Love and First Sight

by Josh Sundquist

  “Who knows?” adds Nick. “If you’re lucky, maybe we’ll even let you join the academic quiz team.”

  “What? And be stuck at nerd tournaments with you losers?” I say to lighten the mood. Everyone laughs.

  CHAPTER 30

  We finally arrive in Los Angeles, where traffic slows us to a crawl.

  “So, how exactly are we going to find her?” asks Nick.

  “Cecily said her dad lived near Venice Beach. Six blocks from the ocean,” I say.

  “GPS can get us to Venice Beach, but that could be a lot of houses,” says Nick.

  “Well, I’ll need your help for that,” I say. “She also said it was a corner lot with a yellow house and a red surfboard on the porch. I don’t think I could pick all that out from a moving car.”

  “No problem, we got you,” says Nick.

  We weave through the narrow streets of Venice Beach for about three hours. Eventually we find it. The house is such a big bright yellow that even I can see it. And once we are parked out front, I can identify the splotch of red on the porch, too.

  “We’ll wait out here,” says Ion. “But if you need anything, we’re here for you.”

  “I know you are,” I say.

  I’m able to walk without my cane, albeit slowly, across the sidewalk, through the front gate, and up to the porch. I stand there for a moment. What am I going to say? It all comes down to this. We’ve driven halfway across the country, and I’m standing here, and this is my one chance to apologize and win her back. I look over at my friends waiting in the car. I can’t really see them, but the glance is instinctual, like I know it’s what I am supposed to do. It’s where I am supposed to look for support.

  I knock and wait.

  I hear footsteps behind the door.

  Then it opens and she’s standing there.

  I wish I was better at reading facial expressions. Is she happy to see me? Angry? Shocked?

  Knowing she’s right in front of me makes me feel unsteady. I reach out a hand to grab the porch railing.

  “Will?” she says, her voice registering complete confusion.

  I’m not sure what I was planning to say, but I blurt out, “Ces, it’s so good to see you.”

  I start to raise my arms to hug her but stop myself as she says, “What are you doing here?”

  What am I doing here? Isn’t it plainly obvious? I just drove across the country to see you, I think.

  “I’m really sorry about your dad,” I say.

  “Thanks,” she says. “It was pretty scary, but he’s going to be all right. He’s even promised to start eating better and stuff.”

  “That’s good,” I say. “Yeah, really great.”

  “But you didn’t answer my question,” she says. “Why are you here? How are you here?”

  “We drove, actually,” I say. “Don’t worry, not me personally. Whitford did the driving.”

  She doesn’t laugh.

  “So…?” she prompts.

  Right. She still wants to know why.

  Why, indeed? To answer that question could take hours. To completely explain the reason, to tell her what I’ve learned. But in simple terms, she is the reason. But she’s also the one who taught me the reason.

  See, I had been kidding myself with this idea that I needed to maintain my independence. In truth, my life has been dependent on others, or at least interdependent with others, since the day I was born. And my story has been woven together with Cecily’s from the moment I transferred to Toano High School. She’s the one who got me to try out to be cohost when I didn’t think I could, who helped me scroll through the announcement script. She’s filled the gaps whenever there were things I couldn’t do for myself. She taught me about art, about beauty, and about sunrises. And she’s filled the emotional gaps, too. Yeah, independence and self-reliance sound nice in theory, but in reality they are just synonyms for loneliness. And before I met Cecily, I was so tired, without even realizing it, so tired of being lonely.

  I think through all this, and then blurt out, “Because, Cecily, I was wrong. I always thought I could do life by myself, that I wanted to live independently. But you taught me that if there’s no one to share your experiences with—if there’s no one to look at the painting with, no one to audition with, no one to go to homecoming with—then what’s the point?”

  She’s quiet for a while. “Um,” she stammers.

  “I love you, Cecily.”

  The words just come out automatically, from some truthful part of me that is finally ready to say what’s inside. I don’t think about them; they just happen.

  She gasps. “What did you say?”

  “I love you,” I repeat, faster and more insistently. “I love you, Cecily.”

  “Will…”

  But I don’t care whether she loves me back, I just want her to know, right now, for this moment and to remember it always, that this is how I feel about her, and I say, “I’ve loved you for a long time. I loved you before I could see and after I could see. I loved you when I could only imagine your face and after I could look at your face. I love you completely, all of you.”

  She’s quiet.

  I’m breathing quickly, heavily, like I’m about to cry or start laughing. I feel like something inside my chest—maybe my heart, or my lungs, or something—is expanding and growing, and I need her to speak before it breaks open.

  “Well, say something,” I plead.

  “You love me?” she asks, pronouncing love like it’s a foreign word.

  My chest relaxes a little, confident she has at least gotten this message. Even if I never talk to her again after this, she’ll know forever how I felt.

  “Yes, I do,” I say.

  “Really?” But her voice breaks at the word, and she falls into my arms crying.

  “What?” I ask, unsure how she’s feeling.

  “My whole life, I never thought—” Her voice falters but then the words spill out. “I never thought anyone would feel that way about me.”

  “Oh, Ces.”

  I wrap my arms around her and hold her face against my shoulder.

  She grabs my hands.

  “No cane?” she asks.

  “My eyesight has improved a lot,” I say.

  “That’s great!” she says. “Oh my God, Will, that’s so great. Can you see me, like, right now?”

  “Yes, I can see you quite well. You have a beautiful smile.”

  She bites her lip.

  “I mean it,” I say. “I’m sorry for the things I said in the car that day. You’re beautiful. You always have been, and you always will be.”

  She melts against my shoulder.

  “You want to go for a walk?” I ask.

  “A walk?” she says, as if waking up from a dream to find us standing on a porch in California.

  “I’ve never seen the ocean, and since we’re so close, I thought, you know…”

  “Okay,” she says.

  She takes my hand, and we walk down the stairs and back out to the sidewalk toward the beach. With my free hand, I give a little wave toward the car to let them know everything is fine. Cecily seems so wrapped up in our walk that she doesn’t even notice all the thumbs-ups they flash in return.

  We take off our shoes, walk out onto the sand, and eventually sit down near the water. We watch the deep green waves rise and then crash into light foam that spreads across the beach. I wonder how much longer I will be able to appreciate sights like this. I pick up a handful of sand and let it stream through my fingers. The grains are far too small to identify individually. Instead, they blend together like a streak of cream-colored paint.

  “What?” she asks, grabbing my other hand. “What’s wrong?”

  She was so happy when the surgery seemed to have worked, when she could finally show me a sunrise. It hurts to tell her about the swelling, but I do.

  “What are the—” she starts to ask.

  “Fifty percent.” I say the number like I’m referring to the 50 percent cha
nce I’ll go blind again, not the 50 percent that I’ll retain my eyesight.

  “The flip of a coin,” she says.

  “The flip of a coin,” I repeat.

  We are quiet for a while, listening to the sound of the waves.

  “So,” I say, “what do we do now?”

  She smiles. It feels like a misplaced expression. I wonder if I’m reading it correctly. What could she be happy about?

  “You could start by kissing me,” she says.

  “What?” I say, caught completely off guard.

  “You heard me,” she says, rotating to face me.

  I stammer, “I didn’t realize that you felt, uh, you know, like that about me—”

  She puts a finger on my lips, cutting me off. “I think I’ve loved you from the first time we went to that museum, Will. I just never believed you could love me back. I never believed anyone could love me back.”

  “But now?” I ask softly.

  She leans her perfect face in till it’s just inches away from mine. “Well, there must be some reason you drove all this way to see me, right?”

  “There is,” I say. “If I’m going to lose my sight again, I wanted to make sure you were the last thing I ever saw.”

  I put my hand behind her neck, pulling her the final inches until our lips meet. I close my eyes, and the world goes dark as my lips light up, my whole body tingling. I run my fingers up the back of her head and pull her tight against me, wanting her to know that I don’t ever intend to let go. We kiss like that on the white sand beach until the sky lights up in a fiery sunset. We hold hands and watch until the sun dips below the horizon, disappearing to someplace our human eyes cannot see.

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  MORNING ANNOUNCEMENTS

  Spring Semester, Day 1

  FINAL SCRIPT

  [approved for broadcast by V. Everbrook]

  CECILY

  Good morning, I’m Cecily Hoder.

  WILL

  And I’m Will Porter.

  CECILY

  We’re your new announcement coanchors. Traditionally, this show begins each year with each host sharing his or her New Year’s resolution. By the flip of a coin, Will has been chosen to go first. Will?

  WILL

  Thanks, Cecily.

  Most of you probably know I was born blind and that I transferred here at the start of last semester. My life has changed in many unexpected ways recently, both as a result of coming to this school and because of an experimental operation I had a few months ago to potentially give me eyesight.

  Today I have a wonderful girlfriend who has shown me how to appreciate the burning skies of dawn and dusk, I have parents who have patiently helped me learn shapes and colors, and I have amazing friends who have taught me to recognize everything from mountains to canyons to casinos. And as a bonus, the operation went even better than I could have hoped. My next goal is reading. By the end of the year, I hope to be reading the announcements to you off the teleprompter rather than this braille terminal. Anyway, the point I’m getting at is that my New Year’s resolution is to keep my eyes and mind open. Open to beauty in all its forms. And open to all of you—my friends and classmates. Happy New Year.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is a story that has been growing in my mind for over a decade. I had originally imagined that Will would, after the operation, immediately be able to see the world with total understanding and comprehension. But as I researched the case histories of patients who had undergone similar procedures, I found a quite different story: Those born with total blindness have a visual cortex that developed differently from that of a sighted person, and the road to recovery is long and difficult.

  The most famous (and insightful) modern case study for me was Sidney Bradford, who gained his sight at age fifty-two. His story was studied and recorded by the famous British neuropsychologist Richard Gregory. Bradford was, among other things, disappointed to discover that both he and his wife were unattractive. In fact, he found the entire world to be a visual disappointment, and as Will’s dad explains in this story, Bradford’s psyche fell apart and he died soon after.

  The great neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks compares the Bradford case to one he followed in the 1990s in his book An Anthropologist on Mars. In that situation, too, the patient experienced severe depression. Eventually, his eyesight regressed to preoperative levels. But so confused and frustrated had he been by his new sense of sight that the patient was actually glad to return to blindness.

  The third (and the only hopeful) case study I reviewed in depth was the book Crashing Through by Robert Kurson. It chronicles the story of Mike May, who is to my knowledge the only living person who had an operation to gain eyesight after living his life in total blindness and also the only person I learned of who had a successful transition, psychologically speaking, from total blindness to (some) eyesight. This can probably be attributed to his work ethic and attitude, but also, from a neurological perspective, it should be noted that May didn’t lose his eyesight until age three, suggesting the possibility that he experienced some development of the visual cortex that could have aided him in his later adaptation to eyesight.

  Will’s procedure is based loosely on the one that May had: a stem cell transplant and then a cornea transplant.

  The most extensive collection of case studies on this subject can be found in a book called Sight Restoration After Long-term Blindness: The Problems and Behavior Patterns of Visual Rehabilitation. It was written by an Italian named Alberto Valvo. I’m indebted to my assistant, Lisa, for tracking down a copy of this rare book at a university library.

  According to Valvo, there are fewer than twenty documented cases of adults who went from total blindness to sight ever recorded in human history. Valvo says that they universally experienced depression and were often tempted after gaining eyesight to harm their eyes (or themselves).

  I’m deeply indebted to all these authors, pioneers, and scientists, therefore, for giving me a framework for what it might be like for Will to gain eyesight as a teenager.

  I also learned a great deal about the way the brain develops in a blind person from Blind Vision: The Neuroscience of Visual Impairment by Zaira Cattaneo and Tomaso Vecchi. Both of them were also kind enough to exchange several emails with me as I attempted to develop my understanding of the way Will would process the physical world—three-dimensional space, the imagination of color, etc.—without ever having seen it. They also insightfully pointed out how difficult it would be to find patients like Will to study, because people born with total blindness are exceptionally rare. Most people with visual impairments retain some of their eyesight, such as the ability to perceive light or some color, or they became blind after at least some development of the visual cortex.

  Since the pioneers in this field, including Cattaneo, Vecchi, and Valvo, were all Italian, I gave Dr. Bianchi a similar ethnic heritage in their honor (although it should be noted that his grasp of the English language is far inferior to that of these scientists).

  The techniques that Mrs. Chin taught Will—his ability to navigate and function in a sighted world—I myself learned through the thorough text The Art and Science of Teaching Orientation and Mobility to Persons with Visual Impairments by William Henry Jacobson.

  As far as the writing and voice of Will, I tried to gain some understanding of the mind of a person with a visual impairment through memoirs of vision impairment, including the hilarious Cockeyed by Ryan Knighton, the haunting Planet of the Blind by Stephen Kuusisto, the poetic Touching the Rock by John Hull, the inspiring Touch the T
op of the World by adventurist Erik Weihenmayer, and the wise As I See It by blind dynamo Tom Sullivan. I also enjoyed the classic thought-experiment novel Blindess by José Saramago.

  I was also informed by a great many movies and documentaries about vision impairment, especially The Eyes of Me (which was particularly helpful in how it showed students transitioning between schools for the blind and mainstream schools and vice versa), Going Blind, Proof, Blindsight, and of course the Pacino classic Scent of a Woman.

  The concept of the tyranny of the visual was first proposed by Marshall McLuhan in the 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy.

  As a general note, I wish to remind the scientifically minded reader that even “normal eyesight” can sense only visible light, which itself occupies a tiny sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. Just as a dog whistle makes a sound human ears can’t detect, the vast majority of electromagnetic wavelengths—including those used for Wi-Fi, X-rays, radar, cell phones, AM/FM radio, and broadcast television—are invisible to humans, despite occupying the same spectrum as visible light. So even eyes with twenty-twenty vision are blind to well over 99 percent (assuming a linear scale) of the electromagnetic energy passing through us each and every second.

  Yet even just that fraction, which we are capable of perceiving with not only our eyes but with other senses as well, contains an infinity of observable phenomena. I was inspired by that fraction to tell this story—most of us are so caught up in our personal narratives of what we have versus what we want, our little worlds of selfies and how many likes they get, that we fail to notice the beauty around us, the infinite beauty that we possess the ability to appreciate.

  And although I did extensively research visual impairment and endeavor to represent it accurately in this book, I want to stress that this is fundamentally a story about how we as human beings—both the sighted and the visually impaired—sense and experience the world. It’s not meant to be a scientifically accurate description of vision impairment or a textbook on the neurological development of the visual cortex. So I hope people with vision impairments will forgive the artistic liberties I’ve taken as a storyteller.