Blind Sight Read Online Free PDF Page B

without needing by measure or touch to understand the measureless untouchable source of its images.
”
    And,
    “
The man of stamina stays with the root below the tapering—Stays with the fruit beyond the flowering: he has his no and he has his yes.
”
    I finally told Amy the whole thing. Well, not the whole thing. I didn’t say “Mark Franco.”
    That’s when Amy told me she had been spending some time with her ex-boyfriend, Darren Vincz, and they were getting back together. I wasn’t really surprised. I guess a part of me always knew that Amy was using me a little. So I just sort of nodded, and then she wanted to make out, and we ended up almost having sex. Sara always talks a lot about the mind-body connection, but your mind and body can act in total opposition to each other. Like, I knew it was ethically wrong to hook up with someone else’s girlfriend, and I even knew Amy only wanted to do it because I had been
too
okay with the Darren thing, and so I really thought we should NOT have sex, even though my body totally wanted to. Anyway, it didn’t happen.
    Later, when I got home, I watched
The Kindness of Strangers
on my computer. In that one my father, hair slicked back and sporting a Middle European accent, manages to kill several FBI agents before being shot himself, in a car-chasing sequence, in Prague. It’s really good.
    A plane ticket arrived: round-trip, first-class.
    “I wonder if you will recognize each other,” Sara said to me on the way to the airport in Philadelphia.
    “I sent him some pictures,” I reminded her. “And I know what he looks like.”
    “You know, I’m really excited for
him
,” Sara said. “It’s like I’m sending him the best present in the world.”
    Six hours later I stepped off an escalator and into the baggage claim section of Delta Air Lines in Los Angeles. I looked around and met eyes with this tiny blond girl—well,
woman
, I found out later—and she came right up to me.
    “Luke?”
    We shook hands.
    “I’m Kati,” she said. “I’m your dad’s assistant. He’s waiting for you right over there.”
    I nodded, looking around, although Kati’s “right over there” had not been accompanied with any sort of gestural indication of where “there” was.
    “I’ll get your luggage, okay?” Kati patted me on the elbow. That’s when I realized I was still holding her hand.
    “Oh, I can get it,” I said, letting go of her.
    “Just tell me how many and what color.” Kati smiled over my left shoulder.
    That’s when I turned and saw my father, standing by a row of metal chairs. That is, I saw the outline of my father: baseball cap pulled low, sunglasses, slightly hunched shoulders. Nevertheless, I recognized him. I would say that this was because of the movies I had rented, the first season of
The Last
my father had sent on DVD, and all the images I had found on the Internet. Sara might say I recognized him from that one and only meeting, seventeen years before. Either way, I saw the man—Anthony Boyle—Mark Franco—angel, comet, cop, bodyguard, bad guy, bomb-squad captain, beautiful person, astronaut with a destroyed planet to navigate, and thought,
    “That person is my dad.”
    So that’s how we met. We didn’t fly into each other’s arms or anything like that. We shook hands. I appreciated that, because I think it’s better to not load a whole bunch of feelings on top of things. Like, you could have a bunch of feelings about my family history and say it’s very meaningful, or you could say, “Nope. Just random. Doesn’t mean anything.” You could say, “Oh, my long-lost father, what anemotional moment,” or you could say, “Okay, we are biologically related. Interesting.” My point is that people act like their feelings are something they can’t help, but that’s not totally true. Every time you run something over in your head you are firing the same set of synapses into the brain. You can
create
an emotion, is what I’m saying. You have