Beate was not made of metal. She was not made of gemstones, nor paper. She was not a manuscript. She was a blind girl who wasn't blind enough.
She touched her fingertips together, and closed her eyes. When she shut her eyes, nothing was there at all, no live world, no gone world. Sometimes she did that, in moments of frustration. The darkness was only for emergency. No one in the dark needed her to behave. When she opened her eyes, her father was a blank place surrounded by two ghosts, each of them pressed against his ears, so that she could see the shape of his head. The ghosts were soldier dead, and stabbed. The train must be passing over a battlefield. One looked at her, the corner of his mouth sagging.
“Will you help me?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I can't.”
Beate's mother huffed beside her, and Beate turned to look at the place she judged her mother to be. She didn't remember what the woman looked like. Johanna had a nature like a pincushion beneath a heel, an embroidery hoop with linen stretched too-tight. Her mother was still accompanied by the ghost. It was caressing the chicken and lapping at the air.
Then gone, the soldier ghosts, and with a surge, the train rattled onto a bridge. It filled halfway across with new ghosts, luggage in their hands, hats askew, dresses torn. They pitched and rolled and flew out the windows on one side, wailing, their belongings floating around them, their faces agonized, their hands outstretched to hang onto a train that no longer existed. There'd been a derailment here. In a moment it was gone, all the ghosts thrown into whatever water they were crossing, Beate breathing deeply in her seat trying to recover.
The train pulled eventually to a halt. Trains always wanted to continue. Beate smiled. She liked train ghosts, apart from the terrible ones. Trains weren't alive, but all the souls that had ever ridden, all those who'd built the tracks? Those souls craved motion. Some were still riding, their faces in the wind.
Go go go whispered the peaceful dead of the train, Beate's preferred dead.
“Go, go, go,” whispered Beate.
“Stop smiling and stop whispering,” said Beate's mother. “The surgeon is meeting us at the station.”
The ghosts leaned urgently forward, wishing that the train would continue. She stood. Her skin felt rumpled. She was thirsty, and the air smelled of something pleasant, some perfume. She adjusted her glasses again, snatching one last glimpse at the ghost passengers, their comfort and peace, their trust that the train would take them where they belonged. “Shall we go, then?” Beate said. “Go, go, go.”
Fritz Abendroth looked into the woods surrounding the raised platform. Something glinted in the trees. His daughter turned her head as well. He wanted, for a moment, to ask her if she saw something there. The sun dropped below the treeline.
The doctor was waiting. He tossed the family's trunks easily into his carriage himself, though he was in his middle forties, nearly the same age as Fritz, bearded and long-limbed, imbued with an elegant vigor. Fritz looked at him in envy. His own belly seemed full of down, a pillow plumped to bursting. Something needed to be done, an abstinence.
“Doctor Arthur von Hippel,” the surgeon said. “I am offering you my hand, Fraulein Abendroth: it is directly in front of your own.” She did not take it until her mother nudged her. He'd said his first name. No one did that. Beate did it herself, as he'd set the example.
“My name is Beate Abendroth,” said Beate. “I'm blind, but not mad.”
“No one told me you were,” said the doctor, but Fritz saw, to his concern, that he was curious. The doctor tilted his head to examine Beate. “To the house,” he said. “There are comfortable rooms readied for your stay, and other guests to supper tonight as well. The dust of the road must be on you.”
He raised his hand to brush pollen from Beate's brow, and she flinched.
“Stop it,” Johanna said. “That's the doctor. She doesn't like being touched around her eyes,” she said apologetically. “She can see a little, and it changes the light.”
“Quite all right,” said von Hippel. “No one does. It's a reflex. She's not wrong, is she? No, she is not. Her eyes are not wrong. She has lovely eyes.”
He peered into them, seeming pleased with his announcement. Her parents both frowned. Her eyes were wrong. Her corneas looked like cocoons, and what might hatch from them? Johanna's own eyes were the color of gentian, and she'd been complimented on them many times. Johanna and Fritz glanced at each other. They walked their daughter to the carriage.
The house was large, white with columns, only slightly in disrepair. A classical design, with a gracious front porch, and a long drive lined in dark, pointed trees, the same species as the ones that made up the woods at the edge of the property.
“Will supper be formal?” Fritz made himself ask. The trees seemed to be stretching up from their roots and trying to dart at the sky. He felt the urge to laugh, but held it in check. He felt a desire to run at those trees and make certain he went with them when they ascended.
“Not formal, no,” said the doctor. “We're away from the city, and we may as well enjoy it.” He rolled his sleeves up. His arms were powerful, and his fingers startlingly delicate, narrow-tipped manicured nails without callouses. Fritz had none himself, of course. He was a man of books, and so too was Arthur, a surgeon. He wanted to trust him, this man who'd invented a clockwork trephine for removing corneas. Fritz imagined it for a moment, the way it would slice into the cornea, like a soft-cooked egg being topped.
He spasmed and folded head-down in the hedge, dry-heaving. Von Hippel gave a cry of sympathy. Something about the chicken, Fritz tried to mumble, something about the train.
“Perhaps a dinner in your rooms,” the doctor said, leaning over him. “You're not well.”
“No, no,” said Fritz. “We'll dine with the group. A small weakness, and it's passed.” Perhaps the coffee. The cream had been thick and yellow.
The daughter was drifting over the groomed lawn, and Johanna was doing nothing about it, despite the way Beate had hitched up her skirts. It was warm, but that was no excuse. “Beate!” he cried. “Beate! Come in!”
At least she wasn't speaking to anyone. She seemed only to be walking, across the grass, very slowly, her hands out before her. She seemed bewildered, and Fritz wondered why. Perhaps it was the country air. If she tripped and fell, at least, it would be no horror. They were safe enough here in the country, at the surgery, and the doctor seemed to approve of the girl. He was tramping across the lawn to fetch her, and as Fritz and Johanna watched, the doctor took their daughter by the arm. She seemed docile, even grateful. It was unlike her. Normally, she would have lashed out, or gone limp.
Johanna took Fritz's arm in her own as well, and they watched their daughter walk slowly in, supported by von Hippel. Fritz compared the edge of the doctor's hairline to his own.
“He's a doctor,” said Johanna. “A surgeon.”
“He is,” said Fritz, and together, the parents allowed themselves a moment of hope for their own futures.
Beside the house there was a pen full of rabbits, small and white, brown-dappled, black. All sniffing and twitching, in heaps of multi-colored fur. Johanna wondered if they were to be supper. She'd never enjoyed rabbit, though cooked with wine it might be palatable. It was, she thought, too warm for a stew. She sniffed the air, smelling the country, hay rotting somewhere, and trees rotting too, the sweetish scent of termites.
She bent toward the pen to pat them, and Fritz snatched her back. The rabbits were altered. Some were bandaged about the head, the bandages surgical, but stained. Their eyes had all been removed.
2.
Beate could hardly breathe. Her eyes darted in all directions, but beyond the haze of dark and light she could see nothing, truly nothing, the nothing her parents insisted was all she should ever have seen. There were no spirits here. This place, these grounds, this house, were ghostless. She put her hand to her mouth, feeling for her own face. Years surrounded and now, none. Where co
uld they be? What was happening?
For the first time in twelve years, her vision was wholly dark. Was she cured? The train had been filled with ghosts, and nothing had changed, not until they arrived here, on this land. In the grass outside the house, she'd stumbled in the black, touching nothing, feeling nothing, seeing nothing, until the doctor had come to find her, to bring her back in. The touch of his hand had been a relief, stranded as she was, alone. Had this been her parents plan all along? Was it all a lie, this story of some new technique? Was her outer blindness to be matched by an inner, had that always been their notion? This von Hippel, was he some ocular exorcist, no kind of surgeon at all? But no — that made no sense. There had been no secret techniques performed upon her, she was sure of it. She had only traveled, and now she was here.
Alone in this room. It had been years since she'd been alone, anywhere. She felt for the curtains and drew them open for the morning, the golden glow. Without ghosts, there would be no boundaries for the universe. The bed was narrow, with carved boards at head and foot, and both sides. It had a scratchy wool blanket, which she rolled back. She unlaced her boots, and stretched her toes, craving touch of any kind. She peeled off her stockings. It was hot. She'd been directed to sleep, but how could she sleep?
“Where are they?” she'd managed to ask the doctor on the lawn.
The doctor had laughed. “Who?”
“They,” she said. “Them.”
She had felt his fingertips on her eyelids again, and this time she let him, without flinching.
“What do you see?” he asked.
She started to tell him, and then remembered what her mother had said. No talk of ghosts to him, or he would not take her as a patient. She found that she wanted to stay, wanted this doctor to work on her in this ghostless place. What would he do?
“Light, a little,” she said, the appropriate answer. She'd used it many times. There were doctors in her history, but none who'd been able to help her, though her eyes had been pricked and stabbed, held open by hooks, stared into, barked over. “I see morning and evening. I see small objects, if you hold them close to me. Sometimes I see other things, made of my mind playing in the dark, the other doctors say. But not all I see is lovely.”
“You've learned to make do, and I can only imagine with what you have populated the darkness around you.”
She jolted.
“Don't be startled, Beate — I see what you have done. There is no shame in it. You are not the first blind child to have invented companions, and you will not be the last. And if I can cure you — whatever accompanies your sightlessness will likely go. You wish to see, and I can help you. But are you sure you're ready to stop seeing the things only you can? There's no shame here. I might tell your parents I can't help you. There's a language for you, night writing, dots to feel with your fingertips. You could read. This surgery will stop you seeing things in the dark. If all goes well, you'll see my face, in the light, in three weeks time.”
She discovered that she did want to see this man's face, and desperately. What was he, that the dead avoided him? Was it him they avoided?
“I want the surgery,” Beate had said, and so he'd taken her arm and walked her back to the house, and her parents, through the strange quiet, and the dark, through no ghosts. She looked around, scanning the nothing.
For a moment, in the direction of the trees, she thought she saw something running, a white motion, a leaping terror. She turned toward it, but it was gone.
“There will be pain,” he said. “But not so much. The cocaine will numb your eyes, and I'll be there to keep you still. Then a fortnight bandaged. It's a calm enough recovery. When we remove the bandages, you'll begin to see.”
She remembered things she'd seen, hands gone and faces, arms torn and heads removed. One of her three companions in the city house wandered miserable and choke-throated, coughing and strangling his last moments, a frenzy of bloodied handkerchiefs and large-eyed pleading. The woman on the roof killed herself nightly. For a time, when she was small, Beate had thought the woman could fly, but then it became clear that she was only dying.
“I'm not frightened of pain,” Beate told the doctor, and then, boasting a little, “nothing frightens me.”
“You can give me your trust,” the doctor said. “This trephine is my own invention. I won't hurt you.”
“I'm already hurt,” Beate surprised herself by saying. “That's why I'm here.” The doctor made a startled sound at that statement, and held her arm more tightly.
There was another bit of whiteness in the direction of the trees, something running away, not toward her. Then it was gone again.
“What's over there?” she asked.
“A wood,” said the doctor said. “An old one. A part of it was cut down to build these buildings. Some people say they don't like it, but I think the forest is a lovely one. The trees are tall, and the creatures there are glad ones. In Giessen, you'll see it one day, there is an academic garden full of medicinal plants, and an academic forest as well, planted with trees from every forest in Germany, but I prefer this one. This one came here naturally.”
Now, in her room, alone, Beate listened to the insects trilling outside, to the wind blowing through the trees, to the sounds of something howling far off, a fox she thought, but she didn't know whether she was listening to the living or to the dead. She covered her eyes with her hands, and imagined a language of dots on her lids. She stretched her bare limbs on the linens, feeling the weave of the fabric on her skin pretending, for a few pleasant moments, that she was something other than human. A spider, eight legs, skittering up a wall or ceiling, a swift arachnid escapist.
She woke abruptly, her face being washed with a warm cloth.
“Don't worry,” a woman's kind voice said. “I'm the nurse.”
“The doctor is here. He wishes to look at your eyes, for only a moment, before supper,” the woman said, and another set of hands touched Beate's face, holding her head and tilting it up, moving her skull. There was light in the room, from a lamp perhaps. She went limp, feeling the doctor opening her lids. The quiet was strange. To be surrounded only by the living. To be touched only by the living. Was this what it was to be a good daughter? Was this what they meant? Was this what the living normally did?
The press of fingers on her jaw. Beate felt dizzy. With the dead gone, she could hear breathing for the first time in years. She could feel hearts beating as they examined her eyes, and she saw shadows of real things, the doctor's fingertips, his own eye, very close to hers, an instrument, a bright light intervening at the edges of her universe.
“She's a perfect candidate,” the doctor said, his voice more formal than it had been. It had an edge of anticipation in it, excitement just below the surface. “We'll go to Heidelberg. I'll show you at the convention. This will be a cure for blindness. You won't feel pain. You won't be made ill by chloroform. The coca, I've tried it myself, is a peaceful thing, a quieter of motion in the eye, and when it's used, I can prick my own eye with a needle and feel nothing. Would you like that? To feel nothing?”
Ghosts might be numbed. Their pain would be lessened. She wondered if there was a way to medicate the dead.
“I'd like to feel nothing,” she said, testing the words. Perhaps she would.
“Things are different than they were, Beate, even a year ago. You'll be the perfect patient, and you'll be famous. Would you like that?”
She didn't know what she'd like. The doctor was certain, and so Beate began to be certain too. She had ancient memories of faces and places, the pumpkin-colored checked silk of her dress when she was five, the sky, the stars, the leaves on the trees. Her vision had been so full of spirits for so long that she'd almost forgotten what it might be to see figures in a field of vision that wasn't simply darkness. She might see tables and gardens, the faces of the people who spoke to her. The doctor, she might see, and the nurse. She might read. She'd touched books, but they w
ere nothing to her. Sometimes she heard her father reading from the newspaper, or her mother reading aloud from a letter. She didn't care about books, she decided.
She let the nurse dress her, lacing and pulling the corset tightly, twisting her travel-crushed hair back into a coronet. She imagined a visible world as she was dressed. Ghosts, replaced by the living. She imagined herself at a ball, dancing with someone, her dress crinkling as she spun, and she would dance through ghosts, of course, she knew that. They were everywhere except here, but she wouldn't know their natures any longer. The ghosts would be gone from her sight.
One day, someday, she'd go into that wood. She'd wait until her eyes were perfect, and then she'd walk into the trees, all alone, and see what there was to see.
3.
“The patient, B.A. is a young girl, seventeen years of age, thin, delicate, and of average height. Both eyes failed at the age of five, after an episode of high fever reported by her parents as nearly fatal. The fever — or some aspect of its treatment — produced corneal ulcers. She has, in both eyes, a four millimetre corneal leucoma, which opacity obscures the entirety of the pupil. While the patient is capable of distinguishing light from darkness, and counting fingers at a distance of two metres, she has been rendered effectually blind, with a side element. She reports spirit forms and indistinct figures, an oddity no doubt caused by the effects of sunlight without context.”
4.
At supper, the doctor introduced another ophthalmologist, elderly and visiting from Dublin, Doctor Samuel Bigger, who rumbled benignly over his pre-dinner cup. The Irish doctor's wife was not so calm. She bent close to Beate's face — Beate had not worn her glasses — and talked into it, too loudly.
“This is the keratoplasty?” said the wife, and then, addressing both doctor and parents, “She looks too young, and her corneas should be conical, not flat. She shows signs of globe collapse.”
The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods Page 19
