Overthrow Read online

  ALSO BY CALEB CRAIN

  Necessary Errors

  American Sympathy

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Caleb Crain

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  The author thanks Allison Lorentzen, Ben Nugent, Christine Smallwood, Peter Terzian, and Ben Wizner for their insights into an early draft and their suggestions for improving it. He thanks Sarah Chalfant and Jacqueline Ko at the Wylie Agency, and Allison Lorentzen, Norma Barksdale, and the rest of the team at Viking for shepherding the book into print.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Crain, Caleb, author.

  Title: Overthrow : a novel / Caleb Crain.

  Description: [New York] : Viking, [2019] |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019003204 (print) | LCCN 2019005390 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525560463 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525560456 (hardcover)

  Classification: LCC PS3603.R359 (ebook) | LCC PS3603.R359 O94 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019003204

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Colin Webber

  Cover art: La Manifestation, 1893, by Félix Vallotton

  Version_1

  To Peter

  Contents

  Also by Caleb Crain

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  About the Author

  You may my glories and my state depose,

  But not my griefs; still am I king of those.

  —Richard II

  1.

  It was a few days after the clocks had fallen back for the end of daylight saving time, during the interval when people have adjusted their schedules but not yet their habits. A graduate student in English named Matthew Fisher was walking home from the subway. Dusk had caught the houses along the street with their blinds still undrawn, and living room after living room was exposed, glowing in bright display. Was it wrong to look into them? It was like looking into lives that one wasn’t going to get to live. Matthew saw a toy sailboat on top of a television. He saw a sweater folded over the back of a chair. When he saw a pinecone on a mantelpiece, for a moment he seemed to see the room that contained the pinecone from the pinecone’s point of view, as if he, too, were surrounded by the bright yellow cheer that belonged to the family that lived there.

  And then he was himself again, outside in the dark, walking.

  He had a beard, which he had grown after he had turned thirty, just over a year ago, in the hope that it would make him a little harder to read. He was pretty sure that he did now look a little bearish. In one of his online profiles he claimed to have a boxer’s build, which wasn’t completely misrepresentative. According to a man he had recently picked up in a bar, he looked like the sort of person who could work for a long time without getting sick.

  He hadn’t called the man again, afterward. He was a little alone in the world at the moment, as it happened. He had fallen behind in writing his dissertation, and his close friends in the program, including a man he’d been seeing, hadn’t. They had finished in the spring and then left for jobs and fellowships in other parts of the country over the summer. He had stayed in touch with some of them by email, and he and the now amicably former boyfriend talked now and then by phone. He hadn’t foreseen how hard it would be to replace a number of friends at once, exactly when one was supposed to be conserving one’s energies for research and writing. Nor had he foreseen that not having people in one’s life would make it much more difficult to take in new ones. Under the circumstances, any single new person seemed to carry somehow too much presence.

  Tonight, though, he noticed that he seemed able to send some of himself out into the world. Halfway down the block, he became aware of a young man on a skateboard, pushing down the sidewalk toward him. Twenty-three? Twenty-four? The boy was wearing a gray toggle coat. Against the dim evening, his face and bare hands were almost luminous. He had a sort of elfin beauty, Matthew saw as the boy came nearer. A fine nose. Thin lips. Eyes like little candies. A few yards from Matthew, the boy kicked up his skateboard and carried it. The dismounting might have been no more than urban politeness, but when his eyes met Matthew’s, they had a sly look, and Matthew heard himself saying hi.

  “Oh, hi,” the skateboarder replied, stopping in his tracks.

  It was always startling that it turned out to be so easy. For a moment Matthew didn’t know what to say. The boy was taller than Matthew was.

  “You can say it,” said the skateboarder.

  “Say what?” Matthew wondered aloud.

  “I’m on my way to a friend’s. Do you want to come?”

  “Is he a skater like you?”

  “She. No.”

  “She.”

  “She’s straight, even.”

  “I remember straight people,” said Matthew.

  The boy continued to carry his skateboard, and Matthew, reversing direction, fell into step beside him. The skateboarder said his name was Leif. He had been skating at the late-nineteenth-century monument at the park entrance a block away. Matthew was familiar with it. A marble ledge at the back served as a bench, and skaters liked to pop their boards into the air and surf along the bench’s edge, as if filing it down by skidding along it. The marble was soft, and Matthew had noticed that they were in fact filing it down, unevenly. He always felt a little protective of a thing if it spoke of the past.

  The city had trained him to be a connoisseur, and he could tell that this boy, with his nonchalance and moonglow complexion, outclassed him. Still, he was used to getting more than he deserved, and there wasn’t any evidence of unwillingness. In a few minutes, he might be grabbing the tousled hair at the back of the boy’s head and kissing him.

  He was aware, however, that as they walked, his own apartment was receding behind them, along with the prospect of dinner.

  “Where are you taking me?” Matthew asked.

  “Down the rabbit hole.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “No, not really.”

  “‘Drink me,’ I hope,” Matthew hinted.

  “Subtle!”

  “I mean, drink you, as it were,” Matthew clarified. “That you’re a tall drink of water or whatever.”

  “‘As it were,’” the young man echoed.

  “Not that that’s any more subtle,” Matthew admitted. He didn’t believe in dignity, at least not where the pursuit of boys was concerned. The skateboarder, for his part, accepted the compliment without acknowledgment, and Matthew realized that he knew he wanted the boy without knowing yet whether he liked him. The boy might be stringing Matt
hew along merely for the pleasure of manifesting the power of his own beauty.

  “You’re sweet,” the boy offered.

  “No, I’m not,” Matthew replied.

  In pickups, there were always small frustrations and disappointments, such as delay, that one had to decide what to do with. If they added up too quickly, one could decide to set against them not only the pleasure that, if all went well, one was about to have, but also the revenge of never seeing the man again, afterward. In case he might want to see the man again, however—in case the latest boy might turn out to be the one for whom he was willing to break the pattern of solitude that he had fallen into—Matthew always tried, for as long as he could (for a while, anyway), to turn aside any verdict that negative impressions of the boy might have led him to by sorting them, along with positive ones, into a picture or story that was, at least tentatively, worth holding on to. That is, he tried, as he assembled the picture or story, to see in it someone he might be interested in or even able to fall for. Someone he could imagine looking back at the picture with.

  They turned onto one of the quiet residential avenues.

  “What do you do?” the skateboarder asked.

  “Do you skateboard a lot?” Matthew countered, because he didn’t feel like explaining about kingship in early modern English poetry yet.

  The boy coughed. It began almost as a hiccup but sank quickly into a rough hacking, low in the chest, and the boy had trouble mastering it. “Sorry,” he said, when he had his breath again. “I meant to laugh at you, not cough at you.” He took a plastic water bottle out of his coat pocket and swigged from it.

  “Do you smoke?”

  “I caught pneumonia at Occupy. I’m just getting over it.”

  “Should you be out in the cold? Are you even wearing a sweater under that?”

  “I thought you weren’t sweet. Here it is.”

  They had come to one of the stolid corner-lot apartment buildings—prewar, gray stone, with elegant cornices—that were still just a little too large for the rich to convert to single-family residences and persisted therefore as refuges for young strivers. The best part of picking people up, Matthew sometimes thought, was seeing the insides of strangers’ homes, the apartments of people that a grad student in English might otherwise not even get to talk to.

  “It’s me,” the skateboarder told the intercom.

  At the back of a black-and-white-tiled lobby, a staircase twisted up tightly and steeply, and on the first landing, Matthew caught up to the skateboarder—his name was Leif, Matthew reminded himself—and kissed him. The boy gave more than the porcelain delicacy of his looks suggested that he would. Afterward, his face was flushed, Matthew saw; they kissed again.

  “You’re perfect,” Matthew said.

  The boy smiled with concern. He had a girl’s eyelashes and very faint freckles. “Are you drunk?” he asked Matthew, unseriously.

  On the third floor, a door had been left ajar, and the skateboarder walked in without knocking and without waiting to see if Matthew followed him. “I brought someone,” he hollered as he strode down a dark, narrow corridor, which, according to a paradoxical layout typical of prewar buildings in the neighborhood, revealed the private spaces of the apartment before the public ones, leading past the open doors of a bathroom and three bedrooms—onto the dainty pink-and-white quilt of one of whose beds, carefully made, the young man possessively threw his toggle coat—before reaching a dining room and a parlor. The skateboarder and Matthew paused on the near side of the threshold between the two rooms, which were connected by pocket doors trundled away into their pockets.

  Beyond the threshold, a petite young woman with straight chestnut hair unfolded her legs from a lotus-style perch on a sofa. She was sitting next to a scruffy, fair-haired man who seemed to be her boyfriend. She rose to give Leif a hug.

  “Matthew here wanted to see what we’re doing,” said Leif, by way of introduction. “He’s perfectly safe.”

  Somewhat sheepishly, the woman inspected Matthew. “He looks safe.”

  “Elspeth and I went to college together,” Leif told Matthew. “That’s Raleigh,” he added, of the man still on the sofa. “He’s a skater like me. I mean, not like me, not in my league.”

  “Why are you such a dick?” Raleigh said. Then, looking Matthew over, “Does this guy skate?”

  “No!” Matthew admitted.

  “Did you just pick him up?” Raleigh asked Leif.

  “I think actually he picked me up? Can I offer him a glass of water without you giving him the third degree?”

  “Oh, there’s juice, too, I think,” said Elspeth. Speed-sliding in her slippers, as if they were cross-country skis, she took Leif with her to the kitchen.

  Left alone with the straight man, Matthew nodded, as if to acknowledge that the man had a right to be suspicious, and became aware of holding his winter hat in his hands and worrying it as if he were a Dickens character. He shoved it into a coat pocket. How embarrassing to be older and to be here so obviously as a supplicant.

  He looked around in what he hoped was an innocuous manner. The dining room, behind him, was bare, somewhat severely so. The only decoration was a black-and-white photo-poster, blown up so large that grains of half-toning were visible. In the photo, a chair had been knocked over, on what seemed to be a stage. A microphone lay on the floor beside the chair; a black cable snaked away.

  By contrast, the parlor, where Elspeth and Raleigh had been sitting, was a jumble. It was in the cluttered style, reminiscent of respectable Victorian living rooms, that had become fashionable among people with somewhat unconventional ambitions. There was a smoke-damaged oil of a landscape. There was a birdless subfusc birdcage. On a coffee table, a glass pitcher held half a dozen dried hydrangea clusters, of a mothlike grayish lavender. The sofa had been reupholstered in white and chartreuse stripes sometime in the past decade, but cracks in its dark, carved frame had been repaired with a glue that had turned mustard and opaque and had begun to crumble. Only in a listing Ikea bookcase was fresh color visible—red, orange, and blue on the dust jackets of essay collections and volumes of poets’ correspondence, the fogeyish new hardcovers that young people who work in publishing are tempted into bringing home from the giveaway table but then never read. In such a setting, with its allusions to a tradition that it hadn’t quite inherited, Matthew thought he knew where he was. He might know even better than the people who lived here, he thought, with a confidence whose force triggered in him, as suddenly, a reconsideration: What if his confidence was a way of keeping from himself an awareness of how out of place he really was?

  When Elspeth and Leif returned with a glass of water, Elspeth waved at Raleigh, as if shooing away his vigilance. “It’s fine,” she insisted.

  “I thought we were supposed to try to find people,” Leif said, in his own defense. “I actually do think he has . . .”

  “Has what?” Matthew asked.

  “If that’s what this is about,” Raleigh said.

  “Sometimes we do experiments?” Leif said to Matthew. “With tarot cards?”

  “Tarot cards,” Matthew repeated.

  “I know, right?”

  “No, no,” Matthew said. Magic was a thing that one had to reckon with when trying to understand kingship. It existed in Spenser’s fairy world; it existed in Shakespeare in even his earliest plays, the ones not really much by Shakespeare. In the course of his reading and note-taking, Matthew had been learning the scholarly way of discussing it, which neither reified nor underestimated.

  “Leif,” Elspeth pleaded.

  “It’s tarot cards not because we think we can predict the future,” Leif said. “It’s tarot cards because Elspeth doesn’t have any feelings about card cards.”

  “I don’t understand why anyone would have feelings about them,” she said.

  “If you’d had a childhood, for instance.�
��

  “We used to do it at school,” Elspeth told Matthew, “and when we started going to Occupy, it seemed like we should take it up again. As an alternative means of communication.”

  “A new world is possible,” Leif said. “You don’t have to tell us you don’t believe because we’ve already read your mind about that.” The irony in his voice suggested that he was setting up a test less of Matthew’s credulity than of his willingness to be carried along.

  “It’s not really a joke,” Elspeth said.

  Matthew was bewildered, but he nodded. Sometimes during a pickup it was advisable to be as parsimonious as a diplomat with statements of how much one believed or didn’t believe.

  Through the cotton of the skateboarder’s upper right shirt sleeve, Matthew thought he saw a figure, and he pointed at the boy’s arm. “Is this a tattoo?”

  Leif rolled up his sleeve to show off the image: a small thicket of lightly stylized trees, somewhere between depictions of trees and emblems of them. While Matthew was admiring the trees, Leif did, too, looking over his own right shoulder at them while his left hand held back the fabric. “A green thought,” he said, in explanation. The lines were drawn so boldly that Matthew wondered if they were legible by touch.

  Elspeth dropped onto the sofa and pulled Raleigh down beside her.

  “Like it’s so hard to read this guy’s mind,” Raleigh commented.

  “Does he have a boyfriend?” Leif asked Elspeth, as he let his sleeve fall.

  “No,” Elspeth answered tentatively.

  “True,” Matthew admitted. Maybe it was a game. Or a way for the girl to keep a hold on her gay friend, or vice versa.

  “Is he trouble?” Leif asked.

  Elspeth paused. “Yes.”

  “I’m not trouble!” Matthew said.

  “He’s sad,” Elspeth said. “He’s that kind of trouble.” She was willing to look at him only dartingly. Under her eyes there were shadows that appeared to be part of the structure of her face, as in the face of a child born prematurely who hasn’t quite, as grandparents say, “filled out.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “I think actually you’re right and he knows. That’s why you brought him, isn’t it.”