Overthrow
Page 41
The tech reporter for the city’s largest broadsheet was close enough that despite the rising hum, she was still able to speak to Joe without raising her voice. “But you probably know them better than anyone now,” she said.
(“That’s Stacey Temple,” whispered Lloyd.)
“I’m not psychic,” he replied to her.
“Take a guess?” Temple joked. She had very sharp cheekbones.
“‘A green thought in a green shade’?” Joe said. The words had popped into his head. “They used to quote that so often I thought it was code for something, but it’s just from a poem.”
“What did he say?” another reporter asked.
“‘A green thought in a green shade,’” answered a reporter who had overheard.
“Found it,” someone else said.
“You found the poem, or—?”
“Joe, sir, that password seems to work, actually.”
A long icicle froze him from his throat to his groin. It removed a cone of himself from the inside of himself.
“It’s not opening for me,” another reporter said.
“You have to use underscores instead of spaces between the words.”
“It’s not downloading.”
“What is all this stuff?”
Voices began to issue from a laptop held aloft by Jan Ridgely, at first unintelligible under the interference of the room’s cross talk, and then, as the reporters succeeded in hushing one another, blotted over for a moment by a glissando of blips while Ridgely tapped the volume on her laptop upward.
“Maybe I’ll write it in ballad rhythm,” Leif Saunderson was saying, as the voices became distinct. “Or in one of those alliterative Icelandic things that Auden is so into.”
“You’ll still know,” Elspeth Farrell replied.
“I know,” Saunderson said. “I’ll be sort of ironic about not wanting to know. I’ll be sentimental for the naïve. I’m calling it the dark poem.”
“Oh, Leif . . .”
“We shouldn’t be—,” a reporter interrupted.
Ridgely hit the Escape key.
Fortunately, Joe remembered, it wasn’t at all clear that under the new laws of combat a revelation could still change the ending of a story.
About the Author
Caleb Crain has written for The New Yorker, Harper's, the Paris Review, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, n+1, and The New York Times Book Review. He is the author of the novel Necessary Errors and the critical work American Sympathy. He was born in Texas, raised in Massachusetts, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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