Land Of The Blind

'Okay,' Caroline says.

Outside, she is surprised by how dark and cold it has gotten. She starts her car and drives across the river gorge and into downtown, curving along Riverside with a handful of other cars, and makes her way down wide streets built at the turn of the twentieth century for thick lanes of traffic that were long gone by the turn of the twenty-first. The buildings are stout and handsome – marble and brownstone, terra-cotta and brick. This city conceals more than some, its wealth and its power, its alliances and feuds, and even more, its grace. She catches a glimpse of the Davenport Hotel, lit up with construction lights. It's supposed to reopen later this summer. Spokane is old, and it is beautiful like old things are, lit from within by nostalgia and hard times. But so many windows are still dark, so many storefronts vacant. She envies the optimists here, but how can you ignore the taped and painted windows, the boarded doors? How can you not feel like a whole city of people waiting for it to finally be over, a whole city tending a parent's slow death?

She turns on Stevens and heads up the South Hill, once the concentrated prime real estate in Spokane. Cliff Drive is a short row of older houses at the first crest of the hill and Eli's house is at the far west edge, not one of the mansions but a grand home nonetheless, a nice, two-story Tudor style. The lights are off. She parks in front and steps out of her car. From here downtown appears bright and busy, and she can see across the river, across the valley, to the hills that used to frame the north side of the city, until streets and buildings sprawled over those and the next hills too, and the next, where the money has been moving, where Susan Diehl is sitting on white furniture in her own half-million-dollar house on her own ledge, drinking martinis with Mr. Diehl. It's a beautiful view, the lights like liquid coming down those ridges and the clouds set atop the valley, and she envies for a moment this Eli Boyle, with his high-tech money and his political donations and his Tudor house on this point, above all the shit.

Her feet clomp on the wooden porch. No one answers the doorbell. She presses a flashlight against the big picture window to cut the glare and peers inside. The living room is beautiful, dark wooded, with built-in hutches and cabinets, a fireplace, and a grand, curving staircase. But there is no furniture. She looks back to the front yard to see if she's missed a For Sale or a Sold sign, but she hasn't.

She walks along the wood porch to another window and peers in at a dining room, also empty. She walks all the way around the house, to the back, and looks in the kitchen. No appliances. Nothing. From the back porch she looks across the vast lawn. There is a garage, or a carriage house actually, on the side of the house. It is made of stone. River rock. A single set of dark wooden stairs winds its way up to the second floor. There is an apartment on top, or an office. These windows are dark too, but a dull blue light comes from one of the windows, like that of a computer screen.

The cold grass crunches under her feet. A hand-lettered sign on the carriage house reads EMPIRE INTERACTIVE. She shines her flashlight on the sign, then climbs the steps to the second floor and gets a slightly different view of downtown Spokane, with some perspective. From here, you can get it all in your field of vision. That's the thing. It really is a small city when you think about it, a city of coincidence and reoccurrence, of patterns and inescapable reputations. A man has dinner at a table next to his ex-wife in a restaurant he hasn't been to in two years and he shakes his head. 'That's Spokane.' A woman sees an old boyfriend picking out china with his new girlfriend at the Bon Marche. 'That's just Spokane.' But don't they also take some measure of security from that, too? Don't they all believe they know everyone here, that they are safe and gentle and good to one another? The devil you know.

She once went six months without a dead body.

But as she reaches the top step she recognizes that faint smell and it breaks her heart a little. Six months. And when she tries the doorknob to the apartment above the carriage house, it turns easily in her hand. Caroline Mabry takes a breath and pushes through the door.

The eyes may be confused in two ways… when they've come from the light into the darkness and when they've come from the darkness into the light.

– Plato, The Republic

VI

Statement of Fact

1

WHO AM I

Who am I to describe Eli Boyle's life, to trace its shape – the outside surfaces, the dates and places, the beginning and the end – when, admittedly, I never took the time to learn what existed inside that form, the truth of who Eli was, what drove him, what scared him, what he dreamed?

When this story comes out, the news media will not be so judicious, of course. They will sum up Eli's life with one false clichй or another: rags to riches to rags again, or the impersonal nature of computers, or the profane irony of a love triangle. And perhaps these stories are true; I honestly don't know what Eli believed, or what he thought about or – certainly – what his story meant. My own expertise lay simply in the horror of a shared adolescence, from its birth in humiliation at the Empire bus stop to its ending in betrayal in a wine-soaked room at the Davenport Hotel.

The world continued after the prom, of course, weightless days that left no imprint on me. True, my former friend Tommy Kane never spoke to me again, but that was of no great import – although I suspect it was he who threw my yearbook in the boys' room toilet. (A janitor fished it out; even today, many of the nineteen pages on which I was photographed remain wrinkled and stained.)

Dana and I did not get together after the prom. I'd like to believe this was because of our concern for Eli's feelings, but it likely had as much to do with a kind of inertia caused by the rigidity of our high school personas. At school, I was disheartened to see Dana retreat back into her loose clothing and pigtails, to see her stop wearing makeup. And I was equally surprised that my attraction to her could turn itself off so easily. I knew what lay under those baggy clothes, and yet she seemed too much like the old Dana, too bookish, too girlish, too logical in comparison to the curvy collections of fluff that I found attractive. I began to think of the girl in the hotel that night as someone else entirely. But this retraction wasn't entirely my doing. Something changed for Dana, too. She began to hesitate when she saw me, to blush when I said hi, to avoid me in the halls. It occurred to me that she might even see me as a mistake, as a blemish on her otherwise perfect school record, the B she never got. And when I read what she wrote in my wet yearbook (… I'll always care for you. Be good. Dana), I knew I'd been kissed off.

Susan and I were finished, too. She didn't sign my yearbook, but at school one of her friends handed me a note from her that read, in part, We are fucking through – although my teenage dyslexia transposed the last words to read We are through fucking – and I was understandably, or maybe just hormonally, heartbroken. I'd like to say that I was through with women built like Susan (all facade, no structural integrity), and that I had learned to appreciate the charming architecture of women like Dana (who am I kidding? There were none), but this is a story of weakness, not of strength.

I got no yearbook wishes from Eli. No notes or secondhand threats. I suppose I just stopped existing for him. I thought about apologizing, telling him that Dana and I weren't going to see each other, that it had been a mistake,