A/N: Written for the Extra! Extra! contest. I JUST REALIZE I COULD POST THIS HAHAHAHAHAHA.
The article I based it on is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/magaz ... ner-t.html
Aaaaand the story.
IN THE [INSERT APPROPRIATE SENSORY ORGAN] OF THE BEHOLDER
The first subject's apartment was extremely open.
Upon seeing it, Sander did not actually take a startled step back, but he did redistribute his weight as if he were about to, his knees unlocking under him. Somehow he had expected the homes of the blind men to be poorly lit and perhaps low-ceilinged in the bargain. The kind with drawn damp curtains that did not dry from laundering to laundering. As it happened his own maternal grandfather had lived in a house of that character, and while he did not remember his grandfather in any great detail-- there was some long-standing disagreement between his mother and him, and Sander had been taken to visit him perhaps twice a year at most-- he retained a reasonably clear impression of the way the man had moved: gingerly, holding his body in such a way as to ensure that he did not brush up against anything more solid than he was. This uneasiness was what he really associated with blindness, of course, Sander would decide, later, blindness in this case a catch-all word for the practical difficulties of navigating a space using evidence gathered through senses other than sight. The house and its dense shadows and limp curtains, he would decide, had merely formed a frame for the conceptual linking.
Later. Later he worked it all out to his own satisfaction. But there on the doorstep little pockets of surprise popped in his mind, one after the next, as he pivoted slightly on his heels (his neck ached too much to twist; it had been a long drive) to complete his initial impression of bright space.
He noted, again, the extreme openness of the subject's apartment.
Its layout involved no walls or subdivisions. A few folding screens of varying degrees of translucency; that was it. And a very high ceiling, arched in places. A great deal of space, all unbroken.
The air still but not stale on the bare skin of his face.
And there was, yes, plenty of light, moving through the cool motionless air in a loose pale weave: cottony parallelograms of it lay thin on the floor, and fattish blobs welled up at the bright edges of mirrored surfaces, disappearing if he closed one eye only to reappear halfway along the length of another shining thread, like the round lumps that often form in wool if a novice is spinning it at an uneven rhythm. After a month of cleaning up his girlfriend Marit's attempts to find a purpose for the handloom she had bought at Ikea in a drunken shopping spree, Sander was very familiar with this phenomenon, as Marit preferred to call it.
Like most intelligent but timid people, (he thought; in fact it should have been 'like most people') Sander found it helpful to do this, to take the new image and put it in terms he understood. He sometimes worried about the extent to which his girlfriend’s eclectic and shortlived hobbies gave shape to his viewing of the world, but not right then; then it was a comfort and not to be sniffed at.
“Good morning,” the blind man said.
He was sitting at a circular glass table with cast-iron legs in the kitchen area that the door opened onto. No place had been set for him, and he appeared small, there, with light splitting around him as fibers around a shuttle and his shadow pulled long across the tiles of the kitchen's floor, its wispy head separated from the body by the shallow gritty furrow where tiles changed over to hardwood planking. His pullover might have been either dark blue or black: it was large for him and hung in heavy, almost cartoonishly rounded folds off his limbs.
In one hand he held a half-eaten apple fritter. Little white crusts of glaze glinted in the deep corners of his mouth.
“Are you the researcher?” he asked.
“His assistant, actually,” Sander said. He smiled; remembered; stopped smiling. The blind man inclined his head in such a way that it appeared he was staring at Sander's mouth behind his sunglasses, and for a brief panicky moment Sander thought that perhaps there had been a mistake, and this man was not blind at all, and was dumbfounded by the tense contractions of Sander's face. Then he realized that the man was simply directing his attention at the source of the sound. He coughed. “Yes. Sander Arons is my name. And you are Mr. Bastiaan Visser, correct?”
“I am,” the man said.
“Would you mind if I brought the equipment for the experiment into the house, Mr. Visser?” Sander asked, stuttering a little on the rehearsed words. Sander would not, personally, have thought to ask, but he was glad, standing there, that Professor Karremans had suggested it. It was not comfortable to look at a home, another person’s home, and know that the person who lived there had never seen what you saw, and it made him eager to get explicit permission for all his other intrusions.
The man paused to consider it; not in a perfunctory way, Sander thought. It was difficult to read the small shiftings of his face. He was fifty-six years old, according to the survey he had filled out, and his cropped hair was not so much graying as grayed, but he looked younger than his reported age. The wrinkles in his lean face were faint like the tracks of birds on dry sand, and the fleshy parts of his flat cheeks did not have the looseness characteristic of fifty-and-over Anglos. Possibly this was a result of never really having a reason to form expressions, and thus never overworking the small muscles around his mouth and eyes (particularly eyes); possibly blankness was a side effect of congenital blindness.
Sander carefully ended this train of thought, since Professor Karremans’ advice was not to speculate while conducting the research. He made note of it, though; he suspected that he would want trivial distractions on the long drives from address to address, whether in the form of idle theories or amusing voicemail messages from Marit or keeping an eye out for roadkill.
“Not at all,” the blind man said, eventually.
“Okay,” Sander said. He breathed out. “I'll be right back.”
He left the door open, to make transportation easier for all concerned, and went around to the back of the van. The mannequins were not heavy but he made two trips, because, well. Because it felt odd to hitch his arms around their waists and hold the pale headless bodies like he would someone else's disobedient child.
Besides, the silent naked street, reflecting heat while the many-storied houses slept upright under layers of slushy clear gray snow: these things made the perspiration-slick back of his neck itch like he was being watched in his handling of the props. Overhead the sky showed vibrantly and texturelessly blue. He squinted up at it while he went back and forth across the driveway, and in minutes his aching eyes began to see staticky stippling that did not in point of fact exist, as if what he were looking at was a concentration of blue dots-- not with white between, just volumeless dots, floating in a void.
Sander worked more quickly, having looked at it (them?). When the mannequins were set up, facing the table, he dashed out one last time to retrieve his clipboard from the glovebox, and shut the door behind him.
The mannequins looked less uncanny inside where the glare of the sun was softened a little with hanging dust motes. Rather beautiful in the impersonal way of furniture, all sleek plastic curves and fluid lines. The white of the plastic was a shade warmer, also: milk- or bone-white as opposed to the jarring manufactured white they were outdoors under a truer light. It made more sense, here, to connect their silhouettes with, say, Marit’s, when she was wearing wired underclothes that forced the asymmetries out of her (normally terrible) posture and the hang of her small breasts; the idea of asking the subject to grope them and pretend that they were women seemed less ridiculous, and the reflective polish of the plastic was inviting enough.
Mr. Visser, who had gotten up at some point during the set-up, hovered between the two. His fritter was gone. Up close, Sander had a good view of the vulnerable shadow of his jaw and his small delicate ear, flat against his skull.
He wondered what it was that had allowed the man to determine the mannequins’ location so exactly; Visser owned a cane, but Sander knew that precisely because it was still leaning by the door. The sound of the thuds when they were placed? Sander’s footsteps? Luck? There didn’t seem to be any polite way to ask.
He told him: “Before you are two mannequins, A and B.” He glanced at his clipboard. “A is a little to your left and B is a little to your right. I need you to touch them both, one at a time. Feel them. And then you will score their respective attractiveness for me on a scale of one to ten. Focus your hands on the waists and hips, please. Do you understand?”
The blind man nodded, once. He turned to the left and laid his square hands on the slight swell of A's stomach, knuckly fingers splayed over its convexity. And then he simply-- held them there. For at least a minute. Head bowed.
Sander was on the verge of asking him to go on when he apologized, carefully, stringing the words together like beads on a bracelet, this without physically acknowledging Sander in any fashion.
After that he picked a brisker pace. His palms skimming polyester raspily, he circled the slim waist, and fit the heels of his hands to the shallow dip of each hip, and cupped the stiff full roundness of the thing's hollow bottom; and then he did it again, and again, mapping the volume of it onto the flat of his hands thoroughly enough that Sander suspected that if he removed the mannequin the man would be able to sculpt it out of oxygen and illuminated dust motes. Molding air more accurately than Marit had the clay for her bronze casts. The right shape at the right time in the right place: the model woman's stylized profile reduced to a process in his mind, a patchwork of isolated impressions rather than a complete picture absorbed in a single glance.
The man stepped back.
“How would you rate her?” Sander said.
“Attractiveness,” the blind man said, a little drily. “Let us say, an eight. A beautiful body.”
Sander filled in a box. “And now the other, if you please.”
“Of course.”
The man performed the same intimate examination of B. The patterns traced on top of patterns, becoming more tender with every pass. This time without hesitation.
And the steady repetition did something to Sander, who followed the man's wrists with his gaze more closely, this time, his eyes rolling by slight degrees in their sockets. After a minute he began to see afterimages when he blinked. Faint reddish flashes. And he grew painfully aware of the tension in the tendons of the man's forearms. Visser was describing the arcs of the body, yes, but he was also defining them, applying delicate measured pressure to the planes of imitative flesh, as if to leave his mark on it even as it marked him.
