Дж. Хатчинс - Personal Effects - Dark Art

“I’m sure Ms. Jackson appreciates your concern,” I said. All right. The man wanted me to acknowledge his blindness. I obliged him. “That’s pretty remarkable. Have your other senses also compensated for your sight loss?”

Martin Grace opened his eyes. His pine-green corneas stared into mine. No. Past mine.

“I imagine we’ll have all the answers we need by the time your leave,” he said.

He blinked slowly. Another moment passed.

“You’re more direct than the others,” he said. “Is that your personality shining through, I wonder, or the fact that you’re on a deadline?” His thin lips teased into a smirk. “One week. Do you honestly care if the blind man steps before the firing squad? I certainly won’t need a blindfold.”

I shrugged. This was more adversarial than I’d expected. “I’m here to help you, Martin. I’d like to work with you, learn about your life, if you’ll let me. I help people express themselves through—”

“Oh, I know what you do,” Grace said. His smirk broadened, then flicked back to a flat line of impassivity. “In the great sea of quackery—where chiropractors and regression therapists splash about and make money hand-over-fist—perhaps the biggest, fattest ducks are people like you, Mr. Taylor. You’re a two-bit Crayola salesman, nothing more.”

I didn’t move, but the head inside my mind was nodding. So. This was how it was going to be. I considered the notes I’d made this morning, the prep I’d done for our session.

“I thought you might have a better opinion of my profession, considering you’re a musician,” I said. My voice was neutral, professional. “I went on Amazon today and ordered some of the CDs you worked on at The Jam Factory. I’m curious to hear your keyboard work on Charlie Murphy’s jazz album. Your coworkers say you’re quite talented.”

Martin Grace unfolded his fingers and made a theatrical flourish with one hand. His tone was condescending, acidic.

“Ladies and gentlemen, our Mr. Taylor is invested. My. I suspect you aren’t even going to ask this fine institution”—he made another insulting hand flourish here—“to reimburse you for the purchase. Tell me that you at least scored free shipping.”

I wasn’t, and hadn’t.

I looked into his eyes, my mind reciting Dad’s quote in today’s Times —“the man might be blind, he might not be”—and wondered if Martin Grace could see me now, puzzling over him. I resisted a childish urge to stick out my tongue and test this. I glanced up at the security camera in the far corner of the room. Yet another reason not to act like a goofball.

Grace gave a humorless chuckle. He placed his hands back in his lap and closed his eyes.

“You really are different,” he said. “But not so different.”

I didn’t like this. I changed tactics, hungry to disrupt Grace’s game of superiority. My goal was to establish a bond. Coax him into expressing himself in the language in which I was fluent.

“I’m confused, Martin,” I said. “You’ve been indicted for a murder you say you didn’t commit… and you’re suspected in nearly a dozen more. But you do nothing to defend yourself. Am I invested because I’m open to the possibility that you might be innocent? Am I naive because I don’t want to see a man with airtight alibis sent to prison, or worse? If the sadness from these deaths has forced you to become blind, if this dark man—”

“You. Don’t. Know. Anything. About the Dark Man,” Grace hissed. He leaned forward, closing the space between us. He smirked again.

“Do you honestly think you understand the black… because you’re afraid of it?”

My stomach churned with slushy, slippery dread.

“How—” I began. Damn it. I couldn’t help myself, I couldn’t understand how he…

“I can’t see you, Mr. Taylor, but I already know you,” Martin Grace said. “I smelled the stink of fear when you opened that door. Just look at you and your youth and your oh-so-comfortable clothes, and your baggy jeans, your button-down shirt hanging over an undoubtedly very trendy T-shirt, and your old wind-up watch—an heirloom from a dead relative?—and your broken-in sneakers that just barely squeak on this shit-hole’s floors, and the sloppy glop of jelly on your shirt, and oh, your inexperience, all the paperwork you brought along, all your notes…”

I couldn’t blink. Couldn’t say a word.

“…oh, and be sure to breathe , Mr. Taylor,” the blind man continued, “be sure to keep breathing while the patient yanks the rug from beneath you, makes you, pins your personality like a lepidopterist pins butterflies into glass boxes, pins you for the fraud that you are—you’re an amateur, Mr. Taylor, an artist, a paintbrush-wielding phony —and somehow, you think I haven’t heard this all before, haven’t anticipated every question you’ll ask, haven’t a brain inside my skull .

“You want to save me, Mr. Taylor? You think I owe you explanations about the black, about the Dark Man, about this? ” His eyelids flashed open like bad window shades, pupils not seeing his own waving hand before his face. “Here is wisdom. This world is cold, cruel and selfish, Mr. Taylor. We must tear the things we want from its grasp, claw our way inside, be worthy of the right to possess what we possess. You want to save the blind man? Get inside his mind like he’s gotten into yours? Then fucking earn it.”

Grace leaned back now. His eyes lowered to the hands in his lap. Whatever bond I’d hoped to make today had been depth charged, nuked and shot into the sun. My mouth made like it wanted to speak, but I was too stupefied to say anything.

“Stop trembling,” Grace said. His voice was now passionless, bored. “And for God’s sake, close your mouth. You sound like a beached fish.”

He’s… cruel , Annie Jackson had said.

Yes. Yes, he was.

I stood up. I was numb, full-body numb. I watched my hands push the wooden chair back to its spot beneath the table. I saw my fingers slide across the table to the stack of papers I’d brought, and to the long, rectangular electronic device resting beside it.

This is what… this is what prey feels like , I thought. Cold and hunted and utterly alone.

And yet. And yet.

I eyed the large Casio keyboard I’d placed on the desk. I heard my mantra for Grace’s case in my mind: He’s blind, but help him see . I felt my spine straighten, my shoulders rise, just a bit. I switched on the instrument, then turned to face my patient.

“You are a cold-hearted son of a bitch,” I heard myself say. “And I’m going to help you if it kills me. We start again tomorrow, you and me, and I’m going to tear and claw the best I can, just like you said.”

The man sneered. Opened his mouth to retort. I didn’t let him.

“And you’re going to meet me halfway, old man,” I said. My fingers tapped a few keys on the Casio. Notes, sweet and bright, chimed from its speaker. Grace’s eyebrows rose, curious. “You’re going to play this thing tonight and find your groove and we’re going to talk about it, because if you want someone with steel, Mr. Grace, someone to listen to your wretched stories about the Dark Man and your Life Before Blindness—and you do , as sure as I’m standing here, I know you do—then you’ve gotta earn that, too.”

Martin Grace’s eyes slid upward, in my direction. He actually smiled.

“We’ll see,” he said.

I twisted the metal doorknob to leave. “And that,” I said, “is the goddamned point.”