Land Of The Blind

1

You're probably wondering how a man falls so far so fast – how an idealistic, socially conscious lawyer one day finds himself planning a murder, of all things, how a man who's never broken any laws (okay, there were a few narcotics statutes) skips over all the other felonies and misdemeanors and goes straight for a premeditated murder. Of course, the explanation begins with my overpowering ambition and, especially, my unfailing blindness to the desires and motivations of people around me. But there are two other forces at work here, and between them, these two hard cases are undoubtedly the cause of more criminal acts than all the other suspects combined:

Love.

And politics.

This is the shape of my confession, then, a dark story of love and politics, a reckoning, a cautionary tale of how far one man can fall in this world. And to describe a fall, of course, one must start with height.

So let me just say this: I was rich.

I use this as the measure of my success because it is the gauge of my generation, a generation which will fade from even the shortest history because we contributed so little in the way of art and politics and bravery, because our currency was… well, currency. We were an entire cut of people in their twenties and thirties still running creative and procreative juices but spending the current of our days discussing stock options and price-to-earnings ratios and small market capitalization and "What's in your 401 (k)?"

Since profanity is nothing without a tease – a glimpse of flesh beneath the satin – it is a fair question to ask: How rich was I?

At the peak of my wealth, in 1999, I had seven million dollars in various checkbooks, savings accounts, stock portfolios, retirement accounts, and pants pockets. I had a condo in downtown Seattle, a new BMW roadster, a new Range Rover, and a vintage Harley-Davidson motorcycle. I was shopping for a boat. Now by the standards of the founders of Microsoft and Amazon and countless other late-century techno-thieves, my portfolio was little more than cab fare, but to me it was as much money as existed in the world.

I remember the first time it occurred to me that I was rich: in 1997, when I was making one of my rare visits to see my parents. I stood in their driveway as my father paced around my Harley.

"It's a beaut," he said. "How much was it?"

"It really wasn't too expensive."

"How much?" he asked.

When I told him that it cost thirty-two thousand dollars, he laughed giddily, but then his face set and he cocked his head. "Huh," he said, and he didn't have to tell me that it was more than he'd earned any year of his life.

I won't bore you with the details of my windfall, the picks and splits, the mergers and offerings, the good fortune that I convinced myself was good analysis. Suffice it to say that after I helped Eli get Empire off the ground (at least conceptually; in other ways, that Spruce Goose would remain forever grounded), I returned to Seattle and threw myself into the hunt for technology start-ups, to show Dana that I could succeed in her world or, rather, in her husband's world. I worked nonstop, hounding the city for raccoon-eyed computer geeks, for Microsoft drones looking to break off from the mothership, for coders and programmers, dreamers and brainstormers, people with the slimmest ideas as long as they involved somehow hunching over a keyboard and staring into a glass box. I read newspapers and trade magazines, hung out at cyber cafes and the technology departments of local universities. I beat the bushes until, by 1998, I'd flushed three dozen successful start-ups out into the open for Michael's venture capital riflemen, and written the contracts and done the various other legal work for five successful IPOs. You have probably heard of some of these companies, and may have even owned their stock, the most noteworthy being CybSys TechTronic (CSTT – the nation's premier producer of data cap transponders and backup port regulators for wireless modem and data recovery chips) and Myonlineshoestore.com, which was, for eight wonderful months, the number two online shoe store in the whole country.

Not all of my companies were successful, of course, and after the crash a certain newsmagazine looking to describe the irrational frenzy of the late nineties listed among the heavily funded and lightly considered tech businesses one discovery of mine: MousePants (later MousePants.com), which manufactured computer-friendly clothing, beginning with cargo pants with small mouse pads on the thighs (I suppose we should've stopped production once we saw the ubiquity of laptop rollerballs and touchpads, but even without the eponymous gimmick this was a good-looking, comfortable pant).

From the outside, the legal part of my job was not glamorous – a daily diet of IPO's, recaps, mergers and acquisitions, management buyouts, divestitures, bridge financing, debt and equity placement, credit lines, reorganizations, and countless other functions that were simply a shifting of money from one pocket to another. First for Michael and Dana, and later for one of Seattle's bigger law firms (I will not tempt action from those carnivores by mentioning the partners on their letterhead), I worked as a buffer, as Michael said, between Chad and Charlie, drafting paper maneuvers that ensured Charlie would give Chad an endless supply of money and Chad would give Charlie "a position" in some emerging tech business. Any guilt I felt over our… exaggerated display of Empire quickly faded when I saw the speculative prospects that brought in millions in seed money and made our game seem as established as Monopoly, when I saw that the point of this new economy was not some finished machinery, but the money that greased it so fully that it would take five years to realize the machine was running only on that grease.

But most of my wealth came not from my legal work, but from tips and insights I gleaned about start-ups and new products, buyouts and takeovers. Each time I bought stock for myself, I picked up a few for Eli, too, and while he spent most of his money paying back investors and genuinely trying to turn Empire into a computer game, he managed to do pretty well alongside me, two unlikely success stories from Empire Road in the Spokane Valley.

But while it is the most obvious, money wasn't the only measure of my success, and not even the one that motivated me. I am a perception junkie, always have been; my drug is the way people see me. I had kicked the habit briefly during my ascetic phase following Ben's death, but now I was back on the shit. And all of Seattle seemed to be tripping with me, a full-blown collective high.

My own symptoms were so acute I began to doubt that I even existed when no one was there to see me. I craved that fleeting moment when I stepped into restaurants and people looked up, or meetings when it was my turn to speak. I dated every girl who would go out with me, always eager for new eyes in which to see myself. When I pulled to a stop at a traffic light I looked around for my reflection in the windows of buildings, my forty-dollar-trimmed hair, my tailored suit, my glass eye and sunglasses – near-perfection encased in a black BMW.

I was chained again to this self-addiction, and it wasn't long before I began to imagine the black tar of my particular habit – politics. I joined a few groups, a taste there and here – the Jaycees, a Bar Association committee on technology, nothing too extravagant. I got involved with the Democratic Party, and donated money to a handful of candidates. But the little tastes made me want more, until I found myself having the old daydream: a podium, bunting, my name on a banner behind me, a crowd of supporters: Mason. Mason. Mason.

During those days, older, established lawyers occasionally sought me out to explain this new world of high-tech business, and I developed something of a reputation as an expert in my field. I spoke at conferences to rooms full of gray-haired lawyers about the speed and dexterity with which we would need to practice contract law to keep up with the demands of an industry that seemed to change by the minute. During these presentations I sometimes began sentences with the words "In the future," and I rambled on about the day when client conferences would be video-streamed over broadband, when computers would automatically read through a trial transcript and make the appropriate appeal, when entire hearings would be held on the Internet and the lawyer would never have to leave his office (except, I suppose, to jetpack home to have sex with his robot girlfriend in his cryogenic sleeping portal).

That's how it happened that, in April 1998, I accepted a request to speak at the first annual "Spokane Technology Symposium" with various civic leaders, elected officials, and local entrepreneurs (always shy about such things, Eli had given them my name when they tried to recruit him for the symposium). The whole endeavor smacked of desperation, as the local leaders tried to spark the kind of twelfth-hour high-tech boom that had transformed Seattle and Portland – and much of the rest of the country – but passed Spokane by like a long-haul trucker on bennies.

The symposium was held in the conference room of an airport hotel. We sat at round tables as waiters brought us fingers of chicken left over from some canceled flight, and a salad that consisted of cottage cheese and Jell-O. At each table sat a member of the city government and several representatives of the technology elite of Spokane.

At my table was a frowning, buzz-cut retired air force corpsman who had recently been elected to the city council and who wanted to make sure the library computers weren't being used to access porn; a junior high school student with razor-wire braces who won a computer science contest by using his laptop to graph local marijuana prices; the furtive founder of a local keyboard manufacturing company that was in the process of moving to Belize; and the manager of one especially cutting-edge firm called Jocko's Soft Tacos: "We just got a new computer for our drive-thru window that has cut in half the number of Mexi-Bobs that we throw away."

I also spoke to the mayor, a nice older gentleman who had retired from "the carpet industry, myself," and who ran for office because he was tired of gardening with his wife all day. He admitted that he was catching hell for failing to bring technology companies to Spokane, and for allowing sharp minds such as mine to escape.

"My kids like the computers," he said. "Me, I wouldn't know how to turn the goddamn thing on if you put my hand on the crank." He struggled to frame the problem, using his fingers to put quote marks around every eighth word. His opponent in the upcoming election claimed that to "attract" certain kinds of industry, cities must offer "incentives" to help convince entrepreneurs that a certain "atmosphere" existed.

That's true, I said. Tax incentives, growth districts, infrastructure – there were things a city could do to attract technology companies.

"And how long does it take, all of that?"

"Well… it can take years," I said.

"Yeah," he said. "That's no good. I only got three months."

I suppose that's when it first dawned on me that my newfound success connected at some point with my old dream – that I could be a kind of visionary figure, a political candidate for the twenty-first century. It would be more than a year before I would do anything about this vision, though, and even that day, I got drunk and didn't give any more thought to my political career. And beyond that flash of inspiration, I suppose Spokane's first technology symposium isn't very important to the core of my confession – except for one other detail.

After dinner (barbecued ribs and coleslaw) and several drinks, I staggered to the elevator fairly drunk – and not quite alone. That night, in a small room on the fourth floor of a hotel built into the hillside over my old hometown – the lights of Spokane sparkling below us like a lake of stars – I had sex for the first time with Dana Brett.

2

It was unbelievable to me that Dana could've fallen in love with such a sneaky, coldhearted, lying bastard as Michael Langford. She seemed oblivious to his manipulation of her, his cheating of clients, his double-dealing with colleagues and competitors. She also seemed oblivious to his intense dislike of me. Oh, when we were around other people, Michael was friendly, but when it was just the two of us he berated me, called me a fraud, and taunted me with the fact that he had married the only woman I have ever loved.

"Hello, Mason," he would say when I answered the phone. "Who are you bilking today?" When I would say something he disagreed with, he'd say, "Mason, are you looking through your bad eye again?" When he didn't return my calls right away, he'd say, "Sorry I didn't get right back to you, Mason. I was nailing my wife."

Michael's company was called Techubator. (He and his partners thought it was a clever name for a tech company incubator; I always thought it sounded like a machine to help jack the fatty.) I only got involved with Techubator in the first place to spend time with Dana, and with Michael's constant disdain and vicious barbs it was the only reason I stayed as long as I did. But as I got deeper into the business, Dana's role kept decreasing. Then, in early 1998, she left the firm entirely to devote herself to creating Web sites for nonprofit agencies.

I was frantic. I tried to dissuade her through e-mails and phone calls, but she was adamant that it was time to move on. On her last day I flew down to Techubator headquarters in San Jose for her going-away party, and when the cake was gone and the chino-wearing staff had wandered back to their cubicles, I saw Dana sneak outside the office and found her on a park bench on a sidewalk in the business park.

She said the pace had gotten to her. "We're running on a treadmill. We never get anywhere. We start these companies and then move on to the next one before we know what happens. It's like giving birth and never getting to see the babies grow up."

"We had three IPO's in the last six months, Dana," I said. "We have three more in the works. How much bigger do the babies have to get?"

She had grown her hair longer; it was brown and straight, and she pushed it back out of those cinnamon eyes. "I don't mean financially, Clark," she said. "All of the things that were supposed to happen… the transformation of our economy and our culture. What happened to all of that?"

"My economy's been transformed," I said.

She ignored me. "Besides, it'll be easier on me personally."

I perked up, put my hand on hers. "Things tough at home?"

She looked up. "No," she said, not convincingly. "I just think it's not good for a couple to live together and work together. And frankly, I'm sort of bored, Clark. I need a new challenge. I need something more."

In the time I'd spent at Techubator, Dana was always friendly toward me but she'd maintained a slight reserve. And yet, at meetings, I'd feel her eyes on me and I'd know she was thinking the same thing I was – that we'd somehow missed each other in the crash and whorl of our lives.

That's what I felt sitting on that bench. With the words "something more" hanging in the air, I looked into her eyes. She didn't look away. The space between us seemed charged. Dana's mouth opened slightly.

"Dana-" I began.

"There you are," said Michael, an edge in his voice.

We both looked up from the park bench.

Michael came into the courtyard, bent down and kissed her full on the mouth, then rested his hand on her neck and looked down at me. "We're so glad you could come, Clark," he said. "Did Dana tell you all about our plans?"

I said yes, and how impressed I was with her nonprofit Web site plans. Before coming to work for them, I reminded them, I'd done quite a bit of charity work myself.

"Oh, right. In Portugal," Michael said evenly, nearly masking his sarcasm. "Did she tell you the best part? In a year or so, we're going to start having kids."

"No, she didn't mention that part."

"Or two years," Dana said.

Michael squeezed her shoulders. "I can't wait."

A few weeks later I left Techubator and accepted a job with the Seattle law firm. I still remained involved with some of the companies funded through Michael's venture capital contacts, and we were both still shareholders of Empire – which was chewing up seed money with no hope of having a real game in the near future – but I knew I couldn't stand to have any more regular dealings with Michael Langford.

For four months I could think of no excuse to call Dana. But I found myself thinking about her every day, and I felt a charge, a gap in my breathing when I'd see her small oval face and those placid eyes.

Then, in April of '98, I was invited to the technology symposium in Spokane. I agreed to go only if they included a presentation on what I said was the fastest-growing segment of the industry – Web pages for nonprofits. I told them I knew the perfect expert to come speak on that topic, and that coincidentally this person had lived in Spokane, too. And then I made an anonymous donation to the symposium to pay for this expert's airfare. For her part, Dana seemed excited to be back to Spokane, and to see me, and that's how Dana and I ended up together in the lounge at the Airport Ramada Hotel and how we found ourselves at a corner table, laughing and throwing back White Russians and Cape Cods, as if we might drink enough booze to float us over the locks between us, which is, of course, the only really good thing about booze.

I told her that her presentation had been great. (In fact she'd alienated the crowd a bit, contending that for every dollar a city spent attracting private technology firms, a city was morally required to spend a hundred dollars on computers for schools and other public projects.) I also remarked on the sorry state of affairs in Spokane, compared with new economy centers like Seattle and San Jose.

"Oh, they're better off without all that shit," Dana said, raising her glass to ask for another Cape Cod. "Sometimes I think this is the last real place on earth, Clark. Sometimes I think I haven't been right since I left here."

"Spokane?"

"If Michael would do it, I'd move back here in a minute. Have a bunch of kids."

"What would Michael do here? There's no technology base. There's nothing."

She shrugged. "He could be a waiter. He was a waiter when I met him. A good waiter. He could hold nine water glasses." When she was drunk her right eyelid fluttered, and it occurred to me that if the left eyelid got going too, she might just lift off the ground. "That's something. Bringing people water. That's basic goodness. Someone is thirsty. You bring them water. What has any of this technology" – she pronounced it teck-nodgy – "really done for anyone, Clark? Does it make them less thirsty?" She swilled her drink. "We used to go to the mall to buy our CDs. Now we buy them at our desk. What's really changed?"

"The whole world," I said. "The whole world has changed."

"Is this what you saw us doing when we were young?" she asked. "We were idealistic. We wanted more than this, Clark. Remember? Remember what you wanted?"

I stared into her fluttering eyes. "Yes," I whispered. "I remember."

She stared back at me, confused, and then it seemed to register, what I was talking about. She laughed, tossed her head back, and snorted. "I don't mean that, silly." She waved her hand dismissively and knocked my drink into my lap.

I jumped up and slapped at my crotch, where the Kahlua had doused whatever had begun to smolder down there.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm a dope." Then she took her drink, looked at it, and dumped it in her own lap, the vodka and cranberry juice making a small and inviting pool in her skirt. We both watched as the booze seeped into the small triangle between her thighs – until all that was left were six of the most fortunate ice cubes I've ever seen.

"There," she said. "Even."

Ten minutes later we were in her hotel room. I would like to say that the next eight minutes constituted one of those life-altering, transcendent moments that can occasionally occur when two people do what we attempted to do, but far too much liquor had crossed the breach for anything more than a boozy tumble. (Ow. Ooh, not there. Mmmph. Are you okay? Sorry.) We certainly did nothing to make good on the promise and longing of all those years.

And yet, when it was over, we held tight and I spent the next hour staring at the tiny blond hairs on her temple, listening to her breathe on my neck, and we lay all night like that in each other's arms, slowly sobering up, but not saying a word, not wanting to waste a second with talk or sleep, our fingertips lightly tracing each other's bodies until dawn began to nudge at the curtains and we could stand it no longer and, aching, we pressed together again, and then all morning, clenching and arching and falling away. And I doubt that such things can be controlled, but the last memory I hope to indulge on this earth is the weight of Dana's hand on my neck and the gust of her voice on my ear as she whispered, "Clark. Oh my God, yes."

When I finally gave in, it was to the deepest sleep I can ever remember. When I awoke, about three that afternoon, Dana was sitting in a chair across from my bed, talking on the phone. "No," she was saying. "It was fine." She listened for a few minutes. "I'm flying out tonight." She listened again. "Clark?" She looked up at me. "Yeah, I saw him a little bit… Well, we didn't make any plans, but if I see him, I'll tell him hi."

"Okay," she said. "Love you too," and hung up the phone.

"Hi," she said to me.

"Hi."

She smiled sadly, and I had the inexplicable feeling there was someone else in the room with us – some version of our pasts or vision of our futures, some overwhelming sadness. "You have the worst timing of any person I've ever met," she said finally.

We showered separately, dressed, and drove into town. She wore a print dress that reminded me of the things she wore as a kid. She kept pushing her hair over her ears. We ended up at the Davenport Hotel, which was just then beginning another renovation, and I stood quietly in kinship with it, my insides long ago gutted and abandoned, dead for fifteen years and now, against all reason and odds, crying out for rebirth.

We drove out to the Valley, to her parents' old house, in the apple orchards near the Idaho state line. They'd moved to Arizona a few years earlier, and Dana didn't want to disturb the new owners. She sat low in the passenger seat of my rental car and traced the white porch railing on the car window. "We're kids for such a short amount of time." She turned and looked at me. "But forever."

Dana had never been to my house when we were in high school, and I said nothing as we drove past it. My mother was in the yard, her back to us, bent over a flower bed along the sidewalk in front of their house – her shoulders a little narrower, her hair a bouquet of gray. I passed behind her, a ghost in a rental car.

"Where is it?" Dana asked a few blocks later. "I thought we were going by your house."

"It was back there," I said.

At the airport, I ordered a drink, but Dana didn't want one. We sat at the end of the terminal, watching mothers preboard with their babies.

"Have you thought about how you're going to tell Michael?" I asked.

"Tell Michael?" She cocked her head.

I stared at her for a moment and then said, "Oh." Understanding fell in my lap like a White Russian. "You're not going to tell Michael."

They announced her section of the plane and Dana stood. "Oh, Clark," she said. "I'm sorry. It would kill him." She kissed me. "This was nice. Maybe even something I needed. But I have to get back to my life now."

This was nice. I lurched and burned and swayed and watched her walk all the way down the tarmac, until at the very end, just before she stepped on the plane, I swear I saw her glance back.

3

I got drunk that night, and again the next night and pretty much every night for the next six weeks. I have always tried to drink moderately, but as you may have noticed by this point in my confession, I have a somewhat compulsive personality. So for me drinking moderately is akin to fucking moderately, or jumping moderately from a cliff. Either you do or you don't. And after watching Dana get on that plane, I did. I got drunk on the plane back to Seattle, got drunk at the airport bar after I landed, and then – when Dana wouldn't answer my e-mails – set about humiliating myself in a different bar each night for a month and change. I have fond memories, and fonder blackouts, from this time (one Saturday afternoon I staggered from a Pioneer Square bar and led a tour of the Seattle Underground to the water, where, thankfully, I was stopped before I could perform any baptisms). I will not indulge these lost evenings, these nights in which I was potted, canned, screwed, smashed, soaked, bottled, and blitzed; instead I'll skip to the last night of this long hot binge, when I was summarily thrown out of the Triangle Pub for standing on a stool and asking for help measuring the bar's hypotenuse.

After I was led outside I promptly fell over on the sidewalk, looked up into the drizzle, and saw a girl's thin face staring down at me. She was young and lithe in her Deadhead sundress, her braided red hair and worn backpack. I immediately recognized her as one of the girls I'd slept with during my bohemian days.

"Tamira," I said.

"No," she said. "Kayla."

"Oh. Kayla. You look like a Tamira."

"Yeah. I just came out to tell you, it doesn't have a hypotenuse."

"What?"

"The bar. It's an isosceles triangle. Doesn't have any right angles. So you can't measure the hypotenuse." She peered into my eyes. "What's wrong with you?"

I asked her to marry me. We went instead to a late-night breakfast joint where I told her the whole sordid story while she ate ginger french toast and tofu sausage with one of her turquoise-ringed hands and smoked Lucky Strikes with the other.

"So you're saying you spent the last three years trying to be like the guy that this Dana woman married?" she asked.

I thought about it. "Yes," I said. "I guess I did."

Kayla took a drag of a Lucky Strike. "Well, there's your mistake. The last thing some married chick wants is a guy like her husband. You should go back to yourself."

In a flash of understanding I saw that Kayla was right. Go back to myself. The problem was this: which self?

Two days later I was back in Spokane, at a cemetery downriver from the city. I crouched down in front of a small stone, set flush into the ground. I ran my finger over the letters, BENJAMIN T. MASON, and those cruel dates, NOVEMBER 12, 1966-NOVEMBER 19, 1985. I know there are people who go to such places to talk to the person who has died, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. (I also refuse to say that a person has "passed," as if he has simply processed a rich meal.)

Mom had left plastic flowers on Ben's grave, and a wooden hummingbird whose wings windmilled frantically in the wind. I straightened the flowers, wiped the grass clippings from the headstone, and wished that Ben could tell me what to do now. I remembered his saying that I really only lived in the perceptions of others, and suddenly it seemed painfully true. I couldn't think of a time when I'd acted on my own, when I wasn't driven by my grief for Ben or my love for Dana or my desire to show up Michael Langford – or, for that matter, the tyranny of Pete Decker or the suggestive looks of girls in high school. I wondered if I even had a self.

"I miss you," I said aloud. Surprised at myself, I looked around to see if anyone had heard, but no one was near.

I left the cemetery and drove into Spokane, to the northeast end of downtown, to a brick storefront that had been an antique and junk shop until six months ago, when it became the offices of Empire Interactive.

This was at the beginning of Eli's compulsion about security, and he'd recently installed an elaborate key card system on the door. In addition, the windows were tinted so no one could see in. I pounded on a window, unsure if anyone inside could see me.

Finally the door opened and out came Louis Carver, beaming. "Clark! What are you doing here?"

"I came to check on my investment."

Louis patted me on the small of my back. "Come in."

I followed him through the door into a narrow anteroom, where a security camera monitored our progress, then through another key-carded door into what looked like a cafeteria: tile floor, long tables where a half-dozen people sat working intently on computer terminals. At the far end of this room were three small offices, one for Bryan the tech guy, one for Louis, and one for Eli.

He came out of his office wearing wrinkled slacks and a striped shirt with a salsa stain near the collar, his glasses slightly askew. "Clark!" he said, and then his piggy little eyes shifted around the room, as if embarrassed by the excitement in his voice.

"Hey, Eli." I reached out and he took my hand reluctantly, gave it a soft, fleshy shake, and then turned back toward his office.

Louis gave me a lingering stare and then went back to work.

I followed Eli into his office, a simple, white-walled room, with a long computer table and the old Empire binders stacked on bookshelves along the walls. He looked out the window at the people in the office. "I don't trust them," he said. "I don't like the way they look at me. They're ingratiating. They smell money. They pretend to hang on every word I say. They pretend to like me."

"Maybe they do like you," I said.

He turned to me, one eyebrow raised, as if I'd just suggested that he become a male model or an exotic dancer. Then he turned back to stare into what they called the Game Room. "I just don't know why we had to hire so many," he said.

"We've got to get this thing off the ground, Eli," I said. "If we don't start earning money pretty soon, the investors are going to get antsy."

"I don't care," Eli said. "I'll pay them out of my own pocket."

I had to beg him to show me what they were working on, including an e-mail component that would allow characters (Eli still wouldn't call them players) to contact each other away from the instant messaging of the game – to allow more backstabbing and double-dealing. "That's the key," Eli said: "treachery." I hadn't been by the office in more than three months, so he showed me the newest graphics, which were – as our team of young testers assured him – "killer." He was especially excited about a prison for miscreant and broken characters – a rocky island covered with catacombs, tunnels, and torture chambers, straight out of The Count of Monte Cristo.

But he was leery of showing me much else, including the game engine that he and Bryan were constantly tinkering with, the "brains," the basic system that ran the shadow world, took the information and the actions of the characters and translated them into the movements of people on the computer screen.

"It's not that I don't trust you, Clark," he said, "but you come in contact with a lot of other companies. I'd hate for something to end up in the wrong hands."

It was late in the afternoon. Eli had recently moved into the house on Cliff Drive (that place of horrors, now) and he invited me over. I said we could take my rental car – I knew Eli hated to drive – but he smiled wryly and pulled a single, plastic-coated, black key from his pocket. I followed him out back, and there it was: a new, dark gray Mercedes-Benz convertible, and the only extravagant thing I ever knew Eli to buy.

I followed him up the South Hill to his house, but after we parked he led me away from the main house to the small carriage house in back, where he was living. There was very little furniture in the carriage house, and his clothes were still in his suitcase. Apparently he only ate pizza; the boxes were stacked against one wall. "You want a beer?" he asked.

I explained that I'd been drinking too much lately, and that I'd recently had a kind of pre-midlife crisis. Yet after what had happened at the prom, I didn't figure he'd sympathize with my attempts to steal Dana from another guy, so I spoke generally about my desire to find some part of myself that I'd forgotten. "I just can't help feeling," I said, thinking of Dana, "that there are things from my past I need to confront."

Eli stared at me for a long moment. "Come here," he said finally. "I want to show you something." I followed him into the kitchen. He opened a drawer. Inside was a bulging folder with the word DONTES written across the top. Eli reached in the Dontes folder and pulled out a thin file, then slid it across the counter to me.

A name was typed on the file: Pete Decker.

"Open it," Eli said.

There were three black-and-white glossy surveillance photos, taken through a car window, each showing a thin and tired-looking Pete Decker coming out of a downtown apartment building in jeans and a T-shirt and a dishwasher's apron. The last picture showed him climbing in a beat-up Chevy Nova. He'd aged considerably, and not very gracefully, in the twenty years since I'd seen him.

Eli stood over my shoulder as I looked at the picture. "I hired an investigator to find him. He's been in and out of jail." Eli grinned. "He just got busted again a few days ago for cocaine. Isn't that great?"

"You hired an investigator to find Pete Decker?" I asked.

He must've registered the discomfort in my voice because he took a step back. "Yeah, like we were talking about. Unfinished business. I mean, you of all people must've wondered what happened to Pete Decker."

I was curious, but honestly I felt nothing as I looked at the pictures of this skinny, smoked-out guy, hands in his jeans pockets, a cigarette butt dangling from his mouth.

"Yeah," I said. "I don't mean there are scores to settle. It's more about myself, like I got sidetracked, like I've forgotten who I was supposed to be." Again, I thought of Dana. And Ben. "Like I've let people down."

Eli smiled and took the pictures back. When he put them in the drawer I saw something black and metallic and it was only later that I realized that it was a handgun. And if I make this discovery sound casual on my part, a fleeting image, know that later, when hatred and revenge filled my chest, I had no trouble remembering exactly where that gun was located.

"Come on," Eli said. "I want to show you one more thing."

I followed him out the door and down the stairs. We crossed the dry lawn to the main house, dark and empty. He juggled some keys until he found the right one. He turned on a light and half the bulbs lit up in a huge chandelier in the foyer. I followed him into the big open living room, pillars on either side of the door and a curved staircase climbing to the second floor. The windows were topped with stained glass and the wood floors were polished and immaculate.

"Beautiful," I said.

"It's too big. And there are so many windows. It feels so… exposed. I don't feel like I fit here, like my life hasn't caught up with this house. So I haven't put any furniture here. I haven't hung anything on the walls." He gestured to the fireplace. "Except that."

It took me a moment to recognize the framed photograph that hung above the mantel. There were four people in the picture and they were so young, their faces line-less and blameless and unafraid. The two girls in front were pretty, especially the petite dark-haired one, who smiled shyly, as if she knew something the others didn't. The other girl clearly didn't want to be in the picture and she contributed little beyond a bland attractiveness – blond hair, blue dress, baby's breath corsage. But it was the two boys in the flaring tuxes who caught my attention: the taller one with the feral hair and uneven eyes, his arm thrown around the shoulder of the short awkward boy, who beamed like this was the high point of his life.

I felt Eli over my shoulder. "You were fearless," Eli said. "You did whatever you wanted. Played sports and dated cheerleaders and ran for everything. I thought you could do anything you wanted."

I turned back to Eli Boyle and it occurred to me that, outside my family, he'd known me longer than anyone in the world.

"I remember who you were going to be," Eli said.

I looked at the prom picture again.

That's when he pulled a pen and a checkbook from his back pocket, leaned against the wall, and wrote out a check. He turned and handed it to me. It was a check for ten thousand dollars. It was made out to "The Committee to Elect Clark Mason."

"I can help you," he said.

And even though it was preposterous, seeing my name like that – The Committee to Elect… – it sparked something in me, something primal and powerful. I tried to laugh it off but I could not take my eyes off the check. "Elect me to what?"

"Whatever you want," he said. "Something big."

And that was it – the genesis of my half-witted plan to become Representative Clark Mason (later, Eli and I agreed that a candidate with two last names might be a meal too rich for Spokane voters and I went with my middle name, Tony), my plan to pick up my ambitions at the place where I'd left them fifteen years before. Eventually Eli and I settled on the U.S. House of Representatives as my best big shot. The current lifer in that seat, a prosaic Republican named George N-, was vulnerable for the first time because he'd defeated the previous lifer, Tom F-, an equally prosaic Democrat, solely on the issue of term limits – specifically, limiting candidates to three terms. Now, of course, faced with his own fourth term, George N- had changed his mind and decided term limits weren't such a good idea after all.

We talked about it all that first night and the next night and every day for the next two weeks. We were taken with the millennial excitement of the 2000 campaign, the opportunity to present a new kind of candidate – progressive both socially and technologically – and over the next few months Tony Mason was born.

My God, I was invigorated. It was as if clogged blood vessels had been cleared to my head and my heart. But if I was happy, Eli was positively exuberant, and he attended the details of my impending campaign as if we were both running.

"Butch and Sundance," he said one day, out of the blue. "Together again!" I mostly laughed this kind of stuff off, but it was a recurring theme for Eli in those early days of the campaign, this idea that the election was about him and me. "It's good to have someone who will always be loyal to you," he said one day.

"You bet," I said.

"You know, Clark," he said another time, as we priced office space for my campaign headquarters, "in my whole life, I never made another friend like you."

I thought about our fight at the bus stop, the way I avoided him at school and made out with his date at the prom, the way I used him and Empire to try to get Dana back into my life, how I went weeks, months, even years without talking to him. And he thought of me as his best friend. But again, I was too self-absorbed to really register Eli's loneliness, or to imagine what he got out of helping me run for office. All I could think about was the campaign; all I could think about was the candidate.

Even though the general election was still two years away, my contacts in the Democratic Party were clearly intrigued by me. Conservative Spokane was a tough sell and anyone who had a plan – and, especially, his own money – was welcome to run. After getting the party's blessing, the very first person I called was my old professor, Richard Stanton.

"Maybe you ought to just go straight for president," he said.

I explained my theory, why I thought George N- might be vulnerable this time, how I was going to bring economic development to my old hometown, how I would run as the first true candidate of the twenty-first century.

He said he hadn't heard me this excited since I was imagining my stupid nonprofit legal service ideas. "Good to have you back, Mason," he said.

That's when I asked him to be my campaign manager.

Dr. Stanton burst into laughter. "No way in hell."

I figured I could change his mind later. In the short term I began fund-raising, calling some of my old business contacts. Finally, after a week or so, I called Michael and Dana Langford at home. It had been two months since I'd slept with Dana.

"Mason," Michael said. "Tell me: how is it that you're not in prison?"

I heard someone else come into the room with Michael. "Hey, baby," he said. "It's our old friend, Clark Mason."

I patiently and evenly explained what I was doing, and said that if he and his wife would support my candidacy in any way, I would be eternally grateful.

He put his hand over the phone and I could hear him telling Dana. After the word "Congress," he burst into laughter. Then Dana came on the phone.

"Are you really?" she asked. I was thrilled at the things I heard in her voice – pride and envy, hesitation and urgency.

"Yes," I said. "I am."

"That's great," she said. "Of course we'll make a donation."

"Hey, tell him our news," Michael said in the background.

"I was going to," she said, another strain in her voice. "Clark, do you remember in Spokane, when you and I were talking about timing?"

"Of course I remember," I said quietly. "You said mine was bad."

She cleared her throat. "Well, I didn't know for sure then, but now I do," she said. "I'm pregnant. Michael and I are going to have a baby."

4

Running for office is nothing like you assume it's going to be, nothing like the discussions of public policy and government ethics that we engaged in during college poli-sci classes. I could write for days about the disappointment of politics.

And yet we have precious little time left, Caroline. We both know that. No time to waste wading through the billion trivial details that make up a modern political campaign: endless debate over what colors to use on buttons and posters ("Since George N- is using red and blue, I think we should go of commercials (it took four people two weeks to choose "Isn't it time for a

The thing that surprised me most was how little I actually had to do. We were perhaps a little too successful in raising funds early on, because before long we had an eighty-dollar-an-hour expert for every aspect of the campaign, and nothing was really required of me other than wearing the right tie with the right suit and remembering to stare straight into the camera. ("That eye," said the director of my commercials the first time he met me, as if I weren't even there. "What am I market for the speeches I'd daydreamed of giving, and the handful of addresses I expected to formulate policy or fine-tune my stances on issues; they had poll numbers to tell me which of my beliefs were popular enough to mention, and if I couldn't duck a certain issue, there were copywriters to rewrite my more liberal opinions. ("Each student has the right to pray in school. What I'm saying is

After a few months of this, you end up feeling more like a product than a candidate, like a toilet cleaner or an especially moist cake, and when the TV lights flicker and the makeup begins to heat up, you can actually feel the talking points and last-minute instructions start to bake in your mind (Stare straight ahead; say farm equity, not farm subsidy). Early on, I was fine with this state of affairs. After Dana dropped her bomb it dawned on me fully that I would never be with her and I was happy to just stand there and wave, cut ribbons, pat schoolchildren on the head, and not think about the woman I loved having the baby of my sworn enemy.

In fact, I felt a real kinship with Empire. By early 2000, we were both fully funded and fully imagined, yet we were, at best, half realized – sketchy products with limited prospects and very little application in the real world.

I recall only one moment of transcendence during the eighteen months I ran for Congress – one day when my candidacy was about something more than my candidacy. It was early on, a gathering of the four Democratic hopefuls in front of twenty or thirty people at the Spokane Public Library. Eventually we ended up talking about the causes and possible solutions for Spokane's double-digit poverty rate and its fifty-year economic slump. (I wonder: after fifty years, isn't a pothole simply part of the topography?) In the end, this is the only issue in Spokane. Everything else – high crime, the meth epidemic, declining downtown, bad roads and services – spirals out from the one thing about Spokane that no politician in the last fifty years has ever come close to solving: it is poor.

The other candidates each seemed to have a pet cause for this state of affairs, and so we spent some time talking about the long decline in mining and other natural-resource-based industries, the geographic isolation, the inability to transition to other kinds of business, the city's insidious, uncaring power base, and what one candidate called "an unending cycle of regenerative failure."

As I listened I had the sense that we were staring at a vast, flooded valley, trying to decide which molecule of water was to blame.

"Those aspects of the problem are valid, of course, and we should do everything we can to address them," I said. "But let's be honest. That's not what the voters really want." I allowed that to hang in the air for just a moment and then I leaned back into the microphone. "What they want is for this to be a place that their kids don't have to leave. What they want is to stop gathering at the back fence to tell the neighbors how well the kids are doing in Seattle or Portland or San Francisco. I'll tell you what these people want from government – they want us to bring their children home."

I looked backstage and saw Eli, his fists balled up in front of his face, nodding enthusiastically, as if he'd been waiting for me to say that very thing.

If a campaign can be defined by one moment, then in that one I rose slightly above a mediocre slate of Democrats and stopped being simply a political upstart, the "New Economy Guy," the youngest of the four Democrats trying to unseat George N-. In that moment I became the prodigal candidate, the pied piper, and the hard subtext of my candidacy was cast – Vote for Mason. He'll bring your kids home.

In the winter before the election, Dr. Stanton took a leave of absence from the university to come aboard – "If you're really serious about wasting your money, I want to help" – as my campaign manager. He urged me to loosen up and be myself (" Tony Mason? Who the all cylinders, and yet I could sense in Eli some distrust of Dr. Stanton and the other political operatives surrounding me.

Our strategy was simple: spend money. It's almost unheard of for a first-time candidate to outspend a sitting congressman, but I sure as hell gave it a run. Ours became far and away the most expensive campaign in eastern Washington history. I spent the little bit I'd raised before the campaign even got going, and the paper-route allowance the party gave me barely paid for billboards and antenna balls, so it wasn't long before I was breaking out my own checkbook to cover expenses. By the end I spent about two million dollars of my money and about $300,000 of Eli's, plus quite a bit directly from – I found out later – the coffers of Empire Interactive. I probably would've spent even more – honestly, I'd have spent every cent he and I had – but at the same time the campaign was draining one end of my bank account, the long-dreaded flameout of the speculative technology market was draining the other end.

I suppose I should mention one other event that occurred during this period and that was connected in its own way to the campaign: I got married. Again, I don't want to derail this confession with my personal mistakes, and I certainly don't wish to enflame my ex-wife's very capable legal team by going into details – which would be in violation of at least one court-issued gag order anyway – and to be painfully honest about it, the entire thing exists in my memory like just another detail of the campaign, managed and measured, without much involvement on my part. So I will simply say this: I had known the woman before, and had even had a short romantic history with her. I can't say how much of my decision to marry her was based on politics, but I will say that as a young candidate in a conservative district, having a wife lent me a certain gravitas that I had lacked as a single man. In fact, everyone saw her as an asset to the campaign – "You can't go wrong with big-titted arm candy," Dr. Stanton said – although the thing I found most attractive about her this second time through was that she did absolutely nothing to remind me of Dana and the heartbreaking feelings that I still carried for her.

Unfortunately, though, this woman was accustomed to a certain lifestyle, and that presented a challenge to my financial solvency and led me to a few lifestyle changes (full membership at one of Spokane's two country clubs, for expensive example).

It was around this time that Eli started pulling back, too. What had once been a campaign focused around the two of us was now a huge machine with me at the center and several layers of publicity and press and strategy people between Eli and me, not to mention my new wife, a self-centered snob who'd gone to high school with Eli and who still had no use for him. Eli sightings became scarce around the campaign, and to my deep shame, I did nothing to bring him back into the fold.

And so it was that by the summer of 2000, with the election only months away, I found myself in the troubling position of having done exactly the opposite of what I'd set out to do, what the young visionary Kayla advised me that morning while she ate breakfast: Go back to yourself

Instead I chased the weakened version of an expired daydream, formless and without meaning. I became a politician. For someone allegedly seeking self-awareness and redemption, it would have made more sense to have my soul surgically removed and replaced with chipped beef.

I knew I was betraying myself in some fundamental way, but my addiction was in full bloom; I couldn't stop. I became more depressed and scattered as the campaign wore on. I butchered a swing through the small farm towns of the Palouse, south of Spokane. (At the Colfax library I was supposed to deliver the line "It's time to get government off the backs of the small farmer," but what came out of my mouth was somewhat

"What's the matter with you?" Dr. Stanton asked me. "You actually have a shot here." After that, he bowed out of rural campaign swings with me; he worried that he was making me nervous. But I screwed up when he wasn't with me, too, and at one stop I called George N- "a chinless dickball, an ethics-challenged, steaming bowl of fuck."

Dr. Stanton was irate. He said that if the media had happened to be at that event the campaign would be over. He asked if my verbal slips were caused by problems at home. "A campaign is tough on a young couple, especially if you've just gotten married. Why don't I talk to her? You want me to talk to her?"

"No," I said. "That's nice of you, but it's not her." And still, Dr. Stanton was a good enough friend to realize that my marriage was part of the problem, although I don't think he understood the larger problem. Just as Ben had foreseen, my weakness had finally played itself out; I had turned myself over completely to the perceptions of others, the voters, members of various country clubs and organizations, my campaign staff, the media covering the race, the state party, everyone but myself. And these verbal mistakes, these Tourettic slips of tongue, were my real self trying to get out.

But the more successful Tony Mason the candidate became, the further Clark Mason receded into the background, until one day in September, seven weeks before the election. I was sitting on the couch in our house, staring at furniture that my wife had chosen for us from catalogs and stores in Seattle. I looked down and saw that I was wearing clothes that a campaign consultant had chosen, sitting on a couch I'd never seen until it showed up in a living room that someone else had decorated.

"Tony?" my wife said from the kitchen. "Can we go somewhere warm for vacation after the election?"

"Sure," said Tony. "We can go wherever you want." And just like that, Clark Mason was officially dead.

As I said, this is ultimately a story about a fall, and that is what happened in that autumn of 2000. So as not to clutter this up further with my emotional state, I'll draw on the cold organizational skills of my legal background to tell you what happened. And so I hereby duly report the following: that within a six-day period in October 2000, these events did occur in the City of Spokane, County of Spokane, Washington State:

I. I met with my accountant and was apprised of the following:

A. Despite his repeated and unheeded warnings – something about all my eggs and one (1) basket – my entire portfolio consisted of emerging technology stocks.

B. The bubble had officially burst and technology stocks were down some 200 percent. My particular stocks were down even more. A full third of the companies that I owned no longer even existed.

C. I could try to redirect my investments, but I had spent too freely on the campaign, my house, my wedding, and countless other things.

D. I was broke.

II. I met with the state Democratic Party chairman, who informed me:

A. The party was impressed with my showing, but projections showed that I couldn't win.

B. They were worried about rumors that my campaign was partly funded by unwitting investors of a shadow company called Empire.

C. The party wasn't inclined to spend any more money on the campaign.

D. I was fucked.

III. Upset about these developments, I came home unexpectedly after canceling a campaign appearance and found:

A. My wife lying naked on the bed, reading a book.

B. Another man's pants lying next to the bed.

C. Said man in my shower. (In hindsight, I wish I'd bothered to find out whose pants were on my floor and, more important, what sort of range stud could drive my pinhead wife to such heights of ecstasy that she actually wanted to read a book. But I needed to get out of there, so I walked out of the house and didn't stop until I was downtown, standing in front of the Davenport Hotel, of all places.)

D. I was alone.

Unraveling can make one of two sounds: the long sigh of a balloon losing its air, or the dull flapping of a tire blowing out on the highway. An unraveling candidate makes both these noises, and nothing can be harder than to put back together a candidate who has come apart. I kept campaigning after the collapse – I couldn't think of what else to do – but it was over. My paid staff left when they were no longer actually paid, all except the loyal Dr. Stanton. I'm still touched by the way he kept apologizing for everything that happened, as if he could've done something to stop the deflation.

Like any wounded animal, when the last blow came, I found it a relief. It happened at the end of October. I was at the hotel where I'd recently moved, watching late-night TV, when I saw the ad: a picture of me from several years earlier, when I still had long hair and the eye patch. I didn't remember choosing that particular picture for an ad, and I was surprised that my formerly high-paid staff would allow it. Then the voice-over: "Until a year ago, Clark Mason" – I sat up at the mention of my real name – "was a rich Seattle attorney. Do we really want a liberal, rich west-side lawyer representing eastern Washington in Congress? Do we trust Seattle to take care of Spokane?"

My first thought was fairly detached: Now that is an effective piece of advertising. There were three such ads, all with the same theme and the same deep, movie-preview voice-over. They seemed to run every six or seven minutes on various channels. If there had been any hope for a last-minute reversal, that series of ads certainly took care of it.

A few days later, I read in the newspaper that the ads had been paid for by a political action committee called the Fair Election Fund, and that the officers of this fund were my friends Louis Carver and Eli Boyle. Louis called me immediately and said that he'd known nothing about it until he read it in the paper that morning; Eli's paranoia and delusions, he said, were getting out of control. I told Louis that it was okay, and that he should forgive Eli, that Eli needed him.

Later that day I talked to the press, halfheartedly defending myself against the charges that I was a carpetbagger. "One thing I can tell you, I'm certainly not a rich Seattle lawyer anymore," I said. I liked that joke – it was the first thing I'd written for the campaign in a while – but I think it came off sounding self-pitying and arch.

When the press conference ended, I watched the TV cameramen pack up their equipment; it was a bittersweet feeling, knowing I would never feel their hot lights on my face again, that their attention would move elsewhere, that I had run my last campaign.

It was two days before the election. I bought a fifth of whiskey, drank half of it in my car, and brought the rest to my campaign headquarters, which was in the process of being dismantled. (We were three months behind in rent.)

There was only one person in my office, a young volunteer named Lara. She cried as she watched movers pack up desks and computers, boxes of pins and bumper stickers.

"Mr. Mason," she said. "I'm so sorry."

"Thank you, Kayla," I said, and patted her on the head.

"Who is Kayla?" she asked.

"Hmm?"

"You called me Kayla."

"I did?" I thought about that clear-eyed girl, Kayla – who had magically appeared on the sidewalk outside the Triangle Pub, with that most basic of geometry solutions and the kind of advice Ben might have given: Go back to yourself.

I walked right past Lara, went outside, and looked up into the sky. I got in my car and drove east, across the river, to my parents' house on Empire Road. I parked in front and walked to the front window. My father was still awake. I could see him watching TV. Mom slept next to him on the couch. Dad saw me, got up, and opened the door. We stood on the porch looking at each other from opposite sides of the screen door. He had aged so much; I'd seen him a dozen times over the last decade, but I realized that I hadn't seen him in so long, hadn't seen anything. His calm blue eyes seemed to float in almond-shell lids; the creases around his mouth were dusted with gray whiskers.

"I lost," I said.

"Yeah," he said. Then he held the screen open for me.

And finally, I went inside.

5

After the election, I stayed in my parents' house for a few months, resting and getting my affairs in order, an exercise that mainly consisted of filling out stacks of paperwork chronicling various failures: divorce, bankruptcy, the sale of my house and other property, defensive filings with the Federal Election Commission and the IRS. But I also found time to talk to my parents about Ben, to explain my guilt and apologize for not being around all those years after he died.

My father mostly listened. My mother fed me. And the banks, creditors, and lawyers bled me, asset by asset, cent by cent, until there was nothing.

"They get the motorcycle, too?" my dad asked.

It was actually the last thing I had left. It was stored in a friend's garage in Seattle, and I had forgotten to list it in my dwindling assets. The next weekend I took the bus to Seattle, rode the bike home, and gave it to my dad. He tried to make me take it back, or sell it, but I insisted. The very next day he rode it to work. Unfortunately, it was only three months before the lawyers tracked the motorcycle down and took it away. I apologized to Dad, but he waved his hand.

"I didn't like it anyway." He never mentioned the bike after that, but my mom said he rode it to work every day while he had it.

I continued to put my life back together. I hung a shingle in Spokane and began to practice law again – wills for people with nothing to leave behind, divorces for people with nothing to split. I got a little bit of contract work, enough to start paying my ex-wife, to get a very small apartment and an old Honda Civic. I stopped wearing the glass eye and put my patch back on. I grew my hair a little bit longer. I breathed. Ate. Walked. Talked a little. Was I better? I believed so. I made the mistake of thinking the trappings were my problem, the symptoms were my disease. I was poor, I thought, so I must be on my way to being whole again.

Then, more than a year after the election – this January, just a few weeks ago – I finally went to see Eli Boyle. Honestly, I wasn't angry with him. In some important way, I believed I deserved what he'd done. And yet I hadn't wanted to see him until then.

We imagine that time has qualities of its own, a weight and a girth, powers of redemption and recovery. We believe that time will fix or heal, or at least resolve. But sometimes the time just passes. The days go by and nothing changes, nothing.

I drove up the face of the South Hill. I turned on Cliff Drive and drove past the mansions to the end of the cliff, where the lesser homes clung to the tawny slope like billeted climbers. Eli's lawn and trees were overgrown, the house empty. This was all that was left of Empire Interactive. The employees had all been fired by Eli or had wandered away. Louis was the last to go, almost a year before. Since then, Eli had moved everything he could carry up to his carriage house apartment, where he still lived. He had painted EMPIRE INTERACTIVE on a small sign and posted it outside his door. Unlike me – and Michael and Dana, it turned out – Eli had been selling his technology stocks along the way, and he was keeping Empire on life support from the last of the money that he'd saved, hoping like all the surviving tech companies to make it through the long night until the money rose again.

I climbed the stairs and knocked on the door. Dead bolts slid, hooks were lifted, keys turned, and finally the door opened and he was standing there, shifting his weight from foot to foot. I hadn't seen Eli in sixteen months. He'd gotten heavier, his hair thinner, a dusting of red whiskers across his cheeks and chin. And there was something in his eyes, that darting; when he blinked it was like he was in pain, like he was trying to force glass from his eyes. He backed into his apartment. He had this way of scrunching up his nose to push his glasses up. He did this, they slid back, and he did it again. The room smelled like coffee, pizza, and body odor.

"I didn't want to do it, but you gave me no choice-"

"I know," I said.

"The whole thing, you running in the first place, it was my idea-"

"I know."

"And you brought that woman in-"

"I know, Eli."

"It's always you and me and then you always forget, you always forget-"

"I know, Eli. I won't forget anymore." I walked slowly around the apartment, Empire reduced to these stacks of boxes and binders at our feet. He grimaced as he backed slowly to his computer, still unsure, I suppose, just what I meant to do to him.

"It was… you… betrayed… I-" Eli seemed unglued, his eyes darting back and forth. "I couldn't let it go. You have to stand up sometimes. Fight back." His voice had no modulation, like an idling engine, and I could see that he was sick in some way.

"I'm not here to talk about that," I said. "That's all in the past."

He nodded unsurely and made a small whistling sound.

"I tried to call you, but your phone has been disconnected."

"It was tapped," he said. "I kept calling to have them get the bugs off, but they wouldn't so I finally just disconnected it." He pointed at the computer. "I have e-mail, but I think they're watching that, too."

"I'm here to see the game."

"It's not a game," he said. Again, the painful blink.

"I want to see it."

"It's not ready."

"I know it's not ready. It's never ready. But I need to see it, Eli."

He watched me for a few moments, then turned on his computer, opened a couple of files, and the game engine began loading. "It's very rough. Still having trouble with the transitions. It doesn't go very far into the action yet." He talked as he worked the keyboard. "Bryan left the pixel shaders in a terrible state, and… and-" He looked down through his glasses at the screen. "Just when I think I've finally gotten it to be organic, I see some other thing I didn't anticipate. It's that Michael Langford. I know there's more venture capital, but he won't release it-"

The computer screen went black and then opened on a pastoral scene, a village in the distance. The graphics were nice, if a little flat, already out of date, passed up two years earlier by the 3-D photorealistic real-time rendering stuff. Even so, there was a quality to the graphics that was soothing and familiar. Tiny electronic birds chirped, and white puffs of sheep sailed in the distance. Eli used the mouse to move us forward, and we glided, from his character's point of view, across the field, the village growing in our vision. But the computer stopped and the scene lurched and was replaced by a close shot of the village gate. "I hate that," Eli said. "That hiccup. That's what I'm talking about; it's very rough. And I'm telling you, it doesn't go very far into the scene yet."

"I want to see."

On the gate were the words USER NAME:____________________and PASSWORD: ____________________.

Eli turned to me and it took a second before I realized that he wouldn't type his password until I turned away.

"Dontes," I guessed, thinking of the name on the Pete Decker file, the Monte Cristo prison he'd constructed, and most of all, of the elaborate way Eli had helped me build up my dream of a political career, before pulling it out from under me. "Edmond Dontes," I said.

Eli looked at me in horror. "How did you know that?"

I didn't answer. After a moment, he typed his password. The gate opened, and Eli's alter ego entered his village. Children and maidens rushed up to greet him. His computer-generated arms extended stiffly on either side of the screen, rubbing the kids' heads and taking flowers from the women. Then the image on the screen swung around slowly and there was Eli Dontes himself, tall and muscular, with a bushy mustache and curly brown hair, square of features and back. Eli saw me look from him to the vision of him on the computer, and he blushed and looked down. And then, the computer screen went blank, the picture replaced by strings of code.

"There are a lot of other scenes, but we're having trouble getting them to flow together."

"That's it?" I asked. "That's all you have?"

"Like I said, it's a little rough. Some glitches. If Michael would just release the rest of the investors' money-"

"That's actually why I'm here," I said. "Michael has someone who wants to buy Empire, or the concept of it, anyway." I reached in my briefcase and pulled out Michael's fax. "They want whatever you have, all development and research materials, all rights to the name and the likeness of the game."

"It's not a game," Eli said quietly.

"I doubt they're going to still want it once they see it," I said, "but it's an offer, Eli. Any offer is good. Especially given the climate and the game's… limitations."

He glanced over, then went back to reading the fax. When he got to the price, he laughed. "Two hundred thousand dollars? Is he serious? That's offensive."

"At least it's something," I said. "And this isn't just you. Michael and Dana. Me. We could all use the money, Eli."

"That sneaky asshole," he said. "I know what he's doing."

"You've been using your savings to keep the thing afloat. How much longer can you do that?" In front of his house, the Mercedes had a For Sale sign on it.

"Michael's wanted this from the beginning," Eli said. "He's wanted it for himself from the very beginning." His eyes narrowed again.

"Eli," I said, "if you run out of money, they'll take your house, everything."

He waved his hand toward the house, across the lawn. "They can have the house."

"At least consider this."

"Tell Michael I want my money." Eli continued to stare at the fax.

"Listen to me. Michael doesn't have your money. He's as broke as you and me. Everyone's broke, Eli. You have to sell the game."

"Not a game!" He waved the fax around, then relaxed. "Don't call it a game." Then I saw the look on his face that I'd seen when he showed me the photos of Pete Decker, and I couldn't help thinking of him up here eighteen months earlier, during the election, pacing around, cursing me for betraying him again, for letting him get close and then pulling away. "Tell Michael to give me more money and I'll finish the game."

"Look," I said, "I have to be honest with you. The game isn't worth two thousand dollars, let alone two hundred thousand. Three years ago, maybe. But technology has passed it by. The things you're trying to do – wristwatches do that now."

Eli wasn't hearing a word I said. "So Langford thinks he can get Empire out from under me. I should've guessed. The levels of treachery, that's the thing. Your true enemy is always the last one to reveal himself."

"Eli, just think about it. Please."

"Don't worry," he said, "I can take care of Michael Langford."

When I left I could see him in the window above the garage, the small curtain pulled back, the lenses from his glasses reflecting the light as he watched me drive away.

That evening I called Michael to tell him that Eli had refused even to consider selling the game. Dana answered. I hadn't talked to her since the frenzy of the election, when I'd called to tell her I was getting married. Now she said she was sorry about the election, and about my divorce. We small-talked. I told her I was practicing law again, that I was going to stay. I could hear in my own voice the sense of settled defeat, of fatigue. "Maybe you were right about Spokane," I said.

"What did I say?"

"You said it was the last real place."

She laughed. "And is that a good thing?"

"Yeah, it is," I said. "You've got to be tough here, a realist. For me, yeah, that is a good thing."

She said she and Michael were at a kind of equilibrium. They'd had to sell their big house in Los Altos and were living in a smaller place in Sunnyvale, but they were clearing away the debt and Techubator was flirting with profit again.

"There's this sense among all the people down here," she said, "that if we can make it a few more months, the money will start to come back."

"You'll make it," I said. "You're too smart, and Michael's… relentless."

"Yes," she said. I could hear noise in the background. "We're having Amanda's birthday party," Dana said, and then she sighed. "Oh, Clark-" and I could hear in her voice a shadow of the huge longing that I felt.

"I'll get Michael," she said after a moment.

As I waited I could hear children laughing in the background, and Dana asking who wanted cake. That's when I started doing the math in my head.

"Congressman!" Michael said into the phone. "Oh, wait, but you lost, didn't you? Well, at least you have your wife to comfort you. Oh, wait, you lost her too."

"Eli won't sell," I said.

"He has to."

"I tried to tell him that, but-"

"Try harder." And then he hung up to go back to the party.

I sat with the phone on my shoulder, clicking off the months with my fingers. Amanda was four. The date was January twentieth. Go back four years and nine months: April 20, 1998.

I couldn't speak for that entire month, but I could account for one day. On April 16, 1998, Dana was with me, laughing and kissing my neck, sliding out of her booze-soaked skirt in a hotel room in Spokane.

6

We never learn anything. Our lives circle back around endlessly, presenting us with the same problems so we can make the same mistakes. We pretend we are moving forward but we live on a globe rotating on an axis, orbiting a burning sphere that is itself orbiting with a million other round hot stones. In a universe of circles, movement is just the illusion that comes from spinning, like a carousel – the faster it spins, the faster the world moves around it.

How else to explain what began to form in my mind? How else to explain how a man could lose all that I'd lost – a childhood, an eye, a woman, an election, a fortune, a brother, maybe even a daughter – and still believe that, in the end, he might win? How else to explain how I could look at my sick friend Eli Boyle, who had wanted nothing his whole life except my help, and begin imagining him as the instrument of my treachery? If I have not been standing in this very spot for thirty-six years, spinning in a tight circle, how else to explain my position today?

When I went back to see Eli, the whole thing was already taking shape. It would be horrible, but defensible, if all I did was fail to stop Eli before his delusions got worse, before he got dangerous; if I just stood by while he paced and ranted and the black metallic handgun hummed and vibrated in that drawer. I would still feel responsible, but at least I could have some technical deniability, that weak measure of conscience of someone who looks the other way in the presence of evil. What I did was inexcusable.

I showed up at Eli's house breathless and frightened. I lied to him. I told him that he was right, that Michael was holding millions of dollars from us, that investors were clamoring to get back into Empire, but Michael wanted the game for himself.

"He's jealous of you." I held up the two-year-old copy of Wired in which Eli was quoted ("The future of gaming we didn't sell Empire, he would sue us and send us to jail.

"Can… is… can he do that?"

"Sure," I said. "We faked those presentations. We funneled investors' money into the campaign without their knowledge. We'll go to jail, and he'll end up with the game."

"Not a game!" Eli seethed, and his eyelids tried to squeeze the world away.

I went up there every day for the next week and watched him pace and rant and vow revenge. "We should've never gotten involved with Michael. He's a thief."

"He's sitting there in California with all that money," I agreed, "all that money the investors wanted to go to Empire. He's sitting there laughing at you.

"He's going to steal the whole thing," I told Eli. "He's going to steal it and ruin it and make millions and he's going to laugh at you the whole time."

Eli shook and sputtered with anger. "He can't… I… won't… It's-"

I could feel myself giving in to something dark, something I'd always known was inside, but had always tried to suppress. I remembered Pete Decker on the bus, goading me into fighting Eli. Kill that faggot motherfucker! "He'll change the characters," I said. "He'll make it a bunch of princesses, or set it in the future. He's going to turn it into just another game, a stupid test of hand-eye coordination. Ms. Pac-Man."

After a few days of this, Eli's sputtering and shaking began to go away, and I could see the thing forming in his mind – as clearly as if it were my own mind – until one day we sat together at the lunch counter at Fletts, speaking in low voices over cups of clam chowder.

"You can't have anything to do with this," he said.

"If you say so."

"It has to be me," he said. "I'm sorry."

"Okay."

"From here on out, don't ask me any questions."

"I won't."

"You need to be out of town."

"Why?"

"Why do you think?" he snapped, as if I was an idiot. "We have your political career to think about."

I stared at my soup.

"Call Michael," he said. "Tell him I want to set up a meeting for two weeks from now. Tell him the meeting has to be kept secret, and it has to be in Spokane. Tell him Empire is ready."

"Okay."

"I'll e-mail him the details of the meeting."

"Okay."

"If he asks, tell him I'm really losing it. Making crazy demands."

I had to look away. "I'll tell him."

"And listen. Afterward, you're not going to see me for a while. I may have to go away. Don't worry, I'll contact you when Empire is ready." He smiled. "We'll have the money for you to run for Congress again. We'll do it right this time. Just you and me. Not all those outsiders from Seattle. No women."

"Right," I said.

Then Eli took a bite of soup and pointed the spoon at me. "He's going to hurt like he's never imagined someone could hurt. He's going to hurt the way you and I hurt."

I didn't answer.

After lunch, he asked me to take him to the general store. Eli went in alone. He came out with a sack and I could tell by the shape that it contained a box of shells. "Don't ask," he said. At his apartment I sat in the other room, pretending to read a magazine, but I could see through the doorway into the kitchen as he loaded the shells into the gun, one by one, until all six chambers were full. I wish I could say that it filled me with dread, that it snapped me out of this craziness, but I watched with fascination.

When he was done, Eli put the box of shells and the handgun back in the drawer. He took a deep breath and came back in. I pretended to be reading the magazine.

"Don't worry," he told me. "This is going to work. I'm going to take care of everything." He walked me to the door.

I went down the stairs, but he stayed on the landing above me.

"Thanks," Eli said.

"For what?"

"For coming back, even after… I shouldn't have spent that money against you, Clark. I shouldn't have done that."

"It's okay," I said.

"We always come back, huh?" He scrunched his nose and raised his glasses and looked like the boy at the bus stop, the boy who'd come across me bleeding alongside the river. "We're like-" He shivered and then he smiled. Eli had trouble expressing emotions. He began to fidget and to shift his weight. "We're like best friends."

"Yeah," I said. "Sure we are."

He grinned like a kid at a birthday party. Then he paused.

"And we'll never go against each other again."

"No," I said.

He smiled again and went back inside.

When I got home I called Michael and told him Eli was ready to sell but that Michael had to come to Spokane. He didn't want to do it, but finally he agreed. "The game had better be ready," he said. "Otherwise, the deal's off."

"The game is ready," I said.

"One more thing, Mason," Michael said. "When this is all over, I don't want you calling here. It makes Dana nervous when you call. I don't like to see her upset."

Outside the snow was swirling, and I imagined being lost in it, lying down and letting it blow and drift around me until I was buried, gone. "Okay," I told Michael. "I won't call after this."

The next day, Eli sent me an e-mail.

Senator-

Have a nice trip. Get an early start. I'd go too but I have a meeting that day, February 6, at 10:00 a.m. Everything will be great after that.

Your best friend,

Eli

I bought an airline ticket for February 5, the day before Eli was going to… do it. I caught the last flight out. I got to San Jose about 10:00 p.m. and slept at a hotel near the airport. All night I tossed and turned, until the sheets and covers were like ropes binding me. In the morning I grabbed a taxi (a receipt, I was thinking, and a witness) and gave the driver Dana's address in Sunnyvale.

"That's gonna cost," he said. "You could rent a car for what it's gonna cost."

"I know." I stared out the cab window at the surging, pointless suburban northern California traffic – millions of cars and no sign of a downtown anywhere. The clouds were light and formless, a white-gray haze above us. I felt a detachment from myself – a defense mechanism, I suppose – self-denial over what we… what Eli was doing.

But it's his plan, I protested my own guilt. I didn't buy the gun. I didn't buy the shells. I didn't load it. I didn't tell Michael to come to Spokane.

"Gun?" the cabbie asked.

"What?"

He gestured to the eye patch. "Your eye. BB gun?"

"Oh," I said. "Yeah."

"It's always a stick or a BB gun, ain't it?" He turned and smiled, his own right eye milky, the pupil spilled out like the punctured yolk of an egg.

I looked back out the window. Cars swirled around us on the freeway, and every eye seemed to stare at me. A little boy perched on a safety car seat looked at me and shook his head slowly, and we stayed even with the little boy's car until I wanted to yell at the cabbie to go faster or go slower, anything but driving alongside that boy.

Calm. Cold. There is a synapse in the brain that connects brilliance to brutality. It is the oldest part of the brain. And so I felt better when I thought about the details, when I reveled in my criminal genius:

I had found a way to murder my enemy without incriminating myself, without even lifting a finger. The brilliance of it overshadowed any misgivings I might have. Even if Eli were caught, he would say I had nothing to do with it. The motive would always be his disagreement with Michael over Empire. My motive – Dana and our daughter – would stay secret forever. And since I would be with Dana when it happened, my motive would also be my alibi.

Perfect. Cold. I could hear my own breathing.

The cab left the freeway for the flat prosperity of Sunnyvale: small stucco war-era houses remodeled and expanded until they threatened to burst their small lots; new apartment complexes and condos and low-slung business parks where fortunes had been made and lost and were slowly being made again; an anachronistic villagelike downtown shaded by the condos and apartments rising around it. I was suffocating.

There was some kind of street fair going on and the cabbie had to detour around it – blocks of Berkeley vendors unloading knit hats and bracelets from Volvos and microbuses, and I thought I might choke in the back of that cab. The heat.

I had found a way to murder my enemy. What are you doing? Nothing! Settle down. You're just seeing an old friend.

"Seeing an old friend?" the cabbie asked. "That's great."

Was I talking out loud? Jesus. "Yeah," I answered. Was I really doing this? I checked my watch. Almost ten. The meeting would be any minute.

The cab stopped in front of a small, one-story stucco house, leaning out over two painted posts onto a lawn pocked with oranges from a small, leaning tree. No garage, just a cloth carport over a blue minivan. A tricycle sat on the front porch. My daughter's tricycle. My wife was in that house. The air was shallow and sharp in my chest; I couldn't get it to go any deeper, my lungs pressed beneath some weight.

I paid the cabbie and walked up to Dana's door. And that's when I knew I couldn't do it. My God. We were going to kill Michael. I'd told myself that Eli had lost his mind, but it was me. "My God!" I said aloud. "We can't do this." I rang the bell over and over. We had to hurry. We could still warn him. Michael's cell phone number! Maybe we still had time.

My first thought when Michael answered the door was relief: Oh, thank God. I didn't do this. Then a little girl came up and peeked around his hip. She was beautiful, round faced and pigtailed, wearing pajamas with Belle from Beauty and the Beast on the front. Amanda.

"Who is it, Daddy?" Behind them was the house not of a Silicon Valley mogul, but a struggling, working couple: a box of Cheerios on the dining room table, papers and bills spread out, toys and pillows on the carpeted floor.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Michael asked me.

I couldn't look away from the girl. "Is Dana here?" I asked.

"Mama's gone," said the girl.

"She's in Spokane," Michael said. "That freak friend of yours said he didn't trust me. It had to be Dana. I don't know why I ever got involved with you crooks."

I just stared at that little girl, at Michael and Dana's little girl. She held out a picture she had drawn. I took the picture and looked down at it. It was a stick-figure girl with stick-figure pigtails. "That's me," Amanda said. "What's on your eye?"

"It's… it's a patch," I said. My legs felt weak beneath me. I thought of what Eli had said. He's going to hurt like he's never imagined someone could hurt. Oh my God.

"Are you a pirate?"

"He sure is, sweetie," said Michael. "What do you want, Mason?" Behind him, his telephone rang.

7

What Eli wanted was the money he believed Michael owed him, the venture capital he was convinced Michael was holding back: $500,000, according to the ransom note Dana read over the phone. Michael listened with his hand on his head, making little moaning sounds every few seconds. I set Amanda's drawing down on the dining room table and stood next to Michael, my head next to his so that I could hear what Dana said.

"'Get the money and fly to Spokane,'" Dana read. "'There is a flight out of San Jose in ninety minutes. That gives you just enough time to go to the bank and get to the airport. The flight lands in Spokane at three-thirty. Exit the airport and walk to the garage. On the top floor, near the elevator, you will find a gray Mercedes-Benz with the top down. Put the money in the car and then go back into the airport and sit at the pay phone directly adjacent to the escalator. When Eli has the money, he will call and tell you where to find me. I'm in a cabin in the woods. If you do everything right, he won't hurt me. But if you call the police or don't bring the money, he will kill me. If you bring the police, he will never tell them where I am and I'll-'" She stopped. "What's that word?"

"Starve," said Eli in the background.

"It looks like swerve."

"No," he said. "It's 'starve.' How could you swerve to death?"

"Yeah, I didn't think that made sense," she said, and I couldn't believe how matter-of-fact she sounded, as if they were just chatting. "'Starve to death,'" Dana said. "'You have until four o'clock. If Eli doesn't have the money by four o'clock, he will kill me.' "The phone went dead.

"Dana!" The phone dropped out of Michael's hand. "Jesus. This isn't happening!" He tried Dana's phone again, but there was no answer. While he listened to it ring, he suddenly pushed me in the chest. "Did you have anything to do with this?"

"Of course not," I said. "I love Dana."

He just stared at me. Then he threw his phone across the room and put his face in his hands. Amanda started crying. "Daddy?"

Michael picked her up and comforted her. His hand was on her head. It fit perfectly between her pigtails. He was crying, too. He pressed her hard to his chest, and her little legs swayed side to side. She had frills on her socks.

So perfect. So cold.

"Listen," I said. "Nothing is going to happen. I'll take care of this, Michael. I'll make sure nothing happens. Eli isn't violent. He's just confused. He'll listen to me. I'm going to get Dana back and get Eli some help. I knew he was losing it. I knew-" I couldn't finish. I couldn't tell him that I had pushed Eli to this point.

"I don't have that kind of money," Michael said. "We gotta call the cops."

"No," I said. "Not yet. Don't force his hand. I'll fly back up there. I'll talk Eli down. Don't worry. I won't let anything happen. He's just confused."

"What if he hurts her?"

"He won't," I said. "Look, you can call the police if you want. But please. Let me fly up there and see if I can stop this. Get me on the plane and then it's up to you. Call the police. I don't care. But give me a chance to make this right."

Michael considered me. I'd always thought we looked alike, but as I looked into his teary eyes I felt so much smaller than him, so much less.

"Okay," he said.

He let me on his computer and I signed onto my e-mail and wrote Eli a quick note, just in case he checked.

Eli-

Don't do anything. I'm coming back there. Don't move. I need to talk to you.

I lied about everything. There is no more money. I'm sorry. For everything.

It's going to be okay.

Clark

We ran out to Michael's minivan, parked under the cloth carport. His hands shook as he worked the keys – hung on a long gecko key ring – and he beat on the dashboard as we sat snarled in traffic, trying to get around the street fair and the construction. The drive took forever, Michael yelling at drivers and squirreling the minivan from lane to lane. Throughout, Amanda sat in a child's seat strapped in back, staring at me.

"Does it hurt?" she asked.

"Does what hurt?"

"The thing on your eye."

"Sometimes." I turned to face her full on. "So you just turned four?"

"Yeah," she said.

"When's your birthday?"

"December nine."

I turned to Michael, my mouth dry. "You had her party late."

He looked perturbed. "What?"

"Her birthday party. When I called in January you were having her party."

"My parents were out of town for her birthday so we had a second party when they got back," he said, incredulous that I would ask about such a thing at a time like this. I did the math again. Less than eight months.

"My sister just had a baby," I said carefully. "She was almost a month early. Was Dana early like that?"

"No. She was three weeks late. What the hell is this, Mason?" Seven months.

We pulled into the airport turnout. As I got out of the car, Michael put his hand on my arm. "Please."

I said good-bye to Michael's daughter and ran into the airport.

I bought a ticket and was the last person to board. I settled in, panting and sweating, between two businessmen, who leaned away from the frantic, one-eyed passenger who sat between them. The plane had to land in Seattle before continuing to Spokane. The Seattle leg seemed to take forever. I'd check my watch, and only two minutes would've passed. I'd sit for an hour, snap my arm up, and check my watch again. Two minutes. I stretched and leaned and craned my neck. Out the window the clouds were stretched and striated, not enough to cover the snow-scarred ground beneath us.

In Seattle the passengers deplaned slowly, as if they were marching to their deaths. "For God's sake," I muttered. Both the businessmen got off and the Spokane passengers got on, families, students, and short-sleeved businessmen, ladies in tan slacks, a couple of drunk golfers. The new passengers sat and we waited, quiet except for the low rumble of conversation from the back of the plane and an occasional cough. I checked my watch: 2:45. And still the plane didn't move. I buzzed a flight attendant and asked what the problem was. "It's just a minor delay, sir. We'll be taking off shortly."

We didn't take off until just before three. It was a fifty-five-minute flight to Spokane. There wasn't enough time. Eli had said to put the money in the car by four or she would die. I was having trouble breathing again. Like he never imagined someone could hurt. Eli didn't have a phone, so I tried to call Michael from the phone on the plane, but it wouldn't work. I slid my credit card over and over, but it fucking wouldn't work. I tried the phone in the row in front of me. None of them worked. Maybe Michael had called the police. Maybe it would be okay. At 3:55 we made a pass over Spokane, but there was low fog and the pilot said we had to circle. Always circling. We banked and straightened and I saw in a flash my own death, like a carousel ride, faster and faster, around and around, the same faces spinning at the bus stop and high school and the prom and Empire – Dana and Eli and me, and even Ben, until he couldn't hold on anymore and he let go of the railing and fell away. I knew then that I couldn't hold on much longer either (the plane banking, my head sliding against the seat, the tears falling from my eyes) and it occurred to me that I was dead already, that I had been dead since that day by the river, that Eli had put his hand on the chest of a corpse, had comforted a dying boy, and I thought, We are all just loose piles of carbon and regret.

When the fog cleared and the plane stopped circling and I stopped spinning, there was nothing holding me together; when we finally landed, at 4:10 P.M., I felt as if I would dissolve in the air.

As I got off the plane, I half expected to see police meeting me. There were none. I ran through the airport, waded through the other passengers, and sprinted across the terminal, over the sky bridge and into the parking garage, up the elevator to the top floor – low-roofed concrete and round pillars. No cars. The Mercedes was gone. My voice echoed in the garage. "No! Eli!" I ran down three floors to my own car, which I'd left in the garage the night before. My tires squealed coming down the ramp, and I sped away from the airport and across town.

It took me fifteen minutes to get to Eli's house. The Mercedes was parked out front, the For Sale sign still on it. I ran up the stairs to the carriage house apartment. "Eli!" The door was unlocked. He would never leave the door unlocked.

My old friend Eli Boyle was lying on his side. Blood was barely moving, in a slackened flow outward from the wound, across the carpet, onto the kitchen floor. Lying there on the ground he seemed so small, just like when we were kids and I saw him walking to the bus stop, the braces rattling around his knees, drawn into himself, as if he could keep the world away. And I remembered feeling his hand on my chest that day, comforting me, the pellet from Pete's gun burning in my eye.

I suppose there are worse things than rest. "I'm so sorry, Eli," I said. I crouched down next to him. Blood wept from his head.

The gun was next to his body. I picked it up. The shades were pulled in the apartment and it was dark, so I carried the gun out onto the porch. I pulled the pin the way I'd see Eli do it and rolled the chamber out. There were two bullets missing. I slammed it closed, threw the gun across the lawn, and screamed out: "Dana!" And then I looked up at the main house and-

Caroline? Another police officer is here. A Sergeant Spivey? He says you have gone home. Is that right? He says I have to stop writing. We almost made it, didn't we? Just close enough to know what we've missed… if that's not the shape of life-

I've been trying for two days to imagine the words I would use to close this, to finish – I have dreamed for you the profoundest words, Caroline – poetry to temper the sorrow and the longing, to somehow make this life beautiful.

But there are no words. No poetry. And only one thing left for me to do.

Rest now.

Clark