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anything?”
    I could hear his breathing and the very faint rustle of his white coat. I could hear the clicking of his penlight, strangely loud, as though a whole auditorium’s lights were being thrown on and off.
    â€œAnything? Tell me when the light is on.”
    His accent was faintly British, his breath mildly freshened by gum. I could picture him standing there, could picture the look in his gentle brown eyes, as he watched my eye, as he waited for an answer. But in front of my open eye, there was just darkness—a dark tunnel, night in the darkest forest. I tried to focus closer, then farther away, but there was no closer, no farther away. It was the same kind of darkness I’d tried to imagine as a child before falling asleep—a kind of deep space, which for some reason I’d assumed would be relaxing, but then the darkness would usually turn into a blackboard, and random words would start appearing in chalk.
    â€œAnything?”
    The doctor was waggling the penlight back and forth—I was almost sure, from the rustling of his sleeve.
    â€œAnything?” His voice bounced off the chair, off the floor, off the walls. I had the sensation of being a witness, but a witness who had lost the authority to speak. I heard his penlight, his sleeve, I
saw
them. But it was as though, without the right type of evidence, my testimony no longer mattered. I’d fallen somewhere below the visual, somewhere that couldn’t be trusted.
    â€œNothing?” he said.
    His sleeve had stopped moving. The penlight had clicked off.
    â€œNothing,” I said.
    After a moment, the doctor flipped the overhead light back on; he wheeled his stool over to my left-hand side. He explained that the retina of my right eye was detached and that my cornea was badly scratched. Normally, these were problems that could be fixed. But the real problem, he was sorry to say, was that the optic nerve behind my eye had been severed. Peter’s finger had gone in past the knuckle and curved behind my eyeball, his fingernail slicing the nerve. The doctor showed me this on his ownfinger, pointing to his gold wedding band, which was a bit more information than I needed. Without an intact optic nerve, he explained, no information could be carried from my eye to my brain. Medical science did not yet know how to regenerate the optic nerve. Given the severity of the injury, he said, there was nothing that could be done.
    â€œDo you have any questions?”
    I did, but it seemed they weren’t in my head, just as what I’d seen of his penlight hadn’t been in my eyes.
    â€œAnything?” he said.
    â€œI don’t think so.”
    â€œYou’re sure now?”
    I felt a kind of vertigo. “No questions.”
    â€œWe’ll need to run a few tests. Do a CT scan to make sure there’s no blood in your brain. But there shouldn’t be anything else to worry about.”
    Nothing else to worry about.
    I thanked him for his explanation, grateful for etiquette for the first time in my life—for its small dignity when there was nothing else to say.

2
    Something was pressing into the bright stillness, a kind of approaching blur. Instinctively, I slipped through the tall grass to stand behind one of the apple trees. It was a mild day, the blond October sun touching off the loamy scent of the leaves, and I was barefoot—the grass cool and sharp in the shade. The truck noise interrupted the meadow first, its own cavalry of warning, and then the truck itself rounded the bend, a flatbed with wood slats on the sides. It jounced along the ruts, dirt rising in a slow cloud behind it. Watching from behind the tree, I felt my heart pounding, unsure why my instinct was to hide. I knew who it was. Four days earlier, I’d called Nat from Newport, his name and number listed on the back page of Lev’s manual. The snow was probably still another month off, and Lev had sold me the two cords of firewood