12-08-06

“Scchuh. Both of you have too much time on your hands,” he said, and if he weren’t so tired, he’d suggest a way for us to not have as much time. “Why don’t you mow the lawn and repaint the house? That should take up all this free time you seem to have and otherwise spend complaining.” That was one of his favorite things to say. Or, “Try being daddy for a day. You go to work, you get yelled at, you take care of twenty computers and twenty shouting stock brokers, and then you come home and make dinner, then you clean up, then you tell mommy you have to finish paying the bills when she gets her lower lip all fat and tries to get me to watch another episode of the latest TV show she’s watching, and then you, the next day handle her when she’s going off about all the bills we should have paid yesterday. I’d be happy to switch out for your life. When should we initiate the swap?” Tonight he simply says “scchuh,” to me and retreats back into his room.
“Celia?”
“Hi Cindy. You sound distressed.”
“I can’t see his face anymore. When we are lying in bed together and I lean in to give him a kiss, or sometimes I just want to see him up close—everything suddenly goes completely blurry.” Cindy lets out a breath, and if I could illustrate it, it would look like a jagged staircase. “I’m losing my vision.”
“Don’t be so dramatic.”
“I’m not. I can’t see him at all. It’s been one week and I swear, there are these things about him that I remember saying to you or someone else that I loved, like his long long eyelashes, and the little craters on the right side of his cheek from his bicycle accident, and I can only remember what these little body marks look like from zooming pictures on my computer and because I keep a really detailed journal.”
“Well, you’re obviously not losing your vision if you can see pictures on your computer.”
“Um, how is that obvious again?”
“Well. Losing your vision means you lose the ability to see. Having the ability to see something, such as a picture on your computer, means you do not meet the central criteria that would qualify you as a blind child.”
“You’re a regular whip-smart, ass-fuck these days aren’t you?”
“Yup.”
“I can’t exactly see the pictures on the computer either.”
“But you just said you could.”
“No I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did. By the way, why do you always lie?”
“By the way, no I didn’t.”
“By the way, yes you did.”
“I said that looking at photos on the computer is the only way for me to stir up an image of his face. I don’t even know if I really see anything. It’s like when mom keeps talking about the time you got yourself completely covered in mud and you came out of the garden and told her you planted four seeds and in a few weeks we’d have roses, and instead it turned out, you planted her two earrings that dad gave her as a gift, and some loose pearls that had come undone from her necklace. You don’t actually remember that memory, but there are just random, fairly innocuous things that trigger that memory.”
“Ok, what are we talking about?”
“