Crashing Through (23 page)

“Will you ever be able to drive a car?”

“Well, I’m trying to teach my dog to look out the window to help me steer. And I’m trying to teach my kids to turn the wheel while I press the pedals. Why is everyone laughing?”

After talking to the fourth graders, May hopped a ride with a friend to Baker Beach, popular for its crashing waves and panoramic view of the Golden Gate Bridge. For several minutes he stood at the lip of the beach, watching the frothing white bubbles atop the water, astonished to see that sand changed from light to dark when lapped by the water. He removed his shoes and began walking in the wet sand, and a moment later he looked up and found the orange silhouette of the Golden Gate Bridge, its suspension towers aglow against the gray sky. For a time he walked toward this bridge, this structure he’d known all his life in his imagination, certain he could not reach it by foot but walking to get there still, a bridge that had called to him by legend for forty years and now called to him by orange.

After a time, he stopped walking and turned around to see how far he’d gone. There, lying atop the sand, were shapes that hadn’t existed moments before, which meant he must be looking at his footprints. He had never conceived of footprints as visual; to him, they were the press-grind-and-pivot feel of sand on his feet—a texture, not an image. He looked at the trail and immediately felt connected to the footprints; they were a part of him, each step connected to the next until they arrived at and became him. He bent down to feel them, but the first one mushed away under his touch, and though he always wanted to touch things, he didn’t want to touch his footprints anymore. It didn’t feel like a good thing to do, so he stood up and left the rest of himself undisturbed.

On a lovely summer day, May met his brother Patrick in Palo Alto. Busy work schedules had kept them apart for much of the time since May’s surgery. Today would be different. Today, Patrick brought the Limo.

The Limo was a long, sleek, black tandem bicycle built for performance and guts. The brothers had made countless rides with it down the Pacific Coast, always with May churning in back while Patrick steered in front.

“Let’s do it different today,” Patrick said. “You ride up front. You steer.”

“You sure?” May asked.

“I’m sure I’m terrified,” Patrick said. “I’ll have no control. You have no experience. The bike is built for speed. But let’s do it.”

May smiled the way he had when he was six.

The men climbed aboard the Limo. Hydrants of adrenaline opened inside May’s body. The brothers began pedaling. The front seat felt foreign to May, wobbly and heavy, like he was trying to wag a dog by the tail.

“Aim for the white line in the center of the road,” Patrick called. “Easy left…left…okay, hold steady!”

Soon the tandem’s speedometer read twenty-one miles per hour. May kept the bike pinned to the white line. He felt like he could keep riding forever, wind in his face, brother as his engine, this ferocious and beautiful machine his servant.

The road, however, was ending, and the Limo needed to be turned around, a tricky maneuver even for sighted riders.

“Want to try the turn?” Patrick asked.

“Definitely,” May called back.

May began to lean left, looking to the outline of trees on either side of the road for guidance. He leaned harder left. The bike bent with him. Each man pedaled harder to defy gravity and calamity. The Limo banked farther, the brothers’ knees churning to keep it aloft, until May again saw the white line that meant the center of the road, and a moment later he was guiding his brother back to where they’d started.

At ride’s end, May and Patrick checked the odometer. They’d covered three miles. They embraced and vowed to go even faster the next time out. On the way home, May replayed the ride in his mind. It seemed curious to him that he hadn’t seen the edges of the road narrowing in the distance the way sighted people always described it; to him, the edges looked parallel for as far as his eye could see. The disparity didn’t bother him much, but he wondered if, after almost four months of vision, he shouldn’t be seeing things more normally than this. Still, it had been a thrilling adventure, and he couldn’t wait to get home to tell his family about pulling a U-turn even some sighted riders couldn’t manage.

Enchanted Hills Camp turned fifty during the summer of May’s new vision. This was the place of his boyhood adventures, where he’d wooed Jennifer, where it always seemed he could run without stopping. He took his family to celebrate for the weekend.

Late on Saturday night, after hiking the upper camp, he and the boys began the long trek back to their cabin. The sky was jet-black, and Carson and Wyndham said they were scared.

May wanted to distract his sons, to divert their attention until they reached the lower camp. Instead, they diverted his.

“Dad, do you see the stars?” Carson asked.

“Yeah, they’re so bright!” Wyndham added.

May did not want to break their distraction by stopping to look, so he asked them as many questions as he could about the stars until, before they knew it, they’d reached their cabin.

After the boys and Jennifer had fallen asleep, May took Josh to Recreation Field, a clearing in the woods at Enchanted Hills. He had fallen asleep here many times after listening to sighted counselors describe the night sky. Tonight, he wanted to see the stars for himself.

He wrapped Josh’s leash around his leg, lay flat on his back, and closed his eyes. He could hear echoes of counselors from decades back yelling “Go!” to start a race. He could hear them telling him about the sky.

May opened his eyes. Electric dots of silver-white, as many as the sound of a rainstorm, ran to every space in the world, and when he tried to see where they led there was no world anymore, they led everywhere, across a blanket of night that had no edges, and for a moment May didn’t know where he was among these stars, if he was under them or around them or beyond them, they were everywhere and he was everywhere, he was where he wanted to be.

He lay there for an hour or maybe two. Past midnight, he heard the worried voices of female counselors who seemed to think that he and Josh might be wild dogs or bobcats. He sat up and waved his hand. It was chilly and time to go back to the cabin. He lay back one last time and looked to the sky. He still didn’t know why his vision wasn’t improving, still had no clue to its strange nature. More and more, he’d been wondering if this vision might somehow be his vision for life. But he could think of none of that now. As a million stars danced onto his eye, he could think only of how lucky he was not to have looked at the night sky until his sweet sons had urged him to do it.

CHAPTER
TWELVE

Four months had passed since the launch of Sendero’s GPS system. Customers seemed thrilled with the product, but it remained too expensive—$995
plus
the price of a laptop computer—for any but the most well-heeled individuals. After an initial flurry, sales began to wane. May had to face something he had suspected from the start: that the company’s survival would depend on convincing various departments of rehabilitation and other agencies to buy the product for their blind clients. He continued to work long days making sales calls, planning business trips, and providing tech support to existing customers. Money grew tighter for the May household. May figured he had six months to make the business fly. He had no backup plan.

Late one afternoon, Jennifer and May made a trip to the grocery store. She headed for the deli section, leaving May on his own to explore. He pushed a cart slowly down the first aisle, gazing at shelves in which every item appeared collaged to the next. This colorful melding of things occurred often in unfamiliar settings, and it could flummox and frustrate him. Boxes on shelves looked sharply in focus, yet he couldn’t tell where one began and the next one ended—how was a person to make sense of that? He found it hard to muster sympathy for shoppers torn between brands of mayonnaise when he would have been happy just to see the individual jars.

This didn’t happen at home or at Peet’s coffee shop or at the handful of other places in the world May knew intimately. For him, context and expectation were everything; they literally produced better vision. So when he spotted a long, silver, rectangular shape on his family room coffee table, he saw it as the robust, three-dimensional television remote control he knew it must be. But if someone had taken that same remote control and put it on one of these grocery shelves, or even on his car seat, it would have appeared to him just a colorful, flat, meaningless shape. The problem for May was that for every place he knew as intimately as his family room coffee table, there were countless places in the world—like this grocery store—he did not.

That meant May had to figure out what he was seeing in a different way. To do this, he relied on an arsenal of clues he had to assemble on the spot. They were:

•
Touch

•
Color

•
Context and expectation

•
Other senses

Over the next ten minutes in this grocery store, he turned to each of these clues repeatedly. As he walked the aisles, here’s how it worked:

Touch.
Overwhelmingly, irresistibly, May’s first instinct was to touch the items on the shelves; more than anything, an object’s feel revealed its identity. Items like bread, eggs, frozen pizzas, and fruits were easily discerned by his hands. Many others, especially things in nondescript packaging, like boxes of crackers or cans of soup, remained mysterious. In cases where touch fell short, he looked next to:

Color.
A two-liter bottle of soda became Coca-Cola for its iconic red-and-white swirls. The dark green Heineken sign signaled the store’s beer section. A purple box with black lettering was a dead giveaway for Kellogg’s Raisin Bran. Still, the colors of many items revealed nothing about their identities. In those cases, he turned next to:

Context and expectation.
The heavy brown jar he was handling in the bread aisle was not likely to be spaghetti sauce, which would beshelved near the pastas, not the breads. But it might well be peanut butter, which he knew belonged near the bread. The small rectangular box he touched next to the eggs in the refrigerated section was almost certainly butter rather than Pop-Tarts. If, by this time, his checklist of clues still hadn’t given meaning to the shapes he was seeing, he would try to engage his:

Other senses.
Coffee could be smelled from a distance of three aisles. Nothing sounded quite like dry spaghetti when shaken in its box. And as a last resort he could pull an item to within a few inches of his eye and try to read the label, though that could take a minute or more—if he could do it at all.

This was the cognitive heavy lifting required of May virtually everywhere and always. He saw almost nothing automatically. He assembled clues around the clock.

Jennifer tracked him down, and together they went to check out.

“How’d you do?” she asked.

“Man, it’s a lot of work,” he said. “But a grocery store is okay for me. At least there are some clues here.”

“I see you found the Raisin Bran. That’s great.”

“If the world were made up of nothing but Raisin Bran boxes,” he said, “I could see forever.”

Jennifer needed to make another stop, this time at Costco. May long had been fascinated by this warehouse club store, which sold, under a single gargantuan roof, stereos, computers, blue jeans, office furniture, rotisserie chickens, toys, vitamins, and virtually anything else a human being might use, usually in bulk sizes and stacked on palettes that could reach three stories. He hadn’t been to Costco since his surgery and was eager to take it in.

He and Jennifer grabbed one of the store’s oversized shopping carts and began walking the aisles. The items on the shelves blended into one another before May’s eye. As always, he ached to touch things, so he began to put his hands on the objects within his grasp.

Many items were contained in commonly shaped boxes or in a blister pack, the object sealed between cardboard and a stiff plastic bubble, thereby short-circuiting his touch. He yearned to tear open these packages to discover their contents, especially the blister packs, in which the product was tantalizingly visible but untouchable through the plastic. Many of the blister packs showed a picture of the product on the cardboard, but to May the picture often looked like part of the actual item on top of it—he simply could not separate illustration from object. Many other things in the store were stacked high and beyond his grasp. His touch, in effect, had been turned off.

May went to his other clues. He looked for revealing colors, but in this warehouse setting an item’s packaging was often more utilitarian than come-hither. He tried to draw on context and expectation, but sections in this store seemed randomly placed, and the categories were endless—it was possible to find a flannel shirt for sale across the aisle from toys. Even the size of a product’s packaging—usually a potent context clue—revealed little about its contents here, as many of Costco’s boxes held bulk amounts of the things inside.

May searched harder for clues but found few. Boxes on shelves melded further together. Items flattened. Things still looked sharply in focus but had little meaning, and without meaning what was he seeing, really? He redoubled his efforts but quickly felt overwhelmed. And it occurred to him that much of the world was like the world of Costco—a massive place in which the true nature of things seemed just beyond his eye. As Jennifer found him in an aisle and put her arm around his shoulders, he knew that this might be the way the world appeared to him forever. When Jennifer asked how he was doing, he told her that he was tired.

Not long after his trip to Costco, May attended a board meeting of the Society for the Blind in Sacramento, where his friend Bryan Bashin was the director. The meeting started and voices began flying. Ideas were served and volleyed, objections noted, minutes made. In the hallway afterward, Bashin asked May what it looked like to see so many people moving and speaking and gesturing. May told him that it was a lot to see, an overflow, and that after a time he’d been forced to close his eyes.

Late that night, Bashin called May at home to inquire of his well-being. A part of May wanted to confess to Bashin that his vision hadn’t improved since the surgery, that seeing continued to require intensive mental effort, that he didn’t want
every…single…thing
he encountered to be a project. And he wanted to confess that he was starting to wonder if this struggle might be for life. But that didn’t sound like Mike May. That wasn’t Mike May. Instead, he told Bashin, “I’ll find a way.”

May wanted another go at Costco’s shelves. He asked Jennifer if she needed anything else at the store. She said she could always use another gallon of ketchup. A half hour later they were in the aisles.

He stared, touched, stroked, reasoned, expected, imagined, deduced. Much of the store remained a canvas of bright and colorful shapes. He still could not tell the illustration on the blister pack from the product inside its plastic bubble. Costco still seemed a lot like the rest of the world.

Near the back of the store, May spotted a large object at the end of the aisle. He moved near it and put his reasoning powers to work: The object wasn’t moving. It was large and squarish. It was positioned near pallets.

“Is that a forklift?” he asked Jennifer.

Her face went white. She waited for a moment, then leaned in to May’s ear.

“No,” she whispered. “That’s a very, very heavy woman. She might weigh four hundred pounds.”

May didn’t believe it. Then the object reached for something on a shelf. To him, the heavy woman looked like two people stuck together.

May could barely reconcile the image with the idea; he had never touched a person anywhere near that size. Ordinarily, his impulse would have been to move closer, if not to touch then to get a better look—anything to cement this new impression. This time he wanted to move away, not because he desired to know less about the heavy woman but because the woman disgusted him. He told himself, “No! Stop feeling that way! She’s a human being and her size is irrelevant. She’s a person!” but he could not stand down his contempt, the sense that her shape equaled sloth and laziness and maybe even slovenliness, that her shape equaled her. As the woman labored down the aisle May could really see her, and in the huff-and-puff of her walk he could envision her struggling to climb stairs, squeezing in beside him on an airplane, breathing. He raced to remind himself that he was the kind of man to empathize with such a plight, but his feeling overwhelmed him, and it said of the woman, “She disgusts me.”

On the way home, May told Jennifer that he was ashamed.

“I’m sick about it,” he said. “I formed an emotional reaction to this person strictly based on her appearance. That’s an ugly thing to do. People do that with the blind, too. I never wanted to be a person like that, Jen. And I never thought I was. I’ve gotta work on that. I don’t want to be that.”

“You’re not that, Mike.”

“Maybe I am, Jen.”

“Have you always felt that way about very heavy people?” Jennifer asked.

“That’s the thing,” May said. “I never did when I was blind.”

As the summer rolled on, May focused even more of his energies on pitching his GPS to government agencies. Still, six months after his sales efforts had begun, Sendero had not sold a single unit to any of them. The agency decision makers seemed happy to buy a twenty-five-dollar cane, but they didn’t seem to think a blind client needed much else to find a job. Money grew tighter in the May household.

By this time, word of May’s cutting-edge surgery had attracted some media attention. A television crew asked to film a short interview in his home, to which May consented. Jennifer borrowed some furniture from friends for the shoot—as a designer, she did not want viewers to see that she couldn’t afford to decorate her house to her own high standards. May tried to apologize for the family’s constricting budget, but Jennifer wouldn’t hear of it. She reminded him that they were old hands at start-ups and that their own new furniture would come in due time.

The crew set up and began filming. May knew what their first question would be before they asked it, because it was everyone’s first question: “How did it feel to see your wife and kids?”

He knew what they wanted to hear. They wanted him to say that seeing his wife and kids was the single most important and beautiful moment of his life, that it was like a religious experience, that he’d cried and finally felt that he knew them completely. Instead, he told them what he told everyone, and it always sounded something like this:

“Seeing my family was great, but not for the reasons you might think. It was a very special moment we’d been leading up to, and when the bandages came off it was a chance to share it with them and describe it to them and just be around them for their reactions. But I already knew them better than I knew anyone else in the world, so I didn’t need to see them in order to know them or love them any better. I already felt like I could see them when I was blind. And, actually, the first time I cried, it was from seeing a float in a parade.”

That answer always killed the buzz in the room, and it did this time, too. The interviewer rephrased the question to give May another chance. May gave him the same answer.

Later, the reporter asked if May had seen anything that had bothered him since gaining vision. May related how upset he’d been to see a homeless person, that the sight of clutter and disorganization troubled him, that even car exhaust and smog appeared unpleasant for their implications. He didn’t dare mention his reaction to obese people—he was nearly too ashamed to discuss it with his wife.

Jennifer was next in the interview chair. Straightaway, the reporter asked if she felt threatened by May’s new ability to see women. She replied that she did not. The man chuckled knowingly, leaned in for a just-between-you-and-me, and asked again. She gave him the same answer. He tried a third time. May listened intently from the other room. He knew Jennifer had been nervous about being interviewed on camera.

“I don’t know what you’re driving at,” Jennifer finally told him. “I think it’s great. I want Mike to see other women. I want him to see everything.”

May’s face flushed warm.

“She knows who she is,” he thought. “And she loves me.”

May traveled to San Francisco in early July for another eye appointment. Goodman gave him the same assessment he always did: No change. On previous visits, May had asked if his vision might improve in a few weeks or a month. This time, he felt like asking if this vision might be forever, but instead he asked nothing at all.