by Jess Walter
“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.
2 | THE EMPIRE CLUB
The 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.
3 | MY BROTHER DIED
My 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.