She remained drowned in darkness; yet it was a darkness where blindness was solely a symptom of extinguished light. Her conciousness drank it in.
Duende
The living tattoos drawn on the inside of her eyelids had a name: phosphenes. She’d happened upon the information by chance; a random page in one of the few books the girls could study. She read whenever she had the opportunity, which was not as often as she would have liked. Outside of training and performing, free time was scarce.
The encyclopaedia identified phosphenes as a form of optical stimuli: memories of light. Mental vision as opposed to physical. It was fascinating, really, how the human brain, in its impossible complexity, found it necessary to apply shape to its impulses; even during periods of blindness.
The result was an exhibition of harlequin daubings splashed across a closed-eyelid gallery, all via the brushstrokes of unconscious ingenuity. In moments, she would become such a phenomenon herself: an abstract form thrown into empty space.
The difference between light and dark was negligible. She knew that. Remove sight, and you created a wider canvas for the remaining senses. They thrived. Plus, one still had those dancing electrical impulses for company–relinquishment of the visual world could never be total.
In through the nose. Out through the mouth. She filtered breath, listening to the light breeze she engendered as her closed eyes continued to paint imaginary art.
The phosphenes performed for her; synchronised fireflies. Soon it would be her turn to perform.
On the other side of the door, her audience–
§
–the tired musician raised his left eyebrow. It was a response to the closing click of the door through which he had entered the room. Not that anyone could see the expression–he was alone. The lifting of the eyebrow, in its untrimmed and grey-flecked eminence, was a response to the transition from vision to blindness. With the tangerine hallway light now obscured, there was nothing but a darkness as indisputable as existence itself.
Though there was memory. That shone its own light.
The musician looked into the mirror every morning upon waking, yet within his current sightlessness, he failed to picture that face. He saw only the posed portraits containing his image over the years: decades of posters, cover art and paparazzi shots. The point of focus in all was, without fail, the lifted eyebrow. When did that pose become such an ingrained habit? Had he become a caricature of himself? With no light to see by, he focused on the familiar pinch and pull of muscles as they kindled movement above his left eye, which when lit would present as a thunderstorm grey. The expression birthed by the eyebrow’s pose would be overtly quizzical, he knew, with the wiry hairs sculpting the silhouette of a furious tomcat arching its back and drawing claws. Hell, in the perfect twilight of the room, and with vision dimmed to nought, he almost swore he could hear the movement of his brow as it climbed the ascent of his forehead.
A forehead etched with fresh lines each day.
Wasn’t it said that, for the blind, the absence of vision strengthened and refined the remaining senses?
He breathed in through open mouth and flared nostrils. Deep. He smelled–
§
–ashen scent. It was present only at the edge of her perception; an unremembered dream beckoning recall. Unformed. Aromatised cinders. Bitterness. A subtle, organic complexity. Burned leaves and homely yeast. Black pepper. Despite her blindness, she knew her precise position; kneeling before a closed door, as was customary before each performance. Beyond the door, the piquant odour would doubtless be more potent.
She inhaled with intent. In through the nose. Hesitate. Something else. A chemical tartness she recognised but could not immediately place. Varnish? Yes. The floor. She shifted her hips a millimetre to the right as her left knee rotated a quarter circle. The stubborn squeak of skin rubbing wood was confirmation the surface had been newly polished.
There was more. The lingering sweetness and subtlety of her own perfume. But she was familiar with that already.
Kaleidoscope waves and dots still flitted across her blind vision. She opened her eyes. They fled. She remained drowned in darkness; yet it was a darkness where blindness was solely a symptom of extinguished light. Her conciousness drank it in.
The dancer kneeled in the dark. Then she remembered. Years back. Cigar smoke. That was it. The–
§
–remnants of the Ecuadorian cigar he had smoked in The Mercy Seat before being led across the cobbled courtyard. The red-brick building he had subsequently entered had, according to historical records, once functioned as a bottling plant for a brand of locally produced spiced condiment; later, a drama studio. Whatever its history, the centre room of that timeworn structure was where the musician now sat–bathed in gloom and half-submerged in a leather armchair of grand vintage.
“I’m a huge fan of yours,” The Mercy Seat’s owner, one Mr Damascus, had said. “How about a smoke? Rolled in Ecuador. The leaf is a Nicaraguan-Peruvian blend. They only ever put a thousand of these up for sale.”
In the bar with the obscure name, the musician had taken the slender box from the man’s clammy pink fist without offering thanks. He then unpackaged and lit it himself. On a precarious stool at the bar counter, and before an audience of liquor bottles lined up in quarrelsome order, he’d let the smoke envelop him like a vaporous tear; lucid smoke that blushed and danced in the half-light of a dozen ceiling-hung light bulbs. The bulbs were rounded, and shapeless, and naked, and each contained two interlinked filaments that sparked like angels’ wings.
“The duet you sang with the actress, you know, the one who ended up in the nuthouse. That was a fucking demon of a song. I love that Old Testament-type shit, man. I mean, your newer stuff’s great too–don’t get me wrong. It’s just not got that dirtied edge. No offense meant. If anything, what you’re putting out now’s the sound of a man at peace with himself. Kind of happy.”
The musician had replied that no offense had been taken. He spoke the truth.
He had remained perched on the stool, his focus merely on breathing in the smoke, then watching it part like silken drapes under the stress of each subsequent exhalation. Dark chocolate. Vanilla. Summer flowers. A hint of spice, too. The music in the bar at that moment had been a rusty blues number underscored by a vinyl crackle. It fit the mood.
“Drink?” The owner’s voice was as threadbare as the song.
The musician nodded and asked for an Old Fashioned. In lieu of any visible serving staff, the owner retreated behind the teakwood bar and mixed the drink himself before placing it in front of the smoking musician with scant ceremony. A simple short glass filled two-thirds up with scorched liquid amber. Three rough-cut ice cubes. Orange peel and a single vermilion cherry impaled on a silver hairpin. Fruit and sugar and bitters mingling in duet with the malty scent of the cigar.
So the musician had smoked, and drank, and listened to music a half-century removed from the present.
“How’s the drink?”
As the musician offered only a theatrical eyebrow raise in reply, the man behind the bar had no option but to continue the dialogue himself.
“When you’re ready, I’ll take you next door to the red building. I assume that’s why you came. Anyway, a warning. It’ll be dark in there. Upon entering, just sit down. Take your time. And when you’re ready, you can count to five. Aloud. She’ll hear.”
The tired musician responded with a dry nod. He finished his drink and stood. The smoke from the cigar followed him like a torn cape; a shadow hoisted aloft by the–
§
–breeze, or at least a shift of air, tickled at her skin as she kneeled before the closed door.
“One.”
A voice. Not hers. But for her hollow breaths, she was silent as well as blind.
“Two.”
A lone syllable. Yet it carried a burdensome weight that wrote a memoir in its brief existence.
“Three.”
The voice stirred memory; the sensation was akin to a dirty silver spoon circling a mug of the blackest coffee.
On her eleventh birthday, her parents had sent her away to what they had grandiloquently described as a boarding school. She endured the place for only a single term before absconding and crossing the slate grey water to the mainland on a ticket purchased with stolen coins. That had been eight years prior to the current reality she inhabited. In the dark, and with the unknown man’s voice filling the unlit air, she was back on the boat. She saw what she had seen then. How the island had shrunk into insignificance until it was but a rock groped at by the ceaseless waves. And they were not gentle. She recalled the image now only because the memory of those waves–and their primaeval intonation–was not dissimilar to the tenor of the counting voice.
“Four.”
The voice was both overfed and starved; she guessed a man accustomed to having his appetite served, yet never certain what he actually desired. It stirred something in her: a rarely experienced sense of vulnerability. She considered her choice of outfit. Its starkness. Too much? Too little? A brief submission to the notion that somehow–through force of will or trick of fate–the voice had grown eyes; that it was watching her. Even through the door.
She had never felt this way pre-performance, or indeed, been so aware of the risqué artistry of her attire. And all because of the single voice, rolling in on the displaced air that wafted through the pencil-line gap between door and floor.
Blindly, she raised her hand. Blindly, her fingers curled around the cold metal doorknob.
“Five.”
Her wrist rotated–
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