Land of the Blind

by Jess Walter

  “Your hair’s sticking up on the sides,” his mother said.

  “It’s supposed to do that,” Eli said. “It’s called feathering.”

  “It’s called sticking up. Those pants are too tight.”

  “They’re supposed to be tight,” he said.

  “Where are your glasses?”

  “I’m wearing contacts.”

  “Oh, God. Now you’re putting shards of glass in your eyes. And your chest and arms are so bloated. Is that from drugs?”

  “They’re muscles, Mom. From lifting weights.”

  “Well, it’s not healthy. It’s bad for your circulation.”

  I clipped his bow tie and straightened it and helped him into his jacket. I splashed Aqua Velva on his cheeks.

  “You smell like a sailor,” his mom said.

  When he was dressed, she leaned on the back of a chair in their tiny kitchen—there was only room for the two chairs—and took his picture.

  “My God, Eli,” she said. “You’re beautiful. I wish your father…” She turned away and started crying.

  I drove. Eli and I picked up Susan, who looked a little too professional, and who didn’t talk all the way to Dana’s house, maybe for fear of cracking her makeup. At Dana’s house, her parents didn’t come out onto the porch this time. Eli went to the door and came back with Dana, who wore a silver dress with a deep neckline. She had a wrap pulled around her shoulders and when she shivered a little in the cold, on the way to the car, Eli offered her his coat. She took it and I sighed with relief. Her hair was swooped up on her head and spilled out on her forehead. She looked perfect, like an old movie actress. Susan hadn’t been eager to double-date with two people so far removed from her social stratum, and when Dana walked out to my parents’ Dodge Colt looking beautiful—and not in my date’s makeup and hairspray way—Eli’s coat around her shoulders, Susan mumbled something with the word “asshole” in it.

  We had dinner at the Mr. Steak at the end of the mall, and at first, I have to admit, I worried about Eli’s ability to pull this whole thing off. He sat next to me and echoed my every move, taking off his jacket and unfolding his napkin as I did, shooting glances at me every few seconds to pick up his next cue. He ordered the same food and drink that I did and looked at me for approval every time he spoke, which, in the first twenty minutes, was exactly once. (“So, do you like meat, Dana?”) But as the dinner progressed he actually seemed to loosen up and even told a few good jokes at his own expense about grade school (“You probably don’t remember me. I was sort of stuck up. Didn’t talk to many people”). And while he didn’t actually make eye contact with Dana, he was polite and stood when she excused herself to go to the bathroom.

  By the time our food came, Dana seemed to be having a decent time—at least in comparison to my arctic date, who chewed her thumbnail and stared off into space as we began talking about college. I was looking at state universities. Eli couldn’t afford a university, and his grades weren’t high enough for a scholarship. He was going to start at community college, he said, build his grades up, and then hopefully transfer to a four-year school.

  When Dana admitted she was going to Stanford, Eli’s fork fell to his plate. “Wow!” he said. “Stanford. Are you sure?”

  Dana smiled at her sirloin. “I’m sure.”

  Susan excused herself to go to the bathroom.

  “Aren’t you nervous?” Eli asked.

  Dana looked up at him, surprised. “You know, I don’t think anyone has asked me that. They just keep telling me how great it is.”

  “It is great, but that’s the first thing that popped into my head,” Eli said. “I’d be scared to death. Everyone there must be so smart. And it’s so far away.”

  “She’ll do fine,” I said, and waved a little plastic cup at the waiter so he’d bring me more sour cream for my baked potato.

  Eli leaned back in his chair. “I just keep thinking college is going to be just like high school, but twenty-four hours a day. No escape.”

  “I don’t know,” said Dana. “I guess I’ve been assuming that’s when life really gets going. In college.”

  “Really?” Eli asked. “You think so?”

  “God, I hope so,” said Dana. “If it doesn’t…” She didn’t finish.

  There was a moment of quiet, and Eli took a deep breath. “I lied,” he said to his plate. “My mom inherited some money that she put away for my college. I could probably afford a four-year school, at least in state. It just sounds so scary to me, I figured I should go to community college first. I’m a chicken.”

  “It’s perfectly understandable,” Dana said.

  Eli laughed a little. “No, it’s not,” he said. He pounded his fork down into his ribeye and was about to cut it when he stood up, lifted his fork and his steak to his heart, and addressed Dana formally. “I pledge at this very moment, on this cut of meat, to take my two-point-five grade point average and enroll at Harvard.”

  Eli sat down and rubbed at the steak stain on his white tux as Susan returned from the bathroom, saw that she’d missed something funny, and glared at me. She mouthed that thing with the word “asshole” in it again and then sat down to finish her flank steak.

  It’s funny. I saw a basketball game on ESPN Classic the other day, a game I’d first seen in 1979, the NCAA championship game between Larry Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores and Magic Johnson’s Michigan State Spartans. At first I was startled to have come across so important a relic of my teenage years, then I was giddy to watch my memories roll across the TV screen, then I was disappointed to see what a flat version it was compared to my mental picture of the game (the players were too slow; the game was a blowout; Bird and Magic rarely guarded each other). I had taken a very ordinary game and made it a seminal moment in basketball and my own development.

  And perhaps my sweet memory of the rest of the prom, of Eli’s near-total transformation, is a similar trick of mental editing and mythmaking. Because it certainly wasn’t perfect. For instance, we hadn’t had time for dance lessons, and so Eli’s dancing during fast songs resembled nothing so much as a dog trying to escape a leash. The Mr. Steak stain on his tuxedo was quickly joined by punch on his shirt and a slice of cake in his lap and two unidentifiable stains that may have come from Eli himself. He head-butted Dana at one point and nearly chipped her tooth, and his hair eventually lost its feather and fell straight on his head; he looked like a pimply, red-haired Ringo Starr.

  But these are minor blemishes on an otherwise sparkling evening. From the moment he and Dana strode in (“Who is that? Eli Boyle? No way”) to the first slow dance (his mother had taught him a kind of box step; while the rest of us just leaned over and hung on our dates’ asses, Eli and Dana actually danced) to his anticipating when to pull out her chair, when to get her punch, when to get her wrap, Eli was a gentleman, almost smooth, and I know that I am not imagining this part: more than a few girls found ways to cast looks over at the two of them. I can’t say he and Dana clicked, really, but they seemed to have a fine time and I watched as Eli relaxed and began enjoying himself.

  It was even his idea, after our regular dance pictures, to have one more taken, together, the four of us. Of course I see now the significance of this moment, not just for Eli, but for Dana and me and even Susan—for whom this was the penultimate indignity, the next-to-last straw, having to be photographed with the likes of Eli Boyle while our classmates stood in a queue. In the photo, Eli and I are standing behind our dates in the photographer’s sea-foam grotto, lost in our tuxes, at the last minute our arms thrown over each other’s shoulders and our heads dipped in, like war buddies about to ship, our dates standing at an angle in front of us, a cool distance between them, Dana smiling politely, Susan chewing glass. If you saw the picture, you would notice first this wide range of smiles: Dana polite and quite nearly believable, Susan snarling, me wary, and Eli positively buoyant standing next to me. I have a theory about pictures like that; they actually reveal more as time passes, and as
the colors fade and the styles die, other things emerge, connections and motivations, and maybe even futures.

  When the pictures were finished, Susan and I sneaked up to the room Tommy Kane’s parents had rented for him on the ninth floor, where we guzzled T.J. Swan wine (Steppin’ Out—the good stuff) and had quick, drunken, distracted sex (my tux pants at my ankles, her gunnysack dress around her neck). The wine made me sluggish and my hands felt like someone else’s hands. After all the toil in her parents’ Wagoneer, I wasn’t as accomplished in an actual bed, and we weren’t gone from the dance long.

  I apologized all the way down in the elevator, but Susan was fixing herself in the mirror, as angry with me as I’d ever seen her. When we got back to the dance I couldn’t see Eli and Dana right away, but then I spotted them over by the grotto. I immediately got nervous. Tommy Kane and his date, Amanda Rankin, were standing across from Eli and Dana; Tommy was too close, and I thought he must’ve gotten in Eli’s face over something. I began to hurry across the room, ready to rescue Eli from trouble, but when I arrived I saw that everything was okay. Better than okay. Tommy was asking about the various stains on Eli’s tux, and he was giving them a good-natured tour. They were all laughing. It was as if they were all friends. Eli beamed. Amanda Rankin, who had apparently gotten quite a bit of bottle courage before the prom, steadied herself on Dana’s arm. And Dana didn’t look unhappy either.

  “There you are,” said Tommy when he saw me. “Gimme the key. Eli and I are gonna take our sweet dates up to the suite and have a little sweet wine.”

  “Yeah boy! Fuggin’ juice me!” said Amanda Rankin through eyes as uneven as my own. “I need more wine.” This was a statement as untrue as any I have ever heard.

  Eli looked nervously from Tommy to me and from me to Dana, whose face remained perfectly inscrutable, as if she were miles away.

  “Whatever you want to do,” Dana said to Eli.

  “Great,” said Tommy. “Let’s go.”

  “Okay,” said Eli, but the look he gave me was one of terror. We hadn’t gone over this possibility in our preparation. Drinking? A hotel room? In our wildest dreams, we hadn’t come up with this scenario.

  “We’ll come with you,” I said. This was the last straw for Susan, who yanked on my arm.

  “I’d like to dance once at my prom,” she said through gritted teeth.

  “Go dance,” said Tommy. “You can’t hog the room all night, Mason. Give the rest of us a chance.”

  So Susan and I danced, a Led Zeppelin slow-fast-slow dance, then a Steve Miller Band guitar shake, followed by some disco instrumental that neither of us managed to catch on the beat. I kept watching the doorway of the ballroom, imagining all the trouble Eli could get into with a bottle of wine and a first-rate fuckball like Tommy Kane.

  “Who are you looking for?” Susan asked me.

  “Nothing. I’m just…thirsty.”

  We danced again, to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” a song I thought might not end until sophomore year of college. After each song, I turned to leave the dance floor but Susan wouldn’t budge, would just begin dancing again. So I’d stay for one more.

  “Ready to go upstairs now?” I asked after Cheap Trick’s “Surrender.”

  “No!” Susan said. “I am not.”

  “Come on. Let’s go have a little wine.”

  “Fuck you, Clark!” Susan said. Then she burst into tears and ran out of the ballroom. A hundred pairs of eyes watched her go and then swung slowly to me, standing alone in this world I had created, this green, underwater Boogie Wonderland.

  “Susan!” I ran after her and found her in the lobby, crying on the shoulder of one of the two girls who’d come in jeans and without dates.

  “Asshole,” said one of the jeans sisters.

  “Susan. I’m sorry.”

  “Why don’t you just go back in there?” said the other jeans sister. “Or go see your fucking girlfriend.”

  “Dana, please. Can I just talk to you?”

  Susan’s head turned slowly.

  “I mean…Susan.”

  The two girls in jeans stepped back, as if Susan were a radiator about to blow. “I can’t believe you just called her Dana,” one of them said.

  “Come on. I just messed up,” I said. “Come on. Can’t we talk?”

  “You asshole. You fucking asshole.”

  “Susan…”

  “You have been staring at her all night.”

  “No I haven’t.”

  “Yes you have.”

  “It’s not what you think,” I said. “I’m trying to help Eli.”

  At the same time, all three girls’ heads fell to the right, as if I’d just told them a terrible lie.

  I could feel the desperation boiling inside, and that and the wine I’d drunk convinced me that I could make these dubious girls understand. “See, when I was a kid we both got picked on, but I grew out of it. Eli never did. I’m trying to help him.”

  Susan scoffed and turned to walk away.

  My desperation bubbled to the surface. “See, our neighborhood was tough and there was this accident…” And I don’t know what made me do this, the wine probably, but I reached up and pushed on my eyelid until my prosthetic eye slid from its socket and I held it up to demonstrate…What? How he’d saved my life, maybe. Twenty years later, I can’t really say what I hoped to achieve, but it certainly wasn’t the result I got.

  One of the jeans sisters—who, I later learned, had wolfed a half bottle of peach schnapps—vomited on the faded carpet of the lobby of the Davenport Hotel. The sound of her retching caused Susan to pause in the doorway and look back, at which point she saw: one of the girls in jeans covering her mouth, the other bent over, dumping a sour mixture of peach liqueur and stomach acid on the floor, while her boyfriend stood above them in a tuxedo, waving good-bye with his glass eye. And for just a second, I had the sensation that I could see with the fake eye that I waved around, the whole sad scene—me, the girls in jeans, a crying Susan, a few people lingering in the lobby, and the desk clerk, whose face betrayed nothing, as if such sights were so common here as to be dull.

  I realized I could chase Susan and try to repair my own life, or I could go help Eli. It almost seems as if those two choices have been in front of me like this since elementary school, when Pete Decker first forced Eli and me to fight, when I first had the chance to rise above my own smallness and help my friend.

  The door closed behind Susan. I put my magic seeing eye into my pocket and turned for the elevator. I’m coming, Eli, I said to myself, and the feel of that collapsed left eyelid reminded me of that day alongside the river, when Eli had rescued me, and I could hear the gurgle of that water and smell the smoking of my eyelashes. I can’t say what I felt as I rushed to help Eli, some redemption perhaps, the emerging angels of my better nature.

  The elevator stopped on every floor. My classmates got on or off and smacked me on the shoulder, asked why I was winking and said they’d heard that Susan was really mad at me. I ignored them all and got off on the ninth floor. I ran down the hallway. The door to room 916 was closed, and I couldn’t hear anything inside. I took a breath, gathered myself, flattened my lapels, and patted down my hair, and then realized that with my left eye in my pocket I wasn’t likely to pull off “gathered.” I gave up and knocked on the door. I sensed someone looking through the eyehole and then the door opened and there was Eli, his tie removed, his hair a mess, his face ringed in sweat.

  “Where have you been?” he whispered. He immediately began pacing.

  I stepped inside the room and saw what looked like the results of a fierce battle. Two empty T.J. Swan wine bottles were keeled over on the coffee table. Amanda Rankin was asleep on the big double bed, her dress pulled down to reveal a padded black bra. There was no sign of Tommy or Dana.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” Eli careened around the room. “We drank a lot of wine…and Tommy turned out the lights and he and Amanda…” He pointed to Am
anda Rankin’s partially disrobed figure on the bed. “Dana and I just sat here. Amanda must’ve passed out, because after a minute Tommy turned the lights on and wanted to drink again.”

  I heard a sound from the bathroom like a sick person moaning. I looked over. The bathroom door was closed.

  “Dana had a lot of wine. Tommy’s in there with her.”

  I tried the door. It was locked. I pounded.

  “Go away, Boyle,” said Tommy. “We’ll be out in a minute.”

  “Stop it,” I heard Dana say, muffled, from the other side of the door.

  My shoulder hit the door and I was surprised at how easily it opened. I suppose I hadn’t hit anything that hard since I nearly killed the cheerleader during the basketball game. Inside, Dana was on her knees, bent over the bathtub, moaning and spitting, having just thrown up. Tommy was standing behind her, trying to pull her dress up.

  “Hey, Mason,” said Tommy, his eyes drunken slits. He smiled.

  I pulled him out of the bathroom and pushed him across the room. He crashed into the bed and fell to the floor. As I stalked toward him, Eli slid past me into the bathroom.

  Tommy was laughing. “Come on, Mason. She was giving me the eye, man.” He looked at my collapsed lid and smiled. “Oh, sorry.”

  I pulled him up by his tux shirt and pressed him up against the wall. He pushed me back and I nearly lost my balance. “Come on. She don’t like that fuckin’ geek.” He pushed me again, harder, and I staggered back, against the bed.

  I grabbed him by the shirt and flung him across the room, and he knocked the television from its stand. It crashed to the floor next to him. “Jesus, Mason. What the fuck’s got into you?”

  Just then a key turned, the hotel room door opened, and in came the same desk clerk that I’d seen downstairs. He still had that stony look on his face, the most overwhelming case of boredom I’d ever seen. He looked around the room: One girl passed out on the bed. One boy on the floor next to the TV. The eyeball boy standing in the middle of the room. One girl getting sick in the bathroom. Another boy standing helplessly behind her. Empty wine bottles everywhere.