Second Sight

At the age of ten I was involved in an accident that severely damaged my eyes, a corneal laceration is what they called it. It’s a cut on the cornea, which is the transparent part of the eye covering the pupil and iris, it’s usually caused by something sharp flying into the eye or by something striking the eye with significant force. In my case it was by force.

My older brother, Adam, who was twelve at the time was playing with a plastic knife, he liked to pretend he was a soldier and was deep in war when someone came up behind him and he would pretend to stab them and save his soldier friends, well I guess one day he was so immersed in it, I must have startled him because next thing I knew he broke my eyes.

I don’t remember much after that, I must have blacked out. When I came home some months later both my eyes were bandaged up. It took a toll on my brother, he tried his best to apologize but it led him down a dark path of being an extremely dangerous adrenaline junkie but somehow we remained very close. I’ll always remember what he looked like back then.

~~

I sat there listening to the description from a woman whose house was broken into. She had 2 children, a boy and a girl and thankfully they were not hurt. I’m amazed at how people can remember such detail when they are going through something so traumatic, at how their brains retain every little detail subconsciously, it has amazed me for years.

It’s kind of ironic that being partially blind I am able to draw with such detail but my other senses have been so heightened in the years since my accident, it now just feels so natural to me.

Drawing has been my coping mechanism even though I've never clearly seen any of my drawings, they are total blur most of the time but when I finish, people are amazed at the result and how life like they are from their memories. I’m not sure why but something just felt familiar about this particular drawing and from what I could see, well ... it started to piss me off and a memory had been unlocked.

While studying art at university, I was approached by a retired police officer and asked if I could draw from peoples descriptions of things. He was helping with a number of break ins and they needed someone to draw a man from the witness description, they asked me because they suspected it to be the same perpetrator and my professor was a friend of his and suggested he give me a try as I had a unique ability to focus on the details. So now I am a sketch artist for the police and have been so for the last 5 years. I love my job as I do what I love to do and help people at the same time and it works for me and my situation.

I still live in the same house I grew up in, It was familiar to me so I stayed with my parents until I left for university, finally free. My parents were killed while I was away in an accident about 5 years ago, right around the time I took on the sketching. The person who killed my parents was never caught as it was a hit and run and there was no witness but they did have some evidence, it just wasn’t enough. There were no matches of any kind in their system so this person had never been in trouble before it seems. It was an on-going case.

I’ve not been able to find out how my brother feels, he left at 22 and sometimes came home to see me or my parents but it always ended up with arguments about how he destroyed my life. I forgave him after it happened and he was thankful for that and we stayed pretty close but because of them he left. I kind of understood but I missed him very much. He is all that I have left. He visited regularly after the accident, but would never talk about it. I always knew he was here because of his damn car parked in the drive and I told him to get rid of it.

I was called into work early to do another sketch. A woman saw a man standing in their neighbors window but the family had been away at the time, she went and banged on the window and shouted and the man had ran out of the house, pushed her over and disappeared. This couple also had two children of a boy and a girl and I remember from the other woman's description that this man sounded somewhat similar, I had a strange feeling beginning to creep over me. I had mentioned it to my supervisor and he made note of it and informed his superior that it is possible we may have multiple robberies by the same person. The parents gave almost the same description as the witness had. When my supervisor called me to his office, I was escorted and sat in front of him and we were left alone.

He asked me if I was able to tell that the pictures I had drawn the last couple of weeks had been the same person, I told him I wasn’t certain for obvious reasons but they felt similar from their descriptions so I assumed they were one and the same and he confirmed. He had shared some of the details of the case with me out of courtesy but then I realized it was because I was partially blind and could only see some details but they were blurry.

The first family had found a book with braille in the girls room and asked me if I could translate it or at least tell them the title. “Forgiving What You Can’t Forget”. I smiled. He sighed and passed me another book.

The latest family had found a braille book left on their table in the kitchen and didn’t see it at first, this one was called “Forgiving The Unforgivable”. I told my boss it seems they are trying to forgive someone or ask for forgiveness, maybe they did something to someone and he is seeking vengeance or forgiving them for something they did maybe, at least that's what it seemed to me. My boss asked me what I thought the person looked like in my mind because I drew them, he said the person looked familiar to him but wanted to know what I thought. Well, I told him I had no idea because I haven't seen a clear face in over 10 years, he seemed frustrated, like he knew I knew something but wasn’t telling him what it was. Well, he’s right.

My boss was telling me this as he wanted to keep me updated on the case, I was going to be off for a while as I had been accepted for an experimental surgery to help restore my vision and he wanted to make sure I would be safe. I liked my boss a lot and he had been good to me when I first came here, he had been kind of a father figure to me.

So I am now scheduled for this operation, my doctor said I’d be in and out in a day but would need a few weeks to adjust, get my eyes looking pretty and he warned me that suddenly seeing again after so long can be a little overwhelming so suggested I stay with someone, I really have no-one so he arranged for me to have someone come by to care for me until I am adjusted.

About a month ago at my routine check-up/probe your eyes/make you uncomfortable appointment, my doctor heard about this surgery that may possibly restore my sight. Of course I was skeptical about it but how does that even work, an eye transplant I asked him, he laughed and said no like I was completely stupid and totally serious, pffft, he’s dumb sometimes for a doctor and no sense of humor. Anyway, it was a procedure called Keratoprosthesis. He explained every detail to make sure I knew everything and there was only a few procedures being done and he wanted me to know the pro’s and con’s of them all, it was a long appointment.

Essentially, I would be getting artificial corneas to help me see again and I almost shouted at him, like a robot eye I asked him with amusement in my voice trying to be funny and lighten the mood, he was not impressed, I could tell by his voice. So we went through the pro’s and con’s but there can be on rare occasions some risks. Well, what's the worst that can happen when I’m blurry eyed already, I couldn’t see it but I know he just shrugged.

~~

So here we are, I am ready for my close up and I won’t go into too many details but basically an eyelid thing is used to keep the eye open throughout the surgery. Some lubrication stuffed in there to prevent the eye from drying and then a manual incision is used to create a pocket and a punch is used to create an opening. So he cuts my eye open and shoves this thing in there, sounds delightful right, the Alphacor is then inserted into the corneal pocket to allow for bio-integration. After several months, a second procedure is used to remove part of the anterior cornea to allow light to reach the retina. The posterior cornea is left intact.

Now I am lying here on a bed waiting to wake up. I can’t open my eyes just yet because they have a blindfold on and the sudden light could be bad for me so they are taking me to a dark room to adjust to the light slowly, I can’t say I’m not nervous because I am.

I can hear the doc talking to me about where we are going and how this is going to be a major change for me but he is fully confident. I can see some kind of light peeping through the blindfold and now I am getting super angsty and want to rip this thing off and see what I can see, I’m excited and scared at the same time.

We stop and doc asks me if I am ready, nope, but he ignores me and takes the blindfold off anyway. My eyes are shut tight and I tell him I don’t want to open them, now he laughs, douche-bag. So I slowly open them and it’s blurry but I can already see shapes and I am on the verge of fainting or puking or something because I haven’t felt this much anxiety in a long time. I go for it, I open my eyes fully and I see a white light above me and now I’m thinking I’m dead and going to heaven but then I hear doc laugh.

He looks like a douche-bag, he’s kinda cute though. Is this really my first thought after major eye surgery, oh boy.

So I’d say it’s been about a month and I am going back to work, I spent a lot of time sitting around looking at stuff and now I want to go back to work.

My boss is cute and younger than I expected and he has very nice eyes and I can feel myself blushing, stupid eyes. Anyway he said he has some major developments in the case and he wants to meet up tomorrow to go over them, he also mentioned a development in my parents case that he wants to personally talk to me about so now I’m worried because there hasn’t been a development in five years and now here we are going over something else that traumatized me when I just conquered the first thing that went wrong in my life, but hey, lets do it all at once and get it over with.

I’m jumping ahead about 3 days here because there is a lot to unpack. Where the hell do I even start, from the beginning I guess....

Cute boss, as I call him now, called me to the office and he told me they have a lead on the robberies that are connected by the braille books. He brought all my drawings so I could see what they looked like, well shit. I immediately knew what he meant when he said they looked familiar to him, as he explained the connection all I could do was sigh as I sat there and stared at the drawings. Adam, I will kill you.

The perpetrator had worked at a place that helped families struggling with every day life. They would help with the food bank and clothing and volunteer at a school for children who are blind on occasions and that is where they got the books from they believe. How could he do this I thought to myself, he had been so careless. Here’s the thing, they never actually took anything and these families were never robbed but they all had one thing in connection as well as the books, all the families had blind or partially blind children and they think the books were a message. I sat there and thought to myself, yes .. I know but the message was for me.

As my boss looked at me and asked if I was ok, I just nodded as I didn’t want him to see the tears I had forming in my eyes. I had to go home, I suddenly wasn’t feeling well and he agreed but he wanted to talk to me first about my parents accident too.

They had also found the car that was involved in the hit and run and were tracing it as we spoke, It was a black cavalier with two yellow stripes front to back and tinted windows, it was involved in a traffic stop and when they released the vehicle the police had received an alert that the vehicle in question was involved in a hit and run 5 years prior. I thanked him and he let me leave for the day, I was not happy.

Now that I could see better, I turned onto my road and my eyes had immediately went to the car in my driveway. You have got to be kidding me. As I walked up towards the house I was looking at a black cavalier with yellow stripes front to back and tinted windows parked right in front of me. Idiot, I thought.

As I got closer to the door it swung open and I saw his face. I didn’t know what to say this time. Usually I would greet him with hey douche-bag or what did you do this time but today I was silent, he had been gone for about 2 months so this was the first time I saw him in a while. He nodded towards the car and looked at me and smiled, I told him we should talk inside.

I told him 2 things ...

Get rid of the car before we are both arrested. I told him he needed to get rid of it years ago, It had been in hiding for 5 years but he got caught with it and today he brought it home to stretch its legs. I told him he was an Idiot because they found it, they will be looking and they will know who it belongs to. His face dropped in shock and he began apologizing profusely before he stood up to head out.

Wait .... Second thing...

I got his message with the books and I forgave him again. I told him this time he’d been creative but it would have been less noticeable if the kids weren’t blind, he always liked to push himself. He became an adrenaline junkie when he left and he told me he wanted to do something special for me and this wasn’t the first time he had left messages like this.

I told him we needed to leave, now, but it was too late. Sirens were coming and we knew they were coming for us.

~~

My cute boss just stared at me sitting across from him. He passed a folder to me across the table and opened it so I could see what it was. A hospital report and lawsuit because unbeknownst to them and my poor poor doctor they had performed surgery on a person that didn’t need it, the procedure, if done on a seeing person gives them the ability to see in the dark. The procedure enhances the cornea to an extreme level of sight.

He asked me how long I’ve been able to see. He knew he was at the beginning of something, he wasn’t sure exactly what he was in for, but he knew that something disturbing was coming his way.

I smiled.

I had my eyes closed.

I thought I’d keep them that way for a little longer.