Land of the Blind

by Jess Walter

  “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.”

  Of course, I’m hardly the first student to be struck by Plato’s simple ontology, to make the short leap of imagining my life as a cave, society as empty and illusory, and all that I had been conditioned to want as nothing more than fancy lies. Success, fame, money, women? Shadows. Just shadows.

  But if my epiphany was that of a million other disaffected, twenty-one-year-old state school philosophers, it was also that of a young man who had just buried his brother, and I must say—I went a little crazy that day. Behind me, the sun slanted through a window in the classroom and bits of dust danced in its light, a Milky Way of mites and bits and loose particles. How can we still pretend that heaven is up there when whole universes—tiny heavens and hells
—can exist in a single beam of sunlight.

  “Mr. Mason?” Dr. Stanton stepped toward me, and as I looked up from the sunlight to him I felt myself passing, as Plato said, from one realm to the next, from belief to knowledge. Even now I can’t say just what it meant except that I was overwhelmed, a parched man suddenly up to his knees in cool water.

  “Mr. Mason?” Dr. Stanton asked again.

  For the first time in my life I could see. Or I was blinded. Or there’s no difference. I slapped my head. The other students looked up at me.

  “I don’t—” I cast around, looking at the ruffled paperback of The Republic, at the students around me, just like me, dreaming our stupid little dreams, competing and succeeding and living and dying by rules that we didn’t make up, rules that made no sense. I reached into the sunlight. Nothing was there.

  “What is it, Mr. Mason?”

  “I don’t—” And I saw myself on Empire Road, that narrow gash of houses, that stretch of failure—the cruelty of Pete Decker at one end, the frailty of Eli Boyle at the other. That would always be my universe, my galaxy of dust in my beam of sunlight. Tears streamed from my eyes—the bad and the good. Grief is a release and—

  “Mr. Mason?” Dr. Stanton said. “What is it?”

  “I don’t—” Every dream is an escape.

  “Mr. Mason!”

  The really shitty thing is this: When someone dies, you never get to see him again. Never. How can you possibly deal with the unfairness of that? How can you deal with the death of the best person you know, the death of everything true and good?

  I looked up at Dr. Stanton. “I don’t—” I wiped my eyes. “I don’t believe in God.”

  4 | WHAT I MEANT

  What I meant to accomplish with this confession was not a recounting of the grief-induced, sophomoric insights (though technically I was a junior) that I had in college but something more, something transcendent.

  I am a failure even at being sad.

  So again, I apologize, Caroline. I only wanted to make the point that I wasn’t always like this—or rather like the obnoxious young politician who was handed his hat in the 2000 congressional elections, the desperate man who drove to Eli Boyle’s house two days ago with murder in his heart, who walked gingerly across the lawn to Eli’s carriage house, who climbed silently up those steps.

  At least for a short time, beginning in the fall of 1985 and ending more than eight years later, in the spring of 1994, I was free.

  Though I hadn’t known how to express it that day in class (atheism not really being the point), the combination of Ben’s death and Dr. Stanton’s class transformed me, untethered me from all that I’d believed.

  I moved out of the frat house and into an apartment above a garage in Wallingford. I quit all my campus posts and all the self-serving organizations I had joined. I gave the Dodge back to my parents and bought an old ten-speed bicycle. I grew my hair out, stopped shaving, and started wearing secondhand clothing; I favored army fatigues and flannel shirts. I stopped wearing my glass eye and went back to the eye patch—a bit self-consciously at first, but old habits die hardest. I sat for hours on the Ave on lotused legs, reading poetry and smiling at strangers. I became one of those people you step around on the sidewalk, a step removed from panhandler.

  Strangely enough, this didn’t affect my social life as much as I feared it would. I didn’t get involved seriously with anyone, but I screwed constantly. It turned out there was no shortage of girls who were looking for sad, hygienically challenged men, girls who smelled like patchouli or clove cigarettes, nice girls who seemed like the sort that Dana would’ve become, the sort that Ben would’ve dated, girls who didn’t really comb their hair, who majored in comparative literature and international studies, who carried string-tied journals in their worn backpacks and rode bicycles for transportation, girls who talked knowledgeably about rain forests and dominant cultures and art-house movies.

  I went almost six years without seeing a shaved armpit.

  I exchanged the politics of me for the politics of them. And there were plenty of them to help. I raised money for AIDS patients, African famine relief, and Central American refugees. I volunteered at schools and community centers in Seattle’s Central District and at shelters downtown. Free of the strictures of my self-loathing and its corresponding ambition, I ambled in good conscience about the campus, and the city—a better man. Of course, the cynic might look at me now—disgraced politician, low-rent attorney—and doubt the sincerity of this transformation. For them, I offer this one proof:

  For ten years, I did not run for a goddamned thing.

  “You know, it’s possible to go a bit overboard with this kind of thing,” Dr. Stanton finally said when I showed him the tattoo on my lower back—the Chinese symbol for compassion (at least that’s what I was told; I found out later it was actually the symbol for compensation, the word right next to “compassion” in the illustrated dictionary my tattoo artist used). Dr. Stanton was uncomfortable with my rebirth, I think, because he worried about his role in it, and specifically, that he was now my mentor.

  “Look, I’m not really the mentor type,” he said. “I’m sorry about your brother and I’m glad you found something meaningful in my class, but that was Plato. That wasn’t me. I don’t even like Plato.”

  I was amused and impressed by his protests, which seemed in keeping with the modesty and intelligence that a great mentor should have. Still, it was he who encouraged me to continue along in my previous poli-sci/prelaw track (“Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater”), insisting that my brother would’ve wanted me to be a lawyer and that I could do more good as a lawyer than “playing bongos on some street corner.”

  So I spent three years getting my master’s in sociology at the University of Washington and then found my way into a lesser law school, not so much out of some deep desire to practice law, but out of a much deeper desire not to leave college, the brick womb of my rebirth. I lingered in law school as long as they would have me, taking a few classes here and there, constantly changing my emphasis.

  Dr. Stanton finally gave in to my need for a mentor, and he and I met once a week for lunch, during which time I would share with him some new plan for using my law degree to bring about unlikely social change. I was forever trying to earn his respect, and forever getting his good-natured scorn instead. I will list a few of my ideas and Dr. Stanton’s responses, ideas that I should really have registered with the Patent Office’s Department of Hubris. I planned to:

  Open a nonprofit legal services clinic for indigent elderly men (“There’s a great deal of money to be made in hobo law,” Dr. Stanton said); establish a safe house and law office for battered women; use the same house to care for and represent homeless children and orphans; organize a team of lawyers to sue for third-world debt relief and the international removal of land mines (“I do like the idea of sending lawyers to blow up old land mines”); create a pro bono law firm to research old Indian treaties and then sue the government over them; and offer free representation to the families of executed prisoners (“Yes. Help Dutch’s family get his handguns back from the coppers”).

  Richard Stanton was—and remains—the finest and truest person I know in the world. We would meet at one of the bars near the campus, spend the first half of our lunch with me fantasizing about my conscience-clearing law career and the second half with Dr. Stanton complaining about the poli-sci department and the university as a whole. He felt no respect from his colleagues; he was mistrusted, he said, because of his television and private-sector background—“Nobody likes a convert, Mr. Mason”—and at the same time, he was seen as something of a simple traditionalist within more progressive academic circles because he rarely published and insisted on teaching forms that had been long taken for granted and left behind. He drank more and more during these lunches, and often stayed to drink alone after I left, although he was the kind of drunk who knew he was ingesting a depressant and so he grew quieter and more
reflective with each glass of draft beer—no raised voices or lampshades for him. At the end of our lunches, he always seemed on the verge of tears. Somewhere in there I became aware of a horrible event in his past, right around the time he went in for the earring and the ponytail, something that caused him tremendous guilt and sorrow. He left a woman behind, I think—his wife, probably, but it seemed to be more than that—and either he assumed that I knew the details or he believed the details were beside the point, because he only ever made glancing reference to it (“my collapse,” or “the big fuck-up”) and thwarted every attempt I made to find out what happened. (“What happened?” he responded when I asked him directly. “You think this shit just happens? Like the weather? Wake up and smell the self-determination, Mr. Mason. Put down the bong and take a hit of reality.”)

  This was my life in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a satisfying mixture of college, grad and law school (seventy-two thousand dollars in student loans), sodden lunches with my mentor and friend, and the occasional vegetarian Birkenstock Ten Thousand Maniacs girlfriend.

  I finally graduated from law school in 1993—at the age of twenty-eight and near the bottom of my class—and, while I waited to take the bar exam, got a job working with Max Gerroux, Dr. Stanton’s best friend, a former liberal appeals-court judge who’d given up the bench as part of an elaborate plea bargain over the butt of a joint that a state trooper saw in his car ashtray one day, a plea bargain that allowed him to continue practicing law and smoking joints. The latter he did with far greater passion and frequency than the former. Every time I knocked on his door, Max would grunt, “One moment, please,” like someone who has been punched in the stomach, then let out a great exhale, spray something around his office and answer the door with narrow, red eyes. “Clark!” He always seemed surprised that I was there.

  “There” was a small office on the second floor of a brick storefront in the funky Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, above a Greek restaurant, behind a door marked simply LAW OFFICE. The office smelled like feta cheese and tahini sauce, and was decorated with metal filing cabinets and a horrific nude self-portrait of Max in oil colors (Dr. Stanton called the painting “greasy gnome porn”). Max was barely five feet tall, with jet-black hair. He was half Flathead Indian and half Jewish—“the first and last of my people”—and he credited this background for creating his heartbreaking sense of humor and his preternatural ability to abide suffering and deflect bullying.