The Blind

by A. F. Brady

  Eddie lowers his head and tears silently fall from his eyes onto his dirty sneakers. He tugs at the edges of his sleeves and pulls them down over his wrists.

  It occurs to me that it’s strange he doesn’t mention the unsettling sensation of his girlfriend being cold. Every other time I’ve heard a story about interaction with a dead body, people will always remark about how their loved one was cold. And that this was terrifying. But Eddie doesn’t say anything about Allison’s body being cold.

  As he concludes his story, he reaches into his pocket to show me a picture of her. He is looking up at me with wet, persuasive eyes as he hands me a worn and wrinkled printout of Reese Witherspoon when her hair was brown for Walk the Line.

  DECEMBER 8TH, 11:28 P.M.

  I’m wearing heels that are too tall and hard to walk in, so I’m taking tiny little steps and bending my legs like a velociraptor. Lucas is walking too fast for me and he refuses to slow down. He was the one who bought me these shoes and insisted I wear them tonight. I’m grasping his elbow, trying to keep up as he takes huge strides down the uneven pavement toward his building.

  Dinner was awkward. It’s not often Lucas brings me out with his work associates, and I didn’t realize how much of a dog and pony show he puts on for these people. He had one hand under the table either on my thigh or my hand, and when he needed me to laugh on cue, or go along with a lie he was telling, he would squeeze far too tightly. I ended up squealing more than laughing, and I can see the finger marks on my right thigh rising up under my sheer panty hose.

  “I thought it went well tonight. Don’t you?” I say, stumbling behind him, trying to keep the cold air from freezing my teeth as I speak.

  “It did not go well.” He pulls his elbow out of my grasp and speeds up as we approach his entrance. The slots of the revolving door are wide enough for two, but he shoves his way into one without me, leaving me to push the heavy door alone. I’m embarrassed and nervous as I rush my tiny steps past his doorman, who greets me with a tip of his cap and a warm smile. Out of breath, I catch Lucas at the elevator bank, slipping into an open car and not planning on waiting for me. I wave my handbag in front of me; it catches the sensors of the elevator and the door opens wide to let me in. Lucas doesn’t acknowledge me, and instead slaps the button for his floor over and over until the door closes behind me. I brace myself against the railing and pull off my shoes. I’m hopping back and forth to get the feeling back in my freezing legs and work the kinks out of my sore feet.

  “Put your fucking shoes back on, Sam. We are still in public. Have some respect for yourself.” He won’t look me in the face; instead he looks at the shoes in my hand with wide, glaring eyes, until I pick up one aching foot to slide the shoe back on. When we arrive at his floor, he brushes past me and takes enormous strides down the hallway to his front door. If it weren’t for the time it took for him to slide the key into the lock and open the door, my hobbling wouldn’t have gotten me there in time to slip in after him.

  He’s pulling off his tie and pacing the apartment. I know exactly what’s coming, and I remove my shoes and my tights to gain a better grip on the floor beneath me. I can hear him mumbling to himself as he flies between his closet and the kitchen, pulling off pieces of clothing and throwing ice cubes into a glass. Maverick runs to a corner farthest from the half bathroom and cowers near a large potted tree. He knows exactly what’s coming, too.

  My head is filled with the right things to say to Lucas to calm him down, and as I try to bring the sentences from my brain to my mouth, he walks past me and grabs me by the waist. I know he doesn’t mean to hurt me, and I know that if I could just better sense the nuances of what he needs, I wouldn’t piss him off so much. His arm is hooked around my middle and he throws me to the floor of the bathroom. My leather skirt catches on the tile floor, and I can hear the fabric ripping at the zipper. I hold up my hands to Lucas and push myself between the toilet and the wall, where he can barely reach me. He moves his drink from his right hand to his left and crashes a flat palm into the side of my head. My ear screams and vibrates and I pull up my shoulders to defend myself. I squeeze farther back into the corner and knock the toilet paper off the holder. Three more slaps come down on my ears and I’m pushing so hard against the holder that the shiny chrome is breaking the skin over my collarbone. My fists are clenched and my eyes squeezed shut when I hear the sound of his lighter and smell the first plume of cigarette smoke. It’s over.

  Maverick runs from his hiding place and jumps on top of my knees. I let the backs of my legs fall to the ground to give him room, and he anxiously licks around my face and neck. When Lucas passes by the door to the bathroom, I hug Maverick close to me, knowing he would never hurt his dog. Lucas throws an ice pack at my feet and stands in the doorframe, watching as I lift the pack to my temple and wiggle out of my corner. I close the toilet seat and sit down on top of it, with Maverick still on my lap. Lucas sits on the floor in front of me with his back against the wall. His drink is sweating on the tiles next to him. He rubs my calves with his left hand and smokes his cigarette with his right. Part of me wonders if I deserve to take a beating now and then. The other part of me wonders if I deserve to have a boyfriend who buys me Manolo Blahniks and takes me to dinner at the Four Seasons.

  DECEMBER 9TH, 12:14 P.M.

  The sessions with Travis and Dr. Brooks have my mind wandering back to growing up. I wonder how much of what I remember is modified by my education and experience, and how much of it actually happened.

  I sit here and think to myself that I knew what she was doing the whole time; I knew that my mom was sick and that she was incapable. I was resilient and strong and resisted her attempts to control and decimate me. I look back through the windows of the house I grew up in, onto scenes of my childhood, and I color everything in with my current understanding of her disorder. I paint a happier picture for myself because I can’t carry this baggage anymore.

  I bring these thick and tangible memories with me as I walk through the group-room door and see a crowd of expectant eyes looking up at me.

  “Hello, everyone. Good to have you here today.” As I scan the faces around me, I notice that some of them aren’t familiar. “I see some of you are new to this group—welcome. Why don’t we go around the room and introduce ourselves? I’ll begin. My name is Dr. Sam James, you can call me Sam, and I am a staff psychologist. Lucy, you want to go next?” Lucy is sitting at the edge of her chair, her short skirt riding up so her exposed butt is flush against the slick blue plastic seat. Her chair has a desk attached, and she’s leaning on it with all her weight so that the back legs are upended. She lolls her head side to side and introduces herself.

  “I’m Lucy. I’m a patient here. Been here awhile. I love Miss Sam’s groups because no one gets in trouble for telling the truth.” She smiles a huge, goofy smile at me, and I can see the wad of green gum clamped between her back teeth.

  We continue around the room with short introductions, rarely as colorful and animated as Lucy’s; usually just a name quickly blurted out. I’m told that we have additional patients joining the group because they’re new and have nowhere to go, and roommates and fast friends have brought them to sit in on my group.

  “Today’s discussion is going to be about family. I’ve been thinking a lot about family recently, and it’s an important part of who we are. Our families have a huge influence on us, both before we are born and all through our lives. Does anyone want to talk a little bit about what their family is like?”

  I worry sometimes when I start these kinds of discussion groups because I know I’m opening a Pandora’s box and the stories that could emerge may be too traumatic to bear. I convince myself this is for the greater good, and a trauma released is always better than a trauma retained, so I press on. “Anyone?” The patients shuffle in their seats and look around at one another.

  “I know I must be one of the only ones with a story like this, but I grew up in a really happy home. We even had a dog growi
ng up, and I had a turtle, too. We had a nice little house, and both my parents had jobs. Everybody got along with everybody.” This is a new patient whose name I can’t remember. He has the skinniest head I’ve ever seen, and his wide ears stick out like a car with the doors open.

  “My mom was a great cook,” he continues, “and she always made corn bread on the weekend, and my little sister and me would fight over who got the last piece. But then my grandma would always sneak in and pop it in her mouth while we were arguing. She lived with us, too. And while my mom and pops were at work during the day, my grandma would look after us kids. It was a nice time, growing up.”

  “Thank you for sharing that. Sounds like a positive environment to grow up in. I’d like to hear from others who may have had a similar experience as— I’m sorry, remind me of your name?”

  “Paul.”

  “Thank you. If people have had a similar experience to Paul’s?” I scan the room hopefully, with little expectation that many hands will rise.

  “I had a nice childhood, too.” June. “We didn’t have too much money, and my daddy was away for work a lot, but everybody was nice and calm, and we never had any drama in the house.” June is suffering from schizophrenia. When she was first prescribed antipsychotic medications in the mid-1990s, she developed tardive dyskinesia, a terrifying side-effect that permanently turns her hands into claws, slacks her jaw and tongue, and compromises her mobility. Her limbs sway and jerk involuntarily, and her neck bends to the left, so her shoulder is always to her ear.

  She has taken to wearing oversize men’s button-down shirts that she can leave open to compensate for her twisted body. I can’t imagine making the decision to take the meds or leave them, to choose to maintain soundness of mind or body. June has been here for almost as long as I have, and I’ve never heard her utter a word of complaint.

  “I know we always talk about how hard people have it, and growing up on the street with no one, and no money, and having to turn to prostitution and drug dealing to get by, but I didn’t have any of that in my life, either.” This is Susan. She is sitting next to Tashawndra and knows that her comments describe Tashawndra’s upbringing. Susan places a hand on her friend’s knee, assuring her that she’s not trying to be offensive. Some patients shrink back into their seats, distracted by their own memories.

  “We come from everywhere, don’t we?” Stephan. “You can never really tell who will be touched with mental illness and who will be passed over. I had it in my family. We were riddled with it. My father was an alcoholic. My mother was bipolar. There was always anger and frustration in my house. Disappointment. Someone was always letting someone else down. And you can’t grow up in an environment like that and imagine that you’ll walk away unscathed. You can’t come out of a dirty house and think you’ll emerge clean.

  “My brother and I both ended up the same as them. And their parents before them, too. They say that addiction is a family disease. So is mental illness. Unless you find a way to stop it or deal with it, it’s going to get you if it’s in your family.” Stephan tells his story with his hands raised in surrender. He shakes his head and shrugs his shoulders as he continues.

  “I went to college, for crying out loud. I got a good education. That doesn’t stop it. It doesn’t stop the disease from coming to get you. And you can learn everything you want about it. Find out what bipolar means, where it comes from. You can find out whatever you want. But that doesn’t mean you can stop it. I bet I know as much as all these doctors, and still, I can’t fix it.” He closes his commentary with an exaggerated shrug and gently folds his arms back over his chest. The other patients are staring at him, wide-eyed. I fear the overwhelming sense of recognition and reality that he has released into the room. When the OMH results are in and the death sentence is doled out, I won’t be able to fade into the background anymore. I feel the truth clawing at my throat, and I have to sip my coffee to stop from choking.

  DECEMBER 10TH, 10:24 P.M.

  Sid is mopping up the counter in front of me where my Jack and Cokes have been sweating. He’s not very talkative tonight, which is good because I don’t feel like talking. There’s Christmas music playing in the bar, and string lights up around wreaths and garlands and festive holiday decor. It’s making me feel even smaller and lonelier than I did before I came in here. I needed the noise of the bar to soothe me, so after finishing a bottle of red at home, I put on my coat over my pajama pants and sneakers, and came to Nick’s. None of my friends are here. Seems the only people who go to bars on weekends are college kids and amateurs and pathetic, miserable drunks such as myself.

  “Sid, can I have some cocktail olives?” I’m hungry, but I don’t have the energy to go across the street to get a sandwich or a slice of pizza, so cocktail olives will have to be a makeshift dinner again. Sid puts a rocks glass full of fat green orbs in front of me, along with another drink. I reach for a stack of bar napkins and pull a pen out of my handbag. My thoughts are going too fast and I need to get something down on paper so I can try to understand what the hell has been happening. I think about the addiction groups I facilitate every week and the aspects of life that are negatively affected by substance abuse: work life, home life, interpersonal relationships, self-care, mental health… I check all the boxes in my head before I write them down on the napkin.

  I still can’t get a certain patient to really talk to me. I’ve been lying to Rachel and telling her we’ve been making progress, but in reality Richard won’t say a useful word. He watches me and scrutinizes me, and I feel like he judges me when he sits in my office, but he won’t let me in. I’ve always been the best with these kinds of patients, and Rachel is counting on me to be able to figure out a back door to his psyche. I can’t do it. It’s been six weeks since I took Richard from Gary, just as smugly overconfident as he was, and now I realize even I can’t get this man to talk. I don’t want to be replaceable. I couldn’t bear the rejection if Rachel reassigned him to someone else, someone she found more capable. I need to be the capable one. I need to figure out what brought this man to treatment at Typhlos.

  Sid leans on the bar in front of me and flashes his grimy horse teeth. “You want another one or something different?”

  I look down to see that I’ve already finished the Jack and Coke. “Well, you’re not putting any Jack in these drinks, so maybe a shot and a beer.” I smile my charming smile at him and hope he doesn’t think I’m drunk.

  “Hardly a splash of Coke in there, my dear. Jameson and Miller Lite?”

  “You know me so well.” I return my attention to my list.

  My home life and interpersonal relationships—how can I even begin to address those? Home life consists of buying booze, drinking booze and recycling bottles. Throw in the occasional shower and a meal from a deli bag or a plastic takeout container. Add a weekly carton of cigarettes and copious quantities of Advil, and I’ve got the painting of my home life. It’s Christmastime, and I don’t have a family to buy presents for. I don’t have a reason to pull myself together so that I can impress the guests at a shiny, top-shelf holiday party.

  To complicate matters, I’ve got Lucas to contend with. But because I can’t manage to face him or the fact that I can’t ever change him, instead I will distract myself with AJ for physical feelings of love, and I’ll keep David by my side for emotional support and intellectual feelings of love. As the words bleed through the deteriorating bar napkin, I look up to catch my beleaguered reflection and I can’t believe that this is what I actually do. There’s too much truth on this napkin. I drink my shot, crumple the napkin and stuff it into the empty glass.

  The whiskey ring at the bottom of the shot glass begins to disintegrate my life that I’ve scribbled down. I don’t want to be disposable. I don’t want to be expendable. I need to be needed, and I see the crushing failures in every aspect of my life. Only at work do I have anyone relying on me for anything. And it’s only because they pay me to be reliable. But I see that slipping through my fin
gers as soon as the OMH report comes through and exposes the truth.

  Lucas doesn’t need me; he needs a punching bag, and she could be anyone. AJ probably doesn’t even know my last name, and the only purpose I serve for him is as a receptacle. David would be better off without me; he knows it and I know it. It’s only my patients who need me. Only my patients who are forced to believe that I am competent and composed and able to save them from themselves. Eddie needs me, and Tashawndra needs me, and even Richard needs me.

  I see my slack jaw and teary eyes in the mirror behind the bar, and when I catch the look on Sid’s face as he notices me from down the bar, I know it’s time to leave. I pull a wad of cash from my coat pocket and tuck it under my empty beer. I pop an olive into my mouth to get the boozy taste out and stumble toward the exit. I blow Sid a kiss and force my face into a happy mask as I walk into the cold night. I clench the other napkins in my sweaty fists inside my pockets and hope I can soak through them and erase the pathetic, hopeless words describing my life.

  DECEMBER 12TH, 3:23 P.M.

  I’m sitting on top of the desk in a group room, waiting for the rest of the patients to shuffle in before I get started. My plan is to use this group session to surreptitiously garner some information from Richard. This is a mixed group, filled with old and new patients, suffering from all types of mental illness. I like these groups because they show patients making progress for those who need inspiration, as well as the madness into which we can descend if we veer off the path of recovery.