Free The Point of Vanishing by Howard Axelrod Page B

pounding of my heart would gradually subside, my chest rising and falling, rising and falling. I’d feel myself sinking into the coldness of the snow, into the quiet. The snow below me would gradually warm with the heat moving through my legs, through my arms, and the sense of my body would grow quiet, until I wasn’t thinking about the cold at all, as though my body had become a door that was open, the quiet of the hillside coming in and filling me in some way that kept me warm. It didn’t feel like I was floating or falling but only like there was nowhere to float or fall. I could stay this way for some time.
    Eventually, when I sat up, the hills and distant mountains looked different. The land felt oceanic, unimpeded in all directions. The frosted trees on the hills seemed to continue forever, well beyond what the eye could see, and the bluish, snow-capped mountains looked both very close and very far. The ease in the land’s movement, the way no part of it seemed divided from any other, accorded with the way I felt—with the way I saw. There was an organization to the land but with a wide margin, with no precise division of space, with no need of my hand or foot to turn any line solid. I felt at home, in a habitat that fit with my senses, as though some membrane had been dissolved. I was back in the world rather than outside it. And seeing this way felt like a kind of cleansing, an absolution, as though the land itself had opened to take me in.
    This wasn’t a good sign. I tried to blink it away, to look again, but nothing changed. Exam period had begun, and I was sitting on my bed in Adams House, my Riverside Shakespeare heavy as a small dog on my lap. A chair had scraped along the hardwood floor in the room above me and I’d looked up from reading
King Lear.
After a bit more scraping, the sound had stopped. But something was wrong with my ceiling. There was a shadow where the ceiling ended, and a hovering where the brown wood molding began. I waited for the shadow to go away, for my normal sense of space to return. But it didn’t return. No matter if I stared harder, no matter if I turned my head. The lines of the brown molding had a phantom-like quality, a margin for error. As though my ceiling didn’t begin in any one place, as though the plaster and the wood molding were no longer solid. It was easy to picture how I had seen the ceiling before—how sharp the division between the molding and the ceiling, how definite my sense of depth and space. But that configuration of lines, which had been tied in place as neatly as a present, had come untied. Geometry had gone off-duty. My ceiling’s
formality
, in both senses of the word, was gone. I couldn’t tell with any certainty where my ceiling began.
    In my two weeks back at school, I thought I’d already made all the necessary adjustments. Instinctively, I sat in the last row in crowded lectures, generally on the right-hand side, to have the whole lecture hall in front of me on my left. I walked up to class later than usual, so as not to be caught in the crush of so many bodies on the sidewalk. On rainy days, I trailed a little behind Alexis, Ray, and Andrew—without sunlight there were fewer shadows, fewer depth cues, and it was the best way to avoid the sharp spokes of umbrellas, menacingly poised at eye level, and also not to miss a curb. No one really seemed to notice. Finals were coming up, the rush of the semester was at itspeak. Especially once my eye healed outwardly and the blood inside it went away, my friends tended to forget—probably because they couldn’t
see
that anything was different. The Pakistani doctor had been right. He’d told me my eyes would move normally, would continue to “look” at the world just the same. The metaphor he’d used was a toaster oven with a broken cord: the toaster looks fine, it just can’t be plugged in. Which led to some strange situations.