The Blind Eye (15 page)

She was rolling up her sleeves so that she could return to her work. He just looked at her in silence, but her face gave nothing away.

How’s your nose?
she eventually asked, and he watched as she felt across the dirt, her fingers tapping lightly as she searched for the trowel she had been using before she had let him in.

He touched his face.
Better
, and at the risk of causing yet another rift, he asked her how she had known.

To use the periwinkle?

No, that I was bleeding
.

She grasped the trowel and dug into the soil, her hair falling across her face as she turned towards him.

My powers
, she told him.

With the darkness of her hair hiding her expression, he was uncertain as to whether she was smiling.

My very strange powers
.

And as he reached across to help her stake the seedlings at their feet, he realised he had no idea whether she was joking or not.

2

When Silas asked me to explain how the remedy I had given him could work, I told him he needed to throw away notions he held as truths; he needed to see the world in a different way.

He tried. I know. When he sat in the library, with his eyes half closed, he was not only wanting to capture the way in which Constance saw, he was also reaching for a broader understanding, he was trying to bring a new vision of the world within his own reach.

When I ask you questions
, I once tried to explain,
I am attempting to draw out the inner expression of the defence mechanism. I need to see both the totality of the symptoms and those that are rare or peculiar in order to form a complete picture. The remedy we pick will have the same essence or nature as this expression
.

Silas could not understand how you could see such a thing, unless of course you had the vision supposedly possessed by Constance, the capacity to see the field, the extraordinary dancing charge that surrounds everything.

In his articles, Rudi would always talk about the soul of
a remedy. This was, in fact, the phrase he used in several of his conversations with Silas.

It is a question of knowing
, and Rudi would turn excitedly to where Constance worked, silently, at the other end of the shack.

It is extraordinary
, and he would lean forward, unable to suppress his amazement,
her ability to actually see the essence of it all. Everything
.

Once, Silas told me, Rudi had knocked his tea over in his enthusiasm, the liquid spreading, pale brown, across his notes.
She can look at you and she can know what remedy it is that you need – just like that
. The click of his fingers had made Constance start. Silas saw it, the slight jerk in her shoulders as she had continued working.

I cannot tell you what that means
, and Rudi had sighed.
I cannot tell you what I would give, just to know what she sees
, and from the other end of the room, Silas had heard the grinding of the pestle against the mortar, the slight break in the rhythm as Constance had listened to her father’s words.

The essential nature. A flower, a tree, a stone, a piece of grass, a venom; the list of potential substances with therapeutic properties is infinite. We just have to know them, we just have to be able to see, and without Constance’s vision, we are left with a need to conduct provings such as this one.

When Larissa and Matthew commence taking the remedy we are examining, I will be overseeing their case on a the
daily basis and I must be observant of all alterations that occur; I cannot rely on what they tell me alone. From the little I know of this process (I have only ever participated in informal provings in the past, occasionally trying remedies on myself), the provers can become the proving and therefore may not know that they are experiencing change. If we were testing Scorpion they would become the Scorpion, right there in the centre of their beings. They would feel that all they were experiencing was perfectly normal, they would tell me that there had been no change (unless, of course, the symptoms were particularly blatant or physical), because the part of them that observes would also be Scorpion, blind to its own nature.

What interests me, and it is a phenomenon that Rudi wrote about extensively, is to do with the notion of a collective unconsciousness. Because we are talking about energy here, and we are therefore discarding boundaries as we have been taught to construct them, it would not be surprising to find that those of us who are participating in this proving without taking the remedy experience related symptoms. I, for example, may have similar physical, mental and emotional sensations to those experienced by the provers in our group. So, too, may the other supervisors, perhaps even the director, despite her not being here with us.

When he wrote about this, Rudi always took it one step
further. There have been others who have written similar articles, who have described related phenomena occurring on a larger world scale during a proving process. For example, during the proving of hydrogen, two scientists with no knowledge of the testing being conducted announced that they had achieved nuclear fusion at room temperature. Three months later, as the proving neared completion, the claim was announced to be false, but three years later, when the results of the proving were published, a similar claim was again made. A colleague of mine was once involved in the proving of a particular bark. As the proving commenced, a blockade was announced to prevent woodchipping of those trees. I have heard of various diseased tissues being tested at the same time as supposed breakthroughs in the treatment of the particular diseases were announced; they are all random stories and when I hear them, I am torn between dismissing them as pure coincidence and feeling a strange excitement at the possibilities they open up.

I told Silas to throw away notions he held as truths, and he tried. There are times when I have to tell myself this as well. It is something we all need to do. Because it is only then that whole new worlds begin to unfold in front of us, sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrifying, sometimes both at once, depending on how far we are prepared to let go, how willingly we take the leap.

3

Sometimes, in the peace of the library, Silas tried to write a list. He would open his notebook, a blank page, smooth and white on the desk in front of him, wanting to itemise what it was that had led him to become obsessed with Constance in the way he had. There were distinct circumstances he could write down: Pearl’s stories; the amount he had smoked; his isolation in that town; the very strangeness of the garden and the lives Rudi and Constance led; his mother’s death ... He could list them all, maybe more if he thought for longer, but it was never going to be enough.

Greta told me she had seen some of his lists.

But as I got to know him better, I stopped doing it. Prying, that is
, and she looked away in embarrassment, both of us realising that we were circling a discussion neither of us was sure about commencing, even though we knew that it was the real reason for meeting up again, despite the fact that we had spent most of the morning talking about Silas.

You know I am sorry
, Greta said.

Don’t
, I interrupted her.

Do you know
, Greta asked me,
what he wrote, at the end of each of those lists?

I thought for a moment that we had gone back to the safe topic, the one on which we had been lingering, the topic of Silas, and I was relieved. I shook my head.

‘Myself
, and Greta looked at me.
He would cross everything else out and that was all that would be left
.

There’s no need
, I told her.

For what?

For you to say that it was all your fault
.

But it was
, and she just looked at me, squarely, directly, as I attempted to meet her gaze.

4

Silas told me that if he could have got to a doctor, he would have. If there had been someone who would have driven him up to the tip of the gulf and then down to the town on the other side where the leaden smoke belches out of the stacks by the wharves, he would have asked to be taken there, the words dry on his cracked lips. But in the rare moments of lucidity that came in between the hours of being rocked mercilessly by a fever of extraordinary intensity, he knew he had little hope of finding outside help.