Out of the dark

“You don’t exist.”

Someone said this to me recently. Someone who urged me to build this website. We’d been chatting about the internet and social media, and my stubborn reluctance to take part. No Instagram. No Twitter. A Facebook page rarely touched. It was being suggested that this very well could be the reason for the silence that came after sending some emails out to publishing houses and agents about the book I’m looking to place. I needed a presence, it was said. Without much of one in the virtual world, without followers, these publishers already had their excuse to say no or nothing at all, to move on before asking to read even a single page of the story. “These people, they need to see you, they need to know who you are…”

I have issues with this, I do. With anything other than the words on the page mattering at all. But well, fine. Here it is. Here is the website. Here is me trying, even if I come here dragging my heels.

I’d had a website once. For years. This was because a tech-savvy friend had built and run it for me. Me? I’m no tech savant, nor am I comfortable with any show — with the business end of being an artist, the presenting, the putting yourself out there. … My friend? He works for Apple. He was also my first editor at the college paper. And he’s someone who has tried to pull me, also, out into the modern world. You’ve got to put yourself out there — that’s his line, actually; that’s been his line for me always. And so he ran my site, and we made plans to fix it up again after a glitch had caused it to freeze.

And then one day, a glitch happened within him also, and suddenly he could not see.

Now imagine. Yes imagine, reader, a lifetime of light suddenly dimming, then blurring, then fading out altogether. Imagine the pain and the panic of that. Of emergency surgeries. Of having to feel for the wall. Of needing a hand and a voice to guide you. Yes imagine it all going dark, even the words on this page, imagine them fading to leave only the black, and the black then stretching over every thing, every face — even your own; we see ourselves in the mirror every day, we eye the flaws, we sigh. Now imagine that reflection, you, vanishing too. Imagine being able to see only in your sleep.

Since it happened, since my friend Jason lost his vision a year ago due to diabetic retinopathy, we’ve spoken nearly every day. We’re on opposite continents now so we reach each other by phone, and talk for hours usually, when it’s his morning and my night. We’ve cried together. Yelled together. Cursed. There are steps to these kinds of things, they say — steps to grieving. They say acceptance comes, that it’s the last step, but I’m not so sure we’re there yet. When will we really know?

But here lately, we’ve been laughing a little more. A lot more. And we’ve pushed each other — he, telling me to keep at it, to not get discouraged by the silence from those agents and publishers; me, telling him all the time to pick his guitar up again. See, Jason’s a musician and the guitar his instrument, it’s practically an extension of himself, a limb. But for awhile he just didn’t want to, or he couldn’t; whenever he tried it would bring about more pain, more tears. So he did other things instead. He listened rather than played. Listened to other music, to the world around him. To ballgames. Podcasts. To his friends and family. To me.

Jason was in the early pages of my book when his vision began to leave him. One of the last things he ever read was a scene in which I tell the story of how my grandparents meet. This happens on the east bank of the Wisła river in Warsaw, in the summer of 1948. My grandparents have each taken their dogs across to the other side of the river because back on the other bank, back in the main part of the city where they both live, there are ruins still everywhere, and the noise and the dust of a people and a place still picking themselves and each other up, still rebuilding.

On the other bank, though: silence. And some air to breathe. And sand. And it’s there where the two dogs find each other first, collide first. And so I tell this story from their perspective, from their colorblind eyes. I tell of them spotting each other, running to each other, and my grandparents catching up.

My phone rang. It was Jason. “I just want to tell you that I’m in the break room at work right now, and I’ve been reading the scene of how your grandparents meet. And I’m crying. I’m fucking crying and everyone here’s been asking me if I’m OK. So thanks — asshole.”

In the ensuing months, as Jason’s view of the world faded, I read him the rest of the book. We did this in person when I came to see him in New York the first time, and then the second time, and then over the phone. I believe the process helped us both. For him this was a different world in which to escape, another country, another time. And the sharper my words, the better he could see. For me, very quickly I learned that reading to him proved an effective way of self-editing — if I stumbled in saying it, perhaps there was a problem there in the sentence. And of course: Jason returned also to his role as my editor, telling me where he thought the story soared, or where it sagged.

Jason is in Seattle now. I’m in Warsaw. Further apart, but closer all the time. Our conversations go on, and the world still spins — however wobbly. Just this week he told me he was proud of me. That I’m actually doing it — this website, the putting myself out there. Through the phone he could also hear me rolling my eyes. “I know. I know you hate it. But I think this is good for you. And you’re learning a new skill. It’s a good step.”

Steps. Jason has been taking some, too. In recent months his fingers have felt their way back to the guitar, to those six strings. And two days ago he called to say he’d been working on something, a new song — his first new song since his old world faded away. “I recorded some of it, actually. It’s rough, just a first go, a work in progress. But anyway, would you want to hear it?”

The audio clip he sent over lasted one minute and fifty-eight seconds. Within that span I could hear my friend again, could hear his essence. And maybe then I was the one crying.

In this darkness, in this awful year, we have figured out how to lean on each other. Guide each other. Push. He’s the musician who can sing but can no longer see. I’m the writer who says he’s got a story to tell, yet hates for himself to be out there too much — to be seen.

Yet we’re here. Here somewhere, in this mess. Here somewhere, in this dark. And we’re reaching out. We’re feeling for the wall. We exist.