Land of the Blind (18 page)

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 unimpressed. “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.

“Is that—” Ben began.

“I think it is,” I said. I stood there with my little brother, staring at that tiny sheet of paper. On the paper was written a phone number, the one-word name of the club—“Empire”—and a contact person.

Eli Boyle.

T
he Empire Club met in a dark, smoky lounge called Fletts, on a street of old businesses just across the river from downtown. At night, the lounge burned easily through its fuel, a steadily dying clientele of heavy drinkers and smokers. During the day Fletts served up BLT’s and patty melts at its small lunch counter, and the smoke was allowed to slowly dissipate in the lounge, which sat dark and empty—except on Saturday afternoons, when the lounge housed Eli Boyle’s Empire club.

I sat on a stool in the restaurant, from which I could see down the length of the counter to the lounge. The meeting was scheduled for 2:00
P.M
.; it was 1:30. I ordered a cup of coffee and a bowl of tomato soup and sat with a baseball cap pulled down on my head and my windbreaker pulled up high at the collar. Looking to my right, I could see down the lunch counter and across the hall, where Eli was scurrying around the lounge, pacing up and down a long table, stacking sheaths of paper in a dozen piles. He looked pretty much the same, although a potbelly strained his button-down shirt and his hair had thinned. But what surprised me most was the look of intensity on his face.

“I still can’t believe that guy kicked your ass,” Ben said. He had begged to come, and now I could see what a mistake it was to have let him.

“It was a draw,” I said.

“Are you going to talk to him?”

“I don’t know.”

The other members of Empire began dragging in. “Hello, honey,” said the old waitress, or “Hiya, sweetie.” The first was a gawkishly tall young man with dark hair and a storklike nose, followed by a frail young boy leaning sideways in a wheelchair, pushed by an older woman I assumed was his mother. Two girls came in together, their steps synchronized, a good four hundred pounds between them, and then a pale young man. They all carried thick black binders with the word
EMPIRE
stenciled on the front, and they
were eager, as if they had a great story to tell and couldn’t wait to get inside to tell it.

Five minutes before the meeting was to start, I felt a poke in my side.

“Clark friggin’ Mason.”

I turned and looked up, half expecting to see Eli, even though the voice was higher pitched, and coming from a man less than four feet tall.

“Louis!”

“Do I look different?” he asked me.

He looked about the same, a blunt curl of hair over wide fun-house features.

“I grew two inches since high school,” he said proudly. As soon as he said it, I could see that he was bigger, and that by dwarf standards he must be quite tall.

“You look great,” I said.

“You too.”

“Are you in this…thing, Louis?”

“Empire?” He smiled and waved a binder like the other members carried. “Yeah. It’s really great. Eli has a real gift. Are you here for—”

“No,” I said, “we just happened to stop in—”

“What are the odds?” Ben said next to me.

“—for some soup,” I continued.

“We love us some soup!” Ben said.

I elbowed Ben and turned back to Louis. “So what is this thing?”

“Empire?” Louis looked unsure, as if it wasn’t his place to say. “It’s hard to explain.”

“But it’s a club?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “more like a game, one of those interactive, character-driven things.” He quickly corrected himself. “Eli doesn’t want us to call it a game.”

“What does he call it?”

“He used to say it was an ‘alternative world.’ Now he just calls it Empire. He says defining it is the first step to killing it.”

“So it’s like a role-playing thing?” Ben asked. “Like Dungeons and Dragons?”

Louis chewed on his bottom lip. “I really think you should talk to Eli about it.”

“I’ll bet it’s more like Risk,” I said. “Or Axis and Allies.” I remembered the way Eli always drew tanks, and the charge he’d gotten from tug-of-war and battle ball. “One of those games where you have wars and conquer each other and take over land?”

“Yeah, there’s some of that. But you know, you should really ask Eli.”

I looked into the lounge. “I don’t know if he’d want to see me,” I said.

“Yeah,” Louis agreed. “He doesn’t let go of things easily.”

I was surprised that Louis knew about the rift between Eli and me. “Maybe I’ll stop by next time I’m in town.”

I could see Louis was relieved. “Sure,” he said. “Next time.”

The waitress saw Louis then and brought him a Coke. “Hey, big guy,” she said.

“Hey, toots,” he said, and turned away from me. “What time you get off?”

“Couple minutes after you touch me,” the waitress said.

This tickled Louis. “On my worst day,” he said. While he flirted I tried to get a look at the folder he was carrying, but he held it close to his side. There were about ten other people in the lounge now, and I could see Louis was eager to join them.

“Could you do me a favor and not say anything to Eli?”

“Sure,” he said. “It was really great to see you, Clark.”

Once Louis was inside, the waitress carried a tray of glasses and two pitchers of soda into the room. Eli held up a pocket watch, made some announcement, and the lounge erupted in noise and activity, like a small stock exchange. Ben and I craned our necks to watch. The group was spread out at the tables, shuffling paper, stacking things, and exchanging what looked like Monopoly money back and forth, making trades, shuffling fake money and papers from their folders back and forth across the tables. People were relaxed and smiling, but they were also working hard. At the front of the room Eli was not smiling. He paced and collected paper from people, handed paper around, talked and gestured with his hands. Every few minutes, he’d turn around and move pins on a big map behind him.

“This gives me the creeps,” Ben whispered.

Eli worked with such energy it was hard to take your eyes off him. At one point he wiped sweat from his brow. A few minutes later he castigated one of the girls about something, and she looked down at her shoes in shame.

We watched for ten or fifteen minutes more and then we paid for our soups—Ben hadn’t touched his—and walked out, taking the opportunity to look closely into the lounge. At the door, we could hear people yelling: “Two over here!” “Calling out!”

We started walking back toward Ben’s apartment. “That was weird,” Ben said. “Watching someone who didn’t know we were watching him.”

I knew what he meant. There was something odd about Eli, the way he could detach from himself physically. “He’s always been like that,” I said. “I think there’s always been this gap between the way he sees himself and the way we see him.”

“So which one is real?” Ben asked.

“What do you mean?”

For the first time that day, Ben was engaged. “I just wonder, which is a truer view of reality, the way we see ourselves or the way others see us. Is Eli king of that room, king of the fat girls and albinos? Or is he what we see—the same old awkward guy from our neighborhood, whose only claim to fame is that he once kicked your ass?”

“Eli is what he is.”

“But I’m not just talking about Eli.” Ben stopped walking and leaned against the chain-link fence of a park. Behind him, kids were shooting baskets on hoops with no nets. “I’m talking about all of us—about me,” Ben said. “I imagine I’m living an ascetic’s life, stripping myself of everything but my curiosity. But you show up out of the blue and all you see is a guy wasting his life drinking wine and watching TV.”

Ben rubbed his hollow cheek and seemed to be chasing something around in his mind. “Or you, with your frat-boy friends and your law school haircut imagining you’re more evolved than the rest of us.”

I didn’t deny it. “So what do you see?” I asked.

Ben’s eyes hitched once on the way from my face to the ground. “That’s not the point I’m trying to make.”

“Sure it is,” I said. “What do you see when you look at me?”

“It’s not important,” he said.

“Come on,” I said. “What do you see, Mr. Ascetic? Mr. Chianti. Mr. Curiosity.”

“Well,” he said. “Okay. I see someone so focused on the way he’s perceived that he forgets who he is. And where he’s from.”

I grabbed him by the sweatshirts and pushed him against the fence. “I’m only going to tell you this once,” I said. “Eli Boyle did not kick my ass.”

I smiled, and then he did, and I let him go. But for a few minutes afterward I still felt his louvered ribs in my hands, and the echo of what he’d said in my head. We walked slowly back to his apartment, the wind swirling garbage before us, our progress marked by the sagging clapboards of our hometown. I looked around Ben’s neighborhood. Every other car window seemed to be covered with plastic or cardboard or duct tape. “Is there no glass in this town?” I asked. We passed a couple of children playing in a patch of dirt that passed for lawn. One of the kids sat in a bathtub, weeds coming through the drain, while the other kid made thundering swats against the bathtub with a stick.

Ben sighed. “You make the classic elitist mistake.”

“What’s that?”

“Believing that people choose to be poor.”

I looked around at the neighborhood, which was not much different from the one Ben and I had grown up in. For the first time it occurred to me that no matter how many times I sat at an outdoor café on Capitol Hill, how many beers I had in Pioneer Square, Seattle might never be my home. If that is true—and I have come to believe that it is—then I suppose it’s also true that no matter how many interesting and progressive and attractive people I met in my life, I was always alone in some fundamental way when I wasn’t in the company of my little brother.

“You’d better get back,” said Ben when we reached his apartment.

“Yeah,” I said, distracted. “I got this thing tomorrow.”

“Sure,” he said.

“We okay?”

“Sure.”

“And you’ll at least think about school?” I asked.

“Every day,” he said.

We hugged awkwardly and I started for my car. I thought of something I wanted to say—that he was wrong, that I could tell the difference between what other people thought about me and what I knew about myself—but when I turned around Ben had disappeared, gone back into his cave.