Cockeyed

by Ryan Knighton

  The toxicology report showed an amount roughly equivalent to two pills. It was just enough, just marginally enough for his age and body weight, to shut his system down. According to one of Robin’s statements, he went to bed angry, and in the morning, he was snoring heavily. She couldn’t wake him, so she left him to sleep some more. The next time she tried to wake him, he wasn’t breathing right.

  So much doesn’t make sense and never will. Why would he take the very drugs he was so angry about? One story says he asked for the Valium, another that she put them in his hand and said, “Here, take these.” Did he know what the pills really were? Did she know? Was it a deliberate switch, to get him to try the morphine? Maybe she thought he’d like it and let her keep the pills. Or was it just the most costly mix-up of his life? And then back again: why would he take anything he was that opposed to? Two pills is not a suicide, either. What is it we’re left with? Little and nothing. Death. Unreliable accounts and a cruel set of contradictions. We stare into the facts, but nothing takes final shape. Just this sketchiness, just our inferences, our conjectures, the same way I look at the world and navigate through its smear, hoping the errors won’t hurt too much.

  Within days of Rory’s death, Robin’s ex-boyfriend, also a junkie, moved into the apartment. My father and sister arrived one afternoon to gather Rory’s things. Robin’s boyfriend, flopped out on Rory’s couch, was playing my brother’s Sega games.

  Acquiring knowledge is one way my mother grieves. For years she has wrestled in private with her sadness about my eyesight. But that battle, like any of hers, quickly translated itself into practical action. After my diagnosis, she couldn’t help me through the process of going blind. I’d moved out too quickly. Instead, because she needed to help, she immersed herself in all the literature and research. To this day she knows more about the science of my retinas than I do. Occasionally, and cautiously, she updates me about clinical trials I would otherwise ignore. We both know my psyche can’t afford to place all hope in the remoteness and bureaucracy of scientific progress. A life is not best built around the idea that maybe the cure is near. But my mother is out there, following it on my behalf. The moment a solid breakthrough blips on the radar, I’ll get a call.

  That’s what she does when one of her family is in trouble. She does everything she can to get some control back for those who seem helpless or lost. Hers is a generous will to power, through knowledge. For years she’d done everything she could to help Rory, too. Nutritionists, psychologists, psychiatrists, physicians, even dance lessons to help Rory develop a different relationship to his body and nervous energy. Based on what she knew, she developed her own approach. If he was furious and manic about something, Ma would send him downstairs to write her a letter before they’d talk. Writing gave him clarity and tempered his mood beforehand. And what moods they were. I remember when she quietly dispatched my father, like one of her officers, to disconnect the starter in Rory’s car, a necessary tactic before she confronted Rory about something he’d done. Ma didn’t want her son taking off at fifty miles an hour, past the elementary school, in a pissed-off rage. “If he bolts,” she said, “a run will do him good.”

  Of course Ma was out the door, chasing after the 911 call, already sharing blame for something she could never have foreseen or prevented. When she arrived at Rory’s apartment, she burst through the bedroom door to find paramedics trying to resuscitate her son. A couple of hours earlier she’d phoned the house, and Robin had said he was sleeping, although it was late. It’s been six years, and still Ma will be busy with her rose bushes, or scrubbing the day’s forks and knives, then prick with black thought. How close she came to insisting Robin wake Rory up. Maybe the difference of those two hours would have made all the difference. Nobody knows. As if anybody could have seen it coming. If foresight and hindsight had their own eyes in our bodies, my mother would have blinded hers by now. I would help her do it, too, just to give her some peace.

  By the time Tracy and I arrived at the hospital, everybody except Auntie Angie had left. Nothing more could be gained or hoped for there, so my parents and brother and sister had gone home, to our family house, to—to what? To rage, to pace? Do what? Make dinner? Stare at nothing? What do you do inside the vacuum?

  Daily I’m accosted by things that hurt: chairs, half-open doors, sandwich boards, even dogs, the ones I sometimes discover with the tip of my cane. Usually accidents are small, but sometimes they’re hefty, landing me in a clinic or the emergency ward. Often I go to work looking like a boxer, bruised and mulched by whatever my face hammers. The bodies of the blind grow more and more conditioned. We rebound from the world, suck up the sting, and push ahead. It seems inevitable in our character to carry on, like the Terminators of this world. I defer to the wisdom of the blues. As my friend Harmonica Slim says, when I’m particularly bruised or gashed, “Well, kid, you ain’t good looking, but you’re hard to kill.”

  Maybe that’s why, driving home in Angie’s car, I promised myself that I could do the same now, carry on for my family. I would take the lead. Let them rest, lose their minds, whatever they needed. I would be one step ahead, thrashing about, clearing the way for them. Arrangements needed to be made: phone calls to family, Rory’s friends, Rory’s landlord and bank, the coroner. A mountain of pebbles needed moving. Even the tiny but insurmountable stuff had to keep up. Groceries, meals, dishes piling in the sink. Whatever it took, I’d do it or keep things going. But not a tear until I was done. That was the promise I made and kept. It was selfish, too. I needed to know that when my family looked around, they’d see somebody holding it together. I hoped the image, even the illusion, would be of some comfort.

  Chaos is difficult to recall. That was my parents’ house. When Tracy, Angie, and I arrived, I caned up the stairs and through the front door. The house had its familiar smell but resonated with tension and quiet. I remember the first hours were a pinball machine of hugging and clenching. I’d step ahead, and my sister would grab me, softly weeping, no words, and we’d stay that way, then I’d move to the kitchen and Ma would be there, grab my hand and hold it, rant under her breath, then we’d separate until the next pass. On and on through the house, back and forth, from person to person, all of us aimless and drifting until we’d find one another again in the hallway, by a window, or on the sundeck. A family breaking apart, reconfiguring, and breaking apart again, molecular, looking for its missing order. Mykol left us at one point and walked the gravel path through the nearby ravine, a tangle of trees, cutgrass, and dry creek bed where we’d played as kids. He found a broken beer bottle near the bridge, put it to his arm, and carved Rory’s name.

  My grandparents arrived at the house and joined the pacing. I was already downstairs most of the time and on the phone, calling all the numbers I could remember. Fill the house, I figured. Instead of twenty, make it five steps to find the next person you can lean on. With the rhythm established, the house stayed this way for weeks. Flowers everywhere. Food stacking in the freezer. The smell of coffee at all hours. Packages of cigarettes and Kleenex.

  “I can’t do it,” Ma said to me the next morning. “The coroner is going to call with the toxicology results, but I can’t do it.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, “I’ll take it.”

  Every time the phone rang, the house seized. I shuffled from wherever I happened to be and pawed for the receiver. Eventually the call came and filled me with numbers and chemistry I didn’t totally understand, except for their consequence.

  “Don’t tell me,” Ma said, “I don’t want to hear about it right now.”

  It was difficult, but I kept the information to myself. I knew something about how relatively little was in Rory’s system. I also knew which drug it was. The implications of what I knew weren’t clear to me, not yet. The knowledge may have felt like carrying hot coals, but my parents weren’t ready. Not until the funeral was over, perhaps. When she was up to it, which wouldn’t take long, Ma would begin her ritual and get her hands on
every scrap of information. Keeping it to myself gave her the right to choose her moment, and she deserved at least that much. It was a minor thing, but nothing seemed too minor.

  The funeral was arranged, so we needed to make the calls. I sat on the floor in Rory’s old bedroom with my sister. She opened my parents’ thick, black address book to the letter A and read me the first name and phone number. I felt like a sniper. “Hi, it’s Ryan Knighton calling. Yes, good to hear your voice, too. Yes, it’s been a long time. I wish I was calling with better news, but. . . .” Again and again, “I’ve got some terrible news . . .” or “I hate to tell you this, but. . . .” Load, dial, fire, repeat. With each call, someone fell silent in my ear, at the other end of the line.

  The intention here is not to cast myself as a hero. There’s nothing heroic about helping. Plenty of difficulty was met head on by everybody, and it continues. I’m not alone. But I want the contrast to be clear. In recalling a life lived into blindness, I know now that Rory’s death made me a different man and a different blind man. My eyes today are worse. Yet, somehow, today I’m far more at peace with seeing less. When Rory died, everything became easier; not perfect, but easier. I had been a young man in denial, one who resisted his diagnosis and its future at every turn. I’d mocked blindness, ignored it, camouflaged it, even accepted it, to a very minor degree. Rory’s death, however, left a space, and that space demanded I become the kind of person I wanted to be: resolved, selfless, capable, any number of adjectives I’d let my blindness disfigure in me. Rory’s absence made room to grow. If I’d been at war, it was more or less over. Whatever I’d been fighting didn’t matter to me anymore. It was just too small.

  Letting go of my sight, which is my past, has never been an intuitive process. What started in Pusan finished to a degree with Rory. More than anything, his death forced me to make room for a world that didn’t revolve around my blindness. I miss things every day, but what are they? Objects. Phenomena with colour, depth, and shape. They have smells, tastes, textures, and weight. This world makes a lot of noise, and even more when I bump into its design. In the rain outside my window I hear the substance and size of what I can’t see. Sure, I miss things, but Rory’s death is the first time something in my world went missing. I thought I knew loss, but what did I know? Little. That’s why, when we laid Rory to rest, I tried to put something to rest in me, too. Things grow smaller in the distance, and things disappear. Even blindness can. That’s what I hope for. That’s what I owe him and me.

  The day before his funeral, several hours were set aside at the chapel for family to sit with Rory’s body. Each by each, we came to say goodbye and to see him one last time. People say it’s a good thing, to see a person one last time. It gives closure, they say. But what if you’re blind? What does closure look like?

  I didn’t go to the viewing. The old me would have stayed home out of denial, as escape. But not anymore. Of my own choosing, I sat and smoked in the sun, on my back deck, and tried to remember what Rory looked like, how he moved, the plump feeling of his arm when I held it and he guided me. I listened to his voice. The person I said goodbye to that day was the one who, a week earlier, told me over the phone he was bored, just making pancakes, just wondering what I was up to. But the image I let go was from years before. It’s difficult, but I can remember the sight of Rory’s face when he was young. I don’t really know what my brother looked like when he died and never will. Seeing him one last time wasn’t necessary. In a way, I’d done that years ago. My other senses of him needed one last visit, though. No viewing could give me that, so I sat with Rory, on my deck, in my mind.

  As for my parents and Mykol and Erin, they were going blind. I still feel for their extra loss. They had to let go of something they’d never see again, albeit just one sight, an immeasurable image we loved.

  Seeing is itself touched with elegy. Reality seems to press its light into us, it is happening, but that’s not the way things are. The eye can process only so many images per second, taking in sights the way a camera takes a series of stills. The reality we see is the sketchpad comics we made as kids, me and my brothers and sister. Draw a stickman taking a step on one page, and on the next draw that same figure, only his foot is slightly further ahead, and again on the next page, draw this figure, but with his foot on the ground. Flip through them quickly, and he appears to walk. That’s the mechanics of the eye, too. We think we are seeing life as it happens, but pictures are missing. Moments disappear between the stills and make up our unwitnessed lives. To see is to miss things. Loss is always with us.

  Seeing also takes time. Light travels at its pace, as do the signals from our retinas, passing from cells to nerves, and then, once within the brain, images are made. We move among them. But what we’ve seen has already happened out there, barely a moment ago, as a past we live within. The world we see is always gone.

  I’m told that Rory’s son, Gavin, looks more and more like his father every day. When Gavin is twenty-one, I won’t know what that means. For now, I can piece together a picture of him from the memories of my little brother, from when we were kids. How strange to use memory to see what is in front of me today, to see what is missing.

  In the summer of 2003, four years after Rory’s death, Tracy and I married. Many people must know this feeling. When you’ve been through what we have, the weight of what’s behind can’t help but push you forward and together, closer. Through it all, she stood beside my family and became part of its new order. I carry on as a stronger person because of her. Now and then my eyes throw a wrench in our plans, but nothing of a scale or significance worth really sweating about. People often ask me how we live together and what it’s like to build blindness into an otherwise normal middle-class life. The truth is, it’s hard to see. Blindness for us is mostly made of many small things. I reach for a glass but can’t find it. I continue to talk to you over the table, looking for the glass with my hand. The moment I give up, Tracy nudges the glass to my fingers. It’s so casual, the allowance she gives me to try and to fail, and it is so reflexive, her help when I need it. To learn how to live like this, together, took much time and patience. From where you sit, our way might not catch your eye. The exchange is so fluid and quick, like one of those moments in between the stills.

  Without exaggeration or sentimentality, I can say Tracy is the greatest mystery of my disability. To live with me, she denies herself some pleasures, the kinds sight guarantees, and the kinds the sight of two people guarantees. This means, ultimately, she gives up some of who she is. How could I ask that of anyone? How could she agree? How does someone wake up each morning and choose to stay with blindness? I never did. How does she cope with a body even I want to leave? It’s not my place or capacity to answer for her. But what I do know is this much.

  A blind person and a sighted partner can come to an intimacy few are given. Imagine you only see the world through the eyes and the words of another. Many of our shared experiences are created by what Tracy chooses to narrate from the visual reality around us. Think about that. Relinquish your eyes, which means some of your consciousness, to the control of another person. Or claim that responsibility for yourself. I take in little other than what Tracy does. In this I am given to her, and she to me. It’s both an alarming and rewarding way to live, tangled as a spliced being, a deeply bound physiology of one who looks out upon the world as two. That’s startling when you first experience it and hard to let go. I’ve grown with another person as an extension of my own body and waking life. I don’t mean this figuratively, either, no metaphor intended. Tracy is an extension of my body. To be as plain and true as I can, she sees for me, the way I would have wanted to.

  Sacrifice has always been our problem and our solution. What Tracy gives up makes room for my blindness and, at the same time, enriches our bond. A poet I know once defined it this way: love, he said, is the compassionate understanding of the discord between the heart and the world. Tracy knows my discord, my blindness, pitch perfect. Her u
nderstanding comes from rare compassion, one without pity or martyrdom. My difficulty has always been to give back in kind. Some days I don’t know how.

  I’m told Tracy was something to see on our wedding day, but even I could have told you that. A butter-coloured gown and her hands full of chocolate-brown orchids. Her family gave me a dressy black cane for the occasion. As Tracy and I walked down the aisle, I swung it ahead for the two of us. Mykol stood by me as my best man, and Gavin carried the rings. After the ceremony, before dinner, my sister lit a candle for Rory and placed it on the table between Gavin and my parents. Once in a while its brightness cut through the blur of my eyes. Certainly I’ve known more than loss. So much more. All these people, they surround me, so strong and constant. Like light.

  Jungle Fun

  Two years ago I found myself on a small island, about a twenty-minute ferry ride from West Vancouver. Most of the island residents are hippies who sell nice soaps and project their egos into trees. Tracy had stayed in Vancouver with our dog and her own projects. I was on my own, except for the thirty-one other blind people I shacked up with.