Love and First Sight Read online

  I get back on the elevator and press the Lobby button, which is helpfully embossed with a five-pointed star. From there I press every single button and count the number of times the doors open. I am painfully aware of how each wasted floor is another few seconds closer to Mom’s humiliating arrival, but it’s the only way to be sure I’m on number twelve.

  I find the office, and a receptionist ushers me into an examination room. I sit and wait on a soft bench covered with crinkly paper. I check my phone. Good news: That elevator ordeal took only five minutes. Bad news: I get no service in here and can’t text Mom. So to prevent her from bursting in at some point and making me look like a child in front of my new doctor, I have to make the only slightly less childlike request of using the receptionist’s phone to call her and say I made it to the office safely.

  “Hello, Will,” says Dr. Bianchi when he enters the examination room, bringing with him a whiff of cigarette smoke. “Or do you prefer William?”

  “Will is fine.”

  “Nice to meet you. You want to touch my face?”

  He has an accent. You wanta to toucha my face-ah?

  “I’m just kidding,” he adds. “That is a little of the blind humor for you, yes?”

  I chuckle. “Good one.”

  “You like music, Will?”

  “Music? It’s okay.”

  “I love music. I shall turn it on for us. You like the opera?”

  “Sure.”

  “Here is another thing all the people believe about visual impairment,” he says. “You all love to touch the faces, and you are all musical geniuses? Yes?”

  “Yeah, people are always surprised that I want to be a writer instead of a musician.”

  “You wish to be a writer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very good.”

  He presses a button, and opera music turns on. He turns down the volume so it’s just a background.

  “There we go,” he says. “One thing that is true, though—those who were born blind have a more developed sense of touch and hearing. For how long have you lacked eyesight, Will?”

  “I was born without vision.”

  “In my office, Will, we always say eyesight, not vision,” he explains. “Because they are not the same, yes?”

  “I guess not,” I concede.

  “Eyesight is in the eyes. Vision is more. It is in the mind. The heart. The soul. But I digress. Let me ask you. Why do you want eyesight?”

  “Why not?” I say, as if the question is pretty self-explanatory.

  “Yes, why not? But again. This is the important question.” He emphasizes those two words: important question. “Why do you want eyesight?”

  “I think it would make my life better. Like, you know, reading and stuff. Have you heard of the ‘tyranny of the visual’?”

  “Yes, of course. Since so many of us in today’s world rely on sight because of the mass media, living in our society is now more difficult for the blind.”

  “Right. So I think having vision—that is, eyesight—would improve my life.”

  He pauses and then says, “Will, do you know why I came to this country?”

  “No.”

  “I have lived here for twenty years. I moved to America from Italy because PU has one of the best medical research programs in my field in the entire world. So I want to live here for a better career so I can give the better life for my family. So I understand this. When you say you want the better life, I understand this.”

  I don’t say anything. The opera singer’s voice shakes with vibrato.

  “And I am one of the few surgeons who practice this surgery because I think it can offer a better life. Another reason humans have evolved to rely on eyesight as the primary sense is because it has the best spatial resolution.”

  “Sorry,” I say. “I don’t think I know what that is.”

  “Say you are in a restaurant, listening to another table. Easy enough to accomplish. But if you try to listen to two different conversations at different tables simultaneously, you find the limitation of hearing. You can’t concentrate on both at once. But a person with eyesight can see and process hundreds of objects and colors at the same time. This is spatial resolution.”

  He pauses and then says, as if closing his argument, “So this is why I think eyesight can give you the better life.”

  I ask, “Can you help me see, Dr. Bianchi?”

  He thinks for a moment. “It is a possibility,” he concludes, in a tone that suggests I’ve cleared his first hurdle. “But several things stand in our way.”

  “Like what?”

  “First, we must get the B-scan. To see if your congenital blindness makes you a candidate for the stem cell operation.”

  “Okay. A B-scan. Then what?”

  “Then we must find a stem cell donor.”

  “If we do, that’s it? Then I can see?”

  “If only, Will, if only. No, then we must give your eyes a month to heal. After this, then we look for a corneatransplant donor.”

  “So there are two surgeries?” I ask.

  “Yes. First you need retinal stem cells. After that, we wait one month for you to heal. Then we have a two-week window. During that time, you can get corneas.”

  “So we need to find a donor? Um, how about one of my parents?”

  He chuckles. “No, you cannot ask someone to do this for you. Not a living person. You need an organ donor, a cadaver who is recently deceased due to traumatic accident. But with the eyes intact. And for this donor we can only wait.”

  “What if we don’t find a donor within the two weeks?”

  “Donors are relatively easy to find. Sadly, accidents happen every day. And rarely are the eyes damaged.”

  “But if it did happen? If two weeks passed without us finding a donor?”

  “If we miss the window, this is not a surgery we can do for another time. You would be staying blind forever.”

  Yikes.

  I’m not sure how to take this. “Okay, let’s assume we find a donor, and I have the operation. Then I can see? Is that it?”

  He chuckles again. “Oh, no, Will, that is only the beginning. After the operation, this is when the real work must begin.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Because you have never had eyesight, your visual cortex, the region of the brain that processes sight, has developed differently. If the visual cortex is stimulated with magnetic waves, the person with eyesight sees a flash of light. But for the person born blind, when the visual cortex is stimulated with the magnetic waves, he feels a tingling on his tongue or his fingers. Do you understand why?”

  “No,” I admit.

  “The brain rewires itself to solve the problems it is given. This is called neuroplasticity. In a blind person, who does not need the visual cortex for processing eyesight, the visual cortex will instead be used to process taste or touch.”

  “Is that reversible?” I ask. “Would I be able to use that part of my brain for eyesight?”

  “This is what we hope. I would provide you therapy and monitor your progress, but mostly it would just take time. You would be like, if I may say so, a newborn baby. After the surgery. You would have to learn how to see.”

  “But I could learn? With practice?”

  “Hopefully. There are a number of risks. You may also lapse into confusion for some time, or for all time.”

  That catches me off guard. “I’m sorry. Did you say ‘for all time’?”

  “It is a possibility,” he says reluctantly.

  “Like, for the rest of my life? You mean I might go crazy?”

  “The operation is full of risks, Will. It is a decision you must make for yourself.”

  I’ve had fantasies about eyesight. Like, if I could just magically have eyesight given to me or whatever. Of course I have. I think about it sometimes. And I’ve always just thought that it would all happen instantly. I’d open my eyelids and—poof—the world would open up to me.

  Dr. Bian
chi just crushed that dream.

  “So can I think about it for a while?” I ask.

  “I insist that you do. Think as long as you need. And discuss it with your family. But as long as you’re here, would you like to get a preliminary B-scan to see if you are a candidate?”

  “Sure, but can I, um, use your phone?” I ask. “I need to, um, call my mom and tell her I’m going to be a bit longer.”

  “Of course,” he says.

  • • •

  On the drive home, I get a text from Whitford inviting me to “Settlers Sunday” this weekend. The entire quiz team will be there, he says.

  There are many board games made specifically for blind people. We have a few downstairs, in fact. I’m not going to bring one of those over and force everyone to play, but I do want to make friends. I want to fit in at this school. And Whitford lives just around the corner anyway. So I agree to go. I’ll be “playing” Settlers, even though I won’t really be able to participate at all. Hey, maybe one of them can move my piece for me. Yeah, that plan always works out great.

  It makes me wonder, though. What if I could one day play board games without help? What if I could use my eyes to see where my own piece on the board should go?

  The truth is, I’ve always wanted eyesight. I mean, obviously. I’d love to be able to see. It’s not like I’m unhappy with myself the way I am or bitter about being blind or anything. I get along all right. I’m fine with who I am.

  But if there’s a chance I could gain eyesight, I mean, come on. Plenty of people go from sighted to blind. But how many people can say they’ve gone from blind to sighted? And how many details does most of the world take for granted, colors and shapes that I would be able to notice and appreciate? Normally, you learn to see for the first time as a baby and don’t remember it. But getting eyesight for the first time as a teenager, when you can observe and remember every moment of the experience, that’s much more than a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It would be like winning the lottery. I could live a thousand lifetimes or a million lifetimes and not get the chance to try something as cool as that again.

  CHAPTER 9

  On Sunday, it takes a while to persuade Mom to let me walk to Whitford’s by myself. It’s literally only three houses away. Perhaps, I think, living independently is something of a lofty goal, after all. Not because it is so terribly difficult for me to get by on my own, but because my mother simply won’t let me.

  I leave the house and walk left down the sidewalk. My mind keeps rewinding to the appointment with Dr. Bianchi. Would I really want to try the operation? Will I even qualify as a candidate? I count two driveways and then turn left at the intersection. Whitford’s house, Siri tells me, is now on my left.

  But at the end of the driveway, I stop. Do I seriously want to go to a board game party? I won’t be able to play the game. Which will be awkward. Probably even more so for everyone else than for me.

  This was stupid. I am going to walk back home.

  “You just going to stand there all night?” a voice says from about ten feet away. “Or are you going to come inside?”

  I jump. “Jeez! You scared me!”

  Cecily laughs.

  I ask, “How long have you been standing there?”

  “The whole time you have. I saw you coming and thought I would wait for you to come inside with me, but, uh, you never did. Were you waiting for someone who could guide you in or something?”

  “Actually—yeah, that’s what I was doing, I guess.”

  I don’t tell her that I could have navigated to the front door without a guide. There’s almost always a sidewalk through the front yard that leads directly to the entrance of a house. Or at least, that’s what Mrs. Chin taught us.

  “Come on, let’s go in,” she says, offering her arm.

  At the front door, I meet Whitford’s parents, both professors at PU.

  “Nice to meet you, Dr. Washington and Dr. Washington,” I say.

  “You can call us Mr. and Mrs. Washington,” says Whitford’s dad. “We’re not so pretentious as to require the use of honorifics in our home.”

  He and Mrs. Whitford burst into peals of laughter. Cecily and I chuckle politely.

  They show us to the kitchen table.

  “Hey, Nick, Ion, Whitford!” says Cecily. At first I think naming each person at the table is an odd greeting. Then I realize it was for my benefit, to tell me who is in the room.

  “Cecily, I see you’ve brought us a new Settler of Catan!” says Nick in an affected English-narrator voice.

  Cecily replies in kind. “Indeed I have, good sir.”

  As I sit down in a wooden chair beside Cecily, I hear the rattle of game pieces inside a cardboard box.

  I shouldn’t be here. What a disaster waiting to happen. If only I’d gone back home before Cecily saw me outside!

  As if she somehow knows how I’m feeling, Cecily grabs my hand and gives it a quick squeeze.

  “Will and I will be on a team together,” she says.

  I tense up. I’m torn between my bad memories of the last time I relied on another player and the cold hard truth that I can’t actually play at all if I don’t have help.

  “Good, because I don’t have the expansion pack,” says Whitford. “We can only have four players.”

  Well, then. My hand has been forced. I guess I’m on a team.

  Whitford says, “Cecily and Will, you guys want some snacks? I’ve got cookies, Doritos, Skittles—”

  “Sweet! Skittles, definitely,” I say.

  Whitford pours some Skittles into a bowl and sets it in front of me. I eat them one at a time, smelling each candy first to guess the flavor before I put it in my mouth. I’m usually right. Skittles are my favorite. Always have been, since I was little.

  “It’s my week to set up the map, right?” asks Ion.

  “Indeed,” says Nick.

  “In that case, I’ll take the terrain hexes and harbor pieces, please.”

  “You got it,” says Nick.

  “I’ll teach you to play as we go along,” Cecily says softly to me.

  “If I ever invent a board game,” Nick says, shuffling through the box, “I’ll make sure the title starts with the same first letter as a day of the week. I think that’s the key to success: an alliterative title so people naturally have a weekly standing game night.”

  “That’s probably why Settlers has blown up,” says Ion. “They’ve got the whole weekend on lockdown. Settlers Sunday or Settlers Saturday.”

  “Ditto for Scrabble, Snakes and Ladders, and Sorry,” says Whitford.

  Nick adds, “It continues with Monopoly Monday, Trivial Pursuit Tuesday, et cetera.”

  “What about checkers?” asks Whitford. “Isn’t that the most popular board game of all time?”

  “So glad you brought that up,” says Nick. “Checkers was actually invented in ancient Egypt to amuse King Ramses, the pharaoh. Homer references the game in his writings, as does Plato. But for most of history, checkers has been referred to as ‘draughts,’ and while I can’t attest to all languages where the game has flourished, in English we can see that following our alliterative formula, every single day can be named a Draught Day. Thus it can be played daily, explaining its position as the king of all board games.”

  There’s a stunned silence after Nick finishes his speech.

  “Drops microphone, walks away,” says Ion.

  “How do you know stuff like that?” asks Whitford.

  “I’m on the quiz team, bitches,” says Nick.

  “So am I… but seriously… the entire history of checkers?” says Whitford.

  “Okay, fine. I just read about it the other day,” admits Nick. “I basically brought up that whole thing about the board games on certain days hoping someone would ask about checkers. But you have to admit… it sounded impressive.”

  “If you’re done showing off now, I’ll take the number tokens and robber, please,” says Ion.

  Nick’s fingers return to
rummaging the box for the requested items.

  “So, are you guys going to homecoming?” I ask, trying to sound casual.

  “Stand around with a bunch of awkward adolescents trying to dance while listening to sellout pop music under the Orwellian eyes of a hundred chaperones? Count me out,” says Nick.

  “Whitford and I are going,” says Ion. “Cecily, are you?”

  “I don’t think it’s really my scene,” says Cecily.

  The game begins, and Cecily narrates what’s happening and explains each decision we have to make in our turns. The game has something to do with a map. The object is to build roads and establish settlements in order to accumulate something called victory points. Cecily consults with me about whether to build a road or a settlement depending on the resource cards we have. I touch the little rod piece that represents a road and the house-shaped one that represents a settlement. Apparently settlements can be turned into cities, which are represented by the most complex-feeling piece of all.

  Cecily takes a bunch of photos while we play. She’s testing a macro lens she just got off Craigslist. The lens, she explains, is designed to focus up close on tiny objects like game pieces. Gathering around the screen on her camera, the others agree that it does create a cool effect as Cecily tries to describe it to me.

  Ion ends up winning the game, but if there were victory points for trash talking, Nick would have had it in the bag.

  As my friends slide the game pieces across the table and drop them back into the box, I mention the meeting with Dr. Bianchi.

  The packing of the game comes to an abrupt halt. The group is riveted.

  “That’s way cool,” says Nick.

  “Is it something you want?” asks Cecily.

  “I have to get the test results to see if I qualify. That’s step one. Then, I don’t know. We’ll see.”

  There’s a pause, and Whitford says, “Well, I’ve rigged up a new reading device for you, but maybe you won’t need it for much longer after all.”

  “Need what?” I ask.

  “Cecily told me you wanted to try out to host the morning announcements.”

  I didn’t so much want to as agreed to if she would do it, too.