Crashing Through (10 page)

The Necker Cube

Normal observers not only see the cube in depth, but see its front side shift positions back and forth with their continued gaze. Bradford perceived neither the depth nor a shift, asking, “What is depth?” when questioned on the matter.

Perspective Size Illusion

Normal observers perceive the men to be of increasing size from left to right, though in fact they are equally tall. Bradford, to begin with, did not know the figures to be people. After being told, he was asked for their relative size, and said, “The first man looks smaller, but the last three look the same.”

Bradford remained a cheerful, if easily fatigued, subject. He proved able to recognize capital but not lowercase letters, likely due to the fact that he’d had access to block versions of the former but not the latter at school. Using the ballpoint pen his wife had given him as a gift—his first-ever writing instrument—he managed to scratch a barely legible version of his name, along with rudimentary drawings of things he knew by touch, such as trucks and tools. Nothing, however, was reflected in his drawings that he had not already known by touch. He could clearly discern the quarter moon—evidence of good visual acuity, or sharpness—but was surprised to learn that a quarter moon was not shaped like a quarter piece of cake. Gregory and Wallace conducted more tests and made more observations, then arranged to meet with Bradford after his discharge to see the rest of the world.

Bradford burst forth from the hospital and onto the Birmingham streets. Marvelous was everywhere to him, thrilling a foregone conclusion. Everywhere he turned he discovered another color or movement or object worthy of his gaze.

Days after his discharge, Gregory and Wallace went to meet Bradford in London. But when they gathered on the first night, Bradford did not seem his usual cheerful and curious self. Instead, he appeared fatigued, and his companion reported that he hadn’t been much interested in the passing visual scenes during the ride into London. When questioned on the matter, Bradford told Gregory that the world seemed a drab place.

The next morning, Gregory and Wallace set out with Bradford for a walking tour of London. He came to life in Trafalgar Square, where he marveled at the blankets of pigeons that flew all around him, laughing as he used his new vision to follow their swoops and dives, stroking their bodies to know what they were like. But when Gregory led him to other city landmarks, Bradford again seemed tired and apathetic—buildings bored him, streets looked dull, the parade of faces meant nothing. Unexpected nearby noises did little to attract his gaze; he just kept looking straight ahead but seemed not to see much at all.

Bradford even moved differently than he had before. While blind, he had marched into intersections. Now, however, the cars attacked his eyes from every direction, and he could not move for a deathly fear of being struck. If Gregory hadn’t dragged him by the arm they might not have budged all day. Even when they reached the safe side of intersections, Bradford struggled to step up, often mistaking a shadow for a curb. This was not the world he had spent a lifetime traversing so confidently.

Gregory proposed a trip to the Science Museum in South Kensington, where he hoped its collection of machines and tools—the long-standing stuff of Bradford’s passions—might spark the man’s interest. Bradford struggled, however, to understand the exhibits, these meaningless shapes behind ropes that remained maddeningly beyond his touch. He could say virtually nothing about the simple lathe that Gregory showed him, though he knew the tool’s function and had long dreamed of using one. Gregory persuaded an employee to open the glass case, allowing Bradford a chance to touch. He closed his eyes and fervently ran his hands over the lathe. Then he stepped back, opened his eyes, and declared, “Now that I’ve felt it I can see.” After that, using only his eyes, Bradford could describe how it looked. Gregory knew he would never forget this moment. It was as if touch had switched on Bradford’s vision.

The group next visited the zoo at Regent’s Park. Gregory was friendly with the zoo’s head of mammals, the famed zoologist Desmond Morris, and had arranged for Bradford to be allowed into some of the cages. Before they began, Bradford was asked to draw a picture of an elephant, which he managed in rudimentary form. A half hour later, when Gregory took him into the elephant’s cage, he walked around the animal three times without noticing that it was there. He laughed at the sight of two giraffes peering at him from above, the only occasion on which Gregory would see Bradford laugh at something he saw.

Gregory and Wallace stayed another day with Bradford. They were careful not to press him, as vision seemed heavy labor that tired him greatly. He continued to struggle with curbs and, on more than one occasion, nearly plummeted off a staircase for failing to perceive that there were steps below. He remained baffled by faces even when he studied them closely, and knew that he could spend days with someone and still not recognize that person’s face when it came time to say good-bye.

And he noticed chipped paint.

He might pass a lamppost or a park bench and stare intently at sections where the paint had peeled, and when he understood what he was seeing he would go listless and turn away. When Gregory asked of his distress, Bradford said that he had expected to see a more perfect place when his bandages came off, that he had always imagined the sighted world as a kind of heaven. Now he knew it was less than that. He could see it in the frayed wood and stained fabrics and smudged windows he encountered daily, that no matter which way he turned things fell short of what he’d hoped they would be. He could see the truth in chipped paint and it disappointed him.

Six months later, Gregory and Wallace made a trip to Bradford’s home. He continued to describe the world as drab, and though he had used his vision to help build things and tend to his garden, he still lived much as he had while blind, keeping the lights off at night, shaving in the dark, and showing little interest in films or television. He could do more than he could before, yet this seemed its own burden, as few were inclined to continue admiring a man who wasn’t supposed to be blind anymore.

Though he could make no sense of faces, Bradford somehow found his own to be repulsive and his wife’s to be ugly. He was greatly let down, he told Wallace, to discover that his wife wasn’t as beautiful as he’d expected. He continued to note the imperfections in the things he saw, and to express his disappointment that the world was not as he’d wished when he was happier, in times when he was a different man. “We formed a strong impression that his sight was to him almost entirely disappointing,” Gregory would later write. “He was not a man to talk freely, but was obviously depressed, and we felt that he had lost more than he had gained by recovery of sight.”

Bradford’s depression deepened. In a letter to Gregory, his wife wrote, “He is very disappointed about everything. But when he feels better he says he will do more drawings for you.” Six months later she wrote, “He is not any better. I wish you could help him…. It seems to me our world is not grand as we thought.”

On August 2, 1960, just nineteen months after his second surgery, Bradford died. He was fifty-four years old and had been perfectly fit. To Gregory’s mind—and he was certain of it—Bradford had simply given up and let go.

One might wonder, after learning of Bradford’s case, if it mustn’t be an anomaly. The answer lies in three obscure sources: a German book lost for years, a virtually unknown pamphlet printed in the early 1970s, and the single case study of a famed neurologist. Together, they describe the few dozen cases known to history of vision restoration after long-term blindness. Together, they tell a story remarkably similar to Bradford’s.

None of these subjects saw normally after their surgeries, no matter how good their visual acuity. Parts of their vision worked beautifully, others not at all, and still others in unusual and enigmatic ways. Nearly all of the subjects perceived motion and color immediately and accurately, as if they’d seen all their lives. But it got more complicated after that.

Like Bradford, these patients could make nothing of human faces. They struggled to accurately perceive depth, distance, and space—essential components for understanding the visual world. And they strained to identify objects by vision alone, even those they knew intimately by touch. In case after case, the subjects yearned to “switch on” their vision by touching what they saw; without touch, one after another seemed lost.

Often, their vision was confusing, frustrating, and tiring, an avalanche of rapid but uninterpretable impressions. None seemed to see automatically and effortlessly, as the normally sighted do. Patient after patient struggled with scale, perspective, and shadows, seeing colorful but meaningless mosaics where others saw the world. Some closed their eyes to stem the flow; others could not remember one impression before the next flew in to replace it. Few made anything of pictures or photographs. Expectations and other senses drove many of their visual perceptions, yet those expectations and other senses might be wildly wrong.

And that was just the vision. In their hearts, things were magnitudes worse.

Patients became depressed, a fate few seemed to escape. Marius von Senden, who collected the bulk of the case histories in his hard-to-find book
Space and Sight,
wrote:

It also emerges from the reports as a whole, that the process of learning to see in these cases is an enterprise fraught with innumerable difficulties, and that the common idea that the patient must necessarily be delighted with the gifts of light and colour bequeathed to him by the operation is wholly remote from the facts.

Alberto Valvo, in his pamphlet
Sight Restoration After Long-Term Blindness,
observed:

One of the most striking overall findings is that patients recovering sight often suffer from depression, and tend to regress to behavior characteristics of their blind period.

But it was the words of the subjects themselves that conveyed the texture of their crises. “How comes it that I now find myself less happy than before?” one fourteen-year-old girl asked her father. “Everything that I see causes me a disagreeable emotion. Oh, I was much more at ease in my blindness!”

“I still often have fits of crying,” wrote a thirty-eight-year-old man. “I don’t know why, unless perhaps because I have seen too much during the day. In the evening, I prefer to stay in a darkened room, like a crying baby…. This is too long and unhappy a road, leading one into a strange world.” The man dreamed of “significant aggressiveness” toward the surgeons who had given him vision.

One twenty-five-year-old man wrote, “I still have the painful feeling that I am not up to the task of returning completely to seeing, and I do not know whether I shall be able to manage it.”

The despair was not lost on those who studied these patients. The case histories are rife with phrases like “lost all her good-humour as soon as she was compelled to see,” “ever more disillusioned in his hopes,” and “would sooner not see at all.” Of his fifty-year-old subject, renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote, “He found himself between two worlds, at home in neither—a torment from which no escape seemed possible.”

It was a landscape Bradford would have understood, one that stretched in every direction for innocents who did not know better than to ask the gods for the terrible gift of new vision.

May knew nothing of these cases. But Bashin did. As their conversation wound down one night, Bashin told May that his own research had shown that cases of vision restoration after a lifetime of blindness were astonishingly rare. He provided May with the names of the authors whose studies he’d read—Gregory, Sacks, and a few others—and told him he could find them in the library or on the Internet. He did not describe the strange details and dire outcomes, nor did he insist that May read the cases. Instead, he told his friend, “You might want to check them out. I think you’d find them interesting.”

Late that night, May told Jennifer about his talk with Bashin.

“It turns out he’s also a candidate for the stem cell surgery,” May said. “The two main indications for the procedure are chemical burns and Stevens-Johnson syndrome—me and Bryan.”

“Is he going to do it?” Jennifer asked.

“I don’t know,” May said. “But it seemed to spark him to consider his own situation more closely. It’ll be interesting to see how he thinks about it for himself. Bryan’s a good, good thinker.”

“What else did you guys talk about?”

“Business, camping, gadgets. Oh, and he referred me to a few case histories of people who got their vision restored after being blind forever. He said they were interesting.”

“Are you going to read them?”

“I might.”

May and Jennifer sorted out the next day’s schedule and compared notes on upcoming appointments. They talked about building an addition to their house, which was growing smaller in direct proportion to their sons growing bigger. Then, before they turned off the lights, May asked a final question.