Cockeyed

by Ryan Knighton

  Without question, my stick is a part of my past and present life. But it certainly isn’t the future. Soon I may have other gadgetry, new technologies that will, one day, replace this cane and fuse me with some new digital resolve. A person with a white cane is an emerging cyborg. A stick is a primitive beginning, but soon enough my flesh and machinery will merge into a new being. That’s the next step of my evolution, and it may happen in my lifetime.

  Among other places, I often wonder if my future is in Naperville, Illinois. There, two brothers, doctors Vincent and Alan Chow, are developing the first artificial retina. A microchip retina. The device is less than two millimetres in diameter and not quite as thick as a human hair. The artificial retina contains roughly five thousand photosensitive cells that generate an electrical signal when exposed to light. No batteries or extension cords are needed. When implanted, this extra retina would artificially stimulate my natural retina cells, jump-starting them into action again. The theory is predicated on the fact that seeing happens in the brain, not the eye. Signals are all the eye creates, and those signals are interpreted by the brain into images. I’ve still got a brain, I think. I just need a new interface with the code of light. One day, maybe. For now, the stick remains my best and only prosthetic, although others, like the microchip retina, are busy fashioning what I may one day become.

  I say all of that with caution. My generation never had a Woodstock, not really. But Silicon Valley, before the NASDAQ bubble burst in the late 1990s, may have been the closest my generation has come to our own utopian-flavoured lost weekend. I keep it in mind as a cautionary tale about my possible cure and imminent rebirth as a cyborg. So many shiny objects are out there in the technological playground, and we all know how much the sighted like shiny objects. Sometimes we make magnificent things out of them. Canes, for example. Yet, sometimes shininess is all our fantasies are about. I don’t know if I could ever commit myself to implanting a piece of technology in my body, knowing one day it will necessarily follow the eight-track tape, the abacus, and Pong. My cane works well, but would I surgically attach it to my arm? Technologies, like species, adapt and disappear at their own extraordinary pace, too. I find it hard to imagine what it would take for me to commit to a technology other than my cane. A solid performance on NASDAQ probably won’t be enough.

  For now, I try to remember what my eyes have shown me. The more complex something is, the more difficult, when broken, it is to cope. Everything breaks. Better a stick than an eye, or a stick than a microchip. With something like a cane, at least my independence extends to fixing the problem. Something small as a stick can change your whole being. The fantasy grows from there, and so do I.

  I remember when my mother and I stood outside the doctor’s office one afternoon. I’d recently picked up my cane and graduated from the mobility training. She hadn’t seen me use the stick yet, and the image of it frightened her. Until that moment, my blindness, for her, was relatively abstract. Blindness was a diagnosis about the future, a disease with a name, and some clumsiness in my manner. But now I had a cane, and the sight of it proved my condition. We stood on the corner, outside the office building, and waited for the crosswalk signal to change. Ma tapped the sidewalk with my cane, testing its version of the world. The sound and the image were both frightening to me, too. My mother with a white cane. Now I knew something about how I must have looked to her.

  “Is this how you’re supposed to do it?” she asked, and dragged the cane across the concrete, precisely as Jimmy had discouraged.

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  “Here, you show me how it works.”

  Ma handed me my cane. As a nearby bus pulled away, I edged to the street and swung the stick, clipping the side of the bus as it passed.

  “Hear that?” I said. “Sounds grey.”

  Ma laughed. “Very fancy. A cane that tells colour.”

  Whatcha Got

  The New Orleans I remember, the one before the floods, loved a good hustle. Don’t get me wrong, I say this with respect and gratitude. I too love a good sleight-of-hand. The New Orleans I remember offered plenty. The last days of Jane and Ryan fit in well there. We’d fooled ourselves as long as we could, until there was no going home. Sometimes we build on hope, shaky as it is. Sometimes it isn’t enough.

  My relationship with her had substantially thinned over three years. To be fair, I don’t think she considered me such a peachy catch by the end, either. Rightly so. Time and time again we discovered we had shrinking little in common. On any given Saturday night Jane made crafts at the kitchen table, while I continued to bar-hop with my old friends. A quick nose around the apartment suggested some of our differences, too. You’d find Jane’s water-logged Victorian novels neatly stacked beside the bathtub, and maybe a couple of scented candles burning in the corner. My stuff sprawled everywhere else. Piles of my dippy avant-garde poetry covered the living room floor. So did my empty cigarette packs and cassette tapes. Jane perpetually tidied my mess, and I perpetually suffered her lack of hearing aids. Typically they remained on the kitchen table instead of in her ears. Conversation was always hard, but it atrophied over time. Still, I knew I could communicate in other ways. If I had to hear Enya one more time, I could always throw Jane’s Birkenstocks out the window. Frequently I stayed up late listening to the TV or drinking beer and brooding, while Jane went off to bed by herself. I may have been a little blinder than before, but things didn’t look good.

  Our demise wasn’t dramatic or attached to a specific moment, really. Like my vision, we went out in a slow blur. Disability first brought us together, but eventually it dissolved our affections, too. I didn’t want to talk about my eyes much, not with Jane, not with anybody, even though my tunnel vision continued to decay and horrify. I thought I was coping, but I could only laugh off so much. Not the bitterness and anger. With nothing tangible to rage against, soon I targeted our relationship. Over time, our mutual acceptance and comfort soured into resentment. In Jane I stopped seeing anything but my frailty, my need for safety and my fear of loneliness. That’s all I saw, and that self-loathing grew enough to eclipse the Jane I once knew.

  For three years we hid out together, nevertheless. The idea of our early comfort and ease was hard to give up, especially because we didn’t know what we’d be giving it up for. Who could desire a blind man or a deaf woman? A break-up could be for nothing, and that’s why we tried to mend our imminent split. A vacation, we thought, a vacation might do us some good.

  During our last summer, we packed up Jane’s hearing aids and my white cane and went through the considerable frustration of navigating our bodies, as uncooperative as ever, from Vancouver to Louisiana. It wasn’t intended solely to be a couple’s retreat. We travelled for the standard reasons, as well. We went for the jazz, the history, the architecture, the food, and, by all means, those alligator smiles. Who can resist the elegance of a finely honed con game? Not me.

  Consider the central scene. In the French Quarter, on Bourbon Street and its neighbouring boulevards, dozens of enterprising kids were at work. They artfully pried change from the fingers of tourists, all of it well deserved. The first hook I heard went something like this.

  “Hey, mister,” a kid said, “c’mon mister, you got two bucks? Betcha two bucks I can tell you where you got your shoes.”

  I knew it was a sucker’s game, but that’s what I was buying, even seeking. I wanted to lose, to be the good loser, as did all the other tourists who swallowed his hook. I was tickled to be deceived, as in a magic show or the land of Oz. The pleasure, in the end, was in discovering what I couldn’t see, even if it was merely a pun lurking somewhere in the question. The lift of revelation only cost two bucks, to boot. That’s cheaper than microchip retinas, snake handling, psychoanalysis, or any other means to revelation I can think of.

  “Okay, I’m in,” I said, caning my way back towards the voice I had just passed.

  It was late afternoon, and I’d given up on Jane by this point. She
was still off somewhere in a shop looking at bric-a-brac. All day she’d been at it, and she didn’t seem to have a plan to quit. Now was my chance to take in some of the colourful repertoire around me. My version of sight-seeing. I like taking in fresh language uses of any kind.

  “Here’s your two bucks. Okay, tell me where I got my shoes.”

  I waited for an answer, but all I received was an awkward silence. Then the kid began to fill it in with some stammering.

  “Uh, well, uh,” he said, “Like, I, actually, I was talking to this guy here.”

  Great, I thought, now I look like a street arts zealot. How often does someone burst in as if he can’t live another second without learning where he got his shoes? By the measure of our pause, I’d say my zealotry was, in fact, rare. The kid quickly recovered his patter and rhythm, the lifeblood of his hustle.

  “But, hey,” he began, “ain’t nothing wrong with your money. It’s at least as good as this guy’s, eh? Four bucks it is, and I’ll tell everybody here where everybody got their shoes, all four of ’em. Unless one of you got some third leg tucked away somewheres. You know—kickstanding.”

  I’m going to guess the kid leaned to demonstrate whatever kickstanding looked like. I’m not sure. Nobody laughed, either way.

  “On second thought,” the man said, the one I’d barged in on, “I think I’ve changed my mind. That’s okay, you go ahead with this guy.”

  “No way! No need, no need,” the kid said, “I got plenty for everybody. You watch, you just watch me. I can, you know—multi-task. Mul-ti-task!”

  “I dunno,” the man said, “maybe I should—hey, I may not even have the two dollars, come to think of it.”

  The man stood just outside my tunnel vision. The sound of loose change jingled as he rummaged through his pockets. Under his breath, he debated spending the money, deeply uncertain, as if about to buy a black market kidney.

  “C’mon, mister,” the kid cut in, “It’s just two bucks. There’s plenty of shoes for everybody. Just gimme what you got there, and that’s good enough. We’ll be, like, square.”

  I liked the way this kid pumped something else out of words, although I don’t know exactly what. Apparently square and multitask don’t mean square and multitask. Finally the man next to me arrived at a decision.

  “You know what? I think I’m gonna say no. I think I’ve changed my mind. You go ahead and tell this guy where he got his shoes and I’ll keep my shopping habits to myself.” He chuckled at his own turn of phrase. “Heh, heh, heh. I’m happy to just watch, thanks.”

  But the kid and I both knew Scrooge McTourist wanted a free kick. You know his kind. He was one of those misers who’ll stop to listen to a busker, then either pretend to drop something in the hat or, if the hat is passed, pretend hats don’t really exist.

  “Here,” I said, “here’s four bucks. Give us the works.”

  “No! No, please don’t.” Scrooge was upset. “You don’t have to pay for me. I’m fine. Save your money. I’ll just watch.”

  There’s nothing like the poor blind man paying for the stingy tourist. I enjoyed that I could boost his free ride and enjoyed that he couldn’t do anything about it. Hostage takings are nice.

  “No, I insist,” I said. “Here, four bucks.”

  I held my fist out in front of me. From it dangled four bills. Nobody took them. It seemed Scrooge and the kid didn’t know how to handle my gesture.

  Reluctance like theirs is common, and it interests me. For many, when a blind person tries to pay, something awkward happens. Even with everything on the up and up in a normal, dull shopping moment, my cash becomes jinxed or toxic or something. It’s a funny social impropriety, what my money and I can cause. In some people, I sense a moral complication happens. They act tentative with me, as if taking a blind man’s money is an abuse. It’s really fun. But I suspect the situation is something more dynamic. Their caution isn’t so much a reaction to my blindness or my filthy blind man’s money, Rather, cashiers and sales clerks are caught off guard by my body language and its unintended meaning. I don’t hand the cash over, I hold it out to be taken. That’s an upsetting shift, for some, having to take instead of receive. Especially from the gimpy.

  I felt uncomfortable, too, waiting like that, my hand in the air, posed like one of those obnoxious cigar store Indians. I suppose I could’ve tossed the bills down into the kid’s hat but that might have seemed insulting. Who said there was a hat, anyway? The bills might have fluttered to the hatless sidewalk, as if to say, “Here you go, here’s your stinking money. Now pick it up!” I’ve learned not to toss anything. Too dangerous. Once, in Berlin, I was eating cherries as I strolled my friend’s neighbourhood. Breezing along, I tried to spit a pit into a public garbage can, but what I took to be a trash bin turned out to be an elderly and surprised fräulein on a bench. To this day I launch nothing in any direction.

  “Here,” I instructed, and waggled the money some more. “Just take it and tell us where we got our shoes.”

  The three of us had successfully killed any fun any joke could deliver. The kid finally tugged the four bills from my hand, as gentle as could be.

  “You got your shoes on your feet, fools.”

  An extra dollar remained between my fingers. I’d taken five from my wallet by accident.

  The kid and I joked around a bit, then chatted a while about business in the Quarter, about our homes, about his other gags, about my blindness. Eventually, before I left, with Scrooge McTourist long gone, the kid took my hand, shook it, and palmed me two bucks back.

  “No, you keep it,” I said, but he insisted I take the two bills.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that we’d become partners. If I didn’t take the money, there’d be no punch line. If I took the money back, we’d conned the stingy guy together. He’d always think the poor blind man paid his way when the poor blind man hadn’t shelled out anything. I thanked the kid for a good time and pocketed our winnings.

  My vacation wasn’t all about that kind of con, though. It goes without saying I wouldn’t have gone through the fresh hell of travelling a different country and a new city with my white cane, not just for bad jokes. Leaving my routine and my neighbourhood kicks out the crutch of memory. In that respect, my home is perhaps the only spot on the planet where I can truly feel secured within a rich sense of place. Always will be.

  When I say home, I mean two things. More than the apartment I live in today, I’m thinking of the places I walk to in my neighbourhood and everything I’ve memorized within that distance.

  My mental map is not to be underestimated. I’ve memorized this neighbourhood in excruciating and ridiculous detail, a degree the sighted would pay no mind. Rarely will you find me venturing beyond that knowledge and the places it circumscribes. Where I live is a state of mind, quite literally. It’s a matter of defence, even delusion. Memory keeps me from being as thoroughly blind as I am. When you can’t see, nothing seems to exist in a city or landscape if it isn’t in mind already.

  Think about buildings. Each one I passed in Louisiana appeared to be, and remained, a vague sketch of an idea, no more and no less. I saw bits of its shape, and that’s all. An unknown like that repels me because it’s too overwhelming, with all its capacity to hurt, embarrass, disorient, and elude. Sighted people walking past new places ask, “What’s in there?” The blind ask, “What’s that?” We are far, far away, even when we are near.

  When I do muster the courage and wherewithal to venture inside the shape of an unknown building, I can, with a lot of effort, error, and discomfort, touch my way into some limited knowledge of the contents and purposes served there. Only then, in a sense, have I seen what most people glean as they walk by, or derive from reading the store sign. If I can’t touch something, if it isn’t narrated to me, it isn’t there. So I pay no mind to what I don’t know. I only go where I remember.

  As you might imagine, disorientation takes on a whole new meaning. When I travel, the scale of being lost is differ
ent than when I was sighted. It’s not about directions, not at the street level anymore, although that’s always a problem. More immediate is the sense that, say, sitting in a new bar in a new city, when I let go of my beer, along with it I let go of the surety it imparts about where I am and what’s around me. I can easily feel I’m nowhere. The sensation compounds and follows me, too. The world away from home doesn’t make my world bigger. It introduces me to a terrifying smallness. It’s like moving from living in a complex city map to a skeletal line drawing.

  Back home, the bus stop is twenty paces from the corner of Fifth Avenue. No bench. The stop is beside a tree, and I know where to wait because of the branches that graze my porkpie hat. The bank machine nearest my house is around the corner and inside the first set of doors. Only the right one opens. I don’t read the screens on the ATM. I don’t have to. I’ve memorized the pattern of buttons to press and in what order to press them. At Slickity Jim’s Chat and Chew, Tyler always puts the cream for my coffee beside the mug’s handle and puts the sugar beside my napkin. The others who work there tell me at what time they’ve placed my sandwich, quick and habitual. The washroom is to the left of the open kitchen door. These memories make the basics of my lunch hour map at home. I haven’t even mentioned how I know which key is which on my ring, how I’ve memorized the menus of several restaurants, according to my tastes, how I’ve memorized grocery store aisles, how I’ve learned which intersections could trick me into crossing when cars are turning left in front of me, and so on and so on.

  But here, in New Orleans, or anywhere else in the world, where do they keep the cream? Which of these buildings could be a bank? Which door is for the bank machine and which buttons do I press in what order? How do I know from out here on the sidewalk that this bank isn’t a mattress store? Every gesture, step, reach for the cream, when I’m away from home, is a grope and test to see if anything is in front of me, let alone the particular thing I’m looking for. I’m always on the edge, then, of a flat and shrunken earth, trying my best to give it more dimension. That’s closer to exploring than holidaying or travelling, and we all know how rested explorers feel.