The anesthesiologist puts an IV in my arm. He tells me things are going to get blurry. I start to remind him that I won’t know the difference, but I’m fast fading into sleep and the words get stuck in my throat.
• • •
All of a sudden, there’s this incredible noise pounding into my brain. It’s louder than anything I’ve ever heard, like a jet engine, endless, incessant, painful. It sounds like static, feels like a continuous slap to my face, and tastes like acid.
“AHHHHHH!” I yell. “Turn it off! Turn it off! Turn it OFF!”
“Will! It’s Mom! It’s okay. It’s okay.”
I struggle to move and find my body still lagging behind my brain’s commands.
“TURN IT OFF!” I yell, gaining enough control to thrash and jerk.
“Nurse!” Mom says. “Nurse!”
Some more words are spoken—I hear “sedation”—and the sound gets foggy, and I fall asleep. When I wake up again, it’s back, pounding me, demolishing me, demanding my attention.
“The sound! Turn off the sound!” I say.
“Will, sweetheart, calm down!”
“Mom?” I say, my hands groping, finding her face. “Mom, make them turn it off!”
“Turn off what, Will?”
“That sound!”
“There is no sound, Will. It’s very quiet in here.”
“You can’t hear it?” I ask desperately.
“No.”
“Dad?”
“I don’t hear anything, either, Will. What does it sound like? Are your ears ringing?”
And that’s when I realize that the sound is not coming through my ears. In fact, it’s not actually a sound at all. It’s something else, some other sensory fist pummeling me with its volume and intensity. Is this eyesight? Have the bandages already come off? Am I seeing? Is this my very first sight?
But I lift my hands to my eyes and find bandages. If my eyes are bandaged, what could I be seeing? Unless… is this what the inside of bandages look like?
No, my eyelids are shut. I can feel that. They are taped closed by these very bandages.
What, then? What is this?
Then I remember how once Mrs. Chin explained that complete blindness is not like a person with normal eyesight covering his eyes. Because even then, that person still sees darkness. Blindness is like trying to look at the inside of your shoe through the bottom of your foot. It is an absolute lack of sensory input.
And that’s when it hits me: I’m seeing darkness for the first time.
My heart starts to pound from excitement. I can hear it on the monitor, which just proves to me that I’m right. What I thought I heard before wasn’t sound.
“OH MY GOD!” I say. “I can see! Mom! Dad! I can see!”
“Honey—” Mom says sympathetically.
“No, really! I can!”
“You still have bandages over your eyes, sweetheart,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
“No, that’s just it! I can see the darkness! I can see the blackness! It’s unlike anything I’ve ever felt!”
I don’t know how to describe it to them. Metaphors rush through my mind: It’s like a new arm is growing out of my face and getting electrocuted! It’s like I have a second nose and it’s snorting wasabi!
“Oh my God, Sydney, he can see!” says Dad. “His retinas are transmitting to the optic nerve! They are sensing the absence of light!”
Mom and Dad start laughing, and so do I. We laugh and laugh, and Mom starts crying, and the laughs and cries blend into each other. But none are louder than the sound of the blackness pouring into my brain from my eyes. I keep telling myself, no, it’s all right, this is a good thing. But my brain keeps saying, What is happening? What is this mass intrusion of static? The overload of sense from my eyes, plain and dark though it may be, is so strong that I can barely pay attention to Mom and Dad. Eyesight is asserting itself as king over my other senses. It is enacting a coup d’état against hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. And I can already tell it’s going to be a bloody revolution.
CHAPTER 17
The next morning, on Friday, Mom takes me to Dr. Bianchi’s office to get the bandages removed.
At the medical building, Mom and I walk back to a little examination room.
“Mom, can you just wait outside?”
She doesn’t say anything. She’s stonewalling, trying to guilt me with her silence.
For a moment, I consider the situation from her perspective. I think how special this moment must be for her. Her blind son is about to see for the first time. How many parents get to witness something like that?
“Fine, you can come in,” I say.
“Thank you,” she says, sounding genuinely appreciative.
I sit down on the crinkly paper of the examination table, and we wait in silence for Dr. Bianchi. After about ten minutes, I hear the door swing open, and he says, “How is my star patient feeling?”
“Pretty good,” I say. “But there’s a lot of weird stuff going on.”
I tell him about the pounding darkness, about what I assume are the first transmissions from my upgraded eyes to my brain.
“That means it worked, right? I will be able to see?”
“Possibly, possibly. Although this will take time to develop. You will come back to see me on Monday and we will begin your therapy. For the weekend, just rest and take note of what you experience.”
I hear him scrubbing his hands in the sink. He walks over to me and starts to tug at the tape gripping my temple.
My mom is quiet. Too quiet. “Mom, are you videotaping this on your phone?”
She says nothing, which tells me I’m right.
Dr. Bianchi pauses.
Annoyed, I say, “I don’t want all your little friends at the country club crying tears of joy while watching a video of me on endless loop. Turn it off.”
“William, this is a moment you will treasure forever. You will want to show it to your own children someday! And your grandchildren!”
I know that “you will treasure” is Mom’s code for “I will treasure,” but hey, in the history of the world, fewer than twenty mothers have seen their blind child gain sight. Why not let her enjoy it the way she wants to?
“Fine,” I say. “Keep filming.”
“All right. But I am starting a new recording now. I don’t want that little, um, altercation on the video.”
“Whatever,” I say.
Dr. Bianchi removes enough of the bandages that I am able to lift my eyelids. But my view still seems to be blocked by the remaining gauze.
This is it! I’m about to see!
I try to slow down my excitement so I can soak in every detail. This is a moment I want to remember forever. This is the moment I go from blind to seeing. This is the moment I step into the light.
Dr. Bianchi has stopped peeling back the bandages. I feel his face move very close to mine.
“Why did you stop?” I ask. He says nothing. “Dr. Bianchi?” Still he doesn’t reply. “Can you finish taking off the bandages, please?”
He steps back. “I’m sorry, Will,” he says.
“What? Is something wrong?”
“The bandages are already removed several moments ago. Your eyes are open and blocked by nothing.”
I blink. I feel my eyelids move up and down, just as they always have done when I blink. And I sense that raging current of black noise that I have felt since yesterday. But there is nothing more. There’s nothing else that signals of color or movement. I close my eyes and press them tightly shut. Then I open them. Nothing different: It’s the same sensation whether my eyes are open or closed.
“Turn it off!” I say. “TURN IT OFF!”
“Do you hear the noise again?” asks Mom. “It’s quiet in—”
“No, the camera! Turn it off!”
“Oh, yes, sorry,” she says quietly.
I grab at the paper cover of the examination table with both hands, fingernails clawing through it, ripping it
, balling it into my fists.
“Delete it, Mom! No one can ever see that video! Ever!”
“I already did.”
I feel my lower lip quiver. I’m about to cry. (My eyes may have never performed their primary function, but my tear ducts have always worked just fine.) No, I will not cry. I’m sixteen years old. I won’t cry in front of my mother and my doctor.
“Let’s go,” I say. I have to leave. I have to leave immediately and go home and lock my door and sit in the darkness and never come out.
“Wait for one minute, please,” says Dr. Bianchi. “You must allow me to examine you.”
“It didn’t work, can’t you see that?” I spit the words at him. “Can’t you see that with your eyes?”
“Will, I gave you the warning about how the cortex must take time—”
I stand and put my hand out, a signal for Mom to give me her arm as a guide.
“We’re leaving,” I say.
Mom is as upset as I am. I can hear it in the way she snatches her purse and jumps to my side, ready to lead me out of the office.
In the car ride home, I hear her sniffle.
“Are you crying?” I ask, rank hostility in my voice.
“Of course I am.”
“I’m the one who can’t see!” I say. “What are you crying about?”
“Don’t you know how hard this is for me?”
“How hard it is for you?” I demand. “For you? Why is everything always about you?”
“No, Will, it’s about you. It’s hard because I can’t do anything for you. It’s hard because I would give anything to be able to switch eyes with you, but I can’t.”
That wasn’t the response I expected, and it shuts me up. I want to be angry at Mom, but I can’t be. It’s not her fault. The surgery was her idea, sure, but I chose it. I wanted it.
Once we get home, I go to my room and shut the door. I cry and punch things for hours. I break some stuff. I don’t even know what. Just random stuff.
The absurd part of all this, I realize, is that I am now so much worse off than I was before the operation. I had convinced myself I wouldn’t be one of those people who got depressed when the sight of the world wasn’t what I expected. But I went through everything, two surgeries, and I didn’t even get that far. I was blind two weeks ago, and I’m still blind now, but at least before I was relatively happy with my life. I was adjusting to a mainstream school, had friends, a possible cohosting gig, good grades. I had it all, really. And then I got this fantasy that I could have sight, that I should have sight, and it made me feel like what I had wasn’t enough anymore.
That’s why I had the operation.
And guess what? It didn’t work. I’m still blind. And it’s worse, too, a more unbearable blindness. Before, my blindness felt like nothing, and now I have this loud static in my brain that offers only distraction and pain.
Dad was right. I’m a different person now. The operation did change me. It changed the way I see my life, from the inside. Now I know I will never be happy as a blind person. Now that I have had a sample—not of full eyesight, per se, but of believing that it could be mine—and then had it ripped away from me, I will be forever stuck in this twilight world of dissatisfaction.
My phone buzzes intermittently. Just-checking-in-on-you texts from Cecily, Ion, Whitford, and Nick. But I don’t want them to know. I’m not ready for them to know. I’m not sure I’ll ever be.
I spend the rest of the day wallowing on the floor with my door locked, not even coming out for meals.
CHAPTER 18
When I wake up Saturday morning, I am immediately assaulted by insanity.
It’s like music, except with a thousand different instruments that are all out of tune. It’s like the taste of every food group at once, like the smell of all the cafeterias in the world.
Am I having a nervous breakdown? Am I dying?
And then I move my head, roll it to the side, and everything changes. Now it’s a completely different swirl of madness.
I blink.
And it all shutters for a second, shakes like an explosion inside my brain. I blink again, another explosion, like a single blow to a bass drum, like jumping into an ice-cold lake. I close my eyes, and the overload regresses, simplifies itself back to that pounding darkness I’ve experienced for the two days since the surgery.
I open my eyes, and the flood pours into me again, choking me with its power. I shudder, from my feet to my head, and it all changes again, shakes like an earthquake. I start to feel dizzy, and I fall on the floor, and my head gets lighter—this is it, I’m dying—and without warning I feel my stomach empty itself up through my throat. Vomit spills all over my face, and I recoil, which changes the world again. Then I’m coughing, and with each gasp, the torrent changes. I blink.
BOOM.
It breaks over me, a tsunami-level wave of sensory input.
I know it, deep down, below gut level, in the deepest region of my instinct.
These are colors.
I can see.
The colors shake and tremble, move in and out like a radio with a spinning dial. I retch again, bucking with the force from within. Compared with that pounding darkness I was experiencing, this is so much faster and louder and more stupefying. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced, a nonsequential mishmash of percolating aliveness.
The colors shimmer. They shift. They move.
I can see!
My eyes are working!
These are colors, and they are moving every time my head moves, and I can see them move, and I can see colors and movement!
“Mom!” I yell. “Help! Come quick! Moooooom!”
Within seconds, she bursts through the door. At the very moment I hear the sound of the door opening, there is a violent change in the colors, and seeing it causes me to heave once again.
“Oh my God, Will, what happened!?” she cries, her feet rushing toward me, the colors moving so wildly now that I close my eyes and fall backward. “Henry! Henry! HENRY!” she calls for my dad.
“No, Mom, it’s all right!” I say. “I can see! I can SEE!”
“Henry, call 911!”
“Listen, Mom!”
“Henry, get an ambulance! Something is wrong with Will! Oh my God, my poor baby, what is happening, what is that all over you?”
“No, Mom. Listen to me—”
“What is it—oh my God, Will, what happened?” says Dad, his voice going from loud to earsplitting.
Mom is hysterical, screaming from all directions at once. “Did you call an ambulance?” she yells.
“No, I—here, I will do it right now,” says Dad in a panicky voice I’ve never heard before.
“Dad!” I say. “Stop! I’m fine! I just threw up! That’s it.”
“What?” he asks, a little calmer.
“Look at me! I’m fine. It’s just puke. That’s all,” I say the words slowly, emphasizing each one, trying to get my parents to slow down and listen.
But my eyes are closed. I can’t let in the colors. They are too much. They overwhelm me; they’re drowning me.
“What’s wrong with your eyes?” asks Dad.
“Call the ambulance!” Mom is still screaming.
“What?” I ask. I try to open my eyes again, just a little.
“Your eyes—why are you squinting?” says Dad.
“Because, Dad. Because I can see!”
“You what?”
“HENRY, DO SOMETHING!”
“I can see, Dad! I see colors and movement! I can’t open my eyes, because it makes me dizzy. That’s why I threw up.”
“Oh my God,” he whispers. Then he snaps into action. “Sydney!” She keeps screaming about the ambulance. “SYDNEY!” I hear him grab her, hold her still. “Stop! Stop! He can see. Will can see!”
She quiets down, and after a long pause, says almost reverently, “Will… you can… you can see?”
“Yes, Mom, I can see!”
I hear her collapse on the flo
or and start crying. But they are tears of joy. I can hear that much. Tears of joy.
“Can someone get me a towel or something?” I ask. “I need to get cleaned up.”
I take a shower with my eyes tightly shut, afraid to let in the overwhelming power of new sight. After drying and dressing—with my eyes still closed—I make my way to the kitchen table by touch. Mom and Dad gather around. I open my eyes.
“Well?” says Mom. “What do you think? Do we look how you expected?”
“Uh…” I say.
I’m not really sure how to explain it. It’s not that my family doesn’t look how I expected. It’s that they don’t look like anything at all. Or rather, I have no way of knowing which part of the soup of color and movement represents their bodies. Each splash of color bleeds into the next.
I do notice certain movements while Mom is talking. Is that her face? Or is it the ticking grandfather clock on the wall by the door? Or the bubbling goldfish tank? Or any number of other moving objects in the room? I start to feel dizzy again and have to close my eyes. I don’t want to return to the puking.
“I have no idea what you look like,” I say. “I don’t even know what a human being looks like.”
“But you’ve touched people,” interjects Mom. “You know how we are shaped.”
“By touch, yes. Not by sight.”
I hear something slide across the table. “Here, let’s start with a simpler object,” Dad says. “I’ve put it right in front of you. Open your eyes.”
I do. I see a churning mass, each color bleeding into the others.
“Recognize it?” Mom asks.
Love and First Sight Page 11
