Free Now I See You by Nicole C. Kear Page A

here?”
    After curtain call, while the rest of the cast rushed out of costume, excited to start celebrating, I undressed slowly. None of my castmates had seen my fall or paid much attention to the hiccup with my lines but still, I seared with embarrassment.
    The blow hadn’t been just to my throat. It always happened the same way; I’d go days, weeks, or months even, without thinking about the encroaching blindness, until it almost felt as if the whole thing had been a long, drawn-out nightmare, and then suddenly, I’d be reminded. It was never a gentle reminder either but a full-on assault, like Fate was bitch-slapping sense into me.
    You can run but you can’t hide, Fate hissed. This is not going away .
    It didn’t help my morale that these reminders tended to happen in the theater, thanks to the industry’s insistence on blackouts in between scenes. Everyone else just followed the trail of glow tape to exit and enter the stage but that pale illumination was worthless to me. In the blackouts, it was near impossible to get myself on and off the stage what with everyone else running around and moving the furniture that I typically relied on to orient myself in the dark.
    Once I’d gotten tangled in a backdrop in the middle of a performance. Once I’d stepped right off the front of the stage. Often, I’d been frozen, stuck onstage, unsure where to go, until a puzzled set runner grabbed my hand and pulled me off. I felt like a piece of furniture someone needed to be responsible for moving. It would have been easier had I told people about my night blindness but I’d tried that once and the director had raised his eyebrows and said: “You’re night blind and chose a career in the theater?” which embarrassed me into keeping my mouth shut in the future. It was hard enough to get, and keep, work without revealing that you needed special accommodations.
    And now here I’d gone and nearly broken my neck on opening night. It was folly, I thought as I combed out my beehive, to keep pretending like this.
    But since I wasn’t ready to either quit or risk discrimination by confessing my limitations, my only option was to get royally pissed off. If Fate wanted a fight, I’d give her one. I applied war paint in the form of Russian Red lipstick and rouge. I suited up for battle with four-inch heels, a low-cut slip dress, and a black feather boa which concealed the bruise purpling on my neck. As a finishing touch, I decided to leave on the fake lashes; they made me feel protected somehow, powerful. When I walked out of the dressing room, my heels struck the floor so hard I imagined the wood beneath my feet splintering.
    On the walk over to the cast party on Jane Street, I stopped into a bodega to buy a pack of Marlboro Lights. I wasn’t a smoker really, but I did keep a pack in my purse, mostly as an accouterment. I’d found that I sometimes needed a minute to orient myself, especially when I entered dark spaces, and rather than just stand there blinking like a moron while my eyes tried to adjust to the lack of light, I’d taken to busying myself with a cigarette. It was a cover, and a good way to meet guys, too.
    Unfortunately, on a recent trip to my retinal specialist, Dr. Turner, I’d learned that cigarette smoking depleted the lutein in my eyes. She wasn’t real clear on what that was or why I needed it but she was clear on the fact that my retinas were already shot to shit and it was pretty idiotic to knowingly make them worse.
    Dr. Turner was a big proponent of parsing out info on a need-to-know basis. This was one of the reasons I didn’t much like her, since, as a patient with a functional brain, I preferred being granted access to my medical information. The other reason I didn’t like her was that she had as much heart as the Wicked Fucking Witch of the West.
    I’d started seeing her about a year or two after I was diagnosed and she’d prescribed a medication to help shrink edemas in my eyes that might be