Jess Walter - Land Of The Blind

Caroline writes down the word "lawyer." She's beginning to recall details of the election now, and she wonders if her lax memory has to do with her job, or the funk she's been in, or if the loser in any election just naturally fades from memory that quickly – the Dukakis syndrome. "Wasn't he rich?"

"Mason? Yeah," Evan says. "Cashed out some tech stock and spent all his money trying to get elected. That's the only reason he even got thirty-six percent."

"Do you have a list of his donations?"

"I got his filings at the office. Sure."

"Fax it to me?"

"Monday?"

"Today?"

"It's Saturday, Caroline."

"I know. But you owe me." She gave Evan a tip once about a former police chief who drove around drunk at night, pulling over teenage girls and "frisking" them.

"Okay," Evan says. "But remind me to never go out with a cop."

"Why?"

"I'm just not sure I could pass the background check."

She ignores this. "So does he sometimes go by the name Clark?"

"That's his real name. Clark Anthony Mason. He didn't think the Maxwell House Dems would vote for someone with two last names. And he thought Anthony sounded too professorial or blue blood or something. If you can imagine some kid from the Valley worrying about being too blue blood."

Evan laughs as he remembers. "Boy, that's classic lamb behavior, worrying about the menu while the restaurant burns down."

"What do you mean?" Caroline asked.

"It's just… here's this kid, doesn't look twenty-five years old, all stiff and square, grows up in the Valley and goes off to Seattle, comes home thinking they're just going to hand him a congressional seat. And… Jesus, that eye."

"Yeah, he wears an eye patch," she says. "I don't remember that from the election."

"No, he wore one of those glass eyes, didn't move at all. You got the feeling he sat in front of the mirror until he figured which angle the eye looked straight and not cockeyed. That was the only way he'd face people, straight on, without moving his eye. On his posters, he was always staring right at you. It was a little creepy, especially in the debates. Guy moved like a robot."

Caroline had just assumed he was stiff and liked that about him, that he didn't seem polished. But mostly she voted for him because he was for gun control and Nethercutt wasn't. Over time she'd become a one-issue voter. "I was trying to remember what exactly he ran on…"

"Oh, the usual economic development crap; he was gonna bring high-tech jobs here. 'Course, back then, you couldn't run for dogcatcher without promising you'd bring computer jobs to Spokane. I have to admit, your boy really sold it, though."

"So how did Nethercutt beat him?"

"Mostly by ignoring him. Let the PACs and the issue people run the negative shit: that he was a flaming liberal, that he burned flags and liked Internet porn. And of course there was the Seattle thing."

She vaguely remembers television ads that had knocked Mason for going to college and working in Seattle, ads that accused him of being in the pocket of liberal Seattle power brokers.

"Yeah, that provincial shit is the gold standard in Spokane," Evan says. "We don't trust anyone who doesn't live here and we assume anyone who does live here is stupid."

"You know what he's done since the election?" Caroline asks, and she thinks, I know what he's doing. He's sitting in my interview room, writing his memoirs.

"No idea."

"But he's not still involved in politics?" she asks.

"Mason? Nah. Lambs never run a second time. They go back to their insurance offices, or their teaching jobs at the community college." Evan clears his throat. "So, are you gonna keep going out with the guy?"

"I don't know," Caroline says. She looks up in the window again and sees that Clark is still writing, that his face is shot with hard memories, with misgiving and regret. She leans forward and watches closely. And watching him like this she knows there is a body somewhere. Tell me, Clark. Who did you kill?

Caroline sits back. "Yeah, you're probably right," she says to Evan on the phone. "I can do better."

Nobody emerges whole from childhood. I know this. And I don't pretend to think that the shattering of my left eye that day on the south bank of the Spokane River was in some way unique or was an unfair burden, that it put my suffering on a par with the suffering of someone like Eli Boyle. Truth is, I have got along fine with one eye. I can't say that it was a help in my run for the Fifth District congressional seat, or that I would knowingly choose the patches and glass eyes and dark sunglasses that I have worn since childhood, or that I have gone more than a day without shifting my gaze to the floor in the presence of the binocular, ever conscious of the fact that I am incapable of that most basic human communication – looking deep and straight in someone's eyes.

But except for the external nature of my scars, I don't imagine myself different from any other adult, limping and scuffling and scurrying along with all manner of insecurities and fears and defects, the results of bad parentage and low self-esteem, of being unprepared and unprotected in a world that seems on its surface so inviting and safe. The world is not safe. I need only continue the story of Eli Boyle's life to prove that.

But I am afraid I won't be able to offer a full accounting of Eli's indignities, for instance during our junior high years – the classroom-clearing farts, the daily capture and rolling of boogers between his fingers, the untold humiliations dreamed up by his classmates. There is simply not time.

So, Detective, in the event that I am unable to finish this statement, this story of Eli's life and death, which is also in some small way, I realize, the story of my own life and death (and the string of failures that connects them), then at least I can offer some proof of fidelity to you, to this arrangement you have made with me, to the comfort and understanding of your two eyes.

To you, Caroline, I offer this:

I did it.

I killed Eli Boyle.

If such a statement is all the court wants, then I am happy to no longer be an officer of that temple of disasters. And if such a confession is all that is required for deeper forgiveness, well… I don't look forward to the lines in heaven.

I took my friend's life, metaphorically and unintentionally when we were young, and then, two days ago, I ended it literally and with malice. And forever. And yet that is not the only crime I have to confess, and it is certainly not the most heinous, and if you think Eli Boyle is the only victim of my greed and anger, then you underestimate the heart's potential for darkness.

You told me this process usually begins with a body.

You may find Eli's at a house at the west end of Cliff Drive, not in the main house, empty and cold, with its Gatsby staircase and deco chandeliers, but in the small, dank apartment above the garage out back. He is lying on the floor, in a lake of his own blood. He is on his left side, with his left arm behind him and his right against his head, as if something important has just occurred to him. There is a long black hole in his head, from his jaw to his scalp. I put the hole there.

I will forever be haunted by the look on his face in the moments before the horrible event played itself out. I saw that look once before, a look of surrender, of disbelief, a look that asks how life can keep getting worse – a look I first saw on Eli Boyle's face twenty years ago, during a moment that now seems like the first step toward his death, the first blow.