Blind Sight (7 page)

“Grandfather was killed by Accordion Indians,” Pearl whispered to me. We were all standing in the backyard of our new house, having been let out to play. None of us had ever stood in a backyard of our own before until we came to Delaware. There was a fence running the perimeter of the yard, but before you got to the fence there were a lot of trees, and a birdbath, and flower beds. There was even a shed with tools in it, but we had been told not to go inside that without a grown-up. We understood about not going into places without a grown-up. What surprised us was that Sara and Nana let us play outside by ourselves, and only came and checked on us once in awhile. In New York City we didn’t play outside without grown-ups.

“Who got killed?” I asked.

“Our grandfather,” said Pearl, pulling me by the elbow over to the birdbath, which was too high for me to look into. “Our mom’s dad.”

Aurora, who was nice about these things, lifted me up so I could look into the birdbath. Disappointingly, it was just a dish with water and a few leaves in it. I thought it might look more like our bath, with toys and soap bubbles.

“Our grandfather was a preacher,” said Aurora. “Preacher Prescott.”

“He went to preach to the Accordion Indians,” whispered Pearl. “But they killed him.”

That sounded very bad. Had the Indians squashed our grandfather with their accordions? (We had an alphabet book, one of those ones meant for “gifted” children, which featured the fine arts for the letters: “B” for “Bassoon” and “E” for “Easel.” “A” was for “Accordion.”)

“They didn’t kill him,” said Aurora. “He died before he got to the Accordion Indians. His leg got sick and all the blood got stuck in his leg and that’s how he died.”

“The Accordions would have gotten him anyway,” said Pearl.

“Probably,” said Aurora.

I wanted to go inside and ask Sara if I could give the birds my Froggy sponge to play with, but just then Aurora and Pearl started hopping around the birdbath and hooting.

“We are Accordion Indians!” sang Aurora. “We are wild girls! Wild girls!”

“And we’ll kill you!” shouted Pearl, crouching down on the ground and growling.

Aurora hopped on one foot and looked at Pearl.

“No,” said Aurora. “We’re shy. We hide in the trees.”

And they danced off to one of the trees, and I hopped along with them, but they said no, I had to be Grandfather Prescott. (I was always being given parts like this.)

By the end of the week, we had modified and perfected this game, which mostly consisted of me watching Aurora and Pearl run around and make noises (they were very enthusiastic accordionists) until it was time for my big moment. Then I got to run in front of them and shout, “Good News! Good News!” And then, “My Leg! My Leg!” and fall down. Then Aurora and Pearl would pick me up (my favorite part) and carry me around for awhile and put me behind the tool shed. Then they threw grass at me. At a certain point, Pearl would demand that we leave because the tool shed and everything in it belonged to her. Aurora would pick me up again (hooray!) and then we all went into the side yard, which was “Florida” and which was where you went for better health.

I don’t think I got this all sorted out until I learned about Ecuador when we got to Geography in fourth grade.

Grandfather Prescott died when Sara was little, so she never had a father around either. Mark’s father left when Mark was four. I don’t know if his father is alive. I don’t know if Mark even knows.

I guess it’s best not to get stuck on what you think things are, or how they happened, or why. We should remain as detached as possible. Maybe for a second, when a caterpillar emerges from its cocoon,
there is a moment when it freaks out and thinks, “Hey, what’s happened? What are these wing things for? What happened to all my little legs?” but then it just flies away. That’s how we should be, as people. We should be ready for everything to change.

After we finished at the gym today, we went back to the house so Mark could shower and make phone calls. I met Carmen, Mark’s cleaning lady, and tried out my Spanish on her. Then we went for lunch. When we are out in public Mark always wears a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. At the restaurant he sat with his back to the other diners, facing me. After lunch, we visited the Griffith Park Observatory. I’m glad he’s also someone who likes to take his time looking at things, and reading about them.

“I’m a closet nerd,” he said.

“Me too,” I told him. “Well, maybe not a closet nerd. I’m probably an obvious nerd.”

“You’re obviously cool,” he said. “They get that, right? At your school? They get how cool you are?”

“Well, it’s easy for me,” I assured him. “Because of my sisters. Everybody wanted to be friends with Aurora because she’s so nice. And everybody wanted to be friends with Pearl because she’s scary. So by the time I showed up for stuff everybody just figured I was okay too.”

I think this is mostly true. Sometimes girls will tell me that I’m not like “other guys,” but that’s probably a product of my sisters too. The whole not-being-a-Chad thing. I wonder what kind of guy Mark was in school.

I told Mark that when I was little, I thought the sky was the ceiling of the planet, like a dome that protected the planet from outer space, and us from falling into it. And that I kept on thinking of it like that for a long time, even after I understood some basic science. Then one day, I looked up into the sky and REALLY understood that
the only thing between outer space and me was space. And that we are glued to the earth because of gravity and that gravity is a constant force. There was never any dome at all, just a perception of a dome.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “Are you saying there’s not a dome? Shit!”

I couldn’t help noticing that in spite of the baseball cap there was a certain amount of double takes, nudges, whispered conversations—“Is that …?”—happening around us. A couple of times I thought people were going to come up to Mark, but nobody did.

“God, a totally normal day,” he said during the car ride back to the house. “Great, huh? Let’s get Slurpees. I haven’t had a Slurpee in forever.”

I agreed that it had been great although almost nothing about it had really been normal for me. Two weeks ago, I had never sat in a jade steam room, never experienced valet parking, never been taught about the enlivening powers of Tabasco Sauce from my father, never been taught anything by a father. I had never spoken Spanish with someone from Mexico, never stared at live images of the sun, never known how much I weigh on Jupiter, never been sent into a 7-Eleven to get two Slurpees.

“You know,” Mark said, when I got back to the car, “back to what you said about gravity? I have to admit gravity kind of freaks me out. I don’t get it. I mean, I get it, but it seems impossible, sort of. I would have been one of the people saying, ‘Hell no. The earth is flat.’ ”

“Me too,” I said. “Although you have to go with the idea that makes sense of A LOT of things, not just what makes sense for you personally, right? People tell you to trust your instincts, but …”

“When people tell you to trust your instincts it just means they have no clue either,” Mark said.

“Yeah,” I said, sucking at my Slurpee. “Yeah.”

The attraction between two bodies is proportional to their masses. This is the law of gravity, but there is nothing in the law that tell us WHY that should be so.

I agree with Mark. Thinking about gravity, really thinking about it, can kind of freak you out.

Actually, Luke
still
mostly feels that the sky is a kind of protective dome. In many instances he has been able to replace intuition with acquired knowledge, but in this case he has failed. However, he is prepared to accept that what he feels is wrong, and what science has proved is correct.

Luke had spent the day watching. He watched his father watch his own reflection in the mirrors at the gym, watched the couple sitting next to them at lunch watch his father eat a frittata, watched his father watch himself, Luke, at the observatory. Luke had watched the sun. He located the signals being sent to him, around him, for him. Luke experienced happiness in meeting those signals successfully. He enjoyed his father’s enjoyment of the Slurpee, and his father’s enjoyment of Luke’s enjoyment of his own Slurpee.

He enjoyed seeing his father recognized, enjoyed feeling slightly famous himself, enjoyed feeling that he was the person whom Mark
wanted
to talk to.

Later that evening, as Luke was getting ready for bed, Mark came into Luke’s room holding a leather jacket.

“I just found this in my closet,” Mark says. “Here. Try it on.”

“It’ll be huge on me,” says Luke, but, “No, it’s small on me,” says Mark, and so Luke puts it on. It fits perfectly.

“It’s yours,” says Mark. “It looks way better on you, man.”

Luke has never owned anything made of real leather. His Nana does not have a problem with leather (God gave Adam and Eve coats of skins to wear, John the Baptist wore leather, etc.), but Sara prefers natural or micro fibers. Luke has only bought a few of his own clothes, and he has yet to consider where he personally stands on the ethics of leather.

“Good night.” Mark puts a hand on Luke’s leather-clad shoulder and jostles it slightly. “Thanks for today.” Mark leaves.

Luke stands in the bedroom that he now thinks of as “his” bedroom and inhales the scent of the jacket. He puts his hands inside the jacket pockets, discovers a coin in the right one. He holds the coin hard in his hand, turns it over and over, rubs it between his thumb and forefinger. Luke experiences a sudden rush of emotion: a tightening and throbbing in his throat, as if his throat were a cocoon for something alive, something with a hundred little legs. Luke thinks for a moment that he might cry, half laughs at himself, takes the jacket off, and hangs it carefully in his closet.

O
kay, so your mom and your sisters,” Mark said to me at the gym this morning. “I’m getting them. What about your Nana, though? What’s her deal? She’s religious or something?”

“They’re called the New Plymouth Brethren,” I explained. “It’s kind of a splinter cell from the regular Plymouth Brethren, who are really fundamentalist.”

“You go to church?”

“They call it Assembly. Yeah, I go. We all used to go. Well, not Sara. But us kids. For awhile. It’s kind of complicated.”

I told him I would try an essay about Nana today, while he was at work. Then I’m going to go for a bike ride in Griffith Park. He’s got a regular Schwinn twelve-speed in the garage, along with the most awesome dirt bike ever. I explored the garage yesterday. There are all kinds of things in there. The dirt bike is brand-new. He hasn’t even ridden it yet.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “That was part of some gift basket.”

“Someone sent you the Z250 in a gift basket? That’s like a six-thousand-dollar bike.”

“Well, not
in
it. You get all this stuff. Kati deals with most of it. Take whatever you want in there.”

It’s kind of crazy. There are
bags
of stuff in there. Watches, sneakers, cameras, game systems. I might set up the Wii for us later on, if I have time.

Okay. Essay. This will be more fun, now that I know Mark will be reading it.

There was actually an example of a grandmother story in
50 Successful College Application Essays
. But that girl’s grandmother had been a Holocaust survivor.

My grandmother was the first adult woman I saw fully naked.

That sounds really bad. It wasn’t a sexual thing. I was four and we had only just moved in with her.

All right, so I have an extremely clear memory of my Nana’s breasts and pubic hair. Her breasts were oblong. I mean the skin went down a little ways before it made the round part. And her pubic hair was mostly grey, and it spread—or seemed to—across to the tops of her legs.

It was probably about two seconds (maybe less) of actual viewing time and I don’t remember feeling alarmed or ashamed or anything like that. But the event must have been sufficiently impressive to the cells of my body, and I guess some sort of learning moment occurred, and I remember it. Not only that, but I assumed, for a long time, that breasts came in an oblong structure and that pubic hair was mostly grey and there was a lot of it. “Assumed” is the wrong word. It’s sort of like my early feelings about the dome over our planet. I KNOW that women have different-shaped breasts. I’ve seen the Kama Sutra, and R-rated movies, stuff on the Internet, and come on, I have SISTERS. It’s just that the initial sort of mental picture that often comes up when someone says “nude” or “naked” is this image of my naked
Nana. It’s weirdly hard to unknow what you know even when what you know is wrong. Even weirder is: it’s MY brain that’s making these images of Nana appear even when it’s also MY brain that knows better. People write books or make movies about people losing control over computers, and the machines going rogue or becoming evil, but our own brains are computers, and we don’t seem to be able to control those very well. Our entire lives are operating, if you really think about it, on a rogue program.

So anyway, there I was, age four, gazing up at her, and Nana calmly whipped out a towel and her eyes sort of swiveled and locked on mine, and there it was for the first time, the special look of Nana’s that has since been dubbed the Sword of Silence.

It’s like a superpower she has.

Interpreting the Sword of Silence has always been my special knack. Even though I was only four, I knew what it meant. The towel Nana took up was unnecessary—a gesture to convention, or maybe Nana was chilly. Because Nana was not really naked, I was not really looking at her, and even my own existence and hers was in doubt. It simply was not happening. The sword can only cut so deep, though, I guess, since I still remember it vividly, and she surely meant to swipe my brain clean of it entirely.

“The Sword of Silence” as a term came into use a couple of years later between us three kids, once Aurora and Pearl and I had all received the as-yet-unnamed sword and had discussed it amongst ourselves. Pronouncing the “w” in “sword” when we say it is another
thing we do, along with using the word “sworded” as a verb. As in, “Nana sworded me.” Nana often smiles when she swords you. It’s this very helpful sort of smile. As if to say, Here, let me aid you in your confused ways by evaporating them. It’s not necessarily violent, but it’s powerful. Aurora wore an “Evolution Rocks” T-shirt to the breakfast table once and she swears Nana sworded it so hard she actually faded the material. Aurora went up to her room and put a sweater over the T-shirt before coming back to breakfast.