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The lights flickered, unexpectedly, a little after ten in the morning, and then went out. Harvey glanced up. He got enough morning sun that he didn't need illumination in his office, but the alteration of color in his peripheral vision was distracting. Donna sat in her darkened cube with her hands up, as if her computer were attempting a citizen's arrest. A paralegal from downstairs was examining the ceiling with an expression of alarm. Harvey flipped open his laptop, and found it was running only on battery.
He stepped out of his office and discovered that a couple of light bulbs two doors down had exploded, white glass like snow on the carpet and a strange ozone smell in the air. Donna's screen was blank and the constant hum of computers had fallen silent. The battery lights above the stairwells were on. People stood up out of their cubes in twos and threes, all vaguely alarmed and none willing to act decisively. Harvey had no intention of milling around.
Down the hall, stiff-arm past a herd of secretaries, Harvey headed for Jessica's office, but he found the problem before he got there. At reception, next to the main bank of elevators, an electrical panel lay open, its door swinging wide. The wires inside gave off that smell again, worse: some combination of lightning and burned hair. The receptionist stood at her desk bawling hysterically with a phone still in her hand, and the people in front of her were the reason.
Three people lay on the floor, one on his face with his hands over his hair as if it were an air raid. The other two had been bowled backward, awkward sprawls and their knees bent high. One of them was Mike Ross, who coughed and struggled to sit up. The air-raid victim rolled over and asked, "What the hell? What the hell?"
It was that blond associate whose name Harvey had never bothered to learn, and except for an unfortunate tendency not to assimilate new data into his mental schema, he didn't seem hurt. The third man, whom Harvey didn't recognize at all, was red-faced and unconscious. He wore a cap and a work-shirt with a name patch on it: an electrician. A small number of tools lay scattered against the wall. A junior partner kneeled at his side, already on the phone with 911.
Harvey took a knee next to Mike and grabbed his shoulder. "What have you done now?" he grumbled.
If Mike were Mike, he would answer with a sulky (worst case) or impertinent (best) joke. But Mike stared into Harvey's eyes with no expression at all on his face. He lifted up one hand and touched Harvey's grip, and then swept his fingertips up Harvey's sleeve like a crawling spider. "Harvey?" he asked, uncertain.
Harvey was opening his mouth to ask him whether he believed his own eyes when he realized the answer: Mike's pupils were tiny points of black in a sea of blue. Mike's pupils were constricted little pinpricks, and hunted back and forth within his eyelids. No, Mike couldn't believe his eyes, because Mike couldn't see.
"Think you can stand?" Harvey asked. He moved his hand slowly down to Mike's elbow, and tugged. Obedient, Mike gathered himself and got his legs under him, and wobbled to his feet. Harvey held onto that jacketed elbow tightly in case Mike decided to pass out, but his balance trouble seemed to be a simple side-effect of spatial disorientation, and subsided as he straightened.
"What the hell?" said the blond associate behind them. He'd retreated to the receptionist, not that she could tell him what the hell between her sobs.
"Harold, are you okay?" Mike called. Like a blind person would, he spread out his arms in search of tactile input. He was far enough away from the walls that the only tactile input was Harvey. Mike pressed one flat palm against Harvey's necktie, then slid it to the right so it lay over his heart.
Harold shook his head as if he'd taken a blow. "Mike, Jesus." His hands had begun to shake.
The electrician on the floor was still unconscious, his face redder by the minute and swelling. Harvey made eye-contact with the partner at the man's side and she shook her head, stumped. She opened the top button of his work-shirt, but that was all she knew to do. Harvey knew no better.
"Okay, everyone into the conference room," said Harvey, like a senior partner should. "You, you --" he pointed to Harold and the receptionist, "go on. You, what's your name, go get Jessica and a first-aid kit, and meet me there." The bystander -- a paralegal? a secretary? -- dashed away as told. If it was a client not an employee, well, at least the client was getting to see Harvey be decisive.
Three people tasked to stay with the electrician and wait for emergency personnel, the rest were dispersed on errands or sent into the conference room. Harvey came last, walking backwards, leading Mike by both hands. Despite the obvious inference that Harvey would not walk him into an obstacle -- indeed, could not without walking into it himself first -- Mike shuffled slow, tiny steps along the carpet. His arms were jumpy under Harvey's grip, as if he were restraining himself at every moment from the impulse to yank free.
Someone held the door and they crossed the threshold like awkward square-dancers. At some point in their slow-motion retreat, Mike had begun to cry, and shiny tracks marked his face. He seemed totally unconscious of it, licking tears off his lips as they fell as if they were raindrops. His collar was turning dark from moisture. Without a word, Harvey led him to the conference table.
"Edge is here." He put down Mike's hand on the wood, and let go for the first time. "Have a seat."
Tentative as he was under anyone else's guidance, when left to his own senses Mike turned around, caught the edge in both hands, and scooted to sit on the conference table without a pause. His feet dangled and his shoulders hunched and he furrowed his brows furiously. Unconsciously he reached up to wipe the tears off his face and banged his hand into Harvey's own. Harvey pushed Mike's hand away and pulled out a pocket handkerchief to dab at Mike's cheeks.
Mike blinked, big prominent eyesockets, long sandy lashes. The skin on his nose was a bit pink, as if from sunburn. He blinked again, a third time, eyes shiny and brimming with those involuntary tears. He did not focus on the face in front of him; he didn't focus on anything.
"What do you see," asked Harvey softly.
"Not a fucking thing," Mike grumbled. His voice was even. "Big wobbly x-ray-colored exclamation mark on the right side of the visual field. I assume that means there was uncontrolled arcing."
One finger pushing up Mike's eyebrow and another pressing down on his cheek, Harvey peered at the surface of Mike's eye. It swam with liquid, of course. The white was more than a little bloodshot. The bright blue iris reflected a tiny convex Harvey peering back at him. No obvious particles marred the surface of the cornea. There was no clear sign of injury at all. But if the color on Mike's nose was any indication, he might have been burned. Or that color might come from mortal humiliation at being helpless in front of his boss: it was hard to tell.
Jessica arrived just then, with an army of paralegals and a gigantic flashlight. The flashlight was ridiculous and unnecessary, of course -- they were in a windowed room -- but Harvey watched as the beam swung across Mike's face. His pupils could not get any narrower; his eyelids failed to narrow. No reaction at all.
"The paramedics are here," Jessica announced.
Mike's blank eyes were unnerving; he swivelled them around like a periscope searching the horizon. "Is the electrician all right?" he asked.
"I'll send someone to find out," said Harvey, as those paramedics crouched over said electrician. His face was beet-colored and swollen, his hands twitching listlessly at his sides. The paramedics worked quickly, with foreboding expressions, and the associates held flashlights and stayed out of their way. Mike couldn't see any of that, of course. It would be possible to lie to him right up till the moment the electrician went into cardiac arrest.
Mike lifted his hand to his face again, two fingers extended.
"Stop," said Harvey. He captured that wrist and felt its tension. "If there's debris in your eyes, you'll do yourself harm."
"But it itches."
"Life is unfair," Harvey told him, and held onto his hand.
Harold and the receptionist stood by the window, their arms wrapped around one another. The receptionist was down to hiccups, but Harold looked like he was just about to take up where she'd left off. Harvey already had about all the crying he could stand right in front of him, and decided to head things off before they could begin. "You. Blond newbie. Who sues whom in this situation?"
In his peripheral vision he noted Mike's mouth open and ready to answer, and stuffed a hand over that mouth. Harold took a shaky breath and said, "Uh, isn't it an insurance issue? And a workman's comp issue. I think I get to sue for mental suffering, though."
Harvey lifted his hand off Mike's mouth, his palm wet with tears. Mike could not resist, of course. "If the paramedics came, then the electrician is hurt. It's between him, his health insurance company, and the building's master insurance. If there's negligence or active malfeasance going on in how the wiring is set up, or a manufacturing defect in the elevator --"
If you can't see, you're not going to realize that all the lights are off. Harvey qualified, "If the accident knocked out the power on this floor?"
"Then the firm's insurance can file against the building's master insurance for making it impossible to pursue the ordinary course of business. Did everything really just shut down?"
Over Mike's shoulder, Harvey watched the paramedics hustle away toward the freight elevator on the other side of the building. The electrician had an oxygen mask over his face, and most of the clothing on his torso cut away or shoved aside. He had a tattoo on his chest, some design Harvey did not recognize. Jessica watched them go, hand (and flashlight) on hip, and then turned and shooed her followers away on some tasks the necessity of which were above even Harvey's pay grade. She led a second pair of uniformed medical people into the conference room. They zoomed over to Mike's side and quickly surrounded him. Harvey backed out of their way.
A tiny yellow penlight danced across Mike's face, illuminating his eyebrows and the lines around his eyes. Low conversation reiterated everything Harvey had already asked. He glanced at Harold and the receptionist. "You're each going into separate rooms in a minute, and I'll want you to write down your version of what happened. Don't talk it over now; it's important for you to have your own separate observations down on paper."
"In case we have to sue?" said Harold, more as a question than a statement.
Jessica answered him, from the doorway. "I've got the forms for incident reporting. It's standard procedure, even if nobody gets sued. If you could follow me --"
They went, hand in hand, and followed Jessica down the hallway. There was a moment at which Harvey could have provided a consoling pat on the shoulder, but that was not the kind of man Harvey was. He stood near the window arms crossed and watched Mike get worked on, poked and interrogated and handled with gentle, expert hands.
"Harvey," said Mike in a small voice. With brusque efficiency, a paramedic was holding open one of his eyes as Harvey had done before. Mike said, "Will you be my lawyer?"
"Bit of a conflict of interest, don't you think? Considering I'm your boss."
"If I'm blind." Mike took a big breath. The paramedic switched to his other eye. "If it's permanent."
"That's not funny, Mike."
"No," said Mike, "it's not."
"You aren't bleeding inside the eye," said the paramedic, who was a tall and skinny black man with knobby fingers. It was unclear whether he'd said that as an argumentative interjection, or whether he was listening to the conversation at all. He used a knuckle to angle Mike's face one way, and then another way, under the penlight. "Can you stand?"
"Yeah, I, yeah. I walked here." Mike waited overlong for the paramedics to back up, and then tentatively slid off the conference table. He took two steps to his right, fingers never leaving the table's edge. "I'm not dizzy or anything."
"Your head hurt?"
"Besides my eyes, you mean? No." Mike smoothed down his necktie with his free hand: a sure sign he was working back through his recent memory in search of a specific datum. "I landed on my elbows. My head didn't hit the floor."
The paramedic started to put things away in his kit. "We can transport you to a hospital if you want, but you've got no warning signs for concussion. Chances are it's flash-blindness, and you'll be fine in an hour."
Harvey put up a hand. "You're not taking him in for a full examination?"
"Like I said: up to him. It's going to be a wait there, so if he prefers to wait here and see if it gets better, he can do that."
Gingerly, as if afraid it would wheel away from him of its own volition, Mike lowered himself into a chair. "How much does an ambulance ride cost?" he asked, in that odd mordant tone that wasn't really joking.
"Depends on your insurance --" said the paramedic, but Harvey cut him off.
"Doesn't matter. You're going."
And then Mike turned his blind face to Harvey and said, as shirty as you please, "Oh I am, am I?" A little bit of smirk pulled his mouth off-center. Angled as he was toward the windows at Harvey's back, his eyes took the morning sunlight and gleamed. The pupils were still narrow, but they would be, in the sun. The skin under his eyelids was pink and irritated and he looked a little bit strange: that scattered, woozy air of the one time Harvey had seen him drunk. Genially, self-aggrandizingly drunk, off-kilter, but not a danger to himself. Harvey had the leisure to examine that face carefully, what with Mike not able to examine him back.
The paramedic zipped up his little bag of tricks and glanced uncertainly between them. He cleared his throat. At the noise, Mike turned away from the sunny windows, and Harvey watched as his pupils widened. Not nearly as much as they should have, just a milimeter, but more than they'd done a few minutes ago. So it wasn't nearly as bothersome to hear Mike say, "Yeah, I'm not going" than it might have been otherwise.
"That's fine," the paramedic told him. "Rest, cold washcloth over your eyes. Don't ignore the pain, especially if it's a new acute pain. You can always come in later."
And with a brief touch to Mike's shoulder, he was gone. Mike and Harvey were alone in the conference room; on the other side of the glass Jessica was arguing with a gang of strangers in ill-fitting jackets who were probably building management. A few underlings still trotted down the hallways on her errands, but the general air of confused worry was passing. Only Mike and the dearth of overhead lights indicated anything in particular had happened.
Lacking laptops, most of the paralegals and secretaries would likely be sent home, unable to complete their work. Associates could still wade through print reference books, so might be able to stay. Some jackass junior partner was almost certainly going to throw a fit over the billable hours he couldn't bill. And here was Mike Ross in a conference room, unable to go home and unable to read a reference book. "All right," Harvey said to himself. "Up."
"Hm?" Mike had a hand on the conference table again. He of course couldn't see Harvey's gesture that he should stand, so Harvey walked up to him and yanked lightly on his jacket lapel. "What now?"
"My office," Harvey told him, as if they would go anywhere else. Mike got to his feet with that slow care that was turning out to be characteristic of his spatial uncertainty, and Harvey was delighted to watch him unconsciously straighten his sleeves. He forgot to button his jacket, but -- one civilized gesture at a time. Mike was learning.
And so they trundled down the hall. Out of the helter-skelter of emergency, Harvey decided that the square dance method of navigation was too cumbersome and humiliating, so he merely took up Mike's hand and tucked it under his own elbow. Harvey had squired plenty of elderly ladies down the hall in such a manner -- he had yet to meet an elderly lady who did not appreciate chivalric gestures -- and Mike took the chivalric treatment without objection. It also allowed Harvey to set the pace, slightly faster than a crawl but not so fleet of foot that Mike might crash into something. Mike followed where he was led without objection, but the tension in his arm was obvious. He managed to keep his mouth shut all the way there though, which was a miracle. He couldn't see the stares, obviously, nor the way Harvey warned off the curious with a shake of his head.
He sat on Harvey's couch as he was told, but hesitated to lie down. Harvey loomed over him to no avail (though surely he could feel the shadow on his face where Harvey's torso blocked the sunlight); Mike only gave in when Donna arrived with a washcloth and a small ceramic bowl of cold water and barked, "Flat on your back, puppy."
Mike hated that nickname, but he said nothing. He kicked off his shoes before resting his feet against one arm of the couch. (His socks were obviously cheap rayon; another thing Harvey was going to have to teach him. But at least he did know to kick off his shoes.) Donna sat next to his hip and wrung the wet washcloth carefully before spreading it over his face.
"I like to breathe," Mike said mildly, and folded it back so it only covered his eyes. His hands danced around his face for a moment, but there wasn't anything further for him to do and soon he rested his wrists on his breastbone like a sleeping child. He should have taken off his jacket before lying down, but there was no point in telling him that now. "This is not the way I imagined sitting in on the Abramowicz call."
"Cancelled," Donna sang out. She stood and approached Harvey with a wicked look on her face, which meant he should have expected that she would wipe her wet hands on his dress shirt. "I already rescheduled for tomorrow."
Harvey bit back any auditory indication that his assistant was a terrible barbarian, and settled for a glare as she sailed out of his office.
There wasn't any more to do, or not till Mike got better (or failed to get better). Harvey came around his desk and sat down. The papers arrayed in front of him were the same papers he'd left half an hour ago. Somebody suing somebody else, some damn thing unrelated to the situation in front of him. He fussed with individual pages, sorting them into piles and straightening the piles, half an eye on Mike. Who was as still as Mike Ross could ever hope to be -- that is to say, only two of his fingers were fidgeting instead of all ten -- and obviously did not realize he was being watched.
"We were arguing. Harold and I. The electrician was there to close off the elevator bank, and Harold wanted him to wait." Mike smoothed down his necktie against his chest as he talked to the air. Working it out for himself, then. Harvey felt no need to indicate his attention. "He's working on della Garza this morning. Big meeting with the plaintiff."
It wasn't Harvey's case (yet), but he'd heard about it. "Aurelia della Garza uses a wheelchair."
Mike nodded under the washcloth. "Harold thought it would be a slight to her to have her come up the back elevators."
Well, not more slight than I accidentally shut down the whole firm to avoid offending you. Harvey waited for Mike to come to that conclusion himself. Splayed on the couch, his stocking feet against the arm of it, Mike tapped idly at his own breastbone and churned through whatever continued to bother him about it.
"Arc-welding without proper protection is a major source of eye burn reports to the emergency room. It's the same thing as snow-blindness, and it's called photokeratitis, or if you really want to impress your friends, keratoconjunctivitis photoelectrica."
"You're making that up," said Harvey, who suspected he was not.
Harvey also suspected that Mike did not have the organizational experience to understand how many people were finding reasons to walk down this particular hallway and gawk at him. As expected, the secretaries wore jackets and carried their purses: sent home. They were also much better at glancing in through the door glass without a hitch in their stride; the associates had to be herded out of the way with extreme prejudice. Donna seemed to be enjoying that task heartily; he'd always known she was a sadist.
Mike huffed a little chuckle to himself. "If that's what I saw, then it's a burn not just flash-blindness, which is technically an oversaturation of the cells at the back of the eye."
"What did you, read all of Wikipedia one rainy day?"
Mike lapsed into silence. Not for long.
"If you give me name and paragraph number, I can follow along on whatever you're working on."
"Mike, you're injured."
"And you might as well capitalize on the information in my head while it's still current."
It was a testament to Harvey's excellent sense of discretion that he bit back any comment about Mike's penchant for gloom. Better to let the man exhaust himself now, rather than see it come up over and over in the weeks to come.
Given free rein, Mike took it. "I'm not sure you realize," he said. It sounded less personal without his ability to make eye contact, as if he were just expositing the hamster-wheel in his head rather than telling anyone in particular. He went on, "I'm a one-trick pony. I read it, I learn it. That's my trick. I can't sing, I can't dance, I'm terrible at sports and drawing and video games, for heaven's sake, have you ever met another red-blooded American male who can't even level-up in Centipede? I can't cook. I can't do funny impressions."
"That doesn't stop you from trying," Harvey interrupted drily.
"I read it, I learn it, and that's all. So. Who am I if I can't read any more?" Mike's voice didn't break, strictly speaking. His adam's apple moved as he swallowed. "Auditory input doesn't work half as well. That's why you have to tell me everything twice. I've got this storehouse of everything I've ever read up through today, and it's all in here --" he poked a stiff finger in the middle of his forehead, just above the edge of the washcloth, "-- and what if that's all the learning I'll ever get? I'll be out of date in about a week."
If Mike had a subtle bone in his body, this monologue could be construed as fishing for compliments. Harvey could recite an extensive list of Mike's skills, only about half of which were visually oriented. Instead he said, "I went to law school with a blind guy. German shepherd at his feet in class, touch-typed his notes. He runs the public defenders' office in Indianapolis now."
"He didn't go blind right in the middle of the most important thing that ever happened to him, did he?"
"I don't know, I never asked him." Harvey paused, and decided not to say anything about this job being the most important thing ever to happen to Mike Ross.
Mike took in a shaky breath. Harvey watched his ribs rise with it.
There was little point in pretending to work, especially if that non-work was not going to be billable. Harvey checked his watch and came around to the front of his desk. "Move over," he said, and sat on the edge of the couch next to Mike's hip.
Mike squirmed aside, further wrinkling his suit. There wasn't really room for two. He didn't know what to do with his hands, and ended up with his right one curled next to Harvey's knee.
"It's been almost half an hour. Close your eyes."
"They are closed," Mike grumbled, as Harvey reached out for the washcloth. He lifted it away with two fingers.
"What color are your eyelids?"
Mike's eyes were watering again, or maybe this time it was real tears. Bright as the room was, he should be able to see something. "They're pink. Kind of silvery-echoing pink. One of the capillaries on the right hand-side is still lightning-colored, though."
"Lightning's not a color," said Harvey, and held up his hand to shade Mike's face. "Better?"
"Uh." Mike's voice wavered, so he stopped talking. He was controlling his breathing with great care, long deep breaths that Harvey could feel all through Mike's body. It seemed unconscious the way that Mike flexed his right hand and closed it around Harvey's knee. "Better, I guess, yeah."
Tidy, Harvey wiped away the tears at Mike's temple with the washcloth, and then re-folded it and laid it over Mike's eyes again. "You're not blind," he said in a low voice. He smoothed down Mike's necktie against his chest.
"I'm not blind," Mike repeated.
Harvey sat still and let that knowledge percolate for a little while, his palm flat over the silk. Mike remembered abruptly that he had a deathgrip on his boss's knee, and let go. Harvey did not move while Mike unseeing pinched the wool back into its native pleat. He was very careful to smooth it downward, a delicate touch of which any French tailor could be proud.
In his doorway, watching through the closed door, Jessica Pearson stood with a hand on her hip. She'd gotten rid of the flashlight and gazed at Harvey with steely patience. Behind her stood Donna with a smooth and neutral expression, and Rachel chewing nervously on a pen. Harvey gave a nod and then a shooing gesture with his free hand. This time, though, Mike perceived that a visual conversation was going on near him, even with his eyes closed.
"Is that the incident report paperwork?" he asked, his voice firm again.
"Not yet," Harvey told him.
Mike began to sit up. "They'll want it while it's still fresh," he said, and took the washcloth off his face. Upright, he looked disheveled but not undone. The blank spatial uncertainty of before was gone. He turned his face as if meeting Harvey's gaze, thought his eyelids stayed closed, the lashes wet. They were very close to one another, breathing in each other's faces. It would be possible to push him back down and make him rest longer, but not without argument. Harvey stood and buttoned his jacket before putting out a hand to help Mike up.
Mike couldn't see that hand with his eyes closed, of course. Harvey gripped his wrist and he pivoted on the couch and set his stocking feet on the floor. Mike came to a stand without a wobble. He didn't let go when Harvey did.
The witness evidently composing himself, Jessica took the initiative and let herself in. "Mr. Ross," she said.
"Ms. Pearson." He turned to her, but didn't open his eyes. "Given I don't have any shoes on, is it okay if we use your table?"
Harvey realized that this question was directed at him. "Yes, of course." Mike's absent grip on his wrist turned easily into guidance from one side of the office to the other. Mike's steps were stately, slow, but no longer with that awkward reluctance from before. Harvey pulled out a chair and Mike sat in it and they let each other go.
Rachel came in and set down a laptop opposite Mike's seat, ready to transcribe his description of what had happened. In front of Jessica, she wouldn't do anything mushy toward Mike. Mike wouldn't see it anyway, not yet. She cleared her throat to start in on the forms.
"I'll be back in an hour," said Jessica, and gave Harvey a sharp nod. When she was gone, he pulled out a chair at the table for himself, at Mike's elbow.
"This is going to be boring," Mike warned. He put his hand up over his eye sockets and was able to squint at Harvey under the edge of his pinky finger.
"You think I wouldn't sit in on my client's incident report?" Harvey put on his bland working facade for the first time since the lights had gone out.
Mike shut his eyes again. "Of course," he said, with a grin. "What was I thinking."