Land of the Blind

by Jess Walter

  I stared at her for a moment and then said, “Oh.” Understanding fell in my lap like a White Russian. “You’re not going to tell Michael.”

  They announced her section of the plane and Dana stood. “Oh, Clark,” she said. “I’m sorry. It would kill him.” She kissed me. “This was nice. Maybe even something I needed. But I have to get back to my life now.”

  This was nice. I lurched and burned and swayed and watched her walk all the way down the tarmac, until at the very end, just before she stepped on the plane, I swear I saw her glance back.

  3 | I GOT DRUNK

  I got drunk that night, and again the next night and pretty much every night for the next six weeks. I have always tried to drink moderately, but as you may have noticed by this point in my confession, I have a somewhat compulsive personality. So for me drinking moderately is akin to fucking moderately, or jumping moderately from a cliff. Either you do or you don’t. And after watching Dana get on that plane, I did. I got drunk on the plane back to Seattle, got drunk at the airport bar after I landed, and then—when Dana wouldn’t answer my e-mails—set about humiliating myself in a different bar each night for a month and change. I have fond memories, and fonder blackouts, from this time (one Saturday afternoon I staggered from a Pioneer Square bar and led a tour of the Seattle Underground to the water, where, thankfully, I was stopped before I could perform any baptisms). I will not indulge these lost evenings, these nights in which I was potted, canned, screwed, smashed, soaked, bottled, and blitzed; instead I’ll skip to the last night of this long hot binge, when I was summarily thrown out of the Triangle Pub for standing on a stool and asking for help measuring the bar’s hypotenuse.

  After I was led outside I promptly fell over on the sidewalk, looked up into the drizzle, and saw a girl’s thin face staring down at me. She was young and lithe in her Deadhead sundress, her braided red hair and worn backpack. I immediately recognized her as one of the girls I’d slept with during my bohemian days.

  “Tamira,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “Kayla.”

  “Oh. Kayla. You look like a Tamira.”

  “Yeah. I just came out to tell you, it doesn’t have a hypotenuse.”

  “What?”

  “The bar. It’s an isosceles triangle. Doesn’t have any right angles. So you can’t measure the hypotenuse.” She peered into my eyes. “What’s wrong with you?”

  I asked her to marry me. We went instead to a late-night breakfast joint where I told her the whole sordid story while she ate ginger french toast and tofu sausage with one of her turquoise-ringed hands and smoked Lucky Strikes with the other.

  “So you’re saying you spent the last three years trying to be like the guy that this Dana woman married?” she asked.

  I thought about it. “Yes,” I said. “I guess I did.”

  Kayla took a drag of a Lucky Strike. “Well, there’s your mistake. The last thing some married chick wants is a guy like her husband. You should go back to yourself.”

  In a flash of understanding I saw that Kayla was right. Go back to myself. The problem was this: which self?

  Two days later I was back in Spokane, at a cemetery downriver from the city. I crouched down in front of a small stone, set flush into the ground. I ran my finger over the letters, BENJAMIN T. MASON, and those cruel dates, NOVEMBER 12, 1966–NOVEMBER 19, 1985. I know there are people who go to such places to talk to the person who has died, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. (I also refuse to say that a person has “passed,” as if he has simply processed a rich meal.)

  Mom had left plastic flowers on Ben’s grave, and a wooden hummingbird whose wings windmilled frantically in the wind. I straightened the flowers, wiped the grass clippings from the headstone, and wished that Ben could tell me what to do now. I remembered his saying that I really only lived in the perceptions of others, and suddenly it seemed painfully true. I couldn’t think of a time when I’d acted on my own, when I wasn’t driven by my grief for Ben or my love for Dana or my desire to show up Michael Langford—or, for that matter, the tyranny of Pete Decker or the suggestive looks of girls in high school. I wondered if I even had a self.

  “I miss you,” I said aloud. Surprised at myself, I looked around to see if anyone had heard, but no one was near.

  I left the cemetery and drove into Spokane, to the northeast end of downtown, to a brick storefront that had been an antique and junk shop until six months ago, when it became the offices of Empire Interactive.

  This was at the beginning of Eli’s compulsion about security, and he’d recently installed an elaborate key card system on the door. In addition, the windows were tinted so no one could see in. I pounded on a window, unsure if anyone inside could see me.

  Finally the door opened and out came Louis Carver, beaming. “Clark! What are you doing here?”

  “I came to check on my investment.”

  Louis patted me on the small of my back. “Come in.”

  I followed him through the door into a narrow anteroom, where a security camera monitored our progress, then through another key-carded door into what looked like a cafeteria: tile floor, long tables where a half-dozen people sat working intently on computer terminals. At the far end of this room were three small offices, one for Bryan the tech guy, one for Louis, and one for Eli.

  He came out of his office wearing wrinkled slacks and a striped shirt with a salsa stain near the collar, his glasses slightly askew. “Clark!” he said, and then his piggy little eyes shifted around the room, as if embarrassed by the excitement in his voice.

  “Hey, Eli.” I reached out and he took my hand reluctantly, gave it a soft, fleshy shake, and then turned back toward his office.

  Louis gave me a lingering stare and then went back to work.

  I followed Eli into his office, a simple, white-walled room, with a long computer table and the old Empire binders stacked on bookshelves along the walls. He looked out the window at the people in the office. “I don’t trust them,” he said. “I don’t like the way they look at me. They’re ingratiating. They smell money. They pretend to hang on every word I say. They pretend to like me.”

  “Maybe they do like you,” I said.

  He turned to me, one eyebrow raised, as if I’d just suggested that he become a male model or an exotic dancer. Then he turned back to stare into what they called the Game Room. “I just don’t know why we had to hire so many,” he said.

  “We’ve got to get this thing off the ground, Eli,” I said. “If we don’t start earning money pretty soon, the investors are going to get antsy.”

  “I don’t care,” Eli said. “I’ll pay them out of my own pocket.”

  I had to beg him to show me what they were working on, including an e-mail component that would allow characters (Eli still wouldn’t call them players) to contact each other away from the instant messaging of the game—to allow more backstabbing and double-dealing. “That’s the key,” Eli said: “treachery.” I hadn’t been by the office in more than three months, so he showed me the newest graphics, which were—as our team of young testers assured him—“killer.” He was especially excited about a prison for miscreant and broken characters—a rocky island covered with catacombs, tunnels, and torture chambers, straight out of The Count of Monte Cristo.

  But he was leery of showing me much else, including the game engine that he and Bryan were constantly tinkering with, the “brains,” the basic system that ran the shadow world, took the information and the actions of the characters and translated them into the movements of people on the computer screen.

  “It’s not that I don’t trust you, Clark,” he said, “but you come in contact with a lot of other companies. I’d hate for something to end up in the wrong hands.”

  It was late in the afternoon. Eli had recently moved into the house on Cliff Drive (that place of horrors, now) and he invited me over. I said we could take my rental car—I knew Eli hated to drive—but he smiled wryly and pulled a single, plastic-coated, black key from
his pocket. I followed him out back, and there it was: a new, dark gray Mercedes-Benz convertible, and the only extravagant thing I ever knew Eli to buy.

  I followed him up the South Hill to his house, but after we parked he led me away from the main house to the small carriage house in back, where he was living. There was very little furniture in the carriage house, and his clothes were still in his suitcase. Apparently he only ate pizza; the boxes were stacked against one wall. “You want a beer?” he asked.

  I explained that I’d been drinking too much lately, and that I’d recently had a kind of pre-midlife crisis. Yet after what had happened at the prom, I didn’t figure he’d sympathize with my attempts to steal Dana from another guy, so I spoke generally about my desire to find some part of myself that I’d forgotten. “I just can’t help feeling,” I said, thinking of Dana, “that there are things from my past I need to confront.”

  Eli stared at me for a long moment. “Come here,” he said finally. “I want to show you something.” I followed him into the kitchen. He opened a drawer. Inside was a bulging folder with the word DONTES written across the top. Eli reached in the Dontes folder and pulled out a thin file, then slid it across the counter to me.

  A name was typed on the file: Pete Decker.

  “Open it,” Eli said.

  There were three black-and-white glossy surveillance photos, taken through a car window, each showing a thin and tired-looking Pete Decker coming out of a downtown apartment building in jeans and a T-shirt and a dishwasher’s apron. The last picture showed him climbing in a beat-up Chevy Nova. He’d aged considerably, and not very gracefully, in the twenty years since I’d seen him.

  Eli stood over my shoulder as I looked at the picture. “I hired an investigator to find him. He’s been in and out of jail.” Eli grinned. “He just got busted again a few days ago for cocaine. Isn’t that great?”

  “You hired an investigator to find Pete Decker?” I asked.

  He must’ve registered the discomfort in my voice because he took a step back. “Yeah, like we were talking about. Unfinished business. I mean, you of all people must’ve wondered what happened to Pete Decker.”

  I was curious, but honestly I felt nothing as I looked at the pictures of this skinny, smoked-out guy, hands in his jeans pockets, a cigarette butt dangling from his mouth.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I don’t mean there are scores to settle. It’s more about myself, like I got sidetracked, like I’ve forgotten who I was supposed to be.” Again, I thought of Dana. And Ben. “Like I’ve let people down.”

  Eli smiled and took the pictures back. When he put them in the drawer I saw something black and metallic and it was only later that I realized that it was a handgun. And if I make this discovery sound casual on my part, a fleeting image, know that later, when hatred and revenge filled my chest, I had no trouble remembering exactly where that gun was located.

  “Come on,” Eli said. “I want to show you one more thing.”

  I followed him out the door and down the stairs. We crossed the dry lawn to the main house, dark and empty. He juggled some keys until he found the right one. He turned on a light and half the bulbs lit up in a huge chandelier in the foyer. I followed him into the big open living room, pillars on either side of the door and a curved staircase climbing to the second floor. The windows were topped with stained glass and the wood floors were polished and immaculate.

  “Beautiful,” I said.

  “It’s too big. And there are so many windows. It feels so…exposed. I don’t feel like I fit here, like my life hasn’t caught up with this house. So I haven’t put any furniture here. I haven’t hung anything on the walls.” He gestured to the fireplace. “Except that.”

  It took me a moment to recognize the framed photograph that hung above the mantel. There were four people in the picture and they were so young, their faces lineless and blameless and unafraid. The two girls in front were pretty, especially the petite dark-haired one, who smiled shyly, as if she knew something the others didn’t. The other girl clearly didn’t want to be in the picture and she contributed little beyond a bland attractiveness—blond hair, blue dress, baby’s breath corsage. But it was the two boys in the flaring tuxes who caught my attention: the taller one with the feral hair and uneven eyes, his arm thrown around the shoulder of the short awkward boy, who beamed like this was the high point of his life.

  I felt Eli over my shoulder. “You were fearless,” Eli said. “You did whatever you wanted. Played sports and dated cheerleaders and ran for everything. I thought you could do anything you wanted.”

  I turned back to Eli Boyle and it occurred to me that, outside my family, he’d known me longer than anyone in the world.

  “I remember who you were going to be,” Eli said.

  I looked at the prom picture again.

  That’s when he pulled a pen and a checkbook from his back pocket, leaned against the wall, and wrote out a check. He turned and handed it to me. It was a check for ten thousand dollars. It was made out to “The Committee to Elect Clark Mason.”

  “I can help you,” he said.

  And even though it was preposterous, seeing my name like that—The Committee to Elect…—it sparked something in me, something primal and powerful. I tried to laugh it off but I could not take my eyes off the check. “Elect me to what?”

  “Whatever you want,” he said. “Something big.”

  And that was it—the genesis of my half-witted plan to become Representative Clark Mason (later, Eli and I agreed that a candidate with two last names might be a meal too rich for Spokane voters and I went with my middle name, Tony), my plan to pick up my ambitions at the place where I’d left them fifteen years before. Eventually Eli and I settled on the U.S. House of Representatives as my best big shot. The current lifer in that seat, a prosaic Republican named George N——, was vulnerable for the first time because he’d defeated the previous lifer, Tom F——, an equally prosaic Democrat, solely on the issue of term limits—specifically, limiting candidates to three terms. Now, of course, faced with his own fourth term, George N——had changed his mind and decided term limits weren’t such a good idea after all.

  We talked about it all that first night and the next night and every day for the next two weeks. We were taken with the millennial excitement of the 2000 campaign, the opportunity to present a new kind of candidate—progressive both socially and technologically—and over the next few months Tony Mason was born.

  My God, I was invigorated. It was as if clogged blood vessels had been cleared to my head and my heart. But if I was happy, Eli was positively exuberant, and he attended the details of my impending campaign as if we were both running.

  “Butch and Sundance,” he said one day, out of the blue. “Together again!” I mostly laughed this kind of stuff off, but it was a recurring theme for Eli in those early days of the campaign, this idea that the election was about him and me. “It’s good to have someone who will always be loyal to you,” he said one day.

  “You bet,” I said.

  “You know, Clark,” he said another time, as we priced office space for my campaign headquarters, “in my whole life, I never made another friend like you.”

  I thought about our fight at the bus stop, the way I avoided him at school and made out with his date at the prom, the way I used him and Empire to try to get Dana back into my life, how I went weeks, months, even years without talking to him. And he thought of me as his best friend. But again, I was too self-absorbed to really register Eli’s loneliness, or to imagine what he got out of helping me run for office. All I could think about was the campaign; all I could think about was the candidate.

  Even though the general election was still two years away, my contacts in the Democratic Party were clearly intrigued by me. Conservative Spokane was a tough sell and anyone who had a plan—and, especially, his own money—was welcome to run. After getting the party’s blessing, the very first person I called was my old professor, Richard Stanton.

&n
bsp; “Maybe you ought to just go straight for president,” he said.

  I explained my theory, why I thought George N——might be vulnerable this time, how I was going to bring economic development to my old hometown, how I would run as the first true candidate of the twenty-first century.

  He said he hadn’t heard me this excited since I was imagining my stupid nonprofit legal service ideas. “Good to have you back, Mason,” he said.

  That’s when I asked him to be my campaign manager.

  Dr. Stanton burst into laughter. “No way in hell.”

  I figured I could change his mind later. In the short term I began fund-raising, calling some of my old business contacts. Finally, after a week or so, I called Michael and Dana Langford at home. It had been two months since I’d slept with Dana.

  “Mason,” Michael said. “Tell me: how is it that you’re not in prison?”

  I heard someone else come into the room with Michael. “Hey, baby,” he said. “It’s our old friend, Clark Mason.”

  I patiently and evenly explained what I was doing, and said that if he and his wife would support my candidacy in any way, I would be eternally grateful.

  He put his hand over the phone and I could hear him telling Dana. After the word “Congress,” he burst into laughter. Then Dana came on the phone.

  “Are you really?” she asked. I was thrilled at the things I heard in her voice—pride and envy, hesitation and urgency.

  “Yes,” I said. “I am.”

  “That’s great,” she said. “Of course we’ll make a donation.”

  “Hey, tell him our news,” Michael said in the background.

  “I was going to,” she said, another strain in her voice. “Clark, do you remember in Spokane, when you and I were talking about timing?”

  “Of course I remember,” I said quietly. “You said mine was bad.”

  She cleared her throat. “Well, I didn’t know for sure then, but now I do,” she said. “I’m pregnant. Michael and I are going to have a baby.”