Free Persistence of Vision by John Varley Page A

could not * * *, though that fact was not going to drive her away from Keller. She had told me that many times in shorthand and confirmed it in bodytalk. If I left, it would be without her.
    Trying to stand outside and look at it, I felt pretty misers= ble. What was I trying to do, anyway?
    Was my goal in life: really to become a part of a deaf-blind commune? I was feeling so low by that time that I actually thought of that as denigrating, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary. I: should be out in the real world where the real people lived; e not these freakish cripples.
    I backed off from that thought very quickly. I was nottotally out of my mind, just on the lunatic edges. These people were the best friends I'd ever had, maybe the only;; ones. That I was confused enough to think that of them even for a second worried me more than anything else.
    It's possible that it's what pushed me finally into a decision. I saw e -r future of growing Page 27

    disillusion and unfulfilled hopes. Unless I'°° was willing to put out my eyes and ears, I would always be 1 on the outside. I would be the blind and deaf one. I would be the freak. I didn't want to be a freak.
    They knew I had decided to leave before I did. My last few-, days turned into a long goodbye, with a loving farewell'
    implicit in every word touched to me. I was not really sad,, and neither were they. It was nice, like everything they did. They said goodbye with just the right mix of wistfulness and life-must-go-on, and hope-to-touchyou-again.
    Awareness of Touch scratched on the edges of my mind. It f was not bad, just as Pink had said.
    In a year or two I could have mastered it.
    But I was set now. I was back in the life groove that I had followed for so long. Why is it that once having decided _ what I must do, I'm afraid to reexamine my decision? Maybe , because the original decision coat me so much that I didn't want to go through it again.
    I left quietly in the night for the highway and California: ; They were out in the fields, standing fn that circle again. Their fingertips were farther apart than ever before. The dogs , and children hung around the edges like beggars et a banquet. It was hard to tell which looked more hungry and . puzzled.
    The experiences at Keller did not fail to leave their mark on me. I was unable to live as I had file:///G|/rah/John%20Varley%20-%20Persistence%20Of%20Vision.txt (22 of 24)
    [2/17/2004 11:43:30 AM]
    file:///G|/rah/John%20Varley%20-%20Persistence%20Of%20Vision.txt before. For a while Ì thought I could not live at all, but I did. I was too used to living to take the decisive stop of ending my life. I would wait. Life had brought one pleasant thing to me; maybe it would bring another.
    I became a writer. I found I now had a better gift for communicating than I had before. Or maybe I
    had it now for the first time. At any rate, my writing came together and I sold. I wrote what I wanted to write, and was not afraid of going hungry. I took things as they came.
    I weathered the non-depression of '97, when unemployment reached twenty percent and the government once more ignored it as a temporary downturn. It eventually upturned, leaving the jobless rate slightly higher than it had been the time before, and the time before that. Another million useless persons had been created with nothing better to do than shamble through the streets looking for beatings in progress, car smashups, heart attacks, murders, shootings, arson, bombings, and riots: the endlessly inventive street theater. It never got dull.
    I didn't become rich, but I was usually comfortable. That is a social disease, the symptoms of which are the ability to ignore the fact that your society is developing weeping pustules and having its brains eaten out by radioactive maggots. I had a nice apartment in Marin County, out of eight of the machine-gun turrets. I had a car, at a time when they were beginning to be luxuries.
    I had concluded that my life was not