It always began the same way: trying to imagine who he had been, what kind of man…
Her curiosity was natural, Dr. Smith had assured her, and with time it would fade. But it hadn’t faded. If anything the wondering had grown towering and broad, assuming the bulky dimensions of obsession. She’d even gone so far as to write to the Sudbury newspaper, asking for the half-dozen issues surrounding the day of her transplant, in the hope of finding the man’s name in the obituaries…and perhaps the circumstances of his death.
How had he died? she wondered now. A car accident?
Yes, it had probably been a car accident.
Had he known he was about to die? If so, then what was the last thing he’d seen? And whatever that was, was it permanently etched on the backs his eyes, the eyes she now possessed? Would the first thing she saw (if the transplants worked) be a faded imprint of the last thing he had seen on this side? Or a hideously vivid afterglow of the first thing he’d seen on the other…
Another man’s eyes.
Karen reached up and touched the bandages, pressing gingerly over her closed eyelids. No matter which way she pondered it, it still felt strange having actual physical pieces of another human being inside of her. Maybe it felt less bizarre when it was a wholly internal organ—a heart or a kidney—something you were never all that aware of in the first place.
But eyes…eyes seemed so much more personal. The heart might be the seat of the soul, but the eyes were its windows.
Another man’s eyes…
They must have had him on an operating table similar to the one she’d been on…cold, hard, narrow, but lacking the promise it had held for her. For the donor that table had been a kind of premature autopsy slab. Sure, he was brain-dead at the time, she understood the concept. But who really knew for certain?
Oh, Christ, imagine the horror. Completely immobile, unable to cry out or even blink an eye—and then someone opens your eyelids, holds them open with cold metal retractors…and you can see the blade coming down, actually see it. And all you can do is lie there, every nerve ending shrieking a single, inaudible scream.
And with your other eye you see the first one plucked free, plopped like an olive into a waiting jar…