Chapter 5

The light shone painfully on his iris, making his head throb and ache.

“Say ‘aaah.’” The kind doctor asked him one more time, and one more time he sheepishly replied:

“Aaah.”

The old man took some notes on the small pad before walking to a corner on the back of his office. The patient followed him tensely with his gaze. “Come on now.” The man called and he followed, his head persistently hurting at every step.

To just walk was somewhat challenging, his sense of balance hanging by a thread. The pieces of his brain, mushy and jelly, acted like they would ooze from his ears and nostrils, splashing on the ground as he tried to keep his feet gripped and his legs firm.

In the back corner of the bright office sat a large, tall box, impeccably white and rectangular in shape, with enough volume inside to fit about three decently-sized adults, though it was short enough that none would be able to stand in it upright. “A moment, please.” The doctor told him, and the patient kept staring at the box as the man walked over to a control panel beside it.

Its uniformity and cleanliness were mesmerizing. He had always liked smoothness. Clean features, straight lines, plain surfaces, shiny glasses, glossy textures, and pure, unblemished colors like a perfect white or a soul-stealing noir. The tender features of that mechanism were such as to naturally entice his senses. It provoked in him a reaction almost as immediate and violent as ... she did. Though much more neutral, perhaps, and less animalistic.

“What is this?” He felt compelled to ask.

“Oh? This?” The doctor’s face beamed with an I’m-so-glad-you-asked grin. “Gefördiß, ja? This machine will make a complete multidimensional scanning of your body, from bones to muscles, down to the ligaments.” He looked over to the patient, curious to see his reaction, and appeared disappointed as he was met with only a cold, blank stare. “Anyway. Used to be a different machine. Many different ones, as a matter of fact. One for each procedure, and each as massive as the room we’re standing on. We needed to wait for days for the results. You’d have to...”

He was cut short as the door of the apparatus was slid open for the patient, so smooth it barely made a sound.

“You can step inside, now.” The doctor gestured towards it, his tone descending a couple of octaves, as soft as a fly’s fluttering wings. “Mind the head, though.”

“Oh, sure.”

The boy peeked inside, ever so suspicious, and had fuzzy feelings in his crotch as he beheld its interior. “It’s so ... white.”

“A piece of work, don’t you think?” The tone of the doctor, though proud, was enmeshed with a very distinct, salient hurt, almost a fatherly kind of disappointment. “It’s a, uh, Toryo device.” He waved to the patient. “You can step in now. No need to walk on light feet. This thing is quite resilient despite her looks.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Medical equipment this side of the hemisphere is so fickle, I know. Many moving parts. Not to be trifled with or handled with heavy fists. This one you’re stepping into, though...” Again, his tone was peculiar, almost one of begrudging respect. “Exceptional engineering, unbelievable precision. I’d say it’s almost miraculous how well it works and how much—pardon my german—shit it can take.” He knocked on the box a couple of times, yet hardly a sound came inside. “Feels like she was built on another planet, by a species much more intelligent than ours.”

“Huh.” Slowly venturing inside, the boy saw a cylindrical monolith protruding from the floor at the very center, with barely enough surface area to accommodate a person’s buttocks. “So, I...” “Yes, you sit in the middle. The lights will go off, and I want you to look up at one single beam that will be blinking above this entrance, okay, near the ceiling. Understood? It will shine exactly ahead of you, a little above your eyesight. So...” The doctor operated the machine through the panel. “You told me you have no problems with tight, closed spaces, claustrophobia, nothing of the sort, correct?”

“Hmm.” He could feel his heart picking up pace, uneasy and unsure, and almost falling from the ribcage into his stomach. “Yeah. No, uh ... no problem.” He nodded, looking quite silly. “I’m cool.”

The doctor took a pause as he pressed buttons, ticked switches, and pulled levers on that panel. “Once the procedure starts—and don’t worry, I will let you know when it starts—it will get very dark inside. So, I need to be sure: can you confirm to me again that you do not have claustrophobia or any closely-related fears, do you? Nyctophobia, melanophobia, any of them?”

“Um?”

“Fear of the dark? Closed spaces? Got any?”

“Well, uh...”

The darkness of his bedroom. The shadow by the door. Then, right next to his bed. “Well, I...” He cleared his throat. “I get uncomfortable, sure, but, uh ... I can take it.”

“Are you sure?”

He nodded again, shaking like a tall leaf in the wind. “Uh-uh.”

“We can take the usual procedures if you’re not a hundred percent sure. And by that I mean the old equipment, the traditional examinations, many days of waiting, many other appointments to be made.”

“Oh.”

“I feel like you’re unsure. Go ahead and ask me anything.”

“Would you, uh, recommend these traditional, uh, exam, uh, examinations?”

“I would not.”

“Oh.”

“As I just told you, these might be days, many days of examinations, and you’ll have to come back here every time and spend hours on every process, and then we will both have to wait weeks, possibly months until the results are out, technical and logistical complications all considered, you see.”

“Oh.”

“And I wouldn’t say these examinations are much less ... well, ‘intimidating’. It’s really just a matter of you being very afraid of the dark. Pathologically so.”

“Oh, I guess ... I guess I’m not.”

“So are you okay with this test we’re about to perform?”

The boy cast his gaze through the tight opening of the box. “Will I have to do this many, uh, many more times?”

“Just once.”

“Oh. Okay, then.”

“More than okay, it is excellent. In this day and age, a machine like this is...” The doctor sighed and exhaled longly. “A miracle, a miracle. Everything a professional could ask for.”

“Will I, uh ... will it take a lot of time, though? For this examination, I mean?”

“Not at all. Perhaps, umm, five minutes, I would say. Now, sit tight, in the middle, and please look at the lights ahead of you once they start blinking. You do not need to sit perfectly still, but you will want to stay put and move as little as possible throughout the duration of the scan. Do you understand me correctly? Alright? Excellent. I’ll be here with you all the time, do not worry. If you’re okay with it, we can even talk during the process, if that helps calm you down.”

“Oh ... okay.”

“Are you comfortable?” The doctor again asked. Through the screen on his panel, he could see the patient trying to sit on the cylindrical pillar, yet struggling to find a nice position in such a tiny, oddly-shaped seat.

“Umm, not really.”

“I agree, this seat’s not great, but it is functional. In theory, we can have patients as heavy as seventy fäerings in there, though people half as large find it very difficult to sit on. Well...” He pressed a sequence of buttons on the panel. “Good thing that’s not your case.”

“Umm.”

“It’s been forever since I saw a fat ... uh, an overweight individual around here. Guess it’s one of the good things that came out of ... all this tragedy. Ain’t it?”

“Hmm. Yeah, I guess.”

The doctor waited a spareful seconds longer until the patient seemed well-adjusted on the tiny metal seat. “Give me a green when you’re ready.”

“Umm ... okay.” He nodded, rather sad and pitiful. “We can ... uh ... start. We can start now, uh ... doctor.”

“Alright. You see the opening in front of you? The door you just walked through?”

“Hm.” He nodded.

“The hatch will close shortly. It’s not going to make a sound and it’s going to shut only very slowly, so nothing to startle you.”

“Oh. That’s good.”

“Should we begin, then?”

“Yes. We, uh, we should. Begin, I mean.”

“Excellent. On my count, the hatch will shut. Are you ready?”

“Am I ... I mean, I am, I am.”

“Fine. On my count: three. Two. One.”

From inside the machine, without a sound any louder than a slow, soothing hiss, the door slid shut in front of the patient, and all lights slowly faded until there was nothing but perfect darkness within.

“Aaand shut.”

“Doctor?”

“I’m still here. How are you doing?” His voice came very clearly inside the box, distorted only by a slight robotic intonation. “I can see everything from here. And read everything as well: your vitals, your heartbeat, your body heat, your pressure ... all the data, and so much more.” He chuckled. “You are doing ... quite well, I see. All signals good. Tell me, how do you feel?”

He shrugged. “Fine, I guess.”

“Fine, you guess.” Buttons were pressed, levers pulled, and throats cleared before the doctor asked him one final time: “Can we begin? It will be five minutes, maybe a little longer, and I’ll want you to remain as still as you can throughout the procedure, okay?”

“Okay. Uh, yes, we can, uh, we can begin.”

“Excellent, my lad.” Buttons, levers ... start. “Please, look at the light.”

A green, sharp dot beamed ahead and above the patient’s face, over the shut-off hatch, and he stared at it, trying his best to not move an inch.

The light was strong and unnatural, quite like the shine of a laser pen, but looking at it caused the eye no strain. In fact, it was the opposite: like an injection without a needle, his eyes slowly became numb to all stimuli and sensations, and the coarse, hoarse beating, the heavy weight he felt he’d been carrying on his head all this time, it all suddenly went away, and he had nothing but feathers in his brain.

“Alright, we begin in three, two...”

The machine hummed. Nothing else seemed to be happening. Just a quiet, soothing purr, and a very tender vibration under his butt. Though the strange situation caused his heart to pace a little, the voice of the doctor, a rough and husky one, very fitting for a corpulent man in his midlife, quickly soothed him back.

“Come again, my lad: how long have you been feeling these pains?”

The patient’s face turned darker. “One week.” His memory traveled back to forbidden harbors...

“A week, eh? Hmm.” The doctor checked on his screen between long, lazy pauses. “Now, if you will, sit upright for me, please. Little straighter now, if you may. Yes, yes, like this, but ... come on, now, just a little straighter. Straight posture, please. You have any problem with your back? Any pains on your spine, perhaps?”

“Hmm...” If anything, he reasoned, his problem might have been not having a spine at all. “No, no. No problem. Not that I know of.”

“Then you can sit straighter than this.”

He could hear the impatience growing in the doctor’s voice, and struggled against the fickle bones that kept his sad sack of meat upright. Being sat like that, so straight, with his head carried up high and shoulders wide, it was all quite unusual to him. It made him feel vulnerable and under threat.

Naked. Like a chick far from the mother’s wings.

“You do have a bad hunchback, you know. Quite noticeable for a lad your age.”

He grumbled. “I know.”

“I’m going to give you some brochures on this. Little manuals, easy read, so you don’t keep slacking on your spine like this. You really wouldn’t want to go to a doctor, you know, getting to a point you would need to seek medical help for this, and most definitely not at your age, not so young. You will end up in their offices sooner or later, oh, much sooner than later if you keep treating your back this badly.” He sighed. “Straight posture, young man, please!”

“Oh. Sorry.” He straightened it up once more, as best as he could.

“Now, stay still. Like this. Just keep it like this for ... a little ... while ... longer.”

The machine hummed and rumbled, and the boy stood still and straight. It was fascinating to know that, for every hum, following every thud and every vibration, his body was being invaded, his skin and muscles undressed by countless rays of very complex nature, some even deadly at higher concentrations.

Despite this, he felt nothing. It was quite the unique sensation, being inside that machine, unraveled fiber by fiber by its mechanical gaze, the most vulnerable he would ever be, yet feeling just as protected, just as coddled as when he was in the arms of...

«Umm. Feels nice.» He wondered. «I’ve been feeling much nicer as of late, if not for these ... argh!» He touched his forehead, feeling the pieces of his skull barely hanging together. «These pains.»

“Are you alright?”

The boy tried nodding, but the pain ... oh! It felt like having boulders on his forehead, hooked to his skull by long and heavy chains. “Yes, yes. It’s just...” He tapped on it with a finger. “The head.”

“Hang on just a little longer. We’ll get to the bottom of this, I promise.”

The tight seal of the box. The perfect darkness inside. The quick, subtle pulses of the tiny dot above. Or perhaps the doctor’s voice, his calm and soothing ramblings, and his tone of genuine care for his patient, his sincere attention to his ills and woes ... all of it made him feel at peace with himself and the universe, sleeping cozily on the clouds.

“Now, now, we’ll be taking some pictures of your muscles, lad, and your vascular system too. You’ll see some blinking lights everywhere, all around you. It’s very quick and they’re not too strong, but they can be, uh, disconcerting to some. How do you feel? Do you feel fine?” The patient nodded. “Excellent. When the lights begin to flicker, please tell me if you feel anything different.”

“Do I need to look at them?”

“Come again?”

“The lights?”

“Oh, no. Just keep your eyes ahead, your posture straight, and wait until this next step is over. All you need to do is ... nothing. Don’t move, don’t ... nothing. Leave all the rest to me. Understood?”

“I ... yes. Understand. Uh, unders-, uh, understood.”

“Öberstående. Now, ready for my signal. The lights will begin to shine in three ... two...”

He mumbled something to himself, barely audible even to his own ears, and then, as the doctor’s count came to a close, a sort of yellow, blueish flash inundated the cubicle, illuminating it whole, only to then quickly fade.

“How did this one feel?”

He muttered, his words feeling heavy, like waddling through very thick mud. “Feels okay. Kind of pleasant.”

“Yes. Some patients say it’s quite the nice sensation.” The flashes, they returned, and their flickers, now more plentiful, lasted longer each time. “Some report feeling sleepy. Others, just relaxed. Elated. I myself don’t like it too much. More of a free-ranging ox, I am.”

“Um?”

“Claustrophobic, I meant to say. Sort of. I dislike tight spaces like this one.”

“Oh.”

He made little sense of the doctor’s words, but that was okay. The experiences that enveloped him, his mind, his body, they ... oh...

Every time the lights flickered, there was an ever louder clap, like... tlac! Tlac! A mechanical spring trap catching a little animal. Trap! Tlac! Tlap! Every time it snapped, he imagined himself on a sunny beach. Tlac! There were beautiful women around him. The sun was high, the sky was clear, the ocean was calm, its riptides forming tiny canyons on the shore, like rivers of sand. Tlac!

Life was good in his dreams. Tlac! Too bad the dreams...

“Now, we’re not done yet, young man, not yet. Please, one more go-around.”

There was the mechanical rumbling of that machine, now devoid of blinking lights or snapping sounds. Too bad. As his body was invaded by the rays, he tried spying on the darkness, seeing as much of it as he could without turning his neck.

Weird shapes. Wild geometry all around him: greenish, blueish hues blinking, following his gaze wherever he turned it to. “I still see the funny shapes in the dark.”

“Funny shapes, you say?”

“They’re much more ... uh, they’re stronger now.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Like those ... weird ... you know, those weird little thingies you see in the corners of the eyes, you know, but much bigger, and much more ... aggressive.”

“Huh. Can you tell me what you mean by ‘aggressive?’”

“They’re like, uh...” Darn it! After so many years living in the ice, his vocabulary still failed him when he needed it most. “You know ... big smudges ... with very bright colors. Mostly green and blue.”

“Huh-uh, huh-uh.” The doctor pressed some more buttons. “Still. Please, keep still. There’s yet one more round to go.” The machine kept rumbling. “What kind of accident, again, did you say you had, my lad?” One more time the doctor asked him, and one more time he lied to him:

“Fell. I fell. Tripped over. Wet floor. I was ... cleaning the house, you see.” He pointed to his right eye, which he did feel much heavier than the left one, like a marble inside his socket. “Hit the temple on a chair.”

“Hitting a temple is serious business, youn’lad. What were you thinking? Waiting, what, one week? One week to come here? You are lucky. If you had suffered anything bad up there, you wouldn’t’ve had a week to spare. You wouldn’t’ve had a day at all.”

He gulped. “Is it this bad?”

“On your temple? Near your sphenoid, your temporal?” He shook his head, not a trace of lightness in his demeanor. “No. I will never call it ‘bad,’ for it would be understating it. Understating it grossly!” His gaze was heavy on the patient, who sat like a child in the box. “It’s deadly, lad. You didn’t hit it too hard, or you hit it closer to your zygomatic bone (the bone, you see, right under your eyes) than to the lower temporalis. A strong blow there, my man, on the temporal, and that’s a nasty hemorrhage for you. Had two patients die like this. Both old. Both slipping in the shower.” Again, a heavy, iron look. “Not a young man’s way to die. Not at all. Unless you fight for a living, which, well...” He looked at him closely. “I guess isn’t your case.” He pushed one final button and the machine stood silent, the white lights shining blindingly inside it. “You can come out now.”

His head was dizzy when he got up. He firmed one foot on the cold, metal ground and tried to balance himself, his brain swinging from one side to the other in his skull, heavy as the cargo of a ship swaying on very uneasy waters.

He closed his eyes, blinked hard and fast, and looked briefly back to his seat. «Looks like a dick.» He smiled. “If the head was just a bit narrower...”

The doctor grumbled. “Say something?”

“Oh. Dizzy. Head ... feels dizzy.”

“Yes, yes. Have not a worry. And not a hurry. Take your time. Let your blood flow, settle back on your hips. Sitting still for so long on such an uncomfortable stool, of course it feels very...”

He closed his eyes and heard the doctor’s words dissolving past his eardrums, barely licking his skull. They felt pleasant. The message itself mattered little. All he cared about was the tone, the attention, and he savored it dearly, like a subsaharan kid who’d got their first taste of ice cream. «I wish ... I only wish... » Again, the pain. The thuds, the bumps, the uncomfortable, yet no longer unbearable pulsations right behind and under his eyeballs. «Pain.» He touched his face, hiding it in his hands. «I wish I’d heard this voice, a voice like this ... more often.»

Step after step, he left the tiny white box, right foot first, left foot second, and breathed in the pleasant, chill air of the doctor’s air-conditioned space, stepping in there like the very first time.

“You feeling swell?”

He heard the man’s voice and nodded with eyes still mostly shut. “Ja. Feels ... a little good, actually. Like, uh...”

“Like you’re groggy?” The doctor chuckled, doing something on his desk. “Like you churned maybe one bot’o’whisk too many?”

He blinked and blinked. “Umm, yeah. Feels like that.”

“So you drink?”

No, he really didn’t. “No. I really don’t.” He shook his head, and heard the doctor’s pondering nods and whistles:

“The ruskie disease sure is a problem for many men your age. Not here, in this country, where there are no young men left, and I guess also not from, uh, your country, your land, but it is endemic in the continent, in the east. Poor chaps. Drank all their glories away, those sorry folks.” The doctor pressed buttons and shuffled papers while the patient still struggled with his sight and balance, one drunken step after the other in the mercilessly white, ruthlessly bright, cold office. “Such strong, sturdy people. Huge bodies, excellent constitution, superb sets of teeth, and not-too-unwitty a mind.” He made a dismissive, almost contemptuous gesture. “All washed away by vas and vodka. And the bombs. I am not saying that...” The doctor gave his musings a pause. “You sure you are feeling okay, lad?”

The young man supported himself on a wall, tapping it with his palms. “Uh-huh. Just a little...” He kept blinking fast and hard. “It was ... too long in the dark. I have some sensitivity, you know.” He pointed around his forehead. “In the eyes.”

“Mm.” The doctor stood up. “Is this sensitivity something common, or did you just get it recently, with the accident?”

“Both, I guess.” He contemplated his own words. “I, uh, always sensitive. Hmm.” Blink, blink, stare. Ouch! Light, pain, shut, blink, blink. “Always been ... quite sensible. My eyesight. But, umm ... yes. It got worse, uh, recently. With this, uh ... this accident.”

“Here.”

“Oh?”

He heard the doctor walking closer and handing him a set of dark glasses. “I cannot control the brightness in my room, but I can help you ease it with these.”

With many thank-yous, he took the glasses and put them on. «Weird.» He thought. «Now, for some reason, I feel much safer. More private. Like my eyes... » He blinked slow and heavy. «My eyes are safe now.» With confident steps, he calmly sat by the doctor’s desk, trying his best to make as little sound as possible. «Is my eyesight really this sensible?» Then, the contemplation: «I never quite left my room. All the rooms I’ve been in ... I ... I haven’t been to places. I haven’t been to countries or cities. I’ve been to rooms. Rooms in Bovari, rooms in Cali, rooms in Theclan.

Rooms from as far back as his country’s dirtiest, all the way up to his igloo in the artics. «Rooms, all rooms, tiny and cramped, and none well-illuminated, none like this office.» He looked up, sideways, everywhere. «Even my place here is dark. Curtain’s often shut. Skies often cloudy.» Even the sun was deader there. An overall glaze of grays and clouds, like concrete seen through a thin sheet of cotton, or an uneven white wall looked at through dusty glass. «Are my eyes really this bad?» He touched them, feeling them throb. «Or I am just too much of a hermit?»

“You work with ... machines, is that right? Computers, I’ve heard?”

The kind voice of the deep man rescued him from his thoughts.

“Oh, huh?” He half-mumbled. “Umm, yes. I guess.”

“What sort of work would you say you do, exactly? Is it some type of, uh, computer talk? What you do for a living, I mean?”

“Computer talk?”

“Yes. I don’t know the correct term exactly. No longer a young man, you see, and never had much of a mind for these modernities. What I mean is ... well, how do you say ... uh, do you talk to computers? Do you ... interface with them? Write a bunch of commands on the screen for them to follow?”

“Oh. You mean a programmer?”

“Yes, this.” The doctor quickly nodded, almost snapping his fingers. “Precisely. A computer ... programmer, this is it. So, you deal with, uh, lots of computer commands, computer ... uh, codes?”

He really didn’t feel like lying. Not for lack of want, but just because he was really, really bad at it. “Design. I...” Deep breaths. Lying without lying. Lying by telling the truth. “I make drawings. Illustrations. Covers, posters, flyers. This kind of stuff.”

“Oh. You people can do this on a machine?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“But, well, you’re a whole team, I suppose. A whole company, or...?”

“No. It’s just ... uh, just me.”

“Just you?”

“Yes.”

“And people can do this alone in a single device?”

He nodded again, and started to have questions about those questions he was being asked. “Don’t you work with computers, doctor?” He pointed over his shoulder, back to the magical rectangle he’d just crawled out of. “Isn’t that one?”

“Well, technically speaking, yes. They are all machina, are they not? But if you mean ‘computer’ like those boxes with key things that we type texts on them ... no. I can’t say I deal with them, nor that I have dealt with them any recently, or that I know anyone else who has, for that matter.”

“Oh.”

“Quite the rarity, these mechanisms are.”

“Well, uh, I guess ... I guess they are.”

“And expensive, aren’t they?”

He didn’t answer at first. Then... “Hmm.” A simple nod.

He felt suddenly threatened, as if his callous talk had revealed to that man a social condition much above what would have been expected out of a man, a boy like him. Anything could happen if you were rich, or worse yet, if you were perceived as rich without actually being so. Anything bad could happen in the hands of parasitical people—who, to his eyes, were all people

“So ... you’re an artist, eh?”

He snapped from the dark and back again into the light. “Uh-huh.” He did his best attempt at a smile. “Yeah. You can, uh ... you can call it like that.”

Despite all ... he liked that man.

“You deal with a lot of d-” Ruuum! As the doctor was talking, he was cut by a sudden thud stemming from somewhere behind the patient, soon reverbing all throughout the room, as if they both stood in the belly of some mythical beast of legendary proportions. Ruum! Ruum! Rrrr-rrrum!! The sounds grew soft, but all-encompassing, and the boy felt himself inside that little dark cubicle again.

“Ah. Not to worry.” Said the man. “That’s the ... oh, how would you call it? Computer? Yes, I suppose that’s the groß machina in the back, digesting the inputs.” He pointed to the white cubicle, then to an electronic device, a little black, shiny rectangle he had on his desk. “The images are being generated as we speak. The readings I took from you just now, I mean.” He showed the patient the little device, where he saw only very unintuitive, complicated commands and symbols on the screen. “We can see the pictures here in an instant. See that large machine over there?” He pointed to the patient’s right, where another white apparatus, as big as a freezer, lay silent and still, apparently idle against a wall. “That’s the press. A printing device. In a couple of minutes, it will start working. As you can see it yourself, there’s no shortage un deine machina in my workplace. I don’t understand them. Not any more than the common man would, that is, and than what’s strictly necessary for me to perform my medicine. But I am grateful for them. All these analyses, these exams and consultations, you see, they used to take weeks ... oh.”

This time, the doctor interrupted himself. “Anyway, don’t mind me. It’s all very convenient, that’s all I’m saying, even if I am not particularly fond of all this ... modernistic aparashtik.” Still, his face again beamed with harmless curiosity. “Would you say you work with lots of, uh, details on the screen of your device?”

The question caught him off-guard. “Details?”

Boobs. Breasts. Titties...

“Yes. Well, I mean ... do you work with lots of text, lots of very small symbols, tiny letters on the screen?”

“Oh.” Deep in his brain, there was a very long... phew! “Oh, you mean...?”

“Very small fonts on your device. The type that, umm, forces you to move very close to the screen.” The doctor hunched over. “Like this?”

He was rather surprised by the accuracy of the man’s pose. “Oh, yes. Umm, yes. Kind of.”

“Aha!” The doctor boomed and the patient winced. “I knew it! Oh, you youngsters! This explains your bad posture.”

The boy touched one arm and nodded pitifully, avoiding that man’s mighty gaze. “Yeah. Kind of, I think.”

“Kind of, eh? You think, eh? More like definitely.” The good man looked down, back at his small, handheld device, tapping his fingers on the desk while waiting. “I’m not surprised you’re doing so bad on your eyes. Even before this accident, you were probably doing damage to your sight without realizing it.”

“I know. I know.”

“You know, eh?” He frowned. “Can you see straight?” He tapped on the bridge of his nose. “Glasses? Ever used any?”

“Umm, well...” The humming and shaking in the office got stronger and louder. “No. Not really. Never.”