Cockeyed

by Ryan Knighton

  “That’s fine,” I said. “I’ll just keep it to myself, then. They don’t need to know, okay? They won’t be able to tell, I’m sure. Tracy helps me if I need it, but they won’t even notice.”

  He grumbled, tiring of the debate. I could hear, though, that Mr. Kim was worried. If he sent the school a blind teacher, he could lose status and reputation, which meant he could lose business. The airfare provided to us guaranteed that if we were fired for any reason, we could be sent home immediately. Our school would own our work visas, too. We could teach for them and nobody else, so they had to be pleased with our performance. Mr. Kim’s job, in part, was to screen us.

  The subject changed to Mr. Kim’s next concern.

  “And you have no hair?” he asked.

  “Nope.”

  He grumbled some more, probably wondering what the hell kind of dud Tracy had hitched herself to.

  “Do you have a picture with hair in it?”

  “Oh, sure, just slightly older.” By slightly older I meant the picture was from high school, but there was no need to crush the man.

  “Okay. Just make sure you have copies of your degrees and your pictures with you tomorrow.”

  Two weeks later Tracy and I stepped out of the Pusan airport and were greeted, according to Tracy’s report, by the astonished expressions of our employers, Mr. and Mrs. Yun. We loaded our luggage into their Hyundai and headed for our new home.

  “You have eaten?” Mrs. Yun asked, turning to face us in the back seat. Mr. Yun drove.

  “Yes,” Tracy said, “we ate on the plane, thank you. We’re just very tired.”

  “I think you will eat?” Mrs. Yun asked.

  “You think we will eat?” I asked back.

  “Okay,” said Mrs. Yun. Our new desire to eat cheered her.

  Tuning my ear to this idiom took time. Imperatives always came in the form of questions. Off we went to dinner, where more questions began to command us.

  On our table a waiter placed bowls of sticky rice and fish soup. I could smell seaweed, cabbage, and garlic. The affirmation I’d truly arrived overseas came with the aroma. The knowledge and meal were both strong, and for a moment, a rare moment in my time with blindness, I was excited by the future.

  “You have no hair,” Mrs. Yun observed, “but, um, your picture, it is hairy.”

  “Oh, yes, I cut it off. It’s easier this way, and it isn’t so ugly.”

  “I think it is not so ugly with hair,” said Mrs. Yun.

  Her tone was difficult to decipher. Perhaps she wanted me to grow my hair again, or perhaps she was being complimentary.

  The meal now on the table, I probed discreetly for my chopsticks. I reached for a spot where I thought they might be, but Tracy, spying this strange gesture, as if I was about to play a piano, scooped my chopsticks, and jammed them into my hand. Later she said I was close to stabbing my fingers into my dinner.

  “I think you will grow hair?” Mrs. Yun continued.

  “I will?”

  “Good.”

  Mr. Yun fed clumps of noodles into his mouth. I tried to imitate him but I couldn’t pinch one strand with my thin, metal chopsticks, let alone snag a nest of them. Dinner might take me the term of our contract. Without looking up, Mr. Yun further exposed the hair problem.

  “In Korea,” he said, and rubbed his head with his free hand, “no hair is meaning two things.” He paused and looked for the English words. “You are, how you say—” He turned to Mrs. Yun and consulted her in Korean.

  “My husband means you are criminal,” she said, “a criminal who was in prison. You are free now? You are that or you are angry at government. At the government. You will eat this?”

  I could see her pointing, but not the target. Tracy quickly handed me a bowl. “I think it’s pumpkin,” she said, and tried a little before she set it down with a thump beside my rice. The sound placed the bowl within a pattern, within my memory of the table. Now I could find and return to the spot. “It’s wonderful,” Tracy added.

  Throughout the rest of the meal, she conjured a variety of reasons to hand me things, preempting any of my usual groping. Neither of us could articulate it yet, but Tracy and I sensed the all-consuming position we’d confined her to. Whether or not my blindness would have prevented us from finding jobs or keeping jobs wasn’t clear. It didn’t matter anymore. Either way, we weren’t prepared to test the status of my disability now. We’d come too far, and we had too much to lose—an apartment, the experience, a good salary. Together we would keep blindness from interfering in our prospects, which meant, in this new country, Tracy would watch, catch, guide, cover, deflect, and mediate for me. She would live two lives, hers and mine, at least when we were around the Yuns or around the school. Given their reaction to baldness, what kind of reception could blindness earn? Keeping my eyes out of sight wasn’t my job or struggle anymore. It was Tracy’s.

  After the meal, the four of us stood to leave the otherwise empty restaurant. Tracy took me by the arm, holding herself close to me, as if too much in love to contain herself. Discreetly she guided me to the car this way. I felt, as I would for the next five months, like a wagon. My empty hand craved a cane the way some lips crave the weight of a cigarette.

  As we walked to the car, Mrs. Yun turned to look at us. Occasionally Tracy pointed and observed the city, the architecture, window displays, whatever. Doing so, she covertly described things, prefacing with, “Hey, look at the . . .” or “Did you notice that . . .”

  “I think you are very much in love?” Mrs. Yun asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “we’re very close.”

  In our new neighbourhood, our visibility made for trouble we hadn’t anticipated. We were the only western expatriates. Statistically, that’s as conspicuous as a pair of fuzzy, pink, oversized gloves on the body politic. Tracy and I would walk to the local corner store for noodles and juice, and, all the way, hear hellos shouted from the apartment buildings high above. Without fail, we returned hellos to the sky. Then another hello would come from another direction. As soon as we hit the street, the signals bounced back and forth. I’ve never felt so welcomed and so witnessed. Our presence was a paradox I’d only read about: we were the immigrants, both anonymous and overexposed.

  So, I couldn’t use my cane around our neighbourhood. School wasn’t the only no-tapping zone. Too many of the local kids were our students. Too many of their parents owned the local shops and barbecue halls we frequented. Word would get back about the weird teacher bumping into poles at night or caning his way around a herd of idle scooters. Mr. Kim’s admonition still needled in my ears. The school must look excellent.

  Mr. Yun made admiring his school his primary occupation. He was literally everywhere, wandering the streets with his chest puffed out and his hands clasped behind his back, like some haughty, fallen character from a Dickens novel, all pomp and pride. We’d often find him outside, talking to parents or gazing proudly at the school’s new sign.

  Meanwhile, Mrs. Yun, a shrewd and gifted business-woman, ran the show. She even opened an illegal franchise for three to five year olds on another floor. We knew she hadn’t paid for the licence because, when inspectors came around, we were told to lock down the new floor and make all the children sit silently or nap. Warning usually came in advance of an inspection because Mr. Yun saw the franchise reps coming while he either strolled up and down the street or smoked on the corner with the school’s bus drivers.

  The ubiquity of Mr. Yun caused my other problem. Because we couldn’t count on where he was at any given moment, my cane stayed at home, and Tracy stayed on my elbow, even on a short run to the market for squid-flavoured chips. We learned our lesson about Mr. Yun within days. One afternoon, looking for a place to eat, I caned around a corner, Tracy just behind me, and walked smack into the owner of a lunch cart. Mr. Yun was on the other side of the cart, too focused on eating and yakking with people to have noticed my collision.

  I collapsed my cane in one fluid move, like a soldie
r would his rifle. Tracy shoved it in her purse. Arm in arm, as always, we walked around and were greeted by Mr. Yun’s surprise.

  “I think you are hungry?” he asked.

  He held up a long, thin skewer with what looked to me like a brown lump on the end.

  “Very good,” he said and dipped the lump in some sauce before biting a chunk. “You will eat?”

  Before we could answer, Mr. Yun ordered two freshly made lumps. Tracy, a fickle eater, and a salad in a previous life, was wary.

  “What is it, Mr. Yun? I can’t eat red meat.”

  Mr. Yun was perplexed, his English extremely limited.

  “Beef,” Tracy explained. “I cannot eat,” she searched for the Korean word, “bulgogi?”

  To illustrate her idea of a bad lunch, I made a pair of horns with my fingers and planted them on my forehead. Bull face.

  Mr. Yun smiled with recognition. “No, no,” he laughed. “Here, for you.” He handed me a heavy skewer and clarified my lunch’s name. “Feces,” he said.

  I’d heard Shampoo correctly, but I didn’t want to hear feces or hold it on a skewer. It couldn’t be true, I told myself, and I didn’t want to be one of those narrow-minded tourists who’d believe something like a thriving, fecal cuisine was a Pusan favourite. But my paranoia was well lubricated. It’s a common state of mind when you can’t see.

  Together, language and sight, unable to clarify for me, made ample room for distaste and fear. Without the native tongue and without the ability to see Korea for myself, I was already regressing into a gullible kid, one who could believe anything, especially if it was brown and unidentifiable and destined for my mouth.

  “Feces?” I checked.

  “Yes,” Mr. Yun beamed. “Good feces.”

  Tracy stifled a laugh, then whispered in my ear, “Don’t be a total idiot. He’s saying fishes. You missed the swimming-hand gesture.”

  In guarding my blindness, I was habituating daily to a character I didn’t much like. Pretending to be sighted, or passing for sighted, demands a blind person establish a functional degree of self-loathing and fretfulness. With a generous skewer of fish in hand, my duplicity suddenly occurred to me for what it was—a sour and potentially chronic state of mind, one in which I believed everything and everybody could get me if I didn’t pass for sighted.

  Even Mr. Yun did his best to meet somewhere between us, stretching his English and offering me what he could of his home. I, on the other hand, was doing little to meet him or anybody at the school. Assuming the worst, acting reserved, withdrawn, dubious, and indifferent—these were my defences for my secret. In my mind, being closed would keep me from being dismissed, sent from a place I was more or less avoiding. The only person dishing out shit around here was me. It left a bad taste.

  For longer than I care to recall, that lunch with Mr. Yun was the last time I took my cane anywhere in our neighbourhood. It may have also been the last time I heard Tracy laugh in South Korea.

  Tracy’s burden with my blindness was the same every day, but over weeks and months, without variation or relief, the strain accumulated. I couldn’t leave the apartment, not alone, not without endangering myself on the streets. Instead, I made it my job to pace or sleep my free time away, feeling stifled, cramped, and sorry for myself. When Tracy did guide me out, our time became another kind of entrapment, me perpetually slung on her arm like a bag. I felt the weight of it, and she felt it even more.

  What she experienced, for the first time, was her own independence disappearing, overtaken by my visual needs and depression. Like the neighbouring hillside, the one riddled with landmines, my independence here was both off-limits and a historical artifact. But it wasn’t simply about walking around. Tracy had to do just about everything for both of us.

  Once, at the Nampo-dong market, she let go of my elbow to choose some vegetables. As anybody would, I began to roam, keeping near, but shimmying around crowds of shoppers. I felt the nearby shelves and baskets of goods to discover what they held.

  A friend once described to me the single-frame newspaper comic I was about to imitate. In it a storekeeper and his jittery expression are stuck behind the counter. A blind man is about to take his next step into a large pyramid of neatly displayed light bulbs. I saw the comedy in it, but I had to wonder what stupid hardware chain would build a pyramid of light bulbs in the middle of an aisle, in front of the checkout, no less. At the Nampo-dong market I didn’t find a tower of light bulbs, lucky for me and the guy in the light bulb department. My shoulder, however, did find the edge of a five-foot column of clear, plastic egg cartons, a dozen white eggs in each.

  Within the translucent cartons, both the eggs and the white floor tiles mixed and matched enough to disappear. An empty white aisle. It looked like that, until I heard the display. I clipped it with my shoulder. Plastic creaked and leaned. I wheeled around, saw what hadn’t been there before, then caught a bit of a stranger’s hand clamping down on top of the eggs. The motion stopped, and I thanked my savior in equally unsteady Korean.

  Tracy, a few feet away, about to pay for our vegetables, caught the climax of the scene and was on me like a carton on a dozen loose eggs. She was furious.

  “Just, just—I don’t know. Just don’t, okay? Just don’t. You almost knocked over the eggs.”

  Because I see so little, I protect its territory. When somebody, anybody, notes a calamity I’ve barely sidestepped, but one I’m already fully aware of, I burn. This was one of those moments.

  “I know I hit the eggs. You don’t have to tell me that. I’m not an idiot. I know what I did. And don’t blame me. I didn’t see them. Who the hell leaves eggs in the middle of the aisle, anyway?”

  To defend myself, I hoped to fault others, a tactic my siblings and I perfected on one another when we were kids. It still didn’t work.

  “What are you talking about?” Tracy said. “The world is not conceived and designed just for you. That includes South Korea.”

  “But eggs should be refrigerated. Who expects eggs when—”

  “It’s not about the eggs or what you expect.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “No, it isn’t!”

  “Well, what am I supposed to do without my cane? Just stand here, do nothing because I can’t be certain I’ll walk into a bunch of eggs? It’s stupid. All I can do is, I don’t know, expect. I have to expect my way around.”

  Tracy was exasperated. She told me to drop it, but I’ve never been good at letting anything go, be it sight or arguments.

  “No, seriously,” I continued, “what am I supposed to do? Nothing? Wait for you all the time? I might as well stay home for the rest of the year. If I bump into stuff, you’re not responsible, so just let me.”

  “Why would I do that? You want me to let you knock things over while I watch? Okay, fine. But that’s really stupid, not where the eggs are kept.”

  “But I need you to—”

  “I don’t want to talk about this here,” she said. “Just let it go.”

  “But I think—”

  “Just let—it—go.”

  I could hear the approaching bind, so I shut up. If I pushed the point, she would want to walk away, but couldn’t, or wouldn’t. She never had, and I didn’t want to drive her to it now. I could be stubborn and prodding when we bickered, but Tracy, for some reason, never left me helpless, never used my eyes to put some sting in her point. We could have been in a heated exchange on our way out of the apartment, over something small but symbolic. If at that moment I groped about for my jacket and couldn’t find it, Tracy would hand it to me while the argument carried on. She didn’t want to talk about our problems now, so I let it go and let us go home.

  Within a couple of months, we found ourselves in the same angry scenes more and more often. Always having me on her arm, Tracy’s own feeling of entrapment soon overwhelmed her signature patience and generosity. We were, officially, too close.

  In the beginning our office-apartment was unfurnished, and we were t
oo broke to buy anything beyond a few essentials: propane tanks for the hotplate, towels, bedding and whatnot. The previous teachers had left pots and pans, a kitchen table, a couple of chairs and a sleeping mat, but that’s about it. Tracy, alone, over a few months, filled in the rest.

  Some evenings she cruised the alleys and sidewalks for discarded furniture or wooden crates, anything we could use for tables and chairs and shelves. The supply was out there, but our means were limited: I couldn’t help. Tracy needed both hands to carry things, and in no way could I walk on my own in the dark. When she combed the alleys, she always returned with something for our apartment, including more frustration. One night she found a couch. Another capable body was needed. Instead of coming home for help, she stopped at the school in search of a willing teacher. What excuse she gave for me, I don’t know. It must have been humiliating, though, asking a colleague to help salvage trash on my behalf. Indeed we were too close, on top of one another all the time. But when she needed me, somehow I wasn’t there, either.

  Her new life may have been harder than anything I’ve had to reconcile. Despite love, Tracy was finding her compassion exhausting. To carry blindness, we were learning a sighted partner must give up some of her own ability to see and the life it makes, as she’d come to know it. That was a sacrifice our companionship demanded, and one I will always regret for her. Neither of us could accept the cost. It took our isolation in another culture, without others to speak to, and the secrecy of my condition, all these exaggerations, to reveal blindness as we’d never known it before: as much hers as mine.

  After five months our problems found little voice. We did our best to keep the issues down, way, way down, but their expression eventually found a vocabulary: sex. It disappeared. In retrospect, it couldn’t have survived. We both taught children and then, when Tracy arrived home, she tended to me, aided me, guided me, and watched my self-imposed helplessness. I blurred into one of her kids, and she morphed into a full-time mother. The last thing she wanted at the end of the day was to be physically close. Our mattress on the floor became the single place she could find space for herself. Meanwhile, I lay awake, needing to offer something and to feel like a man and a lover, not a little boy or luggage.