The Hermit's Story Rick Bass (popular books to read .txt) 📖

“When I was in high school my friend and I stole a plane from the county airport, even though we didn’t know how to fly, and we crashed it. That’s how I first hurt my back. I went back the next year, got my pilot’s license, rented one legal, but then crashed it, too—flew it through a power line.” He lifted his arm to show Jerry the scars. “Had to have a steel plate put in my arm. It sets off the metal detector in airports.” He tapped his teeth. “Sometimes my teeth pick up radio waves, too. Late at night, driving in flat country, I can pick up those big high-powered Christian stations.” He laughed. “Talk about hearing voices in your head! Drives me fucking crazy, sometimes. Driving out toward Nebraska once, going back to visit family, I couldn’t make the broadcast stop, so I had to turn around and drive back up into the mountains, and wait there for daylight, for the station to go off the air. It’s funny sometimes how much you take peace and quiet for granted: how nothing can be sweeter than just a little space and time where you’re not hurting or in anguish about anything.”

Jerry nodded. In the last couple of years he had taken to going out by himself to a little cabin he’d built away from the main house and reading by candlelight for an hour or two, and drinking a glass of wine or two, sometimes big glasses—sometimes three glasses—before coming back in to go to bed, where sometimes Karen would still be sitting up, propped against a pillow, reading and drinking, though other times already asleep, and the inside of the house as silent as if it were already abandoned: as if they had already lived the full reach of their lives and passed on into dust and then history and then nothingness. Jerry had grown up on the Texas Gulf coast, within reach of full sight and scent of the ocean, and had wanted to move away from it, to higher ground, all his life; often, as a child, he’d had dreams of rising tides and floodwaters.

“I guess I’m the exact opposite,” he said. “A steady trudger, that’s what I am.”

“I know that about you,” said Jim, smiling and reaching over and clapping a hand on Jerry’s shoulder. “That’s why I called.” He smiled again, as if to say, There are no secrets in the world, no masks above masks, no masks below masks, and asked, “How’s Karen?”

…

They kept stopping to eat. Jerry wasn’t hungry, but Jim, in his nervousness about finding out whether the first surgery had been successful, was ravenous. They stopped first at a Burger King, and then a McDonald’s, and then, most disastrously, a Taco Bell; after each meal, Jim would have to stop a few miles down the road and spit up again, as his body rebelled against these repeated attempts at gaining nourishment, and Jerry said nothing but wondered why in the hell Jim kept going back and doing the same thing, again and again, trapped so distressingly between nausea and hunger.

…

They arrived early, but Dr. Le Page was already in and waiting for Jim. After a brief examination, he told him that the news was not good: the first surgery had not been successful, and a second, alternative surgery would be required. They would have to stay overnight.

The retina is designed to cling to the back of the eyeball like the thinnest piece of Saran Wrap, fastened to the eye with nothing more than a few cells’ width of adhesion. A poet looking at a retina held in her gloved hand during an operation described it as “a strong and durable and beautiful outpost of the brain, as it awaits to be reattached to a gorgeous wall that looks like the inside of an abalone shell, with all its shimmering, radiant iridescence.”

Jim’s doctor explained it less poetically, comparing it to a sheet of wallpaper that he hoped to hang back in place upon the curved back of the eyeball, hoping that it would not slide off or pull loose again, that it would rest in its proper place long enough for the living cells to grow back between the thin wrap of the retina and the blood-slicked arc of the inner eye.

In the first operation he had sewn a tiny buckle into the back of Jim’s eye and had then laced the retina to that buckle. He’d shown Jim the buckle before sewing it on; it had been about the size of a small stainless steel staple. The nylon thread used for the sewing was about the diameter of a single long strand of a woman’s hair.

This type of operation was successful about 95 percent of the time, and its surprising failure had caused Jim to consider for the first time that which he had previously been purposefully avoiding—the realization that he might never get back his sight in that eye.

The second, alternative operation—called the bubble procedure—was successful only about 75 percent of the time; if it failed and a third treatment was needed, and then a fourth or a fifth, the percentages continued to decline dramatically.

After Jim got the bad news, they sat for a long time in the waiting room. Jim apologized to Jerry for the two of them having now to stay overnight.

“Hell, don’t worry about that,” Jerry said. “I’m just sorry you didn’t get the answer you wanted. I hate that they have to go in there and work on it again.”

“After this operation, I have to keep my head pointed down at the ground for a week,” Jim said. The retina had only partially attached the last time, so Dr. Le Page would have to go back in there and cut it loose and burn away all the old scar tissue with lasers, then hang the weary retina back in its proper place. At that point, the doctor would pump a bubble of nitrogen gas