Page 89 of Happiness for Beginners

“I have a thing called retinitis pigmentosa,” he said.

“That does not sound good.”

He shook his head. “You have these receptors in your eyes. Cones and rods. The rods are around the edges. They’re in charge of peripheral vision and dim light.”

He paused to make sure I was following.

“Okay,” I said.

“The cones process color and detail.”

“Okay.”

“When you have this thing like I do—it’s inherited—your rods and cones start to die.”

I shook my head like that was impossible. “Die?”

“One by one, they go out.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “They make the wrong kind of protein. It’s all very scientific. They basically just stop working, one at a time. Most people who have it are legally blind by forty.”

“But you won’t be!” Legally blind? Byforty?

“No,” he agreed. “For me, it’ll be much sooner.”

“Sooner?” I was like a denial parrot.

“My receptors seem to be dying very quickly.”

I could feel my heart beating fast in my chest. It was that feeling you get in an emergency when you have to figure out what to do. But there was nothing to do.

“It started with the night blindness—just a little, at first. Two years ago. That was the rods. I ignored it junior year. But by the start of senior year, when I couldn’t read to study, I went to the doc.”

“And got glasses.”

He nodded. “That’s the cones.”

“So what do you do? What’s the treatment?”

“There is no treatment.”

There was no treatment?“This is the twenty-first century,” I said. “There’s a treatment for everything. Even things that don’t need treating.”

He shrugged. “Not this.”

“People don’t just go blind!” I tried to imagine Jake, of all people, unable to see. What about that wry grin he was always giving people? I loved that wry grin. How was he supposed to give that grin if he couldn’t see the person he was giving it to?

“Vitamin A is supposed to help some,” he said. “So I take supplements. Some studies indicate fish oil might not be a bad idea.”

“Fish oil and carrots? That’s the best they can do? Who’s your doctor—Bugs Bunny?”

“There is an experimental gene therapy,” he said then. “A nine-year-old boy did it and he could see the blackboard at school afterward. A girl did it and saw fireflies for the first time.”

“Why aren’t you doing that? Right now?”

“It’s not a treatment. It’s an experiment.”

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