Land of the Blind (26 page)

I
t was unbelievable to me that Dana could’ve fallen in love with such a sneaky, coldhearted, lying bastard as Michael Langford. She seemed oblivious to his manipulation of her, his cheating of clients, his double-dealing with colleagues and competitors. She also seemed oblivious to his intense dislike of me. Oh, when we were around other people, Michael was friendly, but when it was just the two of us he berated me, called me a fraud, and taunted me with the fact that he had married the only woman I have ever loved.

“Hello, Mason,” he would say when I answered the phone. “Who are you bilking today?” When I would say something he disagreed with, he’d say, “Mason, are you looking through your bad eye again?” When he didn’t return my calls right away, he’d say, “Sorry I didn’t get right back to you, Mason. I was nailing my wife.”

Michael’s company was called Techubator. (He and his partners thought it was a clever name for a tech company incubator; I always thought it sounded like a machine to help jack the fatty.) I only got involved with Techubator in the first place to spend time with Dana, and with Michael’s constant disdain and vicious barbs it was the only reason I stayed as long as I did. But as I got deeper into the business, Dana’s role kept decreasing. Then, in early 1998, she left the firm entirely to devote herself to creating Web sites for nonprofit agencies.

I was frantic. I tried to dissuade her through e-mails and phone calls, but she was adamant that it was time to move on. On her last day I flew down to Techubator headquarters in San Jose for her going-away party, and when the cake was gone and the chino-wearing staff had wandered back to their cubicles, I saw Dana sneak outside the office and found her on a park bench on a sidewalk in the business park.

She said the pace had gotten to her. “We’re running on a treadmill. We never get anywhere. We start these companies and then move on to the next
one before we know what happens. It’s like giving birth and never getting to see the babies grow up.”

“We had three IPO’s in the last six months, Dana,” I said. “We have three more in the works. How much bigger do the babies have to get?”

She had grown her hair longer; it was brown and straight, and she pushed it back out of those cinnamon eyes. “I don’t mean financially, Clark,” she said. “All of the things that were supposed to happen…the transformation of our economy and our culture. What happened to all of that?”

“My economy’s been transformed,” I said.

She ignored me. “Besides, it’ll be easier on me personally.”

I perked up, put my hand on hers. “Things tough at home?”

She looked up. “No,” she said, not convincingly. “I just think it’s not good for a couple to live together and work together. And frankly, I’m sort of bored, Clark. I need a new challenge. I need something more.”

In the time I’d spent at Techubator, Dana was always friendly toward me but she’d maintained a slight reserve. And yet, at meetings, I’d feel her eyes on me and I’d know she was thinking the same thing I was—that we’d somehow missed each other in the crash and whorl of our lives.

That’s what I felt sitting on that bench. With the words “something more” hanging in the air, I looked into her eyes. She didn’t look away. The space between us seemed charged. Dana’s mouth opened slightly.

“Dana—” I began.

“There you are,” said Michael, an edge in his voice.

We both looked up from the park bench.

Michael came into the courtyard, bent down and kissed her full on the mouth, then rested his hand on her neck and looked down at me. “We’re so glad you could come, Clark,” he said. “Did Dana tell you all about our plans?”

I said yes, and how impressed I was with her nonprofit Web site plans. Before coming to work for them, I reminded them, I’d done quite a bit of charity work myself.

“Oh, right. In Portugal,” Michael said evenly, nearly masking his sarcasm. “Did she tell you the best part? In a year or so, we’re going to start having kids.”

“No, she didn’t mention that part.”

“Or two years,” Dana said.

Michael squeezed her shoulders. “I can’t wait.”

A few weeks later I left Techubator and accepted a job with the Seattle law firm. I still remained involved with some of the companies funded through Michael’s venture capital contacts, and we were both still shareholders of Empire—which was chewing up seed money with no hope of having a real game in the near future—but I knew I couldn’t stand to have any more regular dealings with Michael Langford.

For four months I could think of no excuse to call Dana. But I found myself thinking about her every day, and I felt a charge, a gap in my breathing when I’d see her small oval face and those placid eyes.

Then, in April of ’98, I was invited to the technology symposium in Spokane. I agreed to go only if they included a presentation on what I said was the fastest-growing segment of the industry—Web pages for nonprofits. I told them I knew the perfect expert to come speak on that topic, and that coincidentally this person had lived in Spokane, too. And then I made an anonymous donation to the symposium to pay for this expert’s airfare. For her part, Dana seemed excited to be back to Spokane, and to see me, and that’s how Dana and I ended up together in the lounge at the Airport Ramada Hotel and how we found ourselves at a corner table, laughing and throwing back White Russians and Cape Cods, as if we might drink enough booze to float us over the locks between us, which is, of course, the only really good thing about booze.

I told her that her presentation had been great. (In fact she’d alienated the crowd a bit, contending that for every dollar a city spent attracting private technology firms, a city was morally required to spend a hundred dollars on computers for schools and other public projects.) I also remarked on the sorry state of affairs in Spokane, compared with new economy centers like Seattle and San Jose.

“Oh, they’re better off without all that shit,” Dana said, raising her glass to ask for another Cape Cod. “Sometimes I think this is the last real place on earth, Clark. Sometimes I think I haven’t been right since I left here.”

“Spokane?”

“If Michael would do it, I’d move back here in a minute. Have a bunch of kids.”

“What would Michael do here? There’s no technology base. There’s nothing.”

She shrugged. “He could be a waiter. He was a waiter when I met him. A
good
waiter. He could hold nine water glasses.” When she was drunk her right eyelid fluttered, and it occurred to me that if the left eyelid got going too, she might just lift off the ground. “That’s something. Bringing people water. That’s basic goodness. Someone is thirsty. You bring them water. What has any of this technology”—she pronounced it teck-nodgy—“really done for anyone, Clark? Does it make them less thirsty?” She swilled her drink. “We used to go to the mall to buy our CDs. Now we buy them at our desk. What’s really changed?”

“The whole world,” I said. “The whole world has changed.”

“Is this what you saw us doing when we were young?” she asked. “We were idealistic. We wanted more than this, Clark. Remember? Remember what you wanted?”

I stared into her fluttering eyes. “Yes,” I whispered. “I remember.”

She stared back at me, confused, and then it seemed to register, what I was talking about. She laughed, tossed her head back, and snorted. “I don’t mean that, silly.” She waved her hand dismissively and knocked my drink into my lap.

I jumped up and slapped at my crotch, where the Kahlúa had doused whatever had begun to smolder down there.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m a dope.” Then she took her drink, looked at it, and dumped it in her own lap, the vodka and cranberry juice making a small and inviting pool in her skirt. We both watched as the booze seeped into the small triangle between her thighs—until all that was left were six of the most fortunate ice cubes I’ve ever seen.

“There,” she said. “Even.”

Ten minutes later we were in her hotel room. I would like to say that the next eight minutes constituted one of those life-altering, transcendent moments that can occasionally occur when two people do what we attempted to do, but far too much liquor had crossed the breach for anything more than a boozy tumble. (
Ow. Ooh, not there. Mmmph. Are you okay? Sorry.
) We certainly did nothing to make good on the promise and longing of all those years.

And yet, when it was over, we held tight and I spent the next hour staring at the tiny blond hairs on her temple, listening to her breathe on my neck,
and we lay all night like that in each other’s arms, slowly sobering up, but not saying a word, not wanting to waste a second with talk or sleep, our fingertips lightly tracing each other’s bodies until dawn began to nudge at the curtains and we could stand it no longer and, aching, we pressed together again, and then all morning, clenching and arching and falling away. And I doubt that such things can be controlled, but the last memory I hope to indulge on this earth is the weight of Dana’s hand on my neck and the gust of her voice on my ear as she whispered, “
Clark. Oh my God, yes.
”

When I finally gave in, it was to the deepest sleep I can ever remember. When I awoke, about three that afternoon, Dana was sitting in a chair across from my bed, talking on the phone. “No,” she was saying. “It was fine.” She listened for a few minutes. “I’m flying out tonight.” She listened again. “Clark?” She looked up at me. “Yeah, I saw him a little bit…. Well, we didn’t make any plans, but if I see him, I’ll tell him hi.”

“Okay,” she said. “Love you too,” and hung up the phone.

“Hi,” she said to me.

“Hi.”

She smiled sadly, and I had the inexplicable feeling there was someone else in the room with us—some version of our pasts or vision of our futures, some overwhelming sadness. “You have the worst timing of any person I’ve ever met,” she said finally.

We showered separately, dressed, and drove into town. She wore a print dress that reminded me of the things she wore as a kid. She kept pushing her hair over her ears. We ended up at the Davenport Hotel, which was just then beginning another renovation, and I stood quietly in kinship with it, my insides long ago gutted and abandoned, dead for fifteen years and now, against all reason and odds, crying out for rebirth.

We drove out to the Valley, to her parents’ old house, in the apple orchards near the Idaho state line. They’d moved to Arizona a few years earlier, and Dana didn’t want to disturb the new owners. She sat low in the passenger seat of my rental car and traced the white porch railing on the car window. “We’re kids for such a short amount of time.” She turned and looked at me. “But forever.”

Dana had never been to my house when we were in high school, and I said nothing as we drove past it. My mother was in the yard, her back to us, bent
over a flower bed along the sidewalk in front of their house—her shoulders a little narrower, her hair a bouquet of gray. I passed behind her, a ghost in a rental car.

“Where is it?” Dana asked a few blocks later. “I thought we were going by your house.”

“It was back there,” I said.

At the airport, I ordered a drink, but Dana didn’t want one. We sat at the end of the terminal, watching mothers preboard with their babies.

“Have you thought about how you’re going to tell Michael?” I asked.

“Tell Michael?” She cocked her head.

I stared at her for a moment and then said, “Oh.” Understanding fell in my lap like a White Russian. “You’re not going to tell Michael.”

They announced her section of the plane and Dana stood. “Oh, Clark,” she said. “I’m sorry. It would kill him.” She kissed me. “This was nice. Maybe even something I needed. But I have to get back to my life now.”

This was nice. I lurched and burned and swayed and watched her walk all the way down the tarmac, until at the very end, just before she stepped on the plane, I swear I saw her glance back.

I
got drunk that night, and again the next night and pretty much every night for the next six weeks. I have always tried to drink moderately, but as you may have noticed by this point in my confession, I have a somewhat compulsive personality. So for me drinking moderately is akin to fucking moderately, or jumping moderately from a cliff. Either you do or you don’t. And after watching Dana get on that plane, I did. I got drunk on the plane back to Seattle, got drunk at the airport bar after I landed, and then—when Dana wouldn’t answer my e-mails—set about humiliating myself in a different bar each night for a month and change. I have fond memories, and fonder blackouts, from this time (one Saturday afternoon I staggered from a Pioneer Square bar and led a tour of the Seattle Underground to the water, where, thankfully, I was stopped before I could perform any baptisms). I will not indulge these lost evenings, these nights in which I was potted, canned, screwed, smashed, soaked, bottled, and blitzed; instead I’ll skip to the last night of this long hot binge, when I was summarily thrown out of the Triangle Pub for standing on a stool and asking for help measuring the bar’s hypotenuse.

After I was led outside I promptly fell over on the sidewalk, looked up into the drizzle, and saw a girl’s thin face staring down at me. She was young and lithe in her Deadhead sundress, her braided red hair and worn backpack. I immediately recognized her as one of the girls I’d slept with during my bohemian days.

“Tamira,” I said.

“No,” she said. “Kayla.”

“Oh. Kayla. You look like a Tamira.”

“Yeah. I just came out to tell you, it doesn’t have a hypotenuse.”

“What?”

“The bar. It’s an isosceles triangle. Doesn’t have any right angles. So you
can’t measure the hypotenuse.” She peered into my eyes. “What’s wrong with you?”

I asked her to marry me. We went instead to a late-night breakfast joint where I told her the whole sordid story while she ate ginger french toast and tofu sausage with one of her turquoise-ringed hands and smoked Lucky Strikes with the other.

“So you’re saying you spent the last three years trying to be like the guy that this Dana woman married?” she asked.

I thought about it. “Yes,” I said. “I guess I did.”

Kayla took a drag of a Lucky Strike. “Well, there’s your mistake. The last thing some married chick wants is a guy like her husband. You should go back to yourself.”

In a flash of understanding I saw that Kayla was right. Go back to myself. The problem was this: which self?

Two days later I was back in Spokane, at a cemetery downriver from the city. I crouched down in front of a small stone, set flush into the ground. I ran my finger over the letters,
BENJAMIN T. MASON
, and those cruel dates,
NOVEMBER
12, 1966–
NOVEMBER
19, 1985. I know there are people who go to such places to talk to the person who has died, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. (I also refuse to say that a person has “passed,” as if he has simply processed a rich meal.)

Mom had left plastic flowers on Ben’s grave, and a wooden hummingbird whose wings windmilled frantically in the wind. I straightened the flowers, wiped the grass clippings from the headstone, and wished that Ben could tell me what to do now. I remembered his saying that I really only lived in the perceptions of others, and suddenly it seemed painfully true. I couldn’t think of a time when I’d acted on my own, when I wasn’t driven by my grief for Ben or my love for Dana or my desire to show up Michael Langford—or, for that matter, the tyranny of Pete Decker or the suggestive looks of girls in high school. I wondered if I even had a self.

“I miss you,” I said aloud. Surprised at myself, I looked around to see if anyone had heard, but no one was near.

I left the cemetery and drove into Spokane, to the northeast end of downtown, to a brick storefront that had been an antique and junk shop until six months ago, when it became the offices of Empire Interactive.

This was at the beginning of Eli’s compulsion about security, and he’d
recently installed an elaborate key card system on the door. In addition, the windows were tinted so no one could see in. I pounded on a window, unsure if anyone inside could see me.

Finally the door opened and out came Louis Carver, beaming. “Clark! What are you doing here?”

“I came to check on my investment.”

Louis patted me on the small of my back. “Come in.”

I followed him through the door into a narrow anteroom, where a security camera monitored our progress, then through another key-carded door into what looked like a cafeteria: tile floor, long tables where a half-dozen people sat working intently on computer terminals. At the far end of this room were three small offices, one for Bryan the tech guy, one for Louis, and one for Eli.

He came out of his office wearing wrinkled slacks and a striped shirt with a salsa stain near the collar, his glasses slightly askew. “Clark!” he said, and then his piggy little eyes shifted around the room, as if embarrassed by the excitement in his voice.

“Hey, Eli.” I reached out and he took my hand reluctantly, gave it a soft, fleshy shake, and then turned back toward his office.

Louis gave me a lingering stare and then went back to work.

I followed Eli into his office, a simple, white-walled room, with a long computer table and the old Empire binders stacked on bookshelves along the walls. He looked out the window at the people in the office. “I don’t trust them,” he said. “I don’t like the way they look at me. They’re ingratiating. They smell money. They pretend to hang on every word I say. They pretend to like me.”

“Maybe they do like you,” I said.

He turned to me, one eyebrow raised, as if I’d just suggested that he become a male model or an exotic dancer. Then he turned back to stare into what they called the Game Room. “I just don’t know why we had to hire so many,” he said.

“We’ve got to get this thing off the ground, Eli,” I said. “If we don’t start earning money pretty soon, the investors are going to get antsy.”

“I don’t care,” Eli said. “I’ll pay them out of my own pocket.”

I had to beg him to show me what they were working on, including an e-mail component that would allow characters (Eli still wouldn’t call them players) to contact each other away from the instant messaging of the
game—to allow more backstabbing and double-dealing. “That’s the key,” Eli said: “treachery.” I hadn’t been by the office in more than three months, so he showed me the newest graphics, which were—as our team of young testers assured him—“killer.” He was especially excited about a prison for miscreant and broken characters—a rocky island covered with catacombs, tunnels, and torture chambers, straight out of
The Count of Monte Cristo
.

But he was leery of showing me much else, including the game engine that he and Bryan were constantly tinkering with, the “brains,” the basic system that ran the shadow world, took the information and the actions of the characters and translated them into the movements of people on the computer screen.

“It’s not that I don’t trust you, Clark,” he said, “but you come in contact with a lot of other companies. I’d hate for something to end up in the wrong hands.”

It was late in the afternoon. Eli had recently moved into the house on Cliff Drive (that place of horrors, now) and he invited me over. I said we could take my rental car—I knew Eli hated to drive—but he smiled wryly and pulled a single, plastic-coated, black key from his pocket. I followed him out back, and there it was: a new, dark gray Mercedes-Benz convertible, and the only extravagant thing I ever knew Eli to buy.

I followed him up the South Hill to his house, but after we parked he led me away from the main house to the small carriage house in back, where he was living. There was very little furniture in the carriage house, and his clothes were still in his suitcase. Apparently he only ate pizza; the boxes were stacked against one wall. “You want a beer?” he asked.

I explained that I’d been drinking too much lately, and that I’d recently had a kind of pre-midlife crisis. Yet after what had happened at the prom, I didn’t figure he’d sympathize with my attempts to steal Dana from another guy, so I spoke generally about my desire to find some part of myself that I’d forgotten. “I just can’t help feeling,” I said, thinking of Dana, “that there are things from my past I need to confront.”

Eli stared at me for a long moment. “Come here,” he said finally. “I want to show you something.” I followed him into the kitchen. He opened a drawer. Inside was a bulging folder with the word
DONTES
written across the top. Eli reached in the Dontes folder and pulled out a thin file, then slid it across the counter to me.

A name was typed on the file: Pete Decker.

“Open it,” Eli said.

There were three black-and-white glossy surveillance photos, taken through a car window, each showing a thin and tired-looking Pete Decker coming out of a downtown apartment building in jeans and a T-shirt and a dishwasher’s apron. The last picture showed him climbing in a beat-up Chevy Nova. He’d aged considerably, and not very gracefully, in the twenty years since I’d seen him.

Eli stood over my shoulder as I looked at the picture. “I hired an investigator to find him. He’s been in and out of jail.” Eli grinned. “He just got busted again a few days ago for cocaine. Isn’t that great?”

“You hired an investigator to find Pete Decker?” I asked.

He must’ve registered the discomfort in my voice because he took a step back. “Yeah, like we were talking about. Unfinished business. I mean, you of all people must’ve wondered what happened to Pete Decker.”

I was curious, but honestly I felt nothing as I looked at the pictures of this skinny, smoked-out guy, hands in his jeans pockets, a cigarette butt dangling from his mouth.

“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t mean there are scores to settle. It’s more about myself, like I got sidetracked, like I’ve forgotten who I was supposed to be.” Again, I thought of Dana. And Ben. “Like I’ve let people down.”

Eli smiled and took the pictures back. When he put them in the drawer I saw something black and metallic and it was only later that I realized that it was a handgun. And if I make this discovery sound casual on my part, a fleeting image, know that later, when hatred and revenge filled my chest, I had no trouble remembering exactly where that gun was located.

“Come on,” Eli said. “I want to show you one more thing.”

I followed him out the door and down the stairs. We crossed the dry lawn to the main house, dark and empty. He juggled some keys until he found the right one. He turned on a light and half the bulbs lit up in a huge chandelier in the foyer. I followed him into the big open living room, pillars on either side of the door and a curved staircase climbing to the second floor. The windows were topped with stained glass and the wood floors were polished and immaculate.

“Beautiful,” I said.

“It’s too big. And there are so many windows. It feels so…exposed. I
don’t feel like I fit here, like my life hasn’t caught up with this house. So I haven’t put any furniture here. I haven’t hung anything on the walls.” He gestured to the fireplace. “Except that.”

It took me a moment to recognize the framed photograph that hung above the mantel. There were four people in the picture and they were so young, their faces lineless and blameless and unafraid. The two girls in front were pretty, especially the petite dark-haired one, who smiled shyly, as if she knew something the others didn’t. The other girl clearly didn’t want to be in the picture and she contributed little beyond a bland attractiveness—blond hair, blue dress, baby’s breath corsage. But it was the two boys in the flaring tuxes who caught my attention: the taller one with the feral hair and uneven eyes, his arm thrown around the shoulder of the short awkward boy, who beamed like this was the high point of his life.

I felt Eli over my shoulder. “You were fearless,” Eli said. “You did whatever you wanted. Played sports and dated cheerleaders and ran for everything. I thought you could do anything you wanted.”

I turned back to Eli Boyle and it occurred to me that, outside my family, he’d known me longer than anyone in the world.

“I remember who you were going to be,” Eli said.

I looked at the prom picture again.

That’s when he pulled a pen and a checkbook from his back pocket, leaned against the wall, and wrote out a check. He turned and handed it to me. It was a check for ten thousand dollars. It was made out to “The Committee to Elect Clark Mason.”

“I can help you,” he said.

And even though it was preposterous, seeing my name like that—
The Committee to Elect…
—it sparked something in me, something primal and powerful. I tried to laugh it off but I could not take my eyes off the check. “Elect me to what?”

“Whatever you want,” he said. “Something big.”

And that was it—the genesis of my half-witted plan to become Representative Clark Mason (later, Eli and I agreed that a candidate with two last names might be a meal too rich for Spokane voters and I went with my middle name, Tony), my plan to pick up my ambitions at the place where I’d left them fifteen years before. Eventually Eli and I settled on the U.S. House of Representatives as my best big shot. The current lifer in that seat, a prosaic
Republican named George N——, was vulnerable for the first time because he’d defeated the previous lifer, Tom F——, an equally prosaic Democrat, solely on the issue of term limits—specifically, limiting candidates to three terms. Now, of course, faced with his own fourth term, George N——had changed his mind and decided term limits weren’t such a good idea after all.

We talked about it all that first night and the next night and every day for the next two weeks. We were taken with the millennial excitement of the 2000 campaign, the opportunity to present a new kind of candidate—progressive both socially and technologically—and over the next few months Tony Mason was born.

My God, I was invigorated. It was as if clogged blood vessels had been cleared to my head and my heart. But if I was happy, Eli was positively exuberant, and he attended the details of my impending campaign as if we were both running.