Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(43)

The closest C and I ever got to meeting each other was when an Annie Leibovitz installation came to the gallery on campus, hundreds of her photographs and serials of her proofs, and for several breath-holding minutes, we talked in hypotheticals about that installation because, of course, meeting on campus was nothing.

Safe as houses.

It was photography, and we talked about his pictures all the time.

Then, the hypotheticals drifted away, scrolled up the screen, and disappeared.

He didn’t talk about the installation, later, after he had surely been to see it.

As if we had stood the other up and couldn’t speak of it, when really, I had not let him quite ask me so that I wouldn’t have to either reject him or accept.

He knows I am a new member of the Lakefield State research faculty, but that’s all. He hasn’t asked what I research and I haven’t told him. I know he works somewhere on campus, and that he likes his job, but he hasn’t told me what it is.

Or at least, I change the subject when I’m worried he’s getting close to saying something that will release him from my computer.

He wants to know why I’m not comfortable going out, and because I won’t tell him, he worries it’s because I’m shy or not adjusting well.

Because we don’t really talk about our day, not exactly.

More and more, he’s told me about these things that he’s done—the concerts and the new restaurants, and the events.

When he does, I try to get him to talk about his photographs. Or I tell him the room is dark.

I don’t tell him exactly how dark it gets, nowadays, how that scares me. How I’ll look at the time on the laptop again and again, certain it must be later, and it’s still early and I’ll realize, looking at the living-room windows and the giant halo around them, the distorted ring my night blindness refracts a light source into, that there is still enough residual evening light that I should be able to see better.

I don’t tell him that I take one bus line, the one that I worry about missing, every morning, because it’s the line without any transfers and I’m not sure about transfers yet. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, terrified I’ve overslept and I’m going to miss that bus.

I don’t tell him that I get all of my groceries at the corner store three straight blocks from my house. Or that my whole life I was a vegetarian, but it’s too hard to find good options at the corner store so I’ve started eating meat again.

I don’t tell him that I talk to my mom every day on the phone and that sometimes, I make her talk to me after I’ve gotten in between the covers and that she talks me to sleep.

I don’t tell him that I miss museums, and concerts, and getting tipsy enough at bars that I’ll sneak a drag of a friend’s cigarette, or cool restaurants, or coming back from the bathroom during a movie date with an extra button undone so your date notices and tries something.

I couldn’t manage the aisles of a dark theater, now. The crush of bodies in a dimly lit bar. The strobe lights at a concert.

C, I can manage.

His words are lit and bright and framed into the square of the laptop screen.

C is hypotheticals and light. Pictures of the world I’ve been missing.

I can fix him on this little slide of a life I’ve made and figure him out, slowly, as the magnification increases, as I catalog the bits and pieces he shows me and think about them in different combinations, or simply label them—C doesn’t take pictures of people. C lives next to a couple who keeps goats right in the middle of the city.

C can make me come just by telling me he will stay online while I touch myself in the dark, by telling me that he’s touching himself thinking of me with my hand between my legs.

He’s right in front of me.

I can see him, as long as neither of us moves and keeps the focus where it is.

I think my best bet is to keep still and let the snow fall, let the days get long again, the light return its hours to me, a few more chances a day to figure out what it is I can comfortably keep in front of me and see.

For me, there isn’t some miracle cure, this is my life, or my disease will progress and my life will change focus again, and I’ll have another new life.

I need C to stay right where he is because for now, I don’t know enough to move from where I am.

My hypothesis is that the light will come back, both outside and inside me.

I’m afraid and angry, but the light is a theory I want to prove.

Until then, I just have to keep the experiment going with as many controls as possible.

One bus, back and forth.

One store.

One man, his words under glass.





Chapter Three


Break in the Weather


After all the doctors, I got assigned one doctor, this crazy-smart woman who actually is an expert in visual-field vision loss and double-majored in anatomy and micro in undergrad so we have sort of a common ground, or at least, she totally gets why I have a mug that says EAT. SLEEP. MICROBIOLOGY.

I see her every other week and she has me on really high doses of vitamin A and a supplement called lutein that has been demonstrated to slow the progress of my disease.

I go in, we visit, and she asks about my research, then she measures my visual field, which is mostly done with a big machine I sit down and look into, but Dr. Allen always checks me again, by hand, with a semicircular cardboard meter and string.