I was never very good with words.
Of course I was only 8 years old at the time. Oh those were the days. Certainly not good ones, but I suppose today’s are not much better. At least we were friends then. Of course, so many things have happened since then, but it still feels like yesterday.
It was just the regular beating. The kids….they didn’t know any better. It was just the thing to do.
Nobody accepted me for who I was…who I am. My parents did. They believed in things…things now deemed to be ancient phony religion, only those from a century or more ago believed.
They told me they loved me exactly the way that I was. “God has made you perfect in his eyes, and you’re perfect in ours.”
Too bad that didn’t help me at school.
I’m glad I was smart enough to put my glasses away this time around. “I can handle this,” I thought…
It was just me, myself, and I by that time. No God (though I’d never tell my parents that). No friends. Nobody. I had lost Siri forever, and was never gonna get him back. We used to be everything to each other. Not anymore. I decided I didn’t really want to see him after the operation. I didn’t really want to to be his friend. Cause he was just the same as everybody else now. Or at least I thought. He was no less of an outcast than I was, but I didn’t see it at the time. He just seemed like one of them now.
Nope. It was just me, I thought…
And I paid the price for it.
Those kids really had it out for me this time. But maybe not. It was only Tuesday.
“You fucking retard!” I remember them saying. “Where are your glasses four-eyes!” “Ha! What a They took turns punching me in the face, in the stomach, and wherever else they could (need I say more?). I thought “hey, maybe if I raised my arms it wouldn’t hurt so much…”
That didn’t help. The pain was excruciating. But I had to get through it. That’s the way I lived: one day at a time. I couldn’t see any farther.
It was at that moment when I fell over to the ground. The bullies had just about had their fun. And it was at that moment when a rock came flying in from nowhere.
And then a second.
And then a third. My God, they were as bloody as I was!
It was Siri.
I had gotten up by that point, and when I tried to touch him, in came another swing!
What the hell had just happened?
“Sorry,” he said.
“Oh shit…”
That’s all I could think of. Oh shit. That’s all I could say.
I think a part of me was scared of what the adults would say, what my parents would think.
But I think a much bigger part of me was scared of Siri.
What had happened to him? Where did he go?
I knew the answer to that.
I told it to him. I told him what I felt, even if he did deny me. I knew it was true.
Things were not the same. They were never the same again. He was different. Gone.
I think he realized that after that day…
_________________________________________________________________________
I decided to rewrite the beginning scene of the prologue from the perspective of Robert Paglino. I thought when reading that considering that Siri as the narrator says that everything began with Pag, it would be interesting to redo this scene from Pag’s point of view. Furthermore, I did it in the narrative style very similar to what we actually see of Siri in Blindsight: that is, looking back and reflecting on what had happened. Thus, even though stylistically it is very similar, I tried to change the tone and feeling of what Robert Paglino would have been thinking if it was him telling the tale.
