Blind Spot – Chapter 1

Jeannie

‘Glitch’ by Steve Fendt

‘So, okay. You’re out walking, or driving, whatever. Or maybe just sitting at home, reading, and suddenly you notice …’

‘So it can happen anywhere?’

‘Yeah – so anyway …’

‘There’s nothing specific that triggers it?’

Jeannie never did let me tell my stories my way.

‘No. Suddenly you notice part of your field of vision is missing.’

‘Like, a black spot?’

‘No, it’s just, I don’t know … an area where vision doesn’t exist.’

‘That doesn’t make sense.’ She sets down her mug on the table, sits back in the chair. Which creaks. She’s stacking on the kilos lately. I rather like it: a new dimension to her allure.

‘Okay, try this. Hold your arm out straight in front of you. Palm outwards. Spread your fingers. Come on.’

‘Must I?’ But she does it.

‘The area covered by your hand, you can’t see that. You know there’s stuff there, but you can’t see it.’

‘Ri-ight.’

‘Now do this.’ I put my palm against the left side of my face. Hesitantly, as if I might be about to play a trick on her, she copies me.

‘Good. That’s how big the area of no vision will be in, ooh, about two minutes.’

‘Shit … and that’s why you don’t like driving?’

‘I love driving. I just don’t think I should do it. No more than I have to. Definitely not in the city.’

‘And it’s not, like, dark, this area?’

‘No, it’s as if … as if there’s a big jagged rent in the visual world, and someone’s taken a needle and thread, and stitched the edges, and drawn them together, so that there’s just a puckered mess in the middle and that bit of visual reality doesn’t exist any more.’

‘Eww. As if someone has sewn your eyeball.’

‘Jesus Christ. Thanks for that image.’

‘No worries. So when you turn your head, the … blind spot, the non-vision area … it stays where it is?’

‘No, no, of course not. It moves.’

‘Don’t get cranky, I’m trying to understand. And it’s just in one eye?’

‘No, it’s in both eyes, but one side of my field of vision.’

‘Huh?’

‘It’s not a defect of the eye itself, as I understand it. It’s a glitch that happens in the brain, in the visual cortex. A processing error if you like, where the data gets scrambled.’

‘And that’s what people mean when they talk about a migraine “aura”?’

‘Yeah, sort of. Some people. Some auras. Everyone’s experience seems different, and there can be other symptoms as well. For instance …’

As I enumerate the fascinating list of diverse symptoms her pupils grow small and she stifles a yawn.

Once people have put you in the little box of Migraine Sufferers, they think they know all there is worth knowing about your experience. It’s as interesting as, say, gout, or haemorrhoids.

We talk about other stuff now. Her kids, soon bound for uni. Jonno’s latest business deal. A niece’s wedding over in Albany. Then she has to go: it’s a ninety-minute drive and she wants to miss peak hour.

No sympathy shag this time, then. Am I disappointed or relieved?

A carefully platonic hug. Her familiar scent, familiar warmth stir me and I begin to think about inviting her back indoors.

Too late now. She gets in her car, leaves the door open, looks up at me.

‘You should get shot of this place. Sell up. Get yourself a flat in Collingwood or Fitzroy. Williamstown. Or down on the Peninsula. It’s doing you no good, this isolation.’

‘I like it out here. Love it.’

‘It’s making you weird.’

‘Ta.’

‘Let go, Ben, for fuck’s sake. Three whole years! Stop grieving and move on. Em wouldn’t want this.’

‘Grief doesn’t have an expiry date. And like I said, I love this place.’

‘Hmm.’

A sceptical look, then she’s off down the drive. Just a tad too fast, raising a red cloud. A double toot as she reaches the road. The sound of the car recedes, fades. Leaving the breeze in the casuarinas, the distant hum of the freeway.

As I go back indoors, I’m pissed off. The more I think about it, the more pissed off I am.

I get the same thing from our other friends, both families:

‘Em would want this … Em wouldn’t want you to do that.’

You have no idea what my dead wife would want. I’m the one she spent the last twelve years of her life with. I’m the one she shared her hopes and fears with, laughed with, argued and fought with, made up with, then started all over again. Don’t misuse her name or co-opt her memory to lend weight to your own advice.

Probably just as well then that I didn’t broach with Jeannie what’s been troubling me most lately. What scares me.

---

Next week in Blind Spot:

Chapter 2: In a Jam

Ben goes to Camperdown for his monthly dose of people. It doesn’t end well.

---

Acknowledgement of Country: This story is set on the lands of the Djargurd Wurrung, while the author lives on Wadawurrung country. I pay my respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.

Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction. Characters, institutions and organisations mentioned herein are the product of the author’s imagination. The locations are based on real places.