Just as we practiced yesterday at his house, Whitford gave me a wireless earpiece that he said looks something like a hearing aid. From off camera, Cecily turned her television mic off and turned on another hidden mic that sends a signal to the device in my ear. That way she could direct my hand movements as I recited the script, and all the while I look like I know where I’m pointing. Pretty clever, right? We thought so.
At lunch everyone agrees that we nailed the audition. But the winners won’t be announced for a few more weeks. By then, I will have already had my second operation. Or not, depending on whether they find a cornea donor. My future, or more specifically the future of my eyesight, lies with the destiny of one unfortunate organ donor. Somewhere out there right now, presumably, is a healthy person looking through a pair of functional corneas with no idea of the future that awaits him. I wonder what he’s looking at right now. A spreadsheet at work? A documentary on Netflix? The cracks in a sidewalk? He could never imagine that in a matter of days, someone else will be looking through those very same eyes. Or maybe it’s a she. Either way, something calamitous will have to occur in order for those corneas to become available to me. Is it wrong for me to hope for such a thing?
CHAPTER 16
The weeks tick by slowly. First I have to wait a month for the stem cells to (hopefully) be accepted by my body and begin to replicate into daughter cells. I still go to school, do my journalism work, hang out with my friends, and sometimes with just Cecily. But I never really feel completely there because in the front of my mind, right behind my eyes, in fact, is the uncertainty of my future. After the month of healing is up, it’s a waiting game. There’s a two-week window in which I can receive a transplant. If no corneas become available, game over. The procedure fails. So the wait is painful, that buzzing anxiety even louder in my mind. It’s tough to concentrate at school or on my homework. They seem so mundane compared with the breathless narrative of my mind. I sit in my room and jump at the slightest sound, hoping it’s the telephone with the call from Dr. Bianchi’s office. Finally, after almost two weeks, just as my window is closing, the call comes. A donor has been found. My corneas are en route.
This is a strange feeling, discovering that I might gain a new sense. I’ve gone my whole life without eyesight, assuming that I wanted it, assuming that my life would be so much better if I had it. But now that it might possibly happen, I’m actually kind of afraid. Afraid of all the stuff that could go wrong, the complications, the side effects, the chance of infection. And there are the difficulties adjusting that Dad told me about. The possibility of confusion, stress, headaches, depression.
Who will I be when I am no longer Will Porter, blind teenager? What will I be like? And the other kids in school—the hundreds of voices I pass by each day in the hall—what will they think? To me, they’re an undifferentiated and anonymous mass of chattering, but to them I must be memorable. I mean, I’m the only blind kid in the school. The one with the sunglasses and the long white cane that swings shin-whackingly wide through the hallway, the guy who occasionally makes wrong turns, who uses the girls’ restroom, and who’s trying to host the morning announcements. Will they think that I am a sellout, giving up the life I was meant to live, the body I was born with, not accepting my place and my condition and my community? Or will they accept me as one of their own, without question?
Cecily comes over and sits with me in my room the night before my operation. “You know what bothers me?” I find myself telling her as we sit beside each other on my bed. “Blind people have a difficult time because most people have eyesight. But if the whole human race had evolved without eyesight, we would have adapted to it. Like bats. That species figured out how to survive without it.”
“Bats?” That word seems to catch her off guard.
“Yeah, like bats. I mean, sure, if the entire human race went blind all at once tomorrow, the world would fall into chaos. But if it happened very gradually, we’d figure it out. We’d find a way.”
“I guess,” she says reluctantly.
Then I realize what I’m hearing in her voice: She’s remembering the incident in the hallway, when those guys called her Batgirl because she was hanging out with me. I don’t want her pondering the price she’s paid for being my friend, so I abandon the bat example and move on to a different line of reasoning, speaking quickly to distract her.
“You probably think blindness is really difficult, but that’s just because you have adapted to your situation. That would be like if Superman looked at you and he was like, ‘Cecily’s life must be so terrible because she can’t fly.’ He’s only saying that because he’s used to flying. He doesn’t know that you can get along just fine with the abilities you have as a normal human.”
“Are you having second thoughts?” she asks, interrupting my train of thought.
“I guess. Maybe. I don’t know,” I say slowly. “I mean, sure, I’m fine the way I am. But I think things could be better.”