Random Walk: A Novel for a New Age

Three

Sara Duskin dozed off in the taxi. She wasn’t tired, really, but she had things on her mind and her thoughts just wound inward and inward, curling on themselves until they had led her far away from consciousness. When the taxi stopped in front of her house she awoke instantly, and her eyes were open by the time the driver turned to tell her they had arrived.

She turned her head to look at the meter, turned her head again to look down at her purse. She paid him, tipped him, and walked up the driveway to the door.

She heard Thom dribbling a basketball, then looked and saw him arcing a shot at the basket mounted on the garage. She was fitting her key in the lock when he caught sight of her and ran to her.

“I thought you were home,” he said accusingly. “I saw the car and I thought you were home.”

“Didn’t I tell you I was going to the doctor?”

“Yeah, but I thought you came back ’cause the car was in the garage. And then the door was locked, and I rang and rang and you didn’t open it.”

“Wasn’t the key on the hook? In the garage?”

“Yeah, but I thought you were home, see, so why would I bother with the key? And then I figured you were asleep, so I got the key and went in, and you weren’t home, and it was spooky.”

“Were you scared?”

“I didn’t say I was scared, just that it was spooky.” He followed her into the house, and while she heated water for tea he poured himself a glass of milk and helped himself to a handful of Oreos.

“I won’t spoil my dinner,” he said.

“I don’t care if you do.”

“You don’t? What’d you get from the doctor, drugs?”

“You guessed it, sport. A little coke, a little smack—”

“What’s smack?”

“Heroin. Gosh, don’t they teach you anything in that school of yours?”

“I could buy heroin, Mom. You want me to buy some without leaving the school building?”

“In Fort Wayne?”

“Right here in beautiful downtown Fort Wayne. You want me to buy some what-did-you-call-it? Smack?”

“Don’t do me any favors. The doctor gives me a good price.”

“I’ll bet.” He looked down at his glass of milk. “How come you didn’t take the car?”

“I got a ride.”

“I thought you took a cab.”

“I did. That’s what I got a ride in.”

“How come?”

“Oh, I thought I might be tired, and it might be easier to let somebody else drive.”

“Is that the truth, Mom?”

He had such an earnest gaze, and he was such a fine looking boy. Thirteen years old, tall for his age, and blond, and with such clean-cut chiseled features. It was such a joy to see him; it was so good to be able to see him—

“Mom?”

“It’s the truth,” she said, “but it’s not the whole truth.”

“What’s the whole truth?”

“I don’t think I can drive anymore, Thom.”

“What did the doctor say?”

“He didn’t say anything good.”

“What do you mean?”

She took the teabag from the cup, set it in the saucer. She reached for his glass of milk and added a little to her tea.

“There’s crumbs in it,” he said. “From the cookies, I dunked them and there’s crumbs.”

“So?”

“So now you’ve got cookie crumbs in your tea.”

“So?”

“So nothing. What did the doctor say?”

“He says I definitely don’t have glaucoma.”

“Isn’t that good?”

“Not in this case, because they can arrest glaucoma. There are drops they give you, and if you take them regularly your vision doesn’t get any worse.”

“He gave you drops last week.”

“Right.”

“Even though he didn’t think it was glaucoma.”

“Right. Because the eyeball pressure wasn’t elevated, but he thought the drops might arrest the symptoms just as if the pressure were elevated as in true glaucoma.”

“But it didn’t?”

“No, it didn’t.”

“What does that mean exactly? Your eyes are worse than they were last week?”

“That’s right.”

“And you knew that already because that’s why you took the cab instead of driving.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Mom?”

“What?”

Are you gonna go blind, Mom? She could hear his question as clearly as if he had spoken it aloud. But he was not yet ready to speak it. Instead he said, “What can you see, exactly? I mean, how bad is it?”

She thought for a moment. “You see that roll of paper towels?”

“Sure I see it. Why? Can’t you see it?”

“Of course I can see it, dummy. Didn’t I just point it out to you?”

“Huh?”

“Bring me the roll of paper towels, sport. Thanks. Now what we want here is the cardboard tube, so let’s take all the paper towels off. If we fold them — that’s right — we’ll be able to use them again. Sweetie, you look utterly mystified.”

“Well, you’ve got to admit you’re acting pretty weird, Mom. First a cab, then unrolling the paper towels. Didn’t I do something like this with toilet paper when I was a little kid?”

“You can’t possibly remember that.”

“I remember you talking about it. Did I get in trouble?”

“No, but you got laughed at. Okay, we now have a cardboard tube. Now, voila! We tear it in half and we have two cardboard tubes.”

“And if we put them together we have a whole one again. And if—”

“Hold ’em to your eyes, Thommy. Like binoculars, but right up against your eyes.”

“Like this?”

“Like that. Pointing straight out, that’s right. Now you see what I see.”

“Oh, wow,” he said. “That’s as much as you can see?”

“Gimme. No, as a matter of fact I can do a little better than this.” She shortened both tubes until they were about four inches long. “Here,” she said. “Now try it.”

“You can’t see very much.”

“No.”

“Just straight ahead? So if a car was coming from the side—”

“That’s why I took a taxi.”

“Wow,” he said. He was still holding the cardboard tubes to his eyes, looking experimentally around the room. He said, “Was it this bad last week, Mom?”

“No. He said there’s been further deterioration and vision loss since last week.”

And he hadn’t had to say that; she’d already known. Her field of vision was shrinking, and it sometimes seemed to her that she could feel it drawing in. He’d tested her: Now keep your eyes straight forward, Mrs. Duskin. Now I want you to watch the red dot. Without moving your eyes, just be aware of the red dot. Tell me when it disappears.

The red dot (and the yellow dot, and the blue dot) had disappeared sooner this week than last. Each time it passed from her field of vision she said “There” or “Now” or “Oooops,” and the ophthalmologist made a pencil mark on the sheet of graph paper. When he had finished, he connected the dots to form a pair of irregular circles. While she studied them, he handed her without comment her test from the preceding week. The circles then had been larger.

“What’s going to happen, Mom?”

“He doesn’t really know,” she said. “Since he doesn’t know exactly what’s wrong with me, he can’t tell exactly what will happen next. My condition could just spontaneously arrest itself; the deterioration could stop of its own accord. Or it could clear up completely.”

“Or?”

Softly she said, “I think I’m going blind, Thommy.”

“You think so, huh?”

“I’m pretty sure of it.”

“Do you know—”

“How much time I’ve got? Not too long, I don’t think. He wants me to see a specialist.”

“You better go right away.”

She shook her head. “I’m not going.”

“Why not?”

“Because it won’t do any good.”

She thought he’d argue with her, or ask her how she could be so sure, but instead he said, “Mom? Are you scared?”

“This tea’s good,” she said. “I’m probably spoiled now, I’ll want cookie crumbs in it all the time.”

“Are you scared, Mom?”

“No,” she said. “No, I’m not. Funny, isn’t it?”

She did some counseling at Indiana-Fort Wayne, and if one of her clients had said the same thing she would have labeled it denial. How could you fail to run the gamut of negative emotions at the prospect of blindness? One of her senses, perhaps the chief one, was being taken away from her. Her world was shrinking and turning dark around her. How could she react other than with fear and rage?

Yet, from the beginning, it had not felt like deprivation. It had felt like a gift. From the onset, when she started catching flashes of white light out of the corners of her eyes toward the end of the day, and then when her field of vision began to have an occasional halo around it, from those first symptoms she had sensed that more was being given to her than was being taken away.

She was not being singled out for punishment. Rather, she was being chosen for something. For something important.

Charming, her professional self commented. Instead of paranoia, she was opting for grandiosity.

Except she didn’t feel grandiose. If anything, she felt curiously humble.

She was forty-one years old, the widowed mother of a thirteen-year-old boy. She stood five-four in flat shoes and weighed 105 pounds. Except for her pregnancy, her weight had not varied by more than a pound or two since college. It stayed the same, irrespective of her diet. The great majority of the female students she counseled, and not a few of the males as well, had some sort of problematic relationship with weight and food. Many struggled with their weight, and some had serious eating disorders, anorexia and bulimia. Half the world was hungry, she sometimes thought, and the other half was either starving itself or alternately gorging and vomiting.

She had a heart-shaped face, a strong straight nose, a small mouth. Her forehead was broad, with a sharply defined widow’s peak. Ten years ago, weeks after a drunk driver had crossed the centerline on State Road 37, she had found herself wanting to change her hair style and combing tentative bangs down onto her forehead. Almost immediately she’d realized what she was doing, trying to deny her widowhood by covering her widows peak.

The hair had been dark brown then. Now it was a soft gray and she wore it as she’d been wearing it for twenty years, falling evenly to within an inch of her shoulders. Her eyes were also gray, a surprising shade a full tone deeper than her hair. They were no less imposing to look upon now that they had begun to lose their function.

Since he’d already spoiled his dinner with Oreos, she didn’t bother cooking. They had a pizza delivered and ate it in front of the television set. Neither of them watched; he was doing his homework, and she had her eyes closed and let her gaze turn inward.

He said, “Mom? This is gonna sound dumb.”

“I’m glad you warned me.”

“Well, here goes. Uh. Is there something you don’t want to see?”

“Oh, God.”

“Well, I just thought—”

“I thought the cobbler’s kids were supposed to go barefoot. But what about the psychologist’s kids?”

“Psychobabble, huh? I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize, Thom.” She opened her eyes, surprised for an instant by the smallness of her field of vision. Her mind’s eye still had a wide screen, and it was as if she saw less now when she opened her eyes.

She said, “I asked myself the same thing. On a metaphysical level everything that happens to us is the result of a choice we make. Even your father, on some level or other he elected to be in that accident—”

“I still don’t get that. I mean, he was driving along minding his own business, right? And some drunk came sailing at him from out of nowhere, and it’s his fault?”

“I didn’t say it was his fault.”

“You said he chose it. He called up somebody and had an accident delivered.”

“Why do you think he just happened to be there?”

“Because he was coming home, wasn’t he? He was on his way home.”

“So it was just bad luck, huh?”

“I guess.”

“Coincidence.”

“Right.”

“Well, you can believe in luck and coincidence, Sport, or you can believe that they don’t put pepperoni on your pizza unless you order it that way.”

“So Dad had this desire to get killed in a car wreck and—”

“Well, to die.”

“And it went into some computer up in the sky, and they dispatched a drunk driver to do the job.”

“Well, something put them in the same place at the same time.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Why did Dad want to die?”

“I don’t know.”

“You blame him for dying, huh?”

“Not anymore.”

“You used to?”

“Oh, God, yes. How could he do that to me? To us? Leaving us all alone like that, the son of a bitch. Survivors are usually angry with loved ones who die, unless they’re too occupied with feeling guilty for having survived. Or unless they just stuff the feelings and aren’t aware of them.”

“I can’t remember how I felt. It was a long time ago.”

“I know.”

“Sometimes I think I can remember, but it’s like unrolling the toilet paper. I remember that it happened, but I don’t really remember. Are you going to have the last piece of pizza?”

“Take it.”

“Are you sure? I already had three.”

“Take it.”

“Thanks. Can I ask you something? If Dad chose to be in a car wreck, aren’t you choosing to uh—”

“Go blind.”

“It’s hard to say the word.”

“It’ll get easier. Yes, of course I’m choosing it, but I don’t think it’s because there’s something I don’t want to see. I think there’s something I do want to see.”

“I don’t get it.”

She closed her eyes. “I think,” she said, “that I’m going to be able to see far more with my eyes closed than I was ever able to see with them open. Thom, ever since I started to have trouble with my eyes, I’ve been getting glimpses of things.”

“What kind of things?”

“It’s hard to explain. At first it would happen at night when I went to bed.”

“Like dreams?”

“No, not like dreams, because it would happen while I was awake. I would close my eyes and I would start to get pictures. Almost like watching a movie, except that when I tried to focus in on an image I would lose it.”

“I get things sometimes. Like if I stare at a light and then close my eyes, and you get these colors, and they sort of change color and finally fade away.”

“This is a little different.”

“What kind of things do you see?”

“All kinds. Scenery. People’s faces. Sometimes they’ll be having a conversation.”

“Do you hear what they’re saying?”

“I know what they’re saying. Some of the time, anyway. It’s very flickery, it’s like a film that keeps cutting from one image to another. Or sometimes it’s just one picture that flashes on the screen, and it’s there for a while and then it vanishes and nothing else comes on.”

“They turn the lights on and the show’s over.”

“Something like that. A lot of the time I see people walking down a highway.”

“Where are they going?”

“I don’t know yet,” she said. “I’m starting to know.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll tell you what I thinks happening. I think that as I lose my eyesight, this other kind of sight is expanding. It doesn’t just happen late at night now. It can happen any time I close my eyes. It doesn’t always, but it seems to be happening more and more.” She heaved a sigh. “I think it’s a gift, Thom.”

“A gift.”

“I think so.”

“And you chose it.”

“It was offered to me, and I chose to receive it.”

“You picked out your own present. Mom? What do you figure it is that you see? The future?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Like having a crystal ball in your head. Hey, can you see how I’m going to do on my science final?”

“When is it?”

“I think a week from Wednesday.”

“Well, that’s easy, then,” she said.

“Are you serious? You really know how I’m going to do on a test I haven’t even taken yet?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well?”

“You’re not going to take the test, Champ.”

“I’m not?”

“Nope.”

“Why? Am I gonna be sick? Am I gonna choose to have a cold that day?”

She shook her head. “You’re going to choose to be elsewhere.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I think we’ll be out of here by then, Thommy.”

“Out of here?”

“Gone. Out of Fort Wayne.”

“We’re moving?”

“’Fraid so.”

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Do you know when?”

“Soon. Before your science final.”

“We’re just gonna pick up and go? Just like that? Are we going to take the car? We can’t take the car, you can’t drive. What are we—”

She held up a hand. “Stop. No more questions. I don’t have any more answers just now. Okay?”

“But—”

“‘More will be revealed.’ Okay?”

At breakfast the next morning she said, “I want you to stay home from school today, sport. I’m going to need you to help me.”

“Gee, it’s the week before finals. Oh. I won’t be taking finals, will I? Or is it just the science exam I’m gonna miss?”

“You won’t be taking any of your finals. In fact, it’s possible you won’t be going back to school at all this year.”

“Really?”

“Breaks your heart, doesn’t it?” She took a bite of toast, a sip of tea. “At nine-fifteen I want to call the office and tell Rysbeck I’m not coming in. I hope they can issue a check right away. I’ve got sick leave and vacation time coming.”

“Are you quitting your job?”

“That’s right. Then we’re going to have to do something about the car. It’s not paid off, but I think it’s worth more than we owe on it. I’ll call Angert Motors and find out what I can do.”

“You’re selling the car?”

“Well, I can’t see to drive it, Thom, and you can’t drive for three more years yet, so I don’t see what good it is to us. I suppose we could knock the windows out and use it as a huge outdoor planter, but aside from that—”

“Mom.”

“What?”

“I’m a little worried.”

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For admitting it.”

“The thing is, I’m scared.”

“Okay.”

“I mean, don’t you think this is a little crazy? I mean, you’re going blind, like, and I don’t know how we’ll even be able to do anything if you can’t see. I mean, how will we get places if you can’t drive? How will you work, how will we have any money, how will you even fix dinner, I mean—”

“Take a breath.”

“It just seems so crazy! Like you want me to leave school now and miss finals. Two more weeks and school’s over, it’s vacation, so why can’t we wait until then? Doesn’t that make more sense?”

“I’m sure it does.”

“I mean, what’s the rush? I mean, why do we have to rush to pack up and go somewhere when you don’t even know where we’re going? If you really want to know, I think you’re acting crazy. That’s what I think.”

“I know it is, Thommy.”

“Mom, I didn’t mean it.”

“Sure you did. It’s okay.”

“No, I—”

“You meant every word of it, sweetie, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

He rushed to her and his embrace was fierce. He said, “I don’t want us to go anywhere. I don’t want you to be blind. I don’t want any of this. It’s not fair.”

“I know.”

“I mean it. It’s not fair. It sucks.”

“I know.”

“I hate this. What’s so funny?”

“Oh, I was just thinking. The other day, when I tried to imagine telling you that I was going blind? I had this image of you jumping up and down and shouting, ‘Oh, goodie, we’ll be getting a dog!’”

“You’re terrible.”

“I know.”

“The good news is we’re getting a dog. The bad news is it’s a seeing-eye dog.”

“Some joke, huh?”

“You’re really terrible.”

“I know,” she said, stroking the blond hair, kneading the nape of the neck. “I’ll tell you what. Fix your terrible mother a cup of tea—”

“With or without cookie crumbs?”

“Without. And I’ll try to explain why everything’s so crazy and why it all has to happen so fast.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t know where to start. Okay. These pictures I’ve been seeing, these visions.”

“People walking on a highway.”

“That’s one of the themes, yes. It’s not just a batch of visually interesting images.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I mean is that it’s all part of something very big and very important. There’s a reason why I’m losing my eyesight and getting this other sight in its place. I’m being given an important part to play in something very big that’s happening.”

“What is it?”

She closed her eyes. “Things are happening very rapidly,” she said. “Everything is getting ready to change. I don’t understand it, but maybe I don’t have to understand it. I don’t understand electricity but when I turn the switch the light goes on.”

“Unless the bulb’s out.”

“All of a sudden,” she said, “things that used to be important don’t matter anymore. My work doesn’t matter. Your finals don’t matter; your whole education doesn’t matter. The car doesn’t matter. Whether or not I go blind doesn’t matter. Do you hear what I’m saying, Thommy? None of that stuff matters.”

“What does?”

“Going forward. Letting go of everything that’s not necessary. Thommy, I close my eyes and I see things, but I don’t see all of it. I know we have to leave here within the next couple of days. I want to make arrangements about this house and money and everything before then, but if I can’t handle any of it we’ll just walk away from it, because the important thing is to go. We’ll know more when we have to know more. You know what it’s like? It’s like driving at night. You can only see as far as the headlights reach, but you can go all the way across the country that way.”

“Not if we sell the car. Not if you can’t see to drive.”

“Oh, shit,” she said. “I’m not doing a good job of explaining this.”

“That’s okay,” he said. “I sort of get it.”

Explaining to Thom, she spoke with powerful assurance. Alone, she was less supremely confident. There were doubts, there were fears. But there was always enough certainty to overcome them.

She felt guided.

She sat down with a vice president at her bank and arranged to pay the mortgage payments and taxes out of a line of credit secured by a second mortgage. Angert Motors sent a man out to look at her car, and she wound up getting twelve hundred dollars for her equity in it. Hal Rysbeck cut through a maze of red tape at the school and got her a check for most of what she had coming; the rest would go to her bank and be credited to her account. And a very nice woman at Klopfer & Klopfer Realty listed her house for rent and agreed to have a moving firm pack and store her personal articles.

It all went so smoothly that she took it for confirmation that she was acting appropriately. The universe was endorsing her action by cooperating at every turn. But if there had been any snags she would simply have let go of whatever was stuck. She was willing to leave the car in the driveway for someone to repossess, willing to let the mortgage go unpaid until the bank foreclosed or the city sold the house for back taxes. None of that really mattered because something else, something new, something still incomprehensible, mattered so very much more.

She had had her last appointment with the ophthalmologist on Monday. That Thursday, she and Thom took a taxi to the Greyhound Terminal downtown, where a very helpful black man worked out their route for them and sold them their tickets. They would go from Fort Wayne to Chicago, where they would change to an express bus that went through Davenport and Omaha and Cheyenne en route to Salt Lake City. There they would change to another bus that slanted northwest through Idaho, stopping at Boise en route to Portland.

“Now that’s Portland, Oregon,” the man said, grinning. “You absolutely sure you want Portland, Oregon, and not Portland, Maine?”

“As sure as I am of anything,” she said.