Often, with little care or attention, a seedling of a wish will take root and grow across a windswept garden of unspoken dreams. It will sett ever deeper into the mind, its root structure wide and strong over the darkness of the psyche where it dares to exist as a hushed and secret desire. The subconscious will nurture this desire and feed it until it grows from a seedling of desire into a stalk of hope. And when that happens, a flower of dark faith is born, its root base entrenched deep into the hardpan of who we are, where a dry and unfed hunger is concealed from the killing frost of conscious thought.
Brian Goodwell lived in the light of such darkness, his mind forced to conjure the images from his faded memories. Were it not for his hearing, his sense of smell, his ability to taste, or touch, Brian Goodwell thought he might go mad. Wondered sometimes if he hadn’t already and no one had ever bothered to tell him.
Brian shared his life and his love with his wife Tess whom he had not seen in over eleven years. They had been married for only a year and a half when the doctor discovered Brian suffered from Retinoblastoma, a cancer of the retina. Both eyes were affected. When Tess came home from work that night Brian followed her around the house, trying to memorize every curve of her body, the angle of her jaw, the slight gap in her front teeth, the color of her hair, the shape of her hands, and the dimples in her cheeks when she smiled. They made love that night before Brian shared the news with Tess, and when he did, Tess took his face in her hands and studied it as if it were her that was about to go blind.
The doctor had said that surgical removal of both of Brian’s eyes would be the most effective treatment option. If left untreated, the tumors would travel up the optic nerve to the brain and death would soon follow. They sought a second, third, and fourth opinion. Tess wanted to keep trying. She would have sought a ninety-ninth opinion had there been time. It was her insurance from her employer that would cover the tests and ultimately, the procedure to remove her husband’s eyes. Tess worked as a hotel property district manager, her pay was good and the benefits, including their insurance coverage were among the best available. From a financial perspective, the procedure to remove Brian’s eyes would be painless. From a physical and emotional perspective, the procedure would be devastating.
The night before the surgery Brian and Tess stayed up all night. They turned on every light in the house, as if the flow of electrons through copper wire could beat back the arrival of Brian’s long and permanent night. With less than an hour before sunrise they walked back through the house once again and one by one began to extinguish the lights. “I want to go one more time from the darkness into the light,” he had said to Tess.
They sat on lawn chairs in their back yard and held hands in the false dawn of the day, and when the sun peaked over the horizon, Brian looked around the back yard. “I was going to put our garden right over there,” he said as he pointed with his chin. “Flowers and vegetables, and both red and green peppers, tomatoes, green beans. It was going to be beautiful.”
“It will be beautiful,” Tess had said. “You can still do it. I’ll help you.”
“You’ll have to help me with everything. Everything, Tess. I can’t ask that of you. I won’t.”
“Brian, don’t. Please don’t do this now. We’ll figure everything out. One step at a time. I promise. It will all be alright. You’ll s-”
Brian buried his face in his hands for a moment, then stood.
“Brian, I’m sorry, baby. I didn’t mean that. It’s a figure of speech.”
“I don’t feel like I’m losing my sight, Tess. I feel like I’m losing my mind.”
Now, a little over eleven years later, Brian Goodwell grasped the handrail and walked down the three steps of his back door and into the yard. Seven steps forward, then a ninety degree turn to the right, then nine steps more. The edge of his garden. He dropped down to his knees, then felt carefully on both sides to make sure he was lined up properly with the neat rows of vegetables. His garden was getting better and better each year. Tess had told him so.
The first few years had been a disaster. He would sometimes pull the flowers and vegetables by mistake and leave the weeds to grow and prosper. The first year, out of stubbornness, he refused to allow Tess to help him, and the net result of his garden that year had been six green beans, two smashed tomatoes, and one red pepper. But his sense of touch and smell had gotten better over the years and he now knew his way around the garden like the back of his hand.
At the beginning of his second season, Tess confessed to him that she had gone to the market and seeded his garden with produce picked from the aisle instead of the ground. Brian confessed to her that he knew she had done so because he liked to eat the tomatoes raw and had, one afternoon, bitten into one that had a sticker on the side.
But now Brian moved expertly along, feeling first for the stalks and stems of his labor before he pulled any weeds that tried to rise around the plants. When he worked in his garden, he thought only of Tess. It was Tess who had helped him through the last eleven years. It was Tess who remained true to him, who taught him how to be self-sufficient, who did not pity him, who not only told him, but showed him how much of a man he still was, blind or not. Brian loved Tess more than he thought humanly possible.
He’d run his hands across her face, his fingers barely touching the surface of her skin. Every night when she came home from work he would greet her the same way. First a kiss, then he’d get to look at her beauty with his hands. At first, right after the surgery, this worked well for him. He would picture her face in his mind as he ran his hands across her delicate features. But over the years, the picture of her began to fade to what it was now, a dim shadow of a memory, like an under-developed photograph, a ghost of an image. He sometimes thought he’d give his own life to see his wife’s face just one more time. In death he could look down upon her every day.
So Brian spent his days in the garden of his mind with a secret wish that grew unchecked, rooted deep in an unfulfilled desire that he cultivated into a depressive hope of death where he could free himself and Tess from the burden he had placed on them both.
When the Sids pulled the trigger, Brian got his wish.
When consciousness came it was in progressive, laborious steps as if I were walking up a steep incline on the bottom of the ocean’s floor. I couldn’t see because of the blindfold that covered my eyes, but I knew I was naked.
Naked in every sense of the word. My guns, my badge, my clothes, and my boots were all somewhere I’m sure, but they were not on my person. My shoulders ached from supporting the weight of my body and I could no longer feel any sensation in my hands, the bindings on my wrists tight against the cold steel. I found that if I stood on my toes I could relieve the pain in my shoulders for a short time, but then my legs would begin to tremble and buckle under their restraints and I would once again fall against the weight of myself, my body its own burden. To say at that moment my life was not rooted in fear would be an outright lie.
I am not certain how long I had been unconscious or in fact how long I had been awake before I heard the footsteps echo off the walls around the area of my confinement, their sound drawing close until I could sense a nearby presence and smell an odd mixture of cheap cologne and nicotine stained clothing. When I heard him start to move away, I said, “Who are you?”
When I spoke, the sound of my words stopped the man for just a moment, but then he continued to walk away from me, his footsteps growing faint until I could barely hear them. I counted ten steps in all from his hard soled shoes before I heard a door open and a voice say, “He’s awake.”
Tens steps. Thirty feet to a door. Tied to a steel beam and cross section in a wide open space indoors. A warehouse? I tried to think how to turn the situation around, but my options were limited, if not down right non- existent. Two sets of footsteps approached this time, and when I felt they were near enough I spoke again.
“Listen to me,” I said. “I’m a cop. I don’t know what you’re doing, or what you’ve got planned here, but I want you to know it’s not too late to throw it into park and just walk away.”
“You hear that,” a voice to my left said. “It’s not too late. What do you think? Should we just walk away?”
A laugh came from my right. I felt myself swallow and hoped the two men did not notice. I tried again. “Look, sometimes things happen and before you know it you’re on a certain path and it looks like there’s no room to turn around or go back so you just keep going forward no matter how bad forward may seem, but I’m here to tell you, it’s not too late. Listen to me when I tell you that. You had me out before I saw your faces. I’m blindfolded now. That means I don’t know who you are or what your agenda is, and I don’t care. Cut me loose and walk away. I can’t identify you, so no harm will come to you, I guarantee it.”
