Cockeyed (28 page)

“I bet you see what I mean,” he said. “Think of it this way. There should be no competition here. You can't go wrong. It's basically all the same. I wish people would see that.”

I looked at the sea of brown couches again. “So, you guys sell me one version of everything here, with only minor variations? Is that what you mean?”

“More or less,” he agreed. “It gives folks some harmless sense of choice and individuality. We sell what I call Ikealism. Not a chair or a lamp, but chairness and lampness.”

“Like Cabbage Patch Kids.”

Plato wasn't up on his 1980s pop culture.

“They were dolls,” I explained, “cute and creepy dolls with detailed heads. You could kind of see a fundamentally universal Cabbage Patch face, but each one was marketed as having at least one minor computer-generated difference. That made each one singular and worthy of its own name. Also made them cost a mint. I think some parents died fighting over them.”

“They came with names?” Plato asked.

“Birth certificates, too. My little sister had one named Roger Igor. For a while, anyway. My brothers cooked him one day on the barbecue. My sister found out when she saw the video.”

Plato muttered something, and I heard his pen scratching.

“You realize,” he said as he wrote, “that you are scripting a conversation in which you not only put words into Plato's mouth, but you have offered him a Cabbage Patch Kid analogy?”

“What's your point?”

From the chair across from us he took two pillows and held them up. One was red and the other blue. I think. The shape and texture were the same, although one was bigger than the other.

“I had said once,” he explained, “that the artisans, along with the artists, had to leave the Republic because they're all liars. They make, with their crafts and their poems and sculptures, artful variations on the shadows of ideal forms. Imitations are lies, and lies ain't good.”

“Even a table is a lie?” I asked.

“It's a version of the ideal table, so it's a lie.”

In my mind I pictured a utopia in which everybody sat on rocks and ate with their hands. My time at scout camp came back in all its utopian horror.

“The individuality of things,” Plato continued, “their distinction, is what we see people coveting today. That's one of the many sources of inequality. Unchecked individualism. The pursuit of “me” and “mineness.” But I think for people to be equal, first, all things—our material conditions—must be equal. IKEA expresses an unsophisticated idea of that promise. Yet, somehow we failed to make an equality of things here, even though little or no uniqueness is available to fight over.”

I agreed. I couldn't see anything but brown couches. Why anybody would choose one over another was beyond me.

“I don't mean to bore you with all this,” Plato said, “but my conclusion is short. The irony is we can't manufacture
away individualism. It is seen even when it isn't there. So I was wrong. What can I say? I eat my crow when it's served. Artisans and their trades don't make versions or make lies, after all. It was never in the objects themselves but in the seeing, in people's desires to see something unique, no matter what.”

Tracy called again, and Plato got up with me. He excused himself to finish his break in peace, maybe just on another couch. I thanked him for the chat and listened to him wander away.

What came over me next, definite and bright, was a deep and urgent sense of my affection for Tracy. I wanted to apologize, find her among the maze of couches, and help her choose one. I had been a jerk of sorts, a smug blind guy in IKEA, as if I were outside it all. Cynicism wasn't the right exit, nor was righteousness. With Tracy I can feel a necessary relief from my individuality, from blindness, from all my differences, be they subtle or bold. That's a better way out of here.

I knew, and I continue to know, her pleasure should be mine, be it sand, beige, or brown, wherever I can find it, whatever shape and colour it may take for her. It doesn't matter if it is a couch or a poem or a city. To not want to see what she is looking for, even if I can't, that is my worst crime against my Republic. I have to want to see what's out there for her, with her, although it's not there for me or my eyes. That's only fair to our differences.

When I found her near a brown glob of couchness, I asked
her to describe it to me. As it came into focus, with each word, IKEA disappeared around us, its couches and its smell, and left me alone with Tracy's voice. I coveted every word of her.

 

I haven't seen my face in five years.

Because I haven't seen it, I've awakened into a new order, a different sense of time and identity, like a strange twist on those bad made-for-TV flicks. You know the ones. Some poor schmuck is struck by an ambulance, lands in a coma, and wakes up a dozen years later to face a stranger in the mirror. Blindness is a kind of inverted coma. I wake up everyday with Peter Pan in my smile. I look in the mirror, but the person looking back remains young and not there, just an idea. The world gets older, but I see no evidence of it. I see no evidence of time writing itself on my face, either.

It seems strange to live a life but never reveal your final face. Most of us are afraid of it. We're haunted by the idea that one morning we will discover an old person in the mirror. But I'm afraid of how I will make peace with that absence. I never saw my time coming and never will.

I haven't seen the faces of others in years, either. Some people, those new to me at the college where I teach or
around the coffee shop where I don't teach, they're without faces, except the caricatures and portraits my imagination doodles. Others from my sighted past, such as my parents, my brothers and sister, and Tracy, their faces remain lit in my mind but also eerily suspended in time, along with my own.

What I did not expect, nor could I have anticipated, was the loss of my face to others. Because I don't see faces anymore, mine included, I seem to have, well, stopped giving face. I'm giving up on its expressiveness, its animated reactions to the world, despite knowing others look at my expression and can spot it quite well. You could say I'm losing touch with my face, even losing some control of it. If you don't receive the facial expressions of others, you forget to give back in kind.

Tracy will ask me what's wrong when I'm quiet and content, maybe listening to the radio or entertaining an idea. Inside I'm engaged by what I'm hearing around me, experiencing pleasure in the textures of thought or the surrounding fracas of restaurant talk, but I look pissed off. My face characterizes me as serious and dour, even consistently angry, according to my students. But that isn't how I feel. I've simply forgotten my face. I'm not indifferent or retreating from the world around me but from my face itself.

Somewhere in my family's tooled wooden chest of memorabilia, kept behind a plastic slip in a cloth-bound photo album, is a picture of me. A young me. A seeing me. It was taken by my father when I was ten years old.

If I lift this photograph up and hold it close to the shrinking island of vision in the centre of my right eye, I can see, scanning
the picture, bits of lawn, a shoeless foot—toes, mostly—high in the left corner, something red, a knee towards the centre, a ball, and above that, about an inch higher in the photo, perhaps a quarter of my young face, the left eye and nose and a bit of my forehead. Each of the fragments I see is smaller than a dime. If I look at the word “dime” on this page, less than half of the letter “m” is clear to me. My tunnel vision is that narrow now. Total blindness is that near.

Dragging the rake of my eye around that backyard photo, I collect holes of clarity. They are coins of shape and resemblance similar to the paper bites taken by a three-hole punch. With a little time and patience, I can piece them together in my mind and infer what used to be a cohesive scene from my life.

The picture holds a moment in time I remember and remember seeing. Playful, ten-year-old shenanigans we had in the backyard. I have a memory, and I have a photo of it. I am, however, becoming blind to both. My eyes and my mind's eye are deteriorating. Together.

What you might see is a picture of a potbellied kid in red shorts, shirtless and shoeless, grinning, winding up for a pitch with a muddy softball in his right hand. The angle of the camera suggests the photo was taken from above. The top of a wooden railing in the bottom of the picture suggests it was taken from some kind of veranda. My brother Rory, five years old, barefoot in green shorts and a white t-shirt, is running away from the camera or from me as I threaten to let the ball go. My pitch would head straight for the lens, if my aim was any good, and if I'd actually thrown the ball that day.
Although I don't see all this in the photograph at once, I remember the details. How I remember them, though, is changing. Contracting.

Description is a lot of work. You at least get a sense of the patience required to reconstitute a sight from its pieces—and I've only sketched out the most general of resemblances here. I've said nothing about textures, expressions, shadow, landscape, and so on. All that could be communicated instantly if I'd just printed the picture for you. But that would miss the first point.

My eyes, with only 1 percent of a functioning retina left, arrange visual experience in a manner more like narration than “seeing.” My world is gathered up like so many fragmented descriptions that, hopefully, accumulate one at a time into something clear and whole and real. Like a book. When you read my description of a picture, you come to see it as I do: in pieces.

If you'll indulge me just a smidge longer, I agree that there is little evidence so far of a profoundly meaningful photograph, one that is weighty enough to conclude my memoir, my autopathography. The backyard picture wasn't figurative in the beginning of my blindness. It doesn't connect to the day I was diagnosed or the image I saw when I discovered the eroding holes in my visual field. Yet this picture always stuck in my mind's eye and conjures an acute memory in my body of that mischievous surge I felt when I wasn't sure if I would let the ball go at my father's camera. That would have been just like me, pushing the joke too far. That memory in my
body is still a clear picture, although the picture in my hand is not.

The moment is as good as any to show how blindness is a verb, a blinding, which may be only that. My blindness is without a defined ending. I am a blinding man. Unfinished. Maybe perpetual.

At the time of my backyard goofing, in 1983, I could see a lot. I had healthy eyes, and to this day they leave a phantom sensation of what it was like to live inside a seeing body. I saw my father's moustache poking out from under the camera, his tree-like forearms and chest. I recall the ease of my eyes gathering in the periphery, taking in the weight of my father's body as he leaned back a bit on his left foot in his brown sandals and summer denim cutoffs. The deck below him was painted brown, as was our house's wooden siding, white shutters framing each window, a barbecue under tarp beneath one of the windows. The light and colour flanked further down. Without moving my eyes, I could take in the edge of the lawn below the deck, and the oily, brown railroad ties that divided the thick green lawn from the concrete patio. Above it all my father stood and asked us to say cheese. One piece at a time, I try to rebuild the memory of what I once saw in a single flash of light.

Now, when I look at any picture from my past, a frightening exchange of time happens. What I saw in my life with good eyes, I can no longer remember without blinding it, cutting memories up into the confetti of my present condition. As the disease eats away at my retina, as it eats into the future,
it is also eating its way back through my mind's eye and all it saw, full and well, in the past. When I was ten, I saw my father with his camera. Now I remember him that day as if, back then, I was this man who is on the edge of total blindness.

I dream in tunnel vision, I think. I remember in tunnel vision, I think. The question remains, when my tunnel vision goes, as it will very soon, what will I remember seeing? How will I remember?

All I can do is write it down and keep writing. How else can I hold this picture, this life, or this face together? The view from here is of a boy with a softball, ready to let it go. His is an ironic gift from the past, as if the young me is aiming at the old, saying, “Here, buddy, let me help you with that.” I wanted to let the ball fly at my lens, whatever was left of it.

My hope is that one day soon I'll puzzle over another ten-year-old boy. Or maybe it will be a girl. Tracy and I would be thrilled either way. Because I'm thinking about my father taking a picture of his son, let's just say, for fun, that it's a boy. I've got an image in mind, I think.

When the time is right, I'll show him this photograph of me and my softball and let him find some of his young face in my own. In our family, only Tracy will play baseball with our son, and only Tracy will take the family photos. To him I will tell all the stories, of things I've seen and things I've never seen.

Then, one day, my son will ask me the inevitable question, “How long have you been blind?”

I'll try to recall what I've seen in my life and try to remember
exactly when the images stopped visiting me. I worry that I already know the answer, though.

“I've been blind,” I'll have to say, “for as long as I can remember.”