Land Of The Blind

Mom and Dad were so proud of my A's and my smooth transition to college that they indulged my bouts of civic self-importance. My sisters, too, sat through my lectures. The only person who didn't put up with this shit was my brother Ben, who rolled his eyes at my newfound civic pretentiousness and missed no opportunity to mock me: 'Spokane is a cup of piss,' he said that same Christmas. 'Seattle is a two-dollar cup of piss.'

My parents were just beginning to worry about Ben during this time, that his unleavened cynicism was more than just a phase. He had graduated from high school and grown into a thin, caustic young man; with his short hair and raw features, he looked like a British soccer fan. He had abandoned his smoking jacket and pipe for a mode of self-expression he called 'enlightened laziness,' which consisted mostly of sitting around my parents' house in flannel pajamas, skimming old philosophy books, playing Atari, and drinking red wine out of Slurpee cups. When my father laid down the law and told him to enroll in college, Ben disrespectfully declined. He found an apartment and got a job mopping hospital corridors at night so that his days would remain open for sitting around in his pajamas, reading Nietzsche and Sartre, and drinking red wine out of Slurpee cups.

That fall – it was my junior year – every phone call home quickly devolved into a discussion of Ben's malaise. 'He needs to get out of Spokane,' I said. 'It breeds apathy.' But my mother convinced me that at least some of it had to do with Ben missing me, that he was aping my slovenly behavior during my last summer at home.

That's how, on a crisp, clear Saturday morning that October, I found myself driving across Washington State, through the serrated Cascades, through the channeled scablands, wheat fields, and scrub forests, until I descended into Spokane and all that I'd left behind. I drove straight to Ben's apartment, near Spokane Falls Community College, on a basalt-and-pine ledge northwest of downtown. His apartment was at the end of a wrought-iron-railed staircase – a basement studio with dark curtains hung over submarine windows. It was 11:00 A.M. and the apartment was dead quiet. I knocked three times before the door opened, and there stood Ben, in flannel pajamas, eyes half-opened slits. I followed him into the apartment and he went to the kitchen, poured himself a bowl of Cap'n Crunch and a tumbler of red wine.

'Isn't it a little early for Chianti?' I asked.

He rubbed his head and his brown hair remained where he'd pushed it, like Play-Doh. 'You can't serve Riesling with Cap'n Crunch,' he said.

The apartment was dark and fetid, damp like the inside of a shoe. 'Mom and Dad want me to talk to you about college,' I said.

'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.

2

THE EMPIRE CLUB

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