What if: a man afraid of the dark goes blind



After a while, the sensation of gripping the blankets by my sides began to ebb
as my fingers became numb.  Doctors came and went, and I began to recognise them
by the sound their shoes made on the squeaky plastic floor.  The nurses were
quieter, gliding in on rubber heels, to speak to you suddenly from the darkness,
a few inches from your face.

No visitors and no answers, just the crack in their voices as they told me that
my eyes were gone and I'd never see again.  Not even a slight appreciation of
light and shade to spare me the terror of the dark.  My psychologist had come
to sit with me yesterday or a hundred days ago, to explain that absence of light
was not the same thing as darkness.  He knew the depth of my fear of the dark,
and his voice told me without words that I was doomed.  Blindness seemed to have
rendered me telepath. All trutgh was exposed to me int he click of the tongue or
almost noiseless purse of the lips. He went.  He had been the only English
speaking psychiatrist on this dreadful island.

On the next day, they moved me to another ward.  I felt the air move on my face,
and the balance organs in my ears related accelerations and rotations, but since
I had never seen the hospital with my eyes, I had no conception of where I was.
I was still too sick to ride in a chair, they took me on a horizontal gurney ride.
I imagined the strip lights passing overhead as I was pushed along corridors but
could feel no shadow of their existence from their colf fluorescent tubes.  The
doors banged around my head at regular intervals, betraying an idea of my journey
and the last bump was against a wall and I assumed I had arrived.

The room echoed differently, and there were other voices, frail and pleading. The
room felt infused with light, though I shied away from the notion, training myself
to stop thinking about the world in shades of light and dark.  For me all was dark,
and the sooner I began to describe my world in gradations of sound and smell the
better.  And the sound of this room was pain without release, and the smell was
injury and decay.  I was on the exit ward.

For an hour in the afternoon, a ray of sun traversed my face and I slept a little,
comforted by the illusion of light.  I awoke with the blankets around my waist and
feeling horribly cold and alone.  The heat had gone, and my skin felt like dead
chicken flesh.  I called out to a nurse but none came, for it was the time of the
late afternoon when the young nuns went back to the convent for vespers and left
us to our thoughts and their God.  I shivered for a while, until the evening shift
of lay nurses came around with food and tucked me in and spoke to me in the native
tongue to try to convince me to eat, but I could not.

I felt a candle burning onm my bedside table, and heard it spit as mosquitoes spent
their last second in its glory.  I must have slept again, because when I was next
aware, it was cold and silent.  My ears swept the room for sounds of groans and
suffering, but the room was oddly silent.  Had they moved me again as I slept?
I called out "Annuna" which I knew from other patients meant a cry for help in the
native tongue of the island, but nobody woke and nobody came.

The cold was very bad now and I shook even under the bedclothes.  I let my left hand
venture out to the bedside table but found nothing there except a burned down candle
and my spectacles.  Why they had left them there for me, a man with no eyes, I had
no idea.  But the catholics were very strict with sins like theft and carelessness,
and perhaps they thought the rims were valuable.  I crushed them in my fist and
threw them ahead of me.  They clattered lightly on the floor some distance ahead, 
hitting no obstacles.  That was not right and I became more nervous.

I called out once more until my shrill alien voice rattled the window panes.  I swung
my legs out of the bed and leaned forward to find a chair I guessed would be there.
I found my clothes on it, and pulled them on, calling out all the while.  When I was
dressed I tried to stand, and found that I could, although my legs were weak and I
could barely walk above a shuffle.  I made my way around the bed, trying to use the
sounds my feet made to guess the extent of the room.