by Leah Thomas
I am Moritz Farber. I was born listening.
I was born without eyes. Do not ask if I am blind. I have never been blind. But I was born with no eyeballs in my sockets. While I doubt I wailed as loudly as you did, others have since screamed bloody murder at the sight of me.
Oliver, you should be grateful you were raised in a cabin and not a laboratory. I spent my earliest years in a testing facility. I do not intend to talk about it. Needle me as much as you like. I have felt worse. I have felt actual needles.
Yet I have also thought this: at least scientists could bear the sight of me.
You have never seen an eyeless boy. Perhaps not even in all those comics and books that occupy your time. Imagine you are looking at your dear Liz. Imagine that above her button nose and her sunshine smile there are no eyes reflecting a computer screen. Imagine that there is nothingness there—just skin. No expression whatsoever. Imagine this. Can you say you love her still?
I have no eyes, no eyelids. No eyebrows. I grow my dark hair long in the front so that my fringe hides the worst of it.
But there is nothingness on my face. Who would not scream?
I do not say “tch!” like you and your mother do. That would be irritating.
Sometimes I click my tongue against the roof of my mouth when I wish to see anything with greater clarity: If I am curious about the pores in someone’s nose. The dust in the cobblestones outside. Anything minuscule requires this extra effort on my part. A focused click and, yes. I can see EVERYTHING.
Such clicks are usually unnecessary. My surroundings create enough sound waves to see by. This is the only advantage of living around other people. Kreiszig is a city of bustle. Of bodies and movement and clatter. No one can see what I see in the morning fruit and bread markets, where people haggle and stack and chop and banter. The noisier an area is, the clearer it is to me.
During school I can see well enough to avoid those who might be looking for me. See hiding places that others miss. Empty closets and classrooms. I can duck beneath tables when familiar footsteps trudge closer, scraping against the floor. At least my nothingness gives me warning.
Surely you have read about echolocation. You seem to have read about everything else. Surely you have read about whales using echolocation to find one another in the dark depths of the sea. About dolphins using sound waves to communicate with one another across great distances.
I see with my ears. My brain uses sound waves to determine the shapes of objects and barriers in my vicinity. How a bat might by using sonar. I can “see” how far away things are, can see what they look like by the way my ears interpret sound bending around them. I am not the first person to accomplish this. I am the only person, so far as I know, to have been able to do this from birth, and with more clarity of sight than a person with flawless vision.
My ears are so sensitive that I can tell individual eyelashes from one another when someone blinks. Because I can hear the sound of eyelids closing.
Imagine what I see at hip-hop concerts, Oliver. I always have the best view at any venue. At the summer festivals in the park, when the bass pounds hardest through the speakers, woofers, and amplifiers, I can see the droplets of sweat on thirty thousand people at once. I can see right into the performers’ teeth. The hair follicles on their chins and the lines in their fingers as they clutch microphones. Darkness and light have no bearing on my sight. Darkness has no sound.
But color is silent also. I do not envy you the colors you have seen. Color is an alien concept to me. Probably much as the Internet is to you.
Many of the scientists at the facility thought my oversensitivity should be wreaking havoc on my brain. Certainly, they speculated, if I can hear eyes shutting and bones creaking and hairs sliding against one another, I should be incapable of processing the ceaseless input. How can I sleep over the sound of my own blood flowing in my veins? They believed I should be clutching my head. Wincing and whimpering in an anechoic chamber. A soundless room.
One thing about having no eyes, Oliver, is that you can never close them.
Yet I have never known anything else. I don’t have to ignore the sound of water in pipes. Or wind in stairwells. Or a slightly squeaky nostril when someone speaks to me. My brain adapted. It labors on my behalf. This is something you can understand, Anatomy Expert.
If I whimper now, it is because of what I am. I have seen, if not everything, enough to despise myself and the rest of the world, if not yet you.
Many otherwise intelligent people severely underestimate the human brain. May all those scientists forever scratch their heads. I have no patience for their antics. They can rot.
Of greater concern to me is the chronic weakness of my heart. But that is a story best left untold. Leave it be. Needling won’t reveal it.
I am not a fellow hermit, Oliver. If only.
For the past year I have been enrolled at Bernholdt-Regen Hauptschule, attending public school for the first time in my life. I did not want to attend any school at all. But Father came home early from work with brochures one evening. Brochures he had been collecting in the hopes that I would at least mime excitement when he presented them to me.
The schools in those brochures. As if we could afford half of them. But Father is proud. I could not say that. Not while he was sitting before me, grease on his uniform. A hopeful smile on his lips. He has tried so hard to raise me well. No one asked him to. Still, he has tried.
I have not even taken the required assessment that would allow me to pick from decent schools. To say nothing of procuring a letter of recommendation. There are some schools suitable for the likes of me. I chose Bernholdt-Regen because it was nearby.
I chose it because I deserve nothing better. Because I have reasons to whimper and reasons to despise myself.
Father was pleased that I made any decision at all. He believes Hauptschule might raise my awareness of the world. Discourage some of my alleged “antisocial” habits. I do not know why he believes I need more awareness. I see 360 degrees at once even at nighttime. And he’s one to murmur and mumble about antisocial habits.
My teachers have been informed that I suffer from a cardiovascular disease, photosensitivity, and a severe reading impairment. They don’t precisely understand. Sometimes they speak loudly to me. Move desks and chairs out of my path as if they think I will deliberately stumble over any piece of furniture foolish enough to get in my way. They think I am blind.
I am not blind. I have never been blind.
It is fair to say I have a reading impairment. Echolocation does not allow me to see the contents of screens or most books. Flat surfaces are impenetrable to me.
Father suggested I feign blindness at school. To raise fewer questions. To make it easier to belong. But I loathe the notion of using a cane when I don’t need one. To pretend to be blind, for the sake of fitting in with people—with children—who have no interest in me in the first place? What a repulsive idea. I’m nothing like them. They can rot.
For almost as long as I have lived, I have worn opaque goggles in public. I am told they are black. On the left side I wound shoelaces around the strap to make it thicker. To obscure a pitted scar directly behind my ear. I’ve been told the goggles make me look like a Gothic owl. But they obscure my eyelessness enough to discourage the shrieking of strangers.
I can recall the exact moment I became aware of what I am to strangers.
I was just shy of six. I had begged my nanny to take me into the bakery one morning. The smells that were wafting out into the street drew me in. I was sniffing the egg tarts and custards nearest the window. The ovens in the back were hot, filled with croissants and sandwiches. The room was sweltering. There was a little boy around my age standing beside the Brötchen. Watching me. Waggling his tongue at me from the opposite side of the room. He winked at me and snorted into his hand. What good fun it would be to “outwink” him!
I was an imbecile.
I was happy to remove my goggles in the heat of the ro
om. The boy screamed and screamed. His father clenched his cracked, floury fists and hollered at the nanny. She nodded. Dragged me away in silence. Pulled me close to her side. Placed a hand over the upper half of my face to spare the world the sight of me. All the while I was clicking, clicking, and seeing too much in all directions as the boy’s father tried to console his stricken child. With his apron he wiped the wash of tears and the dribble of snot that slipped down the boy’s lip.
Here is an adage you must know: The eyes are the windows to the soul.
I can see so much of others. But no one can see into me. On some primitive level, this makes it seem like I do not have a soul. Perhaps I don’t. If I am less than human somehow, I don’t expect humanity from others. And do not doubt that I am less. I know that I was created as much as born. There is nothing comforting about it, Oliver.
I have pondered this too much. My peers at this worthless school don’t even consider the state of their souls; they are too preoccupied with pop music. With eyeliner and sport.
You talk about being lonely and unwell in a cabin in the woods, even though you put on a great show of being cheerful. Your personality is as colorful as your vision. You really should be grateful.
There is nothing so lonely as being surrounded by people. I waste my days in a massive pool of bodies that, for the most part, cannot be bothered with the “disabled” boy in goggles.
For the most part.
There is a boy named Lenz Monk who has taken to tormenting me. Today I was on the second floor, leaning over what must be the last drinking fountain in Saxony (of course Bernholdt-Regen would maintain something so unhygienic), focused on the filthy grime on the mouth of the faucet. Lenz, passing behind me, kicked the back of my knees. Of course my legs folded. Of course water shot into my face. Perhaps if I had not been so fixated on the gunk, I would have heard the swish of Lenz’s pants as he aimed his kick.
Instead I came up dripping. At least this time he did not leave me bleeding.
I did not turn to look at him. I do not need to turn to see. I only walked away. Lenz does not taunt. He merely grants his bruises and watches in silence. Last week he slammed a door on my fingers. I heard the door as it fell and I could have moved my hand, but Lenz does not stop until I whimper. If I whimper sooner, he leaves me sooner. If his first attack succeeds, he is satisfied.
I am typing with my left hand only today, because the skin on its knuckles is unbroken.
The number of times Lenz has done his best to shove me against walls or bathroom stalls or concrete. Lenz often tries to pull away my goggles. To pull them taut and snap them back into my face. He walks the same street home that I do, toward Ostzig on the city’s east side. Often I must hide behind a kiosk outside the train station where smokers gather. They don’t look at me while I listen, trying with all my might not to cough on their smoke and waiting for the drag-scrape of Lenz’s feet to pass by.
He waits for me to whimper.
Eventually he will catch hold of me again. Once he squeezed my throat until I could all but hear the bruises forming beneath my skin, could hear the blood vessels creaking under his fists. I had to wear a scarf so that Father would not wor—
Why should I stain your simple ears, Oliver? You can be spared such things.
Appreciate your isolation. Public school is true torture.
There is something I have been considering since you first began writing to me. I have never heard you speak. Yet I imagine that you chitter and chatter like birds and traffic in the morning. I imagine you are a very noisy person.
The noisier someone is, the more I can see. Perhaps you could help me see something that I have never seen before. Perhaps I could see the world with your optimism?
But I will never meet you.
I have exposed enough of myself for the time being. I await Part Two. Not with bated breath, but with gracious anticipation. I still don’t comprehend why, precisely, you are so fixated on this Liz of yours. It seems she is mistreating you.
Excuse my caution. I am not used to such abrasive honesty.
Moritz
P.S. To address your curiosity, specifically:
1. Marvel or DC: I could not care less. I do not listen to comics.
2. Cartoons: They are irritating. Bangs and explosions. Some people do enjoy them.
3. Oscar Wilde: I have listened to the audiobooks of The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest. Why is he so verbose? Who has that much to say? Apart from you?
4. Computers and the Internet: I prefer the radio. Flat surfaces frustrate me.
I never learned Braille. I am not blind. But I learned the shapes of letters long ago. I learned my keyboard home keys early on as well. When I am typing to you, my computer dictates what I am writing back to me in a robotic voice. It is not lovely to listen to. It is like tone-deaf Daft Punk.
Chapter Five
The Power Line
I didn’t think you were being rude to me in your first letter, although I’m sort of annoyed that you’re slandering Liz in your second one. Look, I may whine about her a bit, but when I LINEARLY get around to telling you more about her, I think you’ll get it. It’s not like Liz asked me to shut down. I mean, none of this is her fault. She’s not the one who made me like this.
As for whether I could still love her if she had no eyes: for that I have to take more extreme measures.
Please follow these instructions:
1. Stack the pages of this letter neatly.
2. Roll the pages up into a cylinder.
3. Smack yourself over the head with it.
4. Repeat.
You complete ass. Of all the stupid—sorry, stoopid—things to say. You think that Liz would lose her soul if she lost her eyes? She could look like anything, so long as she was being Liz. I mean, come on, Moritz. What you look like isn’t who you are.
If Liz wouldn’t be soulless without eyes, neither are you.
Haven’t you ever fallen for anyone? I mean, I know fewer people than I’ve got phalanges, and I’ve found someone I can’t stop thinking about. But you haven’t? I find that really hard to believe. Look closer. What are you … blind?
Also! What. The hell. You’ve been holding out on me, Mo! You’ve got no eyeballs? And instead you wear goggles and you’ve somehow developed bat vision? Um, okay. I understand you can’t read comics, but please try to get your ears on Daredevil. Don’t you get it? You see like a bat? You’re bilingual? You’re more than halfway to being a superhero already!
And whatever happened to you growing up (needling you about the lab again), you aren’t subhuman. I mean, look at the X-Men. Rogue can’t even touch people without killing them! And Beast is freakin’ blue. So you have no eyes? At least your eyes aren’t flesh-burning lasers! But if they were, you’d still be worth knowing.
As far as echolocation goes, when I was nine or so I went through a pretty sizable dolphin obsession. We have a small fishpond a few acres away from our cabin that I’ve hiked to before. But there are, surprisingly, no dolphins in it. (Why couldn’t I be a hermit at a beach house? I’ll never see the ocean….)
Here’s what I’ve learned about echolocation: dolphins can click at frequencies so high that most people can’t hear them. Most humans can hear sounds as low as 20 hertz, which doesn’t sound like anything but feels a bit like being underwater with pressure on your ears, and as high as 20,000 hertz, which is probably like ALL CAPS, if ALL CAPS were a seriously pissed-off teakettle. But there have been a few documented cases where scuba divers swimming with dolphins could feel vibrations in the water. And here’s the weird part:
Some people felt some emotion in the vibrations. They could sense if the dolphins were happy, or sad, or scared that a boat was gonna come and make tuna of them. These dolphins were sending their feelings into the world. What if I could see sound waves instead of electricity? What color would dolphin feelings be?
(Liz said this was the “girliest” question I’ve ever asked. I know t
hat cowboys are manly, but why? And somehow dolphin noises are … girly? Who writes these rules?)
Anyhow, maybe the reason people avoid you is because the emotions your brain sends out when you click are kind of … negative emotions? Clicking is a nervous habit. And you do it more when you’re worried about this kid who follows you home. Is he what folks call a “bully”? Is there a German word for that? I checked the German dictionary, and it said Tyrann, which sounds like tyrannosaurus. But he sounds less like an awesome tyrannosaurus and more like a loser. Maybe you’re clicking unhappiness at people, and they’re sending it right back in echoes.
I hope this doesn’t sound dumb. What I’m getting at is some people can be really terrible. But you have to work harder not to let it faze you, because if you let them make you feel that way, you’re just adding to the mess of unhappiness in the air.
I don’t understand why you’re so self-conscious. You seem pretty cool to me, even if you are kind of stuffy. I’m wondering what could have happened to make you despise Moritz Farber. Moritz Farber is not even a little boring.
Like I said, you’ve got all the makings of a comic book superhero! If people give you shit for being pretty cool, stand up and peel your goggles off and scare them away. Laugh maniacally and send happy dolphin-waves—
Actually, I mean it. I think you should try pulling the goggles off sometime. Have you ever done that? If you’re so ugly (shut up and hit yourself over the head with the rolled-up pages again), you can send them running for the hills! Maybe then you won’t have to whimper anymore. Lenz won’t stop if you don’t stop him.
What are you so afraid of? I can’t even ride a bike down my driveway, but you can do anything. Anything you want, wherever you want!
In fact, your Magic Brain Vision (henceforth called MBV) makes my allergies look pathetic on all fronts. So I’ll try to get to the good parts of my story. I’ll try to hurry and get to Liz, to stop you from “talking smack,” as kids say.
I’m going to rush my earliest years. I want to get to when I was old enough to read, old enough to wonder why the heck I couldn’t handle batteries, old enough to stop peeing on household pets. Since you trust my storytelling so much (which is one of the coolest compliments—stories are everything to me), I think I’ll tell you three stories from when I was a little kid. Three memories of three accidents that really stick out in my mind. Three’s okay, but I kind of wish it were five. Because you know who really was a good storyteller? Shakespeare. He wrote plays in five acts.