Jess Walter - Land Of The Blind

"Barber college? Electoral college?"

We sat on the ratty couch in his living room and he gulped wine while we watched football on his twelve-inch TV. Dog-eared paperbacks lay everywhere; I picked one up – Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, by Albert Camus. "You do the classwork, but you don't want the credits. Is that it?"

"You want me to pay someone to tell me what books to read?"

"Is that all school is to you – the books? What about the people? The experience? The social life?"

"Yeah, good point." He feigned earnestness. "Maybe I could join your frat. We can double-date-rape together."

"Look, I'm just here because Mom is worried about you. It doesn't matter to me what you do."

"That's a shock." Ben took a pull of his wine.

I talked him into getting dressed and going for a walk. I put on a windbreaker. Ben put on three sweatshirts.

We walked west, down Pettet Drive and across the river, and when Ben looked up, he saw that I'd steered us to the campus of Spokane Falls Community College.

"Subtle," he said.

"Sorry," I said. "I know you had your heart set on living in the basement of that crappy apartment building the rest of your life-"

"Actually," he said, "I'm waiting for something on the second floor to open up."

"-mopping floors, drinking wine, and playing Atari."

"I'm saving for a Nintendo."

"Don't you want more than we had growing up?"

"Actually," he said, "I want exactly what we had growing up."

We walked into the student union building. There were a handful of students in the cafeteria, studying and eating. "Doesn't this look better than mopping floors?"

Ben was unimpressed. "You don't think someone mops these floors?"

"I don't see why it has to be you."

"It has to be someone." He took in the students' dim presences and looked away. "Do you know what your problem is, Clark? You decide what you're going to see before you even look at things."

I was amused. "Yeah, why do you suppose that is?"

"You really want to know what I think?"

"Sure."

"I think you're so busy climbing you don't notice what's really around you."

"That's called success, Ben," I said. "That's called drive."

"Or running away."

"I run for things. Not away. You might think about that yourself." I pulled him over to a bulletin board near the front of the cafeteria. It had the word clubs written on top in big block letters. "There's a whole world out here-"

"There's a whole world in here." And he pointed to his head.

I ran my hand over the bulletin board, shingled with flyers and notices from three dozen campus groups, from the Gay and Lesbian Student Alliance to the Arab Student Union to the Spokane Climbing Community. "You know what this is?" I tore a phone strip from a campus philosophy group and handed it to him. "This is-"

That's when I saw something out of the corner of my eye that froze me.

"What's the matter?" Ben asked after a few seconds.

The club name was stenciled in green military-style letters on a white sheet of paper, but there was nothing explaining what the club did. There was only its name, the date and place of its next meeting – that very day, it turned out – along with a contact person and a phone number. I wonder even now, years later, what might have happened if I hadn't torn that small piece of paper away. Maybe none of this would have happened. Maybe that was the point from which all things diverged, the point at which we could've all continued forward, instead of eddying back to the place where I sit now, alone.

"Is that-" Ben began.

"I think it is," I said. I stood there with my little brother, staring at that tiny sheet of paper. On the paper was written a phone number, the one-word name of the club – "Empire" – and a contact person.

Eli Boyle.

The Empire Club met in a dark, smoky lounge called Fletts, on a street of old businesses just across the river from downtown. At night, the lounge burned easily through its fuel, a steadily dying clientele of heavy drinkers and smokers. During the day Fletts served up BLT's and patty melts at its small lunch counter, and the smoke was allowed to slowly dissipate in the lounge, which sat dark and empty – except on Saturday afternoons, when the lounge housed Eli Boyle's Empire club.

I sat on a stool in the restaurant, from which I could see down the length of the counter to the lounge. The meeting was scheduled for 2:00 P.M.; it was 1:30. I ordered a cup of coffee and a bowl of tomato soup and sat with a baseball cap pulled down on my head and my windbreaker pulled up high at the collar. Looking to my right, I could see down the lunch counter and across the hall, where Eli was scurrying around the lounge, pacing up and down a long table, stacking sheets of paper in a dozen piles. He looked pretty much the same, although a potbelly strained his button-down shirt and his hair had thinned. But what surprised me most was the look of intensity on his face.

"I still can't believe that guy kicked your ass," Ben said. He had begged to come, and now I could see what a mistake it was to have let him.

"It was a draw," I said.

"Are you going to talk to him?"

"I don't know."

The other members of Empire began dragging in. "Hello, honey," said the old waitress, or "Hiya, sweetie." The first was a gawkishly tall young man with dark hair and a storklike nose, followed by a frail young boy leaning sideways in a wheelchair, pushed by an older woman I assumed was his mother. Two girls came in together, their steps synchronized, a good four hundred pounds between them, and then a pale young man. They all carried thick black binders with the word EMPIRE stenciled on the front, and they were eager, as if they had a great story to tell and couldn't wait to get inside to tell it.

Five minutes before the meeting was to start, I felt a poke in my side.

"Clark friggin' Mason."

I turned and looked up, half expecting to see Eli, even though the voice was higher pitched, and coming from a man less than four feet tall.

"Louis!"

"Do I look different?" he asked me.

He looked about the same, a blunt curl of hair over wide fun-house features.

"I grew two inches since high school," he said proudly. As soon as he said it, I could see that he was bigger, and that by dwarf standards he must be quite tall.

"You look great," I said.

"You too."

"Are you in this… thing, Louis?"

"Empire?" He smiled and waved a binder like the other members carried. "Yeah. It's really great. Eli has a real gift. Are you here for-"

"No," I said, "we just happened to stop in-"

"What are the odds?" Ben said next to me.

"-for some soup," I continued.

"We love us some soup!" Ben said.

I elbowed Ben and turned back to Louis. "So what is this thing?"

"Empire?" Louis looked unsure, as if it wasn't his place to say. "It's hard to explain."

"But it's a club?" I asked.

"No," he said, "more like a game, one of those interactive, character-driven things." He quickly corrected himself. "Eli doesn't want us to call it a game."

"What does he call it?"

"He used to say it was an 'alternative world.' Now he just calls it Empire. He says defining it is the first step to killing it."

"So it's like a role-playing thing?" Ben asked. "Like Dungeons and Dragons?"

Louis chewed on his bottom lip. "I really think you should talk to Eli about it."

"I'll bet it's more like Risk," I said. "Or Axis and Allies." I remembered the way Eli always drew tanks, and the charge he'd gotten from tug-of-war and battle ball. "One of those games where you have wars and conquer each other and take over land?"

"Yeah, there's some of that. But you know, you should really ask Eli."