I could feel myself giving in to something dark, something I'd always known was inside, but had always tried to suppress. I remembered Pete Decker on the bus, goading me into fighting Eli. Kill that faggot motherfucker! "He'll change the characters," I said. "He'll make it a bunch of princesses, or set it in the future. He's going to turn it into just another game, a stupid test of hand-eye coordination. Ms. Pac-Man."
After a few days of this, Eli's sputtering and shaking began to go away, and I could see the thing forming in his mind – as clearly as if it were my own mind – until one day we sat together at the lunch counter at Fletts, speaking in low voices over cups of clam chowder.
"You can't have anything to do with this," he said.
"If you say so."
"It has to be me," he said. "I'm sorry."
"Okay."
"From here on out, don't ask me any questions."
"I won't."
"You need to be out of town."
"Why?"
"Why do you think?" he snapped, as if I was an idiot. "We have your political career to think about."
I stared at my soup.
"Call Michael," he said. "Tell him I want to set up a meeting for two weeks from now. Tell him the meeting has to be kept secret, and it has to be in Spokane. Tell him Empire is ready."
"Okay."
"I'll e-mail him the details of the meeting."
"Okay."
"If he asks, tell him I'm really losing it. Making crazy demands."
I had to look away. "I'll tell him."
"And listen. Afterward, you're not going to see me for a while. I may have to go away. Don't worry, I'll contact you when Empire is ready." He smiled. "We'll have the money for you to run for Congress again. We'll do it right this time. Just you and me. Not all those outsiders from Seattle. No women."
"Right," I said.
Then Eli took a bite of soup and pointed the spoon at me. "He's going to hurt like he's never imagined someone could hurt. He's going to hurt the way you and I hurt."
I didn't answer.
After lunch, he asked me to take him to the general store. Eli went in alone. He came out with a sack and I could tell by the shape that it contained a box of shells. "Don't ask," he said. At his apartment I sat in the other room, pretending to read a magazine, but I could see through the doorway into the kitchen as he loaded the shells into the gun, one by one, until all six chambers were full. I wish I could say that it filled me with dread, that it snapped me out of this craziness, but I watched with fascination.
When he was done, Eli put the box of shells and the handgun back in the drawer. He took a deep breath and came back in. I pretended to be reading the magazine.
"Don't worry," he told me. "This is going to work. I'm going to take care of everything." He walked me to the door.
I went down the stairs, but he stayed on the landing above me.
"Thanks," Eli said.
"For what?"
"For coming back, even after… I shouldn't have spent that money against you, Clark. I shouldn't have done that."
"It's okay," I said.
"We always come back, huh?" He scrunched his nose and raised his glasses and looked like the boy at the bus stop, the boy who'd come across me bleeding alongside the river. "We're like-" He shivered and then he smiled. Eli had trouble expressing emotions. He began to fidget and to shift his weight. "We're like best friends."
"Yeah," I said. "Sure we are."
He grinned like a kid at a birthday party. Then he paused.
"And we'll never go against each other again."
"No," I said.
He smiled again and went back inside.
When I got home I called Michael and told him Eli was ready to sell but that Michael had to come to Spokane. He didn't want to do it, but finally he agreed. "The game had better be ready," he said. "Otherwise, the deal's off."
"The game is ready," I said.
"One more thing, Mason," Michael said. "When this is all over, I don't want you calling here. It makes Dana nervous when you call. I don't like to see her upset."
Outside the snow was swirling, and I imagined being lost in it, lying down and letting it blow and drift around me until I was buried, gone. "Okay," I told Michael. "I won't call after this."
The next day, Eli sent me an e-mail.
Senator-
Have a nice trip. Get an early start. I'd go too but I have a meeting that day, February 6, at 10:00 a.m. Everything will be great after that.
Your best friend,
Eli
I bought an airline ticket for February 5, the day before Eli was going to… do it. I caught the last flight out. I got to San Jose about 10:00 p.m. and slept at a hotel near the airport. All night I tossed and turned, until the sheets and covers were like ropes binding me. In the morning I grabbed a taxi (a receipt, I was thinking, and a witness) and gave the driver Dana's address in Sunnyvale.
"That's gonna cost," he said. "You could rent a car for what it's gonna cost."
"I know." I stared out the cab window at the surging, pointless suburban northern California traffic – millions of cars and no sign of a downtown anywhere. The clouds were light and formless, a white-gray haze above us. I felt a detachment from myself – a defense mechanism, I suppose – self-denial over what we… what Eli was doing.
But it's his plan, I protested my own guilt. I didn't buy the gun. I didn't buy the shells. I didn't load it. I didn't tell Michael to come to Spokane.
"Gun?" the cabbie asked.
"What?"
He gestured to the eye patch. "Your eye. BB gun?"
"Oh," I said. "Yeah."
"It's always a stick or a BB gun, ain't it?" He turned and smiled, his own right eye milky, the pupil spilled out like the punctured yolk of an egg.
I looked back out the window. Cars swirled around us on the freeway, and every eye seemed to stare at me. A little boy perched on a safety car seat looked at me and shook his head slowly, and we stayed even with the little boy's car until I wanted to yell at the cabbie to go faster or go slower, anything but driving alongside that boy.
Calm. Cold. There is a synapse in the brain that connects brilliance to brutality. It is the oldest part of the brain. And so I felt better when I thought about the details, when I reveled in my criminal genius:
I had found a way to murder my enemy without incriminating myself, without even lifting a finger. The brilliance of it overshadowed any misgivings I might have. Even if Eli were caught, he would say I had nothing to do with it. The motive would always be his disagreement with Michael over Empire. My motive – Dana and our daughter – would stay secret forever. And since I would be with Dana when it happened, my motive would also be my alibi.
Perfect. Cold. I could hear my own breathing.
The cab left the freeway for the flat prosperity of Sunnyvale: small stucco war-era houses remodeled and expanded until they threatened to burst their small lots; new apartment complexes and condos and low-slung business parks where fortunes had been made and lost and were slowly being made again; an anachronistic villagelike downtown shaded by the condos and apartments rising around it. I was suffocating.
There was some kind of street fair going on and the cabbie had to detour around it – blocks of Berkeley vendors unloading knit hats and bracelets from Volvos and microbuses, and I thought I might choke in the back of that cab. The heat.
I had found a way to murder my enemy. What are you doing? Nothing! Settle down. You're just seeing an old friend.
"Seeing an old friend?" the cabbie asked. "That's great."
Was I talking out loud? Jesus. "Yeah," I answered. Was I really doing this? I checked my watch. Almost ten. The meeting would be any minute.
The cab stopped in front of a small, one-story stucco house, leaning out over two painted posts onto a lawn pocked with oranges from a small, leaning tree. No garage, just a cloth carport over a blue minivan. A tricycle sat on the front porch. My daughter's tricycle. My wife was in that house. The air was shallow and sharp in my chest; I couldn't get it to go any deeper, my lungs pressed beneath some weight.