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.'
I looked into the lounge. 'I don't know if he'd want to see me,' I said.
'Yeah,' Louis agreed. 'He doesn't let go of things easily.'
I was surprised that Louis knew about the rift between Eli and me. 'Maybe I'll stop by next time I'm in town.'
I could see Louis was relieved. 'Sure,' he said. 'Next time.'
The waitress saw Louis then and brought him a Coke. 'Hey, big guy,' she said.
'Hey, toots,' he said, and turned away from me. 'What time you get off?'
'Couple minutes after you touch me,' the waitress said.
This tickled Louis. 'On my worst day,' he said. While he flirted I tried to get a look at the folder he was carrying, but he held it close to his side. There were about ten other people in the lounge now, and I could see Louis was eager to join them.
'Could you do me a favor and not say anything to Eli?'
'Sure,' he said. 'It was really great to see you, Clark.'
Once Louis was inside, the waitress carried a tray of glasses and two pitchers of soda into the room. Eli held up a pocket watch, made some announcement, and the lounge erupted in noise and activity, like a small stock exchange. Ben and I craned our necks to watch. The group was spread out at the tables, shuffling paper, stacking things, and exchanging what looked like Monopoly money back and forth, making trades, shuffling fake money and papers from their folders back and forth across the tables. People were relaxed and smiling, but they were also working hard. At the front of the room Eli was not smiling. He paced and collected paper from people, handed paper around, talked and gestured with his hands. Every few minutes, he'd turn around and move pins on a big map behind him.
'This gives me the creeps,' Ben whispered.
Eli worked with such energy it was hard to take your eyes off him. At one point he wiped sweat from his brow. A few minutes later he castigated one of the girls about something, and she looked down at her shoes in shame.
We watched for ten or fifteen minutes more and then we paid for our soups – Ben hadn't touched his – and walked out, taking the opportunity to look closely into the lounge. At the door, we could hear people yelling: 'Two over here!' 'Calling out!'
We started walking back toward Ben's apartment. 'That was weird,' Ben said. 'Watching someone who didn't know we were watching him.'
I knew what he meant. There was something odd about Eli, the way he could detach from himself physically. 'He's always been like that,' I said. 'I think there's always been this gap between the way he sees himself and the way we see him.'
'So which one is real?' Ben asked.
'What do you mean?'
For the first time that day, Ben was engaged. 'I just wonder, which is a truer view of reality, the way we see ourselves or the way others see us. Is Eli king of that room, king of the fat girls and albinos? Or is he what we see – the same old awkward guy from our neighborhood, whose only claim to fame is that he once kicked your ass?'
'Eli is what he is.'
'But I'm not just talking about Eli.' Ben stopped walking and leaned against the chain-link fence of a park. Behind him, kids were shooting baskets on hoops with no nets. 'I'm talking about all of us – about me,' Ben said. 'I imagine I'm living an ascetic's life, stripping myself of everything but my curiosity. But you show up out of the blue and all you see is a guy wasting his life drinking wine and watching TV.'
Ben rubbed his hollow cheek and seemed to be chasing something around in his mind. 'Or you, with your frat- boy friends and your law school haircut imagining you're more evolved than the rest of us.'
I didn't deny it. 'So what do you see?' I asked.
Ben's eyes hitched once on the way from my face to the ground. 'That's not the point I'm trying to make.'
'Sure it is,' I said. 'What do you see when you look at me?'
'It's not important,' he said.
'Come on,' I said. 'What do you see, Mr. Ascetic? Mr. Chianti. Mr. Curiosity.'
'Well,' he said. 'Okay. I see someone so focused on the way he's perceived that he forgets who he is. And where he's from.'
I grabbed him by the sweatshirts and pushed him against the fence. 'I'm only going to tell you this once,' I said. 'Eli Boyle did not kick my ass.'
I smiled, and then he did, and I let him go. But for a few minutes afterward I still felt his louvered ribs in my
