Blindsight

She always used my name. I don’t think she ever called me son.

“You’re still happy here?” my father asked.

“Wonderful. I do wish you could join us.”

Jim smiled. “Someone has to keep the lights on.”

“Now you know this isn’t goodbye,” she said. “You can visit whenever you like.”

“Only if you do something about the scenery.” Not just a joke, but a lie; Jim would have come at her call even if the gauntlet involved bare feet and broken glass.

“And Chelsea, too,” Helen continued. “It would be so nice to finally meet her after all this time.”

“Chelsea’s gone, Helen,” I said.

“Oh yes but I know you stay in touch. I know she was special to you. Just because you’re not together any more doesn’t mean she can’t—”

“You know she—”

A startling possibility stopped me in mid-sentence: maybe I hadn’t actually told them.

“Son,” Jim said quietly. “Maybe you could give us a moment.”

I would have given them a fucking lifetime. I unplugged myself back to the ward, looked from the corpse on the bed to my blind and catatonic father in his couch, murmuring sweet nothings into the datastream. Let them perform for each other. Let them formalize and finalize their so-called relationship in whatever way they saw fit. Maybe, just once, they could even bring themselves to be honest, there in that other world where everything else was a lie. Maybe.

I felt no desire to bear witness either way.

But of course I had to go back in for my own formalities. I adopted my role in the familial set-piece one last time, partook of the usual lies. We all agreed that this wasn’t going to change anything, and nobody deviated enough from the script to call anyone else a liar on that account. And finally — careful to say until next time rather than goodbye — we took our leave of my mother.

I even suppressed my gag reflex long enough to give her a hug.

* * *

Jim had his inhaler in hand as we emerged from the darkness. I hoped, without much hope, that he’d throw it into the garbage receptacle as we passed through the lobby. But he raised it to his mouth and took another hit of vassopressin, that he would never be tempted.

Fidelity in an aerosol. “You don’t need that any more,” I said.

“Probably not,” he agreed.

“It won’t work anyway. You can’t imprint on someone who isn’t even there, no matter how many hormones you snort. It just—”

Jim said nothing. We passed beneath the muzzles of sentries panning for infiltrating Realists.

“She’s gone,” I blurted. “She doesn’t care if you find someone else. She’d be happy if you did.” It would let her pretend the books had been balanced.

“She’s my wife,” he told me.

“That doesn’t mean what it used to. It never did.”

He smiled a bit at that. “It’s my life, son. I’m comfortable with it.”

“Dad—”

“I don’t blame her,” he said. “And neither should you.”

Easy for him to say. Easy even to accept the hurt she’d inflicted on him all these years. This cheerful façade here at the end hardly made up for the endless bitter complaints my father had endured throughout living memory. Do you think it’s easy when you disappear for months on end? Do you think it’s easy always wondering who you’re with and what you’re doing and if you’re even alive? Do you think it’s easy raising a child like that on your own?

She’d blamed him for everything, but he bore it gracefully because he knew it was all a lie. He knew he was only the pretense. She wasn’t leaving because he was AWOL, or unfaithful. Her departure had nothing to do with him at all. It was me. Helen had left the world because she couldn’t stand to look at the thing who’d replaced her son.

I would have pursued it — would have tried yet again to make my father see — but by now we’d left the gates of Heaven for the streets of Purgatory, where pedestrians on all sides murmured in astonishment and stared open-mouthed at the sky. I followed their gaze to a strip of raw twilight between the towers, and gasped—

The stars were falling.

The Zodiac had rearranged itself into a precise grid of bright points with luminous tails. It was as though the whole planet had been caught in some great closing net, the knots of its mesh aglow with St. Elmo’s fire. It was beautiful. It was terrifying.

I looked away to recalibrate my distance vision, to give this ill-behaved hallucination a chance to vanish gracefully before I set my empirical gaze to high-beam. I saw a vampire in that moment, a female, walking among us like the archetypal wolf in sheep’s clothing. Vampires were uncommon creatures at street level. I’d never seen one in the flesh before.