Jess Walter: Land Of The Blind

No sleep, shallow breathing, hand vibrating, the flash when she closed her eyes. Caroline looks down.

"I've been having these dreams," he says, "where I did something wrong. Something terrible? But it's almost like I've done it in another world. Like no one around me knows. But when I wake up…" He swallows. "Do you ever have dreams like that?"

She thinks, Fuck you, but says simply, "No," and slides the legal pad to him.

The Loon picks up the pen and writes across the top of the page: Confession. His handwriting is precise and practiced. He considers his one word, then crosses it out and writes Statement of Fact. He exhales, as if that were it. Then he shakes his arms, cricks his neck, and looks around the room. "Could I be alone to do this? It won't take long."

"Okay." She stands to leave. Statement of Fact. This guy's a lawyer, she thinks.

"One more question, Caroline," he says as she's on her way out.

She turns back from the door. His hair has fallen over his eye patch and he looks like a kid all of a sudden. That's the thing about men, even crazy ones; after a while, they all turn into boys.

"Why'd you become a police officer?" he asks.

Caroline doesn't hesitate as she reaches for the door. "I like the snow."

Eli Boyle's dandruff was more than enough indignity for one child. In fact, the word "dandruff" barely did it justice. He was like a snow globe turned upside down, drifting flakes on the Empire State Building or the St. Louis Arch or the Golden Gate. Our classmates made sudden noises – clapping their hands or dropping books – just to see Eli's head snap around and the snow dislodge and cascade from his head, drift onto his desk and settle on the floor of the classroom. When he sneezed, teachers would stop lecturing until the ash settled. It was hard to believe a human head could flake so much without losing actual mass, and the glacial till of Eli Boyle's scalp was discussed with some seriousness as a potential science project. Walking down the hall, the dead, flaking snow covered his shoulders like two lesser peaks beneath Boyle's Everest of a head. So, as I say, at least the way I remember it, Eli Boyle's dandruff would have been enough humiliation for one kid to bear, enough embarrassment to ruin his life the way lives are ruined in elementary school, before they actually begin.

But dandruff was only the first of Eli's afflictions. I will list them here, but please don't think me cruel, or blame me for piling these horrors upon him. I was not his Maker; Someone Else visited these burdens upon Eli Boyle, Someone Far Crueler Than I. Or just more indifferent. And don't think for a moment that I take anything but the most humble responsibility in relating these difficulties. When I am finished with this confession, this affidavit, this statement of fact, it will come as no surprise that Eli Boyle turned out to be a better man than I, and nothing would make me happier than to report now that the adolescent version of that good man started life with a clean slate, or at least a clean scalp. But I cannot. So I offer this accounting with no great joy, but with a fidelity to truth and a desire to re-create for those who care, for the record, I suppose, an Eli Boyle whole and pristine, just as he was then, all the more amazing when you consider the list of ruined parts that comprised him:

He had bad breath, like he'd eaten sour cream from a cat box. He wore braces on his teeth and his legs; had acne and a unique bacon-flavored body odor; picked his nose and ate what he mined; exhibited a zest for epic, untimely flatulence (the Social Studies Incident of 1976; the Great 1980 Pep Assembly Blowout…); wore black-framed, Coke-bottle glasses; had thin red hair, skid marks in his underwear, and allergies to pollen, cotton, peanuts, and soap. He had a limp, a lisp, a twitch, waxy ears, gently crossed eyes, and was – how to put this – afflicted by the random popping of inappropriate erections, boners as we would say then, as we did say then, through his gray, standard-issue PE shorts.

His overprotective mother dressed him like a janitor in Dickey overalls and flannel shirts at a time – the mid-1970s – when everyone else wore designer jeans and varsity T's. He was the oldest kid I ever knew to wet his pants at school, to cry, to sit in the front of the school bus, to call out for his mommy. He rode a three-wheeled bike with a flag on the back because of "balance" problems; ate a special lunch with no milk or cheese or whole grains; and had grand mal seizures, blackouts, muscle spasms, and fits of gagging. He had to wear corrective shoes because of a deformed foot. He had scoliosis, skin lesions, and scabies, and the nurse was always hauling him off for impetigo or indigestion or impacted turds or any of the other nasty bugs that he carried around like his only friends. The fact that he lived in a trailer wasn't awful in itself, because the great, prematurely bearded quarterback Kenny Dale also lived in a trailer, but Eli Boyle lived alone with his mother in the worst park in the worst trailer, an old gray can with a dirt lawn and stained sheets for curtains.

He was what we called then "a B-Flat SpEd," which meant that while he was in special education, there was nothing really wrong with him. He was brighter than the other SpEds and was able to pull B's and C's in regular classes, with the occasional A, although he was a miserable failure in that rigid and unforgiving society that is really the only society. It occurs to me now that he may have been mildly autistic, but we didn't know that word and so we felt accurate then in calling him a spaz, a loop, a 'tard, a dork, a dweeb, a dick, a freak. It was said that even the other 'tards in special ed made fun of Eli.

So that's him, as complete and flawed and tragic and sad, as wonderful as I can remember him, as pure and imperfect, as unforgettable as anyone I've ever known. Eli Boyle. The man who saved my life. And the man whose life I have taken.

You must forgive the formal informality of this tract or report or confession, this statement of fact. Even before this trouble I was told that I write like a disgraced lawyer (so is that irony or premonition?) and since my ambitions and insecurities pulled me toward a political career that anyone with a local newspaper would know flamed out brilliantly and prematurely – here I go offering the obvious as proof of the obvious – I have developed that unique, self-serving, solipsistic style of intellect that arises among attorneys, politicians, and strip-club dancers (I plead guilty to two of the three) and that is why I might now and then lapse into the kind of writing that we lawyers are trained to commit, using language to obscure and obfuscate rather than clarify and communicate.

So, when I say that it is Eli Boyle's life that I have taken, you may ask yourself, Is he simply being metaphoric? Yes and no. But let me say, there is nothing metaphoric about this confession, nothing metaphoric in my hatred and rage and my thirst for revenge, nothing metaphoric about the person I set out to kill, the handgun I held in my hand, the blood that crept across the floor beneath my feet.

But that is all ending, and before I tell the ending I must tell the beginning:

Start by picturing my neighborhood in the mid-1970s: poor and uneducated and ignorant of even those facts, a strip of sorry homes three blocks wide and a mile long, a thin cut of plywood shacks, trailers, and single-story war-era baby boomer starters that kids at school called the "white ghetto," weeds and falling shingles and axle-rusted pickup trucks parked on gray yards next to vacant lots where kids smoked pot and cigarettes; a grocery store on the near end, the gravel pits of an excavation company on the far, a long street of houses pinched like an ant farm between the dirty plate glass of the Spokane River and our rutted, potholed road, after which my neighborhood was named: