Blind

by Thom Hawkins

Dalton Hargrove, a nearly retired actuary, was lying on his belly beneath the window, his right cheek digging into the carpet pile, when he decided to call Jill. This was, after all, an emergency.

He crawled across the carpet on his elbows until he felt the legs of Jill’s nightstand, sat up with his back against the bed, and pulled the phone from its cradle. Then, he ran his fingertips across the number keys, getting a sense of their placement, but instead of dialing, he lifted the receiver to his ear. The dial tone buzzed pleasantly. His hearing was intact. He knew this, of course—he would’ve recognized its absence—but the bright, consistent sound of the dial tone was reassuring, like hearing all the beeps in an audiology exam.

When the tone converted to the doo-wop, doo-wop of a misaligned receiver, he reset the tone, felt for the keys again, and began to dial. Four-four-three. Then what? He could see the area code in Jill’s handwriting—that part was most familiar. The other numbers swam in his head, disordered. There were some twos. More threes. A five and a one. Doo-wop, doo-wop…

Dalton reset the dial tone again and started the sequence over, trusting an unconscious ability to recall the number, picturing it on the counter when he called Jill about the emergency contact. Four-four-three, seven-two-three, three-five-one-three. He pressed the phone to his ear and listened to the ring tone. “Patience,” the tones told him. “Have patience.”

“Hello?” It was a man’s voice, but a different man this time.

“Is Jill there?”

“No Jill here,” the new man said.

“Wait!” Dalton yelled, fearing he was already in the process of cutting him off. “Wait a second!”

“There’s no Jill here,” the man repeated.

“Please don’t hang up. I need your help.” Dalton paused, listening for the click that told him the call had ended. When he didn’t hear it, he continued. “Something’s happened. I woke up…” Again he couldn’t say the word. “I woke up and I couldn’t see.”

********************

On the last day before his retirement, Dalton Hargrove woke up blind. He heard his alarm, but when he opened his eyes, the room remained dark. He sat up in bed and looked to the window. Jill would pull the curtains wide each morning after she dressed, and Dalton would close them again in the evening. He hated to think that anyone walking past their house could see them in their natural history diorama of a modern suburban home. With the curtains open, there was nothing he could do to stop someone from standing on the street to watch their staid evening routine with anthropological curiosity. He knew he’d closed the curtains because he’d done it months ago, and Jill was no longer around to open them again the next morning.

“I’m going to open my eyes now,” Dalton said to the room, then counted silently to three. He tried to follow the signal from his brain to his eyelids, but it was too quick. He sensed his eyes were open the same way he could hold up two fingers behind his back and know how it looked, or that he could step carefully around a room even though he couldn’t see over his rounded belly to his feet.

He had to turn his alarm off, so he swum through the waves of bedding, found the clock, and pressed the button to turn off the alarm. Tilting the clock to his face with his left hand, he swept the back of his right across his face, verifying that his eyelids were open. He could feel his lashes fluttering separately through the little hairs on the back of his hand.

“The power’s gone out,” Dalton mumbled, trying to convince himself of something that could not possibly be true. The power had gone out and there was just enough juice left in the wires to trigger the alarm, but not enough to power the display. It was nonsense, but that had to be it.

Stumbling into the bathroom, he flipped the light switch. The continuing darkness confirmed his suspicion that the power had gone out. Feeling for the tap, he ran some cold water and splashed it on his face. The time didn’t matter anyway, he reasoned. He just had one last thing to get through this morning and then time would be his to command. He felt for the towel hanging behind the door and dried his face, then blinked into the darkness.

Dalton pictured the bedroom as a chessboard, and moved across it like a knight. One step forward from the bathroom door to the bed, then two to the left past the end of the bed, verifying his position with his right hand on the bedpost. Two more steps forward brought him to the other side of the bed, and one more to the right, the window. He felt for the curtains with his fingertips.

********************

“You mean you’ve gone blind?” the man on the phone asked.

“Yes,” Dalton answered.

“What can I do?” The man’s voice softened, as if speaking to a child.

“I’m trying to call my wife.”

“Your wife?”

“My…ex-wife.” It was another word he’d been avoiding. “We’re separated. She left a number, but I don’t know it.”

“You dialed me?”

“I thought I could remember the number, but I must have gotten it wrong. Can you help me?” Dalton paused, waiting for acknowledgment. He heard the man breathing into the receiver—the measured breaths of someone at more than an arm’s length from his drama. He savored those breaths like he had the dial tone; they were reassurance that people were still out there in this world.

“Maybe you should dial 9-1-1,” the man said at last.

“I don’t…No, I just want to talk to my wife. She’s staying with someone. Maybe you can look him up somehow?”

“Uh, yeah. Okay. What’s his name?”

“Phil. Phil Howard.”

“Two first names, eh?”

It was true. Jill had left a man with two last names for one with two first names. Maybe this is what Dalton could never provide for her.

“Let me see. I think I have a phone book around somewhere.”

Dalton listened to the man’s breathing as he moved around. While he waited, he tried to picture Jill’s face. Her dull, blonde hair framing her milky complexion. Her light grey eyes turning up at the outside corners. Her nose broad and dotted with freckles. Her mouth turned down at the edges, opposing her eyes. Her lips parted and he heard her voice from the day she left him. “Why can’t you see that I don’t want to live this way? I can’t do this anymore.” He hadn’t responded, only turned away as she went upstairs to pack her suitcases. Dalton ate alone at the dinner table, his back to the stairs as Jill stomped up and down, ferrying their luggage—a matched set of four in grey and blue they bought in anticipation of all the trips they would take when Dalton finally retired. He counted the bags as she pulled them down the stairs, a thump after each pair of stomps. He refused to watch her leave. After the final thump of the front door closing, he walked up the stairs to the bedroom. She’d left the door to her closet open, its emptiness plain. He walked over to the window and watched her car pull out of the driveway. Once she drove off, he yanked the curtains closed.

********************

He pushed the curtains aside, expecting to see the yard, the street, and a night sky dimmer with clouds. Instead, the world outside had been erased.

Dalton Hargrove had been an actuarial fellow for the past nine years. Fellow was the firm’s term for senior actuaries, whom they couldn’t afford to pay more. Instead of increased wages, they were given fewer case assignments, but more time to mentor journeymen actuaries and present brown-bag lunches on regression, advances in medicine, gerontology. Hargrove himself recently gave what he considered to be a capstone series—eight sessions over the course of eight weeks, each week highlighting an important lesson he learned during his career. His last presentation, entitled “Know When to Say When,” was about the relationship between retirement planning and life expectancy. What he found, in fact, was that no correlation existed. A person who spent a few months planning for retirement died no sooner from the stress induced by financial complications and lack of funding or adequate care than someone who planned their whole career for it. This was a valuable lesson, he impressed, because he himself spent the better part of the previous two decades planning for his retirement, but only now conducted the statistical study to determine whether he should have.

The talk was well received by the journeymen staff, who were just beginning their retirement planning process, and found solace in a rationale to abandon the work. It was only the other fellows who tut-tutted Hargrove’s conclusion and muttered that it could not possibly be correct. Nonetheless, he’d been feted at the conclusion of this final session with bottled beers snuck onto the premises by a wily intern.

Today was his last day at work. His final hours in the office would be less about celebrating his career and more about administering the end of it. Although final‑day employees were paid for a full day, they were only kept in the office long enough to “out-process.” Once Dalton Hargrove, actuarial fellow, turned in his badge and computer, he would cease to be an asset. An ex-employee was merely a distraction to those still employed by the firm.

His last box of remaining bric-a-brac—outdated actuarial manuals kept based on sentiment rather than usefulness, a pair of scissors brought in from home, an old photograph of him and Jill on a cruise—sat on his desk, awaiting his final hours.

********************

The power hadn’t gone out, Dalton finally accepted. Something else was wrong—something with him. He didn’t want to use the word, so he described the outcome. He couldn’t see. If he couldn’t see the clock, he had to accept on faith that his alarm meant it was just after six-thirty in the morning. He was due in the office around eight, but if he were late, no one would care. They would only notice at the end of the day, when he hadn’t turned in his computer or his badge—an administrative default.

Maybe it wouldn’t even be a surprise. After Jill left him, Dalton tried to pull his retirement papers, intending to work a few years more to have something to do while he replanned his future as a single man—a widower, in a way, bereaved of his relationship. The firm, though, already top‑heavy with fellows, refused his reversal. If he didn’t appear today to out‑process—what then? Maybe they would change their minds over the weekend amid the prospect of more paperwork, stretching his career out to touch the Monday of one more timesheet.

He insisted that he must at least be allowed to update his emergency contact, but found that he had no replacement. He called the number on the slip of paper Jill left on the kitchen counter. A man answered. A familiar voice, but not so much that he knew whose it was. Dalton asked for Jill, hoping the man would tell him he had the wrong number, but instead he said, “Just a moment.” He waited, listening, until he heard Jill say hello as if the number belonged to her, as if at any point in their life together, he could have called that number and she would have answered.

“Yes, Dalton,” Jill answered his question. “You can use me as your emergency contact. I still care about you, you know?”

“Then who was that man?” Dalton whispered.

********************

“Okay, maybe Howard comma Phillip? Oakcrest Drive?” the man said.

“Yes, that’s him,” said Dalton. He was Jill’s friend, or had been just a friend. A widower she met at her gardening club.

“Okay, I’ll read the number out to you. Do you have a pen?” He paused and exhaled into the phone. “Oh, I’m sorry. I guess that won’t do you much good. I can read it out a few times and just let me know when you think you’ve got it memorized.”

The man’s words emanated unheard from the receiver, because next to it laid the still body of Dalton Hargrove. The clot that took Dalton’s vision now took his life. There was just enough juice left in Dalton Hargrove’s retiring brain to send a signal through his nervous system to close his eyelids. The morning sun shone through the gap where he opened the curtains, warming the flesh of his cheeks.

He hadn’t planned for this.

He hadn’t planned for any of it.

About the Author

Thom Hawkins is a writer and artist based in Maryland. His stories, plays, and experimental fiction have appeared or are scheduled to appear in Always Crashing (Pushcart Prize nominee), Collaborature, Encephalon Journal, Excuse Me Magazine, Gargoyle Online, New Myths, Oyez Review, The Scop, Shoegaze Literary, Variant Lit, and Verdant Literary Journal.