Blind Sight Read Free Page A

“his” bedroom yet, even though his father introduced it to Luke with: “So this is your room.” For four days, Luke has been moving cautiously about his father’s house, putting anything he uses or touches back very carefully. Luke does not stand in his father’s house and shout, “Who are you? What does this mean? Are we supposed to love each other? Why didn’t you ever want to know me before?” Luke puts magazines down at the same angle he picks them up, flattens them into stacks, and says to himself, “I like keeping things neat too.”
    “What’s his house like?” Pearl asked Luke by phone the day after Luke’s arrival in Los Angeles. “Is it really fancy?”
    “It’s awesome. But it’s not, like, super huge or anything.” Luke looked around the living room where he was standing.
    “Well, describe it,” said Pearl.
    “Um … it’s really sort of empty.”
    “Empty? Like no furniture?”
    “No, there’s furniture. But everything is put away inside it. All the stuff. It’s really organized.”
    “So it’s impersonal,” Pearl mused. “Cold.”
    “Oh no. It’s really nice. No clutter. I’ll take some pictures,” Luke said.
    Luke is in the kitchen now, which has all new appliances. He admires the refrigerator particularly, which is full of food in clear containers. His father told him to help himself to anything at all, and so Luke forks broccoli salad into a green rectangular dish. Even the dishes are cool: Japanese style, he thinks. Luke munches broccoli, thinks briefly about sex, which he has never had, and then his jeans pocket rings. It is the new cell phone his father’s assistant, Kati, gave to him. (Kati, who, three seconds before, Luke was imagining sitting naked on top of the kitchen counter.)
    There is a text from Luke’s father:
Done in 1 hr. C U at home. Evrythng ok?
Luke smiles. Mark likes texting. Luke is not used to it because the cell phone plan allotted to him by Sara on his old phone has very limited texting. He likes that Mark texts him about ten times a day, sometimes with information, sometimes with an observation, or a description of what he is doing. Luke types back:
Great! See you then
. After a moment he changes this to:
evrythng cool! C U when
.
    Luke puts the now empty dish, the fork, and the glass in the dishwasher, closes the door, thinks, takes everything out and washes them by hand over the sink, dries them with a brown dish towel, restacks them in cupboards and drawers.
    Luke sees that somehow, in transferring salad from container to bowl, he has left blobs of salad dressing on the marble countertop. Luke grabs a sponge.
    Now that he is examining them more closely, Luke thinks that the tiny blobs of dressing look like cells, and the splattered threadsof dressing spreading out from the blobs look like the dendrites and axons that extend from a neuron.
    Luke separates a dressing axon from a neighboring dressing neuron with the tip of his index finger. He knows that the axons of neurons do not actually touch other surrounding neurons. There is a space between them, a synaptic cleft. This space is where information is relayed from neuron to neuron. Neurotransmitter molecules move across the tiny space (five thousand of which would equal the width of a human hair) to neurotransmitter protein receptors. Electrical signals become chemical signals, and are converted back to electrical signals.
    Signals, Luke thinks, sponging up the dressing. He thinks of Nana’s family Bible and conceptualizes the names as cells, the lines connecting the names as dendrites, the spaces between the names as synaptic clefts. Signals, he thinks again. Signals being sent. Signals being sent from a mother to a daughter, then another, then another. Electrical signals. Chemical signals. Luke decides now to take his father’s copy of
Fitness
magazine outside and look at it on the patio.
    It had taken Luke awhile to think through the ramifications of his ancestral history, but once he