Cockeyed (17 page)

“It's a roach,” she said, “a huge, huge roach.” She stared somewhere at the floor. “Oh, shit.”

If I rummaged around my memory, I bet every girlfriend I've had has at some point leapt from bugs while in my presence. If I could see, I would, too. Not many things make me squeamish. Snakes do. Roaches do, too. Very squeamish.

“Where is it?” I said as I pulled my feet up onto the couch.

Not that I imagined a roach beside my bare feet. I imagined all of them. Why even have a singular form? Never a roach, always roaches. Tracy didn't answer me, so I pressed.

“C'mon, where is it?”

Maybe she was now and forever paralysed on the couch, staring at one of a thousand belt-buckle-sized bugs. Our new roommates. We slept on the floor. I was thinking about that, as I'm sure Tracy was, if she wasn't already designing in her mind some sort of hammock system we could sling from the ceiling.

She muttered one more “Oh, shit,” and in it I heard a tone I didn't recognize, nor wanted to recognize. It was defeat, a pure, flat surrender. That was it. She'd had enough. Of everything.

“Tell me where it is,” I insisted.

“It's on the floor, but don't bother—”

“Where on the floor?”

She was impatient. “Just, I don't know, on the floor. On the floor, over there.”

“Where's there?”

“Where I was!”

“Okay, okay. How am I supposed to know? Is it near the low table?”

“No,” she sighed, “near the chair.”

I didn't need antennae to get the signal. Tracy was trying to figure out what to do next, while I was, like the roach, bugging her.

“I'll get it,“ I said.

The prospect of roach hunting didn't thrill me, but I needed to help, anything to lift Tracy up. It was just a bug, that's all. I didn't want it to become anything more than that. I didn't want a symbol, be it for blindness, for my failure to help, for anything. Kill it while it's still a bug and get rid of whatever Tracy was feeling.

She began to say something, telling me not to move, but I was off the couch and shuffling towards an idea of where the roach might be.

“Is it around here?” I whispered. I think I didn't want it to hear my plan.

Tracy's voice was full and steely. “No, it's gone. I said ‘don't move' and now it's run somewhere.” I stared hard at the floor, as if she might be wrong. “Thanks,” she added.

“Holster the sarcasm. I'm trying to help. Where'd it go?”

“It's gone under the book-crates, but just don't, okay? Just forget it.”

“No, I can do it.”

“No,” she said, “no, you can't.”

She'd never said that to me before, and it was more than either of us wanted to hear. It was, in a word, true. She turned the blow-dryer back on and resumed getting ready for work. I gave up and sat back down on the couch.

I can't say I was disappointed that Tracy thought I couldn't kill a bug in our house. Disappointment is too small. I was emasculated, enraged at her, at the roach, at blindness, at fast-moving children, at our skuzzy home, at Mr. Yun and his inability to sit at his desk, at my distrust in Korea, at unrefrigerated eggs, at the weight of couches, at everything, including my own complicity. Why couldn't I just be a blind person, here or at home? I didn't know how to let go of my sight, in a way Tracy could live with. In a way I could live with.

We sat on the couch and stared at the crates where the roach lived. It was probably multiplying already, the way symbols do. Like me, it could stay home in the dark indefinitely. It could have, but it didn't. A few minutes passed, and it crawled out again. This time I spotted it. The little body fit just inside my sliver of sight, filling my good eye with black and gloss. I picked a book up from the coffee table and tried to come down with one quick move.

“It's not there,” Tracy said.

Normally she would've found this funny, me killing the floor. But she sounded tired. My attempts to do as the sighted
do are sometimes laughable, but only so long as we're not trying to accomplish anything.

“Where is it, then?”

“Never mind. It doesn't matter. You won't get it.”

Her certainty, and her withdrawal, hurt.

“Well, then, why don't you try,” I snapped. “At least I'm trying.”

Tracy shut off the blow-dryer again. “I'm tired of trying,” she said and meant all of it. Whatever she'd found in herself, I couldn't catch or contain. Her blur stood up and walked away, then shut the bedroom door between us.

Mrs. Yun had been organizing a large-scale musical, an English extravaganza to be performed by all the students. We were slotted to help with rehearsal that morning. The cast's pronunciation of lines and songs from
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
needed serious coaching. I feigned enthusiasm, but I didn't need six hours of know-it-all Oompa Loompas telling me what sort of lesson I should learn from a kid who chews too much gum or a kid who watches too much TV. At least their deviances earned novel transformations—a girl who becomes a blueberry, a boy who shrinks to the size of a glue stick. Nobody, not even an Oompa Loompa, had warned me what would happen to a blind guy who refuses to close his eyes.

I walked into the rehearsal room with Tracy's shadowy figure just ahead of me, the shape offering a little guidance. My favourite student, Little John, the smallest, most animated boy in Apple Class, jumped between us and greeted his teacher, the Lion King. Lots of other kids picked on Little
John, a name I gave him because the plainer “John” was already taken by a dour Christian boy. Little John remembered the character from Robin Hood and was happy I saw it in him. Most mornings he ran to greet me before any of the others.

Bounding in front of me, waist high, he looked up and shouted, “Good morning, Lion King!” Overcome with enthusiasm, he seized my nuts in one hand and gave them a nasty rattle, shaking hello. To my surprise, they were still there.

I had to do something. Since Pusan was going down fast, I decided I'd rather lose my job than lose Tracy. By the end of the day, I was determined to out myself with my cane. It may have been too late, but we needed to see if any light could get in.

As a first act, I told Tracy I would be going out the next day on my own, to give her some time to herself. Our friend Reg was scheduled to arrive from Seoul by train in the afternoon. It was our day off.

“You do whatever you like,” I said. “I'll get Reg, and we'll be here in time for us all to grab dinner somewhere.”

Tracy was both surprised and skeptical. “How? You can't,” she said, apparently too comfortable with the phrase. “How will you find anything?”

“I'll use my cane. I know which subway stop it is. I'll find Reg, no problem. Don't worry.”

“What, you're going to use your cane now?”

“I think I'd better, don't you?”

“What about the Yuns?”

“I don't know. We'll see.”

Tracy didn't contest the idea. She shared, although unspoken, my sense that we didn't have much to lose. If my blindness meant as much as Mr. Kim led us to think, so be it. We'd carry on, find other work, or go home. It wasn't worth it anymore.

The next morning I stepped out of the apartment and down the stairs, tapping the edge of each with my cane. It felt, to understate the point, magnificent. If I ever have my eyes replaced with working models, I bet my first step out of the hospital will feel as good as those first steps with my cane. I could see again. Each tap made definition and let me plod into some rickety kind of freedom. As I rounded the final landing and began to descend the final flight, Mr. Yun strolled through the entrance and climbed the stairs towards me.

“Good morning,” he said. “What did you eat?”

Since our day at the lunch cart, Mr. Yun obsessed over our daily menu.

“Kal-gook-su,” I said. My pronunciation sucked, but he got the gist of the word I was after. He clapped his hands and laughed, pleased by my effort. We stood on the stairs beside each other, and I leaned somewhat on my cane, waiting.

“What this is?” he asked and plucked the cane lightly, like a stand-up bass.

“It's a stick,” I said and tapped it against the stair.

“Ahhhhhh. A stick.”

“Yes, a stick.”

“Why stick?”

It may not have been the correct answer, but I gave him what I thought was the truth.

“Well, mobility can be a problem, but my stick keeps me in gainful employment.”

“A stick is for—?” He tried to repeat some of the phrase but couldn't manage all the syllables.

“Gainful employment,” I repeated.

My Scrabble lessons, of all sources, had taught me something of value. I was going to put it to use. If I couldn't hide my cane, I'd try to hide it from reference. If we can't talk about it, we can't talk about it. Tracy and I knew that all too well.

“Ahhhh,” he said, after some tutoring, “a stick for gain-fulem-ploy-ment.”

“Very good pronunciation.”

“Thank you,” he said. “And gainful employment is?”

“It's hard to explain. Difficult.” I exaggerated my lean on the cane and motioned to the general scene of us chatting on the landing. “Gainful employment.”

“Aaaaah,” he said.

“Okay?”

“Okay,” Mr. Yun agreed, happy with his new phrase. With that, he said good morning and climbed the stairs.

Tracy and I never saw another blind person in Pusan. If we did, their canes may have differed from mine, or maybe the lack of blindness in the public eye, because of cultural and political pressures, made the use and meaning of a white cane ambiguous for some, such as Mr. Yun. Either way, he accepted my gainful employment and never expressed any interest in the subject again. English was never something he had much interest for in the first place. For the final few
weeks that Tracy and I lived in the school and saw the Yuns, I carried my cane and never used its name. Sometimes I carried it in a bundle under my arm, just in case I needed it, and sometimes I walked with it as I did at home, testing the way, casually, with my idiosyncratic style. Back then I didn't swing it much. I tested my path, stabbing down, like a gondolier might test water for depth. Sometimes I used it like a walking stick. Maybe that image of me and my cane never said “blind man” to the Yuns or the other teachers. Perhaps it was a matter of politeness and privacy. Nobody said much about it either way, as if they couldn't see the blindness I'd been hiding after all.

Whatever the truth is, I changed my ways, and although I wore my retinas on my sleeve, when I picked up Reg at the train station, nobody seemed to see me there, either.

Chuffed by my success with Mr. Yun and the promise that things around home might change for the better, I left the school, caned to the subway stop, and made my way to the train station. Despite the thick crowds of people, all of us sandwiched shoulder to shoulder in the subway car, I felt as if I'd inherited an empty city. I was on my own, without my hand on Tracy's elbow. All the way I hummed a Charlie Feathers tune in honour of the occasion.
Leave me one hand loose, and I'll be satisfied . . .

Emerging from the subway, I walked out onto a public square, across the street from the train depot. As I stepped out, I met Neil, a guy from Oregon who also taught English at another school, one of the few foreigners we'd befriended. The square was crowded with people, although nobody
seemed to be moving. Neil and I exchanged greetings. He knew about my blindness but didn't really understand or believe it until he saw me now with a cane. His greeting had a trace of surprise in it.

“What's going on in the square?” I asked.

“You didn't hear about this? It's a protest. There're police and students everywhere.”

“What's the cause?”

“Environmental stuff. One of the rivers is being polluted upstream. A smelter or something, I think.”

I listened to the protest but couldn't hear anything I recognized as protesting.

“Is it finished?” I asked.

Neil looked around for me. “No, I don't think so. A lot of them are still sitting.”

“So it's like a sit-in?”

“Kind of. Students do that here, and a lot of them shave their heads in solidarity.”

I felt the breeze on my scalp. Neil noticed what he'd just said.

“Hey!” he chirped. “You fit right in. Better steer clear of the cops.”

I looked over Neil's shoulder at the crowd and tried to see the layout of things, where all the bald protesters might end and where a line of cops might begin. Neil realized, again, the implication of what he'd said.

“Do you need me to help you find your way around?”

I did, but I didn't want to give up my first day on my own. It was too sweet, too important to hand back now.

“No, I'll be fine. I'll see you later.”

Into the throng of mostly seated people, I tapped my way and, banging loudly, hoped to draw enough attention to my cane that people might move out of the way. I didn't know how, otherwise, to say, I'm blind and I need to get through your protest. As I passed, a few hands tugged at my pant leg, suggesting I sit back down. To those people I shrugged, as if to say, I'm bald every day, so I'm not here to sit with you, although I probably would if I had time, thanks. Few moved. My cane wasn't doing its most expressive job.

On the other side of the square I could see what I guessed were the doors to the train station. I lost the image now and again as I walked, so it took me a long time to get there, stopping occasionally to correct my course and recover lost ground. By the time I arrived at the steps leading to the doors, I'd carved a large zigzag through the protesters. My strange route, I guess, alerted the cops to my presence. They couldn't figure out what I was doing, where I was going, or why. To them I was the odd man out—white, wandering and headed towards them, with a stick and a protester's haircut.