Panic immediately set
in after Steven figured out that he could not see. The downtime was fairly considerable, as his
mind raced along. When he had gone to
sleep, the sun was barely coming up above the buildings outside of his window,
but when he woke up, there was nothing but darkness. He flailed around in his bed as he could feel
his blankets thrown away. He yelled and
thrashed for what seemed like an eternity, before falling off of his bed and
crawling to his knees: it didn’t provide any orientation, and as he attempted
to crawl to a phone or to the door, he slammed his face into the wall, feeling
the throb of his cheek before he collapsed on the ground crying in dismay. He did not get up for nearly an hour, curled
up on himself sobbing quietly, the entire time his mind racing as he pleaded
for an answer to what happened. He never
received a response.
Without being able to see the light of the sun outside,
or the lack thereof, only being aware of a relative time when he felt his
stomach grumble with hunger. He remained
against the wall until that point, trying to regain his composure but failing
miserably. His hunger stirred him to
action and Steven decided to try once again to figure a way to somewhere. He could barely picture his apartment in his
mind, the image already distorted from the panic and fear of losing his
sight. He did not know exactly where in
his apartment he was as the thrashing and disjointed crawling was clouded by
that fear that he was still trying to overcome.
His stomach turned; what if this is permanent, he thought, and
inadvertently wailed slamming his head back into the wall, feeling the drywall
give way. His head throbbed in a
rhythmic pattern, breaking his concentration on his condition due to the
pain. He reached his hands up, running
the palms along the wall until he felt the hole he had just created. The rough edges of the drywall greeted his
fingers as his attempted to pull himself up, tearing the edges of the hole and
making it larger. He immediately wished
that he had stayed on his hands and knees crawling. From the new angle, he was even more
disoriented than before.
The phone rang, and in the darkness, or perceived
darkness, Steven flailed around, attempting to find the phone. He wept, crying in frustration as he slammed
his head into the end table, feeling an oblong, plastic shape fall onto him as
he groped about. He heard the phone near
him, but the ringtone died and he knew it had gone to voicemail. He wailed in emotional agony, curling back up
into a ball against the end table, and cried.
As he lies on the ground, Steven heard the phone vibrate slightly as the
voicemail alert went. He groped slowly
in that direction, his hand moving deliberately in a wide fan-like motion
across the carpet, trying to find the small cell phone. He felt out, moving towards the wall and
swinging both of his arms out before his fingers brushed across the phone. He let a gasp out, jerking his hand back and
sliding the phone open. He carefully
felt across the face of the keypad, straining his mind to try and remember the
order of the keypad. Why did I have to
get a phone with a full keyboard, he thought, as his finger gently traced the
keys. After what seemed like an
eternity, he believed he had figured out which of the small keys were the
number keys. He held his breath, and
pressed three in a slow, methodical manner.
The voice on the other end told him he had guessed correctly.
“I’m going to hold your eyes open and shine a light
directly into them, alright?” The voice
came on suddenly, after Steven had been sitting by himself for what seemed like
an eternity. He jumped, and the doctor
put her hands on Steven’s shoulder reassuringly: “Sorry, I didn’t mean to
frighten you.” Steven felt her pull
gently at his eyelids, and he tried to hold his eyes steady. He didn’t feel anything, and heard no sound
other than the doctor sounding like she was experiencing something
peculiar. “Your pupils are dilating
appropriately. And you can’t see
anything?”
“No. I
can’t.” Saying those words drove the
reality of the past few days home to Steven, and he swallowed hard, deep into
his throat, the words almost getting caught in the process. He felt tears roll down his cheeks, and ne
did not care that the doctor could see it.
He was still terrified. He felt
her hand rub his shoulder again, but he found no real comfort in it.
“We’re going to have to run some more tests. MRIs definitely. I’m sure we’ll be able to find the
problem. You’re going to be alright.”
“Ok. Thank
You.” The doctor told him she would go
schedule the tests immediately, and Steven heard he leave the room. He was once again alone with his thoughts. The near silent hum of the fluorescent
lighting mingled with the smell of a hospital: the sanitary, scrubbed clean
smell that reminded Steven of the proclivity of disease and reinforced the
fragility of his entire existence. His
loss of sight had taken something from him that he didn’t even know he could
lose; it ripped away any semblance of normalcy that he still maintained,
replacing it with the cold, lonely darkness.
Steven sat, feeling a complete sense of terror, that same feeling that
had not stopped in the time since he woke up to discover his affliction. It welled up in the depths of his stomach,
causing a feeling of nausea. He attempted
to endure to the best of his ability, but the quiet sobs still echoed through
the room when a nurse entered. She
gently rubbed his back, and helped him into a wheelchair. Her voice carried a sort of sing-song quality
to it, and Steven found it incredibly comforting as he was wheeled slowly
through the halls of the hospital towards radiology. The nurse pushed him into the room, where
another doctor explained the procedure in the quiet inflection of his soft
voice. He directed the nurse to help
Steven into the MRI machine, which muffled their voices and Steven was left
alone inside the metal cylinder. Without seeing his surroundings, Steven could
envision the machine holding him close inside its metal exterior. His mind flashed backwards to his childhood,
and the last time he was trapped inside the magnetic embrace of an MRI machine.
His
father gripped his small hand firmly but with a sense of tenderness. He smiled down at Steven in an attempt to be
reassuring, but the young boy was still terrified beyond all belief. He was disoriented and dizzy, his mind racing
at a hundred miles per hour but also sluggish and his thoughts hard to
concentrate on in a wicked dichotomy caused by the fastball sent straight into
his eye. The bruise over it was
substantial, the eye swollen shut behind the purple sheen the skin had adopted;
tear streaks were still visible across Steven’s cheeks, especially the left
one, which was clearly too tender to be touched. Steven’s baseball cap was slid far over his
face, and his father kept shaking him at intermittent intervals to ensure that
he was responsive: he was, but barely.
The nurse ushered them into radiology.
The minute that Steven found himself inside, panic began to grip his
young mind, forcing its way through the muddled thoughts. He tried to thrash viciously against the
restraints, wailing in a pitiful cry for his father to help him. The man stood on the other side of the
window, listening to his son crying inside the metal tube and feeling a growing
sense of impotence within him, unable to do anything due to the machine running
and the potential intervention of the hospital staff. He chewed his lip viciously, blood beginning
to form in the corners of his mouth as he heard his little boy cry in terror. The tests were finished, and proved that
nothing was wrong with Steven past the concussion; the problem warranted
intervention of more in-depth testing, but no additional problems were
discovered in the young boy. His father
feared that he would not be the same after that day, and he was correct in that
assumption. In his concussion-addled
state, Steven had experienced a level of isolation and fear he was not prepared
to deal with at the age of ten. Inside
the darkened sarcophagus, Steven felt every doubt his young mind could conjure
up, even in the few brief minutes that he was encased inside. As he sat once again inside one of the
machines, his mind drifted back to that day thirteen years ago; and although
blind, his mind’s eye re-conjured the horrific images that he had invented all
those years ago.
It
was loneliness that struck him first, deep within the MRI machine. Despite being spoken to only a few moments
earlier, Steven knew full well that the doctors and his father were behind the
glass in the other room, leaving him alone inside something he did not understand:
in the rush and explanations, no one had explained to the boy exactly what was
going to go on inside radiology. That
uncertainty left a level of anxiety in an already disoriented mind, which did
nothing to calm his nerves. He
remembered the baseball, and his father getting him into the car, as well as
vaguely waiting in the hospital. All
those were blurred, and coupled with the blank spots in his memory, caused the
young Steven to be forced into the machine in an already damaged state of
mind. Inside the machine, time slowed to
a crawl as the isolation began to creep inside, sending a spike of anxiety deep
into the center of his mind. Every sound
the machine made around him was a symbol of imprisonment and an impending doom
that crept across his skin, forming goose bumps so intense that nearly every
muscle in his body shuddered along with his skin. Formless phantoms crept into the darkness of
his peripheral vision, concepts of fear that only a ten-year-old boy could
adequately understand. That sense of
abandonment was the chief anxiety, as Steven remembered every time he turned
around in the grocery store to find his parents missing, was left at soccer
practice late due to a miscommunication; the only real difference is that this
time, he felt like that abandonment was intentional, especially knowing that
his father was right behind the glass with the hospital staff.
