The Truth Shall Make You

People said I was running away when I packed my car and left. I didn't feel that way about it. I would be back. And perhaps, over my serious burn-out regarding the world of lines, grids, squares, and cubes in which I had been immersed for too many years. Bricks and blocks. Books and papers. Even the people I talked to seemed square. Hyper-rational logical, linear ways of thinking, of doing everything, dominated even the so-called party. I lacked only my dissertation to be free of it all. But when I left, it was with a sense that I couldn't get to it from where I was.

It's easier to escape the gravitational pull of the city, and of academia, when you leave in the dead of night. Everyone is sleeping. No one to debate. No one to run after me telling me I am crazy. The streets are empty. The seduction of architecture obscured by fog. The whole city looking like a spent woman; a spent man. Naked and colorless. Hopefully, morning would find me in some other world. Rivers and streams moving to their own fluid laws of flow and purpose. Wordless rolling hills and jagged mountains, trees and wind. The relief of unconscious wildness would be such a salve for my bruised and battered sensibilities.

And this is how the morning found me on a simple winding highway making its way down into a valley. Passing through a dense fog turning pink as the sun rose on the unexpected and unpredicted. The serendipitous. The synchronicity that logic still struggles to wrap its tentacles around. It came in the form of a young woman standing beside the road with her thumb out. It was a startling and ghostly kind of image in the middle of nowhere. I pulled off to the side of the road and looked back through the fog, half-expecting to find it to have been an illusion. A hallucination in the absence of sleep. But slowly she emerged like the onset of a dream in the dead of night. A backpack slung over her shoulder, and a walking stick that seemed to be sweeping the ground in front of her. And then there was the tapping of her stick against the side of my car, and a pink blushing face draped with yellow hair and a pair of dark sunglasses. Who would be wearing sunglasses in the foggy pre-dawn dimness that engulfed us? Somehow, it occurred to me that this woman was blind.

I rolled the window down, my breath becoming a fog of its own as I spoke.
"Are you ok?" It was the first thing I could think to say in the unpredictability of the moment. I could hear footsteps and the tapping of another cane coming up from behind her.
She nodded. "Yes, we're fine. We just need a ride." A second face appeared next to hers. A young man, also in sunglasses. Also, blind. He smiled. "We can pay you" he said. I turned the motor off, and reached for the door handle as they took a few steps back. As I stepped out, my whole body seemed to ripple with the chill of this wet cold morning air. I decided not to ask them anything, even though I felt a rush of questions moving through my mind. I had some underlying sense that this was just all part and parcel of what I was looking for. Some sense of the magical and inexplicable personified in the middle of nowhere.

"Let's put your stuff in the trunk" I said.
"Oh, it's so nice and warm in here" the young woman said, as she crawled into the back seat, her friend right behind her. I started the car and turned the heat up.
"Where are you headed?" I asked, glancing up at the rear view mirror. They were huddled close together.
"Umm', the young man stammered. "We're just going south. How about you?"
"We can pay you" the young woman repeated, in what seemed a nervous voice to me. "We have money."
"Yeh, I'm headed that way too." I replied, as I moved the car back onto the highway, and silently made my way through the gears.

A few miles passed in a silence broken only by my noisy wiper blades clearing the window of the fog's condensation. I turned on the radio and spun the dial. It was mostly static with one or two stations coming through and then disappearing as we rounded curves or dipped down a sloping hillside. I turned it off. I glanced up in the mirror. The young woman's head was resting on his shoulder. They were holding hands. I wondered if they perhaps were running away from something.

I spent the next week traveling with these two. It seems that, like me, they weren't headed anywhere in particular, but wanted to just keep moving. So, we wandered all over in the Southeast, camping and talking. The trivial and superficial chatter began to fall away on day two. His name was Jarvis. She was Shana. While they had told me at first that they were 18 and 17 years old, I found out later they were just 16 and 15. I was alarmed that I had unwittingly transported two runaways, and minors at that, across state lines. And so, on day three, the truth began to spill out. Actually, it was that night as we sat around a campfire in a state park in Georgia. Shana had pulled out her ukulele again, and was singing Bobby McGee again. It seems to have been the only song she knew.
"Did you two meet in a school for the blind, or something like that? I asked Jarvis. He laughed.
"No, in fact, we have only been blind a few weeks" he replied, staring down at the fire he could not see, and poking randomly at it with a stick. I looked over at him, and then across the fire to Shana plunking mindlessly away on her ukulele.
"Really?! An accident, of some kind?" He shook his head.
"Do you believe in God?" he said, turning his head toward me.
"I guess that would depend on how you might define 'God'" I answered.
"The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away," Jarvis said, standing and turning his face up to the sky. He turned his head from side to side, as though taking in something big and vast. It wasn't the starry sky, I knew that much.
"You believe God took away your sight? Blinded you?"
Shana had stopped playing, and was listening to our conversation.
"Sorta," Jarvis said, stumbling with his stick out in front of him, making his way to Shana. She waved her arm around and latched onto his stick.
"I'm right here, Jarvis,'" she said. Jarvis felt around for a place next to her, and sat down. Shana seemed to be looking over the fire toward me.
"It was the Reverend that told us it would happen if we was to sin with each other," Shana said. "And then it did happen, exactly like he said."
"We didn't mean for it to happen, but it did" Jarvis interrupted. "Next morning we woke up and we was both blind."

We all sat silently for what seemed a long while. I was lost in thought looking at them. They were hugging, and feeling each other's faces. I was a long, long way from the university now. It's one thing to pay homage to the irrational, or the arational. It's quite another to be lost to such a world. I found myself walking some philosophical line between sanity and madness. Where along the long line of our collective history did we become so ego-centered? So rational? What was gained in that shift? What was lost?
"I heard upon his dry dung heap
that man cry out who cannot sleep;
'If God is God, he is not good;
If God is good, he is not God.'
Take the even, take the odd,
I would not sleep here if I could
Except for the green leaves in the wood,
And the wind on the water."
-Archibald McLeish

"You want to know what I think?" I said, breaking the silence. "I'm not so sure God took away your sight. If he did, then he is not the God I've heard so much about."
"The Reverend, he told us. He prophesied it would happen. He was right." Jarvis muttered.
"And you believe the Reverend knows God's will?" I challenged.
"He does know it," Shana spoke up. "The Reverend was called out by God. God told him to come to us, and to warn us of our ways. He said it would happen if we was to sin, and it did. And so now, it's just like with Adam and Eve. We have been kicked out into the world, and left to die."
"Who told you the Reverend was chosen by God to give you that message?" I asked.
"The Reverend told us," Jarvis replied. "He told about how he was on this hillside, an' this big white bird came down, an told him to go to us who was sinnin', an' to try to save us. But we didn't listen."
"And you believed that?" I quarried. They both nodded their heads.
"Belief is a very powerful thing," I said.

I sat down again, and re-kindled the fire. Shana was the first to speak. "Do you believe the Reverend is a false prophet?"
"Yes. That is what I believe." I replied.
"Then why are we blind?" Jarvis asked.
"Because you believed as you were told. And you believed that the Reverend was telling you God's intention to make you suffer for your sins as he defined them, and in such a way. Because you believed, you have blinded yourselves. There is no physical reason you cannot see. There is only the belief that your sins would make you blind. You were blinded by the power of your own belief. And not by God."

One night, several days later, I crawled into my tent and left Jarvis and Shana to the dwindling fire. I was awakened awhile later to the sound of Shana's voice. "Look, Jarvis. Look how pretty the embers are." Jarvis nodded.
"Yes. I see it." He turned to her. " And I can see you, Shana."
"I can see you too." she replied. After that I could only hear soft sobbing sounds.

I returned to the university and completed my dissertation in a relatively brief period of time. The lofty sounding title, "Conversion Reactions and Hysterical Paralysis as a Function of Ecstatic Belief", was essentially a case study of Jarvis and Shana.

Jarvis and Shana live here in the city now. They are quite devout in their faith, but quite adamant about allowing no one to come between them and the unfolding truths they were finding for themselves. They work at a coffeehouse just off the campus. I see them every day. And they see me.