Blind

by Kory M. Shrum

“Oh Eddy,” Locke replied with a disapproving tilt of her head. “Don’t be that way. Just show me the booklet.”

  He removed the booklet that Dr. Barnard had given him and handed it over.

  “I didn’t even read the Artist section,” she replied, accepting it. “I’ve known I wanted Instructional eyes for as long as I can remember.”

  “Well, you do have a knack for, uh, instruction,” Edison said with a small smile.

  “You mean bossy,” she said, frowning. “I know what you mean.”

  He reached across her leg and pointed out the earmarked page. Again that strange tension rolled over him. Locke herself became very still.

  “Read it aloud,” he said in a voice that was strange even to him.

  “Artists usually work closely with Architecturals because—” and this is where she began to quote the glossy page with the same pedantic tone as most of their teachers. “’It adds practical application and effective construction to an expansive and creative nature. Exceptional pairings such as the Wright and Picasso pairing of 3612 rendered the most astounding structures of our time.’

  ‘Or the irreplaceable partnership of ambassadors Thatcher and Poe, 3621, who prevented a conflict over energy rations through the design and construction of The Hydraulic Whale—a massive steel structure positioned in the South Atlantic river, responsible for providing abundant hydraulic energy for over three hundred principalities as well as irrigating an otherwise infertile 700,000 square miles.”

  Locke lowered the page. “Tell me why you’re choosing this?”

  “I want to see color, to dream, to imagine things,” Edison replied again. But at this point the words felt hollow, robotic. He tried again. “I want to understand all of this.” He swept his arms out in front of him. “Like metaphor—”

  “Metaphor is simply the linguistic example of an algebraic variable,” she replied brutally, in a tone that made him think specifically of their fourth year teacher, Mrs. Tyne. “It stands in for something else.” She sounded like everyone else then. “You’re already capable of simile. You make comparisons all the time. I don’t know why metaphor should matter.”

  Edison exhaled. “You sound so certain.”

  “Most people find comfort in certainty.” She shut the booklet and looked at him strangely. The clicking of her shifting eyes stopped.

  “Never mind,” Edison said. “You’re like everyone else. You don’t understand.”

  Locke tilted her head as if to take him in from a different angle. He was sure her eyes had provided some conclusion and now she was processing how to best relay the information to him.

  She handed him the booklet instead. “Will you change your name as well? I hated Descartes. No one could pronounce it properly. And you know how I am about imprecision. And Edison isn’t much of an artist name, is it? Oh, but you should choose something with an –ED, so I can still call you Eddy.”

  “Will you go with me?” he blurted. He wasn’t even sure where the question had come from, if it was genuine, or if he was just desperate for her to stop talking. “To the hospital, I mean, when it’s time.” And he realized it would be nice to have someone there. Nana would have Curie and his father certainly wouldn’t show support. That left him with Locke.

  A soft smile crossed her lips and her voice became sweeter than he’d ever heard it. “Of course. I’d be honored.”

  Edison found it excruciatingly difficult to focus on his homework. He was exhausted and part of him saw it as pointless, knowing that his education would take a wildly different approach soon enough and all these quadratic equations would be useless.

  He was a prisoner at the kitchen table as his pencil bounce-tapped back and forth on his open text book. Then he heard his father come into the house. At first they didn’t speak. His father entered the kitchen, returned his leftovers to the fridge and seemed to contemplate its interior thoughtfully without actually removing anything. Then Edison heard the clink of a cup, the shut of the wood cabinet and a pouring of some fizzy beverage into the cup itself.

  Then his father did the surprising thing of sitting down beside him, after weeks of not so much a word to the boy. He took it even farther by asking a question. “Where is your grandmother?”

  “She took Curie to the park,” Edison replied. He continued to look down at the open textbook without actually seeing it.

  “Do you need help?” his father asked. His father had not offered to help him with his mathematics homework since year three when it became clear that Edison needed no help at all.

  “No.”

  “You look stuck,” his father pressed. Lifting the cup to his lips before setting it down again.

  “Are you going to file the appeal?” Edison asked. He didn’t want to play whatever game this was.

  His father’s eyes shift-clicked from his cup to his son’s school books to Edison himself before answering. “I don’t know.”

  “Nana’s right,” he adds. “I’ll find a way.”

  Mr. Jacobi considered him again. “Have they taught you the history of our ocular implantations yet? I know it is standard Settlement instruction—or at least it was.”

  Edison put his pencil down to prevent revealing the shaking tension in his hands. “They told us about before, when eyes were still—” Edison searched for the word. “Organic.”

  “The organ of sight,” his father said. “Did you know the iris was supposedly colored—each pair unique to its host? I believe you expressed an interest in color with Dr. Barnard.”

  Color, yes. Do you remember what I told you about the sky?

  “Why do you think we lost our eyes?” Edison asked.

  His father’s fingers traced the handle of his cup. “I personally agree with the Architectural assessment. Over-stimulation rendered them useless. We saw so much until we saw nothing, even when looking. I believe our consequent evolution was meant to restore balance. Why do you think we have all this?”

  Edison wasn’t sure what he was pointing at.

  “This is wood.” The older man gestured at the cabinets, the walls. The he pulled at his shirt. “This is cotton.”

  “So?” Edison asked.

  “Did you know there was a time when everything we used was manufactured? With the exception of air, water and sunlight, everything was made. We’d put so much technology between ourselves and the natural world that we lost the connection. Even the air, sunlight and water must be filtered now. For a time we had nothing natural, now we are moving back toward the natural, to the way it was before.”

  “I don’t understand,” Edison said.

  “You want to understand what happened with your mother,” his father replied. “But doing this won’t help you understand her or what happened.”

  “It isn’t about her. Is it so hard for you to believe that this is for me? That I’m doing this for me?”

  “I want you to be happy,” his father replied. “And safe.”

  “Then don’t file the appeal,” Edison said.

  “I can’t simply watch you fail.”

  “I won’t fail,” Edison said.

  “You will because it is still technology,” Mr. Jacobi said. “And it is the nature of the eye itself to deceive us.”

  He’d woken to the sound of Curie screaming. The kind of screaming that suggested more than a wet diaper or a hungry belly. Raising his head from his inclined desk where he’d fallen asleep while pushing through some rather tedious homework, he called out. “Mom?”

  His ears strained but he didn’t hear her. And Curie was still crying. Why hadn’t she responded to Curie’s crying?

  His heart thumped against his ribcage roughly as he pushed himself out of the chair and into the hallway. His father was at work and Nana was living a hundred miles away, in the apartment she acquired after her husband’s death. But his mom should be here.

  When he eased open the door, it was just enough to see Curie, holding onto the side of her crib and screaming. Her baby face was dark from blood
and exertion with no sign of giving up. He’d never heard her scream like this before.

  “Curie,” he said, pushing the door open wider. But he stopped.

  Beside her crib was a dark splatter. He couldn’t be sure of the material. But the viscosity was strange. It was too thick to be water, but too thin to be—a sound interrupted his processing. A small one that barely registered over Curie’s scream. Edison had only caught the tail of the guttural moan in a moment when Curie, desperate, had stopped screaming only long enough to suck more air into her lungs.

  Pressing his palm against the door, he eased it wider. Each creak intensifying the rhythm of his heart. His eyes followed the viscous trail first, the nervous clicking of the orbs stretching out much like the door had, as if to prolong the moment. The sound of time itself, being stretched long by unforgiving hands.

  The biggest pool sat by the crib in an irregular, half-oblong, half-line shape, but that isn’t where it had ended. More had hit the wood at various angles, moving toward the back of the room.

  He saw the eyes first.

  The mechanical orbs slick with the same viscose material that marred the nursery floor. One had rolled to the right, leaving a bizarre sort of track, a series of squares and rivets stamped in its wake. The other appeared to sit where it’d been dropped. The floor around it untouched.

  He would have stared at it forever. The eyes, tracing the acute 70 degree angle over and over again until his father came home and shook him from the trance.

  But the same low groan issued from the corner again, from the small space between the crib and wall, beneath a window that illuminated it, but only partially.

  He saw all the blood—and he was certain it was blood now—soaking the front of her clothes. It was like she’d splashed it all over herself, careless of her clothes and hair. She was dead. Her legs sprayed out in front of her with her back propped unevenly in the corner that was too small to really accommodate her. He was certain she was dead.

  Until she spoke

  “It isn’t enough,” the woman moaned. “It isn’t enough.”

  “Mom?” Edison said, his voice was high and quivering. “Mom, are you okay?”

  “Help me,” his mother said, tearing at the back of her head, pulling her hair as if to rip it out. “I have to remove the chip. It’s got to come out too or I’ll never see it. I’ll never see it again.”

  Then she plunged her fingers into an eye socket and that was the last thing Edison remembered.

  “Is there a reason you’re pacing outside my door?” Nana asked.

  “It’s Curie’s door,” he said, automatically. But then he felt terrible for being so short when, in fact, he had been hovering and trying to solicit an invitation.

  “Technically,” his grandmother said. “But since I sleep in here too and I’m older, I have seniority.”

  Edison nodded, coming into the nursery and sitting at the edge of the bed where his grandmother had been reading. The nursery looked nothing like it had on the day he’d found his mother. Nor like the incarnation before that, when it’d been an art studio. They’d repainted and bought new furniture on both occasions. His father had even tore out the flooring—as if to remake the room from the inside out.

  Edison kept his voice low as not to wake Curie.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, a pathetic question.

  His grandmother took the application, giving it a once over. “I’m listening.”

  Edison hesitated, staring at the sheet of paper in her hands. It was blank still, even though he was supposed to submit it fully completed tomorrow morning when he checked in for surgery. Twenty minutes of pacing outside her door, rehearsing this conversation over and over again—and he still found it hard to speak.

  Nana placed a hand on his knee. The fingers crooked at odd angles and the skin stretched thin over protruding knuckles. His eyes paused on the dark spots marring a few places, as if old blood had pooled beneath the skin.

  “Is he going to stop me?” Edison asked.

  “The surgery is tomorrow,” Nana said. “He’d have done it by now, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe he was waiting for something.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “He asked me to watch Curie in the morning.”

  Edison looked over at the sleeping girl three times the size she was when he’d found his mother blind.

  “Are you nervous?” Nana asked. Her voice graveled against her chords.

  “No,” Edison lied.

  “I was a wreck,” Nana said, laying the book flat against her chest. “I didn’t sleep for days before.”

  Again he was silent, watching Curie’s thumb bob in her mouth as she sucked at it intermittently, as if it were forgotten, only to be remembered again with renewed passion.

  “Do you think he is right?” Edison asked. His voice was someone else’s. Lower and more resigned than he’d ever heard it.

  Nana gripped his knee. “Edison, I want you to listen to me. I’ll try to explain something to you. You may not understand, but I’m going to try regardless. Is that all right?”

  The strange request caused him to meet her eyes for the first time. “Okay.”

  “When you grow up, you pick up a lot of fears along the way,” she began. Then she shook her head. “No, that’s not what I want to say.”

  “Dad is scared for me,” Edison offered.

  “Yes,” his Nana said with a tight grin. Her disappearing lips, as thin as a penned stripe turned white. “But what I’m trying to say is that what happened to your Mom, what she did—that scared him. And he’ll always carry that with him.”

  “Do you think I’m like her?” he asked. His eyes fell to his lap.

  “Yes,” Nana said. “You have her kindness. Her patience. Her curiosity.”

  “But am I like her?” Edison pressed. “Do you think—?”

  “No. And your father doesn’t either. Not really. That’s what I’m trying to say,” Nana answers. “The fear your father has isn’t about you at all.”

  Edison’s head snapped up and he found his father in the doorway, watching them with still eyes. Instinctively, Edison’s mouth opened to apologize though he had no idea why.

  “We have to be at the hospital early,” Mr. Jacobi said. The tension between his thick brows released, smoothing out. “You should try to go to sleep early. And no food after midnight.”

  Even after he was gone, Edison still couldn’t look away from the doorway.

  “Here,” Nana said.

  Edison opened his hand expecting to get his application back, but it was a small booklet instead. His mother’s book, The Tales of Eden, lay sketched in colors he couldn’t see, in a world he couldn’t imagine.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “It was in your sister’s books,” she replied.

  As he looked through the pages his throat grew tight.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Nana said, gently, making the boy accept the booklet and the application. “There’s plenty of time for that when you’re older.”

  Edison could only nod.

  Then he spread the application flat on top of the booklet and wrote Eden beside Name.

  Something was wrong.

  Edison’s heart pounded furiously in his chest, coursing up through his constricted throat and the pulse in his temples shattered all thoughts. He couldn’t remember where he was. What day it was. What had happened? And why was it so utterly and completely dark?

  His body felt strange, sluggish, and heavy like the time he’d taken pain medication to alleviate the throb of a decaying baby tooth before its removal. His slowed responses and poor limb control only frightened him more.

  And then he remembered—Edison had lain down on one hospital bed and woke up in another, as was often the case with surgery. This morning he’d hardly had time to be nervous between kisses from Nana, and Locke’s constant chatter as the three of them—Mr. Jacobi included after all—drove to the hospital in the early hours. He’d
then entered the hospital and handed over his application to Dr. Barnard before turning himself over to his care.

  Had he undergone the surgery already? Was this his first dream? He reached up to feel his eyes to confirm what may or may not be happening but he only felt the soft mesh of gauze under his fingers. He wanted to feel them. He wanted to see. Even as he gingerly worked the gauze away from his face, he felt the strength of his limbs returning, the medication dulling with every awakened moment. The pain in his skull worsened.

  Then something went terribly wrong.

  Instead of sliding his fingers under the gauze to find the expected metal orbs nestled in his skull, his fingers curled into the warm moist tissue of empty sockets, sore from cauterization.

  He screamed as much at the dull pain of his actions as with terrified surprise.

  “Eddy, Eddy,” Locke said. “Be still. I’ll get your dad.”

  Her footsteps left the room as quickly as they came. Edison continued screaming more and more from fear than any other emotion he could specify. As he drew himself up into a sitting position, his head hit something, and reverberated with pain.

  “Edison,” Dr. Barnard said, in the rush of feet entering the room. “Edison, I need you to remain calm.”

  “Lie down, son,” his father said. And suddenly there were hands all over him, forcing him into the bed. “That’s it. Be still.”

  “What happened?” Edison said. “Where are my eyes?” He heard the fear in his own voice.

  “No need to be upset,” Dr. Barnard said. “You will be perfectly fine. Your skin simply reacted to the nickel and I thought it best to wait it out rather than leave them in and possibly cause an infection. But your eyes should arrive tonight and we’ll get you right back into surgery. You’ll be back on your feet in no time.”

  “It’s all right,” Mr. Jacobi assured him. “Just a little set back, son.”

  “I’m sorry to frighten you like this,” Dr. Barnard added. “Artist eyes are so seldom chosen that the pair we had on hand were not nickel-free, as most of the newest models are. But the pair being sent from Columbus will be top of the line—brand new.”