Crashing Through

by Robert Kurson

  Bradford’s depression deepened. In a letter to Gregory, his wife wrote, “He is very disappointed about everything. But when he feels better he says he will do more drawings for you.” Six months later she wrote, “He is not any better. I wish you could help him…. It seems to me our world is not grand as we thought.”

  On August 2, 1960, just nineteen months after his second surgery, Bradford died. He was fifty-four years old and had been perfectly fit. To Gregory’s mind—and he was certain of it—Bradford had simply given up and let go.

  One might wonder, after learning of Bradford’s case, if it mustn’t be an anomaly. The answer lies in three obscure sources: a German book lost for years, a virtually unknown pamphlet printed in the early 1970s, and the single case study of a famed neurologist. Together, they describe the few dozen cases known to history of vision restoration after long-term blindness. Together, they tell a story remarkably similar to Bradford’s.

  None of these subjects saw normally after their surgeries, no matter how good their visual acuity. Parts of their vision worked beautifully, others not at all, and still others in unusual and enigmatic ways. Nearly all of the subjects perceived motion and color immediately and accurately, as if they’d seen all their lives. But it got more complicated after that.

  Like Bradford, these patients could make nothing of human faces. They struggled to accurately perceive depth, distance, and space—essential components for understanding the visual world. And they strained to identify objects by vision alone, even those they knew intimately by touch. In case after case, the subjects yearned to “switch on” their vision by touching what they saw; without touch, one after another seemed lost.

  Often, their vision was confusing, frustrating, and tiring, an avalanche of rapid but uninterpretable impressions. None seemed to see automatically and effortlessly, as the normally sighted do. Patient after patient struggled with scale, perspective, and shadows, seeing colorful but meaningless mosaics where others saw the world. Some closed their eyes to stem the flow; others could not remember one impression before the next flew in to replace it. Few made anything of pictures or photographs. Expectations and other senses drove many of their visual perceptions, yet those expectations and other senses might be wildly wrong.

  And that was just the vision. In their hearts, things were magnitudes worse.

  Patients became depressed, a fate few seemed to escape. Marius von Senden, who collected the bulk of the case histories in his hard-to-find book Space and Sight, wrote:

  It also emerges from the reports as a whole, that the process of learning to see in these cases is an enterprise fraught with innumerable difficulties, and that the common idea that the patient must necessarily be delighted with the gifts of light and colour bequeathed to him by the operation is wholly remote from the facts.

  Alberto Valvo, in his pamphlet Sight Restoration After Long-Term Blindness, observed:

  One of the most striking overall findings is that patients recovering sight often suffer from depression, and tend to regress to behavior characteristics of their blind period.

  But it was the words of the subjects themselves that conveyed the texture of their crises. “How comes it that I now find myself less happy than before?” one fourteen-year-old girl asked her father. “Everything that I see causes me a disagreeable emotion. Oh, I was much more at ease in my blindness!”

  “I still often have fits of crying,” wrote a thirty-eight-year-old man. “I don’t know why, unless perhaps because I have seen too much during the day. In the evening, I prefer to stay in a darkened room, like a crying baby…. This is too long and unhappy a road, leading one into a strange world.” The man dreamed of “significant aggressiveness” toward the surgeons who had given him vision.

  One twenty-five-year-old man wrote, “I still have the painful feeling that I am not up to the task of returning completely to seeing, and I do not know whether I shall be able to manage it.”

  The despair was not lost on those who studied these patients. The case histories are rife with phrases like “lost all her good-humour as soon as she was compelled to see,” “ever more disillusioned in his hopes,” and “would sooner not see at all.” Of his fifty-year-old subject, renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote, “He found himself between two worlds, at home in neither—a torment from which no escape seemed possible.”

  It was a landscape Bradford would have understood, one that stretched in every direction for innocents who did not know better than to ask the gods for the terrible gift of new vision.

  May knew nothing of these cases. But Bashin did. As their conversation wound down one night, Bashin told May that his own research had shown that cases of vision restoration after a lifetime of blindness were astonishingly rare. He provided May with the names of the authors whose studies he’d read—Gregory, Sacks, and a few others—and told him he could find them in the library or on the Internet. He did not describe the strange details and dire outcomes, nor did he insist that May read the cases. Instead, he told his friend, “You might want to check them out. I think you’d find them interesting.”

  Late that night, May told Jennifer about his talk with Bashin.

  “It turns out he’s also a candidate for the stem cell surgery,” May said. “The two main indications for the procedure are chemical burns and Stevens-Johnson syndrome—me and Bryan.”

  “Is he going to do it?” Jennifer asked.

  “I don’t know,” May said. “But it seemed to spark him to consider his own situation more closely. It’ll be interesting to see how he thinks about it for himself. Bryan’s a good, good thinker.”

  “What else did you guys talk about?”

  “Business, camping, gadgets. Oh, and he referred me to a few case histories of people who got their vision restored after being blind forever. He said they were interesting.”

  “Are you going to read them?”

  “I might.”

  May and Jennifer sorted out the next day’s schedule and compared notes on upcoming appointments. They talked about building an addition to their house, which was growing smaller in direct proportion to their sons growing bigger. Then, before they turned off the lights, May asked a final question.

  “Do you think it’s worth it, Jen?”

  “The vision?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think you should do what your heart tells you to do,” she said.

  A few nights later, May and Bashin spoke by phone. Less than three weeks remained before the scheduled surgery.

  May told Bashin that he still hadn’t decided whether to go forward. Then he asked if Bashin had thought more about his own prospects for the operation.

  “I don’t think the time is right for me,” Bashin said. “I don’t want to deal with the risks of cyclosporine. Also, I don’t have normal tear function, which is an additional complication for me—every time you have an operation it weakens the eye and you might just have one shot, so the timing might not be right on that count. I’m in a new job and can’t afford to take off a month to see how this goes. And I don’t know that I want to risk my light perception. For me, it probably makes more sense to wait for the science to advance.”

  “That all makes a lot of sense, Bryan,” May said.

  “But I think there’s a more important bottom line for me,” Bashin added. “I already know what vision is. I have vivid visual memories, I can still see all kinds of marvelous and subtle things in my mind’s eye. I can remember standing on my rooftop as a ten-year-old looking at mountaintops thirty miles away. What I need is something I can depend on, a tool that I can use reliably and longterm. But I don’t think I need the experience of seeing, Mike. I’ve already been on that journey.”

  May told Jennifer about his phone call, and that Bashin had decided to wait on vision restoration. When she asked if he’d read the case histories Bashin had mentioned, he told her that he had not.

  “But I have been thinking about a couple other issues.”

  “W
hat are they?” Jennifer asked.

  “They’re some other reasons why it might not be the right time for me to go forward.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, this is a critical stage for Sendero. I can’t afford to be distracted now. I can’t afford to get laid up. Either of those things could endanger the business. If I’m not right, even for a month, it could jeopardize the business.”

  “Okay. What else have you been thinking about?”

  “I’ve been thinking about us. We’ve come through some tough times. Marriages are such finely balanced equations. Maybe throwing something major into the mix, even if it’s great, upsets the formula. Maybe getting vision requires so much time, with all the doctor visits and the adjustments, that it takes away from our lives. I mean, we’re already incredibly busy. We already have lives that don’t allow much time for our marriage.”

  Jennifer took May’s hand.

  “I believe in you,” she said.

  CHAPTER SIX

  May returned from the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics triumphant but jobless. That’s when his high school buddy Rob Reis called and pitched him on the impossible. He and some engineers were going to start a company that would make the world’s first laser turntable.

  “The world’s first what?” May asked.

  Reis explained it this way: standard phonographs and turntables used a needle, or “stylus,” to play the vinyl record albums of the day. That method had worked for years, but not without its problems: the stylus picked up noises, pops, and hisses, and also wore down the record. If someone could figure out how to play an album without ever touching it, the result would be pristine audio fidelity and records that could last a lifetime.

  “That someone is us,” Reis told May. “We’ll do it with lasers. The lasers can read the record grooves.”

  May saw promise in the idea even before Reis finished talking. He signed on to raise capital and run marketing for the company. They called the business Finial Technology, after the architectural ornament used to adorn the tops of gables and other like structures. It would be a four-man concern: Reis, two other engineers, and May.

  “I can’t promise we’ll be around long-term,” Reis said. “This is a true start-up. It’ll be day-to-day.”

  “That’s what I’m about,” May said. “Let’s do it.”

  Finial was beautiful from the start. Working from a tiny two-room shop, the engineers perfected and shrank the lasers, while May proselytized and ignited buzz and raised capital, all in the name of a new way to hear music. Soon the engineers moved the laser to its launchpad—a hand-cranked turntable—for its first test. The four men held their breath as May laid a Cat Stevens record on the platter and began to turn the handle. For a moment there was only silence. Then, with nothing touching the album but a beam of light, the thump and slap of a bongo began to fill the room with sound.

  Engineers do not make great dancers. Blind guys can be worse.

  The four men in the room boogied as if James Brown had jumped into their bones.

  When they finally caught their breath, they felt as if the sky had sung to them.

  “From light,” they said. “It’s all from a beam of light.”

  Finial was soon the talk of the audiophile community. May wrote the instruction manual for the system and demoed a prototype for the New York Times and others in a $700 top-floor suite at the big consumer electronics show in Chicago. People fought to get in. It was revolutionary stuff—something Sony and Philips and the other titans of sound hadn’t pulled off. By 1986, Finial had raised $7 million in seed money and employed forty people. It seemed just a matter of time before the principals became millionaires.

  It was around this time that May made a major discovery on the slopes at Kirkwood. A curvy and athletic twenty-nine-year-old blonde named Jennifer Smith, one of the instructors in the ski program for the blind he and Salviolo ran, had recently parted ways with her boyfriend. May and Smith had spoken briefly in the past. If anything, Salviolo confirmed, she was more beautiful than ever.

  “She’ll probably be at the bar tonight,” Salviolo said. “A bunch of people are getting drinks and then going to dinner.”

  “I’m there,” May said.

  He arrived at the bar freshly showered and groomed, and wearing one of his best shirts. Smith, however, was surrounded on all sides.

  “Tap me the moment a chair opens up,” May told Salviolo.

  The tap came a half hour later. May bolted from his seat and flopped into one next to Jennifer. The landing was so big and familiar that she believed he had mistaken her for someone else.

  “Mike, it’s Jennifer Smith here,” she said.

  “Yeah, I know,” May said.

  Their conversation was easy from the start. She had been to Chile; his mother had been raised in Chile. She was at Kirkwood teaching two girls who had been campers at Enchanted Hills; he had read those two girls the bedtime story “The Blueberry Pie Elf” every night when he’d been their counselor there. She didn’t believe in coddling blind kids; he told her about driving his sister’s car when he was in high school. Her voice ran and jumped and smiled. His tanned face and wavy hair and the lines around his eyes grinned to the twists and turns in her good stories.

  At dinner, they knew only each other. While new acquaintances of May’s often were careful to avoid using phrases like “did you see that movie…” Jennifer let it rip, unworried about words when so many stories needed telling. Her appetite for new experience—and her willingness to find it alone—called to him. His focus on her, as if the world had narrowed to a point across the table from him, made her feel heard in ways she hadn’t known.

  Soon enough, the subject turned to dating. Jennifer had heard whispers that May might be a bit of a rogue, but she wasn’t sure whether to believe it.

  “I’m a monogamous person,” she said.

  “Oh, I’m not,” May said. “There’s a whole world out there.”

  “I think it’s too complicated going out with more than one person,” she said. “It seems to me it never ends nicely.”

  The conversation moved to other subjects. May and Jennifer kept connecting.

  “Would you like to go out sometime?” he asked.

  “You call me when you’re monogamous,” Jennifer said. “That’s a good time to call.”

  They wished each other good night, and Jennifer went to her room.

  “All my senses are firing,” May told Salviolo. “This one’s special.”

  May phoned Jennifer the next day.

  “Okay, I’m monogamous,” he said.

  They agreed to meet that Friday night at a restaurant in Napa. She had no idea it was eighty-five miles from May’s home in Sunnyvale, California.

  A guitarist warmed the candlelit room while they got to know each other. As before, May locked into Jennifer. She told him about her current stint as a student at Rudolf Steiner College, where she was studying the spiritual aspects of art and therapy—the “granola and woo-woo” stuff, as she called it. That was where some men checked out in conversation with Jennifer. May confessed that granola wasn’t his thing, but he kept asking questions and was moved by her passion.

  “I’m a color person,” she told him. “I don’t connect with math and science. I live in a world of colors and impressions.”

  May told her that he saw numbers in colors—that sevens were green, fives were blue, and so on—and that he could add numbers with ferocious speed because they separated into colors in his mind. No one had talked to her like that before.

  After dinner, Jennifer offered to drive May home. Instead, he suggested that they detour to Enchanted Hills Camp, which was nearby and not yet in session. He gave her precise directions—“Okay, turn left here and then go 2.8 miles until you see a white hand-painted sign”—which she found astounding, and before long they were inside the director’s house, which was fine since May’s mother, Ori Jean, had recently taken that job.

  Inside, May went to his trusty
Plan A. He built a fire, unpacked his guitar, spread a blanket, and played Jennifer’s favorite songs. They were the only two people on the 311-acre grounds. Jennifer found some sheets and made the bed, then pulled the blanket over them. She did not want to make love yet, but they traced around those edges. “You look beautiful,” he told her, and she believed he saw her.

  In the morning, May asked if Jennifer might like to ride horses.

  She told him that she’d been riding since girlhood. She chose English saddle and he would go bareback. They set out on the trails, riding fast. Jennifer watched as May ducked under trees, leaped off his horse to move barbed-wire gates, and traversed tricky hills and ravines, but she never second-guessed him, never asked if he was sure he should be riding like that; she just kept riding alongside him and believing he’d be okay, and May could hear that belief in the thundering hoofs of her own horse that she never slowed for a moment to make them safer, and that sound meant everything to him, that sound of a person who lived in a world of impressions having the impression that he could do anything.

  When they slowed they talked some more. Out here, feeling like this, Jennifer wanted May to know everything about her, even the weaknesses and flaws, because if he could love her then, she could imagine loving him for a long, long time.

  Jennifer Smith was eight years old before she could pronounce the word otolaryngologist, but she always knew what her father did for a living. As one of the country’s preeminent inner-ear surgeons, he developed and performed procedures for giving hearing to the deaf.

  Mansfield and Charlotte Smith welcomed Jennifer in 1957, then two more children by the time they settled in Saratoga, California, a few years later. Though the family was well-to-do and lived in a beautiful home, the Smiths were not out to raise softies. Every year, Mansfield took the family backpacking in the Sierras, requiring the kids to read topographic maps and learn the other skills of orienteering, even if it meant that they got lost along the way, which they did every time. The trips were rough and the outcomes in question; more than once Jennifer heard word of hikers just a mile away who had died for not raising their tents ahead of the punishing snows. By campfire, Mansfield told ghost and adventure stories, tales that could lead anywhere, which was the place Jennifer adored most.