Cockeyed

by Ryan Knighton

  At breakfast the next morning, Jason announced we’d have a fire drill in an hour, or maybe in two hours. He had a good feel for the timing of blind people. We have one speed, and it’s somewhere between dawdle and mosey.

  “The fire drill is an insurance thing,” he explained, “but no big deal, really. It’s timed, too, so it shouldn’t take long.”

  Although more like a Spartan dormitory than anything else, the lodge had a spacious wooden dining hall with generous windows that looked out over our dirty bay. The dock was out there somewhere, several canoes and paddle-boats tied to it. I bet we made the locals plenty nervous when we took to the water near their yachts.

  For meals and happy hour we sat at six large, round tables, five or six campers at each. We were served by two chipper young students who, like me, wanted to go home. I couldn’t blame them. Somehow they managed to feign cheer even when helping the table of shameless, nit-picking yobs, the ones I thought of as the Aristocrats. These people mistook our camp for a private resort and mistook themselves for a blind elite who deserved to look down upon the rest of us. I can still hear them.

  “Oh, Miss! Where are the servers? I’ve been waiting for ten minutes? Miss! Miss! Can you remove the onions from my salad? I said no onions. Can you cool my soup with an ice cube? Can you pick the seeds off my bread? When you’re done, can you take those seeds, plant them, grow wheat, mill it, and bake some seedless loaves before serving me another onion sandwich?”

  Of Eddie and Cheryl and others, me included, the Aristocrats often commiserated how young blind people today have it too easy. We stay home, live with our parents, collect government money, and refuse to integrate ourselves into the sighted world. Such helplessness, the Aristocrats complained, when so many technologies and opportunities are practically given away. “In our day, we had to fend for ourselves and learn how to . . .”

  The Aristocrats didn’t like it, but not everything was done for the campers. For one thing, we fetched our own coffee from the large steel urns the students kept topped up throughout the day. The sugar and cream station was a massacre of dirty spoons, half-emptied sweetener packets, puddles of honey and half-and-half, and a variety of solids I felt but couldn’t identify. Everything fused to everything else. If the world ended today, centuries from now some future people might discover that coffee station and take it for a significant midden of a very unkempt people. But we managed. We plunged our hands into the primordial muck and hoped to find what we needed.

  We also ate waffles every morning, except on the days we had pancakes. A large syrup jug rested in the middle of each table. Campers were on their own to pour and hope for the best. From all indications, my chair had been sticky since 1983.

  On fire drill day, my comrades at the breakfast table included Liza and Dick. “Let me know when I’ve got enough syrup,” Liza asked her hubby and began to pour. As she did, they both stared out the windows, or what would be out the windows if they could have seen through them. When Dick thought Liza had poured enough, he said so, and she stopped, sort of. Neither seemed to care if he was right. They’d gone through the ritual of good table manners and that was enough to satisfy. The result, which spilled over the plate and pooled a bit around my juice glass, was irrelevant.

  The syrup business was a good lesson for me. I actually joined in the fun for once. We all did it. We’d ask each other for help, pretend to give it, then carry on, thanking our helpful fellow camper as we wiped our sticky hands on the sticky tablecloth. It was a gentle anarchy, a dysfunctional politeness, and it was ours. Sweet.

  These details suggest something about how Jason’s fire drill would proceed. Modern dance troupes could only be in awe of its choreography. The drill could only be about as weird as modern dance, too.

  Martin and another camper, Kevin, were chummy from previous years. They were both notably alarmed when Jason announced the oncoming safety exercise, particularly Kevin, who had a frantic manner most of the time and a needy, high-pitched voice to match. I could hear them at the table next to mine, where Jason also ate his breakfast. Kevin prodded Jason relentlessly.

  “You’re gonna let us know when the fire drill is, right? You’re gonna let us know, right?”

  Part of Kevin’s frenetic way was to use up extra energy repeating himself.

  “For sure,” Jason said, for the fifth or sixth time, “not to worry. You’ll know when it’s coming.”

  “Heh, heh, heh,” Martin feigned a chuckle. “Yep, heh, heh, we wouldn’t want the alarm to just go off. It might frighten people. Heh, heh. Wouldn’t want that.”

  “Don’t worry,” Jason said. “I wouldn’t think of it. Everything will be clear when we get around to—”

  Kevin asserted himself. “Alarms. I don’t like alarms. That’s all I’m saying. I don’t like alarms.” He sounded as if he’d just discovered this about himself, and the fact surprised him.

  “Me neither!” Martin added, equally surprised.

  “Wouldn’t know what to do,” Kevin said. “Wouldn’t know how to do it, either.”

  Martin grunted in agreement. “It could be real. How would we know?”

  “That’s the worst,” Kevin agreed. “Real alarms are the worst.”

  The alarmists continued while the others at their table picked up a new topic of conversation, although not a fresh one. Breakfast chit-chat focused on one of several things. Lots of campers liked to compare medications and personal data about which ones worked better than others for what symptoms, everything from ulcers to depression to thyroid malfunction. Then there was the gossip. Which campers liked which campers, which CNIB case workers were better than others, which regions had the best programs for kitchen skills, afternoon bingo, or white-water rafting. But people mostly talked meds. During breakfast the four counselors distributed a variety of drugs. The stuff was all prescription and necessary, and more pills than I’ve ever encountered outside a pharmacy or a good rave. I’m talking about a plastic baggy of gel capsules, and that was sometimes for just one person’s morning intake. They were like bean bags, these handouts.

  That, I think, pulled some facts into focus. Take Liza and Dick, for instance. Punctuating other people’s sentences with a harmony of “your cat” probably is a truckload of fun with that much chemistry in your system.

  But I also discerned something better than before, a fact I’d neglected. In the cleanliness of my own blood, I felt some of my fortune and privilege. I may be blind, but I don’t cope with brain damage, weak organs, psychological trauma, or a myriad of other unimaginables along with it. Mine is a kind of aristocracy, too, if I’m not careful. I’m merely blind, the stock model, and, in addition, I have a wisp of low-functioning sight. That would have been enough to radically change several lives around my table.

  “Are we doing the drill now?” Kevin asked.

  “It’s been five minutes,” Jason said. “Everybody’s still eating.”

  “I just thought it might be coming. I want to be ready. You know, for the alarm.”

  Jason and the other three counselors had misplaced the alarm keys, after all. They wouldn’t be able to shut it off if they turned it on, so a new plan was struck. I think Kevin gasped. It was decided we’d all go back to our rooms and wait until we heard Jason’s cue. He’d shout from his post downstairs, “Fire! Fire!” and then the drill would be on.

  “Can you not shout it too, you know, loud?” Martin asked.

  Kevin demonstrated. “Maybe just, ‘Fire! Fire!’ That would be enough, don’t you think?”

  After breakfast, everybody caned back to their rooms and shut their doors. On the way, much conversation filled the halls about who would lead whom, how roommates would find one another when we reached the safety of the lawn, and so on. Once in our rooms, the building silent, the tension grew. This wasn’t just an insurance exercise. This was on par with semifinals at the World Cup Fire Drill.

  Then the call came. We heard Jason’s homemade alarm from downstairs, and we were off.
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br />   Doors shot open and slammed shut, canes dropped to the floor, keys scraped, and locks locked. For some reason, we’d tacitly agreed that doors were to be secured. Jason shouted from one end of the hall, downstairs.

  “No, no, don’t worry about the locks! Just go!”

  “I’m not leaving my walkman if I can’t lock the door,” Eddie shouted back. I heard him open his door and go back inside to fetch Divine Blade.

  “I forgot my coat,” Cheryl said. “F-f-f-f-fuggen.” Back into her room she went.

  “Oh, good idea, Cheryl,” Liza chirped, “it’s raining.” Back she went to her room with Dick leading the way.

  “Just go!” Jason shouted. “This is a fire drill, folks! We won’t be outside long!”

  “I’ll wait for Eddie,” Martin said, hanging around his door.

  Kevin was already well down the hall, but he decided he’d wait for Eddie, too. He caned his way back while Martin guided, saying, “I’m over here, you’re warm, you’re getting warmer.” Had it been a real fire, Kevin’s warmth would have been severe.

  “Hey, Jason,” Kevin called. “I meant to ask if you think Martin and I could switch roommates?”

  “Forget it,” Jason said. “Fire drill’s over. It took too long. We have to do it again. This time everybody have your coats on and be ready to go when I shout fire. Back into your rooms, please, and let’s try it again.”

  Back into the gates we went and prepared for a second race. When Jason made his alarm noise, we threw open our doors, shot from our rooms, and again played with the locks.

  “No locks,” Jason hollered, “abandon all locking and go!”

  We actually made it down the hall towards the stairs, a mass of canes and zigzagging campers, all of us swinging, stopping, going, knocking into one another and then the stairs, a slow funnel like a blocked artery. Most campers descended on either side of the staircase, following the handrails, making a trickling line of campers in single file. A few people like me, the ones with a little sight, barreled down the middle of the mostly empty stairwell. In the chaos, nobody listened to Jason.

  “You’re going the wrong way,” he shouted.

  He and the other counselors had forgotten one key fire drill element. None of us knew where the closest exit was. We were heading, all of us, to the dining hall and the only exit we knew.

  “Go to the other end, go back the other way,” he pleaded.

  I called back to the crowd on the stairs. “I think Jason wants us to turn around, guys.”

  Everybody stopped.

  “And go where?” Dick asked.

  “I dunno,” I said. “Where are we going?”

  “The emergency exit is at the other end of the hall!” Jason said.

  My sense of timing isn’t the most precise, but I think, in a real fire, we’d have all baked to death by then.

  “Where at the end?” Martin asked. “I don’t know what you mean when you say at the end.”

  Jason probably gestured. “You know, that way, the end of the hall. Just there.”

  “Sh-sh-sh-shimbles.”

  “Yeah, but where at the end?” Kevin asked.

  Dick clarified. “Is the emergency door on the left or right?”

  I guessed it was on the left, but a couple of campers disagreed.

  “No,” Jason said, “that’s Eddie’s room.”

  “I locked my door,” Eddie said. “We can’t go that way.”

  I thought Jason was going to melt on the spot. “Here,” he conceded, “how about I just show you guys where it is and if there’s a fire, promise to use that door, okay?”

  That seemed reasonable to everybody. We followed him down the hall and discovered a new door. Everybody got the hang of how to open it and run for our lives.

  All of this points to one thing I admire about blindness and the blind. We have an incomparable ability to throw a wrench in bureaucracy, whether we mean to or not. Our bodies are collectively so idiosyncratic and uncooperative, as are some of our personalities, that we don’t lend ourselves well to goals like efficiency and standardization. I mean, you can’t standardize the movements of this many blind people, and you can’t take anything about us for granted, either. That’s the bureaucratic goal, right? We went through the insurance drill so that the insurers could assume all the blind folks knew how to get out of the building. As if. I doubt if any of us could have left the building the same way twice. It was a gentle, even an unintentional, anarchy.

  Not all mornings began with such a scene. In fact, Tai Chi was the main morning activity during camp. I took a liking to Tai Chi. Jesus, no, I didn’t do it, but I enjoyed my coffee at the far end of the dining hall while a handful of others, down at the opposite end, did their best to strike a pose. From where I sat, I could squeeze bits of the action into view. Carson, our novice, led the show. He was a fellow camper and one of my favourite people.

  “Now, make a wing,” Carson said one morning, “but make it high-up and flat, like a tipping sailboat.”

  Carson likely saw at some point in his life. The imagery he used suggested as much. I noticed he took a lot of analogies from the ocean. I wondered if he’d lost his sight in a boating accident or something. Our Poseidon. I imagined birds nibbling at his eyes. Hitchcocky stuff.

  To describe a Tai Chi move to newcomers, blind newcomers, is difficult. Inkblots would be a similar challenge to put into words. Carson hadn’t thought his lessons through. Not everybody had seen a sailboat, let alone the tipping kind. Carson had to bust out the technical manual and try again.

  “Or think of it this way,” he said. “Take your right hand, bend at the elbow and turn it inward at the wrist and open your fingers, like a starfish, and then, holding your elbow up as high as you can, pull a hand towards you, the right one, like you are calling somebody, but keep the hand and arm parallel to your chest, more like you are raking than calling somebody, maybe. Now turn your wrist and swim, extending the arm out, follow through, always follow through, and return and swim out again and . . .”

  A half a dozen people contorted. They looked like they’d fallen out of trees and busted their elbows and shoulders. Carson had said swim, but few did. Some updated the chicken dance, others went fly fishing, and Eddie broke into an impromptu round of shadow boxing. Carson hadn’t said anything about how fast the arm should go, so Eddie’s pace went rapid-fire, a rhythm to match his morning dose of Van Halen. Liza’s arm slowly stirred a pot of soup.

  While all this was happening, Carson’s lower body maintained an elegant pose, angled but relaxed. His students, however, ignored everything but their flapping. Some remained rigid, while others slouched into their normal bad postures. Eddie bent low at the knees, it appeared, with his legs wide apart, going for a lead singer crotch-shot, the kind struck before belting a high note.

  I guess if you don’t mention it to the blind, it isn’t there. If you give the upper part of me guidance, the rest of me wouldn’t know what to do. You’d think Carson, and the rest of us, would be conscious of such things with one another. Nope.

  I expected, of all places in the world, this would be the one where sighted habits were dropped. They weren’t. People sat around the breakfast tables and spoke to one another without identifying themselves or whom they meant to address. Cheryl might have asked something like, “Are you going to glue macaroni owls at the crafts table this afternoon?” Everybody would carry on chewing until somebody said the obligatory, “Are you talking to me?” All six dining tables sounded like a rehearsal from Taxi Driver. You talking to me? You talking to me?

  It happened in the halls, too. Cruising around the lodge, its disorienting design, if we heard someone approaching, we said hello, but never, “Hello, it’s Martin,” or “Hello, it’s Eddie.” Even I forgot to add my name to my voice. The hallways echoed with a casual anthem: “Who’s there?” All day and night, “Who’s that?” and “Who’s there?” If you hear the questions often enough, you begin to wonder at the depth of the answer. I don’t know, I
wanted to say. I don’t know who’s here. Who are we? Who are you? Could any of us really say?

  Likewise, you’d think of all places in the world, this one would have been gesture-free. Nope. Everybody, me included, carried on flagging and pointing, and as you’d expect, none of us followed. We were so used to living with sighted people that we couldn’t even be blind with one another.

  Carson, from what I could tell, was the only one who avoided any of the above. Sometimes he avoided answering anything. Beyond his morning Tai Chi class, the guy was basically a ghost, walking the beach alone, or hanging out quietly on the edge of a chatty group, just listening. His self-reliance was a likeable trait. Enviable, even. Something in his character, some core resignation to his blindness, carried him. He maintained an eerie peace I wish I could know, a peace without irony, cynicism, or victimization propping it up. Those were the defences of choice for most people I met. Me, too.

  While it’s fair to say Carson kept to himself, unlike me, he didn’t hide from the group in his room. His tactics differed and weren’t born of fear. Within days I was running out of strategies to avoid people. Soon I borrowed one from Eddie. Headphones. I wore my walkman when I wanted to be left alone. It could have been surgically attached to my ears, I wore it so much during the first few days.

  Initially I kept the sound off. I thought I’d developed a great way to say to people that I wasn’t available. What I failed to see was the obvious. Nobody saw the headset, so conversations continued to follow me around the lodge and down to the beach.

  To avoid everybody in a fresh fashion, I walked down to the lodge’s dock for a swim one afternoon. It was raining, so I figured I’d be on my own for as long as I could stand the frigid water and whatever creepy stuff brushed against my toes. When I reached the end of the dock’s wooden planks, I heard an extra set of footsteps behind me. They were Carson’s. I asked if he came for a swim, but he said he didn’t know how. He thought he’d just listen. And he did. Not a word passed between us. He likes to listen, that’s all. I hoped one day to learn how to do that, too.