Blind (2 page)

“A fox,” his mother corrected. “I’m going to make you a fox-boy and write about you in my next story. Would you like that?”

“Yes,” he said, tapping his heels against the wood floor in delight.

She took the drawing from him them and spread it flat on the floor before pulling him into her arms.

She kissed the top of his head. For long while she just held him, saying nothing. And Edison was perfectly content with that.

“What’s a life without dreams?” she said at last, her voice faraway now.

Edison pretended not to hear the sadness.

When Edison woke it was still dark. Something had jarred him from heavy slumber and had left his heart rapt and thrashing. His bedroom held the predawn close, the fuzzy outline of his desk and corner against the wall were soft around the edges as they bled into the shadows. The rapid click of his eyes darting around the room, annoyed him, increasing his agitation.

Then he heard the voices.

He pushed his school books off of him and slipped from bed. He found a T-shirt on his floor to cover his cool skin. The smell of roasting meat and sweet bread filled the house. He braced one hand on the frame before he dared to peek out.

“You can’t do that,” Nana said. She was nearly foot shorter than her son, but she was unafraid to look up into his wild face. Her hair was out of place and she still wore the long robe that she favored in the off hours of the day. She’d turned away from the stove where dinner was cooking to scold him.

“It will buy time,” his father replied.

“Sure, an appeal will delay the operation, but—”

“That’s all I need. More time. There’s only very small window for such a request. If I can simply drag it out for a year, maybe two, then he’ll no longer be eligible.”

“No,” his Nana said firmly. “He’ll pursue it regardless because he’s as stubborn as you are. He’ll get the ocular implantations, no matter his age. And you’ll simply put his life in danger.”

“His life is in danger if I do nothing.”

“The integration of such a chip is highly complicated,” she said. “There are so many things that go wrong. These chips have more side effects than any other. The morosity and impulsive behaviors that your wife had are the least of it. It is best if you nurture him now. Help him stabilize rather than fight him! Your resistance endangers him more than the chip itself! And it was the same with Vivienne!”

Nana looked at Edison then, past his father directly into his own eyes. Edison slipped back into his bedroom. For countless moments he waited to hear them come down the hall into his bedroom. He waited to be yanked forcibly not only into the hallway, but into the argument.

Instead, the house grew quiet, even over the sound of pots clanking at the stove and his own thunderous heart.

When the door was finally opened from the outside, it was only the small, frail woman.

“Come on out. Dinner’s ready,” she said, her robe hanging open on either side of her. Her long thick brain hung over her shoulder, well-past her sagging chest. “And don’t worry. Your father won’t be joining us.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Locke asked the next day. She laid her bike down in the grass near Edison’s front porch and sank onto the step beside him. “You haven’t heard anything I’ve said, have you?”

“Sorry,” he mumbled and leaned his back into the cool stone. “I know you hate it when people don’t listen to you.”

She ruffled his hair, as she’d done more and more frequently lately. And as was the latest custom, a strange feeling rolled through him, a flutter somewhere between his heart and stomach.

He knocked her hand away. “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

She cradled her wrist as if he’d broken it. He opened his mouth to apologize again but couldn’t think of what he was apologizing for. That things were different? He wasn’t sure how to articulate that anyway. Because he wasn’t sure how they were different, especially since so many things were still the same. She was only a few months older than him, still his best friend, still living just two doors down. But she’d already undergone Settlement and so they no longer had classes together. Once she chose
Instructional
eyes, her education had been adjusted, as was the case. In fact, Edison was only one of six students still left in his class. And if his father did appeal, then what? Would he be tutored individually? Like an idiot?

But it wasn’t that she’d changed classes.

She lowered her wrist and straightened her back.

“I
said
I know what you should say to your dad,” she said. “I know how you can explain your side to him.”

“Just because you are good at telling people what to do, doesn’t mean you should,” Edison replied. His eyes were fixed on the backpack between his feet as he ran a minor calculation of the zipped teeth.

“Oh Eddy,” Locke replied with a disapproving tilt of her head. “Don’t be that way. Just show me the booklet.”

He removed the booklet that Dr. Barnard had given him and handed it over.

“I didn’t even read the Artist section,” she replied, accepting it. “I’ve known I wanted Instructional eyes for as long as I can remember.”

“Well, you do have a knack for, uh, instruction,” Edison said with a small smile.

“You mean bossy,” she said, frowning. “I know what you mean.”

He reached across her leg and pointed out the earmarked page. Again that strange tension rolled over him. Locke herself became very still.

“Read it aloud,” he said in a voice that was strange even to him.

“Artists usually work closely with Architecturals because—” and this is where she began to quote the glossy page with the same pedantic tone as most of their teachers. “’It adds practical application and effective construction to an expansive and creative nature. Exceptional pairings such as the Wright and Picasso pairing of 3612 rendered the most astounding structures of our time.’

‘Or the irreplaceable partnership of ambassadors Thatcher and Poe, 3621, who prevented a conflict over energy rations through the design and construction of The Hydraulic Whale—a massive steel structure positioned in the South Atlantic river, responsible for providing abundant hydraulic energy for over three hundred principalities as well as irrigating an otherwise infertile 700,000 square miles.”

Locke lowered the page. “Tell me why you’re choosing this?”

“I want to see color, to dream, to imagine things,” Edison replied again. But at this point the words felt hollow, robotic. He tried again. “I want to understand all of this.” He swept his arms out in front of him. “Like metaphor—”

“Metaphor is simply the linguistic example of an algebraic variable,” she replied brutally, in a tone that made him think specifically of their fourth year teacher, Mrs. Tyne. “It stands in for something else.” She sounded like everyone else then. “You’re already capable of simile. You make comparisons all the time. I don’t know why metaphor should matter.”

Edison exhaled. “You sound so certain.”

“Most people find comfort in certainty.” She shut the booklet and looked at him strangely. The clicking of her shifting eyes stopped.

“Never mind,” Edison said. “You’re like everyone else. You don’t understand.”

Locke tilted her head as if to take him in from a different angle. He was sure her eyes had provided some conclusion and now she was processing how to best relay the information to him.

She handed him the booklet instead. “Will you change your name as well? I hated Descartes. No one could pronounce it properly. And you know how I am about imprecision. And Edison isn’t much of an artist name, is it? Oh, but you should choose something with an –ED, so I can still call you Eddy.”

“Will you go with me?” he blurted. He wasn’t even sure where the question had come from, if it was genuine, or if he was just desperate for her to stop talking. “To the hospital, I mean, when it’s time.” And he realized it would be nice to have someone there. Nana would have Curie and his father certainly wouldn’t show support. That left him with Locke.

A soft smile crossed her lips and her voice became sweeter than he’d ever heard it. “Of course. I’d be honored.”

Edison found it excruciatingly difficult to focus on his homework. He was exhausted and part of him saw it as pointless, knowing that his education would take a wildly different approach soon enough and all these quadratic equations would be useless.

He was a prisoner at the kitchen table as his pencil bounce-tapped back and forth on his open text book. Then he heard his father come into the house. At first they didn’t speak. His father entered the kitchen, returned his leftovers to the fridge and seemed to contemplate its interior thoughtfully without actually removing anything. Then Edison heard the clink of a cup, the shut of the wood cabinet and a pouring of some fizzy beverage into the cup itself.

Then his father did the surprising thing of sitting down beside him, after weeks of not so much a word to the boy. He took it even farther by asking a question. “Where is your grandmother?”

“She took Curie to the park,” Edison replied. He continued to look down at the open textbook without actually seeing it.

“Do you need help?” his father asked. His father had not offered to help him with his mathematics homework since year three when it became clear that Edison needed no help at all.

“No.”

“You look stuck,” his father pressed. Lifting the cup to his lips before setting it down again.

“Are you going to file the appeal?” Edison asked. He didn’t want to play whatever game this was.

His father’s eyes shift-clicked from his cup to his son’s school books to Edison himself before answering. “I don’t know.”

“Nana’s right,” he adds. “I’ll find a way.”

Mr. Jacobi considered him again. “Have they taught you the history of our ocular implantations yet? I know it is standard Settlement instruction—or at least it was.”

Edison put his pencil down to prevent revealing the shaking tension in his hands. “They told us about before, when eyes were still—” Edison searched for the word. “Organic.”

“The organ of sight,” his father said. “Did you know the iris was supposedly colored—each pair unique to its host? I believe you expressed an interest in color with Dr. Barnard.”

Color, yes.
Do you remember what I told you about the sky?

“Why do you think we lost our eyes?” Edison asked.

His father’s fingers traced the handle of his cup. “I personally agree with the Architectural assessment. Over-stimulation rendered them useless. We saw so much until we saw nothing, even when looking. I believe our consequent evolution was meant to restore balance. Why do you think we have all this?”

Edison wasn’t sure what he was pointing at.

“This is wood.” The older man gestured at the cabinets, the walls. The he pulled at his shirt. “This is cotton.”

“So?” Edison asked.

“Did you know there was a time when everything we used was manufactured? With the exception of air, water and sunlight, everything was made. We’d put so much technology between ourselves and the natural world that we lost the connection. Even the air, sunlight and water must be filtered now. For a time we had nothing natural, now we are moving back toward the natural, to the way it was before.”

“I don’t understand,” Edison said.

“You want to understand what happened with your mother,” his father replied. “But doing this won’t help you understand her or what happened.”

“It isn’t about her. Is it so hard for you to believe that this is for me? That I’m doing this for me?”

“I want you to be happy,” his father replied. “And safe.”

“Then don’t file the appeal,” Edison said.

“I can’t simply watch you fail.”

“I won’t fail,” Edison said.

“You will because it is still technology,” Mr. Jacobi said. “And it is the nature of the eye itself to deceive us.”

He’d woken to the sound of Curie screaming. The kind of screaming that suggested more than a wet diaper or a hungry belly. Raising his head from his inclined desk where he’d fallen asleep while pushing through some rather tedious homework, he called out. “Mom?”

His ears strained but he didn’t hear her. And Curie was still crying. Why hadn’t she responded to Curie’s crying?

His heart thumped against his ribcage roughly as he pushed himself out of the chair and into the hallway. His father was at work and Nana was living a hundred miles away, in the apartment she acquired after her husband’s death. But his mom should be here.

When he eased open the door, it was just enough to see Curie, holding onto the side of her crib and screaming. Her baby face was dark from blood and exertion with no sign of giving up. He’d never heard her scream like this before.

“Curie,” he said, pushing the door open wider. But he stopped.

Beside her crib was a dark splatter. He couldn’t be sure of the material. But the viscosity was strange. It was too thick to be water, but too thin to be—a sound interrupted his processing. A small one that barely registered over Curie’s scream. Edison had only caught the tail of the guttural moan in a moment when Curie, desperate, had stopped screaming only long enough to suck more air into her lungs.

Pressing his palm against the door, he eased it wider. Each creak intensifying the rhythm of his heart. His eyes followed the viscous trail first, the nervous clicking of the orbs stretching out much like the door had, as if to prolong the moment. The sound of time itself, being stretched long by unforgiving hands.

The biggest pool sat by the crib in an irregular, half-oblong, half-line shape, but that isn’t where it had ended. More had hit the wood at various angles, moving toward the back of the room.

He saw the eyes first.

The mechanical orbs slick with the same viscose material that marred the nursery floor. One had rolled to the right, leaving a bizarre sort of track, a series of squares and rivets stamped in its wake. The other appeared to sit where it’d been dropped. The floor around it untouched.