Blind Sight

by Meg Howrey

  But in the car ride home, there had been an advertisement on the radio for “That Perfect Father’s Day Gift for That Special Dad,” resulting in a heavy wave of silence that, for Luke, drowned out the next advertisement and the latest news of more suicide bombings in Baghdad. A few minutes later, Mark asked if Luke liked Indian food and Luke said, deliberately, awkwardly, “Yeah, Dad, I like Indian food.” It was the first time Luke had used the word “dad” in speaking to his father. It came out with an unintentionally italicized sound. After a moment, Mark said, “Me too … son,” in the same italicized way. They had laughed a little. Mark did a funny imitation of President Bush, and they laughed a little too much at that. Then Mark had turned off the radio.

  During his run Luke had also imagined describing the ocean experience to Sara and his sisters. He created responses from his family along the lines of “Sounds like you are creating memories, that is a beautiful moment to share,” or “So is it hugely relieving to be with a dad after being locked up with us crazy bitches your whole life?” Luke does not want or need any of those responses. He is determined to maintain a rational, detached, scientific approach.

  But sometimes when Luke sees a butterfly he does feel sad for the caterpillar that was lost. And there is no logic that can stop him from feeling this way. The fact that Luke does not acknowledge this feeling only strengthens the feeling, which is allowed to rest in Luke’s subconscious, biding its time, as much a part of Luke as his two feet, driving into solid earth, remembering and forgetting with every step.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I brought a bunch of photographs with me to show my father. It was Sara’s idea—so Mark could see me at different stages of my life and get to know my family and where I grew up and stuff. I haven’t given them to him yet, though. If someone tells Sara, “I have pictures of my trip to Machu Picchu!” or whatever, she will sit right down and examine each one and ask questions and everything, but not everybody is like that with photographs.

  Mark hasn’t really said anything about his own family. I’m hoping it doesn’t include any strange genealogical patterns.

  So these early pictures I have were all taken with a film camera because there were no digital cameras back then. My favorite one would have been deleted otherwise, because nobody in it was ready yet, and also it’s not quite in focus. There was another picture taken a few seconds later, once everybody got organized and in position and smiling, but Sara couldn’t find it. So this photo is a real “Moment Before” and that’s what I like about it.

  Mark explained about “Moment Before” to me. It’s an acting thing where the actor decides what his character was doing the moment before they are doing whatever it is the audience gets to see. So, like, if you are playing Mr. Jones, and the first time we see you is when you open the door of your house, then you should have thought about all the things you as Mr. Jones were doing before you opened the door. Because if the Moment Before you opened the door was you dancing naked in your living room, then you’ll open the door differently than you would if you were, like, cooking spaghetti.

  Sara is in bed in this picture. Her hair is long, the way it is now again, and she’s wearing a yellow cotton T-shirt with “World’s Greatest Mom” printed on it in bubble letters. She doesn’t look like how she normally looks. Normally she dominates any photograph she is in, standing really upright with a big smile and kind of intense eyes. In this picture, you can’t really see her face because she is leaning a little bit forward, holding on to Aurora, who is half on the bed and half off of it, with her arms outstretched. Aurora has her hair in two curly ponytails. She has really skinny arms. There is something nice about the two of them. Rory already looks exactly like herself and Sara looks soft and you want to tell her that everything is okay, and she should just lie down and relax.

  To the left of this action is a white and pink and very shiny cradle. It looks expensive. Next to that is my Aunt Caroline, who is also white and pink, and expensive looking, but not shiny. Aunt Linny usually looks a little bit lost, or confused, which is often the case. She’s the kind of person you have to show where the bathroom is in a restaurant. Not just point to it, but actually walk her there. Uncle Louis is not in the picture. He’s an important lawyer and very busy and we don’t often see him. Nana will always say ONCE in every visit of Caroline’s, “And how is Louis”—like that, without a question mark—and then will immediately get up from the table and start clearing dishes, or go to get the mail or something so nobody ever hears how Louis is.

  Aunt Caroline is holding a pink and white bundle in her arms.

  On the other side of the cradle is my Aunt Nancy. She looks totally different in this picture than she does now. Now she is super thin and has those kind of rectangular black glasses that, like, a German architect might wear. Here, though, she is a little bit heavy and her glasses are these giant red things. She looks like someone who has cats, but she’s actually very allergic to them. Aunt Nancy teaches Renaissance History at a liberal arts college in Maine. Because she lived in England for eight years when she was married to an Englishman, she says English-type words like “daft” and pronounces certain other words like English people do. For instance, instead of saying “Renaissance” the regular way, she says, “Re-NAY-sance.”

  On the other side of the bed (the right side) is Nana, who is holding a giant bouquet of white and orange flowers. Nana looks like the thin version of Aunt Nancy if the thin version were to put on a fluffy wig. Nana is gesturing with her free hand to Pearl, who is in front of the bed. Pearl is almost two here and she doesn’t have a lot of hair, but what she has is blond and sticks almost straight up. She is wearing overalls, but no shirt, and tennis shoes. She looks like she is kicking the bed.

  In fact, she is kicking the bed. Earlier in the day, Aunt Linny had given presents to Pearl and Aurora. Aurora got a purse with purple flowers on it. Pearl got a bracelet made out of buttons. Pearl had felt that maybe she hated the bracelet. Aurora offered to exchange items. Pearl had agreed to the exchange, and then immediately hurled the purse across the room, dislodging a purple flower. So Aurora got both things. Aurora tells this story all the time, and Pearl claims to remember it too, or at least her profound sense of the injustice of it all.

  So in this photograph you get to see the Moments Before people got all sorted out and posed and that’s really interesting, because life isn’t really like photographs. Life is more like acting, where you want people to see a little bit of what you are hiding so they know you are hiding something and maybe wonder about what is really going on inside you. In life you might want people to see that something is wrong, so they will ask you, “Hey, what’s wrong?” In photographs people just want to look good.

  But here is Sara, who isn’t exercising her usual mesmeric force upon the camera holder, and looks just like an ordinary mom, holding on to Aurora, who is reaching out for something—me, I think, because that’s me in the pink and white blanket. And Aunt Linny looks like she wants to hand me over to my Aunt Nancy, and Aunt Nancy looks like she is defending herself from any contact with me by inverting her shoulders and shrinking her chest, sort of, and Aunt Linny is looking at Aunt Nancy, and not at all in a confused or dreamy way. She’s actually sort of smirking. And there is my Nana with one hand on Pearl’s knee and Pearl is looking at Nana like she cannot imagine how much more she is going to be made to suffer on this day. It’s a fantastic picture. The only person in the photograph you can’t see clearly is me. But that’s cool. I might have been the star attraction, but it’s what my arrival meant to everyone else that was the circus.

  I asked Sara who took the picture and she said it must have been Joyce. Joyce was supposed to be Sara’s midwife for my birth but Sara had me in a hospital because Joyce sort of panicked at the critical moment. I didn’t even have a name yet here, since “Leila” turned out not to be appropriate.

  So it’s a photograph that was taken about five seconds before everyone got ready for it, and one week before
I had a name, and nine years before I looked at the family Bible and learned why it was Sara expected me to be a girl, and seventeen years before I met my father in Los Angeles.

  I guess every moment in life is a Moment Before, though, and all the moments of your life are one giant Moment Before you die.

  Okay, that seems like kind of a dead end. Literally. I’m going to start over.

  Let’s try this again: I am looking at a photograph of my family and me. My family runs to girls. Everyone thought I would be a girl too, but I wasn’t. In the photograph I am looking at, it’s impossible to tell both what I am and what I might be.

  What’s sort of amazing, when you think about it, is that I was THERE for this moment. I know that my brain wasn’t totally formed and everything, because brains can’t form all the way inside the womb or our heads would be too big to get out. But I had access to sight and sound, even if in a limited way. I don’t know how conscious I was, though. How conscious can you be if you haven’t yet discovered your own feet?

  It’s impossible to know how much I know in this photograph. As Sara would say, all the studies and tests that are done are studies and tests that are thought up by people, and are only as good as the thoughts that produced them. There can be no definitive study of how a human being is, because there is no definitive human person to create the right test. She has a point, but it’s kind of annoying. Like, you can’t even say something like, “Studies show …” to Sara because she’ll just say, “No studies have been done on the unthinkable, but the unthinkable still exists,” or something like that.

  I could probably tell you what everyone in this photo was saying right around when the picture was taken. It’s not that I have any psychic abilities. But I’ve listened to all these people talk and I’ve noticed that people usually say the same kinds of things. I mean, the sentences are new, sometimes, but people don’t often suddenly come out with some radical new way of expressing themselves, or have a total personality change.

  Sometimes knowing all these people and listening to them and knowing what they aren’t saying and why they aren’t saying it, or why they’re saying what they are, or what they’re really saying when they are saying something else, is very … tiring.

  There must have been a Moment Before for Sara too. A Moment Before it was just wonderful that she had a son instead of a daughter. A Moment Before she had found a way to make it okay that she had failed to live up to the family legacy. Maybe I’ll try writing that.

  Sara Prescott lies in bed. She feels really alone. Today is meant to be a day of joy for Sara, and she knows this, so Sara tells herself how joyous she really is. She keeps having to tell herself this. Because she cannot help it, Sara also thinks that what she really feels in this moment is not joy but the sensation of being pretty much royally ripped off. It is not in Sara’s nature to nurture such a feeling. The worse she feels, the more joy she attempts to radiate.

  Sara’s mother is speaking now.

  “Oh Caroline,” Pauline is saying, as she sets a large vase of flowers upon a dresser crowded with statues of Buddha and Ganesh. “Just look at this beautiful arrangement! You have such an amazing gift.”

  “They are gorgeous, Linny,” Sara says to her sister. “Thank you so much.”

  “Delight, happiness, gratitude,” Sara tells herself, because a mantra is a good way to shut out unwelcome thoughts like how her mother always makes a HUGE deal over anything Linny does.

  Nancy is talking now.

  “I thought you’d be in hospital still,” says Nancy.

  Sara looks at her sister Nancy, who is sucking on the right earpiece of her glasses as if it were a pipe. Nancy has recently quit smoking so she’s gained some weight. Sara now sees herself through Nancy’s eyes: tired, messed-up hair, inaccurately fertile. Sara attempts to sit up straighter. Nancy doesn’t know her, Sara tells herself. Not the real Sara, the true Sara, the joyous and grateful Sara.

  “Oh I was in and OUT!” says Sara cheerily. “You know me!”

  “You’re a toughie,” admits Nancy. The act of speaking flips her glasses up unexpectedly, the left earpiece nearly jamming itself in Nancy’s nose.

  Sara smiles.

  Nancy removes her glasses from her mouth and pushes them into her hair.

  “Unfortunately,” Nancy says in her clipped way, “I gather your midwife rather bungled the home birth scenario?”

  Sara reminds herself she is grateful that Nancy is here, because Nancy is always an opportunity to practice patience and compassion.

  “Joyce could have managed everything just beautifully,” Sara says firmly. “But she is young in her practice still, and even though this was my third time, it was really her first all on her own. She needs to grow in her confidence level. She did a wonderful job at the hospital. And the girls adore her.”

  “Oh Joyce,” Nancy sniffs. “I saw this Joyce person. She let me in. I must say she looks incapable of delivering a newspaper, let alone a child.”

  This, although mean, lies close to Sara’s own feelings about Joyce, who panicked and called for the ambulance, and cried, at which point Sara said, “Oh for God’s sake, pull yourself together, Joyce.” Resentment of Joyce is part of Sara’s overall sense of being misled and denied. It is a relief to Sara to hear the inadequacies of her midwife safely voiced by her sister.

  “Well!” Nancy continues. “You are the expert on popping these children out. One assumes you know what’s best.”

  “Of course she knows what’s best,” Caroline says.

  Caroline says this, as she says most things, vaguely, as if she weren’t quite sure of the words, or their meaning, or to whom, in fact, she is actually speaking.

  “Of course we are grateful that the child was born healthy and safe!” says Pauline, brightly, from her corner.

  Sara wonders why she can never get a feeling of sisterhood going in a room full of women where most of the women are, in fact, her actual sisters.

  “I’m going to be sick,” thinks Sara. “No,” Sara tells herself. “I’m fine. This is such a wonderful moment. I am so grateful for this moment.” Sara scrambles for her mantra. “Delight. Happiness. Gratitude. Delight! Happiness! Gratitude!”

  “Oh these flowers, Caroline!” cries out Pauline. “I just can’t get over these flowers,” she almost shouts.

  The three sisters now turn and look at their mother, who is not actually looking at the flowers. Pauline is looking at herself in the mirror over the dresser, not in a vain way, but more as if she wants to make sure of what she looks like when she is in a state of not being able to get over the flowers.

  “I have nothing to be ashamed about,” Sara thinks. “Shame is not a choice I am going to accept. It was not a one-night stand. It was a moment of love.”

  “Where are the girls?” asks Caroline, looking around the room, as if just now noticing their absence.

  “Joyce has them doing a puzzle,” says Pauline. “I’ll go get them.”

  “Mother is never as happy as when she discovers a legitimate reason to leave a room,” says Nancy, after Pauline has left the room.

  Nancy walks over to the pink and white cradle and peers down at its contents. “Do we have a name for the progeny? You were expecting a girl, of course.”

  Sara glances at a homemade sign scotch-taped to the wall over the cradle. A sign that had once said “Welcome to the World, Leila” and which had had to be altered by Joyce and a pair of scissors.

  “I always thought that’s why you smoked,” says Caroline to Nancy, or rather, in the direction of Nancy. “You wanted a reason to leave a room.”

  Now the children run in: small Aurora, smaller Pearl. Pauline behind them, steering Pearl by the shoulders.

  “Careful,” says Pauline to Aurora, who is attempting to climb the bed.

  “I know,” says Aurora, working her toes into the space between box spring and mattress and hoisting herself upwards. Very carefully, Aurora puts her arms around her mother. Sara pats her daughter’s back
. “You have a baby brother!” she had told the girls when they were brought to the hospital room. “Are you mad, Mommy?” Aurora had asked.

  Pearl stands at the foot of the bed and starts kicking it, not so hard as to be reprimanded, but hard enough to make her presence known.

  Joyce comes into the room, carrying a camera.

  “Oh, let’s get out Baby,” says Aurora. “And make a picture.”

  Joyce presses the shutter of the camera before everyone can get organized. People complain. “Take another one,” they tell her. “When we’re ready.”

  Luke is sweating. He deletes the last section of his writing from his computer.

  “Whatever,” Luke says to himself. “Whateverwhateverwhatever.”

  Luke feels that he has been very accurate in imagining the conscious and subconscious feelings of his mother. So accurate that it doesn’t feel to Luke like imagination, and he experiences a keen sense of betrayal by his mother’s Moments Before, by her mantra, by the effort it took her to accept him.

  “But it doesn’t matter,” he tells himself. “Even if it is real.”

  Luke kicks off his shoes and does a handstand against the wall. He considers the nature of consciousness and the problems of other minds. He thinks that this might be something he could study more in college and he projects an image of himself engaging in serious intellectual debates over coffee, an image constructed out of other images: a visit to Pearl’s dorm room, movies, dialogue from books.

  It is not difficult, even for Luke, still inverted, to see why natural selection would favor an organism that recognized not only its own mind, but other minds as well: while Caveman Fug is showing his dwelling to Caveman Oog, he senses that Caveman Oog is envying the square footage of his dwelling. Caveman Fug then assumes a defensive posture or, possibly, deliberately depreciates his dwelling by pointing out the mildew and bat guano. Caveman Oog is appeased, and Caveman Fug lives long enough to pass on his genes. Imagination in this sense is useful for a complex organism that needs to defend itself from members of its own species. However, somewhere along the way this elegant and useful design feature of the brain has run a little amok, creating the possibility of an organism that can imagine the subconscious feelings of others in such a way as to inflict useless pain upon itself, and then avoid facing this pain by standing on its hands and theorizing abstractly on the nature of consciousness.