He felt too heavy and leaden to be frightened by that thought. Even the blindness did not frighten him yet, though he knew a moment was coming when it would rip him like a rake. He felt cold, shivering. His insides rose, gorge, he turned his head to heave but nothing came.
Tony Hastings knew time had passed but he had no memory of it except the scraping where his eyes had been. Now he felt the gouges burning, holes dug in the front of his face with fish hooks in them. The pain was a loud noise, he could not think, wonder, calculate, the only words were Stop This Now. Still unable to move because of something on his head, he banged his legs and hips against the floor. He shoved his hand into his pocket for his handkerchief, too small, tore off his necktie, rolled it up, put it gingerly to his face but it was not enough. He pulled his shirt out of his belt, tried to tear it, could not, remembered obscurely dish towels above a sink, and after a long resolve forced himself to move despite the threat of a headache like Zeus out of the sky. No headache could be as bad as this though, and thereby he discovered he could get up. He staggered, leaned against the wall, bumped into some huge object at his feet, found the sink, felt above it, the soft edge of one dish towel, then the other, grabbed them both, crumpled them, touched them lightly to the holes in his face, then pressed hard and soft to keep out the acid air.
The pain was deep and permanent but no longer a flame. He found the chair with his feet, lifted it up and sat in it, keeping the towels on his eyes to keep it out. Not knowing if he had eyes or sockets, not daring to feel and find out, nor if Ray had gouged him or merely smashed him hard in the eyes with his fist or if it wasn’t Ray at all but the gun going off too close to his face. Someday someone would examine him and tell him. Wet streams and crusted riverbeds on his cheeks.
He thought, Am I sure it’s both eyes? He took the towel away from first one side, then the other. The air was quicklime. The second edition of the news came screeching: I’m blind. Not dead, blind. His worst childhood fear. The rest of my life, blind man, grope. Green, yellow, trees, mountains, ocean, red blue and magenta shades, tints of violet.
Looking ahead, the question, Can I endure it? Thinking, could he learn braille? Would people read to him? A seeing eye dog. A white tipped cane.
On the chair, himself as tragic. Chosen for catastrophe. The bad things that can happen which won’t happen to you. The third edition of the news—I’m blind—was the melancholy fulfillment of a long downward process, his fate confirmed. He thought woefully, the life and career of Tony Hastings, mathematics, Louise Germane. Louise Germane and the blind man. Instead, unlucky fellow.
He heard a car on the curve, like some old myth of danger. What he needed was help. They should come looking for him. If they missed him when he didn’t return, it wouldn’t be much longer. He tried to remember what the ugly thing was that darkened the recent memories of his friends.
Then he realized that if Ray Marcus took his car, no one would think of looking here. He would have to rescue himself.
He would have to grope his way out of the trailer and up to the road. He would have to stand by the road with the bloody towels on his eyes and hope a driver would see his distress and stop. He would say, Help me to the state police office in Grant Center. There was a reason not to go to the state police in Grant Center. Bobby Andes, he was on the edge of remembering something. He felt around on the floor and found his necktie which he tied around his head to bind the towels to his eyes. Wondering, night or day? He listened and heard the cool distant whistle of a bird, two clear notes, and again the fortified distant roar of mankind being civilized, so it must be day.
Every move exhausted him as if he had been kicked in the belly. Force himself. Which way the door? He turned, and his foot caught against whatever it was on the floor, big. Like a bag of earth, he remembered feeling something like that against him when he was lying there. He felt down, touched heavy cloth containing something hard, an arm, a shoulder, a person.
“Ah,” Tony said. “You.”
This would be Ray, then, and he had not got away. From the shoulder, he felt for the head and recoiled, cold skin. He lifted the arm and let go, heard it fall, thump.
So I killed you, Tony Hastings whispered.
He had bought something with his blindness.
To make sure he was dead, Tony forced himself against revulsion to touch the head again, feel around the eyes, up to the bald front. The touch shocked him, and he allowed his hand to rest a moment on the brow, the hair of the eyebrows, the shape of the forehead, liberties he could never have taken before. The devil had a skull like Tony’s. The devil had guts and organs, charted in an endlessly replicated geography like his own, like all of us, making it easy for doctors, who would find the same things wherever they looked.
He wondered how he had killed him and if Ray had had time while dying to reflect and understand why. But from the talk they had had just before, he realized there was no way Ray would understand, no way he could grasp what he had done or see what Tony saw, neither the crime nor the punishment. The only understanding would be what Tony could imagine for him as he went, the figure of Tony’s imagination, suffering in Tony’s imagination. Eventually that could be plenty, a tremendous satisfaction, later when Tony was himself again, though at present he felt nothing, and the only Ray was a dead body.
He tried to resurrect his hatred so as to enjoy this death by imagining Ray dying slowly. Bleeding to death, not so much pain as weakness and helplessness and knowing he was dying. But his hatred and vengeance all seemed remote, dead feelings of no interest now. He remembered Ray’s boast about the pleasure of killing and his own imagined superiority, and he wondered if Ray had blinded him to make him pay for that superiority. Blinding him because he wanted Tony to be conscious of something too. Refinements of revenge.
He felt around for the gun. His hand discovered a cold place on the floor, sticky, crusty, Ray Marcus’s clotting blood. He started back, banged his head on the table. He tried to get up, put his hand on the table for support, found the gun there. Think about that, Tony. That means Ray Marcus found the gun before he died. Then watched himself bleed to death.
He didn’t want to stay in the room with the corpse. He put the gun in his pocket, forced himself up, and tried to find his way around the obstacle, prodding with his feet. The stickiness on the floor seemed to be everywhere. He stumbled against the bed where it shouldn’t be. He found the wall, the stove in the wrong place, he rearranged it, found the door. Cautiously he stepped out, but despite his care there was no ground. He dropped, landed hard against tree roots, for he had forgotten the trailer door had no step.
Head aching from his fall, pain returning, he waited a while to recover. His belly ached from where he must have been kicked. The air was moving sweetly, it was warm, he could feel the sun on him. He would try to find the car. He thought if he went downhill he would end in the ditch under the curve and could climb up to the shoulder. He would stand by the road and when he heard a car step out to wave. The ground scrambled beneath his feet, he slid and fell again. Held by branches, he grabbed them, staggered over roots and mossy rocks and tangled limbs. He kept going down, longer than he should. He was on bare rock and slipped again, lost his footing and landed in water. A cold stream ran around his ankles.