, if any thought goes to another person at all.
Matthew drew one of the slides out of the box at random. Kidney cells (human), read the label. He filed it back into its grooved place.
After a little searching, he was able to find the books that Leif had asked for. He also found one of Leif’s little red passport-size notebooks, one that still had blank pages. He added it and the books to his backpack, which already held books and changes of clothes for himself, as well as the presents for both of them that his mother had mailed to his apartment in the city—needlessly, it had turned out—the week before.
If Leif had died, Matthew thought, without intending to let himself think it, as he pulled out the dresser’s middle drawer and a stack of Leif’s folded white T-shirts briefly wobbled—if Leif had died, Matthew would have had to come here anyway, to choose clothes for Leif.
Maybe he hadn’t used up absolutely all his anger.
What he had been watching all this time was Leif trying to destroy himself. He didn’t mean his taking Fosco’s medicine, or not just that. He meant the whole effort that Leif had made to open himself to the world and keep himself open to it. Leif had taken off his armor in the middle of battle—in the middle of a war. It probably had something to do with being gay—with not being a man the way men usually were—with having had to learn the rules of combat artificially, the way that autistics have to learn social niceties. It was easy to make a terrible mistake if you weren’t by nature a killer, if you were deducing it all from first principles.
Matthew halted his thoughts. It probably wasn’t a good idea to do too much thinking here alone, he advised himself.
The hen and chicks—he had almost forgotten. He picked the plant up and ran it quickly under the faucet as if it were an ice cube tray that he was filling. Water beaded up on the pebbles in the medium and on the leaf clusters’ indifferent, ingrown faces. He suddenly wondered: Should he not be watering it? There were plants that didn’t like to be touched with water directly. Would some of the stiff spikes now fur over?
He returned the plant to Leif’s desk. He sat down, and with his handkerchief he started to dab away the small mirrored spheres that were now lodged in the folds between the lames of the plant’s armor. There were dozens of the spheres, and each one dissolved at the lightest touch of the handkerchief, as soon as its cotton fibers interrupted the integrity of a water-pearl’s surface.
This was something he could do, he told himself, as he kept dabbing. This was the sort of task he could safely spend his anger on. Even if he didn’t save the plant and even if the plant didn’t in fact need saving.