The Blind and the Numb

Story about two people in a world where everyone loses sight, touch, or hearing after puberty.

Karen lived in a forest, in a cabin made of rotting wood. The cabin had been made by her father long before he died, and she had neither the strength, nor any companions in her life, to restore it.  Many men wanted to suit her, but she returned no interest. Karen was a pretty girl, though not unnaturally beautiful. Her face was the shape of a teardrop, her olive skin was smooth as ocean water on a storm-less night. Her hair fell down her back in one neat, glossy wall of black.  Her lips were two thin red lines that would sometimes curve into the shyest, most endearing smile, the kind of smile men would build a life around. And her eyes were green as the grass in summer. There were prettier girls, certainly, but any man would be lucky to have her as a wife.

She was naturally a very quiet girl. All her thoughts were a sandstorm somewhere between her neck and her throat, but they never escaped the mouth. The thoughts curdled there unspoken, becoming sour.

She was blind, and loathed her sense of hearing. She counted herself fortunate, though, for the sense of touch. In her world, people lost one of three senses once they hit puberty: sight, hearing, or touch. This was God’s punishment for their blasphemy. Children were innocent, but grew wicked as they got older, and so they were not allowed to enjoy his creation.

            Despite having perfect hearing, Karen kept to herself.

Her reclusive personality was exactly what drew attention to her. She piqued people’s curiosity. Most people took advantage of the senses given to them. She rejected them, and never told anyone why.

If one were to sit outside her cabin during certain parts of the day, they could see her come out very timidly from the opening in the cabin. She would walk purposefully to one of the bushes in her garden, and bend down to look at it.  

            Karen was blind, and though she had made the short trip for years, she still walked very cautiously, and low to the ground. And then she would sit there for a long time, squinting at the bush, as if she was trying to make out some writing on a dark, moonless night. Nothing about her would move, except for the very subtle sway of her head.  For hours, she’d sit, and you would find yourself hoping for her, with her, that she would be able to make out the image. Even the sun seemed to change positions, as if adjusting itself to get a better view of her, or maybe just trying give her more light. Clouds parted, leaving openings for the sun to shine down on her. But if she ever noticed how the world itself seemed to be rooting for her, she gave no sign of it. After she had enough, Karen would very lightly graze her fingertips against one of the leaves with a nostalgic smile, stand up quietly, and walk back to her cabin. No one knew what happened when she went in. Karen was quiet, secretive and other things around her became quiet, almost by association. The whole world had a knot in its throat, a rock in its stomach, because it was waiting very eagerly to hear her speak. When she chose to say something, it was something very important, and no one or thing wanted to miss it.

            The children in town used to have a cruel game involving Karen. They’d get a bunch of rocks, those colorful, metallic rocks with little rainbows running through them. They’d gather a couple dozen of them and say they were going to wait for the woman in the forest to come out to throw them at her. All the kids would laugh and cheer them on, or tell them that she was a monster, that she’d steal one of their senses out of jealously.

            Then they’d get there, and be struck by the tragic beauty of the scene, even as blissfully ignorant children. She would come out in a meticulously-cleaned white dress, and the boys would immediately feel like they’re looking at another little girl. Karen didn’t stand with the poise of a woman. She stood with the poise of a small child, running a chore for her father, fearful of failing to fulfill the task.

The children would silently remark to each other how quiet it was, pointing delicately at their ears, very afraid of making a sound, and they’d wonder if she really did take one of their senses. But there was nothing malicious about the woman, and their fears were quickly put to rest.

There was something so heartbreaking about Karen’s yearning for sight that even children, naïve and ignorant and happy, could feel it. She wanted to trade hearing for sight. After she was done staring, or trying to stare, she’d get up, now with fresh grass stains on her dress. The young woman would stand up, turn towards her house, and walk inside with the expression of a sad little girl that had done something wrong and now had to face her father.

Then the boys would walk back, leaving their stones there for her, wondering if that would be them one day, when they grew up. They wondered if they, too, would desperately sit and try to feel what could no longer be felt or hear what was no longer audible or see what had turned to darkness. Some things that were clear now, they realized, would one day be lost to them forever. That was what it meant to grow up, and it made growing up no longer seem as exciting as they once believed.

           

When the children returned, they seemed older, many years older. They looked like they had lost something very important, and wanted to go back and look for it, but they didn’t. They didn’t bother because they wouldn’t know what to do with it if they found it again.

And then no one would speak. Once their friends had returned, the boys felt awkward, as if their parents, not peers, had just come to interrupt them playing a game. Everyone there felt some big wordless thing pulsing in the air and the sky overhead and even just a few inches below Earth. No one could understand it, except the boys who had been to see Karen. They could understand it, but they couldn’t explain it. Because there were no words for it. But it drove everything they did until they day they died.  Eventually the boys returned to normal, or at least pretended to. The only sign that remained of their experience was the slight hesitation when they talked about what they wanted to do when they grew up.

 

 

Eric was a handsome enough man, and he knew it, though he wasn’t excessively proud in his appearance. By nature, he was shy. Others perceived it as him being ostentatious. He didn’t mean it that way, though. He just preferred the quiet.

All his life had taught him not to feel, and so when he lost the sense of touch, he believed it suited him. He was raised to be distant. His parents fed him, they clothed him, and they let him be. When he lost his sense of touch, he couldn’t remember the last time anyone, even his parents, had embraced him. There was nothing to miss.

 Eric never felt superior, though he was born a noble. He felt alone. Perhaps not lonely, but he certainly felt alone.

Sometimes he would walk through the forest by himself to clear his head, and one day he saw Karen coming out of a cabin he thought abandoned. Immediately he was struck by what she was doing, and was almost moved to tears. He stopped looking at her, for that was wrong. It was unfair. She, at that moment, was not touching him, and so it was wrong of him to enjoy the sensation of seeing her. He’d listen, though, he’d listen to her breath, soft and rhythmic, waiting until that one cathartic sigh escaped her lips. He had to listen really closely, but that wasn’t too difficult because the rest of the world wasn’t saying much in those moments.

Then while she was moving to go inside, he stood up, and spilled a large pile of  color-streaked rocks. They made a rattling noise, and in that idyllic moment, it sounded like a great avalanche, a spilling of many secrets.

Karen stopped moving for a second, and Eric knew he should speak.

“I’m sorry,” he said. Though really, he was glad he had seen her.

There was a pause, building a tension so thick even the leaves around him seemed to hang lower to the ground, closer to the two of them, waiting for what happened next. “I’d like to come tomorrow…would that be alright?” Because if hadn’t asked, he knew he’d likely never work up the courage to visit her again.

She turned, smiling, looking a little below and to the left of his head. She nodded.

The next day he returned, and she was laying on her back, staring into the sky. She wasn’t squinting, though. Her eyes were closed. Eric sat down wordlessly, brushing lightly against her hand as he lied down. She held his hand in hers, and he was content to stare at her. These meetings went on for a while, their contact growing in frequency and intimacy.

 

Other townsfolk noticed, and they all, for the most part, supported the relationship.  The elders knew about Karen. When she was little, her father would hide away all of her schoolbooks, keep her busy with domestic duties, and fill her head with frightening, trembling images of a world without him. Without his wife, her mother, she was the only person that he could love without any feeling of guilt. He was deaf from birth and lost the sense of touch as he aged. His only sensation was sight, and he took as much pleasure from it as possible. He took his daughter out to see all the beautiful sights of the world, like bright wildflowers that looked like a blazing fire, or dark flowers that looked like delicious hard candy. And he’d take her to the river, where he would splash around and show her how the drops of water look like diamonds when the sun hits them the right way.

He taught her to resent hearing, making her feel like it was only a tool for communication of information, not beauty. Dad never showed her music, or spoke her name, or made her laugh. He did all the wrong things, and maybe that was how it was meant to be. For some of us, we would be nowhere if not for our painful childhoods.

Eric and Karen got along beautifully for months. Neither spoke, as Karen had nothing to say and found no joy in things he could say. He himself was full of billions of words, but found that, if she did not want to hear them, they felt better to keep inside. Many times it was painful for Karen, being unable to see his face, even while their lips touched. She could feel every part of his body, but never would she know his face.

And for him the pain was similar. His hands could be everywhere; he could see her fingers travel along his body, but felt no sensation at all.

They were like two different worlds, two Earth’s in perfect orbit, hanging a few thousand feet from each other. As the two fell more and more in love, it was like standing on two great parallel mountain peaks. And they were reaching out their fingertips, getting on the tips of their toes, even at the risk of falling to their death, just to feel each other.

So. Close. Almost. Touching. Almost. Grazing.

But they knew that it could never happen.

When they left each other, though, they’d remember that the space between them was so infinitesimally small. They’d remember the day all wrong, they’d remember how small the space was and not how hard they had strained, how they had hurt and struggled and still not even shared one true moment, not with the same perception. But still they knew, or thought they knew, without even a tenuous doubt, that they could do it. They could pull themselves to each other. Just. A. Bit. Closer.

He would scratch at his arms, hoping he could remove whatever was between the two of them. His skin would bleed and scab over, and then he’d try again, willingly mangling his flesh. Because when she was gone, he just knew. He could fix things.

She would do the same, crying, rubbing her eyes raw. And her soft, childlike face would get red and dry. Her head would hurt, and she’d just keep crying. Because she just knew that there had to be some small invisible film keeping her from seeing him. She just had to wash it out.

When they met again, she would feel the scars. He’d see her face. And they both realized they couldn’t fix it. None of us can help how we’re born, what senses we lose. There are things in us we can’t change, immovable objects existing in our life like so many thousands of pores in our bones.

It was torture to them, to be so close and unable to truly be together. What Karen had, Eric would never know, the feel of the other’s skin. And what Eric had, Karen would never know either, the sight of the other’s face. It was clear to each other, too, the pain that they were in. They loved each other, but could never truly be happy together. For the rest of their lives, they would yearn for something that could never be. To be looked in the eye with adoration, or to delight in the other’s touch.

They could hear. That much was theirs. But Karen had been raised to resent hearing, and Eric learned this. He never tried to sing her to sleep, or even profess his love to her. She knew she was loved, of course, but half the joy is in hearing it and the other half was in wanting to hear it.

One day, Karen spoke to him. Eric wasn’t surprised. In fact, he was saddened, because he felt this would be the only conversation she would have with him.

“Am I beautiful?” She asked, shyly like she was afraid of the answer.

“Yes.” He said, unable to really explain it.

“And what of you?” She asked.

“I think,” he said “that I am only beautiful when I’m with you.”

            “Then,” she said half-happily, as if figuring out some simple solution their painful conundrum. “I suppose we should stop seeing each other. Because to remain beautiful is to be alone.”

            Tears rolled down her cheeks, but she kept smiling, hoping they couldn’t be seen. Eric kissed her on the cheek, then on the forehead. She closed her eyes, and he kept his open, knowing this would be the closest they’d be again. There was something so magical about the moment that one might wonder if she had opened her eyes, and if he had closed his, perhaps they could have traded senses.

Eric started crying a timid, barely audible whimper.

“I love you.” She said, and with that her voice may as well have died and left her throat.

He didn’t respond. She could never feel joy from hearing it. Instead he caressed her wrist. Dropping tears as he did.

 

            For the rest of his life, Eric scratched at his arms, trying to get to that point he couldn’t quite reach. He never married, and though none argued that he was handsome, the sight and feel of his arms was something egregious, it ruined him. Only once did he return to the place in the woods, a few days before he died, while his sight was beginning to dull from age. His arms were horribly disfigured by this time. But he never went to her. He waited outside to see her, and when the sun went down, she had still not come out, so he left. 

            Karen lived differently. She stopped touching. She grasped things lightly, slept as if trying to float over her bed, and took no pleasure in what Eric could not. If she could not regain sight in the arms of Eric, she never would, and her last hope was to give up what Eric could never have. She would become completely oblivious to the world, no sight, no touch, no hearing, if she could just feel the dreamy happiness of love. When and if he returned, they could be together. They could never touch, but they could still be. The act of being, or existing, is a sense on it’s own. Desperately, she told herself these things as she lay in bed before sleeping.

            It was just a wild dream, though, and she knew it. When she wasn’t touching him, it would be like he wasn’t there. Every moment she would fear that he had left, or died. The same could be said of him. He’d never sleep for long, always needing to check that she was lying beside him.

Her home was no longer quiet. She had spoken for the last time, and the world was no longer waiting for what she had to say. But it was still remarkably peaceful, even if at times the noise was a bit bothersome.

One day she knew that he had died.

So she went again to the bushes outside of her now-ruined house, trying to see the bushes like she used to. There she sat for hours, squinting once again like when she was young, before her hair had dried and split, before her skin had grown wrinkled, and before her life had been set on a path of solitude.

Not once did a flash of green appear, so she reached out her hand, as there was no reason to continue her refrain from touch. She expected to be comforted like before, to feel a healthy green leaf in her hands, a reminder that there still beauty to see if she could recover her sight. But when she grazed the leaf with her hand, it was dry and crumbled between her fingers.