Steve woke up, or thought he did, to a feeling of closeness in the room. The curtains were drawn around the bed; he was in the top bunk, and there was a faintly luminous look to the thick air. He lifted his wrist, then remembered that his watch and his glasses were on the floor under the bed. He drew a deep breath, and parted the curtains. Hard to tell whether it was dark or faintly light; light seemed to swirl on lightness; the unaccustomed height of the bunk disoriented him. A faint quick flash, like a streak of daylight; he heard a sudden intake of breath, and a swishing noise. He blinked, and rubbed his eyes. The soft sparks of nearsightedness closed in on him. Impossible to see anything at this hour, and without his glasses. Regretting the inconvenience of hostels, and longing for daylight, he fell asleep.
Waking with the first white light, he realized immediately that he did not feel well –
shivery and feverish. Gingerly he stretched himself down from the upper bunk and reached for his glasses under the bed. At first he couldn‘t find them; he had to lie down on his stomach before he saw them, nearly back against the wall. He groped them out, and reached for his watch. To his chagrin he found that someone had stepped on it in the night; the crystal was smashed, the hands pointed to a quarter to three, and he couldn‘t get it going again. He was glad to leave the dormitory. He washed and ate hastily, and get out in the open.
The climb ahead of him was not one he had tried before. The mountain slanted, small and yet, it seemed, very sharp against the aqua sky. He adjusted his glasses; the sun was very bright; he put on his sunshades, which lent some relief. There were a few houses on the 14
path, but he soon passed them. When he got to the rocks, he was very sure; it all seemed right, almost as though he had been there before. This gave him a strange feeling. ―All right, and all wrong,‖ he thought, grasping nevertheless the obvious handholds. The sky was very blue, the rocks blacker than black through his sunshades. Above, a couple of birds whirled in space.
At the summit, just for a moment, he didn‘t want to look down. He stood with his eyes on his feet, holding his breath. Then he turned, and felt the dizziness that had been coming on him all the last part of the ascent. A feeling at once of constraint and liberation came over him; it was the sunshades: somehow, they worked too well.
He took them off, and the queerness of the mountain came in on him, the queerness of standing there at that height; the queerness of the rock, the nearness of it; the light at that altitude; the queerness of being free. And then he took off his glasses to wipe his face, because he had been seized with the impulse to jump -- to be really free. And as he removed his glasses, he was encompassed by the sky; there was no distance; everything was near, so near he could understand it, almost see it. The sky burst in on him; he was surrounded by the unknown, he was a part of it, near it; up here where there was no more distance, no further ascent, where everything was near, near as God or a mother, near as his wife, as life, as death. He could nearly see.
When he descended to the town again, it was almost night. In the lights of the cafes and houses, everything looked very real, very bright, as he always thought of a town at dusk.
But in the café, something wasn‘t right. The red tablecloth was too brilliant; the darkness behind the bar was too black. Something seemed to have changed his sense of color –
some light, some nearness – and to put this shoddy closeness to shame. He still felt slightly ill: no better, but no worse, than in the morning. A man sat reading a paper at the table opposite: he saw the headline, Knife Murder At Hostel, but he was more concerned with reading the man‘s face, which, he felt, he knew already, and yet which he devoured as though it were his salvation. Those black eyebrows, the thick underlip, lines at the corners of the mouth; the heavy dark hair his companion kept throwing back with his left hand, while his right hand held the paper (what day was it, anyhow?) -- looking at the man‘s features, he felt that everything had changed, and when the man looked up and signaled to the waiter, he felt that he signaled him, too, with a sign that he must change, to keep pace with everything else. ―Bring me a coffee,‖ the man murmured, and he thought, ―Oh, is that what they say, ‗Bring me a coffee.‘‖ He felt as though he had never known this before, and the stranger‘s ―Bring me a coffee‖ pierced him like a knife, right down to -- to depths he had never imagined, and yet -- weren‘t those depths his own, old self, the person he had been before -- before something had happened? ―I am ill,‖ he thought, and, paying his bill, he sought the hostel. He went into the dormitory and lay down on the first bed, the lower bunk. ―What day is it?‖ he thought, and, looking for his stopped watch, found that the date said June 26. When was that? With his glasses still on, blackness came closer, was all around him. With a final effort, he removed them.
Very shaky the next morning, and feeling that, with his glasses on, he couldn‘t see at all, he boarded the train home. ―Too old for this,‖ he thought, ―give it all up.‖ He minded everything about the train ride: the irritation of the prickly seats, the loudness of the children in the car, the passengers eating. ―I must really be ill,‖ he thought, as he went to 15
the end of the car for the fourth time for water. On the way back, he stumbled and fell against a middle aged woman sitting reading; when she looked up, he seemed to see, beneath her tilted hat, the face of his wife, but changed into someone distant and harrowing, someone who would ravage his soul -- and he wanted her to, he wanted her to expose the foul depths that were his heart, his personality. ―A slave to justice,‖ he muttered, and the woman said, ―Don‘t worry about it.‖
At home his wife tucked him into bed and lay down beside him. With his glasses on she had seemed strange, distant and forbidding, but without them -- in the room that also seemed lighter now that he couldn‘t see -- she seemed very near. ―I knew this once,‖ he thought, next to her cheek, which seemed huge in the dim green light, ―I knew this nearness, it was all around me, it was me.‖ And as he fell asleep he thought that, now, when he couldn‘t see, he understood.