1.
A
few weeks later they put her under, did the procedure. Walked around with a
puffy bandage taped to her eye for a month and a half, in retrospect a rehearsal
for what came later. Two years, five operations, and the eyes died on her
anyway. Blind from glaucoma by her tenth birthday.
Her twin sister Laden was spared all that. Nearly identical irises to her own, green with flecks of brown and gold, but with a difference: were more than merely decorative, could see Jane feeling around for things, watch her stumble. Seemed fitting Laden would be tasked with leading her around that first year. A kind of babysitter. Babysitter to the newly blind. Laden felt guilty about it, said so, actually went into therapy about it, left Jane wondering, once puberty hit and she was old enough to wonder with genuine curiosity as much as with the maturity of bitterness: would she feel as guilty if they hadn't looked so much alike? Now that she was blind, she imagined that was less the case.
Her
parents sent her to the Nevada School for the Blind and there she learned to
read with her fingertips and with practice gained some skill and nerve using a
cane. Down stairwells, up escalators, crossing streets, attuned to the
acoustical messagings of the air around her. People would commend her parents
for how brave she was, which made no sense to her. Was it bravery if she had no
choice? It was brave and commendable when she graduated high school with
honors, was brave and commendable when she finished college in no more than
four years, moved into her own apartment, cooked and cleaned and dressed
herself, paid her rent on time. Standards had been lowered, yet people had been
moved by how well she’d risen to meet them. Was it insulting? She chose to read
their goodwill and innocence as something other than an insult. As what then?
Hard to tell, but she accepted it.
More impossible feats: became a certified public accountant, joined a firm, received annual bonuses for high performance. Fifteen years of that and she switched to money management. An office a few towns over from Reno. Thought: Surely this’ll sink. People at the main office and certainly the other financial advisor with Edward Morgan in Darrow, Nevada thought the same. Here’s no threat. Who’ll feel comfortable with a blind lady handling their money? The cliché alone works against her: the blind leading the blind. Might as well put that on her business card. Still, within five years most of the guy’s biggest clients had switched to her. Honest woman, keen sense, each told him in their own way. In the end had to move several towns over and start over. In a fit of drunken satire had even contemplated bringing a knife to his own eyes, considering blindness had all too clearly proven good for business.
She
bought some property, thirty acres, put up fencing, a horse barn. A pair of horses
at first, some alpaca. Her grandfather had been a farmer and she’d spent her
sighted early years running about his place, foraging in the hay barn, launching
dirt clods at rats crouched in the corners of the mechanic's bay. Felt good to
build something akin to that. Hired a man and his teenage son to help tend the
horses. Took her mother in after she’d been diagnosed. A lady from Bogue
Chitto, Louisiana, Ms. Della, tough ex-biker with a Creole accent, cooked
jambalaya in a crock pot, demon smoker of unfiltereds, moved in not long after
to help as caretaker. Soon enough had a kind of compound established. If she
was going to take care of her mother this way, all the way through illness to
the other side, best to have a crew of people around her. Or at least have
someone who could sit bedside, describe to her each step of the way changes as
they moved over her mother's face: Miss Jane, here’s what she looks
like now, this morning. Here’s what’s off, what’s different. Her
mother's long decline narrated in the most specialized and endangered of
Southern accents.
State it again because it's relevant: she lost her eyesight before puberty. When she was certain she would go blind, made a point of studying herself closely as much as possible in her bedroom mirror. Comprehensively, in squinting detail: her face, her arms, her belly, legs and feet, the freckles on her neck. When her vision degraded to little pinpricks of light, those pinpricks day by day narrowing to pinches of darkness, she still retained a stray and static trace of what she looked like. A long while after, in dreams, would even appear to herself, forever nine years old. When her body began its changes, swelling and widening, embarrassments of hair springing up and spreading without permission or warning, the discomfort was entirely tactile. With her hands felt how her body had become wholly her own yet someone else’s. Hormones, her mother explained. She was under their possession. Nights behind a locked bedroom door, in a tone of ashamed irritation, Laden narrated how they were both changing. When she turned around suddenly or rolled over on her side in bed, could feel it. Gravity and her nerves and her sensitivity to presences and acoustics, all of it had become so…intense. The girl she was in her mind’s eye severely strange to the woman who was being molded from her. We’re taller than the boys, Laden would tell her. At church some of the dads look at us.
Identical twins. So
risking accusations of vanity, her sister assured her: You’re pretty,
Jane. Prettier than I am. Pretty? What’s that? Laden sat a while
quiet, thinking for a description. When she did answer, did with weird finality
and authority: Pretty means people feel good when they look at you.
Had a first lived understanding what that might mean not long after, when a neighbor boy several years older called her around the side of a shed, asked if he could put his hands up her t-shirt. She was so knocked off balance by the request, how differently his voice sounded than it did usually, such seriousness to it, such pressure, a clipped neediness she’d later discover, after years of similar encounters, bespoke a volatile mix of simple common lust and nervousness, didn’t manage to say no to the warmth of hands on her stomach. Climbed and squeezed and crawled around, painfully worked the cups of her bra beneath her breasts, pressed and lifted them in their palms--hands and thumbs and fingers. All of it lasted a few minutes, ended without struggle. She pulled away, fumbled off, felt along the side of the shed out into the yard where she touched one tree trunk then another until she was back on the street. When Laden heard later, she was angry. Gross, she said, disgusted and but something else as well. That boy, later she'd admit, she'd liked him. Of the two of them, why her?
Even more awkward was the sex she had a year later. What she learned then, losing her virginity to some banker's son's enthusiasm, became cosmic truth as a matter of course. Most guys didn’t know what to do with a girl but it surely made things all the more self-conscious and nerve-wracking if she was blind. You could feel it in the stress coming off of them, you could hear it in the tremble of their breathing. How to do this? What now?
Her first real boyfriend, Josh Dawes.
That’s when she found out what it was really about. Comfortable enough to ask
him, Hey could we take a minute, could we slow down? One
August in the middle of the afternoon, on a Naugahyde couch, his head between
her thighs, each his hands cupping her buttocks, paralyzed for the first time
by the giddy jolt of a minor orgasm. His soft longish hair slipping between her
fingers. Cradling either side of his head in her hands. Lightly. Go slow. Took another few years before some guy asked her, What’s
it like? She told the boyfriend in bed with her, skinny Darrell
Marcus, she didn’t know. Couldn’t say or didn’t know? Both. She hadn’t begun to
fool around until years after she went blind. Sentimentally eager as he was,
offered to keep his own closed next time. She laughed. Sweet gesture on his
part but she assured him that wouldn’t quite replicate the experience. If he
wanted to know, she told him, he should keep his eyes open, watch her.
Watch how much she enjoyed it. How much she could enjoy herself.
Lost her eyesight. Lost: funny way to put it. If something leaves, why say
you've lost it? Same with people, with a sister. Especially with a
sister. How can you know for sure when you've lost her? Here’s one way, common
enough: she turns eighteen and leaves for Los Angeles.
There she'll meet a different sort of
person, some girl she'll glimpse reflected in the windows of parked cars as she
walks past them. At college learns what an actual party is, how to crash one,
throw one. Friends, acquaintances, it's not as she'd been taught: aren’t they
much the same thing? Clubs and apartments and restaurants and galleries, grown
men who wear upscale clothes and can correctly pronounce the names of their
designers. Sporty types and business types, the whole surprisingly varied
spectrum between. With one immutable through-line: no matter the man, he'll
talk about the future as if it's already written in his favor.
At twenty she'll insist she be called by her nickname. What her
Cali friends call her, what Jane will refer to disparagingly as her “L.A.
name”: Ladie. Offended in high style should anyone in the family refuse to call
her otherwise, so of course Jane makes a point of calling her Laden.
The prodigal son. Only half the story. What about the
prodigal daughter? In the Bible it was written that a son shall wander,
sometimes for years, before he is moved to return to his father’s doorstep
dissolute and humbled. Having exhausted all of life’s options, each of which
has found him wanting, soon he arrives home, nowhere else to go. A sad story,
really. Having returned home one shall find comfort but also undeniable proof
of one's defeat. Not so with the prodigal daughter. She did well for herself,
did some modeling then some acting. Later married rich and had two healthy
sons.
There was no reason to return, so why
should she? Rarely called, seldom came home for the holidays. The
boondocks, she called Nevada, the Nevada not Tahoe or Las Vegas. Never mind
she'd never set foot on a dock until she’d walked onto one on Venice
Beach.
Of this and other things Jane was resentful. If their mother and
father had been at least a little bit angry maybe she would've been less so.
They were parents, though. They knew what they were doing. Go ahead, get
angry, let her see that, feel that, they might lose her for certain. When their
father died, Jane's father, Ladie’s father died too.
He'd died quickly of a heart attack one hot
afternoon, clearing brush from an empty lot adjacent to their own. A
neighborhood kid found him. Months after their mother would see the boy riding
his bike past the house, and the boy, newly terrified of old people, would
peddle off and hide somewhere until his heart stopped pounding.
Ladie
came back for the funeral. Jane barely recognized this voice, her sister’s, its
different shapes of talking. Whole different manner in showing and not showing
herself, how she put things. This time said goodbye before she left. But after
that didn’t return for years. So went their thirties, their forties. Jane made
the switch from counting people’s money to investing it. Coupled up with a
college professor and for a while thought she had something. That is, until she
turned certain he was drawn to her for virtues of association: what it said
about him, that she was with him. Later she questioned: Had it been that,
really? Or just another convenient way of ending things? She came to her
conclusions without much debate and the advantage of that became clear only
much later. Afforded the right to leave him, lose him, without taking on much
guilt. Now she wondered if she hadn't been bored. Easier to call someone phony
than boring. He was surprised and badly hurt and many years later she wondered,
had he yet come around to permitting himself, like her parents with Laden, just
a little bit of anger? Even her speculations about him, this long after the
fact, seemed more concerned with own her reading of things, her own feelings,
than his. Bad enough to always steal words from other people’s mouths. Now she
was pretending she could think for them.
In penance for her sins, she treated herself. Bought a farm. Hired some hands to clear the land. Bought it, really, on a whim. Standing with the realtor and her mother in the kitchen of that old farmhouse marveling at the smell of it: dried corn cobs and dust. The nearest cornfield a day and half’s drive from there, so how? A hundred years of long gone people swirling about like dust motes in that kitchen. Bought the place money down. Against her nature, didn't negotiate. Took the asking price. Low enough already. A lot about it needed fixing but that was part of its appeal.
Soon as the repairs were finished, later she liked saying, everything fell apart. Might even say buying the house had dislodged the normal course of things. A whole year she worked to make it habitable, evenings and weekends, hiring contractors, applying fresh paint to the walls, while unbeknownst to her as the paint dried the walls had begun narrowing in on her. New roof, new doors, plumbing, wiring. Done, done, finished. So much changed after that. Or maybe she became less occupied, enough to note certain subtle changes.
Her mother had always been a quiet person. What she told herself, as a way of justification. Quiet, reserved. Still, it was hard now not to notice: the quiet had become peculiar. Couldn’t keep up with conversation. Got lost in her own house, preoccupied with her own fogginess. Jane called a doctor. The doctor referred them to a specialist. The specialist asked for fMRI brain scans and upon examining the scans tried her professional best to not sound like she was handing down a verdict: Alzheimer’s. Certain medications were prescribed. But these only seemed to pull her further into a fog. Her mother’s hand trembling as it lifted a fork, mouth agape. Mother picking at the blue cornflowers printed on the paper napkin laid out next to her plate, lifting then eating them. Jane moved her into the new place but it was like rooming with an untutored ghost. Exhausting. Mother wandering the rooms through the night, fumbling with doorknobs and locks. After a week of it Jane called a personal care service and hired Ms. Della. That was a bit of help, but still. Had to work more from home. Had to share the caregiving efforts in shifts with Ms. Della. On days she did venture to the office Ignazio would make sure to pick her up at five sharp so she could be home on the couch by dinner time, next to her mother. After she suffered a bad spate of shakes they decided to wean her off the meds and soon the shakes abated. The hallucinations though. Those stayed. Her mother a sort of radio. Someone turning the dial at random moments so its poor frail receiver might inhabit some other channel. From the way she talked they could hardly ever guess what she was hearing. Who was it talking, though, if not her mother?
Half the time she’d sit on the couch, hands moving of their own accord, fingers working in slow motion but steadily. As if she were stitching invisible threads with invisible needles. Someone sewing underwater. What have you got there? Jane would ask. Never really an answer. Sometimes she’d seem to lift, lift and set aside one by one certain objects the shape and size of coins. The fingers held them that way, at least. Dimes in a parking meter, quarters in a vending machine. Her mind gone but it was strange, wasn’t it, how muscle memory still lived in the fingers?
One night in particular. Afterwards Jane told herself: never forget this. Mother turned to Jane as she sat, as she always did, next to her on the couch listening, waiting for some genuine hint of the woman she knew to emerge from the drift of vague gestures and non-sequiturs. Reached out to hand her one such phantom token, Jane reaching to accept it. Took it slowly, carefully from her mother’s fingers. A gift? she asked. What is it? A vacant, gentle pause, after which her mother told her, her or whomever: "The moon needs adjusting." Some enigmatic proclamation that most likely meant nothing. Nonsense. What was nonsense, though, for someone in such condition? An impossible request, after all. No true way to tweak the moon, far away as it was, large as it was. A dead rock living on borrowed sunlight. This was what Jane thought as she listened to her mother’s face, listened to keep from crying, slack and blank as it sounded, a face which she loved but which showed her nothing.
I’m there in spirit, was what Laden said. But what that really meant was, I’ll send money, the only thing Jane probably had enough of. Why send that and not any of the classic existential resources now in such scarcity: time or space or energy? Would take a physicist to send her more time, she joked to herself with resignation more than bitterness. Laden was a caregiver as well, as Laden explained. The kids, Mom’s grandkids, they're young but old enough to be spooked by the sight of it. Much as she wanted to visit didn’t think it’d be right, leaving them in care of a nanny for weeks. Bringing them along would be even worse: remembering their grandmother that way. Best if she was just someone they recognized in photos.
So many ironies layered in the excuses and justifications it became easier to just forgive her. Fear—maybe fear was it? Not the kids...maybe Laden was the one who couldn’t handle it? Their whole complicated history, she could imagine how it might play out yet again over a long stay or even a brief visit. A guest. Laden could never simply be that. There would inevitably be a certain amount of power sharing. And since they were both daughters both would want a say in every detail. What clothes mom might wear each day, how mom might benefit from certain supplements, walks around the farm, fresh air, et cetera. The most basic tasks rendered impossibly complicated even before they've had a chance to be discussed. No thanks. At this point, what activity involving their mother wasn’t already complicated?
It wasn't a choice she made, more an unintended outcome of her day-to-day busyness. Jane didn't argue or even resent she didn't visit. Some time much later, maybe. Or not. Maybe later she'd realize she'd actually been relieved. A money account was opened under their mother's name, funds were transferred, payments for services withdrawn at pre-established times and dates, everything automatic...as with the functioning of lungs or heart or intestines, involuntary. Don’t you want to see her? Jane didn’t ask. Don’t you want to help dress her? Even a bit? None of that. Keep it clean, civil. There was only so much time before the disease began shutting down her vitals, one organ then another, so pay close attention, because every moment you took time to look at her you were saying goodbye. Laden might have been able to bear it, helping their mother. But maybe less so when there was only this left, a body.
Still, there were moments. The body yawning. The body speaking or smiling and for a moment bringing back into the room someone almost naturally their mother. These Jane didn’t tell of, sparing her sister the guilt. On the couch or in bed, she would blink or breathe and out of nowhere and for no reason would speak the names of her daughters, three different ways: Laden, she’d say, or Janey, or Girls. More often would call Jane Laden and most often call her in the plural. Girls? she’d ask, and Jane would answer, Yes mom? Once even called out, both hands clutching the sides of a T.V. tray, Laden! Girls! Calling out from some back porch some evening way back in the distant past, calling her baby girls home for dinner. It surprised her how this didn't bother her, that her name was the one least mentioned. She knew she’d been the daughter most admired and loved. So it was curious: why now refer to her as the daughter less favored? It was as if she were daughter enough now for both of them. Laden, smart and pretty, who could see. Jane, smart and pretty, who couldn’t.
2.
The brain was born a girl. It grew. The brain grew and so the girl
grew. The girl watched and listened, worked the fingers of newfound hands in
the air before her, and across the expanse of the brain neurons reached out to
one another, firing in patterns that mapped the wiggling of fingers. The girl
learned to talk and so the brain learned too. Synapses meshed in sentient meat
and against the edge of a couch the girl pulled herself upright from crawling.
In months that followed the girl began walking and the brain did too. When
the girl was hungry, the brain, hungry, cried with her. When the girl strained
to reach a toy fallen to the floor outside her crib, irritation
leapt from amygdala to hippocampus, emerged an outraged whole in a fraction of
a second’s passing, a fourteen-month-old screaming and crying. When the girl’s
mother arrived, held her, rocked her, the brain as well was soothed.
When
the brain aged eleven years, hormones bloomed among its networks, and the
girl, for no other reason than a brain’s will to mature, was subtly then
forcibly changed. Breasts grew from the girl's chest and the areolas upon
each breast widened. Hips broadened, and buttocks. Between the girl’s legs and under her
armpits a curly and brittle kind of hair surfaced. Morning of its first menstruation
the brain busied itself coordinating the girl’s shame and terror, chased her to a back
bedroom of the house where she found her mother, asked for help, which appeared soon
after in the form of a first tampon. Now the brain was someone else, because
the girl was someone else. Reborn by fits and starts a teenager soon a woman.
Sixty-five
years passed. The woman lived the years, celebrating them then dreading them as
birthdays. The brain kept its own time, multiplying years by dendrites, gathered in
its prime to a peak fitness before slowly, judiciously paring back on the excesses
of its youth until, by thirty, it had leveled off to a modest, stable adulthood. In
the woman’s seventy-sixth year, in the more obscure interiors of the
brain, however, irreversible changes were occurring.
A hundred billion nerve cells and branches
of those cells intersecting at more than a hundred trillion points, a hive of
evolved interrelation, a forest. Electrochemical pulses cascading across these
any given moment, a borealis of consciousness viewed from within in a fraction
of a millisecond, emerging as sensation or thought: of, perhaps, a recipe for chess pie, or an itch
on the inside of one’s left ankle, or resentment over a recent doctor’s bill.
There was disorder, there were misfires. Reach exceeded grasp among many intricate coordinations. Of this the brain was aware but didn’t know, and of this the woman
remained innocent.
If the brain didn’t know, how could it
hope to tell her? If the woman didn’t know, how could she be aware
she didn’t know, enough to consult a doctor, a neurologist, someone versed in the
norms of healthy or unhealthy brains, to help it? The woman was a mother and a
grandmother and many decades a widow. More than likely she had been too busy to
notice.
A few thousand, a hundred thousand, a
million, a few hundred million neurons, beta-amyloid proteins secreting from the
fatty membranes around them, each of which wander and gather, loiter about and clot
the commerce of neurotransmitters. Within the neurons themselves, dozens then
hundreds, hundreds then thousands, a hundred thousand, a million, a hundred million and more tau molecules
detach from their microtubules, bumble about, attach to one another like drowning
people grasping at each other, seeking strength in numbers to support their drowning. From these neurofibrillary tangles form, tangles that block the flit and flow of nutrients to axons and dendrites…among its voices the
brain loses track of what it has just said and what it has just heard. There's talk but less and less conversation. Chaos, noise. What had
the brain wanted to ask itself, tell itself? What had it just been thinking?
There is inflammation, there
are vascular disturbances, proteins clot the brain’s arteries and the arteries
harden. As arteries suffer, so do the veins and capillaries, so does the
blood-brain barrier: so the brain starves for glucose and its vibrancies wither. The woman continues living while unbeknownst to her and against its will, the
brain conjugates itself to nothing. The brain once a brain, once a woman.
Seventy-six years of efficient meticulous expansion…how rapidly it contracts. Star by star, neuron by neuron, each damaged, extinguished, galaxies breaking their orbits and scattering without purpose…the woman left as a witness, appearing to herself and others as old as she’d grown. The brain, shrunken to the size of childhood, continues to desiccate and diminish until a fatal momentum has gathered to take the woman with it. The woman dies, is left a living body. Then the body dies too.
Flesh to flesh. Dust to dust. A person-shaped singularity bursting forth a blizzard. Hundreds of trillions of atoms cut free to wander, disperse the body they’d once sculpted, either quickly through cremation or painstakingly
by way of rot in a coffin. Alone. Alone hereafter, together. Leaving loved ones of the brain and woman and body to fear their own futures and wonder: Was this it? Was this enough? Alone enough, alone together. Enough to render love itself
hopeless.
