Outside, in the snow, children from the neighborhood were barking taunts at one another. Their plastic sleds quacked beneath them as they sat down, squirmingly, on the hardpack at the heads of the trails. The slope behind the Farrells’ backyard ran downhill so steeply that no one had ever built on its few acres, and in neglect the land was so heavily and erratically wooded that to ride down through and between its black trees was genuinely dangerous and enlivening. Back when Elspeth and her brother had run with the neighborhood children, their father had periodically attempted to forbid sledding on the slope as too risky, and it was a legacy of his attempts that the subdivision’s children, long after Elspeth and Sam’s father had moved away, still skirted along the edges of the Farrells’ backyard, instead of tramping diagonally through it, and never looked up at the windows of the house.
With her back to these windows, Elspeth had laid out five cards on her mother’s dining room table.
The ace of money The ace of cups, inverted
The eight of staves
The five of money The six of staves
To turn over only number cards was like a commentary on the recent undeceiving, the working group’s great public failure, which shouldn’t, strictly speaking, have shaken Elspeth’s faith, since she had never thought that she could do anything with numbers.
Because she had never thought they could read the future, either, she had never bothered to learn how most people who used tarot cards actually used them. She had a vague memory that in the configuration she had just laid out one card was supposed to represent old love and one card new, but she didn’t know which was which, and she didn’t recognize anyone, having had the bad luck to turn over instead of personalities only statistics.
Did it mean anything that the ace of cups was upside down? Of course the other four cards might also be. It was only because the figure on the ace of cups was asymmetrical that its orientation showed. On closer scrutiny, the ace looked less like a cup than like a castle—a miniature castle with seven turrets—a chatelet so diminutive that it could be held in a single hand. A gilded container for the self, in this case upended. Or maybe it looked more like a throne? An unyielding, high-backed bishop’s throne.
There was now always another puzzle for Elspeth under the evident puzzle. Under the question of what a hand of tarot meant there now lay the question of what she thought she was doing. Maybe she was ceding away from herself her own will. Maybe she was hoping to let things say for her what she didn’t want to have to say herself. It shouldn’t be possible to have a private religion, but maybe a private one was the only honest kind in an era when faith had to be sheltered from so much knowing. From even one’s own knowing.
The eight staves that were depicted on the eight of staves card were interwoven as if they constituted a net connecting the cards around it. It would take only six lines to connect four points, however, and it would take ten to connect five. You really are a fact-checker, Diana kidded whenever Elspeth overexplained—when, for example, she had overexplained that it made more sense to freeze soup in portions that were the size of a single serving than the size of a meal.
Maybe there were eight staves because eight was the smallest number that could be split in half three times: man from woman, mind from body, self from other.
“When’s your bus, honey?” her mother asked as she came down the house’s narrow central stairs.
“Three seventeen,” Elspeth replied, gathering up her cards, to hide them. Her brother had already left, the night before.
“So we should leave here at two forty-five,” her mother said.
Her brother had claimed he had a report to write, and Elspeth was going back early in case it was going to be possible to visit Leif in the locked ward. Leif hadn’t emailed her back yet. There was a computer in the ward that the residents could take turns using.
It occurred to Elspeth that she should tell Diana she was on her way. Elspeth had been making an effort, which Diana probably hadn’t even noticed, not to need to tell Diana everything, but it would be all right to tell her the bus schedule.
“I wish there was something I could do for you,” her mother said.
“There’s nothing wrong with me, Mom. Nothing has happened to me.”
“I know.”
“You’re paying for my lawyer,” Elspeth pointed out.
“That’s not what I mean,” her mother replied. “How will you get to your friend?”
“There’s a train. Matthew can meet me at the station.”
“Matthew is his . . . ?”
“Uh-huh.”
“D’you find it?” one of the boys outside yelled.
Elspeth’s mother’s eyes strayed to the windows.
“I’m surprised they still go sledding,” Elspeth said, looking over her shoulder at them. “I thought kids only played video games now.”
“They take movies,” her mother explained, and stuck out a stiff arm as if she were holding up a phone.
As her bus reached one of the lime green metal bridges that join the city to the continent, Elspeth decided it made more sense to go back to her own apartment. Diana hadn’t retracted her invitation, but the holiday had made its interruption, and Elspeth felt she could no longer presume that in Diana’s eyes she still stood in quite so dire a need of succor.
She checked her phone, in the look-busy way that one does when returning to civilization. Leif still hadn’t emailed.
Her roommates were still at their families’ houses. In the refrigerator, there was a carton of eggs she had left behind because she had known they would keep. Or she could have peanut butter for dinner. There were two heels of bread in the freezer.
She hadn’t sensed anything when it had happened. She had cast back into and combed through her memories pretty thoroughly afterward, hoping to turn up a sliver, at least, of awareness that she could reproach herself for not having paid more attention to, but there hadn’t been one. She had been out shopping that day for a Christmas present for Diana, something sincere that wasn’t too much. It couldn’t be food, which she herself might end up eating. She had found a porcelain tumbler with a streaked, opalescent glaze, but to buy just one would have seemed to say too clearly that she saw Diana as alone. In the end, she had bought a candle.
In return, when they exchanged gifts, Diana had handed over a black-and-white snapshot: a sparrow perched at an angle on a wooden banister. The shadowed grooves of the wood grain were in sharp focus, but the sparrow itself was blurred, the stipples and smudges of its coat faintly doubled. The shutter must have startled it into the intake of breath that precedes flight.
It had been while Elspeth had been buying the stupid candle that Leif had done it.
She decided on peanut butter. She was only good at taking care of other people, not herself. She had to use a knife to pry apart the slices of bread, scattering, as she did so, some of the crystals of rime with which the bread was diamonded. On the counter the crystals wilted, dissolved. The pith of each slice of bread had been bleached to an uncanny, filamentous white by the long storage. She set the toaster to Frozen.
Her phone. “What happened to you?” Diana asked.
“Oh, I came back here,” Elspeth said. “To my place.”
“Suit yourself.”
It was easy for Diana either way. Elspeth turned on the public radio station at a volume audible but not quite intelligible, a known lonely person’s strategy.
The thing about what Leif had done, she thought as she sat down at the dining room table with her dry toast and its gluey covering, was that she could just as easily have been the one to try it first. If you didn’t know how to take care of yourself, it was the obvious way of taking care of yourself, she thought, and as she had the thought, a surge of self-pity constricted her throat and she had to thump herself on the chest and slip-slide back into the kitchen for a glass of water, which she ought to have poured for herself in the first place.
She drank it at the sink, staring into the black window above it, which reflected the white cabinets behind her but only the outline of herself. The radio chuckled and warbled, far away in the parlor.
The truth, though, was that she liked even peanut butter. She liked knowing that it was waiting for her in the next room, and she didn’t like the idea of ever not being able to look forward to eating it again. She understood but maybe she also didn’t understand what Leif had tried to do.
In the dark, later that night, Elspeth’s body sat up in bed. Somewhere above her, the soul that should have been hers was battering itself against the ceiling like a bird caught inside an airport terminal. Her heart, for the moment empty, was knocking in her chest.
When she tried to think about what was happening to her, she saw the words of her thoughts assembling themselves in anticipation of her thinking them.
“Please don’t hang up.”
“What time is it?”
“I’m not sure. Oh, it’s a quarter to three.”
“Is everything all right?”
“I don’t think I’m a real person.”
“Are you having a nightmare?”
“No, it’s—it feels like I’m in a moving car and there’s no one in the driver’s seat.”
“Are you asleep?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Maybe we should just keep talking,” Diana said.
“Okay.”
“What should I say?”
“Anything.”
“My mother has an heirloom she wants to give me. A lace tablecloth that her mother gave to her. She wants to give it to me, but she also seems to be afraid I’ll ruin it somehow. She’s being impossible.”
Elspeth listened silently. After a while, the squirrelly emptiness inside her ran itself out, like a windup toy running out the tension in its spring. Her reunion with herself, when it came, was as casual as stretching out her arms into the sleeves of a coat.
The next morning, she wondered if the experience had been a side effect of her gift. It had been a little like losing one’s place in a book.
In the afternoon, an email came at last from Matthew saying that Leif did want her to come; his hospital stay was being renewed. They had held off so long on inviting her, Matthew explained, by way of apology, because first everything had been too chaotic and then for a while it had looked as if Leif might be allowed to go home. But there were still a couple of issues that everyone agreed he should continue to work on.
The use of the word everyone didn’t seem to be ironic; it sounded to Elspeth like a child’s identification with the grown-ups in his life. If it was Leif’s word, too, then it betrayed a wish on Leif’s part to be seen as safely on the side of the responsible authorities. She wondered if she was going to lose him, the distinct person in him she had loved—but she cut herself short: it would be vulgar to turn his misfortune into an opportunity for her to have feelings.
She replied to the email, arranging for a visit on Saturday, which was going to be New Year’s Eve. She didn’t mention the holiday.
Diana said she was going to be having dinner with a colleague that evening but invited Elspeth to sleep on her couch when she got back to the city. It was something to look forward to.
The train lumbered past mudflats, snow-frostinged scrapyards, fenced-off lawns, and, once, a pen with two swaybacked gray horses. Elspeth kept her knapsack on the seat beside her, taking out only a book, which she held but couldn’t let her guard down sufficiently to read.
There was so much time to kill out here that people had shoveled the parking lots, which were mostly empty.
The journey reminded her of John Clare’s escape from his asylum. Clare had tried to walk back to a past that in his madness he thought he remembered, only to discover that the woman he recalled as his wife was dead. In real, sane life, he had married a different woman. Maybe a caretaker had more trouble than other people forgetting the lives he hadn’t lived because to him those lives didn’t seem any less real.
Her heart beat so sharply when she felt the train halting at her destination that she wondered if she was going to lose touch with herself again. But she didn’t.
Matthew’s fists were balled in his pockets. His beard had gone scraggly, but his sunglasses were still decorative.
“Can I carry that for you?” he offered.
“I’ve got it.” She couldn’t remember whether he and she usually hugged.
The doors of the sedan he was driving were heavy but easy. Inside, it seemed very parental, very stiffly cushioned. Warm chimes sounded as the engine cleared its throat and hummed into life.
“Excuse me,” he said as he put his arm on the back of her seat and looked over his shoulder. She watched the progress, or rather, regress, in the mirror on her side.
If she lost touch with herself while she was in the ward, maybe they would keep her. Once, accompanying a friend to the emergency room, she had fainted at the sight of her friend’s blood spurting into a syringe, and because she had hit her head, the nurse had insisted on admitting her.
“How’s he doing?” she asked.
“He’s all right, now that they’ve mostly figured out his medication.”
On the roof of every house a shelf of snow was draining into icicles, the top of the shelf sagging under the melt like the swaybacks of the horses she had seen.
It was hard not to relax in such a comfortable vehicle.
“How are you doing?” Matthew asked. He was a handsome man, but a part of her still didn’t know if she trusted him.
“I can’t believe I didn’t know.”
“You couldn’t have known,” he replied.
They were taking an on-ramp.
“Are we going straight there?” she asked, sitting forward.
“We might as well. Is that all right?”
“Is there anything I shouldn’t say?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Matthew said. “I already told him that the internet thinks he’s in a CIA black-site prison.”
He steered the sedan onto a fork that began to spiral gently downward. Beyond the highway guardrails, the white towers of a medical center revolved at a stately pace.
What would Leif be like? Elspeth couldn’t find him in her mind. Maybe she hadn’t been aware when he had done it because for some time now she had been letting him go.
Well, he had committed a crime. Everyone but she and Matthew had.
Why was she so fucking law-abiding?
At the parking lot entrance, Matthew pulled a ticket from the mouth of a dispenser.
He already had a little bit of a belly, which she pretended not to see, fixing her eyes insistently on his. Patients around them were staring, perhaps envious of his having a visitor.
“Where’s Matthew?” he greeted her by asking.
“He’s in the car. He said he had talked to you about me coming up first, but I can go get him if you want.”
“Oh, that’s right.” He led her into what seemed to be a sort of social area, a collocation of small tables, one or two of which held board games in tidy, edge-worn boxes. There were more board games in a small bookshelf nearby. As if they were in the living room of a summer house. “Do you want a window or an aisle seat?” he asked.
“Maybe not so near the TV,” she suggested.
“Here, you face away.”
“No, that’s okay,” she protested, but he thumped a place for her.
The walls were greenish bronze color, like that of a car from the 1950s. She had had the idea, perhaps from movies, that the walls would be white. She was carrying her coat in a ball—she had had to take it off when they searched her—and she untangled it and draped it over the back of the chair.
“Thank you for coming,” he said, as she sat down.
She remembered his telling her that he would never go back to jail. “Don’t be silly,” she said.
He seemed to be the same person. Maybe a little more subdued than she remembered. His face, like his stomach, was maybe ever so slightly more padded.
“You have that real-world glow,” he said. “That’s what they’re looking at.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’ll lose it in a few minutes and they’ll leave you alone.”
She admired the view out the window. Snowed-over landscaping surrounded the medical center like a moat; almost no footsteps dotted the snow. At the base of the tower that they were in lay a rectangle of white that was outlined and crossed by traces that suggested the palisades and terrace of a lost garden. A hundred years ago there would have been staff wheeling patients into the garden every morning and every afternoon.
“How’s it going?” she asked.
“When I was twelve I had a fantasy that I was going to be a paraplegic, and it’s a little like that.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“No no, it was going to be great. I was going to be all at once Christ, Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, and the debonair victim of a terrible skiing accident. My body was trying to make me at long last male, and I wasn’t having any of it. I didn’t want to sin—I didn’t even want to want to sin—so instead I was going to be unable to move my legs. It was going to be amazing.”
“And it’s like that now?”
“I’m not being serious,” he said. “Did you know Matthew didn’t fool around with another boy until he was twenty?”
“Are they trying to make you straight?” she whispered.
“No no no. Don’t worry. I just feel a little immobilized.”
“I see,” she said.
“What I mean is I’m not sure it’s therapeutic for me not to be able to tell the difference between am I better and am I not able to get into any trouble.”
“I see,” she said again. He was fighting with himself, and he was putting on a show, were her two impressions. “Is it distracting here?” she asked. “With all the people?”
“It’s writers’ colony rules,” he said. “You decide when you want to leave your room, and no one can come into your room without a prior invitation.”
“So you can keep your focus.”
“Yeah,” he said, but he looked away. “You know, if you want to say anything, you can. I can handle it, and if I can’t handle it, well, I’m in here.”
It was hard to take the invitation at face value.
“I have something that I want to say,” he continued, “and it’s that I’m sorry. Even though my therapist isn’t sure I should say it.”
“Sorry for—for taking the medicine?”
“No. I mean, yes of course I am sorry for that, but that’s not what I mean. The medicine itself turned out to be the hardest thing to fix, by the way. The vet told Matthew she wouldn’t write a new prescription for Fosco without a police report, and there wasn’t one, so I had to sign a HIPAA to turn my medical records over to the vet. The woman in Records here thought it was hilarious.”
“I was afraid for you,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But what I’m really sorry for is that I put you at risk when—”
“Nothing happened to me.”
“Maybe my therapist is right. She thinks all of us were in a system together. She thinks we were acting like a family. According to her, I don’t know enough yet to apologize.”
“You don’t have to apologize.”
“That’s not the same thing. The whether to apologize and the what to apologize for. Her opinion is that it might take me a little time to redraw my boundaries. Maybe I had previously been drawing them too encompassingly, when really the part that I can do anything about might turn out to be in fact even smaller than what most people think, let alone than what the group we were in was thinking.”
“Smaller how?”
“What she says is that it’s sometimes the followers of a sect who create the leader out of the most suggestible member.”
There was nothing but his usual, now ever so slightly ruined prettiness in his face. He didn’t seem aware that he had landed a blow. Maybe the drugs interfered with his natural delicacy.
“She’s never met any of us,” Elspeth said in defense. But almost as quickly as hurt and anger had overtaken her, they were dissipating. Leif was hiding his gift by using it to read from his doctors what they wanted to hear. He was still using it to make connections with people important to him.
“It’s just an interpretation she’s offering,” he said. “It’s not meant to be ‘the truth.’”
Elspeth nodded. She had to be careful not to take away from him anything he might need.
For the rest of the day she held Leif’s betrayal tight and close, as if it were a small animal whose teeth and claws she did not want to give an opportunity to. For dinner, back in her apartment, while she waited for Diana to be freed of her colleague, she thawed a block of chicken soup and sliced an avocado. While she stood over the soup, nudging it with a wooden spoon, she grew annoyed at her own sighing. It ended up being a good dinner, plain as it was, despite being a solitary one.
Before she left for Diana’s, she texted. It turned out that Diana’s colleague had canceled. Elspeth had been alone for the past few hours for no reason.
On the subway people were bristling with the holiday’s angry energy, the aggrandizing sloppiness with which it was acceptable for one night to mark public places as one’s own. It was the holiday of leaving behind—the holiday of not caring, of violently discarding—and in principle Elspeth admired the celebrants’ selfishness and ferocity.
Raleigh had texted her Happy New Year, she saw when she came out of the subway.
Children were picking icicles from the blue bars of a scaffolding.
“It’s candy!” one exclaimed.
“It’s not candy,” another replied, a little scornfully.
On the top floor of Diana’s brownstone, the door was ajar.
“I’m putting a pie in the oven,” Diana explained, coming out from behind her peninsular counter. She and Elspeth kissed amicably. “Should we open a bottle?”
There were dustings of flour on the countertop, the movement of Diana’s hands recorded in swirls and sprays. “Oh, do your pie first.”
“It’s going to be apple-raspberry. I put bitters in, but I don’t know if that’s right because I put lemon zest in, too.”
“It sounds amazing.”
“Bitters might be trying too hard.”
“I’m putting my coat on your bed,” Elspeth announced, walking back to the small room where Diana slept, unwinding her scarf as she went. She laid her parka across the duvet, specifically across the foot of the duvet, wondering as she did so whether in her imagination she was neutering the piece of furniture or hiding it or staking a claim.
“I remembered to make the dough last night,” Diana said. She was pressing a pale stiff sheet of it into the circular elbow of a pie dish, folding the draped excess onto the lip as she went. “Do you want to open that?” she asked again, nodding at a bottle that bore a print of her palm in flour. “How was Leif?” She tumbled fruit into the crust’s hollow.
“He’s adapting,” Elspeth said. She was going to be as cheerful about it as the children she had seen outside.
“Adapting how?”
“He doesn’t believe anymore.” Under the wrapper on the neck of the bottle, there was just a screwtop.
“Doesn’t believe?”
A second sheet of pie dough came out of the refrigerator, this time on a flat plate. Diana’s knife ran through it.
“What’s that for?” Elspeth asked.
“The lattice.”
“Science,” Elspeth said.
Diana peeled a strip from the plate and draped it over the dome of raspberries and apples.
The landline rang. “Can you get it?” Diana asked. A second strip was already looped through her fingers.
Elspeth carried her glass with her.
“Happy New Year,” said an older woman’s voice, when Elspeth picked up. “This is Mrs. Watkins.”
“Oh, Happy New Year, Mrs. Watkins,” Elspeth returned. Is it all right? she mouthed to Diana, pointing at the receiver.
Diana shrugged. “Tell her hi for me.”
“I’ll get to her in a minute,” said the voice in the phone. “But right now you tell me who you are and what it is you study at the university.”
“I don’t go to school here, actually. My name is Elspeth, and I met Diana at a protest.”
“Oh, that’s right. She did tell me about you. At the Occupy. You all were doing good works.”
“Well, I hope we were.”
“Feeding the hungry—isn’t that the Lord’s work?”
Elspeth didn’t know how to reply.
“Tell me, Elizabeth, what kind of upbringing did you have?”
“It was in a small town,” Elspeth said, trying to be equal to the question. “I went to the public school. My father left when I was ten. Is that what you mean?”
“Just you and your mother, then.”
“And my brother.”
“Two of you, my.”
“He turned out okay, at least. Does Diana have any brothers or sisters?”
“She’s my only lamb. Let me talk to her now. So good to make your acquaintance.”
There was a musical scraping as the oven yawned and Diana put in the pie. Elspeth handed over the phone.
“Happy New Year, Mama,” Diana said.
Elspeth ran the faucet and began to wash dishes.
“Apple raspberry, with bitters and lemon zest,” Diana told her mother, as she sat on the sofa still in her apron, with a look of concentration on her face. “Well, this is a different recipe,” she said, turning away as if to shield the conversation somewhat.
It was almost sad, Elspeth thought, the way parents continue to care about matters they no longer have a say in. It wasn’t a holiday on which Elspeth’s own mother made a point of calling.
“She is,” she heard Diana say.
“Some of which young people?” she heard Diana ask.
Elspeth held the sponge under running water, to rinse away a leaf of flour that had caked up in it.
“I did,” Diana said. And then: “I would be. Of course. You have a good New Year’s, too, Mama.” Diana carried the receiver to its cradle and set it in place.
“Is she worried?” Elspeth asked.
“She worries.” Diana retrieved her drink.
“She asked about my upbringing.”
“She was trying to figure out what kind of a Christian you are.”
It hadn’t occurred to Elspeth to identify her denomination. “We were Lutheran. What about you?”
“She’s a Pentecostal accountant. It’s probably why I’m a sociologist. I had to figure out what it meant when she spoke in tongues.”
“Could you understand her?”
“People can only understand if they’re inspired, too. But my theory at the time was that it was mathematics.”
“Because she was an accountant?”
“I had a teacher who told me it was the language of God. I think I think of it now as a way of beginning certain kinds of conversations. Of licensing certain conversations. Like with your group.”
“With us? At Occupy?”
“When you were all witchy together. I mean conversations that need to seem to come out of nowhere, conversations that don’t work unless they seem to fall out of the sky.”
“I see,” Elspeth said. She wet the sponge again and swabbed the counter a second time. She returned the sponge to its little holster in the sink.
“Sometimes describing an experience from the outside can seem cold to someone who knows it from the inside,” Diana said.
“No, maybe they are similar,” Elspeth considered.
“It may be just that they’re both experiences that I’m not going to share.”
“Is your mother all right with your being—?”
“She’s been informed. She’s waiting for the phase to pass. She’s always willing to forgive.”
Elspeth nodded. “Wait—did we—what time is it?”
In fact, they hadn’t missed midnight. Diana hadn’t set the timer for the pie, either, but she checked on it through the window in the front of the oven until she guessed that it was time to lower the temperature and shift the pie to the center rack. Elspeth found a radio station broadcasting the countdown and turned the volume low but not so low that they wouldn’t be able to hear when the chanting of the crowd became rhythmic.
At midnight, as the white noise of the crowd resolved into pulses, they toasted and shyly kissed.
“It’s nicer when a girl kisses a girl,” Elspeth observed.
“New year indeed,” Diana commented.
“Oh, that’s not what I mean.”
“Careful, then.”
“It’s just that I never tried it before.”
“Didn’t you ever experiment?” Diana asked.
“I thought it would be taking advantage.”
“Of who?”
But that night it didn’t go any further.
On Monday, the first working day of the New Year, Elspeth took on a new fact-checking assignment, and by the end of the week, her replacement laptop, which she had financed by credit card, was full of galleys of the article to be checked and PDFs of the writer’s sources, and her dining room table was littered with thesis-clipped printouts and books whose pages were flagged with orange, pink, and blue stickies—a colonization of the common space that was her prerogative as the roommate with the most seniority, the only one of the original tenants still on the lease. As a courtesy, however, because she still thought her roommates were likely to return any day now, she collapsed the array into a stack every evening, placing each set of pages at a ninety-degree angle to the set beneath for ease of disarticulation the next morning, and stored the stack in the nook that had once been a dumbwaiter. Many nights she rode the subway to Diana’s, where they took turns cooking dinner. Afterward, there was sometimes a TV show; then, oblivion on Diana’s sofa. She slept so deeply that it was as though for an interval she was deleted.
She went so often in part because she didn’t want to be alone if she woke up again vacated by her soul. She needed that much help—a thread around her pinky that was tied at the other end around someone else’s. Diana didn’t seem to mind, at least so far. Elspeth knew she needed to keep in mind that Diana was a lesbian. She also needed to guard against assuming that as a white person she had an automatic right to Diana’s attention. But if she asked too often whether it was okay to visit, she risked sounding uncomfortable with leaning so heavily on someone who wasn’t straight and wasn’t white. Raleigh kept calling, meanwhile, asking for coffee or lunch. She kept putting him off, but she sometimes wondered whether, if she couldn’t otherwise find a way to maintain her balance, it was becoming something like her duty to try returning to him.
She continued whenever she had a spare hour or two to sort through the files on the server of the working group’s hacked and still-shuttered blog, where Leif and she and very occasionally the others had once tried to explain themselves to the world. She reread what they had written; she excised what had been contaminated; she rebuilt what had been damaged. It was an available penance, even if it wasn’t clear that anyone but she felt that it was called for. It was a way, too, of maintaining a connection to her friends and what they had been together. As tasks go, it wasn’t as difficult as Raleigh and Jeremy had made out that it would be. It was tedious, but it was like doing one’s taxes oneself: one had to investigate every ramification, but in most cases the liability turned out to be zero, and even when it was nonzero every individual step in the remedy was simple and easily taken, so long as one took no more than one step at a time. When one didn’t understand, one googled; there was always a support forum where the question at issue had been asked and answered; eventually, one understood. She put the site in a “sandbox.” She set about “hardening” it. And then, at last, she went “live” with it again, moving in metaphor from childhood through the tempering of steel to resurrection—well, either resurrection or eyewitness news. Although to a casual browser of the web the restored site looked the same, it had been invisibly fortified.
She was pleased with her work, and she couldn’t think of any reason not to talk about it, even to the press. The site was public, after all. Even while it had been down, conspiracy-minded commenters had been able to spider and quote from a partial mirror captured long ago in an internet archive. Her refurbishment didn’t expose anything new. She thought that by talking to reporters about it she might be able to win the members of the working group some goodwill. She told Diana that she was thinking of calling the print reporter with the scrunchie, the one who had been less of an ambulance chaser than the others.
Elspeth was innocent, after all. She was so innocent that every morning, the backup program that Raleigh had installed on his and Elspeth’s old laptops sent her an email warning that it had been forty-nine days since the last successful backup of their hard drives—fifty days—fifty-one days—and she never clicked. The government had taken her laptop, and she respected their seizure even when it came to the laptop’s digital reflection. Her restraint didn’t have anything to do with the authorities’ threats. They didn’t even know that she almost certainly still had access, through the backup program, to the files that had caused all the trouble, the ones that Raleigh, Leif, Julia, and Chris had downloaded that night from Bresser’s server. They didn’t know that every morning she chose again not to look at the files.
She never drew on her gift for her own advantage, either, and it, too, was invisible to them and always there.
She was like a winged creature proud of having made a promise to herself that even if hunted she will not take to the skies. She lived by her own choice in a world that they didn’t even know it was possible to escape.
She offered Stacey Temple a seat on her great-aunt’s sofa. For the last dozen years of her great-aunt’s life, the thermostat had been turned up so high that the sofa’s frame had cracked, and when Elspeth’s mother had the sofa reupholstered, the fractures in the frame had been soldered together clumsily, and the sofa now existed, confusingly, in a limbo between decay and repair, lacking many of the associations that had once made it dear but not quite elevated to the anonymous functionality that would have made it respectable.
Elspeth brought out a tray with two mugs of chamomile tea and a small plate of store-bought gingerbread cookies. The journalist was already taking notes on her steno pad. She seemed to be studying what she was sitting on.
“Are you writing about the furniture?” Elspeth asked.
“Just scene-setting.”
“Oh, of course,” Elspeth granted. She knew the kinds of shortcuts writers took; she had fact-checked so many of them. It was a good thing she had put away the tarot deck. “Thank you, you know. For advising me, before.”
“Oh,” the woman said. “You’re welcome.” She remembered to smile. “So none of it is new?”
“The furniture?”
“The website.”
“Had you read all of it before?” Elspeth asked.
“My concern is whether I’ll be able to convince my editor that there’s a story here.”
“I see,” Elspeth said.
“But let’s talk for now, since I’m here,” the woman said. She set her digital recorder on the coffee table and lit its light. “Where were you when you discovered you had been hacked?”
She had been at Diana’s. “I don’t remember,” Elspeth lied. “Here, I guess.”
“And how did you feel? It must have been so upsetting.”
“Oh, I was angry,” Elspeth said. “But they were like naughty children.” She took a cookie for herself and broke off one of its stubby paws. “They probably won’t like my saying that. What I mean is, it was hard to stay angry at them.” The woman wrote steadily in her pad even though the recorder continued to signal unblinkingly that it was listening. She wasn’t writing prose but was positioning individual words on the page in a pattern that must have been meaningful to her. “You take notes, too?” Elspeth asked.
“It helps me think,” Temple said. “And, you know, in case. And you dehacked—do you think that’s the word?”
“I don’t know.”
“You dehacked the site yourself?”
“I was given some guidance by Jeremy, who runs the other website.”
“‘Free the Telepathy Four’?”
“Is that what it’s called now?” Elspeth asked.
“I think the URL is something about a working group.”
“That sounds more like it.”
“Do you have a background in computers?”
“They weren’t super malicious or anything. It wasn’t that hard. Especially if you’re a nerd. Diana says I should have been an engineer.”
“Who’s Diana?”
“Just a friend,” Elspeth said. “Don’t put her in, please.”
“Are you not out?”
“Oh, that’s not it. But she’s been helping me because she’s a friend not because she was in the working group.”
“I see,” the journalist said.
“I mean, she was in a different working group with me. It probably doesn’t matter. But if you could leave her out.”
“What if I describe her without naming her? Is she one of your roommates?”
“No. She lives in the city, uptown. Although I have been staying with her a lot, lately, to be honest.”
“But I can’t use any of this.”
“No. Sorry.”
Temple drew a vertical line along the left-hand side of the page. “So tell me something I can use,” she said.
“Well, I think something very interesting is the paradox that when the hackers put up their message calling us ‘nothingfags’—can you print that?”
“The copy desk will come up with a write-around.”
“I wonder what it will be,” Elspeth said. “‘An expletive suggesting overfondness without a motive.’”
“Something like that,” the journalist admitted.
“But ‘overfondness’ could be ‘whore,’” Elspeth said.
“They’ll leave it if it’s integral.”
“The paradox,” Elspeth tried again, “is that when they, the hackers, put up their message accusing us of standing for nothing, they put it up over the messages where we had tried to spell out what we thought we stood for.”
“About telepathy,” Temple suggested.
“The posts weren’t about telepathy.”
“I don’t know if that’s strictly—”
“Well, to say what we meant, maybe sometimes we said a little more than we meant,” Elspeth replied.
The journalist took the time to write down Elspeth’s answer word for word.
“I thought you were—,” Elspeth began, but broke off.
“What?” Temple asked.
“Forget it.”
“I can take it. I’m a journalist.”
“No, you’re right,” Elspeth said. “You have to be able to be challenging.”
“This website was up before, and what I’m wondering is, if they didn’t hear you the first time, why do you think they’ll hear you now?”
“Maybe they didn’t want to hear it before,” Elspeth said.
“And why will they now?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they won’t. But isn’t it news, what we actually meant? Everyone keeps saying they wish they knew what we actually meant.”
“You just said you didn’t mean it literally.”
“A lot of it is literal,” Elspeth protested. “The part where we said everyone probably knows more about what each other are feeling than we usually let on, and if we let ourselves know that we know, the world would probably be a better place—that was literal.”
“But I don’t know if it’s news.” Temple drew a double line in her steno pad. “I mean, it’ll be up to my editor.”
“It’s lucky,” said Elspeth’s lawyer, Dominique Blount. “One of our paralegals is your size.” Someone’s dry cleaning was hanging on the back of the door to her office. The lawyer slid up the plastic wrapper that ensleeved the clothes.
“You want me to wear it?” Elspeth asked.
It was a gray wool skirt-suit. “Wouldn’t it look a little more formal?” Blount asked.
Elspeth felt bad for the woman it had been taken from, whoever she was, who had been told that her outfit looked as appropriate for an object of the law as for a subject of it. The least Elspeth could do was try it on.
In the handicapped stall of the echoing women’s room, she clicked the hanger onto a coat hook. The fabric of the suit was heavy but limp and had the mildly tangy, olive-like smell of cleaning solvents. She wondered if she would have been offered a stranger’s clothes if she had been a man. But maybe if she had been a man she would already own an outfit that was in the genre of a uniform, and someone like Dominique Blount would be confident that society had trained her to wear it in such situations unprompted.
No, she realized. They would tell a man like Chris what to wear. He probably didn’t own a suit, either.
Once she had struggled into the gray wool, she faced the mirror over the bathroom’s sinks. The shoulders were a little boxy. The waist of the skirt was right, but she didn’t quite fill the bell of it; the woman it had been stripped from must have a bit more figure in the rear. Oh well. Tugged askew by the heavier fabric of the jacket, her own blouse looked weak and shapeless.
She shrugged off the jacket; she wriggled out of the skirt. Maybe something would happen between now and tomorrow morning that would save her from having to wear it.
Any of the women who smiled at her as she carried it back to her lawyer’s office could have been its owner.
“It doesn’t fit?” Blount asked, when she saw Elspeth in her own clothes. Blount herself was wearing slate blue that day.
“No, it fits.”
The lawyer considered Elspeth and the suit in Elspeth’s hands. “I think it could be helpful,” she said.
Elspeth nodded, folding the suit over her arm. They stood in awkward silence for a moment.
“So we’re all set for tomorrow?” the lawyer asked. Blount had set up a meeting with Somerville where Elspeth would be able to tell him her side of the story. Elspeth was even going to be given immunity. “The US Attorneys’ Office is just five hundred yards from our front door, so if we meet here at nine fifteen, that should give us plenty of time to take the elevator down and pass through security and so forth. If you bring your phone, remember you’ll have to leave it here.”
“Why are they doing this for us, again?”
“They want to find out what you know,” the lawyer said. “They’re willing to see if they can work something out.”
“But I don’t know anything.”
“You know what happened to you,” Blount said. “There might be a part of it that’s useful.”
Everyone wanted her to be useful. “I want him to see that there’s no reason for any of this.”
“Well, it’s a chance for him to hear your side of things.”
“So there’s a risk but maybe also a benefit. Like talking to a reporter.”
Blount laughed. “I wouldn’t go that far.”
“I talked to one this morning.”
“You did what.”
“Stacey Temple interviewed me this morning.”
The lawyer’s eyes shifted to a stack of manila folders on her desk. The cover of the folder on top arced and draped gracefully, and a little revealingly of the documents inside.
“Is that all right?” Elspeth asked.
Blount had turned so pale that the blush on her face was visible as only paint and seemed to float over and somewhat apart from the surface of her skin. “If it already happened . . .”
“She’s probably not going to run it,” Elspeth said. “She didn’t think it was really news. Their standards are very high over there.”
“He calls and yells,” Blount said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Oh god,” Blount continued, to herself, apparently contemplating the things that were going to be yelled at her.
“Why does he care if I talk?” Elspeth asked. “I thought he wanted me to talk.”
“It’s his case,” the lawyer said.
Elspeth’s soul became disengaged from her body again that night. When she realized that it had happened, she was in the middle of dreaming that transparent tunnels were being dug through the sky. She felt Diana’s hand on her wrist, which woke her up. She must have cried out in her sleep. “Can you see them?” she asked Diana.
“Do you want me to turn on a light?”
“I won’t be able to still see them if you turn on the light.”
Diana waited while Elspeth finished staring up at the sky that wasn’t in the ceiling above Diana’s sofa. In the dream, she had been in one of the tunnels at the same time that she was looking at them from below. Were they the timelines in the recurring dream of Raleigh’s that Matthew had told her about? She didn’t like the idea that she was still receiving thoughts of Raleigh’s so strongly. But maybe the tunnels or something like them were nowadays in many people’s minds. In the dream she had understood that no one who was in a tunnel ever left it. Each one came to an end with its digger still inside.
In her nervousness she had put on espadrilles, even though it was January, and her feet, under the table, were now wet and cold, soaked through by slush.
“There’s you,” Thomas Somerville, the assistant US attorney, was saying, “and there are the defendants, and there’s me and there’s the government, but there’s also the law, and there’s the fact that we may be setting precedents here, and I don’t want any more than you do to do anything that would limit or impair the protections that the law will continue to be able to offer to free speech in the future. Agreed?”
She was afraid that the point of his question might be to get her into the habit of agreement. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“Do you agree?”
Somerville as a man was a figure blossoming into middle age. He was plethoric and had broad shoulders and was beginning to be heavy. His teeth were arranged in almost military order, his new weight pushed out tight what would have been wrinkles in a less glossy complexion, and his head of hair was still full enough, his forelock still sufficiently jaillissant, that Elspeth thought he would be able to carry himself under the device of it without embarrassment for another ten years, at least, though not, there were signs, forever.
It was patent that he wasn’t the sort of person who is ever persuaded by being shown the other side of an issue.
“Do you agree?” Blount, seated to Elspeth’s right, unhelpfully repeated.
“I’m not sure I understand what I’m being asked to agree with.”
“Look,” Somerville said. “What I’ve got in mind here is that a settlement would not create a precedent. It would not make case law that would force anyone’s hand later, and maybe that’s something that all of us agree we would prefer.”
“Why are you asking me about this?” Elspeth asked. “I’m not accused of anything, am I?”
Though Elspeth and he had only just started talking, his eyes were wide with exasperation. While deciding how to reply, he left his mouth open. “A case like this is always evolving,” he said quietly.
“If your office is contemplating charges against my client—,” Blount began.
“No, come on, look. I don’t rule that out, I can’t. It’s my job. We’ll get to that later if we need to, but maybe we won’t need to, okay? Right now what I’m trying to talk about is the larger picture, because my read on you, Elzbeth, is that you’re an idealist.”
Like many people with an uncommon name, she had trained herself not to correct mispronunciations.
“Can you agree with me on that at least?” he asked.
“It’s kind of you to say that.”
“‘It’s kind of me to say that’?” he repeated, as if he wanted her to believe that her reply had wounded him.
“I’d like to talk about the larger picture, too,” Elspeth said. “This whole case is a—it’s a—”
“Go on,” he prompted.
“It’s a show trial and a witch hunt.”
“Really. Interesting. According to what I’ve been reading online lately, I’m an ogre of fantastical proportions. So if there’s a witch hunt, then I’m the object of it, Ms. Farrell. And there’s definitely not a show trial here. What I’ve been trying to explain to you for the past fifteen minutes is that I for one would like for there not to be any more show, if possible, than there has already been.”
“I haven’t commented on the case online.”
“I’m glad to hear it. There’s been entirely too much comment already. And I can tell you I’m not the only one who feels that way.”
It was fortunate that no article about her by Stacey Temple had yet appeared in the newspaper.
“What do you really even think that the accused did?” Elspeth asked.
“You want to know my theory of the case?” he asked. “Sorry, Elzbeth. We are here today for you to tell me what you know they did.”
“I wasn’t there.”
“But you felt confident lecturing me a moment ago about what they didn’t do? I hope you’ve got a little more for me than games with words, Elzbeth, because those can be very dangerous for someone in your position. This is our chance to talk. Our one chance. Shall we get started?”
Elspeth shrugged.
“Let me amend that,” he said. “This is your one chance. I’m still giving you the benefit of the doubt, by the way, for the record. And it’s very kind of me to say that to you, under the circumstances.”
“We’re very appreciative that you’re willing to give us this meeting, Tom,” Blount said.
“Thank you for that, Dominique,” Somerville replied.
He rather demonstratively opened a manila folder, full of printouts. Elspeth was capable of reading text upside down, but the table between them was so large that the words were too far away for her to pick them out.
“Maybe we could begin by establishing how long you’ve known Leif Saunderson.”
“What does that have to do with the case?” Elspeth challenged him.
Somerville sighed. He leaned forward. “Do you know what this meeting is for?”
“It’s reasonable,” Blount intervened, “if we try to narrow the scope a little, in the interest of Elspeth’s privacy.”
“But does she know what the meeting is for?” Somerville asked. “This is called a proffer meeting, what we’re having,” he told Elspeth, his voice raised, “because you’re proffering to me your evidence—you’re offering to let me use it in court, if I’m interested—but it’s impossible for me to figure out whether I am interested unless and until I get to see what it is you’re trying to sell. That’s the situation between us right now.”
“I thought . . . ,” Elspeth began.
“What did you think?”
“I thought it was so we could talk.”
“Exactly. We’re talking.”
“I thought that if we talked you’d see that we were just kids.”
“Last time I checked, all the defendants were competent adults.” Somerville took his phone out of his pocket and without apologizing for the interruption started typing. He seemed to be sending a text. “When did you first meet Leif Saunderson?” he resumed.
“Our sophomore year,” Elspeth said helplessly. Blount had sold her out.
“College or high school?”
“College.”
“What year was this?”
“Two thousand six? We were in the same ceramics class.”
“Ceramics—like, pottery?”
“Like pottery,” she confirmed. The detail didn’t seem to be to his liking, which was a small consolation.
“So you were both artists.”
“Well, no, we both discovered we weren’t. Our bowls kept blowing up in the kiln.”
“Blowing up?”
“If there are any air pockets in the clay, it blows up when you fire it. It’s normal. It’s not a terrorist thing.”
“‘Not a terrorist thing,’ did you get that?” Somerville asked a voiceless assistant of his, who was taking notes on a yellow legal pad at the end of the table.
“They can’t use any of this, right?” Elspeth asked Blount.
Somerville answered for her: “Only if you try to give any testimony in court that contradicts what you say to us today.”
“That’s accurate, yes,” Blount murmured.
“I thought you said I had immunity. What if I say in court, Oops, actually I took ceramics in two thousand seven?”
There was a sharp rap at the door. “Come in,” Somerville ordered.
“Pardon me, sir,” said a young man in a suit and tie. “I had a feeling you’d want to be made aware of this.”
Somerville didn’t get up. His face took on an impassive expression, which Elspeth sensed was somehow for her benefit, as the man, who must have been on Somerville’s staff, leaned over, bracing himself against his thigh with one hand and with the other shielding his mouth as he spoke inaudibly into one of Somerville’s ears. The man’s tie slipped away from him and dangled.
“When did this come in?” Somerville asked.
Stacey Temple must have published her article after all.
“Just now.”
Somerville’s eyes were on Elspeth. “Mm-hmm,” he said.
She was watching a playlet, she sensed. It didn’t matter that she could tell because it was almost certainly fooling Blount and because as a play it was capable of moving its audience even if the audience was cognizant of the artifice of it.
“So apparently,” Somerville resumed, “the person I should be asking you about is Raleigh Evans.” He watched Elspeth for a reaction.
“Raleigh who was my boyfriend?” Elspeth asked. Raleigh’s name sounded so unfamiliar coming out of Somerville’s mouth.
“I’m willing to keep talking with the understanding that we have,” Somerville said, “but it’s probably my responsibility to tell you that according to what my people are telling me, Ms. Farrell here may well have exposed herself to a charge of accessory before the fact.”
“How? By sleeping with my boyfriend?” She was a little surprised by herself. It wasn’t like her to be so intemperate.
“If there’s new testimony concerning Mr. Evans . . . ,” Blount interjected.
“We have reason to believe he was using Ms. Farrell’s provision for wireless internet access when he was planning his attack.”
“Using my Wi-Fi?” Elspeth asked. “That’s supposed to be a thing? Are you serious?”
“Maybe you’d enjoy the challenge of explaining to a jury of your peers what it means to run a private wireless internet server in your own home?”
“Everybody has Wi-Fi,” Elspeth said.
“I think you’ll find that everybody doesn’t.”
“Elspeth, I would advise that we—,” Blount began.
“He’s bluffing,” Elspeth said. “It’s just Wi-Fi, and anyway there was never any ‘attack.’ Our working group’s whole philosophy was that there couldn’t be an attack from people like us, for the very reason that we were able to perceive what we were able to perceive. Instead of the old idea of privacy, there has to be a new moral understanding, which people like us have to feel our way into. That’s what we believed. We didn’t believe in ‘attacks.’”
“This was your personal philosophy?”
“It was the working group’s,” Elspeth said. She saw Somerville glance at his assistant to check that he was getting down what Elspeth was saying; she sensed Blount wishing to restrain her. “I’m not telling you anything new. All of this is on our blog.”
“Which blog is that?”
“The working group’s blog. The one that was hacked after the arrests and that I spent the last few weeks fixing.”
“Your working group kept a blog?” Somerville reached down to the floor to draw a laptop out of his satchel.
“Elspeth . . . ,” Blount softly warned, too late.
They waited in silence for Somerville’s laptop to boot up. It chimed, hummed, whirred.
He tilted his head up in order to look at the screen through the bottom of his glasses.
“You mean you’ve been investigating us all this time,” Elspeth said, “and you didn’t know until I said it just now that we had a blog?”
“Who wrote it?” Somerville asked. “It looks very interesting.”
“It was mostly Leif’s.”
“It’s his philosophy?” Somerville asked, but he didn’t insist on an answer from her. From the darting of his eyes it was evident that he was now looking at the website himself. “‘The New Morality of Privacy.’ Is that what I should be looking at?”
She didn’t reply.
“Here,” he said, pointing at the screen. “‘The idea of privacy isn’t logical anymore.’ Oh this is good, Elzbeth. This is really good, thank you. ‘We’re in relation, so in order to say my truth, I also have to say yours, or at least a face of yours.’ That’s gold, right there. That’s him saying the laws don’t apply to him.”
“That’s not what he’s saying.”
“He’s saying he has the right to any information that speaks to him. That’s justifying the crime before the fact.”
“That’s not the way he meant it. He says ‘face of yours.’”
“It seems pretty clear to me.”
“He didn’t even think it would be possible for one of us to read something unless we were part of what we were reading somehow and it was right for us to be part of it.”
“So if you’re able to read it,” Somerville said, “then you have the right to read it, and it doesn’t matter what the law says.”
“No, it’s not like that.”
Somerville smiled and didn’t respond.
“I’m letting you go,” Elspeth said when she and Blount reached the sidewalk.
“You should consider retaining my services until you’ve secured new representation.”
“No, I’m going to let you go right now.”
“I respect your decision.”
As the lawyer walked away, leaving Elspeth alone, her toes beginning to burn with the return to cold, wearing under her coat the paralegal’s forgotten suit, it seemed to Elspeth that it was her mother’s help that she was rejecting. It was after all her mother who had paid for Blount, whose only offense at the end of the day was that she had worked within rules that an older generation had come up with for themselves in their navigation of an earlier version of the world. It was no one’s fault that in the changed world there wasn’t and never had been anything for Elspeth to fall back on but her own rage and perspicacity.
The snow along the street was granular and translucent; it was already old snow. Elspeth wondered whether she or someone else would be the one to tell Leif that she had betrayed him.
She checked her phone. There was a new email, announcing that she had been tagged in a status update by someone whose name she didn’t recognize, and when she clicked, she saw that the update linked to a post about her that before she quite knew what she was doing she was in the middle of reading.
Her heart pounded. She shouldn’t be reading this now.
She was an attention whore. She treated Occupy like an accessory that she wore while starring in a personal reality show of her own imagining. Everyone was sick of letting her and her fellow showboats distract from the struggles of people who didn’t have the luxury of having their nervous breakdowns acclaimed as world-historical. Most people couldn’t take for granted a surplus of privilege so great that they could make an elaborate drama out of their inability to focus on issues larger than themselves.
Evidently Stacey Temple had published her interview. This was one of the first online reactions.
The ranter indignantly refused to reward Temple’s interview with a link, but the interview was easy to find on the newspaper’s homepage. Elspeth read it quickly, not for itself but to see whether it appeared to justify the rant.
It was hard to say. Elspeth was, after all, even more of a traitor to the ideals of Occupy than the ranter knew. The only cruelty she knew for sure to be gratuitous was that of the stranger who had taken it upon himself to tag her. The tag suggested an unknown number of people capable of finding the near-anonymous direction of malice against her casually entertaining.
She noticed that she was breathing in violent gulps, as if she wasn’t confident that she would remember to breathe if she didn’t make sharp efforts.
A passerby impatiently sighed. Stationary over her phone, Elspeth had obliged the man to step outside the narrow lane of sidewalk that had been shoveled. “Sorry,” she murmured. It was the internet’s fault for taking her away from her body, as the internet tended to do.
If only she were able to talk again with Leif for a minute or two with their old freedom.
When she got home to her empty apartment—her roommates seemed to have decided to sleep every night at their boyfriends’, visiting only when they remembered an item of clothing or a bottle of prescription medicine that they needed—she took off her coat and her hat and her wet shoes and socks and the heavy wool skirt-suit, and knowing that she wanted to be away from the world for a while turned off her phone. In her underwear she carried a chair into the utility closet and stood on it to unplug her Wi-Fi, too.
It was strange the way, once she had done these things, the silence of the apartment came to the surface. Or rather, its faint, homely sounds: the taps of the chair’s feet as she set it back under the dining room table, the whelk-shell echo of the shape of the rooms, the whir from behind the refrigerator, the one loose window sash that from time to time was joggled in its frame by a flaw of air. It was like the blank solitude one finds when one gets up in the middle of the night. She was alone; no one could address a word to her. There would be no thoughts in her head but her own unless she happened to open a book.
She waited for the shower to run warm and then hot. When she stepped in, she began to cry, and then the wetness of the water somehow stopped her, as if like cured like.
Afterward, she dressed in a clean set of underwear and in her own clothes again.
She was able to work for a while without needing access to the internet because the piece she had been assigned to check was fairly esoteric and the writer had depended mostly on printed books for his sourcing. She unpacked the books, notes, and printouts onto the dining room table, brewed herself a cup of tea, and then disappeared, reassuringly, into the deliberateness of the task of reconstructing the writer’s footsteps. Methodically she retraced the paths that she figured out he must have taken as he carried his facts into his manuscript. It was a history piece; it had almost nothing to do with the world one now lived in.
In the middle of the afternoon, the buzzer startled her.
By now she knew that the police, like mailmen, were somehow able to let themselves through the building door, so it probably wasn’t them. She guessed it was a reporter. When she tiptoed out of her apartment and down the building stairs, however, and leaned around the curve of the last flight to peek into the lobby, she saw Julia on the other side of the door’s glass. Julia didn’t at first see Elspeth. Her eyes were hollow, and she was wearing the eccentric-looking beret that she had adopted since the arrests. The beret seemed to come from outside the ordinary vocabulary of clothes; it was marked as strange, like an item of clothing from a child’s dress-up bin, or an item in a thrift store that is a little too obviously the property of someone recently deceased.
Elspeth opened the door.
Julia hesitated. “I wasn’t sure you’d want to talk to me.”
“Is this for your project?”
“I got a tip about you.”
“Come in,” Elspeth said.
As they made their way upstairs, gratitude or nervousness drew from Julia a flood of words: “I came as soon as I could so that I could get here before your lawyer told you not to talk but as I was thinking about it, as I walked over, I realized perhaps that’s not fair to you. Perhaps you shouldn’t talk. Perhaps I shouldn’t be asking you to. But I thought to myself that I could always ‘go meta’ and ask about what went into your decision to talk. About where you are, as it were, rather than what you would say.”
“Did your lawyer give you the tip?”
“Oh, Kenneth usually hears about these things from me now, if he hears about them at all.”
“I didn’t make a deal,” Elspeth said, bringing Julia into the parlor. “I didn’t mean to, anyway.”
“Are they saying you made a deal? I don’t know, remember, because I can’t go online.”
“Not going online sounds so nice. Would you like some tea? I have gingerbread cookies.” It occurred to her that she had a routine now for entertaining the press.
“It is nice, in a way. I’d love something.” Julia scanned the room, but there was nothing for her to notice; there wasn’t anything in the parlor that Elspeth had changed. A few more of the hydrangeas’ dried petals had dropped onto the coffee table. That was all. The petals looked like the little moth wings one finds in the sill when one first opens one’s windows in the spring. “People can’t be mean to me,” Julia continued. “Or rather, I’m sure they are being mean, but I don’t know anything about it if they are, so they might as well not be being mean.”
Of the Telepathy Four, the one the internet’s commenters were hardest on was in fact Julia. She was a woman, for one thing, and in her manner she was oblivious to the small conformities, for another. On social media, people were almost as hard on her as they were on Bresser, but perhaps because of the judge’s order she really didn’t know this.
While the water was boiling Elspeth brought out a plate of the cookies. “Someone attacked me today online,” Elspeth volunteered.
“Was it very bad?” Julia asked.
“People get so angry now when they see someone paying more attention to thoughts and feelings than they think thoughts and feelings deserve. It’s like there’s a new sumptuary law against introspection.”
“It’s a new world,” Julia said vaguely, which stopped Elspeth from continuing her theory.
Elspeth went back to the kitchen for the tea. “I don’t have a lawyer anymore,” she announced when she returned with it.
“Is that safe?” Julia asked.
“Is it safe for you to be here?” Elspeth countered.
“So long as I don’t leave any trace. Unless a thing is recorded, now, it doesn’t happen. I mean, I know that’s not strictly true, but anything unrecorded is now so much harder to prove than the many things that are recorded, it might as well be true. Hard memory drives out soft. I don’t even call or text anymore. I knock on doors.”
“How did you hear about me talking?”
“My source told me. I haven’t read it yet myself because for some reason I missed it when I was reading today’s paper.”
“Oh, you mean the interview. That’s in tomorrow’s paper.”
“That explains why I didn’t see it.”
So she didn’t know about the proffer meeting. Maybe no one knew yet but Elspeth, Somerville, and Blount. Elspeth didn’t really want Julia to be the first person she told. She had always thought Raleigh had probably been interested in Julia, but that wasn’t the reason.
“Is there something else?” Julia asked.
“I talked to Somerville,” Elspeth said, giving in.
“Oh, so did Chris, you know. He went before the grand jury yesterday.”
For Julia to be nonchalant about it was somehow worse. “I did it because I thought I was going to change his mind.”
“Oh, poor thing,” Julia said. She was trying in her clumsy way to show pity, but she didn’t know how to.
The cookies were untouched.
“I guess I can’t ask what you said,” Julia commented.
“I only told him what I told the newspaper. That we had a blog. That we had a theory. I didn’t realize he didn’t know.”
“We had a blog?”
“It was mostly Leif and me.”
“I guess Somerville isn’t the only one who didn’t know about it. I hope I get to read it someday.” Julia had tears in her eyes. “I know that sounds dumb, but I mean it.” Julia found a tissue in her purse. “I know you probably don’t want to hear this, but sometimes I think that all of this is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me or will ever happen to me. I know of course that it’s all horrible, but even during the horrible parts I feel so alive.”
It soon got into the news that Elspeth had met with Somerville. Elspeth didn’t think Blount had talked, but the information might have leaked backward through Julia to one of her sources, or Somerville might have disclosed it himself, off the record. He had a motive to, after all. The grand jury seemed to be nearing the end of its work, and if there were any plea bargains to be struck before the arraignments, it was in Somerville’s interest to improve his negotiating position by frightening the three defendants who weren’t yet cooperating.
The revelation further blackened Elspeth’s name online. She had been widely accused, after Temple’s interview was published, of inappropriate boasting. Didn’t she know her friends were in serious trouble? How could she fail to understand how modest her ability to defend her site really was? And now she had told Somerville about the working group’s blog. It was the internet’s opinion that she must have told him much more.
She hadn’t, and she hadn’t been boasting, and of course she knew her friends were in trouble, and of course she knew her web security skills were negligible, and telling Somerville about the blog had been a stupid accident, but when she considered posting these disclaimers and disavowals on the RPF website, every draft she came up with sounded defensive—worse than saying nothing at all—and in the end she kept silent. After Temple’s interview, the RPF site was heavily quoted by supporters as well as critics of the Telepathy Four, and one day word spread among its new readers that it was possible to send Elspeth an email through a contact form on the site, and in half an hour, before she disabled the form, a score of strangers wrote her that she was a stupid anarchist slut who would get what was coming to her and she should visualize being hit every time she considered uttering a word and she was in their sights now and they would pay her back someday they hoped soon and above all an ugly bitch like her should learn that her place in society was to shut up. Most of the writers seemed to be motivated by hatred of RPF and of Occupy generally and were therefore relatively easy to dismiss from her mind once she had absorbed and metabolized the mere menace of them, which did take a few days. A week later, however, when she made the experiment of turning the contact form back on, there was a new surge of hate mail and these writers presented themselves as partisans of the Telepathy Four who felt called upon to punish her for her betrayals of the cause. These wasps left their stingers behind in the wounds they made.
She answered now whenever she saw that it was Raleigh calling. When he first heard her explanation for her disclosure, he was unable to stop himself from saying that surely she could have done a little more research about what this kind of conversation with a prosecutor usually means, seeing as how, unlike the rest of them, she was still allowed to go on the internet. She didn’t hold the small cruelty of this reproach against him because, as she told Diana, he was right. “So tiresomely,” Diana had replied. Perhaps so, but Elspeth felt that it was her duty now to be bullied and bored a little by the kind of reproach Raleigh had made. It was her duty as the one who had fucked up, and to some lesser extent, in her conversations with Raleigh, as the one who didn’t want to get back together.
She needed to make sure that Leif, too, knew what she had done and the limits of it. She called his lawyer, Michael Gauden, and told him everything she could remember about her meeting with Somerville.
When she finished speaking, there was silence on the other end of the line. “Hello?” she queried.
“I’m not sure what the point of this call is,” the lawyer said. “There’s nothing to prevent you from speaking to Somerville again.”
“If he asks again, I’ll refuse to,” she said.
“I don’t know what I can do with this, but thank you, I suppose.”
From Leif himself—or rather, from Matthew on Leif’s behalf—she heard nothing. Maybe he wasn’t well. Some days, she was sure that if he knew, and if he was well enough to understand what had happened, he was bound to forgive her. He had to. Probably he already had forgiven her. On other days, however, she worried that in his isolation and his illness a suspicion of even her could have crystallized in him. How could he know what her motive had been in talking to Somerville? Only the effect of her meeting and a secondhand report of it would have been able to reach him. She imagined visiting the locked ward and sitting at the games table in the dayroom with him again. You didn’t think I was angry, did you? she would say, and he would reply, It would have been all right if you had been. But the imagined conversation didn’t reassure her. It didn’t ring true. Leif wouldn’t speak so lightly about something that had really hurt him. Nonetheless her mind rehearsed the scene over and over, unable to leave it and unable to make it more plausible. Sometimes her mind even went so far as to imagine that Leif, too, apologized.
In this way the silence—the actual silence—between her and Leif became as time passed more definitive. She told herself that she should approach him rather than wait for him to signal that he was able to pardon her. But from day to day there were always other things for her to do. She had her fact-checking work. She still needed to find a new lawyer for herself—a subpoena from the grand jury could come at any time. Whenever she began to research lawyers, however, the task itself, as she got into the details of it, brought home to her that unlike her friends, she wasn’t facing charges, and she stalled, aware that she was guilty of having been spared and wondering whether, since she had been spared, she really deserved a defense and shouldn’t try instead to save her mother from having to pay for it.
She was at fault on both sides of the equation: she hadn’t been with her friends when they had made their mistake, and she had been away from them when she had made her own. She hadn’t been bold enough, and then she had been too bold. Certainly she wasn’t “good” anymore; the internet had taken care of that. Maybe she never had been, a thought that liberated her a little from her own caution. The feeling of liberation came and went in spasms, as late liberations do, and it was during one of these throes, one night when she had stayed home (having explained to Diana that she needed to work through the evening in order to finish checking an article that closed the next morning), that she finally logged on to the server of the company that had backed up her and Raleigh’s hard drives, whose password she and Raleigh had chosen so that it would be impossible for anyone else to guess but easy for them to remember. There, in a blue folder, the blue of the sky from a Cape Cod sailboat, was the past that had belonged to her before the arrests. The past that the government had taken from her. Raleigh’s past lay waiting and blinking in an identical folder, just beside it. When she double-clicked on hers, she saw recipes, and photos that she had forgotten that she had kept copies of, and drafts of, embarrassingly, poems, and other fragments that she hadn’t been able to recover merely by logging back into her old email account. Almost without thinking she dragged the folder, marked ELSPETHS_, onto her desktop. The scorn that she felt for Somerville’s failure even to know about the working group’s blog must have had something to do with it. A small window popped up to tell her that of 383,402 files to be copied, an at first small but quickly rising number had so far been copied. She watched for a minute or so as the digits wheeled higher. Then she pushed back her chair and, leaving her computer running, went to bed.
She expected to have a moral hangover the next morning, but she didn’t. Maybe she was changing. Was it unlike her that she still hadn’t told her mother that she had let Dominique Blount go? Or had Elspeth not known until now what she was like? A couple of days later, her most recent fact-checking assignment out of the way, she spent a pleasant afternoon distributing the recovered files into the hierarchy of folders that she had improvised from memory when she had first set up her new laptop. Putting them in the electronic cubbyholes proper to them gave her a sense of tidiness and accomplishment. It was like going through a bureau drawer and throwing out all the socks that have lost their twins. She felt like she knew where she was again, once she had finished.
“They’re going to be arrested again,” Jeremy called to tell her, a week later.
“Arrested?”
“For the federal case. The grand jury has returned its indictment. The other time was for the state case.”
“Leif, too? Can he leave the place where he is?”
“I don’t know how they’ll handle that.”
“Are you at the courthouse now?” she asked.
“They’re letting them go by themselves to the court tomorrow morning, and they’ll be arrested when they get there.” He gave her the address of the federal courthouse. It was down the street from where she had met Somerville and around the corner from the state court where the four had been arraigned in November. “We’re keeping where Leif is out of the press,” he reminded her.
She called Diana, and they agreed to meet the next morning on the courthouse steps.
Then she called Raleigh, whom she probably ought to have called before Diana. He said his parents weren’t able to book a flight from Oklahoma on such short notice. “You don’t want to come, do you?” he asked.
It had never occurred to her that she had the option of not going. “Don’t you want me to?”
His hesitation in answering seemed to her a little maudlin. She reminded herself that it couldn’t be easy to go back to jail.
“You’ll be strong,” she said.
“I wish I knew that.”
After she got off the phone, she sat down to her fact-checking work for a few hours, a little heartlessly. Even if her friends were convicted and sent away, her life was going to continue, and it was going to continue to have to be paid for. For intervals she was able to blank herself out in the work.
Alone in her bed that night, she dreamed again about the tunnels in the sky. This time they reminded her of the tunnels behind glass in a child’s ant farm. While she was watching them, she opened her eyes and also saw the white frame that the plaster molding made around the white plane of her bedroom ceiling.
She was sane as long as she could see both. It was the third time her body had lost contact with her soul. It still felt strange, but she couldn’t be afraid of it forever. She couldn’t keep calling Diana. It might be that this feeling of non-feeling was from now on going to be part of her life.
She closed her eyes, to listen for the voice inside that she still believed would someday speak. She still knew where to listen for it even though it still never had.
She had been floating on her sorrow and anger as if her life depended on her ability to tread water and stay on top of them, but she couldn’t do it forever. When she decided to stop struggling, the sorrow and anger rose into and through her as if she were a meadow being flooded.
There were no steps per se in front of the federal courthouse; the building was handicapped-accessible. Instead there was a plaza, palisadoed with cement bollards spaced widely enough to admit pedestrians but closely enough to keep out any trucks or cars that were being driven as weapons. Elspeth spotted the traffic-hazard orange of Diana’s jacket, and she was so eager to tell Diana that the night before she had been able to do without her that her heart took a puppyish leap.
Hatless despite the cold, Diana was reading something on her cell phone.
“I woke up again last night,” Elspeth said. “This time I let myself be afraid, and it was just fear, which is terrifying, but that’s all it was.”
“You fact-checked it,” Diana said.
They approached the cylindrical glass atrium at the courthouse’s entrance. The name of the courthouse was spelled out along the drum of steel and glass in large chrome letters, with the showiness of a wealthy suburban high school or a convention hotel in a midsize city.
The only tragedy they might not survive, Elspeth at that moment felt, was if the law made them say they hadn’t felt what they had felt. She suddenly wanted to take Diana’s hand even though only a moment ago she had been proud of having been able to do without her.
“Nothing metal in your pockets, people,” a guard said in a singsong voice, while clunking plastic trays into a stack. “Keys, coins, into the trays. You must check your cell phones in at the desk behind me unless you’re a registered attorney.”
“No cell phones?” someone asked.
“You a registered attorney?” the guard replied.
When Diana took hers out of her pocket, she saw that her mother had tried to call. “It’s not like her to call so early. Let me catch up to you.”
Elspeth told herself that she would be all right alone here, too. She walked through the magnetometer.
In the bright halls, the reflecting slaps of her footfalls clattered at her like static.
When she reached the second floor, a man with his shirt pronouncedly unbuttoned stopped in front of her. “I know you,” he said. It was Philip, Jeremy and Raleigh’s roommate. “We’re this way.”
Around a corner she saw a long line of people.
“Jeremy wanted a show of force,” Philip explained.
“Will the courtroom even hold this many?”
“I’m sure Jeremy will let you come wait with us in front,” he said. “Look who I found,” he called out.
Jeremy was wearing a black suit and carrying a navy blue overcoat, and with the new sobriety and formality of his wardrobe came an air of consequence. “Elspeth,” he said, embracing her. “It’s a difficult and important day.”
“Didn’t we know it was going to happen?” she asked. Matthew was standing behind Jeremy. It was his place in line she was cutting. “I’ll get behind you,” she suggested.
But behind him, guarded by him, were a gray-haired man and woman who seemed to be making an effort to hold themselves still, like birds conscious of being under observation. Elspeth remembered the neatly dressed, cautious-looking king and queen of money. “Are these your parents?” she asked Matthew.
The man and woman smiled without offering their hands.
“They are,” he said.
“Thank you for . . . ,” she began, but they were waiting for their son’s lover’s arraignment, and she faltered, not sure that they would want to talk.
“The marshals wouldn’t let us ride with Leif,” Matthew said, “but we’ll be able to drive him back, after.”
“That’s good,” Elspeth said, nodding. It would be hard, it occurred to her, for someone in Matthew’s position not to seem either to exceed his place or not live up to it.
“Is Raleigh inside already?” he asked her.
“He said he would be, but I haven’t talked to him since last night.”
They fell silent, awkwardly. She took in the corridor’s white ceiling and white floor and white walls. As discreetly as she could she surveyed the crowd in line. Jeremy had summoned more people than the Working Group for the Refinement of the Perception of Feelings had ever been able to. Most were in their twenties, but a few looked older; there seemed to be slightly more women than men. Some seemed to be focusing on her, the newcomer, returning her gaze, when it landed on them, with studiedly beneficent expressions, as if to signal that they recognized from Jeremy’s body language that she had a place with the leader of their group even if they themselves didn’t happen to know what her place was. Her eye was caught by Greg, the barista from Leif’s café, standing a dozen yards back. He nodded when she noticed him and then looked away so as not to seem to be demanding any acknowledgment. He had pocketed his cap. The hair that was still on his head was downy and almost blond.
“It’s nicer than the state courthouse,” she observed to Matthew. It seemed less ancient and corrupt, though she knew she was probably responding to nothing more substantive than its light fixtures.
“It’s newer, anyway.”
“Are you Leif’s roommate?” Matthew’s mother asked.
“We went to college together,” Elspeth replied.
“Oh, that’s right. Matthew told us about you—didn’t you, Matthew. You’re also a writer.”
“Maybe someday,” Elspeth said.
“Don’t you work for a magazine?”
“I’m just a freelancer.”
“We’ve subscribed for years, but I always seem to be four or five issues behind.”
“Oh, me too.”
“My god,” exclaimed a woman in a blue skirt over what seemed to be a slightly longer black petticoat, as she strode toward the head of the line. “Don’t you know nothing ever happens at an arraignment?”
“They’ll read the charges, won’t they?” Jeremy asked.
“Not necessarily, no. But even if they do, that takes twenty seconds. Twenty-five seconds, max.”
“We thought we should be here for our friends,” Jeremy said.
“But there’s not gonna be a jury here to see that you’re being here for them.”
“You’re here, Jan,” Jeremy pointed out.
“I have to be. You need to save your ammo, Jeremy. You need to husband your troops. If you drop from exhaustion, it won’t be good for my story. I guess I’ll get some quotes, since there are so many of you. Not from you, though, Jeremy. You’re already too canned.” She wandered down the hall.
Jeremy told the people standing near him the name of Jan Ridgely’s newspaper. “She’s good,” he said. “She’s very good.”
Leif’s arraignment, which was going to be the first, was scheduled to begin at ten a.m., and at three minutes before the hour, Elspeth and the rest of the audience were still out in the corridor, not yet admitted, when Julia and her parents rounded the corner. All three members of the Di Matteo family were walking with the quick, carefully aligned strides of people who know they are late but don’t think they should run. Elspeth didn’t know where Julia was supposed to be, but she knew she wasn’t supposed to be in the corridor. Her presence was strangely terrifying. It was like seeing the bride alone in the parking lot when one can already hear the organ inside the church beginning to sound.
Julia’s charcoal suit was tailored to her, as the one that Elspeth had borrowed hadn’t been. Her beret was tucked under her left elbow even though it was brown to her suit’s gray. Her eyes darted nervously through the crowd. “Nobody’s seen Kenneth?” The smell of fear was coming from her, but she was vivid and beautiful, Elspeth had to acknowledge, with her olive skin and her dark hair.
“He might be waiting for you in the basement, at the Marshals’ Office,” Jeremy said. “I think that’s where you’re supposed to surrender.”
“They told us it was going to be a voluntary appearance,” Julia’s mother said. It seemed to be a line that she had prepared to say; on people who weren’t in any position of authority it was wasted. “We don’t have our phones,” she added.
“I think what they say about a voluntary appearance is that it’s a courtesy but not a thing,” Jeremy replied.
“Let’s go downstairs,” Julia’s father suggested.
“Momma, will you take this,” Julia said, removing a leather notebook from her purse and handing it to her mother.
“I think we should go downstairs,” the father repeated.
“We heard you,” Julia said.
“We’ll save you seats,” Jeremy called out to the Di Matteos, who were already retreating. The only member of the family to turn her head in acknowledgment was Julia, whose face twisted with the confused, late recognition that she herself wasn’t going to be able to sit in any seat that Jeremy saved.
Soon after, the bailiffs opened the doors.
There was still no sign of Diana, and so when Elspeth took a seat, she arranged her empty coat beside her on the settle as if around an absent person.
Leif was already sitting at the defendants’ table, in the corral at the front of the room. His back was to the door that Elspeth and the others had come in through, but he was turned sideways in his chair and was watching the procession into the courtroom out of the corner of one eye, as if he wasn’t sure it would be appropriate to look at the visitors directly. His attorney, whose blond hair tumbled down rather showily, was looking at papers. Somerville, meanwhile, stood at the butt of the prosecution’s table, arms folded, making silent appraisals of the members of the audience, the tuft of his forelock nodding as he did so. A slight freezing of his features revealed to Elspeth the moment when he took note of her, even though nothing in his face departed from his mask of general complacence.
The flannel shirt that Leif was wearing seemed, incongruously, to have been starched as well as ironed.
Everyone rose at the appearance of the judge, a short man with a folded-in face. The shape of his body was hidden by his robe, but his cheeks were round. He gathered his skirts behind him with both hands before he sat down. Once he sat, everyone else in the room took their seats again, too, in rumbling, rough synchrony, as in a church, though the attorneys, Leif, and several bailiffs and court officials remained standing, the way a lector stays up when it is time for him to read a lesson.
“The United States of America versus Leif Lewis Saunderson,” the bailiff declared, as if he were the prologue in an Elizabethan play.
“Good morning, Your Honor. Thomas Somerville for the United States.”
“Good morning. Michael Gauden for Mr. Saunderson.”
The judge’s lips drew into a line. “Mr. Gauden, in this court it’s customary to declare the presence or absence of the defendant.”
“I’m sorry, Your Honor. I’m not familiar with—”
“Don’t make excuses for yourself.”
“Your Honor, Mr. Saunderson is present in the courtroom.”
“It’s for the benefit of the record,” the judge said. “Defendants have been known to be shy.” From his high desk he now for the first time looked down over his glasses at Leif.
The judge was bored, Elspeth sensed. How could he help it? On the only paths he walked, he was never challenged. It was upsetting and in a way confusing that so much was going to depend on someone on whom most of it was going to be lost.
She wasn’t able to read much from Leif, who was facing away, toward the judge. He was in a place where he couldn’t talk, but she reminded herself that that didn’t mean he wasn’t there.
Diana at this point edged her way down the row toward the seat that Elspeth had saved for her, holding her purse aloft so that it wouldn’t bump anyone. Elspeth slid her coat out of the seat and around herself, and Diana unholstered one arm from her jacket and then the other.
“Is everything all right?”
“She wanted my salad dressing recipe.”
Once Diana was sitting spine straight beside Elspeth, there was an amplification in Elspeth of the understanding of what was happening in the room. It was an experience that Elspeth had sometimes had with Raleigh when they had first started being together, so long ago that she had almost forgotten what it felt like. The hum that was always in her seemed to begin to hum at a higher number of revolutions per minute.
As a result, in Leif’s pretty shoulders, pinched upward together, she became able to read an anxiety not to bring into further harm the friends he had led this far. He was coming back to them. She knew he was going to come back to them. She was aware, too, suddenly, of Matthew, sitting next to his parents in the row ahead of her, to her right. She was able to see into his heart as clearly as if it were a cavern and she were tossing flares down onto its floor. She could see distinctly his gemlike indifference as to whether Leif was going to stand by his friends or sell them out. All he wanted was for Leif to survive. He might not even be wishing Elspeth well, an indifference understandable to her, considering her disclosure to Somerville.
She couldn’t unmake her mistakes. She could only try to understand them.
“Mr. Saunderson, please raise your right hand. Do you solemnly swear that the testimony you give will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”
“I’ll tell the truth.”
“You don’t need to put it in your own words, Mr. Saunderson,” the judge remarked. “The law provides all the words. Your full name?”
“Leif Lewis Saunderson.”
“And how old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
“How long were you in school?”
“Um,” Leif said, adding in his head. “Sixteen. Plus kindergarten? Seventeen?”
“A bachelor’s degree? Or beyond?”
“A bachelor’s, sir.”
“Have you had anything alcoholic to drink or taken any recreational drugs recently?”
Leif shook his head.
“Speak up for the benefit of the court reporter.”
“No.”
“No alcohol at all.”
“Not since December.”
“And are you or have you been under the care of a psychologist or physician?”
Leif pulled himself up. He was deciding not to be ashamed of it. “Yes. A psychiatrist.”
“What was it regarding?”
“I was a danger to myself.”
“How did that manifest itself?”
“I took drugs that I shouldn’t have.”
“Are you saying you’re in treatment for narcotics addiction?”
“No, I was trying to kill myself with the drugs.”
“I’m sorry to pry, Mr. Saunderson, but I have to ask you these questions in order to find out if you’re competent to make a plea today. Are you taking any psychiatric drugs now that might affect your state of mind? Or are you going through a withdrawal from any drug?”
“I think I’m on an SSRI.”
“And is your mind clouded by this SSRI?”
“No, it’s very clear,” he said, touching his temples, as if to make sure. “Your mind is clear, too,” he added.
“My mind is clear, Mr. Saunderson?”
“What you’re communicating is very clear.”
“The court on its own motion orders a hearing on competency,” the judge said.
“Your Honor, if I may,” Gauden interjected. “We’d like to request that the examination take place at the facility where Mr. Saunderson is currently being held, which right now is a voluntary commitment. It’s an environment that he’s familiar with and where he feels secure. It’s a private facility, I know, but if—”
“The difficulty isn’t that it’s a private facility but that it’s out of state. I’ve been given to understand that there isn’t anyone there that we here are in the habit of working with.”
“We’re willing to forgo any hearing on psychological competency if—”
The judge cut Gauden off. “I’m not giving you the hearing, Mr. Gauden. I’m ordering it.”
“It’s not safe,” Leif said.
“The facility here is very secure, Mr. Saunderson, as I’m sure you noticed when you passed through it this morning.”
“I want to make a statement.”
“There’s no call for you to make a statement right now, Mr. Saunderson.”
“I just want to say that I did used to think that I could read people’s minds sometimes. I just want to put that on the record.”
“Mr. Gauden, look to your client.”
“That’s all I wanted to say. It’s been troubling me.”
“I’m committing Mr. Saunderson to custody for the course of the examination. Mr. Saunderson,” the judge said, raising his voice as if he were addressing a child, “you’re going to be in the care of the state for thirty days or until the doctors examining you no longer require your cooperation, whichever comes first. Do you understand that?”
“Yes.”
“They’ll take very good care of you, and they’ll be able to tell me after they’ve spent some time with you whether you’re able to understand what we’re doing here in this courtroom and whether you’re in a state of mind such that you’re able to help Mr. Gauden with your defense.”
“I thought I came here to say not guilty,” Leif said.
“No one pleads in my courtroom until I know that he’s competent to,” the judge replied, and rapped his gavel into its wooden dish.
“No,” Matthew said, suddenly on his feet. “No. Wait.”
“Matthew,” Mrs. Fisher said, her voice full of fear, her hand trailing toward her son’s back, her embarrassing, primitive love overspilling in public.
He scrambled down the row, not waiting for people to get out of his way. At the front of the room, three burly officers were handcuffing Leif.
“Matthew,” said Mr. Fisher, in the lower-pitched voice one uses with a dog or child who hasn’t listened to one’s earlier commands.
Matthew was intercepted at the defendant’s table by Gauden, just as the officers were taking Leif out through a small brass door.
“I don’t want to stay here,” Elspeth said to Diana. She foresaw that Somerville and the judge were going to be avuncular with Chris during his arraignment, which came next, and she didn’t think she could bear to watch. Chris had been innocent once, and part of him probably still was.
“Do you want to go home?”
“I can’t. There’s no one here for Raleigh.”
They walked downstairs. Outside, over the flat, bollarded plaza, the clouds in the sky were low and indistinct from one another. “Tomorrow a social worker will reach out to you, okay?” they heard one woman saying to another, who was on the verge of tears. The sorrow of one formed part of the occupational climate of the other. Beyond the plaza there was a park where one could walk along a brick-and-concrete path between squares of chained-off, snow-crusted lawn, and they made their way to it for privacy.
They walked for a while without saying anything. For the comfort of it Elspeth wished that Diana would take her hand, but although she knew that Diana would be willing to, if she were to ask, she was afraid that her hand would seem damp and heavy to Diana by the time she was ready for Diana to let it go and that she would expose to Diana her need. It wasn’t really need, exactly. She should be able to keep whatever it was to herself. They walked separately as well as in silence therefore.
Sparrows were bickering over a rift of black ground that exhalation from a sewer grate had opened in the snow. The birds’ cries were tinny and rhythmless, like the grinding sound when someone is grabbing at the change in his pocket. Elspeth knew that not even bird-watchers took note of sparrows; they existed without being worth noticing. Only a machine could have the patience to number and keep track of them.
“If I don’t go to jail . . .” She didn’t finish her thought. “That sounds so melodramatic.”
“It doesn’t look like you’re going to,” said Diana.
“If I don’t, would you consider having a relationship?”
“With you?” Diana asked.
Her surprise made Elspeth aware of having assumed that Diana was waiting for her. Elspeth’s eyes burned. Maybe this was what boys felt when one turned them down.
“Would you at least kiss me before you ask that?” Diana asked.
There was no one around. Elspeth was clumsy until she came close enough.
“Is this safe?” Elspeth interrupted to ask.
“It never is.”
Elspeth felt Diana slip her hands into the cuffs of the sleeves of Elspeth’s coat and hold on by the underside of Elspeth’s forearms. Elspeth leaned forward, burying her face against Diana’s coat, croodling into her. Then they kissed again.
“I think I love you,” Elspeth said.
“That always sounds so much like a command.”
“You’re so cold about it!”
“In this terrain I think it’s better to be a little cold.”
“I understand.”
“No you don’t,” Diana said.
While they kissed a third time, Elspeth made an effort to continue to be able to hear the impersonality in the chittering of the nameless, unspecial birds around them, but it was hard under the circumstances to keep her mind from assimilating the sound to an impression of happiness.
They stayed in the park so long that they missed Julia’s arraignment as well as Chris’s and walked in on the last arraignment, Raleigh’s, while it was still in progress.
“I understand Mr. Penny to say that you are waiving your right to a formal reading of the charges,” the judge was saying, “but I’m something of a stickler and I like to be sure that defendants know the gist of what they’re accused of, and so I’d like to walk you through the charges nonetheless, if I may.”
“Yes, sir,” Raleigh said. “Your Honor, I mean.” He had the posture of a boy standing at a blackboard to deliver an oral report.
“First of all, the government is claiming, Mr. Evans, that you defrauded Bresser Operational Security, Incorporated, of property, in this case data, by use of a wire transmission. This is a charge of wire fraud; it’s the only such charge against you. The other charges all involve a law known as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The gravest of these is that the data you obtained, without authorization or in excess of your authorization, has been determined by the executive branch of the government to require protection from disclosure for reasons of national security. Another charge against you under the CFAA is that you obtained that data, without authorization or in excess of your authorization, from a computer that is used in interstate commerce, and still another is that the computer you fraudulently accessed was one used at least partly for US government purposes. The government also says that what you obtained through fraud and without authorization had a value in excess of five thousand dollars, and they further claim that through your access to the protected computer in question, again without authorization or in excess of your authorization, you caused damage and loss to Bresser Operational Security. The law calculates such loss by summing up any reasonable expense that Bresser Opsec may incur in the course of responding to your illicit access and resecuring its servers, and the government will also be arguing that in this case that loss is also greater than five thousand dollars. How much greater will likely be a matter of debate. The amount is distinct from the value of the data you took. You are also accused, as a sort of corollary to each of the five CFAA charges I have just described, of conspiring to commit the charges in question, which as a legal matter is a separate thing from the charges themselves. Have you had a chance to talk with Mr. Penny about these charges, and does my description of them conform to what you and he discussed?”
“We did. It sounds like what he explained to me.”
“It’s difficult to say what sentence you might face if you were to be convicted of all these charges, and nothing I say now is to be construed as representing an intention on my part as to your sentence, if the case should be decided against you. But I do want you to know that the gravest charge alone could incur for you a term in prison as long as ten years. If the government is able to show that you used what the law calls ‘sophisticated means,’ the penalty will be increased. As it also will if you are shown to have deployed what the law calls ‘special skills.’”
“I’m the only one in the group who can’t read minds,” Raleigh blurted out.
The judge paused. He looked up from the rap sheet in his hands. “No, Mr. Evans, I should say that you can’t. But the law has in mind skills that are a little more, shall we say, sublunary.”
“I’m not a hacker, either.”
“We’re not trying the case now, Mr. Evans. How do you plead to the charges? Shall I enumerate them again?”
“Not guilty.”
“Be it recorded that the defendant so pleads.” The judge laid the rap sheet facedown. “Will you be making a motion for detention?” he asked Somerville.
“No, Your Honor.”
“I’ve been given to understand that both the government and the counsel for the defense are willing to abide by the automatic rules for discovery. Is that correct?”
Somerville and Penny assented.
“Other than requiring an unsecured bond to guarantee his return, I’m not going to impose any conditions on Mr. Evans’s release. What that means, Mr. Evans, is that as far as this court is concerned, you’re going to be free to use your computer and cell phone. There’s a certain amount of jurisprudence now that maintains that access to the internet is an expressive right, and I don’t want to be fussed with it. But this court has no power to lift any restrictions on you imposed by the state court, and I advise you that to the best of my knowledge the state court’s restrictions on you remain in effect.”
“Thank you, Your Honor.”
“Never mind that. Do you understand? If the state court says you can’t go online, you still can’t go online, no matter what I say.”
“I understand.”
“Well, they’ll walk you through it all again in Pretrial Services,” the judge concluded.
Raleigh was then made to disappear through the brass door, as Leif had.
“Do you think Leif will still want to see me?” Elspeth asked, when she and Diana were alone in the elevator, on their way to the third floor, where Pretrial Services was located.
“I don’t see why not,” Diana replied.
In a yellow waiting room they found Julia, her parents, and her lawyer, Kenneth Montague. The parents were wearing their coats; the father was holding a Russian troika-driver’s hat.
“It’s so good of you to come,” Julia said to Elspeth.
Elspeth saw Julia’s parents freeze. “I know we shouldn’t talk,” Elspeth said.
“Who knew that being a criminal would require so much form?” Julia said.
“Remember what we talked about, Julia,” Montague interposed.
“My whole mission is to remember everything,” Julia said. “Are you going to see Somerville while you’re both in the building?” she asked Elspeth, as if she were beyond taking sides even in her own case.
“I’m not talking to him,” Elspeth said. “I let my lawyer go because she had me talk to him.”
Julia nodded abstractedly. Perhaps she seemed not quite present because she was making an effort to commit Elspeth’s words to memory.
When Jeremy and Philip arrived, Elspeth excused herself to use the women’s room.
The restrooms for the public were at the end of the building, and as Elspeth progressed alone down the long corridor, she was able to perceive that her body was still resonating from Diana’s touch. It was as if the two of them had taken an amusement park ride together and she wasn’t yet completely sure of her land legs again.
As she passed the men’s room, the door dipped open and Chris stepped out. He was flicking water off his hands. They had put him in a blue suit so out of keeping with his usual style that it seemed to cut his frame out of the larger picture, as if he didn’t belong to the scene but had been pasted onto it.
He wasn’t pretending not to see her, but he didn’t say anything.
“Leif is in the hospital,” she told him.
“Is he all right?”
“It wasn’t his pneumonia,” she said. “He was depressed.”
“I heard,” he replied.
He might have heard even more than she had. His devotion to Leif had always been so fierce.
He was the one she would have ended up being with, she realized, if she had stayed in the tunnel that she had been traveling in. In none of her possible timelines would she have remained with Raleigh.
“You shouldn’t really be talking to me,” he said.
“I know.” It came into her mind that she could have saved him, but she didn’t know whether this was her own thought or her reading of one of his. They had spent all those hours practicing, and she was still attuned. Perhaps he was, as well.
Suddenly the fact of his disloyalty came to her like a thick smell blossoming right under her nose. “How could you?” she asked.
“Your conscience is clean?” he answered.
As he walked away, his new shoes struck neat, clipped strikes against the stone floor.
When she returned to Pretrial Services, Raleigh had been released and was at the center of a crowd in the waiting room. Beside him, Felix Penny’s arms were extended as if to suggest a path through the press of people, which Raleigh wasn’t taking. Penny seemed to be trying to disguise a look of distaste with a feigned expression of amusement.
“I’m going to update with the basics as soon as I get to my phone,” Jeremy was telling Raleigh. “Then a longer post when we get home.”
“Raleigh, these are my parents,” Julia said.
“Your parents?” There was something almost disrespectful about the note of incredulity in his voice. Julia’s parents were older and were significant people, and they were being jostled and unbalanced along with everyone else in the room.
Elspeth stood next to Diana but not in a way that would suggest to an outside observer that either of them had a claim on the other.
“I wanted to ask about the motion to dismiss that you said you will be making,” Jeremy said to Penny.
“I might be able to talk about it with you later, Jeremy.”
“Are you Elspeth’s new lawyer?” Julia asked.
“I’m Diana. We’ve met.”
“Oh, that’s right. From the Kitchen. I do remember.”
It was evident that Julia was curious.
“Is the idea,” Jeremy asked, “that if the government won’t release the file that was downloaded, there’s no proof of theft or even access?”
“Elspeth!” Raleigh called out, only just now noticing her.
“Now is not a good time to talk to Elspeth, Raleigh,” Penny said.
“I’m not in prison yet, am I?” Raleigh replied.
“But won’t your motion,” Jeremy asked, “be at odds with the motion that Montague said he’s going to make to compel discovery of the stolen file?”
“No, it’s all the same,” Raleigh answered, instead of Penny. “They make a motion to compel discovery of a piece of evidence in the hope of finding out something about the evidence that will support a motion to suppress it. Discovery is all about suppression; it’s so Orwell. The thing is, it might not even matter because of Chris.”
“Chris?”
“The government doesn’t really need any other evidence if Chris testifies as an eyewitness.”
“Raleigh, can I speak to you alone for a moment?” Penny asked.
“I’m going to talk to Elspeth first.”
Raleigh steered her by the elbow, and in his excitement his grip pinched her. When they got into the corridor, she said, “Please don’t,” and shook her arm free.
“Sorry.” He continued to walk her forward, away from the others.
“Julia was trying to introduce her parents to you.”
“Was she?”
“And you should be more careful not to talk about your case.”
“I don’t know. Penny says the judge’s talk about a ten-year sentence is just talk. He says it would be obscene to give someone a sentence that long in a case like this. Did you hear Montague give notice of that motion to compel that Jeremy’s talking about? The room they put me in, I couldn’t hear the other defendants’ appearances.”
“I think we were still in the park.”
“What park? Who?”
“Diana and I went for a walk. I was upset about Leif.”
“Did something happen?”
“They committed him to a state hospital. It’s only for an examination, but he didn’t seem to be prepared for it.”
“Can we go a little farther?” Raleigh asked.
“I’d rather not.”
“I want to ask you something.”
“Please don’t.”
“I want to ask if we can get back together.”
“No, Raleigh,” she said.
They were still close enough to the others for Raleigh’s disappointment to be legible to them, even though their voices couldn’t be overheard, and she knew that this deepened his chagrin.
“I know I don’t have any right to ask. I know I might be about to go away.”
“It isn’t that.” She couldn’t tell him that he had become lackluster to her, so she said what she could: “There’s someone else.”
He swiped at his always unruly hair.
“There is?”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“No, it’s okay. If you found someone else . . .”
“Yes,” Elspeth confirmed. It was better, as Diana said, to be a little cold in such terrain.
“I think I know who,” he said, and then he, like Chris, walked away from her without saying good-bye.
It wasn’t until they got to Elspeth’s that they realized that they had forgotten their cell phones at the courthouse. Maybe they had meant to make themselves unreachable. Being without them overnight felt like an improvised shelter—like a tent that children put up in the living room with sheets and chairs.
As Elspeth filled her teakettle, she wondered how her checkerboard linoleum floor and pressed-tin ceiling looked to Diana’s eyes. “I’m nervous,” she said. She lit the first match she struck, however.
Once their tea was ready, they sat down together on the sofa in the parlor. “Hi,” Diana said.
“I don’t really know anything,” Elspeth warned her.
Later, when she opened her eyes, she saw Diana’s ongoing observation of her.
“You can still run away if you need to,” Diana said.
In the middle of the night Elspeth slipped out of bed and returned to the laptop, which was on the dining room table. It booted up without chiming, since she had thought to mute it earlier.
She opened once more the backup program that Raleigh had set up for himself and her, the one that had quietly captured and recorded the selves that they had had in those days, the ones they were never going back to. A rainbow pinwheel revolved as the password was verified.
She knew what she was about to do even though she also knew that she shouldn’t do it. She wondered when she had decided, or rather, when she had become unable to stop herself. When Chris had walked away from her? When Raleigh had? When she had realized that Leif had not looked in her direction once during his arraignment? She couldn’t blame any of them. If you betray someone, you have no right to ask them to stay with you and understand why you betrayed them. But if she could leave her friends for Diana, she could leave Diana, too, for them. In her own way. She had no heart not because she was heartless but because that part of her was always breaking and falling away into other people and she was never able to recover all the pieces.
She opened Raleigh’s folder. She opened the folder inside it that represented his desktop. The file taken from Bresser was still there, on top, the most recent; no one had visited this imaginary room since the night of the friends’ break-in into Bresser’s account. RPF-dove-shark.zip was the filename.
She clicked and dragged.
At least Bresser had recognized the dove, she thought, while she waited for it to download.
Now she was a criminal, too. She felt her neck and shoulders flush with shame, even though no one could see her. She had wanted to be with her friends again, and now she was with them.
As Raleigh had described, inside the package she downloaded there were folders named for every member of the working group. In fact, for most members there were multiple folders, each containing what seemed to be a different kind of data. There were also a number of folders with titles that looked like gibberish to Elspeth, whose contents she could not immediately identify.
Though Raleigh had said he had had trouble opening some of the files, the first half dozen that she tried popped open when she double-clicked. In a folder with her own name on it, for example, she found an archived webpage containing every Facebook post of hers less than three months old that would have been visible to a friend of a friend—in other words, almost all her recent posts. In the same folder was a spreadsheet containing two months of tweets by someone named Beth Farrell, who seemed to be a fan of all things Occupy and had even tweeted once about the Working Group for the Refinement of the Perception of Feelings, but who was unknown to Elspeth. It seemed likely, given the nature of these files, that the ones she couldn’t immediately understand the significance of were also records of some kind of surveillance.
She tried to peek into some of them with a plain-text editor, but she saw only hexadecimal pi. It then occurred to her to google for the three-letter extension at the end of the name of one of the troublesome files; that revealed the software program that had created it. Maybe decipherment wouldn’t be so hard, after all. She was reminded of the process of dehacking the RPF website, which had been mystifying only until one saw how to break each large task down into smaller ones.
The name of the software program seemed to refer to the exploration of caves—a metaphor, apparently, for investigation in the dark. In order to download a free copy, she registered under her own name. Almost as soon as she registered, it occurred to her that it was stupid to expose her name, but it was too late. It was very late even just by the clock. She tried to put the error out of her mind.
The files that the cave-metaphor software was able to open were charts: the contents of numbered categories were represented as fluctuating over time. Elspeth couldn’t tell for sure what the categories were, but she suspected that they were the numerical addresses that lie beneath the human-language names of websites. The period of time covered by the charts was, again, the months prior to the break-in.
The chief obstacle she faced, it seemed, wasn’t that she wasn’t able to get files to open but that she often didn’t know what she was looking at.
In one of the folders not named after a member of the working group, there were a number of extremely large files, which her trick of googling the file extension revealed to be audio, compressed in a codec that wasn’t native to the operating system on her computer. It took a little searching before she was able to find a plug-in that would play the codec, and before she could use the plug-in, she also had to find, download, and install an open-source audio and video player compatible with it. Once plug-in and player were installed, however, the icons of all the audio files that were compressed in the codec changed in her finder from dog-eared blank pages to triplets of eighth-notes on wavy staffs. It was like turning over matching cards in Concentration.
She stood up. She didn’t know how loud the files would be and she didn’t want to wake Diana up, and her headphones were on the bureau beside her bed.
The bedroom wasn’t so dark that she needed to turn on a lamp. Light wherever it falls gives off a secondary light, and in the bedroom Elspeth was able to see by the secondary brightness that was diffused from the light that fell into the corridor from the dining room. Diana was so still. On the wall, tucked into the corner of a poster of the Lake District that Elspeth had had framed last year, was the snapshot of a sparrow that Diana had given her for Christmas. Elspeth clasped the headphones to her chest quickly and tightly so that the jack at the end of the cable wouldn’t be able to swing free and rap against the side of the bureau.
Once she was seated in front of her laptop again, she double-clicked.
“Hey,” Raleigh said.
“Are you downstairs?” a woman asked. It was Julia.
“I’m at work.”
“But it’s Saturday,” Julia said. “Why can’t you be downstairs? I want to see you again.”
Elspeth halted the file. It was dated November 19, two days before the break-in, three days before the arrests. It wasn’t as if Elspeth hadn’t at some level known.
She heard Diana padding down the hallway, and she closed the window of the audio player, even though it had showed no more than the waveform of what she had been listening to, which wasn’t parsable by the human eye.
“What are you doing, sweetheart?” Diana asked. “It’s almost two.”
“Trying to figure something out,” Elspeth replied. What she had learned wasn’t really any more painful than fresh water on a scraped knee. It stung a little.
“Come to bed. The internet is bad for young girls.”
“I know,” she admitted. She should have stopped as soon as she knew the files contained surveillance. Now it was her responsibility to understand and live through, alone and silently, the shame of eavesdropping and the hurt of Raleigh’s betrayal. She couldn’t involve Diana. Maybe the creation of a secret was a reflex when one was new to having a lover of one’s own sex and wasn’t yet sure how to differentiate oneself.
She let Diana take her hand and draw her up out of the chair.
“No one knows we’re here together, do they?” Elspeth asked. “Since we don’t have our phones.”
“I guess they don’t.”
“Let’s not tell anybody,” Elspeth proposed. “For now.”
“Sure,” Diana said. “Let’s keep it to ourselves.”
There was a diner a block from Elspeth’s apartment, mildly ironic about being a diner. Because it was late on a weekday morning, the waitress let them have a booth even though there were only two of them. The night before it had seemed urgent to Elspeth that they should hide what was going on between them, in order to protect Diana, but in daylight her alarm seemed excessive. After all, if the government knew about the backup program on Raleigh’s laptop, they would have shut it down long ago. They hadn’t even known about the RPF blog. So they had no idea; there was no need to worry. The files she had downloaded had no more existence than did any thought in her mind that she alone had.
There was a subway entrance just outside one of the diner’s plate-glass windows. A pretty woman with bright red hair was walking up its stairs. Elspeth’s eyes were drawn to her.
“I wonder if I’m a lesbian now,” she said, from behind her laminated menu.
“I’d say you have some tendencies.”
“I’m serious.”
“That’s one of the signs,” Diana said. “Am I your first?”
“I watched it once,” Elspeth said. “Online.” It was disinhibiting to answer while looking at a list of waffles and pancakes, without being able to see one’s questioner. “Maybe it’s not binary for girls.” She put down her menu.
“Do you know what you’re getting?”
“Either waffles or pancakes? It’s such a constraint to have to choose.”
They rode to the courthouse afterward to recover their phones. On the subway home, Elspeth, alone again, wondered if the faint, pretty pain in her chest that she experienced when she didn’t know when she was next going to see Diana again was the point. The old-fashioned, almost Victorian pit-a-pat. Maybe it could be the point even if the world was going to end. The way a poem could still mean something even if it was never published—even if the reader or hearer knew that someday it would be completely forgotten.
She knew it would be better for her if she didn’t think about the folder she had downloaded from Raleigh’s backup. She was still innocent so long as she didn’t think about it. But what if she had jumped to the wrong conclusion about what she had heard? The conversation between Raleigh and Julia might have taken place more recently and Bresser or someone else might have forged the date and time on the file, in order to upset her. Anything was possible, if you didn’t know how far ahead of you they might be. The backup app kept a log, and even if someone had been clever enough to change the date of the audio file, no one would have been able to change the date in the log of the backup software, too. If she looked again, and verified that according to the log the file was at least as old as Raleigh’s capture of it, she would know for sure. She would look one more time—one last time—and then she would be able to stop thinking about it.
That, at any rate, was what she told herself, without really believing that it was anything but a pretext. She wanted to return to the scene of the crime.
It was gone, she found when she logged in. There was no longer a copy of RPF-dove-shark.zip in the latest backup of Raleigh’s laptop.
She checked her own hard drive; she still had her copy.
And the other items that had been on Raleigh’s desktop were still there.
Did they know about her?
She closed the app. She shut down her laptop. She walked to the kitchen. She poured a glass of water. She drank it. For a minute, she stared out the window into the light well.
She walked back into the dining room and logged in again.
This time she looked more carefully. The backup app had made a new sync with Raleigh’s laptop at 9:43 that morning. What if she opened the app’s snapshot of Raleigh’s desktop as it had appeared yesterday? It turned out that in the copy of yesterday that was stored in the cloud, RPF-dove-shark.zip was still there.
Which meant they didn’t know. They still didn’t know about the backup program at all. Whoever had custody of Raleigh’s laptop had deleted the folder of surveillance materials unaware that within the hour the backup program would sync with the copy of the laptop that Elspeth still had access to.
She had been given proof that the government had tried to destroy its copy of what it was accusing the working group of stealing.
The consequences, she reasoned, were like the legal paradox that Raleigh had talked about, of forcing the discovery of evidence in order to find grounds for suppressing it, but backward: if the government was improperly attempting to hide the surveillance folder, then the fact of the government’s surveillance became newly pertinent to the case. Until the attempted suppression, the particular contents of the stolen folder hadn’t all that much mattered, legally speaking. They could have been lists of batting averages, for all the law officially cared. Whether the government should have been engaged in such surveillance had no bearing on whether it was against the law for the working group to break into Bresser’s protected computer. Until the suppression, the surveillance had merely been the honey in the honeypot.
The tricky part was that Elspeth couldn’t share her proof of the government’s attempt to hide evidence without admitting to her own snooping, nor could she do it without jeopardizing the privacy of her friends. She knew the remedy at once: she would ask her friends’ permission. She would ask everyone to give up all their secrets, for all their sakes.
She didn’t tell Diana.
It wasn’t because she was ashamed. Shame simply wasn’t a logical response anymore, she thought, that night, when she and Diana were kneeling face-to-face on Diana’s bed. All the lights in the bedroom were on. What she was fighting was like blackmail, which couldn’t be fought unless one accepted one’s exposure. In the new world everything was always going to be exposed anyway. In the universal light everyone was going to have to come to better, more forgiving understandings of one another.
She wasn’t going to tell Diana because she was going to protect her.
The radiators had gone cold for the night, they noticed after they finished. They pulled Diana’s sheets and coverlet over themselves.
The sky the next morning was so uniformly gray that it seemed to have no feature, neither cloud nor sun. Elspeth felt less bold than she had the night before about challenging her friends to let her publish their secrets, and she might not have taken steps to see any of them if she hadn’t, upon turning the corner onto her street, found Julia, swaddled up and pacing, in front of her stoop.
“I told myself to count to a hundred Mississippi, and here you are,” Julia said.
Elspeth’s uncharitable first thought was that on prior occasions Julia had had the advantage over her of greater knowledge and that this time she had it. She didn’t want to invite Julia inside, but she couldn’t leave her out on the street. “Come in,” she said curtly.
Julia paused in the doorway to unwind her scarf, unselfconsciously. Elspeth reminded herself that she didn’t have a live claim on Raleigh anymore, and that there was no such thing as a retrospective one. It could be that the only thing that was nettling her was pride.
“Was there anything particular on your mind?” Elspeth asked, when they reached her landing, as she fished in the side pocket of her backpack for her keys.
“I wanted to hear your impression of the arraignments. You’re the only one who saw us all. And from the outside, as it were.”
“Didn’t your friend the reporter see it all?”
“Her perceptions aren’t fine.”
Elspeth put in the key. “I actually didn’t see your arraignment or Chris’s,” she admitted. “We left after Leif’s and didn’t come back until the middle of Raleigh’s.”
“Oh, Elspeth, you abandoned me,” Julia said, with a smile of complicity that Elspeth didn’t acknowledge.
In her hallway Elspeth threw her keys down with her backpack and stepped out of her boots. In the dining room she pulled back her hair, but there was nothing on hand to fix it with and she had to let it fall again.
“You must have had some thoughts, though, about what you did see,” Julia resumed, when she had joined Elspeth in the dining room. “I myself had the impression, for example, that although the journalists are as devoted to us as ever, the people, except for the crusadey ones, may be losing the thread.”
There was a certain pathos about a project like Julia’s of gathering and holding on to one’s impressions, which like cerements were bound in time to obscure, with their accumulating pallor and shapelessness, the body of life that they were intended to preserve and commemorate.
“I know about you and Raleigh, Julia,” Elspeth said.
“I’m not sure what you’re referring to.”
“I’m not the sort of person who minds the way most people mind. I mind in the way that I can’t help but mind, but I don’t really mind.”
Julia didn’t reply.
“Everything has turned out different than I thought it was going to,” Elspeth continued.
“It’s the way people are,” Julia said. “I wouldn’t wait for me to apologize.”
“I’m not waiting for anything.”
“I’m not going to apologize for finally being someone,” Julia said. Her face flinched and she looked away. “Did he tell you?”
“It’s in the surveillance they were doing of us.”
“What surveillance?”
“I have a copy of the folder that was on Bresser’s server.”
“How did you get it?” When Elspeth didn’t answer, Julia asked, “What’s in it?”
“I stopped listening. I assume everything’s in it.”
“You’re probably in danger,” Julia observed.
“I don’t think they know I have it.”
“They’ll find out. You should tell Anonymous.”
“How do you tell Anonymous?”
“Or you could upload a ransom file, if you think they’re going to come for you. Before they come for you.”
“What’s a ransom file?”
“It’s when you upload a file in encrypted form to a site where anyone can get it so that later, if you need to release it suddenly, all you have to do is shout the password.”
“I want to give it to the lawyers, and I want your permission before I give it to them.”
“Why? If it’s your copy.”
“I don’t want to repeat their violation.”
“Can you afford to be so high-minded?”
“It’s how I want to do it.”
Julia considered. “The reason I called Chris Hyacinth is because I thought you were going to end up playing the Princess Casamassima to him,” she declared. “You’ll probably hear that if you keep listening.”
“I haven’t read the book.”
“But you know what I mean. Maybe I said it because I thought I was the one who should have gotten that role. Oh, never mind,” she broke off. “You have my permission.”
“Can we go for a walk?” Elspeth asked Raleigh, a few hours later, after she recognized his knock and opened her apartment door.
“Outside?”
“In the park,” she said. She had been inside since Julia had left and she didn’t care that it was February. She laced up her boots.
“Julia says you know,” he said, in an almost by-the-way tone of voice, as he followed her down the stairwell. “I’m sorry. I know I fucked up.
“I said I’m sorry,” he said with a more personal emphasis when they reached the sidewalk.
“Okay,” she said.
“Are you going to get Chris’s permission, too?”
“I don’t know. I’m asking you first.”
“The price of my permission is going to be that you forgive me.”
“The price?”
“And you have to really mean it.”
“Raleigh . . . ,” she began, but broke off.
“Julia and I aren’t a couple, by the way,” he said.
They entered the park at the monument along whose back ledge Leif had used to skate. On the front, set into the pink marble, was a brass sculpture of a Revolutionary War general. A man in relief was holding the head of the general’s horse, and the man was black; Elspeth wondered who he had been—who the man depicted had been and who the model had been.
No one was skating the ledge today. A mortar of week-old snow had gummed up many of the bricks in the pavement.
“I just want to hear you say it,” Raleigh said. “That you forgive me.”
The snow had receded unevenly from the asphalt of the walkway and from the dark sockets where the boles of trees were joined to the earth. Here and there arms of snow seemed to reach toward the walkway with cupped, downward-facing hands.
“Does it have to be tit for tat?” she asked. The hurt part of her was more stubborn than she had realized it would be.
At dusk the sky was still blank, and Elspeth walked the few blocks between her apartment and Matthew’s under its strange glow. The tunnels that she had dreamed about might have been hiding behind the scrim of it; they might have been somehow fueling its luminosity. Matthew’s window was dark, but a few seconds after she rang his buzzer, a light in his apartment blinked on, and soon he was standing in the building’s doorway.
“Look at that,” he said, looking up. “It’s like the sky in a movie before the aliens land.”
He had been unpacking his laundry, and his open futon was littered with small bricks of folded T-shirts, folded socks, and folded underwear, held together with rubber bands. Because he was gay, the intimacy of these items of clothing made them charged objects; they were suspect. Before long, if she went ahead with being a lesbian herself, people would be performing this kind of supererogatory noticing on the appurtenances of her life, too.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said, as he began shifting the bricks of clothing to the tops of columns of books on his desk.
“I just got in,” he apologized. When he had finished clearing the futon he folded it up into its sofa form. Then he brought her a glass of water. “How are you?” he asked.
She should have asked first. “I’m fine,” she said.
She watched him sit down and then immediately get up again and walk over to his desk. At the back of it, near the window, there was a potted geranium, and he twisted off a small yellowed broom that had once borne florets. A few whitened petals fluttered away from the forked stalk as he carried it to the trash.
If all along she had felt the need to keep Matthew at a remove, then all along he must have sensed the need in her. Matthew had always been able to enter into their games.
A dog howled somewhere outside. “He must hear thunder,” Matthew said.
“I want to see Leif,” she said. “I need to ask him something. Do you see him every day?”
“I take the train to the train. At first I was going to bike, but it’s too far.” He sat down again.
“Should I bring something?” she asked. “Maybe something for him to read?”
“The trouble with that is he doesn’t like finding his bookmark further along than he remembers having read.”
How disconcerting that would be. As if a section of tunnel that one had passed through had been not only closed but erased. She took a sip of colorless water from the colorless glass that Matthew had given her.
“How is the new place?” she asked.
“We’re still getting to know the doctors and nurses. In the elevator people have burned their names in the ceiling with lighters but that’s just the elevator. The man he shares his room with has a thing where he needs to know the title of every song he hears, even if it’s just a scrap of song playing in the background on television in the next room, but other than that he’s pretty quiet. If there’s not a song to talk about, sometimes the three of us just sit there and listen to the air blowing out of the vent underneath the window.”
“Is he mad at me?”
“Why would he be mad at you?”
“For talking to Somerville. I thought I was going to change Somerville’s mind. I was so stupid.”
“Why don’t you come with me tomorrow,” Matthew said. “He loves you. He’s Leif. He still Leif.”
She wondered if he would give permission. She wondered if he was still willing to fight, regardless of whether he still believed. The new order had revealed to them that poems didn’t have to be published in order to have meaning as poems, but apparently the same order was also going to require the publication of all the prose of one’s life.
The thunder was sounding now even to their merely human ears. The dog was still crying, no longer sharply.
“It’s almost purple,” Elspeth said, of the sky, which had darkened.
“The color of congealed blood,” Matthew said. “That’s why purple is royal, according to Pliny. That’s its ‘glory.’”
“Does green mean anything?” she asked.
“I think it’s always just life.”
There was clatter as it started to hail.
Elspeth walked home when it let up. Once she was dry, she pulled one card from her tarot deck. The Fool. He was upside down, as if he had been hanged that way for a lesson. Last summer she had seen a man in the park hang himself upside down like a bat, his knees over the limb of a tree. The man’s cell phone had plummeted out of one of his pockets and hit the ground, cracking its glass screen. In the tarot card a little gray fox was pawing the upside-down Fool’s pocket, which in the Middle Ages was not a pouch sewn into one’s clothes but a separate item of clothing that could be tied to the skirts of one’s jacket.
The card made her want to check something online.
While she waited for her laptop to boot up, she reviewed her plan. The next morning, on the train ride to the hospital, she was going to tell Matthew that she was now with Diana, and at the hospital, she was going to tell Leif the same thing and also tell him that he hadn’t been wrong to sense that people in the government’s side had been reading him, because in a more prosaic way than he had imagined, they had been. Once he knew, maybe he wouldn’t need to think of himself as crazy anymore. In a day or two, either she would relent or Raleigh would, and once she had permission from three out of four, it was too bad about Chris, but she was going to release the files to the lawyers and everyone was going to know everything and it would all change.
In the interim she wanted to look inside Raleigh’s backup app one more time. She hadn’t taken any screenshots, and screenshots might help her establish the files’ provenance. On the backup program’s website, she entered the username and password. A page loaded that was mostly blank, as sometimes happens—one of the intermittent hiccups that the internet is prone to. Her attempt to log in must have failed for some reason. She moved her cursor to the top of the screen, with the intention of trying a second time to log in, but the button there said Logout. Which meant she was logged in, actually. She reloaded the page, but the fresh version of it that appeared was still mostly blank, as if there were no files even in Raleigh’s root directory on the backup. Had the government wiped Raleigh’s hard drive? No, that couldn’t be; if the drive had been wiped, there would have been no software on it to do the syncing; she wouldn’t see any change at all. And where was the backup of her old laptop? In a dialog box at the bottom of the page, she changed the date to a year ago and asked to see what had been backed up as of then. In the backup for that date, too, the root directory was empty. She tried a few more dates, also without success.
There was nothing in Raleigh’s backup account anymore. Nothing of his, nothing of hers. Even the past had been deleted.
They had finally found out.
On her desktop she still had the copy of the RPF-Dove-Shark folder that she had downloaded and decompressed two nights ago. Had they compromised it somehow? The files inside looked untouched. To make sure, she double-clicked open a folder and double-clicked open a folder inside it and double-clicked open a file.
“Dude, where are you?” Raleigh asked.
“One block south of the southwest corner, in front of the old church,” said Chris. “You know where I mean? I’m looking at where the drum circle was. I see three garbage trucks, and cops throwing everything into the backs of the garbage trucks.”
“Everything? What do you mean everything?”
She halted the audio player.
She saw the Fool upside down, his pockets emptied of what he had meant to keep to himself.
To the left of her breastbone, decentered, her heart punched into and punched into and punched into itself. Into a search bar, she typed, “How to upload a ransom file.”
Against her hip, her cell phone vibrated, startling her.
It was Diana. “Hello?”
Elspeth was going to have to lie better than Raleigh or anyone else had ever lied to her. She was going to have to be as deceitful as only a thing wholly in the world could be.
She lied so well that at seven the next morning, when there was a rap on her door, she was alone.
She was showered and dressed, though still barefoot. She had been waiting for them.
The three men were in dress shirts and blazers. The leader seemed to be the one not wearing a tie.
“Elspeth Farrell?” he queried.
“Come in,” she said.
“How are you doing this morning?” he asked, trying to put a lock on her eyes, relying on his colleagues to scan the cluttered corridor and the doorways into empty bedrooms that she led them past.
“There’s nobody here but me,” she said.
“You probably know why we’re here,” he said. On the nape of his neck, she saw, as they reached the dining room and he swiveled to survey it and the parlor, was the delicate mottling of stork bites. His hair there was cut like a duck’s ass, but otherwise there was nothing obviously military or police-like about him.
One of the other men took a large camera out of a satchel and began photographing her laptop, which before answering the door she had stowed in the dumbwaiter’s nook. It was balanced on top of her reference collection.
“You didn’t take pictures last time,” she said.
“Last time?” the lead officer asked.
“When you arrested Raleigh.”
“That wasn’t us. This time you’re getting the professionals.”
“Are you FBI?”
“He and I are,” he said, pointing to himself and the cameraman, “and he’s Secret Service. A lot of people don’t realize that the Secret Service takes care of computers now almost more than they take care of presidents. It’s typical in a case like this for us first to photograph the disposition of items.”
The FBI agent with the camera had noticed that her power cable was still twisted through the handle of a coffee mug on the dining room table, and he took a picture.
“That’s where the laptop was when you knocked,” Elspeth said. “I moved it before I answered the door.”
“That’s okay,” the lead agent said, “but if you could put it back for us.”
She complied but didn’t turn the computer back on.
“Is there a router?” the Secret Service agent asked her.
“In the broom closet,” she said.
“You must have a lot of questions,” the lead FBI agent suggested. “You probably want to know where we are with things.”
“That’s okay.”
“Maybe while they’re doing this, maybe you and I could sit down and talk a little, before things go any further. I know a little about what you’ve been going through, but I’d like to hear it from you.”
“Your already knowing is sort of what it’s about, isn’t it,” she said.
“It’s really put you behind the eight ball, I can see that.”
He couldn’t see it, she reminded herself. Nobody could. “That’s okay,” she said again.
“A lot of times, people in your situation want to be able to explain what they’ve been going through.”
“Did you bring the garbage bags?” the Secret Service agent asked the photographer, evidently afraid that he had been supposed to.
“In my satchel,” the photographer said, handing it over.
“It’s not actually a garbage bag, that’s just what he calls it,” the lead agent said. “It’s actually a protection against Wi-Fi and RFID and all that. Is this your kitchen? Maybe we could talk in here for a minute.”
“That’s okay,” she said, once more.
“I know the judge that this is going to go in front of, and she’s always very appreciative when people cooperate. Do you mind if I get a drink of water?”
“Go ahead,” Elspeth said.
From the dining room she listened as in the kitchen he opened one cabinet and then another and then took down a glass. She heard him rinse it out before he filled it.
“We don’t have to do this the hard way,” the lead agent said when, since she hadn’t followed him into the kitchen, he returned to the doorway.
“Am I free to go?” she asked.
“Not just yet,” he said, before taking a sip.