Cockeyed

by Ryan Knighton

  “Let’s see. Hmm, I know. You take the keys, you drive her home, and you take a screwdriver to open a window.”

  “Fine,” I conceded.

  “Have you been drinking?”

  My parents knew we’d been at a party. I knew something different. A dozen of us had actually been hard at work helping our friend Andrew harvest any magic mushrooms we could find around his family farm. I hadn’t eaten any this time, but Karen, I imagined, was having a wonderful visit with our front porch.

  “No,” I lied. “I didn’t drink anything.” Three beers didn’t seem to be enough to get in even more trouble over.

  Karen’s bedroom window was unlocked, after all. Getting her inside didn’t prove to be much of a problem. Only the mushrooms got in the way.

  “Windows are cool,” she informed me.

  I held her up by the feet and tried to help her through. Karen seemed to forget the purpose of standing there, opting to gawk instead of move.

  “I’m, like, all about windows. I’m so pro-windows,” she said, then climbed in for the night.

  I couldn’t linger. I knew my father would be waiting up for me, so I drove straight home, careful to stop at the end of Karen’s street when the sign told me to.

  It was early September and unseasonably cold. Fog crowded its way into the lower stretches of the route home and made it hard for me to see my turn. I could make out the streetlights, but the fog smeared the lights across my eyes, wiping out anything the brightness intended to catch. A car approached. Its headlights burst in the fog and made an obstacle I couldn’t see around. I slowed down and dropped the car into first gear, barely inching along the road, and listened to the other car speed past. How could it do that? None approached from behind, and none approached in front. I was alone and creeping in the dark, the closest thing I could manage to feeling my way home with my functional four senses trapped inside the car. I wanted to turn the headlights sideways to light the periphery. The best I could do was guess where to turn.

  When I judged I was close, even in the middle of the intersection, I cranked to the right. It wasn’t the road, though, and it wasn’t a grassy patch. This time I felt the car lean and slowly descend into a ditch. Calm, as if used to this sort of thing, I braked and turned off the car. I hadn’t crashed. I had, essentially, parked Dad’s car on the bank.

  When I tried to back out, the tires were helpless against the wet grass. Instead of retreating, I slid a bit further down. My father had just installed a cell phone in his car that week, the newest thing going. I tried it out for the first time. The receiver was so large it felt like a VHS tape against my ear. At home the phone rang, and I almost hoped nobody would answer.

  In the headlights of my mother’s car, I could better appreciate what I’d done. Dad’s car was a foot or so shy of the water at the very bottom of the ditch but fully parked on one side of the deep embankment. The car looked out of place but oddly peaceful, too. Kind of sleepy. No hint of violence or high-speed trauma could be read into it. Dad walked around the scene, inspected for tire rubber on the road, dents in the fender, anything to explain how this could have happened, but no damage and no evidence of reckless speeding could be found. Another fifteen feet and I would’ve made the turn.

  “I wasn’t speeding. I turned, and I guess I missed the road,” I repeated. I couldn’t offer anything more than the self-evident.

  “I can see that, Ryan.”

  When my father makes a sentence, it’s never good to hear your name at the end of it. Dad dragged on his cigarette, exhaled hard through his nose, and chased the smoke with his signature, heavy sigh. The arc of my life readied for its final descent. When my father sighs, he sounds like a bull saddened by the colour red.

  “Honestly, I couldn’t see the turn.”

  “Do—you—see—it—now?” he boomed.

  “Yes, but that’s because the extra lights are on. Mom’s car makes it—”

  “Don’t split hairs, Ryan. If you can see what you’ve done, you can see enough to . . . to not have done it!”

  He looked down the road and saw the tow truck coming. I heard its diesel engine.

  “How am I to understand this, Ryan? Did you fall asleep? Were you driving the shoulder?” I didn’t answer. “Are you drunk?”

  I worried I could still have beer breath and didn’t want to have that offense on my head, as well.

  “Okay, I had two or three beers at the party, but that was hours ago and I’m not drunk at all,” I pleaded. “I just . . . I didn’t . . .”

  Nothing more could be argued. He’d found his answer to the slow wreck. That was enough. Dad paid to have the car towed home instead of letting me drive it.

  For two excruciating days, my father refused to speak to me. When I walked in a room, he left. If I asked him to pass the beans, he did, but put them down with a slam. I was with Greg in the lunchroom all over again. Yes or no questions were given nods or grunts. Ma carried on, business as usual, but her chipper edge had dulled. Quietly, she made an appointment to have my eyes checked, just in case, but stayed out of the situation, otherwise. Like me, I suspect she also waited for dad to break. Even my brothers and sisters waited, mostly in their rooms, like animals sensing a nasty shift in weather. Then, one afternoon when he was driving me home from work, he suddenly pulled over and put on the emergency lights.

  He turned to me and broke into a fury I’ve never known since. It was like rocketing across four lanes of traffic, every horn honking and every tire squealing. The emergency lights ticked their beat, but I could feel time slowing down, as it does.

  In his rage my father surveyed everything I’d done to endanger myself. I’d lied about drinking. I’d lied about not seeing the turn in order to hide the fact that I’d been drinking, and who knows if I’d done this before. He’d clearly reconsidered the legend of the Rock King. Then he reminded me about my mother’s job at the police station, what she sees and hears every day about drunk drivers. I’d endangered myself, my family, strangers, and in his judgment, I’d demonstrated unforgivable idiocy. The only thing I had going for me was luck. I was lucky, he said, that’s all, and being lucky doesn’t make it any better.

  We sat in silence on the side of the road. Soaked in self-pity, I stared out the window for an answer and fidgeted with loose change in my cup holder. Dad lit a cigarette and resumed not looking at me. My only option was a confession. At least I could fill in the missing cause with apology. So I did. I apologized for driving drunk. I swore I would never do it again. My tone had all the sincerity I could find but still rang empty to me. Just a prop to stand in for whatever the truth really was.

  When he finished his cigarette, Dad flicked the butt out the window and said it would be a long time before he trusted me again. I had to earn it back. How or if I could do that wasn’t clear to him. He turned the emergency lights off, and we pulled away. We never spoke about the accident again.

  Within a week or two the calm returned between us, but something was missing. Dad could feel it, too. The first casualty of distrust, I learned, is familiarity. My father saw me as a slightly different person now. Part of me was a stranger to him. Since my time at Great West Pool, that seed of estrangement had grown in me, too. More than ever, I didn’t know how to account for the gap between my intentions and my mistakes.

  So many tales of blindness return to the subject of guilt. I think of Oedipus unable to look at what he’d done, or what some would say he was fated to do. But it was an accident, and I’m confident that’s why he took his eyes. Fate is blameless and much easier to look upon than anything one can regret. To believe fate made him do it would’ve saved Oedipus a lot of grief. When it came to my car accident, to know blindness made me do it would’ve saved both my father and me a lot of grief, too.

  In a way, both Oedipus and I destroyed our fathers while travelling the road home. The car accident was my fault, no doubt, but when my family and I learned later that I was going blind, my failing eyesight confused the owners
hip of all that blame. It wasn’t my fault anymore. The guilt became my father’s, instead.

  Like other diseases, I suspect, one peculiar misfortune of my own is its lack of boundaries. Blindness doesn’t keep its consequences within my skin. It crashes into the lives of others, family, friends, and strangers, and transforms those lives as well. My father was my first victim. From me he still takes upon himself a regret for what I did that night in his car. It’s guilt for his assumption that I’d lied about what I could and couldn’t see, and for chastising his blind son. I wasn’t drunk, I was blind, and he hadn’t trusted me. I know he’s never forgiven himself. I don’t know how to relieve him of the guilt, either. In that lies the real accident and the real heartbreak. I just can’t keep blindness to myself.

  The afternoon we drove home from the eye doctor’s office, having just learned that I was going blind, my father and I passed the ditch. I looked at the spot, not having thought about it for some time. I felt a unique relief. Something strange in my past, something I couldn’t account for, finally belonged to me, and made sense, even. It’s true good drivers notice everything. I know my father looked at that ditch, too, and recognized, for the first time, what had really happened. My stories were becoming true. We didn’t talk about the ditch and the accident, though. We let it pass. Only a few blocks remained before we’d be home. Ma was there preparing my eighteenth birthday dinner. She would be the next person I couldn’t keep my blindness from.

  My diagnosis still hadn’t sunk in, not really, yet I felt unbearably anxious. I didn’t want to tell my mother that we’d learned I’d be blind within a matter of years. It would kill her. I had no choice, though, no way out. My diagnosis was going to hurt her, and I didn’t know how to do that.

  When we arrived home, Dad and I took our shoes off at the front door. His hand motioned for me to go downstairs to my room. I headed down but stopped at the bottom of the stairwell to listen. My mother was up in the kitchen with my brothers and sister, peeling potatoes and making salads for my birthday party. She asked Dad how things went at the doctor’s office.

  He walked into the kitchen and told my brothers and sister to go outside for awhile. When they were gone, he sat down at the table with Ma and poured them both a coffee. I couldn’t hear everything they said, but I didn’t have to. I knew my father was about to hurt my mother for me, and then he did.

  At Home with Punk

  Night blindness, or moon blindness, is easily misunderstood. It doesn’t only mean someone sees jack-squat when the lights go out. Even a little light can be too little. Many folks in my condition are blinkered by ambient restaurants, while others experience night blindness in the slanted rays of dusk, and all of us, well, we take a moonlit stroll and we know too well black is black. Shades of night blindness abound, which can make the condition unapparent to us all, the night blind included. Hell, when it first came upon me, I couldn’t spot my own night blindness if you’d lit it on fire and handed me some gas in a spritzer bottle.

  Within a year of my diagnosis, I became totally night blind. That completed the first stage of my retinal deterioration, according to my doctor, and thus indicated the ready onset of further degeneration in my peripheral vision and central acuity, blah blah blah. Who the hell cares, I thought. Certainly not me, not at the time. Not with that nineteen-year-old hormone festival in my body. I felt I had more pressing concerns than some rumoured future of blindness. Moving out on my own, for instance, would be neat.

  Instead of listening to my doctor, I shrugged off the details and, as much as possible, nursed disinterest in my so-called medical decline. Except for one thing. Armed with a teen savvy for self-serving opportunism, I used night blindness as doctor’s orders to get out of Dodge. The pitch to my parents went something like this: “I can’t live at home anymore, Ma, I gotta go—you know—before I can’t see.” I figured my parents could use the room, anyway. We lived in a boxy house stuffed with four kids and a lot of pets. The time was right to strike out on my own. Because I was night blind, though, most things in the world would strike me first.

  Night blindness changed my body, but it also changed my place in the world. It permanently coloured my relationship to the suburbs, for one thing. My new body, in time, grew intolerant, even hostile, to the useless, long suburban sidewalks and their grid. I couldn’t travel them well anymore, either on foot by day or, now, by any means in the dark. No doubt my childhood streets were great for ball hockey and BMX bikes, but they weren’t amenable to young men who can’t steer clear of a ditch. The urban planners hadn’t anticipated odd physiologies like mine. Buses in Langley were infrequent and erratic. I knew where I wasn’t wanted. I took the hint. Gladly, in fact.

  My parents, always supportive, didn’t really need my excuse to help me do whatever I saw fit. I’d completed enough college courses to obliterate my high school grades, a chronicle of my early loafing, and was ready to transfer to a local university. Before those first classes began, I moved out, with a truckload of donated rattan furniture and a mound of aging appliances and kitchenware, all of which my folks had scrounged from coworkers and friends. Dad strapped the works down on a one-ton flat deck and used my pillows to keep the ropes from cutting into the edges of IKEA book-cases and my mother’s ancient brown easy chair, my favourite, the velour one. Finally we backed out of the drive-way, and I left home. My moving truck looked like an inheritance from the Beverly Hillbillies. I have yet to meet someone whose first kitchen had two cake decorating sets, as mine did. Such are my parents and their unbridled generosity.

  My new roommate, Jane, was a deaf student also attending Simon Fraser University. Yes, deaf. This, our poetry courses would teach us, was poetic. She was slender and sweet, spoke with a slight lisp, and wore hearing aids, unless she didn’t want to hear anything or anybody, which was most of the time. Jane’s most notable feature, however, was her hair. She cared for a long mane of the bushiest, curliest tendrils I’ve ever seen, hair so big and poofed that Jane could only paint it down with tubs of salon goo. Nothing really worked, though. In short, she was a terrific character who misread my lips daily. Jane also happened to be the daughter of some church buddies my grandparents favoured. She was looking for a roommate at the same time as me. We’d never met before. We weren’t friends, not yet, but we shared a need to transplant ourselves out of our homes and closer to school. Everything seemed to be mutually beneficial. Even perfect.

  We were the true Odd Couple, and it helped. Being in the company of the other’s disability was a comfort of sorts. Our denial, or struggle, or whatever attitude we took to our fucked-up bodies on any given day, gave us each some private reassurance, when we didn’t see an apartment full of the other person’s fear. Mostly the absurdity of our match amused us.

  “Hi, you’ve reached the answering machine for Ryan and Jane. We’re probably home right now, but Jane didn’t hear the phone again, and I can’t find it. Please leave a message. Or just come over and help.”

  Our bodies weren’t as poorly designed as our new apartment. The ugly digs Jane and I chose were irredeemably close to our new school. You may be familiar with Simon Fraser University. It’s the depressing concrete monolith that often doubles for the Pentagon in movies and The X-Files. The university’s architecture is that oppressive, and because it sits on top of a mountain, in the clouds that rain on Vancouver, the architecture is forever wet. We lived as close as we could.

  It seemed wise at the time, in the practical and dull sense of wise. The goal was to minimize bus trips after evening classes and to diminish my potential for getting lost among the darkened shrubberies of low-cost apartment blocks. Proximity validated my excuse for moving out, not that I really needed one. I didn’t believe a word of my rationale, really. Like any respectable nineteen-year-old, I just didn’t want to listen to my parents’ music anymore. Where I lived didn’t matter to me at all, as long as I had the keys to let the people and parties come and go. What I hadn’t considered, though, was the holy trinity
of fun: location, location, location.

  Not to exaggerate, but the neighbourhood and apartment we chose sucked, and sucked beyond any definition of sucked I’d known. My life was deeply suburban all over again, deeply boring, deeply in service of long television nights and delivered pizzas. That I had chosen this place made it all the worse, as if I’d doomed myself to some version of Langley forever. I was becoming the Sisyphus of the culde-sacs. Today I think of that time near SFU as the year of brown carpets, soupy smelling hallways, rented movies, and a suppressed fear of going out in the dark. Nothing chained me to my second-hand sofa, but I’d imprisoned myself in order to avoid a life that would reveal my blindness to me in all its force and difficulty. As long as I stayed home, I was okay, and okay meant living in a state of self-loathing with M*A*S*H reruns lighting the room. But I still didn’t think of myself as a blind guy. Not at all, not yet.

  I found it hard to understand or even believe I was night blind. Bullshit, I thought, I can’t be night blind yet. I can still stand on my deck at midnight, count the streetlights, and see the tip of my burning cigarette. Even a star or two was visible if I bothered to look up and indulge my neglected awe for the cosmos. I found night blindness difficult to identify or accept because I could see light, be it candlelight, flashlight, or, soon to become my favourite, strobe light. But I failed to spot anything those lights intended to brighten, unless the lights were very intense. A lava lamp in my room, I could see that, but it floated like the sun itself, supported by nothing, suspended from nothing, just a ball of oozy luminescence surrounded by a great deal of space. Isn’t that what everybody saw? Isn’t that why we invented fluorescent tubes? Night blindness can be, in fact, a lot like a night sky. Visible points of light are here and there, the ones we might wish upon, and a whole lot of vaporous mystery stretches between them. Often I tripped over the vaporous mysteries in my room as I fumbled my way to the light switch or headed for the door in search of bigger city lights and brighter city kicks. I needed to look beyond the black hole of the suburbs and find a suitable place for my pathology. And I did, kind of.