Dante's Wood Read online

  “Don’t be like that. Jesus just wants to help you out.”

  “I’ll bet. She’s probably three hundred pounds and has a harelip.”

  “I don’t think so. Jesus says she’s a lawyer.”

  “Which, everyone knows, is incompatible with being fat and ugly. Besides, I don’t need that kind of complication in my life right now.”

  “I agree with you about women being complicated,” Josh said, finally taking the hint that I wasn’t interested in becoming one of Jesus’s experiments in noncommercial matchmaking. “You remember that orange juice we bought last weekend?”

  “Sure. Was something wrong with it? Tasted OK to me.”

  “That’s because you couldn’t read the packaging. I was supposed to get the fresh-squeezed, Vitamin A and D added, low acid, reduced sugar, lots of pulp kind.”

  “I take it that’s not what we got.”

  “Low acid wasn’t on my list. But I was supposed to remember anyway.”

  Josh and I continued to chat about the intricacies of the female mind until the Cubs game ended, as I’d predicted, with a loss, and the Channel 9 Evening News came on. The lead story was a human-interest item about the birth of a baby giraffe at the Lincoln Park Zoo. I assumed this meant there were no murders, arsons, or tornadoes to pump up Nielsen ratings that afternoon. The Double L was starting to fill, and I had just turned my attention to the more interesting human-interest stories going on around us when a news flash came on. I was wrong about there being nothing gruesome to report on:

  “Police are still declining to release details in the fatal stabbing of Gloria Jackson, whose body was discovered at six o’clock this morning in a DePaul neighborhood alley, the latest in a series of slayings that are already being compared to the killing spree of mass murderer Richard Speck.

  “The deaths of two other nurses, also occurring in the early-morning hours, appear to be the handiwork of the same killer, who is believed to be a male in his early twenties based upon the description of an eyewitness who reportedly observed him fleeing the scene. All three victims were hospice workers at area nursing homes, and police speculate that revenge for the death of a loved one may be a motive in the killings.

  “Today Jackson, age twenty-eight, was remembered by family and coworkers as a caring professional who helped terminally ill patients make it through their darkest hours . . .”

  The broadcast switched to footage of Jackson’s parents, who could be heard sobbing on the screen.

  “Ugh,” Josh said. “That could be my daughter in a few years.”

  I downed the rest of my drink in a gulp.

  “Makes you consider how random life is,” Josh continued. “You know, I’ve always thought that had to be the worst—burying your own child. I don’t see how you ever get over it.”

  I mumbled something about not having an opinion.

  “That’s a first. Sometimes I envy you still being a bachelor. You were never tempted?”

  “Who would put up with me?”

  Josh laughed, a little too heartily. “I see your point. Buy us another?”

  “I’ll get them,” I said, suddenly feeling an overwhelming need to be on my feet.

  On my way over to the bar, I wished I’d come clean with him. The trouble was, I wouldn’t have known where to begin.

  Two

  Thirteen months earlier, I was diagnosed with Leber’s Hereditary Optic Neuropathy, a disease caused by a defective gene I didn’t even know existed until I woke up one morning with blurred sight in my left eye. For reasons that aren’t completely understood, this gene sometimes causes a power failure in the nerves that channel information from the eye to the brain, similar to a car that’s been driving along just fine abruptly running out of gas. The eyes keep on working, but the brain is getting a weak signal—or none at all. Usually the patient experiences this as a rapid loss of vision in one eye, followed a few weeks later by the other, though occasionally it happens all at once in both. The end result is nearly always blindness in the legal sense, ranging from the relatively mild (poor central acuity with intact peripheral vision), to what ophthalmologists call CF (the ability to count fingers held up at close range), HM (the ability to see a hand waved in the face), and all the way on down to NLP (no light perception or total blindness).

  I first had an inkling of what was happening to me when I rose from bed, stumbled over some books I’d left on the floor the night before, and realized my depth perception was off. I began experimenting by closing one eye, then the other. When I looked out my left there was a spot in the center of what I could usually see, like a small jot of petroleum jelly had been put there. I could make out objects distinctly around the perimeter, but not through the middle. This caused me to think at first that something was trapped under my eyelid, but nothing came out when I blinked several times and my pupil seemed clear when I checked it in the bathroom mirror.

  There was no pain, and I’d never had any trouble with my vision before, so I told myself it was just strain, or maybe a mild infection. The eye was watering a bit, so I picked up some antibacterial drops at the pharmacy in the building where I work and went about my usual business. As the day wore on, however, the spot grew bigger, and while I was driving home that evening I nearly rear-ended a Mini Cooper because I didn’t see a traffic light turning red. The next morning, when I tested it by covering my right eye, the spot was everywhere and drained of color.

  It was only then that I conceded the need for some professional attention. I was still shaken by my experience driving the night before—it would end up being my last time behind a wheel—so I cabbed it over to the office and went by the ophthalmology group on the eighth floor to ask one of my colleagues there, Bob Turner, to take a look. Turner made a joke in poor taste about how I’d been exercising my wrist lately, but got down to business when I couldn’t even read the first line off the Snellen chart.

  “You really can’t see it?”

  “Not unless you’re hiding it from me.”

  “Fascinating,” he said, sounding like Mr. Spock. “I’ve heard of this, of course, but never actually run across it in someone your age. I’ve got to get pictures.”

  Photographs of the back of my left eye, called the fundus, taken later that morning with special equipment, showed enlargement of the peripapillar vessels and visible atrophy of the retinal ganglia. By two in the afternoon I was in possession of blood tests confirming a homoplastic mDNA mutation at G11778—the worst kind, Turner cheerfully informed me.

  “There are other mutations associated with your condition, but they don’t produce as severe effects.”

  “Put it down to being an overachiever.”

  “You’re sure no one else in your family is affected? Your mother never had any eye problems?”

  “She died when I was an infant.”

  “No brothers?”

  I shook my head. “I’m an only child.”

  “Maternal uncles? Cousins?”

  “They live abroad.”

  He sounded deflated. “Too bad. You might want to contact them and find out. It would make an intriguing family study. I’m sure I could get government funding.”

  And I could donate my body to science, too. “Thanks. I think I’ll pass on that. You were saying there could be further deterioration?”

  With my new cyclops vision I could see Turner nodding his head.

  “So what happens next?”

  “Well, I’d like to get you started on drug therapy right away. With your mutation the chances of a full recovery are almost nonexistent, but there have been studies in Japan showing mild improvement in patients who are started early on a regimen of vitamins and coenzyme Q10—”

  “I meant with the other eye.”

  Turner hemmed and hawed in the way you’d expect, but eventually got to the point.

  I must have surprised him by how calmly I took it. I saw no reason to tell him what I was really thinking. After the standard-issue pep talk and a pat on the bac
k, he gave me some useless prescriptions and a pamphlet on living with vision loss and told me to phone him if I had any special concerns. Otherwise there was nothing to do but sit it out. I went home and did what any sane person in my circumstances would have. I wept and prayed and punched a hole in my living room wall, got drunk, bargained with God, slept when I could, got drunk some more, thought about killing myself—though I prided myself on never actually needing to call the suicide hotline—and wore myself out in many other equally unavailing ways while I waited for the other shoe to drop. Suffice it to say that it did, twenty-one days, four hours, and fifty-seven minutes later.

  You may have noticed an avoidance of melodrama in the way I’ve laid this out. It’s deliberate. In works of literature blind characters are always tragic figures burdened with heavy symbolism. Usually they are being punished for a crime that is sexual in nature, and their blinding is a dramatic affair involving fire (Edward Rochester is the poster child for this) or self-mutilation (Oedipus, Hazel Motes). Rarely have they lived a blameless existence and steered clear of bigamy, incest, and morbid preoccupation with religious issues. Readers of fiction have therefore come to expect that the blind hero will err in a major way, be maimed in a sensational fashion, and, thus humbled, undergo a spiritual transformation that will return him to life’s journey sightless but filled with a new, inner light—or, in the alternative, “happy ending” version, with vision miraculously restored.

  Of course, this bears no resemblance to reality. In real life, blindness occurs for no particular reason save accident or ill-luck, and often in a manner that is unspectacular, if not dull. Frequently it develops gradually, like the slow closing of a curtain. One day the individual notices he isn’t seeing as well as he once did—he’s tripped over a few curbstones or ended up in the wrong restroom—makes some adjustments and moves on. The adjustments add up. Large-print type gives way to magnifiers and audio books, driving a car to taxis and public transportation, until the day comes when he discovers he’s no longer able to use his eyes to do the things he did before.

  In my case, the process was a bit speedier, but no less unoriginal.

  When people ask me what it’s like, I repeat the Woody Allen joke about the miserable and the horrible. Then I explain why it’s wrong. Being blind doesn’t make life horrible. It simply adds a freight train of inconvenience to misery. And though I wish I could tell you that blindness made me a better person, or helped me find strength in adversity, or personal growth through suffering, or any of a number of states invented to calm the fears of those who can’t imagine getting through the day without one of their major senses, it didn’t. There are no special compensations that come with lack of sight, no “aha” moments when life suddenly acquires a deeper, richer meaning.

  As I would go on to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, blindness did not change me. After I went blind I was still the same arrogant, uncaring, self-deceptive bastard I’d always been, with special emphasis on the next-to-last point. In fact, it took the events I want to tell you about to make me finally see how much I’d been lying to myself all along. But before we get there, I need to say a few words about how I got back on my feet, so as to dispel any skepticism that I could expose a clever killer without the aid of paranormal abilities or advanced training in the martial arts. If I can’t help injecting a little humor into the account, don’t be misled. For every day that I groped my way back to independence, there were two that I spent in angry frustration, swearing and throwing things around my small apartment. Pollyanna I was not. It was only when I got fed up with listening to Dr. Phil and wearing out the seat of my pajamas that I made a conscious decision to return to the living. As it turned out, this was yet another example of my bullshit, though I wouldn’t realize it until it was almost too late.

  I began by installing a screen reader on my computer, software equipped with synthetic speech that tells a blind person how to move his cursor to get to a desired field of text—with a keyboard, obviously, instead of a mouse—and then “reads” it to him. If you’ve never heard one of these things in action, imagine spending all day in an elevator that announces the arrival of each floor and points out when the door is opening and closing (as though this wouldn’t be apparent to anyone with two ears) or stuck on the phone with one of those robotic hawkers of suspiciously easy credit.

  My new software came with a menu of reading voices I could select from, more than twenty in fact, with names like Victor and Samantha, though to me they all sounded like Katie Couric being played back in slow motion or HAL 9000 after Kier Dullea had messed around with its circuitry. Needless to say, after the first hour of this, I was less than impressed with the wonders of technology. But I was grateful to be surfing the web again, and following a few false starts I was busily browsing all my old favorites, with the exception of certain, shall we say, indelicate URLs that could no longer be of interest to me. OK, they were still of interest, but the folks who owned them hadn’t been courteous enough to make them accessible to a blind user. This is a continuous problem with screen-reading software: websites that rely heavily on graphic conventions are nearly impossible to follow. Nevertheless, with my screen reader I was able to do most of the pleasant and not so pleasant things a sighted person could do with a computer, such as keeping up with e-mail, checking the headlines for the latest disaster, and paying bills.

  Naturally, in the beginning I wasn’t primarily interested in listening to heavy breathing, but in gathering information about my options. Very quickly I learned there were literally hundreds of websites, listserves, and chat rooms devoted to the special needs and interests of the blind, places where I could lurk at my leisure and hopefully pick up tips from the pros. But just as quickly I was surprised to find there was no consensus about how a freshly minted blind guy like me should go about getting himself back into circulation. In fact, when it came to learning what I would need to get by, it appeared that blind people and the social welfare agencies that served them fought over everything.

  Take, for instance, the subject of getting around, which ought to be straightforward: you sign up for a dog or a cane and take lessons in how to use them. In my case I was sure it would be a cane—I’m not a dog person—but knowing this only landed me in a thicket of other bitterly contested issues. These included, to start, whether I should use a rigid or a folding cane. Rigid canes are more sensitive and don’t fall apart easily, but they’re a pain to store in tight seating areas like restaurant booths and the economy section of airplanes. Folding canes, on the other hand, can be placed in a lap or a backpack when they’re unneeded, providing their owners with an occasional break from always standing out in public like a Scandinavian in Tokyo. This sounded good to me until I learned on one of the more militant websites that concealing my cane would be a serious no-no, a sign I was ashamed of my blindness and still hoping to pass for normal.

  Other hot buttons were whether I should learn cane travel from a blind or a sighted instructor (blind instructors, the same website assured me, were at no disadvantage in knowing when I was about to be run over by a truck), and whether my training should take place near where I lived and worked or in distant, unfamiliar surroundings (presumably so that I could be scared silly and thereby develop blazing confidence). The list went on. All this left me perplexed and with renewed feelings of depression until I realized that with blindness, as with everything else in my life up to that point, I would just have to find my own way forward without worrying much about whether it gained me any friends.

  The first decision I reached was that I wanted nothing to do with a residential program. Don’t get me wrong. These boot camps for the blind do wonders for people who enjoy being part of a team and need to be isolated from well-meaning but counterproductive loved ones who are all too happy to do everything for them. But I lived alone, was by nature ill-equipped to sit through group hug fests, and had no intention, as someone in his later years, of ever living in a dormitory again, let alone one filled with si
milarly anxious adults who were being retrained in the use of knives and other sharp implements. (Woodworking, it may surprise you, is a popular offering at these schools.) Also, to be candid, at that point in my socialization I wasn’t ready to accept that I belonged in a group of blind people. Oh yeah, I understood I was blind, but I still thought of it as being just like a sighted person—only one who couldn’t see.

  So I started my education by signing up for a Braille correspondence course, which I could take in the comfort of my own home and with a tumbler of bourbon to shore me up when I felt my spirits lagging. My social worker, Felicity, who should have been discouraged from her vocation on the strength of her name alone, advised strongly against this:

  “Aren’t you overcompensating?”

  “You think wanting to read again shows I’m not adjusting?”

  “Well, at your age . . . I mean it’s going to be very difficult, close to impossible I’d say. I don’t know anyone who is Braille proficient who didn’t learn it as a child. And there are so many audio books available today. I’d really like to see you focus on something more positive. Have you thought about cooking classes? Many of my clients have found it very rewarding to be back in the kitchen.”

  No doubt those who could stand being there before. “No, thank you. Last time I checked my microwave was still plugged in.”

  “Or sewing. That way you could mend your own clothes.”

  “My dry cleaner would miss the business.”

  “Well, what about financial management then? The Lighthouse has a wonderful course. Being able to balance your checkbook would remind you of all the things you still can do . . .”

  With my usual bravado I’d like to tell you that Felicity had it all wrong: that Braille was a cinch for someone like me, with years of higher education under his belt, to master. It wasn’t. But after my exposure to a screen reader I was desperate to read with my own voice again, so I stuck with my lessons over the course of a few bitterly cold months in winter when it sometimes seemed as though I would have been better off trying to decipher the Rosetta Stone without the help of a translator fluent in Greek or Egyptian Demotic. Try this some time when you are alone in an accessible ATM: run your fingers over some Braille cells without looking and see if you can tell where one letter leaves off and the other begins. Like so many other things, it becomes easier and easier with practice, until one day you are skimming through books like a skater on ice, but in the beginning it felt like I’d just been sent back to first grade with Dick, Jane, and Spot.