by Paul Cleave
“I know it doesn’t seem like it right now, but you will get through this,” Principal Anderson says.
Joshua says nothing.
“You can’t fully acknowledge what’s going on, but you will, and soon, and it’s going to hurt. It’s really going to hurt.”
Joshua still says nothing. It already hurts. How can it get worse? They reach the bottom of the stairs.
Principal Anderson carries on talking. “It’s going to be hard, and it won’t make sense, and you’re going to feel numb and lost, but you still have your mom. She’ll be there for you, I’ll be here for you, and all the teachers and students will be here for you.”
“Not if the curse takes all of them.”
“What curse?”
All of a sudden he needs to know what this man looks like. Until now, he’s never cared, but in this moment it’s important—especially if the man is going to give him such bad news. Black hair? Brown? He knows what black is, because black is all he sees. Brown is a lighter shade of that, a warmer shade. What does Principal Anderson have? Is he bald? Does he look like the kind of person who gets things wrong?
They continue to walk with Principal Anderson’s hand on his shoulder. Joshua realizes he hasn’t asked the big questions, the how and the why, and he still doesn’t ask them now. How and why can lead only to more hurt.
They get outside. He can hear Mrs. Templeton catching up. He can hear birds in the trees and the warm breeze rustling through the leaves. They come to a stop, and Mrs. Templeton hands him his cane and his bag. He turns his face to the sun. He will remember these moments, he thinks. Next week, next month, in ten years’ time, each of these moments following his father’s death he will remember.
“Your ride is here,” Principal Anderson says.
He hears the car making its way down the extended drive leading to the Canterbury School for the Blind. It comes to a stop in front of him. The door opens. Footsteps as someone approaches.
“Hi, Joshua,” a woman says. “My name is Audrey Vega, I’m a detective who works with your dad, and I want to say . . . I want to say I’m so sorry about your father. He was a good man. A great man. I liked him a lot. Everybody on the force did. He was well liked and incredibly respected and . . . and this . . . this is a great loss to all of us.”
Joshua doesn’t know what to say.
“I’m taking you to see your mom at the hospital,” she says.
“I don’t understand. I thought . . .” Then it hits him, a sense of hope so strong his legs threaten to collapse under the weight of it. “He’s still alive. The doctors are—”
“I wish that was it,” Detective Vega says, and she puts a hand on his shoulder, as Principal Anderson did earlier. “I really do, Joshua. But he’s gone. I’m sorry. I’m here to take you to your mom.”
His mom. What is she thinking right now? What is she doing? He lets Detective Vega guide him into the car. He sits in the passenger seat, and before the door is closed Mrs. Templeton reminds him once more that everything is going to be okay, and Principal Anderson reminds him they are all there for him. Somebody puts his bag into the backseat, then Detective Vega climbs in behind the wheel. The car smells like takeout food and feels like an oven. He reaches for the panel to his side and finds the button to lower the window.
“Seat belt,” Vega says.
He clicks his seat belt into place. They start to drive. He can hear a helicopter overhead, moving across his part of the city on its way to another, and he imagines perhaps it’s a news crew going to where his dad died. If he switched on a TV right now, there’d be a dozen voices all yammering away about his father’s death. His dad once said that bad news for everybody else is big news for the media. He would often say, It’s human tragedy that keeps them employed. They’ll be asking the how and the why. As they drive, the need to understand what happened intensifies the closer they get to the hospital. Soon he can’t not know.
He leads with the what. “What happened?”
“Your father and Detective Kirk were following a lead,” she says.
“What kind of lead?”
“They went to interview a suspect. There was a confrontation and it went bad.”
“So dad was . . . was murdered?”
“Yes.”
“The person who killed him?”
“He’s dead too.”
Joshua is happy that guy is dead too, but then he changes his mind. He would rather face the man who had done this to his dad. Being blind means he can’t look him in the eye, but being blind wouldn’t prevent him from swinging a sledgehammer.
“How did Dad die?”
“He . . . he fell,” she says. “It happened at a construction site. I don’t know all the details, but your father fell from a great height. He would have died instantly. He wouldn’t have felt a thing.”
“Except he would have,” Joshua says. “He would have felt fear all the way down, and the higher he fell from, the longer he got to feel it.”
Detective Vega doesn’t say anything. She slows down for something, indicates, and a few seconds later takes a corner.
“What about Uncle Ben? Is he okay?”
“He’s fine. He’s with your mother now.”
A monstrous thought emerges. He wishes, and he can’t deny it, but he wishes it’d been Uncle Ben who had fallen, and not his father. He knows he’ll be having thoughts like this a lot over the next few days, the next few weeks, maybe forever. He can already feel himself obsessing over the what-ifs. Wishing like mad his dad had turned left instead of right, or called in sick that day, or gotten stuck at a red light when he had a green. Wishing away all the chain reactions that had brought them to this place.
He wipes at his eyes. Will the tears ever dry up?
“I know this may not mean much right now, but your dad died a hero,” Detective Vega says. “Any cop who dies on the job dies a hero.”
“My first father died a hero too,” he says.
“I . . . I know,” she says, and he’s grateful when she doesn’t add everything is going to be okay. They continue to drive. He doesn’t ask any more questions. He can hear other cars and motorbikes and buses and trucks. Occasionally somebody yells out at another driver. Horns toot and walk signals beep and brakes squeal. “We’re here,” Detective Vega says a short while later, and the car slows down, then comes to a stop.
They get out, and Detective Vega hands him his cane and carries his bag. “This way,” she says, and he takes her arm. He can hear traffic behind him and people around him; the hustle and bustle of the hospital nearly overwhelms him. “Doors are ahead,” she says.
The doors open and they step into the lobby. Joshua can’t tell how big the room is, but it sounds big. He can hear lots of voices, mostly soft murmuring, a desperate-sounding conversation perhaps between a patient at reception and a nurse.
“Joshua!”
Joshua turns towards Uncle Ben. Captain Kirk, as his dad always used to call him, not only because of his name, but because he looks like the original Captain Kirk too, according to his mom. A hand lands on his shoulder. It’s warm and firm and Joshua can smell familiar aftershave.
“I’m really sorry, kiddo,” Uncle Ben says, and he has always been Uncle Ben even though he’s not really an uncle. They hug each other tight, and suddenly he thinks back to the last time they hugged. It was a year ago. His dad had fired up the barbecue and his uncle Ben had come around for some steaks and some beers and had brought his girlfriend with him. Everybody had hugged hello. Back then, Joshua came up only to Uncle Ben’s chest, and now there’s only a few inches separating them. Joshua has always been skinny, but the last year has seen him on the path to becoming tall and skinny. His dad had noticed that very thing just a few days ago and had acted like it was some sort of amazing phenomenon, a source of pride, as if Joshua himself had done something to make it happen.
How can it be his dad won’t see him as an adult? Won’t continue to get excited about each and every inch?
He realizes Uncle Ben is saying something.
“Sorry . . . what?”
“I’m saying it all just . . . just happened so quick, you know? And your dad, he . . . Ah, hell,” he says, and Joshua knows Uncle Ben is close to tears too. They break the embrace and Uncle Ben puts both of his hands on his shoulders. “I wish . . .” Uncle Ben adds, but doesn’t say what it is he’s wishing for. Instead he says, “Thanks, Audrey, for getting him.”
“Good-bye, Joshua,” Vega says, and she gives him a hug before disappearing.
“Is he really dead?” Joshua asks.
“Yeah, buddy, he is. I’m really sorry. It wasn’t his fault. I want you to know that the guy who did this . . . He got what he deserved, okay? I’ve made sure he’s being put to good use. I mean . . . I mean—well, don’t say that to anybody,” he says, and his uncle sounds like his dad used to sometimes when he was wired on coffee, and he guesses his uncle is running on adrenaline. “I shouldn’t have said that. In fact I didn’t say that, okay? Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes,” Joshua says, but really he means no. His uncle isn’t making any sense.
“Good. Good. The guy that killed your dad, he was a bad guy, and your dad died making sure that guy couldn’t hurt anybody else.”
Joshua isn’t so sure. He thinks his dad didn’t need to die. He thinks the thing Uncle Ben did that he can’t talk about could have been done earlier. That way his dad would be coming home from work tonight the same as always, and Joshua would be napping in Mr. Fox’s class.
“Where’s Mom?”
Before Uncle Ben can answer, they are joined by someone else. “Hi, Joshua.” A woman, warm and mature sounding, perhaps even as old as forty. “It’s a real pleasure to meet you, I only wish it were under different circumstances.”
“Joshua, this is Dr. Toni Coleman,” Uncle Ben says, and he knows the name but can’t figure out how.
“People prefer to call me Dr. Toni,” she says, and then there is a hand on Joshua’s elbow. A moment later a hand is in his, shaking it. He can sense her smiling and looking sympathetic at the same time.
“Did you try to save my dad?” Joshua asks.
“Dr. Toni is a different kind of doctor,” Uncle Ben says.
“Different how?”
“I’m an ophthalmologist,” she says.
Now he knows where he knows her name from. She’s been in the news. “I don’t understand,” he says. “What’s going on?”
“Your dad has died, Joshua,” she says, “and I’m sorry for that, but his wish was that if something ever happened to him, he wanted to give you a gift. We’re hoping to make you able to see the world the way your dad saw it. We’re hoping to give you his eyes.”
FIVE
The technology is still in its infant stages. That’s what Dr. Coleman will be telling the family right now, Dr. Tahana thinks, as he stands over the body of Detective Inspector Mitchell Logan. He imagines Dr. Coleman will tell them the procedure has been done no more than fifty times throughout the world, and all of those within the last two years. Giving sight to those who don’t have it—it’s hard only to thank medical science when it feels like a miracle. Twice it’s been done in New Zealand, each time at Christchurch Hospital by Dr. Coleman and her team. Coleman is a brilliant doctor who, he believes, still hasn’t reached the peak of her career—and one of only a dozen doctors on the world stage doing these procedures. She accepts the accolades and the respect that comes with that position, but he knows she doesn’t really care about them. If she did, she certainly wouldn’t be involved in what he was doing right now.
Tahana looks over the body of Detective Logan. His hand is nailed to his shoulder, more nails in his chest, one in his neck and another embedded into his gum via his cheek. It wasn’t the nails that killed him—and if it hadn’t been for the fall, Mitchell would have survived with minimal scarring.
Mitchell isn’t the only dead man in the room, and Tahana walks over to the second body—cause of death, a gunshot to the throat. Unlike Mitchell, whose internal organs were crushed in the fall and cut into by broken bones, this man’s organs are in perfect working order.
“At least you’re finally good for something,” he says to the dead man, which is something he has said to other dead men in similar circumstances. For twenty-eight years he has been harvesting organs and bones from the dead to save the living—and for the last five years, he’s been harvesting them from the likes of Simon Bower. Those killed in the commission of a crime have had their names retroactively added to the database of organ donors whether they wanted to donate or not. Earlier this morning, Simon Bower’s name was added. History has been rewritten so that, for all intents and purposes, when Bower applied for a driver’s license at the age of sixteen, he checked the box that said yes to donating his organs. There are fourteen people walking the streets of Christchurch who would be in the grave by now if Tahana and the others hadn’t been prepared to put their careers and their freedom on the line by illegally harvesting organs from these people who never wanted to be donors. However, he doesn’t care what their wishes were. The way he sees it, those who took from the community were, in death, able to give a little back.
He moves back to Mitchell. Removing the dead man’s eyeballs requires delicate work that cannot be rushed. One wrong cut, the tiniest of slips, and the eye becomes useless. He’s looking at forty-five minutes, perhaps an hour, per eyeball. It would take longer in a living patient—removing Joshua’s will be a far more delicate operation for Dr. Coleman, but even that will pale in comparison to the work required to attach the replacements.
As he makes the incisions to loosen the skin and muscle around the eye, he wonders how Dr. Coleman will describe the procedure to Joshua and his mother. It will be in simple enough terms, he thinks. A stem cell cocktail injected between the optic nerve and the new eyeball will help gel everything together after everything is attached, the eyeball carefully put into place and bandaged for it to heal, the biggest concern being the information from the eye to the brain traveling without corruption. Of course, it is more complicated than that—that’s why the technology is still groundbreaking—but in ten years’ time, hell, maybe even in five, it will be as common as a heart transplant.
A pair of surgeons enter the room. They acknowledge him with a nod before they begin working on the second body. Tahana listens to ribs being cut and bone being sawed as they open Bower to remove what can be saved. Neither of the surgeons knows Bower isn’t really a donor. Nobody will ever question it, least of all Bower’s family. The family never do—they’re too busy wondering what turned their child into a monster.
Like Mitchell, Simon Bower is also having his eyes harvested, and the doctor doing the harvesting matches Tahana’s pace. An hour later, each body has a single eyeball removed. Each eyeball is placed into a sterile bag full of saline, then each set placed into separate organ-transport containers filled with ice, each container carefully labeled. Other containers are filled with Bower’s organs and whisked away by interns coming in to get them, a heart rushed into an operating room, a kidney put onto a helicopter and raced to another hospital. Stored correctly, the eyes will last up to twenty-four hours, which gives them more time than they need.
It’s going to be a long day for Dr. Coleman and her team.
He goes to work around the second eye.
SIX
It’s hot in Dr. Toni’s office. There’s a fan in the corner of the room that blows air over Joshua’s face as it turns one way, and ten seconds later blows air over his face as it turns the other. He can hear sounds coming from the waiting room and the corridor beyond. He can hear somebody revving a car loudly in the parking lot several stories below. The chair he is sitting in is comfortable. His mother sits in the chair next to him and holds his hand tightly as they listen to Dr. Toni explain the procedure. Occasionally he can hear his mom crying, and each time it happens she tries to hide it. Hearing her cry makes him want to cry.
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sp; He feels like something vital has been scooped out from inside him. If somebody were to cut him open, his stomach would be empty, his chest would be only a cavity, all that would be left would be some blood and bones and his empty thoughts. He listens to Dr. Toni’s words. He wishes he knew what she looked like. Of course, after all of this, he might be granted that wish. Of course, if wishes came true, he’d be asking for his father back. He’d give up the chance of seeing in a heartbeat to have him here. He keeps expecting him to show up and apologize for being late to this appointment, before firing off questions about the operation.
The first thing Dr. Toni says is that they’ve met before, a long time ago, back when he was much smaller. She used to know his mom and dad a little, and Uncle Ben too, so she met Joshua back then as a friend of the family, not as his doctor. She tells him she’s the only person in New Zealand who’s performed these operations.
“I’m sure you’ve heard of them,” she says, and she’s right, he has. He imagines blind people everywhere have been following the progress of the operations. The first one took place two and a half years ago in Japan and made the front pages of newspapers around the world. He spoke a lot about it with his parents, and then in class Mr. Fox spoke a lot about it too.
“It’s an exciting time,” Mr. Fox had said, “but it doesn’t mean any of you can slacken off from your studies. You have to plan for how the world is now, not for how it might be. And of course you can hope. We can all hope.”
Which is what Joshua and everybody else in the school was doing—they were hoping. The second procedure was performed four months later in the United States, then the third not long after that, also in the States. Now it no longer makes the news, but of course there are still stories online. Every week or two somebody somewhere gets the procedure done, and, other than a few cases, all the operations have been successful. When it was finally performed here in New Zealand two years ago, it made the news again. There is, of course, a downside—as there often is with transplants. They require something nasty to have happened to someone healthy. That’s the price of admittance.
