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The walk to your other classes requires you to cross four streets, none wider than two lanes. Minutes later, deciding this isn’t a man you wish to meet, you use the university’s phone-registration system to drop the course from your schedule. You apologize and make an appointment to pick up the syllabus. His tone is condescending, and you don’t explain why you didn’t see his note. “Didn’t you see the note on the chalkboard?” says the gray-voiced man you don’t realize is also the mayor of Morgantown. The next day, you phone the professor and learn he moved the class to a building closer to his office. None of the voices sound like a class in progress. The rooms with open doors seem like offices. Twentieth-Century American Literature should begin in one minute, and you remain the only person in the room.Ī short walk takes you to Stansbury Hall, home of the English department. You feel the minute hand of your tactile watch. A few days ago, in your practice walk to all your classes, a janitor confirmed you were in the right building. Arriving early for your first class, you find an empty classroom whose lights are off.
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No creative writing programs offered you admission, but you were accepted into the master’s program in English at West Virginia University, the giant school you nearly attended as an undergraduate. Reluctantly, you accept your parents’ offer to help with rent and sign the lease for a one-bedroom in a building that used to be, someone tells you in a few months, a psychiatric hospital. The only apartments in Morgantown, West Virginia, that you can afford are efficiencies with hot plates and buzzing fluorescent lights. As part of the mental gymnastics required to convince yourself you are neither disabled nor blind, you regard these payments as something between an inheritance and laundered money. Your monthly budget is $476, the Social Security check you’ve received since turning 18. It’s the first time you’ve lived on your own, not counting your single sophomore year of college. The few friends he’s held on to have moved to different cities, and he is on his own for the first time since losing his sight. When this chapter, an adapted excerpt from Hill’s upcoming memoir, Blind Man’s Bluff, begins, it’s the summer of 1998, and Hill has graduated from college. Relationships, when they formed, frayed against the strain of what he refused to reveal. After his circle of friends shrank and a disability counselor told him to aim for a report card of C’s, he used the blurry peripheral vision that remained to pretend that he could still see. At age 16, James Tate Hill was diagnosed with Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy, a condition that left him legally blind.