The dream had receded, withdrawing into the other half of consciousness and leaving in its wake a darkness made stagnant with the memory of a prior moment's rapture. The spell had broken; sleep had ceased; the strange narrative and marvelous absurdities had vanished. There was only the murmur of muffled voices and subdued footsteps wafting upward through the maze of staircases and half-open doors, and the same darkness pressing behind his eyelids, a separate substance from inky stain that seeps into the fabric of a night sky and fills the corners and crevices where shadows lurk and fester. Impenetrable and unremitting, it was a bottomless black rather than the dusk that descends behind closed curtains or on the heels of the sun's daily plunge from the throne of its horizon, palling the familiar room with a tinctured wash of indigo and painting with a midnight pallet the glass quadrants of a window-pane. Here was not the charcoal shade which suffuses sleep and flashes invisibly in the temporal breadth of a blink; here was not the liquid dark streaked and stained with lingering light, expunged in the merest flicker of a thought and a movement as effortless as thought itself.

He was scared,and thought he was dreaming, but even dreams held less horror than the oblivion that enfolded him that morning.  He clawed at it, as if blindness was a layer of mud to be rubbed at and dug through; he even cried to wash it away. But it had lingered and now it was a part of him, a year later, like the bondage that after so much time and bleeding becomes as much a part of the skin as the tether that torments it.

"Where are we?" he asks, never knowing. Location means nothing to him now; there is only the hand to which he has surrendered his own, the sensation that lurking and crowding on the perimeters of his blindness is something that his eyes, when functional, had never explored.

"Carlyle Street," she says, with a flippancy that suggests that the name should be familiar to him. Because she never lies, and because he loves her, he accepts this, vaguely attributing to this unfamiliar name a divergent branch on the mental map he has preserved from back when he could wander these parts on his own, with nothing but his eyes to guide him.

Now he is rootless, adrift, buoyed on a turbulent tide of people that surges and shouts, gathering momentum, and in its fury propelling him towards its precarious peak;  it will reach its apogee, a moment of suspension, then tumble downward  in a crushing deluge to leave him shattered and splintered like driftwood on a rocky shore. Like the element he envisions, the crowd is indomitable, intractable; an elemental disorder characterizes its breadth and bustle as it drives them through spiraling streets and presses them against the cool face of brick that encloses the alleys like the walls of a channel. A liquid chill raises the hairs on the back of his neck; the fabric of voices assumes an unintelligible, oceanic roar; the rapids swell and ensnare him, catching him in a current that goads him forward. Out of fear he falters, bracing against the hand that leads him with a firm, but patient insistence; then the fingers that enfold his own tighten their hold, pressing into his palm a pulse of reassurance,  and he remembers, drawing from the impenetrable darkness pressing behind his eyelids a thought that hangs half-formed: that the blind, as he has seen to it, are not leading the blind.

***

She is not impatient with him, though a little sister she is and always has been, and thus entitled to the wanton claims and complaints that are the staple of younger siblings. But she is also grown up, or nearing: her sulking is gradually giving way to sympathy--she dare not call it maturity--and she feels now a strange new sodality with her brother that his blindness has made possible.

Of course they had all been warned, and when the moment came they were saddened but not surprised. His vision had atrophied, degenerated beyond remedy, and when the morning came, the day that his cries called them from their breakfast and up to the room where he sat frightened and alone in his own private darkness, they could do nothing but console him, remind him in a gentle way that the loss of vision was not the loss of life.

A year has passed, and the treatment proved as futile as they knew it to be. Gradually, he's been learning to adjust to the loss of one sense and rely on the remaining--versed now in a tactile language read through the touch of a finger, avoiding collision through exploration with a thin white cane, and considering partnership with a dog trained to guide him through his darkness and assume the role that she now is happy to fill.  

"Where are we?" he asks, the fingers tightening around her own. There is a note of irritation in his voice that sounds whenever he must address something that relates to his loss of sight--an alloy of anxiety and embarrassment concealed beneath a brittle layer of annoyance and condemnation. Her hesitation is momentary and deliberate--a lie, she knows, is best exposed when dissembled with over-confidence. SHe tells him Carlyle Street, hastily contriving a name from that of an old history teacher. He says nothing, as she knew he would, and quickens his pace. He hates to be led through new places now, pained by the the thought that all around him, vivid and tangible, are sights and structures that will never be familiar, only  garbles of sound and intermingling smells as muddled and meaningless as anywhere else.

So when he wants to get out, she offers to keep him company and, without telling him, deviates from his usual boring circuit through town. Even if he doesn't want to explore new places, she feels it's part of her duty, as his sibling and companion, to expose him to them anyway; even if he can't see them doesn't mean he can't feel them, and feeling, she knows, is all he has now.

***

"This is the church?"

The wave has broken; the sound has ceased; his ears resound with the syncopation of their gait, the cadence of two strides marching out of sync. He likes it, this irregularity, the discrepancy in their respective rhythms: he finds that when their steps match up, one dissolves into the other, and he must seek out of the pressure of her hand to reassure himself that she still is, in fact, strolling beside him.

He hears birds singing their musical fragments and trilling their broken notes, and beyond their plangent chorus is a comfortable quiet, a sort of vacuity of sound that he finds soothing. He knows, through experience, that this lapse in noise corresponds with the leg of the journey that takes them past the local church. He tries not to picture it, but imagines that he can feel it in some abstract way beside him, the placid presence of its white-washed walls and stained-glass windows bathing him in its shadow. His sister has stopped, presumably to gaze at the structure that they have passed so many times but never entered. Her hand loosens its hold; he tightens his.

"Yes," she says, a long moment later, and resumes walking.

***

The truth is she is lost. She had been pursuing some meandering strain of thought, drifting down a trail of contemplation that led her into remote windowless mental corridors, when suddenly there were buildings that she had never seen before, incongruous and intimidating, and street signs that might as well have been in another language for all their familiarity. At first she hadn't been worried--the aim of her wandering was, of course, to encounter places that she had never been before--but then the turns she took seemed only to lead her deeper into unknown territories, pressing them further into a twisting labyrinth of sidewalks and store-fronts from which there seemed no emerging.

She paused to appraise the situation and compose herself.

"This is the church?" he asked, gazing over her shoulder where, had she adhered to the familiar route, the little local church would be standing, its doors open and extending an invitation never accepted.

What can she say? To tell him no would be to admit to her lie and a long history of similar lies, and, of course, to make him panicky and resentful; she could think of nothing that would trouble him more than the notion of being stranded on foreign streets without his bearings.

So she tells him yes, and starts walking, knowing as she does that she is following him as much as he is following her, an irony that recalls a particular proverbial saying which is more apt in the current situation that she would prefer it to be.

***

Their is a certain, indefinable character to the street he lives on that makes it unique and singularly distinguishable from the rest of the world that his blindness has homogenized, absorbed into that great awful stretch of black in which all his surroundings are encompassed. It is not a sound, exactly, but not a physical sensation either--perhaps it is a confluence of the two, something subtle in the intersection of senses that blindness has made him attuned to. It is the feeling of sunlight, filtered through the canopy of trees which line the sidewalk, striking his skin with the exact same warmth and softness each day; it is the absurdity of so many television programs, heard in fragments through open windows, forming their absurd discourse of statements truncated and interposed with words from another voice and conversation; it is the gradual inclination of the sidewalk rising beneath his feet and  climbing towards a predictable peak. He knows this street, at night, at day, in blindness; it is where he lives, where he has always lived. It is a part of him.

"This is home?" he asks, out of habit--he already knows it is, but waits for her answer all the same.

"Yes," she says. He doesn't know why she sounds startled.

Walking through the gate, she releases his hand and watches as he climbs the porch steps without her.

"Blind leading the blind," she says, and smiles.