Better Off Not Knowing

Once, there was a man who could not see.

He was born without sight, at least in the conventional sense. His parents, denouncing and disowning him, gave him to an orphanage that burned down three weeks after he arrived. Left without a home or any way to find one, he was forced to wander the streets and find his own way. He was quite successful, even more so than those with sight, for he saw in ways that no other stray could.

Still, though, he was plagued by strange dreams that made no sense to him. In them, he saw things instead of the perpetual darkness he had accepted, even taken for granted, as his world. Indeed, he had no inkling that such a thing as sight existed.

One day when he was rummaging through a garbage can, a particularly malodorous vagrant happened to pass by. Hungry and curious, the vagrant stopped to watch the blind man and see if he found anything edible. To his utter astonishment, the sightless man shortly came up with a whole Subway sandwich that had been discarded due to an employee's mistake on the order. Apart from the standard sulfurous stench of rotten eggs that clung to anything that had been in a dumpster, it smelled positively wonderful to both parties.

As the blind man made to dig in, the other bum made himself known by asking if he could share the sandwich. The blind man, who had been ignoring the other's roaring stomach even as he'd been digging through the garbage, allowed the other man to take a rough half. He could have done it himself, but, as he reasoned, his stomach wasn't nearly as far gone as the other man's.

They munched quietly (a relative term, as only they, being nobody, were there to hear each other noisily snarfing down their respective halves of the morsel) for a time. Unsurprisingly, the second man finished first and thanked the blind man for sharing. The sightless man waved him away, saying that it had been no trouble and company was always welcome. Only at this point did the sighted vagrant look into the blind man's eyes and see the truth of them.

His first question was whether the blind man was, in fact, blind. The sightless man failed to understand. The vagrant then bumbled through a rough explanation of what sight was and the fact that those without sight were regarded as "blind." The blind man thought deeply about it as the other was explaining. The dreams suddenly made sense to him, and he was quite excited by the time the bum had finished explaining. He bade him to stay and, when the other assented and sat down, the blind man began asking the vagrant what the various things in his dreams were. At great length, the bum stopped him, saying he was tired, and went to sleep in a corner of the alley where they'd met.

That night, the sightless man's dreams were filled with vibrantly colored scenes that made him terribly happy. Near morning, though, they changed to the worst nightmare; they disappeared, and though he could hear what was happening, he was still blind. He felt, for the first time, the horror many have at being unable to see. The terrible happiness turned to utter despair, and when he woke up, still sightless, he walked to the nearest river and drowned himself.