Slipping Into Darkness by Peter Blauner Read Free Book Online

there. He’d tried to ignore it, telling himself he’d already made it through his share of close calls and near-blackouts. But in his heart, he knew it had never really gone away. The darkness was always bulging and pressing against the other side of the door, trying to get through.
     
    “So how long’s it going to take?”
     
    “It depends on how it’s been inherited.” Dr. Friedan held Francis’s lid open as he shined a penlight into his eye. “Some people can keep functioning for years. The majority need a cane by the time they’re forty. Could be nothing’s going to happen right away.”
     
    “I had an uncle was a deputy inspector who needed a Seeing Eye dog by the time he was sixty.”
     
    “A police officer?” The doctor pushed the lid open wider.
     
    “My mother’s brother.”
     
    “Well, that may be how you got it.”
     
    Francis felt his eye muscles straining to shut as the light focused on the rim of his cornea, a dazzling laser whiteness growing more and more intense until it felt like a finger pushing deep into the socket.
     
    “All right, that’s enough.”
     
    He panicked and pulled away, not able to see anything for a few seconds. This was what it was going to be like. He was being taken from the ranks of healthy, normal, independent people and told to go stand somewhere else. They were going to put a label on him; they were going to relegate him to special sections for the handicapped at ball games and on buses; they were going to help him find his seat and maybe give him headphones at the movie theaters; they were going to give him pamphlets to read and tapes to listen to that would help him with “the period of adjustment”; they were going to make his life more and more circumscribed until he couldn’t function on his own anymore.
     
    “Can I ask what it is you do for a living, Mr. Loughlin?” The doctor checked his file. “I don’t seem to have your insurance information right in front of me.”
     
    “I’m in telemarketing,” he said automatically.
     
    “Really?” The doctor peered over the top of his glasses. “I wouldn’t have guessed that.”
     
    “I can be very persuasive.”
     
    “Well, it’s a good thing you don’t drive a truck for a living.”
     
    “Why?”
     
    “The loss of night vision can sneak up on you. It can go very slowly or very quickly. You’re going to have to monitor it carefully.”
     
    “You saying I’m going to have to stop driving?”
     
    “I’m saying you’ll have to use your judgment.” The doctor propped Francis’s left eye open for a more thorough check. “Some days you’ll see better than others. But I’m sure you don’t want to be in a position of endangering anybody or having an accident because of your situation.”
     
    “No. Of course not.”
     
    Francis squeezed his eyes shut. All his life, he’d been the Go-To Guy. The first man you’d want into the room on a drug raid or testifying at a homicide trial. Let Francis do it. He’s an adrenaline junkie. But now his other senses were diminishing in sympathy. His fingertips going numb, his tongue feeling dull, his hearing going tinny for a few seconds, like an old transistor losing its signal.
     
    “You need a minute?” The doctor put aside his chart.
     
    “No. Why?”
     
    “It’s a lot to take in. Most people would be very emotional.”
     
    He looked over the doctor’s shoulder at a cross-section of the eyeball poster that one of the major drug companies had thoughtfully provided. From the side, the figure first resembled a blowfish with dozens of labeled spines coming off it. The iris, the cornea, the anterior chamber, the sclera, the bulbar sheath, the ciliary zonules. But the longer he stared, the more the shape seemed to change. The orb flared a brighter shade of orange and then pulsed and dimmed like the sun getting ready to explode.
     
    So this was the future. One day the lights would go out and the world of visible things would cease to exist for him.
     
    He started thinking about everything he hadn’t seen