SEA OF TRANQUILITY

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70 American Short Fiction ❖ He was locking up the store when everything went black. It was a Friday at half past six. When he knelt down by the door with his key, the darkness took him by surprise and made him lose his balance. It felt like an eclipse at fi rst, or a complete electrical failure. Like black velvet curtains falling over a stage. Outside the glass door the liquor store was gone, and the Korean BBQ at the corner. Th ere were no cars, no parking lot or Dumpsters or stop signs. Everything he knew was gone except for a stretch of cloudless sky. He crawled the length of the store, feeling his way along the carpet tiles until he got back to his desk. Th at’s where he stayed until Marci came to get him. He held onto her sleeve the whole way to the hospital. He saw only the blue sky and the mountains, but not the dashboard or her face. He clutched her hand so tightly he was afraid he would hurt her, but she didn’t pull away. She kept saying he shouldn’t panic. Th ere was an explanation, and the doctors would fi gure it out. Th e ophthalmologists at Memorial were some of the best in the state. Maybe it’s hysterical blindness, she was saying. It could be all the stress from closing the store, or it might be an ocular migraine or a transient episode in his brain. Th ese things happen. Th ey happen all the time, and he wanted to believe her. ❖ Th ey tested him for glaucoma and occlusions in his internal carotid artery. Th ey made sure his retinas hadn’t detached and checked them for cholesterol crystals, but everything looked normal. Th ey injected dye into his arm and photographed the inside of his eye to see if the veins were leaking, and the doctors stood around his chair and talked about him as if he were a textbook case and not a living patient. Nurses rolled him around the hallways, and he could hear
L. Annette Binder 71 ventilators in places and the beeping of machines, snatches of voices he hadn’t heard before but they all were somehow familiar. Th ey did an MRI, too. Th e technician sounded like a smoker. She coughed just like his Uncle Lewis who’d died from emphysema. She set the line with the contrast dye into his forearm, and it burned when it went in. Keep your eyes closed, she said. Th at always makes it better. Th e CT scans came next. Th en the specialists from Denver who ignored him when he said he could see things in the distance. Let’s go outside, he told them, and I’ll show you what I mean, but they talked only about his ocular fundus and his arterial branches. One of the doctors asked him if he was a veteran or had experienced any recent psychological trauma. He said he could be converting his stress into vision failure. Another doctor named Mitkoff was convinced there was a neurological reason. Your pupils have decreased constriction, he said. Th ey don’t respond normally to the light. Th e things you see are only illusions. Th ere was a name for this syndrome where the blind had beautiful visions. Th ey saw butterfl ies and songbirds and climbing lattice patterns, and what could he say to these experts who were so certain they were right? On the seventh day the doctors still couldn’t agree. Th ey discharged him with referrals to a psychiatrist and the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins. Marci left her shift early and rolled him through the doors. He didn’t want to use the chair, but she said it was hospital policy. He couldn’t see the parking lot or the sliding glass doors at the hospital entrance. He couldn’t see her hands on the wheelchair handles, but just before they got to the car he looked up at the sky. Th e moon was full and it was hanging there and he saw all its familiar craters. Normally, he needed the crescent to make out the details because that’s when the sun threw the strongest shadows, but he saw the ripples now and every swirling cloud. It wasn’t eight o’clock yet, and the sky was halfway between blue and black. He followed its dome downward, and there were the distant mountains he’d seen every day of his life. Th e mountains
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SEA OF TRANQUILITY

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