You felt relieved. You liked your room, even if it wasn’t much to look at. Like everything else in the house, it felt like a jail cell. But at least it felt like a semi-private jail cell. Sure, you could still hear the television in the living room blaring. But it gave you at least a taste of solitude and it contained everything in the world that was yours.
You put the pillow over your eyes again. You braced yourself for the noise of kitchen faucets gushing water; the noise of plastic McDonald’s collectible plates clanking against each other. But you didn’t hear them. Instead, you heard your mother let out a loud sigh, and you heard the television turn on. It was her favorite reality show—the one that had people dancing and singing and competing against one another. You heard her chuckle. You wondered if there was a way to make yourself deaf as well as blind.
You told yourself that you’d have to be practical. If you blinded yourself the way Oedipus did—if you stabbed your eyes with something sharp—there would be too much pain to do anything else. You wouldn’t be able to move on to stab your eardrums, after that. You’d have to take one thing at a time. Which was more annoying? Sounds or sights?
For you, the answer was sights. If everything became blackness, then there’d be no context for the noise. The noise wouldn’t be coming out of anyone or anything, except the blackness. If you blinded yourself and then your mother spoke to you, you would laugh because it would seem to you like the blackness had come alive, and was imitating your mother like a comedian would. And oh, that would be a funny joke. That would be the funniest joke of all time.
There was an ice pick in one of the kitchen drawers. It hadn’t been used in ages. Was there really any legitimate use for an ice pick? In the days before ice makers it may have had some utility but in the present day it seemed to only be useful as a weapon. Why did you even care about such things? You didn’t care, really. You just thought it was odd. But then again, so many things about life were odd.
You decided you’d go ahead and blind yourself. You went out to the kitchen to get the necessary tool. You walked as quickly and quietly as you could. Your mother was absorbed in her show. There was no indication that she noticed you. If she did, she probably thought you were grabbing a pop. You put your hand on the drawer handle and gently pulled. It let out a little squeaking whine, but did so as a roar of applause poured out of the television. You picked up the ice pick, hid it in your pocket, walked off to your room, shut the door, and locked it.
Then you took off your glasses. Turned on the lights.
You stood there, in front of the mirror, weapon/tool/surgical instrument in hand. If you followed through, your life of inaction would come to an end. The rage and sadness you felt inside would finally have an escape valve. You’d have permanent scars to speak of your dissatisfaction with the world. Self-blinding offered more permanent relief than anything you’d tried before. More permanent than, say, masturbation (which worked, fleetingly, as a distraction and anxiety-reliever; but was insufficient for continued relief from the burdens of the world). You’d been thinking about how to find a way out for years. This could be it.
The wood of the ice pick handle was smooth in your hands. It felt good and it felt right. You picked it up with your left hand and put the tip of the ice pick up to your eye, so that the piercer and the piercee almost grazed one another. All you’d have to do is slam it into there. You wanted to do it. You told your arm and hand and fingers to comply with your request. But you felt a sudden aching. A tightness. The muscles, as though possessed of a will of their own, refused.
You were not ready, yet, to slam the ice pick into your pupil. It was there—waiting for you—just begging to be pierced. The black pupil against the brown iris seemed like a bull’s eye inviting you to hit it. And it would be easy to hit. It wouldn’t be like the time Dad had taken you clay target shooting at the outdoor range. You’d only hit one target that day (and that was unintentional… you’d pulled the trigger out of nervousness and gotten a target besides the one you were shooting for).
No, this target wasn’t moving, nor was it thirty feet up in the air. The projectile wasn’t birdshot. It was so simple, so simple. It would only take a second. You reckoned the pain would last far longer than that, but the actual action would only take a moment. Maybe not even a full second. Maybe a matter of milliseconds.
You should have been able to do it. You felt like you needed to do it.
But you weren’t able to do it.
You threw yourself onto the bed and under the covers. Thrashed around in them. Let out little groans you hoped no one could hear. You wished, for a moment, you were in the loony bin. There, at least, you’d have rubber walls to bounce off of. Here, all you could do was fidget between sheets and regret that you lacked the courage of your convictions. You flicked a switch, and then the room was—for the most part—dark. But could still see a thin ray of light from a street lamp creeping into your room through a small gap in between your mini-blinds and the window. Fuck the light, you thought. You put the pillow back over your head, and that helped some. But it also made things feel stuffy. You couldn’t do it for more than five minutes at a time. It got to be downright uncomfortable.
Of course, blinding yourself would be uncomfortable, too.
But that was different. It would be the discomfort that would end all discomfort. Just a bit of pain, you imagined, there for the first few months. They’d give you good drugs to lessen it. And then it would be gone and you’d have nothing but blessed blackness in its place. You wanted the blessed blackness. You needed the blessed blackness. But all you got, that night, was an eight-hour installment of blackness. And even that wasn’t uncontaminated by vision. You had dreams. Terrible dreams of ugly faces in ugly places doing ugly things. You woke from them, crying and trembling. What if I blind myself and still dream, you thought. Then all of it would be for nothing. The ugliness is everywhere. It’s going to win. I can’t escape it.
***
You’d slept in your clothes. You didn’t want to take a shower. You thought your mother was going to scold you for not having changed your clothes or showered, but when you walked out into the kitchen to grab some orange juice she didn’t seem to notice. She greeted you in an unironically cordial manner.
“Why there’s my baby boy,” she said. She put her coffee down on the coaster and hugged you uncomfortably tight.
Your father was there, too. He was eating scrambled eggs that, from the smell, had been overcooked. “So,” he said. “Detention, huh?”
You nodded.
“Your mother and I don’t care for that.”
You didn’t want to have the conversation right then. It was tempting to have it then, because Mom seemed to be in one of her better moods. But you had to walk out to the bus stop, and you wanted to have some time alone there before all the other neighborhood kids came out. It was peaceful outside, at the bus stop, before all the other neighborhood kids came out. Quiet. Still.
“It won’t happen again, Dad.”
“He has to stay an hour afterward today,” Mom said. “So the bus can’t take him home. I’ll have to leave and pick him up. That’s going to make dinner late. It’s really as much a punishment for the parents as it is a punishment for the kids.”
“I’m sorry,” you said. You weren’t really sorry, but you knew if you didn’t say it, you’d hear about it.
Your mother ignored what you said and babbled on. “I’m going to schedule a meeting with your teachers. I think we need to get you out of those gifted and talented classes and into something a bit less challenging. I think that’s just the cure.”
Your father finished chewing his eggs. “There are lots of good jobs out there for folks, even if they ain’t gifted or talented. I mean, with the way your grades are going, I think we have to admit that—no matter what your test scores are—you’re probably not going to college. But I’m going to start talking to HR about how we might be able to get you in over at the plant. You’d be making better
money, out of high school, than a lot of kids will make coming out of college.”
You didn’t agree, but you nodded. Another reason to blind myself, you thought. It would make me ineligible for factory work. Sure, I might still see ugliness in dreams, but at least I wouldn’t have to end up like Dad. This heightened your resolve.
Your mother insisted you eat some eggs before leaving for the bus stop. “You have plenty of time before the bus comes,” she said. She piled a string of yellow and brown gunk on a plastic McDonald’s collectible plate for you. You ate as quickly as you could. Then you went to your room and looked for the ice pick. At first you looked in your top drawer, but after that yielded nothing you remembered you’d fallen asleep with it in your hand. You looked in your bed. Found it in the midst of tangled sheets. You breathed a sigh of relief and plopped it into your backpack.
Your heart felt sick when you thought of how you hadn’t been able to do the necessary deed, last night. But maybe the courage would arise this morning. Yes, that was always a possibility. Maybe the tension of school would be the incentive.
You had to go to the bathroom and take a piss. Standing over the toilet, you looked at various medicine bottles and household tonics. You saw a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, turned so that you could read its DIRECTIONS and WARNINGS. After you flushed the toilet, you read the label. “Do not use in eyes… In case of accidental ingestion, seek professional assistance, or contact a Poison Control Center immediately.”
You grabbed it from the shelf. You didn’t think anyone would notice it was gone. This could be an easier way of damaging your eyes. A chemical process, rather than a crude spike. All you’d have to do is allow the peroxide to make contact with the eyes. But how?
You grabbed a huge wad of toilet paper—twenty sheets long. Fortunately, the bathroom was across from your room. You were able to quickly sneak the bottle of hydrogen peroxide and the toilet paper into your room, without being spotted. The toilet paper squeezed into the backpack well enough, but you had too many books and folders in there for the peroxide to fit. So you removed all school-related material. Hid it all away in the back of your closet. Then you replaced it with the rest of the blinding supplies: the peroxide and the ice pick. You felt a wave of relaxation wash over you. No books, just blind: yes, that made you feel so much better. Then you remembered you’d also need the cotton belt off of your housecoat. You tossed it in, too.
Your plan was this: you would—at some point in the school day—sneak away to an empty room or stairwell where you would blind yourself using the ice pick. If you couldn’t summon up the will to do that, the hydrogen peroxide was your Plan B. The label said not to get it into your eyes. So if you intentionally forced it into your eyes, well, that would surely cause some damage, now, wouldn’t it? Would it blind you? You weren’t sure. But it would have to do some damage. And if you repeatedly forced the hydrogen peroxide into your eyes, over long stretches of time, then that had to inflict some significant damage.
If you lacked the courage to use the ice pick, you’d dab some of the hydrogen peroxide on a piece of toilet paper. Then you’d force your eyes wide open and stick the wad of peroxide-soaked toilet paper right on top of one. Kind of the same way you’d seen people put contact lenses in. You’d do that to one eye, and then you’d do it to another. Finally, you’d tie the housecoat belt around your eyes, to hold the toilet paper in.
Yes, that’s exactly what you would do. You hoped it would burn your eyes and render them no longer functional. At the very least, you hoped it would hurt. You hoped it would punish your eyes for seeing so much ugliness.
With all your tools for self-injury packed away, you marched out to the living room. Mom’s coffee table knickknacks clattered and shook once again, under your steps. You told her you were going now. She sipped coffee and waved goodbye to you. Dad waved, too. Waved a little too excitedly, like someone waving bon voyage to a cruise ship.
When you escaped out the front door, you saw your breath in the air. You should have picked up some gloves. You should have worn a coat. You didn’t like the idea of going back in and having to say “goodbye” all over again, but you did. You put on your coat and your gloves.
“There he is, the absent-minded professor!” your mother said.
In your coat pocket, you flipped her the bird.
You walked back out and felt the weight of the household fall from you. It felt good, for a moment. Then you realized you got out later than you’d wanted to. You jogged off your front porch and down the stairs. Over the years, they had begun to work themselves away from the foundation, so that when you stepped on them, they tilted. This made you trip, but you righted yourself before falling.
There were already other kids at the bus stop. The minute they spotted you walking toward them, they started laughing.
“We need to stop calling him Trash Ass,” one of them said. You were surprised, because you didn’t expect the least bit of sympathy from this crowd. The dude—a senior, no less—looked at you. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
You looked at the ground and nodded back.
“We need to stop calling him that,” the senior said, “because it’s not just his ass that smells like trash!” He smiled. “I can smell his b.o. from here. Let’s call him Trash Pits!”
The other kids started laughing. “Trash Pits! Trash Zits,” they chanted, nonsensically.
You couldn’t bear it any longer. You were not one of them. It was high time that you stopped going through the motions of being one of them. You walked away from the bus stop.
“Awww,” the senior said, “we hurt his widdle feewings.”
“H-he’s really leaving… ” a girl said. She giggled, then repeated herself. (This time, sounding incredulous rather than mocking.) “Oh wow… he’s really leaving.”
You kept walking. Out of your little white trash subdivision. Onto the sidewalk. Into your neighborhood, a suburban area called Hikes Point. Not the poorest place in Louisville. Not the richest.
You didn’t have any idea where you were going. You just knew you weren’t going to school.
Where you going, Trash-Pits, to deposit yourself in the dump?
Honestly, that didn’t sound half bad. But you knew of a little city park, an odd wooded area nestled in the suburbs. It was only about five blocks away. You decided you’d go there and do what you’d planned to do. It made a hell of a lot more sense than trying it at school, anyway.
It felt freeing to play hooky. (Even if your plans were to just spend all day outside, in the cold.) The park had a soccer field, but you ignored that and walked onto the nature trail, instead. It had been three whole weeks since the last snow. But there, in the shade provided by the trees, there were little remnants that lingered. Snow trapped in an oak’s bark and in its roots. Snow crusted over fallen leaves.
You went off the trail, to the darkest, most densely forested area you could find. It was white with snow and brown with leaves and black with shadows. You lay down there. You used the backpack as a pillow, and you breathed.
It wasn’t true wilderness. You still heard cars zoom by. You still heard airplanes overhead. In fact, you’d not been there too long when you even heard someone else tramping through the trail. They didn’t seem to stumble on to you, though. That, at least, made you feel relieved.
After you had rested for about fifteen minutes, you fetched the ice pick out of your bag. Then you realized you hadn’t brought a mirror. But you could aim without a mirror, couldn’t you? It wasn’t that hard.
That’s when it dawned on you. You would never blind yourself, for the same reason you would probably never kill yourself. You were a gutless coward. What were you doing out there? When your mother found out you not only skipped detention, but skipped school altogether, she would rage at you. You should try to scurry back. You should beg for forgiveness. If you hurried back and came up with some excuse for missing the bus, you might be able to set everything right.
You endeavore
d to get up off your ass and do all that. You really, really wanted to do all that. But once again, your muscles wouldn’t follow your brain’s directions. So you lay there, in the cold. When your muscles sufficiently un-froze, you got up on your knees and opened up your backpack. You had to snort snot back into your nose. You had to wipe a lingering thread of it off with your jacket sleeve.
You got out the peroxide, the toilet paper, and the housecoat belt. And then, you executed Plan B. Wadded up some toilet paper like a cotton ball. Put the toilet paper up to the mouth of the peroxide bottle. Turned the bottle upside down to soak the toilet paper through. Repeated those steps with a second wad of toilet paper. You took off your glasses, then pried your eyelid wide open with your right hand while you put the peroxide-soaked t.p. onto the eyeball, itself, with the left.
The peroxide felt so cold against the skin adjacent to the eye. Felt cold on the eye itself, too. It felt cold, and it stung. Stung so fiercely that, at first, you winced and shuddered. But in a matter of moments, you learned to love it. The stinging was like life embracing you. For the first time in a long time, embracing you. You felt something. And if you felt, you counted. You existed. It took you momentarily out of the pain in your head and the pain in your heart and reminded you that you really existed as something material. You weren’t merely a disembodied spirit. “You’re solid,” the pain insisted. “You’re real”.
You groped for the housecoat belt. Tied it tight around your head in such a manner that it kept the toilet paper in constant contact with the eyeball. Then you pulled it up a little so you could see out of your other eye. So you could hurt it in the same way. And when you did, when the pain embraced both of them, simultaneously, you felt yourself getting a hard-on. You unzipped your pants. Wriggled your jeans and underwear down to your knees. Life was no longer merely embracing you. It was stroking you. You stroked back, whimpered, and came. Wiped your hand off on the cold earth beside you.
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