THE MIRACLE THAT restored my sight, one wicked winter morning, was a miracle which led to many desperate others. Who could have foreseen the catastrophes that followed this moment I had dreamed of for over a decade? The only blessing that accompanied the sudden, unexpected reversal of my blindness was this: I was alone when it happened. My wife was away shopping; the two children were out. Myself, I was in my humble study, listening to an old recording of Sviatoslav Richter playing Schubert's Sonata in G major. Thanks to Sarah, a fire crackled in the wood-burning stove, making my sanctum warm and dry—the room where I worked was an uninsulated extension added to the house in the months after my accident. A pot of nice fragrant cinnamon tea was on my desk, along with my Braille Bible, some reference books also in Braille, and my computer loaded with voice synthesizing software I used to draft the many motivational speeches I gave touring the country. It has always struck me as ironic, although naturally I never mentioned it in my uplifting talks, that I made a far better living after the accident than when I was among the sighted. No one would have paid a plug nickel to hear me speak before tragedy struck me down. Now I filled rented auditoriums and hotel convention halls, and my talks on surviving personal crises were well-received wherever I went. Not that my philosophy about adversity management was more informed or refined than the next survivor's—not a vain bone in this body—it's just my story had all the necessary elements. The perfect life, the great disabling affliction, the season of despair, the awakening of hope, and the long road of spiritual renewal that rewards the steadfast pilgrim with a life far richer than what seemed so perfect before. Sarah, I must say, deftly supervised this unanticipated chautauqua career of mine, from bookings to billings, and oversaw with the help of our dedicated manager every detail of our burgeoning mission. And with seldom—no, never—a complaint. She was nothing less than a stoic saint, an altruistic martyr, with just enough savvy to hold our shattered lives together, not only keeping her eye on our spiritual needs, but making sure there was always bread on the table.
One reason I have been so successful on the circuit is because I believed every word I said, or at least most every word. To the sort of individual who attends such seminars, unwavering personal conviction on the part of the speaker is nine-tenths the victory. I have often felt that if I held up an egg in the palm of my hand and proclaimed with firm faith that it was not an egg, but a flower or a shoe, say, the right audience of seekers would cry out in agreement, So it is! With conviction and what might be called a winning idiosyncrasy in the presenter—in my case, the blindness—one can bring people around to anything. That I never used my powers of persuasion to ends other than kindly inspiration, positive role-modeling, carrying the simple message of hope to souls willing to listen, pleases me. The temptation to deceive was always there, somehow, but it was a human weakness never acted upon. Not that I'd have known what to deceive my acolytes about, nor that I ever made the logical next step to consider the possibility that some of them entertained deceptive thoughts regarding me. No one, I convinced myself, would want to victimize this victim: Hadn't I suffered enough? The answer is, I had not even begun my real suffering.
Not born blind, indeed I had 20/20 vision for thirty years. A robust, confident young man, I met my Sarah at a church bazaar—we were always active members at St. Francis Episcopal—and it was love at first sight. Her thick auburn hair drifting in gentle waves down the back of her white dress, her quick blue eyes, the exquisite mole above her lip, the strong warm hands that shook mine when we were introduced, her smile as radiant as dawn. How many times since my world fell into shadow have I conjured up the visual memory of that day. After a succinct courtship, we married and started a family. Rebecca was born first, and then the twins, Emma and Luke. Emma survived only a few weeks, poor little bird. My grief over the loss was so great that to this day I indulge in fantasizing about her, what her interests would have been, how her voice might have sounded. I would like to think she'd have turned out a trustworthy Milton's daughter. In my mind's eye, I always pictured her as a young Sarah, slender as a willow and sturdy as an oak, along those lines. But we all know how ingenious imagination can be, how it sometimes finds a shining berth in the rankest mound of dung.
Time passed, our young family thrived. My job at the utilities company was going well enough; the benefits were good and hours such that I could spend quality time with my children. I worked the graveyard shift at the local power plant as a maintenance technician troubleshooting outages, servicing customer emergencies, getting people back on line when an ice storm or high wind brought down wires or blew out a transformer. In the Northeast, where we live just a mile from my own childhood home, our crew had more to do during the night than one might imagine. Always something going wrong, always some problem to remedy. I very much enjoyed the challenge, as I've told my rapt audiences, and learned a lot meeting people from all walks of life under trying circumstances. So long as I live, I will never forget the courage of the little girl—her name was Belinda, if I'm not mistaken—who, during a severe nor'easter that crippled not just Gloucester but the whole corridor from the Carolinas up to Maine, offered her mommy her teddy bear to feed to the flames in the fireplace that heated their home while our crew worked through the night to restore power. A bunch of us later pooled together to buy her a new bear, bigger and fuzzier than the one she sacrificed. Duress brings out the best in us—so I often advised my Ramada listeners. In a file somewhere there is a newspaper clipping with a photograph of Belinda surrounded by her benefactors and our stuffed bear. Sarah had it up on the refrigerator for months. She thought it was a flattering shot. I must have looked pleased with myself, because in those days I was. Life was a river awash with proverbial milk and honey.
A stifling, muggy midsummer night changed all that. I wasn’t even supposed to work the shift, but a massive brownout across our regional grid forced the company to call upon every available hand. My memory of that night is selective at best. I whispered goodbye to Sarah, kissed the children where they lay asleep in their bedrooms. The streets were eerily dim. Thick steamy amber haze hung in the wilted trees. Cicadas had burrowed up from the earth to mate that year, dogday locusts we called them, and were lustily clicking and buzzing away outside the open windows of our utility van, their boisterous droning sounding like bandsaws underwater. We were hard at work on a central routing transformer, using the headlights of the van to see, when I must have made the simplest error, crossing two clusters of wire in such a way that I sparked a high-voltage explosion. Knocked unconscious, I have no recollection of what happened in the hours that followed. My first perceptions had only to do with a searing, bludgeoning pain in my neck and around the base of my hot skull. My face was burned and my eyes felt as if they were molten.
Recuperation swallowed up days and weeks of time, all of which remains vague even now. What stands out from the miasma of my lengthy recovery was the ophthalmologist's concern that the many lesions on the corneas of both eyes were healing, as he'd expected them to, but my vision still hadn't returned. Yet one should have resulted in the other. I could make out uneasy shapes at a distance of a foot or so in front of me, but had no strong sense of day or night, of whether the lights were on or off. The doctors performed tests to determine ocular blood flow, ran an MRI against the possibility of brain damage, but found nothing that would explain the blindness. My 20/20 vision was now 20/400 at best and when I was released from the hospital my condition was not only unimproved, but worsening. They continued to chart my progress but there wasn't much more that could be done medically.
Summer faded into fall. The once steady stream of colleagues and friends who dropped in to visit, read me the Bible, listen to music with me, dwindled. I couldn't in fairness expect otherwise. Sarah's considerate idea of building an extension onto the house, thus to spare me the trouble and danger of walking up and down stairs I couldn't see, kept me busy for a while. Not that I was able to help. But my wife and the contractor did consult with me about construction specs. Ever the clever one in our family, Sarah suggested we might save money by forgoing windows in my modest wing—they could be added later, when and if my sight returned—and used the balance of the home improvement loan to carpet the whole house. I thought it an extravagance, but she insisted it would cushion any falls I happened to take. Although my equilibrium hadn't been a problem, I commended her ingenuity.
Around Thanksgiving I lost my job. My supervisor was kind enough to give me the bad news in person. They’d held out as long as they could, he said, sitting with me in my den over some chowder Sarah served us in mugs. “Damn bad luck,” he told me, his voice gooey from the thick soup if not the tacky sentiment. I nodded, trying to form an understanding smile on my lips, though I'd already begun to forget what I looked like before the accident, and had no clear concept what such a smile might look like now. Vivid silence clouded the room before I heard him shift in his seat and rise to leave. “Your workman's comp is all in order,” he said, taking my free hand into his, which was clammy. I thanked him, climbing to my feet. I wanted to touch his face but hadn't the nerve to ask. As I recall, he had a dense, large nose, the by-product of a long-standing love affair with cheap scotch chased by cheaper ale. Balls and beer, the boys used to call it at work, a thousand years ago. Off the top of my head I couldn't tell you his or any of their names now.
Then came the truly dark days. Days that added up to months, a year of miserable months that vanished like voices murmuring in an empty room. Learning Braille was a necessary but grim admission that my blindness was not the temporary setback my hopeful ophthalmologist had diagnosed. A second sightless Christmas came and went. Luke and Becca seemed happy with their presents, none of which I could see any more than I could their presumptive beaming faces. Sarah thanked me for the nightgown I bought her with the help of a salesperson who was kind enough to describe it to me over the telephone—rayon, beige, a few flounces edged in lace. We tried to act celebratory, to make the best of the situation, and I even indulged in a little champagne which gave me a migraine that lasted a week. Sitting alone in my personal black hole on New Year’s Eve, I urged Sarah to go without me to a party down the street, hire a sitter, enjoy herself a little. It hardly seemed fair for her, who looked after me day and night, to stay home reading to me from Isaiah, or Job, while I followed along with my fingers. Even as I sat wallowing in my misfortune that evening, listening to Mahler and eating a bowl of popcorn my wife had placed on the side table, I guessed the busybodies were talking about none other than me and what a shame all this was for poor Sarah, who was still so young and vibrant. I drowned myself in the choral voices of the Ninth Symphony, then fell asleep in my chair. Later, Sarah woke me and led me by the arm upstairs to bed, which smelled of roses and sage. My melancholy delirium lifted for a moment, for these fragrances reminded me of the carefree, caring nights we used to enjoy, the nights of earlier intimacy that resulted in the birth of our babies. Half awake, I kissed her and thanked her for all she had done to help me through this tragedy. I promised her—though she might not have heard, since I could tell by her breathing she was asleep— that I would try harder, would overcome the doldrums that made life so tough this past year and a half. That I would do something with myself, defeat my disability in some way, learn to see anew, like blind Bartimaeus whom Jesus cured in Jericho with nothing more than a few words of encouragement.
True to my promise, the next morning I glued Braille tabs to the keys of my old typewriter and sat myself down to outline everything that conspired to bring me to my present predicament, and what I believed as I began my long journey back to life. Sarah set me up with a fresh ream of paper. The work was slow. It took a while to get a feel for producing words and phrases through the clumsy machinery of the typewriter. Not being able to review what I'd just written, I had to visualize the sentences fore and aft in my head. Initially, Sarah read me back what I'd sketched, but even she had reasonable limits as to how much time she could devote to my little project. The children weren't getting younger. She had even taken a part-time position with that contractor who built the extension, in order to supplement my benefits. He was called Jim James, a name whose triumph of redundancy might have intimated the ways matters were drifting but did not. We were grateful for the income.
At first I thought to write an article for the St. Francis newsletter about how faith in God is essential to our surviving crises, or some such, but as I got the ideas down on paper, I realized it was one cliché after another and of no use to anybody. I had to delve deeper into my reservoir of pain so turned some of my ideas around backwards and found they came out much better. Faith alone, in other words, was not enough to carry us through. Rather, it was one oar we could use to pull our fragile ship through the turbulent waters of doubt and despair, the other oar being hope. Like that. I spent hours on end working out my thoughts, quoting passages from my King James whenever the reference seemed apropos, or sometimes —if the pretty image struck my fancy—when it wasn't.
Not only did the newsletter publish my first effort but, thanks to someone in the congregation who showed it to an editor at the local paper, reminding him who I was—the man blinded while trying to bring light to others, as he put it—I was commissioned to write a human interest article detailing the aftermath of that horrifying night. I missed the deadline and Sarah asked for an extension, which they granted. When I did turn in my manuscript I explained in an apologetic cover letter that typing on an old Royal rigged with Braille tabs that kept falling off made for perhaps not the best working conditions. I hoped nevertheless that they would find the final product worthy of their esteemed pages.
The memoir was a success. Letters came in from around the state, the most gushing of which were published in the newspaper over the days that followed. Sarah knocked on my door soon after, announcing that the editor himself had dropped by the house with something that might make me very happy. Indeed, I was floored by Mr. Harrison's kindness. On behalf of everyone at the paper, he presented me with a used computer preloaded with software for the blind. Little Luke, who was eight then and computer-savvy, taught me how to use this gift, and within a matter of months I was contributing regularly to various periodicals distributed in the area. From this print exposure came my first invitations to speak before the public. My wife’s inherent Christian strength of spirit was aroused by what she saw happening before her eyes. The love, empathy, and compassion she witnessed flowing toward her husband from these strangers, common workaday people who listened intently to what insights I was able to give them, overwhelmed dear Sarah. That Mr. Harrison offered to assist us financially, lift the burden of her having to work for the contractor, so she could devote more time to helping answer every request to address this crowd or that, constituted another blessing on our household. I, who had come to abide misfortune, was now in the pulpit of Everyman, as it were. Many are called but few are chosen, the Bible tells us, and I—an unfledged beggar by the waters of Siloam—was chosen.
Sarah was never more attentive, never more heedful than during the heady times that followed. Invite followed invite, obliging us to be away from home for days, even weeks, at a time. When my wife told me that we'd begun to charge sponsors a nominal fee to offset expenses of travel, lodging, meals, not to mention the live-in housekeeper who also looked after Luke and Becca, I didn't object, though deep down I would have preferred offering my inspirational views without money attached. Harrison advised her on the best ways to proceed, and acted on my behalf as an agent, placing my lectures in various journals and anthologies. “Building the rep,” as he put it. They were right, of course, telling me that if we wanted to get my message out there, we needed assistance, and who better than the listeners and readers themselves to assist? The venture was worthy, we all knew. There were many who wanted, needed, to hear my story of hardship and hope. I told Sarah that, if she didn't mind, she should be the one who managed the practicalities with Harrison's help. Back in the halcyon days before the world went dark I wore the financial pants in the house, if you will. Given that now I couldn't tell a one dollar check from another of a thousand made our positions clear. Sarah agreed with all my requests, bless her heart. Both my muse and protector, she was brilliant in her role.
What possible point would there be in reproducing a transcript of the speeches I made? Often I was introduced by a local priest or minister. My wife would then lead me to the podium. Applause. I launched straightaway into my backstory, guided my auditors from the shadowy valley of pain and grief to the mountain of renewal and joy. Self-pity was just that: a pit from which we must rise and shine. I told them about my New Year's Eve revelation, mentioning how I had come to believe that the marvelous scent of sage and roses in the bedroom that night was an auspicious sign from God, the soulstruck breath of my guardian angel. My favorite concluding exhortation was Don't be afraid of miracles. Applause. Then a few questions and answers. Do you think that God will restore your sight one day? was the perennial query I could count on being asked. My response was, in this life or the next, I believe He will let me see my wife and children again, for He's a good and generous God.
A reception would follow during which the voices around me brimmed with appreciative respect that made me understand just how attached each member of the human family is to another. My calling as a missionary of faith suited me well and as the years elapsed the uneasy peace I'd made with my blindness deepened. Never would I have touched so many lives had I not been stricken. I like to think that I was always a good man, but so many have proclaimed there's a genuine spark of greatness in me, that at times I have to believe there may be. If so, all credit goes to our Savior, as such blessings flow only from Him, and so forth.
Home, now, from nine long weeks on the road, after a restless night in my bed in the study—Sarah and I agreed to sleep in separate quarters after such long trips on the circuit because when I was particularly fatigued I tossed and turned—I awoke feeling not quite myself. True, I had been working harder than ever. Our schedule had been non-stop for months, so perhaps this explained my sensation of unbalance. Along with prayer, music has always been my remedy for any illness, and so it was I'd put on Schubert's Opus 78 for piano, whose divine opening chords would, I was sure, bring me around. Martita, the housekeeper, served spicy cinnamon tea and tended my fire. Not wanting to bother her—and besides, the monumental Richter seemed to be working his magic—I said nothing about my disposition.
Some minutes after she closed my door, abrupt pain erupted in my temples. Beset by wild dizziness, by violent nausea, by spasms that stabbed like long needles through my skull, I shrieked though no noise left my throat. Gasping, I rolled from my chair onto the floor, hitting my head as I did. I tried to call out for Sarah but couldn't. Then, as suddenly as the pain began it was replaced by numbness. I could hear the piano music very distantly, as if it were coming from the far end of a long tunnel. Light engulfed my eyes—a cascade, a flood, a torrent of unblinding light. As I grabbed at the arms of my chair to stand, I found myself staring into what appeared to be flames dancing behind the grate of the potbellied stove. My eyes agonizingly darted around the room and there, in this dim place on whose walls firelight flickered—more like Plato's cave than a Christian's den—were all the things I'd come to know only by touch. My table, my books, my computer, my cot, my chair. No embellishments, nothing on the walls, all very minimal, even dreary to my naive eyes. But of course, I thought. Why decorate? Why wallpaper a blind man's cell? Standing now, a bit shaky, admiring my wife's wise Christian expediency, I walked around placing my hands on everything, still not quite sure what was happening. My vision was blurry but with each new moment I became more reassured this wasn't a dream, a taunting nightmare. The radical pain having largely subsided, I remained a little numb, whether from excitement or physiological impulse, I didn't know or care. I wanted to climb to the roof and cry out to the world that my miracle had finally come. My feet carried me to the door that led to the main house, and I who rarely left my sanctum—why should I have?—opened it.
Bright white light poured through the living room windows, crisp sun reflected off the snow. But for the ticking of a clock, in Franz Schubert's wake, the house was silent. I took a few tentative steps and gazed, blinking hard while heavily tearing, in wonder. What had happened to our simple home? If you will, I couldn't believe my eyes. The walls were gilded and the windows dressed with billowing chiffon sashes. In an alcove stood a gargantuan breakfront on whose glassed shelves were countless porcelain figurines. I stumbled ahead toward facing sofas and stuffed chairs upholstered in striped silks of chartreuse and gold. Here was a commode with a marble top and a vase of orchids above the marquetry. There were two reclining brass deer on a prayer rug by the hearth. An antique grandfather clock clad in luminous mahogany stood haughty in a corner. Oriental carpets of red, blue, yellow, and green lay atop the white wall-to-wall. Fine old portraits of men and women dressed in the garb of another century hung everywhere, staring out at me from canvases black as lacquer. A chandelier centered it all, its prisms reflecting hundreds of tiny rainbows on the ceiling, which was done up with decorative plaster moldings. Though I examined each piece of furniture, horrified and fascinated, and though what I saw was as tangible as truth itself, my heart sank, because I knew this couldn't be so. I pinched myself, closed my eyes, reopened them. But the room didn't change. If anything, it became more lavish as my sore eyes adjusted to the light.
A familiar sound came from upstairs. It seemed to be Harrison, softly whistling to himself some random tune, as he often did when he accompanied us on the road. I thought to call out his name, tell him the astonishing news, ask him to come down, fall to his knees with me and pray Lord God thanks for this deliverance, but didn't. Who knows how or wherefrom inner voices speak to us, or in what mysterious ways they confide to us involuntary prophecies that save us from harm, disillusion, even doom? The whistling stopped and when it did, I took a couple of steps back, bumping into a side table and knocking a crystal lamp to the floor. I was startled to hear Harrison say, “Bunny?” And hearing him ask the question again, this time in a deeper, softer, more melodiously concerned voice, I looked around for a place to hide, an Adam's fig leaf as it were, suddenly frightened, frightened even beyond the terror of finding myself among the sighted, standing there agog, a dumb novitiate, a stranger in my own house. He glided down the carpeted stairs, silent as a proverbial ghost, and seemed relieved to find me, half-crouching behind one of the big plush sofas.
“You all right?” asked Harrison.
Instinctively, I stared forward and said I was. “What did I break?” I wanted to know.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw him inspecting the damage, dressed to the nines in a deep blue silk robe, the same color I remembered Sarah's irises as being. His hair, which I'd always pictured black and short, was silver and stylishly long. His unshaven face was taut and handsome. Averting my eyes when he glanced at me, I noticed that he, like Sarah, had a little mole, though his was on the cheek. What bothered me most was that his robe was open in the front. If my wife or children were to walk into the room just then, what an eyeful they’d get. Think how embarrassed everyone would be.
Taking me by the arm, he sat me down by the gold wall in a chair appointed with fine overstuffed upholstery. “Stay right here,” he calmly requested, his voice sweet but the look on his suntanned face as annoyed as a pet owner scolding a naughty puppy. I could have sworn he cursed under his breath as he left, but at that moment I didn't trust my ears any more than my eyes. At least while he retreated toward the kitchen he tied his winsome dressing gown. I had caught a subtle glimpse of what hung there, haloed by white hair. It was nothing anyone should want to see, let alone someone who'd been denied the privilege of seeing anything whatever for a decade.
Other astonishments soon appeared. The more I saw, the more I understood it was important, somehow, that those around me thought I saw nothing. Conspicuous among my discoveries was how wrong I’d pictured everyone and everything. I who had begun truly to believe my fervent homilies, urging my followers to keep the faith first by trusting themselves, their convictions, their own views—be thee blind or seeing with lucid eyes—now began to understand how utterly I'd erred. If that morning returned to me my sight, the rest of the day brought my insights, as I have come to think of them.
Harrison in his baronial robe waltzing through our kinky nouveau riche living room was merely the first verse in my New Apocrypha. Martita, who came to clean up the broken lamp, was someone whose voice, again, I recognized but whose appearance struck me as incongruous with the life I’d believed my family was leading. Not that she, poor Cayman immigrant and clearly a good if very illegal girl, behaved in any way that could be perceived as unchristian. No, it was that they had her in a black uniform with white starched trim and in a state of what might well be deemed quasi-penal subservience. Harrison wondered if I wouldn’t like to go back to my room, said I looked exhausted, Lord knows no one would blame me for wanting a little more rest, given the grueling schedule I had just endured. Again I asked what I’d broken and he answered it was nothing, just a glass one of the kids left on an end table, not to worry. The maid crossed herself and, having finished cleaning, left the room. “Where’s Sarah?” my hands shaking although I anchored them between my thighs.
“Out,” he said, “shopping.”
When I inquired when she was expected back, he muttered something and, excusing himself, flew upstairs, ever silently, no doubt to change into some clothes.
Time passed—twenty-three minutes to be exact, now that I could watch the clock— then Sarah unlocked the grand front door. Making her way to the kitchen, she failed to notice her husband seated in an unwonted corner, escapee from his holy cage. The years had not been kind. My once wholesome Sarah had acquired, I must admit, a gaunt sophistication. Though elegant and drily beautiful, her face was as if invaded by knives—angular, hewn, deblooded. It was all I could do to maintain on my own face the blankest possible expression. This was only the beginning. What I saw next I wouldn't wish on the Prince of Darkness himself. Harrison floated back downstairs, gathered my wife in his arms and kissed her, put his forefinger to his lips, and pointed in my direction. I would like to believe she might have fainted, standing there in the arms of this man, staring at her blind husband not thirty feet away. To the contrary, she sweetly called my name, breaking from Harrison's embrace, and asked me the same question he had, patting my head, offering to help me get back to my room. I needed more rest, she cooed. After all, we had less than a week before we were committed to going to Louisville for the Christian Recovery Convention, at which I was one of the headliners. Bed did seem a desirable destination at that moment.
“Yes, bed,” I answered, and allowed her to take me by the arm, as she had countless times over the last decade, and lead me into my hermitage. I fell asleep immediately.
Seeing the world, I had not yet come to know how to reckon it. That was, I always felt, God's distinct purview, His task. Yet in the days that followed, seeing what I saw was judgment enough and though Job was my cherished Old Testament hero, I would prove to be no Job. Seeing, like my original blinding, was an unexpected trauma, a crossroads. The more I reflect upon what has happened, whether from a vantage of darkness or light, the more I see life as an investigation into just this: How much pain we can tolerate before we either turn ourselves humbly over to our God, that His will be done, or turn on the sadistic Bastard with every fiber of our being. Just how He found the fortitude, tenacity, and nerve to look down on me from on high these ten long suffering years, knowing all the while that every word of encouragement I offered to the far-flung members of His miscellaneous flock was fouled by the adultery and avarice of those who pretended to sustain His wretched servant, I cannot pretend to know. The myriad ways of the Almighty are, it has been often recorded, mysterious. We mere mortals who fail to know our own hearts can’t begin to fathom what motivates His. Not that my poor wife’s weakness of the flesh, her infidelity, and materialist lust are in any way the fault of the Precious Savior. Nor that my benefactor and proponent, Harrison, without whose support I might never have found my audience, all those hungry souls who have dined—I hope nutritiously—at my inspirational banquets, was guided by the hand, if not the hoof, of the Lamb. As I lay in the equally dark but somehow less blurry shadows of my new world, as deeply dejected as I ever was when I first lost my sight, I decided to follow my instincts and see what there was to see. My life became a blindman's bluff.
Sarah checked in on me later that same day, concerned why I’d been stumbling around in the living room. “You feeling all right?” she wanted to know.
“Fine, just fine,” I assured her, and testing the waters asked if I couldn't sleep upstairs with her tonight. We generally had separate bedrooms on the road, and so often slept apart at home. Surely, I reasoned, the Lord would want a wife to abide some snoring now and then, if only for the sake of Old Testament conjugal duty.
Though I stared at the wall behind her, the look of dismay that shrouded her face, like Beelzebub's specter, was unmistakable. Her voice smilingly assured me that we need to take it easy during this week off, while the frown on her lips mutely bespoke another message. I wanted to say, how could I have been so blind to her true feelings all this time? but kept my own counsel and meekly agreed. That seemed to brighten her mood. Her face relaxed as she brushed back her frosted hair and asked what kind of soup I wanted Martita to bring me for lunch. “Barley,” I said, and watched my estranged wife's hips pitch softly back and forth as she left the sanctum.
The children were my only hope. My wonderful babies, my joys, bounty of my loins. They, I assured myself, had not veered from the path of righteousness like their mother. Persisting with my charade the next morning, I once more entered the main house. Rather than loiter in the garish living room, I joined Martita in the kitchen, which was also extensively renovated, shiny chrome, glass, and granite everywhere, and a tilework splashback depicting urns choked with flowers and saccharine French farm scenes. Though she was at first surprised by my appearing in her domain, Martita helped me to a chair at the long table and got me my morning tea. It was quite early, I saw by the wall clock, too early for Sarah, but maybe not for the kids, who I assumed would come down first, on their way to class. Becca was in her last year of high school, and Luke a junior. As Martita busied herself, chatting amiably about this and that, I furtively studied her, wondering just how much she knew about the goings-on around here. Her black hair combed into a chignon, her handsome concise form moving lithely in her uniform, her dark eyes, her pretty hands—she cut a finer figure than I had imagined. Some obvious questions came to mind to ask her, but I thought the better of it. Ease up, I reminded myself. As Paul advised in his Epistle to the Hebrews, Let us run with patience the race that is set before us.
Luke entered the kitchen first. That is, a young man whom Martita referred to as Luke. Rather than coming downstairs, however, to have his breakfast, he ducked through the back door having apparently spent the night elsewhere. Abstracted, with eyes glazed, he noticed me as he opened the refrigerator door and drank long and hard from an orange juice carton, but said nothing. His hair was every bit as orange as the juice he consumed, and rose in numerous spikes off the top of his head. His mascara was smudged—little Luke wore mascara? Great chunks of silver graced each of his fingers. He was skinny as a broomstick and looked the warlock part he affected. I sat in stunned silence, maintaining my own vacant glazed-over stare which matched my son's. I didn't know they made boots that big.
“What's he doing here?” Luke asked Martita.
I interrupted, “How are you this morning, Luke?”
“Awright, I guess,” he answered.
“You're up with the roosters,” I pressed, at the same time wondering if he oughtn’t be nervous that the coffin lids were all supposed to be down by this time, and then saw him give Martita a look that could only be described as threatening.
“Whatever,” he said, taking a fat green apple from the bowl of fruit on the table and politely excusing himself with a sneer.
After he left the kitchen, I said, “Luke's a fine young man, isn't he.”
If both Sarah and Luke had gone the way of Judas, and Harrison with them, it seemed improbable Rebecca had managed to resist the tide of treachery. For having betrayed my credulous innocence with vizor'd falsehood, and base forgery, as blind Milton himself once wrote, the pillared firmament is rottenness, and the earth's base is built on stubble. I fled to my cave.
A pestilence had swept through my household, like the very dogday locusts which prophesied the onset of my blindness that summer night a decade ago. I lay on my cot, hands over my forehead and face, unable to move, loath to think, as sweat broke out across the length of my body and a range of black emotions chased through me. Above all, I wanted never to leave my room again. They could bring me my filthy barley soup and vile cinnamon tea whenever they found time between the commission of sins, and to hell with the rest of it. Indeed, when Sarah ventured by later, reeking of sage and roses, and found me prostrate, she let out a little cry of fear. Perhaps I should be ashamed to admit it, but that cry was like sweet music to me—even better than the opening strains of Stravinsky’s Apollon Musagète, though it sounded more like Honegger’s Symphony No. 2, the molto moderato, so very crushingly ominous, as performed by von Karajan and the Berliner Philharmoniker. Not because I was deluded enough to think it meant she was concerned, as such, for my sake, or that my heart melted with sudden forgiveness. No, no—rather because it gave me my idea. Whereas before I couldn’t see her face if she voiced distress on my behalf, now I did, and Sarah’s look was that of a caretaker grown weary of her role, disgusted, in fact, by it. Humanitarian that I long strove to be, and that many had seen fit to call me, I reluctantly sympathized with her. I understood her failings and well knew how many persons of good intent and a hopeful heart nevertheless plant the earnest seeds of their goodness and optimism in the yielding muck of ambition. Look at Harrison. He probably didn’t have designs on my wife, my home, my finances, my very self, when he first got me into print and onto a podium. How do I know? Because by the same reasoning one might say that I never intended for him to succeed so assiduously in ruining me, even as he saved the souls of thousands by helping me to save my own. Having noted that, inspiration took hold of me and would not give way to any alternative from that day forward, until it had fulfilled itself like the competent beast it was.
The idea began simply.
I didn’t feel up to Louisville. We would have to cancel.
Sarah thought we should all pray for guidance, and so we went through the gesture of prayer. I still didn't feel like going. Harrison suggested that a doctor ought to be brought in to look me over. Louisville was, after all, “awfully darned important to the furtherance of the crusade”—the Christian Recovery Convention was, if I didn't mind his saying so, the Holy Grail of such gatherings, the motivational orator's Valhalla. It was a dream come true for me, for Sarah, and everyone who believed in my message of hope.
“A doctor won’t find anything wrong with me,” I said, staring right through him.
“What then?” he asked, after underscoring again the importance of keeping this engagement, reminding me it was the kickoff to our big tour through the South, saying something about another book deal in the works.
I appreciated how much work Sarah and he had put into Louisville, the tour, all the rest, but couldn't do it. The problem was this. Somehow I lost my calling. Sarah's pale face drained of all color as she looked at Harrison, who was also ashen.
“You still believe in God, of course,” my wife whispered.
I told her I suppose I did, it wasn't that.
“Well, what is it, man?” Harrison asked, noiselessly taking my wife's hand in his.
“Not sure,” I said. My message of seemed stale, banal, for some reason, and the more I thought about it the more I'd come to believe it was one better repudiated than preached. Likewise, God seemed more complicated than I'd believed Him to be. I didn't understand Him or His ways, certainly not well enough to speak His cause before others whom, by the way, I also did not understand.
Sarah withdrew her hand, stepped toward me, placed it on my head, which made me wince a little, and she said, “You're tired, dear, is all...your audiences need you, your family needs you, all of us need you to go to Louisville and shine the light of truth into the darkest corners of people's souls and help them find their way back into the sun.”
Sarah, it would appear, had been listening to my patent drivel these past years so perfectly was she able to quote me to myself. God in heaven, I almost laughed, but the idea had nothing to do with gaiety. Instead, allow me to admit, it ran more along the lines of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans 12:19. Look it up for yourself.
Over the days that followed my initial confession of apostasy came many wearying pleas and petitions from my wife, my manager, even the children. My prediction regarding Rebecca was not wrong. She had become what the kids call a Goth. The dyed black hair, the black fingernails, the black dress and black boots even bigger than Luke's, if that were possible, and a girlfriend in tow dressed in the same uniform. Becca, I should say, did seem the least egregious of the lot of heretics my family had become. She at least didn't seem to care as much as the others whether the income from my missionary work continued or not. She styled herself, I'm guessing, as a bit of an anarchist, though we all know anarchy is best proselytized by the disaffected well-to-do. Be that as it may, Rebecca was no more able to budge me from my den than the others, and Louisville soon came and went, absent its blind featured speaker. Harrison told me we received hundreds of cards and letters from well-wishers.
Which brought me to the second phase of the idea. The revenue stream must be stopped. This was not as simple as merely dropping off the lecture circuit since, clearly, Harrison had invested wisely and, despite myself, money still flowed in with those letters.
An anonymous tip to the Internal Revenue Service informing them that my family and closest advisor were bilking our religious foundation of tens of thousands of dollars, maybe more, for personal gain, rather than funding programs for the blind and other disableds, got the job done. It all went rather quickly. The lien on our home and bank accounts, the removal of the furniture and frippery in the living room and everywhere else in the house—yes, things moved irrevocably, decisively. Sarah spent a lot of time crying, I can report. When she wasn't doing that she was arguing with Harrison. Luke simply disappeared off the scene. And Rebecca, I gathered, was spending more time over at her girlfriend's place. Harrison's indictment for fraud and income tax evasion was bittersweet for me though my residual sentimentality toward him, the former him, I should say, the man who did help me in the beginning, faded away to nothing when I learned how much we had earned over those fruitful years, and how much he had stolen from his gullible mistress. They broke up. And once my lawyer—a former devotee who volunteered his time—cleared me of any collaboration in my handlers’ schemes, I filed for divorce from the lovely Sarah who, seeing there was nothing to salvage, didn't contest the action. The foundation was dismantled. The media was ruthless. An insightful if scathing article about my “amazing fall from grace” was published in the very newspaper that gave me my computer and printed my own first efforts. Fond memories. Now I was left with the house and enough money to live modestly, having such comforts as society thinks are due a poor blind fellow who'd been bruised a bit in the proverbial school of hard knocks.
While I sometimes feel a numbness in the pit of my stomach when pondering the arc of my brilliant life, I still have my Sviatoslav Richter disc of Schubert's Sonata in G major to comfort me. I still indulge in fantasizing how my daughter Emma, had she lived, would have saved me from my hapless enemies if not myself. But the past has passed. The sole question that remains is whether or not to feign a sudden miraculous recovery of my sight after Martita becomes my new bride. God knows there's much to be said for blindness, especially when one can see. Either way, I'm sure she and I will be quite happy living here together once we get this gilt off the walls.