Ordinary Daylight

by Andrew Potok

  On the walls around the space-age controls hung posters of rods and cones magnified ten thousand times. Through what little remained of my own photoreceptor cells I peered at the huge ones on the wall. They were like bulbous seed sacs and spindly reeds surrounded by the eerie seascape of the eye. I imagined these rods and cones as they swayed this way and that, aroused by light, recharged by darkness. They were supposed to grow, like a kind of neuronal escalator, constantly being born on one end and dying on the other. It was thought, the biochemist was saying, that perhaps a failure of the retina to metabolize the dead rod and cone clippings caused the debris and blindness in the RP eye.

  The normal eye, the eye belonging to most everyone in the world, is the sense organ through which people gather most of the information about the world. It is a spheroid, one inch in diameter, whose complexity permits a person to see, under ideal conditions, a single lit candle seventeen miles away. The light is guided onto the retina, an assemblage of nerve cells a half millimeter thick, by way of the cornea, which sheathes the eyeball, through a clear watery pool called the aqueous humor, then through the crystalline lens that refracts it, through another gelatinous pool, the vitreous humor, and through a web of blood vessels and nerve fibers. Having passed through this maze, the light registers a sharp, inverted image on the retina, where it excites the cells that transform its energy first into chemical and then into electrical charges, the language of the brain. Electrical impulses, generated in the retina, travel via the optic nerve to the back of the head, where they are interpreted by a visual center, the seat of perception. The system is, to say the least, intricate and uncanny, and continues to work, except in the case of a tiny minority of people, for the entire life of the body. The failure of any one of the parts, though, interdependent and essential as they all are, is potentially blinding.

  Some parts of the eye are easier to fix than others. For instance, neither the cornea nor the crystalline lens depends on the blood supply for nourishment, as does almost everything else in the body, and they can therefore be replaced in one way or another without excessive threat of tissue rejection. Moreover, even this threat of tissue rejection for the cornea is much less than it was in the early days of grafting, and though the eye’s lens cannot be replaced by an organic one, it can be replaced by lucite. The retina, however, is not only a part of the brain itself, embryologically derived from it and linked to the visual cortex by millions of connecting fibers, but it is also entirely dependent on the blood and therefore the proteins, hormones, vitamins, and other nourishment carried by it.

  Sometimes RP doesn’t exist alone but as one of several even more debilitating malfunctions such as deafness or mental retardation or both. Whether part of a larger syndrome or not, it is associated with a faulty gene or genes and thus transmitted to new life. The gene can be dominant as is Sarah’s and mine, or recessive or sex-linked. The most common form of transmission is through a recessive gene, meaning that one parent must mate with another carrying the same recessive trait in order to produce a child with the disease. This gene is carried unsuspectingly by one in eighty human beings, worldwide.

  A few days after Ben’s call, Helga mentioned the Foundation and made me suspect extrasensory perception. “I talked with someone from your Foundation,” she said scornfully. “You don’t know him, but he says he knows who you are.”

  “Really?” I said. “What’s he doing here?”

  “He’s not here. He called from New Jersey or Boston, I think. He wants to come for treatment. I said no.”

  “Why, Mrs. Barnes?” I foolishly asked.

  “Because I don’t want any of your meddling doctors snooping around here.”

  “I see.”

  “What do you do for that Foundation?” she asked.

  “I don’t do anything for them. To me, they’re like a central place where I can find out about other people with RP. I sometimes try to help other people going blind. . . .”

  “They are a bunch of scoundrels,” she said. “They raise enormous amounts of money and distribute it among themselves and their doctor friends. Why do you think they all get so rich?”

  “This Foundation has a lot of people on its board who have the disease or who have children with it. . . .”

  “Don’t insult my intelligence!” she screamed. “Those thieves don’t want to find a cure. The cure is right here, and they should know it. A cure would put them right out of business.”

  Roy came through London once more, on his way back from Cannes. Another friend, Chet, had come to blow glass in the Midlands, and all four of us camped out on Sta’s beds and floor. One evening we went to a Knightsbridge theater to see a new Polish movie, and even though the quality of the film was atrocious, I saw it relatively well, and afterward, walking through the dark streets, I had my new eyes once more, this time just for the evening. I walked ahead of Roy, Chet, and Sarah, and they saw me pirouetting around parking meters, lampposts, fire hydrants. They saw me easily spot curbs and evening strollers. We stayed up late that night, all of us convinced that I would take up painting again.

  Sarah, too, was beginning to report what she took to be real changes. One morning, as we walked down the long dark circular staircase in the Chalk Farm station, she said: “It seems to me as if they turned on extra lights this morning.” I ran back upstairs to ask an attendant about extra lights.

  “You Americans,” he barked, “you think electricity is cheap.”

  “I’m not complaining. I want to be sure that there are no extra lights.”

  “And why do you want to know that?” he queried suspiciously.

  “It just seems brighter. I was wondering—”

  “Of course there aren’t any extra lights,” he said. “And I’ll wager it’ll be another fifty years before the lights change at Chalk Farm.”

  My evening’s improvement hardly caused Helga to raise her head to look at me. Even Sarah’s description of the Chalk Farm incident made little impression. Helga was agitated and preoccupied, giving us bees quickly and dismissing us minutes after we’d arrived.

  She told us one morning that she was negotiating with the Arabs.

  ELEVEN

  HELGA’S INVOLVEMENT WITH ARABS had been a mystery. We heard about them all the time but never saw any of them. Depending on her mood, she would regale us with stories vilifying them as drunken primitives, or when they were praising her know-how, her bees, and her wisdom, she spoke of them as gods, not only wealthy beyond our imagination, but kind, humane, and discriminating. She treated them for everything. From her choppy tales, interrupted by stray, dissociated thoughts, I pictured her whiling away long afternoons on thick Persian carpets at the Grosvenor House or the Dorchester, playing Parcheesi with their demented children, whose idiocy or retardation she attempted to cure with bees; or telling flamboyant stories of her life to veiled fat women who giggled politely but longed to be back in the desert, sipping Coca-Cola. When an Arab potentate, speeding back to the hotel from an illicit rendezvous with a buxom English wench, turned his Mercedes over on the M1 in the pink of early dawn, Helga would arrive later that morning to lecture him on temperance and lay bees all over his bruised and weary body. She treated them for diabetes, myopia, idiocy, impotence. She tried to soothe their headaches and their menstrual cramps. “How they love me,” she would often say. “There is nothing they wouldn’t do for me.” And she would show us expensive handbags from Harrod’s, gold brooches from Cartier.

  Toward the end of May, she announced that she was going to Abu Dhabi for a few days. “I couldn’t refuse,” she explained. “They are sending a private plane for me and offering me everything. But can I share my secrets with those blacks?”

  “Blacks, Mrs. Barnes?”

  “Blacks, browns, whatever they are,” she said. “They are not like us.”

  She had warned us all at one time or another about the serious side effects of sudden withdrawal from bee venom. “Some bodies cannot deal with this. They have to taper off sl
owly, as you will see for yourself when it is time to stop.” But she prepared no one for her absence. As we patients ran into one another on the streets of Beckenham, we talked of this. “It’s a bloody shame, that’s what it is,” said the mother from Manchester.

  The day Helga left, I felt enormously relieved, as if London had finally been liberated from a satanic presence. I vacillated between wanting her back quickly and safely so we could continue our business, and fantasies of her destruction at the hands of ruthless terrorists somewhere over the Persian Gulf.

  London had been under the spell of an exorcism trial. One Michael Taylor was accused of tearing out his wife’s tongue and eyes, having been “pledged to Satan” the night before. The Reverend Raymond Smith testified that he himself had expelled over forty devils from Taylor’s body. Not quite free of them, however, Taylor left his wife (“the darling of my life”) to die in a pool of blood on their kitchen floor. The judge’s ruling for acquittal was based largely on the Vicar of Wakefield’s finding that Taylor was, in fact, possessed by demons when he tore his wife to bits. The archbishop of Canterbury begged that exorcism not be condemned out of hand and the canon of St. Paul’s added that the Church cannot bar exorcism even though too much unfavorable publicity was bringing it to disrepute. “One has to be a little agnostic about all this,” he said.

  I followed the controversy carefully, for the whole affair made me and my involvement in bee madness feel as rational as Hegel or Marx.

  Sarah went off to visit friends in the south who were outfitting a boat to cross the Atlantic. I took Helga’s absence as a long-awaited opportunity to get in touch with the doctors who, in one way or another, allowed their names to be used in support of her therapy. First I called a Harley Street radiologist, a Dr. Singer, copies of whose congratulatory letters Helga had Xeroxed for me. For years, she had been referring her arthritics to him for X rays and, in return, he testified quietly and privately to having witnessed improvements in them and in her RP patients as well.

  “There is no doubt about it,” he told me. “She is performing cures with retinitis pigmentosa, but I would be driven right out of England by the Medical Council if I were to say so publicly.”

  I told him how she was threatening me and Sarah, how angry she was generally these days, how all her patients seemed to be living in constant fear and dread.

  “Ah, yes,” he laughed, “that’s my Helga. She is like a prickly pear,” he said, “barbed on the outside, soft on the inside. My advice to you is to stay as long as she will have you. I can imagine that it’s not pleasant, but the longer you stay, the better your chances of success.”

  Next I called Dr. Ryder, the only doctor who allowed his name to appear in full support of Helga. We met in the creaky little library of the Royal Homeopathic Hospital on Great Ormond Street. Ryder was lean and, as Helga had said, hungry—hungry for a share of her cure. He was anxious to explore the bees’ effect on my body and to be mentioned in whatever publicity I could muster. He didn’t seem to know much about retinitis pigmentosa. As we talked, he browsed for RP information through one of the volumes from the near-empty shelves surrounding us.

  “What’s missing in the retinitis eye?” he asked. “These blokes don’t seem to know.”

  “No one knows,” I said. “They suppose it’s chemical, but they’re doing basic research still.”

  “Yes, yes,” Ryder said in a pretty, BBC accent. “What do you suppose the bees are doing then? Stirring up the adrenal cortex?”

  “Helga says ‘stirring up the glands.’ ”

  “Do you feel differently right after treatment?” he asked. “Some report feelings of euphoria.”

  “Euphoria? Only when I think my eyes are getting better. Otherwise depression. Do you mean that some people think the venom itself gets them high?”

  “Yes, that’s it. But never mind. Let’s you and I set up a series of blood tests. Round the clock. Let’s take blood before and after bee stings, every couple of hours if we can manage it. One thing that should be simple to detect is elevated levels of cortisol.” Bee toxin, he explained, increased the body’s production of its own organic cortisone.

  “What about other biochemical reactions? Can you monitor enzymes or hormones? If you could, wouldn’t that give you more clues?”

  “Mmm. Perhaps, perhaps.”

  “Say you found some enzyme or other in larger amounts than normal, and say I was seeing better at the time . . .”

  “Yes, yes,” he said, “that may be true. It’s probably more difficult and expensive though. Let’s start with cortisol.” We arranged a day for testing. “Let’s learn what we can about bee venom,” he suggested as we both got up. “I know of a study going on right now at the University of London. Why don’t you wander over there and talk with the investigators?”

  I said I would.

  “And do try to stay as long as possible with old Helga. Though God knows she’s a bloody megalomaniac.”

  The excursions to the University of London and the various hospitals I visited in search of leads were hazardous. I felt old and infirm as I shuffled on the edge of dark, cavernous stairwells, while students, nurses, even patients hurried by. Walking around Russell Square, I bumped a baby carriage and heard the nanny swearing at me all the way to Gower Street, where I turned my ankle on a piece of sidewalk under construction. Inside the university building that housed the department of physiology, I trailed the dark walls with the fingers of one hand while the other one guarded my face. In a tiny office, I met one of the physiologists involved in venom study. Because her research found no significant link between arthritis and any of the substances she isolated in bee venom, she seemed skeptical and tired, though somewhat intrigued by this new condition that she had never heard of. She agreed to send me her published material and to “ask around about retinitis pigmentosa.”

  I sent off letters to several British entomologists to inquire about the feeding habits of bees and finally felt that I was no longer just a passive acquiescent patient.

  I decided to try establishing a scientific baseline for my vision. I called Dr. Ryder for advice, and he urged me to try a Harley Street specialist whom he hadn’t met but who had been highly recommended. I would have preferred Moorfields, I told him—it was the best ophthalmological hospital in England—but I followed Ryder’s suggestion instead.

  The brass plaque on Dr. Bemari’s thick front door was one of the largest on Harley Street. I know because I fingered them all as I bent over trying to read the shallow engraved names on the shiny metal. I knocked, and after a few minutes the heavy front door buzzed and opened. Inside, the place was spacious, a kind of shabby elegance, perhaps the leftover elegance of a previous owner, in which everything looked somewhat out of place, out of proportion, out of scale. A few waiting patients sat at a huge conference table together with Dr. Bemari’s secretary, who pecked away at a tiny Hermes portable and turned from time to time to stuff an index card into a box on the mantel behind her. The place had a mannerist air about it, posturing like a stage set, and after waiting a few minutes, I left, happy to be outside on Harley Street, as if it were health itself, pristine and true, like wilderness.

  Dr. Ryder prevailed upon me to try again. When I went back a few days later, I was escorted upstairs immediately. The doctor’s office was enormous. He was on the phone at a desk in a corner. He was a little brownish man with a squeaky voice, who was speaking alternately English and some Indian dialect.

  “Have you been here before?” he asked me, one hand covering the receiver.

  “No, I haven’t,” I replied.

  “Who sent you?” he wanted to know.

  “Dr. Ryder,” I informed him.

  “All right, my friend. Sit you down,” he said, motioning me to a chair, and, as I approached, handing me a thick cloth. Surprised but properly submissive again, I felt around for the chair and sat down, the cloth in my lap. As he continued talking on the phone, he began fumbling with the cloth, trying to put it
over my head. It was a startling turn, and I struggled for a moment. Then I accepted it, whatever it was, as the strange norm of Indian ophthalmology. I say that I accepted it, this scene from a Peter Sellers movie, but just for the briefest moment I must admit I was afraid of being bound hand and foot in this black sari cloth to be shipped to his native land and dunked, head first, in the healing waters of the River Ganges. It is, they say, a slow healer, but God’s ways are mysterious and unhurried.

  Bemari now took my hand and put it on a wooden handle. “Hold this like an umbrella and close your eyes,” he ordered. I was now entirely inside the droopy mantle held up in the middle by an umbrella stick. In the coziness of my tent, tingling with curiosity, I decided to see this, too, through to the end. A little excitement would do me good, I thought.

  Eventually he hung up the phone and reminded me to keep my eyes closed. Then he asked: “You are here for an eye examination?”

  “I’m glad you asked,” I said, my voice raised to compensate for the drapery around me, “because in fact it’s more complicated than that. I have retinitis pigmentosa. . . .”

  “No, no, my friend,” he admonished. “No, no, no. Do not tell me what is wrong with you. It is my specialty to tell you. I am a professor, a teacher of many students, and what I teach is how to tell, by looking into the eyes, what is troubling you. We seek clues in the eye itself to the rest of the body. The eye holds within its perfect roundness the secrets of the heart, the brain, the liver. . . .” He was now pawing the umbrella, and as he spoke, I realized, with some trepidation, that he had climbed inside with me. He told me to open my eyes, and the bright light of his ophthalmoscope began looking for signs. He looked for a long time, and when he finished he extricated us both and sighed.

  He mumbled, first to himself and then, clearly, to me: “Forty-five. Forty-five. Yes, the number is forty-five. . . . How old are you, my friend?”