Movement Seven — The Cloth Over My Eyes

The next thing I remember clearly is my own hand reaching for a strip of thin cloth — I don't know where it came from, whether it had been mine all along or whether it simply arrived, the way so much else that morning had simply arrived, unexplained and unquestioned — and drawing it up over my eyes, tying it there with a small, practiced motion that felt, even as I watched my own hands perform it, like something being done for my benefit rather than for whatever had taken hold of the rest of me.

I felt my hair grow. I want to tell you that plainly too, strange as it sounds, because it was one of the clearer sensations available to me in that entire stretch of time — a slow, spreading warmth across my scalp, the particular unhurried lengthening you might imagine, if you'd ever had reason to imagine such a thing at all, and I understood, distantly, that whatever I looked like by the time it finished growing, combined with whatever state my body had already been left in before this morning began, I must have looked, to anyone still standing close enough to see me, something very close to savage.

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There was a strange comfort in the darkness the cloth gave me, and I want to admit that plainly too, uncomfortable as the admission is. With my eyes taken out of the arrangement, whatever remained of me — small, quiet, tucked somewhere behind whatever had taken hold of the rest — no longer had to witness anything directly. I could still feel it all. I could still hear it, and smell it, and, in the worst moments, touch it. But I did not have to see it, and I have wondered, in the years since, whether that small mercy was granted to me on purpose, by whatever had wrapped that cloth around my own eyes with my own obedient hands, or whether it was simply an accident of the shape the moment happened to take. I've never found a way to ask. I'm not certain I'd want the answer, even now.

I can't describe what happened after that. Not because I'm withholding it from you, but because the cloth had made sure, quite deliberately I think, that I wouldn't have anything visual to give you even if I wanted to. So let me tell you, instead, what I can give you, which is everything the rest of my body was still, somehow, gathering, even with my eyes taken out of the arrangement entirely.