So, no, I’m not wearing these sunglasses because I fatuously think they make me look cool, whatever that means, and while they are a part of my disguise, they are actually necessary for me, even in here. You see how much I trust you, that I can tell you this, even though it means singling me out. I’m telling you, directly, about a condition that distinguishes me out from something like tens of millions of people. I was struck on the head by a bit of cinderblock when I was thirteen. I’d been passing a construction site. Freak accident, or so they said. There was no brain damage—a miracle, the doctors said, they all said it—but then I lost most of my inborn saccadic blindness. It didn’t cease altogether, but it became much weaker and irregular. At times my vision was almost what it had been before the accident, but most of the time I saw—I saw the streaking of things. At times, there was no suppression at all. I could tell those times because my eyes always felt cold when the blindness was fully suspended. It happened without any obvious cause, every so often, not quite every day. It was weird. Saccadic blindness... it’s like the blindness is a kind of warm blanket that would just drop away altogether once in a while. I had to start wearing sunglasses, and I had to train myself to keep my head steady, to close my eyes whenever I turned my head, to try to maintain as much conscious control over my eye movements as possible. You understand, this is like trying to maintain constant conscious control over your breathing. Otherwise, if I allowed my eyes to swivel around as they had before the accident, I would have become incapacitated almost right away, like the worst motion sickness you ever had. I still take Dramamine every day.