Disclaimer: I do not own CSI: Miami. It is the property of CBS, and no copyright infringement is intended.

Long Arm of the Law

Aging, it turned out, was not the hardest thing Horatio Caine had ever done…but it certainly did rank among the most frustrating. Approaching fifty, his primary and only real complaint was that he’d begun having difficulty focusing at near distances, leaving his arms too short for certain tasks—like reading—that should have required near vision. Otherwise, and aside from a few minor aches, his health was good. But that one issue was big enough, not because it posed a serious problem but because of the social implications.

“Morning, y’all.” Calleigh breezed into the break room to deposit her lunch bag, then spotted Horatio catching up on reports from the night shift while he waited for the morning’s coffee to finish brewing. She cocked her head at him and flashed one of those dazzling smiles of hers, which was never a good thing. “You know, Horatio, you’re giving a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘long arm of the law’.”

Horatio answered with the smallest of grins, primarily to avoid giving her any satisfaction. “Not long enough, I’m afraid.” This wasn’t the first of the hazing, nor did he assume it would be the last, but a lifetime of teasing had taught him the best way to foil attacks was to admit the weakness himself.

Entering the break room slightly ahead of Calleigh’s remark, Eric grinned but wisely avoided commentary. Instead, he held out a report and said, “Sorry it’s so late, H.”

“Better late than never.” Horatio accepted what appeared to be a trace analysis report on a case they had closed a few days earlier. “Thank you, Eric. How goes—” Glancing at the report, he grunted and took a moment to decide how to handle the situation. “Hold on.”

“Problem, H?” Eric turned from the coffee pot back to the sofa.

“Formatting error.” Horatio handed back the report, which had been typed in a fourteen-point font rather than the standard twelve-point. “If you could correct this, I would appreciate it.”

Eric looked at it, as if he hadn’t noticed that the letters were oversized. “Whoops. Sorry about that, H. I meant to shrink the font—guess I must have enlarged it by mistake. My bad.” But his smirk said everything.

Wearing a matching grin, Calleigh leaned over his elbow to look at the report before she turned away. “I don’t know, Horatio. That doesn’t look so bad. Maybe we should make that the new standard.”

Horatio slid on his sunglasses, partly to cut the glare from the early morning sun and partly—largely—because they contained a prescription for reading, and rolled his eyes. “Not necessary, although I do appreciate the offer.”

Before either of them could respond, the door opened for a courier. “I’m looking for Horatio Caine.”

“I’m Horatio.”

“You need to sign for this.” The courier walked over with his clipboard extended, pointed to the appropriate line, and waited for Horatio to sign before he handed over a sealed 9x12 manila envelope and disappeared.

“Blank envelope,” Calleigh commented. “Those are never good news.”

“Not blank.” The corner of the envelope did bear a label, just not in ink. He adjusted the envelope’s distance, then its angle to avoid catching the lights, and at that rate managed to recognize the first two words as the sender’s name, but reading the rest of the label wasn’t worth the effort. He already recognized the sender, and the contents of the envelope would confirm it.

Passing close enough to look at the envelope, Calleigh cocked her head at it and grinned. “Ooh. Braille. An even better idea, Horatio—no focus needed at all.” That brilliant, impish grin of hers expanded. “See, I knew there was a reason you hadn’t invested in reading glasses yet. You’re just way of us, that’s all.”

“Always.” Horatio looked again at the label on the envelope and realized that the label was too long to be simply his name and the sender’s name. So he readjusted the envelope and set about trying to make out the rest of the label.

Eric laughed. “Now if you could just learn to read it with your fingers, you’d be all set, right? Coffee’s ready. You want some, H?”

“Thank you.” All jesting aside, Eric was right: this was ridiculous. Consequently, Horatio relocated to the break room’s table and tried again, this time tactilely, and even after forty years the neural connections held. Father Devon here, son. I continue to receive letters for you and wanted to pass them along before tomorrow’s anniversary in hopes they might help you through. I’ll leave the parish open late tonight and tomorrow, if you need to come by.

Delivering Horatio’s coffee cup to the table, Eric grunted. “Whoa. H, I was only kidding.”

Calleigh had already followed him to the table and taken a chair immediately on his left. “Horatio, where did you learn to read braille with your hands?”

Although he wanted to delve into the letters themselves, Horatio knew better than to remove the contents of the envelope in front of his two best investigators. “I learned—” He leaned back instead, resting his hands in his lap. “—the same place most children learn to read.”

Eric leaned over Horatio’s other shoulder and picked up the envelope. “Huh. Father Devon over at Holy Rosary? I know him.”

Horatio and Calleigh both shifted to look up at him, but Horatio spoke first. “You read braille.”

Sitting down with his own coffee cup, Eric shrugged. “Friend of mine from grade school’s blind, so technically I guess you could say I learned in school too. See, the difference there, H, is that I read it with my eyes, not my fingers.” As if caught in a lie, Eric offered a guilty smile and a half-hearted shrug. “Well, I can actually pick out some of the letters by touch—just for the heck of it—but it’s slow and I miss more than I get. That—” He pointed at Horatio’s hands, now still, by way of reference. “—takes skill.”

Horatio nodded. “So it does.”

“So? What’s the story?”

“The story is that when I was four, I was playing on the floor in the kitchen near where my mother was cooking, she dropped a meat cleaver, and it lacerated the back of my skull across the occipital lobe. Somewhat doubtful, but there you have it. I was totally blind for the first five months, and it returned gradually after that. I was nine before I was considered fully sighted, although my vision improved some every year.”

Eric pushed himself up from the table and paced over to the window, looking out toward the water. “So you, uh—” He scrubbed at his forehead with his free hand. “You had a brain injury?”

“Not had.” Horatio knew what Eric wanted him to say—that at some point, if he waited long enough and worked hard enough, his own brain injury would go away. And Horatio wished that he could say it. “It’s ongoing. You know that.”

“Not for you.”

“Absolutely, for me too—especially as I get older.” Thinking of the earlier jokes, Horatio smiled. “Issues I had worked out years ago, I’m having to work out again as my body changes. Sometimes—” He glanced sidelong at the oversized letters on Eric’s report, left laying on the table a few feet away. They should have been plenty large enough to read at that distance, but the individual words ran together into one large block of text instead. “Sometimes, Eric, my mind doesn’t have the flexibility necessary to keep up. The injury took a backseat after a certain number of years, but it’s always there. That never changes.”

Calleigh scooted back from the table a little, although her fingers toyed with the edge of manila envelope and she eventually propped it up to stare at the braille. “I know just a very, very little about cortical vision loss. I have a five-year-old niece who was born with it; I’m not really that close to her—they’re still down in Louisiana, so I’ve only seen her once—but I did a little internet research before they came for Christmas a year ago. That’s what we’re talking about, right?”

“Um, I’m not sure. The damage was limited to a small portion of my occipital lobe that assimilates the visual information collected by other parts of my brain, which were still working.”

“Oh wow. I’m not even sure I understand how that would work.”

“Well, essentially my eyes still worked but my brain wasn’t able to interpret the information because that part had been destroyed; therefore, I couldn’t see. And when my vision did start to return, it was fragmented.”

“Fragmented? How do you mean?”

“At first, for instance, I could see colors but not forms.” He’d started seeing colors not long after he started kindergarten and had spent hours—many, many of them—asking about the colors of every conceivable object. “Later, I could see things when they moved, but they disappeared once they stopped moving.” He’d been old enough, at that point, to realize that keeping his body in motion kept the world in motion as well. The result? A lot of wandering around the classroom and two years worth of exasperated teachers. “It took five years for my brain to be able to put all the pieces together reliably.”

“But you said it’s ongoing? I don’t understand.”

“Certain tasks are difficult. I have tricks that help, but the problem still exists.”

“Like what?”

“Um, okay. Separating one small item from a large, tightly-grouped collection, or identifying an object in the foreground when the background is busy. It’s a phenomenon called crowding. I have tricks that help, but the problem still exists.”

“Like separating bomb fragments?” Calleigh looked for confirmation that she was understanding correctly and continued only once Horatio nodded. “You always spread the pieces out so carefully, one piece at a time. I could never figure out why. That’s because it makes it easier for you to distinguish individual pieces?”

“Sort of, although it doesn’t actually make it easier—It makes it possible.” He waited, eyebrows raised, for the distinction to register in her expression. When it did, he continued. “If you were to dump the fragments of a bomb together on a layout table without spreading them out, all I would see would be the collection and some of the larger pieces. Now, moving each piece does two things: I’m guaranteed not to overlook anything, plus I get the pieces as far away from each other as necessary to be able to see each one when they are in a group.”

Still standing by the window, Eric shoved his hands in his pocket and turned even further away. “And if you can’t move it? Like that bulletin board over at Legal Grounds—two feet high by three feet wide, so many overlapping business cards you can’t even see the cork. How do you deal with something like that?”

“I go slow and search every item until I find what I’m looking for. I touch and use light whenever I can; flashlights, penlights, and my other senses are my best cues. I get closer to reduce the amount of clutter my eye sees.”

“I’ve seen you do it,” Calleigh admitted. “I just—It never occurred to me there was a specific reason for the way you did things.”

Eric smiled, although he didn’t look particularly amused. “You get closer…except now you can’t because your eyes muscles are getting too stiff to focus up close.”

“As I said, things I had previously worked out have to be rethought.”

At length, Eric shook his head and walked back to collapse at the table to Horatio’s right. “Forty-three years, H?” He shook his head again, then ran his hands over his face. “Man, I can’t even imagine how I’m gonna live with this thing for three or four.”

“The same way you’ve been doing it. You wake up every day and you live your life to the best of your ability, and when your brain stops you from going as far as you would like to go, you find a way around it. The workarounds become more automatic with time, and after a while they stop being workarounds and become the new normal. Just give it time, Eric. And never, ever quit looking forward.”

Eric nodded, but when he spoke again it wasn’t to ask about living with a brain injury. “H, if you don’t think your mother was responsible for what happened to you, who do you think was?”

“Um, most likely my father—and most likely it happened on purpose.” Horatio’s attention strayed back to Father Devon’s letter and to the anniversary it preceded. “Speaking of my father, you’re going to read something about me in the newspaper tomorrow.”

Both of them leaned forward, looking understandably confused, but Calleigh found the question first. “What are you saying, Horatio?”

“I am saying, Calleigh, that everything you are going to read is true and that the two of you should be the first to know.”

“Know what? Horatio, you’re not leaving the lab, are you?” Eric’s voice held an edge suggesting panic, although he hid it well.

Horatio picked up the envelope and his coffee cup and stood, offering his best smile as reassurance. “Only to catch the bad guys.”