Eden's Eyes Read online

  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.

  Around her the hospital droned onward, its morning sounds damped to a level made inaudible by her dark imaginings.

  How had he died? she wondered now. A car accident?

  Yes, it had probably been a car accident. She'd been involved in one herself about five years back, just this side of Dunrobin. She'd been on her way to a CNIB meeting in Ottawa with one of the local counselors when the right front tire suddenly blew. The explosion had struck Karen's sensitive ears like a cannon blast. The small car had swerved into a broadside skid, struck the soft shoulder, flipped, then rolled three times before coming to rest on its roof in a roadside cornfield. Unhurt (apart from a cut above one eye and a bruised shin), Karen had shaken for hours afterward, realizing how close to death she had come.

  She decided the donor had died like that, in a car accident.

  Had he known he was about to die? her mind demanded. If so, then what was the last thing he'd seen? And whatever that was, was it permanently etched on the backs of his eyes, the eyes she now possessed? Would the first thing she saw (if the transplants worked) be a faded imprint of the last thing he had seen on this side?

  Or a hideously vivid afterglow of the first thing he saw on the other. . .

  Another man's eyes.

  Karen reached up and touched the bandages, pressing them gingerly over her closed eyelids. No matter which way she pondered it, it still felt strange having actual physical pieces of another human being inside of her. Maybe it felt less when it was a wholly internal organ—a heart or a kidney—something you were never all that aware of in the first place.

  But eyes. . . eyes seemed so much more personal. The heart might be the seat of the soul, but the eyes were its windows.

  Another man's eyes. . .

  They, must have had him on an operating table similar to the one she'd been on. . . cold, hard, narrow, but lacking the promise it had held for her. For the donor that table had been a kind of premature autopsy slab. Sure, he was brain-dead at the time, she understood the concept. But who really knew for certain? Unless they'd been there and survived to tell the tale—which in itself was a contradiction—how could they have known for certain that he was dead? Really dead?

  Oh, Christ, imagine the horror. Completely immobile, unable to cry out or even blink an eye—and then someone opens your eyelids, holds them open with cold metal . . . and you can see the blade coming down, actually see it. And all you can do is lie there, every nerve ending shrieking in a single inaudible scream.

  And with your other eye you see the first one torn free of its bed, plopped like an olive into a waiting jar. . .

  (What do they put in the sockets?)

  Then the knife finds the vulnerable flesh of your belly, oh yes, your warm, gut-filled belly, and it traces, its fine and your nerves cry out again and again, a chorus of agony heard only by the angels, the dark angels—

  A hand, tightened on Karen's forearm; she let out a yelp.

  "Hey, hey, pumpkin, it's only me. Your dad. She pulled herself up and hugged him desperately. "What is it, child? You're sweatin', breathin' like you just. run a mile. What. . . ?"

  "'Just hold me awhile, Dad. Please."

  Without another word Albert Lockhart drew his daughter close and held her, just as he'd done all those years ago.

  It was seven thirty-five.

  "When do I get the fistula out?"

  In the Children's Hospital across town, Dr. Forget smiled. "It's like I told you before, Shirley," he said, patting the child's decidedly plumper bottom. "We have to keep the fistula in your arm until we're sure-sure-sure that your new kidney's going to work. If you have to go back on dialysis for a while, we don't want to have to operate on you to put it back again."

  Shirley Bleeker, seven, affected her most persuasive pout. Lending force to her argument, she held out her scarred, ravaged little arm and examined it with disgust. Like a fat worm under the skin, the Gore-Tex graft which served as a hookup point for dialysis pulsed and writhed. "When will you be sure?"

  The doctor glanced at Shirley's mother, who stood by the closed examining-room door. Realizing what he was after, Mary Bleeker nodded. She was always honest with her baby, even when it hurt.

  "Could be as long as a year, honey."

  Shirley's bottle green eyes brimmed with tears, the anguish of chronic illness never very far from the surface.

  "But, hey," the doctor said with real enthusiasm. "You're going to be good as new!" He crouched and hugged his tiny patient to his chest, a great weight of compassion filling his heart. Nudging her out to arm's length, he looked her over appraisingly.

  Although she had gained some weight since her surgery, and the anemia she'd endured throughout her life had begun to improve, Dr. Forget could still see the listless, sad-eyed child underneath; the waif who'd always looked as if she'd just stepped out of a Romero film; the innocent whose

  life had been a dark carnival of bland meals, constant thirst, repeated painful operations to keep her fistula patent, and twelve hours a week skewered to a dialysis machine. . . hours that should have been spent just being a kid.

  “Think of all the good things you can do now that you couldn't do before," he told her. "Think of all the big tall glasses of Pepsi you can drink in the hot weather, and all the ice cream you can gobble, whenever you want."

  The child gave him a hopeful grin, then glanced fetchingly at her mom.

  "Almost whenever you want," her mother added, and laughed. Right now, with her only child free at last of that horrid dialysis machine, she'd probably let her consume ice cream as her staple diet if that was what she wanted.

  Stretching to his full height, Dr. Forget shifted his attention to Mary, whose young face bore the telling hallmarks of constant strain.

  "She's past the worst of it now, Mrs. Bleeker. It's been three weeks, and so far the transplant shows every sign of holding its own. We're going to let you take Shirley home today, but we'll have to see her weekly for the next couple of months."

  Her own eyes welling tears now, Mary Bleeker nodded her thanks.

  "We're going home?"' Shirley shrilled excitedly, gluing herself to her mother's leg. "Really?"

  "Yes, honey," Mary Bleeker promised. "We're going home."

  "Didja get it?"

  As she skulked into Tommy Kelly's hospital room, dragging her shopping bags behind her, Bella LeGuin nodded conspiratorially. Shooting a quick glance into the hallway to be sure she hadn't been spotted, she fished out a Mickey of cheap whiskey from one of her bags and tossed it onto the bed.

  "Hot shit!" Tommy proclaimed gleefully—but in an effort to snare the bottle he sat up too fast, and the still-healing incision in his chest punished him for it. Licking his dry lips, he tried again, more slowly this time.

  The bottle felt like a missing limb in the palm of his hand. He held it up to the early-morning light of the seventh-story window and gazed at its amber beauty. Then he unscrewed the cap and drank deeply, hi
s breath quickening as the pungent fluid torched its way down through his guts.

  Bella LeGuin cackled.

  "God's holy trousers!" Tommy exclaimed when he finally came up for air. "'If this ain't love. . ." He kissed the bottle affectionately; it was already one-third empty. "May we never stray apart for this long again."

  He glanced at Bella, who had stationed herself on the edge of a blue vinyl chair to witness this tearful reunion. Bright-eyed and toothless, clad in pilfered castoffs and flanked by her half-dozen grimy shopping bags, Bella cut a classic portrait of the big-city bag lady—which of course was what she was. And after three weeks of clean sheets, antiseptic air, and regular bubble baths, Tommy Kelly noticed the stink of her for the first time in the many years he had known her and shared her delights.

  But he decided not to comment on it until after he'd gotten his smokes.

  "What about my butts?" he said, capping the Mickey and slipping it under his pillow with a conjurer's deftness.

  After another quick glance behind her, Bella reached into a pocket and pulled out a pack of tobacco. From a different pocket she produced a book of Eddy matches and a sheaf of Vogue rolling papers.

  "Cameo?" Tommy complained, accepting the cancerous care package. "You know Players is my brand, Bella."

  Stretching out her right arm, Bella regarded him with patient disdain. "My arm's only that long, Tommy Kelly. And you know yourself that a thief can't be too particular. What'd you expect me to do, say, 'Hey, fella, I'd rather hawk a pack of Players but the arm that God gave me is just too damned short?'"

  Tommy was already rolling one, his yellow-stained fingers working with practiced efficiency.

  "Bella," he said sincerely. "You smell bad."

  Bella grunted. "I'd invite you to kiss my rosy red arse, Tommy Kelly, but I'm not of a mind for gettin' up off it just yet."

  Tommy popped the rolly-o into the corner of his mouth and lit up, coughing out his first deep lungful. Wincing, he clutched his chest in pain.