Wake

Chapter 33

As I’d noted, the datastream from the special point did not always follow the same path to its destination. I mulled over the significance of that for a while, and I finally got it.

It was a huge leap, a startling conceptual shift: the other entity’s location varied substantially in the realm in which it dwelled, and in order to send data to its intended destination, the entity passed it on to whatever intermediate point was physically closest to it at any given moment. Amazing!

Still, there was one particular intermediary to which the entity linked most frequently, and that point shot out links of its own to many other points, some of which it reconnected with time and again.

Perhaps these other points were special in some way. I touched many of them, but still, maddeningly, could make no sense of the data they poured forth; the only datastream I could interpret was the one from the special point, and even then, only some of the time. Oh, for a key to understand it all!

Caitlin was startled to hear the door open downstairs. She looked at her mother, and could see what must have been a startled expression on her face, too. “Malcolm?” her mom called out tentatively.

A single syllable: “Yes.”

Caitlin spun her chair around, got up, and followed her mom down the stairs — and there was her father! She closed the distance between them, trying to bring him into focus.

“How’d you get home?” her mom asked.

“Amir gave me a lift,” he said. Amir was Bashira’s father.

“Ah,” her mom said, apparently wondering whether Bashira had tipped off her own father. “Did he say anything … interesting?”

“He thinks Forde may be on to something with his civilexity modeling.”

Caitlin looked him up and down. He was wearing a … a jacket with … with…

Yes! She’d read about this: the perfect professorial garb. He was wearing a brown jacket — a sports jacket, maybe? — with patches on the elbows, and … and … was that what a black turtleneck looked like?

He had something in one of his hands, a few white objects, and some light brown ones. He waved them vaguely in her mom’s direction. “You didn’t bring in the mail,” he said.

“Malcolm, Caitlin can—”

But Caitlin interrupted her mother, something she very rarely did. “That’s a nice jacket, Dad,” she said, trying not to grin. And then she started counting in her head. One, two, three…

He began walking and her mom moved aside so he could pass into the living room. He was perhaps sorting the … the envelopes, they must be, shuffling through them.

Seven, eight, nine…

“Here,” he said, handing some of them to her mom.

Twelve, thirteen, fourteen…

“So, um, how was work?” her mom asked, but she was looking at Caitlin and, as she did so, she briefly closed one eye.

“Fine. Amir is going to — what did you say, Caitlin?”

She let her grin bloom. “I said, ‘That’s a nice jacket.’”

He really was quite tall; he had to stoop to look at her. He held up a finger and moved it left and right, up and down. Caitlin followed it with her eye.

“You can see!” he said.

“It started this afternoon. It’s all blurry but, yes, I can see!”

And she saw for the first time something that she’d never known for sure ever happened, and it made her heart soar: she saw her father smile.

Even her mother agreed that Caitlin didn’t have to go to school on Tuesday. She was sitting on a chair in the kitchen, and Dr. Kuroda was looking into her eyes with an ophthalmoscope he’d brought with him from Japan. She was astonished to see faint afterimages of what he told her were her own blood vessels as he moved the device around. “Nothing appears to have changed in either of your eyes, Miss Caitlin,” he said. “Everything looks perfectly fine.”

Kuroda turned out to have a broad, round face, and shiny skin. Caitlin had read about the differences between Asian and Caucasian eyes, but she’d had no idea what that really meant. But now that she saw his eyes, she thought they were beautiful.

“And you say the eyePod is already feeding my brain a high-resolution image?”

“Yes, it is,” Kuroda said.

“Then if my eye is fine,” she asked, disliking the whine in her voice, “and the eyePod is fine, how come everything is blurry?”

Kuroda’s tone was light, amused. “Because, my dear Miss Caitlin, you’re myopic.”

She sagged back against the wooden chair. She knew the word, having encountered it countless times in online news stories about “myopic city planners” and things like that, but had never realized it could be literal.

Kuroda turned his head away from her. “Barbara, I’ve not seen you wear glasses.”

“I wear contacts,” she said.

“And you’re myopic, too, right?”

“Yes.”

Kuroda swung back to face Caitlin. “That darn heredity,” he said. “What you need, Miss Caitlin, is a pair of glasses.”

Caitlin found herself laughing. “Is that all?”

“I’d bet money,” said Kuroda. “Of course, you’ll need to see an optometrist to get the right prescription — and you should make an appointment to see an ophthalmologist for a full eye exam.”

“There’s a LensCrafters at Fairview Park Mall,” her mom said, “and they’ve got an optometrist right next door.”

“Well, then,” said Kuroda, “let me utter the words my own daughter thought I’d never say: let’s go to the mall!”

The eye test was humiliating. Caitlin knew the shapes of the letters of the alphabet — she’d played with wooden cutouts of them at the Texas School for the Blind when she’d been young — but she still didn’t connect those tactile things to visual images.

The optometrist asked her to read the third line down. Even though she could now clearly see it, thanks to the lens he’d slipped in front of her eye, she couldn’t tell what it said. Tears were welling up — and, damn it all, that just made things blurry again!

Her mother was in the little examining room, and so was Dr. Kuroda. “She can’t read English,” she said.

The optometrist had skin the same color as Bashira’s, and an accent like hers, too. “Oh, well, Cyrillic, maybe? I have another chart…”

“No. She was blind until yesterday.”

“Really?” said the man.

“Yes.”

“God is great,” he said.

Caitlin’s mother looked over at her daughter and smiled. “Yes,” she said.

“Yes, he is.”

The LensCrafters saleswoman — who also had dark brown skin, Caitlin saw, and was wearing a white blouse under a blue blazer — wanted to help her pick out the absolutely perfect frames, and Caitlin knew she should be patient. After all, she was going to have to wear glasses forever. But finally she just said to her, “You pick something nice,” and she did.

They decided to put a lens with an identical prescription in the right side, even though Caitlin was still blind in that eye. Lenses for myopia tended to shrink the appearance of eyes, and this way they’d both look the same, the saleswoman said.

Her mom was usually a tough up-sell, but she said yes, yes, yes to everything the clerk offered: antiglare, antiscratch, anti-UV, the whole nine yards; Caitlin suspected if the clerk had rattled off an extra hundred bucks for antediluvian, she’d have coughed up for that, too.

Caitlin knew LensCrafters’ slogan from the ubiquitous commercials: glasses in about an hour. She thought it would be the longest hour of her life. She felt her Braille watch as she, Kuroda, and her mom walked through the mall to the food court — for the first time, without the use of her white cane. Everything was still blurry, and that was giving her a headache. Still, in a way, it was relaxing. To see the people coming toward her! To not bump into things! She hadn’t realized it until now, but she’d always used to walk with her shoulders tensed, preparing for an impact. But now — well, now she had a bounce in her step, something else she’d never thought could happen literally.

Still, all the visual input was disorienting, and she found herself taking a look, then closing her eyes for five or six paces, then looking again. When they got to the food court, Kuroda went to the sushi place — which, Caitlin suspected, would disappoint him — and she and her mom went to Subway. Caitlin was amazed to see how colorful the sandwich fillings were, and, somehow, seeing the food made it taste even better.

The three of them sat together at a little red table with chairs attached to it. Dr. Kuroda used chopsticks to dip a piece of sushi in sauce.

Caitlin couldn’t resist. “Do they tell you in Japan that it’s raw fish?”

Kuroda smiled. “Do they tell you what’s in the special sauce on a Big Mac?”

She laughed. At last the hour was up and they headed back to LensCrafters. Caitlin took a seat on the stool, and the nice woman placed the glasses on her face—

And Caitlin didn’t wait. She got up, and turned around, and looked — really looked — at her mother.

“Wow,” Caitlin said. She paused, trying to come up with a better word, but couldn’t. Her mother’s face was so detailed, so alive! “Wow!”

“Here, let me adjust how they sit…” said the clerk.

Caitlin sat back down and swiveled to face her.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said, “but your ears go up a bit when you smile like that. If you want me to get the frames adjusted properly, you’ll have to stop grinning…”

“I’ll try,” Caitlin said, but she doubted she’d have much success.