Land of the Blind

by Jess Walter

  4 | RUNNING FOR OFFICE

  Running for office is nothing like you assume it’s going to be, nothing like the discussions of public policy and government ethics that we engaged in during college poli-sci classes. I could write for days about the disappointment of politics.

  And yet we have precious little time left, Caroline. We both know that. No time to waste wading through the billion trivial details that make up a modern political campaign: endless debate over what colors to use on buttons and posters (“Since George N——is using red and blue, I think we should go blue and red”), what I should wear (“No cowboy boots? You’re running for Congress from eastern Washington and you don’t own cowboy boots?”), and the tone of commercials (it took four people two weeks to choose “Isn’t it time for a change?” over “Aren’t you ready for a change?”).

  The thing that surprised me most was how little I actually had to do. We were perhaps a little too successful in raising funds early on, because before long we had an eighty-dollar-an-hour expert for every aspect of the campaign, and nothing was really required of me other than wearing the right tie with the right suit and remembering to stare straight into the camera. (“That eye,” said the director of my commercials the first time he met me, as if I weren’t even there. “What am I supposed to do with that goddamned eye?”) There turned out to be very little market for the speeches I’d daydreamed of giving, and the handful of addresses I did deliver were written by pros. (“Small words! Big ideas!”) I certainly wasn’t expected to formulate policy or fine-tune my stances on issues; they had poll numbers to tell me which of my beliefs were popular enough to mention, and if I couldn’t duck a certain issue, there were copywriters to rewrite my more liberal opinions. (“Each student has the right to pray in school. What I’m saying is let’s protect the students’ right to not pray.”)

  After a few months of this, you end up feeling more like a product than a candidate, like a toilet cleaner or an especially moist cake, and when the TV lights flicker and the makeup begins to heat up, you can actually feel the talking points and last-minute instructions start to bake in your mind (Stare straight ahead; say farm equity, not farm subsidy). Early on, I was fine with this state of affairs. After Dana dropped her bomb it dawned on me fully that I would never be with her and I was happy to just stand there and wave, cut ribbons, pat schoolchildren on the head, and not think about the woman I loved having the baby of my sworn enemy.

  In fact, I felt a real kinship with Empire. By early 2000, we were both fully funded and fully imagined, yet we were, at best, half realized—sketchy products with limited prospects and very little application in the real world.

  I recall only one moment of transcendence during the eighteen months I ran for Congress—one day when my candidacy was about something more than my candidacy. It was early on, a gathering of the four Democratic hopefuls in front of twenty or thirty people at the Spokane Public Library. Eventually we ended up talking about the causes and possible solutions for Spokane’s double-digit poverty rate and its fifty-year economic slump. (I wonder: after fifty years, isn’t a pothole simply part of the topography?) In the end, this is the only issue in Spokane. Everything else—high crime, the meth epidemic, declining downtown, bad roads and services—spirals out from the one thing about Spokane that no politician in the last fifty years has ever come close to solving: it is poor.

  The other candidates each seemed to have a pet cause for this state of affairs, and so we spent some time talking about the long decline in mining and other natural-resource-based industries, the geographic isolation, the inability to transition to other kinds of business, the city’s insidious, uncaring power base, and what one candidate called “an unending cycle of regenerative failure.”

  As I listened I had the sense that we were staring at a vast, flooded valley, trying to decide which molecule of water was to blame.

  “Those aspects of the problem are valid, of course, and we should do everything we can to address them,” I said. “But let’s be honest. That’s not what the voters really want.” I allowed that to hang in the air for just a moment and then I leaned back into the microphone. “What they want is for this to be a place that their kids don’t have to leave. What they want is to stop gathering at the back fence to tell the neighbors how well the kids are doing in Seattle or Portland or San Francisco. I’ll tell you what these people want from government—they want us to bring their children home.”

  I looked backstage and saw Eli, his fists balled up in front of his face, nodding enthusiastically, as if he’d been waiting for me to say that very thing.

  If a campaign can be defined by one moment, then in that one I rose slightly above a mediocre slate of Democrats and stopped being simply a political upstart, the “New Economy Guy,” the youngest of the four Democrats trying to unseat George N——. In that moment I became the prodigal candidate, the pied piper, and the hard subtext of my candidacy was cast—Vote for Mason. He’ll bring your kids home.

  In the winter before the election, Dr. Stanton took a leave of absence from the university to come aboard—“If you’re really serious about wasting your money, I want to help”—as my campaign manager. He urged me to loosen up and be myself (“Tony Mason? Who the fuck is Tony Mason? Sounds like a gay rib joint”). The campaign was hitting on all cylinders, and yet I could sense in Eli some distrust of Dr. Stanton and the other political operatives surrounding me.

  Our strategy was simple: spend money. It’s almost unheard of for a first-time candidate to outspend a sitting congressman, but I sure as hell gave it a run. Ours became far and away the most expensive campaign in eastern Washington history. I spent the little bit I’d raised before the campaign even got going, and the paper-route allowance the party gave me barely paid for billboards and antenna balls, so it wasn’t long before I was breaking out my own checkbook to cover expenses. By the end I spent about two million dollars of my money and about $300,000 of Eli’s, plus quite a bit directly from—I found out later—the coffers of Empire Interactive. I probably would’ve spent even more—honestly, I’d have spent every cent he and I had—but at the same time the campaign was draining one end of my bank account, the long-dreaded flameout of the speculative technology market was draining the other end.

  I suppose I should mention one other event that occurred during this period and that was connected in its own way to the campaign: I got married. Again, I don’t want to derail this confession with my personal mistakes, and I certainly don’t wish to enflame my ex-wife’s very capable legal team by going into details—which would be in violation of at least one court-issued gag order anyway—and to be painfully honest about it, the entire thing exists in my memory like just another detail of the campaign, managed and measured, without much involvement on my part. So I will simply say this: I had known the woman before, and had even had a short romantic history with her. I can’t say how much of my decision to marry her was based on politics, but I will say that as a young candidate in a conservative district, having a wife lent me a certain gravitas that I had lacked as a single man. In fact, everyone saw her as an asset to the campaign—“You can’t go wrong with big-titted arm candy,” Dr. Stanton said—although the thing I found most attractive about her this second time through was that she did absolutely nothing to remind me of Dana and the heartbreaking feelings that I still carried for her.

  Unfortunately, though, this woman was accustomed to a certain lifestyle, and that presented a challenge to my financial solvency and led me to a few lifestyle changes (full membership at one of Spokane’s two country clubs, for expensive example).

  It was around this time that Eli started pulling back, too. What had once been a campaign focused around the two of us was now a huge machine with me at the center and several layers of publicity and press and strategy people between Eli and me, not to mention my new wife, a self-centered snob who’d gone to high school with Eli and who still had no use for him. Eli sightings became scarce around the campaign, a
nd to my deep shame, I did nothing to bring him back into the fold.

  And so it was that by the summer of 2000, with the election only months away, I found myself in the troubling position of having done exactly the opposite of what I’d set out to do, what the young visionary Kayla advised me that morning while she ate breakfast: Go back to yourself.

  Instead I chased the weakened version of an expired daydream, formless and without meaning. I became a politician. For someone allegedly seeking self-awareness and redemption, it would have made more sense to have my soul surgically removed and replaced with chipped beef.

  I knew I was betraying myself in some fundamental way, but my addiction was in full bloom; I couldn’t stop. I became more depressed and scattered as the campaign wore on. I butchered a swing through the small farm towns of the Palouse, south of Spokane. (At the Colfax library I was supposed to deliver the line “It’s time to get government off the backs of the small farmer,” but what came out of my mouth was somewhat off-message: “It’s time to get farmers off their fat asses.”)

  “What’s the matter with you?” Dr. Stanton asked me. “You actually have a shot here.” After that, he bowed out of rural campaign swings with me; he worried that he was making me nervous. But I screwed up when he wasn’t with me, too, and at one stop I called George N——“a chinless dickball, an ethics-challenged, steaming bowl of fuck.”

  Dr. Stanton was irate. He said that if the media had happened to be at that event the campaign would be over. He asked if my verbal slips were caused by problems at home. “A campaign is tough on a young couple, especially if you’ve just gotten married. Why don’t I talk to her? You want me to talk to her?”

  “No,” I said. “That’s nice of you, but it’s not her.” And still, Dr. Stanton was a good enough friend to realize that my marriage was part of the problem, although I don’t think he understood the larger problem. Just as Ben had foreseen, my weakness had finally played itself out; I had turned myself over completely to the perceptions of others, the voters, members of various country clubs and organizations, my campaign staff, the media covering the race, the state party, everyone but myself. And these verbal mistakes, these Tourettic slips of tongue, were my real self trying to get out.

  But the more successful Tony Mason the candidate became, the further Clark Mason receded into the background, until one day in September, seven weeks before the election. I was sitting on the couch in our house, staring at furniture that my wife had chosen for us from catalogs and stores in Seattle. I looked down and saw that I was wearing clothes that a campaign consultant had chosen, sitting on a couch I’d never seen until it showed up in a living room that someone else had decorated.

  “Tony?” my wife said from the kitchen. “Can we go somewhere warm for vacation after the election?”

  “Sure,” said Tony. “We can go wherever you want.” And just like that, Clark Mason was officially dead.

  As I said, this is ultimately a story about a fall, and that is what happened in that autumn of 2000. So as not to clutter this up further with my emotional state, I’ll draw on the cold organizational skills of my legal background to tell you what happened. And so I hereby duly report the following: that within a six-day period in October 2000, these events did occur in the City of Spokane, County of Spokane, Washington State:

  I. I met with my accountant and was apprised of the following:

  A. Despite his repeated and unheeded warnings—something about all my eggs and one (1) basket—my entire portfolio consisted of emerging technology stocks.

  B. The bubble had officially burst and technology stocks were down some 200 percent. My particular stocks were down even more. A full third of the companies that I owned no longer even existed.

  C. I could try to redirect my investments, but I had spent too freely on the campaign, my house, my wedding, and countless other things.

  D. I was broke.

  II. I met with the state Democratic Party chairman, who informed me:

  A. The party was impressed with my showing, but projections showed that I couldn’t win.

  B. They were worried about rumors that my campaign was partly funded by unwitting investors of a shadow company called Empire.

  C. The party wasn’t inclined to spend any more money on the campaign.

  D. I was fucked.

  III. Upset about these developments, I came home unexpectedly after canceling a campaign appearance and found:

  A. My wife lying naked on the bed, reading a book.

  B. Another man’s pants lying next to the bed.

  C. Said man in my shower. (In hindsight, I wish I’d bothered to find out whose pants were on my floor and, more important, what sort of range stud could drive my pinhead wife to such heights of ecstasy that she actually wanted to read a book. But I needed to get out of there, so I walked out of the house and didn’t stop until I was downtown, standing in front of the Davenport Hotel, of all places.)

  D. I was alone.

  Unraveling can make one of two sounds: the long sigh of a balloon losing its air, or the dull flapping of a tire blowing out on the highway. An unraveling candidate makes both these noises, and nothing can be harder than to put back together a candidate who has come apart. I kept campaigning after the collapse—I couldn’t think of what else to do—but it was over. My paid staff left when they were no longer actually paid, all except the loyal Dr. Stanton. I’m still touched by the way he kept apologizing for everything that happened, as if he could’ve done something to stop the deflation.

  Like any wounded animal, when the last blow came, I found it a relief. It happened at the end of October. I was at the hotel where I’d recently moved, watching late-night TV, when I saw the ad: a picture of me from several years earlier, when I still had long hair and the eye patch. I didn’t remember choosing that particular picture for an ad, and I was surprised that my formerly high-paid staff would allow it. Then the voice-over: “Until a year ago, Clark Mason”—I sat up at the mention of my real name—“was a rich Seattle attorney. Do we really want a liberal, rich west-side lawyer representing eastern Washington in Congress? Do we trust Seattle to take care of Spokane?”

  My first thought was fairly detached: Now that is an effective piece of advertising. There were three such ads, all with the same theme and the same deep, movie-preview voice-over. They seemed to run every six or seven minutes on various channels. If there had been any hope for a last-minute reversal, that series of ads certainly took care of it.

  A few days later, I read in the newspaper that the ads had been paid for by a political action committee called the Fair Election Fund, and that the officers of this fund were my friends Louis Carver and Eli Boyle. Louis called me immediately and said that he’d known nothing about it until he read it in the paper that morning; Eli’s paranoia and delusions, he said, were getting out of control. I told Louis that it was okay, and that he should forgive Eli, that Eli needed him.

  Later that day I talked to the press, halfheartedly defending myself against the charges that I was a carpetbagger. “One thing I can tell you, I’m certainly not a rich Seattle lawyer anymore,” I said. I liked that joke—it was the first thing I’d written for the campaign in a while—but I think it came off sounding self-pitying and arch.

  When the press conference ended, I watched the TV cameramen pack up their equipment; it was a bittersweet feeling, knowing I would never feel their hot lights on my face again, that their attention would move elsewhere, that I had run my last campaign.

  It was two days before the election. I bought a fifth of whiskey, drank half of it in my car, and brought the rest to my campaign headquarters, which was in the process of being dismantled. (We were three months behind in rent.)

  There was only one person in my office, a young volunteer named Lara. She cried as she watched movers pack up desks and computers, boxes of pins and bumper stickers.

  “Mr. Mason,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Thank you, Kayla,” I said, and
patted her on the head.

  “Who is Kayla?” she asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “You called me Kayla.”

  “I did?” I thought about that clear-eyed girl, Kayla—who had magically appeared on the sidewalk outside the Triangle Pub, with that most basic of geometry solutions and the kind of advice Ben might have given: Go back to yourself.

  I walked right past Lara, went outside, and looked up into the sky. I got in my car and drove east, across the river, to my parents’ house on Empire Road. I parked in front and walked to the front window. My father was still awake. I could see him watching TV. Mom slept next to him on the couch. Dad saw me, got up, and opened the door. We stood on the porch looking at each other from opposite sides of the screen door. He had aged so much; I’d seen him a dozen times over the last decade, but I realized that I hadn’t seen him in so long, hadn’t seen anything. His calm blue eyes seemed to float in almond-shell lids; the creases around his mouth were dusted with gray whiskers.

  “I lost,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. Then he held the screen open for me.

  And finally, I went inside.

  5 | AFTER THE ELECTION

  After the election, I stayed in my parents’ house for a few months, resting and getting my affairs in order, an exercise that mainly consisted of filling out stacks of paperwork chronicling various failures: divorce, bankruptcy, the sale of my house and other property, defensive filings with the Federal Election Commission and the IRS. But I also found time to talk to my parents about Ben, to explain my guilt and apologize for not being around all those years after he died.

  My father mostly listened. My mother fed me. And the banks, creditors, and lawyers bled me, asset by asset, cent by cent, until there was nothing.