Blindsight

“Bilateral autoenucleation.”

The doctor supervising my rotation in the trauma unit says this, as if he’s offering me a gift.

“Guy took out his own eyes with a flathead screwdriver.”

“Why the hell would he do that?” It’s the only response I can come up with.

“Excellent question, Barnes. Your job,” the jerk says, handing me the chart with a grin and clearly hoping I’ll squirm under the pressure, “is to find out. That’s why you applied to med school, isn’t it?”

It’s not, in fact. My reasons had more to do with green pieces of paper, but he doesn’t need to know that. “Yes, sir,” I say, clicking my pen like a good student.

Room 717 is almost completely empty. Just one bed in which a man with white gauze stretched over his eyes lays as still as a cadaver, plus a chair occupied by a clearly annoyed nurse on babysitting duty. No wires. No poles. No scalpels or syringes or razors. This is the room reserved for patients who need medical care but can’t be trusted to keep from hurting themselves or anyone else.

“You can take five,” I tell her. “I’ll let you know when I’m done.”

Suddenly her palpable irritability vanishes and she passes by me with a wink. The old white coat can work magic sometimes.

I sit, her residual heat warming the backs of my legs.

“Do you fear God, Dr. Barnes,” the man asks.

“Uh, I’m a medical student, sir, not a doctor. Wait, how did you know my name?”

“I could hear the man in the hall. Your superior.”

“Oh, I see. And you are,” I have to glance at the chart, “Mr. Alhazen?”

He nods.

“Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“Only if you are willing to properly listen to my answers.”

I roll my eyes dramatically and place a blank progress note on the chart. “Can you tell me what led to your injury?”

“It began with my sins, of course. My many sins.” He makes a wet, strangled sound in his throat. “But I have to imagine that you are asking about my initial symptoms.”

“Sure. Let’s start with those.”

“It all began about three months ago. I was outside, in the woods. The sun was bright, and I noticed a golden ring around my field of vision. A halo.”

“A golden halo,” I repeat as I write, considering schizophrenia as a possible diagnosis.

“That’s correct. That was all, at first.” His head turns to lock on me, as if he’s making eye contact through the bandages. It makes my skin itch. “But after a few days, I was seeing other things.”

“Can you give me an example?”

“You didn’t answer my question before.” The tip of his tongue glides along his upper lip. “Are you a God-fearing man?”

“Not really,” I find myself admitting to him. “I went to church as a kid, but the Bible kind of weirded me out. A lot of strange stuff in there.”

“Like Matthew 18:9?”

“I’m afraid I forgot that one.”

He leans forward. “And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.”

“No offense, but that passage seems to recommend removing one eye, not both.”

He waves a hand. “I started with the one, but the same problem continued with the eye that remained in my head. Day and night, the most horrific things.”

I wait in silence. After a moment, I give my pen a click to prompt him.

“Babies.”

“Pardon me?”

“I started seeing little babies everywhere. In my bedroom, peeking at me from the window, the closet door. Even at work, their blue eyes watching. Waiting. Sometimes they would cry but made no sound. They screamed and pointed at me, but still I heard nothing. They became increasingly grotesque, misshapen, monstrous, until eventually I saw what they really were.”

“Hallucinations,” I say.

“I’m not psychotic, Mr. Barnes.”

“I didn’t say that you were.” An idea suddenly occurs to me. A fragment from some neurology lecture. “Is there any chance that you were beginning to lose your eyesight in the time leading up to the halluc—I mean, the problem?”

He gives it some consideration. “That may be the case. My grandmother and my mother both had macular degeneration at an early age, and I feared that same fate for many years. I didn’t want to accept the truth, and I had still been seeing well enough to function, even if things were getting…dim.”

I smile and wonder if he can hear the skin sliding over my teeth. “It’s possible you had symptoms of Charles Bonnet syndrome.”

“HAVE,” he snaps.

“What? You mean, this is still happening to you, even without your—?”

“A thousand-fold.” His voice trembles. “It is unbearable.”

“That might make sense.” I lean in, elbows on my knees. “So, this Charles Bonnet thing can happen when someone is losing, or has lost, their vision. It’s kind of like phantom limb syndrome. When you lose an arm, the brain is still expecting sensory input from a limb that no longer exists, so it will sometimes create its own input. Like a sensation of pain or tension.”

“These are not hallucinations. They are demons, revealing my sins to me. Torturing me with them.”

“But that’s the thing. When you started losing your vision, your brain would have used the thoughts and memories stored there to generate these visions, trying to make up for the lack of input it was receiving. So, if you carry feelings of guilt, those may be the things that you see. And it would continue even if your eyes were gone, maybe worse, because the experience is not originating in your eyes, it’s happening in the visual cortex.”

He lays back against the upraised head of the bed, his jaw working beneath the thin flesh.

“So, what you are suggesting is that I dug both my eyes out of their sockets because of a neurological feedback problem. A glitch. That it was not a parade of demons sent by God to torment me with hellish visions of splintered yellow bones and pus-covered heads vomiting hungry beetles and silently screaming children dying because of me, because of my selfish decisions, until I carved out one eye, then the other, and perhaps soon the very brain from my skull until my penance is paid?”

By the time he finishes he is panting and sweating. Two red dots bloom on the bandages where his eyes once were. Panic erupts in my chest.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Alhazen. I didn’t mean to upset you.” I scoot the chair back and stand. With perfect aim, his hand darts from the bedsheet and grips my forearm. It is hot and slick, but his hold does not break when I pull away.

“I see you,” he says, his voice now deep and powerful. It bounces off the tiles of the floor and walls, echoing in my ears. Those red spots on the white cloth seep and ooze and grow—his blind, bloody vision searing into me. “I see what you have done. What you are. The devils are all here with us. All are watching. Waiting.”

My radius and ulna are close to snapping under his iron fingers.

The animal that lives inside me acts without any coherent thought to stop the pain. I click the pen in my other hand and jab outward, his head the easiest target from my compromised position. The point goes straight through one of those two red blotches in the gauze. I hear a juicy crunch. I release the pen and at the same time, he releases me. Stumbling to get away, I trip on the chair and land hard on the floor.

From my position, I look up to see him tilt his head toward the ceiling, the pen jutting from his left eye socket. He is smiling as he pulls it out, trailing a viscous crimson jelly, and proceeds to stab himself deeply where each eye had once lived, then slashes at his neck, slinging wet gore all over the white room, mouth twisted in a silent scream.

Dodging splashes of his blood, I scrabble and kick along the floor, pull myself up by the door handle, and stumble out of Room 717.

In the maze of corridors, I move as fast as one can without drawing too much attention. My mind is a chaotic alarm but I ignore the storm of thoughts and focus on the exit. On getting to my car.

On escape.

Outside, the air is clean and my lungs gulp it down. My head is clearing. I walk under a row of trees leading to the parking lot, the sun sparkling though the spaces between their leaves. When I step onto the blacktop, my heart is finally slowing.

This is not your fault, I think with each step. You didn’t do that. He did it to himself.

But you did all the other things. This is some other part of my mind. The one I keep locked away. The animal. He saw you. Not the nice you. Not the honorable student of medicine.

The real you.

It’s better if he’s gone.

I know that I just need to get to the car and get away from here. Then I can think.

The parking lot is bright. Glare reflects from a hundred windshields. I search for the car, the red BMW that I couldn’t really afford, but my vision is strangely obscured.

Around everything that I see is a golden ring.

A halo.

When I finally spot my car, I savor the slimmest moment of relief before I see the baby there behind the steering wheel.

Watching me.

Waiting.

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