his afternoons sifting through his memories to catch every last ghost of his youth kept him somehow sane, even as it left him buried in notebooks, filling page after page with verse he could not see. Notebooks. That thought shook Henry out of his reverie. Of course. As he reached for his robe in the dark of his room, a crack of thunder rattled the house. Henry swore his sister's laughter rose from out of the garden to join it. The doctor's examination room was shuttered and unlit. Henry, however, was used to negotiating the dark. He crossed the room in stocking feet and stopped at the edge of the desk. Soon his fingers found a drawer and, in it, Dr. Islington's notebook. As Henry groped for a candle and then lit it, letting his eyes adjust to the flame, he remembered the doctor's metamorphosis of the day before, the terrific sense of awe it had instilled in him. Then he flipped through the notebook until he found Islington's most recent entry: Eleanor had been right. The night was much easier for Henry. As the doctor had explained to them soon after the operation, while Henry's eyes were still bandaged, less light means less visual stimulus entering the brain. The closer Henry could come to his previous state of absolute blindness, the less he was prone to these terrific visions. Even then, there seemed always to be a glee the doctor exhibited in hearing about and recording in his notebook Henry's latest phantasmagorical episode. A hiss from outside his window jolted Henry out of his thoughts. "Brother, it's me. Come down." He parted his curtains, and even in the dim light he could see Eleanor's long, pale hair undulating in the wind. As lightning danced in and out of the racing clouds, her locks took on the appearance of tentacles. Henry squinted. "What are you doing out there?" he whispered back. "You'll wake the doctor. Come back inside." He heard her laugh, the same mischievous giggle she'd had since they were children. Then the luminous mass of her hair — now blonde, now green, now blonde again — bobbed away in the lightning-charged darkness toward the garden. As Henry slept that night, he dreamed he and Eleanor were both children again. They played upon the gleaming new tracks the rail company had stitched across the fields behind their grandmother's house. All manner of beasts, machines, and combinations thereof crawled along those tracks as Henry groaned and turned in his bed: steam engines curled first into nautili, then into pachyderm-shaped gramophones, and then into electric-eyed cats that licked their sparking fur with ferrotype tongues bearing images of comets and atoms. Around that mad factory, that assembly line of illusion, Henry and Eleanor darted and laughed, gorging themselves on the ripe, metallic berries that sprang as if by magic from their footprints until their lips were blue and their bellies sore. Henry awoke with a start, the storm still raging and the sky like ink. As he savored the already fading images of his dream, he remembered what their mother had said years ago after hearing Henry babble wild tales of the menagerie in grandmother's fields: "You will be a poet someday, Henry. In the age of steam and electricity, a poet. God help you." That was before the auto accident, before he'd gone blind. True to his mother's prediction though, he did become a poet of sorts. Not one of any particular stature; more of a hobbyist really. But spending No. 141 May 18, 1913 Today, a breakthrough profound enough to make the philosophers proud! Our young man Henry has far surpassed anything of which we could have dreamed. But let's not pervert Henry's magnificent new state of being by speaking of it in terms of dreams as the quack Freud might. Rather, Henry's apparitions are of true mythopoeic significance. They are a new epistemology, an epiphany! This man, his sight denied him for so long, has leapt both forward and backward in psychic evolution, as befits the cyclical nature of our human consciousness. And even better: This evolution seems to be accelerating at an exponential rate, a feedback loop in which his visions feed on themselves. We must give eternal thanks to Eleanor for volunteering him for the operation; finding the perfect candidate such as Henry — a man who had lost his biological sight yet retained the innate eye of a poet — was not easy, and Henry has been more than worth every penny we paid his sister. Here Henry stopped reading. Paid? Eleanor? She had told Henry that she'd depleted most of the family's savings to pay for Dr. Islington's operation. There had been no mention of her getting paid. Puzzled, he reached to turn to the next the page of the doctor's notebook — but he stopped as he heard footsteps in the hallway outside. Before he could think of hiding, the door of the examination room opened. It was the doctor. "Henry? What are you doing in here, my boy?" Islington was wearing pajamas, and his thin hair was disheveled. Henry almost didn't notice the pistol in his hand. "I think I'm the one who should be asking questions here, Doctor." He held up the notebook. "What is this? What does this mean? Am I your patient or your, your guinea pig? What have you and my sister been keeping from me?" Islington lowered his pistol. "Henry," he pleaded, "you misunderstand." He crossed the room to where the younger man stood at the desk, his steps light and careful. "This has been the arrangement all along, see? You're not simply regaining your sight. You've been given the truest sight of all, your birthright as a human being — the godlike perception that's been clipped and corrupted by this sick and scientific world. "We're wielding science against itself, don't you see? There are many of us, men of learning and wisdom, and we've put you on the path, we believe, to the ultimate vision, to bear witness to the ultimate RYTIS BERNOTAS, COSMIC LIGHT
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