Land of the Blind

by Jess Walter

  And like that, the crisis was no longer mine. The lettermen laughed—not at my relationship with Eli, but at Tommy’s noticing it. Such were my political instincts, even then. But as a politician I knew that I risked making an enemy unless I finished the play and rescued Tommy from the trouble I had caused him, by diverting once more.

  “You guys see Dana Brett’s rack?” I asked.

  Nine heads nodded and woofed and smiled and the morning continued like all mornings did then, only with a couple of small, subtle changes registered in the landscape: Dana Brett had announced her intention to be noticed, to be in play. And Eli Boyle had announced his intention—above all odds and against great obstacles—to fit in.

  I was to have a role in both of these events, and of course in that awful moment when those intentions crashed together.

  4 | I HAD SEX

  I had sex for the first time that fall, if one could call those ten or fifteen seconds of dizzying release sex, in the back of a garaged Jeep Wagoneer, with a collection of soft fleshy parts and irritating conversational tics whose first name was Susan and whose last I will keep to myself (there are legal considerations and, besides, this is my confession, not hers). Despite my short duration and ham-handed performance, it was a great relief to have finally done it, since the other football players saw virginity among our ranks as nothing less than a character flaw and possibly a sign of homosexuality. Of course no one knew I was a virgin, because before any of us actually had sex we had all lied that we had, inventing girls from other schools and friends of cousins and experienced neighbor ladies. I see those studies reporting that 72 percent of high school boys have had sex and only 12 percent of high school girls and I think I know why: the census takers’ inability to track the huge population of imaginary female sex partners.

  But in Susan I had a real partner, and this changed me in some way. Namely, I wanted more. I liked sex. Liked everything about it. Hoped to get better at it. And so I stayed with Susan for the rest of the school year, even though I couldn’t think of a thing we had in common, except our mutual recognition that I needed practice having sex. And so we did, almost daily. We had so much sex in Susan’s parents’ Wagoneer that I couldn’t bear to see her family driving around in it, her brothers and sisters belted into the backseat that we used like a gymnast’s apparatus. I still can’t see a Jeep Wagoneer on the freeway without becoming aroused, and more than once I have narrowly averted accidents after following a Wagoneer’s path too far in my rearview mirror.

  As I dated Susan that year I got marginally better at having sex in off-road family vehicles. The entire school, of course, knew that we were together, and knew the instant that we began “doing it.” We groped in the hallways and she waited by my car after school and outside the locker room after games and we went to dances—Homecoming, Sadie Hawkins, Christmas, and Sweethearts—and groped outside the gym. We wrote notes and talked on the phone, and people combined our names into one: ClarknSue.

  Looking back, I realize now that Dana Brett’s rack arrived the very week I had sex with Susan. But at the time, I didn’t connect those events, didn’t realize that Dana would hear about it, and that she would dress that way not to impress the high school boys, but to impress me, to get me to notice her the way I’d noticed Susan.

  And I did notice Dana, but I was so single-minded then—a mad scientist devoted to my work with tall, statuesque Susan, we were like a small Intercourse Research and Development firm—that it never occurred to me to go out with anyone else, especially my old grade-school friend, the eternally presexual, perpetually cute Dana.

  For her part, I think Dana must have realized fairly quickly that I wasn’t interested, for she was back to wearing baggy jumpers and combing her hair straight. But the rack was out of the bag, and the other football players hounded her for a few weeks, asking her out and offering her rides home, before they eventually gave up. Tommy Kane was especially smitten with Dana, and he asked me about her constantly. I even tried to fix her up with him. But she wasn’t interested. So the guys called her frigid and surmised that she was a lesbian, based solely on the evidence that she had laughed when Tommy asked her to climb into the backseat of his Ford Maverick.

  “I hate dykes,” Tommy said, and in our base stupidity we all agreed. What possible good was there in a woman who wouldn’t have sex with us? I would love to say that I didn’t participate in these Cro-Magnon conversations, in this emerging male idiocy, but this is, after all, a confession. We bragged about the things we did to our girlfriends, as if they had no part in it. We banged them and humped them and screwed them and nailed them, and if they did anything to us we still took credit (“I got a blow job last night”). As with everything I am confessing here, from my first snub of Eli at the bus stop to the events of…fifty-two hours ago, I offer no excuse except this: I was young and male and I was pretty sure I’d invented sex, just like I invented driving fast and making fun of people and eating french fries.

  With all of this attention to sports and student government and, of course, my groundbreaking work in Susan’s parents’ Wagoneer, I didn’t have much to do with Eli, except on those Sunday afternoons when he’d call to make sure the coast was clear and then come by the house so we could work on his appearance. He was plainly disappointed by our progress. He’d been dressing right for two months and nothing had changed. Even though they’d finally broken up our mainstreaming gym class (“They’re making a mockery of physical education!” Mr. Leggett testified at the school board meeting), the SpEddies had retained a bit of their mascot cool.

  But Eli lost even that measure of popularity. If anything, he was worse off. At least he had been the best of the worst. Now he was the worst of the best. If I were him, I might’ve choked on the irony.

  One Sunday in the late part of winter, we sat on my front porch and watched my sisters skip rope on the sidewalk in front of us. It was probably February or March, one of those days that strobes between warm and cool, the sun flashing in and out of clouds.

  “What am I doing wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I lied. “I don’t even know what you mean.”

  “You know what I mean,” he said. “Why isn’t it working?”

  I looked over at him. Eli was four inches shorter than me, about five feet eight, not too fat or too skinny, and while he still hadn’t mastered the blow dryer, his hair didn’t look awful anymore. His face was still too wide and his skin was still a problem, all pale and pimply, but it was getting better. Honestly, he didn’t look that bad. The problem was deeper: context and history and a collection of problems that went to his core.

  “Level with me,” he said. “Be tougher on me.”

  “It’s hard,” I said. “People have thought of you one way for so long…”

  “There are only a few months left in school,” he said. “Please…”

  I looked at him and saw those same eyes I’d seen on the bus in grade school, searching my face for something he’d missed, some rules that no one had told him. “I’m serious, Clark. I’ll do whatever you say. Just please, help me.”

  “Well, there are other things besides clothes and hair,” I said.

  He pulled a pencil and pad from his pocket. “What?”

  “Well, there are things that probably can’t be helped.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Well, you’re a senior and you still ride the bus.”

  “I don’t have a car,” he complained.

  “I know,” I said. “You asked what it was and I’m trying to tell you.”

  He wrote this on the small piece of paper and said, “Other kids ride the bus.”

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “There are other things.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Well,” I sighed, and looked down the block. “There’s…you have a bit of a lisp.”

  “What elth?”

  “That’s funny,” I said.

  “C
ome on. What else?”

  “Well, your hands shake.”

  He wrote on his paper. “And?”

  “You limp when you walk. And you twitch and make funny noises. You still pick your nose too much. And…”

  “Slow down.” He wrote on his paper. “Okay, what else?” he asked.

  “That’s it.”

  “What else?” he asked.

  “You smell,” said my sister, who had stopped skipping rope.

  “Shawna!” I said, and she ran off.

  Eli’s chin slumped to his chest and he nodded, as if she’d confirmed what he suspected. The problem was that he and his mother didn’t have a shower in their trailer, just a tub, and his mother would only let him take baths twice a week (“You’ll wash the oils off your body and end up with dry skin. And I will not have that on my conscience”).

  So we started the second phase of the Eli reclamation the very next day. I began driving Eli to school an hour early. I used the extra hour to shoot baskets, and since it would have drawn unwelcome attention for Eli to arrive early simply to take a shower at school, he lifted weights for twenty minutes, then showered and dried his hair.

  But perceptions don’t break easily, and by senior year few people were likely to notice that he smelled better and that his arms and shoulders had begun to develop small buttes and gullies from the weight lifting. He was still Eli. And, in truth, any progress would have been too slow for Eli, who by April saw our impending graduation as the date of his death.

  “It’s not helping,” he said as we sat in my backyard later that spring, throwing chestnuts over my back fence. “Everything is the same. It’s never going to change.”

  “It’s not the same,” I said. “It’s better.”

  “It’s not,” he said. “There’s gotta be something we can do.”

  I felt so bad for him I began work immediately on the final stage of the Eli Project. “Let me think about it,” I said.

  Eli went home and I called Susan and canceled our afternoon of Wagoneer tag. Then I got out the phone book and called Dana Brett at home.

  “Clark,” she said breathlessly. I had never called her before.

  “Dana, are you going to the prom with anyone?”

  There was a brief pause. “No,” she said.

  I drove over to talk to her. She lived in a part of town that had been built on old apple orchards—a nice neighborhood of older houses and newer California splits. I was surprised to find her parents on the front porch when I arrived, smiling. All I knew about them was that they were both community college professors and, according to Dana, somewhat overprotective. Her mother had an Instamatic camera and she demanded to take pictures of Dana and me, leaning us against opposite sides of their porch railing. It was weird but okay with me. They told me to say cheese. I said cheese. Her father shook my hand firmly, clapped my shoulder, and asked where I was planning to go to college.

  “Well, I was accepted at the University of Washington,” I said. “And then I want to go to law school somewhere.”

  “Outstanding,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Dana was accepted to Stanford,” her mother said.

  “That’s what I heard,” I said. “That’s really something.”

  “Mom,” Dana said. She rolled her eyes. “Please.” Her dad burst out laughing for no reason. It startled me. I had never met such nice parents.

  Dana’s chestnut hair was pulled into a ponytail and she was wearing jeans and a tight T-shirt. I could see those breasts again, round and straining against her shirt. I wondered why she didn’t dress like that more often at school. Dana’s mom brought us some lemonade and we walked around to her backyard. Her parents watched us from the kitchen window, their arms around each other’s waists.

  “Before I start, you can say no if you want to,” I began.

  Dana laughed. “You don’t have to worry about that.”

  So I launched into the story of Eli and me, our humiliation at the hands of Pete Decker and Matt Woodbridge, how Eli had saved me at the bus stop in elementary school, and saved me again the day my eye was shot out, about the moment in battle ball when Eli and I stood side by side and the day a few weeks later when he asked for my help, about my four-month project to rehabilitate him, to clean and clothe and cloak him in high school acceptability. I had told no one about Eli and me, and it felt good getting it off my chest, even if the effect on Dana was a bit confusing.

  She listened for a while, smiling, then looked back at her house, then slumped against their swing set. She stared at the ground and nodded as I spoke. I told her about giving Eli my clothes and teaching him to walk and comb his hair, getting rid of his old glasses and practicing what to say to people. I told her how we met sometimes on Sundays and how hard Eli was working.

  “That’s nice of you” was the only thing she said, and it was so quiet I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. The whole time I talked, she never looked up at me. In retrospect, of course, I see my obtuseness as a kind of cruelty, but at the time I couldn’t see past my concern for Eli, and I just kept talking. And talking.

  I explained how impatient Eli had become, and how desperate he was to show people that he was more than they thought he was. But time was running out, and he needed something drastic. He needed a girl to notice what everyone else had failed to notice up to that point, someone to break the ice so that the other girls would see it was okay to date him. He needed a pretty girl, I said—Dana Brett put her hand over her mouth—a pretty girl whom the other guys wanted to date. He could ask a girl out on his own, of course, but he couldn’t stand the weight of rejection. If the first girl said no to him, then no other girl would be able to say yes, even if she wanted to. He would be a lost cause, a goner.

  “Why me?” she asked.

  I looked back and saw her parents wave from the kitchen window. I waved back.

  “Well,” I said, “you’re so much smarter than the other girls and, well, you’re pretty and, I don’t know, I guess I thought you’d understand.”

  “I do,” she said.

  “You probably don’t remember this,” I said. “But when we were kids, and Eli first got transferred into our class, you weren’t mean to him.”

  “I remember,” she said.

  “So I thought you’d sympathize. And since you and I are friends…”

  Finally she looked up at my eyes. “We are,” she said, not as a question.

  “You can double-date with Susan and me.” I hoped she saw that by offering to double-date I was taking as much of a social chance as she was, driving to and from the dance with Eli. But of course that wasn’t what she was thinking.

  “Okay,” Dana said, and she looked at me with downturned eyes, and she seemed again like the smart, shy little girl from grade school. “Have him ask me. I’ll say yes. But don’t tell him you talked to me. It’ll be better if it doesn’t look like a setup.”

  “Thanks, Dana.”

  We walked back to the house and her parents came out to greet us, holding hands, her mother holding out a plate of cookies. I took four.

  Dana walked right past them into the house. Her mother, seeing something was wrong, turned and watched her go inside. I took another cookie.

  Her father was as clueless as I was. He stood there, still beaming at me. “What kind of law?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You said you’re going to study law. I was wondering if you knew what kind?”

  “Well,” I said between bites of chocolate chip pecan cookies, “I don’t know. Maybe contract law at first. But later I want to go into politics.”

  “Outstanding,” said Dana Brett’s father.

  5 | THE DAVENPORT HOTEL

  The Davenport Hotel was decked out and lit up for our prom, its once-grand second-floor ballroom littered with folding chairs and covered with green and blue streamers, shimmering paper fish, giant clamshells, and a trident that looked for all the world like a big dinner fork.
At the last minute, however, the prom committee (Clark Mason, chairman) had rejected “A Night in Atlantis” as a theme, even though the decorations had already been purchased; and so a sign declaring the scene as BOOGIE WONDERLAND hung behind a foam-rubber faux grotto.

  Boys stood around in little circles in their ruffled tuxedo shirts and flopping bow ties, the girls in candy-flavored lip gloss and taffeta dresses. Courage for this event was gathered outside in cars, from water bongs and ceramic pipes, from flasks and sixers. Unmufflered Chevelles and Novas pulled up in front of the grand hotel, windows shaking. Car doors opened and girls with piled hair and tight dresses emerged onto the sidewalk, shuffling feet while their dates went to park the wheels. Two girls who thought it would be “hilarious” to come to the prom in jeans and without dates sat silently in the lobby in big overstuffed chairs, the very portrait of second thoughts, while two guys in tuxedo T-shirts stood next to each other, hoping that their own bad idea could be divided in half. The rest of us strode into the hall in our shiny shoes and store-bought haircuts, parroting antiquated adult behavior, rules handed down from some point deep in the past, utterly pointless rules like the required pinning of small flowers on shuddering lapels (“That’s okay,” Eli said when Dana told him she’d bought him a boutonniere. “I rented my own shoes”). Giving in to the mystique and the endless optimism of fresh testosterone, boys rented rooms and upgraded their wallet rubber supply. Girls, too, had their delusions, their mimicking of wedding rites, their manicures and stylings, their practicing picture smiles in front of bathroom mirrors. The night itself was a letdown for most, but there were minor intrigues—surprise breakups, throw-ups, and feel-ups. But without a doubt, no one drew more attention that night than Eli Boyle and the lovely Dana Brett.

  I spent the day with Eli, picking up our tuxes (black for me, white—to hide any rogue flakes of dandruff—for Eli), helping him get dressed, even combing his hair for him. His mother stood behind us in the hallway of their trailer, which I’d never been in before, and which smelled like the clothes of old people.