“It sounds like an adventure of the highest order,” Bashin said.
“Yes,” May replied. “It’s that trail in the forest that no one has ever been on.”
“What about reading?” Bashin asked.
May fell silent for a moment.
“I know the letters, and I can read words if I really concentrate,” May finally said. “But reading per se somehow isn’t coming to me. I’m not sure why. It’s the same with faces. I’m not sure I’m getting them, although it’s hard to say because I don’t really know what faces are supposed to be like. I think I just need to give it all time.”
May’s voice brightened.
“You know what, Bryan? I think figuring this out and giving it time might be part of the adventure, too.”
Though May scarcely had time for coffee, he went twice a week for blood work in Davis and three times a week for checkups with Dr. Goodman in San Francisco.
Goodman would ask May to read the Snellen eye chart, the one that starts with the giant E on top. From the standard testing distance of 20 feet May could not even see the E—it simply wasn’t there. When Goodman moved him closer, to within five feet of the chart, May could read the E and the next two lines. Goodman estimated May’s acuity at 20/800 for uncorrected distance, meaning May could see at 20 feet what people with excellent natural vision or corrected acuity (glasses or contacts) can see at 800 feet. People are considered legally blind when their vision is 20/200 or worse.
“I know that 20/800 sounds bad,” Goodman told May. “But we have patients who are 20/1,000 and are independent. They get around without a dog or cane and can see enough to do the activities of daily living on their own.”
Goodman also asked May to read the lines on a handheld card. From inches away, his vision was much better, about 20/100. That result encouraged May. He did not like to do poorly on tests.
“So what’s wrong with my eye?” May asked.
“There’s nothing wrong with your eye,” Goodman said. “In fact, it’s an almost perfect eye. Optically, I’d say you’re 20/40. In California, that’s good enough to drive.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” May said.
“I’m not an expert on this,” Goodman said, “but I’m pretty certain the problem is in your visual cortex.”
“My brain?”
“I think so. I mean, I can see your entire optical system, and it’s excellent. An eye seeing as beautifully as yours should be able to read all the way down the chart. That leaves the brain.”
Goodman’s thinking made sense to May. Of course it would take the brain some time to get used to seeing, especially after forty-three years of blindness. May was already excellent at some aspects of vision, like motion and color. And he’d always been a quick study. Whatever his other shortcomings, his brain had always been good. The rest of his vision would definitely come soon.
Only a week remained before May’s product launch at the Cal State University–Northridge conference in Los Angeles. He worked eighteen-hour days preparing brochures, establishing prices, and fine-tuning the GPS. CSUN would be the place where the world met Sendero.
On the afternoon before the launch, Jennifer drove May and Josh to the Sacramento airport. She would join him in a day to help decorate his booth and pitch prospective customers. Inside the airport, May located the colorful tile path to the boarding gates he’d known so well underfoot. Like Dorothy on her way to Oz, he followed the winding color to his destination, which he recognized, after several seconds of study, by reading the large letter and number above the gate.
He took his customary window seat with Josh at his feet and began to look around. He’d been on hundreds of airplanes, and yet everything seemed a revelation: the speckled colors of the seats, the small white towel on the headrest, the floor lighting, the matching outfits of the flight attendants—no one had told him about any of this. What an advantage, he thought, to be able to see whether the flight attendant was addressing him or the person in front of him, and whether there was a line for the lavatory.
May fastened his seat belt as the airplane thundered to its takeoff. When the pilot signaled that it was safe to use approved electronics, May opened his laptop and started working. After a half hour in the air, he looked up from the screen.
“Wait a minute,” he thought. “I can look out the window.”
He turned his head to the left and put his eye against the glass. Green squares crawled by below, dissected in places by crisscrossing dark lines that reminded him of the veins he’d seen in his hand. Puffs of gray, streaked white lines, and blobby stretches of blue lay atop the sliding squares. May’s mind went into action. Green was likely farmland, since the stretch from Sacramento to Los Angeles was agricultural. The dark lines could be roads or maybe rivers—yes, they might be rivers, too. The blue, since it stretched as far as he could see, was much more likely sky than water. But what about this white—could it be snow? He’d heard that it had been snowing in the Tehachapi Mountains…
“Excuse me,” May said, turning to the woman in the seat beside him. “I just got my sight back last week after being totally blind for forty-three years. Could you help me figure out what I’m seeing?”
The woman fidgeted in her chair but said nothing. May waited several seconds. Still she didn’t speak.
“Are the white lines out there mountains?” he asked.
“No, honey,” the woman finally said. “That’s haze.”
For the next half hour, the woman provided a play-by-play so detailed and impassioned that others might have mistaken her for the person with new vision. Much of what May saw had to be reconciled with his intellect. The ground below moved by very slowly, yet he knew he was traveling at five hundred miles per hour. The green squares were tiny, yet he knew they must cover many acres. He wondered if all of this seemed odd to sighted people, too.
When the plane landed and slowed to taxi, air travel seemed a bit less strange to May. For decades, airplanes had felt like a kind of time machine to him, a box into which one stepped, waited for a few hours, and then emerged in a different place. The sight of the world passing beneath confirmed that he had gone somewhere, and that seemed a powerful feeling to him. As he gathered his bag and took Josh’s harness, he hoped that the GPS he was about to unveil, the one that would announce passing streets and points of interest, would give the same kind of feeling to the blind.
Standing at baggage claim, May watched dozens of pieces of luggage snake past on the conveyor belt. He didn’t rush to find his own, preferring instead to watch the mechanical parade. Many of the bags appeared melded to each other, especially if they were of similar color. He pressed his pocket-sized remote control, which activated a beeper attached to the handle of his suitcase.
“Next time,” he told Josh, “I’m going to put something bright green on the handle so I don’t need this beeper.”
For a moment, May wondered if that meant bright green was his favorite color. But as he considered it further, he realized that it wasn’t so much the green as the bright that excited him. At least for now, his favorite color was bright.
He made his way to the elevator at the Los Angeles Airport Marriott, the site of the CSUN show. When the doors opened, he stepped out and scanned the lobby area. He could see bunches of people gathered in one spot—evidence of a front desk. When he walked to the area he could see that the people had formed a line, so he took his place at the end of it. Normally, he moved forward in lines by listening to feet or by sliding his cane forward. This time, the room was noisy and he had no cane. It didn’t matter. When the line moved, he saw it and moved with it. He made a mental note to tell Jennifer about this feat. Then he went to his room and crashed for the night.
In the morning, May put out water for Josh and left for the show. Before vision, he would have used his cane to navigate the hotel’s network of halls, passageways, and show floor. This time, he was going solo.
May walked tentatively. He felt alien without his dog
or cane, as if he’d left his hotel room without an appendage, without his arm.
“Don’t worry,” he told himself. “There are no drop-offs here, I know there aren’t. There are no drop-offs here.”
Newborn worries flooded his thinking. What if a hotel employee or guest passed by and assumed he was fully sighted and expected more of him? What if they thought his eyes looked weird? What if they saw his measured walk and wondered, “What’s wrong with that guy?” What if someone approached and expected him to recognize their face or read their badge? What if blind people at the conference thought he was trying to show off?
May wanted to turn back. He wished he’d made a sign to hang around his neck that read, “I can’t see perfectly. I don’t mean to give that impression.” He kept going.
The convention hall played a symphony on May’s eye, its colorful banners, labyrinth aisles, and high-design corporate logos elbowing one another for first position in his awareness. None of it made immediate sense. The colorful shape to his right was simply a blue rectangle until he considered that it was near the floor, which meant it likely wasn’t a banner; it appeared to contain some large writing, which meant it probably belonged to an exhibitor rather than to the hotel; and it bunched at the bottom, which meant it could be a decorative skirt like the one he used to cover his own show table. Or maybe it was the side of a box. Or someone’s jacket. Every colorful shape demanded analysis. He yearned to touch them all.
May began to walk the aisles in search of his booth. Along the way, he spotted a series of short horizontal lines along the ground. He stopped for a moment, remembering that stairs could appear that way to him. Could there be stairs on a convention floor? He remembered that some of the more elaborate convention booths used stairs in their displays. But was he near such a booth? And would an exhibitor at a conference for people with disabilities use stairs? He stepped lightly toward the lines. The ground was flat; the lines were just a design. He looked up for a moment to settle his mind. Bright and colorful shapes and lights and twirling fans yapped back at him.
Nearing his booth, May saw people walking with canes and dogs. He had never seen a blind person before. Right away he could see what he’d known forever: that blind people moved differently. Some walked tentatively, some plodded, some outright strode; all of those styles were obvious to his eye. He enjoyed watching the ones who dodged obstacles, a strong clue that they had some useful vision.
“That’s how I’ll look pretty soon,” he thought. “It’s kind of like seeing myself in the future.”
Standing tiptoe on a chair, hanging balloons and banners, Jennifer was already at work on the booth by the time May arrived. She climbed down, gave her husband a kiss, and put him to work stacking brochures. May thanked her for making the trip.
“It feels like we’re a team again,” Jennifer said. “It’s like our bun-warmer days in Oregon.”
The Sendero booth buzzed from the opening bell. Prospective customers, distributors, suppliers, even the media lined up to talk to May about his product. Few people pitched their wares more naturally than May did, yet he found himself nervous to greet these people. He knew that word of his surgery had spread through the so-called blind vine, so this would be the first test of the blind community’s reaction to his decision, and an unflinching barometer of things to come. If these people believed he’d deserted the cause, run from the life he’d embraced, leaped at his first chance to “hang with sighty,” as some called it, it could cost him his business and, equally terrible, the respect he had earned over so many years. He reached out his hand and said, “Hi, I’m Mike May. What can I tell you about Sendero?” He dreaded hearing the word “sellout” in return.
No one said it. In fact, the response seemed universally supportive, full of excitement and interest. One after another, people used words like “explore” and “curiosity,” and the best part was that May sometimes couldn’t tell whether they were referring to his surgery or his GPS. Congratulations flowed. By midday, not a single person, including prominent members of the powerful blindness organizations, had expressed a doubt about him, his eyesight, or Sendero.
Their faces, however, were another matter. Especially when they spoke.
Mouths flapped, eyelids flickered, heads bobbed. Faces looked battery-powered. People had calisthenic lips. This random ballet demanded interpretation, but the moment May tried to figure it out—Why does that woman’s mouth make a circle whenever she sounds surprised?—he lost what the person was saying and then had to struggle to merge back into the talk. It occurred to him to look away slightly, just enough to avoid the commotion, but then he’d see hands gesturing, torsos rocking, feet shuffling—people talking with their bodies!—and he’d wonder, “Are those movements individual or universal? Why does he wave his hand to ask a question?” and these questions again unplugged him from the flow of the conversation.
“It’s so strange,” he told Jennifer during a break. “Faces are so distracting. It’s like when you’re talking and you hear an echo of your own voice. It’s impossible to ignore that echo. Seeing someone speak is just like that for me. I feel like I have to close my eyes to hear people.”
“You can close them,” she said. “I’ll talk to people for a while.”
“No, I can’t,” he replied. “It’s all so interesting. I don’t want to miss a thing.”
That afternoon, May demonstrated his product in the field. It worked flawlessly, delivering people to a hotel door, to a nearby steakhouse, wherever they wanted to go. Some went to his booth and placed orders or signed up to become distributors. He recognized many by the color of their hair or clothes, and greeted them by name before they could say hello. It was the kind of victory, he told Jennifer, that made him feel like a kid again.
Near day’s end, as May prepared to close his booth, he heard the whisper of a distant and sultry land.
“Hola.”
A delicate pair of hands took hold of his. At once, he knew they belonged to the wife of one of the major foreign dealers, a woman who had been attending the show—and leaving men breathless in her wake—for years. She spoke only Spanish. May had always been happy to speak it with her.
She pulled herself closer to him, their chests just inches apart. Reports about the woman’s heartbreaking figure flew through his mind. He moved his eyes toward her dress and could see at once that it was low cut—the colorful fabric seemed miles to either side of her bronzed skin. He glanced further downward. A thick, dark line divided her chest. May had once studied engineering. He knew that the dark line—a shadow—was being cast by something.
“Holy smoke,” he thought, “there’s a lot of woman there and not a lot of clothes.”
They parted and the woman began to speak, telling him how nice it was to see him, asking how he’d been. She didn’t realize he could see. He tried to stammer a response, but his limited Spanish vocabulary had left him.
May continued to soak in his friend. By all accounts she was gorgeous, and as she spoke May connected her reputation with the image in front of him, and very quickly that image began to look beautiful to him. He recalled men’s descriptions of her shape and that, too, now looked alluring to him. He remembered that someone had said she had the face of an angel, and though he couldn’t understand her face, it also looked beautiful to him now. Since boyhood, May had understood the power of imagination and suggestion and expectation on a blind person’s concept of beauty. Now, as he struggled for yet another Spanish word, he wondered if things might not work that way for the sighted, too.
By the show’s end, May had taken more orders and signed more distributors. At the airport, he and Jennifer celebrated the successful launch of Sendero and the warm reception for his new vision. On the airplane, Jennifer gave the window seat to May. This time during takeoff he was already pressed close to the window, ready to watch the world move by from another new perspective.
About a month after CSUN, May took his sons to Picnic Day, the massive annual parade
and celebration put on by students at the University of California–Davis. Out of town on business, Jennifer asked them to remember everything so that they could tell her stories when she returned.
The men found prime seating on a curb as the parade began to roll. A giant and skinny creature or machine or robot wobbled down the road, its top disappearing and reappearing from the trees.
“Wow! What’s that?” May asked his boys.
“That’s a stilt walker!” Carson replied.
May began to ask for more details when a flailing shape streaked by atop a circle, stopped, then went backward on the same circle, parts thrusting to all sides.
“What’s that?”
“That’s the unicycle guy!” the boys shouted.
“Is he waving at us?”
“No!” The boys laughed. “He’s balancing!”
For the next hour, an assembly line of mysterious creatures passed May’s eye: hula hoopers, tall clowns wearing umbrella hats, short kids holding big balloons, men wearing animal costumes, animals wearing sunglasses, Native Americans in traditional clothing, posters written in tall Chinese characters, horses with writing on their bodies. And floats. Lots of floats.
May yearned to understand these magnificent color-shapes, but where was he to begin? This was not a hotel room, where he could deduce that the dark round shape near the sink was a coffeemaker. This was not his living room, where he could reason that the rectangular shape on the table was the TV remote. He stared at each passing curiosity. Which part should he look at first? Which parts were important and which could be ignored? Which parts would give him a clue? By the time he attempted to answer these questions, a new object had paraded itself before him.
Near the end, the Cal Aggie Marching Band swung into action. As the players passed in front of May and his boys, they stopped marching and held their positions. Some members were just three feet away. May inhaled their bright uniforms and studied their brass instruments, some of which looked bigger than the person who carried it. Someone yelled a command and the band broke into another song, their knees rising and falling, drummers lifting and pounding, trombones herking and jerking, kids whirling, every uniform matching, and May marveled at it all, and when he looked down he could see his children moving too, pointing at things for him to see, telling him what was before them, and May could feel tears running down his face, and it seemed strange to him to be crying in front of the Cal Aggie Marching Band when he hadn’t cried the day his bandages came off, and it seemed right to him to be crying because when he looked down again his sons seemed to be looking at him.
Crashing Through Page 19