The Correspondent

          What I think happened is that as I was driving out of the li­brary parking lot, away from the lights and into the darkness, you know, well—I suppose I can’t say exactly what happened. I was driving just like usual, slow and steady, but something oc­curred. I can’t remember it exactly, but what I think is that quite suddenly I couldn’t see. I couldn’t see! But how? That stretch of time, was it a moment or was it minutes? It was as if my life was a movie and went black, wasn’t it, but I’m not certain, and that’s what’s troubling me. I’m not certain it was my vision, that black chasm. It wasn’t as if I’d closed my eyes; it’s as if the space of time has been deleted from my memory, up until I crashed. And this has happened to me before, this feeling of deletion. That’s what makes me afraid. How does a thing like that happen? I suppose it must be underway, Colt—the loss of vision. I suppose that must be what this was. I have known conceptually I would go blind, but as an eventuality. Now it seems the blinding is underway, and this is how it will go, but I didn’t anticipate it being like this. This confusion.

         The car went by tow, I was delivered home by a cab, and I sat awake all night afraid of the darkness. Afraid to turn off the lights.

         I have nightmares. I may have mentioned this. In the night­mares I can still see, but I know I am blind somehow. So I am looking out the window at the sailboats, but maybe they are fuzzy, or maybe I know it’s daytime, but it looks like night. Or I’m in the garden and I don’t recognize the flowers—What is this?, I think. Or I’m looking at the text in a novel but I cannot make any sense of the letters or the words. But the worst dream, this is the one I have over and over, is I’m sitting down at the desk to write and there is the stack of letter writing paper, there are my pens, there are the envelopes, and I’m pawing at them like a cat, but I cannot pick them up. Or I pick up the pen and it lists like a noodle in my hands. I press the thing to the page and it softens or disintegrates. Or there is one version where I get as far as the ink on the page, but I can’t make sense—I can’t write a thing, it’s all scribbling. It’s the way my fear imagines blindness. You’d think the dreams would just be a black void, which is what I suppose it will actually be, though if I were dreaming of a black void I suppose . . . I wouldn’t be dreaming at all. I would be sim­ply asleep, but I don’t think I sleep, at this point in my life, with­out dreams, the mind being far too saturated for that. Far too many haunts for that.

        My ophthalmologist Dr. Jameson said that with my condi­tion, once it gets going, it could be a year or it could be ten years until it’s complete, and as things progress it can sort of come in and out. I will have to make an appointment. I’ll do that today. I haven’t told anyone other than Rosalie and the child Harry I’ve mentioned in the past, the child with whom I exchange monthly letters, son of my former colleague Judge James Landy. Oh, I’ve also told Joan Didion the author. I haven’t told Bruce or Fiona.