Second Sight

by George D. Shuman

  “Sherry,” Brigham said sternly.

  “Really,” she said. “I mean it.”

  Brigham looked at her, nodding, thinking she was even more pigheaded with sight.

  “Where are we going for dinner?” she said happily, hoping to lighten the mood.

  “Do you still feel up to it?”

  “I’ve got to get out of this house.”

  “Well, it depends on what you want to eat.”

  “Something red,” she said.

  “Spaghetti?”

  She shook her head, whipping her hair from side to side.

  “Lobster?”

  She clapped her hands. “Yes!”

  “You’ve got to stop grinning like that!” Brigham said. “People will think you’re daft.”

  “I’ll be good, I swear,” she said. “I won’t stare, I won’t ask questions, and I promise not to look surprised by anything.”

  Brigham rolled his eyes. “Promise to wear your glasses.”

  “Not these,” she said. “One of my other pairs.”

  “Fine. We’ll wait till dark, but you must wear something.”

  “Can we watch a movie when we get home? Please, please?”

  “I’ve inherited a five-year-old,” Brigham grumbled, getting to his feet. “I’ll be back for you in a couple of hours. Why don’t you close your eyes and go to sleep?”

  Sherry reached for his hand and he took it and squeezed before continuing on to the door.

  “Did you know my bathroom soap is green?” She giggled.

  Sherry knew she had to take it slow. The doctor wanted her to wear eye patches five hours a day—to force her eyes to rest. She was down to two hours, and Brigham was sure she was pushing the envelope, as always. He was worried about her. She was worried that whatever radiation she had been exposed to in New Mexico would affect the already tenuous wiring of her brain.

  Sherry wasn’t sure what to think of the miracle of sight.

  The experience, for better or worse, was a little disconcerting after thirty-two years. There was more to seeing again than just strengthening fibrous muscles that navigated the eyeballs around a crowded street or room. Sherry had to learn how not to be blind, how to abandon the instincts she had so long ago developed and honed and come to trust. She needed time to get her equilibrium under control. Suddenly she was relying on an entirely new means of navigation and she was tripping and bumping into things that she normally would have avoided. She also needed to practice being skeptical, she’d told herself, not to rely entirely on the presentation of things, on the world as it seemed.

  Dr. Salix had never come right out and said it, but he didn’t have to. It was possible that she would regain her vision in its entirety. It was equally possible, however, that one day she might be drying her hair and look up to find she was no longer in the mirror. There were no guarantees that she would continue to see. There were no guarantees that she would be alive in the morning either. Who knew better than she how quickly things could be taken from you in this world?

  So she didn’t yet dare to accept its permanency. Not yet and perhaps not for some time. It had been thirty-two years, after all, since she’d last seen a thing.

  And that was okay, she told herself. Part of living practically was having the knowledge that whatever happened today was good enough. She would plan for the best and she would be positive, but only by tempering her elations daily. There were no more long-term plans for Sherry Moore.

  Suddenly she thought of the empty shelves in her library. She must get books for that room. She must fill the empty shelves with colorful old books and then she would try to read as many as she could before her eyes went dark or she died.

  She tapped the key on the computer, the screen came to life, and she spoke her name and the date.

  A list came up and she listened to the choices, stopping at last with a video from MSNBC. She was in the news again. Front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer and headline cable news.

  “They were calling it a minor miracle in Philadelphia last week. Blind celebrity psychic Sherry Moore is said to have regained full sight during a routine neurological test at Nazareth Hospital last Tuesday. In a prepared statement given just minutes after she was photographed leaving the hospital, Dr. William Salix confirmed that Moore has been totally blind for the past thirty-two years. Salix said that Moore’s condition was the result of head trauma received as a child, a condition known as cerebral blindness. While there are no statistics to support that Moore is truly a miracle case, Salix says he knows of no other patient who has recovered sight after such a long period of time. Cerebral blindness, according to Salix, results from trauma to the occipital cortex. Victims of cerebral blindness are left without sight, but their pupils appear normal and actually fluctuate in varying degrees of light. Moore received national attention in 2006, when…”

  Sherry turned the volume down and swiveled her chair to face the windows. The boughs of tall cedars bounced lightly in the breeze. There was a tugboat on the river and it was pulling a barge well behind it. She had heard the mournful moan of its horn dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times before. But now she was actually seeing the water ripple around its bow, right down to the pale green froth of its wake.

  She turned back to the computer and touched another key. There was just one other nagging uncertainty that had come with her “minor miracle,” and it had been bothering her since the moment she had opened her eyes. From the moment she had seen the blurred face of Dr. Salix in the operating room and screamed. Had sight come at the sacrifice of her longtime friend?

  Did she still have the gift of second sight?

  “Adult literacy,” she said to the screen. “Private tutors, Philadelphia.”

  She scrolled through a dozen listings and listened to each description. After fifteen minutes she stopped and spoke a phone number that the computer dialed.

  She thought about the cadaver on the table once more—his hand, the texture of his skin, the terrible feeling she had watching those images. She thought it unusual that his last memories were trapped in the last century. She might not have been surprised if he had had no memories at all. He was in a coma, after all. Time might have cleansed the slate of short-term memory. She had a feeling from the images she had seen, the wind and flames, the woman staked in the road, that they had been played and replayed until they were frozen in his mind. His thoughts had ended in that room some fifty-odd years ago. She could still see that man behind the door, the box on the table, the gun by his hand. It was sad that he’d never thought of his parents, his siblings, or a wife when he died. It was rare that life parted from the body before retrieving some millisecond of someone loved. Only the boy in the trenches by the truck, the heaps of dead bodies, the chaplain, the helmets, and canteens seemed real. He had been there, she was sure. He was that boy with the green book.

  She wondered too about the strange words she had spoken during her test. There was no image to go with them. They had bored into his mind, but from where? The words can’t and on meant nothing out of context, so what was he trying to say? Can’t go on? Can’t live on? And the name she repeated. Monahan, Thomas J. Was it his? There was just no way to know.

  “Jonathan David,” the voice answered.

  “Yes, Mr. David, I noticed your ad for literacy services. Private tutoring? Is that correct?”

  “It is,” the man said stiffly.

  “I was impressed with your qualifications. Are you taking on new clients?”

  “I have two days open a week.”

  “You’re in Philadelphia.”

  “The city,” he said, ruling out suburbs, which he must have found offensive.

  “Perhaps we could meet. I’m a member of the Athenaeum,” she said. “I could meet you there for an interview.”

  “The Athenaeum,” he repeated. “It would have to be on Tuesdays and Fridays, both at three o’clock.” He coughed. “If things work out I am to be paid on the date of each session, only before, not
afterward.”

  Sherry had to remind herself she was looking for a qualified tutor, not a friendly chat over tea.

  “Tuesday it is,” she said. “Three o’clock.”

  They exchanged descriptions and settled on a location. She laid down the receiver and felt as if her world was about to take a new turn.

  She had been given a wake-up call. And with it a window of the world she lived in.

  From now on, she solemnly vowed, she would live in the here and now.

  For Sherry Moore there were no more tomorrows.

  7

  Terry Simpson opened the door to his rented room, tossed his backpack on the floor, and kicked off dirty Nikes. One of them landed on a threadbare recliner, the other scattered flies from an open pizza box on the floor.

  A roach ran across a radiator. A pay phone rang in the hall. He picked up an envelope that had been pushed under the door and threw it on a stack of Playboy magazines and campus newsletters.

  He crossed the room and opened the refrigerator, snapped a Budweiser from a six-pack, and grabbed a half-eaten stick of pepperoni.

  There was a note on a stained carton of Chinese food that read JAMIE’S KEEP OUT!

  He slammed the door and walked to the window. He probably wouldn’t remember much of Boston at all. A couple of girls—Jenny Stewart was really hot—but then Jenny was a second-year and interning at a city clinic on weekends, and who had time for all that crap?

  He wiped pepperoni grease on his jeans and crossed the room to a frameless single bed with stained yellowed sheets. He peeled off his socks and let them fall by a keg tap snaking under the box spring. There were copies of opened letters and new schoolbooks under the bed.

  He snatched a glossy brochure for a BMW from the desk by his side and rolled on his back, studying the interior of a roadster. Next week? Next month? Soon, he was sure. Soon his plan and all the hard work he had done would come to fruition. Two more weeks of fall semester partying and then one day the phone would ring and he would suddenly be a millionaire. What could any school possibly teach someone like him?

  He tossed the brochure and pressed Power on the remote.

  He flicked through channels to MTV and arched his back, unzipping his jeans and yanking them off to join the dirty laundry on the floor.

  He lay in his boxers and chugged down more of the beer. Was it the third or fourth of the morning? Who cared? He’d rather nap here in his bed than in Connie Collins’s constitutional law class.

  The noon bells chimed from St. Mary’s. He wondered how much a diamond stud earring like Randy Moss’s would cost. He wondered what his classmates would say the day he parked his new convertible in front of the dorm and scribbled a check in the name of Elmer Fudd for the creepy fuck of a landlord who lived in the basement.

  He reached for a sheet of paper on his desktop and held it up in front of him. Simpson, Washburn and Shonik was embossed across the top with an address on State Street. That would have gotten their attention, he knew. And if it didn’t, the enclosed Excel spreadsheet would. It was but a fraction of the 709 names he’d collected, along with dates and symptoms of side effects of Regeral taken by teens for attention deficit disorder. There were even some names and dates of deaths that he had read about online. He didn’t need to prove a case. Not even one. He didn’t need any courtroom experience. Real lawyers didn’t go to court. They settled.

  All he needed was one legitimate complaint, even the fear of there being one legitimate complaint, and with his vast collection of potential plaintiffs the pharmaceutical giant Case and Kimble would be groveling at his feet, doing whatever they could to quell a class action suit.

  He had suggested in the letter that his firm wanted no part of a protracted battle over the drug Regeral, but that it had an obligation to its client. If only there were some common ground between them, they might be able to put the matter to rest. The time and expense of researching similar cases could be forgotten, the documents destroyed. If his client could be compensated for a life in which he would never live up to his potential, things might be different. A low seven-figure number should be satisfactory, he wrote audaciously. My client wants only to get on with his life.

  He snickered and tossed the empty beer can at the trash and missed. He put his feet up on the wall and looked at the cracked green ceiling, a daddy longlegs, a pencil someone had stuck through the drywall. How unbelievably simple life was, he thought. All you needed was some imagination and the balls to do something about it. He wasn’t going to lick envelopes for some ass-wipe judge as a law clerk and he certainly wasn’t going to take the bar only to wait in line for shit ambulance cases as a public defender. No, that was how his father had begun his life. He was going to have his BMW now. He was going to start out where his old man was finishing off.

  He closed his eyes and rocked his head to the beat of the music, swiping at something annoying his ear, feeling good, feeling warm, feeling like the beer buzz was coming on fast.

  Oh, God, that Jenny Stewart was so hot. No one came close to getting into her pants last year, or at least that was the word around the campus. Terry had walked up and talked to her a few times, but she wasn’t interested. She kept to herself, dressed fashionably, though a little more conservatively than the other girls, and, unlike the other girls, looked like a million dollars without trying. You just knew she was going to be driving a hot car one day and have homes in the Hamptons and the Grand Cayman Islands. He’d like to see the look on her face when he made his first million dollars. Like to wipe a C note on his crotch and stick it down the front of her snobby bitch blouse. He’d like to see her end up like the blonde in the horror movie he watched last summer. Parents’ house burning to the ground, family inside and dying, she lying half naked in a puddle in the street as water rained down from a broken fire hydrant. And then the utility pole snapped and crackling power lines started to fall down on her.

  Sweat began to bead on the back of his neck. He wiped it and then felt the tickle in his ear again. Why did he suddenly think of that movie? He’d told everyone how lame and juvenile it was and now he couldn’t get it out of his mind.

  He sat up feeling lightheaded. He stared at his dirty toenails. Next to them the marks in the carpet where the pedestals of his computer tower had once sat. Had someone moved it while he was out?

  He leaned over to take a look.

  No one cleaned the room for him and his roommate had his own computer in the bedroom. It couldn’t have been him. The thing had sat here since his parents had dropped him off in August and he sure as hell hadn’t moved it himself.

  He thought about a file of porn he kept on the desktop and then he remembered the list of supposed Regeral victims.

  “Jesus, no way,” he whispered. He got down on his knees and looked around the back side of the computer. The back plate was gone and the hard drive was missing!

  Could Case and Kimble have sent someone to steal it? Sure, his computer required a password to get in, but that would be little more than a nuisance to Case and Kimble.

  Or maybe it wasn’t Case and Kimble themselves that broke into his room. Maybe they only figured out who he was and complained to the school? Would the school have come into his room and taken his hard drive? No, he thought not. Not even the cops could come into his room without a warrant.

  Oh Jesus, Lord, he thought. What in the fuck is happening here? What in the fuck have I gotten myself into?

  He ran to the stack of magazines by the door and ripped open the letter that he’d found on the floor. It was nothing. Just the landlord’s fucking bill; he crumpled it in a ball and tossed it aside.

  He walked to the window slowly, noticing the curtain had been pulled back and was hooked behind the speaker wire he had running to a corner of the ceiling. Had he done that?

  He could see the apartment building across the street and the blank panes of glass over a dozen windows. He could see a shadow sitting behind the wheel of a black van in the Methodist Church parking
lot.

  He shook his head. This was too weird for words. Was someone fucking with him?

  He felt the tickle at his ear again and swiped it once more with the side of his hand, and this time when he withdrew his hand he saw blood on the pad of his thumb.

  “Jesus.” He started to stagger, sticking his finger in his ear, and it made a wet sucking sound when it came out.

  His stomach constricted and his scalp began to tingle. He looked at the blood on his finger and slowly turned toward the kitchen.

  Now, as the room began to move, he put a hand out to steady himself and fell against the computer monitor, driving a corner into the old drywall and cutting a hole in it. He righted himself, took a step sideways, and a drop of blood smacked his toes. Then another hit the carpet and another his left foot. He felt the wet stream on his upper lip and tasted the coppery blood when he opened his mouth. Blood was pouring from his nose.

  The bathroom mirror, he thought, staggering ahead through the kitchen. He needed to get to the bathroom mirror and see what was wrong. One foot, then another—the beer couldn’t have done this! Halfway across the living room floor a wave of nausea doubled him over. What about the pepperoni? Had he been poisoned?

  “Wow,” he thought, brushing sweat from the back of his neck. Maybe he’d just had too much to drink. Maybe he’d fallen and hit his head last night and not remembered?

  A horn honked and he heard laughing—kids on their way to the campus—and then there was nothing. The world went completely silent to his ears.

  He stood up and the pain in his stomach was gone. Everything seemed so clear after that, as if a door had opened and all the world’s knowledge were there for the taking. And when he could hear again, the voices were as clear as if they’d come straight from his own head.

  He walked to the kitchen and took a screwdriver from the junk drawer. In the pantry, he slowly removed the gray safety plate from around the circuit breaker panel.