Jess Walter - Land Of The Blind

Eli looked over at me, a look of inspired and resolute determination on his face. Catching a single ball wouldn't win us the game, of course, but it would accomplish something we hadn't done in a week of battle ball: it would get one of our pathetic teammates back into the game. It would mean progress. And that was something.

The other team stood across from us, ten strong and preternaturally threatening, a cast photo from Lord of the Flies. They smiled and exchanged knowing glances and then Erskine said, "Now!" and they delivered a full throttle, the throwing of all ten balls at once. I ducked, and Erskine's throw hit the wall behind my head like a gunshot. We sidestepped and dropped and rolled, and when the balls had finished careening off the wall and back to their side, Eli and I were still alive. Of course this pissed them off; for the next two minutes they fired indiscriminately, and we dodged every throw.

That's when Erskine whispered to one of his teammates, and then they both smiled like dogs in a gravy parade. Erskine took the kid's ball, stepped forward, and gave us the old up-and-under.

The bastard lofted that ball in the air, as soft and as high as he could, barely over the line to our side. Before I could warn him against it, Eli left our wall and began running toward the gimme. I think of this moment in slow motion – Eli leaving the foxhole while I yelled out, "No-o-o-o!" – but such was Eli's lack of speed and coordination that I may be remembering in real time, the ball sailing up sweetly against the gymnasium lights, Eli clattering out slowly toward it, knees knocking, arms outstretched, black glasses looking straight up.

The other nine boys, of course, were cocked and loaded as Eli ran toward them, his eyes on the ball floating down from the ceiling.

"Eli, wait!" I yelled. But in battle a man's true nature emerges, and I unhappily admit that I did not leave my spot against the wall as my comrade ran bravely to his battle ball death. I suppose, in my defense, that there was nothing I could have done anyway. Eli was a goner as soon as he pulled away from the wall. Even the SpEds on the sideline could see what was going to happen. "Corn dog! Corn dog! Corn dog!" yelled Repeat. "Cottage cheese!"

Eli ran forward until he was only ten feet away from the firing squad, his eyes straight up on that ball in the air. Erskine Davies took a step forward, his back twisted and torqued, the rubber ball behind his head. The other boys followed. And the next thing I remember is a sound like popcorn. Nine hard rubber balls hit Eli in the space of a half second, knocking his legs out from under him, blowing his glasses off, pelting his arms and legs and nuts and lofting him straight into the air and onto his back, his broken glasses skidding to rest a few inches from my feet.

Eli lay on his back on the hard gym floor, eyes bleary, nose bleeding, but still concentrating on that first cruel ball – lofted up as nothing more than a trap, a lure, an insult to his intelligence and coordination falling to the ground beside him, and as an afterthought perhaps, or maybe with his last bit of strength, Eli reached out from his back with one hand and caught it, the ball settling in his hand like a bird in its nest. And while the rules were unclear on what this meant, to catch a ball after being so completely pummeled, we all stood there reverently and the gym – and maybe the whole world – went quiet for a second.

I am not overstating this. Imagine what it takes to turn a whole gymful of high school boys – however briefly – into human beings. This is what happened: the world changed. Nothing less.

And from his back, in this new world he had just then created, Eli Boyle pointed defiantly to the sideline, where Louis had already taken a tiny step onto the court.

"Louis," Eli said. "You're in."

The least unhappy, I once read, are those who never attempt what is beyond men. I think this must be true – what else would a failed politician say? – but I also think such an idea assumes the same boundaries for all men.

This is not the case.

So it didn't matter that as soon as Eli stood up that day, another ball took his legs out from under him and he was put out of the game. It didn't matter that as soon as Louis ran into the game, Erskine Davies threw a ball that thwacked against his little shoulder and sent him sprawling. It didn't matter that as I stood against the wall, stupefied by what I'd seen, a hard rubber ball racked my 'nads and my team was officially, brutally, put out of yet another game of battle ball.

It didn't matter because we'd all seen something amazing, seen it with our own eyes, an act of such superhuman coordination and concentration, it would have seemed unlikely in the hands of the great prematurely bearded quarterback Kenny Dale. From a hunkering SpEd like Eli Boyle? It was a fucking miracle.

For days the story was told all over school – by the SpEddies as a kind of fable, the story of what could be accomplished with hard work and faith, and by the rest of the kids as a rich and impossible tale, a Ripley's moment, the world's largest fungus, the beard of bees, the stream of water running up a pipe, the twenty-six-foot-long tapeworm, the man who fellates himself, the dog who flies a Cessna, the turnip with a map of the world on its surface. The mildly retarded kid driven into the air in a game of battle ball, hit by nine balls at once, who still managed to reach out with one hand and catch the tenth.

In spite of everything, children know a miracle when they see one.

And so, if for the SpEds Eli's athletic moment was magically inspiring, for the rest of us – worshipers of entertainment – it was supernaturally funny, so entertaining it became meaningful. Who knew the SpEds could be so much fun! People talked about transferring into the mainstream PE class in the hopes of seeing something similar – Curty the blind kid catching a football, Louis the dwarf dunking.

I think we forget sometimes the halting sameness of high school: each day is like the day before it, six periods of class break in all the same places, lunch at the same table, the same jokes and asides and greetings from all the same kids, the same clothes and songs and dances, and if school is truly preparation for life, it is mostly in this way, gearing us for the rigid schedule, the stifling patterns, the lack of variation that an adult strives for so that he can resent it the rest of his life. How much money do we pay for an education that will allow us to loop our necktie the same way each morning, to be given a regular parking spot to park our BMW every day, to buy a summer home so that even our vacations become routine? We are drilled in this unending sameness in high school, and only the insane and the inspired ever get past it.

But for a moment during my senior year, Eli Boyle introduced an entire high school of jeans-clad lemmings to the world of the insane and the inspired, to the idea of transcendence. And again, if you think I am overstating a fluke play in battle ball, ask yourself what get passed along as miracles these days – weeping statues, brief remissions from cancer, hazy pictures of Jesus on the stumps of trees. How little it takes for people to quit their jobs and move to compounds in Montana and New Mexico, to put on robes and eat macrobiotic foods. How badly do we want a miracle of our own? How much would we like to open the front door and, just once, find God standing there? Or vintage Angie Dickinson?

No, Eli's catch that day was a miracle, plain and simple, and it grew, as miracles are known to, in the days afterward, and with each telling. Eli was knocked unconscious. He had a concussion. He flew fifteen feet in the air and a shard from his broken glasses jutted from his forehead. He rolled twice and caught the ball in his fingertips and then rifled it at the other team. He single-handedly brought the 'tards back.