A Final Glimpse

The evening of June 1st began with a mild fever around 8pm on a quiet Thursday. The kind where a light sweat beads on the forehead without knowing the cause or reason...

***

Following my nightly routine, I paid little attention to subtle changes in body temperature. I needed to iron clothes, take the dog out one last time and make lunch for the next day. I had been spending way too much at my work's cafeteria. They make a mean lasagna but at nine dollars a portion, I could take that same nine dollars and buy enough pasta ingredients to last the whole week. That, along with the money I blew on strippers every Friday, landed me in the red every month.

Budgeting cash was not a skillset that I claimed...

***

Opening the refrigerator to an unorganized mess—one of the many shameless habits of a bachelor—I noticed twitching in my right hand while reaching for one of my favorites, a cold Heineken.

With the beer secured in my grasp, the twitch turned into a quake. Seismic spasms rumbled the bottle to the point of distorting the label unreadable. Thankfully, I hadn't opened it yet. I used my left hand to grab my right wrist in the hopes of stabling it. The touch alone was an instant fix. It simply went away. Weird, I thought...

Being the dismissive person I was, I let it go without much pondering other than I should cut down on caffeine. That, or maybe I had a mild stroke. I didn’t know.

11PM

The cold sweat became apparent, dampening my shirt collar enough to notice. I didn't have time to be sick, already being behind on an important project requiring attendance the next day.

I saved my work on the desktop and minimized the excel chart to visit the restroom. Surely there had to be some type of expired cold medicine in there. I may have been a party animal at heart and rarely got sick, but I still kept the basics around.

I found a basket of over-the-counter remedies and supplements underneath the sink along with cleaning supplies, a bag of cotton balls and lord knows why there was a tape measure and flea powder down there. Clearly, they didn't belong and have since bought them again. Oh well, I thought. I'll learn to keep things organized one day. My major concern was combating the growing symptoms...

Without reading any of the dosage labels, I decided on using four effervescing cold tablets and cough syrup to mix together in a glass of water. I added a small package of lemongrass powder my ex left behind; she claimed it worked wonders for taming the bug. I stirred the citrus scented drink until everything dissolved and downed it like seasoned chugger, leaving items scattered on the sink's counter to deal with later.

An hour passed. The mixture hadn't helped but possibly worsened whatever was ailing me, allowing paranoia to easily creep in when I began hearing things that weren't there...

Overlapping whispers—the sounds of people talking over each other—came from other rooms. Thumps and thuds that jerked my head in their direction, happened right near me. I knew it all was somehow internal because Max's ears never moved. He laid comfortably in his dog bed while I stayed there in that recliner questioning reality. I had no idea what was going on.

Sweat began to make its way down my back and chest, absorbing into the white, button-down shirt I wore. I had to change it. It felt clammy and uncomfortable.

When I stood up, the rush of blood to my head altered my spatial awareness to a dizzying dimension. My movements were careful and slowed from the double vision similar to crossing ones eyes together.

Nausea was the next feeling to stand above the rest. It kept building until I knew what would happen next. I rushed to the restroom just in time to unload my dinner into the porcelain bowl.

That's when I saw her...

Like cloud watching, my brain formed a tanned, withered face out of the swirling, disgusting mess floating in the toilet. The sight caught me off-guard and triggered a recent memory that rushed in with such immense shock, it threw me back several feet into a corner to begin reliving it.

The plane tickets, the palm trees, the friends, the laughter, the ocean breeze, the souvenirs, the brothel...

The brothel?

The brothel...

Vacationing in Cozumel a week earlier, a couple of my buddies had taken me to a known brothel. Well, it was known but in no way was the business side advanced enough to be considered a real brothel. Regardless, the women were gorgeous. The atmosphere, completely sexual. A temptation any unwed man would fall for every time.

Marina was her name. She was a Goddess. A seductive brunette wearing a pink, wrap-around dress made of silk with a silver-laced trim. I knew right away she was the one I wanted.

I smiled at her. She smiled back and slowly made her way over to me, moving with irresistible charm. Her soft touch met my hand and led me to a room where the pheromone scent of island ecstasy, beckoned...

I used her.

It wasn't my fault.

I mean, I wasn't rude or pushy or anything. I was there to indulge in a fantasy. Satisfy masculine urges...

But where I went wrong was inexcusable on every level...

Already strapped for cash, I didn't have enough to pay her. I kissed her on the forehead and told her I would be right back with the payment. Her faced contorted with confusion. I started walking away from her, looking back at every few feet reassuring her I would return.

After making it several yards away, I turned to look again and there was an old woman dwarf standing in front of Marina, looking at me with hypnotic, white pupils. Her brown skin was wrinkly and matched the floor-length, hooded dress she wore. Her long, gray, bushy hair was topped with a black scarf. Curiosity stopped me in my tracks to get a better look.

Never taking her eyes of me, she spoke with contempt...

Bad man... Bad man... quedarse ciego! quedarse ciego!

I didn't know what she said but kept looking at her. I watched her eyes close and remain closed for a few seconds until they sprung open in a flash, revealing a normal shade of brown with a wicked expression. I started walking away again, creasing my brow, wondering if what I had just saw really happened. In my most-convincing tone, I told Marina one last time I would be back. They both sneered a hardened glance and walked back inside the large, one floor adobe.

I had every intention of paying her, but never returned...

3AM

I sat remembering the awful thing I had done to Marina while wondering what the old woman might have done to me. Perhaps, she had been causing the unknown condition that kept changing by the minute...

Soon, my eyes began playing tricks. I began seeing transparent images of exotic women walking in and out of my living room walls like apparitions. Some were laughing, others crying. All of them were wearing religious rosaries around their necks.

It became even more chilling when a woman holding a young girl's hand walked from behind me, passing right beside the left arm of the chair I sat in. They made it to the middle of the living room before the child turned its head and looked directly into my eyes with the solid whites of theirs. It was the old woman with the wrinkly face. I jumped from the chair and ran back to the restroom, this time to splash cold water on my face in a desperate panic!

I thought I was going crazy...

5am

The sweating had stopped. The fever went away. But my vision began deteriorating.

As if a black and white filter and dimmer switches were installed in my eyes, objects lost their color and were slowly fading from sight. I panicked again, running around to turn every light on as bright as they could go.

Nothing I did helped...

My phone's alarm went off at 8am as it does every workday. By then, I was completely blind, blinking my eyes to nothing but darkness in the mind space of my soul...

There are no words to describe the emptiness and devastation that followed. I don’t know how anyone could prepare for such a fate—navigating the rest of your years in a world where the five senses becomes four.

For me, the loss of sight equaled the inability to experience the beauty of life as it was intended. I'm left as a prisoner of dark nightmares inside a lonely black void...

What started as a fever, ended with the realization that I'd somehow been cursed for being… a 'bad man'.

"quedarse ciego!" — Go Blind.