Eden's Eyes (6 page)

"I have great hope for you, Karen. I am flying home to Germany in the morning, but I will be leaving you in the capable hands of Dr. Burkowitz, who will keep me informed of your progress by telephone. It will be three weeks at least before the grafts are tried. . . before they are exposed to the light. . ."

Too groggy to grasp all of what the doctor was saying, Karen found herself concentrating on the feet of his hand on her forehead. As he talked, he stroked her in a way that was not so much intimate as it was infinitely soothing. The hand of God, she later remembered thinking. Touched by the hand of God.

And if it all worked out, if after three more weeks in the lightless prison of her mind she was allowed at last to witness the sky and the earth and the fragrant blossom, then surely God had touched her.

Three weeks. . .

Karen drifted away on the sound of the doctor's voice, uncertain if the words she was hearing came from him or from the poetic muse of her own imagination.

"It will be painful at first," he whispered through a tunnel. "Perhaps even agonizing. For a while, you will fear the light for its ability to scorch the chambers of your mind. But gradually, shapes will appear where before there was only darkness. . ."

Darkness.

She dreamed of darkness. But a darkness with substance, slithering life, immovable weight. In the dream she could feel it folding in around her, smell its seamless fiber, and fear grew within her like a blighted fetus. She felt buried, buried alive and when. . . and when she awoke she was screaming.

Screaming and clawing and fighting to get out.

Three hundred miles northwest, in the mining town of Sudbury, Eve Crowell sat in her wheelchair before her son's open grave and prayed. It was eight o'clock and full dark. The funeral service had ended ten hours earlier. Bert, who sat waiting in the front seat of his car a hundred yards away, had tried at least a dozen times to wheel her out of there; but each time Eve had hissed at him like a rabid bat, and Bert had backed away. The sexton had finally given up and gone home. He'd left his number with Bert, who was to call him on the chapel phone as soon as Eve was ready to leave. He still had to fill in the hole.

Bert ground another cigarette into the gravel beneath the open car door. It had been his last from the pack he'd bought just this morning. Normally a pack lasted him a week. He glanced down at the litter of butts, eerily luminescent in the hardening moonlight, and thought of grave slugs feasting. As he watched them, they seemed to move.

He, stood up, rubbing his eyes, wishing it was over. He wondered now if he shouldn't have just left things alone. The boy's body would have died on its own eventually anyway, the doctors had told him as much. Maybe that would have been better for Eve. Maybe that would have given her time to adjust.

But now. . .

Her ceaseless outpouring of words reached him as low, unintelligible mutters. He turned and in the moonlight saw her gesticulating madly, tugging at her hair, pounding her breast. Part of him wanted to go over there and slap her till she quit. . . but another part understood. Let her have her grief. If it had to be so. . . crazy, then so be it. Let her get it out.

Bert sat down again. He wanted a cigarette, badly.

He waited till midnight. By then, Eve had begun babbling about bringing the boy back, summoning his vengeful spirit. . . and suddenly Bert had had enough. He seized the handgrips on her wheelchair, rolled her over to the car, and piled her as gently as he was able into the back seat. In her rage she managed to gouge him again, this time across the back of one hand, but Bert barely noticed. Once she was in, he strode to the chapel to call up the sexton, then waited in the lot near the car, ignoring Eve as she cursed him through the rolled-down window. When the sexton arrived Bert apologized for the delay, then climbed back into the car.

He turned in the seat and glared at his wife, his words weighted with a menacing tone Eve had never heard him use before tonight.

"Now you listen to me, Eve Crowell. I know that you're hurting. I know that it's hard. But I'm going to start up this car and drive us home. . . and you're going to sit there and not make a sound, do you understand me?" Eve did not reply, only sat there, stunned, like a slapped child. "Because if you do, if you so much as squeak back there, I'll drive you straight to Algoma Psychiatric and have them lock you up in a padded cell. Do I make myself clear?"

Clutching her Bible, Eve regarded her husband with wet, wounded eyes. And even as she nodded Bert felt the guilt slicing through him like a saw blade.

No, he told himself as he cranked the ignition. Just this once I will not give in.

They made the five-minute drive in silence.

"Are you coming up to bed?" Bert asked once they were home. "I think you should rest."

Eve ignored him. With exaggerated effort she rolled herself past him, the grim set of her mouth, the cold look in her eyes, even the squeak of her wheels on the kitchen linoleum accusatory. She vanished into the den. Bert went after her, hoping to console her. . . but the den door swung shut in his face so violently, the molding splintered in the jamb.

Thinking that maybe he should have taken her to the psychiatric hospital—and loathing himself for thinking it—Bert trudged wearily up to his room. He was not expected at work the rest of that week, but he would be there just the same.

The only decent picture Eve had of her son as an adult was a family portrait he had reluctantly posed for on the occasion of his twenty-fifth birthday. By then his hatred for his father had been total, and he had balked at the prospect of standing next to him, even for the space of a shutter click.

Now that picture—minus Bert's gloating face, which Eve had neatly snipped out and then chewed to a pulp—was the focal point of a crude shrine. She had spent half the night constructing it, and now she examined it, with a mixture of pride and smoldering rage. Rusting carnations, pirated from a garish bouquet Bert had brought back from the funeral home, rimmed the gold-painted frame. Blessed candles, scores of which Eve kept in a secret drawer in the den, formed a bright, encircling hoop. Carefully chosen prayers and psalms, cut from the mounds of tracts Eve hoarded like a pack rat, lay among the candles in meticulous geometric array. The shrine itself adorned the top of a low, antique leaf-table, which had belonged to Eve's mother.

Flipping open her Bible, Eve started to pray. With one bent finger she cruised the onionskin pages of the Book of Revelation, barely glancing at quotes she had years ago altered to suit her, then fervently committed to memory. Her voice was a constant murmur, dropping at times to sibilant whispers, soaring at others to exultant highs.

"I am he that liveth and was dead. . ." Glancing at her son's framed, unsmiling face, Eve pressed a loving finger to the glass. "And behold, I am alive forevermore. . . and have the keys of hell and death; I will come on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee.

"And behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was death, and hell followed with him. And the sun became black as sackcloth, and the moon became as blood, and the stars of heaven fell unto earth."

Eve smiled.

"For the great day of his wrath is come. . .

"And who shall be able to stand?"

Chapter 6

April 26

Three weeks.

Three snailing weeks of struggling to pass the time, of trying to still the insistent dark voice of he heart: It isn't going to work, kiddo. Steel yourself for that. They'll remove the dressings and you'll still be blind.

But another part of her, her very soul she sometimes felt, banished all negative thought before a flood tide of hope. And of course there was the evidence—it no longer seemed quite so dark behind the bandages. Black had thinned to gray.

Well, whatever the outcome, today was the day. At eight this morning Burkowitz would be coming in to remove the bandages.

Karen flipped open the crystal face of her braille wristwatch and fingered it deftly—six-thirty—then snapped it closed again.

She waited impatiently, her thoughts shifting back uneasily over her seemingly endless hospital stay.

The first postoperative week had been the worst. Despite the regular Demerol injections (which Karen ended up begging them to increase), by the start of the third day the pain had become excruciating. It came in sudden sizzling torrents, the worst of it usually at night, when Karen would awaken screaming and thrashing and gouging at the bandages, certain in her delirium that rusty spikes had been driven into her sockets. During these attacks the nurses would be forced to restrain her, binding her wrists and lashing them to the side rails. And until the next injection took effect, Karen would flail and sob and beg them to remove the grafts. She had come close to rejecting her new eyes, Burkowitz told her later, and the pain had been a result of the tissue inflammation. When Burkowitz reported this to Hanussen over the phone, the surgeon expressed some amazement at the severity of Karen's reaction. In all of his prior recipients, graft rejection had been the least problematic complication.

By the start of the second week, when the pain had mercifully pulled most of the way back, Karen had pretty much forgotten the details of those first few delirious days.

There arose the occasional stark recollection—impressions of mutilation, of death already upon her, and worse, of damnation's fires blistering her back where it lay bare against the floor of a balsa wood coffin—but she ignored these, perhaps realizing that she'd come through a period in her life that was best left buried. Dark things had spawned in the ooze of her pain- and drug-riddled mind, and the door which held them back now seemed flimsy enough without her poking at it from the other side.

The memory of one event (real or imagined, she would never be certain) refused to be dislodged however, and in the days that followed it reared up time and again to haunt her. She had been drowsing fitfully that night, long after visiting hours had ended, when the pungent odor of sweat mixed with feculent farm smells had wrenched her fully awake. A moment later a coarse hand had brushed her cheek, and then Karen had felt the heat of quick, ragged breathing on her neck. She had cried out. . . but when the nurse arrived there had been no one else in the room. For a crazy moment, before she realized she'd been dreaming, Karen had thought it was Danny.

But it was a busy stretch that second week, with little time left over for reflection. Between regular barrages of tests, constant assaults by inquisitive reporters (who had precious little regard for privacy, Karen had decided by the end of her second interview), and daily visits from her psychiatrist, there was scarcely enough time to eat.

The psychiatrist, Dr. Smith, was the same one Karen had seen a few months prior to her surgery, as part of a "suitability" screen each prospective eye recipient was subjected to. Because the process was new, they told her, it was imperative she be deemed emotionally capable of surviving the potential rigors. During the interview the doctor had cited a case in point, one of the European recipients who had suffered a complete psychological breakdown two months following his successful surgery. Stricken with horrible dreams and bizarre hallucinations, the man had ended up having his new eyes removed. Karen liked Dr. Smith ("Call me Heather"), a wry old gal with a chatty English accent, and appreciated her easy, open manner. It helped to know what might lie ahead.

But it was during the strung-out days of the third week, when boredom and uncertainty replaced the worst of the pain, that Karen's fears gradually got the best of her. The tests were done, the reporters gone, and the days grew impossibly long, the hours previously spent in a mellow narcotic haze suddenly stretched out endlessly before her.

She tried in various ways to fill up the time: visiting other patients, chatting over the phone (mostly with her dad, who came down to visit as often as he could—but it was a forty-mile jaunt and he had a farm to run), reading through a few pages of fiction in braille. She even got as far as hauling out her manuscript. . . but that was it. Concentration was simply impossible.

So she worried. And the worry summoned its hectoring sister, paranoia. Were the doctors hiding something? she puzzled as the hours crawled past. If not, then why weren't they around as much as they had been before? Had the grafts already failed? Wasn't there anyone around with guts enough to tell her the truth? It got so bad that by the end of the week she'd begun to suspect that her father was in on the cover-up, too.

But the worst of it was the dreams. . . the dreams, and the waking bouts of ghastly imagining.

She dreamt recurrently that she was buried alive, but each night that pure and suffocating blackness grew increasingly more vivid. She was in a hole much deeper than blindness, an airless nothing without sound, tactile sensation, odor—an utter, seamless void. And her single awareness was that it owned her, that it meant to keep her forever.

The daydreams invaded the long hours of boredom, during which her mind shifted down to a susceptible neutral. These were perhaps, worse, because she could not shut them off like she could the nightmares, simply by waking. Dark and imageless, they crept in unexpectedly and dominated her mind, beginning innocently enough, but building by insidious degrees to a hideous fever pitch.

And invariably, their subject was the donor.

Karen thought of him even now, as she lay in her hospital bed, waiting for the minutes to slip past. It always began the same way: trying to imagine who he had been, what kind of man. . .

Her curiosity was natural, Dr. Smith had assured her, and with time it would fade. But it hadn't faded. If anything the wondering had grown towering and, broad, assuming the bulky dimensions of obsession. She'd even gone so far as to write to the Sudbury newspaper, asking for the half-dozen editions surrounding the date of her transplant, in the hopes of finding the man's name in the obituaries. . . and perhaps the circumstances of his death. The letter had gone out last night.