Yesterday, on catching up with him in the dressing room, I made an awkward attempt not to look him in the eye but botched it. This happens to me on the subway and on buses, too. Sophie says I have not learned how to live in a modern city.

So, I caught his eye and he caught mine: he was certainly not blind now.

“Hello again,” he said.

“Have you seen me before?”

“You’ve certainly been here before, haven’t you?”

“Usually you have been here with a dog that I assumed was a…a working dog….”

“Veronica—yes. She’s a lovely dog. She’s been very good to me, Veronica has.”

As he peeled off his yellow clothes he spoke slowly, with a quizzical aspect, as if testing statements out on himself to see if he believed them.

In the shower he felt for his soap with searching hand-pats. He held his face as if gazing across a height into a distance. He felt the taps for degrees of hot and cold and did not look at their red and blue labels.

He bore the appearance of a man on whom heaven had bestowed bliss—I’d noticed this about him before. He stood with his hands raised to the shower in divine rapture like Saint Francis on a stained glass window I saw in the chapel of that Flemish town where I mourned my brother, Ned. Normally I no longer fully felt the pang of losing Ned, but it overwhelmed me now. Something in the blind man—innocence?—recalled Ned, barely fifteen when he left me, though this man had to be thirty.

I was drawn to his sphere of childish delight and when he held his soap an inch from his face and laughed at it, I blurted, “You seem to be having a good time.”

He looked at me as if I were a dear friend whose name he couldn’t quite remember.

“Yes,” he drew the word out while he deliberated on the time he was having. “The bubbles.”

There were indeed bubbles, little ones, coursing down his arms like sea-froth.

“I haven’t seen bubbles,” he said, “in twenty-six years. I’d completely forgotten how lovely they are.”

“You see them now?”

His eyes crinkled in wonder. “Yes I do.”

“And the dog…Veronica…you don’t need her anymore?”

“Veronica was absolutely dedicated…” He trailed off, remembering her goodness. Then he said, “Do you know, I was blind from the age of four until yesterday? And now I can’t believe how beautiful everything is. Look at the bubbles!” His voice squeaked. “Purple, gold, green, blue…all so exquisitely round, more perfectly round than any of my knitting.”