‘It’s not easy,’ said Alex. ‘I don’t find it easy myself.’
‘But you’ve always been kind to me, and they’re sure to give consideration to that.’ He scratched at the hair around his ears. ‘There are different ways that a person could come to die, I guess. Like when blood comes out of the ears. But you could also die if you happen to walk on the subway tracks and a train arrives. Do you ever think about that, sir?’
‘I try not to.’
The man nodded. ‘The terrorists try to put me in front of the trains. It’s pretty bad, sir. But I have the support of the military now. They’re getting the forces in position. So thank you for the help, and things are getting better all the time.’
‘No trouble. Really. And I hope…’ he shrugged, unsure what he could hope for this man.
‘They’re mobilizing the forces on the border, sir!’ the man called after him as he reached for his key and opened the door of his building.
III
This is what happened. Alex Deveney sat with his head in a box – though it was not actually a box, it was in fact a medical device of some sophistication, but he experienced it as a box, a metal box. And in the darkness of this device they fired lasers at his eyes, burning the overgrown blood vessels, and burning, as well, the tissue around them. This was unavoidable, the risk could be reduced but never eliminated; there would be some spontaneous repair, but also some permanent scarring. The lasers were a specialized type known as Argon Green, used in many similar procedures. More than one eye condition is treated with Argon Green lasers, but for proliferative retinopathy the burns are harsher, the number of burns is many times greater. It is an intractable illness, difficult to treat.
Alex sat with his head in a box, repeating the words Argon Green in his head with each painful flash, about a thousand burns on each side, green knives of light from the dark ground. He lost, for a while, chronology and proprioception, existence distilled to the world of Argon Green and the small fluid arc of the eye.
And the rest of the world went on, planes fell out of the air and diseases were quarantined, amazing rescues were performed from burning buildings, people married and died and played air guitar.
In a biohazard lab, instruments scanned the single sheet of paper that had arrived from nowhere saying that it contained no anthrax, and again and again the machines proved the claim to be true. It made no sense, the only reason to deny such a thing was its ultimate truth, but the instruments ran the results again and returned the same answer. Nothing.
On a late-morning street in the centre of the city, Alex Deveney leaned against the wall of an office tower, his hands over his face.
He hailed a taxi and rode home trembling. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t properly see, everything was obscured by glare and blur, and his eyes were throbbing with pain. And he knew it wasn’t really so bad. He was blowing this out of proportion, he had to be.
The blur would go away, the blur was not permanent damage.
The permanent damage he couldn’t be sure of right now.
The glare was probably lasting. He would have trouble with bright sunlight forever, he’d have to wear dark glasses or some stupid baseball cap. This intense lovely light of winter, the crystal drifts.
He couldn’t really tell if his field of vision had narrowed. It felt constricted. He could be wrong. It was easy to imagine, hard to be sure.
He turned out the lights in his apartment and lay down on the couch. It would get better. Of course it would get better. And he would go on taking pictures. He would go on as long as he could distinguish light from darkness and maybe after that. Perhaps he could make a living as a kind of inspirational novelty. Hallmark would put his photos on their cards, beside poems about how you truly see with your heart. But he wasn’t going blind right now, that was absurd, self-dramatizing.
He had a vague memory of reading somewhere that if you drank a lot of water it would wash anxiety-causing chemicals out of your system, which seemed like probably spurious science, but he went to the sink and drank two glasses of water anyway.
He remembered the tulips he had seen lying in one of the city’s concrete planters the past summer. Squirrels had got at the bulbs, dug them up and eaten them, and left the stalks, with the flowers still in the bud, lying scattered across the planter’s soil. But they had gone on growing, they had gone on turning red, the buds opening into distorted and burned-looking flowers, even bending upwards on the torn stems towards the sun, a futile and terrifying pantomime of vitality. He had wished that they would just give up and die, or that someone would throw them away, but he had never done anything himself, just gone on staring at them every day, at their horrible stupid post-mortem life.
In the hospital, the specialists held their vigil over the burned man. They supervised the debridement of the dead meat from his body, watched the progress of the skin grafts. The man woke and slept again, and saw always the fire as it came towards him.
He knew that he had not been a good man, not really, that he had failed in work and in love and talked to himself sometimes out loud. Speak to the bones, he would say to himself, thinking of her disappointed face and the carton of expired milk. Things happened badly. But no one could tell him why – how it was he had been burned like this, why he was the person that young men had chosen to hurt.
The burned man could not remember their faces, those angry young men equipped with fire. When he saw them in dreams, coming towards him, he could not picture them clearly. These things he knew, that they had lighters in their pockets, alcohol on their breath, that they had tense, implacable muscle. That they were full of lack and desire, and they hated him because he was weak. Because he was no one.
They were angry before these troubles started, these young men, and they would be angry afterwards, formlessly angry, and only rarely would they cross the path of the public world. They were not the city’s only threat, and not the worst, but in the burned man’s dreams they came to him, and he woke to pain and purple infection and the constant drip of liquid in his arm.
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death, he whispered.
Alex went down the winding slope of Grace Street and walked for a while in Trinity-Bellwoods Park, kicking at snow, throwing a badly formed snowball at a tree. Then the pain got to be too much for him and he went home and took a Tylenol and sat with his eyes closed, listening to the radio.
‘And phone in those pledges right now, people,’ the announcer on the campus radio station was saying, ‘because we are $15,000 behind on our rent, and if you don’t get on those phones, we’re going off the air at midnight!’
He would have to remember to check the station tomorrow and find out whether they were still around.
This is what it would be like, he thought, an aimless little life of walks and radios and pointless diversions. Because he couldn’t really believe that it would work out well, that they would arrest the disease with a few treatments and cause no major damage to his sight. His ophthalmologist, he suspected, didn’t really believe it either. It happened that way for some people, but it wouldn’t happen for him.
The girl watched the late afternoon light move across her desk, deep yellow, the sun glowing orange behind the dark mass of trees beyond the window. Her notebook was open in front of her, a purple pen with gold sparkles lying across it. The English teacher reached for a dictionary and set it down on Zoe’s desk. ‘Okay. Definition and derivation,’ he said. ‘Read that part?’