I remember his voice being quite deep, not rough but just
sounding like it came from a place much further down his body than his throat.
He asked about what had happened to my eyes and I told him all about it and
they ran some tests and examined the place my eyes used to be and he said that
he’d be able to help me. Me and Heather were so happy! I couldn’t wait to see
all the things I remembered seeing before, to see if they’d changed or stayed
exactly the same, even whether I’d remembered all the colours right, because
it’s easy to forget exactly what red and blue look like when you’ve only seen
them in your head for ten years. I was so excited at having eyes again, to be
able to live a normal life, maybe get a job, talk to people again without them
being all sympathetic and awkward with their breathing, and see if the picture
I had of Heather was like how she was in real life, whether her eyes were the
same colour as they were in my head. We got told I’d have to wait for a donor
before I could get new eyes, so we flew back to England, and we waited.
Those days of waiting were really hard. Like I say, I’d
managed to get used to not being able to see, but that was because there was no
chance I’d ever be able to see again, other than in my own head; but now I was
going to be able to, not with my own eyes exactly but I’d be able to see all
the things I hadn’t seen for ten years. I was going to be able to see Heather
and my friends and my mum and my dog and myself, see the sky and the trees and
the sun... We were both so excited, and scared a little, because no-one likes
having an operation, and I was scared things wouldn’t look like I remembered
them looking, scared that I had forgotten some of the things I’d seen. But I
was so excited, I could barely sleep, I just kept hoping for a donor to come
along, even though I knew this was basically saying I wanted someone to die so
I could have their eyes; but I really did, once or twice, really did wish for
someone to die so I could see again...
I didn’t have to wait all that long, really, even if every
day I had to wait seemed to last four hours more than it should, long drawn-out
hours that seemed to stretch me tight and stop me from breathing properly. The
call came; a young man had been killed in a car crash, he’d been speeding and
had smashed his car into a tree, apparently, and so... I had my eyes. And me
and Heather went to the hospital and they put me in one of those open gowns and
sent me to sleep on a cold steel table; and when I woke up, it was done. I
couldn’t open my new eyes at first because of the bandage round my face but i
could feel them there, feel them filling up what had been empty for so long.
I remember how I felt when the bandage first came off. I
could barely open my eyes, they were still swollen and sore from the operation,
but I remember the light, the first light I’d seen for more than ten years. It
was brighter than I’d remember light being, but then I had been in darkness for
a long time, so I guess that was to be expected. I remember the wonder I felt,
the kind of simple childish delight in being able to make out shapes, blurred
dark ones against the backdrop of white for now, but I’d been told my vision
would get better once my body got used to the new eyes. I remember the relief I
felt, relief that I could live my life now on my own terms, not needing a dog
to guide me round but just my own eyes, my new eyes, the sense of power and
independence that surged through me. I remember the pain too, like the nail was
being driven through my eyes all over again, pressing agains thte back of my
new eyeballs where they’d joined them up to my brain. And I remember the fear,
the fear of the new, the fear I wouldn’t like what I could see, the fear that
everything would have changed so much in ten years that I wouldn’t know my own
world any more. Yeah, the fear, rising up in me, making it so I almost didn’t
want to open my eyes any more.
But I did, I did open them and look out at the world again
after ten years, and it was amazing. I saw my mum again, for the first time
since before I went blind, even; she looked older, her hair was greyer, there
were far more lines on her face than I remembered... but I could see her face
again, that face I’d seen looking down on me so many times before. That was a
beautiful moment, the first time I saw her face again. We both cried, joy I
think, relief, yeah, that too, and amazement, because I never thought I’d see
again and now I could.
Now I come to think of it, I remember her looking a bit
puzzled, a bit put off by my new eyes, but I guess I just put that down to
surprise, because my old eyes had been brown and these were green. I know that
because I looked in the mirror as soon as I had the chance and my eyes were
green, a kind of pale pastel colour, quite light and a bit chalky, I guess you
could say. It felt pretty odd, seeing someone else’s eyes on your face. Hell,
it felt quite odd to see your face ten years older than when you’d last seen
it. But it felt good, too.
It was strange, seeing light where before there’d only been
darkness. It was painful at first, while my body healed from the operation and
accepted the new eyes. But eventually that pain stopped, and I got used to
seeing things again, used to the way everything seemed a little darker than
when I was 18; I put it down to age, and to the way hospitals always seem to
suck the whiteness out of everything and make every surface seem somehow
grey... It felt strange, as well, that the images were coming from a different
place now, from a few inches of my head rather than from points all over my
body, from outside rather than in, so that whilst I could see everything, it
all seemed shallower than it had been before, like pictures painted on canvas
rather than pictures painted in my mind. I expected it would be a little
strange, though, seeing again, and so I didn’t get too worried, just put it
down to my body needing to adjust and work out what it was doing with this new
sense it had been given.
Even more than my mum, the person I wanted to see most was
Heather. I was so scared to see her, it was like a fist had clenched inside my
chest, and I was so excited at the same time, knowing that I’d finally know if
the picture I’d built of her from her smell and her touch and her taste was how
she looked to my sight...I remember exactly the moment that I first saw her, first
laid my new eyes on her. She wasn’t exactly like the picture in my head. Her
hair was a bit lighter, her eyes a bit darker, not like leaves but like
stagnant water in an old forgotten pool, and her face didn’t seem as round s
I’d thought, didn’t seem so smooth… But if I looked hesitant, surprised, I
don’t think she noticed, because she threw her arms around me and said she was
so happy I was back and did it hurt and was I OK and we both cried a bit, which
felt strange because I hadn’t cried for a long time, hadn’t been able to, and
the hotness and the wetness hurt my new eyes a little; and seeing her cry meant
all the other stuff didn’t matter because it was the worst thing I’d ever seen
and I wanted it to stop and it had to stop and I was so, so glad when she buried
her head in my chest and I couldn’t see the tears any more. And I looked down
at her hair instead, the hair on the top of her head, and saw that it went a
bit darker as it neared her skull and that made me feel odd, kind of
disjointed, because I’d always imagined it to be one colour and now it looked
like two and neither of them were like I thought her hair should be.
It was OK, though, because I knew that not everything would
be exactly right and anyway it wasn’t as if I could complain about seeing my
girlfriend for the first time in my life and it wasn’t like she’d changed, you
know? Except… Except that, after we’d gone back home and started life again,
and I started looking for a job and watching the television and I didn’t need
my dog to lead me anymore because I could do it myself… Things didn’t seem
right any more. I tried to read but the letters didn’t seem right, black
against white not blue against black; and none of the colours I saw were quite
how I remembered them, greens were always a bit darker and reds deeper and
blues were always light and weak-looking, somehow, as if blue wasn’t a colour
itself but a draining away of colour, the last stage before a colour faded into
black… And Heather was different as well. She didn’t look how I’d imagined and
she stopped sounding like I remembered, she stopped being kind in her voice and
she started to feel more rough and started to feel less soft…
I started to hate seeing her, started to hate the way that I
kept seeing new things about her that I hadn’t been able to see before, to see
the tired lines around her eyes and the scorn that sometimes appeared on her
face and the tiny blemishes on her skin, the brown marks on the white,
reminders that she wasn’t stainless or pure and that when I saw her every time
she changed as I noticed someone different until she wasn’t even really Heather
any more, she was someone else, someone completely different to the Heather I’d
known and seen in my head, because now I could see her outside my head and it
was all wrong, all of it.
I started to think that the operation had gone wrong
somehow, because surely sight should be something wonderful, something magical,
something that you gain because otherwise they wouldn’t describe blindness as
“lack” of sight but as an escape from it. And this sight felt terrible, like I
was looking at everything through dark green glass, and it was only getting
worse as time went on, as I saw more things and each thing I saw tore away the
image I had of it and replaced it with this dark, flat drawing, just a shadow
of what it used to be to me...
So I called the doctor in New York, the one who’d perfected
the eye transplant, but I couldn’t get hold of him, not even his office or his
secretary; the number just didn’t work at all. This didn’t make me feel much
better, I’ll admit; and after I searched round on the Internet and in a couple
of magazines, forcing the letters into my brain however wrong they looked, I
found out that the doctor had disappeared off the face of the earth, just
vanished like he had never been there in the first place, nobody knew where he
was. And almost all of the people who’d had this transplant had started going
mad, done things like throw themselves off bridges or run onto train tracks.
One man in Houston had even killed his girlfriend three months after he’d had
the operation, just taken a knife and stabbed her and then, more horrible, cut
off her face and burnt it... And he’d told the police, when they came to him
with his hands still covered in blood, that he’d done it because “She looked
wrong”, that was the phrase he kept repeating, “she looked wrong”, and he’d
thought she wasn’t his girlfriend but some kind of shapeshifter who’d taken on
the appearance of her face and got it slightly wrong, that’s why he’d taken off
her face, so he could see the shapeshifter underneath... And just after I’d
read this, tears still wet on my cheeks, Heather came in and I looked at her
and I realised that she looked wrong, she didn’t look like the Heather I knew
before I had my new eyes and she was still changing, she was still getting
darker every day...
I couldn’t let it get to that stage, I just couldn’t. To
think I might end up killing Heather because my new eyes had made me see her
differently, or maybe see her how she really was... I couldn’t do that, I just
couldn’t, and even thinking about it made the tears flow again, crying so hard
that my still-healing eyes started to bleed a little and the tears came out
pink-red instead of clear... I didn’t tell her what was wrong, just told her I
was finding being able to see again was overwhelming, which wasn’t a lie, but I
knew I had to do something.
I didn’t sleep that night. I left Heather sleeping in our
bed while I went downstairs and sat in the dark silence, thinking about what I
should do, how I should stop myself doing anything stupid. I couldn’t
understand why anyone would hurt someone they loved, why that man had stabbed
his girlfriend; the only thing he’d been able to say that was coherent was that
she looked wrong... And the others, that had committed suicide or gone mad, all
of them... The only thing they had in common was this operation, was that they
had been blind and now they saw... And they’d all decided they didn’t want to
see any more, and I realised that nor did I, I didn’t want to see any more
because everything I saw looked wrong and was wrong, as if by the very act of
looking at something was making it warp and change and become something flatter
and darker than it really was, than it had been behind my eyes... And that was
the answer. The eyes. Everything had gone wrong since I’d had these new eyes,
these eyes that weren’t my own, these eyes that should have been left closed on
the body of that young man in the car crash and never opened again.
I could make sure they never opened again. I could make sure
I never had to see again, even if as I thought that the darkness around me
started to turn green as if someone had turned on night-vision goggles and I
was looking through them now. I realised, now, that I was far happier being
blind, far happier lacing vision than having the sight of so much that was
wrong in the world displayed before me and knowing that looking at it and doing
nothing to change it was making it worse.
So I went into the kitchen and I opened a draw and took out
a knife, and I placed it against my left eye and I pushed so that I felt the
blade penetrate, and flicked my hand and felt my eyeball detach and fall onto
the floor, and then I did the same with my other eye and now I was weeping
blood, pure red blood that pooled around me on the floor and felt thick and
sticky on my hands as I knelt in the middle of it. And I didn’t make a sound, I
just knelt there, still gripping the kitchen knife, with the pool spreading
around me and the liquid pouring slowly down my face and dripping from my mouth
and chin. And in the morning Heather came downstairs and found me and I heard
her scream and felt her arm around me and heard her ragged breath and sobs as
she saw what I’d done to myself and I smiled, because I couldn’t see her
anymore and that meant that her image, the deeper image of her touch and sound
and smell... that image would last forever, unsullied by the time that can only
be glimpsed by prying eyes.
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