A Dark Matter (24 page)

“What do you mean?” Olson said. “Everyone appreciates familiarity, though it’s me who says it.”

Ah, I had replied, but if you couldn’t see, or could only see a little bit, you’d know how much more comfortable you felt in a place you knew well. You could relax better, because on day one you already had a pretty good idea where everything was, from the drawers in your room and the taps in your bathroom to the elevators, the restaurant, and the meeting rooms.

And that was supremely true of the Eel. In a place as well known to her as the Golden Atlantic Sands Hotel and Conference Center, my wife glided, floated, strode unerringly down the corridors, across the immensity of the lobby, through the multiplicity of rooms identified by plaques, and through larger rooms where rows of folding chairs faced podiums with clamped-on microphones. She moved as if she
saw
, because in places like that she did see, and what she saw was an unerring map printed within her mind and body.

I had witnessed her negotiate conference hotels in Chicago and New York, had seen wondrous Eel rise from the chair beside mine at the announcement of her name, step back and set out, head high, smiling in acknowledgment of applause, to walk without hesitation around the long, white-draped table and move directly to the podium that she might thank her introducer and utter her first words.
She saw
, that’s what her unsleeping husband understood, she saw with a sight of her own.

Olson gave me a look of absolute patience and relaxed back into his chair. “She got those nine women together, you said? I bet the Eel was a good detective.”

“She got the job done,” I said. “First thing she did was meet them all in a little coffee shop on the boardwalk, a place they’d all been a million times before, and say that the national organization had sent her out to ask these prominent members of the Delaware chapter about how to handle a problem that the New York office saw brewing. She wanted to talk to them individually, and the ACB had arranged for her to use the most formal of all the public rooms, called the Director’s Chamber, which happened to be the only conference room or facility the ACB had never used.”

—But, the Eel had told me, the Director’s Chamber almost had a presence all its own within it, some unacknowledged being summoned by the luxury even a sightless person could register. When you walked in and stood quietly for a moment, absorbing the atmosphere, you could feel that the walls had been paneled in rich dark wood, that fine old paintings and tapestries hung beneath small soft lights, and that what met the touch of your foot was a glowing Persian carpet
.

—Do you understand? The Eel had asked. You could
feel
the presence of the paintings, you could
feel
the lamps above them, it all set off vibrations, changes in texture, subtle variations in air pressure—an old and precious thing affects the atmosphere in a different way from something new and more cheaply made, how could it help it?
Everything causes
movement.
But in that wonderful room, so much was going on, you really felt as though an unseen, unannounced presence had been there all along, waiting for you—waiting to take your measure! Naturally, for sighted people this wouldn’t even come close to working. Sometimes, it seems like sighted people can hardly see anything
.

—And what she did, I said to my old friend and houseguest, what Lee Truax did, was she sat in there and waited as they came up, one by one, at their scheduled half hour intervals, knocked on the door—tentatively, uncertainly, their uncertainty increased by what they could feel of the weight and density, the sheer seriousness, of the wood that made up the door—heard her invite them in, felt for the big handle, and walked inside through a forest of unexpected impressions, almost groping their way along through the crowded silence, until Lee Truax spoke again and invited them to take a chair across the table. When they sat, another figure seemed to join them, a figure perhaps from a portrait, someone known not to be present but present nonetheless, an authoritative ghost. And they had to deal not only with her, but with this illusion their minds and senses had created for them. It would be hard to say which of the two was more powerful
.

I regarded the soft yellow lamplight flattening out upon the folded white sheet and melting into the pale blanket, and saw the thin, shadowy face hovering beside my wife in a richly appointed room. That what I pictured could have no connection to the face imagined by the Eel’s disquieted visitors placed leaping flames beneath my gathering unease. They—he and she—had been together in the State Street diner, in the basement of the Italian restaurant, again on Gorham Street, yet again on Glasshouse Road and in the meadow, twice. Twice. Loathsome, loathsome Hayward had been close enough to hold her hand. And when she made space for him, he had come back to her. I knew what had happened in that room, and it was obscene
.

“One at a time, they knocked and came in,” I had said to Olson. “One by one, they sat down across the table. A few of the nine women who passed through the Director’s Chamber that day could distinguish light and dark. I think two of them had a vague, blurry, partial vision in one eye. The rest saw nothing but a complete darkness. But no matter what their eyes did or did not report, they could not but feel that another figure, a figure conjured from the materials of the room itself, had been waiting in there for them all along.

This is what the Eel told me.

In the necessary lamplight, I remembered the shock of realizing that I had fallen into the old habit of referring to her by her old nickname. How many times had I done it already? Three times, four? If so, the battle was already lost
.

—She started gently, the Eel said. The woman opposite her had already sensed that this meeting, this
summons
, in fact, was not quite what she had been expecting, and her antennae were up
.

—Tell me about yourself, the Eel requested. Anything, it doesn’t matter. I want to hear you talk about yourself. Outrage me. Delight me. Offend me. Horrify me. All I ask is that you do not bore me
.

So they began, the women, one by one, feeling their way toward whatever they imagined the Eel wanted. At the start, it was about where they grew up, their mothers, the schools they attended, and how they wound up getting married. This is the way I got involved with the ACB
.

—Could you tell me something else? What is there about you that nobody knows?

(That other presence, that shadowy face, flickered with interest and came a little nearer. It knew all about things unknown—things unknown were where it lived.)

—Surprise me, she said. This is why we are here
.

—I’m what people call ‘straight,’ and I have been all my life, I like having sex with men, but right now what I’d most like to do in all the world is lie down with you on top of this table and hold you as tight as I can. Is that outrage enough for you, Lee Truax?

—I’ve been blind since the age of two, and I grew up in a house with three sighted older brothers. The oldest one was killed by a drunken driver, the second one committed suicide with his girlfriend in the front seat of our family car when they were in high school. The one closest to me, Merle, who should have died like the other two but didn’t, used to take me into the field behind our house and make me play with his ugly thing. And worse. My parents, they never thought he could do anything wrong, they thought Merle was the same as Jesus. When I was eighteen, I got married so he wouldn’t be able to rape me anymore. Now I have three boys of my own, and the only way I can stop myself from detesting them is by getting out of the house. That’s probably why I work for the ACB
.