Slowness kills, a voice in my head said. And I laughed horribly.
Going to class, studying, even finding my jeans balled up on the floor exactly where I’d left them—everything about being back at college was a relief, as though time had stopped for a week, my life waiting to be filled back in. There were exams to study for, papers to write. And reading and writing, more than anything else in my life, felt as they always had.
My third night back, Andrew threw me a “welcome back” party. No music, a few beers, the mood subdued. Conversations sparked and waned around the room about upcoming exams, summer jobs—all of it more quiet than usual, as though we were in an open field where a storm might suddenly arise and compromise plans. But the not-talking about my eye was a comfort, the accident’s simple presence in the room enough. Early in the party, I had offered the basic information—optic nerve severed, no surgery required, glad to be back—but just like a press conference, just to have the news out, so I wouldn’t have to deliver it again. There didn’t seem much else to say. Really, what I wanted everyone to believe was the same story I wanted Mom to believe, which was the same story I wanted to believe myself. I’d dodged a bullet. It was a freak accident that could have been life-altering, but I got lucky.
Each of my friends looked so young, so clear, so alive. There was Ray, with his easy, handsome California face, but so earnest, so methodical when he approached me, as though he’d rehearsed his comments in advance. And there was Alexis, the moody heartthrob of our bunch, standing sideways, looking out at the room as though everything had already been said, as though we were onto the same truths. His dark curly hair and dark eyes made him look like a movie version of a Dostoyevsky character—deeply thoughtful, mildly tormented, but too pretty to be intimidating.
Andrew, who had been shifting foot to foot in his black jeans, handed me the May issue of Tennis.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it.” His eyes were everywhere but on mine. “Good article on the second serve,” he said.
The doctor had said I wasn’t allowed any sports, not for at least three months, not until the blood behind my eye dissipated. “I appreciate it,” I said.
Andrew kept staring at the floor. Usually, he was the first into any conversation. At dinner, if someone was telling a story he’d already heard, his lips would involuntarily start mouthing the words as he listened, as though the story were his as well. He was the best athlete in our class, but he was really a literary cheerleader at heart. He’d barge into our room, book in hand, and declare, “You have to read this Carver story, it’s fucking awesome!” Or, “Seamus Heaney is a goddamned legend!” On court he’d grow indignant if his opponent dared to believe in any chance of victory, but off court he was more open and curious than anyone I’d ever met, but his confidence needed to be filled in by his friends—his love for that Carver story or Heaney poem not complete until he’d succeeded in recruiting your excitement, too. He was the perfect friend for me—his enthusiasms pulling me into long literary conversations, his status as an athletic stud making those conversations safe.
But I didn’t know what to say to him now. Maybe he needed me still to be something of an athlete—or, being a friend, maybe he just knew I might still need to feel that way myself. But the feeling I had, the extra space in the air, was like that odd quiet after a funeral—that sense that the world is held together much less firmly than you think. And I had no idea how to say any of this, at least not in any way that was simple, that went along with the story about myself I wanted to believe.
As Andrew moved into another conversation, I knew no one would come any closer. And the hum of the party, the easy warmth of companionship—it was almost enough. It reminded me of the car ride back to college. The May greenery of Hammond Pond Parkway had streamed by outside the window, the trees appearing both looser and more dazzling than they ever had. It was easier now to see shape, to see pattern—and much harder to see the leaves, dappled by the sunlight, as solid, as limited to just being leaves. My vision see-sawed between the two—if I leaned into the world and kept a hard focus, the leaves looked as they always had, though a bit more flat; if I leaned back and let my focus go soft, the leaves transformed into shimmering patterns, the spaces between them filled with light, each tree like some primeval chandelier. The game scared me a bit, how easy it was to lose the firmness of the world, its definition—to feel, as with the very word definition, how much meaning depends on shape. But the game also relaxed me, which was enough for me not to question it too much. And now I found I could do the same thing with my friends, could see them and myself as patterns of conversation, patterns of silence. What came naturally visually, apparently, also came naturally psychologically. But there was a sadness in the center, some heightened sense of the space I’d always felt between me and other people. Being a confidant was a role I liked, listening to Mom in the kitchen before dinner, or to Andrew raving about some new poem, but it wasn’t a role I’d ever learned to let someone play for me. My privacy had always been a natural moat, a helpful protection. But it was strange. Now that I felt most vulnerable, it was a moat I did not entirely want.
The snow began. It spit, it blew, but it kept falling. It fell, and fell, and I began to forget the air between the trees wasn’t always filled with snow, that the windows had ever showed stillness or sky. Inside the woods the air grew quieter, more intimate. The snow took no notice. It fell through the gray, flat afternoons, and it fell, brushing against the windowpane above the futon, through the starless night.
Nothing was more simple and more complex than walking outside in the morning. At first, there was everything and nothing, too much and too little: too much space and brightness and sky, too little that was legible in any language that was human. The shocking brightness of the snow, the cold on the exposed skin around my eyes, the scent of the woodsmoke pushing in behind the chill, which offered a kind of balance and kept my perspective from contracting in the cold. My footprints of the day before would be gone. I would stand there in the trackless white, in my black snowboots and snowpants, breathing in and out heavily behind my neckwarmer, like a man newly arrived on the moon. I would wait to see movement, to hear movement. The ragged dance of the smoke from the chimney against the bright blue sky. Or a parcel of snow sliding from the overloaded arms of one of the evergreens. And the dull percussion of snow hitting snow, the mild reflex of the branch swinging toward its place again, would include me, like the opening of a conversation, a first word. Not the first thing to move, I would feel safe to begin moving—as though I had been welcomed, as though I wasn’t intruding into a conversation in which I had no part.
I kept my snowshoes and poles up by the car, at the top of the steep pitch beside the meadow. By mid-December, the snow was already two feet deep, and every morning I’d strap in to one shoe, then the other, and tromp like an ungainly prehistoric creature towards the trees. There was no sound but the rustle of my jacket and the mild, plush sinking of the snowshoes into the snow. The apple trees glimmered. The abandoned tiller poked a few softened, curious teeth above the snow, like the periscope of a strange submarine. At the entrance to the trail, past the buried stone wall, a lone hemlock seemed to stand sentry. To duck under its snow-feathered branch and push into the woods felt like going inside a warmly lit room—there was the sense of being safely held, of being somewhere that surrounded and contained me. The quiet was different under the trees.
The path rose as a smooth white avenue. Occasionally, my tracks from the day before were still there, the twin trough of the snowshoes and the alternating pockmarks of the poles, and sometimes they were crossed by the hieroglyphic tracks of a squirrel or deer or snowshoe hare, as though in some other realm a friendly meeting had occurred, forest gossip exchanged. As I pushed upward, I’d pause to listen every so often below the brushing of my jacket, below the tufted sound of my snowshoes, until my hearing touched ground with the silence. A dim humming, like a steady rush of wa
ter far away. It seemed to open a pocket in time, to open the years. Decades, even centuries, were able to slide through. The more western forests of Vermont had been clear-cut for timber after the Civil War (and reforested later), but not being near any large rivers for transport, the forests of the Northeast Kingdom had gone largely untouched. I’d read in one of Lev’s guidebooks that glaciers, with sheets of ice more than a mile deep, had pushed through this land thousands of years ago, carving the hills and mountains, depositing boulders and rocks as they went. It was the same land I was standing on. The birch and pine and maple were the same. The wind was the same, and the snow and the sky. The silence wasn’t just the silence of the moment. It gave me a sense of carrying something in myself that was the same, too, something delicate but abiding—something that had remained no matter the radical changes in my life. Something essential I might grow closer to, especially as my outer layers fell away.
Up where the maples stopped, at the vista overlooking the far hills rising into the mountains, I’d drive my poles into the snow. I’d unstrap my snowshoes and lie back, arms at my side. The pounding of my heart would gradually subside, my chest rising and falling, rising and falling. I’d feel myself sinking into the coldness of the snow, into the quiet. The snow below me would gradually warm with the heat moving through my legs, through my arms, and the sense of my body would grow quiet, until I wasn’t thinking about the cold at all, as though my body had become a door that was open, the quiet of the hillside coming in and filling me in some way that kept me warm. It didn’t feel like I was floating or falling but only like there was nowhere to float or fall. I could stay this way for some time.
Eventually, when I sat up, the hills and distant mountains looked different. The land felt oceanic, unimpeded in all directions. The frosted trees on the hills seemed to continue forever, well beyond what the eye could see, and the bluish, snow-capped mountains looked both very close and very far. The ease in the land’s movement, the way no part of it seemed divided from any other, accorded with the way I felt—with the way I saw. There was an organization to the land but with a wide margin, with no precise division of space, with no need of my hand or foot to turn any line solid. I felt at home, in a habitat that fit with my senses, as though some membrane had been dissolved. I was back in the world rather than outside it. And seeing this way felt like a kind of cleansing, an absolution, as though the land itself had opened to take me in.
This wasn’t a good sign. I tried to blink it away, to look again, but nothing changed. Exam period had begun, and I was sitting on my bed in Adams House, my Riverside Shakespeare heavy as a small dog on my lap. A chair had scraped along the hardwood floor in the room above me and I’d looked up from reading King Lear. After a bit more scraping, the sound had stopped. But something was wrong with my ceiling. There was a shadow where the ceiling ended, and a hovering where the brown wood molding began. I waited for the shadow to go away, for my normal sense of space to return. But it didn’t return. No matter if I stared harder, no matter if I turned my head. The lines of the brown molding had a phantom-like quality, a margin for error. As though my ceiling didn’t begin in any one place, as though the plaster and the wood molding were no longer solid. It was easy to picture how I had seen the ceiling before—how sharp the division between the molding and the ceiling, how definite my sense of depth and space. But that configuration of lines, which had been tied in place as neatly as a present, had come untied. Geometry had gone off-duty. My ceiling’s formality, in both senses of the word, was gone. I couldn’t tell with any certainty where my ceiling began.
In my two weeks back at school, I thought I’d already made all the necessary adjustments. Instinctively, I sat in the last row in crowded lectures, generally on the right-hand side, to have the whole lecture hall in front of me on my left. I walked up to class later than usual, so as not to be caught in the crush of so many bodies on the sidewalk. On rainy days, I trailed a little behind Alexis, Ray, and Andrew—without sunlight there were fewer shadows, fewer depth cues, and it was the best way to avoid the sharp spokes of umbrellas, menacingly poised at eye level, and also not to miss a curb. No one really seemed to notice. Finals were coming up, the rush of the semester was at its peak. Especially once my eye healed outwardly and the blood inside it went away, my friends tended to forget—probably because they couldn’t see that anything was different. The Pakistani doctor had been right. He’d told me my eyes would move normally, would continue to “look” at the world just the same. The metaphor he’d used was a toaster oven with a broken cord: the toaster looks fine, it just can’t be plugged in. Which led to some strange situations. About a week after my return, a classmate came trotting towards me on the grass in front of Lamont. He was out of breath, and looking at me a bit too closely. “I heard the most horrible story,” he said. “I’m so glad to see it isn’t true.”
“What story?”
“Some of the guys said you lost an eye playing basketball. That it actually came out of your skull. That it was rolling around on the court.”
I told him what happened. I explained about the optic nerve.
“No shit. No shit! You mean, you don’t see anything out of that eye? Which eye? This one?”
He held his finger in front of my face, wagged it back and forth. He was peering at me like a lab specimen. I had the feeling he was seeing one version of me, while another version was looking out at him. It felt like a trench inside me, like there was an actual space of about a foot between where he saw me and where I was seeing him from. Gently, I had put my hand around his hand and pulled it down to his side.
But the only place I was having any real physical difficulty was the dining hall. The juice machine, which was situated by the doorway to the tables, posed a particular hazard. After filling two glasses, I’d turn to the right with my full tray to go out to the tables, but someone who hadn’t been there a moment before would suddenly materialize on my right and we’d crash. I crashed into a sophomore from Kansas who reminded me of Woodstock from the Peanuts gang, her collarbone exceedingly frail as we bent down to the floor. I crashed into Steve Martins, the hockey stud, who barely noticed me bouncing off him. I even crashed into Prokopow, the house tutor who had suggested I stay home and postpone exams until fall. Each time, there was nothing to do but apologize, clean up the ruined food, and be angry with myself. Why couldn’t I remember I’d lost peripheral vision on my right-hand side? How had I forgotten that space immediately to my right existed? My brain somehow hadn’t registered, no matter the frequency of my crashes, that my blind spot had expanded. The missing area in my brain’s map was like the inverse of a phantom limb—instead of my brain filling in a hand or arm that no longer existed, it had subtracted the awareness of a physical space that did exist. The worst part of which wasn’t the humiliation but the impossibility of an honest apology. I looked normal. I couldn’t tell the story every time I crashed, couldn’t just crash into people with my story, too. The story felt too emotional, too strange to put into words. Or maybe I could have tried, but my instinct was just the opposite—to keep my blindness invisible. But I couldn’t help wondering, as I returned to the line for a replacement helping of Tater Tots, how many other people lived with this kind of doubleness. I’d look at the faces above the salad bar, faces strangely vulnerable as they moved along with their blue trays. How many of them also felt a divide? How many of them looked one way but felt entirely another?
I didn’t want to think about it too much. No reason to get all philosophical. Apart from my crashes, my physical adjustments really had been going well. I was acclimating to the various sets of stairs, like the smooth gray, unevenly worn ones in my entryway: step higher than necessary, then let your foot, coming down, locate the stair. The same tactic worked with shaking hands: keep reaching until contact. Not too much had to be different, I told myself. Already my hearing was adapting, listening not just for sounds but for space—the rhythmic scuffing of footsteps behind or beside me or the wind rush o
f cars coming down Mass. Ave. This happened without any effort on my part, just a sympathetic response, as the doctors called it, as though my ears were actually sympathetic and showing a kind of moral support to my eyes. My Spidey Sense was what I called it. I’d know Andrew was about to appear in my bedroom’s doorway—maybe from a subtle shift of air currents on my face or maybe from the creaking of the floorboards. I didn’t even know how I knew. It was a little spooky. Apparently, studies show that the visual area of the brain begins to process auditory and tactile information within five days of the loss of vision. The occipital cortex just automatically starts using the way sound travels through space, and the touch of wind patterns on your skin, to help you see, to help orient you spatially in your surroundings.
All of which had been fine, just some neurological redecorating, something that didn’t require too much thought. But now my ceiling wasn’t in any particular place. The light coming through the windows was just simple late-day light, but the air around me felt different. My heavy wooden bureau looked weightless, permeable, as though I could put my hand through it. The more I looked out from the solid island of my bed, the more my room felt as though gravity had been altered, as though every object hovered rather than sat. It seemed my vision couldn’t help but tread lightly, as though it were waiting for some more definite confirmation of what I saw. As though, like Gloucester in King Lear, I needed to learn to “see feelingly,” to see not so much with eyes but with my hands and with my heart.
This wasn’t so different from how my bedroom had felt the morning after the accident, but this wasn’t the morning after. Life was supposed to have returned to normal. Finals were just a few days away. But my ceiling wasn’t coming back. I felt betrayed, like when you look into the sky for a plane after hearing its sound, then have to find the plane with your eyes farther along in the sky—some gap suddenly there between reality and your sense of reality. But then usually your brain, working like a minor god, just moves the airplane’s sound to match the airplane’s location in the sky. Your hearing and vision align, like two competing mirrors sliding into one, and that gap vanishes. The plane is where it is, which means you are where you are. But now the gap wasn’t going away. I was stuck in it, stuck in a strange, steady awareness that my sense of reality was assembled by a team, a team not even close to perfect. This wasn’t a well-turned couplet in Shakespeare. It wasn’t even a secret passageway at the back of a wardrobe or a long curious tumble down a rabbit hole. And I wasn’t sure whether I was one step further away from reality or one step closer to it—because that depended on what reality really was.
The Point of Vanishing Page 6