Blind Sight

by Meg Howrey

  “Me too,” I said. “Although you have to go with the idea that makes sense of A LOT of things, not just what makes sense for you personally, right? People tell you to trust your instincts, but …”

  “When people tell you to trust your instincts it just means they have no clue either,” Mark said.

  “Yeah,” I said, sucking at my Slurpee. “Yeah.”

  The attraction between two bodies is proportional to their masses. This is the law of gravity, but there is nothing in the law that tell us WHY that should be so.

  I agree with Mark. Thinking about gravity, really thinking about it, can kind of freak you out.

  Actually, Luke still mostly feels that the sky is a kind of protective dome. In many instances he has been able to replace intuition with acquired knowledge, but in this case he has failed. However, he is prepared to accept that what he feels is wrong, and what science has proved is correct.

  Luke had spent the day watching. He watched his father watch his own reflection in the mirrors at the gym, watched the couple sitting next to them at lunch watch his father eat a frittata, watched his father watch himself, Luke, at the observatory. Luke had watched the sun. He located the signals being sent to him, around him, for him. Luke experienced happiness in meeting those signals successfully. He enjoyed his father’s enjoyment of the Slurpee, and his father’s enjoyment of Luke’s enjoyment of his own Slurpee.

  He enjoyed seeing his father recognized, enjoyed feeling slightly famous himself, enjoyed feeling that he was the person whom Mark wanted to talk to.

  Later that evening, as Luke was getting ready for bed, Mark came into Luke’s room holding a leather jacket.

  “I just found this in my closet,” Mark says. “Here. Try it on.”

  “It’ll be huge on me,” says Luke, but, “No, it’s small on me,” says Mark, and so Luke puts it on. It fits perfectly.

  “It’s yours,” says Mark. “It looks way better on you, man.”

  Luke has never owned anything made of real leather. His Nana does not have a problem with leather (God gave Adam and Eve coats of skins to wear, John the Baptist wore leather, etc.), but Sara prefers natural or micro fibers. Luke has only bought a few of his own clothes, and he has yet to consider where he personally stands on the ethics of leather.

  “Good night.” Mark puts a hand on Luke’s leather-clad shoulder and jostles it slightly. “Thanks for today.” Mark leaves.

  Luke stands in the bedroom that he now thinks of as “his” bedroom and inhales the scent of the jacket. He puts his hands inside the jacket pockets, discovers a coin in the right one. He holds the coin hard in his hand, turns it over and over, rubs it between his thumb and forefinger. Luke experiences a sudden rush of emotion: a tightening and throbbing in his throat, as if his throat were a cocoon for something alive, something with a hundred little legs. Luke thinks for a moment that he might cry, half laughs at himself, takes the jacket off, and hangs it carefully in his closet.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Okay, so your mom and your sisters,” Mark said to me at the gym this morning. “I’m getting them. What about your Nana, though? What’s her deal? She’s religious or something?”

  “They’re called the New Plymouth Brethren,” I explained. “It’s kind of a splinter cell from the regular Plymouth Brethren, who are really fundamentalist.”

  “You go to church?”

  “They call it Assembly. Yeah, I go. We all used to go. Well, not Sara. But us kids. For awhile. It’s kind of complicated.”

  I told him I would try an essay about Nana today, while he was at work. Then I’m going to go for a bike ride in Griffith Park. He’s got a regular Schwinn twelve-speed in the garage, along with the most awesome dirt bike ever. I explored the garage yesterday. There are all kinds of things in there. The dirt bike is brand-new. He hasn’t even ridden it yet.

  “Oh yeah,” he said. “That was part of some gift basket.”

  “Someone sent you the Z250 in a gift basket? That’s like a six-thousand-dollar bike.”

  “Well, not in it. You get all this stuff. Kati deals with most of it. Take whatever you want in there.”

  It’s kind of crazy. There are bags of stuff in there. Watches, sneakers, cameras, game systems. I might set up the Wii for us later on, if I have time.

  Okay. Essay. This will be more fun, now that I know Mark will be reading it.

  There was actually an example of a grandmother story in 50 Successful College Application Essays. But that girl’s grandmother had been a Holocaust survivor.

  My grandmother was the first adult woman I saw fully naked.

  That sounds really bad. It wasn’t a sexual thing. I was four and we had only just moved in with her.

  All right, so I have an extremely clear memory of my Nana’s breasts and pubic hair. Her breasts were oblong. I mean the skin went down a little ways before it made the round part. And her pubic hair was mostly grey, and it spread—or seemed to—across to the tops of her legs.

  It was probably about two seconds (maybe less) of actual viewing time and I don’t remember feeling alarmed or ashamed or anything like that. But the event must have been sufficiently impressive to the cells of my body, and I guess some sort of learning moment occurred, and I remember it. Not only that, but I assumed, for a long time, that breasts came in an oblong structure and that pubic hair was mostly grey and there was a lot of it. “Assumed” is the wrong word. It’s sort of like my early feelings about the dome over our planet. I KNOW that women have different-shaped breasts. I’ve seen the Kama Sutra, and R-rated movies, stuff on the Internet, and come on, I have SISTERS. It’s just that the initial sort of mental picture that often comes up when someone says “nude” or “naked” is this image of my naked Nana. It’s weirdly hard to unknow what you know even when what you know is wrong. Even weirder is: it’s MY brain that’s making these images of Nana appear even when it’s also MY brain that knows better. People write books or make movies about people losing control over computers, and the machines going rogue or becoming evil, but our own brains are computers, and we don’t seem to be able to control those very well. Our entire lives are operating, if you really think about it, on a rogue program.

  So anyway, there I was, age four, gazing up at her, and Nana calmly whipped out a towel and her eyes sort of swiveled and locked on mine, and there it was for the first time, the special look of Nana’s that has since been dubbed the Sword of Silence.

  It’s like a superpower she has.

  Sword of Silence Meanings

  NO

  I did not hear that

  I did not see that

  YOU did not hear or see that

  To ask further questions would be insanity on your part

  Interpreting the Sword of Silence has always been my special knack. Even though I was only four, I knew what it meant. The towel Nana took up was unnecessary—a gesture to convention, or maybe Nana was chilly. Because Nana was not really naked, I was not really looking at her, and even my own existence and hers was in doubt. It simply was not happening. The sword can only cut so deep, though, I guess, since I still remember it vividly, and she surely meant to swipe my brain clean of it entirely.

  “The Sword of Silence” as a term came into use a couple of years later between us three kids, once Aurora and Pearl and I had all received the as-yet-unnamed sword and had discussed it amongst ourselves. Pronouncing the “w” in “sword” when we say it is another thing we do, along with using the word “sworded” as a verb. As in, “Nana sworded me.” Nana often smiles when she swords you. It’s this very helpful sort of smile. As if to say, Here, let me aid you in your confused ways by evaporating them. It’s not necessarily violent, but it’s powerful. Aurora wore an “Evolution Rocks” T-shirt to the breakfast table once and she swears Nana sworded it so hard she actually faded the material. Aurora went up to her room and put a sweater over the T-shirt before coming back to breakfast.

  That’s the thing with the sword. Mostly you obey it because you
don’t want to push Nana. Pushing Nana would be like pulling the wings off a butterfly, or knocking over a little kid’s ice cream cone, or something deliberately cruel like that. Sometimes you obey it because you know that Nana really needs it, for her own piece of mind, and since she never asks for anything, you feel like, “Okay, whatever.” That’s why I obey it, anyway.

  I’m not sure that Sara was totally clear on how religious Nana had gotten when we all moved in with her. I don’t remember any big discussions about going to Assembly. It was just something that happened. Nana would take us three kids while Sara did other things. Sara is really good at honoring other people’s beliefs, though, and for her rare cameo appearances at Assembly she was always very respectful.

  Nana hoped that we would all experience getting Saved. My sisters and I heard stories of other Brethrens’ Savings. Talking about your moment of Salvation is a big thing in Assembly. Normally the Brethren are a fairly quiet bunch, but they can get excited when talking about their special moment. Once, Mrs. Potts, who was Saved in the parking lot of Linens ’n Things, got so emotional when recounting her tale that she lost her grip on her Bible and it went whipping across the room and smote Mr. Federmeier on the forehead.

  But when I about ten, Sara and Nana had some sort of Discussion, and Sara told Aurora that none of us kids had to go with Nana to Assembly anymore, if we didn’t want to.

  Aurora and Pearl summoned me to a conference in their room to discuss this.

  “Sara says we are old enough to choose,” Aurora began. “And I guess Nana agreed to that. So who’s choosing to go?”

  Pearl passed around contraband Twizzlers and we considered this question.

  “I don’t think we should all stop going at once,” Aurora said. “We might want to work into it gradually, one by one.”

  “Nana is gonna sword us,” is what Pearl said. “How bad do you think it’ll be? The kind where she just doesn’t talk about it, or the kind where she looks at you like you just farted during Grace? Or total silent treatment?” Total silent treatment was the height of swording, and pretty uncomfortable.

  The upshot of the whole discussion was that Aurora would leave first. That way, Pearl and I would have a chance to assess the level of swording and weigh the pros and cons of the whole thing. Pearl and I thought Rory pretty heroic for offering herself like that.

  At that point I wasn’t aware that any of us had any problems with going to Assembly. I didn’t think that going was such a big deal. It wasn’t like anything was expected of us. In some ways it was like going to a meditation session with Sara: you went, you sat, maybe you repeated some chants or prayers, you listened or thought your own thoughts.

  Aurora was the first to really voice philosophical dissent with Christianity, although her objections were more of a style nature: she simply preferred the kinds of things Sara would read to us. So the virgin Mary was visited by an angel and ended up pregnant? So what? A similar sort of thing happens in the Mahabharata, only in a much more exciting way. The mortal Kunti is practicing her mantra and then the God Lord Surya appears and the next day Kunti bears his son, who is born wearing earrings and golden armor.

  The swording of Aurora was not terrible. On the next Sunday, Sara and Rory were out of the house early and away for most of the day. Pearl and I went with Nana to Assembly as usual. When one of the New Brethren asked Nana where Aurora was, Nana replied, “Aurora will be spending some time with her mother for awhile.” The way Nana said it, it sounded like some sort of grave punishment was being enacted, and no more questions were asked. Later that night, at dinner, Nana did not speak to Aurora. We were all a little nervous about this, but the next morning Nana was her usual self, and treated Rory just like normal.

  Pearl stopped going to Assembly once she got to high school, but I think it was almost because the New Brethren weren’t Christian enough for Pearl. Even though she considers fundamentalism to be naive, anti-intellectualist, and anti-women, it’s at least serious. Like, she doesn’t call herself a Christian, but she thinks if you do, you should pony up and really believe.

  “Whatever else you want to say about these fundamentalists,” Pearl has said, “they are at least committed. They don’t pick and choose which parts of Scripture to believe, like they’re picking through a salad. They eat the whole thing. Give me an honest lunatic over a mush-mouth pseudo-Christian any day.”

  Nana and I get along really smoothly. I do a lot of things with her. I’m her helper. Sometimes she says things like, “I rely on you, Luke,” or “I know you are going to see the Light, Luke, and I pray for you every day.” I don’t say anything back to this, but I nod. I see it as a nod of agreement: I agree that Nana prays for me, and I agree she believes I will see the Light. Okay, sure, whatever.

  There have been some interesting theories floating around lately about what has been called “the God Gene.” Its actual name is VMAT2. VMAT2 codes for a protein that affects levels of serotonin and dopamine in the brain, and studies have shown that it’s those levels that might account for mystical and spiritual feelings. If VMAT2 does have something to do with belief in the supernatural, then belief in God is something that could be, at least partially, heritable. And so then you have to think about whether it’s something that’s been selected because it confers an advantage. Maybe people who believe in God do better than people that don’t. People who believe in “Love Thy Neighbor,” for example, maybe do better than people that believe in “Tell thy neighbor to suck it.” Or, people who believe that there is an afterlife, or a meaning to their existence, are maybe happier than people who think it’s all just random and they are food for worms. Happy people have more babies, and therefore pass on more VMAT2.

  Of course, when you think about it, the most religious people are the ones who are always telling their neighbor to suck it, if their neighbor doesn’t agree with them. Telling someone to suck it in the name of God is, like, most of history. And suicide bombers are obviously not passing along any VMAT2. Maybe suicide bombers have too much VMAT2, or not enough of something else that would regulate it, and the problem should be treated like the way we treat diabetics. If we can capture one before they complete their mission, we shouldn’t interrogate them. We should stick them in an fMRI machine, ask them to think about God, and see what lights up.

  Of course, you don’t talk about these things with Nana, or with Sara, for that matter. There’s the whole “Studies show …” problem with Sara, and Nana would not welcome the idea that belief in God is something hardwired, like opposable thumbs or hair color. Some Christians argue that a gene for believing in God doesn’t disprove an actual God because God could have created the gene to help matters along, like His decision to create the Big Bang and Darwin’s brain. So they would say that Darwin’s brain is a secondary cause of the first cause, which is God.

  My biology teacher, Mr. Stoddard, gave a speech about “non-overlapping magisteria” before he taught us evolution. This is a theory developed by the biologist Stephen Jay Gould. It’s like a separation of powers. You say that science and theology have separate areas of expertise, and that you should let each side do its business. Science shouldn’t interfere with questions of morality and ethics, and Religion shouldn’t try to explain physical phenomena. Mr. Stoddard said that if everybody agreed to stay on their side of the fence, then there would be no problems. I think it’s a pretty flawed argument, but we didn’t have any problems in my AP Biology class. However, there were only eleven of us, and we were being graded.

  A gene that has something to do with mystical feelings seems reasonable enough to me. And so maybe atheism is an attempt to override a natural instinct. Unless you are missing that gene, and then your atheism isn’t a choice, it’s biological. But of course having a gene doesn’t mean you’ll have what it codes for. A whole bunch of other genes have to be in place supporting it.

  Maybe Abigail Perkins didn’t believe in God and that’s why they thought she was a witch and there is a secret history of
nonbelievers in my family, passing along a genetic sequence with no VMAT2. Maybe this whole line of thinking is ridiculous.

  I think we should all help our neighbors. I am also happy if my remains provide food for worms. Everybody has to eat.

  Luke imagines his father reading this last sentence and laughing. He does not think Mark can be very religious, considering the fact that he says things like “Jesus fucking Christ.” Luke takes his laptop into his father’s office so he can hook it up to the printer.

  Mark’s office, like the rest of the house, has a surgical neatness to it, although there are a few personal objects in this room. Luke thinks he would like to have an office just like this, with everything at right angles to other things. Luke has already examined all of his father’s books, which are mostly about film, or acting technique, or plays, or actors. He has also inspected the six framed photographs mounted on the wall opposite the bookcase: one large photo of the cast of The Last, and five smaller ones of Mark in costume for various roles, standing or sitting with people even more famous than he is. Luke’s favorite is the one where Mark is pretending to lose an arm-wrestling match to the old British actor whose name Luke always confuses with another old British actor.

  Luke sees the pile of photographs he had given his father in a neat stack next to the printer. On top is the one of Luke, in his cross-country shorts and T-shirt, the number 23 on his chest, leading the pack at the invitational against Elmwood High last year.

  While the Nana essay is printing, Luke wanders into the hallway and pauses outside his father’s bedroom door, which is shut. He had a glimpse inside this room when Mark first showed him around the house, but Luke had been watching his father show things, rather than looking at what was being shown. He can only remember a big bed and some kind of artwork above it.