Crashing Through

by Robert Kurson

  “Hey! I can see! Come back down here! I want to check you guys out!”

  Carson came down first. He sat in May’s lap at the dining room table, grinning and looking into his father’s new brown eye. May put his face just a few inches from his son’s. He’d always heard that Carson had deep blue eyes and Wyndham pale blue eyes, and he wanted to see what these blues were all about.

  Carson held still for his father, which allowed May to absorb the color of his eyes, a blue different from navy or the sky, a textured blue, a thermal blue, a Carson blue. May kept gazing into his son’s eyes, their noses almost touching, marveling at the glint of light that danced atop the color. He’d heard forever about the sparkle in a person’s eye, about how eyes could appear to smile and even sing, only he’d never been able to fathom it, a body part with its own personality—did elbows sing?—but there in Carson’s eyes he could see it, a flash here and a twinkle there, a slightly new eye with every blink, an eye that looked alive as it moved to connect with his own.

  “Your blue talks,” he said.

  May moved his eye to Carson’s face. Ordinarily, he didn’t touch people’s faces—it was too invasive, too personal—but this was his son sitting in his lap so he had at it, ruffling Carson’s hair, flapping his ears, stroking his nose, scrunching his lips. Again, the touch seemed to electrify the visual image and make it easier to understand. Now he could see that the insides of Carson’s ears were a bit pinker than the edges, that his hair was more consistently blond than Jennifer’s, and that his face looked as delicate as it had always felt, a seven-year-old’s face. Then, near Carson’s nose, May made a discovery.

  “Carson, you have freckles,” he said.

  Jennifer strained to hold back tears.

  No one had told May that Carson had freckles. He gazed at the soft brown dots, trying to touch them but feeling nothing but skin—hat an amazing thing to see something that could not be touched!—and falling in love with them because they were part of his son, feeling the luckiest man to have the chance, seven years into adoring his son, to discover a new bit to adore on top of it all.

  Carson smiled at his dad. His mouth lit up mostly white.

  “Hey!” May said. “There’s a hole in there!”

  “That’s my missing tooth!” Carson said, putting his finger on the dark spot. “Right there!”

  May put his finger on the hole as Ori Jean cackled with laughter in the background.

  “Carson, go upstairs and get some of the pictures you’ve drawn,” May said. “I’d love to see your artwork.”

  Carson scrambled off his dad’s lap just as Wyndham raced in to replace him. May went directly to his eyes, which were a lighter, softer, more liquid shade than his brother’s.

  “So that’s pale blue,” May said. “They’re beautiful, Wyndham.”

  May moved to Wyndham’s hair, which was nearly as white as Ori Jean’s. He could not get over the idea that each of his family members was called blond when there were such different colors on top of their heads.

  May ran his hands over Wyndham’s face. He searched for freckles but found none.

  “You don’t have freckles,” May said.

  “Nope!” Wyndham said.

  “Okay, run upstairs and get some cool stuff to show me.”

  Wyndham leaped off his father’s lap and bolted up the stairs, nearly colliding with Carson, who was shooting back down with an armful of artwork and picture books.

  “Here’s a painting I made,” Carson said, jumping into May’s lap.

  May bent forward and put his eye near the large construction paper.

  “That’s excellent, Carson,” May said. “It’s got really nice colors—the yellow is fantastic. But what does it show?”

  Carson took his father’s hands, as he always did when he wanted May to see something, and moved them over the paint.

  “The yellow part is a flower,” Carson said.

  He showed May other drawings—of a stone man, a pumpkin, and a face. May could not identify any of them. Carson didn’t care.

  After showing his paintings, Carson put an oversized picture book of animals on the kitchen table. He opened to the first page.

  “Do you know what that is?” Carson asked.

  May studied the picture. He could perceive the shape and the colors, and the image looked sharp to him, but he could not identify what the picture represented.

  “It’s an animal,” Carson hinted.

  May looked for legs and, after several seconds, found equal-looking parts that protruded from a central mass.

  “Well, it looks like it has four legs, so maybe it’s a dog,” he said.

  “Oh, no,” Carson said, shaking his head. “That’s a bear.”

  “Why is it a bear? What’s the difference?” May asked.

  “It’s husky, it’s got short ears…and, um…it’s got thick fur.”

  May studied the photo.

  “Okay, yeah, I can see some of that.”

  Wyndham streaked to the table and jumped on May’s lap alongside his brother.

  “What’s this one?” Wyndham asked, flipping ahead several pages.

  Again, May could not discern the particular animal, or even that it was an animal at all. It took him several seconds to figure out which part of the picture was the animal and which part the background, or even to determine that the animal was right side up. But the most striking part about trying to identify these creatures was the idea that they were somehow flattened out on the page, and that seemed true no matter what angle they were shown from, and that mystified him because every object he’d ever experienced he had experienced in three dimensions.

  “I don’t know what this one is,” May said. “Is it a cat?”

  The boys laughed hard. Wyndham nearly fell off May’s lap.

  “No!” Wyndham said. “It’s an elephant!”

  May laughed as hard as they did. Carson showed him the trunk, the fat tummy, and the floppy ears, and explained that it was a side view of an elephant. May could not conceive how that was possible—in his mind, an animal experienced from the side should show only one ear, but in this picture he could see part of the other floppy ear, too. How could that be?

  The boys showed him another animal. May worked hard to assemble the clues, thinking about why part of the picture showed something very long and slender and part showed something rounder and bumpier, while all the parts had brown patches. He ran through the catalog of animals he had felt that might have those kinds of parts, but he could not match any to the image before him, so he thought about the concept of long—what kind of animal has something long?—and finally made his guess.

  “Is this the giraffe?” he asked.

  “Yes!” the boys exclaimed, laughing. May was happy to get it right. But he also felt the first twinge of frustration with his vision—why couldn’t he just see the giraffe?—and the thought wisped past him that this could not be the way people really see—it couldn’t be this much effort—and he wondered, for just a moment before returning to his kids’ laughter and questions, how long it would take him to get better at this.

  Wyndham opened a shoe box and reached inside.

  “Here, Dad, this is a dragonfly,” he said, placing the insect on the table. It was still alive.

  May put his eye just inches from the insect. He was astonished to see that the wings were as big as the body—he’d always imagined a dragonfly to be just slightly larger than a housefly.

  “This thing is huge!” he said.

  “Look at this!” Carson said, pulling out a praying mantis. May touched the insect, lightly stroking its antennae and legs and delighting in its twitching motions.

  “He’s really delicate looking, even more than he feels,” May said. “I don’t want to break him.”

  The boys belly-laughed, then sprung off May’s knees and charged upstairs to retrieve more things to put in front of him: a Lego theme park, comic books, Hot Wheels cars, a basketball—anything they could find.
The next twenty minutes were a lightning storm of stair dashing and guessing games. May loved watching them run. Motion was easy to see. Joyful motion was beautiful to see.

  Soon enough, the boys wanted to know if May could read. They found a book with big letters on the cover and put it in front of him.

  “Do you know what this letter is?” Carson asked, pointing to a word.

  May studied the first letter. He knew how letters felt from handling his kids’ wood-block letters, and from using an Opticon years ago, a machine that raised a series of 144 pins into letter shapes on the finger as the user moved its optical sensor across a printed page.

  “That’s a P,” he said.

  “Yep,” Carson said. “Okay, what’s this?”

  “Is that an R?”

  “No, it’s an A!”

  May got the next three letters right. But by the time he’d come to the last letter, Y, he could not remember the first three, forcing him to start again. It took a full minute before he put the word party together. He was astonished that reading a simple word required so much work. But that concern didn’t last long. He was too busy loving his role as his kids’ favorite new toy.

  Now that Carson and Wyndham had shown May every object inside the house, they set out to show him the rest of the world outside. They suggested a walk through the schoolyard and to University Mall, a scenic route—and one that led to Fluffy’s, their favorite doughnut shop. The family put on jackets and thanked Ori Jean for starting dinner.

  May was just a step out the back gate when the kids asked if he could see some flowers. He bent low toward the yellowish shape and put his hands on it. He was astonished to see what his hands could never tell him: that a so-called yellow flower had several different yellows in it, each growing richer as it neared the middle, with specks of green along the way and a purple center—and yet people simply called it a yellow flower.

  The boys raced ahead to find more things to show their dad. Though seven and five years old, they were virtually the same size. May easily distinguished the two by the color of the clothes they were wearing, and by Wyndham’s white-blond hair.

  The school playground made May talk. He knew the area perfectly from a thousand of these walks, so when he looked for the bathrooms he saw a building with two bright doors exactly where he expected it to be.

  “There’s the bathrooms!”

  He knew the concrete picnic tables to be off to the right about thirty steps. He looked in that direction and saw gray circles and rectangles.

  “There’s the picnic tables!”

  That meant the swing set was the next thing to the right. May called that one right, too. But he stopped cold when he came to a patch of grass that looked to be a darker green than the rest of the grass around it. He thought about it for several seconds—did grass grow in different hues of green on the same field? Was this another thing that no one talked about? Then he remembered that shade was supposed to make things darker, so the dark grass he was seeing must be in the shade.

  Soon the family had crossed the schoolyard and made it onto Linden Lane. May could see a dark horizontal line on the sidewalk every few steps, and when he dragged his foot across it he knew that line to be the crack in the sidewalk. He determined that the crack appeared darker not because it was a different color of cement but because the sun wasn’t reaching it in the same way it reached the rest of the sidewalk…which meant it, too, was a shadow. He saw the same darkening cement when reaching intersections, and he realized that curbs must also appear a different color because of shadows, not because they were painted a different color. And he thought, “I’m going to have to remember all this business about shadows.”

  Around the block, May headed for the low-hanging tree branch his kids always warned him about. Before they could utter a word, he ducked under it without breaking his stride.

  “Whoa! Cool!” the boys exclaimed. May seemed a bit astonished himself.

  Down the street, Carson pointed overhead and asked, “Dad, do you know what that is?”

  May saw a red shape over Carson’s head.

  “That’s probably a sign for Linden Lane.”

  “Nope. Try again.”

  “A ‘No Parking’ sign?”

  “No! It’s a stop sign!”

  May stood shocked. Stop signs were yellow. He knew they were yellow.

  “No way,” he said. “You’re pulling my leg.”

  “It is, Dad!” Wyndham said.

  May appealed to Jennifer.

  “It’s definitely a stop sign,” she said.

  “Where are the yellow stop signs?” he asked.

  “There are none!” his kids chirped, laughing.

  May could not believe it. For a lifetime he had believed stop signs to be yellow. Yellow had always seemed like it would be the brightest and most dramatic—and therefore the safest—color. Schoolbuses were yellow, his traffic safety sign from fourth grade was yellow. So stop signs had to be yellow.

  May still was trying to reconcile red with stop signs when he came across another curious object. He touched it and immediately recognized it as a fire hydrant. And yet the hydrant was yellow!

  “I thought fire hydrants were red!” he exclaimed. “What’s going on?”

  The boys laughed again.

  “A lot of them are red,” Carson explained. “But sometimes they’re yellow.”

  “This is going to be a lot of work,” May thought.

  He spent the rest of the walk trying to keep up with his sons’ rapid-fire questions. They wanted to know if he could see this newspaper box, that gas station sign, those red berries. All of it was thrilling to May, all of it was wondrous, and all of it was new. But it was also everywhere and all at once, and as they neared their house he was eager to go inside and take a break from the excitement, to be in a place where he could close his eyes. Sliding open the kitchen door, he was greeted by the smell of Ori Jean’s special meat loaf, and it comforted him because he knew automatically, in his heart, what it was.

  With Josh by his side, May made his way to the master bathroom. He was overdue. Since boyhood, he had urinated while standing unless he was in another’s home, where he was less familiar with the layout. This time, like every other time, he looked straight ahead. It wouldn’t occur to him to glance downward for another few days.

  May washed his hands, also without looking, walked into his bedroom, and fell backward onto the bed. He closed his eyes. Instantly, his body exhaled, the kind of “Ahhh…” that came when removing his ski boots after a full day on the slopes. And he had this thought: “Oh, my gosh. Is this really all the same day? Did I wake up this morning totally blind?” He reached for the radio and turned on NPR—he needed a reminder that the rest of the world was still out there. While the reporter spoke reassuringly about some foreign conflict, May disappeared between wakefulness and sleep. The next sound he heard was Jennifer’s voice calling him to dinner.

  It had been hours since May had eaten, so he was ready to dig in. He looked at the colorful plates in front of him and tried to figure out if the designs on top were food or decorations. He found his fork and pushed it toward the biggest shape, which he took to be the meat loaf. When he touched it he knew that he was right. And yet the meat loaf was brown colored, not red, which was strange since he knew that meat loaf was made from red meat. He brought a bite to his mouth and saw the fork closing in on him, and he wondered, “How did I aim before I could see?”

  Reds, whites, greens, and yellows offered themselves for May’s consumption. He’d rarely considered a food’s color, yet here it was, each with a kind of built-in visual advertisement. He picked up his glass of milk and studied it. The liquid looked bright white from the top but darker and more opaque from the side, and this idea seemed a bit unreal to him, that the same milk might be different whites depending on one’s vantage point.

  “May I have more milk, please, Dad?” Wyndham asked.

  May looked around and found a shape that looked to
be a likely candidate. He reached for the milk carton, picked it up, and passed it to his son.

  “Oh, my,” Jennifer said under her breath. “Oh, gosh. That was amazing.”

  She looked across the table at her husband. He smiled as he watched himself push a cherry tomato around on his plate. It hadn’t occurred to her that he still hadn’t looked much at her face or his children’s faces. All she knew was that she was proud of this man, and that her sons were watching what it meant to go out and try.

  With their last bit of dessert, Carson and Wyndham knew they were in trouble.

  “Dad, we have a lot more stuff to show you,” Carson said.

  “Yeah, I know where there’s a spider,” Wyndham said.

  “Nice try,” May said. “Bedtime does not change just because I can see. Get going.”

  The boys dropped their heads and trudged upstairs. May followed a few minutes later to tuck them in.

  To May, the floor of the bedroom his sons shared might as well have been the surface of a new planet. Wherever he looked, a curious stew of colorful shapes melded into the beige carpeting, forming a cacophonous chasm between the door and their brown wooden bunkbed. May knew that he must be looking at the same sprawl of toys, balls, electric cords, art projects, clothes, and backpacks that he ordered put away every night, so he set out to see if he could recognize his favorite among them, a programmable electric truck.

  He squatted and stared across the landscape of the shapes. A couple of minutes later, he found one that appeared long from side to side and seemed to have wheels. He reached to touch it. Instantly, he knew he’d found his truck, its form suddenly sensible to his eye, its red cab a revelation.

  “I found it,” he said. “It’s red.”

  May loved this truck because it had buttons on the back that could be pushed to program its movements: go left, honk, turn around, and so on. May scanned the truck for those buttons. Near the rear he saw several small white globs.

  May began to tap in instructions. A moment later, the truck’s motor whirred and it began to move. He watched as it turned left, just as he’d instructed, then right, as he’d instructed, and as it went into a figure eight May saw beauty in its motion, not just for the elegant shapes it was carving out, but because he had made those shapes happen for his eye.