Chapter 3: The Knock

The third stair quit at a quarter past ten, and after that the house was his.

He had already shut his door. He had pulled the window down and turned the latch, and the heat of the roof was still in his hands, hot shingle and cut grass going damp.

Downstairs the refrigerator started up, ran a while, and quit. In the wall the drain pipe ticked as it let go of the dishwater. In the next room Toby’s box fan turned on its slow setting, one tick for every turn. On the landing Scrap came up the stairs he wasn’t supposed to come up, turned around twice, and lay down against the door with a grunt.

Two people asleep, one dog, one house that was louder at night than it was in the daytime.

He stood in the middle of the floor and did the count he did most nights, out of habit. Four steps to the desk. Eleven to the bed. The door at his back, the window at his right, the closet door that never latched all the way.

Then he sat down and put his hands flat on the desk and unwound the cloth.

Four turns. He had put it back on eleven minutes ago, up on the roof, and here he was taking it off again. He noticed that. He did it anyway.

The cloth went into his lap. There was a mirror on the desk, a framed rectangle on a folding stand, chipped at one corner, propped at whatever angle somebody had left it at years ago. The mirror was for other people. It told him nothing; he knew his own face the way he knew the ceiling. He sat in front of it anyway, because sitting in front of a mirror was where this was supposed to happen.

Eyes. Always closed.

He reached for them the way you reach for a door that’s stuck — not with his hands, with the small muscle behind the eyes that nobody has a name for. Pull. It was like lifting something with a finger that wouldn’t bend. His eyebrows came down. His lids fluttered. His hands closed into fists on his knees and his jaw set and the pull turned into a shake that came up through his shoulders and into his teeth, and he held it, held it, counting, because counting gave the part of him that wasn’t pulling something to do.

Nothing.

The sound came out of his throat without asking him first. He let go and sat back and breathed like a man who had taken the stairs too fast, and the breathing went on longer than it should have, and he sat there and waited for it to be over.

Sweat came down out of his hairline and into the corner of his eye.

Then the anger, ordinary as heartburn, and he let it sit, because it was his, and it was the only thing in the room that was doing what it was told.

It was close. That was the part he didn’t say out loud, not even alone, not even here with the door shut. Close.

He had told them he could see. He had turned his head away from a car coming out of the lot behind the house and shut his eyes the way a man with eyes does, and Dana had gone on cutting, and Toby had been watching the dog, and they had believed him.

That was the lie. His eyes did not open. Not a crack, not a hairline, not here in a dark room with nobody to perform for. Ten years of it, and the world stayed behind the lid.

He had not lied, either.

Because he could see. All of it. It just wasn’t his eyes doing it.

It was more like a second skin, one that knew things. No direction to it, no turning his head, no squinting. The whole room arrived at once, and it did not care about walls. The crack in the plaster ran down from the window frame and turned left and got thin at the end of the turn. There were two flies in the light fixture, dead since June. Behind the outlet plate by the desk a white wire had a nick in its insulation, and that was why the radio on the shelf buzzed every time the furnace kicked, and he had never once had to take the plate off to know it.

The wall was a curtain over a window he wasn’t standing at.

Through the wall, in the next room: Toby’s fan, Toby’s posters going soft at the corners, Toby’s laundry over the back of the chair. And on the desk, in a black plastic case, the sunglasses. The left lens was scratched and the scratch was the dollar off. Thirteen dollars, paid out in returnable cans and two yards mowed all summer in the heat, and the kid had carried the case home and set it on the desk and never worn it. Not once. He was waiting.

Adrian could see them down to the scratch. He was not going to wear them.

At the county fair he had stood at a folding table in front of a man in a vest, and two hundred people had watched the man’s hand open empty, and for the whole of it the quarter had sat under the base of his thumb like a bug under a leaf.

X-ray vision, if you wanted the stupid version. He could count the dust in a shut room.

Ten years.

He had been seven. There was a book about the moon, out of the library, and the porch roof off the back of the house, and eleven o’clock at night, and the moon doing what the moon does, which is nothing. Then black. Then a hospital with tall narrow windows and a bench bolted to a slab of concrete out front, and a year of it, and a folder in a county building with his name on it.

For the first five years he was blind the way other blind people are blind. Cane, ears, the sound of a room deciding how big it was. He could find a doorway by the draft under it. He could name a car by the door shutting. He got good at it, which is what happens when you’ll be doing a thing for the rest of your life, and he hated being good at it.

Five years ago it started to change.

It started as a hand’s width in front of his face, which embarrassed him, it was so little. A hand’s width. A boy on a sidewalk with a hand’s worth of the world, like a man with a flashlight and one battery. Then it was a room. Then the hall. Then the far side of the street, whether he wanted it or not. Thirty-three feet in every direction now, day and night.

Anybody who had been blind a week would have called it a miracle.

He had been blind ten years. He wanted his eyes.

He had a version for the morning already loaded. Better. A few seconds. Inside. He had run it twice while he was doing the dishes.

He got into bed at ten to eleven, because ten years had made an early sleeper out of him and it wasn’t virtue. There was nothing to do.

He put his head on the pillow and it came up, without being called.

The moon with no sky over it and nothing to soften it. Gray ground going out to nothing. Tycho, the big one, with the peak standing up out of the middle of it. And on the humped ground at the center of the crater, a figure, standing the way a statue stands, except that a statue doesn’t lift its head.

Six wings, spread, the span of them wider than the house, and the light coming off them was gold and it did not flicker. On the silver ground behind, their shadow, enormous and holding still.

Furnace eyes. A forge with the door standing open.

He got one look, and the world went black and stayed black.

He had told the truth about that for something like a month. He told a doctor, and then another doctor, and the third one wrote it down, and what he got for the truth was a diagnosis and a year in a building with a bench bolted to the concrete out front.

What he knew and what he could prove were two different numbers, and the difference had already cost him a year of his life, and it was still costing him, in forms, in folders, in an hour now and then in a room that smelled like new carpet.

He did not argue with doctors anymore. He answered what got asked and kept the rest of it where he kept it.

The cloth was on the desk. His hands were on top of the blanket. Sleep came up on him all at once, like a light going off.

In the dark of the room, in the second before the dog shifted against the door, two thin lines of gold came out of the seam of his closed eyes — no wider than a needle, straight up and out at the angle of a man lying on his back — and stood in the dark for the length of one breath.

Then they went out.

The room was dark again. Downstairs, the refrigerator started up.

Fog.

His heel came down and something rang. Not a floor — he could never make it a floor — a clean bright note, like a wet finger going around the rim of a glass, and it went out into the fog and did not come back.

He had been afraid of this place for the first year. You can’t stay afraid of a place you go to every night for five years; a thing you’ve already been isn’t scary, it’s a room you’ve memorized.

He walked, and the fog rolled over itself in front of him and closed up behind him, and the ground kept ringing under his heels, and then it was there.

It had the flat shoulder of a modern building. Concrete, glass, a front that was all business. And then the details started asking questions. Iron gates with figures worked into them, dozens of figures, one on top of another, and some of them with their faces turned down. Lamps with the shape of a fire inside them, burning and holding still. Tiles on the walk that floated a half inch above their own mortar, and there were things carved into them, and one of the things was a face.

He knew this building.

He knew it out of his own life, and that was the part that got him every night. He had lived in Halcyon State for a year when he was seven. He had slept there, eaten there, done his math sheets there, and out front there had been a bench bolted to a slab of concrete, and the windows had been tall and narrow like a church’s. Here were the windows. There was the slab, and the bolts, and no bench.

The rest of the front was the same, down to the plate over the doors where the name went in aluminum letters, each one bolted through its own hole. The holes were still there. He could see every one of them.

The holes held different letters now.

THE WARD.

He stood there a while. Then he walked it.

He had walked it every way a person can walk around a building. Clockwise. Counter. Close in, one hand out. Out at the edge of the fog until the fog took the wall and gave it back again. Every time he came around to the front, because there was one way in and it was the doors.

The wall was low. In the world, a wall like that would be a joke; in the world, he’d have been over it with one hand flat on the cap. He tried it in the first month. He went up four feet and the wall came up five.

He had tried the doors with his shoulder on a bad night, and the doors had not moved.

The iron didn’t care how hard he hit it. Which left the ring.

The ring was iron, the size of a jar lid, hanging out of the mouth of something with teeth, and when he brought it down on the gate the sound went through the whole building and out the back of the fog — low and long, like something struck in a church.

He brought it down again. He waited. He brought it down again.

“This again,” he said, out loud, to the fog and the figures on the gate. “Every night. It’s a lot, is all I’m saying.”

The fog rolled. The gate stood there.

The one mercy was that in here he didn’t get tired. Six hours of knocking felt like the first six minutes, and he had worked out a long time ago that this wasn’t kindness. He came to it like a man coming to a second shift, because the shift was his.

So he knocked. Hand on the ring, weight through the shoulder, the sound going out into the fog and the fog swallowing it. Every so often he stopped and put his ear against the iron and listened, and the building was quiet inside, the way a hospital is quiet at four in the morning, a quiet with a hum under it. Then he knocked some more.

At some point in the night — there was no night in there, but something in him kept time anyway, by the alarm coming — he took his hand off the ring.

His palm was buzzing. It always was. He made a fist, opened it, made it again, and the buzzing went down into his wrist and quit.

Then, through two walls, the small ugly bell of Dana’s alarm clock.

He lay still and listened to the house get up around him. Her feet. The bathroom door shutting and the light coming on underneath it. The water running and stopping. Her shoes going down the stairs in her hand so the heels wouldn’t wake anybody, which never worked, and never stopped her. The kitchen light came on under his door like a stripe of something spilled.

He got up. He had been awake for a while, and there was no point pretending otherwise.

He found the cloth on the desk where he had left it. Four turns, and the knot on the third try.

Downstairs the kitchen smelled like coffee and the toaster and her. The stove clock said five even. At the top of the stairs Toby’s door was still shut and the fan was still going.

“How is it this morning,” Dana said. Her back was to him; she had the spatula in one hand and the pan going, and she rolled her shoulder once, the way she did before she got going on anything.

“Better,” he said.

“Better how.”

“A few seconds. Inside.”

“Mm.” She took the pan off the heat. “Sit down. There’s more in the pan than I’m going to eat.”

She put a plate in front of him. Then she said, “Thursday they want you at nine. I took the morning.”

“I know.”

“Say it back to me, then.”

“Thursday. Nine.”

“Right.” She got her coffee and stood at the counter and let him eat.

He ate. Through the window over the sink the sky was going gray at the edge, and the moon, wherever it had got to, was still doing nothing.