Eden's Eyes by Sean Costello Page A

been before? Had the grafts already failed? Wasn't there anyone around with guts enough to tell her the truth? It got so bad that by the end of the week she'd begun to suspect that her father was in on the cover-up, too.
    But the worst of it was the dreams. . . the dreams, and the waking bouts of ghastly imagining.
    She dreamt recurrently that she was buried alive, but each night that pure and suffocating blackness grew increasingly more vivid. She was in a hole much deeper than blindness, an airless nothing without sound, tactile sensation, odor—an utter, seamless void. And her single awareness was that it owned her, that it meant to keep her forever.
    The daydreams invaded the long hours of boredom, during which her mind shifted down to a susceptible neutral. These were perhaps, worse, because she could not shut them off like she could the nightmares, simply by waking. Dark and imageless, they crept in unexpectedly and dominated her mind, beginning innocently enough, but building by insidious degrees to a hideous fever pitch.
    And invariably, their subject was the donor.
    Karen thought of him even now, as she lay in her hospital bed, waiting for the minutes to slip past. 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 editions surrounding the date of her transplant, in the hopes of finding the man's name in the obituaries. . . and perhaps the circumstances of his death. The letter had gone out last night.
    Around her the hospital droned onward, its morning sounds damped to a level made inaudible by her dark imaginings.
    How had he died? she wondered now. A car accident?
    Yes, it had probably been a car accident. She'd been involved in one herself about five years back, just this side of Dunrobin. She'd been on her way to a CNIB meeting in Ottawa with one of the local counselors when the right front tire suddenly blew. The explosion had struck Karen's sensitive ears like a cannon blast. The small car had swerved into a broadside skid, struck the soft shoulder, flipped, then rolled three times before coming to rest on its roof in a roadside cornfield. Unhurt (apart from a cut above one eye and a bruised shin), Karen had shaken for hours afterward, realizing how close to death she had come.
    She decided the donor had died like that, in a car accident.
    Had he known he was about to die? her mind demanded. If so, then what was the last thing he'd seen? And whatever that was, was it permanently etched on the backs of 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 saw on the other. . .
    Another man's eyes.
    Karen reached up and touched the bandages, pressing them 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 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? Unless they'd been there and survived to tell the tale—which in itself was a contradiction—how could they have known for