Crashing Through (32 page)

“Oh, my.”

May’s heart started to pound.

“How’s it look, Dan? Can you tell anything?”

Goodman kept looking but said nothing more.

May breathed harder. Why wasn’t Goodman speaking?

Goodman pushed his chair away from the instrument.

“I don’t use these kinds of words often, Mike. But this is a miracle. The eye is clear. You turned it around. You did it. This is the most dramatic reversal I’ve ever witnessed. You did it.”

May sat motionless. Nine months earlier he had walked from this chair to the mirror, where he’d seen himself for the first time in forty-three years. He looked across the room. The mirror was still there. He stood up and searched for his reflection. He could see a man standing in the distance.

“That guy looks tall,” he thought. “That’s me.”

EPILOGUE

Days after beating the cornea rejection, May set out to conquer Chair Six at Kirkwood, the same black diamond run that had accordioned his limbs when he’d dared to ski it with new vision. This time, he came armed with his new approach to vision: a commitment to integrate his other senses with the visual scene. He zoomed down the mountain, listening as his skis carved the snow, following Jennifer’s voice in front of him, ordering himself to let the world come to his eye rather than the other way around. He fell, but far less frequently this time.

A few weeks later, May laid his eyes on Christmas. He’d heard people talk of twinkling ornaments, but it wasn’t until he saw the glowing rainbows of dots hanging from his tree and wrapped around neighborhood homes that he felt like he really understood the word
twinkle.
In a department store, he asked his sons why so many people were standing in an aisle. They told him that the people were there to see Santa Claus.

“Where’s Santa?” May asked.

“Right there,” the boys replied. “He’s the guy in the red suit.”

May walked slowly toward the red man until he stood just a few feet away. He remembered Jennifer’s cautions against gawking, but this time he stared—at the man’s pink face, his round body, his shining red hat. He could see the man’s stomach rise and fall as he exclaimed, “Ho ho ho!” but May looked longest at Santa’s bushy white beard, a sky’s worth of white clouds pressed onto a tiny patch of pink face. His kids were in a hurry to pick out toys, but they didn’t rush their dad while he was looking at Santa.

In early 2001, Sendero got word that its latest grant proposal had been turned down. Despite making inroads in shrinking the GPS unit and refining its capabilities, the company was now in serious trouble. Only a major grant could save the business. May and his assistant, Kim Burgess, redoubled their efforts to seek out government money, which they still believed must be there.

On the morning of March 7, 2001, May set out for a checkup with Dr. Goodman in San Francisco. It had been a year to the day since Goodman had removed May’s bandages. On the ferry, May saw a mosquito for the first time. He watched it dance like the tip of a symphony conductor’s baton, astonished that such busy movements could be so silent.

At the appointment, Goodman pronounced the eye to be perfectly healthy.

“I always aimed for making a year,” May said.

“A year is good,” Goodman replied. “But we’ll always need to check you every few months.”

That spring, May was invited to speak to a vision-science class at the University of Minnesota. The students had been assigned the classic studies by Richard Gregory and Oliver Sacks—cases May still hadn’t got around to reading. On the airplane, he used his laptop to listen to the stories of Sidney Bradford and Virgil, the subjects of these landmark vision-recovery studies. It was the first time he’d learned anything about any of his predecessors. He could not tear himself away from these men.

The meeting room was packed with students and professors. Straightaway, someone asked May to compare his experience to that of Gregory’s subject, Bradford, and to Sacks’s subject, Virgil. It struck him, May said, that the essential difference between him and these men seemed to be in the lives they’d led before the surgeries—in who they were, going into vision. “I didn’t do it to see,” he told them. “I did it to see what seeing was.”

In mid-2001, May and Burgess discovered a grant for which Sendero might apply, this one worth more than $2 million, a real long shot. There were none available after that; it was Sendero’s last hope. When May and Burgess finished writing, the proposal was the size of the Davis telephone book.

May went back to work, this time negotiating with a New Zealand–based company called HumanWare. He wanted to put Sendero’s GPS software onto that company’s BrailleNote, a small and lightweight personal digital assistant, or PDA. The advantages would be profound: lighter weight, better portability, instant-on technology, longer battery life, no laptop required. He was awake early, thinking about such matters, on the morning of September 11, 2001, when he heard radio reports of airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center. The announcer said that flames were shooting from the towers and that people were jumping for their lives. He listened for more than an hour before it occurred to him that he could watch the events on television. He didn’t know if he could bear to look at such a thing.

May walked slowly to the television set in the family room, where he pushed the power button and moved his face to within inches of the screen. He didn’t need to change channels to find the story. He could see flames bursting out of the sides of the pale towers, the same colored flames doing the same kind of dance he loved to watch in fireplaces. “There are people in there,” he thought, and he kept thinking those five words for the next hour, until his legs ached and he had to go sit down on the couch a few feet away, and when he did that the image on the screen blurred. May had long wondered if he would retain visual memories if he were to go blind again. After September 11, he knew that he would.

Two weeks later, the phone rang in May’s office. From the kitchen, Jennifer could hear him say, “Are you sure? Are you sure?” Then May walked into the room.

“You’re not going to believe this,” he told Jennifer. “We got the grant. We got the grant. It’s for $2.25 million. We’re going to make it.”

Jennifer hugged her husband harder than she had ever hugged him before. This wasn’t just a grant for Sendero, she told him. It was a grant for the laser turntable and the bun warmers and the talking computers. It was a grant, she said, for him. May called friends and family and organized a night of celebration. When his boys returned from school, he told them the good news—that this grant had been their last chance and that they’d made it.

“When do we get to shave your beard?” the boys asked.

“What did you say?” he asked.

“When do we get to shave your beard?”

Then May remembered. Months ago, when sending in the proposal, he’d told his sons that the grant was so important that if Sendero won it he would let them shave off his beard. His boys had never mentioned the offer after that. But now they stood sober and ready to collect.

“I’ve had my beard since I came back from Ghana,” May said. “Mommy’s never seen me without a beard. It’s part of me. I’ve had it for more than twenty-five years.”

“Can I do it first?” Carson asked.

“No, I want to do it first!” Wyndham said.

“This has been a huge day,” May replied. “Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”

The next morning, May walked into his sons’ bedroom holding a three-head electric razor.

“Let’s do it, guys,” he said.

In the bathroom, May knelt on the floor and gave the razor to Carson.

“I don’t even know how to shave off a beard,” May said. “I think you have to do it slowly. Don’t mow like it’s the front lawn.”

Carson made gentle and rounded strokes on May’s cheek.

“I’m making a
C
for
Carson,
” he said. Soon, there was a
C
on May’s cheek.

Wyndham tried for a
W,
but his father’s cheek was too small for that. Several minutes later the boys had finished.

“That was definitely mowing,” May said.

“You look like an alien!” Carson said. “Let’s show Mom!”

The men walked to the kitchen, where Jennifer was making breakfast. She took a look at May and nearly fainted.

“Whoa!” she cried. “Is that you, Mike?”

The boys belly-laughed.

“Oh, my gosh!” Jennifer said. “Oh, my! What happened? Who are you?”

“It’s Dad!” the boys exclaimed.

“Well, it doesn’t look like him,” Jennifer said, laughing. She walked over and smoothed the back of her hand over May’s cheek.

“I guess it is him,” Jennifer agreed. “Have you seen yourself yet, Mike?”

May realized that he hadn’t. He walked back into the boys’ bathroom and found himself in the mirror. The dark splotch that had always helped him frame his face was gone, replaced by acres of skin. May had never seen himself without a beard—not even in old family photographs from before he went to Ghana. He stayed at the mirror awhile longer, marveling at the changed face that stared back at him.

Days later, May struck a deal with HumanWare to put Sendero’s GPS software on the PDA. The breakthrough was nearly as significant as the grant. Sendero was now positioned to thrive. Sales increased. May hired more people. The company was rolling.

In November 2002, May’s dog guide, Josh, died at age eleven. The loss cut May deeply. Josh had crossed the cusp of some of the most important events in May’s life: moving to Oregon, the birth and raising of his children, starting Sendero, moving to Davis, gaining vision. More than once he’d saved May from speeding cars that had seemed to come from nowhere. May wondered if his new vision had troubled Josh, perhaps made him feel less necessary than he had in the days when they were an original team, in the days when May was blind. May couldn’t face another loss like this one. He told himself he would never get another dog guide.

Since his cornea rejection, May had been taking heavy doses of immunosuppressive drugs. In mid-2002, after consultation with Dr. Goodman, he gradually began to reduce the doses, and in early 2003 he stopped them entirely. This time, his transplant and his eye stayed healthy. He continued to see Goodman for regular checkups.

All the while, May practiced his new approach to vision, integrating his other senses with the visual and building mental libraries of clues to help him identify objects. Instances in which he felt overwhelmed grew increasingly rare. He got faster at recognizing things.

Still, there were regular reminders of the limitations of his vision. In 2003, for example, he made his long-awaited trip to a topless beach, only to discover that he couldn’t see much of a woman’s chest unless she was wearing a brightly colored bikini top.

“All these years I’ve dreamed of getting here,” he lamented to Jennifer. “Now I need the women to be dressed.”

In 2005, after two years of missing the warmth and companionship of a dog guide, May went to the Seeing Eye in Morristown, New Jersey, and got a new one, a golden retriever–Labrador retriever mix named Miguel. Another client had recently returned Miguel because he’d pulled too hard and shown too much initiative. “We’ll be a good match,” May told Miguel. The two have been together since.

In the summer of 2006, May and Jennifer traveled to London, where they had been invited by Richard Gregory to speak to a gathering of leading academics. The conference room was filled with some of Britain’s top vision scientists, psychiatrists, philosophers, ophthalmologists, neurologists, and psychologists. Gregory was eighty-two and emeritus professor of neuropsychology at the University of Bristol. In an introduction, he recalled his famous case study of Sidney Bradford and described May’s case; then he opened the floor to questions for May.

May was beaming after the meeting. He told Jennifer that it was remarkable to have been among so many brilliant minds and to be the subject of their curiosity. In the hallway, Gregory tested May on the hollow mask illusion, rotating a large Albert Einstein example in front of him. To the bystanders, the hollow side of Einstein’s face leaped outward, appearing every bit as convex as a real face. May did not perceive the illusion.

Gregory and a few of the other scientists took May and Jennifer to dinner at London’s oldest Indian restaurant, where their discussion lasted well into the night. After that, Gregory invited the Mays to be his guests at the fabled Athenaeum Club, which counted among its past members the Duke of Wellington, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, and one of Gregory’s old professors at Cambridge, the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell. They talked about their lives in the club’s library. After midnight, Gregory drove the couple back to their hotel in Hyde Park in his hybrid Toyota Prius. May and Jennifer thanked Gregory and wished him a good night.

“That man is alive,” May said as they walked into the hotel.

The years since May beat his cornea rejection have been busy ones for many of the important people in his life.

In 2002, Jennifer May and her friend Penny Lorain formed their own interior design firm, Lorain & May, which specializes in all facets of residential and commercial design. Jennifer oversaw the expansion and redesign of the Mays’ home, where she continues to raise the couple’s two sons, and where Mike May continues to run Sendero Group.

Shortly after her son’s surgeries, Ori Jean May moved from Florida to Chico, California, about a hundred miles from Davis. In 2005, at age seventy-seven, she cracked a vertebra in her lower back. Doctors said that they could repair it, but that such surgery for a person of her age carried with it the risk of heart attack and stroke. “It’s a quality-of-life issue,” they told her. “If you don’t opt for the surgery the pain probably won’t worsen, but it won’t improve, either. You’ll just live with it.” To the surprise of none of her children, Ori Jean decided to undergo the surgery, which was successful. She continues to live in Chico, as do all four of May’s siblings.

Dr. Daniel Goodman continues to practice corneal and refractive surgery in San Francisco. He still sees May every three months for checkups, and the two meet occasionally for dinner or a ball game.

Bryan Bashin is currently a consultant to businesses and individuals, often working in the area of job development and coaching. He continues to monitor advances in the science and technology of vision restoration but has decided to put off his own surgery until the required immunosuppressive drugs are made less risky and the surgery itself becomes less disruptive of daily life. “I’m still open to the idea,” he says, “but for me, the time and the science still aren’t quite right yet.”

Ione Fine has continued to test May inside and outside the fMRI scanner; there have been no changes in the results. In 2003, she published a paper on May’s case, “Long-term Deprivation Affects Visual Perception and Cortex,” in the journal
Nature Neuroscience.
She expected it to prove interesting to colleagues. On the day the paper was published, Fine was attending a small conference in rural northern California. Her cell phone began to ring and did not stop for hours. Mainstream media from all over the world wanted to know more about May’s story. Fine spent the day standing on a nearby hill—the only place she could get cell phone reception—describing the strange visual world in which her subject lived. When her phone battery died she borrowed replacements from colleagues who owned the same model.