Cockeyed (7 page)

“Broken pants?” he asked. “You have broken pants? Who breaks their pants? I don't have a sewing kit, if that's what you need.”

“Just come with me and you'll see,” I said. “Please. Like, now.”

Mykol could hear the urgency in my voice, so he dropped the banter and walked ahead, towards the bathroom. We hadn't walked far before he sensed my trouble with following him. He stopped and extended his elbow to me for guidance. Mykol was always good at knowing when I could see and when I couldn't. I wanted the elbow, but I didn't have a hand available.

“I can't,” I yelled above the music. “If I take my hands out of my pockets, my pants will drop.”

Without a word or a snicker, he moved behind me and pressed his palm to my back. He steered me to the bathroom this way without drawing attention.

When we were kids, I used to wrestle with Mykol for fun, rubbing our elbows and knees raw on my parents' orange shag carpet. Because I was older than him, I tended to win, and because I was older, I celebrated my win with the nastiness only brothers practice. Sometimes when I had his shoulders pinned to the ground, I would loom over his face and threaten to drool, sometimes letting a bit start at the corner of my mouth. Our other brother, Rory, would shout, “Do it! Do it! Drool him! Give him a drooling!” I don't think I ever did, but I can't be sure. Now, as Mykol guided me and my pants to the can, I felt rotten for everything I'd ever done to him.

Nobody else was in the washroom. Mykol asked what the problem was, so I extended the waist of my pants to demonstrate.

“And what's wrong with that?” he said. “Looks comfortable.”

“Seriously, Mykol, the zipper-waist-control-thing is broken, and I can't tighten them enough to keep them on. Please, can you have a look?”

On my face I mustered a look of innocent encouragement.

“Aw, jeez,” he whined as he knelt down, brought his head to my stomach, flipped my waistband over, and began to tug and wrench.

“I don't know what's wrong with it,” I began. Two guys
walked into the washroom, spotted us, apologized, and quickly retreated. With the pants to match, I became Jack Tripper in some lost episode.

It didn't take Mykol long to fix my busted zipper. When we left the washroom, I left convinced that I needed to reconsider my eyesight and act a little more carefully with it. I was ashamed, but in a specific sense: mine was the sting that comes with delayed transformation. I felt like a man whose mid-life crisis had caught up, enlightening him to what a bad idea his new earring was, and how silly he looked wearing the same clothes as his son. In that bathroom I left behind something like my youth and, for sure, my few punk rock days. At that specific moment I became worried, cautious, and practical beyond my years, and I was miserable. That was my first feeling for what it meant to be disabled. I felt very old. I had to wear my blindness from now on, whether I found it ill-fitting or not, and I knew it in my bones.

As Mykol and I walked upstairs into the main area of the club, a man descended the steps towards us. By his size and his stride, I knew he was a bouncer. Mykol knew it by the word “Security” on the guy's chest.

When he reached us, he blocked the stairs and asked us to leave the club. Mykol asked why. The bouncer said something to the effect that we knew damn well why and that this wasn't no bathhouse here, man. I didn't want to explain what had happened. Who cares, I thought. It's closing time, anyway.

My brother took a different position. As the bouncer escorted us to the street, Mykol grinned and argued, saying,
“It's just some brotherly love, man! What have you got against brotherly love?”

When I arrived home, the apartment was dark. I didn't bother with the lights. I walked down the hall, feeling my way, and knocked on Jane's door with the heel of my palm. Only lower tones could reach her ears. I heard her wake up, turn in her bed, and tell me to come in. Something became clear in the black of her room, but I can't remember what. I climbed into bed beside her and began to cry. I told Jane everything, how threatened I felt, how scared I was of my eyes, of my future, and of who I was becoming. She stroked my hair and said everything would be okay, everything would look better tomorrow. Her hands undressed me and pulled the blankets over us. We were two tangled and frightened kids, both wounded and hidden away. Our hope was that nothing would find us or take anything more from us. At some point, just before morning, I fell into a deep and colourless sleep. For three years we stayed together that way.

Lougheed Highway is ugly and unremarkable. It also feels cold and rough against the back of your head.

I remember waking up, spread-eagled on my back, and staring at a street lamp. Movement felt available to my body, but I didn't feel capable, as they say, of going towards the light. I palmed for my hat and wondered if I'd crushed it in the fall. My time out and away hadn't been long, maybe a few seconds, but that was time enough on the wet asphalt to soak my pants and jacket. My palms, face down on the road, had numbed somewhat, too. That was a sort of booby prize. Shredded skin is best chilled.

Jane and I had taken the bus home from the university that night. We'd gotten off at our usual stop, and stepped into the usual Vancouver rain, ready to hoof the two remaining blocks home. Although the whereabouts of our apartment minimized my noodling around in the dark, our bus stop proved to be an inconvenience. It was on a busy highway, and on return trips from class, we had to cross it. Not one of my great talents.

The highway also challenged my penchant for laziness. The crosswalks in either direction seemed too far, especially
in the rain, and especially at night. My eyes detected so little in the dark that walking itself had become a dangerous mode of transportation. Better to shorten the journey by sprinting across the highway, and home. You know you've still got some running left in you, my mind would taunt, although the rest of me would doubt it.

Test run the feeling for yourself some time. In an empty parking lot or an empty ball diamond, close your eyes and sprint a good distance. You'll experience just how unhappy the act makes your body feel. Even when your mind knows it's safe, the rest of you will drag and resist like a mighty skep-tic. That inner argument produces a strange, herky-jerky motion, too. Running blind is never pretty, let me tell you, nor smart.

This time, however, my mind didn't prod me to bolt. Jane did. We got off the bus, and she glanced at the pause in traffic and said, “Quick, quick.” She was off, so I ran after her with particular abandon. The four lanes were clear for now, but Jane failed to mention the median that interrupted the otherwise level street. I suppose, in all fairness, she didn't know she'd failed to mention anything. Neither of us was too clear about what needed mentioning to me and when. Because my blindness could worsen daily, its effects always seemed somewhat new and unpredictable.

As I ran, I discovered the cement median for myself, with my foot. I tripped, skidded on my hands, rolled, then landed on my back in a lane of oncoming traffic. Jane raced back to fetch me and to stop the approaching cars.

When I came to, she helped me up, dusted me off, and put
my hat back on top of my head, as a mother might do for a toddler after a failed first crack at walking. The rest of the way home I limped and kept my hand fixed to Jane's elbow for guidance. My frustration followed us. I'd just tripped over another of my incompatibilities with life's basic skills. As we walked, and the pain announced itself in my palms and head, Jane asked, carefully, circuitously, if I thought maybe—just maybe—it was time to look into a white cane. For two years I'd avoided the thought, despite twenty-four months of bumping and bruising myself. The tumble, although not the worst I'd taken, amplified my sense of endangerment. I felt stumped for an argument against the inevitable. Pride wasn't enough to refuse a cane. A promise to walk slowly or to even stay home wasn't enough, either. Not anymore. I'd exhausted my own ridiculous solutions. Although I had only been knocked down and out for a few seconds, sometimes that's all it takes. A new world order can emerge when nobody's looking, and fast.

Taking up a white cane is perhaps the most dispiriting thing a newly blinded person goes through. Our mobility aid is a form of confession and defeat. Its battered white segments and red stripe declare the very identity we've always feared, avoided, or hoped to disown. A cane is a permanent commitment to blindness, more final than a diagnosis, even. In my case, I committed to it because, while languishing on Lougheed Highway, I understood, at a molecular level, that I had to adapt to the pressures of an unseen world. If I didn't, I would soon be feeling a lot of other pressures, such as a Honda against my face. I could survive, as long as I could
adapt. A white cane substitutes for slow evolution. A cane, albeit primitive and clumsy, also relieves us of one dangerous paradox: the blind are most vulnerable when we are not seen. The entire human species has been through this problem, not that long ago.

About 543 million years back, our gooey, shapeless forebears sprouted the first complex eyes. Seeing had to start somewhere, sometime. According to the biologist Andrew Parker, in his book
In the Blink of an Eye,
the first complex eye to appear on the planet may have evolved in less than a five-hundred-thousand-year period. In terms of evolutionary time, that's no time at all. Imagine if I'd grown, while cuddling the pavement on Lougheed Highway, an eyeball on each earlobe. Profound adaptations can happen in haste. In the blink of an eye, even a white cane can fuse itself to your hand.

Seeing, not to understate the point, transformed the world. For one thing, when the first “eyes” appeared, the oceans of protein blobs and cells and whatnot had to adapt to a new survival pressure. For the first time in history, they were the objects of sight. They were seen but not necessarily able to stare back. Most of the seeing was done by predators who, with this new sense, enjoyed a super-Darwinian advantage. Prey had some major evolving of their own to do, pronto. Developing meaningful and defensive shapes and colours was a start. Another way to put it is this: when sight began in the world, so did the visual meaning of form. To that end, prey might quickly evolve spiky skeletons so predators wouldn't want to take a bite, or prey might suggest toxicity with bright
colours. According to Parker's theory, even those that didn't evolve an eye had to adapt to being seen. Sight was inescapable, whether you had it or not. Parker calls this the “Light Switch Theory.” The degrees, varieties, and speed of evolutionary change in that period remain unparalleled.

I like to think I've had a taste of it, too. On Lougheed Highway, my own light-switch era began. I had to evolve to meet the pressures of a sighted world, and a cane was, and still is, the best adaptation my body knows. Strictly speaking, it's not evolution, but a cane is as close to sight as technology gets. Like the world 543 million years ago, my switch was also about being seen, not just making up for blindness. If others couldn't see me not seeing them, I needed whatever competitive edge technology could offer. Some call my cane, that extraordinary innovation, by its more common name: stick. We've shuttled greetings beyond our solar system, decoded the human genome, and harvested frozen methane. I have a stick.

Within a week I contacted the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, outed my difficulties, and made an appointment with a mobility instructor. I would be given a white cane and taught how to use it. Funny to think that a person needs to be schooled in the ways of banging a stick, but it's true. There's an art to it. Nobody said it's a dedicated or varied art, but a little technique is involved. How much, I couldn't say at the time.

I'd never been to a CNIB office in all my years on the planet. I'd pretty much steered clear of them and any help they might offer. Now I was on their doorstep and in real
need. At the time, mobility training took place in the cellar of a large brown building, one that looked more like military barracks than a nonprofit haven for the squinty. Somehow the building's look reassured me, though, and made me believe this was both an essential and courageous step. This was war, and this was my side's bunker. This was about survival of the fittest in a sighted world, and, dammit, I needed some gadgetry and technique before natural selection sent me the way of the dodo.

Inside the bunker, I waited in the lobby for my instructor. Today, for my first lesson, he'd scheduled some one-on-one training.

I'd read and heard about the intensive instruction people received with guide dogs. For me, a dog was out of the question. It's one thing to commit to a stick, and another to cling to a muddy sidekick named Wally. A dog even eliminates one liberty. To a degree, you can hide blindness, selectively show and conceal your white cane, but you can't hide a golden retriever. As well, I recognized I was still too selfish and immature to be responsible for another living being. The guilt didn't appeal. I would regret sitting at a desk and writing or reading for hours on end while my guide dog sat bored at my feet, secretly hating me and my educational goals or sitcom fetish. Then there was the matter of my permanent disinterest in Frisbee. A dog was out of the question.

I only hoped that my training with a stick would differ greatly from the kind of training given with guide dogs. What I'd read and heard suggested mobility instructors liked to place a blind person and her new dog in perilous situations—
walking along edges, or into traffic, or through minefields, that sort of thing. That didn't appeal. Dropping me off, say, at night, in an unknown neighbourhood and telling me to find my way home with only a length of white fiberglass with a golf club handle for assistance—well, if that was my training, I'd rather stay home forever. Maybe just a little training, just the basics, would be enough.