Train Go Sorry

by Leah Hager Cohen

  Alec thanked the interpreter. I touched his sleeve and waited for him to turn. “You said you know him?”

  “Not really.”

  “But how did you know to ask him for a poem?”

  “Oh! I mean I always used to see him, growing up — he’d always be in the park. Sometimes here and sometimes down in Washington Square. He’s an old city character.”

  We watched him wander off with his basket and cowbell and cup of wine.

  Late that night, after the play, Alec and I waved the graduate students goodnight. We watched as they headed east out of the park. Then he and I went west, disappearing into the shadows of the night-bushes and reemerging on the street to hail a cab.

  Two days earlier I had finally told Alec how I felt about him. With my mouth I had said, “I think about you a lot.” I remember dimly noticing that my hands betrayed me, signing, “I think about you all the time.”

  We had been sitting on the hot trunk of his car, illegally parked near Washington Square, having just spent the day together and now about to part. It was that hour of the evening when all the buildings turn gilt and violet, blazing with ambient light. “Is there music playing somewhere?” Alec asked suddenly. A low-rider, stuck in traffic, shook the block with its pumped-up stereo, and the vibrations had caught Alec in the back of his legs. I pointed the car out to him.

  He told me he was wary. W-A-R-Y. I broke the cardinal rule and watched his fingers. They traveled toward me in the sign for attraction, circled away spelling W-A-R-Y, and hovered there a minute. I stole a glance at his face; he was squinting furiously into the throngs of Villagers, and I looked away to give him privacy. When he spoke again, it was to invite me back to his apartment.

  Now, two nights later, we were headed there together for the second time. Warm black wind rolled in the open windows of the cab. It was too dark for talking; we sat apart.

  “I still don’t understand what made you go. ”

  We were back to that again. I was being stubborn, Alec secretive. We were in his living room, sprawled in the late afternoon light, drinking glass after glass of cold tap water. Heat and hunger and hours of catching up had left me restless, and I’d gone back to pestering him for a better answer as to why he had done it.

  We had not seen each other since Twelfth Night; it was now the end of August. He had returned from Lebanon two days before. After finishing up with his graduate students, he had flown to Cyprus. From there, in defiance of a prohibition against U.S. citizens traveling to Lebanon, he had sneaked into Beirut by boat and spent five days interviewing deaf Lebanese on videotape. He hadn’t told anyone of his plan; not until he arrived safely back in New York did he explain where he had been.

  “I wanted to speak with deaf people living in the war, to get their stories on camera —”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” I interrupted. “You wanted to bring their stories back on film so that deaf people in this country could feel a real connection with their experiences. But I mean why — what in you made you want to go?”

  He stared intently at the carpet, which was as usual covered with a sea of papers and boxes and books, copies of periodicals for the deaf, precarious towers of travel brochures and investment brochures, tattered air letters, smatterings of foreign currency, ashtrays, socks, videocassettes, and maps.

  “Was it because — Alec, was . . .” I knew he could see me signing from the corner of his eye, but he did not turn: a maddening habit. I had to reach across and touch him. “Were you attracted to the danger, was that part of it?”

  “No.” He looked away again, drank from his glass, rubbed his palm across his chin. He had not shaved since Lebanon. “There’s another reason, but I’m not comfortable discussing it with anyone right now,” he said at last, and then, brightening, “Tell me more about your plans.”

  In the morning I was to drive seven hours upstate to the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, in Rochester. I had been offered an internship in the college’s theater department; I hoped that a semester’s immersion in an ASL environment would tip me over the edge into fluency. I wanted to become an interpreter.

  “You already know about my plans. You know all I know.” I was embarrassed to talk of my aspiration. I was afraid he would think me overconfident, or else one of those newly devout hearing people, pie-eyed over deafness, who seize on sign language like a new way of being. “Do you — you must get so irritated talking with me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My signing. It’s so awkward.”

  “Not at all.” He looked at me as though I were mildly demented, and I realized at once how accustomed he was to communicating with hearing people who didn’t even speak English, let alone sign language. Alec himself never used ASL with me outside our lessons, but rather a mixture of signs and spoken English, the latter being dominant. He barely voiced, but mouthed the words with a little breathy sound and signed along in English word order. When he wanted to use an English word that had no exact correlate in sign, he always simply fingerspelled the first letter of the English word as he pronounced it rather than signing a conceptual equivalent. Sometimes he signed whole sentences this way. It was like speaking only in acronyms, while I struggled to match the string of initials with the words he shaped on his lips.

  Our language was neither English nor ASL. It fell somewhere along the spectrum that links the two. Later I would learn that this is not uncommon among deaf people, but in the beginning I was confused by it.

  When I spoke with Alec, I did the opposite of what he did. Intent on signing every bit, I constantly modified the English phrases in my head to fit more neatly into signs. It wasn’t until much later that I realized the folly of this. Alec’s native language was English, as he was the first to proclaim, and he was perfectly capable of appreciating all the rich and subtle connotations of specific English word choices. While someone fluent in ASL could convey the same complex and finely nuanced message in sign language, I was certainly not this person. By so diligently packaging my thoughts into phrases that I could sign, I robbed them of their original value and presented Alec with badly watered-down versions, although he assured me that my signing was not tiresome. “You seem very clear to me.” He drained his glass. “Want to go for a walk?”

  We dressed our feet and went outside. Alec bought a carton of orange juice from the market across the street. It was not yet evening. People drank beer on their stoops.

  As we strolled around the block, Alec’s rubber thongs neatly smacking the hot sidewalk, I puzzled over his journey, over the aspect of it that he had decided to keep mysterious. He and his interview subjects had gotten on very well by exchanging bits of American and Lebanese signs; whatever communication barriers arose, the common bond of deafness overrode them. I thought: If my signing were better, I would know the perfect question to ask. I thought: If I were deaf, I would understand the part left unspoken. Or he would tell me.

  Around the back of the block, a woman swept the patch of concrete between her building and the sidewalk. Within the iron rail that protected her little garden grew a tree whose gnarled trunk branched quite low, with several limbs curving out from the crotch and twisting upward like a cupped hand. I stopped. The tree seemed small and large at the same time.

  “Do you know the name of that kind of tree?” I asked the woman.

  She leaned on her broom and looked up into it. “Sure, it’s a tree of heaven.”

  Alec turned to me with his nose and brow bunched inquisitively.

  “She said the tree is called a tree of — what’s the sign for H-E-A-V-E-N?”

  He put the brown paper bag with the orange juice between his knees and, clenching it there, showed me the twohanded sign for heaven. Palms down, his hands rose one over the other until they split apart and made an opening.

  “Do that again,” I demanded. He obliged, the bag going back between his legs, his hands again churning upward and separating.

  “Okay?” he asked.

  �
�Okay.”

  He retrieved the bag a second time and we nodded good evening to the sweeper and continued down the block. In front of the second-to-last building, a woman in a housecoat watched our approach. As we neared, she leaned out over the railing and beamed coyly at Alec. “That was cute, the thing you did back there with the bag.”

  I started to tell Alec what she had said, but judging from the blush spreading across his face, he had read her lips accurately.

  “You could have handed the bag to me,” I told him as we kept walking.

  He deadpanned back, “It’s part of the sign.”

  I didn’t understand immediately. It took my brain a few seconds to make sense of his language, and in this interval Alec might have apprehended a polite, desperately blank expression working across my face. By the time I got it, and laughed, he had turned away.

  Sitting in a Burger King on upper Broadway, Alec asked, “Did I ever tell you the story of Abraham and Isaac?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, although this was untrue.

  He had told me the Bible story only a few months earlier, just after getting back from Lebanon. I had been idly surveying a scramble of documents on the floor near my feet when I spied a little navy blue book stamped with gold. “May I?” I asked, plucking it from the heap, and “Go ahead,” he had said, shrugging. I flipped the passport open to his picture and read beside it, “Alec Abraham Isaac Naiman.”

  “That’s quite a name you’ve got there,” I said. “That’s really your name?”

  He nodded and put out his cigarette. “Do you know the story, in the Bible, about them?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “How does it go again?”

  So he had told me how Abraham heard a voice claiming to be God. This voice commanded him to take his youngest son, Isaac, to the top of the mountain and sacrifice him. Abraham, who loved his son, did as he was bidden. He took him to the top of the mountain and raised his knife to slit Isaac’s throat. Just then an angel came and stayed his arm; Abraham had proven his faith and Isaac was spared.

  But, said Alec, the point is, how do we know it was really God talking? How do we know Abraham wasn’t hearing voices? He might have been insane. The angel might simply have been Abraham changing his mind, or coming to his senses.

  I pressed his passport to my chin and peered at him doubtfully. “That’s really the point, in the original story? How it’s meant in the Bible?”

  He looked surprised. “That’s how I’ve always interpreted it.”

  We eyed each other, puzzled. I had thought the story of Abraham was intended as a model, a perfect example of absolute faith. To Alec, it was a cautionary tale: be suspicious of that which cannot be verified. Do not trust unseen voices.

  I let his passport fall back to the carpet.

  He told me the story again a few months later, across an orange plastic table in that crowded fast-food joint. I was down for a weekend from my internship at NTID. We seemed destined to do this: keep catching up with each other during those brief times when we overlapped in the same city. In a way, it was best. Alec did not want anyone to know we were involved. The deaf community is small, as people say, and news travels almost impossibly fast within it.

  Even later that year, when I moved back to New York and we saw each other more frequently, we stayed inside almost exclusively, making little forays for Chinese food and videos. During these expeditions, I was terribly conscious of not speaking for Alec. I found that if salespeople realized I was hearing, they would direct everything to me, addressing Alec in the third person and expecting me to speak for him. My initial solution was not to talk at all, just hang back and let Alec handle everything. Sometimes he had to repeat himself two or three times, but he always made himself understood.

  I realized, however, that in relinquishing my own voice, I had chosen a subordinate position. It seemed dishonest, as well. So I began speaking for myself, and occasionally, when a cashier shot a beseeching glance at me, I piped up for Alec. I tried to do it swiftly, unobtrusively. Sometimes he would whip around and watch my lips, checking that I got his message right.

  The rest of the time we spent in his apartment. Only the security guard knew. The signaling device that should have linked the downstairs buzzer to a light bulb in Alec’s apartment was perpetually broken, so I had to go through a little routine with the guard each time I visited. “Remember me from last time?” I would ask. “The person I’m visiting is deaf? He can’t hear the buzzer?”

  “Oh, yeah. He know you’re coming?” the guard would ask.

  Alec and I would have just spoken on the TTY, capital letters marching stiffly across a strip of black screen, electric blue words glowing like the numbers on a digital clock. It always thrilled me how Alec could make those messages tease and flirt, pause for comic timing, twist into grins and grimaces and pensive sighs, even once sing me happy birthday. “Yes, he’s expecting me,” I would reply.

  The guard would nod and sometimes keep me waiting a minute while he studied me. “You can do that sign language, right? That’s cool. I saw some a that on Sesame Street. He your boyfriend? How’d you learn that?” When he was satisfied, he would press a button behind the counter, letting me through the glass doors.

  Up in Alec’s apartment I felt folded into a world as separate and private as if we were in the airplane. Hours of talking with him left me not with a memory of actual words and phrases so much as with an indelible, dreamlike sense of what we had discussed. They also left me exhausted. Talking with him, engaging with him in this peculiar blend of the physical and the cerebral, required deep concentration.

  If our hands were busy, we couldn’t talk. If the lights were out, we couldn’t talk. If we were not facing each other, we couldn’t talk. And so I learned to be more alert, to listen with my peripheral vision and the back of my neck, to respond to a glimpse of motion, a shift of weight. To get my attention, Alec might sign on my body instead of his. “What are you thinking?” he would ask, his finger on my temple. There were times when I could not get his attention; if he chose not to look, I was effectively silenced.

  Once, while making an earnest point in the middle of a debate, I caught him staring at me with an inscrutable smile. He lolled against the end of the couch, propped on one elbow, and although watching me intently, he clearly was paying no attention to what I was saying.

  “What!?” I demanded, quite annoyed.

  Unruffled, he continued to smile. “1 was just thinking,” he mused, “that your signing is looking so natural, like a deaf person’s.”

  I melted.

  But no matter how good my signing got, it wasn’t enough to dissolve the boundary between us. Alec was beginning to align himself more strongly with the deaf community. He collected shelves of books and videotapes on ASL, deaf history, deaf politics, deaf culture. He talked interestedly about the movement in the 1850s to establish a separate deaf state in the western part of the United States. He talked about the patronizing attitudes of the hearing community, about the dearth of deaf teachers and role models in schools for the deaf, about hearing parents who deprive their deaf children of exposure to deaf adults.

  I knew what was coming that day when Alec repeated the story of Abraham and Isaac in the grease-laden air of that Burger King. I let him repeat the story even though I had heard it before. I listened keenly to the way he told it, to the slant, hoping to decipher something new, a deeper shade of meaning—some elemental clue as to the difference between us, why it wouldn’t last.

  As the story unraveled, I became aware of a short man in an army jacket weaving among the tables with a sort of thick-shoed shuffle, silently proffering small yellow cards. A few people gave him money, which he accepted with a glassy nod. Eventually he reached our table and placed a card on Alec’s tray. It was printed with the manual alphabet and read, “Learn the Language of Deaf-Mutes.”

  Alec had been talking in his most Englishy fashion, blending speech with fingerspelled initials. Like many profoundly deaf adu
lts, he never wore a hearing aid; it was likely that the man assumed he was hearing. Without interrupting his story or looking up, Alec handed the card back and dismissed the man coldly. I blushed and ducked my head, jabbing at my milkshake with my straw. The man hitched up his pants and moved on.

  Deaf organizations and their leaders have waged a battle against deaf peddlers at least since the end of World War II, when the National Association of the Deaf established a Committee for the Suppression of Peddling. They believe that the image of the peddler exchanging alphabet cards for donations perpetuates the worst stereotypes about deaf people: they can’t communicate; they can’t hold jobs; they are simple, stupid, seamy, incapable of moral reasoning.

  I thought Alec’s behavior was rude and condescending, and I was ashamed. But when I looked up, the scene had shifted. Glancing away from Alec for a sliver of a moment, I registered something else. A group of teenage girls were getting up from a nearby table, laughing. As they dumped their trays, I saw a yellow alphabet card flutter to the floor. And I understood that most people there would carry home with them that day the impression of only one deaf man, and I understood that it wouldn’t be this one sitting across from me.

  15

  Light after Dark

  It is 5:45 in the morning and the junior class is gathered near the student entrance, inside the bus room, eating Dunkin Munchkins from a large cardboard carry-out box. They have left their sleeping bags and knapsacks in the lobby, piled haphazardly against one wall in anticipation of the chartered bus. The large-paned windows reflect the vaporous shapes of sleepy teenagers. It is far too early for all this confectioner’s sugar, all this cinnamon and honey-glazed chocolate; the students seem united in delicious conspiracy, the doughnuts and orange juice fueling their buzz of excitement.