Land of the Blind (19 page)

M
y brother died suddenly, or so it seemed to me, embedded as I was in the ephemera of fraternity politics, classwork, and stretch-panted sorority girls that constituted the fall quarter of my junior year. My brother died on November 19, 1985, one month after I saw him, in the hour it took me to finish an exam in Principles of Government—an hour that he spent slipping in and out of consciousness, lifting his head, swearing at a nurse, pulling his IV tubes out, asking for our father, breathing fitfully for a few minutes, and finally going still. My brother died in spite of the fervor of a team of nurses and doctors who arrived with a crash cart and tried shocking and drugging and beating him back to life. My brother died two hours after his first treatment of experimental chemotherapy drugs and high-dose radiation—a
double double,
one of the techs called it—sparking in my family a perpetual distrust of the medical community, as if the doctors had hastened his death. (Years later, my father still referred to doctors by his clever pet name for them: “heartless sons of bitches.”) My brother died twenty-four days after being diagnosed with Stage IV extradonal Hodgkin’s lymphoma—the fastest “outcome” his doctor had ever witnessed for that particular late-stage illness, or so he would tell us later. My brother died a week after turning nineteen.

You might wonder, Caroline, why I’ve waited until this late point in the narrative to mention something as important as my brother’s cancer, why I would attempt to understate it this way, to slip it into the text like any other detail in here, as if an element like that has the same atomic weight as a first kiss, a driver’s license, the joys of college. My only defense is chronology, which we cling to the way we cling to faith, in the vain belief that if we obey the order of things, the universe might not go to shit, time might not pile up around us and we might not become buried by random events, ruined by confusion and grief.

But it happens anyway.

A week after I left, Ben’s boss called my mother to say that he had missed two straight days of mopping. Mom found him unconscious on the floor of his apartment, in his pajamas, a spilled mug of wine on the linoleum. He was sweating and feverish, his neck and shoulders horribly swollen. She had seen his glands do similar, smaller versions of this trick over the last two years, and she thought about the years of chills and sleeping problems—
That boy’s always got a bug
. She said his name and touched his forehead, and her hand jerked away, hot and wet.

I don’t know whether, in those first days, my parents shielded the severity of Ben’s illness from me, or the doctors shielded it from them, or I simply didn’t get it. But from across the state, the progression was impossibly fast, marked by confusing telephonic pronouncements from my mother:
The doctors think it’s The Exhaustion. They’re testing him for The Cancer. They think it’s in The Limp Nose. They think it might be The Hotchkiss Disease. Apparently, it’s matzo-sized, which sounds fairly big. They think it’s in the fourth stage. I think that means he’s almost better.

I don’t blame my mother for any of this. She’d suddenly been dropped onto a planet with a completely different language, and doctors who couched my brother’s death sentence with passive and misleading terms (
late-term systemic, marginal outcome, radical treatment, negligible recovery rate
), terms that forced her to ask questions she didn’t even know the words for and certainly didn’t want the answers to. And she had to bear this alone. My father couldn’t bring himself to step into a hospital, and my sisters were too young to help. I planned to come home when the quarter ended, of course, but I was too late.

Afterward, the doctors said that Ben’s body had rejected the experimental drugs. But they insisted that the drugs had been his only chance. He was lucky, they said, because he wasn’t lucid at the end and had very little idea what hit him. I have a tough time thinking of Ben as lucky, of all things. Ben had a mathematician’s sense of the world. He was fascinated by probability, interested in the play of numbers against events. “What are the odds,” Ben was always saying, although like most people interested in defining luck, he seemed to have very little of it himself. Growing up, he would gamble on anything: ball games and stock prices and elections and how many kids were
in the new neighbor family, whether it would rain tomorrow. He loved stories of rare and marvelous fortune: the lottery winners and people who find free money, the man who falls from an airplane and lives, the woman who finds a Van Gogh in the attic. “What are the odds,” he’d say, and this wasn’t just a figure of speech for Ben; he genuinely wanted to know. “One in a million?” I’d say. “Three million,” he’d say; the longer the odds, the deeper Ben’s interest. I think he would’ve been morbidly fascinated to find out that his kind of blood cancer had an occurrence rate of less than one in two hundred thousand, that 80 percent of Hodgkin’s sufferers can be cured, but that the percentage with Ben’s combination of factors who had a sustained remission was so small as to be—as the doctors liked to say—negligible. Of course, Ben wouldn’t have settled for a sloppy word like “negligible.” Ben believed there was a number that corresponded with everything in the universe and everything in people—not just our height but our courage, not just our weight but our grief.

I had just returned from my government test when one of the guys in the frat said someone was waiting on the phone for me. The phone was sitting off the hook. When I put it to my ear and said hello, there was a pause and I didn’t recognize my father’s voice at first. “Clark? It’s Dad.” He sounded rickety and unsure, as if he were speaking from a chair balanced on one leg on the ledge of a skyscraper. “Ben passed away an hour ago.”

In my memory the grief is beyond description, without shape or size—my apologies to Ben—and is everywhere, filling rooms and cars and conversations. But again my sorrow is not the point of this story, and so I won’t dwell on days and weeks that, frankly, I don’t recall anyway, aside from the keening of my mother and the way my father’s hands hung at his sides; he was not a man accustomed to helplessness. The funeral was—as funerals for young people always are—unbearably sad, and made maudlin by some of Ben’s old high school friends, who stood to blow their noses in front of the congregation and offer that Ben was “like, cool.” I remember wishing I could make eye contact with him then so we could revel in their idiocy and in the silliness of such a spectacle. Ben would’ve liked it.

In fact, Ben would’ve relished everything about his funeral—the melodramatic grandeur and hypocrisy, the way slim acquaintances treated their sadness as a kind of commodity, the way they invented relationships with the
deceased and tortured us with empty memories and platitudes. I imagined how Ben would’ve loved watching people sidle up to me after the service to recap for me what had happened.

“So sudden,” they said, shaking their heads.

“Yes.”

“Your only brother,” they said, apparently thinking that hadn’t occurred to me.

“Mmm.”

“And for you, to not make it home from college.”

“Yes.”

“The fact that you never even got to speak to him.”

“Right.”

“You must be devastated.”

“Mmm.”

And then, shuffling their feet, summing up: “And someone so young.”

“Yes,” I said. “What are the odds?”

After the funeral I spent the night at my parents’ house, but it was dark and ghostly and I knew I had to leave. The next day I drove back to Seattle with the radio off and the windows down, icy air blowing through the car. I stopped at the tiny town of Vantage, at the crossing of the Columbia River, got a cup of coffee, and stood on the banks watching the black mass carve a path to the ocean. Where I’m from, everything flows east to west. So that’s what I did. I kept driving, until I dropped down out of the Cascades and into the Puget Sound clouds.

All that week the weather sat heavy on Seattle, gusting rain and acres of wet fog. I slept in my car the first night rather than returning to the fraternity house. The next day, I checked into a motel and I sat there all weekend. I ate only potato chips and drank only water. Then, on Monday, the sky suddenly cleared and the mountains emerged from fog and the brick and ivy of the university seemed almost too sharp, too focused.

I knew I had to get back to my life, and so late that morning I walked to my first class in a week, the sun on my neck and shoulders pushing me on. I slumped down in a chair in my Principles of Government class. After a few minutes the other students began filing in; the professor came over, arms crossed on his chest like sagging bandoliers.

“Mr. Mason?” he said. “You missed a few days.”

“Yes,” I said. It seemed like enough.

He nodded. “Well, we’re still on the Greeks.” His name was Richard Stanton—a former lawyer, weekend television anchor, public relations man, and state legislator. He would also become my mentor, my campaign manager, my best friend.

Professor Stanton was in his late forties, silver haired and handsome to the girls in class, although his deep-clefted chin drew him the nickname Dr. Assface. He was one of those men discomfited by age; he’d gone in for a small stud earring and had recently begun keeping his neat gray hair a few inches past professional. Each morning he gathered the back, which was short of his collar, and tied it in a desperate ponytail, and although there couldn’t have been a half-inch of hair on the south end of the rubber band, I think it was meaningful for Dr. Assface to have that ponytail.

He was the kind of professor dismissed as a lightweight within the academic community (what he used to call “the nest of fucking vipers”). He attributed this to jealousy, although it was true that he rarely published and it was heavily rumored that his only book, the eighty-four-page, widely spaced
History of Political Progressivism in the Pacific Northwest,
was both vanity published and mostly cribbed. But his claim of being the subject of professional jealousy made sense too, because his teaching style made him tremendously popular among his students. He had two speeds: the slow, thoughtful academic—leaning back in his folding chair, a look of deep contemplation on his face, his index finger jammed directly into that bunghole of a chin; and the eager spider monkey—springing around the room, climbing on the backs of chairs, sitting on desks and tables, folding his legs over, crouching a few inches from our faces, and otherwise artificially engaging us with movement so as to agitate us into some measure of intellectual curiosity. He broke the spider monkey out when our energy flagged, which was often, and I always thought his motivation was a magician’s motivation, creating a flourish with his left hand so that we wouldn’t notice him reaching his right into his sleeve, creating a small explosion to hide the doves he pulled from off-stage, creating a ruckus with his body to disguise the dexterity of his mind.

I had declared political science as my major the spring before and this was one of my first upper-level classes—filled with thirty students, many of them, like me, former high school student body presidents and DECA club parliamentarians, Eagle Scouts and Daughters of the American Revolution,
students who had always run for things and run things, future wonks and activists and candidates. But I must say, as a group, we were not the most dynamic thinkers in the world. Most of us achieved without thinking, earning A’s through rote and habit. Still, we expected to run for all manner of offices in the future and to win, to rise effortlessly to the top of whatever worlds we chose.

Dr. Stanton taught Principles of Government more like a philosophy class than a government class. He started with Moses and the idea of a lawgiver, and was supposed to continue through the Greeks to the Romans, Cicero and Seneca; Saints Augustine and Thomas More; through Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and de Tocqueville; Hobbes, Locke, and Marx; Thoreau and Malcolm X. But Dr. Stanton was far more interested in antiquity, and he rarely made it much further than the Romans, or occasionally the saints, sometimes summing up four centuries of political thought with one day’s lecture: “And Thoreau’s
Civil Disobedience
leads us into Gandhi, and of course Dr. King. Any questions?”

So when I returned we were still on the Greeks, Dr. Stanton’s favorites, the Big Three: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. But he was low key on this day and I drifted in and out of the class, my eyes stinging, my mind wandering, sloughing along and kicking aluminum cans down the road.

That’s when it happened. I hesitate to qualify
it,
to explain it away as a religious moment or a realization or anything else, because it simply is
it
—a flash, an awakening.

It
occurred at 11:48
A.M
., two minutes before the end of class on November 21, 1985, on one of those sunny fall days—the last of the season, as it turned out—that make you feel itchy and bored, like a nine-year-old two hours from recess. Dr. Stanton was talking about Plato’s
Republic,
specifically the section in which Plato has Socrates propose that “until philosophers are kings…cities will have no rest from their evils—no, nor the human race.” He was sprawled across his desk, on his side, his legs entwined like sleeping lovers. He was nudging us toward the ramifications of the philosopher-king, but like everything the Big Greeks posited, like everything we learned, we filtered it through minds ruined by television. So my classmates fixated on whether a dreamy, goatee-wearing, dope-smoking nihilist in a microbus—Shaggy from
Scooby-Doo
—would be able to lower the deficit. Dr. Stanton grew frustrated with the flatness of our thinking and our halting “um” and
“like” dialogue, until one of my classmates said, “I don’t get what Pluto means,” at which point Dr. Stanton leapt off the desk, landed on his feet, yelped, sprang into the air, and windmilled his arms, performing the wild finale to all his classroom magic tricks. “Read book seven!” he screamed. “Now!”

I turned gingerly to book VII of
The Republic
and began reading. It started as dully as the rest, with an allegory so elaborate and unlikely I had trouble following it: Plato had Socrates propose a deep cave in which prisoners were raised from birth. In this cave, the prisoners could see neither the sun nor anything else of the outside world; the only light came from a fire burning far above and behind them, so that they saw only the shadows of things on the wall, not the things themselves. “The prisoners,” Plato wrote, “would believe that the truth is nothing other than the shadows.”