The Point of Vanishing by Howard Axelrod Page A

when closer), parallax (when you turn your head, objects farther away don’t move as much), and occlusion (if an object is partially blocked, it’s behind the object blocking it). So, the doctor explained, I would probably be able to manage in daily activities, especially as my brain adapted, but I still wouldn’t
perceive
depth—I wouldn’t have that clear sensation of space, of myself moving through a realm of dimensionality. This change, he said, could prove disorienting for some people.
    And it was. Later that morning, I poured orange juice straight onto the kitchen table, pouring a good two inches infront of the glass. In the bathroom, there was no second bathroom behind my reflection, no space behind me, the whole room just a flat plane like a photograph. I kept wiping at an unsettling white spot on my nose—was it crust that had slid down from the crust sealing my eye?—before realizing the spot was just on the surface of the mirror, just a toothpaste stain. And out my bedroom window, while I was gazing at the Boston skyline trying to gather myself, a horribly enormous black bird blotted out the Hancock building. Its shape was monstrous. It was overtaking the entire tower. I stepped back, flinching. Then I saw. It was just a fly, crawling up the outside of the windowpane.
    Mom and Dad were trying to adjust, too. My third night home, Dad asked at dinner if I wanted to consider pursuing the matter legally.
    â€œLegally?”
    â€œIt’s just an option. Something to consider.”
    â€œIt wasn’t Peter’s fault.”
    Dad rested his fork on his plate. He looked like he hadn’t been sleeping well. The pouches under his eyes were deeper than usual. “In a legal sense, fault might not be what you think it is. I’d give it some thought if I were you.”
    â€œIt was an
accident
,” I said.
    â€œIt’s something to consider.”
    â€œIt wasn’t Peter’s fault, Dad. It was no one’s fault. It happened so fast.”
    â€œI put a call in to Neil Sugarman. He sends his best, by the way.”
    â€œIt just happened. Things like this happen, Dad.”
    Mom gave Dad a look across the table and he fell quiet. The sounds of silverware continued. The meal went on. But the next night at dinner, he brought it up again. When I told him that I appreciated his offer, but there was nothing he could do, he looked stuck. Earlier that evening, when he’d come home fromwork, he’d given me a get-well card. On the front cover was a photograph of a hound dog wearing Coke-bottle-thick glasses, slumped at the edge of a porch. “Men of Thebes, look upon Oedipus,” Dad’s cramped handwriting began on the blank space inside the card. The quote, I knew, was from
Oedipus Rex.
We’d studied Sophocles my senior year at Roxbury Latin: Oedipus, unaware of his own identity, kills his father, has sex with his mother, then puts out his own eyes for shame. Dad, who wasn’t very comfortable expressing his emotions, often relied on
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations
for important occasions. Maybe he’d thought that something from the classics, especially for his English-major son, would be appropriate. Maybe he had looked up
blindness.
The lines were the final haunting lesson of the play: “Though Oedipus towered up, most powerful of men, in the end ruin swept over him … let no man, in mankind’s frailty, presume upon his good fortune, until he find life, at his death, a memory without pain.” From “men of Thebes,” I’d read the way a hungover man moves across a room, not wanting to start things spinning. I knew Dad hadn’t read the play and couldn’t have meant to imply that I deserved the accident. I knew, as his note at the bottom said, that he thought the quote was about vulnerability: “Sophocles’ reminder of our vulnerability to mankind’s frailties was exemplified in the starkest of