Land of the Blind (28 page)

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.

A
fter 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.

“They get the motorcycle, too?” my dad asked.

It was actually the last thing I had left. It was stored in a friend’s garage in Seattle, and I had forgotten to list it in my dwindling assets. The next weekend I took the bus to Seattle, rode the bike home, and gave it to my dad. He tried to make me take it back, or sell it, but I insisted. The very next day he rode it to work. Unfortunately, it was only three months before the lawyers tracked the motorcycle down and took it away. I apologized to Dad, but he waved his hand.

“I didn’t like it anyway.” He never mentioned the bike after that, but my mom said he rode it to work every day while he had it.

I continued to put my life back together. I hung a shingle in Spokane and began to practice law again—wills for people with nothing to leave behind, divorces for people with nothing to split. I got a little bit of contract work, enough to start paying my ex-wife, to get a very small apartment and an old Honda Civic. I stopped wearing the glass eye and put my patch back on. I grew my hair a little bit longer. I breathed. Ate. Walked. Talked a little. Was I better? I believed so. I made the mistake of thinking the trappings were my problem, the symptoms were my disease. I was poor, I thought, so I must be on my way to being whole again.

Then, more than a year after the election—this January, just a few weeks ago—I finally went to see Eli Boyle. Honestly, I wasn’t angry with him. In some important way, I believed I deserved what he’d done. And yet I hadn’t wanted to see him until then.

We imagine that time has qualities of its own, a weight and a girth, powers of redemption and recovery. We believe that time will fix or heal, or at least resolve. But sometimes the time just passes. The days go by and nothing changes, nothing.

I drove up the face of the South Hill. I turned on Cliff Drive and drove past the mansions to the end of the cliff, where the lesser homes clung to the tawny slope like billeted climbers. Eli’s lawn and trees were overgrown, the house empty. This was all that was left of Empire Interactive. The employees had all been fired by Eli or had wandered away. Louis was the last to go, almost a year before. Since then, Eli had moved everything he could carry up to his carriage house apartment, where he still lived. He had painted
EMPIRE INTERACTIVE
on a small sign and posted it outside his door. Unlike me—and Michael and Dana, it turned out—Eli had been selling his technology stocks along the way, and he was keeping Empire on life support from the last of the money that he’d saved, hoping like all the surviving tech companies to make it through the long night until the money rose again.

I climbed the stairs and knocked on the door. Dead bolts slid, hooks were lifted, keys turned, and finally the door opened and he was standing there, shifting his weight from foot to foot. I hadn’t seen Eli in sixteen months. He’d gotten heavier, his hair thinner, a dusting of red whiskers across his cheeks and chin. And there was something in his eyes, that darting; when he blinked it was like he was in pain, like he was trying to force glass from his eyes. He backed into his apartment. He had this way of scrunching up his nose to push his glasses up. He did this, they slid back, and he did it again. The room smelled like coffee, pizza, and body odor.

“I didn’t want to do it, but you gave me no choice—”

“I know,” I said.

“The whole thing, you running in the first place, it was my idea—”

“I know.”

“And you brought that woman in—”

“I know, Eli.”

“It’s always you and me and then you always forget, you always forget—”

“I know, Eli. I won’t forget anymore.” I walked slowly around the apartment, Empire reduced to these stacks of boxes and binders at our feet. He grimaced as he backed slowly to his computer, still unsure, I suppose, just what I meant to do to him.

“It was…you…betrayed…I—” Eli seemed unglued, his eyes darting back and forth. “I couldn’t let it go. You have to stand up sometimes. Fight back.” His voice had no modulation, like an idling engine, and I could see that he was sick in some way.

“I’m not here to talk about that,” I said. “That’s all in the past.”

He nodded unsurely and made a small whistling sound.

“I tried to call you, but your phone has been disconnected.”

“It was tapped,” he said. “I kept calling to have them get the bugs off, but they wouldn’t so I finally just disconnected it.” He pointed at the computer. “I have e-mail, but I think they’re watching that, too.”

“I’m here to see the game.”

“It’s not a game,” he said. Again, the painful blink.

“I want to see it.”

“It’s not ready.”

“I know it’s not ready. It’s never ready. But I need to see it, Eli.”

He watched me for a few moments, then turned on his computer, opened a couple of files, and the game engine began loading. “It’s very rough. Still having trouble with the transitions. It doesn’t go very far into the action yet.” He talked as he worked the keyboard. “Bryan left the pixel shaders in a terrible state, and…and—” He looked down through his glasses at the screen. “Just when I think I’ve finally gotten it to be organic, I see some other thing I didn’t anticipate. It’s that Michael Langford. I know there’s more venture capital, but he won’t release it—”

The computer screen went black and then opened on a pastoral scene, a village in the distance. The graphics were nice, if a little flat, already out of date, passed up two years earlier by the 3-D photorealistic real-time rendering stuff. Even so, there was a quality to the graphics that was soothing and familiar. Tiny electronic birds chirped, and white puffs of sheep sailed in the distance. Eli used the mouse to move us forward, and we glided, from his
character’s point of view, across the field, the village growing in our vision. But the computer stopped and the scene lurched and was replaced by a close shot of the village gate. “I hate that,” Eli said. “That hiccup. That’s what I’m talking about; it’s very rough. And I’m telling you, it doesn’t go very far into the scene yet.”

“I want to see.”

On the gate were the words
USER NAME
: ___ and
PASSWORD
: ___.

Eli turned to me and it took a second before I realized that he wouldn’t type his password until I turned away.

“Dontes,” I guessed, thinking of the name on the Pete Decker file, the
Monte Cristo
prison he’d constructed, and most of all, of the elaborate way Eli had helped me build up my dream of a political career, before pulling it out from under me. “Edmond Dontes,” I said.

Eli looked at me in horror. “How did you know that?”

I didn’t answer. After a moment, he typed his password. The gate opened, and Eli’s alter ego entered his village. Children and maidens rushed up to greet him. His computer-generated arms extended stiffly on either side of the screen, rubbing the kids’ heads and taking flowers from the women. Then the image on the screen swung around slowly and there was Eli Dontes himself, tall and muscular, with a bushy mustache and curly brown hair, square of features and back. Eli saw me look from him to the vision of him on the computer, and he blushed and looked down. And then, the computer screen went blank, the picture replaced by strings of code.

“There are a lot of other scenes, but we’re having trouble getting them to flow together.”

“That’s it?” I asked. “That’s all you have?”

“Like I said, it’s a little rough. Some glitches. If Michael would just release the rest of the investors’ money—”

“That’s actually why I’m here,” I said. “Michael has someone who wants to buy Empire, or the concept of it, anyway.” I reached in my briefcase and pulled out Michael’s fax. “They want whatever you have, all development and research materials, all rights to the name and the likeness of the game.”

“It’s not a game,” Eli said quietly.

“I doubt they’re going to still want it once they see it,” I said, “but it’s an
offer, Eli. Any offer is good. Especially given the climate and the game’s…limitations.”

He glanced over, then went back to reading the fax. When he got to the price, he laughed. “Two hundred thousand dollars? Is he serious? That’s offensive.”

“At least it’s something,” I said. “And this isn’t just you. Michael and Dana. Me. We could all use the money, Eli.”

“That sneaky asshole,” he said. “I know what he’s doing.”

“You’ve been using your savings to keep the thing afloat. How much longer can you do that?” In front of his house, the Mercedes had a For Sale sign on it.

“Michael’s wanted this from the beginning,” Eli said. “He’s wanted it for himself from the very beginning.” His eyes narrowed again.

“Eli,” I said, “if you run out of money, they’ll take your house, everything.”

He waved his hand toward the house, across the lawn. “They can have the house.”

“At least consider this.”

“Tell Michael I want my money.” Eli continued to stare at the fax.

“Listen to me. Michael doesn’t have your money. He’s as broke as you and me. Everyone’s broke, Eli. You have to sell the game.”

“Not a game!” He waved the fax around, then relaxed. “Don’t call it a game.” Then I saw the look on his face that I’d seen when he showed me the photos of Pete Decker, and I couldn’t help thinking of him up here eighteen months earlier, during the election, pacing around, cursing me for betraying him again, for letting him get close and then pulling away. “Tell Michael to give me more money and I’ll finish the game.”

“Look,” I said, “I have to be honest with you. The game isn’t worth
two thousand dollars,
let alone two hundred thousand. Three years ago, maybe. But technology has passed it by. The things you’re trying to do—wristwatches do that now.”

Eli wasn’t hearing a word I said. “So Langford thinks he can get Empire out from under me. I should’ve guessed. The levels of treachery, that’s the thing. Your true enemy is always the last one to reveal himself.”

“Eli, just think about it. Please.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I can take care of Michael Langford.”

When I left I could see him in the window above the garage, the small curtain pulled back, the lenses from his glasses reflecting the light as he watched me drive away.

That evening I called Michael to tell him that Eli had refused even to consider selling the game. Dana answered. I hadn’t talked to her since the frenzy of the election, when I’d called to tell her I was getting married. Now she said she was sorry about the election, and about my divorce. We small-talked. I told her I was practicing law again, that I was going to stay. I could hear in my own voice the sense of settled defeat, of fatigue. “Maybe you were right about Spokane,” I said.

“What did I say?”

“You said it was the last real place.”

She laughed. “And is that a good thing?”

“Yeah, it is,” I said. “You’ve got to be tough here, a realist. For me, yeah, that is a good thing.”

She said she and Michael were at a kind of equilibrium. They’d had to sell their big house in Los Altos and were living in a smaller place in Sunnyvale, but they were clearing away the debt and Techubator was flirting with profit again.

“There’s this sense among all the people down here,” she said, “that if we can make it a few more months, the money will start to come back.”

“You’ll make it,” I said. “You’re too smart, and Michael’s…relentless.”

“Yes,” she said. I could hear noise in the background. “We’re having Amanda’s birthday party,” Dana said, and then she sighed. “Oh, Clark—” and I could hear in her voice a shadow of the huge longing that I felt.

“I’ll get Michael,” she said after a moment.

As I waited I could hear children laughing in the background, and Dana asking who wanted cake. That’s when I started doing the math in my head.

“Congressman!” Michael said into the phone. “Oh, wait, but you lost, didn’t you? Well, at least you have your wife to comfort you. Oh, wait, you lost her too.”

“Eli won’t sell,” I said.

“He has to.”

“I tried to tell him that, but—”

“Try harder.” And then he hung up to go back to the party.

I sat with the phone on my shoulder, clicking off the months with my fin
gers. Amanda was four. The date was January twentieth. Go back four years and nine months: April 20, 1998.

I couldn’t speak for that entire month, but I could account for one day. On April 16, 1998, Dana was with me, laughing and kissing my neck, sliding out of her booze-soaked skirt in a hotel room in Spokane.