The Point of Vanishing Read Online Free PDF Page A

the house made no sense. Three roofs, two of them flat, bound to be buried in snow. A front door, at the bottom of a steep pitch, bound to be buried, too. The triptych windows to the woods—beautiful but ideal for losing heat. The house clearly hadn’t been designed by a Vermonter. Or even by a person capable of envisioning snow. I tried not to think about how my plan, if it even was a plan, was just as haphazardly formed. I tried not to think about Ray andAlexis in med school in New York City, not to think about my parents, not to think about other places I might have been. And then there were the undercurrents, the background thoughts, the ones that had become a part of my mind’s weather—the ones I didn’t need to think about to feel. If only the basketball had come off the rim differently, if only I’d left the gym after the first game. And, of course, Milena. There was always Milena. Just the cool echo of her name, from those dark woods of not-thinking, carried the scent of my room in Bologna, of the thin blue blanket on the mattress, carried the sound of her voice, so foreign and so familiar in my ear. I couldn’t allow myself to think about her. Couldn’t allow the thought that she had punched my ticket to the woods as much as the accident had. That year in Italy after college had made it so hard to return to Boston, so easy to get in the car and head west, so easy to begin the descent into solitude. It was the two together, a delayed chemical reaction, an exponential loss.
    But pushed from the room, my non-thoughts just slipped into the rain, and they gusted against the walls with tremendous force. The beams creaked. The floor seemed to pitch and yaw. The rain lashed at the window above my head. I imagined the morning sun finding me far out in the Atlantic, quietly bobbing, clutching a floorboard to my chest.
    I lay awake, trying not to listen, the pillow over my ear. So much for opening my senses, for expanding and slowing down. So much for using my extra sensitivity as a new compass, as a way to get down to something real.
    I wondered if I’d made a horrible mistake.
    The only timeline I can be certain of is this: Peter’s finger went into my eye around four in the afternoon; I left the hospital around two in the morning. Maybe with my sense of space gone uncertain, time had gone uncertain, too. Sometimes I rotatedexamining rooms, sometimes the doctors rotated to see me. Sometimes the wait was minutes, sometimes it seemed hours. Sometimes the waiting was a relief, sometimes it felt unendurable.
    The only doctor I remember clearly was a young Pakistani man, probably just a resident. The small examining room was rinsed with air-conditioning. The doctor introduced himself in a soft voice and extracted magnifying lenses from a case lined with red velvet. His fingers were gentle on my cheekbone. He took his time peering into my eye. Given the amount of blood, he explained, getting a clear view was difficult. Then he pivoted the large examining apparatus, which looked like a periscope, so it was in front of me. “Chin on the bar, forehead against the curved plastic band.”
    I pushed forward.
    â€œCome forward, please.”
    I pushed forward again. My eye was a peep show for his bright lights: pale blue concentric circles of light—that was to check my eye pressure. The terribly bright white light, like the headlamp of an oncoming train—that was to see in more detail. The doctor held my swollen eyelids open. It was impossible not to back away blinking. But the doctor waited. His manner calmed me some—an answer, it seemed, would be found. Then he brought out his penlight. He turned off the room light and had me cover my left eye with the palm of my hand. Again, he held open the swollen lids of my right eye.
    â€œI want you to tell me if you see anything,” he said into the darkness. “If you can tell when the light is on. Do you see