What We've Lost Is Nothing Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    By the age of thirty-five, Arthur had gone entirely color-blind. So he gave up driving. Then he noticed the headaches, the eye aches. They came more often in summer, when the sun was high and bright, a phosphorescent light spearing his eyes. On winter days the sun glinted off the snow, casting shards of glassy light into his pupils. Sometimes those days were so bad he’d stumble into bed and stay there all day. During the school year, he began going to his office early and staying late; he never turned on the lights. He used overhead projectors in darkened classrooms and wrote in large letters on transparencies.
    The doctor told him he had cone dystrophy; self-destruct was the term Arthur remembered. His foveal cones, responsible for day vision, for fine detail, for color—for so much of the world—were self-destructing . Such drama happening in silence discomfited Arthur. He slept, he walked, he worked, and all along he had this terrible feeling of unconscionable physical theft. How, Arthur wondered, had such imbalances begun?
    He was officially diagnosed with hemeralopia. It was rare in American adults, rare among those not nutritionally or genetically predisposed to such a condition. So he had, at first, hoped that the color could be restored to him somehow. That he could take some pill, some vitamin, some exercises, that might restore his vision. The ophthalmologist gave him photo-chromatic glasses, which darkened in bright light, and told him to make sure he got Vitamin A. The doctor suggested Arthur carry a portable magnifying glass and a clip-on polarizer filter to wear over his glasses. Instead, Arthur went numb. In rebellion against what he believed was his physical doom, he tore down the curtains on the first floor of his house and burned them in his fireplace. The fire made him squint. Pride had kept him from replacing the curtains, and eventually he took to living mostly upstairs. He took a leave of absence from his tenured position at the College of DuPage, where he’d spent seven years teaching eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds, who couldn’t have cared less, how to diagram sentences. He refused to get large-print books. He tried to go on afternoon walks, but he could barely open his eyes; he had begun to blink, on average, four times a second, and eventually the pain was too great and he simply went to bed in a darkened bedroom for one entire summer. He was thirty-eight years old. Unmarried. Just tenured. And pissed off.
    One late-August afternoon, lying on his unwashed sheets, he began to hear the far-off voices of young teenagers returning from a day at the public pool. As their voices grew closer, he began to distinguish them not only by pitch and audibility, but diction, by the way they said certain words and phrases. By the emphasis of letters and how some words ran together and others seemed separated by more than a mere breathy pause. (Angela, cudid OUt! YOU cuDID out!) Arthur sat up in bed and listened. He began to wait for these kids each day, to listen for them, with a notebook beside him. He never saw the faces of the children, but their voices became as familiar to him as his own mother’s had once been. He listened for the rhythmic properties, the frequency and pitch, and tried to create a visual analog, a sort of written language, for the sound of a voice. The girl, Angela, seemed to front-load her sentences, emphasize the beginnings and then trail off. Her friend—Linda was it? Lynn? She spoke more quietly, but rose in tone the longer she went on, as if gaining confidence at the sound of her own voice. John ran his words together and had staccato phrasing, sometimes separating a two-syllable word with as much time as wholly separate words. Arthur ignored how words were spelled and instead wrote how they sounded, not phonetically so much as rhythmically. He realized, one day, that maybe this could be his purpose, maybe hearing