[stylist] I will not Walk by Sight (second version)

[Jacobson, Shawn D]

Dear Stylist.

Below find the second version of my story "I Will Not Walk by Sight".  I would like to thank Bridgit for her comments.  I think the story is a lot better for her imput.

I hope you enjoy it.

Shawn

I Shall Not Walk by Sight
by Shawn Jacobson

Dear Pastor, I am writing to tell you why I have not been in church of late.  It has been a while, and I know that you keep track of those who miss the Sunday service, so I know my absence has been noted.  My explanation follows.  You will think me quite mad, unhinged by nightmares and the abnormal life I have led, yet I feel the need to tell my story so that you can understand the journey I am about to take.
It started at my hot dog stand in the middle of town.  The Baltimore police were telling me to move on so as not to bother others on the street.  I explained that I wasn't bothering anyone, just trying to make a living.  It was my good fortune that the policeman left giving me a warning, but such fortune cannot be trusted for long.
I was preparing for the next confrontation when I saw a woman carrying a cane, the kind I should carry but am too lazy or too proud to bother with.  She came up and leaned against the cart.
"Jeff, it's been ages since I've seen you" she said.  "How are you doing?  Remember me, I'm Poly, I used to go to meetings with you."
"OK I guess" I said.  "Just had a visit from the law, otherwise it's the same old thing."  But what have you been doing with yourself.  Your Federation friends all miss you."
Oh that" she said.  "I've been living with some other blind folk, kind of like a commune where we can be together and not feel weird, a place where blindness skills are normal.  And we have all kinds of fun" she continued.  "You're welcome to join us.  That is, unless you really enjoy selling wieners and being harassed by the cops."
I had remembered Polly from National Federation of the Blind meetings.  I remember her taking me arm one day and leading me to a chair; she had joked about leading me down the aisle, but I had been too clueless to read anything deeper into her humor.  She had been a fixture in our group.  Then, about a year ago, she had stopped coming to meetings and we fell out of touch.  Her reappearance had reminded me of our friendship.
I remembered those days as we talked.  Then she asked "do you want to come with me and experience how we live?"
At that, I left my cart and followed her.  I guessed that the boys in blue would do with it whatever they wanted.  At that point I didn't care.  For it was as if a new revelation of personal emptiness had come over me.  I felt a compelling need to fill the hole in my soul with something; a commune of blind folk might be the filling the whole needed.
"I see you aren't using a cane like you should" Polly chided me as we left the cart and walked out of the respectable part of the city "we'll get you back in the habit before you know it; once you stop pretending you can see, you'll get right back into the swing of it" she continued as she swung her cane.
We continued leaving the business district and heading into Baltimore's heart of darkness, a place where only fools walked without trepidation.  We continued past increasingly rundown buildings past shambling meaningless groups of people killing time.
As we continued, I noticed a tall thin man, or maybe he was an older boy.  He wore loose pants, a T-shirt, and a ball cap with an "X" on it.  I noticed these details since I was still using my eyes for whatever they were worth.  This stranger followed us, a predator of the city seeking prey.
I was about to warn Polly of trouble when, suddenly, she turned and gave him a peculiar look and, for no reason I could deduce, he scampered off into the blighted cityscape.
We're almost there" Polly said as we approached a building falling into shambles "the commune I was telling you about".
It was old, a line of row houses being allowed to return to nature.  The block it occupied was forgotten; one of those places between areas of urban renovation, put apart from all such endeavors, an unplanned place.
The people too seemed outside of any urban plan.  I remembered some of them from Federation meetings of the past, but they had not stayed with the movement.  There was Jill, who decided that the work of the movement would keep her from having time for her family, the movement can devour your life.  There was Kim, who thought that we should be a therapy group and Alex who had been encouraged to leave after begging during one of our conventions.  Beyond them, there were a lot of vaguely remembered folk who had come to one or two meetings and had lost interest.  And then there was Joe; he was different.
"You remember Joe" Polly said to me "you had some common interest.  You two can room together" Polly told me with the assurance of a master planner whose ideas are never questioned.
I had not realized that she meant me to stay there, but that didn't bother me at all.  Jake, whose garage I had been bunking in, would not miss me.  I could come back for what little stuff I had another day.
And I looked forward to rooming with Joe.  When I met him, Joe worked for NASA analyzing pictures of other planets.  His job fit into our shared interest in science fiction and all things astronomical.  We were two space heads trapped in a world of people who would not lift their eyes from the ground.
In particular, I remember him discussing a project where NASA would shoot a beam of particles at Europa and map, through some process using quantum entanglement, Europa's innards to see if there really was an ocean below the ice.  "There may be life there" Joe had exclaimed excitedly "and it may even be intelligent though whatever civilization it built would not be comprehensible to us.  And after we map Europa," he continued "we can go on to Ganymede, and then on to the rest of the outer planets.  Pluto may even have a liquid ocean beneath its surface."  Joe was over the Jovian moons with the prospect.
Then Joe had dropped out of everything.  In a fit of lousy timing astounding even for the Government, his project lost funding.  He left NASA over some office squabble and lost interest in the Federation.  The last time I saw him, he was at a meeting, in the corner, griping about everything and everyone.  We all thought it very sad. He left the Federation in a cloud of rumors and gossip about personality issues and organizational feuds.
I sympathized with Joe.  Before my hot dog days, I had worked in an office and had prospects for greater things.  I also had an apartment, not a large one but large enough for one person, all I expected to need.  It was a stable and comfortable life.
But my boss was big into visual communication and my body language was always wrong, always offensive in a way that I seemed too alien to understand.
"IF you weren't blind," he said with exasperation "I would say that you were antisocial.  But you're blindness problems I just can't understand.  You have to understand that I'm not a counselor, it's not my job to figure out your life."
I ultimately left in a move that engendered mutual relief.  And that started me on a string of bad decisions which left me selling wieners on the street and living in a garage.
"How was your work going before you left?" I asked him that night before going to sleep.
"Great for a while" he said.  "We had actually taken pictures of the waters of Europa and had observed some structures at the bottom of the moon's sea that looked strange, not natural at all.  Then, well, you know the story, typical Federal mess.  They closed down the Europa project and didn't want me on anything else.  I was frustrated, just fed up with the whole stupid business.  I came to NASA to explore space, but I ended up learning about bureaucratic stupidity."
"I hear you brother" I said around a yawn.  I drifted off to sleep surrounded by the creaking noises of the place.  In my dreams something came to me.  She, or at least I presumed it was female (for it was not human) came and started touching me all over my body.  It was dark, so I could not describe the being save that the touch was soft, feathery and cool.  The touching was interspersed with kisses and playful pinches.  It moved over me in a weird, but increasingly pleasant manner.
The next morning I awoke slowly with the night's dreamy pleasure still flowing through my mind.
"How did you sleep?" Joe asked.
"Pretty good" I replied "had a really weird dream though.  Not bad, really nice, but...."
"I know" Joe replied, as though this were normal. "It happens a lot here.  I'll start your training in the laundry room then."  I was glad I had gotten clothes from the stockpile, gleaned from thrift stores, kept for new arrivals.  "Here" Joe continued handing me a pair of eye coverings I recognized as sleep shades used to teach partially sighted folk like me how to function blind.
"You'll need these.  You can't fit in here without the true blindness experience."
That was my introduction to what we call the sense of presence.  This is not a good word for it, there are no good words for it since it is not common to the human experience, but we call it that for want of a better one.  This sense allows us to know where things are and some things about them.  Smooth surfaces leave the feel of eating chocolate while rough surfaces leave the feeling of having a mouth full of salt.  The presence sense doesn't help with color; it would be no use at all with the touch screens that new appliances have, but the ancient washers and dryers here have buttons and dials.  The new sense works just fine with these.
Later, when training in the kitchen, I learned that hot objects observed through the presence leave a feeling of disgust in the stomach.  "You'll never burn yourself if you heed the presence" remarked Sue, who used to be a cook before she dropped out of the working world.
And so the next few weeks went.  I would put on my sleep shades in the morning and would go to various tasks to learn to heed the presence.  I found gardening to be especially relaxing even though sharp, thorny plants observed through the presence left me feeling like I'd tangled with hot peppers; the kind I put on hot dogs for adventurous customers.
You should know pastor that, like the early Christians described in your sermons on the book of Acts; we shared all things in common.  We would eat our meals together rotating through the houses that were still habitable.  We also shared chores so that no one person needed to do all of the hard work required of those who live in these conditions.  The money that came in, and I never knew where it came from, was used for the common good. I guess you would say that Polly's description of this place as a commune was correct.
One night, a member of our group brought beer back to the commune.   Joe and I drank some before going to bed.  I remembered visiting Joe at his apartment before he left NASA.  We watched some SciFi travesty that was so bad it was funny.  Space monsters chewed up the Earth with the help of cheap special effects that were as cheesy as a Wisconsin fond du.
The beer made Joe open up some and he started telling me about Europa again.
"If such places produce intelligent life than there may be a lot of it in the universe.  After all, many of the outer moons could have such seas, and then there are the rogue planets that wander between the stars.  Some of these may have hot enough interiors to heat the ice to water.  There are probably a lot more of these oceans within the darkness than there are Earlike planets."
"Really" I asked.  "You think there are that many planet sized ice balls in interstellar space?"  I had read an article about interstellar worlds a while back, but I hadn't remembered details.
"Could easily be" he said.  "There might be a whole lot of kinds of intelligent sea creatures.  And if they could cross space to visit each other, well....."
"Like a federation of ocean races?" I asked taken with the new concept.  With thoughts of intrepid space exploring squid swimming through my head, I drifted off to sleep.
And the dream was especially good that night.  My dream lover came touching and stroking with special fervor as if she had heard our speculations and had felt joy from them.  The night ended with what felt like a full body kiss that left me howling with pleasure with a voice that had to ring through the whole commune.
And then there was a less pleasant experience that occurred not much later.  It happened on the way back from the store, a neighborhood shop valiantly striving to stay in business.
Polly and I were weighted down with bags when the presence showed me danger, a couple of men following us.  I was wearing sleep shades at the time so I would not have been able to give you a description of the men at all, but I knew they were trouble.  I got a sense of predation, like they were hunting us down, following, waiting for the right time to attack.
Then I heard a voice in my head.  "Use the presence to reach their minds" it said.  "Notice them and dig deeper, deeper into them.  Find what will make them stop" it continued.
By now, I was totally freaked out, but I saw no other way to avoid robbery, or a brutal death.  I tried the presence; there were the men following us, and, yes, there were their minds.  Suddenly I saw it, something with red eyes, a rat, but huge, with razor sharp teeth.  Never mind just how, I put the image into the mind of the closest man.  Suddenly, piteous screams rent the gathering dark.
"Rats!" the man howled "They're gnawing on me."
"There aren't any rats, you're just bugging" the second man said.
So I put the image in his head too.  He began to scream louder than the first as we hastened back to the row houses.
"That was great!" Polly gushed as she gave me a great wet sloppy kiss "you're getting real good with the presence."
I remembered the hug and kiss she had surprised me with one night as our group celebrated the new job of one of our members.  That embrace had been pleasant, a bit of unexpected joy in a life coming apart, but this was better.
The next day, one of our group read The Baltimore Sun on Newline, an audio service we have, when he turned to me.
"Didn't you and Polly go to the store last night?"
"Yes" I replied "what of it?"
"Paper said that the police found a couple of young men in the alley last night, just of our route to the store."
"Oh" I asked.
"The police say they were smashing their heads into the pavement, said they were trying to get the rats out of their heads.  Really weird" he continued.
"Rats in the head" I replied.  That would be weird alright."
"They figure these guys got into some designer drugs gone bad; the paper says there'll be an autopsy, but they don't expect to find anything definitive."
I knew better of course, and it did make me sad that the men had died.  I had certainly not wanted to kill them, just wanted to travel in safety.
But this feeling was muffled, as if I was considering doings on Mars; for I have become increasingly removed from the rest of the world, like this place we live is special, a place apart.  The rest of the world just does not intrude here.  Besides something more horrific would befall me a couple of days later that would blunt the sharpness of the memory.
It happened on an evening when I was tired and wanted to get an early night's sleep.  I had been busy picking up debris from around the property, clearing walks so that we could travel.  It had been a long job since loose roofing from some of the row houses had fallen during a bad storm.  I just hoped to get some sleep and not creek like the tin woodsman the next day.
Well, just as I was drifting off, there was a tumult from the unit next door.  Joe and I ran to investigate.  I didn't put on my sleep shades, strange since we almost always wear them, so I was depending on eyesight rusty from not being used; it was only good enough to keep me from using my presence sense, yet I would see enough to give me the horrors.
We ran into the living area to see a cloud of, well, not darkness as much as the mere absence of light  Then something came out of that darkness, something with tentacles, feelers, and other limbs beyond description .  All these were in a jumble extending from a scaly body.  It looked like it had been dredged up from the deepest ocean, like it was never meant to be viewed by man.
I felt compelled to watch as Polly ran towards the abomination; then, she wrapped her arms around its body rubbing her body against the scales in what was obviously a loving embrace.  Somehow, I tore my eyes from the sight and there were other creatures, each more horrible to behold than the last.  They emerged from the darkness.  Each of them caressed two or three of my erstwhile companions.  I saw Joe and two women fondling a particularly ugly crab-like monstrosity.
Pastor, you will remember that I was always more tolerant of difference among people than most in our congregation.  In fact, I lost several friends chiding them for only wanting to evangelize to folk like them and reminding them that churches that spurned different folk would surely die.  Indeed, I took great pride in my advocacy of the glories of diversity.  Yet, when I saw Polly with the thing she was hugging, and realized that I was meant to join them in this union of flesh, I was overcome with revulsion.  I ran for my room screaming and lay in bed that night shaken to the center of my soul for I realized that the horror that Polly fleshly joy in the lover of my dreams.
It seemed natural that such a night should end in nightmare.  I walked alone in a hot place.  Volcanos of sulfur spouted about me and a swollen red orb filled the sky.  The light cast by this orb was insufficient for sight, so I stumbled through bubbling pools of scalding liquid creaming with the heat and the terror of it all.
I awoke and found myself alone.  I searched the entire row of houses finding no one at all.  My calls for my companions echoed through the place bringing no reply.  After searching vainly for what seemed like pourers, I made a humble meal of cereal and milk and sat down to consider the coming day.
What followed were days in which I considered what I been through.  I realized that Joe had not told me the whole story about, his mapping of Europa.  He must have gained the attention of what dwelt there.  These beings had reached out, back across the void to our world, seeking kindred spirits of like mind.  They had found them here and there, disaffected people tired of the world we live in, searching for a new reality.
But not all creatures could share in the presence.  My guess is that people who can see cannot use this sense given that I can only use it while wearing sleep shades.  Perhaps the sense of presence requires that part of the brain most of us use for sight that sight somehow drowns out the presence ability.
In these days, I also considered a return to the world.  Should I go back to my family where I would be loved but would still feel myself a burden?  Should I go back and try to rescue my hot dog cart from the police and start again living a meager existence on society's edge?  Perhaps I could find an office to work in, I still had the skills.  I could be beloved, inspiring, a blind guy made good.  I could be first in the affections of my co-workers and the first to be presumed responsible when the copier malfunctioned, the special employee with a special problem.
And I am sure you are wondering why I don't return to the church.  Indeed, I did find the joy of the lord there, and went often to seek inspiration in the quiet of the chapel.  Yet there was always the feeling of separation from the rest of the congregation, of not fitting in, of being different, different, different, in a place that found comfort in the ordinary, a church that worshipped a normal God for a normal people.
And I do not think that the good folks here would like the theology I have learned her.  If these creatures that I have seen are God's creations and if they share God's image, then the all mighty must be more like one for Lovecraft's elder gods in wondrous strangeness than the old man in the sky that I worshipped as a child.  I would probably be a disturbing force in your congregation.
And so, I had my reasons not to care about the outside world.  My experience with the presence had left me with the feeling that the world was entirely caught up with appearance games that I no longer wanted to play.
Throughout this struggle for my future, the nightmares continued one solitary walk after another through increasingly hostile worlds.  The worst, even worse than walks through smoggy wastelands or noxious quagmires was a journey over a rocky landscape on some forgotten world wandering between the stars.  The meager light of distant suns failed me as I stumbled, yet it showed me the great emptiness of space, a void so immense that it dwarfed to insignificance the greatest thing that man could imagine.  I woke the next morning whimpering in dark awe.
I remembered my last meeting with Polly.  We embrace, hugged, but I had felt clumsy in the process, somehow embarrassed by our meeting or my unsureness at what I was supposed to do.  What was meant to be the overture to romance became a failure of my ability to show affection.  Later I learned that she had met someone else.
I found myself envious of the nightmare creatures I had seen.  For all of their ugliness, they seemed to have the ability to show affection that I lacked.  Contemplating this, I found myself sinking into a well of self-disgust.
Pastor, I know that you have said that we may be closest to God's grace when we are in the midnight mood of despair.  But here, feeling the self-loathing of one who cannot love, I felt close to nothing good, like I must wander this world alone forever.  And in this bleak mood, I pondered the coming day.
I was always a lonely child and loneliness led me to take refuge in tales in which the aliens were better folk than the people I knew.  Maybe it was this peculiar inclination of mine, or maybe it was the lonely days I spent in this place, or maybe it was the long nights spent walking nightmare worlds, but my revulsion at what I had seen that crazy night was being replaced by longing for the community that I had experienced.
So that when my dream companion returned to replace my solitary nightmares, I opened my arms without question.  I no longer cared what it looked like, for appetences no longer mattered to me.  I didn't care how or who it loved, or who it might love in the future.  I returned to it with relief, no, I should say joy, for that is what I felt.
And its attentions were more fervent than ever before, probing deeper, loving more intensely.  It touched, rubbed, caressed and kissed with exquisite zeal as if it were a shepherd seeking out a little lost lamb.  Like a little lost lamb, I only wanted to return to my shepherd, and to its fold.
So I wait for my dream lover, my guide and friend, to return for me to take me to the community that I found, lost, and hope to find again.  For they have found a new world, a cure for the dissatisfaction I feel with the world in which I live.  Just as Paul longed to be taken from this Earth, so I long to travel to ocean depths beneath the ice, to new strange places where I will feel at home.  I know not what I will do when I get there, how I will live or all the things that I will experience.  I do know that when I attain this new realm I will not walk by sight.