Eyes Shut in the Deepest Dark

The dark does not want to kill you. It wants you to keep looking. I stood at the bottom of Maren Skerry with my eyes shut and that one sentence in me like a bone finally set, and I did not open them.

I want to tell you what the dark you choose is like, because nobody ever told me, and I had forty-four years of the other kind to compare it with. The other kind arrives. The bulb blows, the power fails, the curtain comes down across half your sight without asking, and you stand inside a dark that was done to you, holding the shape of whatever it took. All my life I had lived braced against that dark, counting my light the way other women count their money, because it could come at any hour and it owed me nothing. But shut your own eyes, on purpose, at the bottom of the deepest black there is, and the dark changes its nature entirely. It is yours. You made it. You hold the switch of it in your own two lids, and a thing that has only ever entered by taking does not know what to do with a room it was given.

The whispering had faltered when my lids came down. It did not stop. It lost its direction. For weeks every voice out of the dark had come from somewhere, ahead of me, below me, just past the edge of the lamp, always placed, always a bearing I could be drawn along. Now the voices wandered. They came from everywhere and settled nowhere, is that a light, is that you, the same small questions, but blurred now, unaimed, like a congregation that has lost its precentor, and under them I could feel the dark itself moving, all around me, close, the way you feel a big animal moving in a barn. It was looking for the front of me. It could not find the front of me. A woman with her eyes shut has no front. She faces everything and nothing, and there is nowhere to stand a lamp where she will see it.

And here is the thing I had not expected, the thing I would laugh at if laughing were a thing I did anymore. For the first time in eight years, I was whole. All my adult life I have been a woman divided, one good eye and one ruined one, half a world of colour and half a world of nothing, turning my head all day long like a bird to keep the living half toward what mattered. Shut, my two eyes matched. The good one showed me black and the bad one showed me black and there was no seam between them, no patch, no coin of absence riding in the middle of my looking, because there was no looking. I stood at the bottom of the sea of it, blind as I had always been afraid of being, and I was even. Level. One woman, undivided, in one dark.

The window it had used on me all these weeks was shut, and I had shut it.

Then it lit its lamps inside my lids, and I found out what the siege would be like.

Phosphenes. I will give you the word, because the word held my hand down there and words are half of everything. Press on a shut eye and the retina fires. It cannot help itself. Starve it of light and it makes light, sparks and blooms and rolling violet clouds, light with no light in it, the eye's own machinery idling in the dark. I have explained phosphenes to frightened children on the morning of their surgeries, both of us cross-legged on the bed, press gently, see the fireworks, that is your eye talking to itself, it does that so it never has to be alone. And now the dark of Maren Skerry reached into my shut eyes and struck its matches there, in the one place I could not close, and behind my lids a warm square bloomed. A kitchen. A lamp. The soft gold edge of a door standing open, just there, just ahead, so near that my body leaned toward it before I caught it, because the body goes to the light, it has gone to the light since before there were people.

"Phosphene," I said, out loud, to the cellar, to the dark, to me. My voice came out cracked and small and I kept it moving anyway, a tongue that keeps moving keeps the dark out, my mother said so, and for once in my life I was doing as my mother said. "My own machinery. You are in my own machinery now, and I know every wheel of it. That is not a door. There are no doors down here. That is my retina being pressed on by a liar."

The square brightened. It grew the little details that break you, the steam off a kettle, a shadow crossing the gold, the sound, though there was no sound, my mind supplied it, of a woman moving in a kitchen. And I stood with my dead wind-up torch in my fist and my eyes shut and I named it and named it and did not go, and the not going was a labour, I want that understood. Every separate second of it was a thing I did, the way every separate lift of a spade is a thing a gravedigger does. Nobody digs a grave. They lift a spade, all day. Nobody refuses the dark. They refuse it now. And now. And now.

The torch was the last thing I put down.

I had wound it at the top of the stair until the dynamo screamed, and the dark had drunk it anyway, and I had carried the dead weight of it down with me the way you carry a thing you have stopped believing in and cannot yet bury. My whole life was in that torch. Four torches in my bag on the boat over, a keyring light since I was thirty-six, count your light, test every bulb, the long war my mother enlisted me in before I could spell my own name. And standing there with the false kitchen glowing behind my lids I understood that the torch in my fist was not a comfort anymore. It was a hope, and hope of light was the exact thread the dark was pulling on. As long as I held a lamp I was a woman waiting to see. A woman waiting to see is a woman looking.

I knelt, and felt for the stone, and set the torch down on the floor of the cellar with my own hand, gently, the way you lay an instrument back in a tray when the operation is over.

"There," I said to the dark. My eyes were running behind their lids and my voice had a shake in it and I gave it permission. "That is the last one. You cannot drink from me what I have put down. I am done carrying light for you to eat. I am done looking for you to feed on. Do you understand me, whatever you are. A woman came down here with no lamp and no eyes, of her own two feet, and wants nothing you can show her."

The kitchen behind my lids went out.

The voices came instead. It had worn faces for my eyes all these weeks; now, locked out of my eyes, it put everything it had into my ears. Esther first, close, so close, the clear high voice at my very shoulder, Imani, open your eyes, I am right here, I have the lamp, you only have to look, one look, why will you not look at me, you looked for me all your life. Then Priya, brisk and warm and reasonable, the meters were wrong, Imani, I have checked them, come and see the readings, you of all people believe your eyes. Then a man's voice, worn soft as sea glass, Donald Tasgall asking if I was the relief, asking was it morning, asking would I just look at the water, the light was coming up on the water, it was worth seeing. Two hundred years of them, layered back into the rock, all turned on me at once, and I stood in the middle of it with my lids down and my fists shut, and I did the thing I had come down to do.

I answered Effie's question.

What do you give a thing that wants only to be seen, but eyes. She had asked it on the radio in her dry psalm voice and said even she did not know, for witnessing was the whole of what it wanted and the whole of what it could never have. And she was right and she was wrong, the way scripture is. You give it eyes. You bring your eyes down into the bottom of its house, the two it has been reaching after your whole life, the good one and the ruined one, you carry them into the last dark there is, where it is all of it present and all of it certain that at last, at last, it will be looked at.

And you keep them shut.

Not taken. Not blinded. Not lost in the dark and straining, which is the meal it has eaten for two hundred years. Shut. Chosen. A witness in its own house who will not witness. Eyes, present and living and locked, an arm's length from the thing that has never once been seen, and never opening. There is no crueller gift in all the world and I had carried it down a cellar stair in my own head.

The dark understood it before I had finished understanding it myself. I felt the change in the skin, in the pressure on the small bones of the ear. The voices thinned. The great patient occupancy all around me came in close, closer than it had ever come, close as breath, and it had no front and I had no front, and we stood inside one another the way the sea and the night stand inside one another, and it was not patient anymore. Under everything, for the first time, I could feel it. Hurry. A thing older than light, in a hurry.

I put out my hands.

That was the last part of the plan that was still a plan, and it was my trade come home. Nineteen years an ophthalmic theatre nurse, and do you know what they never tell you about the people who work inside the eye? We are, all of us, wonderful in the dark. The instruments are laid the same way every time so the hand can find them without the eye. I have counted swabs by touch under drapes. I have threaded needles more or less blind while a surgeon swore softly over my head. My whole working life, while I built walls of lamps against the dark, my hands were quietly learning to live in it. My eye was the wound. My hands were never afraid.

And in all these weeks, in all its showings and singings and its lamps and faces, the dark had never once touched me.

It could not. I saw the shape of that now, sharp as a slide under focus. To touch is to be touched. A thing cannot lay itself against your skin without telling you, in the same instant, exactly where it is, and where it stands is the one fact it cannot afford to be certain anywhere. It was made of maybe. It lived in the gap between what you saw and what was there. It could wear any face in the world in my eyes, and it had no hands.

Whatever my hands found down here would be real.

So I walked forward into the throat of the rock with my eyes shut and my arms out, and I read the dark with my fingers the way I have read a tray of instruments, and the dark could do nothing about it at all. Wet stone, colder than any fridge. The far wall, streaming, and under my fingertips, low, at the height of a child, the scratches, IS THAT YOU, IS THAT YOU, the grooves worn soft at their edges by water and years, and I laid my palm flat over the words the way you lay a hand on a fever and I said, out loud, steady now, "Yes. It is me. I am here, and I am not looking for you, my love. I am reaching."

And low in the black, below the words, small and cold and real, a hand came into my hand.

Not the hand from the doorway, pale in the torchlight, waiting to lead me anywhere. There was no leading in it. It was thin, and it was freezing, thirty-five years of freezing, the soft creases of a nine-year-old's palm gone papery under my thumb, and it did not pull me toward any light. It simply closed around my fingers with the grip of something that has waited longer than a life to be held, and held on.

I held on back. With everything. With the grip I did not have on a stair in Handsworth when I was nine and frightened and my hand went slack in the dark, I held my sister's hand at the bottom of the world and did not let go, and all through the rock, in every voice it had ever taken, in Priya's voice and Donald's voice and the voices of two hundred winters, and last of all, God help it, in mine, the deepdark began to beg.

Open your eyes, it said. Look at me. Look.