Overthrow

by Caleb Crain

  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.”