Rise

by L. Annette Binder

  He bought new reading glasses with a higher magnification. The kind the really old folks use, 1.75, then 2.5 and finally 3.5, and that was as high as the Walgreens inventory went, but even with the strongest pair, he could see only the outline of his hands. He couldn’t see the hairs on his wrist or his veins or whether his nails were dirty. He needed an enormous lens in front of his computer monitor just to read his e-mails. He made an appointment with the optometrist for Thursday in four weeks. They could see him earlier if it was an emergency, but he told them no, it was nothing urgent. Both his parents had worn glasses and he was just getting old.

  The moon had terraces in its craters, giant steps of lava rock. There was a deep basin in the upper half and mountains like jagged teeth. In the moon’s first quarter three more craters appeared along the crescent where it went dark. He thought of them as sisters, and sometimes they glowed white at their centers as if they were boiling over. The fourth quarter brought a lake, bigger than all the others, with a white streak down its middle like a lightning bolt. Thumbprints and nipples and chickenpox scars. Veins running just below the surface. He stood by the front window while Marci was sleeping and mapped all the ridges and peaks. One night he tried to draw the things he saw. He took a pencil and a pad, but when he sat down at the kitchen table, he couldn’t focus on the paper clearly, not even with his glasses.

  He was locking up the store when everything went black. It was a Friday at half past six. He knelt down by the door with his key, and the darkness took him by surprise and made him lose his balance. It felt like an eclipse at first or a complete electrical failure. Like black velvet curtains falling over a stage. Outside the glass door the liquor store was gone and the Korean BBQ at the corner. There were no cars, no parking lot or dumpsters or stop signs. Everything he knew was gone except for a stretch of cloudless sky. He crawled the length of the store, feeling his way along the carpet tiles until he got back to his desk. That’s where he stayed until Marci came to get him.

  He held on to her sleeve the whole way to the hospital. He saw only the blue sky and the mountains, but not the dashboard or her face. He clutched her hand so tight he was afraid he would hurt her, but she didn’t pull away. She kept saying he shouldn’t panic. There was an explanation and the doctors would figure it out. The ophthalmologists at Memorial were some of the best ones in the state. Maybe it’s hysterical blindness, she was saying. It could be all the stress from closing down the store, or it might be an ocular migraine or a transient episode in his brain. These things happen. They happen all the time, and he wanted to believe her.

  They tested him for glaucoma and occlusions in his internal carotid artery. They checked his retinas for cholesterol crystals and made sure they hadn’t detached, but everything looked normal. They injected dye into his arm next and photographed the inside of his eye to see if the veins were leaking, and the doctors stood around his chair and talked about him as if he were a textbook case and not a living patient. Nurses rolled him around the hallways and he could hear ventilators in places and the beeping of machines, snatches of voices he hadn’t heard before, but they all were somehow familiar. The MRI technician sounded like a smoker. She coughed just like his Uncle Lewis who’d died from emphysema. She set the line with the contrast dye into his forearm, and it burned when it went in. “Keep your eyes closed,” she said. “That always makes it better.”

  The CT scans came next. Then the specialists from Denver who ignored him when he said he could see things in the distance. “Let’s go outside,” he told them, “and I’ll show you what I mean,” but they talked only about his ocular fundus and his arterial branches. One of the doctors asked him if he was a veteran or had experienced any recent psychological trauma. He said he could be converting his stress into vision failure. Another doctor named Mitkoff was convinced there was a neurological reason. “Your pupils have decreased constriction,” he said. “They don’t respond normally to the light. The things you see are only illusions.” There was a name for this syndrome where the blind had beautiful visions. They saw butterflies and songbirds and climbing lattice patterns, and what could he say to these experts who were so certain they were right.

  On the seventh day the doctors still couldn’t agree. They discharged him with referrals to a psychiatrist and the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins. Marci left her shift early and rolled him through the doors. He didn’t want to use the chair, but she said it was hospital policy. He couldn’t see the parking lot or the sliding glass doors at the hospital entrance. He couldn’t see her hands on the wheelchair handles, but just before they got to the car he looked up at the sky. The moon was full and it was hanging there and he saw all its familiar craters. Normally he needed the crescent to make out the details because that’s when the sun threw the strongest shadows, but he saw the ripples now and every swirling cloud.

  It wasn’t eight o’clock yet, and the sky was halfway between blue and black. He followed its dome downward and there were the distant mountains he’d seen every day of his life. The mountains and the lights along the hills and those matchstick houses on the eastern plains with all their windows lit. The red taillights two miles away on Academy streaking northward through the city. Things began in shadow and got sharper as they receded. There was an enormous circle of blackness around him, he understood this now. It was big as an ocean and getting bigger, and it followed him where he went.

  •

  In the fall of 1961 something knocked a Soviet spacecraft off its orbit. He’d read about this when he was little. There were three cosmonauts inside, though even now the Russians will deny it. You can listen to the tapes if you know how to find them. An Italian monitoring station caught the final exchanges when the cosmonauts asked for help. You can hear their breathing over the static. One of them was praying and it sounded like a song, but they drifted outward and nobody could bring them back and nobody ever tried. What did that last surviving cosmonaut see as he floated into space? The books won’t tell us that. Four hundred thirty miles from earth but no closer to the stars.

  She set his hand on her belly. It was only September, but the nights were already crisp. They were together in Old Farm Park just behind the silo, and the grade wasn’t steep but she’d huffed when she led him up the hill. “If I get any bigger, they’ll need a forklift to move me,” she said. “They’ll need one of those piano cranes.” He’d set his jacket down on the concrete bench so she wouldn’t be too cold. Sitting on cold stone wasn’t good for the baby, he’d learned this from his mother. She worked his hand in circles and he could feel her belly button through the wool of her sweater. It stuck out like a little thumb.

  He forgot he lived in the city on nights like these. Sometimes he heard owls calling or the crash of the dumpsters by the country club where the coyotes dug for scraps. The city was full of creatures. She leaned against his shoulder the way she used to when they went to the movies. She was breathing a little quickly now that she was seven months along. Everything about her went a little faster. Her stomach gurgled even if all she ate was crackers. She called it bubble gut.

  On walks like this she’d tell him he’d waited long enough. He needed to make an appointment with those folks at Johns Hopkins. She knew the doctors by name and where they went to school. They could go together once the baby was born. They could try some of those famous crabcakes. But tonight she leaned a little closer, and he could feel her breath against his ear. “You be my telescope for a while,” she said. “Tell me what you see.”

  He took her hand, and for once it was warmer than his. He latticed his fingers into hers. He told her about the lake on the right side of the moon and how it was shaped like a maple leaf. That was where the astronauts had landed the year that he was born. They’d left their bootprints in that gray powder. He told her about Mars and the mountain at its center. It looked big as Everest from where he sat. It cast an enormous shadow. The canyons in every direction and the pitted plains and the trails that wound between the rocks like mi
ning roads in the desert. Look how beautiful it is, he wanted to tell her. Somebody made these things. Nothing here is accidental.

  Her breathing got a little deeper while he talked. It sounded like she was beginning to doze. He shifted on the bench, careful not to wake her. There were satellites flashing just above the horizon, strange iridium flares and slowly moving devices. He counted eleven just while he was sitting there, propellers and wagon wheels and one of them was like an enormous biplane with four rotating arms. The sky was busy as an interstate. Who knew why there weren’t more crashes.

  He qualified for Social Security, but he didn’t want to take it. His vision was worse than 2/200 and his visual field was less than twenty degrees, and either one alone would be enough to get him benefits. “You’ve earned that money,” Marci said. “You’ve paid into the system and now you get some back.” The company’s regional manager up in Denver told him the same thing. “There’s always a place for you here,” he said. “But take care of yourself first because your health is all that matters.” All the things people told each other in times of trouble, and what good did they do? He was useless sitting there with his coffee mug while Marci worked the cordless drill and put the crib together. She kept dropping those little screws. “Crap,” she’d say, “crap there goes another one,” and it was hard for her to bend down and fish them off the carpet. “If it takes all night I’m putting this thing together.” She laughed a little when she said it. She wasn’t even three feet away, but he was lonely sitting beside her.

  The Shamrock sign was gone and the lights on Stetson Hills. The maple trees by Prospect Park that had started turning early. His blindness was rippling outward. It took away his city one piece at a time. The closest mountains had started to blur as if someone had smudged their edges with an eraser. They’d go away one day. He’d wake up and they’d be gone, and he wondered if he’d miss them.

  The first few hours of labor she watched the soaps. He called her sisters in Seattle to tell them the good news. He stood behind the sofa and rubbed her shoulders when she got tired from the pacing. She told him what the actors were wearing and who was sleeping together. Jason was back on General Hospital, she was saying, but he wasn’t with Liz now because his loyalties were with the mob. Luke was still on the show and he was looking a little ragged. Some sunscreen would have made all the difference there. She didn’t stop talking, not even when the contractions came. “They’re no worse than a period cramp,” she said. “It’s nothing I can’t handle,” but by the time the cab pulled up her voice had started to tremble.

  It was like a submarine in the delivery room with all the monitors humming. The room felt pressurized, and every three minutes Marci started to moan. She squeezed her fingers around his hand so tight the bones shifted in his wrist. This was the moment they’d been waiting for since she showed him the pregnancy stick, but now that it was here it sounded like an exorcism and not their baby’s birth. He held on to the metal bed rail in case she tried to choke him. “God damn,” she said. “It’s not supposed to hurt this bad,” and he kissed the sweaty crown of her head. Her Magic of the Earth CD was playing in the background. An endless loop of whales and rainshowers and breaking ocean waves.

  Seven hours later she was still at five centimeters and the nurses started the Pitocin drip. He tried to wipe her brow with a washcloth, but he banged against her nose instead. After that he was afraid to touch her because he might mess up the needles. She was panting like somebody passing a stone, but she wasn’t opening the way she should. They upped the Pitocin two times in the next three hours, and she really started to shout then. Things began to happen. People gathered around her bed. It felt like a dozen people from all their voices. The room was tight as an elevator caught between two floors. A nurse was telling Marci when to push and she talked like a drill sergeant or a football coach. “Now’s the time,” she kept saying. “Give it all you’ve got.”

  He felt a strange tightness inside his chest when Marci gasped for air, as if he couldn’t breathe unless she did. The tightness worked its way up into his throat. “Yes,” people were saying. “That’s right. You’re doing great,” and all those voices were jumbled together with the sound of falling rain. He held his breath without meaning to, and he didn’t exhale until he heard his son screaming in the room.

  He weighed six pounds eleven ounces exactly. The drill sergeant said he was nineteen and one half inches long. “He’s got a good pair of lungs,” she told them. “You’ve got yourself a screamer.” Marci held him first, and she kept him for the longest time. The nurse told her to smile so she could take a picture. “You, too, daddy,” she said. “Get a little closer to the bed.” She took three pictures and he wasn’t sure where to look, and when the nurse was done Marci took their boy and set him in his arms.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “He looks like you. He’s got your nose exactly.”

  His son squirmed against his elbow. He worked his legs like a turtle flipped on its back, and this was as light as he’d ever be. A clumsy moment and they could lose him. He might drop his boy on the hard floor if his attention wandered. He might bump him against a door-frame or a wall. He ran his thumb over that waxy newborn skin, but his hands weren’t sensitive the way blind people’s were supposed to be. There wasn’t anything distinctive about that bald head. This baby could belong to anyone. The doctors could switch one for the other, and he would never know.

  The cloudy days were hardest. The nights when the baby cried, all those starless nights when Marci ran to feed him. You can’t just sit there forever, she’d say. The house smelled like diapers and burnt baby formula, and he should have tried to help her. He should have found a way, but he just sat there like a train passenger and looked outside his window. He was waiting, and she wouldn’t understand this. He was waiting for the winds to come and give him back his sky.

  •

  The highest mountain on Mars had a crater at its center. It had streaks of red and gray. The black sand dunes and the clifftops and the places where the rocks had slid a million years before. A dust storm turning over the planet’s surface and its center made a perfect T. Be grateful for these things. They will get clearer before they go away. He recognized Saturn from his childhood books, but there were other ones, too, with copper-colored haloes and he didn’t know their names. He saw dragonfly wings and a teapot constellation with clouds of violet steam. He saw his father’s eyes.

  They drove together along Austin Bluffs and she wouldn’t tell him why. All she’d say was that they were going back to school. “Back to the scene of the crime,” she said. “When I was skinny and you still had all your hair.” She unfolded one of their camping chairs once they got to the visitors’ lot. She set two hand warmers in his pockets and a travel mug with instant cocoa in the cup rest on his right.

  “Can you see the scar?” She turned his chin toward the mountain where the limestone quarry used to be. Fifteen or twenty miles, maybe a little more. It was far enough away for him to see it clearly. The county was years into the reclamation but there weren’t any trees yet, just milkweed and prickly pear and tufts of frozen grasses. “That’s where you need to look.”

  “Jesus, Marci. All that’s out there is some sheep.”

  “I’ll call you when I’m ready.” She kissed him on the temple and wiped away the spit. “And don’t complain about the wind. It’s the warmest it’s been all week.”

  He heard the car as she drove away. A Camry she’d had since ’98, but she always mashed the gears. Some students were laughing in the courtyard just behind the lot. It wasn’t a commuter school anymore. The last time he’d driven by there’d been real dormitories laid out in a grid and not just a few scattered buildings. The cafeteria was probably gone where he and Marci used to sit fifteen years before. Anthropology and statistics and introductory accounting, he raced up the hill three nights a week and what did he remember? Early man used oldowan tools to get the marrow out of bones. The australopithecenes could break
rocks with their jaws. He still had his lecture notes in a plastic box next to the water heater.

  “Sir.” A girl touched his shoulder. She knelt down beside him and spoke loudly in his ear, as if he were deaf and not just blind. “Sir, are you alright? Are you waiting for a ride?”

  “I’m bird-watching,” he told her. “I’m looking for big-horns up in the hills.” The girl stepped back then, and the people with her laughed. After that they left him alone.

  He dozed a little in the sun. He drank some of his cocoa. A football game was playing on somebody’s TV. Somebody else was listening to a Spanish language tape in one of the buildings behind the lot. Soy Antonio García Morales, a man said. Yo soy chileno. De dónde eres tú, but the window closed before anyone could answer. Snatches of laughter and conversation and the voices all sounded so young. Marci was right, he knew this. He needed to see an occupational therapist so he could get his bearings. He needed to send in his Social Security papers and make an appointment at Johns Hopkins. But not today and not tomorrow either. All these things could wait. The sky would be clear tonight, and he’d see all his familiar places.