Land Of The Blind

surprised to hear it sounded like my voice. I screamed until my air was all gone.

I could hear Pete's voice, too: 'Oh fuck!'

I was rolling around on the ground, both hands covering my left eye. The world seemed to expand into this purple and then contract, all of the pain and blood and everything pulling back into the socket of my left eye.

I pried my right eye open and blearily looked up to see Pete running away, climbing the bank of the draw. He was pulling Everson with him.

'Wait,' I said quietly, but they were gone.

There was no noise except the trickling river at my side. I began to cry. That brought more of the purplish pain, and I felt like throwing up. My hands were covered with blood now, and I pulled them away and the blood ran down my face and pooled in the sand. I put my hands back on my face, thinking maybe I could hold my eye in its socket. I lay there a few minutes, moaning and trying to figure out the sinewy things I felt against my fingers.

I stood and fell back into the sand, the pain seeking out new levels. I got back up and began walking. I made it a few steps and sat down in the sand again. I got to my knees and threw up. That's when I fell back in the sand, beaten. I couldn't do it. My first thought that wasn't pain was that they would name an award for me, as they had done with Woodbridge's dead brother. I hoped Ben would fare better without me than Woodbridge had without his older brother.

I lay back in the sand and cried, suddenly picturing my mother standing on our porch, wondering where I was. 'Here I am!' I yelled, and the salty tears boiled in my mangled eye. Then I just started yelling and crying, scratching around in the sand, panicking, I guess. I don't know how long I yelled and cried but finally I felt a hand on my chest, patting me, reassuring me, and at first I thought it was my mom, but then I realized that Everson had come back. Of course he had.

'It's okay,' Everson said.

I opened my right eye and stared into the black-rimmed glasses of Eli Boyle.

'It's okay,' Eli said again. 'I called for help.' And he held my hand.

The lady smiled; for the gallantries of a one-eyed man are still gallantries.

– Voltaire, 'The One-Eyed Porter'

III

CRIMINALS ARE NOT EARLY RISERS

1

CAROLINE, GO HOME

Caroline, go home.' Her sergeant interrupts her midstream, although she wasn't getting any closer to explaining why she's let some loon waste the last five hours confessing, or how, at three o'clock Saturday morning, he's still at it, hunched over his second legal pad and his fourth cup of coffee, no end in sight.

'Just go home,' her sergeant, Chris Spivey, says again from the other side of the phone. 'Get your nut a bed somewhere. We'll roust him Monday morning and he can tell us all about how the aliens probed his ass.' Spivey is the first sergeant she's worked for who is younger than she is; at first she found this merely disconcerting, but now he seems like any other boss, officious and rigid, and apparently none too thrilled about getting a phone call at three in the morning. 'Caroline, I won't authorize overtime for this.'

'I didn't call for overtime,' she says. 'But what if there's something here?'

'Lock him up. Commit him. Shoot him. I don't care. Just go home.'

She sighs and looks back through the window at the Loon. He turns the legal pad over and begins writing on the back of the page, in a small and controlled cursive, the way she's seen delusional people write in the margins of phone books and on countertops. 'Okay,' she says into the phone.

'What's the matter with you, anyway?' he asks. 'Where's your head these days?'

A fair question, that.

She's been checked out, barely functioning, coming to work and sitting at her desk, taking hours to fill out the simplest reports, forgetting phone numbers and names. It's no better at home, where she sits down on the couch and forgets to take off her coat, or sits at the kitchen table, or surfs the Internet until dawn, bidding on things she doesn't need in online auctions: parasols and turntable needles, laser printers and fishing lures. Two nights ago she played chess in a chat room. She hates chess.

Where's your head?

The last few months have felt like someone else's life: surprised at her own behavior, watching silently over her own shoulder, wondering when she started liking bourbon, why she doesn't shower on the weekends anymore, when she started playing chess. It's a symptom of depression, maybe, this feeling of detachment from oneself. Sometimes she retraces her steps, examines the last five months for the moment she began drifting – her mother's death, her boyfriend moving out, the retirement of her best friend and the man she quietly pined away for, her former sergeant, Alan Dupree.

But she came through all of those things. No, this started later, after Caroline interrupted a guy who was about to murder a young hooker – a whisper of a girl named Rae-Lynn Pierce. At some point it dawned on Caroline that in fifteen years as a police officer, this girl, Rae-Lynn, was the only person she'd ever really saved. Maybe there were potential victims of criminals that she arrested, people whose lives were better off because of Caroline's actions, but those were abstractions, shadows. They were certainly not real people that she could point to and name. Rae-Lynn Pierce was real, and she was alive because of Caroline.

That's why, if she had to pick the moment when everything finally went to shit, when she lost focus and found herself dreaming of giving up, it would have to be the day three months ago when she heard that Rae-Lynn was dead, from an untreated case of hepatitis. Six weeks. That's how much time Caroline had given Rae-Lynn Pierce.

After that, Caroline began to lose interest. But it was more than a professional crisis; it was as if she had walked for fifteen years, only to find herself at the gorge of middle age, alone. She began to think of it as exactly that sort of transaction – fifteen years of her life for six weeks of an addict's fuck-ups. She fell asleep in meetings, stared out from her desk, let cases stagnate. Spivey moved her to nights, and her depression got worse, more isolated, darker.

And now this Loon, and she's being what… a psychiatrist? A confessor? Certainly not a cop. What did the Loon ask? Had she ever been responsible for someone's death? Maybe that's why she has let him sit in there for the last five hours, because she knows exactly how he feels, desperate to confess but uncertain what for.

She checks her watch. Ten minutes past three. She stalks across the office, unlocks the door to Interview Two, and steps inside.

'That's it,' she says.

He looks up at her and smiles. 'I'm finished, Caroline,' he says, and she is deflated, as much by the smile and the way her name sounds as by the announcement she's been waiting for all night. His right eye is red, as if he's been crying again.

'Done?' She catches the whiff of letdown in her own voice.