Crashing Through (19 page)

May put his hands on Jennifer’s knees and gently pushed them apart. She did not resist. He knelt in between and maneuvered his head for a very close and well-lit view. He resisted all urges to touch and used his vision to see what he could discern, corkscrewing his head into various positions, allowing the light to play off the most interesting parts, watching how delicate areas merged into other areas announced only by subtle shifts in color. Part of Jennifer wanted to run away and lock herself in the bathroom; the other part wanted to pull her husband close and forget about all this looking stuff. Instead, she remained still in just the way he needed, telling herself, “Just stay a visual object. Just stay a visual object…”

After several minutes, May worked his way down Jennifer’s legs, continuing his spoken stream-of-consciousness play-by-play, providing insight on body vagaries even she had forgotten. Before this day, no one had told her she had cute knees.

By the time May reached Jennifer’s toes, the couple had run empty on restraint. Jennifer pulled him to her chest, they began kissing, and the rest followed with a charge and passion that startled them both. Occasionally, Jennifer peeked to see if May was checking himself out—after all, his body was as new to him visually as was hers. But he never seemed to look. To May’s thinking, it would have been a waste of resources to inspect himself; why squander his vision when there was a beautiful woman in front of his eye?

As their lovemaking continued, neither looked at anything at all, preferring to close their eyes, breathe deeply into each other’s ears, and just feel. Then, when a crescendo began for both of them, May opened his eyes, and for a moment he could see that Jennifer’s eyes were still closed, and she looked dear and vulnerable—should he be looking at her when she didn’t know to look back?—but he didn’t think for long because a moment later she opened her eyes and gazed directly into his, and it felt to him that her eyes had heard his eyes calling, that eyes could really do that, and now neither of them was willing to break the gaze, they just stayed locked into each other, and as the moment reached its peak Jennifer’s eyes seemed changed to May, they were no longer just a color and a shape and a movement, they were a voice, and that voice seemed to say, “I’m with you.”

May slept a bit late the next morning. By the time he reached the kitchen, Carson and Wyndham were just about out the door. May poured himself a cup of coffee and sat at the table. He looked first at Carson, who was pulling on his backpack, then at Wyndham, who was fidgeting with a red baseball cap. Jennifer asked if he might like a bagel, but May didn’t hear her. Josh nudged his hand, but he didn’t feel it. May just kept looking and looking at Wyndham. Since losing his vision, May had felt himself just a whisper from being able to see the red hat that his father had given him for their hunting trip; it was always just a hairsbreadth beyond his grasp—there but not there. He had asked himself, “Would I see that red hat if somehow I were made to see?” Now, as Wyndham waved good-bye, May could see that red hat, and as he waved back, it seemed for a moment like he could see himself, too.

CHAPTER
TEN

Not one of Sendero’s creditors cared that May could see. His voice-mail in-box was full. He spent day three of vision digging out.

That evening, he and Jennifer drove to a theater in Sacramento. A friend named Michelle and her husband, Clifford, had purchased third-row seats for the musical
Rent.
May was curious to see the play. He was very curious to see Michelle.

The couples met in the lobby and reached to embrace. May knew from previous hugs that Michelle was tall and curvy, so he readied himself to sneak a peek at whatever might be visible in close. But when she pulled him near, his eye raced up, not down.

“Whoa! You have red hair!” he said.

“That’s true,” Michelle replied, laughing.

“Do you make your hair that color or does it come that way?” May asked.

Michelle laughed some more.

Rent
seemed built for new eyes. The actors came wrapped in colorful costumes, ricocheted off massive props, and matched their arms and legs to the music. May tried to count the number of dancers in the chorus line, but he struggled to keep track, especially when they were moving. With every shift in position they appeared a different picture to him, forcing him to restart his count each time.

It was no easier for him to follow the plot. When he looked at something, entire chunks of storyline escaped him. He simply could not pay attention to story—or to anything else, it seemed—while there was vision going on. And in this theater there was always vision going on.

Halfway through the show, May began to feel his mind lag.

“Man, this is exhausting,” he thought. But he didn’t want to miss a moment, so he told his eye to stay open, and a few minutes later he used his fingers to hold it open. Every shift onstage required a fresh analysis, and there were shifts every second, and it occurred to him that there were shifts every second outside the theater, too, out there in life. A few moments later he leaned back and closed his eyes, and this time he didn’t fight it. The world went calm again. He could breathe.

Walking toward the theater exit, May felt as if he’d been through one of his college wrestling matches. In the lobby, hugging Michelle, he thought nothing about her curves or neckline. Instead, he told himself, “I know I’ll get used to this.”

Only ten days remained until the technology conference at which May would launch his portable GPS system for the blind. He spent his days immersed in preparation, his nights as the new toy for his kids. In between, he took his vision out for some test drives.

Dining with his family at a local Italian restaurant, he deduced that the white shape in the center of the table must be the basket of bread, the brownish-red thing that hovered nearby his glass of wine. He reached for each of them with the nonchalance of James Bond. During appetizers, he spotted a slice of lemon and a sprig of parsley haunting the edge of his plate. Finally, he understood why cooks put inedible but colorful food in one’s meal. Even better, he was able to push the intruders to the side, a victory in a decades-long war he’d been waging against garnishes. Never again, he thought, will I gag on parsley.

The server delivered a portion of wonder with Carson’s spaghetti. Steam climbed from the plate and swirled around his face, fleeing when the boy made blowing sounds. Strands of spaghetti danced in midair before being sucked into the splotch of darkness May knew must be Carson’s mouth. He didn’t say anything to his son about that style of eating spaghetti, but he thought, “I’m not sure I like how that looks—it doesn’t seem very graceful—though no one else seems to mind, so I guess it’s okay.”

At home, May admired the ease with which he found the newspaper at the end of his driveway, and reveled in the power that came with reaching cleanly for one’s coffee cup. At dusk, he could walk to the field behind his house and take in the sunset, which appeared beautiful to him not just for its melding of colors, but for its high contrast against the pale sky.

One morning, while urinating, May heard himself missing the bowl. He looked down and saw a yellow stream. He shut his eyes and turned his head, straining to maintain his aim even as he told himself not to look. Seeing his urine felt to him like touching it, and he didn’t know anyone who wanted to do that.

Around the same time, he visited a nearby medical office so that doctors could check his cyclosporine levels. A nurse asked for his arm, swabbed it with alcohol, and slid a syringe into a vein. May watched as a thick crimson oozed into a glass tube. For a moment he couldn’t connect that color to anything he knew, but as the dark red smoothed higher it hit him that this was blood in the tube, his blood, that was him climbing up that tube, and the idea that he could see such a secret and life-bearing part of him flowing away turned him faint.

“This never bothered me before,” he told himself. “Stay awake. Stay here.”

But as May left the doctor’s office, he knew it had bothered him. And he wondered about the things in the world he’d long passed by that he was not going to pass by anymore.

A local television station got word of May’s surgery and asked to send a reporter to his house. The interviewer arrived with an African-American cameraman. May had never seen a black person before. He looked at the man very closely. He did not want to stare but needed to keep seeing him. May had been raised free of racial prejudice; equality had been among his mother’s fundamental principles. He had lived his life presuming that there must be some staggering feature or characteristic that would explain the ugly reaction by some whites to African-Americans. Yet as he looked at this man, he could not see a single distinguishing feature other than the color of the man’s skin.

“Man,” May thought as he sat on his couch for the interview, “the guy looks exactly the same as everyone else.”

A week into vision, May’s sister Diane planned a surprise visit. She would have told her brother she was coming, but that would have ruined her scheme.

On the way to Davis, Diane and her young niece, Courtney, detoured to a costume shop, where they bought a set of Groucho Marx eyeglasses, nose, and mustache. In May’s driveway, Diane affixed the disguise, walked to the door, and rang the bell.

May, who had been working in his office, answered the door.

“Hi, Uncle Mike, it’s Courtney!” the little girl said. Then she broke out laughing. “Can you tell who it is in that funny face?”

May figured instantly that the bigger person with Courtney must be Diane, and a moment later he deduced from Courtney’s words that Diane must have arrived in disguise.

“Diane!” he said. “You haven’t changed a bit!”

Everyone laughed as May took Diane into his arms. She had been the last person he’d seen before his accident.

Diane stepped back and looked at her brother. She asked if he liked the disguise, but try as he might May could not see that she was wearing one. He saw the pink of her face, the shapes where her features should be, and her hairline, but her face area didn’t coalesce into any meaning for him; he couldn’t read “Diane” in it any better than a layperson could read the results of an electrocardiogram. And this is how it seemed to May for all faces—they appeared clear and sharp but just laid on the page without meaning, each interchangeable with the rest.

“I’ll get better at this,” he told himself. “If I practice with faces I’ll know them.”

Diane sat on the couch and reminisced with her brother. She choked back tears as they recalled sharing bicycles and his adventure driving her Datsun 510. Then, almost offhandedly, she told May how sorry she’d always been for giving him the glass jar of powder that had exploded and blinded him.

“You didn’t give me that,” May said. “I climbed into the rafters and found it myself.”

“What?” Diane asked.

“That’s right, Diane. I absolutely did it myself. I remember it as clear as I remember yesterday. You had nothing to do with it.”

For a time neither of them said anything.

“How long have you been thinking you did that?” May asked.

“Since it happened,” his sister replied, tears running down her cheeks.

“And you never told me?”

“No, Michael. I’ve just felt so bad.”

After Diane left, May pulled on a jacket for a walk to Fluffy Donuts. He considered going without his Seeing Eye dog, Josh—he could do the path to Fluffy’s in his sleep—but he didn’t want to abandon this important family member just because he could see. He affixed Josh’s harness, and the longtime team set out for doughnuts. May even chose another route, this one less familiar, in order to observe some fresh scenery.

Early in the walk, Josh hesitated for a moment to indicate a step up. May saw no curb or step in front of them, just a smooth surface, so he disregarded Josh’s signal and kept walking. A moment later his foot bashed into the curb, nearly sending him sprawling. He looked down. To his eye, the curb still appeared flat, the same color as the street.

A few minutes later, Josh hesitated to indicate stairs. May looked in front of him and saw only a series of horizontal lines painted on the street. He slowed and then, taking baby steps, approached the painted lines. When his foot fell off the first line, he knew that Josh had been right again.

The rest of the walk was spent in a struggle between May’s vision and Josh’s vision. Often, when Josh indicated a step or a curb or stairs, May’s eye told him it could not be so, and yet Josh was right every time. But when they approached Fluffy’s and Josh signaled a step down, May saw that step—that one didn’t look like a line—and he wondered if that step appeared obvious to him because it was the one step along the way he had expected to be there.

Carrying a box of doughnuts under his arm, May set out for home. Again, he balked at Josh’s direction. May knew that Josh could sense that something had changed with him. A dog guide feels its owner’s trust through its harness; it is reassured, even comforted, when the owner takes its cues. May knelt and stroked the scruff of Josh’s neck.

“You’re doing a great job, Josh. I’m the one who’s a little haywire now, but I’m sure we’ll get this squared away before too long. I still trust you.”

At home, May undid Josh’s harness and gave him a bowl of water. Then he headed upstairs to see the boys, and the stairs in his house did not look flat or like lines to him at all.

The next night, May placed a call to Bryan Bashin. As May’s close friend, and as someone who might benefit himself from stem cell transplant surgery, Bashin was certain to be eager for the results.

“So?” Bashin asked.

“Where do I begin?” May replied, laughing.

Bashin wanted May to gush about the new experience of vision, to provide a free-association staccato about it. But he found May a bit reticent—he seemed to talk more in snippets than stories, in stops and starts rather than torrents.

“Well, tell me about the physical details,” Bashin said. “Is the cornea taking? Is your vision clear? Are you in pain? What’s your drug regimen? Give me the nuts-and-bolts stuff.”

“The cornea seems fine,” May said. “The vision is very clear and sharp. But I need to be close to see details, sometimes really close. I’m not in any pain at all. The drugs and hassle part you wouldn’t like: I’m taking eyedrops in the morning and at night to minimize the risk of infection; I take teardrops every half hour to keep the eye moist; I’ve gotta take the cyclosporine orally twice a day and by drops into the eye. But listen to this, Bryan. Those eyedrops I told you about, they have to be refrigerated. That means I have to bring an ice pack with me when I travel.”

“Man, what a hassle!” Bashin said.

Bashin asked about the parts of May’s vision that worked best. That’s when May gushed, telling him about playing catch with Wyndham, about being able to find things he’d misplaced or dropped, about the colors in Carson’s art projects.

“It sounds like an adventure of the highest order,” Bashin said.

“Yes,” May replied. “It’s that trail in the forest that no one has ever been on.”

“What about reading?” Bashin asked.

May fell silent for a moment.

“I know the letters, and I can read words if I really concentrate,” May finally said. “But reading per se somehow isn’t coming to me. I’m not sure why. It’s the same with faces. I’m not sure I’m getting them, although it’s hard to say because I don’t really know what faces are supposed to be like. I think I just need to give it all time.”

May’s voice brightened.

“You know what, Bryan? I think figuring this out and giving it time might be part of the adventure, too.”

Though May scarcely had time for coffee, he went twice a week for blood work in Davis and three times a week for checkups with Dr. Goodman in San Francisco.

Goodman would ask May to read the Snellen eye chart, the one that starts with the giant E on top. From the standard testing distance of 20 feet May could not even see the E—it simply wasn’t there. When Goodman moved him closer, to within five feet of the chart, May could read the E and the next two lines. Goodman estimated May’s acuity at 20/800 for uncorrected distance, meaning May could see at 20 feet what people with excellent natural vision or corrected acuity (glasses or contacts) can see at 800 feet. People are considered legally blind when their vision is 20/200 or worse.

“I know that 20/800 sounds bad,” Goodman told May. “But we have patients who are 20/1,000 and are independent. They get around without a dog or cane and can see enough to do the activities of daily living on their own.”

Goodman also asked May to read the lines on a handheld card. From inches away, his vision was much better, about 20/100. That result encouraged May. He did not like to do poorly on tests.

“So what’s wrong with my eye?” May asked.

“There’s nothing wrong with your eye,” Goodman said. “In fact, it’s an almost perfect eye. Optically, I’d say you’re 20/40. In California, that’s good enough to drive.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” May said.

“I’m not an expert on this,” Goodman said, “but I’m pretty certain the problem is in your visual cortex.”