Land Of The Blind

1

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

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

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

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

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

I got no yearbook wishes from Eli. No notes or secondhand threats. I suppose I just stopped existing for him. I thought about apologizing, telling him that Dana and I weren't going to see each other, that it had been a mistake, but I worried about making it worse, making it seem like I'd stolen something I didn't even want, that I'd made out with his date just to spite him. While I tried to figure out what to say, one morning my shoes and jeans and T-shirts – the entire costume from Eli's ill-fated remake – appeared on my back porch, neatly folded.

School ended before I figured out what to say to Eli, or to Dana. Of course I could've picked up the phone anytime, but something had given way in me. With college looming, the final hours of my childhood held little interest for me, like the last, hot afternoon of grade school – report cards mailed, desks cleaned, every eye on the needle-thin second hand making its glacial sweep around the clock face.

Days lost their mooring and drifted, banged one into the next, and I moved within them in a languid, sun-bleached daze. Summer bled out beneath my feet. My life took on the quality of nostalgia, sweet and distant and beyond change, my family receding into an album of memories. I crafted a schedule in which I rarely saw them, working as a dishwasher in a restaurant all night and sleeping most of the day. I was about to become the first in my family to go to college, and my parents were overly respectful of this; they kept their distance, unsure how to treat me. They fed me and housed me but stayed out of my way, and I ate and rested and brooded like a climber the night before summit.

But Ben had no patience for this new state of affairs. He'd just turned sixteen, and though he remained small (a shade over five feet six inches tall, broom thin), he was dealing with sprouts of hair beneath his arms and on his chin, and the divining-rod erections that govern most sixteen-year-old boys. I'd always been a sort of tour guide through his adolescence, and now that it was finally getting good, Ben couldn't understand where I'd gone, why I wouldn't drive to the lake with him or shoot baskets or talk about girls – why I wouldn't sit on the porch at twilight and laugh at things so familiar we barely needed to mention them.

"Let your brother sleep," our mother would say as I lay in bed all afternoon, the pillow over my head, trying to breathe in long, sleepy rises and falls, pretending I didn't know Ben was in my doorway. Eventually, he got the message; by summer's end, he'd just nod when he saw me. When I left for college, he was camping with friends.

So that's how my last summer as a child passed, in chrysalis hibernation, closed off to the people in my life, until the first day of September arrived and I emerged coolly into our driveway, a suitcase in each hand. My sisters hugged my hips. My mother cried.

My father handed me the keys to their old Dodge Colt, as if I'd just won a very bad game show. "I can't pay for very much college," he said. "But I can sure as shit get you there."

"Thanks," I said, and shook his hand. Then I climbed in the car.

I should have known, of course, that I was leaving behind unfinished business, not just with Ben, but with Eli and Dana. But all that summer, solitude had worked like a drug on me, and I happily allowed old intentions and obligations to fall away. I believed what TV teaches you – that change is only an episode away, the past is dead, and the only world is the one we're in.

I drove my father's car against the grain of late-summer clouds, drifting west on I-90, shadowing the river valley through the city of my birth, my arm resting on the open window, the wind rippling my sleeve. I crested Sunset Hill and saw Spokane recede in the rearview, a world beneath me, the last light glinting off the downtown buildings. The whole thing felt intimately familiar; the beginning of every daydream I'd ever had.

And that was it. September came and we did what people do – Dana and Eli and me. We went to college. More than a decade would pass before we would speak again.

Dana went to Stanford, just as she'd told everyone she was going to. She rarely came home from Palo Alto, but I heard through mutual friends that she joined a sorority and embraced the blossoming that she'd only flirted with in high school – tight skirts and torn jeans, filtered smokes and cheap well drinks. After this brief rebellion she cannily double-majored – she must've had a psychic student adviser – in management information systems and marketing. She became part of a group of Stanford grads and their friends that billed themselves as a sort of Bay Area technology salon – a tight community of young creative computer and business students who lived in and around Silicon Valley, "positioned," as they would say, to be the vanguard of all that was coming, and to become quite wealthy in the next few years.

In that first decade after high school, there would be no canniness or blossoming or positioning for Eli. Certainly no wealth. He spent a year at community college but managed only a few credits before he dropped out to care for his mother, who had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Eventually, he and his mother moved to a downtown apartment to be closer to the hospital where she received medical care, and Eli gave up on college altogether and took a job processing film at a one-hour photo. I saw him once during this time – walking downtown, wearing a photo-booth apron, his nose in a book, plying the sidewalk with his bent-legged shuffle, shoulders rolled forward and glasses at the end of his nose. I was with two frat brothers, privileged sons of Mercer Island professionals, and I am sorry to admit (amid a thousand sorries) that I did not wave or stop to say hi or so much as slow down.

For me, those first two years of college had been nothing short of epiphanic, fulfilling in ways I didn't know I could be fulfilled. Seattle was a land I had dreamed about without knowing it existed (let alone four hours away by car), and I happily left behind my hometown and its embarrassing, rigid poverty, its stunted ambitions, its daydreams that too often consisted of getting day shift at the aluminum factory. I thought of my home as a kind of childhood disease I had overcome, and I learned to despise it the way a thankless child despises his uncultured family.

The campus of the University of Washington opened for me like a pop-up book. Backpacked and Ray-Banned, I marched in Top-Siders and polo shirts with twenty thousand other soldiers of reinvention, from class to class in vast lecture halls, to intramural games along the lake, used bookstores on the Ave, keg lines in the district, breakfast joints in Wallingford, bars in Belltown. I crabbed and kayaked, rock-climbed and mountain-biked, threw Frisbees on cold beaches, drank Canadian beer, and learned to have sex with bulimia-thin girls in dorm room bunk beds and sorority house study carrels (though I never forgot my lessons with Susan, and was always on the lookout for a more vehicular hump). I studied. Got A's. Networked. Brown-nosed.

But most of all I ran for things. I started slowly, filing unopposed for sergeant at arms in my freshman dormitory president of my fraternity (and then a shoo-in for the top spot my senior year) and president of the campus chapter of the Young Democrats, as well as a lesser officer in six other organizations, everything from Junior Toastmasters to the Young Sierra Club. I fell in with a group of similar alpha achievers, and we worked our young resumes and our grade point averages with the same fervor that we chased tail.

At some point during my sophomore year, I stopped thinking of myself as being from Spokane. I was part of the torrent of people who were just then beginning to flood Seattle with our affections and affectations, with our arrogance: an unwitting conspiracy of transplants and entrepreneurs, hikers, bikers, and seekers, the regionally hip – a cult of casually dressed devotees of grubby Northwest realism. Over the next twenty years, we would ruin all that we found charming: old flop hotel lounges and Irish bars and Pioneer Square taverns. We discovered smoky dives filled with drunken hobos and cranky Norwegian fishermen and drank and smoked amid them, sucking their genuineness until we looked up and saw the hobos were software engineers and the fishermen bicycle messengers and hummus was on the menu. Coffee and chowder and punk trios became brand names and mall kiosks and dull pop. Tucked-booth greasy-spoon breakfast joints became tour-guided facsimiles of tucked-booth greasy-spoon breakfast joints, and only by listening closely ("We'll have the whole wheat goat cheese difference. We turned every gas station into a coffee shop, and by the time I left Seattle you could have four hundred flavors of coffee, but you couldn't find a decent gallon of gas.

We were beginning to love the place to death.

"Aren't you homesick?" my mother used to ask on the phone, at the outset of my affair with Seattle. Later, she was more direct. "Are you ever coming home?"

But how could I leave, even for a weekend? The sun might come out.

Spokane was only four hours away and yet it faded from my memory. I came home only three times each my freshman and sophomore years. "I'm really swamped" was my standard response to my mother's entreaties. This was the advantage of being the first in my family to ever go to college; they had no balance to my stories of round-the-clock studying, of mandatory poetry readings and guest lectures and spirit bonfires.

When I did come home I felt increasingly detached from Spokane, and from my parents, whom I lectured with the arrogance of a transplant, with the zeal of a religious convert. Every other sentence out of my mouth began, "The problem with this place-" I suggested that Seattle's vitality revealed Spokane's failings: its aging population, its economic and political intractability, its lack of imagination and unrelieved shabbiness. "Spokane is Kmart," I famously said at Christmas dinner once. "Seattle is Nordstrom."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Barber college? Electoral college?"

We sat on the ratty couch in his living room and he gulped wine while we watched football on his twelve-inch TV. Dog-eared paperbacks lay everywhere; I picked one up – Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, by Albert Camus. "You do the classwork, but you don't want the credits. Is that it?"

"You want me to pay someone to tell me what books to read?"

"Is that all school is to you – the books? What about the people? The experience? The social life?"

"Yeah, good point." He feigned earnestness. "Maybe I could join your frat. We can double-date-rape together."

"Look, I'm just here because Mom is worried about you. It doesn't matter to me what you do."

"That's a shock." Ben took a pull of his wine.

I talked him into getting dressed and going for a walk. I put on a windbreaker. Ben put on three sweatshirts.

We walked west, down Pettet Drive and across the river, and when Ben looked up, he saw that I'd steered us to the campus of Spokane Falls Community College.

"Subtle," he said.

"Sorry," I said. "I know you had your heart set on living in the basement of that crappy apartment building the rest of your life-"

"Actually," he said, "I'm waiting for something on the second floor to open up."

"-mopping floors, drinking wine, and playing Atari."

"I'm saving for a Nintendo."

"Don't you want more than we had growing up?"

"Actually," he said, "I want exactly what we had growing up."

We walked into the student union building. There were a handful of students in the cafeteria, studying and eating. "Doesn't this look better than mopping floors?"

Ben was unimpressed. "You don't think someone mops these floors?"

"I don't see why it has to be you."

"It has to be someone." He took in the students' dim presences and looked away. "Do you know what your problem is, Clark? You decide what you're going to see before you even look at things."

I was amused. "Yeah, why do you suppose that is?"

"You really want to know what I think?"

"Sure."

"I think you're so busy climbing you don't notice what's really around you."

"That's called success, Ben," I said. "That's called drive."

"Or running away."

"I run for things. Not away. You might think about that yourself." I pulled him over to a bulletin board near the front of the cafeteria. It had the word clubs written on top in big block letters. "There's a whole world out here-"

"There's a whole world in here." And he pointed to his head.

I ran my hand over the bulletin board, shingled with flyers and notices from three dozen campus groups, from the Gay and Lesbian Student Alliance to the Arab Student Union to the Spokane Climbing Community. "You know what this is?" I tore a phone strip from a campus philosophy group and handed it to him. "This is-"

That's when I saw something out of the corner of my eye that froze me.

"What's the matter?" Ben asked after a few seconds.

The club name was stenciled in green military-style letters on a white sheet of paper, but there was nothing explaining what the club did. There was only its name, the date and place of its next meeting – that very day, it turned out – along with a contact person and a phone number. I wonder even now, years later, what might have happened if I hadn't torn that small piece of paper away. Maybe none of this would have happened. Maybe that was the point from which all things diverged, the point at which we could've all continued forward, instead of eddying back to the place where I sit now, alone.

"Is that-" Ben began.

"I think it is," I said. I stood there with my little brother, staring at that tiny sheet of paper. On the paper was written a phone number, the one-word name of the club – "Empire" – and a contact person.

Eli Boyle.

2

The Empire Club met in a dark, smoky lounge called Fletts, on a street of old businesses just across the river from downtown. At night, the lounge burned easily through its fuel, a steadily dying clientele of heavy drinkers and smokers. During the day Fletts served up BLT's and patty melts at its small lunch counter, and the smoke was allowed to slowly dissipate in the lounge, which sat dark and empty – except on Saturday afternoons, when the lounge housed Eli Boyle's Empire club.

I sat on a stool in the restaurant, from which I could see down the length of the counter to the lounge. The meeting was scheduled for 2:00 P.M.; it was 1:30. I ordered a cup of coffee and a bowl of tomato soup and sat with a baseball cap pulled down on my head and my windbreaker pulled up high at the collar. Looking to my right, I could see down the lunch counter and across the hall, where Eli was scurrying around the lounge, pacing up and down a long table, stacking sheets of paper in a dozen piles. He looked pretty much the same, although a potbelly strained his button-down shirt and his hair had thinned. But what surprised me most was the look of intensity on his face.

"I still can't believe that guy kicked your ass," Ben said. He had begged to come, and now I could see what a mistake it was to have let him.

"It was a draw," I said.

"Are you going to talk to him?"

"I don't know."

The other members of Empire began dragging in. "Hello, honey," said the old waitress, or "Hiya, sweetie." The first was a gawkishly tall young man with dark hair and a storklike nose, followed by a frail young boy leaning sideways in a wheelchair, pushed by an older woman I assumed was his mother. Two girls came in together, their steps synchronized, a good four hundred pounds between them, and then a pale young man. They all carried thick black binders with the word EMPIRE stenciled on the front, and they were eager, as if they had a great story to tell and couldn't wait to get inside to tell it.

Five minutes before the meeting was to start, I felt a poke in my side.

"Clark friggin' Mason."

I turned and looked up, half expecting to see Eli, even though the voice was higher pitched, and coming from a man less than four feet tall.

"Louis!"

"Do I look different?" he asked me.

He looked about the same, a blunt curl of hair over wide fun-house features.

"I grew two inches since high school," he said proudly. As soon as he said it, I could see that he was bigger, and that by dwarf standards he must be quite tall.

"You look great," I said.

"You too."

"Are you in this… thing, Louis?"

"Empire?" He smiled and waved a binder like the other members carried. "Yeah. It's really great. Eli has a real gift. Are you here for-"

"No," I said, "we just happened to stop in-"

"What are the odds?" Ben said next to me.

"-for some soup," I continued.

"We love us some soup!" Ben said.

I elbowed Ben and turned back to Louis. "So what is this thing?"

"Empire?" Louis looked unsure, as if it wasn't his place to say. "It's hard to explain."

"But it's a club?" I asked.

"No," he said, "more like a game, one of those interactive, character-driven things." He quickly corrected himself. "Eli doesn't want us to call it a game."

"What does he call it?"

"He used to say it was an 'alternative world.' Now he just calls it Empire. He says defining it is the first step to killing it."

"So it's like a role-playing thing?" Ben asked. "Like Dungeons and Dragons?"

Louis chewed on his bottom lip. "I really think you should talk to Eli about it."

"I'll bet it's more like Risk," I said. "Or Axis and Allies." I remembered the way Eli always drew tanks, and the charge he'd gotten from tug-of-war and battle ball. "One of those games where you have wars and conquer each other and take over land?"

"Yeah, there's some of that. But you know, you should really ask Eli."

I looked into the lounge. "I don't know if he'd want to see me," I said.

"Yeah," Louis agreed. "He doesn't let go of things easily."

I was surprised that Louis knew about the rift between Eli and me. "Maybe I'll stop by next time I'm in town."

I could see Louis was relieved. "Sure," he said. "Next time."

The waitress saw Louis then and brought him a Coke. "Hey, big guy," she said.

"Hey, toots," he said, and turned away from me. "What time you get off?"

"Couple minutes after you touch me," the waitress said.

This tickled Louis. "On my worst day," he said. While he flirted I tried to get a look at the folder he was carrying, but he held it close to his side. There were about ten other people in the lounge now, and I could see Louis was eager to join them.

"Could you do me a favor and not say anything to Eli?"

"Sure," he said. "It was really great to see you, Clark."

Once Louis was inside, the waitress carried a tray of glasses and two pitchers of soda into the room. Eli held up a pocket watch, made some announcement, and the lounge erupted in noise and activity, like a small stock exchange. Ben and I craned our necks to watch. The group was spread out at the tables, shuffling paper, stacking things, and exchanging what looked like Monopoly money back and forth, making trades, shuffling fake money and papers from their folders back and forth across the tables. People were relaxed and smiling, but they were also working hard. At the front of the room Eli was not smiling. He paced and collected paper from people, handed paper around, talked and gestured with his hands. Every few minutes, he'd turn around and move pins on a big map behind him.

"This gives me the creeps," Ben whispered.

Eli worked with such energy it was hard to take your eyes off him. At one point he wiped sweat from his brow. A few minutes later he castigated one of the girls about something, and she looked down at her shoes in shame.

We watched for ten or fifteen minutes more and then we paid for our soups – Ben hadn't touched his – and walked out, taking the opportunity to look closely into the lounge. At the door, we could hear people yelling: "Two over here!" "Calling out!"

We started walking back toward Ben's apartment. "That was weird," Ben said. "Watching someone who didn't know we were watching him."

I knew what he meant. There was something odd about Eli, the way he could detach from himself physically. "He's always been like that," I said. "I think there's always been this gap between the way he sees himself and the way we see him."

"So which one is real?" Ben asked.

"What do you mean?"

For the first time that day, Ben was engaged. "I just wonder, which is a truer view of reality, the way we see ourselves or the way others see us. Is Eli king of that room, king of the fat girls and albinos? Or is he what we see – the same old awkward guy from our neighborhood, whose only claim to fame is that he once kicked your ass?"

"Eli is what he is."

"But I'm not just talking about Eli." Ben stopped walking and leaned against the chain-link fence of a park. Behind him, kids were shooting baskets on hoops with no nets. "I'm talking about all of us – about me," Ben said. "I imagine I'm living an ascetic's life, stripping myself of everything but my curiosity. But you show up out of the blue and all you see is a guy wasting his life drinking wine and watching TV."

Ben rubbed his hollow cheek and seemed to be chasing something around in his mind. "Or you, with your frat-boy friends and your law school haircut imagining you're more evolved than the rest of us."

I didn't deny it. "So what do you see?" I asked.

Ben's eyes hitched once on the way from my face to the ground. "That's not the point I'm trying to make."

"Sure it is," I said. "What do you see when you look at me?"

"It's not important," he said.

"Come on," I said. "What do you see, Mr. Ascetic? Mr. Chianti. Mr. Curiosity."

"Well," he said. "Okay. I see someone so focused on the way he's perceived that he forgets who he is. And where he's from."

I grabbed him by the sweatshirts and pushed him against the fence. "I'm only going to tell you this once," I said. "Eli Boyle did not kick my ass."

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

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

"What's that?"

"Believing that people choose to be poor."

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

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

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

"Sure," he said.

"We okay?"

"Sure."

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

"Every day," he said.

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

3

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

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

But it happens anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In fact, Ben would've relished everything about his funeral – the melodramatic grandeur and hypocrisy, the way slim acquaintances treated their sadness as a kind of commodity, the way they invented relationships with the deceased and tortured us with empty memories and platitudes. I imagined how Ben would've loved watching people sidle up to me after the service to recap for me what had happened.

"So sudden," they said, shaking their heads.

"Yes."

"Your only brother," they said, apparently thinking that hadn't occurred to me.

"Mmm."

"And for you, to not make it home from college."

"Yes."

"The fact that you never even got to speak to him."

"Right."

"You must be devastated."

"Mmm."

And then, shuffling their feet, summing up: "And someone so young."

"Yes," I said. "What are the odds?"

After the funeral I spent the night at my parents' house, but it was dark and ghostly and I knew I had to leave. The next day I drove back to Seattle with the radio off and the windows down, icy air blowing through the car. I stopped at the tiny town of Vantage, at the crossing of the Columbia River, got a cup of coffee, and stood on the banks watching the black mass carve a path to the ocean. Where I'm from, everything flows east to west. So that's what I did. I kept driving, until I dropped down out of the Cascades and into the Puget Sound clouds.

All that week the weather sat heavy on Seattle, gusting rain and acres of wet fog. I slept in my car the first night rather than returning to the fraternity house. The next day, I checked into a motel and I sat there all weekend. I ate only potato chips and drank only water. Then, on Monday, the sky suddenly cleared and the mountains emerged from fog and the brick and ivy of the university seemed almost too sharp, too focused.

I knew I had to get back to my life, and so late that morning I walked to my first class in a week, the sun on my neck and shoulders pushing me on. I slumped down in a chair in my Principles of Government class. After a few minutes the other students began filing in; the professor came over, arms crossed on his chest like sagging bandoliers.

"Mr. Mason?" he said. "You missed a few days."

"Yes," I said. It seemed like enough.

He nodded. "Well, we're still on the Greeks." His name was Richard Stanton – a former lawyer, weekend television anchor, public relations man, and state legislator. He would also become my mentor, my campaign manager, my best friend.

Professor Stanton was in his late forties, silver haired and handsome to the girls in class, although his deep-clefted chin drew him the nickname Dr. Assface. He was one of those men discomfited by age; he'd gone in for a small stud earring and had recently begun keeping his neat gray hair a few inches past professional. Each morning he gathered the back, which was short of his collar, and tied it in a desperate ponytail, and although there couldn't have been a half-inch of hair on the south end of the rubber band, I think it was meaningful for Dr. Assface to have that ponytail.

He was the kind of professor dismissed as a lightweight within the academic community (what he used to call "the nest of rarely published and it was heavily rumored that his only book, the eighty-four-page, widely spaced History of Political Progressivism in the Pacific Northwest, was both vanity published and mostly cribbed. But his claim of being the subject of professional jealousy made sense too, because his teaching style made him tremendously popular among his students. He had two speeds: the slow, thoughtful academic – leaning back in his folding chair, a look of deep contemplation on his face, his index finger jammed directly into that bunghole of a chin; and the eager spider monkey – springing around the room, climbing on the backs of chairs, sitting on desks and tables, folding his legs over, crouching a few inches from our faces, and otherwise artificially engaging us with movement so as to agitate us into some measure of intellectual curiosity. He broke the spider monkey out when our energy flagged, which was often, and I always thought his motivation was a magician's motivation, creating a flourish with his left hand so that we wouldn't notice him reaching his right into his sleeve, creating a small explosion to hide the doves he pulled from offstage, creating a ruckus with his body to disguise the dexterity of his mind.

I had declared political science as my major the spring before and this was one of my first upper-level classes – filled with thirty students, many of them, like me, former high school student body presidents and DECA club parliamentarians, Eagle Scouts and Daughters of the American Revolution, students who had always run for things and run things, future wonks and activists and candidates. But I must say, as a group, we were not the most dynamic thinkers in the world. Most of us achieved without thinking, earning A's through rote and habit. Still, we expected to run for all manner of offices in the future and to win, to rise effortlessly to the top of whatever worlds we chose.

Dr. Stanton taught Principles of Government more like a philosophy class than a government class. He started with Moses and the idea of a lawgiver, and was supposed to continue through the Greeks to the Romans, Cicero and Seneca; Saints Augustine and Thomas More; through Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and de Tocqueville; Hobbes, Locke, and Marx; Thoreau and Malcolm X. But Dr. Stanton was far more interested in antiquity, and he rarely made it much further than the Romans, or occasionally the saints, sometimes summing up four centuries of political thought with one day's lecture: "And Thoreau's Civil Disobedience leads us into Gandhi, and of course Dr. King. Any questions?"

So when I returned we were still on the Greeks, Dr. Stanton's favorites, the Big Three: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. But he was low key on this day and I drifted in and out of the class, my eyes stinging, my mind wandering, sloughing along and kicking aluminum cans down the road.

That's when it happened. I hesitate to qualify it, to explain it away as a religious moment or a realization or anything else, because it simply is it – a flash, an awakening.

It occurred at 11:48 a.m., two minutes before the end of class on November 29, 1985, on one of those sunny fall days – the last of the season, as it turned out – that make you feel itchy and bored, like a nine-year-old two hours from recess. Dr. Stanton was talking about Plato's Republic, specifically the section in which Plato has Socrates propose that "until philosophers are kings… cities will have no rest from their evils – no, nor the human race." He was sprawled across his desk, on his side, his legs entwined like sleeping lovers. He was nudging us toward the ramifications of the philosopher-king, but like everything the Big Greeks posited, like everything we learned, we filtered it through minds ruined by television. So my classmates fixated on whether a dreamy, goatee-wearing, dope-smoking nihilist in a microbus – Shaggy from Scooby-Doo – would be able to lower the deficit. Dr. Stanton grew frustrated with the flatness of our thinking and our halting "um" and "like" dialogue, until one of my classmates said, "I don't get what Pluto means," at which point Dr. Stanton leapt off the desk, landed on his feet, yelped, sprang into the air, and windmilled his arms, performing the wild finale to all his classroom magic tricks. "Read book seven!" he screamed. "Now!"

I turned gingerly to book VII of The Republic and began reading. It started as dully as the rest, with an allegory so elaborate and unlikely I had trouble following it: Plato had Socrates propose a deep cave in which prisoners were raised from birth. In this cave, the prisoners could see neither the sun nor anything else of the outside world; the only light came from a fire burning far above and behind them, so that they saw only the shadows of things on the wall, not the things themselves. "The prisoners," Plato wrote, "would believe that the truth is nothing other than the shadows."

Of course, I'm hardly the first student to be struck by Plato's simple ontology, to make the short leap of imagining my life as a cave, society as empty and illusory, and all that I had been conditioned to want as nothing more than fancy lies. Success, fame, money, women? Shadows. Just shadows.

But if my epiphany was that of a million other disaffected, twenty-one-year-old state school philosophers, it was also that of a young man who had just buried his brother, and I must say – I went a little crazy that day. Behind me, the sun slanted through a window in the classroom and bits of dust danced in its light, a Milky Way of mites and bits and loose particles. How can we still pretend that heaven is up there when whole universes – tiny heavens and hells – can exist in a single beam of sunlight.

"Mr. Mason?" Dr. Stanton stepped toward me, and as I looked up from the sunlight to him I felt myself passing, as Plato said, from one realm to the next, from belief to knowledge. Even now I can't say just what it meant except that I was overwhelmed, a parched man suddenly up to his knees in cool water.

"Mr. Mason?" Dr. Stanton asked again.

For the first time in my life I could see. Or I was blinded. Or there's no difference. I slapped my head. The other students looked up at me.

"I don't-" I cast around, looking at the ruffled paperback of The Republic, at the students around me, just like me, dreaming our stupid little dreams, competing and succeeding and living and dying by rules that we didn't make up, rules that made no sense. I reached into the sunlight. Nothing was there.

"What is it, Mr. Mason?"

"I don't-" And I saw myself on Empire Road, that narrow gash of houses, that stretch of failure – the cruelty of Pete Decker at one end, the frailty of Eli Boyle at the other. That would always be my universe, my galaxy of dust in my beam of sunlight. Tears streamed from my eyes-the bad and the good. Grief is a release and-

"Mr. Mason?" Dr. Stanton said. "What is it?"

"I don't-" Every dream is an escape.

"Mr. Mason!"

The really shitty thing is this: When someone dies, you never get to see him again. Never. How can you possibly deal with the unfairness of that? How can you deal with the death of the best person you know, the death of everything true and good?

I looked up at Dr. Stanton. "I don't-" I wiped my eyes. "I don't believe in God."

4

What I meant to accomplish with this confession was not a recounting of the grief-induced, sophomoric insights (though technically I was a junior) that I had in college but something more, something transcendent.

I am a failure even at being sad.

So again, I apologize, Caroline. I only wanted to make the point that I wasn't always like this – or rather like the obnoxious young politician who was handed his hat in the 2000 congressional elections, the desperate man who drove to Eli Boyle's house two days ago with murder in his heart, who walked gingerly across the lawn to Eli's carriage house, who climbed silently up those steps.

At least for a short time, beginning in the fall of 1985 and ending more than eight years later, in the spring of 1994, I was free.

Though I hadn't known how to express it that day in class (atheism not really being the point), the combination of Ben's death and Dr. Stanton's class transformed me, untethered me from all that I'd believed.

I moved out of the frat house and into an apartment above a garage in Wallingford. I quit all my campus posts and all the self-serving organizations I had joined. I gave the Dodge back to my parents and bought an old ten-speed bicycle. I grew my hair out, stopped shaving, and started wearing secondhand clothing; I favored army fatigues and flannel shirts. I stopped wearing my glass eye and went back to the eye patch – a bit self-consciously at first, but old habits die hardest. I sat for hours on the Ave on lotused legs, reading poetry and smiling at strangers. I became one of those people you step around on the sidewalk, a step removed from panhandler.

Strangely enough, this didn't affect my social life as much as I feared it would. I didn't get involved seriously with anyone, but I screwed constantly. It turned out there was no shortage of girls who were looking for sad, hygienically challenged men, girls who smelled like patchouli or clove cigarettes, nice girls who seemed like the sort that Dana would've become, the sort that Ben would've dated, girls who didn't really comb their hair, who majored in comparative literature and international studies, who carried string-tied journals in their worn backpacks and rode bicycles for transportation, girls who talked knowledgeably about rain forests and dominant cultures and art-house movies.

I went almost six years without seeing a shaved armpit.

I exchanged the politics of me for the politics of them. And there were plenty of them to help. I raised money for AIDS patients, African famine relief, and Central American refugees. I volunteered at schools and community centers in Seattle's Central District and at shelters downtown. Free of the strictures of my self-loathing and its corresponding ambition, I ambled in good conscience about the campus, and the city – a better man. Of course, the cynic might look at me now – disgraced politician, low-rent attorney – and doubt the sincerity of this transformation. For them, I offer this one proof:

For ten years, I did not run for a goddamned thing.

"You know, it's possible to go a bit overboard with this kind of thing," Dr. Stanton finally said when I showed him the tattoo on my lower back – the Chinese symbol for compassion (at least that's what I was told; I found out later it was actually the symbol for compensation, the word right next to "compassion" in the illustrated dictionary my tattoo artist used). Dr. Stanton was uncomfortable with my rebirth, I think, because he worried about his role in it, and specifically, that he was now my mentor.

"Look, I'm not really the mentor type," he said. "I'm sorry about your brother and I'm glad you found something meaningful in my class, but that was Plato. That wasn't me. I don't even like Plato."

I was amused and impressed by his protests, which seemed in keeping with the modesty and intelligence that a great mentor should have. Still, it was he who encouraged me to continue along in my previous poli-sci/ pre-law track ("Don't throw the baby out with the that I could do more good as a lawyer than "playing bongos on some street corner."

So I spent three years getting my master's in sociology at the University of Washington and then found my way into a lesser law school, not so much out of some deep desire to practice law, but out of a much deeper desire not to leave college, the brick womb of my rebirth. I lingered in law school as long as they would have me, taking a few classes here and there, constantly changing my emphasis.

Dr. Stanton finally gave in to my need for a mentor, and he and I met once a week for lunch, during which time I would share with him some new plan for using my law degree to bring about unlikely social change. I was forever trying to earn his respect, and forever getting his good-natured scorn instead. I will list a few of my ideas and Dr. Stanton's responses, ideas that I should really have registered with the Patent Office's Department of Hubris. I planned to:

Open a nonprofit legal services clinic for indigent elderly men ("There's a great deal of money to be made in hobo law," Dr. Stanton said); establish a safe house and law office for battered women; use the same house to care for and represent homeless children and orphans; organize a team of lawyers to sue for third-world debt relief and the international removal of land mines ("I do like the idea of sending lawyers to treaties and then sue the government over them; and offer free representation to the families of executed prisoners ("Yes. Help Dutch's family get his handguns

Richard Stanton was – and remains – the finest and truest person I know in the world. We would meet at one of the bars near the campus, spend the first half of our lunch with me fantasizing about my conscience-clearing law career and the second half with Dr. Stanton complaining about the poli-sci department and the university as a whole. He felt no respect from his colleagues; he was mistrusted, he said, because of his television and private-sector background – "Nobody likes a convert, Mr. Mason" – and at the same time, he was seen as something of a simple traditionalist within more progressive academic circles because he rarely published and insisted on teaching forms that had been long taken for granted and left behind. He drank more and more during these lunches, and often stayed to drink alone after I left, although he was the kind of drunk who knew he was ingesting a depressant and so he grew quieter and more reflective with each glass of draft beer – no raised voices or lampshades for him. At the end of our lunches, he always seemed on the verge of tears. Somewhere in there I became aware of a horrible event in his past, right around the time he went in for the earring and the pony-tail, something that caused him tremendous guilt and sorrow. He left a woman behind, I think – his wife, probably, but it seemed to be more than that – and either he assumed that I knew the details or he believed the details were beside the point, because he only thwarted every attempt I made to find out what happened. ("What happened?" he responded when I asked him directly. "You think this shit just happens? Like the weather? Wake up and smell the self-determination, Mr.

This was my life in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a satisfying mixture of college, grad and law school (seventy-two thousand dollars in student loans), sodden lunches with my mentor and friend, and the occasional vegetarian Birkenstock Ten Thousand Maniacs girlfriend.

I finally graduated from law school in 1993 – at the age of twenty-eight and near the bottom of my class – and, while I waited to take the bar exam, got a job working with Max Gerroux, Dr. Stanton's best friend, a former liberal appeals-court judge who'd given up the bench as part of an elaborate plea bargain over the butt of a joint that a state trooper saw in his car ashtray one day, a plea bargain that allowed him to continue practicing law and smoking joints. The latter he did with far greater passion and frequency than the former. Every time I knocked on his door, Max would grunt, "One moment, please," like someone who has been punched in the stomach, then let out a great exhale, spray something around his office and answer the door with narrow, red eyes. "Clark!" He always seemed surprised that I was there.

"There" was a small office on the second floor of a brick storefront in the funky Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, above a Greek restaurant, behind a door marked simply law office. The office smelled like feta cheese and tahini sauce, and was decorated with metal filing cabinets and a horrific nude self-portrait of Max in oil colors (Dr. Stanton called the hair. He was half Flathead Indian and half Jewish – "the first and last of my people" – and he credited this background for creating his heartbreaking sense of humor and his preternatural ability to abide suffering and deflect bullying.

Luckily, these were just the sorts of law he liked to practice.

"Look," he would say over the phone when some prosecutor was playing hardball on a plea bargain. "I am a Flathead Jew. You're welcome to keep busting my ass, but you'll have to forgive me if I don't fucking notice!"

He represented drug cases almost exclusively, and twice he came under investigation for taking his payment in product. Our office was even hit once. During the raid I stood next to Max, who smiled as filing cabinets and drawers were emptied on the floor. He wasn't a great lawyer, but the man knew how to hide a stash.

Unlike Dr. Stanton, when I confided in Max my plans for pro bono and legal social work, he beamed with pride. He got positively giddy about the hobo clinic and the Native People's Justice Center and the rest, nodding and grinning and planning right along with me. "Yes, I see it. We should get right on that, Clark. I know some influential people who will demand to fund this idea of yours. We'll have this thing up and running by the first of the year." I don't think he really knew any influential people – they certainly never came to our office – and anyway, we barely made enough on his drug cases to pay for our spot above the Greek restaurant, let alone do pro bono work.

I passed the bar, and by the spring of 1994, when I got a letter that would mark the beginning of this recent trouble, I was a bearded and ponytailed practicing lawyer and a junior partner in the two-person progressive law firm of Max Gerroux Law Offices. But before I detail the contents of that letter, I should make one more thing clear about Max, a detail that explains both Max and my deep loyalty to him.

He was dying. A snakelike tumor had taken up residence in his spine. It was wrapping around the bone and working its way through his body, wearing a kind of Ho Chi Minn Trail from his brain to his testicles. He had long ago given up on the doctors' ability to beat the tumor, saying that it seemed more natural to have the cancer kill him than the doctors. Everyone knew he was dying. He used this fact most effectively in court, pushing for speedier trials and expediting plea bargains and cutting through reams of legal bullshit ("We all know I won't be here to appeal this. Don't make me go

If this sounds manipulative, you will just have to take my word that he didn't wield his illness cynically or unnecessarily. In fact, he talked about his painful and insidious cancer so plainly and without affect that to this day, I consider matter-of-factness a form of courage. Some days we would be going over paperwork and he would make a small groan or squeeze his eyes tight – "Clark, I need to make a quick phone call" – and I would understand that he needed to get high to fight off the intense pain. It was also understood between us that I needed to protect my future as a lawyer by leaving the room, that I was to never witness his drug use – in case the cops returned to finish their raid. I honored the small deception and usually went for a walk down to Lake Union when I knew he was getting high. I was with Max for six months before I realized why we represented drug dealers: partly because Max honestly believed that the police violated civil rights in drug cases and partly because Max needed to be paid in dope.

As for me, I suppose I cared for Max out of a surrogate loyalty toward Ben, and as I watched Max's cancer progress, I concentrated on every detail, every wince and groan, those things I'd missed nine years earlier with Ben.

One day in the late spring of 1994, Max and I were working on an appeal, the paperwork spread out before us on his pressed-board desk. My mind was elsewhere, specifically on the aforementioned letter, which my parents had forwarded to me the day before. And so I didn't notice that Max was making small huffing noises, as if he was being punched in the rib cage. Finally, when I looked up, I could see that he was glistening with sweat and having difficulty breathing. His eyes were pressed shut.

"You need to make a phone call," I said.

He winced with pain. "I don't know if I can."

"Let me help," I said quietly.

"I don't think you should-"

"It's fine," I said.

"No."

"Please," I said.

He pointed to the oil painting of himself naked. I was shocked that it would be in such an obvious place. Even the cops had looked behind that painting. I took the painting down but there was nothing behind it on the wall, no safe or false panel. "Frame," he muttered. "Lower right-hand corner." I pulled the frame apart and saw it was hollowed out. A small ceramic pipe, matches, and a sandwich baggie of rich green marijuana slid out. I loaded the bowl and slid it between his quivering lips. I waved the match in a circle around the bits of green bud, and he inhaled with short, raspy breaths; the buds sparked red and burned away, and a line of gray-blue smoke issued from the pipe. Max's eyelids fluttered and he held the smoke in his lungs as long as he could, then let it seep out. A quiver of something – pain or relief, I'm not sure there was a difference – rolled through his body.

I refilled the bowl and held it out for him again.

"Thank you," he said, and smoked the second bowl. When we were done, I helped him lie on the couch in his office and I left to go for a walk. I walked through Fremont and down to the lake. I sat on the bank and watched some sailors working on an old crab ship, the hull rusted and streaked. I could hear them across the water, talking and laughing. I pulled the letter out of my pocket and read it again, for the tenth time that day. I will not recount it from memory, except to say it started with a plain, friendly greeting and an apology for not coming to Ben's funeral all those years ago. There was some business about how I hadn't been at the ten-year reunion and congratulations on becoming a lawyer. The rest of the letter I will quote from memory, because it is seared in my mind:

I'm going to be in Seattle on business next month and I thought maybe we could get together, if you want to. There's something I'd like to talk with you about.

I've been thinking a lot about you lately.

With love,

Dana

5

She was beautiful, even more than I'd remembered. Her hair was short and spiky, cut so that it framed her round face and dark eyebrows, her slender nose and round eyes, and made each of these features appear singular – as if they had been invented specifically for her face. But even more than her physical appearance, Dana Brett had acquired a comfort with herself, with her body; she wore a long, tight print skirt with no sign of her old smart-girl self-consciousness, and watching her walk in it, a man could be forgiven if he thought of trading everything – family, career, self-respect – for one day spent tracing that skirt's gentle roll over hips and thighs, to the calf, where a glimpse of smooth, tanned ankle revealed a simple silver bracelet, a dizzying piece of jewelry that was impossible to ignore, to avoid imagining it as the only thing left on her, gleaming in the light from a bedroom candle.

You may surmise by this description that I had been pining away for Dana during the twelve years that we were apart, but that's not exactly the truth. In general, I don't pine. As I have said, I continued to date, though it's true that Dana had never been far from my thoughts. And it was only at that moment, staring at the vision of Dana Brett outside the restaurant Cyclops (I know… but the food was good), that I understood why I'd dropped my habit of trophy blondes and had gone out of my way to date girls who were approximations of Dana, best-guess estimates of what she would be like now: smart, liberal, funky girls who wore hemp bracelets and crocheted hats and read poetry chapbooks and talked of saving sea mammals. When Ben died I lost the chance to live through his eyes, and while I didn't imagine that I loved Dana during those ten years, I think I did start to live through her eyes, to imagine that my new self might please her, as strange as that may sound. I always thought I would see her again, and part of me wondered if I would feel the way I eventually did feel that afternoon – pained, stricken, for the first time in my life, in love. I wasn't really surprised to feel like that, but I was surprised to find that the surrogates for Dana that I'd been dating were nothing like her, and had no more in common with her than with those sea mammals. For Dana wasn't simply another progressive arty chick. She was, as I said, singular, and no cheap granola knockoff could've captured her combination of natural beauty and self-confidence, all of these disparate elements held in place by the binding heat of her.

She stood on the sidewalk in Belltown and looked far too sophisticated for the funky Cyclops, with its Jell-O-mold exterior, the entire wait staff in black-rimmed glasses and Doc Marten's. I parked and walked down the sidewalk, and when she stepped forward I knew that my life had come back to this point for some reason, that our ten-year orbits had finally circled back around on us because we were meant to be together.

I keep searching for another word, but she was simply beautiful. Beautiful. And I wasn't the only person to think so. Her husband seemed to agree with me.

"Clark," she said, kissing me on the cheek. "It's so good to see you! This is Michael Langford, my husband. Michael, this is my good friend Clark Mason."

He stepped forward and stuck out his hand. He was tall.

I held up my hand and pretended to cough so I wouldn't have to say anything until I could get my wits back. The wind blew dust along the sidewalk, and I pretended to have something in my good eye while I waited for the flush to leave my face.

Inside the restaurant, they sat on one side of a small glass-topped table, holding hands in her glorious lap. I sat on the other side, my hands in my own lap. Dana kept staring at me and smiling.

"I can't believe how different you look," she said. "I like it. The rugged look."

I flicked reflexively at my ponytail, which now reached the middle of my back, and stroked my beard. "That's what I was going for. The ragged look."

"You look great," she said, and I could hear the tone in her voice that said I didn't look great, that I looked pretty awful. And that was when I fell apart, when nine years of progress fell away and I was the boy on the bus again.

The menus came and I snuck a hateful glimpse at Michael as he read the entrees. I hadn't had a chance to take him in, but as I looked I felt myself blush again. He looked a little like me. Not the me in the restaurant that day, the roadie for a Southern rock band, but the me I might have been if I hadn't had the epiphany in Dr. Stanton's class, if Ben hadn't died. And for the first time, staring at them – neat and clean in their NorCal money-light way – I hated my Platonic rebirth, and began to think of it as nothing more than some kind of irrational, extended grief.

Michael Langford had short dark hair, a solid build, and a square jaw. He was tall and athletic, the kind of capable, white American male upon whom this country was built, the kind cast in old World War II movies and westerns, the kind adept at selling big-ticket American items – cars and condos and congressional agendas. The kind I always wanted to be. You recognize your own kind, of course, and I could see this guy was what I had been once, an achiever, a success junkie, a salesman of the first order, a runner for things, a politician – perhaps not in practice, but certainly in bearing. While I was working to make myself the kind of man I thought Dana would love, she fell in love with the kind of man I used to be.

When the waitress came, I had the briefest urge to order a skewer of irony. I looked down at my hands and wondered, What the fuck happened to me?

"What kind of law do you practice, Clark?" asked Michael after we'd ordered.

"For the time being, I'm doing some criminal law," I said. "First amendment cases. A lot of pro bono." I wanted to stop talking, but my tongue was operating freely. "Illegal searches. Civil rights violations. I recently started a nonprofit legal aid service for homeless children." Shut up, I told myself. "And the elderly." For God's sake. "And battered women." I tailed off right around that point, though I may have mentioned orphans and illegal aliens and widows and land mines and slavery reparations.

"Wow," Michael said.

Dana blushed.

"I'm fielding offers from some big firms in town, though, thinking of going corporate." I was amazed at the lies that were spewing from my mouth. I couldn't get a job parking cars at a big firm. But these were more than lies. I was drowning, prattling on helplessly, hoping I might say something that would make me feel better. "I'm also considering international law. Working abroad." Abroad? I was considering working abroad?

"Really," Michael said. "Where?"

I was curious, too. "Portugal."

We were all quiet for a moment, as I geared up to talk about the complex Portuguese legal system and the demands there for civil rights lawyers. I prayed for my food to arrive so I could shove it in my mouth and shut myself up, so I could divert myself and stop staring at Dana's piercing eyes, so I could stop lying like a husband at three in the morning. "So when did you two get married?" I asked desperately.

"Three months ago," Dana said. "At a winery north of San Francisco. It was spur of the moment. I didn't even tell my parents."

"That's great," I said. "Three months." We didn't see each other for twelve years and I missed my chance by three fucking months. I tore at a piece of bread and crumbs shot into the air. "I'm engaged myself… about to be engaged."

"Oh, what's her name?" Dana asked.

"You don't know her." Course, neither did I.

"What does she do?"

"Pilot."

"For an airline?"

"Mmm." I chewed on some bread. "Yeah."

"What'd you say her name was?"

I chewed and swallowed my bread. "Megan. She's out of town. Megan."

"I'd love to meet her sometime."

"She's out of town."

Dana smiled. "It really is great to see you, Clark," she said again.

"So you both work in computers?" I asked.

"We work for a small finance firm, sort of like an investment bank, but lighter on its feet, committed to emerging tech companies. In fact, that's what we wanted to talk to you about. You see, Clark," Michael began, as if I were buying a vacuum from him, as if he'd just dumped crumb cake on my carpet to demonstrate the beltless sucking power of the R-690 Clean Machine, "what we do is function as a kind of a buffer, a go-between for Charlie and-"

Dana touched his arm lightly, and that simple touch filled me with such deep longing and regret that I felt the last part of my new self tear away. "He's not going to know what Charlie means," Dana said gently to her husband.

Michael rolled his eyes at himself, like he'd been stupid to imagine that I might know what Charlie was – and even though I had no idea, I couldn't stomach the condescension of having him actually tell me.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I forget I'm not talking to industry people sometimes. We call venture capital people 'VC,' you know, like the Viet Cong. Charlie? VC? So the people who put up the money are Charlie."

"Sure," I said, and looked toward the kitchen for my soup. "Charlie."

"Well, if a small company needs seed money," Michael said, "we put him in touch with investors. Charlie – the money person – tends to be in his fifties and sixties, while Chad – what we call the idea person – tends to be in his twenties. We fill the gap between Charlie and Chad. We explain Charlie to Chad and Chad to Charlie, the money to the idea and the idea to the money." He winked. "And we take a piece of both."

"It sounds dry," Dana said. "But it's fascinating. And creative." It occurred to me that she was working as hard as I was to impress, and I thought about how she'd changed too, how she must think that I – brave defender of indigent pregnant Indian hobos who'd stepped on land mines – saw her, perhaps that I would judge her as having lost something of her idealism. I thought about Ben's question to me about perceptions: which is truer, the way we see ourselves, or the way others see us. We always imagine that we know ourselves, but in truth, we can only see out. We can't see in.

"Tell him about the virtual grocery store," Dana said.

"No," Michael said. "I've gone on enough."

"Please," Dana said, as if anxious to show me she hadn't sold out completely, that she was still the same smart, idealistic Dana.

"Well," Michael began, and then he raised an eyebrow as if he was about to propose something a little bit risquй, a threesome among the Jell-O molds. "What if, at six o'clock, you decided to make fish tacos for dinner. But you have no fish. You have no tortillas. You simply touch a computer screen and a company fills your entire order, swings by the fresh fish store and the grocery store and delivers your entire order to your door within twenty minutes. And what if the computer knows you and knows what kind of milk and bread you like, and what if it's hooked up to your refrigerator, and it instantly checks every store in the city until it finds the best prices for your particular milk and bread, and what if you are delivered your personalized groceries for less than you would have paid to gather them yourself? What would you say to that?"

"I'd say… What are the odds?"

"Exactly!" Michael said.

Dana must've caught my sarcasm because she looked down at the table.

"We tell investors that we aren't just interested in making money," Michael said. "We're idea farmers. We plant them, grow them, and water them. We want to build a forest of ideas, up and down the West Coast. And that's where you come in."

"I come in?" I asked.

"We're well positioned in the valley," Michael said. "We've worked with eighteen start-ups, linked them with venture capital and larger investment bankers. We've already had two successful IPO's. But there are two axes of technology on the West Coast and, frankly, we have no penetration in Seattle at all."

"Penetration," I repeated.

"We're looking to expand, looking for someone to help us identify and contact start-ups here." He leaned forward, as if he were about to confide something in me. "I was assuming we'd find someone with a tech background, but Dana pointed out that we have the tech backgrounds. What we need is a lawyer, someone who can write contracts. And then she thought of you. She said you were always a real go-getter in high school."

I shuddered like an addict when he said "go-getter."

"I know it's probably not as rewarding as fighting for Indian tribes or going to Portugal, but it could be exciting. And profitable.

"I'm not just talking about a job," he said. "I'm talking about a chance to maybe find the next Microsoft, to be in the center of the next big thing. I'm talking about changing the world, Clark, charting a course into the twenty-first century."

I must interject that this was 1994 and such metaphors were being mixed up and down the West Coast; idiot Utopians were emerging everywhere, and a fair number of them were becoming profanely rich. As for my own actions that day, I was not motivated by money, even though that lunch would end up making me – making us all – a great deal of money. No, what I said next was really no different from my lie about practicing constitutional law, or moving to Portugal, or getting married. I was just trying to impress an old flame and her new husband, trying to reclaim something that I'd lost in Dana's eyes, trying to be part of another club – the club of high-tech entrepreneurs. I could have said, No, I'm committed to moving to Portugal, but instead I began talking out of my ass.

"I represent a company like that," I said.

"Here?" Michael asked.

"No," I said, panicking, thinking they'd want to see it. "In Spokane."

Dana looked up suddenly, as if I'd finally gone too far.

"A start-up?" Michael asked, and leaned forward on the table.

"Yes," I said, making a mental note to find out what that meant.

He leaned forward. "Anything you can talk about?"

"Michael," she snapped. "Slow down. He doesn't work for us yet."

I made eye contact with Dana then, and it occurred to me that she wasn't really irritated with Michael, but was trying to keep me from digging this hole any deeper, that she knew I was lying, that I'd been lying since we sat down at lunch, that I could no more do the job they were talking about than I could speak Portuguese. I saw the old disapproval in her eyes, and I guess it pissed me off.

"No, I don't mind," I said, and cleared my throat to give myself some time to invent a high-tech company or two. "Well," I said, and like an angel, our waitress arrived with our food and I had another minute to think. And I don't know why the solution popped into my mind just then. Maybe it was seeing Dana or thinking about the last time I'd seen Ben, or maybe it was Plato's fault.

"It's a game," I said. "A character-driven, interactive thing."

"VR?" Michael asked.

"Virtual reality," Dana translated.

"No," I said, and when Michael looked disappointed, "Not yet, anyway." I went on to describe a game in which people's real lives intersected with the game, until the lines blurred and it was anyone's guess which realm was real.

Michael was intrigued. "How long until it's ready to test?"

"Oh, they're playing it now," I said. "A test group."

"Really," he asked. "What's it called?"

"Empire," I said. "It's called Empire."

6

What happened next could only have happened in those money-drunk, speculative, E-topian days of the mid-1990s. Based on my ridiculous description, Michael and Dana agreed to come to Spokane in two weeks to have a look at the progress that the Empire research and development team was making. If things went well, they said, they knew an impatient investor who desperately wanted to give seed money to some kind of new interactive, character-driven game, something more involved than Duke Nukem, and more ambitious and darker than the recently released Sim City and Myst, a game that could be accessed at some point in the future by way of something I later found in my notes scribbled as the "Inner Nut."

You might assume that a young man living in Seattle in 1994 would have at least a working knowledge of computers – if he wasn't already toiling away on his own start-up. I offer no apologies for coming late to that party. Yes, I lived in Seattle, but that was no ticket to awareness by itself. There are auto mechanics in Seattle, too. Hell, I'd also missed Nirvana (I prefer my punk smart and clean – R.E.M. and the Talking Heads). At that late date of spring 1994, I still owned no stock in Microsoft or Intel or AOL. What did I own? A 1974 Audi Fox, a bicycle, several shelves covered with books, four suits, some other clothes, a coffee maker, and a couch. But I had no stocks, no computer, and, like most people in 1994 – even in Seattle – I couldn't have found the World Wide Web if you spotted me two W's and a backslash.

So I was relieved to find that Eli at least owned a computer – even if it was an ancient Radio Shack TRS-80. And I was happy to find that Empire was still being played, nine years after Ben and I had eavesdropped on it, although only two original members were left (Louis being one of them). Total membership had increased by only six in all that time, from fourteen to twenty.

"I do appreciate your interest, Clark, and it sounds like a great opportunity," said Eli as we sat outside the Orange Julius he was managing then. "But Empire isn't even a game, let alone a computer game."

"But you just said you use a computer."

"Yeah," Eli said. "I store the information on it, but there are no graphics or anything. Empire is up here," he said, tapping his head. "It's just a series of actions and reactions and decisions, and then we record everything that happens – mark territory, assaults, and retreats on a map. Stuff like that. People buy and sell land and weapons. They hoard food and destroy crops. They get involved romantically and betray each other, make war and have to surrender and build up from scratch. It's all very ethereal."

"It sounds perfect," I said. "Just what this company is looking for."

"Do you understand that the action isn't even managed by the computer?"

"How is it managed?"

"By me," he said. "If you let a computer do it, then it just becomes a measure of hand-eye coordination, a series of tricks that you perform to get from one level to the next. If a computer does it, then the people will cheat. They won't learn a thing."

Eli was becoming exasperated; his pocked cheeks shone red. "I don't think you appreciate how important this game is to me," he said. "This is ten years of my life we're talking about, Clark."

The truth of this struck him like a blow. He laughed and rubbed his head and looked away. "Ten years," he repeated. Eli had probably gained forty pounds since high school, and he'd finally completed his switch to wire-rim glasses, just when black frames had come back into style. He'd gone mostly bald and his pipe-cleaner arms cantilevered from a flat chest and round stomach. He'd never married. When I'd called him at home, he was wary, but here in person, on his break in his orange and brown uniform, he'd seemed genuinely glad to see me – though surprised by my beard and long hair and eye patch. Soon it was as if no time had passed at all, as if there had been no falling-out between us and we were back on my porch trying to make him look cool, instead of sitting in the mall outside a hot dog stand trying to save my face.

"It's just-" He turned to face me. "-this is all I have, Clark."

"I know," I said. "Listen, in ten days Dana and Michael are coming here, and I'm supposed to show them a computer game. Just help me get through that meeting. I promise I'll make sure nothing bad happens."

He looked up and down the bright wide aisle of the mall – music and surf wear and big salty pretzels, a tight orbit of vacant worlds, all paying eight bucks an hour. Then he looked back at me. "What would we have to do?"

For the next ten days Eli, Louis, and I worked nonstop transforming Empire into a computer game. We hired a computer coder named Bryan, and he and I got a quick tutorial in the strategy and what Eli called "the purpose" of the game. From what I could understand – and I don't know that I ever got Empire – it imagined an ancient land of forest and mountains and deserts and lakes and seas. Players started as noblemen or women – lords, as they called themselves – with a small plot of land and a certain number of serfs to work the land and to form an army when the time came. ("You can even imagine that you're sleeping with your serfs!" Louis proclaimed, much to the embarrassment of all.) The goal was not only to take over land and serfs, to defeat the other players and become emperor of more lands, but "to exist on this plane," Eli said, "to live and grow in this world."

There was a random aspect to the game – a spinning wheel and dice determined plagues and famines and earthquakes and the like; this was the quickest fix, replaced by computerized random choice – but most of the action was generated by decisions and reactions that the players made, by their aggressions and their lust, their treaties and their double-crosses, their clashes and battles and betrayals. All of this was overseen and arbitrated by Eli Boyle. The game worked best when players bought into the realism of the game and started looking for options and ideas that hadn't even occurred to him, Eli said. In fact, he told me, recently two players had married in the game to double their holdings, and a few months later, they were married in real life.

"That's what makes Empire work," Eli said, "human nature. Not a bunch of flat pictures drawn by some computer."

We bought four new IBM PCs, and the coder set about replacing many of the easier manual functions of the game with computer functions and transferring the data – the history of the game – from the floppy disks of old TRS-80 to the hard drives of the new computers. He warned us that there simply wasn't time to re-create the game on computer, though – the graphics and the story lines, the countless loops and switches that a computer would require to truly simulate and manage a game this complex.

"What you're talking about is an immersive, interactive digitized world in which players can link to one another electronically and can not only interface but overlay actions and reactions. And you want all of this done fluidly, in real time," said the coder, Bryan, a thick, bearded guy who usually had more than one cigarette burning in the ashtray next to his computer. "You do realize there are companies with coders and writers and illustrators that have been working around the clock for years on shit like this. And you want me to make your game in two weeks?"

"Nine days," I said.

"Nine days," he said. "We might have to take a few shortcuts."

Nine days later I stood in the Spokane International Airport, watching people deplane from an Alaska Airlines flight from San Francisco. Dana came off first, in jeans and a sweater, and fell into my arms. Something about the way she fit against me made her feel different from any woman or girl I'd ever been with. My eyes closed as she pressed against me, as I felt her thighs against mine, her hand on the back of my neck, her voice in my ear. "Clark, I'm glad we're doing this together."

She stepped away and looked at me. "You cut your hair," she said quietly, ruffling my collar-length hair. "And you shaved." She smiled as if I'd done these things for her, which, of course, I had.

"I see your eye's better," said Michael. He and I shook hands.

"It's a glass eye," I said. "I just took the patch off."

"Right," and Michael looked around at the small, odd-shaped 1960s airport terminal. "Very quaint," he said. "Very Jetsons. I like."

The third member of their party stood next to Michael, swinging his head around impatiently, as if he'd expected our presentation right here in the terminal. He was the investor they had spoken about: "Charlie," they had called him, whose name, it turned out, was actually Charley. He was in his early fifties, edgy and flustered in his gray suit, with thick black eyebrows poised above his dark eyes. Apparently, he had made his money in southern California in the lucrative business of water-slide parks.

"This is all very unusual," he said to me in a machine-gun voice. "I don't like it. You're supposed to come to me; I'm not supposed to come to you. All the stories say you come to me. This isn't how it's supposed to work, me coming to you. I don't like it."

"Well, I appreciate you coming," I said. "I think you'll be glad you did."

"It's all graphics," he said to me. "In Forbes, they said gaming is all about the graphics. Are the graphics top-notch? Because if the graphics aren't top-notch, I should just turn around and get back on the plane."

Dana took him by the arm. "Charley, relax. Let's get something to eat."

I took them to the lounge of the Spokane House restaurant and hotel, at the top of the Sunset Hill, leading into town. Four of Eli's most computer-literate Empire players were there, along with four more… attractive people I'd arranged to have present to balance the field a little bit in front of our potential investor, who might not be very encouraged by the spectacle of a game that appealed mostly to dwarves and fat people.

Four computers were set up on tables facing the front of the room; the old Empire binders were nowhere to be found.

The Spokane House lounge was paneled and dark (my primary reason for choosing it) and overlooked the city, which loomed below in the tree-filled valley like an overgrown garden. "Pretty town," Charley said. "What's the real estate picture like?"

"Very affordable," I said, finding myself speaking in Charley's quick staccato. "Cheap. Practically free. Good place for development."

"Excellent," he said. "Very good."

I stood at the back of the room with Michael and Dana and Charley. Eli stood at the front, as if he were about to teach a class. The four real players and the four actors sat in front of him, facing him, their backs to us. Dana and Eli acknowledged each other with a small nod. Dana smiled. Eli did not. When I'd told her over the phone that Eli Boyle was my partner in this game, Dana had seemed pleased – not so much for the game as for me, as if it were a good sign for me, for my soul or something. Eli had reacted to her presence in this whole thing with nothing but a grunt.

At the front of the room he paced nervously in corduroy pants and an old sweater that strained to cover his growing gut. He'd combed his hair, putting some lines in the greasy top, but the back and sides winged out like exploding waves. I watched Charley stare at Eli, measuring the creator of what we were about to see.

"I like that guy," he whispered. "That's what Newsweek said they look like."

"What who looks like?" I asked.

"Computer people," he said. "You know, entrepreneurs, geniuses, nerds, that kind of thing. They don't have time to shower. Too creative. You know, like him." He nodded his head at Eli again.

The four real players turned on the computers, as we'd practiced earlier. Their screens buzzed to life and they began typing letters and entering numbers as I explained the game to Michael and Dana and Charley. I told them about lords and serfs, about treaties and wars, about double- and triple-crosses. The old Empire map came up on the screens. When Charley or Michael asked questions I didn't know the answers to, I made them up.

"How do you win?" Charley asked.

"You defeat other players' armies, vanquish them, take over their land."

"Good, good," he said. "Is there violence? The Wall Street Journal said that kids like to see blood. Is there blood?"

Eli and I made eye contact and he looked out the door and into the hallway, to where Bryan the coder was sitting. Then Eli turned back and nodded at me. "Come on," I said. "Let's pick one player and I'll show you how Empire works."

We had set Louis up at the far end of the room. I pretended to pick him at random, and put my hand on his shoulder. From there we couldn't see any other computer screens, just his.

"After a few minutes of routine decision making by the player," I began, "land swaps and weddings and treaties and the like, updating the map, that sort of thing, the player proceeds to what we call 'the shadow world' and begins living the results of the decisions he's made, where he'll get to make new decisions based on the actions and reactions of the other players."

"The shadow world," Charley repeated significantly.

"Louis," I said. "What's going on with you?"

"Oh," he said, "Dave and I are allies, but I want his access to the ports, and so when we get out to sea I'm going to turn on him and attack him, try to defeat his navy and get him to give up his port town." One of the fake players, Dave, gave a friendly wave from across the room. Louis typed some letters and hit return on his keyboard.

I watched Charley's face drop in wonder as the computer screen leapt to life, and two animated ships were sailing next to each other on a meticulously drawn sea. The computer focused on the deck of one of the ships, and there was a dashing, dark-haired, strangely futuristic-looking man – Asian in appearance – at the wheel of one of the ships. Louis kept working the keyboard until the ship swung sideways, came abreast of the other ship, and fired its cannon. There was no sound.

I nodded at Eli, who nodded at the phony player Dave. "Hey!" Dave yelled. "What are you doing, Louis? I'll get you!"

Michael and Charley didn't seem to notice Dave's delivery, which struck me as over-the-top. They watched intently as the two ships engaged in a rousing sea battle, firing cannons and – anachronistically – lasers at one another, the angles and views shifting back and forth as Louis pounded the keyboard and leaned back and forth as if learning to ride a bike.

"The player controls the camera angles, everything," I whispered. "We're having some trouble with the sound."

Michael edged closer, an odd look on his face, as if he were trying to connect Louis's frantic typing with the carnage he was seeing on the screen. Blasts hit Dave's ship and sailors were blown off left and right, until corpses littered the water. That's when another ship appeared.

"Damn it!" Louis said right on cue. "He's made a deal with another player. Samantha!"

"Ha!" yelled Samantha. "I got you, Louis!"

On the screen, a beautiful, Asian-looking woman commanded a roundish, pink ship that looked a little bit like an animated panty shield and fired lasers and cannons across the bow of Louis's ship.

"Jesus Christ," Charley said.

Michael's mouth was wide open; he stepped even closer to get a better look.

That's when all the computer screens flashed, hummed with static, and went black.

"Ah, shoot," I said. "We did it again. We blew up the network."

"Damn it, Clark!" yelled Eli from the front of the room, on cue. "I told you it was too soon. I need more time."

"This is why he hasn't wanted to get any investors," I whispered. "He's such a perfectionist. He takes it personally. He's been working on this game for years."

"It shows," said Charley.

Eli stomped to the back of the room and turned off the computers. "We're not ready, Clark. I need six more months." And he stormed out of the room.

I apologized and we sat in the room for a few more minutes, talking to some of the real players about how much they loved Empire. "We'll get these bugs worked out," I said. "I'm sorry you didn't get to see the other realms, the land and the mountains, and all of it." That night I had dinner with Michael, Dana, and Charley and we talked generally and specifically about the game and its potential. Afterward, I drove them back to their hotel. In the hotel lobby Dana hugged me again, and Charley pumped my hand as if my arm might bring oil. Michael patted me on the shoulder. "Nicely done," he said flatly; then he took Dana by the hand and dragged her toward the elevator.

There was a message waiting for me in my hotel room. Dana, I thought, and my nerve ends felt alight. I hit play. It was from my mentor and best friend, Richard Stanton.

"Clark? It's Dick Stanton. Look, I don't know how else to tell you this, but Max died this morning. He took some pills. The pain-" Dr. Stanton sighed. "They found him in his office. I just thought you'd want to know. You meant a lot to him."

I tried to call Dr. Stanton, but there was no answer. I could imagine the bar stool where he was sitting. I left the hotel and stood outside, tried to measure the depth in the night sky. I'd been home for ten days and hadn't been out to see my parents. It had been about four months since I'd seen them. They didn't even know I was in town. I started my rental car and drove east on the freeway, through industrial areas and down Trent to my old neighborhood. My parents still lived in the house on Empire Road and I parked across the street, watching Mom and Dad through the front picture window. She brought him a beer. They watched TV together. I hadn't seen much of my parents in the last few years, in part because I believed that they blamed me somehow for Ben dying. I might've convinced them they were being irrational if I didn't believe it so strongly myself.

After a few minutes of watching them watch TV, I drove downtown and went back to my hotel room. I didn't sleep. The next morning, I drove Michael, Dana, and Charley to the airport. Charley said he was going to think about it, talk to his partners, and then we'd have a conference call in a week. "Very impressive," he said. "Top-notch."

Every time he said something like that, Dana smiled at me.

At the airport bar Charley bought us all a drink, and then excused himself to go to the bathroom. He and Michael made eye contact before he left. Then Michael asked Dana to give us a few minutes alone. When she was gone, Michael reached in his suit pocket and came out with a slip of paper.

"Charley likes your game very much," Michael said. "We're going to talk more about it when we get back, but he wanted me to tell you his initial reaction."

He slid the paper across the table to me. It said, simply, $1.5.

"Is that-?"

"Million," Michael said. "Seed money. You draw up the papers."

"Jesus."

Then Michael leaned forward and his lips slid back over his teeth. "Look, you can cut your fuckin' hair and put in your phony eye, but I know what you are. I've always known what you were. Portugal. Land mines." He sneered. "You're a fuckin' low-rent bottom-feeder lawyer. You work for the biggest drug lawyer in Seattle. You don't think I check out the people we work with?"

He took the slip of paper back. "And I know Japanese animation when I see it."

I took a drink. It had been Louis's idea to pretend that a Japanese cartoon was, in fact, the graphics to Empire. We used one of his favorites, Samurai Sea Battle Number 9, and Louis practiced until he could simulate the action in the cartoon. The VCR out in the hallway wired in to Louis's computer, the TV encased in the computer screen, the phony players, Bryan cutting the power before they got too good a look, Eli's creative fit – the whole drama had worked. Or so I'd thought. But Michael had seen through all of it.

"Are you going to tell him?" I asked.

Michael's eyes narrowed. "No," he said. "Dana likes you. And Charley likes your weird-looking friend. A million-five is a million-five. And even though you're two years away from having anything worthwhile, there's something there."

He reached out and finished his bourbon.

"Anyway, it's always better to have the crooks working for you." He waved his drink to the bartender and turned to face me full on. "But I want in. I want shares. And if you ever pull something like that again and I'm not in on it, I will make sure you go to jail and I will feed your law license to my fucking dog. Do we have an agreement?"

Dana and Charley were walking back together.

"Do we have an agreement?" he asked again.

"Yes," I said quietly.

They arrived and Charley picked up his drink. "To Empire!" he said.

Dana squeezed my arm.

"To Empire," said Michael, and he put his arm around Dana's waist, pulling her away from me.

He nuzzled her neck and she blushed and turned in to him. And it was at that moment that I first pictured it. It only takes one thought like that, the door opening a crack, and you start imagining how it would work, what you would do, how you might get away with it. It was at that precise moment that it first occurred to me that the world would be a simpler and better place if Michael Langford were not in it.