Chapter 39: The
First Light
The first operation lasted
nearly eight hours.
Before they wheeled him into
the operating room, Khai Minh lay still on the bed, hands folded over his
stomach. The doctor had explained it to him three times: the surgery came with
no guarantee his sight would return.
The immediate goal was only to
operate on the damaged region, stimulate whatever portion of the nerve could
still respond, and assess his chances of recovery.
“Worst case?”
Khai Minh asked.
“No change at all.”
“And worse than that?”
“The damage could deepen.
Whatever faint response is left in the optic nerve could be lost completely.”
Khai Minh smiled thinly.
“I didn’t know I still had
anything left to lose.”
The doctor said nothing more.
Hoa stood beside the bed and
pressed the watch into his hand.
“You can’t take it into the
operating room.”
Khai Minh closed his fingers
around its face.
“Keep it for me.”
“I will.”
“If I don’t wake up..”
“You will wake up.”
“I said if.”
Hoa’s hand tightened around the
watch.
“Then I’ll keep it until you
come and take it back yourself.”
Khai Minh fell silent.
The doors to the operating room
swung open. The bed began to roll. The doors closed between them.
When Khai Minh woke, the first
thing he knew was pain.
Not in his eyes.
It started behind the sockets,
drove deep into his skull, then ran burning down one side of his face. Every
heartbeat sank a hot needle into the nerve.
He reached up, and a hand
caught his wrist.
“Don’t touch the bandages.”
Hoa’s voice, close to the bed.
“What time is it?”
“Almost morning.”
“How long was the operation?”
“Over ten hours.”
“Any results?”
“The doctor says we have to
wait.”
Khai Minh closed his eyes.
Behind the thick bandages there
was only the same solid black. No different from the man he’d been before the
surgery.
Three days later, the doctor
removed the first layer of bandages.
The room lights had been dimmed
as low as they would go. Khai Minh sat on the bed, his hands trembling faintly.
“I’ll take them off one layer
at a time.”
The doctor said.
“If there’s pain, tell me at
once.”
The last layer came away.
Khai Minh opened his eyes.
Nothing. Darkness still lay
over everything, wall to wall.
Beside him, Hoa hardly dared to
breathe.
“Do you see anything?”
The doctor asked.
“No.”
“Not even a trace of light?”
“No.”
The doctor raised a penlight.
Khai Minh’s head snapped away.
A stab of pain lanced through
his eye and tore a sound out of his throat. His hand flew up, but Hoa caught it
and held on.
“Khai Minh!”
“Let go.”
“You can’t touch your eyes.”
“Let go of me!”
He wrenched hard. His elbow
caught the instrument tray and sent it crashing to the floor.
The doctor switched off the
light. The room sank back into darkness. The pain loosened its grip.
Khai Minh sat gasping, cold
sweat sliding down his temples.
“Pain in response to light
means your visual system is still answering.”
The doctor said.
“All I felt was the pain.”
“That isn’t sight yet. But it’s
the first response we’ve had.”
Khai Minh turned his face to
the wall.
In the weeks that followed, his
progress crept forward so slowly it was almost impossible to see.
He could tell whether the room
lights were on or off, nothing more. Strong light sources smeared into vague
white streaks with no shape at all. If he strained to focus too long, the pain
in his head turned savage; more than once, he vomited in the middle of a
session.
Hoa was there for every one of
them.
She read the numbers off the
eye charts, walked him up and down the corridor, set objects of different
brightness in front of him and asked:
“Can you make out anything?”
“No.”
“Look again.”
“Still nothing.”
“You looked for two seconds.”
“Two seconds is enough to know
there’s nothing there.”
“The doctor said to keep your
eyes open longer.”
“Since when are you a doctor?”
“Since you stopped
cooperating.”
Khai Minh turned his face away.
“I’m not your patient.”
“Then find your own way back to
your room.”
Hoa released his arm.
Khai Minh stood stranded in the
middle of the corridor.
He had no cane. Every distance
in this place was foreign to him. Footsteps, the hum of air conditioning, the
rattle of carts, sounds crossed and echoed from every direction, and the
hearing that had kept him alive for years suddenly wasn’t enough to find a path
through them.
“You’re doing this on purpose.”
“Yes.”
“You think this is going to
make me grateful?”
“No. I just want you to
see the world again. All of it.”
Khai Minh stood motionless a moment.
Then he stepped forward.
His foot struck the wall. He
corrected, took three more steps, and walked into a chair.
Hoa didn’t move to catch him.
Khai Minh ground his teeth and
kept feeling his way.
By the time his fingertips
found a door, the back of his shirt was soaked through.
“Is this my room?”
“Yours is on the left.”
His hand curled into a fist.
Hoa laughed—a small, escaped
sound. It had been years since he’d heard laughter and not felt it aimed at
him.
Time passed. The smears of
light before his eyes slowly gained edges.
He learned to place the window
first. Then the shapes of people moving. Everything remained blurred and
doubled, layered over itself like images under water.
One afternoon, Hoa set his
mother’s watch on the table.
“Try looking at this.”
“I already know what it looks
like.”
He opened his eyes. Before him
floated a pale, rounded shape. Its rim caught the light, and at its center sat
a patch of darker color.
Khai Minh bore down and
focused.
The pain woke behind his eye
sockets.
The image shivered, swimming
near and far. He was on the verge of shutting his eyes when the patch at the
center of the watch face suddenly sharpened.
Not black.
Not gray, either.
“Blue.”
His voice shook.
Hoa stared at him.
“You can see it?”
“The watch face..”
He blinked. The image blurred
again, but the color stayed.
“It’s blue.”
Hoa smiled, her eyes rimmed
with red.
Khai Minh picked up the watch
and pressed it into his palm.
In his memory, his mother was
bending over the strap, adjusting it, saying:
“When the time comes, you’ll
know.”
After ten years of darkness,
the first thing he truly saw was not his own face, not the room, not the sky.
It was his mother’s last gift.
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