Light in the Darkness

"I don't want to get personal, Al." My voice trailed off; I had no idea how to bring up the subject that interested me most right then.

He smiled. A very intuitive guy was Al.

"The eyes? No, Frank, I wasn't born this way. I was just a normal Italian kid—with the usual career choice; the family or the church. I picked the church—which pleased my mother very much, and certain uncles rather less. After high school, I entered seminary and, though you may not believe it, quite enjoyed my studies. Then, in my second year, I woke up one morning, went to the bathroom to shave, looked myself in the eye in the mirror, and passed out. I really had no idea why; I'd caught of glint of light in the mirror, but I thought nothing of it. I was lucky I didn't slit my own throat; the straight razor was still clenched in my hand when I came to.

"I've since learned to shave without needing a mirror." He tried to smile, tried unsuccessfully to recapture some humor, but the pain was unmistakable.

I felt for the guy. After what I'd seen a few minutes earlier in the street? I had to wonder what his life was like, what any life would be like without the ability to look another human being straight in the eye.

"I dressed hurriedly, and ran to the chapel. I was still late for morning Mass—for the first time in my life. It was in July," he continued. "Bright day. Lots of sunshine," He paused then, for just a minute or two, as Lorna had earlier, as though he were trying to remember something he'd forgotten—or give me the chance to do so—and for a brief moment in time, I could almost see that bright day in July with lots of sunshine.

Then that memory—if memory it was—was gone, as completely and absolutely as the three fingers on my left hand. I looked at him, uncomprehending, trying again to match pictures to the words.

"So I didn't notice anything strange until I got to the chapel," Al either didn't notice—or, more likely, ignored—my look. I tried to focus on the rest of his story, but the uneasiness remained. "The chapel was a small, old place that felt as though it dated back to Charlemagne, rather than to the first generation of Italian Catholics here in America. The chapel was always nearly pitch dark. Fr. Justinian wasn't going to waste a few cents on more candles—let alone that new-fangled, probably demonic electricity—so the only light in the place was from the two candles on the altar.

"I knelt in my usual place in the second row of pews, and tried to concentrate; I loved the mass in those days. But everywhere I looked, lights flickered on the walls, the missal, the few others attending, though I didn't yet understand that I was, in some sense, the cause of that. Fr. Justinian, though, made the connection more quickly than I had, and probably thought that I was trying to break his concentration as a prank.

No deeply humorous, forgiving, or affectionate man was Fr. Justinian.

He turned to look at me, no doubt thinking of a curse for me then, with a really ugly penance for me at my next confession. When his eyes met mine, though, he dropped to the floor as if he'd been polexed. All the other seminarians ran to help him. I ran out. I've not been inside a church since."

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There was the sound of grief in his voice, a sense of deep loss for his vocation, for the mass, for the life his eyes had taken from him. I looked down at my own maimed hand, then, and was reminded of what my life should have been. I realized that, different as Al's and my life had become, there was an unbreakable kinship of loss between us.

I tried to drive that out of my mind, for reasons that weren't fully clear to me at the time.

"Sunshine?" I said, as much to myself as to my new client, reminded of that one deeply disturbing word.

"Sunshine, Frank." He seemed completely unsurprised that, from his whole strange story, that was the one word in which I'd commented. "I can't remember sunshine, either. But I know that, for the first several years my eyes were luminous, they posed only minimal problems—outside, at least. The weather was bright out, Frank. For the life of me, I can't remember what that was like, or when it changed."

"All I remember is the snow, and the dim skies. Ever since the war." I shifted uneasily, realizing that I was walking into something significantly deeper than the snow several feet deep on the unplowed streets of my far less prosperous neighborhood.

"There must be some cause, for your eyes, that is," I said, trying to turn both my own mind and my client from the issue of barely remembered seasons other than winter.

"If there is, Frank, no one has been able to find it," he smiled, deeply weary. "For the first couple of years, I went to every ophthalmologist, optometrist, homeopath, acupuncturist, or any other quack I could find. I remember one—a pompous little bastard, barely older than I was at the time, who wouldn't speak to me directly. He spoke to his assistant who then conveyed the information—which I'd of course just heard—to me.

"I'd learned to warm doctors about the potentially deleterious effects of looking directly into my eyes, though not all believed me. For some reason, though, I seem to have forgotten in that particular instance. Honestly? I quite enjoyed when he looked dead into my eyes through the slit lamp and immediately fell backwards off of his stool. There was a rather satisfying crack as his head hit the concrete floor. I hope he was ok—I do. I really do," he smiled a deeply insincere and rather grim smile and chuckled with a malevolence that did not fill me with confidence.

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"After our fine and dedicated medical professionals had learned to examine me without looking directly in my eyes? They all came to the same conclusion. There's nothing there. Nothing wrong. There's no light. Nothing. My eyes are absolutely normal, according to every doctor I've seen, and that must have gone into the hundreds before I finally abandoned the pointless endeavor. The only really interesting response I received was from an Ayurvedic physician, an aged Indian who looked as though he could personally remember the Mughal invasion. He insisted that my eyes were a rare manifestation of previous karma, discussed in an extremely arcane Sanskrit medical text circulating only in manuscript and known only to that doctor and his guru.”

I laughed; I couldn't help myself.

"Maybe all of this is a rare manifestation of previous karma," I said, only half joking.

I liked DiGiordano. I was honestly pretty moved by his tale of woe. But I was again reminded of the absolute impossibility of the case.

I looked him as closely as I dared, and said, "I have no idea, Al, what you expect me to do. Vague memories of different times, of better weather that could just be meaningless dreams? I'm a detective, and not a very good one at that."

"You're not thinking of backing out, are you Frank?" he said with what seemed a mixture of fear and anger.

I stood up, shook his hand, and said, "No, I'm working for you now, Mr. DiGiordano." I don't know why I said that, though I did live to regret those words.

"I'm glad to hear it, Frank," he replied, with a tone that, again, did not fill my heart with warm feelings.

Maybe I had considered backing out. But after seeing that office, and the power the man obviously held? Backing out probably wasn't even possible.

I walked out of his office, towards the the lobby. I somehow found my way through the blindingly lit corridors without either guide or breadcrumbs.

I was pretty happy about that, actually.

I nodded at Sherry and was about to walk out the door, when she looked at me—with surprising gentleness—and asked, "Is Al—I mean Mr. DiGiordano—alright?"

"You know him much better than I do."

She looked down, oddly shy for such a beautiful woman.

"I do know him, Mr. McGill, in a way, but he trusts you—and he trusts very, very few people. He's been talking about you since he went down to meet you two days ago. It's as though he'd reconnected with a long-lost friend." That made me pause for a couple of beats. "He's really a great man, Mr. McGill, greater than anyone can see. I worry about him, sometimes. Underneath all the power..."

"He's a shy guy who just wanted to be a priest and serve God."

She smiled up at me. "You read people very well, Mr. McGill."

"Frank, please. We're informal down in my part of town. The Southside." I wanted to remind this very beautiful—and myself—that I did not belong in that office, that building, or that part of town.

"Frank, then," she said, smiling, and either missing my reference or unconcerned by my poverty. "If you need any help, with anything, please let me know." I wondered, momentarily, if that was some sort of come-on, but I could sense nothing but concern for her boss. "I don't know what's been weighing on Mr. DiGiordano's mind. I really do hope you can help resolve it."

"I'll do everything I can, Sherry."

For a moment, she looked as though she were going to cry. Then she thanked me. I took the elevator down to the street, hailed a cab, and went home to develop the pictures I'd taken of of Lorna and the chauffeur in the Caddy.

Hell, a divorce case—even one as ugly as Patterson’s—was an improvement on luminous eyes and endless winter.