Land of the Blind

by Jess Walter

  Luckily, these were just the sorts of law he liked to practice.

  “Look,” he would say over the phone when some prosecutor was playing hardball on a plea bargain. “I am a Flathead Jew. You’re welcome to keep busting my ass, but you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t fucking notice!”

  He represented drug cases almost exclusively, and twice he came under investigation for taking his payment in product. Our office was even hit once. During the raid I stood next to Max, who smiled as filing cabinets and drawers were emptied on the floor. He wasn’t a great lawyer, but the man knew how to hide a stash.

  Unlike Dr. Stanton, when I confided in Max my plans for pro bono and legal social work, he beamed with pride. He got positively giddy about the hobo clinic and the Native People’s Justice Center and the rest, nodding and grinning and planning right along with me. “Yes, I see it. We should get right on that, Clark. I know some influential people who will demand to fund this idea of yours. We’ll have this thing up and running by the first of the year.” I don’t think he really knew any influential people—they certainly never came to our office—and anyway, we barely made enough on his drug cases to pay for our spot above the Greek restaurant, let alone do pro bono work.

  I passed the bar, and by the spring of 1994, when I got a letter that would mark the beginning of this recent trouble, I was a bearded and ponytailed practicing lawyer and a junior partner in the two-person progressive law firm of Max Gerroux Law Offices. But before I detail the contents of that letter, I should make one more thing clear about Max, a detail that explains both Max and my deep loyalty to him.

  He was dying. A snakelike tumor had taken up residence in his spine. It was wrapping around the bone and working its way through his body, wearing a kind of Ho Chi Minh Trail from his brain to his testicles. He had long ago given up on the doctors’ ability to beat the tumor, saying that it seemed more natural to have the cancer kill him than the doctors. Everyone knew he was dying. He used this fact most effectively in court, pushing for speedier trials and expediting plea bargains and cutting through reams of legal bullshit (“We all know I won’t be here to appeal this. Don’t make me go through the motions of something I’ll never see to the end”).

  If this sounds manipulative, you will just have to take my word that he didn’t wield his illness cynically or unnecessarily. In fact, he talked about his painful and insidious cancer so plainly and without affect that to this day, I consider matter-of-factness a form of courage. Some days we would be going over paperwork and he would make a small groan or squeeze his eyes tight—“Clark, I need to make a quick phone call”—and I would understand that he needed to get high to fight off the intense pain. It was also understood between us that I needed to protect my future as a lawyer by leaving the room, that I was to never witness his drug use—in case the cops returned to finish their raid. I honored the small deception and usually went for a walk down to Lake Union when I knew he was getting high. I was with Max for six months before I realized why we represented drug dealers: partly because Max honestly believed that the police violated civil rights in drug cases and partly because Max needed to be paid in dope.

  As for me, I suppose I cared for Max out of a surrogate loyalty toward Ben, and as I watched Max’s cancer progress, I concentrated on every detail, every wince and groan, those things I’d missed nine years earlier with Ben.

  One day in the late spring of 1994, Max and I were working on an appeal, the paperwork spread out before us on his pressed-board desk. My mind was elsewhere, specifically on the aforementioned letter, which my parents had forwarded to me the day before. And so I didn’t notice that Max was making small huffing noises, as if he was being punched in the rib cage. Finally, when I looked up, I could see that he was glistening with sweat and having difficulty breathing. His eyes were pressed shut.

  “You need to make a phone call,” I said.

  He winced with pain. “I don’t know if I can.”

  “Let me help,” I said quietly.

  “I don’t think you should—”

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Please,” I said.

  He pointed to the oil painting of himself naked. I was shocked that it would be in such an obvious place. Even the cops had looked behind that painting. I took the painting down but there was nothing behind it on the wall, no safe or false panel. “Frame,” he muttered. “Lower right-hand corner.” I pulled the frame apart and saw it was hollowed out. A small ceramic pipe, matches, and a sandwich baggie of rich green marijuana slid out. I loaded the bowl and slid it between his quivering lips. I waved the match in a circle around the bits of green bud, and he inhaled with short, raspy breaths; the buds sparked red and burned away, and a line of gray-blue smoke issued from the pipe. Max’s eyelids fluttered and he held the smoke in his lungs as long as he could, then let it seep out. A quiver of something—pain or relief, I’m not sure there was a difference—rolled through his body.

  I refilled the bowl and held it out for him again.

  “Thank you,” he said, and smoked the second bowl. When we were done, I helped him lie on the couch in his office and I left to go for a walk. I walked through Fremont and down to the lake. I sat on the bank and watched some sailors working on an old crab ship, the hull rusted and streaked. I could hear them across the water, talking and laughing. I pulled the letter out of my pocket and read it again, for the tenth time that day. I will not recount it from memory, except to say it started with a plain, friendly greeting and an apology for not coming to Ben’s funeral all those years ago. There was some business about how I hadn’t been at the ten-year reunion and congratulations on becoming a lawyer. The rest of the letter I will quote from memory, because it is seared in my mind:

  I’m going to be in Seattle on business next month and I thought maybe we could get together, if you want to. There’s something I’d like to talk with you about.

  I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately.

  With love,

  Dana

  5 | SHE WAS BEAUTIFUL

  She was beautiful, even more than I’d remembered. Her hair was short and spiky, cut so that it framed her round face and dark eyebrows, her slender nose and round eyes, and made each of these features appear singular—as if they had been invented specifically for her face. But even more than her physical appearance, Dana Brett had acquired a comfort with herself, with her body; she wore a long, tight print skirt with no sign of her old smart-girl self-consciousness, and watching her walk in it, a man could be forgiven if he thought of trading everything—family, career, self-respect—for one day spent tracing that skirt’s gentle roll over hips and thighs, to the calf, where a glimpse of smooth, tanned ankle revealed a simple silver bracelet, a dizzying piece of jewelry that was impossible to ignore, to avoid imagining it as the only thing left on her, gleaming in the light from a bedroom candle.

  You may surmise by this description that I had been pining away for Dana during the twelve years that we were apart, but that’s not exactly the truth. In general, I don’t pine. As I have said, I continued to date, though it’s true that Dana had never been far from my thoughts. And it was only at that moment, staring at the vision of Dana Brett outside the restaurant Cyclops (I know…but the food was good), that I understood why I’d dropped my habit of trophy blondes and had gone out of my way to date girls who were approximations of Dana, best-guess estimates of what she would be like now: smart, liberal, funky girls who wore hemp bracelets and crocheted hats and read poetry chapbooks and talked of saving sea mammals. When Ben died I lost the chance to live through his eyes, and while I didn’t imagine that I loved Dana during those ten years, I think I did start to live through her eyes, to imagine that my new self might please her, as strange as that may sound. I always thought I would see her again, and part of me wondered if I would feel the way I eventually did feel that afternoon—pained, stricken, for the first time in my life, in love. I wasn’t really surprised to feel lik
e that, but I was surprised to find that the surrogates for Dana that I’d been dating were nothing like her, and had no more in common with her than with those sea mammals. For Dana wasn’t simply another progressive arty chick. She was, as I said, singular, and no cheap granola knockoff could’ve captured her combination of natural beauty and self-confidence, all of these disparate elements held in place by the binding heat of her.

  She stood on the sidewalk in Belltown and looked far too sophisticated for the funky Cyclops, with its Jell-O–mold exterior, the entire wait staff in black-rimmed glasses and Doc Marten’s. I parked and walked down the sidewalk, and when she stepped forward I knew that my life had come back to this point for some reason, that our ten-year orbits had finally circled back around on us because we were meant to be together.

  I keep searching for another word, but she was simply beautiful. Beautiful. And I wasn’t the only person to think so. Her husband seemed to agree with me.

  “Clark,” she said, kissing me on the cheek. “It’s so good to see you! This is Michael Langford, my husband. Michael, this is my good friend Clark Mason.”

  He stepped forward and stuck out his hand. He was tall.

  I held up my hand and pretended to cough so I wouldn’t have to say anything until I could get my wits back. The wind blew dust along the sidewalk, and I pretended to have something in my good eye while I waited for the flush to leave my face.

  Inside the restaurant, they sat on one side of a small glass-topped table, holding hands in her glorious lap. I sat on the other side, my hands in my own lap. Dana kept staring at me and smiling.

  “I can’t believe how different you look,” she said. “I like it. The rugged look.”

  I flicked reflexively at my ponytail, which now reached the middle of my back, and stroked my beard. “That’s what I was going for. The ragged look.”

  “You look great,” she said, and I could hear the tone in her voice that said I didn’t look great, that I looked pretty awful. And that was when I fell apart, when nine years of progress fell away and I was the boy on the bus again.

  The menus came and I snuck a hateful glimpse at Michael as he read the entrées. I hadn’t had a chance to take him in, but as I looked I felt myself blush again. He looked a little like me. Not the me in the restaurant that day, the roadie for a Southern rock band, but the me I might have been if I hadn’t had the epiphany in Dr. Stanton’s class, if Ben hadn’t died. And for the first time, staring at them—neat and clean in their NorCal money-light way—I hated my Platonic rebirth, and began to think of it as nothing more than some kind of irrational, extended grief.

  Michael Langford had short dark hair, a solid build, and a square jaw. He was tall and athletic, the kind of capable, white American male upon whom this country was built, the kind cast in old World War II movies and westerns, the kind adept at selling big-ticket American items—cars and condos and congressional agendas. The kind I always wanted to be. You recognize your own kind, of course, and I could see this guy was what I had been once, an achiever, a success junkie, a salesman of the first order, a runner for things, a politician—perhaps not in practice, but certainly in bearing. While I was working to make myself the kind of man I thought Dana would love, she fell in love with the kind of man I used to be.

  When the waitress came, I had the briefest urge to order a skewer of irony. I looked down at my hands and wondered, What the fuck happened to me?

  “What kind of law do you practice, Clark?” asked Michael after we’d ordered.

  “For the time being, I’m doing some criminal law,” I said. “First amendment cases. A lot of pro bono.” I wanted to stop talking, but my tongue was operating freely. “Illegal searches. Civil rights violations. I recently started a nonprofit legal aid service for homeless children.” Shut up, I told myself. “And the elderly.” For God’s sake. “And battered women.” I tailed off right around that point, though I may have mentioned orphans and illegal aliens and widows and land mines and slavery reparations.

  “Wow,” Michael said.

  Dana blushed.

  “I’m fielding offers from some big firms in town, though, thinking of going corporate.” I was amazed at the lies that were spewing from my mouth. I couldn’t get a job parking cars at a big firm. But these were more than lies. I was drowning, prattling on helplessly, hoping I might say something that would make me feel better. “I’m also considering international law. Working abroad.” Abroad? I was considering working abroad?

  “Really,” Michael said. “Where?”

  I was curious, too. “Portugal.”

  We were all quiet for a moment, as I geared up to talk about the complex Portuguese legal system and the demands there for civil rights lawyers. I prayed for my food to arrive so I could shove it in my mouth and shut myself up, so I could divert myself and stop staring at Dana’s piercing eyes, so I could stop lying like a husband at three in the morning. “So when did you two get married?” I asked desperately.

  “Three months ago,” Dana said. “At a winery north of San Francisco. It was spur of the moment. I didn’t even tell my parents.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “Three months.” We didn’t see each other for twelve years and I missed my chance by three fucking months. I tore at a piece of bread and crumbs shot into the air. “I’m engaged myself…about to be engaged.”

  “Oh, what’s her name?” Dana asked.

  “You don’t know her.” Course, neither did I.

  “What does she do?”

  “Pilot.”

  “For an airline?”

  “Mmm.” I chewed on some bread. “Yeah.”

  “What’d you say her name was?”

  I chewed and swallowed my bread. “Megan. She’s out of town. Megan.”

  “I’d love to meet her sometime.”

  “She’s out of town.”

  Dana smiled. “It really is great to see you, Clark,” she said again.

  “So you both work in computers?” I asked.

  “We work for a small finance firm, sort of like an investment bank, but lighter on its feet, committed to emerging tech companies. In fact, that’s what we wanted to talk to you about. You see, Clark,” Michael began, as if I were buying a vacuum from him, as if he’d just dumped crumb cake on my carpet to demonstrate the beltless sucking power of the R-690 Clean Machine, “what we do is function as a kind of a buffer, a go-between for Charlie and—”

  Dana touched his arm lightly, and that simple touch filled me with such deep longing and regret that I felt the last part of my new self tear away. “He’s not going to know what Charlie means,” Dana said gently to her husband.

  Michael rolled his eyes at himself, like he’d been stupid to imagine that I might know what Charlie was—and even though I had no idea, I couldn’t stomach the condescension of having him actually tell me.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I forget I’m not talking to industry people sometimes. We call venture capital people ‘VC,’ you know, like the Viet Cong. Charlie? VC? So the people who put up the money are Charlie.”

  “Sure,” I said, and looked toward the kitchen for my soup. “Charlie.”

  “Well, if a small company needs seed money,” Michael said, “we put him in touch with investors. Charlie—the money person—tends to be in his fifties and sixties, while Chad—what we call the idea person—tends to be in his twenties. We fill the gap between Charlie and Chad. We explain Charlie to Chad and Chad to Charlie, the money to the idea and the idea to the money.” He winked. “And we take a piece of both.”

  “It sounds dry,” Dana said. “But it’s fascinating. And creative.” It occurred to me that she was working as hard as I was to impress, and I thought about how she’d changed too, how she must think that I—brave defender of indigent pregnant Indian hobos who’d stepped on land mines—saw her, perhaps that I would judge her as having lost something of her idealism. I thought about Ben’s question to me about perceptions: which is truer, the way we see ourselves, or th
e way others see us. We always imagine that we know ourselves, but in truth, we can only see out. We can’t see in.

  “Tell him about the virtual grocery store,” Dana said.

  “No,” Michael said. “I’ve gone on enough.”

  “Please,” Dana said, as if anxious to show me she hadn’t sold out completely, that she was still the same smart, idealistic Dana.

  “Well,” Michael began, and then he raised an eyebrow as if he was about to propose something a little bit risqué, a threesome among the Jell-O molds. “What if, at six o’clock, you decided to make fish tacos for dinner. But you have no fish. You have no tortillas. You simply touch a computer screen and a company fills your entire order, swings by the fresh fish store and the grocery store and delivers your entire order to your door within twenty minutes. And what if the computer knows you and knows what kind of milk and bread you like, and what if it’s hooked up to your refrigerator, and it instantly checks every store in the city until it finds the best prices for your particular milk and bread, and what if you are delivered your personalized groceries for less than you would have paid to gather them yourself? What would you say to that?”

  “I’d say…What are the odds?”

  “Exactly!” Michael said.

  Dana must’ve caught my sarcasm because she looked down at the table.

  “We tell investors that we aren’t just interested in making money,” Michael said. “We’re idea farmers. We plant them, grow them, and water them. We want to build a forest of ideas, up and down the West Coast. And that’s where you come in.”