OUT OF SIGHT

By Ryan Knighton

My blindness has side-effects. Celebrity is among the niftier. No, it’s not like you’d catch me and Brad Pitt comparing our best photogenic expressions. Mine isn’t that kind of celebrity. For a living I teach college students how to craft a nice sentence, and for shelter I make my home on the edge of an industrial park on Vancouver’s east side. It’s hardly the life of the famed, but it’s a good deal. Besides, people always say my wife is the real looker. I’ve always suspected as much. I’m content to be the lucky blind guy next to her. And the one who lives next to Gord’s Auto Repair.

While I may not be famous in the usual sense, I’ve got a conspicuous public life, all the same. For one thing, scads of people stop to congratulate me for crossing the street, extra kudos if I’ve made a straight line. Often some add, “Remember me? I said hello last week.” It’s hard, though. So many strangers say things. Sometimes it’s “Hi, Blind Guy,” and sometimes it’s “Look out for the bus!” Sometimes it’s both, quickly. How does Cher handles so much attention? Still, I try not to begrudge it all. Being conspicuous makes a truly helping hand easier to find when I need it, but don’t know how to ask. In return, I answer questions, the same questions over and over, like the genuinely famous do. One question, in particular, follows me around.

People often ask me what I hate most about blindness. Blindness is the answer--I hate blindness most about blindness, but that’s usually not what folks are after. Pick something, they say, something else. Of course I hate being asked two or three times a week what I hate most about blindness, but I don’t think that’s what my inquisitors are after either. So, pressed to choose one big-time irritant, I’ll go on the record with public washrooms. Hell for the blind is made of porcelain.

Let’s say I’ve got a kindly waitress on my arm, one willing to make the long march with me. I know I should be grateful for the guiding hand, and I am, yet my gratitude is often eclipsed by how excruciating it is, at age 32, to have someone take me to the can. Maybe at 75 or 80 I could accept it as a fact of life. We all hope the golden years will relax our stubborn pride. We hope.

Despite my squirmy embarrassment, asking for help isn’t what I worry about most these days. The door is the real pressure point. Approaching the men’s room with a waitress on my arm is somewhat like a first date. At the door we’re faced with the awkward problem of whether we’ll say goodbye, and how. While I’m thanking her, we both wonder if we’ll shake hands and call it a night, no invitation in. She asks herself, “Does he need me to follow him?” Or do I merely worry that she’s worried about this? Does she sense my worry? And so on and so forth in this game of neurotic ping pong.

My anxiety is justified. There’s no underestimating the verve with which people will play good Samaritan to the disabled. Even when I insist I don’t need a hand beyond the door, this is sometimes mistaken for shyness or a silly desire not to impose on a stranger who makes eight bucks an hour delivering burgers to tables, not blind men to urinals.

It’s no problem, I’ll assure her. Really. Just point me in the right direction and send me in, white cane swinging. If nobody’s inside, I’ll crash around and find the urinal myself. What I won’t mention is that the danger in going it alone is determining whether I’m in front of a urinal or between two of them. I could feel for the layout with my cane, but a cane can’t tell me if I’m connecting with outer or inner edges. The best proof is running a hand around whatever’s in front of me, but that’s where I draw the line. Standing before my best guess, I take my chances, and I hereby apologize for the occasional misjudgment. Misjudgments are less humiliating than the alternatives.

Once a waiter dragged me through the door and swung me into a stall. This despite my trailing declarations of independence. "No need! There’s no need," I pleaded, but he hauled me through the busy washroom with cheery assurances. I don’t know what I did to deserve such unfortunate kindness, and it’s hard to be really snarky with someone aiming to be helpful. Yet, when he chirped, "Here you are, if you need anything I’ll be waiting right here”--well, who could possibly go?

If I hate public washrooms most of all, what is it I hate about them? It’s being doomed to a lifetime of guidance through the Freudian twilight zone of toilet training, independence, and humiliation. At least I have a good excuse, I suppose.

When I was a kid, some magazine, maybe Owl or Ranger Rick, regularly featured a handful of strange photographs. Each was an isolated fragment from some entire image, and the game was to infer what object the pictures corresponded to. Maybe a shiny black pillar is really the hair of a fly, or a milky blemish is only one lasagna molecule. Things like that. I think of the game now because that’s how I see today.

If you rolled up a newspaper like a telescope and looked through it, I see a little less than that tunnel in one eye. The rest of my sight is a blurry ocean of waves, shadow and light, everything muted and rippling except that one little island of acuity I cling to. Because it’s so small, it’s clogged with pieces of the world passing me by. To know what the hell’s filling up my tunnel, I rely mostly on context.

Once I asked a red-headed waitress for directions to the washroom. I didn’t know she was a waitress by the colour of her hair, but the shred of it I saw stopped beside me with a smell of coffee in the air, among other things.

She sidled up to my table, and what quickly overwhelmed the smell of coffee was one big perfumey fog. I began to fret. I was having a bland summer lunch at Milestones in suburban Langley, British Columbia, my hometown. More than usual I was hand-wringing about help to the men’s because, this being my hometown, I didn’t know who might be watching or, worse, who my guide might be. What I did know was that she wore a lot of the perfume aptly named Poison, and the scent made me do a kind of olfactory double-take.

Let me pause here to put an urban legend to rest. The myth of super-senses isn’t true. When you’re blind, your sense of smell does not, in my experience, rival Clark Kent’s. You simply make smell perform new unconscious tasks, such as using it to recognize people. The brain may have previously assigned the recognition function to sight, but new neural pathways grow between compensatory senses and old cognitive tasks. In my daily comings and goings, a smell or a voice now evokes a friendly recognition for me as powerfully as a distant profile or a familiar mannerism once did. Now that I’m mostly blind, a smell can grab me as it goes by, the way a phantom glimpse once could.

This particular Milestones waitress turned my head with her Poison. Its sticky sweetness caught me like flypaper, tugging my attention towards her. The Poison told me I might be about to ask Heidi for help. Heidi was a high school debutante who, back in grade eleven, only dated Keggers, those jockish guys who diddled around on basketball courts, drove convertible VW Gulfs, and worked weekends singing fraternity style Happy Birthday at The Keg. Cosmic justice dictates that most are still slinging lager there, though I’m sure some made out fine in the dot-com boom.

For some misguided reason — a reason right out of a John Hughes storyboard — Heidi took an interest in me for three glorious weeks in grade eleven, much to every Polo-wearing sprout-boy’s dismay, and to my slack-jawed astonishment. I was artsy-fartsy and bumbling, though not yet aware my clumsiness was due to a touch of blindness, not the 24-hour kind. Our match was, in the high school paradigm, unnatural. Maybe Heidi’s attraction to me was an impairment caused by the chronic haze of Poison. I don’t know. Mine was not to question such an unlikely gift as her.

She dumped me, of course, after those blissful weeks; and, what’s worse, dumped me for a 21-year-old security guard from Willowbrook Mall. Sure he had an orange sports car, but he also had a moustache. Apparently I couldn’t compete with that. Although Heidi and I were an unorthodox match, our break-up was highly orthodox. You are always dumped in high school for someone you perceive to be your inferior. This allows you the cold comfort of calling rejection by its less painful name–injustice.

Now here I was, years later, reawakened to this old humiliation, newly blind, and possibly about to ask the self-same Heidi Hagan for a tender hand to the commode. In the absence of discernible faces, it’s curious whose faces and stories you project on the blurry people and smells and noises around you. My imagination usually envisions worst-case possibilities. In this respect, I’m a psychological boy scout, always prepared, which means always worried. I was mustering courage to ask for guidance when the blur of red hair and Poison stopped at my table.

"Would you like more coffee?"

"I’d love coffee,” I said, “but I’d love to be in your washroom even more."

I suppose creepy is as good a word as any for my attempt at a charming turn of phrase.

"Um, okay, the men’s room is over that way," she said.

I stared vacantly ahead while she, I imagine, continued to point "that way.” Then I heard the pleasant sound of coffee being poured.

"I’m sorry," I said, "but I don’t know what that way means." I plucked my white cane from the bag beside me. "I guess it wasn’t obvious, and I forgot to—"

"Oh my god, I’m sorry, I didn’t know you’re blind! You didn’t look—you don’t look--not at all--I mean really."

I smiled with that warm sensation you get when you’re sixteen and someone says you look like you’re in your twenties, or when you’re in your thirties and someone says it. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to run into Heidi after all.

"Thanks, that’s very kind. Where’d you say the washroom is?"

"At the back."

"Which way is back?"

"It’s over there," she said, and walked away.

All I wanted were specific directions. Instead, my waitress gave me a demonstration that, along with vision, parts of language disappear into blindness. She had just pointed to verbal spots that had eroded along with my sight. It’s in the nature of blind spots, I guess, that I hadn’t noticed this one.

In a way, the waitress diagnosed a parallel condition in language to the one my doctor had diagnosed in my eyes years earlier. On my eighteenth birthday, my first retina specialist, a man who delivered his bedside manner like napalm, informed me that I would be blind within a few years. No cure, he said. Sorry. Nothing to do but wait.

In response, I entered a staring contest with the two goldfish in a bowl on his desk. I found them more consoling and informative than I found him. The bubbles, the bright blue sand, and the two shiny fish formed an argument. Trauma means “dream” in Greek, and, traumatized, I mustered a dream-logic to cure me on the spot: if I can see these goddamn fish, how can I be going blind?

My specialist told me the name of the condition, Retinitis Pigmentosa, and described how it would soon eradicate my remaining night vision, limit me to tunnel vision, and eventually blinker me altogether. His receptionist handed me the phone number of the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, and that was that. The doctor was off to his next victim, and I was on my way to a very dark and fishless future. The whole scene took less than ten minutes. My specialist said nothing else, not even happy birthday.

Basically, as if medical-speak can achieve such an adverb, Retinitis Pigmentosa is the loss of photoreceptors due to pigmentary changes in the retina. Another way to put it, I think, is that my retina is scarring itself to death. The photoreceptors mainly affected may be rods or cones, or both. I was a cone man, originally, which means I’ve enjoyed the slow loss of all peripheral and night vision, but I suspect my disease has ambitions to give my rods equal opportunity. By my own estimates, I’ve got a year to go until that little island of clarity I live in will consume itself. Easter Island.

There was no family history of the disease. My pathology pegs me for “a sporadic gene mutation.” Neat, eh? Hello, I am a mutant. When children scream with celebrity recognition, “Mommy, mommy, look at the blind man!” they’re making the same mutant diagnosis. But I get a kick. Kids just call me as they see me. Sometimes their mommies are frightened, too, particularly as I stride down the sidewalk towards their awestruck children. Unfortunately, kids tend to fix in place, mesmerized, which often gets them knocked down. Wait till I’m 70 and I need one of those motorized scooters. Think Scent of a Woman meets Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive. My reality crashes into everything and everybody, it seems. Which is what sent me to the doctor in the first place.

For four years I’d exhibited clumsy behaviour nobody could account for. As a warehouse worker during summer vacations, I’d driven forklift and nearly run over everything possible, including one of my co-workers. True, I hated him and his insistence that we play nothing but Iron Maiden on the shipping area stereo, but it wasn’t in my character to crush him. Not that I’ll admit, anyway.

But the real giveaway came when I drove my father’s car into a ditch. Lots of friends crashed their parents’ cars, too, but my accident stood out. I did my teenaged duty at roughly five kilometers per hour. How do you miss a turn at that speed unless your eyes are closed? After sundown, mine might as well have been.

Just because you’re slowly going blind doesn’t mean you can see what’s happening. That’s the paradox. You can’t see blindness in your own eyes, don’t notice the gradual onset. Beyond the car accident, what also suggested diminishing eyesight were the emerging differences between my experience of the world and those of my family and friends.

When I reported to my mother that, as a new driver, I was having trouble on rainy nights, she said they gave everybody trouble and not to worry. I was on my way out the door, about to drive to work.

“But do you use the cat’s eyes sometimes?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said. “That’s what they’re for, reflecting light when it’s hard to see the yellow line.”

“No, I mean do you use them, do you drive on them?”

When I couldn’t see the yellow line, I’d taken to steering onto the cat’s eyes. This, I found, helped position me on the road. A little close to the middle, maybe, but better than anything I could determine on my own. The clunk clunk clunk of the reflectors under my tires let me know where I was. You could say I drove Braille.

“You drive on the cat’s eyes?” my mother asked.

“Well, only at night.”

I’d wager my mother dialed for my first ophthalmological appointment by the time I’d shut the front door behind me.

Today, along with my eyesight, the capacity of language to guide me has atrophied. No cat’s eyes can help me now. Not even Braille can substitute for some words. As one is slowly narrowed into a dark and blurry tunnel vision, areas of the English language are eclipsed as well. Just over there, that way. Right here, in front of you. No, there. Right there, under your nose.

Blind militants generally tub-thump about the sight-centred features of English idiom. Look at you! What a sight you are! You’re a vision. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So nice to see you! Things looking up? I’ve had my eye on you. Out of sight! Watch it! Be on the lookout. Keep your eye on the ball. I’ll see to it. See you later?

On the flip side, of course, are the derogatory metaphors that broaden “blind” to mean much more than "without sight.” Ignorant, for example. Limited, deranged, deceived, terminal, stupid, false, naive, and, my favourite, confused. They’re irksome, but these metaphors have never bothered me much. It’s more amusing than anything when they’re casually employed in my presence.

I once caned my way through the cologne section of a department store. A man at the counter stopped me for a sales pitch.

"The fabulous feature of this elegant cologne,” he said, “is that you can keep it in the freezer and refresh yourself on a hot summer day with a stimulating, cool blast of aromatic body spray."

Kinky, I thought. I’ll take it.

He asked if I liked the swishy design of the bottle and held it up for me to inspect. "Isn’t it lovely?"

I stood there, waving my hand around, trying to figure out where the blur had gone. Realizing his mistake, the salesman smacked his forehead repeatedly, muttering, "Stupid stupid stupid," apparently trying to make the words penetrate his skull with the butt of his hand. It was unfortunate and unnecessary and probably as embarrassing for him as it was for me. Maybe it’s another example of the curious behaviours exhibited by people immersed too long in perfumey scent.

I do know of blind folks who take extraordinary exception to this kind of awkward exchange. They get bitchy and call it “sight-centered inattention.” I chalk it up to cultural habit, though, which doesn’t strike me as a cardinal sin. How could I expect a clerk to remove all visually oriented language and behaviour from his sales repertoire? Especially when I’ve got the same verbal tics? They’re convenient metaphors. Next we’ll demand that the "eye"-sound be removed from "blind." And thereby we’d achieve the politically correct success of becoming blond as a bat or blended by the light. Or maybe just bland.

My waitress’s words of guidance are the true linguistic peculiarity, though: that, over there, right here, and so on. All those directional cues have lost their meaning, the fingers and hands of the words lopped off, as it were, by the same force that’s narrowing my field of vision. Who’d have guessed that a disease can alter language as it alters the body, disabling parts of speech? Looked at this way, language is an extension of the body and subject to the same pathologies.

"Excuse me."

My waitress was back, not a second too soon. I really did need to use the facilities.

"I don’t mean to intrude," she said, "but didn’t you go to Langley Secondary School?"

The immediate future flashes before me. Jeering Keggers point and snicker as Heidi tows me off to the washroom. A security guard with a big-ass moustache waits for us at the men’s room door and says, "I’ll take him from here, honey."

"Yes, I did."

"It’s Ryan, right? I’m Danielle! We were in drama class together. God, I didn’t recognize you at all."

The fists I’ve balled in my lap begin to relax. My spine resumes its natural slouch, and the Poison takes on a slightly different sweetness. How could I have thought it was Heidi’s smell alone? Danielle always did imitate her in the way she dressed, but I guess I never stopped to consider the way she smelled back then.

"You look so different now," she said.

I’m sure blindness can have that effect, I thought, and braced myself. "You too," I replied, aware of how confusing that must sound.

"I’m not sure what it is. Maybe it’s—"

The fierce squint? The white cane? The expression of perpetual disorientation?

"It’s—well. I know!"--she put a hand on my head with daring compassion--"you shaved your hair off. When did you do that?"

Now I was free to burn with embarrassment at my self-centeredness. Just because it’s a sighted world doesn’t mean blindness is the first thing people notice about me, nor the first thing that comes to mind. Along with celebrity and blinded words, I suppose paranoia is just another side-effect.
“Couple of years ago, I guess.”

“Looks cool.”

“Thanks. You smell good. What’s that you’re wearing, Poison?”

“Yeah.”

“Makes me think of high school.”

"I remember in high school your hair used to be long,” she said. “Really long. Down to here, right?"




©2006 Ryan Knighton

No portion of this article may be reprinted without permission from the author.

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