Blind Sight

by Meg Howrey

  But of course there will always be mysteries. Because people lied.

  But he could know who his father was. That was something that could be known.

  Luke hears a car behind him, and he moves to the right of the road. The car passes him, then slows down, pulls over, stops. Aurora gets out of the front seat. Luke stops. He is almost at the cemetery now. If he turns and cuts through the woods behind him and runs north for about fifteen minutes, he’ll be out of the state of Delaware. Aurora walks toward him. Luke, breathing hard, puts his hands on his hips, walks in circles.

  “Luke.”

  Luke, breathing too hard for speech, nods at Aurora, acknowledging her.

  “Luke, sweetie. Are you okay?”

  Luke sucks in a lungful of air.

  “What happened?”

  Luke shakes his head.

  “I’m fine,” he says, before he starts to cry.

  Aurora has her arms around him in an instant. At first Luke does not want this, does not want contact, can’t breathe, does not want to be still. After a moment, though, he holds on to Aurora as hard as he can. His sister’s arms act as a kind of myelin sheath, accelerating Luke’s sorrow, and he cries harder. Aurora pulls Luke down to sit by the side of the road and settles his head on her shoulder. Luke cries into this while Aurora rakes through Luke’s hair with her fingertips. Aurora’s hands are Sara’s hands: large, wide, always warm and dry. Luke reaches an end of crying but remains in the curve of his sister’s shoulder for awhile longer. A car comes down the road. Luke can hear it slowing down, can feel Aurora waving it away. Luke listens to the gravel sound of tires on road. Luke can hear some kind of warbler singing in the woods behind them.

  “I scared Pearl,” Luke says, sitting up.

  “It’s good to know someone can,” Aurora says. “She’s fine.”

  “I don’t want to go home right now.”

  “So we won’t go home,” Aurora says. “We’ll stay right here. Or I’ll take you back to New York with me.”

  Luke nods.

  “Did Sara tell you what happened?”

  “No. She and Nana are having some kind of a talk. Pearl’s getting Aunt Nancy high.”

  Luke finds half a laugh coming out of his mouth.

  “No, I don’t know what they are doing,” Aurora says. “I’ve been driving around looking for you. I remembered you like to run up here. Do you want to tell me what happened?”

  “No.”

  “That’s okay.”

  Luke takes off his left shoe, then sock. He looks at his heel, where the glass puncture is now a little inflamed. Aurora leans forward to examine it.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “No, but I should put something on it,” Luke says. “Or clean it or something.”

  “There’s a first-aid kit in Vlad.”

  Luke walks with Aurora to the car, keeping his heel off the ground. Aurora opens the trunk, starts searching beneath dusty blankets, folding camp chairs, a yoga mat, reusable grocery bags, beach hats. Aurora pulls out a battered white first-aid kit. Luke sits on the fender and holds out his foot.

  “Remember when Pearl got all those splinters in her feet?” Aurora asks, crouching down.

  Luke shakes his head.

  “When Mr. Pollack redid the porch? You remember.”

  Luke shakes his head again.

  “You were so cute. The porch was falling down, so Nana enlisted Mr. Pollack and he came over and tore it all down and rebuilt it. You followed him around everywhere. Sara made you a little tool belt, and you walked around with, like, a little plastic ruler, measuring things, telling everyone that you were helping. You don’t remember that?” Aurora dabs some alcohol on Luke’s foot.

  “Ow. No, I don’t remember that.”

  “I guess you were too little. Anyway, when it was done, Pearl went running across the porch. In her bare feet. And it hadn’t been sanded yet. She got about halfway back before she realized what had happened and then she started screaming. Sara came rushing out and hauled Pearl off to the bathroom. They were in there for hours, Pearl screaming the whole time, while Sara pulled all the splinters out.” Aurora laughs, shaking a bottle of Mercurochrome. “Then Sara coated Pearl’s feet in tea tree oil, or something like that, and gave her an amulet to wear, and a little sign that said, ‘Pearl is a brave girl,’ and that night Nana came tiptoeing into our room with a tube of Neosporin.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “Classic Prescott stuff, really. You remember Mr. Pollack, though? He died the next year. Heart attack. I think he had sort of a Brethren crush on Nana. He was always asking us if we needed any help.”

  “Really? I don’t remember any of this.”

  “Well,” Aurora says, putting a Band-Aid on Luke’s heel, “I remember.”

  Aurora smiles up at Luke, looking for a moment so much like the Sara that Luke loves that his chest hurts. He can see the red imprints of his hands on Aurora’s arms. He has gotten stronger over the summer.

  Luke thinks of his sisters’ father, Paul, who does seem likely to be their real father, although possibly not at all like the Paul Sara has told them about. Even Aurora’s memories of her dad—the man picking her up, the shoes underneath the table—might not actually be memories of Paul. Sara had said that Paul never wore shoes with laces. Those feet could have been anyone’s feet. Aurora could have been playing with Uncle Louis’s shoes on the night that Sara took hold of the hand that was held out to her.

  “You want to get some ice cream or something?” Aurora asks.

  Mary lived in a black-and-white world and then they let her out of her room and showed her a red apple. She was conscious of red now. But maybe she didn’t want to know red like that. Maybe she liked it better the other way, with red inside her mind, without a name, without anything at all.

  Luke does and does not want to get ice cream. He does and does not want to go home.

  “I don’t know,” Luke says. “I don’t know what I want to do.”

  “Okay,” Aurora says. “Let’s just sit here for awhile then.”

  Luke thinks.

  Luke thinks he will go home and talk to Sara. He thinks he will not talk to Sara, he will go to New York with Aurora, with Pearl. He thinks he will tell his sisters what happened. He thinks he will never tell anyone.

  Luke thinks he will go home and call his father, in Los Angeles.

  Luke thinks he will win races this year, go with Nana to Assembly and not be Saved, go to Los Angeles for Christmas, ask Leila to let him keep his eyes open. He will write his essay, and get into college.

  Luke thinks he will do none of these things, he will sit on the side of the road wondering if there is glass in his foot, and who his father is, for the rest of his life.

  Luke thinks he will not do that.

  Luke thinks that there is truth, and there is belief, and there is hope. There are the things you are. And you don’t really have a choice about what you are. You might not even have much of a choice about what you do with what you are. Everyone would like to think they had a choice. You couldn’t help wanting to think that. You couldn’t help wanting to believe. We are designed for belief. Belief was a feature of the brain, like consciousness.

  Although we were still evolving, perhaps. Evolution is very, very slow.

  The brain has evolved, not just from childbirth, but from our primitive selves. Like any device, there have been system upgrades, improvements, and modifications. Our brains are like computers, but we don’t discard our old models, no matter how clunky or inefficient. Our old systems move into a state of semiretirement, reemerging into fame only when the star systems fail, are injured, or destroyed. Shattered.

  There was a time when humans used the midbrain for sight. But we eventually developed a higher center: the primary visual cortex, a faster, better model. We use that now to process all our visual information. The midbrain still functions, but it doesn’t communicate with our systems for consciousness.

  How do we kn
ow this? We know by examining people who have lost the use of their primary visual cortex, usually through damage or trauma of some kind. Such people experience blindness. If you were to put a pencil on a desk in front of them and tell them to pick it up, they would probably say something along the lines of, “Hey, I’m blind. I can’t see a thing.” But if you encouraged them to take a wild guess, a stab in the dark, and they agreed to try, they might be able to reach out and pick up the pencil just perfectly. They might be able to do that ninety-nine times out of a hundred. That’s because while their primary visual cortex no longer functions, their midbrain still does, and is capable of basic operations like orienting on an object placed within their visual field. They can, in fact, still see. What they lost was not their sight, but their consciousness of sight. This phenomenon has been observed, and documented, and is called blindsight.

  We don’t always know what we know, in other words. We don’t know what we know.

  But if you understood all of this, really understood it, would it make any difference? Because there would still be … everything. And there would still be …

  Everything, Luke thinks. Everything, everything, everything. Every. Thing.

  Everything. Or nothing. What would make him believe? Evidence.

  He couldn’t know everything. He never would. He would be specific. He would be very specific. You only had one father.

  He knew the qualia for being a son. He knew the qualia of having a father. That was what he knew.

  He wasn’t done yet. There were parts of his brain that weren’t even fully online yet. He was only seventeen.

  For a moment Luke sees in its entirety a perfectly constructed three-to-five-hundred-word essay describing the phenomenon of blindsight and drawing a line—an axon—from it to him, stating his intention to follow the lines of consciousness, wherever they may lead. To pluck a shiny red apple from the giant Sequoia tree of knowledge, and eat it, and be unashamed.

  “Okay,” Luke says, standing up. “Let’s go.”

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to agent and lodestar Sally Brady, and Shelley Wanger at Pantheon for taking care of this book. Thank you to Adam and Jen—beloved first readers; Lauren—most wonderfully generous and loyal from start to finish; and Chris—for well-timed notes and kindness. Thank you to Gary, Blair, Nick (muse), Kari, John, David, Marty, Emily, Daniella, Jad, staff and writers of the Stone House Retreat—for advice, inspiration, and support.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Meg Howrey is a dancer and an actor who has performed on Broadway and toured nationally. She currently lives in Los Angeles.