Land Of The Blind

hands, and the echo of what he'd said in my head. We walked slowly back to his apartment, the wind swirling garbage before us, our progress marked by the sagging clapboards of our hometown. I looked around Ben's neighborhood. Every other car window seemed to be covered with plastic or cardboard or duct tape. 'Is there no glass in this town?' I asked. We passed a couple of children playing in a patch of dirt that passed for lawn. One of the kids sat in a bathtub, weeds coming through the drain, while the other kid made thundering swats against the bathtub with a stick.

Ben sighed. 'You make the classic elitist mistake.'

'What's that?'

'Believing that people choose to be poor.'

I looked around at the neighborhood, which was not much different from the one Ben and I had grown up in. For the first time it occurred to me that no matter how many times I sat at an outdoor cafe on Capitol Hill, how many beers I had in Pioneer Square, Seattle might never be my home. If that is true – and I have come to believe that it is – then I suppose it's also true that no matter how many interesting and progressive and attractive people I met in my life, I was always alone in some fundamental way when I wasn't in the company of my little brother.

'You'd better get back,' said Ben when we reached his apartment.

'Yeah,' I said, distracted. 'I got this thing tomorrow.'

'Sure,' he said.

'We okay?'

'Sure.'

'And you'll at least think about school?' I asked.

'Every day,' he said.

We hugged awkwardly and I started for my car. I thought of something I wanted to say – that he was wrong, that I could tell the difference between what other people thought about me and what I knew about myself – but when I turned around Ben had disappeared, gone back into his cave.

3

MY BROTHER DIED

My brother died suddenly, or so it seemed to me, embedded as I was in the ephemera of fraternity politics, classwork, and stretch-panted sorority girls that constituted the fall quarter of my junior year. My brother died on November 19, 1985, one month after I saw him, in the hour it took me to finish an exam in Principles of Government – an hour that he spent slipping in and out of consciousness, lifting his head, swearing at a nurse, pulling his IV tubes out, asking for our father, breathing fitfully for a few minutes, and finally going still. My brother died in spite of the fervor of a team of nurses and doctors who arrived with a crash cart and tried shocking and drugging and beating him back to life. My brother died two hours after his first treatment of experimental chemotherapy drugs and high-dose radiation – a double double, one of the techs called it – sparking in my family a perpetual distrust of the medical community, as if the doctors had hastened his death. (Years later, my father still referred to doctors by his clever pet name being diagnosed with Stage IV extradonal Hodgkin's lymphoma – the fastest 'outcome' his doctor had ever witnessed for that particular late-stage illness, or so he would tell us later. My brother died a week after turning nineteen.

You might wonder, Caroline, why I've waited until this late point in the narrative to mention something as important as my brother's cancer, why I would attempt to understate it this way, to slip it into the text like any other detail in here, as if an element like that has the same atomic weight as a first kiss, a driver's license, the joys of college. My only defense is chronology, which we cling to the way we cling to faith, in the vain belief that if we obey the order of things, the universe might not go to shit, time might not pile up around us and we might not become buried by random events, ruined by confusion and grief.

But it happens anyway.

A week after I left, Ben's boss called my mother to say that he had missed two straight days of mopping. Mom found him unconscious on the floor of his apartment, in his pajamas, a spilled mug of wine on the linoleum. He was sweating and feverish, his neck and shoulders horribly swollen. She had seen his glands do similar, smaller versions of this trick over the last two years, and she thought about the years of chills and sleeping problems – That boy's always got a bug. She said his name and touched his forehead, and her hand jerked away, hot and wet.

I don't know whether, in those first days, my parents shielded the severity of Ben's illness from me, or the doctors shielded it from them, or I simply didn't get it. But from across the state, the progression was impossibly fast, marked by confusing telephonic pronouncements from my mother: The doctors think it's The Exhaustion. They're testing him for The Cancer. They think it's in The Limp Nose. They think it might be The Hotchkiss Disease. Apparently, it's matzo-sized, which sounds fairly big. They think it's in the fourth stage. I think that means he's almost better.

I don't blame my mother for any of this. She'd suddenly been dropped onto a planet with a completely different language, and doctors who couched my brother's death sentence with passive and misleading terms (late-term systemic, marginal outcome, radical treatment, negligible recovery rate), terms that forced her to ask questions she didn't even know the words for and certainly didn't want the answers to. And she had to bear this alone. My father couldn't bring himself to step into a hospital, and my sisters were too young to help. I planned to come home when the quarter ended, of course, but I was too late.

Afterward, the doctors said that Ben's body had rejected the experimental drugs. But they insisted that the drugs had been his only chance. He was lucky, they said, because he wasn't lucid at the end and had very little idea what hit him. I have a tough time thinking of Ben as lucky, of all things. Ben had a mathematician's sense of the world. He was fascinated by probability, interested in the play of numbers against events. 'What are the odds,' Ben was always saying, although like most people interested in defining luck, he seemed to have very little of it himself. Growing up, he would gamble on anything: ball games and stock prices and elections and how many kids were in the new neighbor family, whether it would rain tomorrow. He loved stories of rare and marvelous fortune: the lottery winners and people who find free money, the man who falls from an airplane and lives, the woman who finds a Van Gogh in the attic. 'What are the odds,' he'd say, and this wasn't just a figure of speech for Ben; he genuinely wanted to know. 'One in a million?' I'd say. 'Three million,' he'd say; the longer the odds, the deeper Ben's interest. I think he would've been morbidly fascinated to find out that his kind of blood cancer had an occurrence rate of less than one in two hundred thousand, that 80 percent of Hodgkin's sufferers can be cured, but that the percentage with Ben's combination of factors who had a sustained remission was so small as to be – as the doctors liked to say – negligible. Of course, Ben wouldn't have settled for a sloppy word like 'negligible.' Ben believed there was a number that corresponded with everything in the universe and everything in people – not just our height but our courage, not just our weight but our grief.

I had just returned from my government test when one of the guys in the frat said someone was waiting on the phone for me. The phone was sitting off the hook. When I put it to my ear and said hello, there was a pause and I didn't recognize my father's voice at first. 'Clark? It's Dad.' He sounded rickety and unsure, as if he were speaking from a chair balanced on one leg on the ledge of a skyscraper. 'Ben passed away an hour ago.'

In my memory the grief is beyond description, without shape or size – my apologies to Ben – and is everywhere, filling rooms and cars and conversations. But again my sorrow is not the point of this story, and so I won't dwell on days and weeks that, frankly, I don't recall anyway, aside from the keening of my mother and the way my father's hands hung at his sides; he was not a man accustomed to helplessness. The funeral was – as funerals for young people always are – unbearably sad, and made maudlin by some of Ben's old high school friends, who stood to blow their noses in front of the congregation and offer that Ben was 'like, cool.' I remember wishing I could make eye contact with him then so we could revel in their idiocy and in the silliness of such a spectacle. Ben would've liked it.

In fact, Ben would've relished everything about his funeral – the melodramatic grandeur and hypocrisy, the way slim acquaintances treated their sadness as a kind of commodity, the way they invented relationships with the