At my core, I am a chauffeur. I take people from a place they know, to one they couldn't know before they climbed into my car. Undiscovered country and all.

I won't joke about this one. I want you to experience this. I want you to see and hear the realm of a girl who can do neither. Hers is a world without light or sound, but it is a world, and it is like yours in the way that it is completely unique.

******

Zoe Allemond. Born deaf and blind, her accomplishments were far beyond what anyone expected of her. That was their failing. They expected her to come into their world, thought that theirs was the only world. Even those with the best of intentions sought to bring her out of what they considered "darkness" and "silence" as though there was nothing in her head but an abyss.

She reaches out her hand, and I clasp it to let her know I’m there. I sign into her palm.

"It's OK. I can feel you."

There's a broad, unrestrained smile on her face. I smile too; she understands what I'm saying. I've been welcomed into her realm. 

She's heard their praises, felt their warm embrace when she makes a sound she cannot herself hear. It was something she did for their benefit, to make things easier for them. It got her what she needed - Maslow had some things to say about needs and wants, and I really can't put it any better than he did - but it was still an exercise in being a one way beacon.

Not that she minded doing it. Her heart was full of love for them that defied mere functions of the body. That love had been more real for her than for those with their normal complement of senses, in the same way that everything was more real for her.

We’re parked outside her home; like so many of the others, home was the place she wanted to visit before she relaxed into Death's hands. For her, however, my car wasn't a windowed, air-conditioned elevator on a one-way descent. Home was just as close for her as it always was, because she didn't need to have the sights or noises of the physical place. The idea of home transcended the place itself.

I'm not often grateful for my ability to peer into someone's thoughts. It always seemed like part of the territory: drive the car, escort the souls, read the minds. Tens of thousands of times every single day, I see the world as it exists in the head of those who have seen and heard every little inhabited piece of it…and honestly, they're almost all the same.

Again, that's not a judgment. Human senses intentionally hone in on specific stimuli. Myeh, that feels so weird to say. With parts of their bodies built to experience precise fractions of their physical domain, the world they sense is the world they share. Mostly. They need to know that there are other people in that shared world.

But in the creation and navigation of the worlds of the mind, there were few as skilled as Zoe.

"You made beautiful world," I signed into her hand, careful to follow the grammar of her language. She smiles.

"Is only one world," She says. After living so long in a world that expected her to communicate in their way, it's a reflex for her to speak with the tongue.

"With hand, you speak," I say, pushing ever so slightly into her palm for emphasis, "With mind, you speak. Mouth, you need not use."

I don't need to be able to read minds to see the conflict within hers. It's been so long since she felt any kind of despair at her isolation. She has worked so hard to steel herself against it, and the work has shaped her. She must give what can never be returned to her in the form of spoken words with a visible smile. She has taught herself that she is the lucky one. "After all," Zoe reasons, "They are the ones who lack the faculties to reach me."

Not in those words, of course. I say it that way for your benefit, dear reader.

But the fact remains that no one from the outside has ever entered her world. Now that someone can - and has done so - it feels like an unexpected guest. She hadn't thought that someone could actually be here, not it the same way she was. It was an indescribable thrill. It was a terrifying moment of vulnerability.

******

I must inform you of something before I continue, dear reader: everything I’ve described so far, and everything that follows is a translation. Doubtless, you have gathered that I spoke to Zoe in her native language. That holds until the end of this recollection.

What I’m about to tell you is my place in her story. The man writing my words is, too, making a translation of my experience. It's a close translation because the three of us - writer, reader, and myself - share a common tongue, but the man writing these words is only conversational in that language.

I understand Zoe's world, but my humble scribe is as unable to live in her experience as you are, to process the entirety of it.

All of this is to say that I cannot help but limit myself as I describe the details of Zoe’s existence. Her story is hers to tell, in her language, and on her terms. Any other form of the tale - including this one - is incomplete at best.

******

Like almost every other passenger, Zoe wondered what she was about to feel. Only a few thoughts were spared for whether she would see or hear when she got where she was going; again, it’s hard to miss things you’ve never possessed. Unlike most of the others, she didn’t ask me. For Zoe, it had always been an effort to ask anything of anyone, and that held especially true of questions of the mind. She quickly grew to understand and predict which questions didn’t have answers.

“You can ask,” I said. I could still feel her unease of my mind-reading abilities, but the feeling was quickly waning.

“Do you know the answer?” She asked.

“Well…no,” I admitted.

She didn’t add anything further.

The thought of what she could have done differently flashed across her mind. Maybe she should have shown more gratitude to her caretakers, she thought. The embarrassing memories of frustrated outbursts of emotion flooded her heart for a moment, making her feel heavy and cold.

Here at the end, she was forced to finally admit to herself that she did, in fact, grieve her separation. Not so much for what it limited her from doing, but because of the way the separation took the things she held in common with her five-sensed fellows, split those commonalities in half, and transformed the two halves until they looked nothing like the other.

They felt joy like she did, of course. It gave them both the same feeling of a cool, refreshing breeze through the soul.

“But surely, she can’t be happy,” They would say, “How can anyone be happy when they are so trapped?”

Anger, too, gave them both the same painful, invigorating electric shock feeling, like an ongoing explosion in their chest. Their literal hearts beat faster when the fury rose higher.

“But her anger is like that of a child,” They would say, “She can’t communicate it with words, only actions.”

Dying, too, felt the same. Not the physical feeling, perhaps, but the fading, the regrets, and eventually, the peace of an inevitable nothing…

Well. Everyone faced those alone.

“What is it like in your mind?” She asked. The question caught me by surprise. Mind-reading, I should clarify, is not the same as precognition.

“Me? Um…” I stammered, “Oh, my mind isn’t that interesting. I just observe.”

“No…you take people to places they want to go. That means…you have to know what they want, don’t you?”

As with everything else she’s ever told anyone, there’s an economy to the words. She sees through me - pardon the sight pun - knowing not just what I do, but how I do it. She understands the point of it all.

“Do you have to take people where they want to go before they die?” She asked.

“I don’t,” I replied.

“Then…why do you do it?”

I’ve never been down this line of questioning. This is just the way I’ve always done it: pick up the passenger, let them see their highest desire one last time, then they’re off into Death’s hands to do…whatever she does with them. Nothing restrains me from showing them a paradise beyond their wildest dreams, an imagined underworld filled with pain and screaming, an utterly alien place where up is down, sight is smell, and one is none…but I never have. And I don’t think I ever will. I’m not some mischievous genie or psychopathic death demon.

“Just…seems like the thing to do, I guess,” I said.

"It's because you're a good person," Zoe said.

"No. That, I am not."

"Don't say that…"

There's a pleading in her voice that melts me. I see what she sees: a person who can understand her perfectly, who can operate "on her wavelength." I'm the only one who has never had to learn to reach her. To her, it feels like a weight lifted from her shoulders to be understood, a weight she didn't know she was carrying. This was worth dying for.

I grimace, thankful she can't see me in the traditional sense. I don't deserve to be lauded as an angel. She's literally on a trip to meet Death, and I'm the driver of the car. To her, the sudden connection to another being that had been effortless for both parties is an intoxicating gift, one she accepts with tremendous gratitude and absolutely no bitterness at not having had it before.

But I feel awful for what I've done here.

"You haven't done anything wrong, Ms. Twiggs," She said.

"Are you reading my mind? And…please, just Karen. I'm not a grammar teacher," I replied. She laughed lightly, mirthfully.

"Karen, then. And…no. I can just tell when people feel sorry for me."

"Oh no no no no," I cough out quickly, "Nothing of the sort."

"It's OK, really. Everyone who's ever loved me wished they could reach me more easily, even if they didn't say so."

I take her hand, stroking it gently before I respond. She beats me to the punch.

"It's how I know they loved me," She says, wiping away a single tear, "I could always tell the difference between the ones who were…fatigued from caring for me, and those who were sad they couldn't really get to me."

"That's not it at all, Zoe," I said, still clutching her hand. She raised her chin up slightly, the way she always did when she was readying herself to receive information from the outside.

"Crossing into this space, riding in my car…having someone connect with you shouldn't be a gift, Zoe. You're born for it, just like everyone else. The entire human species is centered around a social instinct. To be denied that is…"

"Difficult,” Zoe interrupted, and I knew well enough to let her speak this time, “Difficult.”

I realized that I was falling into unproductive patterns, that I was describing her experience for her…and that I needed to instead let her say it for herself.

So I relinquished the floor.

"What did my mother's voice sound like?" Zoe asked.

"Strong. Kinda husky. Little monotone, but…" I let the silence hang for a moment as we both took a moment to recall the memory, "But sweet. Caring. Guess I'd say…mother bear."

"Thought so," She says, taking her hand from mine to scratch her scalp, "I always thought I remembered a few sounds from when I was very little. Mom told me my hearing didn't completely go out until I was 3 and a half," She said. I heard the voice she recalled, like a muffled recording played through a rain gutter. Old memories tended to pick up noise and grain over time.

"They were all distinct to me, the people I met. I remember the feel of every hand that ever touched mine: the little bumps and rough skin, how much pressure they used on my palm, the time it took to say their piece," She rubbed her own fingers across a palm, "No two were ever the same. I usually knew who I was talking to the second we touched."

She smiled as a rush of memories came to her. It was automatic, a practiced reaction, a display of happiness meant to placate the tired people around her. It hurt that she felt she had to show it to me, too.

“I didn’t even know something was ‘wrong’ with me until someone-” She began.

“There’s nothing wrong-” I interrupted.

“I know, I know,” She also interrupted. I was glad she did. My instinct to interject, as well-meaning as it was, intruded into her right to speak for herself.

“Their words, not mine. Hard to use air-quotes when you say everything with your hands. Well, some people managed it; I always found it difficult,” Zoe continued. I reminded myself to stay quiet. She graciously waited to see if I would add anything, like she did for so many who exchanged words with her.

“They told me about these rays that show them what’s there, movements of the air that rattle something in their head, and it just didn’t register. So many people looked at me and pitied me because there were things that were outside my ability to experience, and I just thought they were silly,” Zoe said, laughing through her nose.

“I loved hearing about science, learning how far away the stars were, how small things are, how weird things get when you keep looking for smaller things. And…they had a hard time understanding me? How I live? They were all so close to getting it. I’d tell them that…just like they can’t know what the tiniest things or the biggest things are like, and they can still sleep at night, I’m not feeling like I’m locked in a cage just because I can’t see light or hear sound. Sure, there will always be things that are beyond me, but there’s still so much that’s not that way.”

She scratched her head, still facing the structure of her childhood home, eyes unmoving as they beheld it. Zoe wasn’t going to suddenly gain sight or hearing here. That might have been possible, but it wasn’t her wish. She didn’t not want it; there were just more important things on her mind.

“And…now I’ll go on to something that’s beyond everything,” Zoe said. She sighed; it wasn’t a happy or depressed sound, nothing so simple as either of those. I could see that she didn’t know what awaited her, and that she was fine with that lack of knowledge. She’d had a lifetime of practice with accepting the unknown.

I relished the richness of her mind, the conscious complexity that she made of simple stimuli. 

Cuh, suh, why do I talk like this?

There was the sublime pleasure of a recalled playground session. The thrill of the pendulum motion of the swingset became a long, pondering reflection on the nature of motion. That reflection turned into equations and something like graphs, as she learned to give names and rules to the things she experienced in a way that her peers never would.

She was so much like everyone else, but she got there in ways that were her own, helped along by people who built the bridges to their shared destinations with her.

And that was what she’d feel for the rest of her time with me: profound gratitude for an existence that may not have completely translated to her five-sensed fellow humans, but was just as full. She knew better than most what that was worth.

******

Zoe Allemond. Accomplished scientist, advocate for disability rights, hilarious jokester…wise woman. Died at age 72, peacefully and in her sleep.

The world already knew what she had done for them. She would have wanted you to know what it was like for her, and I hope I’ve helped her send a small part of that message.

People’s minds are vast, complex, always transforming, unfathomably different from one another, yet paradoxically, so similar. Even I don’t fully see them, can’t completely observe the strings that connect the contents of one mind to every other…but anyone can see some of those strings if they look hard enough.

So…start looking. Discover that part of your humanity.

Like Zoe did.