by Jess Walter
“They get the motorcycle, too?” my dad asked.
It was actually the last thing I had left. It was stored in a friend’s garage in Seattle, and I had forgotten to list it in my dwindling assets. The next weekend I took the bus to Seattle, rode the bike home, and gave it to my dad. He tried to make me take it back, or sell it, but I insisted. The very next day he rode it to work. Unfortunately, it was only three months before the lawyers tracked the motorcycle down and took it away. I apologized to Dad, but he waved his hand.
“I didn’t like it anyway.” He never mentioned the bike after that, but my mom said he rode it to work every day while he had it.
I continued to put my life back together. I hung a shingle in Spokane and began to practice law again—wills for people with nothing to leave behind, divorces for people with nothing to split. I got a little bit of contract work, enough to start paying my ex-wife, to get a very small apartment and an old Honda Civic. I stopped wearing the glass eye and put my patch back on. I grew my hair a little bit longer. I breathed. Ate. Walked. Talked a little. Was I better? I believed so. I made the mistake of thinking the trappings were my problem, the symptoms were my disease. I was poor, I thought, so I must be on my way to being whole again.
Then, more than a year after the election—this January, just a few weeks ago—I finally went to see Eli Boyle. Honestly, I wasn’t angry with him. In some important way, I believed I deserved what he’d done. And yet I hadn’t wanted to see him until then.
We imagine that time has qualities of its own, a weight and a girth, powers of redemption and recovery. We believe that time will fix or heal, or at least resolve. But sometimes the time just passes. The days go by and nothing changes, nothing.
I drove up the face of the South Hill. I turned on Cliff Drive and drove past the mansions to the end of the cliff, where the lesser homes clung to the tawny slope like billeted climbers. Eli’s lawn and trees were overgrown, the house empty. This was all that was left of Empire Interactive. The employees had all been fired by Eli or had wandered away. Louis was the last to go, almost a year before. Since then, Eli had moved everything he could carry up to his carriage house apartment, where he still lived. He had painted EMPIRE INTERACTIVE on a small sign and posted it outside his door. Unlike me—and Michael and Dana, it turned out—Eli had been selling his technology stocks along the way, and he was keeping Empire on life support from the last of the money that he’d saved, hoping like all the surviving tech companies to make it through the long night until the money rose again.
I climbed the stairs and knocked on the door. Dead bolts slid, hooks were lifted, keys turned, and finally the door opened and he was standing there, shifting his weight from foot to foot. I hadn’t seen Eli in sixteen months. He’d gotten heavier, his hair thinner, a dusting of red whiskers across his cheeks and chin. And there was something in his eyes, that darting; when he blinked it was like he was in pain, like he was trying to force glass from his eyes. He backed into his apartment. He had this way of scrunching up his nose to push his glasses up. He did this, they slid back, and he did it again. The room smelled like coffee, pizza, and body odor.
“I didn’t want to do it, but you gave me no choice—”
“I know,” I said.
“The whole thing, you running in the first place, it was my idea—”
“I know.”
“And you brought that woman in—”
“I know, Eli.”
“It’s always you and me and then you always forget, you always forget—”
“I know, Eli. I won’t forget anymore.” I walked slowly around the apartment, Empire reduced to these stacks of boxes and binders at our feet. He grimaced as he backed slowly to his computer, still unsure, I suppose, just what I meant to do to him.
“It was…you…betrayed…I—” Eli seemed unglued, his eyes darting back and forth. “I couldn’t let it go. You have to stand up sometimes. Fight back.” His voice had no modulation, like an idling engine, and I could see that he was sick in some way.
“I’m not here to talk about that,” I said. “That’s all in the past.”
He nodded unsurely and made a small whistling sound.
“I tried to call you, but your phone has been disconnected.”
“It was tapped,” he said. “I kept calling to have them get the bugs off, but they wouldn’t so I finally just disconnected it.” He pointed at the computer. “I have e-mail, but I think they’re watching that, too.”
“I’m here to see the game.”
“It’s not a game,” he said. Again, the painful blink.
“I want to see it.”
“It’s not ready.”
“I know it’s not ready. It’s never ready. But I need to see it, Eli.”
He watched me for a few moments, then turned on his computer, opened a couple of files, and the game engine began loading. “It’s very rough. Still having trouble with the transitions. It doesn’t go very far into the action yet.” He talked as he worked the keyboard. “Bryan left the pixel shaders in a terrible state, and…and—” He looked down through his glasses at the screen. “Just when I think I’ve finally gotten it to be organic, I see some other thing I didn’t anticipate. It’s that Michael Langford. I know there’s more venture capital, but he won’t release it—”
The computer screen went black and then opened on a pastoral scene, a village in the distance. The graphics were nice, if a little flat, already out of date, passed up two years earlier by the 3-D photorealistic real-time rendering stuff. Even so, there was a quality to the graphics that was soothing and familiar. Tiny electronic birds chirped, and white puffs of sheep sailed in the distance. Eli used the mouse to move us forward, and we glided, from his character’s point of view, across the field, the village growing in our vision. But the computer stopped and the scene lurched and was replaced by a close shot of the village gate. “I hate that,” Eli said. “That hiccup. That’s what I’m talking about; it’s very rough. And I’m telling you, it doesn’t go very far into the scene yet.”
“I want to see.”
On the gate were the words USER NAME: ___ and PASSWORD: ___.
Eli turned to me and it took a second before I realized that he wouldn’t type his password until I turned away.
“Dontes,” I guessed, thinking of the name on the Pete Decker file, the Monte Cristo prison he’d constructed, and most of all, of the elaborate way Eli had helped me build up my dream of a political career, before pulling it out from under me. “Edmond Dontes,” I said.
Eli looked at me in horror. “How did you know that?”
I didn’t answer. After a moment, he typed his password. The gate opened, and Eli’s alter ego entered his village. Children and maidens rushed up to greet him. His computer-generated arms extended stiffly on either side of the screen, rubbing the kids’ heads and taking flowers from the women. Then the image on the screen swung around slowly and there was Eli Dontes himself, tall and muscular, with a bushy mustache and curly brown hair, square of features and back. Eli saw me look from him to the vision of him on the computer, and he blushed and looked down. And then, the computer screen went blank, the picture replaced by strings of code.
“There are a lot of other scenes, but we’re having trouble getting them to flow together.”
“That’s it?” I asked. “That’s all you have?”
“Like I said, it’s a little rough. Some glitches. If Michael would just release the rest of the investors’ money—”
“That’s actually why I’m here,” I said. “Michael has someone who wants to buy Empire, or the concept of it, anyway.” I reached in my briefcase and pulled out Michael’s fax. “They want whatever you have, all development and research materials, all rights to the name and the likeness of the game.”
“It’s not a game,” Eli said quietly.
“I doubt they’re going to still want it once they see it,” I said, “but it’s an offer, Eli. Any offer is good. Especially given the climate
and the game’s…limitations.”
He glanced over, then went back to reading the fax. When he got to the price, he laughed. “Two hundred thousand dollars? Is he serious? That’s offensive.”
“At least it’s something,” I said. “And this isn’t just you. Michael and Dana. Me. We could all use the money, Eli.”
“That sneaky asshole,” he said. “I know what he’s doing.”
“You’ve been using your savings to keep the thing afloat. How much longer can you do that?” In front of his house, the Mercedes had a For Sale sign on it.
“Michael’s wanted this from the beginning,” Eli said. “He’s wanted it for himself from the very beginning.” His eyes narrowed again.
“Eli,” I said, “if you run out of money, they’ll take your house, everything.”
He waved his hand toward the house, across the lawn. “They can have the house.”
“At least consider this.”
“Tell Michael I want my money.” Eli continued to stare at the fax.
“Listen to me. Michael doesn’t have your money. He’s as broke as you and me. Everyone’s broke, Eli. You have to sell the game.”
“Not a game!” He waved the fax around, then relaxed. “Don’t call it a game.” Then I saw the look on his face that I’d seen when he showed me the photos of Pete Decker, and I couldn’t help thinking of him up here eighteen months earlier, during the election, pacing around, cursing me for betraying him again, for letting him get close and then pulling away. “Tell Michael to give me more money and I’ll finish the game.”
“Look,” I said, “I have to be honest with you. The game isn’t worth two thousand dollars, let alone two hundred thousand. Three years ago, maybe. But technology has passed it by. The things you’re trying to do—wristwatches do that now.”
Eli wasn’t hearing a word I said. “So Langford thinks he can get Empire out from under me. I should’ve guessed. The levels of treachery, that’s the thing. Your true enemy is always the last one to reveal himself.”
“Eli, just think about it. Please.”
“Don’t worry,” he said, “I can take care of Michael Langford.”
When I left I could see him in the window above the garage, the small curtain pulled back, the lenses from his glasses reflecting the light as he watched me drive away.
That evening I called Michael to tell him that Eli had refused even to consider selling the game. Dana answered. I hadn’t talked to her since the frenzy of the election, when I’d called to tell her I was getting married. Now she said she was sorry about the election, and about my divorce. We small-talked. I told her I was practicing law again, that I was going to stay. I could hear in my own voice the sense of settled defeat, of fatigue. “Maybe you were right about Spokane,” I said.
“What did I say?”
“You said it was the last real place.”
She laughed. “And is that a good thing?”
“Yeah, it is,” I said. “You’ve got to be tough here, a realist. For me, yeah, that is a good thing.”
She said she and Michael were at a kind of equilibrium. They’d had to sell their big house in Los Altos and were living in a smaller place in Sunnyvale, but they were clearing away the debt and Techubator was flirting with profit again.
“There’s this sense among all the people down here,” she said, “that if we can make it a few more months, the money will start to come back.”
“You’ll make it,” I said. “You’re too smart, and Michael’s…relentless.”
“Yes,” she said. I could hear noise in the background. “We’re having Amanda’s birthday party,” Dana said, and then she sighed. “Oh, Clark—” and I could hear in her voice a shadow of the huge longing that I felt.
“I’ll get Michael,” she said after a moment.
As I waited I could hear children laughing in the background, and Dana asking who wanted cake. That’s when I started doing the math in my head.
“Congressman!” Michael said into the phone. “Oh, wait, but you lost, didn’t you? Well, at least you have your wife to comfort you. Oh, wait, you lost her too.”
“Eli won’t sell,” I said.
“He has to.”
“I tried to tell him that, but—”
“Try harder.” And then he hung up to go back to the party.
I sat with the phone on my shoulder, clicking off the months with my fingers. Amanda was four. The date was January twentieth. Go back four years and nine months: April 20, 1998.
I couldn’t speak for that entire month, but I could account for one day. On April 16, 1998, Dana was with me, laughing and kissing my neck, sliding out of her booze-soaked skirt in a hotel room in Spokane.
6 | WE NEVER LEARN
We never learn anything. Our lives circle back around endlessly, presenting us with the same problems so we can make the same mistakes. We pretend we are moving forward but we live on a globe rotating on an axis, orbiting a burning sphere that is itself orbiting with a million other round hot stones. In a universe of circles, movement is just the illusion that comes from spinning, like a carousel—the faster it spins, the faster the world moves around it.
How else to explain what began to form in my mind? How else to explain how a man could lose all that I’d lost—a childhood, an eye, a woman, an election, a fortune, a brother, maybe even a daughter—and still believe that, in the end, he might win? How else to explain how I could look at my sick friend Eli Boyle, who had wanted nothing his whole life except my help, and begin imagining him as the instrument of my treachery? If I have not been standing in this very spot for thirty-six years, spinning in a tight circle, how else to explain my position today?
When I went back to see Eli, the whole thing was already taking shape. It would be horrible, but defensible, if all I did was fail to stop Eli before his delusions got worse, before he got dangerous; if I just stood by while he paced and ranted and the black metallic handgun hummed and vibrated in that drawer. I would still feel responsible, but at least I could have some technical deniability, that weak measure of conscience of someone who looks the other way in the presence of evil. What I did was inexcusable.
I showed up at Eli’s house breathless and frightened. I lied to him. I told him that he was right, that Michael was holding millions of dollars from us, that investors were clamoring to get back into Empire, but Michael wanted the game for himself.
“He’s jealous of you.” I held up the two-year-old copy of Wired in which Eli was quoted (“The future of gaming is in giving up the illusion of the game”). I told him that Michael said that if we didn’t sell Empire, he would sue us and send us to jail.
“Can…is…can he do that?”
“Sure,” I said. “We faked those presentations. We funneled investors’ money into the campaign without their knowledge. We’ll go to jail, and he’ll end up with the game.”
“Not a game!” Eli seethed, and his eyelids tried to squeeze the world away.
I went up there every day for the next week and watched him pace and rant and vow revenge. “We should’ve never gotten involved with Michael. He’s a thief.”
“He’s sitting there in California with all that money,” I agreed, “all that money the investors wanted to go to Empire. He’s sitting there laughing at you.
“He’s going to steal the whole thing,” I told Eli. “He’s going to steal it and ruin it and make millions and he’s going to laugh at you the whole time.”
Eli shook and sputtered with anger. “He can’t…I…won’t…It’s—”
I could feel myself giving in to something dark, something I’d always known was inside, but had always tried to suppress. I remembered Pete Decker on the bus, goading me into fighting Eli. Kill that faggot motherfucker! “He’ll change the characters,” I said. “He’ll make it a bunch of princesses, or set it in the future. He’s going to turn it into just another game, a stupid test of hand-eye coordination. Ms. Pac-Man.”
After a few days of this, Eli’s sput
tering and shaking began to go away, and I could see the thing forming in his mind—as clearly as if it were my own mind—until one day we sat together at the lunch counter at Fletts, speaking in low voices over cups of clam chowder.
“You can’t have anything to do with this,” he said.
“If you say so.”
“It has to be me,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Okay.”
“From here on out, don’t ask me any questions.”
“I won’t.”
“You need to be out of town.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think?” he snapped, as if I was an idiot. “We have your political career to think about.”
I stared at my soup.
“Call Michael,” he said. “Tell him I want to set up a meeting for two weeks from now. Tell him the meeting has to be kept secret, and it has to be in Spokane. Tell him Empire is ready.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll e-mail him the details of the meeting.”
“Okay.”
“If he asks, tell him I’m really losing it. Making crazy demands.”
I had to look away. “I’ll tell him.”
“And listen. Afterward, you’re not going to see me for a while. I may have to go away. Don’t worry, I’ll contact you when Empire is ready.” He smiled. “We’ll have the money for you to run for Congress again. We’ll do it right this time. Just you and me. Not all those outsiders from Seattle. No women.”
“Right,” I said.
Then Eli took a bite of soup and pointed the spoon at me. “He’s going to hurt like he’s never imagined someone could hurt. He’s going to hurt the way you and I hurt.”
I didn’t answer.
After lunch, he asked me to take him to the general store. Eli went in alone. He came out with a sack and I could tell by the shape that it contained a box of shells. “Don’t ask,” he said. At his apartment I sat in the other room, pretending to read a magazine, but I could see through the doorway into the kitchen as he loaded the shells into the gun, one by one, until all six chambers were full. I wish I could say that it filled me with dread, that it snapped me out of this craziness, but I watched with fascination.