Cockeyed (25 page)

First we sat in the mine's main building, patiently waiting for our tour group's turn to descend the original, spiraling wooden staircase into the public chambers. It's a doozy of a walk. The waiting area was solemn and stale smelling, governmental in feel, a lot like the passport office back home. I heard a ticking sound, and Tracy tapped me on the shoulder.

“Hey,” she whispered, “it's another blind guy and his wife.”

“See?” I said, “I told you this was the place to go. Are they our age?”

“No, older. Fifty, sixty maybe. I don't know. She's sighted, too.”

“What if that's us?” I said. “I don't want to meet myself in the future. Not yet.”

When the bell rang for everybody to file in for our descent, Tracy steered us into the group near the other blind man. His wife, from her tone, was overjoyed to discover us. Mostly Tracy.

“We should stick together,” the woman said. “I'd love the company.”

Tracy heard what I heard. By “we” should stick together, this woman referred to herself and Tracy. The blind husband,
apparently, couldn't use the company. As for me, I was nowhere to be found.

The four of us neared the entrance to the mine's stairwell.

“Do you want to guide him down first?” the woman asked.

“Who, me?” I said irritably. “I can—” Tracy squeezed my arm, and I shut up. No need to pick an argument here, not now.

So far, not a peep had passed through the blind man's lips. Maybe, in the distant future, I've learned my lesson not to speak unless spoken to. If he was me, I hoped his wife wasn't Tracy. I righted my tone and answered the woman's question for myself.

“No, I'm fine,” I answered. “Go ahead and guide your husband. We'll go next.”

As Tracy and I entered the stairwell, I felt the claustrophobia I was about to descend into. I also felt the depth of Tracy's. She wasn't exactly keeping it under wraps.

“How many stairs are there, again?” She froze at the first step until I answered.

“Several hundred.” More like seven hundred, but I thought “several” was a better expression.

We took the first few steps, and soon the stairwell grew so dark, I couldn't see my usual smudge, not even with the help of the occasional lamp on the wall. It didn't matter to me, though. Stairs are a pattern, and easy. They're a predictable space to move through, unlike nightclubs or South Korea. Tracy put my hand on the railing. I simply followed the wooden line down, easy as pie, one, two, left, right. Easy. Except for the blind guy ahead of us.

Tracy described the scene to me later, so I could better imagine what I'd heard.

As we walked, I could hear the blind man several steps down and ahead of us. His cane struck everything he passed. Hard, too, excessively hard. He wasn't caning, really. More like beating the bush, if there'd been a bush in front of him. According to what Tracy saw, he had no caning style or technique whatsoever. Instead, he used something like a conductor's method, waving the long white stick side to side and up and down, halting in place until he had conducted a clean, four-point sweep of the next step. This slowed everything down to a crawl. Claustrophobia doesn't suffer such impediments well. Nobody could pass him, not without shoving the man aside or down. Everybody had to wait.

It wasn't entirely his doing, either. Tracy said the man's wife was two or three steps below him, walking backwards, holding one of his hands and describing everything as he beat the snot out of it.

“That's right, John, another step, good. Yes, that's the railing, that's the wall, it's clear. And step. Good. Two more and then the landing. Step. Good. That's a lamp.” All the while, his cane jerked and spasmed, thwack, thwack, thwack. Even if we'd decided to shove him aside and break for it, the pass wasn't safe. This guy had a weapon. Tracy's claustrophobia was getting worse by the second.

The sound of the cane somehow made the space feel even smaller. It crowded our ears with thwack, thwack, thwack. With little else to do but wait, Tracy made the bona fide mistake of looking down between the staircases. It was lit enough
for her eyes to tell her the bottom wasn't anywhere in sight. Her vertigo piled on her claustrophobia, full force, the way I might pile a car on a decorative boulder.

“I think I'm going to freak out,” she said. She covered her face with her hands. “I need to go. I need to go now.”

Who would've thought someone could get vertigo underground? About ten flights of people clogged the passage behind us. Backing out wasn't an option, not anymore.

“It doesn't sound like we can go back,” I said. “Aren't there a lot of people?”

Tracy didn't answer. “Excuse me,” she called down to the blind man's wife. “You know, if you let him do it alone, it's easier and we might be able to move a little faster. I'm only saying this out of experience.”

Thwack, thwack, thwack.

“It's dark,” the man's wife said. “He can't see anything in the dark. Sorry to be so slow, but he needs a guide.” She addressed Tracy as a curious and naïve idiot-child, not a vertigo-driven force of nature.

“I don't see in the dark, either,” I said, “but it's simple with a hand on the railing to go alone.”

Thwack, thwack, clink.

“It's a lamp, John. Step, good.”

Tracy pleaded her case. “Maybe you could let John try the railing. I'm not feeling so well.” By my calculation, John's wife would not be feeling so well in a moment if Tracy didn't get a move on. “My husband's blind, too, and he actually does better on stairs without a guide.”

“That may be,” John's wife said, “but I think this works best for him.”

Tracy turned to me and whispered in my ear. “What is with this he likes this, he can't do that, I'll help him. I don't do that to you, do I?”

“No, never. It's like the guy isn't there. Hey!” I called to the blind man, “Do you have retinitis pigmentosa?”

The thwacking stopped. “Yes!” John beamed.

“Me too!”

John's pause totally arrested us in the stairwell. I could hear the grumblings from behind. Everybody seemed to imagine the two blind guys were going to hang out and compare war stories.

“You should try hanging on to the railing,” I said. “Just hold your cane still at a parallel angle to the stairs. The cane will tap when you're on the bottom step because the tip is lower than you. Stairs are clear—you can trust that.”

“Like this,” he asked.

“Yes,” Tracy answered, then finished the lesson. “Just follow the rail around with your hand when you reach the landings.”

Tracy told me the man let go of his wife and began a normal descent, one hand on the railing, the way I was taught. Maybe he'd never had any real mobility instruction, or maybe he'd come very recently to his cane. Then again, if you get too accustomed to someone's guidance, it's hard to let go. Even if it is for a handrail. His wife, in her attempt to be helpful, had taken his hand away from his only functional guide. Not a thwack followed.

When we reached the bottom, we found Mrs. John the Blind Man had, somewhere along the way, decided we shouldn't stick together after all. With her husband's hand on her elbow, she scooted him a few couples away. Some people don't accept guidance well. Or maybe she felt miffed that, by losing her guiding role with John, we'd disappeared her, somewhat.

Our group wandered the dozens of mining chambers, many of which have chandeliers and statuary carved from the rock salt itself. I could taste the salt in the air. At one point, Mrs. John the Blind Man appeared next to Tracy's ear and whispered a sweet reconciliation.

“Is he enjoying the tour?”

“Who?” Tracy said. I was standing beside her.

“Your husband, silly. Is he enjoying the tour?”

“I don't know,” Tracy whispered back. “Feel free to ask him.”

Mrs. John the Blind Man didn't. Tracy and I were free to resume our honeymoon, and what a spot we were in.

Two brothers, early in the mine's history, had carved an entire underground cathedral from the salt. They excavated tons of the greenish rock and left behind, in its absence, an altar, chandeliers, an ornate and high-vaulted ceiling, statuary, a polished floor, and a descending staircase, all of it salt. I've never heard, smelled, touched, or tasted anything like it.

That's when, once more, I began to dissolve like so much salt. Our tour guide approached Tracy as we walked around the chapel.

“Would he like to touch the statuary?” the guide asked.

Tracy accepted the offer on my behalf. There was no point in arguing with his language. Unlike Mrs. Blind Man, our guide had no reason to know any better about what “he” can do to me.

The feeling is one of deliberate dissociation, becoming “him” all the time. My excavation is performed with the basic tool of a pronoun. In “him,” I'm disappeared, instead of brought into definition. “He” is not here, either, like “you.” Like me.

The archetype for my problem runs underground, as well. Eurydice struggled with it in Greek mythology. When Orpheus guided her back from the underworld, his most dangerous task was to keep his back to her all the way home, not to look at her or address her until they were both delivered from Hades and up to the light of day above. So much for that prohibition.

When Orpheus, proud of his accomplishment, turned to address his love at the mouth of the cave, Eurydice, still not quite all the way home, was instantly sucked back down and made subterranean. According to Hilda Doolittle's famous poem, Eurydice's reprisal for her disappearance begins with the charge, “For your arrogance.” I can dig that. Eurydice was pissed. But who is to answer for it? You? Me? Him?

Not long after we returned from our honeymoon, I noticed myself disappearing in another way. For some time I'd been retreating deeper and deeper into my ears. I'm certain, however, I arrived at a new depth of blindness when a couple of cars crashed outside our apartment. For the first time in my life, I didn't look.

The steely thud happened just below our window, but I didn't even think to have a gander. Tires squealed, followed by the smack and crunch of folding metal. Hey, I thought, a car accident. Then I continued making the bed. I had the entire story, according to my new body politic. I'd heard enough to understand all that I could. Unconsciously, I felt no need to have a look, anymore.

Along with my bigger ears and humbled eyes came a physical and psychological stillness. It stems from the feeling that I am mired in place, unable to fulfill what sounds ask of me, which is to look to them. I imagine myself perpetually stopped in my tracks with one hand cocked to my ear, receiving signals from the distance. Rarely do I turn my head to the sounds anymore or go to the window. If I hear a funny noise in the dishwasher, I tell Tracy about it and wait. I don't bother to inspect the trouble on my own. The curiosity to go further isn't in me anymore. And why should it be? My eyes won't disclose the meaning and cause of the noise, so I just stay put.

A sound can be an incomplete phenomenon if you don't have the eyes to go with it. When a noise is made, something in the world hails us, calls our eyes, and communicates no other content in its vibrations than that beckoning. But I'm a short in that circuit. Because I'm not prompted to look, I'm often left to be still, almost paralysed in listening.

In looking, or looking about, we can be on the go, navigating the oncoming landscape with animated turns of the head, sometimes pointing and sharing the distance with others, zooming in and out of places and details with our eyes. We
remain a body in motion, but we are also darting off and away through our eyes, sending out our imaginations into a further space than that taken up with our flesh and bone. Our eyes send us out there, into the distances we look at.

Now I suffer a vital distinction between looking and listening. I live inside the boredom and indifference that comes of a body that only hears. This morning, taking my coffee in a chair by the open living room window, I heard a dog barking somewhere in the neighbourhood. Now and then a car started. The added intrusion of its engine revved and whined, irritating me, until it drove away. The dog continued to bark, however, and I integrated its white noise into my sense of the morning quiet. From where I sat, the sound didn't snag my curiosity or suggest a story of animal abuse I could investigate. It was merely there, in the background.

But, curious about the sound, Tracy walked to our window and looked. Living on the third floor of our building, she could see what was what.

“I saw that dog out there when I went to work yesterday and when I shut the curtains last night. It's so wet. They've left this poor, scrawny lab outside for at least a day and a night now. Assholes.”

“Who did?” I asked. “Where?” I imagined the shape of a black lab in various neighbourhood spots.

“That house across the street, the one where all the skaters live.”

Tracy stood at the window for a few more minutes, watching the dog. It continued to bark while I finished my coffee and considered who should get first dibs on the tub. My
mind was ready to hit the shower, but Tracy's was still out the window, in somebody else's yard.

“Poor dog,” she sighed, “it looks so unhappy. It rained last night. It hasn't even got a bowl.”

She remained there, perhaps adding up the details of the scene and interpreting the abuse they suggested. No doubt she was right.

My window and Tracy's window are different places, and we are different people with different relationships to the space beyond. Her eyes take her out of the apartment and over to our neighbour's yard. She can watch their dog, place it in the world, and put herself in a story that is happening over there. Seeing encourages that kind of imagination in space. Tracy heard a dog in the distance, which snagged her visual curiosity, and then she looked into it, surveyed the details, inferred a story, maybe even played in it and with the dog in her mind, and then came home, all without leaving the apartment.