Daredevil, page 3
It’s become their bonding time. Some parents take their kids fishing. Or camping. Matt and his dad go over his homework.
A car blares its horn as it passes Matt. He snaps back to attention, squints up at the sky. The sun is hidden behind the Empire State Building. Time to get home. He has to tidy the apartment a bit before putting supper on. Dad certainly won’t do it, and Matt likes things to be clean, in their place.
He shifts his backpack into a more comfortable position and waits for the walk signal. There are a few others waiting with him: an impatient guy in a suit hopping from foot to foot like he needs to pee, a woman with a baby stroller, a couple of ladies in their early twenties wearing smart suits. He can smell their perfume. It’s nice. Sort of musky with some kind of spice to it.
One of them catches him staring and winks. Matt flushes and looks away—
—to see an old man walking into the street. Straight into traffic.
“Hey!”
The old man keeps walking. Matt leans into the street and sees a yellow flatbed truck speeding toward him, way too fast to stop. The other lanes are blocked with traffic. Nowhere for the truck to turn.
It’s going to hit the old man.
Matt doesn’t think about it. He sprints into the traffic. He hears the screech of tires behind him, the angry hooting of a horn. He keeps going. The man is shuffling along without a care in the world. What’s wrong with him? Is he deaf?
“Hey! Move!” Matt shouts as he runs.
Nothing.
Matt glances to his right.
And looks straight into the wide eyes of the driver as he sees Matt and the old man for the first time.
The driver spins the wheel. The truck veers to the right and hits a bus. The horrific crump of twisted metal rings out. The screams of the bystanders. The screech of tires. Matt keeps going. He reaches the old man and shoves him hard. The man stumbles a few steps and sprawls over onto the sidewalk.
Matt keeps running, but something heavy slams into his back. He’s lifted into the air, and he thinks, This is it. You’re dead. Who’s gonna look after Dad now?
Then he lands, skidding along the asphalt. His head hits hard and bounces. He feels skin scraping from his hips, his arms, his neck. He slides across the street and sees a metal canister bounce and flip end-over-end, keeping pace with him as he tumbles and rolls.
The truck has jackknifed, spilling its load into the traffic. The canisters fall all around him, some spraying bile-colored liquid into the air. A sharp scent hits the back of his throat, makes it hard to breathe. He hears more screeching. Screaming. The thud and crunch of cars slamming into each other.
He finally stops rolling, coming to a loose stop on the hot tar. Stares at the gray-black surface. A piece of gum has been ground into the asphalt.
There are more sounds of thudding and trundling. The canisters, still on the move. One of them might crush him. He should get up, should get to safety. He painfully shifts his head, trying to see where the canisters are.
One of them is spinning past him. He sees the thick liquid flying through the air. Too close. He tries to turn away, but he’s too late.
The liquid splashes into his eyes.
Matt screams.
Instant, boiling pain erupts. Red-hot coals grinding into his retinas. Barbed wire rubbing against his eyeballs. A razor slicing and flicking, cutting his eyes to shreds.
He claws at his eyes. The light slowly fades around him.
From the bright lights of a summer afternoon to bright-red pain, flashing and darting.
From bright-red pain to purple pulses. Fast at first, then slower and slower, shifting to purple and black. Purple and black.
Then just the black …
Then just the pain.
A thousand voices scream into his ears, and Matt can hear every single one of them. Screeching, shouting, bellowing. It’s like standing next to a loudspeaker with the volume turned all the way up. It never stops. Even while he sleeps. A barrage of sounds: cars, trucks, people. The roar of motorcycles, the clicking of feet on tiles. Kids playing outside.
People whispering, people talking—it’s all the same to him: torture. Unfiltered sounds louder than anything he has ever experienced take up all the space in his head, shoving away all rational thought. A confusion of voices he can’t separate. Like a million demons clawing at him every moment of his life.
And smells. They overwhelm him, wash over him in smothering, cloying waves. Flowers with scents so strong they make him choke and gag.
A butcher shop three blocks over that throws its old meat and bones out into the alley every night before closing, a smell like a thousand rotting corpses.
Even perfumes and deodorants overwhelm him. He can tell the nurses and doctors are coming minutes before they arrive, can smell their presence an hour after they leave.
The cotton sheets feel like sandpaper against his skin. His fingertips tingle all the time. Like they’ve somehow grown in size, the whorls on his skin now so deep and sensitive they can identify hair strands from a brush as those of a 50-year-old blonde woman.
Heartbeats are a soundtrack to every waking moment. Overlapping, thumping, rapid, slow, fearful, excited. A constant drum and bass that never stops.
None of it stops.
They operate on his eyes. Try scraping, cleaning, cutting into his eyeballs. Syringes are pushed into his pupils, drawing out pus and blood. Nothing works. Matt hears a doctor talking after one of the surgeries. He says the nerve endings behind Matt’s eyes looked like the mangled stump of an arm he’d seen on a car-crash victim.
He lies in bed for weeks, catatonic. Unable to do anything except try to fight his senses, to block out the stimuli that are driving him mad.
He hears conversations from streets away. It’s like watching a hellish soap opera every minute of every hour of every day. The girl from the bakery on 35th Street always talks about her boyfriend who hit her. A secretary about five blocks away tells her boss that his wife has found out about them. A kid at least a mile away screams over dropping her ice cream.
He can’t hold a rational thought. Every time he tries, the voices drown them out. A thousand—no, a million—maniacs babbling at him, clamoring for attention.
Covering his ears does nothing. He even tries screaming to drown out the voices, but that doesn’t work, either.
Eventually, they give him drugs. It’s the only thing that helps. Knocks him out so he can get some rest.
Over the days that follow, he senses visitors through a haze of drugs and pain. Dad. A huge presence he can feel by the bed, almost as if he can still see him. The smell of whiskey and fear. Anger and regret.
“I’m sorry, Matt. Sorry for everything. When you get out of here, it’s gonna be different. We’ll move. Get out of this hellhole. Find somewhere … with trees. And grass.”
A hand, touching his. The touch is an electric jolt of pain. He reacts instinctively, snatches his hand away. Senses the hurt radiating from Dad. Waves of shame and guilt pulse outward. How does he know this? How can he feel it?
He doesn’t know. He just does.
Another visitor. This one comes just as the painkillers are kicking in, the pills lifting him gently on a soft wave of oblivion. A woman. He can smell soap, and … jasmine. A clean smell.
“I’m so sorry, Matt,” says the woman. “For everything.”
She takes his hand, and this time he doesn’t pull away. This time the touch is soft. She leans forward to kiss his forehead. As she does, something cold touches his chin. He reaches up. A cross made of gold.
And then she’s gone, leaving behind a moment of calm, a moment when the voices recede into the background. He almost weeps with gratitude. A moment, a brief moment when he can think, when he can remember who he is.
That means … that means the voices, the smells, everything … they can be controlled. Even if it’s only for a second, it’s important.
It means they can be pushed away.
He feels stronger. Calmer. He will control his senses. Bring them to heel. They aren’t outside forces out to destroy him. They are who he is now.
They’re all he has left.
It isn’teasy. In fact, it’s the hardest thing Matt has ever done, and it nearly drives him mad.
First, he has to single out the sounds: the voices, the noises, the shouts, the traffic, the scurry of rats, the shuffle of shoes, the clatter of cutlery in a thousand houses. The city.
He has to single out each one and slowly push it to the background. Then he has to erect a wall, a boundary for his mind where his everyday thoughts can operate without the never-ending onslaught. He has to learn to put all the sensations behind this wall. To push them farther and farther back, to build the wall higher and higher until he has a cleared space in his mind. An abandoned room from which he can operate.
That’s the first step. Regaining the silence.
The next step is making his senses work for him. Inviting them back into the room. Learning to function from this space, to draw in what he hears, tastes, and smells. He tries to bring them to him in a controlled manner, to zero in on exactly what he wants.
That’s the hardest part. Every time he opens up his senses beyond the wall, everything rushes in on a wave of sensations, knocking down the wall and forcing him to start all over again.
It takes weeks. Weeks lying in that hospital bed, his eyes crusted over, weeping tears of pus and blood.
But he learns. He learns to tame his senses, to make them work for him. He sees himself as a cop, sitting in a high-tech security room with cameras and mics sending their feeds from all over the city while he collates the data in the room behind the wall.
It’s the hardest thing he’s ever done—but slowly, he remembers what it’s like to be Matt Murdock.
Jack Murdock waits outside Matt’s room while the doctors inspect his eyes one last time before sending him home. He’s nervous. Worried. He’s gone through the apartment, trying to minimize the dangers for Matt, but he knows there are going to be problems.
“Jack Murdock?”
Jack looks up, expecting to see the doctor. Instead, he sees two guys in expensive suits.
“Who’s asking?”
The man who spoke hands over a card. Jack glances at it. A lawyer.
“We hear your son is going home today.”
“What of it?”
“The corporation we work for would just like to make sure that there won’t be any unpleasantness.”
“Unpleasantness?”
“Yes. Your son stepped out onto the street in the middle of traffic. He was clearly at fault.”
Jack rises to his feet, realizing who they are. “You shysters blinded my son!”
“No, Mr. Murdock. We didn’t. And I’d prefer it if you didn’t say anything like that again. We take defamation very seriously. Now, can we trust your discretion? Please say yes. It keeps things simple. And we really wouldn’t want to make public your relationship with Mr. Rigoletto.”
Jack stares at him, eyes wide.
“Think very carefully before answering,” says the second lawyer. “After all, who would look after your son if you were in prison?”
Matt is in that bed for a month before they send him home. There’s nothing they can do for him now except refer him to a local chapter of the American Foundation for the Blind. They tell Dad that Matt can speak to counselors there. That they have programs to help him adjust to the loss of his vision.
Matt doesn’t want to go. The first time his dad broaches the subject, Matt locks himself in his room and climbs beneath the bed covers. He can’t face that. Won’t face it.
That means acceptance: admitting that this is what the rest of his life is going to be like.
CHAPTER 4
Six months later.
Matt used to sit up here on the roof all the time, watching the world go by on the street below. Watching family life in the tenement block opposite. He liked the sense of belonging. Of seeing his neighbors, even if they couldn’t see him. Of being part of a neighborhood that knew him. Knew his dad.
Now …
Now it’s different.
He’s not part of anything now. Nobody greets him with friendliness. It’s always with pity, guilt. Sorrow.
That poor boy. His life is over. Might have been better if he’d died.
But Matt doesn’t feel that way. All he feels is … confusion. He always thought being blind meant an absence of everything. Blackness, for ever and ever.
But it’s not that way with Matt. He can sense depth and shape, can somehow feel his surroundings. Right now, for example. The winter wind flicks and curls around the trunk of a tree on the street below, giving it shape and form in his mind. He can … sense … see … the curvature of the trunk, the spread of the winter-bare branches.
No, not “see.” That’s the wrong word. Maybe his memory just fills in what he thinks he should be seeing?
Is that how it works? The wind gives him measurements. His imagination gives him the image?
He stands up, the wind buffeting him. He shuffles forward until the toes of his sneakers protrude over the edge of the rooftop. He lifts his face into the wind, inhales the coldness, the smell of an approaching storm overlaid with the aroma of cooking food—meat, fries, pizza, hot dogs.
He leans forward, tilting out over nothing. It crosses his mind that if anyone down there is watching, they’ll think he’s about to commit suicide.
He smiles at the thought. No. He’s just rediscovering how to live.
The wind soars past his face. He follows it down to the street, around the cars parked along the sidewalk. He “sees” the shapes the wind forms as it whips around the fenders and wing mirrors, over the roofs and around the tires. He knows he’d be able to walk around the cars, hover his hands an inch from the metal, and not touch them once.
Even though he’s adjusting to life without sight, that doesn’t mean he’s happy. Far from it. He still wakes up every day with a heavy pit of despair sitting in his stomach, and the only thing that banishes these feelings is the gym. Always after hours, though. He doesn’t want to feel other people’s pity. Doesn’t want to sense the looks, the knowing nods. He sneaks in through the same back window he’s always used. He doesn’t put on the lights. Why bother?
Every night he attempts to train his new senses, tries to use what he has learned and put it into practice on the balance beams and against the punching bag.
It isn’t the same, though. Inside, without the wind—without something to bounce against objects—he finds it more difficult to gauge distance, to know what direction the punching bag is coming from, so he ends up with more cuts and bruises than ever before.
But he comes back. Night after night. Week after week. Pushing. Trying to force his body to see again. To somehow do what he used to do. To ignore the disability.
And every time he comes back, he ends up flat on his face.
Tonight, when he falls, Matt rolls over onto his back and doesn’t move. He’s tired of it. Tired of everything. Why did this have to happen to him? Why not anyone else on that street? Why not the old man, even? Why did it have to be him? He could have done something with his life. He was on track. A lawyer. A judge. A cop. Anything. Anything that would please his dad.
Now? Now he is nothing.
He can’t even box. The worst possible career his old man would choose for him, and he can’t even do that.
The tears start. He’s held them in since the accident. Kept them in check. But now, sitting on the old, tattered mat, smelling sawdust and sweat and cigars, he lets it all out.
“Quit feeling sorry for yourself, kid. It’s pathetic.”
Matt freezes. He wipes his nose and turns his head this way and that, trying to locate the source of the voice. “Who’s there?”
“Get up.” The voice is low, gravelly. “You deaf as well as blind? I said get up.”
“I—”
“Wrong answer.”
Matt hears the whistle of air. Then something knocks hard against his head.
“Ow! Hey!”
“Get up.”
“What the hell—”
“Wrong answer.”
The whistle of air. Another painful thud, this time against his cheek. Matt scrambles back, bumping up against the wall.
“Get up.”
Matt turns his head left, then right, trying to follow the voice. He takes a deep breath. The air whistles.
Matt’s hand moves fast, grabbing the stick before it hits him a third time. His tormentor chuckles.
“See? Not so hard, was it?”
The stick is yanked out of Matt’s grasp.
“Get up.”
This time there’s no warning. The stick whacks into his face so fast Matt is sure the sound of whistling air comes after it strikes.
“Stop it!”
“You can stop it. Get up.”
Matt scrambles to his feet. Turns in a slow circle.
“You’re a slow learner, kid.”
“Who are you?”
“Wrong question.”
The stick whistles. Matt jerks back out of its reach. He thinks carefully before speaking again, wondering how he’s going to get away from this psycho. How he’s going to call the police.
A thought occurs to him. He turns to where he thinks his tormentor is standing.
“Why are you here?”
He braces himself, standing on the balls of his feet. Ready to dance out of reach. But the blow doesn’t come.
He’s asked the right question.
He says his name is Stick—which, Matt figures, is fitting enough.
They leave the gym and head out onto the cold streets. Matt feels a wave of nervousness. He doesn’t like being outside. Not anymore. It’s still a minefield of disasters for him. He has the white cane his doctors assigned him, but he hasn’t perfected using it yet. He swings it too fast, and he walks with the same pace he used to keep, so he ends up tripping over boxes or bikes padlocked to railings.
A car blares its horn as it passes Matt. He snaps back to attention, squints up at the sky. The sun is hidden behind the Empire State Building. Time to get home. He has to tidy the apartment a bit before putting supper on. Dad certainly won’t do it, and Matt likes things to be clean, in their place.
He shifts his backpack into a more comfortable position and waits for the walk signal. There are a few others waiting with him: an impatient guy in a suit hopping from foot to foot like he needs to pee, a woman with a baby stroller, a couple of ladies in their early twenties wearing smart suits. He can smell their perfume. It’s nice. Sort of musky with some kind of spice to it.
One of them catches him staring and winks. Matt flushes and looks away—
—to see an old man walking into the street. Straight into traffic.
“Hey!”
The old man keeps walking. Matt leans into the street and sees a yellow flatbed truck speeding toward him, way too fast to stop. The other lanes are blocked with traffic. Nowhere for the truck to turn.
It’s going to hit the old man.
Matt doesn’t think about it. He sprints into the traffic. He hears the screech of tires behind him, the angry hooting of a horn. He keeps going. The man is shuffling along without a care in the world. What’s wrong with him? Is he deaf?
“Hey! Move!” Matt shouts as he runs.
Nothing.
Matt glances to his right.
And looks straight into the wide eyes of the driver as he sees Matt and the old man for the first time.
The driver spins the wheel. The truck veers to the right and hits a bus. The horrific crump of twisted metal rings out. The screams of the bystanders. The screech of tires. Matt keeps going. He reaches the old man and shoves him hard. The man stumbles a few steps and sprawls over onto the sidewalk.
Matt keeps running, but something heavy slams into his back. He’s lifted into the air, and he thinks, This is it. You’re dead. Who’s gonna look after Dad now?
Then he lands, skidding along the asphalt. His head hits hard and bounces. He feels skin scraping from his hips, his arms, his neck. He slides across the street and sees a metal canister bounce and flip end-over-end, keeping pace with him as he tumbles and rolls.
The truck has jackknifed, spilling its load into the traffic. The canisters fall all around him, some spraying bile-colored liquid into the air. A sharp scent hits the back of his throat, makes it hard to breathe. He hears more screeching. Screaming. The thud and crunch of cars slamming into each other.
He finally stops rolling, coming to a loose stop on the hot tar. Stares at the gray-black surface. A piece of gum has been ground into the asphalt.
There are more sounds of thudding and trundling. The canisters, still on the move. One of them might crush him. He should get up, should get to safety. He painfully shifts his head, trying to see where the canisters are.
One of them is spinning past him. He sees the thick liquid flying through the air. Too close. He tries to turn away, but he’s too late.
The liquid splashes into his eyes.
Matt screams.
Instant, boiling pain erupts. Red-hot coals grinding into his retinas. Barbed wire rubbing against his eyeballs. A razor slicing and flicking, cutting his eyes to shreds.
He claws at his eyes. The light slowly fades around him.
From the bright lights of a summer afternoon to bright-red pain, flashing and darting.
From bright-red pain to purple pulses. Fast at first, then slower and slower, shifting to purple and black. Purple and black.
Then just the black …
Then just the pain.
A thousand voices scream into his ears, and Matt can hear every single one of them. Screeching, shouting, bellowing. It’s like standing next to a loudspeaker with the volume turned all the way up. It never stops. Even while he sleeps. A barrage of sounds: cars, trucks, people. The roar of motorcycles, the clicking of feet on tiles. Kids playing outside.
People whispering, people talking—it’s all the same to him: torture. Unfiltered sounds louder than anything he has ever experienced take up all the space in his head, shoving away all rational thought. A confusion of voices he can’t separate. Like a million demons clawing at him every moment of his life.
And smells. They overwhelm him, wash over him in smothering, cloying waves. Flowers with scents so strong they make him choke and gag.
A butcher shop three blocks over that throws its old meat and bones out into the alley every night before closing, a smell like a thousand rotting corpses.
Even perfumes and deodorants overwhelm him. He can tell the nurses and doctors are coming minutes before they arrive, can smell their presence an hour after they leave.
The cotton sheets feel like sandpaper against his skin. His fingertips tingle all the time. Like they’ve somehow grown in size, the whorls on his skin now so deep and sensitive they can identify hair strands from a brush as those of a 50-year-old blonde woman.
Heartbeats are a soundtrack to every waking moment. Overlapping, thumping, rapid, slow, fearful, excited. A constant drum and bass that never stops.
None of it stops.
They operate on his eyes. Try scraping, cleaning, cutting into his eyeballs. Syringes are pushed into his pupils, drawing out pus and blood. Nothing works. Matt hears a doctor talking after one of the surgeries. He says the nerve endings behind Matt’s eyes looked like the mangled stump of an arm he’d seen on a car-crash victim.
He lies in bed for weeks, catatonic. Unable to do anything except try to fight his senses, to block out the stimuli that are driving him mad.
He hears conversations from streets away. It’s like watching a hellish soap opera every minute of every hour of every day. The girl from the bakery on 35th Street always talks about her boyfriend who hit her. A secretary about five blocks away tells her boss that his wife has found out about them. A kid at least a mile away screams over dropping her ice cream.
He can’t hold a rational thought. Every time he tries, the voices drown them out. A thousand—no, a million—maniacs babbling at him, clamoring for attention.
Covering his ears does nothing. He even tries screaming to drown out the voices, but that doesn’t work, either.
Eventually, they give him drugs. It’s the only thing that helps. Knocks him out so he can get some rest.
Over the days that follow, he senses visitors through a haze of drugs and pain. Dad. A huge presence he can feel by the bed, almost as if he can still see him. The smell of whiskey and fear. Anger and regret.
“I’m sorry, Matt. Sorry for everything. When you get out of here, it’s gonna be different. We’ll move. Get out of this hellhole. Find somewhere … with trees. And grass.”
A hand, touching his. The touch is an electric jolt of pain. He reacts instinctively, snatches his hand away. Senses the hurt radiating from Dad. Waves of shame and guilt pulse outward. How does he know this? How can he feel it?
He doesn’t know. He just does.
Another visitor. This one comes just as the painkillers are kicking in, the pills lifting him gently on a soft wave of oblivion. A woman. He can smell soap, and … jasmine. A clean smell.
“I’m so sorry, Matt,” says the woman. “For everything.”
She takes his hand, and this time he doesn’t pull away. This time the touch is soft. She leans forward to kiss his forehead. As she does, something cold touches his chin. He reaches up. A cross made of gold.
And then she’s gone, leaving behind a moment of calm, a moment when the voices recede into the background. He almost weeps with gratitude. A moment, a brief moment when he can think, when he can remember who he is.
That means … that means the voices, the smells, everything … they can be controlled. Even if it’s only for a second, it’s important.
It means they can be pushed away.
He feels stronger. Calmer. He will control his senses. Bring them to heel. They aren’t outside forces out to destroy him. They are who he is now.
They’re all he has left.
It isn’teasy. In fact, it’s the hardest thing Matt has ever done, and it nearly drives him mad.
First, he has to single out the sounds: the voices, the noises, the shouts, the traffic, the scurry of rats, the shuffle of shoes, the clatter of cutlery in a thousand houses. The city.
He has to single out each one and slowly push it to the background. Then he has to erect a wall, a boundary for his mind where his everyday thoughts can operate without the never-ending onslaught. He has to learn to put all the sensations behind this wall. To push them farther and farther back, to build the wall higher and higher until he has a cleared space in his mind. An abandoned room from which he can operate.
That’s the first step. Regaining the silence.
The next step is making his senses work for him. Inviting them back into the room. Learning to function from this space, to draw in what he hears, tastes, and smells. He tries to bring them to him in a controlled manner, to zero in on exactly what he wants.
That’s the hardest part. Every time he opens up his senses beyond the wall, everything rushes in on a wave of sensations, knocking down the wall and forcing him to start all over again.
It takes weeks. Weeks lying in that hospital bed, his eyes crusted over, weeping tears of pus and blood.
But he learns. He learns to tame his senses, to make them work for him. He sees himself as a cop, sitting in a high-tech security room with cameras and mics sending their feeds from all over the city while he collates the data in the room behind the wall.
It’s the hardest thing he’s ever done—but slowly, he remembers what it’s like to be Matt Murdock.
Jack Murdock waits outside Matt’s room while the doctors inspect his eyes one last time before sending him home. He’s nervous. Worried. He’s gone through the apartment, trying to minimize the dangers for Matt, but he knows there are going to be problems.
“Jack Murdock?”
Jack looks up, expecting to see the doctor. Instead, he sees two guys in expensive suits.
“Who’s asking?”
The man who spoke hands over a card. Jack glances at it. A lawyer.
“We hear your son is going home today.”
“What of it?”
“The corporation we work for would just like to make sure that there won’t be any unpleasantness.”
“Unpleasantness?”
“Yes. Your son stepped out onto the street in the middle of traffic. He was clearly at fault.”
Jack rises to his feet, realizing who they are. “You shysters blinded my son!”
“No, Mr. Murdock. We didn’t. And I’d prefer it if you didn’t say anything like that again. We take defamation very seriously. Now, can we trust your discretion? Please say yes. It keeps things simple. And we really wouldn’t want to make public your relationship with Mr. Rigoletto.”
Jack stares at him, eyes wide.
“Think very carefully before answering,” says the second lawyer. “After all, who would look after your son if you were in prison?”
Matt is in that bed for a month before they send him home. There’s nothing they can do for him now except refer him to a local chapter of the American Foundation for the Blind. They tell Dad that Matt can speak to counselors there. That they have programs to help him adjust to the loss of his vision.
Matt doesn’t want to go. The first time his dad broaches the subject, Matt locks himself in his room and climbs beneath the bed covers. He can’t face that. Won’t face it.
That means acceptance: admitting that this is what the rest of his life is going to be like.
CHAPTER 4
Six months later.
Matt used to sit up here on the roof all the time, watching the world go by on the street below. Watching family life in the tenement block opposite. He liked the sense of belonging. Of seeing his neighbors, even if they couldn’t see him. Of being part of a neighborhood that knew him. Knew his dad.
Now …
Now it’s different.
He’s not part of anything now. Nobody greets him with friendliness. It’s always with pity, guilt. Sorrow.
That poor boy. His life is over. Might have been better if he’d died.
But Matt doesn’t feel that way. All he feels is … confusion. He always thought being blind meant an absence of everything. Blackness, for ever and ever.
But it’s not that way with Matt. He can sense depth and shape, can somehow feel his surroundings. Right now, for example. The winter wind flicks and curls around the trunk of a tree on the street below, giving it shape and form in his mind. He can … sense … see … the curvature of the trunk, the spread of the winter-bare branches.
No, not “see.” That’s the wrong word. Maybe his memory just fills in what he thinks he should be seeing?
Is that how it works? The wind gives him measurements. His imagination gives him the image?
He stands up, the wind buffeting him. He shuffles forward until the toes of his sneakers protrude over the edge of the rooftop. He lifts his face into the wind, inhales the coldness, the smell of an approaching storm overlaid with the aroma of cooking food—meat, fries, pizza, hot dogs.
He leans forward, tilting out over nothing. It crosses his mind that if anyone down there is watching, they’ll think he’s about to commit suicide.
He smiles at the thought. No. He’s just rediscovering how to live.
The wind soars past his face. He follows it down to the street, around the cars parked along the sidewalk. He “sees” the shapes the wind forms as it whips around the fenders and wing mirrors, over the roofs and around the tires. He knows he’d be able to walk around the cars, hover his hands an inch from the metal, and not touch them once.
Even though he’s adjusting to life without sight, that doesn’t mean he’s happy. Far from it. He still wakes up every day with a heavy pit of despair sitting in his stomach, and the only thing that banishes these feelings is the gym. Always after hours, though. He doesn’t want to feel other people’s pity. Doesn’t want to sense the looks, the knowing nods. He sneaks in through the same back window he’s always used. He doesn’t put on the lights. Why bother?
Every night he attempts to train his new senses, tries to use what he has learned and put it into practice on the balance beams and against the punching bag.
It isn’t the same, though. Inside, without the wind—without something to bounce against objects—he finds it more difficult to gauge distance, to know what direction the punching bag is coming from, so he ends up with more cuts and bruises than ever before.
But he comes back. Night after night. Week after week. Pushing. Trying to force his body to see again. To somehow do what he used to do. To ignore the disability.
And every time he comes back, he ends up flat on his face.
Tonight, when he falls, Matt rolls over onto his back and doesn’t move. He’s tired of it. Tired of everything. Why did this have to happen to him? Why not anyone else on that street? Why not the old man, even? Why did it have to be him? He could have done something with his life. He was on track. A lawyer. A judge. A cop. Anything. Anything that would please his dad.
Now? Now he is nothing.
He can’t even box. The worst possible career his old man would choose for him, and he can’t even do that.
The tears start. He’s held them in since the accident. Kept them in check. But now, sitting on the old, tattered mat, smelling sawdust and sweat and cigars, he lets it all out.
“Quit feeling sorry for yourself, kid. It’s pathetic.”
Matt freezes. He wipes his nose and turns his head this way and that, trying to locate the source of the voice. “Who’s there?”
“Get up.” The voice is low, gravelly. “You deaf as well as blind? I said get up.”
“I—”
“Wrong answer.”
Matt hears the whistle of air. Then something knocks hard against his head.
“Ow! Hey!”
“Get up.”
“What the hell—”
“Wrong answer.”
The whistle of air. Another painful thud, this time against his cheek. Matt scrambles back, bumping up against the wall.
“Get up.”
Matt turns his head left, then right, trying to follow the voice. He takes a deep breath. The air whistles.
Matt’s hand moves fast, grabbing the stick before it hits him a third time. His tormentor chuckles.
“See? Not so hard, was it?”
The stick is yanked out of Matt’s grasp.
“Get up.”
This time there’s no warning. The stick whacks into his face so fast Matt is sure the sound of whistling air comes after it strikes.
“Stop it!”
“You can stop it. Get up.”
Matt scrambles to his feet. Turns in a slow circle.
“You’re a slow learner, kid.”
“Who are you?”
“Wrong question.”
The stick whistles. Matt jerks back out of its reach. He thinks carefully before speaking again, wondering how he’s going to get away from this psycho. How he’s going to call the police.
A thought occurs to him. He turns to where he thinks his tormentor is standing.
“Why are you here?”
He braces himself, standing on the balls of his feet. Ready to dance out of reach. But the blow doesn’t come.
He’s asked the right question.
He says his name is Stick—which, Matt figures, is fitting enough.
They leave the gym and head out onto the cold streets. Matt feels a wave of nervousness. He doesn’t like being outside. Not anymore. It’s still a minefield of disasters for him. He has the white cane his doctors assigned him, but he hasn’t perfected using it yet. He swings it too fast, and he walks with the same pace he used to keep, so he ends up tripping over boxes or bikes padlocked to railings.
