The Hermit's Story by Rick Bass (the best ebook reader for android txt) 📕

Jerry poured a cup of coffee and a glass of juice and slid them into Jim’s view, the eight-inch circle of straight-downward vision between his tipped head and the tabletop, and fixed him a little bowl of yogurt and cereal, which Jim ate slowly, noisily, still staring, of necessity, at that space right in front of and beneath him. Waiting and wondering about the future, as he crunched the dry cereal, his rear teeth grinding and clacking on it like the jaw-gnashers in hell’s lowest reaches.

“It’s good of you to do this,” Jim said. “I really appreciate it.”

“It’s nothing,” Jerry said. “I’m glad I can help out.”

…

Jim was more subdued that morning and allowed Jerry to lead him around by the arm and to accompany him to his checkup. While they waited for Dr. Le Page, a nurse came in and cleaned out Jim’s eye, taking off the old patch and squeezing some salve into the eye—leaning over and into him like a garage mechanic working under the opened hood of a truck or car. As she leaned nearly upside down to reach him, her breasts pressing into his lowered face as she worked, it appeared that she was trying to pull his face to her chest and comfort him.

In applying the salve to his eye, the nurse dislodged the bubble slightly—Jim never felt it move, nor did his vision change in any way, but suddenly all of the pent-up tears from the previous evening came flooding from the eye like water from a hose, and watery, teary snot streamed from his nostrils, and the nurse went and got tissue. Tears kept gushing from Jim’s eye, and when Dr. Le Page came in and saw this he frowned and took Jim’s face in both hands and jiggled his head slightly but firmly. The bubble repositioned itself, and almost immediately the flow was shut off.

Dr. Le Page peered and probed with mirrors and special flashlights before nodding firmly and patting Jim on the back of the head.

“I did a good job on that one,” he said. “I might have filled the bubble a little full, which is probably what’s causing the increased discomfort you’re experiencing, but I wanted to be sure. Six more days,” Dr. Le Page said. “It’s all going to be all right,” he said. “You’ll be like a new man. You won’t ever see twenty-twenty out of that eye again, but your sight will return to you. It should start getting better even by the end of the week. Six more days,” he said, and shook hands with them both and sent them on their way, with the morning still young and half a hundred other patients still waiting in line behind them to see him that day, and then as many the next day, and the next.

…

On the drive home, both men were quiet, listening to the morning radio. Jim rode with his head tipped down, concentrating on not vomiting. He wanted nothing more than to get home to his cabin, build a small fire in the stove, and sleep. If he could, he would like to sleep the whole remaining six days, and longed for some pill or prescription that would allow him to do this: to by-pass the recuperative time and instead slumber away that expanse of time as would some creature hibernating beneath a dense winter shell of snow and ice.

Jerry was depressed as always by the endless bounty of strip malls that formed the fabric of the journey between Spokane and Coeur d’Alene—but finally, after a couple of hours of traffic lights, Costcos, Pizza Connections, and Kmarts, they were back into the country and heading home, and Jerry began to relax, knowing that even if he was not returning home to love, he was at least returning to beauty; as the sun rose higher, burning off the morning’s valley-bottom fog, he felt again both a guilt and a gratitude for having been blessed with good eyesight.

The day seemed extraordinarily beautiful to him—the longer-rayed sunlight of early spring was so much softer and richer than had been the short blunt light of winter—and, though trying not to feel Pollyanna-ish, he took it upon himself to comment to Jim on all the beautiful things he was seeing: to be Jim’s eyes for him that day. To remind Jim of all the beauty that he had to look forward to upon his recovery.

It all looked so dreamlike to him that day. An old red hay truck, goggle-eyed and coming up the road toward them, listing under the burden of immense round bales of hay. The new sunlight on the yellow straw of the hay as the truck passed. So much color.

The snowy white crown and tail of a mature bald eagle wheeling above them in the cerulean sky, framed by the emerald forest beyond.

“Would you look at that,” Jerry heard himself exclaiming.

In Sandpoint, a logging truck crossed the road in front of them, loaded with such behemoths that it had taken only five logs to fill the trailer—old growth Douglas fir, with chartreuse clusters of lichens still clinging to the bark of the newly cut logs and sap still oozing from their cuts, glistening like sugar glaze in that new light.

“There’s a sight you don’t see every day anymore,” Jerry said, referring to the size of the logs.

Jim said nothing, not even a grunt, and instead continued to ride silently, holding his aching head in his hands.

Jerry remembered what Dr. Le Page had said about the bubble’s slow dissolution—how it would be absorbed into Jim’s bloodstream, and then into the lungs, before being emitted as breath, as exhalation, so that Jerry was breathing in the dissolved gas of Jim’s eye bubble, there in the cab of the truck.

Jim continued to ride in silence, head down, eyes squeezed shut. Jerry glanced at him and then back at the road, and tried to hold on to the sunny optimism that