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She must have registered his confusion. “Office says you canceled a few times. A girl can’t be too careful with new customers.”

Against a sparse wall of unvarnished red-clay brick was a blood-red couch. Its cushy leather gave easily under Oliver’s weight. He looked across the room at the large framed print—the famous classic from Godard’s
Breathless
. Below it, a blond wood table was empty except for a straw basket filled with pears. The woman introduced herself as Circe, asked if Oliver would like a glass of red. Had he come here straight from work?

She sat next to him now, tucking her small feet beneath that ample tush. Low lighting obscured how old she was or wasn’t, though Oliver could see that her chest was flat. He could smell her lavender perfume. Circe picked up a lit cigarette from the lip of a Crystal Pepsi. She took a drag, exhaled streams of smoke through her nose. Oliver understood: the envelope should be on the table by now.

Circe giggled thanks. Asked if he needed to shower.

“I can’t do this,” he said.

It took her a second. “What?”

By then Oliver had pulled away, was rising from the couch. “I thought I could. But I can’t. I’m sorry. I just can’t.”

Little Edie

T
UESDAY EVENING, AN
hour or so after dinner, Alice awoke from a nap and discovered white, hot brightness along the surfaces of her eyes. She let out a cry, slammed her lids shut, felt residual burning. By then, floorboards were rumbling. Oliver—who’d just gotten home—was rushing into the bedroom. “Why are they even on?” Alice cried. “They’re off,” he assured, trying to get up to speed, asking, “What? What’s happening?” He again promised the lights were off, and by then Alice’s mother had joined them, and was agreeing, in a soothing tone,
They’re off, honey
. Now, from the depths of the apartment, the baby’s upset was audible. Alice fluttered, tried again; even a sliver was too much, her eyes too sensitive. Oliver was searching through her desk, hunting down the ward’s phone number, then thumping around, cursing each usual spot where he got reception. He gave up, used the house line, was put on hold. Finally a doctor told him that Alice’s sight troubles were most likely a latent side effect of the chemo. Oliver was advised to keep washing out Alice’s eyes with water, and that he should get an alcohol-free version of No More Tears. The ward was sending a prescription for stronger eyedrops to his pharmacy right now. If Alice did not improve, she
needed
to come into Whitman’s emergency care center.

So long as everything remained covered in shadows—people appearing as dark forms against a thinner black veil—Alice was okay. Moving her head was fine. Entering a new room, though, being hit by some kind of light for which she wasn’t braced, that she couldn’t handle. Blinds were pulled, their bedroom transforming into a bat cave; Alice lay in bed, let herself go sedentary. If she had to be trapped, she was not going to feel sorry for herself; she would not wallow, fretting about the implications of this new twist. She kept running a hand over her small bronze figurine, familiarizing herself with Guanyin’s grooves, her sudden points, her small indentations, that chip thing along her base, the rough ending to what Alice imagined as an elephant’s winding trunk.

“I’ll order a car service,” Oliver pleaded. “We swoop into the care center, fix it, in and out.”

“Can’t we just wait?”

Alice was more than ready to be over and done with lying in bed. But she did not want to go back there.

Oliver couldn’t say no to her request. He wasn’t going to. Not after where he’d just been. Rather, he offered a papal procession of damp washcloths, made it idiot-easy for Alice to rinse her eyes, anytime she needed. They bought out all the Chelsea drugstores’ No More Tears shipments, repeatedly flooded her pupils. A five-in-the-morning alarm waking the baby wasn’t an option; instead Oliver showed initiative and nipped at Alice’s lower lobe. The flesh was loose. His teeth applied just a bit more pressure, then he raised his mouth, nuzzled into her ear. “Time for your prescription drops.” She stirred, emitting a sleepy but satisfied moan. Oliver further goaded, got into position, and without mercy used his fingertips to pry open her eyes.

These burned in a different manner than how light affected her, this burn more pulsing than it was painful, and going deeper, as if digging into the corneas, the irises, causing a weird tingle in those roots behind her eyes, those optic nerve things. Medicinal effects were immediate, her pain easing, some, so that if a room was mostly black, her eyes didn’t hurt so bad. But even the weakest morning light—peeking in around the edges of the blinds—caused recoil. Her eyes were so sensitive that she could barely see anything, even in dimness. Her squinting became perpetual; Alice began staring down into her lap, hiding her eyes, squeezing her facial muscles to where her forehead cracked with lines of pain. Her shoulders perpetually curled, her body tensing. She placed gauze pads over her eyes, transforming herself into an Egyptian mummy. She had the awful thought of herself as a corpse, her bedroom a tomb. She kept rubbing at the gauze pads, patting them, exhausted but unable to nap, her eyes burning and pulsing. She felt thirsty, but couldn’t pull herself upright to drink. She imagined that the throbbing could be scooped out from her sockets, like the meat from a melon. She concentrated on motionlessness, worked at stillness, daydreamed about sitting in a Korean nail shop, getting a pedi and reading a stupid magazine with advice about summer sandals. That dead-ice smell kept intruding.

One form of refuge arrived in the simplest of delights, flickering coolness on her tongue: rainbow sherbet. Alice indulged. The taste allowed her to imagine a very specific freedom: walking down the street, laughing and taking a lick from a waffle cone. Every so often she heard a song and let herself indulge further, imagining that he’d been in a studio for its creation. Alice saw him studying the sheet music, listening for his part and joining in, laying down tracks. She missed the humor of his calls, it was true. At the same time, she could not handle any more of the horror she’d felt those few times when Oliver had expected news from the hospital, and had picked up the phone.

How does Oliver see?
The balloon floated through her clouded mind.
How does that happen?

—

Past Alice’s bedtime. Her mother in the kitchen nook, zoning, worn out. Another batch of that horrid tea brewing. “To watch my girl slowly disappear like this…”

She balled her hand into a fist, gave Oliver a hard stare.

“I know hippies. I raised my only girl in a hippie town. Lord knows, I don’t have any problems with anyone having a spiritual center. But explain to me—not even
going
to the care center? Can she actually trust that statue more than her doctors?”

Oliver put an arm on her shoulder, brought himself down to her, and embraced her. In an even, sober voice, he promised: Katherine. He was staying on top of it all.

The next day, walking into the bedroom, Alice’s mother saw her only daughter and granddaughter sleeping next to one another. Half on her side, the baby was leaning in so the crown of her skull almost touched the top of Mommy’s, with Mommy’s shoulder serving as Doe’s pillow. Swathed by afternoon light, the sleeping infant had wrested free of the comforter and was nestled into her mother’s side. Doll eyes were shut, doll lashes long and curving just like her mommy’s had been. Doe’s breaths were slight; the petals of her lips—so delicate they could have been painted on by a toymaker—puckered happily around her pacifier. To her gramma, Doe looked whole, content. Alice remained motionless next to her, asleep on her back like always, compliant to her child’s clinging wishes, satiated by them, or maybe unconsciously oblivious. Alice’s mother could not tell. The two of them, like this, was one of the more tender sights Alice’s mother had witnessed, and one of the most horrifying. Her daughter’s head was
so
diminished, so stripped down and smooth. Its resemblance to a skull was simply impossible to ignore. Indeed, her daughter’s head was tilted backward, her mouth wasn’t just open but gaping, so wide it might have been unhinged. There was no way around it: Alice looked like a corpse. Even when Doe’s hand spasmed and came suddenly alive, dimpled chubby fingers clutching at Mommy’s neck, Alice did not respond. Alice’s mother dipped in, made sure she was breathing. Ten minutes later, she checked again.

Five minutes after that she still could not sit still. Could not be inside that apartment, could not do anything with her energy but convert it into action. She proceeded to go down the list that had been left for her, deciphered Oliver’s chicken-scratch directions. She let Alice’s friend know she’d be back.

Jefferson Market was acceptable enough, she guessed. Probably too in love with its pedigree for her tastes, and with prices that should have landed them in prison. Katherine loaded up, anyway. The store’s color-coded grid of neighborhoods didn’t include her daughter’s, which meant they wouldn’t deliver; but no matter, Alice’s mother dutifully loaded her grocery bags into a wire rolling cart. Empty cabs zipped past her, and when one finally stopped, the driver asked if she was going uptown, then explained in broken English,
Shift over, have to get cab back, sorry.
No matter. She continued with the loaded cart, and for a time admired the city’s hugeness, its teeming streets, even as she disliked and feared all…
this.
It took her some time. The pads of her feet got sore. Her right knee and hip ached. She stopped for bottled water.

Back at home, she turned stove burners on low and searched through cupboards for the right pans, until she remembered they were hanging above the nook. All the while she kept murmuring, continuing her indecipherable running monologue.

You are everything, I love you so much
was what she used to tell her daughter when Alice was young.

—

Mouth accepted spoonful. The fluid, runny substance mashed between molars, onto her tongue, against her cheek’s inner cavity.

Without any visual prompts to guide her, without expectations or ideas, she tasted what immediately became apparent as liquid, not water, almost viscous. Light enough, though, with a tang. It was hot. Alice savored a mouthful. Another.

“Sends me right back to being a little girl and coming home from school.” She cooed. “Momma, I love your tomato soup.”

During his evolution toward Buddhaness, Alice knew, the Buddha went through an ascetic phase, one in which he denied himself, each day, all food save one grain of rice and one drop of water. By this train of thinking, suffering could provide. Perhaps it did not provide enlightenment, but instead a means
toward
enlightenment. Alice figured she had this suffering thing down pat. Perhaps, she reasoned, the narrowing funnel of her visual capabilities could provide her with direction. By narrowing her own focus, maybe she could widen her capabilities, deepen and enrich every remaining sensory experience.

She slowed her thoughts, concentrated, focusing on the smallish grains resting in her soup. Oblong. Thick in texture.

“I get couscous,” she said.

Another sip, a round solid substance, fibrous, with a give, her teeth sinking in. “And carrots. Mmm. Is that cumin?”

“A dash of harissa, too,” her mother answered.

Alice nodded, the name providing access.

Her mother handed her what she said was challah bread. Mom stumbled over the rough
ch,
her effort game and respectful and a bit comic.

Alice dipped the spongy slice, soaking it; she took a bite, let out a groan of appreciation.

“The world can open in new ways.”

“Sweetheart?”

Alice felt for and gripped and squeezed her mother’s hands, enveloping their bony strength. She took a breath and exhaled.

“I can exist like this.”

—

That afternoon, when Oliver came back from the other office, and entered the darkened bedroom, she was beneath Gramma’s patchwork quilt, in a fetal curl.

“Get out while you can,” she moaned.

Without delay he was on the move, heading right for the walk-in closet, in short order emerging with a sealed plastic bin. “I’m an idiot. Why I didn’t think of this sooner?” Overturning the container, dumping out small black objects shaped like bats. “All these just stored away,” Oliver said. He picked up a pair, checked the lenses. “How do you tell if one has lots of protection?”

She settled on a pair of oval couture Versaces that looked superpunkish, their arms crafted to look like steel safety pins. Today their appeal lay in their streamlined dark lenses, curving around the ridges of the eye like swimming goggles, sealing off all angles of light. Alice remembered them as a score, the primo takeaway item from a goodie bag given to her by a friend of a friend—a model turned trophy wife who’d decided to launch her own line during Fashion Week, hold her own, guerrilla-style show right on the sidewalk outside Bryant Park’s tents. Alice had pulled an all-nighter, alternately sewing and fixing like a banshee, holding the hand of this coked-up madwoman. Somehow, they’d managed to get the cocktail dresses close to wearable. The goodie bag had been Alice’s payment, the sunglasses worn five times then lost in the bowels of her closet.

An aftershave she’d given Oliver for the holidays had a subtle combination—cloves and cinnamon and pepper. It reminded her of the pleasure of snuggling into his chest late at night. The connection between her senses and memories provided a small charge. A belief in her own abilities.

She could open her eyes, Oliver promised, it would be fine.

She ran her hand down the side of his face, appreciating the sandpapery feel of fledgling facial hair, as well as the lightly oiled flesh beneath. Bracing, she creaked her eyes a sliver.

The lenses did their job, layering the room in brown film. And it was indeed a pleasure to recognize features she well knew, the patient concern in his brow, his widening smile.

He’d shaved recently, she noticed, which charmed her no end.