When I wake up Saturday morning, I am immediately assaulted by insanity.
It’s like music, except with a thousand different instruments that are all out of tune. It’s like the taste of every food group at once, like the smell of all the cafeterias in the world.
Am I having a nervous breakdown? Am I dying?
And then I move my head, roll it to the side, and everything changes. Now it’s a completely different swirl of madness.
I blink.
And it all shutters for a second, shakes like an explosion inside my brain. I blink again, another explosion, like a single blow to a bass drum, like jumping into an ice-cold lake. I close my eyes, and the overload regresses, simplifies itself back to that pounding darkness I’ve experienced for the two days since the surgery.
I open my eyes, and the flood pours into me again, choking me with its power. I shudder, from my feet to my head, and it all changes again, shakes like an earthquake. I start to feel dizzy, and I fall on the floor, and my head gets lighter—this is it, I’m dying—and without warning I feel my stomach empty itself up through my throat. Vomit spills all over my face, and I recoil, which changes the world again. Then I’m coughing, and with each gasp, the torrent changes. I blink.
BOOM.
It breaks over me, a tsunami-level wave of sensory input.
I know it, deep down, below gut level, in the deepest region of my instinct.
These are colors.
I can see.
The colors shake and tremble, move in and out like a radio with a spinning dial. I retch again, bucking with the force from within. Compared with that pounding darkness I was experiencing, this is so much faster and louder and more stupefying. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced, a nonsequential mishmash of percolating aliveness.
The colors shimmer. They shift. They move.
I can see!
My eyes are working!
These are colors, and they are moving every time my head moves, and I can see them move, and I can see colors and movement!
“Mom!” I yell. “Help! Come quick! Moooooom!”
Within seconds, she bursts through the door. At the very moment I hear the sound of the door opening, there is a violent change in the colors, and seeing it causes me to heave once again.
“Oh my God, Will, what happened!?” she cries, her feet rushing toward me, the colors moving so wildly now that I close my eyes and fall backward. “Henry! Henry! HENRY!” she calls for my dad.
“No, Mom, it’s all right!” I say. “I can see! I can SEE!”
“Henry, call 911!”
“Listen, Mom!”
“Henry, get an ambulance! Something is wrong with Will! Oh my God, my poor baby, what is happening, what is that all over you?”
“No, Mom. Listen to me—”
“What is it—oh my God, Will, what happened?” says Dad, his voice going from loud to earsplitting.
Mom is hysterical, screaming from all directions at once. “Did you call an ambulance?” she yells.
“No, I—here, I will do it right now,” says Dad in a panicky voice I’ve never heard before.
“Dad!” I say. “Stop! I’m fine! I just threw up! That’s it.”
“What?” he asks, a little calmer.
“Look at me! I’m fine. It’s just puke. That’s all,” I say the words slowly, emphasizing each one, trying to get my parents to slow down and listen.
But my eyes are closed. I can’t let in the colors. They are too much. They overwhelm me; they’re drowning me.
“What’s wrong with your eyes?” asks Dad.
“Call the ambulance!” Mom is still screaming.
“What?” I ask. I try to open my eyes again, just a little.
“Your eyes—why are you squinting?” says Dad.
“Because, Dad. Because I can see!”
“You what?”
“HENRY, DO SOMETHING!”
“I can see, Dad! I see colors and movement! I can’t open my eyes, because it makes me dizzy. That’s why I threw up.”
“Oh my God,” he whispers. Then he snaps into action. “Sydney!” She keeps screaming about the ambulance. “SYDNEY!” I hear him grab her, hold her still. “Stop! Stop! He can see. Will can see!”
She quiets down, and after a long pause, says almost reverently, “Will… you can… you can see?”
“Yes, Mom, I can see!”
I hear her collapse on the floor and start crying. But they are tears of joy. I can hear that much. Tears of joy.
“Can someone get me a towel or something?” I ask. “I need to get cleaned up.”
I take a shower with my eyes tightly shut, afraid to let in the overwhelming power of new sight. After drying and dressing—with my eyes still closed—I make my way to the kitchen table by touch. Mom and Dad gather around. I open my eyes.
“Well?” says Mom. “What do you think? Do we look how you expected?”
“Uh…” I say.