Beginnings Exercise 3

Alice Leung has discovered the secrets of bats: how they see without seeing, how they own darkness, as we own light. She walks the halls with a black headband across her eyes, keening a high C ----- cheat cheat cheat cheat cheat cheat ----- never once veering off course, as if drawn by an invisible thread. Echolocation, she tells me, it’s not as difficult as you might think. Now she sees a light around objects when she looks at them, like halos on her retinas from staring at the sun. In her journal she writes, I had a dream that was all in blackness. Tell me how to describe.
It is January: my fifth month in Hong Kong.
In the margin I write, I wish I knew.

After six, when the custodians leave, the school becomes a perfect acoustic chamber; she wanders from the basement laboratories to the basketball courts like a trapped bird looking for a window. She finds my door completely blind, she says, not counting flights or paces. Twisting her head from side to side like Stevie Wonder, she announces her progress: another room mapped, a door, a desk, a globe, detected and identified by its aura.

--Jess Row, “The Secret of Bats” From Ploughshares and 2001 Best American Short Stories

The first thing the author chose to present was the fact that this young school girl from Hong Kong had done something remarkable; discovered a secret. In the first sentence it is blatant of who the story is about and rationale behind the title, in that makes one want continue reading to learn how she made the discovery.

We meet the narrator and Alice Leung in this first paragraph. It is unknown at this point what relationship they have however it’s clear that Alice confides in the narrator and seeks advisement. The journal exchanges lets us know that the narrator is someone of authority, a teacher maybe.

Questions that are raised in my mind as a reader are:
Why has Alice decided to confide in the narrator, is it because they are both different?
How could one describe an all black dream?
Can you see auras of objects in the dark? Are they different from those we see in the light?
Is this discovery considered a difficulty feat?

I think the writer chose to start this way because it’s an intriguing setup to a story that shows a young lady who is obviously lonely, since she is hanging around school after six, and just makes you wonder what is going on at home as well as what bought on her interest in the secret of bats. It’s a different take on the education of bats that makes you realize she is unique in her thoughts. The only really inclination that the teacher/narrator might be curious is in the simple response in margin of Alice’s margin. It draws us all into the secret one girl has.