Crashing Through

by Robert Kurson

  He and Jennifer rode the elevator down, then walked toward the building’s exit. He readied his cane, she pushed open the door, and…

  WHOOSH!

  Sheets of brilliant blues and greens and reds and yellows wallpapered the fresh outside air that swirled around his body, an entirely different bright than he’d seen inside the building, a lustrous coating he could see no matter how he cocked his head, he wanted to tell Jennifer about it and…

  BAM!

  Puzzle piece–shaped objects, ablaze in light and color, kaleido-scoped onto his eye, at arm’s length and miles away simultaneously, each stamped onto ground and sky and everywhere, they seemed to…

  HUSH…

  Darkness appeared beneath his feet, a gray he followed forward with his eye until the ground turned suddenly bright, yet still gray—two grays that were the same but different. He thought about that for a moment, how the same ground could be two such different grays, and he realized that he was standing—of course!—in the building’s shadow.

  “We’re in the shadow,” May announced. “It’s dark here but sunny there.”

  “That’s exactly right,” Jennifer said. “That’s great, Mike.”

  “There’s color everywhere,” May said, turning his head upward. “This is a blast! I can’t wait to share this with the kids.”

  Jennifer rummaged through her purse, thinking she might have left something behind in Goodman’s office. May used the time to take in the shapes and colors around him. Some made sense to him: cars of every color with their wonderful engine and tire sounds; the curb painted red, signifying “no parking” that his friends complained about; the dark bushes that lined the street; the green of a traffic light. He waited for that light to turn to yellow and then to red, and it felt wonderful, mighty, to expect something visually and then to see it happen before his eyes.

  A woman called to May and Jennifer from down the street. It was Antonia, a childhood friend of Jennifer’s whom she hadn’t seen for years. They embraced, and Jennifer struggled to explain why she couldn’t stand there and chat. May did it for her.

  “Guess what?” he said. “I couldn’t see yesterday. But I can today.”

  Antonia cocked a suspicious eyebrow. She knew May was blind.

  “It’s true!” Jennifer said. “Mike just got his vision about ten minutes ago, so I can’t talk now, I gotta go—I’m really sorry, Antonia, but I’ll call you soon, I promise!”

  With that, May took his wife’s shoulder, put his cane in front of him, and began walking. He moved automatically, his gait confident and balanced. Though he could process the image of objects only one at a time—as if watching a slide show—things that moved seemed to do so smoothly and naturally, whether it was a bird flying or trees swaying or cars turning left at the light, and these moving things were easy to perceive, like colors; they were just there to see.

  At the intersection, he and Jennifer stepped off the curb and into the street. Jennifer confirmed that the white lines under his feet showed a crosswalk. When they came to the other side May’s cane indicated a curb, yet when he looked down at the curb he didn’t perceive a change in the height of the pavement, just a shadow of a slightly different color than the street.

  “I’ll get better at that,” he told himself.

  They kept walking. Every step or so, May asked another question.

  “There’s blue stuff all over the ground,” he said. “What is it?”

  “That blue shows there’s a gas line under the ground,” she said.

  “Why is it dark on the ground over there? Is that a shadow?”

  “No. That’s a manhole cover.”

  May could scarcely believe his luck. These markings on the ground were a fantastic discovery.

  “They’re everywhere!” he said. “Why don’t sighted people ever talk about them?”

  He’d begun to ask Jennifer another question—this one about cracks in the sidewalk—when she realized she hadn’t had a chance to ask him a question yet. They were nearing their minivan.

  “Can you see the sky?” she asked.

  May looked up. He breathed in a blue so rich and so everywhere that he could think of nothing to say other than “I see it.”

  “You’re smiling,” she said.

  A moment later May looked ahead and saw a bright red object that appeared, with the exception of being bigger, much like the cars he’d seen passing by. He knew right away that it had to be their van. He walked toward it, reached for the door handle, and let himself in.

  While Jennifer searched her bag for sunglasses, May craned his head around to the left, so that his working eye pointed toward her.

  “You look beautiful,” he said, taking her hand.

  So much had happened in the last half hour that it hadn’t occurred to Jennifer that her husband could see her.

  “Thank you,” she said. “So do you.”

  The van’s interior didn’t beckon May—he knew about all that stuff already—so he concentrated his focus outside, on the world-sized dashboard of amazements out his window.

  Jennifer drove down the series of residential streets that led to the highway. Everywhere he looked May could see traffic signs—bright shapes atop skinny poles that somehow didn’t fall over—but he was far more drawn to their color than to their messages. He delighted when cars applied their brake lights, and he worried for pedestrians who stepped too closely in front of their van at crosswalks. The human stride made sense to his eye.

  Again, May yearned to touch what he saw, but he was helpless behind the shield of windows that surrounded him. How strange it felt to see so much from this van and yet be cocooned in glass and unable to touch any of it.

  Jennifer took the on-ramp, hit the accelerator, and merged into highway traffic. May’s heart leaped into his throat—cars of all shapes and sizes darted, weaved, shimmied, and juked around the van, moving at speeds magnitudes faster than those he’d mused over in town, invading the van’s personal space, nearly clipping its bumpers and doors during lane changes that seemed profoundly unnecessary—why wasn’t Jennifer panicking? WHY WASN’T JENNIFER PANICKING?

  “Can you believe we ran into Antonia?” Jennifer asked.

  The question jarred and then reassured May. If Jennifer wasn’t thinking about traffic, this must be how highway traffic always looked, sighted people must be used to this storm, they probably…

  “Whoa, Jen! Why did you just change lanes?” May asked. “There wasn’t even a car in front of us!”

  “The traffic always slows down a few miles ahead,” she said. “I wanted to get in the carpool lane ahead of time.”

  To May, that sounded like a lot to think about.

  Motion looked beautiful outside his window. Lane markers flew past the van while an assembly line of roadside signs ticked away to his right. Nearby cars looked close enough to touch, and more than once May found himself beginning to reach for them before his brain telegrammed his hand with the message “Impossible.”

  “Jen, watch it, that was close!” he exclaimed when a small car darted in front of the van.

  “I might be the first woman ever to say this,” Jennifer noted. “But it’s wonderful to have my husband critique my driving.”

  Crossing the Bay Bridge, May could see the water below; he knew it was water by how it moved and shimmered. He asked Jennifer a million questions—about white shapes in the bay, a floating construction crane, the town across the way—and except for a voice about an octave lower, he was seven years old again, asking Ori Jean to describe everything she saw from this very bridge, never knowing that she had faked answers on foggy days because his heart had needed to know.

  On another bridge, May asked Jennifer if the shapes in the middle of the road were bushes.

  “No, those are pillars,” she said. “They’re too regular and square to be bushes. Bushes have more random shapes.”

  May filed the information: bushes are more random. And he stared in wonder at the shards of sunlight t
hat staccatoed like Morse code through the gray metal spires that supported the bridge. No one had ever told him about broken pieces of light.

  He could not get enough of the sight of other cars. Effortlessly, he could estimate their acceleration and deceleration. Yet when one car moved away from his field of vision and he shifted his attention to another, it took five or ten seconds before he began to visually understand that new car, to feel like he really had a grasp on what it was. And he had the vague notion that if someone were to put a car somewhere he didn’t expect to see it—say, on top of a tree—he might not figure out that it was a car for a very, very long time.

  He began to practice identifying the different types of vehicles, asking Jennifer to stay even with various cars, pickups, vans, and trucks so that he could study their traits. He looked for clues—pickups had long and flat rear areas that cars did not; vans were more square than pickups—and soon he was impressing his wife with his ability to call out the kinds of vehicles heading east with them under the California sun.

  Soon enough, May wanted to read signs. There was no hope for the pole-supported signs on the side of the road—they were too small and flew by too quickly. But the huge green highway signs that hung overhead and stretched across the road looked more inviting. In forty years, no one had mentioned that there were signs over the highway; he’d assumed all signs stood on the side of the road. May watched the green signs approaching. He knew that objects were supposed to look bigger as they got closer, but to him the signs just seemed to grow clearer and more detailed as they drew closer, not bigger.

  Before May could try to read them, however, he had to convince himself that the van would fit under the signs rather than slam into them—until the last moments, each sign looked to be resting on the road itself. When he assured himself there would be no collisions, he turned his attention to reading. From a distance, he could see only the green of the sign. As the van drew nearer, he could discern its white lettering. But the van always passed under the sign before he could identify its letters.

  Seeing trucks proved easier. With Jennifer’s help (she was masterful at pulling alongside semitrailers and holding her position, even while holding his hand), he could recognize that the giant shapes painted on their sides were letters, even if he couldn’t, at the moment, identify the particular letters themselves. He was better at remembering the visual impression left by a truck. The big yellow one with black letters on the side, Jennifer told him, was a Ryder rental truck. The massive red one with giant swirly white designs on the side carried Coca-Cola. That kind of information nested easily in his memory.

  “This is phenomenal,” he told Jennifer. “It’s a constant flow, it’s thrilling. I’m having so much fun.”

  She reminded him that he was due for the every-half-hour teardrops Goodman had prescribed. May found the bottle, tilted back his head, and squeezed. Glistening blobs streaked toward his eye, they moved faster than cars, and splashed wet and cold, and everything looked fuzzy for a moment before things returned to normal. It was another sign to May that his new vision was sharp, not blurry.

  Soon Jennifer had reached a wide-open stretch of Interstate 80, a natural place for conversation. They marveled at what had happened this day, that an hour ago they had expected a simple bandage change and now he could see. They reviewed what they would have done differently had they known today was the day. May said he would have brought his sons along to share the experience, gone to the Golden Gate Bridge, had a party for friends and family, and prepared something articulate to say like Neil Armstrong had when he’d landed on the moon.

  “Well, forget about the Neil Armstrong part,” he said. “Things always seem better when they’re spontaneous.”

  “Yeah,” said Jennifer. “‘Holy smoke!’ wasn’t bad.”

  For her part, Jennifer said she would have worn different clothes. “Something bright, colorful, and sexy. Maybe a really tight yellow tank top, something like that.”

  May grinned like a little boy. And he was touched—he could hear a wisp of nervousness in her voice as she imagined a more momentous outfit, the kind she didn’t wear every day.

  May still hadn’t examined Jennifer closely. His working eye was on the wrong side of the car, and it didn’t feel appropriate to twist around and stare. At the same time, he wasn’t particularly inclined to check himself out, other than an occasional glance at the patterns on his pants and shirt. He could do more of this personal looking later and in private.

  Near Napa, May tried to find the beautiful rolling hills he’d heard people admire. Right away, he could see the hills, dark masses rising into the blue skyline, and the trees, green bunches balanced on dark, thin lines rising from the green grass below. He was surprised to see so much nature—he had imagined there to be more buildings and trains and industry near the highway; that’s what highways meant. But for miles he saw only grassy hills with an occasional red barn embossed on the side, and this looked beautiful to him, the idea of all this nature in a place that was supposed to be so busy.

  Beyond Napa, May began to feel tired, even worn out.

  “I need to close my eyes,” he told Jennifer.

  His lids shut slowly. At once he felt a great relief.

  “It’s unrelenting,” he thought to himself. “It’s thrilling, but I’m exhausted.”

  May couldn’t keep his eyes closed for long. Despite the fatigue, he could not abide the idea of some bit of life passing by when he had the chance to know it was there. He kept looking. A few minutes later, he made a startling discovery.

  “Look!” he exclaimed to Jennifer, pointing out his window. “A Ryder truck!”

  A half hour later, Jennifer took the off-ramp to Davis. They were five minutes from home. May looked around at the town where he’d attended college and had now chosen to raise his family and run his business. It felt powerful to see traffic lights and medians and buildings he knew would be there. And he couldn’t wait to greet his boys, who would be back from school in an hour, to explore the yard with them, take a walk with them, look around the house with them, and it struck him that he hadn’t given a moment’s thought to what his sons might look like during this day he’d spent yearning to see them.

  Jennifer pulled into the driveway. Suddenly, May realized that he was about to see his mother, this woman who had believed in him, who had allowed him to build his own eighty-foot ham radio tower in her backyard even though she knew it could hurt him, and he knew that in a minute he would tell her he was okay.

  CHAPTER NINE

  May gathered his travel bag from the back of the van, walked through the garage, and opened the door to his house. A cyclone of yellow sound and motion exploded from the kitchen floor and hurtled toward him, a massive object against which he had no defense. Before he had a chance to put up his arms to survive the impact, the storm crashed into his leg and…began to lick his hand.

  “Hey, Josh!” May said to his dog. “Oh, man! That was fast! I’m glad it’s you, boy!”

  May knelt down and looked at his dog’s face. Josh’s golden coat shone in the sunny kitchen area.

  “He’s blond, too,” May said to Jennifer. “But his hair isn’t streaked.”

  May stroked Josh’s head, body, legs, and tail. Immediately, the image before him transformed from a general golden mass into what was clearly a dog.

  “I see you, Josh,” May said.

  May heard light footsteps approaching and felt a hand on his shoulder. As he stood up he could see a billow of white fall below him, and he knew that this was his mother’s hair. He stepped forward and reached for her.

  “I’m okay, Mom,” he said.

  “I know, Michael,” she said.

  “I can see.”

  “I know, Michael.”

  May hugged Ori Jean for another moment and then stepped back. He looked at her, the whole of her. And he thought, “She looks short.” He stared again at the white puff of hair that surrounded her pink face. He could see that she bent
over slightly.

  “I’m old,” Ori Jean said, smiling.

  May took her hands. His first instinct was to look at those hands, to see what he was touching. But he would not look away from his mother’s face.

  “Thank you for being here,” he said.

  For a moment, neither of them spoke. Then May squeezed her hands gently.

  “Thank you for everything, Mom,” he said.

  Carson and Wyndham were due home shortly. Jennifer walked across the backyard, toward their school, so she could accompany them home. May watched through the kitchen window as she disappeared through their brown wooden fence.

  “Are you enjoying it?” Ori Jean asked.

  “It’s unbelievable,” he said, still gazing out the window. “It’s thrilling, incredible. I can’t believe it.”

  Ori Jean watched her son watch the world outside, and in his easy grin and hopeful eyebrows she could see her baby again. That was how he’d looked at balloons during his first birthday party, how he’d looked at the backyard the morning he went to make mud pies, how he’d looked at her when he came home from the hospital even though his eyes couldn’t look anymore.

  A few minutes later, May saw the gate swing open. Two short people with blond hair popped through, their bouncy limbs like the sound of popcorn, one wearing a long-sleeved dark green shirt and carrying a stick, the other in a colorful short-sleeved shirt and swinging a backpack. May felt like he might bubble over—he couldn’t wait to touch his kids, to tell them everything, to see them move, to share the story of how the bandages came off, to tell them about the close calls on the highway. He swung open the door.

  “Hey!” he said, spreading his arms.

  “Hi, Dad,” they said, dropping their stuff, rushing past May, and scrambling upstairs to play. He hadn’t even had the chance to look at their faces. Ori Jean and Jennifer roared with laughter, but no one laughed louder than May. He went to the bottom of the stairs and called up.