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as he walked into the examination room a few minutes later with the chart, a balding chubby man in his fifties, with thick black-rimmed glasses, rapidly blinking eyes, and, most noticeably to Francis, a few obvious tufty places he’d missed shaving halfway down his throat.
     
    “You’re very good at keeping your eye steady. The technician said you didn’t blink much. Most people have to or they’ll get dry.”
     
    “Dryness definitely isn’t my problem.” Francis swiveled on his stool, waiting.
     
    “Your false positives and negatives are another story, though.”
     
    “How’s that?” Tiny dots and afterflashes from the test were still popping up and disappearing before his eyes.
     
    “You clicked on the target three times when there was nothing there. And you missed six percent of the flashes that were there.”
     
    Francis rubbed his lids and shrugged, as if this were of no great importance. “What else?”
     
    “And your gray zone threshold is . . . not great either.”
     
    “So, what does that mean?”
     
    The doctor knuckled the underside of his jaw and handed over the computer readout.
     
    “See for yourself.”
     
    At first, it looked as harmless as a seventh-grade math worksheet. A series of pie-shaped dots, each with a dark ring shading the perimeter. What percentage of the graph is filled in, children? But the more Francis stared at it, the more words he saw like borderline, pattern deviation, and most ominously blind spot. He started to notice how the shaded-in figures looked less like geometry problems and more like a series of solar eclipses. And deep within his joints and muscles, he began to feel a slight chill.
     
    “What is this?” He handed back the sheet.
     
    “It’s your ability to distinguish subtle gradations between light and dark. You told me you’ve been having problems seeing at night for some time now.”
     
    “It’s taking a little longer for my eyes to adjust,” Francis allowed.
     
    “Do you want my diagnosis or not?”
     
    “That’s what I’m here for.”
     
    “You’ve got retinitis pigmentosa.”
     
    “Okay.”
     
    The doctor gave him a searching look, waiting to see if he’d understood. “It’s a genetic disease that affects the retina at the back of your eye. . . .”
     
    “Uh-huh.”
     
    “It cripples the photoreceptor cells along the outer edge. . . .”
     
    Francis nodded along, making the appropriate “hmms” and “aahs,” signaling interest and surprise at the right moments, even as the dots and afterflashes before his eyes kept going off like private fireworks.
     
    “Your central vision should hold for a while. . . .”
     
    “Okay.”
     
    “But your peripheral vision is going to progressively narrow down like a tunnel.” The doctor’s voice became a faraway drone, heard from the end of a long corridor. “Your night vision is also going to become worse. . . .”
     
    “And then?”
     
    The doctor’s face seemed to loom up, as if Francis were seeing him through a fish-eye lens. “I’m afraid we don’t have any real treatment.”
     
    “So I’m going to go blind,” he heard himself say matter-of-factly, pretending he wasn’t having an out-of-body experience at this very moment.
     
    “Well, legally blind,” the doctor corrected him. “Most people can still see something, even if it’s just shadows.”
     
    Everything in the room suddenly pulled back from him, the E at the top of the eye chart shrinking down to E.
     
    “I assume you’ve seen other specialists about this over the years,” the doctor said, not unkindly.
     
    “I suspected something might be up,” Francis admitted, trying to fight the sensation of motion sickness. “But I always thought it would just sort of go away.”
     
    Only the second part was a lie. In his heart, he always knew something like this would happen, even before he’d started bumping into things the past couple of years. He’d sensed darkness hovering around him since he was a small boy, sneaking in at the edges, taking a little bit off the corner here and