I sat up in bed. My smile widened as I saw the result of my night’s work. The window next to me was black. The window in the bathroom, too. Three coats, just to be on the safe side. Strips of felt lined the edges of the windows and the bottom of the door. What I was trying to create was absolute, one hundred per cent darkness. In a city this wasn’t easy. It surprised me how much light there was, and light seemed to breed light. It was like a headline I saw in the paper once: WOMAN MAKES SELF PREGNANT. I was close now, though; I was really close. The room was dark as a coffin with the lid screwed down. I could see every detail, even the dead insects on the floor, even the dust. When the maid came in to clean, which wasn’t often in a place like the Kosminsky, she’d have to use a torch. I decided to pay her extra for her trouble.
On the same street as the Kosminsky was an all-night restaurant called Leon’s. You walked in through a rickety glass-and-metal door, parting a curtain that was lined with vinyl to keep out the draughts. Once beyond the curtain you were hit by the smell of sweat and soup and cigarettes. Upstairs, there was a billiard hall. The restaurant lay to your left. It had yellow tiled walls and square Formica tables, and the windows always ran with condensation. On the ceiling, several white fluorescent tubes (I sometimes found Leon’s a bit bright, but it was so close to the hotel, so convenient, that I was prepared to sacrifice a small percentage of my vision). You paid the woman at the cash-register and she gave you a receipt. It was self-service. There was a TV in the top corner of the room, its screen angled downwards, like some modern bird of prey. You ate with your eyes fixed on it, one arm curled protectively around your plate. Leon’s clientele? Pretty much as you’d expect. Night-porters, taxi-drivers, hookers with their pimps. Junkies, divorcees. Insomniacs. These people were my people. Daylight? They could take it or leave it; it didn’t do them any favours (in fact, in some cases, it did them a definite disservice). I quickly became a regular at Leon’s. I always took a table by the wall and sat with my back to it (I imagined the Kosminsky brothers did the same — though for different reasons). I was in the restaurant every night, at midnight, to eat my lunch. Usually I ordered fried steak with onion rings (Leon cooked it just the way I liked it: juices seeping out of the meat, the onions slightly blackened). Or sometimes I had boiled beef.
Towards the end of my first week, on the Saturday, I asked for fried sweet cabbage with my steak (onion rings were off). A boxing match was on TV that night. Two heavyweights. Fff. Fff, fff. Blat. Fff. Blat, blat. BLAT. Over the din of people cheering I heard the legs of the chair opposite me scrape on the floor.
‘Mind if I sit down?’
I looked up slowly from my plate. It was a man in a donkey jacket, maybe fifty-five years old. His bald head had the high shine of a dance-floor. What was left of his hair floated above it like dry ice.
‘You live in the hotel, don’t you.’
I put down my knife and fork and stared at him.
‘The Kosminsky,’ he said. ‘Eighth floor.’
I was still staring at him. ‘You following me or something?’
‘Following you?’ He paused. ‘No. I live across the hall. Room eight-thirteen.’
‘I haven’t noticed you.’
He laughed. Or coughed. I couldn’t tell which.
‘The name’s Gregory,’ he said.
I stared at him for a moment longer, then reached across the table with my hand.
‘Martin,’ I said. ‘Martin Blom.’
He took my hand in his and gripped it. His palms were dry, almost shiny, and one of his fingers was missing.
‘You probably noticed the finger,’ Gregory said. ‘I lost it working on the trawlers.’
He told me how. Twenty years ago now, maybe more. Up in the Arctic, fishing for cod. His hand got caught in a rope as it whipped around a winch. The finger was too chewed up to sew back on. Funny thing was, he didn’t remember feeling any pain. In fact, he’d never been calmer in his life. He just stood there, asked someone for a cigarette. Smoked it while they tied the tourniquet. After that they called him Smoke. People still called him Smoke today. Most of them didn’t know the reason, though.
‘What about you?’ Gregory said. ‘You always been blind?’
I hadn’t talked to anyone for days — not across a table, anyway, not like this. There was a kind of warmth about it that made whoever you were talking to irrelevant. It occurred to me that I was about to tell my story for the first time. It was a strange feeling, releasing it.
‘It happened in February,’ I said. ‘I was shot by someone. In the head.’
‘Shot in the head? Jesus Christ!’
‘I was coming home from work. Normal day. Stopped at a supermarket to pick up some groceries. Walked back to my car. All of a sudden — BAM!’ I brought my hand down on the table. It caught the lip of a spoon and sent it somersaulting over Gregory’s shoulder. He didn’t even notice.
‘Jesus Christ —’ he said again.
‘Yeah, well. That’s how it happened.’ I decided not to mention the tomatoes; I didn’t think he’d understand. Instead, I found myself making a confession. ‘Sometimes it’s scary. Not the blindness so much. More the memory. You know, of being shot. So sudden like that. Out of nowhere …’ I paused. ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t much care for car-parks any more.’
‘I bet you don’t. Did they find out who did it?’
I shook my head. ‘Nobody saw anything. Even I didn’t see anything.’
It was such a relief to tell the story out loud, just those few disjointed sentences, to a complete stranger, that I did something I never normally do: I ordered dessert — a slice of apple strudel, with cream.
‘No,’ I said, ‘he’s still out there somewhere …’
Later, as I walked the red-light streets of the 14th district, I thought of how we’d traded, Gregory and I: his finger for a piece of my skull. That was what people did. They found something they had in common — an injury was always good; so was a disaster — then they traded. I suddenly saw my dream in a new light, not as fear but nostalgia. Returning to myself as I used to be, if only for a few moments. Revisiting a version of myself that no longer existed. The complete me.
Someone was pulling on my sleeve.
‘Hey, blind man. I’m fucking beautiful and you can have me for twenty-five.’
I looked at her. ‘You’re not beautiful.’
The whore let go of me. ‘What the fuck do you care?’
My life was simple, some might say monotonous. Most days I got up at four-thirty in the afternoon. Outside, dusk would be coming down. If I opened my window I could watch the street-lights fizz, then flicker on. People spilled from their office buildings, out into the orange gloom, all moving at the same speed, but in different directions, like cells under a microscope. At six o’clock I left my room. I walked along the west bank of the river, passing the rowing club, closed for the winter, and the outdoor swimming-pool, its blue floor strewn with leaves. Or else I followed the path that led through the park and round the artificial lake. Or sometimes I visited the zoo. In the street behind the hotel there was a café which was famous for the rudeness of its waiters. It was here that I ate my breakfast. They soon became accustomed to me, sitting at a table in the corner with my glass of café au lait and my slightly stale brioche. After breakfast I returned to the hotel. If it was Victor’s shift, I’d stop for a chat. He had asked me about myself one night when I came in. I’d told him the story. Naturally, he wanted to know what it was like to be shot, right down to the last detail. I didn’t mind his ghoulish enthusiasm. At least it was honest. If Arnold was on reception, however — morbid, chain-smoking Arnold — I’d walk straight past the desk; Arnold wasn’t a man you could talk to easily. Back in my room I switched the TV on and pulled up a chair. For the next two hours I watched whatever they were showing: soap-operas, news programmes, dramas — anything. I’d been astonished when I realised I could actually watch TV. Since I’d established that my vision was linked to darkness, and since the light emitted by a TV screen is so intense, I’d automatically assumed that watching it would be impossible. But it was one of those vagaries of my condition — another mystery or miracle — that I could see the picture as clearly as I could see Victor’s fingernails or Gregory’s bald head.