Sight-Unseen
Part Two of a serial by Vic Miller
Read part one, The Narrator's Gaze
She walked for blocks, the rubber band spreading between her slender fingers. She stretched it and twisted it and bit it. And then at one corner she stopped. Above her towered an old stone building. She bent her head back so that the tip of it came into view. More times than not she stopped here, at the Division of Care, and sometime she went in. To go in she needed to be strong, and on this day she felt up to the challenge. She bit the runner band hard, and pulled on it rapidly with both hands, before pulling open the massive doors and walking inside.
The lobby was maddening. Throngs of people, all dirty and most sick, were being shuffled around and guided into different bronze gates. Above each gate was a number, one through sixteen (the signs were a stark white, with black numbers, and their appearance did not fit with the wood and bronze and brick), and as one looked, from gate to gate, it was very much apparent that the higher the number, the dirtier and sicker the people. Liza took and sip of water from a fountain on the wall, looked around at the nightmare before her, and walked slowly to gate number sixteen.
The line to get to the gate crawled forward slowly, ahead of her was an old lady. She was in threadbare clothes and, evidently blind, was being led by a small boy.
Liza and the boy locked eyes. He was healthy, maybe ten years old, with bright eyes light blue in color. He smiled. And when Liza smiled back, I assure you, those two were the only smiles in the entire building.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” he answered.
Talking was not forbidden in line, but it was rarely done. The two were quiet after that first salutation, but kept smiling. The old lady turned her head to and fro, in unseeing confusion. The line marched forward. The bronze gates were nearing, and a mass of decrepit people had closed in behind Liza and the boy.
“Is your Granny blind?” Liza spoke once more, as they went through the gate.
“She is,” the boy replied, turning his head to send the words back toward Liza.
Once passed the gate they were able to spread out three abreast, as the line turned into a procession, which seemed to not move at all. The hallway guiding them all along was a city block long.
“Do you ever close your eyes and pretend that you are blind?”
“I do, sometimes,” said the boy, “but it scares me most times, so I open them again.”
“Yes, it must be very hard indeed, to not see.” Liza closed her eyes. The pace of procession allowed her to stop for several seconds, as she focused on her other senses. The smells were the worst—wet body odor and mold. The sounds were bad as well: mostly heavy breathing with a cough here and there. She could faintly taste rubber, that soothing mellow sensation pleased her greatly. She reached out and felt the brick wall, which was rough. She opened her eyes and moved forward the few steps she had fallen behind. The boy looked at her expectantly.
“It is very scary,” she admitted.
The boy nodded his head. And they continued in silence for a while.
“Oh, I almost forgot, when I closed my eyes I remembered I had a rubber band, and I want to give it to you.”
She held it out for the boy and he took it.
“Thank you,” he said, shyly looking from it to her several times.
“You are very welcome; just remember what it is good for,” she said, looking down at the boy with as much meaning as she could muster.
“But I don’t know, I never knew, what it is good for?”
They were approaching the end of the hall, and the boy could feel that when the spaced opened again, into another vast room, that she would leave him, and so he took her hand and in his heart implored her to tell him what it is good for.
She smiled again, and this time it was his turn to return it, and once again these were the only two smiles in the building.
“It is good for making dreams come true,” she whispered, squeezing his hand briefly.
And then they were out of the hallway, and just as he had figured, she disappeared into the forest of bodies. He looked up at his Granny, who was blind, and at all of the rest of the people who surrounded him, who he now knew were just as blind, in their own way. He longed to be with her, for just one more second, to hold the hand of the girl who could see. He pressed the rubber band to his heart and screamed in his mind. But it was just a spark, the flames were not yet in his mind, and he continued to lead his granny forward.
Liza wove her way through the crowd, now more loosely packed after spilling from the hallway. The people were being split up into sub-lines, which snaked between ropes, on the way to glass windows. Behind each window was a person. The ceilings were high, and in the vaults were exquisite frescoes between stained glass. The contrast of the beauty above and the horror below sent flushes through Liza’s body. She stumbled forward, pushing her way through the crowd, until she reached a door. It was locked. She felt the madness closing in all around her, and she very nearly huddled down and wept. But she gathered hidden strength and slammed her fists against the dark wood of the door, over and over again.
Finally it was opened, just a crack, by a small beetle looking eyed man. She pushed the door, and the little man, out of her way and entered the room. She had to burst through three more doors before she was out of the building. Nobody dared stop her, because they saw in her eyes that she had flames in her mind. And when the sunlight hit her face, after the last door was thrown open, she gazed around with a strange melancholy at her dirty streets.
