In Canon City, Colorado, Madge Miller, twenty-nine-year-old housewife, got out of bed on yet another bright September morning and looked out at the brilliant sunshine as though peering through an ever-darkening screen.
It wasn’t that she couldn’t see, exactly. The images were quite sharp and clear — that tree, that street, that pickup driving by — but the total light, day by day, was receding to a dim twilight. A week ago colors were largely gone, as though a color print, fully developed, were unaccountably darkening and fading and turning to black and white. The change had been going on for two weeks now, ever since she had begun pulling out of the plague infection that had nearly killed her. The doctor had a name for what was going on, retinitis pigmentosa, he called it, where cells in the retina slowly collect an abnormal pigment and cease to respond to light. There was nothing to be done, he’d told her. Maybe it was just a temporary reaction to the new medicine they’d given her for the plague — and after all, she had survived when a lot of others hadn’t, he’d said. Probably it wouldn’t last, he’d said. Maybe it would just go away, pretty soon; but then, again, maybe it wouldn’t. He really didn’t know.
And meantime, Madge Miller couldn’t drink her morning coffee, either. She slopped it all over the table trying to get the cup to her mouth. Along with the dimming of her vision, her hands had begun to shake. Not when she rested them in her lap, they were just fine then. It was only when she started to move them, to reach for something — then they started shaking, and shook worse and worse the closer she got to what she was reaching for. An intention tremor, the doctor called it, and he didn’t know what caused that, either. It was a little like Parkinson’s disease, he said, but he didn’t think it was that. She was awfully young to get Parkinson’s disease. It would probably go away, he assured her, he didn’t see any reason it wouldn’t, but if it got any worse, he’d have her try some L-Dopa and see if that helped any. Meanwhile, she could use one of those plastic straws to drink her coffee with and probably do okay — And to pour the coffee, doctor? Can I do that with a straw? Or sign checks? Or wash dishes? Or change the baby? Or stroke Jerry to get him hard these days when he’s almost scared to come near me? Can I do these things with a plastic straw?
Madge Miller stared out at the dark sunny street for a long time, her hands at rest at her sides. The medicine had saved her from a fast, dirty death, all right — she knew that. But now, for the first time, she was beginning to wonder what, exactly, she had won …