I remembered having read somewhere that the blind didn’t smoke because, as speculation had it, they couldn’t see the smoke they exhaled. I thought I knew that much and that much only about blind people. But this blind man smoked his cigarette down to the nubbin and then lit another one.

‘Right side,’ the blind man said. ‘I hadn’t been on a train in nearly 40 years. Not since I was a kid. With my folks. That’s been a long time. I’d nearly forgotten the sensation.

Morit is like "Are You Okay" and Keiya stares at her all, What is Okay, what does that word even Mean, how could I possibly be expected to answer this question.

Keiya knows well the danger of getting into habits with others. Habit is a personal, litchy thing—rituals and shoes lined up just so.

Keiya smashes her entire body against a bulkhead, trying to shake free of the anxiety, the anxious fantasy.

I want you to tell me your perspective on eugenics

Well, sure, she's got her tablet, but it's not like anyone wants to talk to her, and it's too much of a bother to program the right phrases in.

She's been told she'd make a very good robot, all things considered.

shook my head. "Their restraints, their disease, the ward, their bodies .. .

Scars didn't bother me much. Disability didn't bother me. It was the act of self-mutilation that scared me. It was someone attacking her own arm as though it werea wild animal. It was someone who had torn at himself and been restrained or druggedoff and on for so long that he barely had a recognizable human feature left, but he wasstill trying with what he did have to dig into his own flesh. Thos

nd the cause of Duryea-Gode disease. If one ofyour parents was treated with Hedeonco and you were conceived after the treat-ments, you had DGD. If you had kids, you passed it on to them. Not everyone wasequally affected. T

"A new drug to control the self-destructiveness?"

My mother started to drift when I was three," he said. "My father only lasted a fewmonths longer. I heard he died a couple of years after he went into the hospital. If thetwo of them had had any sense, they would have had me aborted the minute mymother realized she was pregnant. But she wanted a kid no matter what. And she wasCatholic." He shook his head. "Hell, they should pass a law to sterilize the lot of us."

Two men and three women. All we had in common was our disease, plus a weirdcombination of stubborn intensity about whatever we happened to be doing andhopeless cynicism about everything else. Healthy people say no one can concentratelike a DGD. Healthy people have all the time in the world for stupid generalizationsand short attention spans.

r or later, oneof those others, finding my fingers and wrists bare, would take an interest in my chain.That would be that. I couldn't hide the emblem in my purse. If anything happened tome, medical people had to see it in time to avoid giving me the medications they migh

When I was fifteen and trying to show my independence by getting careless withmy diet, my parents took me to a Duryea-Gode disease ward. They wanted me to see,they said, where I was headed if I wasn't careful. In fac

So we kept on with it. His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now.

The blind man said, ‘We’re drawing a cathedral. Me and him are working on it. Press hard,’ he said to me. ‘That’s right. That’s good,’ he said. ‘Sure. You got it, bub. I can tell. You didn’t think you could. But you can, can’t you?

‘Bub, it’s all right,’ the blind man said. ‘It’s fine with me. Whatever you want to watch is okay. I’m always learning something. Learning never ends. It won’t hurt me to learn something tonight. I got ears,’ he said.

‘That’s all right,’ I said. Then I said, ‘I’m glad for the company.’ And I guess I was. Every night I smoked dope and stayed up as long as I could before I fell asleep.

‘Thanks, bub,’

It’s funny, but if I turn the TV on, and I’m always turning it on, I turn on the colour set. It’s funny, don’t you think?’

Robert had done a little of everything, it seemed, a regular blind jack-of-all-trades.

The blind man had right away located his foods, he knew just where everything was on his plate. I watched him with admiration as he used his knife and fork on the meat.

This blind man was in his late forties, a heavy-set, balding man with stopped shoulders, as if he carried a great weight there. He wore brown slacks, brown shoes, a light-brown shirt, a tie, a sports coat. Spiffy. He also had this full beard. But he didn’t use a cane and he didn’t wear dark glasses. I’d always thought dark glasses were a must for the blind. Fact was, I wished he had a pair. At first glance, his eyes looked like anyone else’s eyes. But if you looked close, there was something different about them.

I’ve never met, or personally known, anyone who was blind.

‘I feel like we’ve already met,’ he boomed.

Someone who could wear makeup or not – what difference to him? She could, if she wanted, wear green eye-shadow around one eye, a straight pin in her nostril, yellow slacks and purple shoes, no matter. And then to slip off into the death, the blind man’s hand on her hand, his blind eyes streaming tears – I’m imagining it now – her last thought maybe this: that he never even knew what she looked like, and she on an express to the grave.

It was beyond my understanding. Hearing this, I felt sorry for the blind man for a little bit. And then I found myself thinking what a pitiful life this woman must have led. Imagine a woman who could never see herself as she was seen in the eyes of her loved one. A woman who could go on day after day and never receive the smallest compliment from her beloved. A woman whose husband could never read the expression on her face, be it misery or something better.

She and I began going out, and of course she told her blind man about it. She told him every-thing, or so it seemed to me.

Her officer – Why should he have a name? He was the childhood sweetheart, and what more does he want?

My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeing eye dogs. Blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to.

She hadn’t seen him since she worked for him one summer in Seattle ten years ago. But she and the blind man had kept in touch.