Land of the Blind

by Jess Walter

  The world continued after the prom, of course, weightless days that left no imprint on me. True, my former friend Tommy Kane never spoke to me again, but that was of no great import—although I suspect it was he who threw my yearbook in the boys’ room toilet. (A janitor fished it out; even today, many of the nineteen pages on which I was photographed remain wrinkled and stained.)

  Dana and I did not get together after the prom. I’d like to believe this was because of our concern for Eli’s feelings, but it likely had as much to do with a kind of inertia caused by the rigidity of our high school personas. At school, I was disheartened to see Dana retreat back into her loose clothing and pigtails, to see her stop wearing makeup. And I was equally surprised that my attraction to her could turn itself off so easily. I knew what lay under those baggy clothes, and yet she seemed too much like the old Dana, too bookish, too girlish, too logical in comparison to the curvy collections of fluff that I found attractive. I began to think of the girl in the hotel that night as someone else entirely. But this retraction wasn’t entirely my doing. Something changed for Dana, too. She began to hesitate when she saw me, to blush when I said hi, to avoid me in the halls. It occurred to me that she might even see me as a mistake, as a blemish on her otherwise perfect school record, the B she never got. And when I read what she wrote in my wet yearbook (…I’ll always care for you. Be good. Dana), I knew I’d been kissed off.

  Susan and I were finished, too. She didn’t sign my yearbook, but at school one of her friends handed me a note from her that read, in part, We are fucking through—although my teenage dyslexia transposed the last words to read We are through fucking—and I was understandably, or maybe just hormonally, heartbroken. I’d like to say that I was through with women built like Susan (all facade, no structural integrity), and that I had learned to appreciate the charming architecture of women like Dana (who am I kidding? There were none), but this is a story of weakness, not of strength.

  I got no yearbook wishes from Eli. No notes or secondhand threats. I suppose I just stopped existing for him. I thought about apologizing, telling him that Dana and I weren’t going to see each other, that it had been a mistake, but I worried about making it worse, making it seem like I’d stolen something I didn’t even want, that I’d made out with his date just to spite him. While I tried to figure out what to say, one morning my shoes and jeans and T-shirts—the entire costume from Eli’s ill-fated remake—appeared on my back porch, neatly folded.

  School ended before I figured out what to say to Eli, or to Dana. Of course I could’ve picked up the phone anytime, but something had given way in me. With college looming, the final hours of my childhood held little interest for me, like the last, hot afternoon of grade school—report cards mailed, desks cleaned, every eye on the needle-thin second hand making its glacial sweep around the clock face.

  Days lost their mooring and drifted, banged one into the next, and I moved within them in a languid, sun-bleached daze. Summer bled out beneath my feet. My life took on the quality of nostalgia, sweet and distant and beyond change, my family receding into an album of memories. I crafted a schedule in which I rarely saw them, working as a dishwasher in a restaurant all night and sleeping most of the day. I was about to become the first in my family to go to college, and my parents were overly respectful of this; they kept their distance, unsure how to treat me. They fed me and housed me but stayed out of my way, and I ate and rested and brooded like a climber the night before summit.

  But Ben had no patience for this new state of affairs. He’d just turned sixteen, and though he remained small (a shade over five feet six inches tall, broom thin), he was dealing with sprouts of hair beneath his arms and on his chin, and the divining-rod erections that govern most sixteen-year-old boys. I’d always been a sort of tour guide through his adolescence, and now that it was finally getting good, Ben couldn’t understand where I’d gone, why I wouldn’t drive to the lake with him or shoot baskets or talk about girls—why I wouldn’t sit on the porch at twilight and laugh at things so familiar we barely needed to mention them.

  “Let your brother sleep,” our mother would say as I lay in bed all afternoon, the pillow over my head, trying to breathe in long, sleepy rises and falls, pretending I didn’t know Ben was in my doorway. Eventually, he got the message; by summer’s end, he’d just nod when he saw me. When I left for college, he was camping with friends.

  So that’s how my last summer as a child passed, in chrysalis hibernation, closed off to the people in my life, until the first day of September arrived and I emerged coolly into our driveway, a suitcase in each hand. My sisters hugged my hips. My mother cried.

  My father handed me the keys to their old Dodge Colt, as if I’d just won a very bad game show. “I can’t pay for very much college,” he said. “But I can sure as shit get you there.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and shook his hand. Then I climbed in the car.

  I should have known, of course, that I was leaving behind unfinished business, not just with Ben, but with Eli and Dana. But all that summer, solitude had worked like a drug on me, and I happily allowed old intentions and obligations to fall away. I believed what TV teaches you—that change is only an episode away, the past is dead, and the only world is the one we’re in.

  I drove my father’s car against the grain of late-summer clouds, drifting west on I-90, shadowing the river valley through the city of my birth, my arm resting on the open window, the wind rippling my sleeve. I crested Sunset Hill and saw Spokane recede in the rearview, a world beneath me, the last light glinting off the downtown buildings. The whole thing felt intimately familiar; the beginning of every daydream I’d ever had.

  And that was it. September came and we did what people do—Dana and Eli and me. We went to college. More than a decade would pass before we would speak again.

  Dana went to Stanford, just as she’d told everyone she was going to. She rarely came home from Palo Alto, but I heard through mutual friends that she joined a sorority and embraced the blossoming that she’d only flirted with in high school—tight skirts and torn jeans, filtered smokes and cheap well drinks. After this brief rebellion she cannily double-majored—she must’ve had a psychic student adviser—in management information systems and marketing. She became part of a group of Stanford grads and their friends that billed themselves as a sort of Bay Area technology salon—a tight community of young creative computer and business students who lived in and around Silicon Valley, “positioned,” as they would say, to be the vanguard of all that was coming, and to become quite wealthy in the next few years.

  In that first decade after high school, there would be no canniness or blossoming or positioning for Eli. Certainly no wealth. He spent a year at community college but managed only a few credits before he dropped out to care for his mother, who had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Eventually, he and his mother moved to a downtown apartment to be closer to the hospital where she received medical care, and Eli gave up on college altogether and took a job processing film at a one-hour photo. I saw him once during this time—walking downtown, wearing a photo-booth apron, his nose in a book, plying the sidewalk with his bent-legged shuffle, shoulders rolled forward and glasses at the end of his nose. I was with two frat brothers, privileged sons of Mercer Island professionals, and I am sorry to admit (amid a thousand sorries) that I did not wave or stop to say hi or so much as slow down.

  For me, those first two years of college had been nothing short of epiphanic, fulfilling in ways I didn’t know I could be fulfilled. Seattle was a land I had dreamed about without knowing it existed (let alone four hours away by car), and I happily left behind my hometown and its embarrassing, rigid poverty, its stunted ambitions, its daydreams that too often consisted of getting day shift at the aluminum factory. I thought of my home as a kind of childhood disease I had overcome, and I learned to despise it the way a thankless child despises his uncultured family.

  The campus of the University of Washington opened fo
r me like a pop-up book. Backpacked and Ray-Banned, I marched in Top-Siders and polo shirts with twenty thousand other soldiers of reinvention, from class to class in vast lecture halls, to intramural games along the lake, used bookstores on the Ave, keg lines in the district, breakfast joints in Wallingford, bars in Belltown. I crabbed and kayaked, rock-climbed and mountain-biked, threw Frisbees on cold beaches, drank Canadian beer, and learned to have sex with bulimia-thin girls in dorm room bunk beds and sorority house study carrels (though I never forgot my lessons with Susan, and was always on the lookout for a more vehicular hump). I studied. Got A’s. Networked. Brown-nosed.

  But most of all I ran for things. I started slowly, filing unopposed for sergeant at arms in my freshman dormitory (“Make it Mason!”) until, by my junior year, I was in full campaign mode—vice president of my fraternity (and then a shoo-in for the top spot my senior year) and president of the campus chapter of the Young Democrats, as well as a lesser officer in six other organizations, everything from Junior Toastmasters to the Young Sierra Club. I fell in with a group of similar alpha achievers, and we worked our young résumés and our grade point averages with the same fervor that we chased tail.

  At some point during my sophomore year, I stopped thinking of myself as being from Spokane. I was part of the torrent of people who were just then beginning to flood Seattle with our affections and affectations, with our arrogance: an unwitting conspiracy of transplants and entrepreneurs, hikers, bikers, and seekers, the regionally hip—a cult of casually dressed devotees of grubby Northwest realism. Over the next twenty years, we would ruin all that we found charming: old flop hotel lounges and Irish bars and Pioneer Square taverns. We discovered smoky dives filled with drunken hobos and cranky Norwegian fishermen and drank and smoke amid them, sucking their genuineness until we looked up and saw the hobos were software engineers and the fishermen bicycle messengers and hummus was on the menu. Coffee and chowder and punk trios became brand names and mall kiosks and dull pop. Tucked-booth greasy-spoon breakfast joints became tour-guided facsimiles of tucked-booth greasy-spoon breakfast joints, and only by listening closely (“We’ll have the whole wheat goat cheese pancakes, the six-herb flan, and two cappuccinos”) could a person tell the difference. We turned every gas station into a coffee shop, and by the time I left Seattle you could have four hundred flavors of coffee, but you couldn’t find a decent gallon of gas.

  We were beginning to love the place to death.

  “Aren’t you homesick?” my mother used to ask on the phone, at the outset of my affair with Seattle. Later, she was more direct. “Are you ever coming home?”

  But how could I leave, even for a weekend? The sun might come out.

  Spokane was only four hours away and yet it faded from my memory. I came home only three times each my freshman and sophomore years. “I’m really swamped” was my standard response to my mother’s entreaties. This was the advantage of being the first in my family to ever go to college; they had no balance to my stories of round-the-clock studying, of mandatory poetry readings and guest lectures and spirit bonfires.

  When I did come home I felt increasingly detached from Spokane, and from my parents, whom I lectured with the arrogance of a transplant, with the zeal of a religious convert. Every other sentence out of my mouth began, “The problem with this place—” I suggested that Seattle’s vitality revealed Spokane’s failings: its aging population, its economic and political intractability, its lack of imagination and unrelieved shabbiness. “Spokane is Kmart,” I famously said at Christmas dinner once. “Seattle is Nordstrom.”

  Mom and Dad were so proud of my A’s and my smooth transition to college that they indulged my bouts of civic self-importance. My sisters, too, sat through my lectures. The only person who didn’t put up with this shit was my brother Ben, who rolled his eyes at my newfound civic pretentiousness and missed no opportunity to mock me: “Spokane is a cup of piss,” he said that same Christmas. “Seattle is a two-dollar cup of piss.”

  My parents were just beginning to worry about Ben during this time, that his unleavened cynicism was more than just a phase. He had graduated from high school and grown into a thin, caustic young man; with his short hair and raw features, he looked like a British soccer fan. He had abandoned his smoking jacket and pipe for a mode of self-expression he called “enlightened laziness,” which consisted mostly of sitting around my parents’ house in flannel pajamas, skimming old philosophy books, playing Atari, and drinking red wine out of Slurpee cups. When my father laid down the law and told him to enroll in college, Ben disrespectfully declined. He found an apartment and got a job mopping hospital corridors at night so that his days would remain open for sitting around in his pajamas, reading Nietzsche and Sartre, and drinking red wine out of Slurpee cups.

  That fall—it was my junior year—every phone call home quickly devolved into a discussion of Ben’s malaise. “He needs to get out of Spokane,” I said. “It breeds apathy.” But my mother convinced me that at least some of it had to do with Ben missing me, that he was aping my slovenly behavior during my last summer at home.

  That’s how, on a crisp, clear Saturday morning that October, I found myself driving across Washington State, through the serrated Cascades, through the channeled scablands, wheat fields, and scrub forests, until I descended into Spokane and all that I’d left behind. I drove straight to Ben’s apartment, near Spokane Falls Community College, on a basalt-and-pine ledge northwest of downtown. His apartment was at the end of a wrought-iron-railed staircase—a basement studio with dark curtains hung over submarine windows. It was 11:00 A.M. and the apartment was dead quiet. I knocked three times before the door opened, and there stood Ben, in flannel pajamas, eyes half-opened slits. I followed him into the apartment and he went to the kitchen, poured himself a bowl of Cap’n Crunch and a tumbler of red wine.

  “Isn’t it a little early for Chianti?” I asked.

  He rubbed his head and his brown hair remained where he’d pushed it, like Play-Doh. “You can’t serve Riesling with Cap’n Crunch,” he said.

  The apartment was dark and fetid, damp like the inside of a shoe. “Mom and Dad want me to talk to you about college,” I said.

  “Barber college? Electoral college?”

  We sat on the ratty couch in his living room and he gulped wine while we watched football on his twelve-inch TV. Dog-eared paperbacks lay everywhere; I picked one up—Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, by Albert Camus. “You do the classwork, but you don’t want the credits. Is that it?”

  “You want me to pay someone to tell me what books to read?”

  “Is that all school is to you—the books? What about the people? The experience? The social life?”

  “Yeah, good point.” He feigned earnestness. “Maybe I could join your frat. We can double-date-rape together.”

  “Look, I’m just here because Mom is worried about you. It doesn’t matter to me what you do.”

  “That’s a shock.” Ben took a pull of his wine.

  I talked him into getting dressed and going for a walk. I put on a windbreaker. Ben put on three sweatshirts.

  We walked west, down Pettet Drive and across the river, and when Ben looked up, he saw that I’d steered us to the campus of Spokane Falls Community College.

  “Subtle,” he said.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I know you had your heart set on living in the basement of that crappy apartment building the rest of your life—”

  “Actually,” he said, “I’m waiting for something on the second floor to open up.”

  “—mopping floors, drinking wine, and playing Atari.”

  “I’m saving for a Nintendo.”

  “Don’t you want more than we had growing up?”

  “Actually,” he said, “I want exactly what we had growing up.”

  We walked into the student union building. There were a handful of students in the cafeteria, studying and eating. “Doesn’t this look better than mopping floors?”

  Ben was unimpr
essed. “You don’t think someone mops these floors?”

  “I don’t see why it has to be you.”

  “It has to be someone.” He took in the students’ dim presences and looked away. “Do you know what your problem is, Clark? You decide what you’re going to see before you even look at things.”

  I was amused. “Yeah, why do you suppose that is?”

  “You really want to know what I think?”

  “Sure.”

  “I think you’re so busy climbing you don’t notice what’s really around you.”

  “That’s called success, Ben,” I said. “That’s called drive.”

  “Or running away.”

  “I run for things. Not away. You might think about that yourself.” I pulled him over to a bulletin board near the front of the cafeteria. It had the word CLUBS written on top in big block letters. “There’s a whole world out here—”

  “There’s a whole world in here.” And he pointed to his head.

  I ran my hand over the bulletin board, shingled with flyers and notices from three dozen campus groups, from the Gay and Lesbian Student Alliance to the Arab Student Union to the Spokane Climbing Community. “You know what this is?” I tore a phone strip from a campus philosophy group and handed it to him. “This is—”

  That’s when I saw something out of the corner of my eye that froze me.

  “What’s the matter?” Ben asked after a few seconds.

  The club name was stenciled in green military-style letters on a white sheet of paper, but there was nothing explaining what the club did. There was only its name, the date and place of its next meeting—that very day, it turned out—along with a contact person and a phone number. I wonder even now, years later, what might have happened if I hadn’t torn that small piece of paper away. Maybe none of this would have happened. Maybe that was the point from which all things diverged, the point at which we could’ve all continued forward, instead of eddying back to the place where I sit now, alone.