Lesser Gods

by Adrian Howell

  I told this story too, though it was harder, especially because I had no concept of time and couldn’t be sure when certain things happened. Mr. Simms was mostly interested in how many different people had come to feed me, and whether I had heard anything about the location of other Slayer safe houses and facilities. Had I learned anything at all that might lead to finding more Slayers to kill? I wished I had, but there was nothing I could offer.

  Mr. Simms persisted, and Terry cut in angrily, “Come on, Swoop, don’t you think he’s been through enough already?!”

  “It’s alright, Terry,” I said, nevertheless grateful for her support.

  I told the story again from the start. I hadn’t mentioned any details about Charles except that he had been one of my feeders, and I didn’t add anything on my second telling either. I didn’t think Mr. Simms would understand, and I was hoping that he wouldn’t bring it up, but sure enough...

  “Adrian, why did you ask that Charles be given a painless execution?”

  I replied uncomfortably, “He was the only one who didn’t beat me.”

  “I suppose that’s something to be grateful for, under the circumstances,” agreed Mr. Simms. “But if it were entirely up to your discretion, would you have had his life spared?”

  I silently thought about that for a moment, realizing that my hesitation was already part of my answer.

  “No,” I finally decided. “He deserved what he got.”

  After a short pause, Mr. Simms asked, “Do you have any questions for us before we finish?”

  “Just one. Am I still a Raven Knight?”

  Mr. Simms seemed to smile as he replied, “Yes, Adrian. But you will remain an inactive one for the time being.”

  I nodded. “Thank you, Mr. Simms.”

  “Take care of yourself.”

  We stood and Terry guided me out.

  As we walked back down the corridor to the elevator, Terry said, “Why did you ask him that?”

  “About being a Knight?” I shrugged. “I just wondered.”

  “If you got your sight back, do you think you’d want to go on another mission?”

  “I might,” I said uncertainly. “I don’t know yet, but I might.”

  Then Terry said with a hint of accusation in her voice, “You didn’t tell me you killed two Slayers, Adrian.”

  “You never asked,” I replied. “I suppose they deserved what they got too, but I’m not proud of it.”

  “But it was easier this time, wasn’t it?”

  “Difficult to say. I didn’t have time to think about what I was doing.”

  Terry was still leading me with her fingers around my left elbow, so she easily noticed my hesitation as we left the lobby of NH-4.

  “Are you alright walking outside?” she asked.

  “It’s still a little scary,” I admitted, forcing myself to keep pace with her. “I don’t know if I could do this alone.”

  “You’ll learn. You’re much better than this morning, anyway.”

  “I don’t know what happened to me this morning, Terry,” I said embarrassedly. “It was like the whole world just disappeared around me. I’m sorry I was such a baby.”

  “No, Adrian. You remember how I was after we got Cindy back. You’re going to have your ups and downs for a while, too. That’s just part of getting back on your feet.”

  “You sound like Cindy,” I said.

  Terry laughed. “Even Cindy can’t always be wrong. Just give yourself time, Adrian.”

  I smiled, remembering how uncharacteristically supportive Terry had been this morning. Now too, the girl who usually did everything she could to show she was a rock was acting almost motherly. I wondered if this was Terry’s way of going through her ups and downs.

  Home. Dinner. A bath. I had sternly told my sister to stop waiting for me outside the bathroom door, and was pleased to not hear her breathing or footsteps when I got out. I guided myself along the corridor wall back toward the living room. My slow pace naturally made my footsteps quieter, which was probably why Terry and Cindy didn’t notice me approaching. At the door to the living room, I heard the two talking.

  Cindy was saying, “Begging, huh? It almost sounds like he had a bout of agoraphobia.”

  “A what-phobia?” asked Terry.

  “A fear of going outside,” explained Cindy.

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Oh, you better believe it, Terry,” Cindy said seriously. “Alia was there for years. I don’t know how you managed to break Adrian free of his fear, but it’s a good thing you got him outside before it got worse.”

  “Well, I can’t take much credit,” replied Terry. “I think Alia might have said something to put the fight back into him.”

  “We’ll need to give him some time outside tomorrow, and the next day too, just to be sure he’s over it.”

  I didn’t like the way they were talking about me. Like I was their patient or something.

  Terry said, “I just wish there was something we could do about his eyes.”

  Cindy replied, “For now, we’ll just have to wait for the final word from the ophthalmologist.”

  “Waiting isn’t one of my strong points.”

  Cindy laughed. “That’s probably why you get along so well with Adrian.”

  “You should have seen him run, Cindy,” said Terry. “It was amazing. But he’s not going to be able to continue his combat training, or even use his telekinesis if he can’t see. If the eye doctors can’t cure him, I’m going to the historian for help.”

  “Patience, Terry,” said Cindy. “One thing at a time. The historian is a dangerous last resort.”

  Terry let out a loud huff.

  I grinned. I wasn’t the only one to be frustrated with Cindy’s bottomless calm. I was also curious about the historian Terry had mentioned. Who was he, and how could he help me?

  “Addy?” Alia’s voice in my head nearly stopped my heart. “The door is right in front of you.”

  “Thank you, Alia,” I said through clenched teeth as I opened the door and walked into the living room. Alia’s footsteps told me she was returning to our bedroom.

  “I’m done,” I announced. “Bathroom’s open.”

  “I’m next,” said Terry, brushing past me.

  I wanted to ask her about the historian, but I refused to admit that I had been eavesdropping.

  The doorbell rang, and a man announced, “Express delivery for Adrian Howell, care of Cynthia Gifford.”

  “That’s us,” replied Cindy, opening the door. Once Cindy signed for whatever it was and shut the door again, she said to me, “It’s from a Dr. Lauder, Adrian. Is that your optometrist?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, she can’t be all bad,” said Cindy. “She sent you a present.”

  “Is it a pair of replacement eyeballs?” I asked in mock-hope.

  “I hope not!” said Cindy, laughing. “By the shape of the package, I’m guessing it’s a kiddie cane.”

  I narrowed my mutilated eyes in her general direction. “A what?”

  “A walking cane for the blind,” explained Cindy over the sound of her tearing open the package. “A child-size one is called a kiddie cane.”

  I hadn’t known they came in different lengths, but I knew what a blind man’s cane looked like. Long, thin, abnormally white poles that just screamed out, Danger! Danger! Blind man coming through! Get out of the way before you get whacked by this stick!

  Cindy apparently finished opening the package. “Sure enough, a cane it is. Good thing it isn’t an aluminum one.”

  “I think I’d prefer to keep using Terry’s jo stick,” I said. “At least when I’m not using it to feel my way forward, I could lean on it and people would just think I was a hiker.”

  Cindy said, “The whole point of the white cane is that people know you’re blind, Adrian.”

  “My whole point exactly,” I insisted. “I don’t want people feeling sorry for me.”

  “It’s for your own safety a
s well as others’, tough guy. If you’re going outside, I want you to use this.”

  “Alright,” I said, reluctantly taking the cane from Cindy.

  I ran my fingers along the smooth stick. Made of some kind of hard plastic, the cane was thinner and lighter than the jo stick, and it came with a rubber grip on the top.

  I muttered, “Next thing, you’ll want me to start learning Braille.”

  Ignoring the sarcasm in my tone, Cindy replied cheerfully, “Glad you feel that way, Adrian, because as soon as I can get the books, you will.”

  I shook my head. “You don’t know Braille, Cindy! How can you teach me?”

  “We’ll learn together. You don’t plan on being illiterate, do you?”

  “I guess not,” I said.

  “Adrian, I have a present for you, too,” said Cindy. “I got it while you were at Mr. Simms’s.”

  After stepping out of the living room for a moment, she placed a small rectangular item in my hands, about the size of Alia’s shoe. It was made of plastic, and I got it right on my first guess. “A clock?”

  “For your bedside,” said Cindy. “Try pushing the big button on the top.”

  I did, and suddenly a high-pitch mechanical voice said, “The time now is 8:37pm. Have you brushed your teeth?” I pushed the button again, and the clock said, “The time is still 8:37pm. Did you really need to push the button again?”

  I laughed. “This is really stupid. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Cindy, and then asked, “By the way, have you?”

  “Have I what?”

  “Brushed your teeth.”

  I shook my head and mumbled, “I couldn’t tell which brush was mine.”

  Cindy took my hand. “Come on, I’ll find it for you.”

  “But Terry’s taking her bath now.”

  “So what?” said Cindy, tugging on my hand. “It’s not like you can see her.”

  I refused to move. “That’s really not the point, Cindy.”

  Cindy retrieved my toothbrush from the bathroom for me and let me brush in the kitchen. Afraid that I might miss or not get the amount right, Cindy put the toothpaste on my brush for me, and she had to show me where the sink was and fill my water cup, too. Already irked at Dr. Lauder’s present, I couldn’t hide my frustration over having to rely upon Cindy for something as trivial as brushing my teeth.

  “We’ll just have to get used to this together, okay?” said Cindy, gently patting my shoulders.

  “Cindy, what happens if the eye surgeon says it’s hopeless?” I asked, wondering if Cindy might mention the historian.

  No such luck. Cindy merely replied, “Then we’ll look for other options, Adrian. Try to be patient.”

  “There’s nothing quite like being handicapped to learn patience,” I said sourly, fingering my kiddie cane.

  “I know how you feel about being handled, Adrian,” said Cindy, “but Alia wants to do something for you tonight, and I hope you’ll let her.”

  “What is it?” I asked apprehensively, recognizing the voice Cindy assumed whenever she was about to embarrass me.

  “Your sister told me how you used to read to her every night back at the research center.”

  “Oh, no,” I said, but I couldn’t keep myself from smiling. “She’s not about to read me a bedtime story, is she?”

  “You got it!” laughed Cindy, taking my hand. “Come on.”

  “It better not be Hansel and Gretel,” I muttered as Cindy quickly led me down the corridor.

  Alia was waiting in our bedroom, and sure enough, my worst fears were confirmed. After placing my talking clock within reach from my bed, Alia sat on my mattress and telepathically read the fairytale into my mind. At first it was the strangest, most awkward and embarrassing feeling, lying there and letting my little sister read me a bedtime story, but I must have gotten used to it quickly, because I think I fell asleep before she finished.

  Chapter 9: The Last Resort

  Dr. Lauder telephoned three days later to report that the ophthalmologist had confirmed her initial diagnosis. Terry called her a cow and much worse, but that didn’t change the fact that there was increasingly little hope that I would ever see again. In fact, it seemed with each passing day that the light my eyes could detect was just a bit dimmer, and I wondered how long it would be before I couldn’t even tell light from shadow.

  Unwilling to give up on human medicine without at least one more try, Cindy quickly arranged for me to visit one of the world’s top ophthalmologists for a third opinion. I took an overnight trip to a big non-psionic hospital, accompanied by Alia and three of Mr. Baker’s Lancer Knights: one telekinetic bodyguard, a peacemaker to make sure the doctor did as he was told, and a mind-writer to delete his memory of me afterwards.

  After examining my eyes, the renowned eye surgeon spoke at length in a dull monotone which, considering the nature of his diagnosis, may not have been entirely due to the peacemaker’s influence on his mind. When I pressed him for any and all options, he suggested that, given a great number of ifs, successful surgery might restore partial peripheral vision in my left eye, but he was probably just being polite.

  “Partial peripheral vision?!” cried Terry when I returned to New Haven and told her. “How are you supposed to shoot a gun with partial peripheral vision?!”

  For my part, I had been better prepared for bad news this time and I was in no hurry to shoot a gun anyway, so I merely smiled and kept my disappointment to myself. Neither Terry nor Cindy had mentioned the mysterious historian again, and I had concluded that it was just another fool’s hope not even worth pursuing.

  Meanwhile, my summer vacation had been officially canceled. The beginner Braille books Cindy ordered for me had already arrived.

  I had originally thought that Braille was just an alphabet for the blind, and all I’d have to do was touch the six raised dots on the paper that represented each letter and learn to tell them apart.

  Wrong.

  For starters, Braille wasn’t just an alphabet. There were separate symbols for punctuation, and the first ten letters doubled as numbers, which was confusing. And that was just basic Grade One Braille. The real Braille that I would eventually have to master contained nearly two hundred additional combinations of dots to represent blends such as “sh” and “th” as well as the short form of common words such as “you” and “between.” Depending on how it was used in a sentence, the single letter C, represented by two dots side by side, could mean capital or lower-case C, number three, or even the word “can.”

  But for the present, I already had my fingers full trying to tell the difference between the first few letters of the alphabet.

  My first Braille reader was essentially an alphabet chart followed by kindergarten-level sentences, with raised Braille dots on one page and normal text on the other. There wasn’t much Cindy could teach me, so she left it mostly to my sister to sit by my side and read the text as I ran my index fingers along the rows of dots. It was very slow, painstaking work. Even when I already knew what was written, I often couldn’t identify the letters on the page.

  “I didn’t learn to speak in a day, Addy,” said Alia whenever I got frustrated with my inability to tell the symbols apart. I wasn’t about to admit that I didn’t have the fortitude to grind through this new challenge in my life, especially after Terry and I had practically bullied Alia into learning mouth-speaking less than a year ago.

  But Braille was just the tip of the iceberg.

  Living with blindness was more than just not knowing where the door was. It was a whole series of inconveniences ranging from accidentally knotting my shoelaces to not being able to tell the difference between my own toothbrush and Alia’s which, at Alia’s insistence, was identical to mine except for the color of the handle. The one commonality with all of the new challenges I faced was speed: everything took much longer.

  Cindy did everything she could think of to blind-proof the penthouse. She put one rubber band around the shamp
oo bottle and two around the rinse so that I could tell them apart without having to decipher the raised Braille dots on the plastic bottles. She put some tape around my toothbrush handle. She rearranged the living room, removing one of the sofas so that it was less crowded. She reorganized my dresser so that each drawer contained only one type of clothing. She glued Braille labels onto the drawers in the kitchen, as well as on the salt and pepper shakers and ketchup and mustard bottles. She placed a square mat in front of every door in the penthouse so that my feet could tell me where I was standing. I didn’t absolutely need all of the things Cindy did for me, but they helped a lot, and I did my best not to complain too frequently about being handled.

  Determined to achieve as much self-reliance as I could, I made my efforts too. With practice, I learned how to eat using forks and knives. I learned how to put just the right amount of toothpaste onto my toothbrush. I stopped putting my shirts on backwards and got better at making my bed. I learned how to walk in a straight line for short distances. I even got better at using my kiddie cane and, while I never went outside of NH-1 alone, I no longer needed someone holding my arm every second of the time.

  Whereas my sister would still be hand-feeding me if I let her, Cindy thoughtfully gave me chores within my limited capacity such as folding laundry, wiping the dining table and vacuuming the floors. She also had me running random errands to nearby stores with Alia. Of course Alia could have gone alone, and I was probably more of a hindrance than a help, but at least I could keep her company.

  Whenever we still had the time, Terry and Alia took me out to the park or sometimes even to the public swimming pool. Being in the water was a bit frightening at first, but once I got better at keeping my head above the surface, the pool was a refreshing respite from the summer heat. I suspected that people were staring even more than usual, but I was used to it by now.

  Laila Brown would sometimes join us on these excursions. She took as little issue with my blindness as she did with Alia’s awkward mouth-speaking, for which I was very grateful. At home, Terry still teased me about Laila wanting me to ask her on a date, but I doubted there was any truth behind it. Laila was primarily there to see Terry.