Kristen Witucki

The Phone Call*

Tallie: May, 1994

The sunlight’s caress over my body awakened me. I yawned and stretched, realizing that I’d slept for a long time. Then I remembered the world crashed in upon me. I didn’t want to face Mama ever again, but already I could hear Mama calling, "Natalie, Natalie! Come down for some breakfast. You haven’t eaten in hours." It couldn’t be helped. I put on a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, socks and sneakers and walked down the stairs.

I went through the motions of school, my mind somewhere in a thick snow. I couldn’t concentrate, not even during reading, a class I normally love. I just had to find out for sure about my eye condition, about whether doctors could fix it. I still felt like a child, but I knew I was researching a medical, adult topic. So calling the children’s librarian didn’t make sense this time. After all, when I asked for a book about Switzerland, the librarian mailed me a story, not a book of facts. I didn’t want to risk the librarian’s getting it wrong again. So when I got home, I took a deep breath, picked up the phone and dialed the number for Adult Reader Services. I was at Dad’s house again. As I dialed I could hear Miles banging a toy loudly on the kitchen floor. But the l ibrary would close soon. The librarian would just have to hear the background noise.

"This is Benjamin," a man’s voice said. He sounded bored and tired but nice enough. "How may I help you?"

"I’m trying to do research about, um, a cure for Leber’s Congenital Amaurosis," I said, almost tripping over the word, amaurosis, trying to sound older, more professional, since I was talking to an adult librarian.

There was a long pause. I hoped he wouldn’t realize I was just a kid and transfer me back into kid world. "You’re doing research about WHAT now?" he asked finally, slowing down his words as if he had just started to pay attention.

"Leber’s Congenital Amaurosis."

"What’s that?"

"It’s my eye condition," I explained, careful to use the adult words. "I’m looking for a cure. My dad told me there is a cure."

"You won’t find that here. You’re blind. You’ll live."

I was ready to hang up. I decided in that moment that I hated him. "But I don’t want to be blind anymore," I said, fighting against the tightness in my throat. "I’d rather be dead."

He was quiet for a moment. "I don’t know everything about your eye condition," he said, "but you’d have a better chance of killing yourself than of coming up with a cure. If you want to die, there’s nothing I can do to help with that either."

"Is he really telling me to die?" I wondered, hating him even more. But I felt intrigued. None of my teachers would have ever told me to go ahead and kill myself. Every time I told them I wanted to be dead, they would scribble nervously, tell me to be grateful for life, for all the kindness I received. Now here was some guy who didn’t even know me, who would never know if I killed myself or not. And I suddenly knew I wanted to live. "Okay," I said after a long silence, "I don’t want to kill myself."

"That’s more like it," he said. Would he have felt guilty if I had hung up and done it?

"But I still want a cure."

"I wasn’t kidding when I said it would be easier to die. I don’t think dying is a great idea. But there’s no cure for you except to accept what being blind means." He paused. "I’m not always sure what it means, except that you can’t see. I’m blind," he said, "so I know what I’m talking about. I even thought about the death idea a few times."

"I wouldn’t make that up," he answered. "And being blind is a lot better than being dead."

"So what does being blind mean?" I wanted to know.

"It means you’ll never be able to see."

Well, duh. But also I didn’t want him to say that. He made it sound so simple. Had he ever felt frustrated about not understanding movies? Had he ever caught his father seeming sad that he was born or his mother seeming preoccupied and worried? Why do people have kids anyway? But I also had to admit to myself that it felt different to hear that from another blind person than to hear that from my sighted mother, my sighted Braille teacher. He knew what it meant; He was a blind person in the world. I respected the answer. My respect made me angry with him. "I am not stupid. What else does it mean?" I snapped. I had never been rude to a stranger in my entire life; it felt good. If he told me not to talk that way, all I had to do was hang up. I didn’t need to call the adult library anymore, not for another few years anyway.

There was a long silence. Then he said in a voice slightly above a whisper, "I don’t know." Then he spoke in his normal voice, "So you’ve been asking all the questions. Now I have a question. What things would you want to see if you woke up one day and could suddenly see?"

Dumb, I thought, you can’t pick specific things to see. "Everything," I said. "People who can see can see everything."

"But there must be specific things, or maybe people, you think about seeing when you wish you could," he insisted.

So I thought about that. "Mountains," I said eventually. "And the tires on the playground. And whatever will make the kids like me."

"Mmmm-hmmm, if you want the kids to like you, you ma need to see dang near everything, and that’s including what they’re thinking. Seriously, the only way they will like you, eventually, is if you are yourself. If I can save you a few decades of figuring that out, my work here is done."

I didn’t know what to say.

"I have been totally blind for over fifteen years," he said, "but the only thing I wish I could see is the moon, because I remember how that looked, and it gave me a lot of peace. I know that I should also want to see my daughter and granddaughter, but faces never meant that much to me. I used to worry about facial expressions I was missing, but I don’t think much about that anymore. But you’re right, you can’t pick things to see. Your eyes decide what you’ll see, and that’s it. But," he continued, "I can’t see the moon, but I still hear the crickets outside. They make the night real for me."

Did that mean his daughter and granddaughter didn’t bring him peace?

I remembered my dream. I had understood the mountains; I had felt their height in my ears’ closing up, had heard the crunching of snow. Had I been skiing? I hated the way parts of dreams escaped me. "I dreamed about mountains," I told him finally.

"So you can understand them, and you don’t have to see them. I have a book you might like. Your profile says you’re a braille reader, and this book is only on tape, I’m sorry. But it’s worth being on tape."

"What is it?"

"It’s called Little by Little, and it’s by an author named Jean Little."

"It sounds corny."

"Maybe, but you should read it, then let me know what you think. You can’t judge a book …"

"By its cover?"

"Or its title. Give it a chance. I have one more question, and then I’ll let you go. Have people tried to describe colors to you?"

I didn’t want to hang up. "Yeah."

"Did you understand them?"

"You said one question."

"You’re sharp. But one-word answers make follow-up questions necessary. Did you understand the colors? I mean, did you really understand them or just think you did?"

"Sure."

"So what is blue?"

"It’s a cold color like ice."

"But how can every blue thing look like ice would feel? Would the sky always look cold on a beautiful, sunny day?"

"I don’t know," I had to admit. "What do you think blue is, if you used to see?"

"I used to see, but I didn’t look," he quipped.

"Oh come on, you must have seen blue."

"If I tell you what I think it is, then you’ll just repeat what I say and think you know, just like now you know it’s icy. Every single person sees different blue things differently. It’s not something you’ll ever understand. But you’ll still be able to like living in the world without knowing the blueness of things. Now go read a book, not a medical book."

"But Benjamin, what if a bird of prey couldn’t see?"

"Then I guess other animals would kill it, or it would starve once its mother stopped feeding it."

"Would that happen with most animals if they were blind?"

"Yes, probably, if they live in the wild."

"Do people wish," I asked carefully, "that blind people were dead?"

"Some people think that not seeing is a kind of death," he answered, "but it depends on what people do with their blindness. I talk to many blind people every day. Many of them go on to have wonderful careers, and many of them don’t."

And he was gone. As I hung up the receiver, I suddenly remembered that the bird in my dream had climbed the rocks away from me without seeing them, just knowing them. And then I wondered whether the other birds would really hurt it, or whether that wounded bird of prey would surprise them all and take off jaggedly into the sky.

*"The Phone Call" is a chapter from Kristen Witucki's novel in progress Songs of the Moon. Witucki is the author of the young adult novel The Transcriber.