Blind Man
It had been raining earlier, but was now stopping. The windshield wipers began to creak. They were now leaving streaks, instead of cleaning the glass. He turned them off and they quit, sliding weightlessly down into their hidden pocket.
He’d been on this highway for an hour, maybe, though it was hard to tell, they all blended into each other so smoothly: the exit sign announcing the shift onto the ramp’s stately decelerating curve; at its end a slow diagonal merge, then acceleration into the new current. It was hard to remember just how long he’d been on this one, exactly when he’d left the last.
He was, anyway, somewhere in Connecticut, on a high bridge over a valley. Below him lay the dense grid of a nineteenth-century mill town. Above the industrial jumble stood a handsome Venetian campanile of dark-red brick, a white clock face on each side. Its slate roof narrowed upward to a needle’s point.
The bridge stretched from one hillside to the other. The traffic, weaving a complicated pattern, prepared for left-hand exits ahead. The signs for this place, whatever it was, were now behind him. He might never learn its name, or the source of its lost potency, or who had thought to erect a Renaissance tower above the grimy brick labyrinth. All these dismal industrial towns were ghostly now, their energy dissipated, industry gone. All that outrage over intolerable working conditions: now there were no working conditions. Ahead, on the crest of a wooded hillside, stood a large white cross.
He’d been told not to think about it, not to go over and over it, but what else was there to think about? It was what occupied his mind. Trying to think about anything else was a torturing distraction. He was never not thinking about it.
At night he lay in bed beside his wife– also wakeful, also silent, her back to him in the dark–and went over it in his mind. It played there forever, an endless loop.
The soft blossom of smoke, like a sweet cloud of scent, drawn swiftly up through the narrowing shafts into the . . .