Crashing Through (17 page)

Soon the family had crossed the schoolyard and made it onto Linden Lane. May could see a dark horizontal line on the sidewalk every few steps, and when he dragged his foot across it he knew that line to be the crack in the sidewalk. He determined that the crack appeared darker not because it was a different color of cement but because the sun wasn’t reaching it in the same way it reached the rest of the sidewalk…which meant it, too, was a shadow. He saw the same darkening cement when reaching intersections, and he realized that curbs must also appear a different color because of shadows, not because they were painted a different color. And he thought, “I’m going to have to remember all this business about shadows.”

Around the block, May headed for the low-hanging tree branch his kids always warned him about. Before they could utter a word, he ducked under it without breaking his stride.

“Whoa! Cool!” the boys exclaimed. May seemed a bit astonished himself.

Down the street, Carson pointed overhead and asked, “Dad, do you know what that is?”

May saw a red shape over Carson’s head.

“That’s probably a sign for Linden Lane.”

“Nope. Try again.”

“A ‘No Parking’ sign?”

“No! It’s a stop sign!”

May stood shocked. Stop signs were yellow. He knew they were yellow.

“No way,” he said. “You’re pulling my leg.”

“It is, Dad!” Wyndham said.

May appealed to Jennifer.

“It’s definitely a stop sign,” she said.

“Where are the yellow stop signs?” he asked.

“There are none!” his kids chirped, laughing.

May could not believe it. For a lifetime he had believed stop signs to be yellow. Yellow had always seemed like it would be the brightest and most dramatic—and therefore the safest—color. Schoolbuses were yellow, his traffic safety sign from fourth grade was yellow. So stop signs had to be yellow.

May still was trying to reconcile red with stop signs when he came across another curious object. He touched it and immediately recognized it as a fire hydrant. And yet the hydrant was yellow!

“I thought fire hydrants were red!” he exclaimed. “What’s going on?”

The boys laughed again.

“A lot of them are red,” Carson explained. “But sometimes they’re yellow.”

“This is going to be a lot of work,” May thought.

He spent the rest of the walk trying to keep up with his sons’ rapid-fire questions. They wanted to know if he could see this newspaper box, that gas station sign, those red berries. All of it was thrilling to May, all of it was wondrous, and all of it was new. But it was also everywhere and all at once, and as they neared their house he was eager to go inside and take a break from the excitement, to be in a place where he could close his eyes. Sliding open the kitchen door, he was greeted by the smell of Ori Jean’s special meat loaf, and it comforted him because he knew automatically, in his heart, what it was.

With Josh by his side, May made his way to the master bathroom. He was overdue. Since boyhood, he had urinated while standing unless he was in another’s home, where he was less familiar with the layout. This time, like every other time, he looked straight ahead. It wouldn’t occur to him to glance downward for another few days.

May washed his hands, also without looking, walked into his bedroom, and fell backward onto the bed. He closed his eyes. Instantly, his body exhaled, the kind of “Ahhh…” that came when removing his ski boots after a full day on the slopes. And he had this thought: “Oh, my gosh. Is this really all the same day? Did I wake up this morning totally blind?” He reached for the radio and turned on NPR—he needed a reminder that the rest of the world was still out there. While the reporter spoke reassuringly about some foreign conflict, May disappeared between wakefulness and sleep. The next sound he heard was Jennifer’s voice calling him to dinner.

It had been hours since May had eaten, so he was ready to dig in. He looked at the colorful plates in front of him and tried to figure out if the designs on top were food or decorations. He found his fork and pushed it toward the biggest shape, which he took to be the meat loaf. When he touched it he knew that he was right. And yet the meat loaf was brown colored, not red, which was strange since he knew that meat loaf was made from red meat. He brought a bite to his mouth and saw the fork closing in on him, and he wondered, “How did I aim before I could see?”

Reds, whites, greens, and yellows offered themselves for May’s consumption. He’d rarely considered a food’s color, yet here it was, each with a kind of built-in visual advertisement. He picked up his glass of milk and studied it. The liquid looked bright white from the top but darker and more opaque from the side, and this idea seemed a bit unreal to him, that the same milk might be different whites depending on one’s vantage point.

“May I have more milk, please, Dad?” Wyndham asked.

May looked around and found a shape that looked to be a likely candidate. He reached for the milk carton, picked it up, and passed it to his son.

“Oh, my,” Jennifer said under her breath. “Oh, gosh. That was amazing.”

She looked across the table at her husband. He smiled as he watched himself push a cherry tomato around on his plate. It hadn’t occurred to her that he still hadn’t looked much at her face or his children’s faces. All she knew was that she was proud of this man, and that her sons were watching what it meant to go out and try.

With their last bit of dessert, Carson and Wyndham knew they were in trouble.

“Dad, we have a lot more stuff to show you,” Carson said.

“Yeah, I know where there’s a spider,” Wyndham said.

“Nice try,” May said. “Bedtime does not change just because I can see. Get going.”

The boys dropped their heads and trudged upstairs. May followed a few minutes later to tuck them in.

To May, the floor of the bedroom his sons shared might as well have been the surface of a new planet. Wherever he looked, a curious stew of colorful shapes melded into the beige carpeting, forming a cacophonous chasm between the door and their brown wooden bunkbed. May knew that he must be looking at the same sprawl of toys, balls, electric cords, art projects, clothes, and backpacks that he ordered put away every night, so he set out to see if he could recognize his favorite among them, a programmable electric truck.

He squatted and stared across the landscape of the shapes. A couple of minutes later, he found one that appeared long from side to side and seemed to have wheels. He reached to touch it. Instantly, he knew he’d found his truck, its form suddenly sensible to his eye, its red cab a revelation.

“I found it,” he said. “It’s red.”

May loved this truck because it had buttons on the back that could be pushed to program its movements: go left, honk, turn around, and so on. May scanned the truck for those buttons. Near the rear he saw several small white globs.

May began to tap in instructions. A moment later, the truck’s motor whirred and it began to move. He watched as it turned left, just as he’d instructed, then right, as he’d instructed, and as it went into a figure eight May saw beauty in its motion, not just for the elegant shapes it was carving out, but because he had made those shapes happen for his eye.

“Time to clean up in here,” he said to the boys, then watched them move about the room picking up colorful shapes. A tall lamp in the corner lit the room—there was no overhead light—providing superior contrast between the objects he was trying to see and their backgrounds. On the other side of the room, where it was darker, objects seemed to blend into their surroundings.

Their room picked up, the boys changed into their pajamas and climbed into their bunkbed. May turned off the light, took out his guitar, and sang them a song. In five minutes they were out cold. May walked to their beds and kissed them good night. He never thought twice about being able to find them in the dark.

Now exhausted, May and Jennifer agreed to retire for the night. On his way to the bedroom, May saw a blond carpet on the floor in front of him. He knew there was no carpet there, so he bent down to examine it. The carpet turned toward him and panted. May stood up and stepped over the blond mass.

“Hey, Jen!” he said. “I just stepped over Josh!”

May had stepped on his dog countless times since they had teamed up. Though beautifully trained, Josh had an uncanny off-duty knack for plopping himself down wherever the notion struck him. Avoiding him seemed like a big deal for both of them.

May waited while Jennifer washed up for bed, then took his turn in the bathroom. He flipped on the light and began to look into the mirror. He’d felt conspicuous doing this in Goodman’s office, but with privacy he was free to really look. He stared at the man in the mirror and again was struck by the tallness of the fellow who stared back at him, and it startled him that he hadn’t realized how tall he was all these years, that this must be the visual equivalent of hearing one’s own voice on a tape recorder for the first time.

He stepped closer and, in the way a radio station becomes clear as it’s tuned in, the man looking back at him grew more distinct, he suddenly possessed more details, more clarity; there was more to him. May stepped back and the man in the mirror again became more general, a mass of shape and color that was more John Doe than Mike May. He played with this changing fellow for a minute, back and forth, closer and farther, tuning the radio in and out, until he felt the confidence to really lean in and look, and when he did that a bushelful of gossipy details spoke back to him. Blemishes, wrinkles, freckles, a mole, the gray in his beard—it all struck him as intensely personal, and it occurred to him that if he could read these stories on his face then others could, too, and he backed away and thought to himself, “Enough of that.” He could not get over the idea that, for all these years, so much of him had been hanging out there for people to see, to simply like or dislike as they pleased.

Now safely distanced from the details, he raised his arm and moved it around, watching an identical arm copy that motion in the mirror. He took his hand and, relying solely on its reflection, tested how close he could move it toward his head without touching his hair. He never grew tired of turning sideways and watching the man in the mirror turn away from him.

The sight of his hands in the mirror intrigued May, so he looked down for a firsthand inspection. At arm’s length, he could see the general shape of a hand and fingers, but as he drew it closer to his eye the veins and wrinkles emerged, and he wondered, “Are those lines a good thing?” A moment later he’d found his toothbrush. He posed from several angles while watching himself brush his teeth in the mirror. Then he closed his eyes to see if he could find a visual memory of what he’d just seen. Even with his eyes closed, he felt like he could see the toothbrush.

May went into the bedroom. Jennifer sat on the bed, held the back of his head in her hand, and reached in to apply medicine to his eye. Then they pulled each other close and hugged. One of them said, “What a day. Who would have thought…” But before the sentence was done they were both sound asleep.

A series of vertical lines lay across May’s eye as he awoke in the morning. He knew he was looking at the ceiling, so he thought about why a ceiling might have lines drawn on it. He tapped Jennifer, who was just waking up herself.

“Jen, is that a heater vent up there?”

Jennifer rubbed her eyes and looked toward where May was pointing.

“Yes, sweetie. It’s great that you can see that.”

May looked around the room. Everything was still there; yesterday hadn’t been a dream—it was still happening, right where it had left off. He tried to remember if he had dreamed during the night, but he couldn’t remember a thing.

Yawning, May walked into the bathroom and examined himself in the mirror, this time without his clothes. Jennifer entered a moment later. She, too, was undressed. Hustle-bustle boy noises echoed from the kitchen, where Ori Jean was helping Carson and Wyndham get ready for school. Jennifer stood next to May, shoulder to shoulder, and they looked at their naked reflection in the mirror, neither moving nor saying a word for several seconds, arms and hands at their sides, Jennifer’s skin a golden brown, May’s a pale white, the gentle rise and fall of their chests distinctly visible to May’s eye, each of them with the same calm body, each taking in the whole of the people in front of them rather than any individual parts, each realizing that they appeared to be a single person if they looked at their reflection in just the right way.

Jennifer leaned over, kissed her husband on the cheek, and left the bathroom. May stepped into the shower and turned on the water. Glistening strings flew from the showerhead onto his neck and chest, exploding on contact and throwing dots of clear wet shrapnel before his eyes. He looked toward the showerhead and could see the tiny holes from which the water flowed, a kind of living metal flower, and he watched those holes spray until the room seemed to start swirling gray in front of him. He reached out to touch the swirl and his hand went right through it, and he stood there for a moment with his arm inside this buzzing dull color until it hit him that he was seeing steam. And for the next two minutes he watched the steam, a magnificent, evolving phenomenon he believed he could look at forever, one that no one could have fully explained to him, this idea that something could be there and not be there at the same time, that one could see something clearly and yet put his hand right through it.

May reached for his shampoo. Ordinarily, he would have patted around to find it by touch, careful not to knock over Jennifer’s countless other bath products. He knew that the shampoo came in a blue bottle. He saw the blue and took it. Vision like that was power.

After he dried off, May went to his closet to select his clothes. He found a pair of pants and a shirt he knew would match—most of his neutral wardrobe did—and looked to see if the colors were pleasing together, as he imagined people meant when they said that clothes matched. It all looked smooth to him.