by Caleb Crain
The police took the man’s friends, too, for having reached out to him. “Let’s go for a walk,” Leif repeated.
* * *
—
“Tell us again about our great powers, Leif,” Elspeth said, as they walked alongside a steel balustrade that edged the river, which was black and glittering.
“What do you want to hear?”
“How we’re going to save the world.”
There were no chants or sirens in the air anymore, just gray sighs from cars on a highway that they had had to cross to reach the water. The river itself was silent.
“We’re going to save the world by being beautiful together,” said Leif.
Matthew wanted to button Leif’s coat for him. He himself had put on his wool hat and bike gloves. “Like in a Ryan McGinley photo shoot?” Matthew asked.
“Beautiful in our souls,” Leif specified.
“You make it sound easy,” said Raleigh.
“Easy as pie,” said Leif.
The city’s light fractured on the disturbed surface of the river, each of its thousand glancing reflections taking for a moment the spiculate shape of a skate’s egg sac and then bouncing into a frame of open jawbones and then reverting to an egg sac again. CGI avant la lettre, thought Matthew.
“Tell us,” Raleigh insisted.
“It’ll be easy because of the meaning of life,” Leif said, his voice cracking a little under the strain of finding a tone that acknowledged his grandiosity but did seek nonetheless to be a little bit believed. The meaning of a life wasn’t assigned, he explained. Most people dodged the challenge by referring it to their children, still mute and unable to object, so that the question of this generation had to be answered by the next. If people began to recognize, however, that survival generally was in jeopardy, postponement became impossible. Through anticipating their children’s deaths, parents became acutely aware again of their own, and once aware, became unable to shift their attention away. To survive their parents’ distraction, some of the children became caretakers. They learned to solve problems that children shouldn’t have to or even be able to solve, becoming so sensitive to the fears and needs of those around them that something in them was broken. An inner ear that in an ordinary childhood was trained on the child’s inner self was turned away, in their case, to others. It was a sort of generational fail-safe mechanism. An injury became a gift. That is, the injured themselves became the gift, though they soon learned that they had to hide their nature in order to get through daily life.
“And you think that’s us,” Elspeth said, when Leif paused, his elaboration having reached a height that he didn’t seem to know how to climb down from. “You think we’re the caretakers, and you think we’ll reform the political system.”
“Oh, maybe,” Leif said.
“Don’t we save the world?”
“It might be more a matter of helping people become able to talk about the ending.”
“That’s so dark,” said Raleigh.
In the absence of a moon, Matthew noticed that he seemed to have set himself the task of scanning the shadows beyond the radiance of the walkway’s lamps. He could see best when the friends were between lamps, almost part of the dark themselves. The glare directly under a lamp slightly blinded one.
“Really, you think the world is ending?” asked Chris.
“I don’t know. It looks like it.”
“You have this gift, and you could use it.”
“What’s my gift?”
“You see things.”
“I guess things.”
“You see everything you were just talking about.”
“I’m just making things up. I can’t do anything about anything.”
“Why do you say that?” asked Chris.
He asked it with a note of sorrow so real that Leif was unable to continue with his persiflage, if that’s what it had been. They had just seen people like themselves being beaten. An experiment in optimism was coming to an end. It was cold. It was late. Matthew had briefly worried, when Leif had begun to talk, that the talk would feed the folie that Leif and his friends had been sharing, at a moment when it might have been natural, and as painless as it ever would be, for them to leave the folie behind. But his harboring of this worry, Matthew had to acknowledge, felt too much like siding with the forces that he had seen in action a few minutes ago, a few blocks away, and he found, to his surprise, that he not only felt no relief over the modesty of Leif’s claim for his abilities but that he even shared Chris’s disappointment: he, too, evidently, wanted to hear from Leif that soon there would be a better world, that Leif and his friends would be the cadres, that the poor would be fed without humiliation, that governments would invest in the health and well-being of citizens, that henceforth ingenuity would be directed into the creation of art, the discovery of new energy sources, and the preservation of the environment rather than into efforts to confuse consumers into making choices against their interests.
Matthew, too, was a utopian, hopelessly. Meaning, he was ungroundedly hopeful. Where was he? They had walked to the end of the city, to the tip where the ferries ran, though none were running now. There was so much he was going to have to give up on, Matthew realized, before he would be able to return to the life he had thought worth living.
* * *
—
The despair of that night turned out to be only momentary; the members of Leif’s circle recovered their spirits surprisingly fast. There seemed to be something restorative, in fact, about the blow they had received. It might even have been the case that awareness of failure—the now demonstrated certainty of it—liberated their energies. If, in the end, their effort was going to be crushed, then they could cause no harm even if they were mistaken, and they might as well pour into their cause the selves that they now, definitively, didn’t know what to do with. Matthew, as usual, held back; he limited himself to the role of fellow traveler. But he attended the meetings, because he couldn’t bear to be away from Leif, and the meetings were held more and more often. The police reopened the once-occupied park, and though they strictly forbade any rebuilding of the occupiers’ infrastructure, the place was more pleasant to visit than ever. The site of defeat felt strangely like one of victory. Did it cheer the occupiers to know that the powers that be had been afraid enough to insist on stopping them? They were free now to feel the approaching chill of winter as provocative rather than menacing; they weren’t going to be sleeping in it. The members of Leif’s working group returned to the park to recruit. They were now sans pizza box. Their recruiting stand could no longer consist of anything more than a few people standing together, in a configuration that they hoped would seem welcoming. No one took advantage of their welcome, however. Maybe they now seemed, despite their intentions, too much like a completed and therefore closed circle.
It hardly mattered. This smaller setback, too, seemed not to dismay but to enliven them. It reinforced the sense they had of being set apart, misunderstood by the blundering world, and they let the recruiting effort subside into a bit of a joke. Through a website, Raleigh had a T-shirt printed with the words GOVERNMENT TRANSPARENCY NOW in large type, and the words THROUGH ESP below, in smaller print. A second T-shirt read, more simply, OCCUPY TELEPATHY. A third: LOOK INTO MY EYES . . . YOU ARE GETTING SLEEPY, VERY SLEEPY . . . YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO JOIN THE WORKING GROUP FOR THE REFINEMENT OF THE PERCEPTION OF FEELINGS. Which was all fine if you were Raleigh, declared Julia, who claimed for a few days to be vexed at the others for not having texted her the night of the eviction and who made a show, accordingly, of her right to be free with criticism. But it wasn’t fine if one wanted to be taken seriously, she continued, with her usual ruthless aplomb. She, for one, was an admirer of a design that Elspeth had shared with her, a mandorla of a white dove flying and a white dolphin leaping, the arcs and shapes of their bodies mirroring each other across a choppy ho
rizon that divided blue sky from green sea. A fin of the dolphin and a wing of the dove seemed, loosely, to correspond, though each animal remained distinctly itself—a remarkable achievement for someone who was no artist, as Julia bluntly put it. (“No, that’s okay,” said Elspeth, when the others nervously laughed at Julia’s inadvertent cruelty. “I mean, I’m not an artist, she’s right.”) Julia decided to have T-shirts silk-screened with the design and with the discreet triliteral RPF, and she requested people’s sizes. No self-serve website for Julia.
Only Raleigh wore Raleigh’s T-shirts, but when the box of Julia’s arrived, one afternoon at Elspeth’s apartment, everyone tried on her shirts. Even Matthew was a good sport. “A little culty,” was Raleigh’s verdict, once they had donned their new uniforms. They stood in a circle, pulling forward the hems of the shirts and looking down at the colorful symbol upside-down on the fabric in front of them. The shirts rendered all their bodies shapeless in the same way.
“We could sell flowers at an airport,” Matthew suggested.
“Why?” asked Elspeth.
“It’s something cults used to do before 9/11.”
“I’m glad you bought them for us,” Elspeth said to Julia, as if afraid that Julia might take Matthew’s joke in bad part.
“It’s not very Occupy, though,” Raleigh said.
“Why not?” Julia asked.
“It’s kind of a commodification.”
“It’s just something to wear, Raleigh,” Julia said. “And you started it. They are culty, but there’s usually an effect of alienation, I think, when a number of people dress alike. Uniformity suggests ritual. Suggests the submerging of the individual in a higher cause.”
“A warpath,” said Raleigh. “A human sacrifice.”
“But the blue is so soothing, isn’t it?” Julia continued. “I was very particular with them about getting the blue right.”
“And doves and dolphins are soothing,” said Leif.
“That’s why I drew them,” Elspeth mildly insisted.
“Not to mention psychic,” said Raleigh. “Everyone knows dolphins are psychic.”
Matthew excused himself, and in the bedroom of one of Elspeth’s roommates, he changed back into his own shirt. He folded the T-shirt carefully—the uniform that he had said he was never going to wear. So the campaign had colors now. He should have shown Leif the bearings of Richard II: a white hart, lodged, its front hooves delicately crossed, beneath a sky of starlike suns—the sign of a king who was to be unkinged. The numerousness of the suns undermined their celestial majesty, and so did the hart, because a hart implies hounds. A hart brings to mind the hunter who became, by love’s enchantment, the hunted. White for purity. Noli me tangere.
Was Leif the hart, or was Matthew? The first to declare love makes the other responsible for reply—makes the other the caretaker, to use Leif’s word—and Matthew didn’t want to do that to Leif. He believed that much, at least: he believed that Leif needed to be spared a moral burden if there was any hope of his someday setting his feelings free. He wanted Leif that badly already: he wanted him with his feelings free. He had a suspicion, sometimes, that Leif continued to entangle his feelings in his folie in order to keep them from Matthew. The folie, in this understanding, was a kind of secondary enchantment, with the purpose of holding Matthew at bay, in counteraction to the first, the original charm of attraction cast by Leif’s mere self.
“There’s always one thing you can’t see,” Leif was saying, when Matthew returned to the parlor. “One kind of thing. It’s because you can’t see it that you became so good at seeing all the others.”
Since the eviction, Leif seemed to hold forth more often about his theories. “What is the thing for you?” Matthew asked.
“He won’t be able to say, probably,” said Raleigh.
“A reader of people could get round his blind spot by dead reckoning, maybe,” Leif speculated.
Matthew picked up the tarot deck and shuffled it.
“He could get round it the way an autistic person memorizes the rules that normals follow,” Leif continued. “My blind spot is something about you, probably,” he said to Matthew.
“You think so?” In Leif’s inability to see was Matthew’s safety. The convention of their talk was still that Leif was the innocent and Matthew the roué. I’m going to be the Daisy to your Steerforth, aren’t I, was how Leif had put it at one point.
“And another thing,” Leif continued. “It’s no biggie to read someone you like. Skill is in reading someone antipathetic.”
“That’s like academia,” said Matthew. “You don’t win any points for paying attention to a text that’s interesting.”
“Are we supposed to be writing these down?” Raleigh asked.
“Have a little respect,” Chris ordered sharply.
Raleigh paused before answering. “We’re not a cult yet, Chris.”
“Boys, boys,” said Leif.
Julia interposed: “It would be skill, in other words, if Raleigh were to read Chris’s mind at the moment.”
“That’s why gays are better at this sort of thing, I think,” said Leif. “We aren’t really capable of not imagining what the other person is thinking, even if we don’t like him.”
“That’s racist,” said Raleigh.
“It’s not ‘racist.’ I think it’s a survival thing.”
“You know what I mean. But anyway, Chris and I love each other. We’re just having a disagreement.”
“I was just beating up on him a little,” Chris confirmed.
* * *
—
“It’s interesting that he’s a writer.” Julia made confidences in Matthew from time to time, with the air of having discovered a capacity for disloyalty in him. They were complicit, her manner implied, in the way of slummers who in the depths of the slums have recognized each other, seeing in each other the desire that isn’t visible to the natives around them. “I should have expected it but didn’t.”
“You thought you would be the writer.”
“Well, I did come downtown with that idea. And we can both be, can’t we? All of us, even. But the truth is that I did think I would ‘find’ something. It sounds so awful, doesn’t it, when I put it like that. What I find is that he’s writing it himself.”
“I don’t think he writes poems about it. I wish he did.”
“Because they would be so fascinating?”
“No,” Matthew replied. “I mean, they would be, but what I think I hope is that if he did write poems about it, maybe less of it would need to actually happen.”
“Oh, see, now you’re problematizing my search for ‘experience.’”
* * *
—
“Is Leif here?” Matthew called into Elspeth’s apartment one afternoon, after he had failed to find Leif behind the counter at his café.
“He’ll be here later,” Elspeth’s answer came down the hall. “He had a cough again.”
Elspeth was sitting at the dining room table with, unexpectedly, Chris, the tarot deck between them. “I have to get as good at it as the rest of you guys,” Chris explained, grinning at Matthew over his shoulder.
“I’m no good,” Matthew said.
“Don’t say that, man.”
“You can stay if you don’t transmit anything,” Elspeth told Matthew.
Maybe she thought Matthew’s presence could function as a sort of psychic Wi-Fi relay station. Matthew had his satchel with him, and he decided to sit in the parlor until Leif arrived. “Is Chris reading you or you him?”
“She can read me like I’m talking.”
“He’s trying to read me.” She was keeping a tally of some kind on a scratch pad.
The weak-backed sofa protested as Matthew sat down. He set a book on his lap, and on the lumpy seat cushion beside him he set the corresponding notebook, hal
f full of notes. It would be more efficient to take notes on a laptop, but he liked the sight of his own jittery handwriting, a record of his industriousness even if nothing more came of it.
He read a few lines of sixteenth-century poetry. They happened to belong to an ode to “solitariness,” ambiguous in the usual way: solitude isn’t worth having without the right person to share it with. In the next room, Elspeth drew three cards. Chris was sitting hunched forward in his chair, arms folded, elbows on knees, his bristly gold head angled at her fixedly. Like a raccoon or a small bear, fond of its keeper.
“Death?” Chris suggested.
“Do you see anything?” Elspeth asked. “Maybe close your eyes.”
On the sofa Matthew decided to close his eyes, too.
“It’s dark,” Chris said.
“How is it dark.”
There was silence as Chris struggled. It was dark as a symbol, Matthew thought, in his own darkness. The dark that he and Chris were looking at was the dark of eyes closed in a north-facing room in a cluttered apartment on a late fall afternoon—a mild and susceptible dark. It stood for another dark, by a sort of metonymy. One couldn’t ever actually see this other dark, though one was going to be alone with it before too long. With it and in it. The world was ending, after all. One of the chosen cards was probably a one of swords, Matthew guessed. A threat or a distinction. A line drawn.
“Well, tell me what you mean by death,” Elspeth coaxed.
“Maybe there’s something I’m afraid to see.”
Matthew opened his eyes. Chris’s were still shut, and in looking at him, Matthew felt the mixture of envy and scorn that one feels when watching people with their eyes shut, as for example when they’re praying.
“Is there an arrow?” Chris asked.
Elspeth looked again at the pictures on the cards. “No arrows.”
“Oh, fuck it,” said Chris, opening his eyes.
“No,” said Elspeth pityingly.
“I suck.”
