by David Wood
I didn't hurry. The blackness was as dizzying as before, my movements every bit as jerky, but I welcomed every misstep, and every misstep where no hands materialised to catch my fall was another small piece of my independence won back. Malachi knew very well what he was doing, even if I did not.
As ever, I heard no other footsteps. I presumed the children had read Malachi's mood and knew enough to stay away.
'Well met, my son.' Malachi greeted my approach warmly enough, but it wasn't wholly my imagination that laced his tone with the merest edge of disappointment.
'Who are you?' I asked bluntly. He had promised straight talk and answers, and I wanted to test just how good his word was. He could have said anything, but I didn't think he would lie. Lying, as far as I could see, served neither one of us. So if he answered, there was every chance that what he said would be the truth.
'You know my name,' Malachi said shortly.
'Okay. I'll accept that. Not a great question. What are you?'
'A man, like yourself in many ways. Unlike you in so many more.'
'Okay. Okay. I take your point, I'm asking some pretty dumb questions. You said talk. I'll stop asking questions. You tell me what you want to tell me. I'll listen.'
The silence lasted two, three, four heartbeats before Malachi broke it with the strangest question I have ever heard:
'Do you remember what it feels like to be betrayed?'
Did I remember? Had I ever truly been betrayed? I could think of instances as a boy when things had been said and other things done, but the feeling of being betrayed was a strong sentiment and not just unfulfilled promises. I thought of the heroes I had worshipped at school: John Belushi, Frank Zappa, Klaus Kinski and Peter Cushing, all of them dead now. Did that count as betrayal, being let down by people I had immortalised? I shook my head. I didn't think it did. 'No.'
'Perhaps that is best. Betrayal hurts. It is worse than a knife in the stomach. A knife in the stomach burns like a fire for seconds but then it dwindles. Our body forgets what that sort of pain is. Our body forgets blood because it is blood. Betrayal scars the spirit. It mars the perfection. It never goes away and because of that it is the hardest thing to forgive.
'That is why I ask your forgiveness now, before I explain what betrayal it is I am seeking forgiveness for. Because once I have told you my story I doubt very much whether you will feel forgiving.
'Can you forgive me?'
The old man had the most infuriating habit of talking in circles. He stubbornly refused to make my understanding an easy process. Asking me to forgive an act I had no idea about, done to me or just as easily someone else, by him or again someone else. . . I wanted to put the brakes on the conversation before I lost my place completely. It would have been easy to just say: 'Yes, I forgive you.' But I was adamant I wasn't going to take the easy path just for the sake of it. I wanted more than that. I wanted understanding. I wanted to know.
'How can I forgive what I don't know?' I asked, holding my hands out. I was shaking. Was he going to clam up because I had held back? Or worse, was he already turning to abandon me to my own private Hell?
'I understand, son.' Malachi said, his inflections void of any emotion. I felt him take my hands and raise them to his face. 'Now you know me.'
Saying nothing, I let my fingers flow over the contours of his face. There was no facial hair, no stubble. His skin was rough, in a way very similar to chalk, pitted and scarred by time and worse. A gash in the otherwise featureless plane of his jawline curved round and up towards his eyes. I felt out the softness of his cheeks, followed the gash as it cut into his eyeline. My touch grew gentle, anticipating eyes but finding only bandages. I probed slightly more forcefully, trying to discern if there was some mockery in his garb, but no, like me Malachi had suffered at the hands of someone's blade. It was a disconcerting discovery, but I don't know if I was surprised.
'Your eyes?' I said reverently, not relinquishing my touch on the intricately textured map of the old man's face.
'My eyes,' he agreed.
'I'm sorry.'
'Don't be. I see all I need to see. As I said before, we are the same in many ways, you and I, but we are dissimilar in many more.' He made it difficult to feel any sort of empathy build between us despite his claims of kinship. 'I am going to make you an offer, but think long and think hard before you commit yourself to accepting it. It has its own pain, very different to the one you are feeling now, but no less acute. It will tear you apart at times every bit as much as your blindness does now, but you shall see. I offer your sight, though regrettably I cannot offer your eyes, and I ask for nothing. It is my debt to be repaid.'
What was I supposed to think? Malachi was offering the impossible, but no matter how ardently I tried not to think about what it would mean to have my eyes no, not my eyes, my sight back, hope was there (like the cannwyll gorff, the Holy Grail, Eldorado or the Mother of All Imaginary Windmills,) elusive, intangible and almost totally fictitious. But it was there.
Something nagged. What made Malachi think my sight was his to give or withhold? And what could possibly be so bad that he required my forgiveness before he would tell me the act?
Still, if it were truly his to give, how could I refuse forgiveness, no matter how heinous the crime? It was my sight, the difference between a world of darkness and one of light.
I opened my mouth to forgive, but instead I heard myself saying: 'Tell me. If I can't forgive you after your confession I don't see how I can forgive you before, either. I can live without sight if it is dependent on soothing your conscience.'
'You misunderstand me, son. Sight is yours, if you desire it, but you must want it. Do you?'
I couldn't bring myself to say that I did, though we both knew the truth.
'It is no shame to say it,' he reassured me.
I nodded, then kicked myself mentally. The old man had to be as blind as I was, so what good was a little head jiggle? 'Yes,' I said softly. 'I want to see.'
Four
Malachi wasn't lying when he promised it would hurt.
If nothing else, the last twenty four hours had taught me to appreciate the not-so finer points of pain as opposed to the odd cut or bruise.
'I can't take the pain away,' Malachi apologised weakly. I clutched at my temples, trying to drive him out of my head. I didn't want the old man reading my thoughts again.
Colours detonated inside my brain, yellows, whites and blues in a cascade of flaring brightness.
I was profoundly grateful that I couldn't see.
He led me on. I could hear new sounds, strange and out of place noises, slowly coalescing in the air around me. I was uncomfortably cold and I was scared. Part of me hated the rest of me for letting a crazy old man build my hopes up so easily. That rational percentage that no matter the evidence it had been confronted with refused to be dissuaded from its unshakeable faith in the banal. It thanked God for my lack of imagination because it was clinically certain I was about to take a fall.
I could hear dogs. It took me a moment, but when I got the idea in my head that I was hearing dogs I could have been listening to anything. I was hearing dogs. They weren't throwing themselves bodily against their confines. They were snuffling, either scared or weak, or perhaps both. Something in their whimperings made me see cages and barricades.
Already I could feel a budding kindred, an empathy to use my earlier words, with these caged animals that I couldn't summon for Malachi. It was impossible to think of him in the same easy terms as the dogs, or even as myself, pigeonholing him as a victim. He had his hurts, but he wasn't a victim… not that one.
We were similar, yes, but his insistence on our differences made me wonder if we weren't polarities; flipsides of the same coin, victim and victimiser. I had nothing to go on and I was most probably way off base, but once I started thinking that way. . .
I didn't want to think those kinds of thoughts – not when every indication I had suggested that my companion could pluck them righ
t out of my head – but I thought them. Every damned one of them.
I knew people bred dogs for fighting; my mental jigsaw composite of them painted dull faces and viscous bastards that cashed in because other viscous bastards wanted to see blood and would pay any price to stand pit-side to witness the mauling of a Rottwieler and a Staffordshire Bull Terrier. Our approach didn't stimulate that kind of frenzy. Underground den or no, these weren't fighting dogs.
'Unwanted pets,' Malachi supplied. 'Mongrels, pedigrees. Homeless like the rest of us. We feed them, so they come back. I want you to kneel down and hold your hands out.'
I didn't question him. I knelt, holding out my hands. I had an inkling of what was to come, but only that. In a minute, less, I felt muzzles nuzzling at my fingers, emaciated ribcages brushing up against my side. A dry tongue laved at my face, causing me to pull back. I had no idea just how many dogs were vying for my attention. I didn't want to know. This underside to the reality I was comfortable with made my skin crawl. Everything I had taken for granted. . .
'Pick one,' Malachi stole into my reverie, pressing something into my hands. I shifted it to one hand while I felt out an animal at random, running my fingers through the down of its coat.
'This one,' I said, my inkling burned out already.
'Use the knife. Take an eye. He doesn't mind or he wouldn't have offered it. He wouldn't have approached you unless he wanted to share his sight with you.'
I let the knife slip through my limp fingers. I couldn't do it. What he proposed was monstrous. It went beyond my sickest imaginings.
I tried to convince myself blindness was preferable, but it wasn't. Blind runners inside my brain raced off at tangents trying to obviate my guilt. One came back with the assurance that if Malachi could dull my pain surely he could overcome anything the dog might feel? I grasped at it. Clutched it to my heart. Held it up and paraded it before my Mind's Eye.
'It won't feel the blade,' Malachi said, pressing the knife back into my trembling hand. I closed my fingers around it before I dropped it again. 'Pain is not reason enough to refuse such a precious gift.'
The dog nuzzled closer.
'Forgive me,' I whispered into its ear, bringing the knife to bear. I was by no means deft. The knifeblade sliced into the soft flesh of the dog's jowls before it hooked up and cut out the sac beneath the eye. The dog stiffened under my hands, letting loose a yelping whine that was utterly sickening. I held back, unable to push the knife further and finish my theft. The thought of digging through the strings of muscle attaching the eye to cut the nerve and sever those ties turned my stomach. I couldn't do it.
'Finish it, Declan. You can't leave it like this. It won't help either of you. You haven't got a choice. Finish it.'
Self-loathing, guilt, disgust… they were all there as I pushed the knife. The only way to do it was quickly. I didn't like myself very much, but I did it because I had to. He was right in that respect; I didn't have a choice. This time though, the dog didn't flinch. I scooped the unhomed eye into my sweating palm, trying to think about anything other than what I was doing with my hands. It's one of those quirks about the way my mind works, but as soon as I tell myself not to think about something my mind runs off at a hundred tangents that all lead back to whatever it is I'm not supposed to be thinking about. In this instance, an almost truism from my school days bubbled to the surface, sweating palms being either impossible or a sign of incipient madness. . . One or the other. Sweating palms triggered mental images of just why they were sweating, and I was back, full circle and shaking.
The eye felt uncomfortably like a nugget of not-quite-set jelly; only it wasn't cold. It was warm and its warmth made it feel horribly alive. Alive meant it was still attached in some way I couldn't imagine to the quiet dog. Not wanting to hold it any longer than I absolutely had to, I held my hand out hoping Malachi would take it. He did.
He told me to do it again, pick another dog and ply my evil trade with his knife; a second sick transplant. I didn't want to, and I told him. I didn't think I was capable, and I told him. But I did it anyway. I picked another animal, stole another eye.
I won't waste time defending myself or lying to try and make my actions sound humane. I have already said why I did it. Roles reversed, I don't think I would have been able to accept something like this, not without having lived through a similar situation. I felt more hate, more revulsion, more self-loathing than at any time either before or after. My actions sickened me, but I couldn't stop them; I know how weak that sounds, but sometimes, stripped down to the bone, the truth isn't so strong. What I did was abhorrent, worse than any kind of theft, but my actions were always my actions and I am big enough to own them now without asking for absolution. I used the knife because Malachi claimed it was a road the only road that led to sight. I was scared. I was trapped in a darkness where all of my own personal monsters were free to hunt me, in a darkness where they couldn't die and I was doomed. More than anything, I wanted to see again. I was desperate to take on board the landscape around me, to escape from the darkness. In here, in the darkness I was trapped inside my own head. There was nowhere I could run to. The bad things were real. The monsters more than just shadows behind my eyes. I was in their place. I wanted to see the world and its colour, its light and its shapes, once more. I wanted to see faces and people. Escape the monsters. Feel the safety the colours offered.
All of the things blindness denied me, I wanted.
Five
Maybe you can understand now why I was so grateful to be blind for a few moments longer.
I didn't want to see because I didn't want to be responsible.
It is the quality of darkness I will remember longest, and that is my Hell.
It felt as though the old man was rooting around inside my skull with thick-ended tweezers. No gentle probing. He used the windows into my brain vacated by the Tin Man's thumbs, his clumsy fingers drawing the lengths of optic nerve out through the ragged muscle. Feeding the nerve ends out until they stood proud, like bloody stalks peering out of the empty sockets.
Colours exploded in a grand display of fireworks, only to be muted as another mandlebrotset of light burst across the blackness of my inner eye. There was no real light, not yet. And it hurt!
'I can't take away the pain,' he apologised again. I didn't care. I wanted it to hurt. I wanted my healing to cost me dearly. If it killed me, well so much the better.
Six
No matter how much I might have wished it otherwise, I didn't die. I felt a barrage of sensations that might better have been termed assaults. Inside my head the pain seemed so much more real, so much more intense and unbearable. I held the image of the world as it was when last I saw it, and each time Malachi's fingers undid some knot of muscle, between screams, I prayed to God it was worth the agony.
It was. Believe me, it was.
At first I didn't understand what was happening to me. There was no sudden explosion of true colour, like a television set being reconnected after the loss of its signal. There weren't any bands of interference to melt back on the real picture.
It was a flash; a subliminal message that invaded my brain with a nano-second's worth of data compiled on my physical surroundings, so fleeting that it failed to register.
It left an impression though, rather like those experimental advertisements where the Coca Cola can flashes onto the screen for just long enough for the viewer to register the fact that he really wants a drink.
I had my first flash of the seeing world, but that glimpse wasn't enough to dissuade me that I was thirsty for more of the same: it only served to persuade me that no lengths were too extreme. Sight was sight, the most necessary of all my senses.
When it came again it was a snippet, a black hole sucking at the void that had been nothingness; the blackness leeched out and silvery half-tones bled in, making the world once more. Half-tones and lies.
'Do it,' I hissed, urging him on despite the constant pain. It had to be worth it.
Malachi's voice was a soothing buoy floating amid the sea of pains, barely enough at times to keep me from going under beneath the tidal flow of wicked sensations. He worked quickly, and though his fingers were far from deft they coped easily enough with the intricacies. The flashes of sight increased in regularity and duration, steadying out into a kind of rickety vision.
'Yes. . . yes. . . yes!' I fairly screamed.
It was like a cartoon thumb-flick book, the real world jerking into and out of sight in a series of erratic, strobing pulses. It took a moment to register that they were always colourless flashes, I was too stunned by the fact that I was seeing once more to think about what it might mean that I was seeing the world through a dog's eyes, too excited to consider what differences there might be in perspective and colouring. It didn't matter. None of it mattered. I was seeing!
Malachi leaning over me was the first thing I saw. I reached out to touch his face, needing to reassure myself that what I was seeing really was there. His face felt as solid as it had when I was blind.
In his face, there was so much to see… so much to learn about the experiences of the man – life mirrored in every line, experiences encrypted in code. Every act of kindness and every act of spite made its mark, etched a fresh line in the script of the old man's life, and I was right in surmising that Malachi was an old man. His skin was shrivelled and leathery, pitted and scarred with the marked seams of too much experience and little of it good. The bones beneath were sharp, visible through the pale, translucent skin like the constructions of an expert model maker before paint has been applied to the latex. His hair was white where the few swatches still clung determinedly to their roots in his scalp. The gash I had felt out cut a path from mouth to eye, a too-big smile running easily in that direction. Malachi looked painfully frail in his grubby white smock. A swath of rag had been ripped from the hem and wound around his temples to shield his eyes, and his feet were bare.