with her left hand. (Years of keeping the instrument in place while she does
this has made her neck muscles so strong that she can crack a walnut between her
chin and shoulder.) The visual cortex is not involved, of course; she “hears”
the mute notes of a phrase with her fingertips, temporarily memorizing them, and
then plays them over and over until she can add that phrase to the rest of the
piece.
Like most blind musicians, Amy had a very good “ear”; it actually took her less
time to memorize music by listening to it repeatedly, rather than reading, even
with fairly complex pieces. (She used Braille nevertheless for serious work, so
she could isolate the composer’s intent from the performer’s or conductor’s
phrasing decisions.)
She didn’t really miss being able to sight-read in a conventional way. She
wasn’t even sure what it would be like, since she had never seen sheet music
before she lost her sight, and in fact had only a vague idea of what a printed
page of writing looked like.
So when her father came to her in her 33rd year and offered to buy her the
chance of a limited gift of sight, she didn’t immediately jump at it. It was
expensive and risky and grossly deforming: implanting miniaturized video cameras
in her eyesockets and wiring them up to stimulate her dormant optic nerves. What
if it made her only half blind, but also blunted her musical ability? She knew
how other people read music, at least in theory, but after a quarter-century of
doing without the skill, she wasn’t sure that it would do much for her. It might
make her tighten up.
Besides, most of her concerts were done as charities to benefit organizations
for the blind or for special education. Her father argued that she would be even
more effective in those venues as a recovered blind person. Still she resisted.
Cletus said he was cautiously for it. He said he had reviewed the literature and
talked to the Swiss team who had successfully done the implants on dogs and
primates. He said he didn’t think she would be harmed by it even if the
experiment failed. What he didn’t say to Amy or Lindy or anybody was the grisly
Frankensteinian truth: that he was himself behind the experiment; that it had
nothing to do with restoring sight; that the little video cameras would never
even be hooked up. They were just an excuse for surgically removing her
eyeballs.
Now a normal person would have extreme feelings about popping out somebody’s
eyeballs for the sake of science, and even more extreme feelings on learning
that it was a husband wanting to do it to his wife. Of course Cletus was far
from being normal in any respect. To his way of thinking, those eyeballs were
useless vestigial appendages that blocked surgical access to the optic nerves,
which would be his conduits through the brain to the visual cortex. Physical
conduits, through which incredibly tiny surgical instruments would be threaded.
But we have promised not to investigate that part of the story in detail.
The end result was not grisly at all. Amy finally agreed to go to Geneva, and
Cletus and his surgical team (all as skilled as they were unethical) put her
through three 20-hour days of painstaking but painless microsurgery, and when
they took the bandages off and adjusted a thousand-dollar wig (for they’d had to
go in behind as well as through the eyesockets), she actually looked more
attractive than when they had started. That was partly because her actual hair
had always been a disaster. And now she had glass baby-blues instead of the
rather scary opalescence of her natural eyes. No Buck Rogers TV cameras peering
out at the world.
He told her father that that part of the experiment hadn’t worked, and the six
Swiss scientists who had been hired for the purpose agreed.
“They’re lying,” Amy said. “They never intended to restore my sight. The sole
intent of the operations was to subvert the normal functions of the visual
cortex in such a way as to give me access to the unused parts of my brain.” She