Ursula Le Guin - The Field of Vision

‘So mostly I keep my eyes shut,’ Hughes said, dour. ‘Like a damned see-no-evil monkey.’

‘When you do have your eyes open, and you look towards some object you know is there—your own hand, for instance -what do you see?’

‘ "A blooming, buzzing confusion." ’

‘William James,’ Shapir said with satisfaction. ‘What was he talking about—how a baby perceives the world, eh?’ He had a pleasant voice with a mild, glancing quality to it, non-percussive; one could not imagine him scolding or yelling. He nodded several times, thinking out the implications of what Hughes had said. ‘To learn how to see, you said. To learn. That’s how you feel about it?’

Hughes hesitated, then said with a sudden, marked increase of trust, ‘I have to. What else can I do? Apparently I’m never going to be able to—to see the way I used to, the way other people do, again. But I still do see. Only I don’t understand what I see, it doesn’t make sense. There are no outlines, no distinctions, even between nearer and farther. There is something there—only I can’t say that, because there aren’t any things. No forms. Instead of forms, I see transformations -transfigurations. Does that make any sense at all?’

‘I think it does,’ Shapir said, ‘only it’s enormously difficult to put a direct experience into words. And when the experience is new, unique, overwhelming...’

‘And irrational. That’s it.’ Hughes spoke now with real gratitude. ‘If only I could show it to you,’ he said wistfully.

The two astronauts were being kept on the tenth floor of a big military hospital in Maryland now. They were not permitted to leave that floor, and anyone who visited it still spent ten days in quarantine before he rejoined the outer world: the Martian plague theory was currently on top. At Shapir’s insistence, Hughes was allowed to go up to the roof garden of the hospital (after which the elevator was elaborately sterilized and roped off for three days).

They demanded that Hughes wear a surgical mask; and Shapir had asked him not to wear his goggles. Docile, he went up the elevator with his mouth and nose covered, his eyes uncovered, but tightly shut.

The change from the dusk of the elevator to the hot smoggy sunlight of July on the open roof did not, as far as Shapir could see, affect those shut eyes. Hughes did not screw them tighter against the flooding light, though he raised his face to it as if he felt the heat pleasant on his skin, and took a deep breath through the binding gauze.

‘I haven’t been outside since March,’ he said.

It was true, of course. He had been in a spacesuit or in a hospital room, breathing canned or conditioned air.

‘Have you got your compass bearings?’ Shapir asked.

‘Not the faintest. It makes me feel blinder, being outdoors. Afraid to walk off the edge.’ Hughes had refused assistance coming through the corridors and in the elevator, feeling his way adeptly with his hands, and now despite his joke about falling off he began to explore the roof garden. He was exhilarated: an active man released from long confinement. Shapir watched him, brooding. The low furniture was a hazard to him but he learned at once how to feel for it; he had tactile intelligence; there was grace in his movements, even as he blundered in blindness.

‘Will you open your eyes?’ Shapir said in his glancing, reluctant voice.

Hughes stopped. ‘All right,’ he said; but he turned towards Shapir, and his right hand came up gropingly. Shapir came forward and let that hand take his arm.

The grip of it tightened, as Hughes opened his eyes. Then Hughes let go, and took a step away, stretching out both his arms. A cry broke from him. He reached forward and upward, his head back, his eyes wide open, staring at the empty sky. ‘Oh, my God!’ he whispered, and dropped, like a man hit by a sledgehammer.

S. Hello. Sidney... I won’t stay long. Listen, that wasn’t such a bright idea of mine. The roof. I’m sorry. I had no idea. But no right, either... Would you rather I left?

H. No.

S. All right... I’m getting stir-crazy myself. Need a good walk. I walk a good deal, usually. About two miles to my office and the same back. Then I add detours. Whatever they say, New York is a beautiful town to walk in. If you know how to pick your route. Listen, I have a queer story about Joe Temski. Not a story, just a queer fact, actually. Did you know that they have written on his record that he is ‘functionally deaf’?

H. Deaf?

S. Yes, deaf. Well, you know, I began to wonder. I go in and talk to Joe, you know, touch him, try to make eye contact, any kind of contact, to get through. No go. I’ve had patients tell me in so many words, ‘I can’t hear you.’ A metaphor. But what if it isn’t a metaphor? It happens sometimes with little kids, they’re called retarded and it turns out they’ve got thirty, sixty, eighty percent hearing dysfunction. Well, maybe Joe really can’t hear me. Just like you can’t see me.

H. [pause of forty seconds] Do you mean he’s hearing things? Listening?

S. It’s possible.

H. [pause of twenty seconds] You can’t shut your ears.

S. That’s what I thought, too. It could be rough, couldn’t it? Well, what I thought was, what about trying to shut them for him? Put earplugs in his ears.

H. He still wouldn’t be able to hear you.

S. No, but he wouldn’t be distracted. If you had to watch your light show all the time, you wouldn’t be able to pay much attention to me or anything else, right? Maybe it’s like that with Joe. Maybe there’s this noise drowning out everything else for him.

H. [pause of twenty seconds] It would be more than noise.

S. I don’t suppose you want to talk about...on the roof...

No, all right.

H. You’d like to know what I saw, wouldn’t you?

S. Sure I would. But in your own time.

H. Yeah, I’ve got so much else to do here besides talk to you.

All the books I can read and the beautiful women I can look at. You know damned well I’ll tell you eventually, because I haven’t got anybody else to talk to.

S. Oh, hell, Geraint. [pause of ten seconds]

H. Shit. I’m sorry, Sidney. If I didn’t have you to talk to, I’d have cracked completely. I know that. You’re very patient with me.

S. Whatever you saw, up there, disturbs you. That’s one reason why I want to know what it was. But what the hell, if you can handle it alone, do. That’s the idea, after all. My curiosity is my problem, not yours! Listen. Let’s forget talking. Let me read you this article in Science. Your Colonel Wood gave it to me, said you might be interested. I was. It’s on what they found inside the Argentinian meteorite. The authors are suggesting we go comb the Meteor Belt for remnants of a trans-stellar fleet that came to grief in our solar system about six hundred million years ago. They would have landed on Mars first, of course. Are these guys nuts?

H. I don’t know. Read the article.

Temski slept heavily, and it was easy for Shapir to insert ordinary wax plugs like those insomniacs use into his ears while he was asleep. When Temski woke he did nothing unusual at first. He sat up, yawned, stretched, scratched, looked lazily around to see if anything to eat was handy, in that serene way which Shapir privately felt was altogether unlike any psychotic behavior he had ever seen, and in fact unlike any human behavior he had ever seen. Temski reminded him of a healthy, poised, contented, tame animal. Not a chimpanzee; something milder, more contemplative, an orang, maybe.

But the orang began to feel uncomfortable.

Temski looked around, left and right, nervous. Perhaps he was not looking but moving his head trying to find the vanished sounds. The lost chord, Shapir thought. Temski grew more and more disturbed and alert. He got up, still turning his head restlessly. He looked across the room. For the first time in seventeen days of daily contact, he saw Shapir.