A Cup of Light Read Free Page A

herself drift. Her hearing aids were out and she was in an ocean of peace. She liked to reach back to this, her silent void.
    It was not until she was seventeen months old that she had been diagnosed and fitted with hearing aids. When they were ready, the audiologist pressed them in and suddenly the sharp, blinding noise of the world exploded in her head. She burst into tears, terrified. Nothing in her life could have prepared her to imagine sound. Later, of course, she came to love being able to hear—for what it was. To her it had its limitations. She also liked not hearing. She liked to lie like this, right now, with her hearing aids out, in the silence. The empty space had a soothing pressure.
    She remembered what it was like before. What she did hear was bloated, underwater versions of sounds—especially when people tried to talk at her. It was impossible for her to make any sense of the stretched-out, distorted noises that came from people’s mouths. She also heard what she later understood to be the tinnitus commonly associated with her type of sensory neural hearing loss—a roaring, a remote wind, an intermittent wall of interference. She wondered if
this
was a set of signals from the world around her, but it too proved unintelligible.
    Luckily the language of objects, with its patterns of form and color and feeling, made sense to her from the start. She started with the things in their apartment. Her mother, Anita, had loved things and constantly acquired them. She shopped, she walked galleries, she cruised flea markets and junk stores. She took Lia. And this in its way was Lia’s first tongue, the language of longing and being sated. By the time she started hearing, and others began to “fix” her, certain things in her were already fixed. Objects spoke to her with their form and their finish, their shape, their physical soul. She wanted to know and feel all of them she could.
    Yet even to understand the objects in a single room, in a single drawer, took such concentration. One leaf contained a neural branchwork of almost infinite complexity, as well as endless shades of green. External factors such as the play of light and the movement of air multiplied things further. Yet the object itself was constant. It stayed where you put it. You could study it for a lifetime, you could spend years knowing it; it would not change. It would still be there, be the same.
    At first she cataloged things by feelings. There was the white-lit joy in the round, perfect forms of her toys; the statuesque upward longing of the legs of a table; the
tristesse
of sun slanting down on her mother’s grouping of statues and vases and antique dolls. These became her first memory-markers. They led her, in her mental maze, to the rooms of memory that contained what she knew. This was always her system. It was right for her. Much later she read about how Seneca of Rome had been able to repeat back two thousand names in order, and King Cyrus of Persia had recited the law in twenty-two languages—and then she knew she was not alone. Remembering made sense to her. It was something she was born to do, even if it meant she was born in the wrong time. Some kids played sports, some studied piano; she worked at memory.
    She glanced at the clock. Seven-fifty. Driver at eight. She rolled off the bed and stood up and stretched and checked herself in the bathroom mirror. Her eyes were puffy. They were gray and expressive, but they had a sad downcast tilt to them. Swollen, they looked pathetic. She applied a cold-soaked cloth to them, counted to thirty, and pulled it off. Nope. The same. She gave up.
    She rummaged in her suitcase. Already things were spilled out over the floor. She pulled out a gray skirt and a long gray tube-shaped top. Had she brought any other colors? She pushed the disorganized pile aside. A flash of red, salmon, chalky white—yes, there were a few other things. Everything was knit, nothing wrinkled.