Rupert Thomson: The Insult

‘No perception of light. I’ll give you a demonstration.’ He reached into a trouser or a jacket pocket. ‘I’m holding a torch. Now, can you tell me, is it on?’

I stared hard, but I had no awareness of a torch. I wasn’t aware of anything.

‘Is it off,’ Visser said, ‘or on?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘And yet your pupils still contract.’ The torch clicked. ‘What’s interesting about cortical blindness is that it’s absolute. Your eyes still see, they still respond to light. It’s just that what they’re seeing is not being recorded in the brain.’ He shifted in his chair. ‘Imagine a TV. A TV receives electromagnetic waves from a transmitter and it reconverts those waves into visual images. If the TV’s faulty, the electromagnetic waves are not converted. Unfortunately, that’s where the analogy ends. Unlike a TV, the occipital cortex cannot be replaced, or even repaired. We simply don’t have the technology as yet. Do you understand?’

‘I think so.’

‘It’s perhaps for this reason — the fact that the retina, the optic nerves and the anterior visual pathways are all still functioning as normal — that people who suffer from cortical blindness often believe, despite proof to the contrary, that they can see. This is a condition known as Anton’s Syndrome. Rare, admittedly, but it exists.’

I didn’t know what he meant by proof to the contrary.

‘Oh, falling downstairs,’ he said, ‘bumping into furniture — that kind of thing.’ Visser’s tone was light, almost playful, and yet I wasn’t offended. I saw what he was describing — it was slapstick, it was farce: policemen walking into lampposts, fat women slipping on banana-skins — and I, too, was entertained.

‘You might also experience visual hallucinations,’ Visser went on, ‘flashes of light and so forth. It’s quite common in cases like yours, where there has been a severe insult to the brain —’

‘I think I know what you’re trying to say, Doctor.’

Visser was silent, waiting.

‘You’re trying to say that I shouldn’t fall into the trap of believing I can still see.’

‘Well, yes. Precisely.’

He sounded so surprised, so pleased with me, that I couldn’t help feeling proud of myself. In fact, I had the feeling that the pride was mutual, that we were, to some as yet unknown extent, dependent on each other.

Once or twice a year, when I was young, my parents would put me on a train to the city. My grandparents met me at the other end. From the station we caught a tram out to their small house in the suburbs (in my memory it’s always the same ride, through streets that are sunlit, tree-lined, deadened by the heat, and my grandmother always offers me a pear, picked from a tree on their allotment). I usually stayed for two weeks, and was always sad when it was time to go.

Not far from where they lived was a big house that stood in a private park. I would ride there on my grandfather’s bicycle, slow down as I passed the gates. Standing on the pedals, I’d turn in an unsteady circle, unwilling to stop, but wanting a second glimpse. There was a driveway leading up to the house between two rows of trees. On winter evenings their branches, black and gleaming, seemed to hoard the gold windows in their fingers. In spring, white blossoms lay scattered on the gravel, each petal curved and pale, eyelid-shaped. Otherwise there was nothing much to see. The house itself was a kilometre away, at least, a faÇade of dark bricks in the distance. Green drainpipes. Chimneys.

When I asked my grandparents about it, they told me it was a sanatorium. That means people who are sick, they said. I was never sure if they meant mad or just ill, and they were dead now, my grandparents; the last time I looked for the sanatorium, I was told it had been pulled down. If I’d been called upon to explain my fascination I don’t know what I would have said. It wasn’t so much what I saw as what I might see. Part of you recognises a potential. Thinking about it now, I found a cruel irony in it. It occurred to me that, if the boy on the bicycle had looked hard enough, if he’d looked really hard, he might have seen the man he would eventually become.

More than twenty years had passed since then, but just for a moment, lying in my bed in the clinic, I’m that boy again, turning circles on his grandfather’s bicycle. And, looking up, I notice a man moving down the gravel drive towards me. I drop one foot to the ground and stand there, watching. The man’s eyes are bandaged and yet he’s walking in a straight line, as though he can see. And when he reaches the gates he stops and looks at me, right through the bandages, right between the black wrought-iron bars.

‘Martin?’ he says. ‘Is that you?’

My hands tighten on the handlebars.

‘It’s you,’ he says, ‘isn’t it.’

I start pedalling. There’s a hill luckily, it’s steep, the wind roars in my ears. But even when I’m back with my grandparents and everything’s normal again, I can’t be sure that I won’t turn round and see him walk towards me through the house.

Knowing me, despite the bandages.

Knowing my name.

‘Mr Blom?’

It was the nurse, Miss Janssen. She had two detectives with her. One of them, Slatnick, was making noises, strange little squeaks and splashes, which I finally identified as the sound of someone chewing gum. The other man’s name was Munck. Munck did most of the talking. His voice was easy to listen to, almost soporific. I wanted to tell him he was in the wrong job; with a voice like that, he should have been a hypnotist.

He was shocked, he said — they both were — by what had happened. He could only express the deepest sympathy for me in my predicament. If there was anything that they could do …

‘Thank you,’ I said.

Munck talked on. The last ten years had seen a proliferation of firearms in the city. Incidents of the type it had been my misfortune to be involved in had increased a hundredfold. Random violence, seemingly senseless crimes. He had his theories, of course, but now was not the time. He paused. Wind rushed in the trees outside. A window further down the ward blew open; I felt cold air search the room. Munck leaned closer in his chair. The reason they’d come, he said, was to hear my version of the event.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t have a version.’

‘You don’t remember anything?’

‘No, not really.’

‘Did you see anything at all?’

I smiled. ‘Tomatoes.’

Slatnick stopped chewing for a moment.

‘They must’ve spilled out of my bag,’ I said. ‘I suppose I was going to make a salad that night.’

‘I see.’ I heard Munck stand up and start to pace about. ‘Where do you work, Mr Blom?’

‘A bookshop.’ I mentioned the name of it.

‘I know the place. I’m often in there myself.’ Munck walked to the end of the bed. ‘Do you have any enemies?’

I raised my eyebrows.

‘It sounds dramatic, I know,’ Munck said, ‘but we have to ask.’

‘None that I can think of.’

‘You have no idea who might’ve shot at you?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

Slatnick spoke next. ‘Am I correct in assuming therefore that you would not be able to identify your assailant?’

I stared in his direction. What is it about policemen?

‘Slatnick,’ Munck said, ‘I think the answer’s yes.’

‘Yes?’ Slatnick hadn’t understood.

‘Yes, you’d be correct in that assumption.’

There was a silence.

‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you, Mr Blom,’ Munck said. ‘I have to say that, in this case, it seems unlikely that justice will be done. All that remains is for us to wish you a speedy recovery. Once again, if there’s anything we can do —’