Land of the Blind

by Jess Walter

  And finally she looks up at him and she can see that he wants to know, but he can’t possibly. How can he when she doesn’t even know.

  “God, you need to get some sleep,” he says quietly.

  “Maybe there aren’t names for the crimes we commit.”

  “What the hell does that mean, Caroline?”

  “I…I don’t know.” She closes her eyes and thinks about Clark Mason and the way he uses that word “confession,” the purity and freedom of it, the way he seemed to just cut loose, to talk—or to write, actually. “I wanted you and Debbie to split up,” she blurts. “I never told you that. I never acted on it. But it’s what I wanted.”

  “Oh, come on, Caroline,” Dupree says. “That had nothing to do with it. You can’t take responsibility for what happens to other people.”

  “Did you think when you left Debbie that we would get together?”

  His answer catches in his throat. “That wasn’t why—”

  “Did you think we would get together?”

  He looks down at his coffee.

  “Then don’t tell me it didn’t have anything to do with it.” She feels herself getting wound up. “Up here, in the world, we collect fingerprints and we make eye contact and we measure blood spatters and interview people who lie to us and we pretend like we don’t want each other and that what we’re doing has meaning. But what the fuck are we doing? You’re with your wife. I’m alone. The dead stay dead. We bag ’em and take ’em away and clean up their blood and so what? We save some girl’s life, and we’re so busy patting ourselves on the back, we don’t even notice that she’s been dying since she was twelve. We just move the shit around up here, Alan. We don’t change anything. We don’t save anyone.”

  “Who told you we’re supposed to save people?”

  “Then what?” She cranes her neck.

  “We make sure the other guys don’t get away with it.”

  Caroline wants to sleep or to cry, she can’t tell which. She looks past Dupree, out the front window of the coffee shop.

  “You’re tired, Caroline. That’s all. You’re a little burned out, and you’re letting some nutcase get inside your head.”

  She’s ignoring him now, staring out the window and across the street.

  “You need to send this guy home. You need to get some sleep. You need—”

  Caroline stands and begins walking slowly across the coffee shop.

  “Where are you going?” Dupree asks.

  She walks to the window and looks out. Across the street, behind the row of parked cars, she can see Pete Decker, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He is yanking on something—the hair of the young girl who answered the door to Pete’s apartment. Pete is dragging her by the hair across the sidewalk, toward the door of the apartment building. Two of the boys who were up in Pete’s apartment earlier stand patiently on the sidewalk holding big stereo speakers and watching Pete pull the girl.

  Caroline walks out the coffee shop door and begins to cross the street.

  The girl says nothing as Pete drags her by the hair. Her face has the placid surface of the recently and frequently stoned. In fact, she doesn’t resist at all until they reach the doorway, at which point she spreads her arms and calmly gets hold of the door frame. For a moment, Pete can’t get her inside. He flicks at her face with the back of his hand and the girl crumples, and Pete gathers himself to finish dragging her inside when he looks up and sees Caroline striding across the street.

  “Oh, hey,” he says, and lets go of the girl. She slumps in the doorway.

  Caroline reaches the curb without slowing. Pete steps out of the doorway and begins to sprint down the sidewalk, but she has the angle. She gets her arms around his waist and is dragged a few steps as Pete tries to run. He smells like cat piss and onions. He twists and punches at her the way he punched the girl; Caroline feels a weak blow glance off her head, and she slides off his waist and down his legs. He tries to run again, but she’s got his ankles and Pete Decker crashes down on the sidewalk. He scurries a few feet with her holding his ankles before she can pull herself up and jump onto his back and crawl up, driving the ball of her kneecap between his shoulder blades. The air goes out of him, but he keeps trying to crawl forward. She grabs the scruff of his hair and pushes his face into the sidewalk. Pete continues to struggle, flailing with his arms and legs. Caroline wonders what the hell is taking Dupree so long.

  And it’s not until she gets one of his wrists and cranks it, and Pete finally gives up and slumps down on the sidewalk, that she looks up and sees Dupree standing there like a civilian, like a fucking tourist next to the gawkers and the kids with the stolen stereo. They’re all staring down at Pete Decker, whose face is jammed into the sidewalk and whose nose and lips are bleeding. And they all have the same look on their faces.

  “Jesus, Caroline,” Dupree says. “You need to get some sleep.”

  5 | THE COLD RETURNS

  The cold returns at night in Spokane, on just about every night in the winter, even nights like this, when the sun has lied about early spring. At dusk the air loosens, the pooled snow begins to freeze, and the grass shines like it’s been sheeted with glass.

  Across the street from the coffee shop the patrol officers have arrived. They carry the stolen TV from Pete Decker’s apartment, along with plastic baggies filled with pipes and baking soda and allergy medicine and batteries and enough cooked methamphetamine to keep Pete and his young friends stoned until the real spring comes. A handful of people watch from the street. Dupree stands among them self-consciously.

  Pete sits quietly on the sidewalk, hands cuffed behind his back, trying to reach the dried blood on his nose with his shoulder. When he sees two cops carrying the stolen TV through the front door, Pete tries to get Caroline’s attention. “I was gonna give that back just like you said. You didn’t give me much time to finish your list.”

  The father of the girl has arrived—a big man in work boots—and Caroline sees the girl cower in the lobby of the apartment building. Caroline pulls the father aside and points at Pete. “He’s facing assault charges for hitting your daughter,” she says, and then shakes her head. “Make sure you keep her safe so she can testify. Okay?”

  The father nods.

  Caroline shakes her head. “What kind of asshole would hit a girl?”

  The father looks down. “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah,” Caroline says. “Me neither.”

  The girl emerges from the building with a patrol cop, and the father opens his passenger door.

  From the sidewalk, Pete cranes his neck and tries to laugh. “We was just screwin’ around, huh, Amber? Tell the cops we was just screwin’ around. Amber?”

  Caroline walks over and crouches next to Pete so that her body is between him and the girl. Pete pulls back a bit, but when he realizes she’s not going to hit him, he smiles. “You didn’t give me very much time.”

  “No,” Caroline says. She continues to fill out her report for the patrol cops.

  “I could’ve used a little more time,” Pete says.

  “Sorry,” she says, without looking up from her report.

  Amber leaves with her father. Pete watches their car pull away.

  The patrol cops come and stand Pete up. He rises easily; he’s comfortable in custody, and the cuffs hang naturally on his wrists.

  “Hey, I thought of something,” Pete says.

  “Yeah?” On the report, Caroline checks boxes for assault, possession of drugs, possession with intent to deliver, possession of stolen goods, and resisting arrest.

  “Yeah,” Pete says. “You asked if Clark ever had a beef with anyone. There was this one guy when we were kids.”

  “Tommy Kane?” Caroline asks without looking up.

  “I don’t know that guy. No, this guy was some kind of queer or something. He and Clark used to get into it at the bus stop. This kid named Eli Boyle.”

  Caroline ignores him.

  “I used to have to break up their fights.�
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  Two patrol cops grab Pete by his arms. “Yeah, I hope that helps you,” he says. The patrol cops lead Pete away to the car. “Maybe helps me out too?” They push his head down, but he’s done this often enough himself, and he slides easily into the backseat. “Maybe you tell my PO how I’m cooperating, okay? Okay?” The back passenger door closes and Caroline looks up to see Pete Decker settle back comfortably and nod to the cop in the front seat, as if he were Pete’s driver. The car pulls away.

  Dupree joins her on the sidewalk. “You goin’ home now?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I’ll go down and get what the guy’s written so far and tell him we’ll pick it up on Monday.”

  “Good,” Dupree says, and he looks down at his shoes. A decade ago, when she first started dreaming the old stuff—running away with him, a small town by a lake, kids—Alan’s bald spot was the size of a nickel. Now it is a cantaloupe. She wonders if she has aged as obviously, or with her, if it’s mostly inside, if there’s a hollow spot, an emptiness that was a nickel and then a cantaloupe, and now is a beach ball.

  He looks up from his shoes. “I was thinking about what you were saying. You know, about you and me? About that other world?”

  “Forget it.” Maybe that’s what she’s imagining, a place where all her daydreams went, and the people she cared about—all the good things that seemed to be in the future but were now beyond her. She reaches out and squeezes his arm. “I was just talking out of my ass, Alan. I’m just tired. Go home. See your family.”

  “Yeah, okay.” He starts to go. “So are you seeing someone?”

  “Mm-hmm,” she says. “As a matter of fact, I am.”

  “That’s great. What’s his name?”

  “Clark,” she says.

  “What’s he do?”

  “Lawyer.”

  Dupree smiles, a parent’s reaction upon hearing that a misfit daughter has met a lawyer, a relief to see she’s getting her life together. He seems genuinely happy for her. Or relieved that she’s not his responsibility anymore.

  “That’s great, Caroline.”

  “Yeah. We’ve been seeing a lot of each other. We talk. It’s good.”

  “Good,” he says. He shuffles his feet once, reaches out and gives her a hug that she doesn’t return, and starts for his truck. She watches him drive away.

  Then she walks to her own car and drives back to the cop shop. She parks in the turnout, figuring she’ll send the guy home and be back to her car in ten minutes or so. Inside the cave, the desk sergeant gives her a quick wave. “Good work down there. You can do the paper on Decker on Monday. You should go home. Get some rest.”

  Dupree has called.

  “Yeah,” she says. “I’m gonna do that. I just need to get something.”

  The thought of bed is overpowering. And yet, still, something is nagging at her, a name she keeps seeing and hearing. There is a point of fatigue that brings apathy, and if you can push beyond it, she thinks, another point that brings clarity.

  She punches in the code to get into the hallway, and then uses her key card to get into the Major Crimes office. She looks in on Clark; he’s still writing, of course, leaning back in his chair now, balancing the legal pad against the edge of the table. She goes to her desk, to straighten up before she kicks Clark out and goes home for what’s left of the weekend. She takes the news stories and the list of contributors and is about to throw them in a desk drawer when clarity arrives.

  She flips through the news stories until she finds it. The names of the two officers of the Fair Election Fund, the nonprofit PAC that laid out all that money on ads painting Clark Mason as a carpetbagger from Seattle. One of the officers is named Eli Boyle. She flips to the list of donors to Clark’s campaign: five thousand dollars from Eli Boyle. So he’s giving to the campaign and funding the ad campaign against it.

  And what did Pete say: Some kid named Eli Boyle.

  She goes to the reverse directory. Eli Boyle lives on Cliff Drive. She thinks of the grand old houses on Cliff Drive, overlooking downtown. The reverse directory also lists Eli Boyle’s occupation. Founder, it reads, Empire Games.

  That’s listed, too, in the donations, for twenty thousand dollars and fifteen thousand dollars. And she finds Empire Games in her notes from the interview with Susan (…sold all the stock except Empire Games…) and in the news story (…he’s on the board of directors of a Spokane high-tech company called Empire Games…). She looks up Empire Games in the reverse directory. Its address is the same as Eli Boyle’s. She writes it on a sheet of notebook paper, tears it out, and stands. She walks across the room and opens the door to the interview room. “How we doing, champ?”

  “Great,” says Clark. “I’m almost done.”

  “Okay,” Caroline says.

  “What time is it?” he asks.

  “Almost eight,” she says.

  He smiles, that easy smile, and she knows how Susan Diehl must’ve felt, seeing him after all those years. “I can’t tell you how much this means to me,” he says. “Your having faith in me like this.”

  “Okay,” Caroline says.

  Outside, she is surprised by how dark and cold it has gotten. She starts her car and drives across the river gorge and into downtown, curving along Riverside with a handful of other cars, and makes her way down wide streets built at the turn of the twentieth century for thick lanes of traffic that were long gone by the turn of the twenty-first. The buildings are stout and handsome—marble and brownstone, terra-cotta and brick. This city conceals more than some, its wealth and its power, its alliances and feuds, and even more, its grace. She catches a glimpse of the Davenport Hotel, lit up with construction lights. It’s supposed to reopen later this summer. Spokane is old, and it is beautiful like old things are, lit from within by nostalgia and hard times. But so many windows are still dark, so many storefronts vacant. She envies the optimists here, but how can you ignore the taped and painted windows, the boarded doors? How can you not feel like a whole city of people waiting for it to finally be over, a whole city tending a parent’s slow death?

  She turns on Stevens and heads up the South Hill, once the concentrated prime real estate in Spokane. Cliff Drive is a short row of older houses at the first crest of the hill and Eli’s house is at the far west edge, not one of the mansions but a grand home nonetheless, a nice, two-story Tudor style. The lights are off. She parks in front and steps out of her car. From here downtown appears bright and busy, and she can see across the river, across the valley, to the hills that used to frame the north side of the city, until streets and buildings sprawled over those and the next hills too, and the next, where the money has been moving, where Susan Diehl is sitting on white furniture in her own half-million-dollar house on her own ledge, drinking martinis with Mr. Diehl. It’s a beautiful view, the lights like liquid coming down those ridges and the clouds set atop the valley, and she envies for a moment this Eli Boyle, with his high-tech money and his political donations and his Tudor house on this point, above all the shit.

  Her feet clomp on the wooden porch. No one answers the doorbell. She presses a flashlight against the big picture window to cut the glare and peers inside. The living room is beautiful, dark wooded, with built-in hutches and cabinets, a fireplace, and a grand, curving staircase. But there is no furniture. She looks back to the front yard to see if she’s missed a For Sale or a Sold sign, but she hasn’t.

  She walks along the wood porch to another window and peers in at a dining room, also empty. She walks all the way around the house, to the back, and looks in the kitchen. No appliances. Nothing. From the back porch she looks across the vast lawn. There is a garage, or a carriage house actually, on the side of the house. It is made of stone. River rock. A single set of dark wooden stairs winds its way up to the second floor. There is an apartment on top, or an office. These windows are dark too, but a dull blue light comes from one of the windows, like that of a computer screen.

  The cold grass crunches under her feet. A hand-lettered
sign on the carriage house reads EMPIRE INTERACTIVE. She shines her flashlight on the sign, then climbs the steps to the second floor and gets a slightly different view of downtown Spokane, with some perspective. From here, you can get it all in your field of vision. That’s the thing. It really is a small city when you think about it, a city of coincidence and reoccurrence, of patterns and inescapable reputations. A man has dinner at a table next to his ex-wife in a restaurant he hasn’t been to in two years and he shakes his head. “That’s Spokane.” A woman sees an old boyfriend picking out china with his new girlfriend at the Bon Marché. “That’s just Spokane.” But don’t they also take some measure of security from that, too? Don’t they all believe they know everyone here, that they are safe and gentle and good to one another? The devil you know.

  She once went six months without a dead body.

  But as she reaches the top step she recognizes that faint smell and it breaks her heart a little. Six months. And when she tries the doorknob to the apartment above the carriage house, it turns easily in her hand. Caroline Mabry takes a breath and pushes through the door.

  The eyes may be confused in two ways…when they’ve come from the light into the darkness and when they’ve come from the darkness into the light.

  —Plato, The Republic

  VI

  Statement of Fact

  1 | WHO AM I

  Who am I to describe Eli Boyle’s life, to trace its shape—the outside surfaces, the dates and places, the beginning and the end—when, admittedly, I never took the time to learn what existed inside that form, the truth of who Eli was, what drove him, what scared him, what he dreamed?

  When this story comes out, the news media will not be so judicious, of course. They will sum up Eli’s life with one false cliché or another: rags to riches to rags again, or the impersonal nature of computers, or the profane irony of a love triangle. And perhaps these stories are true; I honestly don’t know what Eli believed, or what he thought about or—certainly—what his story meant. My own expertise lay simply in the horror of a shared adolescence, from its birth in humiliation at the Empire bus stop to its ending in betrayal in a wine-soaked room at the Davenport Hotel.