by John Varley
He was flooded with relief when I managed to convey to him that I was all right. With eloquent gestures he made me understand that I was not to stay on the road. He indicated that I should climb over the fence and continue through the fields. He repeated himself several times to be sure I understood, then held on to me as I climbed over to assure himself that I was out of the way. He reached over the fence and held my shoulders, smiling at me. He pointed to the road and shook his head, then pointed to the building and nodded. He touched my head and smiled when I nodded. He climbed back onto the engine and started up, all the time nodding and pointing where he wanted me to go. Then he was off again.
I debated what to do. Most of me said to turn around, go back to the wall by way of the pasture and head back into the hills. These people probably wouldn’t want me around. I doubted that I’d be able to talk to them, and they might even resent me. On the other hand, I was fascinated, as who wouldn’t be? I wanted to see how they managed it. I still didn’t believe that they were all deaf and blind. It didn’t seem possible.
The Sheltie was sniffing at my pants. I looked down at her and she backed away, then daintily approached me as I held out my open hand. She sniffed, then licked me. I patted her on the head, and she hustled back to her sheep.
I turned toward the buildings.
The first order of business was money.
None of the students knew much about it from experience, but the library was full of Braille books. They started reading.
One of the first things that became apparent was that when money was mentioned, lawyers were not far away. The students wrote letters. From the replies, they selected a lawyer and retained him.
They were in a school in Pennsylvania at the time. The original pupils of the special schools, five hundred in number, had been narrowed down to about seventy as people left to live with relatives or found other solutions to their special problems. Of those seventy, some had places to go but didn’t want to go there; others had few alternatives. Their parents were either dead or not interested in living with them. So the seventy had been gathered from the schools around the country into this one, while ways to deal with them were worked out. The authorities had plans, but the students beat them to it.
Each of them had been entitled to a guaranteed annual income since 1980. They had been under the care of the government, so they had not received it. They sent their lawyer to court. He came back with a ruling that they could not collect. They appealed, and won. The money was paid retroactively, with interest, and came to a healthy sum. They thanked their lawyer and retained a real estate agent. Meanwhile, they read.
They read about communes in New Mexico, and instructed their agent to look for something out there. He made a deal for a tract to be leased in perpetuity from the Navaho nation. They read about the land, found that it would need a lot of water to be productive in the way they wanted it to be.
They divided into groups to research what they would need to be self-sufficient.
Water could be obtained by tapping into the canals that carried it from the reservoirs on the Rio Grande into the reclaimed land in the south. Federal money was available for the project through a labyrinthine scheme involving HEW, the Agriculture Department, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They ended up paying little for their pipeline.
The land was arid. It would need fertilizer to be of use in raising sheep without resorting to open range techniques. The cost of fertilizer could be subsidized through the Rural Resettlement Program. After that, planting clover would enrich the soil with all the nitrates they could want.
There were techniques available to farm ecologically, without worrying about fertilizers or pesticides. Everything was recycled. Essentially, you put sunlight and water into one end and harvested wool, fish, vegetables, apples, honey, and eggs at the other end. You used nothing but the land, and replaced even that as you recycled your waste products back into the soil. They were not interested in agribusiness with huge combine harvesters and crop dusters. They didn’t even want to turn a profit. They merely wanted sufficiency.
The details multiplied. Their leader, the one who had had the original idea and the drive to put it into action in the face of overwhelming obstacles, was a dynamo named Janet Reilly. Knowing nothing about the techniques generals and executives employ to achieve large objectives, she invented them herself and adapted them to the peculiar needs and limitations of her group. She assigned task forces to look into solutions of each aspect of their project: law, science, social planning, design, buying, logistics, construction. At any one time, she was the only person who knew everything about what was happening. She kept it all in her head, without notes of any kind.
It was in the area of social planning that she showed herself to be a visionary and not just a superb organizer. Her idea was not to make a place where they could lead a life that was a sightless, soundless imitation of their unafflicted peers. She wanted a whole new start, a way of living that was by and for the blind-deaf, a way of living that accepted no convention just because that was the way it had always been done. She examined every human cultural institution from marriage to indecent exposure to see how it related to her needs and the needs of her friends. She was aware of the peril of this approach, but was undeterred. Her Social Task Force read about every variant group that had ever tried to make it on its own anywhere, and brought her reports about how and why they had failed or succeeded. She filtered this information through her own experiences to see how it would work for her unusual group with its own set of needs and goals.
The details were endless. They hired an architect to put their ideas into Braille blueprints. Gradually the plans evolved. They spent more money. The construction began, supervised on the site by their architect, who by now was so fascinated by the scheme that she donated her services. It was an important break, for they needed someone there whom they could trust. There is only so much that can be accomplished at such a distance.
When things were ready for them to move, they ran into bureaucratic trouble. They had anticipated it, but it was a setback. Social agencies charged with overseeing their welfare doubted the wisdom of the project. When it became apparent that no amount of reasoning was going to stop it, wheels were set in motion that resulted in a restraining order, issued for their own protection, preventing them from leaving the school. They were twenty-one years old by then, all of them, but were judged mentally incompetent to manage their own affairs. A hearing was scheduled.
Luckily, they still had access to their lawyer. He also had become infected with the crazy vision, and put on a great battle for them. He succeeded in getting a ruling concerning the right of institutionalized persons, later upheld by the Supreme Court, which eventually had severe repercussions in state and county hospitals. Realizing the trouble they were already in regarding the thousands of patients in inadequate facilities across the country, the agencies gave in.
By then, it was the spring of 1986, one year after their target date. Some of their fertilizer had washed away already for lack of erosion-preventing clover. It was getting late to start crops, and they were running short of money. Nevertheless, they moved to New Mexico and began the backbreaking job of getting everything started. There were fifty-five of them, with nine children aged three months to six years.
I don’t know what I expected. I remember that everything was a surprise, either because it was so normal or because it was so different. None of my idiot surmises about what such a place might be like proved to be true. And of course I didn’t know the history of the place; I learned that later, picked up in bits and pieces.
I was surprised to see lights in some of the buildings. The first thing I had assumed was that they would have no need of them. That’s an example of something so normal that it surprised me.
As to the differences, the first thing that caught my attention was the fence around the rail line. I had a personal interest in it, having almost been injured by it. I struggled to understand,
as I must if I was to stay even for a night.
The wood fences that enclosed the rails on their way to the gate continued up to a barn, where the rails looped back on themselves in the same way they did outside the wall. The entire line was enclosed by the fence. The only access was a loading platform by the barn, and the gate to the outside. It made sense. The only way a deaf-blind person could operate a conveyance like that would be with assurances that there was no one on the track. These people would never go on the tracks; there was no way they could be warned of an approaching train.
There were people moving around me in the twilight as I made my way into the group of buildings. They took no notice of me, as I had expected. They moved fast; some of them were actually running. I stood still, eyes searching all around me so no one would come crashing into me. I had to figure out how they kept from crashing into each other before I got bolder.
I bent to the ground and examined it. The light was getting bad, but I saw immediately that there were concrete sidewalks crisscrossing the area. Each of the walks was etched with a different sort of pattern in grooves that had been made before the stuff set—lines, waves, depressions, patches of rough and smooth. I quickly saw that the people who were in a hurry moved only on those walkways, and they were all barefoot. It was no trick to see that it was some sort of traffic pattern read with the feet. I stood up. I didn’t need to know how it worked. It was sufficient to know what it was and stay off the paths.
The people were unremarkable. Some of them were not dressed, but I was used to that by now. They came in all shapes and sizes, but all seemed to be about the same age except for the children. Except for the fact that they did not stop and talk or even wave as they approached each other, I would never have guessed they were blind. I watched them come to intersections in the pathways—I didn’t know how they knew they were there, but could think of several ways—and slow down as they crossed. It was a marvelous system.
I began to think of approaching someone. I had been there for almost half an hour, an intruder. I guess I had a false sense of these people’s vulnerability; I felt like a burglar.
I walked along beside a woman for a minute. She was very purposeful in her eyes-ahead stride, or seemed to be. She sensed something, maybe my footsteps. She slowed a little, and I touched her on the shoulder, not knowing what else to do. She stopped instantly and turned toward me. Her eyes were open but vacant. Her hands were all over me, lightly touching my face, my chest, my hands, fingering my clothing. There was no doubt in my mind that she knew me for a stranger, probably from the first tap on the shoulder. But she smiled warmly at me, and hugged me. Her hands were very delicate and warm. That’s funny, because they were calloused from hard work. But they felt sensitive.
She made me to understand—by pointing to the building, making eating motions with an imaginary spoon, and touching a number on her watch—that supper was served in an hour, and that I was invited. I nodded and smiled beneath her hands; she kissed me on the cheek and hurried off.
Well. It hadn’t been so bad. I had worried about my ability to communicate. Later I found out she learned a great deal more about me than I had told.
I put off going into the mess hall or whatever it was. I strolled around in the gathering darkness looking at their layout. I saw the little Sheltie bringing the sheep back to the fold for the night. She herded them expertly through the open gate without any instructions, and one of the residents closed it and locked them in. The man bent and scratched the dog on the head and got his hand licked. Her chores done for the night, the dog hurried over to me and sniffed my pant leg. She followed me around the rest of the evening.
Everyone seemed so busy that I was surprised to see one woman sitting on a rail fence, doing nothing. I went over to her.
Closer, I saw that she was younger than I had thought. She was thirteen, I learned later. She wasn’t wearing any clothes. I touched her on the shoulder, and she jumped down from the fence and went through the same routine as the other woman had, touching me all over with no reserve. She took my hand and I felt her fingers moving rapidly in my palm. I couldn’t understand it, but knew what it was. I shrugged, and tried out other gestures to indicate that I didn’t speak hand talk. She nodded, still feeling my face with her hands.
She asked me if I was staying to dinner. I assured her that I was. She asked me if I was from a university. And if you think that’s easy to ask with only body movements, try it. But she was so graceful and supple in her movements, so deft at getting her meaning across. It was beautiful to watch her. It was speech and ballet at the same time.
I told her I wasn’t from a university, and launched into an attempt to tell her a little about what I was doing and how I got there. She listened to me with her hands, scratching her head graphically when I failed to make my meanings clear. All the time the smile on her face got broader and broader, and she would laugh silently at my antics. All this while standing very close to me, touching me. At last she put her hands on her hips.
“I guess you need the practice,” she said, “but if it’s all the same to you, could we talk mouthtalk for now? You’re cracking me up.”
I jumped as if stung by a bee. The touching, while something I could ignore from a deaf-blind girl, suddenly seemed out of place. I stepped back a little, but her hands returned to me. She looked puzzled, then read the problem with her hands.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You thought I was deaf and blind. If I’d known I would have told you right off.”
“I thought everyone here was.”
“Just the parents. I’m one of the children. We all hear and see quite well. Don’t be so nervous. If you can’t stand touching, you’re not going to like it here. Relax, I won’t hurt you.” And she kept her hands moving over me, mostly my face. I didn’t understand it at the time, but it didn’t seem sexual. Turned out I was wrong, but it wasn’t blatant.
“You’ll need me to show you the ropes,” she said, and started for the domes. She held my hand and walked close to me. Her other hand kept moving to my face every time I talked.
“Number one, stay off the concrete paths. That’s where—”
“I already figured that out.”
“You did? How long have you been here?” Her hands searched my face with renewed interest. It was quite dark.
“Less than an hour. I was almost run over by your train.”
She laughed, then apologized and said she knew it wasn’t funny to me.
I told her it was funny to me now, though it hadn’t been at the time. She said there was a warning sign on the gate, but I had been unlucky enough to come when the gate was open—they opened it by remote control before a train started up—and I hadn’t seen it.
“What’s your name?” I asked her, as we neared the soft yellow lights coming from the dining room.
Her hand worked reflexively in mine, then stopped. “Oh, I don’t know. I have one; several, in fact. But they’re in bodytalk. I’m . . . Pink. It translates as Pink, I guess.”
There was a story behind it. She had been the first child born to the school students. They knew that babies were described as being pink, so they called her that. She felt pink to them. As we entered the hall, I could see that her name was visually inaccurate. One of her parents had been black. She was dark, with blue eyes and curly hair lighter than her skin. She had a broad nose, but small lips.
She didn’t ask my name, so I didn’t offer it. No one asked my name, in speech, the entire time I was there. They called me many things in bodytalk, and when the children called me it was “Hey, you!” They weren’t big on spoken words.
The dining hall was in a rectangular building made of brick. It connected to one of the large domes. It was dimly lighted. I later learned that the lights were for me alone. The children didn’t need them for anything but reading. I held Pink’s hand, glad to have a guide. I kept my eyes and ears open.
“We’re informal,” Pink said. Her voice was embarrassingly loud in the
large room. No one else was talking at all; there were just the sounds of movement and breathing. Several of the children looked up. “I won’t introduce you around now. Just feel like part of the family. People will feel you later, and you can talk to them. You can take your clothes off here at the door.”
I had no trouble with that. Everyone else was nude, and I could easily adjust to household customs by that time. You take your shoes off in Japan, you take your clothes off in Taos. What’s the difference?
Well, quite a bit, actually. There was all the touching that went on. Everybody touched everybody else, as routinely as glancing. Everyone touched my face first, then went on with what seemed like total innocence to touch me everywhere else. As usual, it was not quite what it seemed. It was not innocent, and it was not the usual treatment they gave others in their group. They touched each other’s genitals a lot more than they touched mine. They were holding back with me so I wouldn’t be frightened. They were very polite with strangers.
There was a long, low table, with everyone sitting on the floor around it. Pink led me to it.
“See the bare strips on the floor? Stay out of them. Don’t leave anything in them. That’s where people walk. Don’t ever move anything. Furniture, I mean. That has to be decided at full meetings, so we’ll all know where everything is. Small things, too. If you pick up something, put it back exactly where you found it.”
“I understand.”
People were bringing bowls and platters of food from the adjoining kitchen. They set them on the table, and the diners began feeling them. They ate with their fingers, without plates, and they did it slowly and lovingly. They smelled things for a long time before they took a bite. Eating was very sensual to these people.