Cockeyed

by Ryan Knighton

  Maybe I could pitch my services as a living model. I could be employed to live here and show interested customers what it looks like to pass your time in various displays.

  “See the peaceful expression on our model’s face as he sleeps on a blond, pine, queen-sized bed complete with head-board and autumn print duvet and pillow cases? How much do you think he paid for that peaceful expression? $800?”

  From under blankets, I’d stir and yawn on cue, breaking the theatrical fourth wall.

  “Good morning! I sleep well at night knowing I paid only $499 for this complete set.”

  My job, as a living model, would both advertise a dull and affordable IKEA lifestyle and model disabled independence for interested government and nonprofit agencies. IKEA could employ disabled people around the world to live in their stores. IKEA would be a sort of school for disabled youth. Students would come to study strategies for independent living, then take up a short residency as a practicum. Module One: Kitchen Life, Module Two: Bedroom Ergonomics, and so on. IKEA would receive, in turn, a warm-hearted and socially supportive PR image.

  I was busy mulling over this idea when Tracy abruptly exited the store’s thoroughfare and eased us into an oasis of chairs, stools, and couches. She signaled me to let go with a slight lift of her arm. I dropped her elbow. Quickly she maneuvered around the couches, narrowing the field of choices. Waiting, I opened my white cane and floated about the aisles, a free radical obstructing the flow of customers through the IKEA bloodstream.

  Tracy called me over, and I followed her voice to a large brown glob between a number of other large brown globs.

  “What do you think of this one?”

  I stared at the brown shape for what I estimated to be a thoughtful moment. Pretending to inspect the goods, I walked around the couch. I scratched my chin and hmmmed under my breath. If the brown glob had tires, I would have kicked them.

  “I don’t know,” I said, as if juggling a myriad of decisive factors. I put my hand on the upholstery. The cushions felt puffy and more or less couch-like. I sat on it. No sound, a slight give in the cushions, nothing surprising.

  “Well,” I said decisively, “you can comfortably sit upright, and it’s relatively long, so I’m going to say it must be a couch.”

  “Duh, but what do you think of the colour?’

  Tracy knows I can see some colour, but sometimes it’s unclear, when she asks for my opinion, if it is done more out of duty to that bit of sight I have left or out of a sincere belief in my judgment. In the past I have worn purple and green, claiming they were blue and gray. The colour of this couch was fairly black and white, though.

  “Brown?” I asked. “What is there to think about brown?”

  “I really like the colour, ” she said.

  “Brown? What’s so great about brown?”

  “No, buddy, this isn’t brown, this is camel.”

  I screwed up my face the same way I do at emo-metal.

  “Camel? I hate beige.”

  Tracy hauled me off the couch and over to another. “This,” she said, “this is more of a beige, and that’s camel. There’s a big difference.”

  I looked at the two brown things.

  “Oh, I see. Well, what about that one?” I asked, pointing to another couch. “Or is that the same one I was just sitting on?”

  “That’s more of an oatmeal colour. Or maybe sand.”

  “Sand? Is that off-white?” I tried to remember my favourite t-shirt from grade nine, a large, ill-fitting man’s undershirt my mother told me was off-white when I’d always seen it as a plain white shirt. It still looked white in my mind. White always did.

  “Sort of off-white,” Tracy answered, “but more like a cream colour, almost, but less yellow. Oh, hey! Let’s look at those ones over there.”

  I sat down on a brown couch and looked at all the other brown couches. “You let me know when you’ve narrowed it down. I don’t think I’m much use here.” She left me to my thoughts, which were in many ways more comfortable than the couches. My thoughts each had a texture, shape, colour, and intensity, or lack of intensity, I could discern and savour. The couches didn’t.

  Physically, blindness leaves me here in a world where I am only certain about shapes and textures. All I could see were couches, but little else to distinguish one from the other. I still hated shopping and hated how generic the world appeared to my senses.

  An old man in a blue IKEA shirt flopped heavily down on the cushion next to me. Maybe it was a green shirt. I don’t know. He stretched and relaxed, legs splayed in front of him, obviously someone on a break. On his chest was a magnetic name tag. I pieced the letters together in the clean sliver of my good eye. I read just as I did in grade two. One letter at a time, then sounded them out together.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “does your name tag say Plato?”

  He folded his arms and grunted in affirmation.

  “The Plato? As in The Republic?”

  “You’ve read it?” he asked, a hint of surprise in his voice. “Boy, that dates a man.”

  “And you work here?” I asked.

  “Sure do. You need help?”

  I wasn’t clear what kind of help he was offering. A better defence for having kicked poets out of his republic would be a good start, but a hand with the couch choices might be more appropriate to the moment.

  “Can I ask you something?” I said.

  He put his hands behind his silvery head and crossed his long, bony fingers.

  Who am I kidding? I have no idea what he did. I just heard him move in his seat.

  “Sure, as long as it’s not a counselling question. I’m not a counselor. I saw you and your wife or girlfriend debating here. I don’t handle that.”

  “Huh?”

  “You know, the counsellors, that’s their turf. It’s off-season. Don’t you know about them?” I shook my head. “During the pre-Christmas rush, management hires a gang of marriage counsellors to roam the store and help customers who might be feeling stressed about large purchase decisions. Management asked me to supervise the service. They thought my so-called skills inventory made me the perfect candidate to supervise a team of self-help lemonade stands. Makes me sick. I’d rather stock can openers. This is between you, me, and these brown couches, though, okay? Anyways, how can I help you?”

  Obviously he was on his break, so I opted not to ask about the couches. But since I had Plato’s ear, which is better than sitting next to Freud on the couch, I wanted to keep him talking.

  “I wanted to ask, well, I just wanted to know how you like working here.”

  “It’s okay. The benefits package could use some work, but the people are nice. The whole experience has me thinking some ideas over again.”

  Tracy called from farther down the aisle. She wanted to know if we were going to buy a matching chair or not. I said I’d be there in a second. Plato had taken a notepad and pen from his shirt pocket. I could hear the pen scratching as he made notes.

  “What could IKEA possibly make you reconsider?”

  “Well,” he began and flipped a few pages back through his notepad. He read a little, looked up, and pulled on his beard with a fidgety tug. “Well, something went wrong. I’m concerned that this is the kind of place where the Republic ought to have begun, at least in a small way. I’d like to think we are selling some of the day-to-day infrastructure for a utopia here, but I’m not so sure anymore.”

  I squinted and surveyed the room, trying to see utopia. “I’m sorry, but I don’t see it,” I said.

  Plato pointed to my white cane. “Do you have any sight?” he asked.

  “Just shapes and a bit of light and colour. Not much more than wavy shadows, really.”

  “I bet you see what I mean,” he said. “Think of it this way. There should be no competition here. You can’t go wrong. It’s basically all the same. I wish people would see that.”

  I looked at the sea of brown couches again. “So, you guys sell me one version of ever
ything here, with only minor variations? Is that what you mean?”

  “More or less,” he agreed. “It gives folks some harmless sense of choice and individuality. We sell what I call Ikealism. Not a chair or a lamp, but chairness and lampness.”

  “Like Cabbage Patch Kids.”

  Plato wasn’t up on his 1980s pop culture.

  “They were dolls,” I explained, “cute and creepy dolls with detailed heads. You could kind of see a fundamentally universal Cabbage Patch face, but each one was marketed as having at least one minor computer-generated difference. That made each one singular and worthy of its own name. Also made them cost a mint. I think some parents died fighting over them.”

  “They came with names?” Plato asked.

  “Birth certificates, too. My little sister had one named Roger Igor. For a while, anyway. My brothers cooked him one day on the barbecue. My sister found out when she saw the video.”

  Plato muttered something, and I heard his pen scratching.

  “You realize,” he said as he wrote, “that you are scripting a conversation in which you not only put words into Plato’s mouth, but you have offered him a Cabbage Patch Kid analogy?”

  “What’s your point?”

  From the chair across from us he took two pillows and held them up. One was red and the other blue. I think. The shape and texture were the same, although one was bigger than the other.

  “I had said once,” he explained, “that the artisans, along with the artists, had to leave the Republic because they’re all liars. They make, with their crafts and their poems and sculptures, artful variations on the shadows of ideal forms. Imitations are lies, and lies ain’t good.”

  “Even a table is a lie?” I asked.

  “It’s a version of the ideal table, so it’s a lie.”

  In my mind I pictured a utopia in which everybody sat on rocks and ate with their hands. My time at scout camp came back in all its utopian horror.

  “The individuality of things,” Plato continued, “their distinction, is what we see people coveting today. That’s one of the many sources of inequality. Unchecked individualism. The pursuit of “me” and “mineness.” But I think for people to be equal, first, all things—our material conditions—must be equal. IKEA expresses an unsophisticated idea of that promise. Yet, somehow we failed to make an equality of things here, even though little or no uniqueness is available to fight over.”

  I agreed. I couldn’t see anything but brown couches. Why anybody would choose one over another was beyond me.

  “I don’t mean to bore you with all this,” Plato said, “but my conclusion is short. The irony is we can’t manufacture away individualism. It is seen even when it isn’t there. So I was wrong. What can I say? I eat my crow when it’s served. Artisans and their trades don’t make versions or make lies, after all. It was never in the objects themselves but in the seeing, in people’s desires to see something unique, no matter what.”

  Tracy called again, and Plato got up with me. He excused himself to finish his break in peace, maybe just on another couch. I thanked him for the chat and listened to him wander away.

  What came over me next, definite and bright, was a deep and urgent sense of my affection for Tracy. I wanted to apologize, find her among the maze of couches, and help her choose one. I had been a jerk of sorts, a smug blind guy in IKEA, as if I were outside it all. Cynicism wasn’t the right exit, nor was righteousness. With Tracy I can feel a necessary relief from my individuality, from blindness, from all my differences, be they subtle or bold. That’s a better way out of here.

  I knew, and I continue to know, her pleasure should be mine, be it sand, beige, or brown, wherever I can find it, whatever shape and colour it may take for her. It doesn’t matter if it is a couch or a poem or a city. To not want to see what she is looking for, even if I can’t, that is my worst crime against my Republic. I have to want to see what’s out there for her, with her, although it’s not there for me or my eyes. That’s only fair to our differences.

  When I found her near a brown glob of couchness, I asked her to describe it to me. As it came into focus, with each word, IKEA disappeared around us, its couches and its smell, and left me alone with Tracy’s voice. I coveted every word of her.

  Losing Face

  Vladimir: “When did this happen to you?”

  Pozzo: “I don’t know. . . . The blind know nothing of time.”

  —Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

  I haven’t seen my face in five years.

  Because I haven’t seen it, I’ve awakened into a new order, a different sense of time and identity, like a strange twist on those bad made-for-TV flicks. You know the ones. Some poor schmuck is struck by an ambulance, lands in a coma, and wakes up a dozen years later to face a stranger in the mirror. Blindness is a kind of inverted coma. I wake up everyday with Peter Pan in my smile. I look in the mirror, but the person looking back remains young and not there, just an idea. The world gets older, but I see no evidence of it. I see no evidence of time writing itself on my face, either.

  It seems strange to live a life but never reveal your final face. Most of us are afraid of it. We’re haunted by the idea that one morning we will discover an old person in the mirror. But I’m afraid of how I will make peace with that absence. I never saw my time coming and never will.

  I haven’t seen the faces of others in years, either. Some people, those new to me at the college where I teach or around the coffee shop where I don’t teach, they’re without faces, except the caricatures and portraits my imagination doodles. Others from my sighted past, such as my parents, my brothers and sister, and Tracy, their faces remain lit in my mind but also eerily suspended in time, along with my own.

  What I did not expect, nor could I have anticipated, was the loss of my face to others. Because I don’t see faces anymore, mine included, I seem to have, well, stopped giving face. I’m giving up on its expressiveness, its animated reactions to the world, despite knowing others look at my expression and can spot it quite well. You could say I’m losing touch with my face, even losing some control of it. If you don’t receive the facial expressions of others, you forget to give back in kind.

  Tracy will ask me what’s wrong when I’m quiet and content, maybe listening to the radio or entertaining an idea. Inside I’m engaged by what I’m hearing around me, experiencing pleasure in the textures of thought or the surrounding fracas of restaurant talk, but I look pissed off. My face characterizes me as serious and dour, even consistently angry, according to my students. But that isn’t how I feel. I’ve simply forgotten my face. I’m not indifferent or retreating from the world around me but from my face itself.

  Somewhere in my family’s tooled wooden chest of memorabilia, kept behind a plastic slip in a cloth-bound photo album, is a picture of me. A young me. A seeing me. It was taken by my father when I was ten years old.

  If I lift this photograph up and hold it close to the shrinking island of vision in the centre of my right eye, I can see, scanning the picture, bits of lawn, a shoeless foot—toes, mostly—high in the left corner, something red, a knee towards the centre, a ball, and above that, about an inch higher in the photo, perhaps a quarter of my young face, the left eye and nose and a bit of my forehead. Each of the fragments I see is smaller than a dime. If I look at the word “dime” on this page, less than half of the letter “m” is clear to me. My tunnel vision is that narrow now. Total blindness is that near.

  Dragging the rake of my eye around that backyard photo, I collect holes of clarity. They are coins of shape and resemblance similar to the paper bites taken by a three-hole punch. With a little time and patience, I can piece them together in my mind and infer what used to be a cohesive scene from my life.

  The picture holds a moment in time I remember and remember seeing. Playful, ten-year-old shenanigans we had in the backyard. I have a memory, and I have a photo of it. I am, however, becoming blind to both. My eyes and my mind’s eye are deteriorating. Together.
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  What you might see is a picture of a potbellied kid in red shorts, shirtless and shoeless, grinning, winding up for a pitch with a muddy softball in his right hand. The angle of the camera suggests the photo was taken from above. The top of a wooden railing in the bottom of the picture suggests it was taken from some kind of veranda. My brother Rory, five years old, barefoot in green shorts and a white t-shirt, is running away from the camera or from me as I threaten to let the ball go. My pitch would head straight for the lens, if my aim was any good, and if I’d actually thrown the ball that day. Although I don’t see all this in the photograph at once, I remember the details. How I remember them, though, is changing. Contracting.

  Description is a lot of work. You at least get a sense of the patience required to reconstitute a sight from its pieces—and I’ve only sketched out the most general of resemblances here. I’ve said nothing about textures, expressions, shadow, landscape, and so on. All that could be communicated instantly if I’d just printed the picture for you. But that would miss the first point.

  My eyes, with only 1 percent of a functioning retina left, arrange visual experience in a manner more like narration than “seeing.” My world is gathered up like so many fragmented descriptions that, hopefully, accumulate one at a time into something clear and whole and real. Like a book. When you read my description of a picture, you come to see it as I do: in pieces.

  If you’ll indulge me just a smidge longer, I agree that there is little evidence so far of a profoundly meaningful photograph, one that is weighty enough to conclude my memoir, my autopathography. The backyard picture wasn’t figurative in the beginning of my blindness. It doesn’t connect to the day I was diagnosed or the image I saw when I discovered the eroding holes in my visual field. Yet this picture always stuck in my mind’s eye and conjures an acute memory in my body of that mischievous surge I felt when I wasn’t sure if I would let the ball go at my father’s camera. That would have been just like me, pushing the joke too far. That memory in my body is still a clear picture, although the picture in my hand is not.