Blind Sight

by Meg Howrey

  It’s funny how people use that phrase. People say it when they feel stuck, or indifferent, or helpless about something. “It is what it is” is something people say when they want to express, “I guess I can’t change it,” or “Too bad, but I can’t do anything about it,” or “I can’t think of any adjectives.”

  By “people,” I should clarify, I mean people who are not Zen Buddhists. In Zen Buddhism, “It is what it is” is like the equivalent of, “HUZZAH!”

  Last night we had dinner at home, and my dad and I were able to have a fuller, nonparenthetical conversation about things.

  “I always knew it,” he said. “Even when I was a kid. I just thought it was maybe like a mental thing. Because I can have sex with girls, you know. Well, obviously I can have sex with girls.”

  “Yeah, no one at this table is going to debate that,” I told him.

  “And you know,” he said. “The gay scene in New York at the end of the eighties? It was a funeral parlor. Everybody had died these fucking awful deaths or watched everyone else die some awful death. I used to pass this gay bar on my way home from work and these older men would be walking in or out and they’d see me and they’d have this look in their eyes and … anyway, it just seemed like a whole lifestyle I didn’t want. I really just wanted to stay away from the whole scene.”

  “Things are different now, though,” I said. “There’s still AIDS, but the stigma about being gay … most people don’t think like that. You can have any lifestyle you want. And there are some gay actors, right? I mean actors that are openly gay?”

  “More in England,” my dad said. “Here, not so much. And those don’t play romantic leads, or action heroes. Can you name a single A-list American movie star who’s gay? It’s not a judgment thing, even. People may be totally liberal, have a ton of gay friends, think gays should be able to get married, everything, but they’re still not gonna want to see me as a romantic lead if they know that I’m gay. It’ll ruin the fantasy. The whole time I’m kissing the girl they’ll be thinking, ‘But he’s really gay.’ ”

  “I guess there is a possibility that I could be gay, too,” I said. “I’ve never had sex so I don’t have evidence either way.”

  “You’ve never had sex?” he asked. “Not with Amy with a ‘y’?”

  “Well, she wanted to,” I said. “And I wanted to, but not totally. I mean I had mixed feelings about it. So, I’m saying that as far as I know, my mixed feelings were because I’m gay and I just don’t know it yet.”

  “Luke, do you look at dudes and think, ‘I’d like to have sex with that dude’?” my dad asked. “I’m not talking about random speculation, or enjoying musicals. I’m saying … you know … bottom line is: do you want to suck cock?”

  “Um … no,” I said. “Definitely not.”

  “Then you’re not gay,” he said.

  This is perhaps my favorite conversation with my dad so far. It might rank as one of my favorite conversations ever. There is no way I could have had this kind of exchange with Sara, or one of my sisters. With them it would be days, weeks, possibly months of conversation and they would be interested in the entire history of my sexual thought process, and ask lots of questions, and in the end the whole thing would end up in some sort of “Well, you should be open and honest with yourself” and they would never forget that I once voiced doubt and would always and forevermore think of me as someone who is sexually ambivalent, or bi-curious, and would email me articles about this and would stay gender neutral when asking if I am dating someone.

  I’m glad I told my dad about being an atheist, if that’s what I am, because it seems like we both have a thing about ourselves that we prefer to keep private, but we both know what the other one’s is, and we can relate to each other even better. And that’s another conversation we can have, in between other conversations. Like, on the way to the wrap party today, we drove past this guy who was carrying a big “Jesus Saves” poster and we were listening to This American Life on the radio at the time, but later my dad asked me, “So, you don’t believe in Jesus either?” and I knew he had seen that guy and his poster too.

  “I don’t believe in a supernatural Jesus,” I explained. “There might have been a guy they based those stories on, but all those stories are basically the same ones you get in every religion, and if there was a Jesus, he had an earthly father just like the rest of us suckers.”

  That made my dad smile.

  And later, at the actual party, when we were on the Ferris wheel, he said, “So, okay, no old guy with a beard in the sky, but what about there being some kind of force in the universe that connects us all?” and I said, “Well, nobody really believes in an old guy with a beard, right? Not really. That’s just what people say, like, ‘Hey, I’m not a crazy Christian! I don’t believe in an old guy with a beard! I only believe in a mysterious, unknowable, improvable, eternal, invisible force that is intimately connected with the events of the universe and my personal life and fortunes!’ ”

  “But there’s a big difference,” my dad argued, after he finished laughing, “between saying, ‘I believe in a Universal Force that promotes love’ and ‘I believe God thinks homos should go to hell.’ ”

  “They sound different,” I agreed. “But you’re still saying it’s something other than you that is handing out morality. A God of Love or a God of Hate is still a God. Your universal life force might as well be an old guy with a beard,” and he said, “Huh, I never thought of it like that.”

  The wrap party really was like a carnival. They had all kinds of rides and games set up, and different booths, and a huge buffet under a tent (I still cannot get over how there is, like, delicious prepared food everywhere here). Someone on the crew had made a great short film, and they were projecting it on a wall inside the tent. It was set to Louis Armstrong singing “What a Wonderful World” and the images were all of the ruined-Earth sets of The Last but with actors and crew hugging or laughing and stuff. It was really nice, seeing my dad smiling and hugging, and funny too, because sometimes when the song went to the chorus and the lyrics were “What a wonderful world” it was just a close-up shot of my dad standing there without a shirt and everybody watching would whistle and say, “Yeah, baby,” and stuff.

  I teased him a little about this and he said, “I don’t think it has much to do with me, really. I’ve been around for awhile, you know, and nobody put me on a list of hot male actors until now. It’s more about fame. And the character I play. Anyway, all this stuff about how ‘sexy’ or ‘hot’ famous people are? It’s just a sign of how bored people are with the people they’re actually fucking.”

  I suppose people think of my dad a certain way because of who he pretends to be, but some of what he pretends to be is also what he actually is. So some of the symbol of what he is for other people is also him. It’s interesting to think about how nothing about his looks, or his voice, or the way he carries himself would change if people knew he was gay, but a lot of people would interpret all those things differently. They’d read the symbol differently, I mean.

  I know that some people—including people who are gay—think that you shouldn’t discriminate against gay people, because they can’t help being gay. “It’s how they were made,” they say, or, “I didn’t have a choice.” This may be true, although we don’t know whether it’s a gene, or prenatal hormones, or whether there are “gay” brains, or “straight” brains. It’s a weird argument, though, because you shouldn’t discriminate against people at all; whether or not they chose or were chosen shouldn’t make a difference. We don’t say, “Hey, let’s not discriminate against African Americans because they can’t help being African American.”

  We are not supposed to judge other people. If you follow that argument, then not judging other people means you also can’t judge other people for being judgmental. People usually don’t follow that argument to its conclusion, though, because the sum of it is zero and zero is not a very satisfying number. Unless you are a Zen Buddhist an
d then zero is, like, awesome.

  At best we are getting “truth” in tiny bits and pieces. Faster neurons tell parts of the brain what you are seeing before slower neurons actually assess what you are seeing: like you are watching a movie and someone is leaning over your shoulder telling you about the characters—“He’s a villain. She’s really an alien”—right as the characters appear, before you’ve gotten a chance to know them. There is no such thing as total objectivity. We have blind spots, actual ones, because there are no light-sensitive cones where the optic nerve connects to the retina, but we don’t experience that because we automatically fill in the blind spot with information surrounding it. We’d freak out and probably fall over if we knew how little we are actually seeing, or how accurately. People put this huge emphasis on being truthful, but our brains are designed to alter reality. We have to tell ourselves lies just to stay on our feet.

  Even with observation being what it is (partial and subjective) I’m still really looking forward to going to Illinois and meeting my dad’s mom, and getting to see the house where he grew up and everything. We’re going in two days. Mark said we should ask Sara if this is all okay with her, but we can’t ask Sara about anything right now, because she is at a Vipassana retreat, and you take a vow of silence at those. She’ll be there for a month, meditating and not speaking. Knowing how to not speak is something most people have to practice, but I think both my parents have it down pretty well.

  • • •

  Luke, who has been typing out the better part of these thoughts, stops typing. It is almost two in the morning. Luke knows he cannot use any of what he has been writing about his father in an essay, but he feels that he has made several declarative statements stating his opinion on things, and that this is more the direction he needs to be moving in.

  Luke is faced now with the problem of what to do with what he has written. He is not entirely comfortable leaving it on his computer, which could be stolen, or lost, or hacked into. This, Luke thinks, would be bad. On the other hand, Luke does not want to erase what he has written, at least not yet, while there is a possibility that one or two sentences might provide something for an actual essay. Luke decides to download the writing onto a disc. He does this. Luke removes the disc from his computer, and erases the writing from the hard drive on his computer. Luke then picks up a pen, and considers how to label the disc in a way that will prevent both theft and accidental listening. After a moment, he writes “Early Harpsichord Music” on it. Surely, Luke thinks, the mathematical probability of the kind of person who would steal a disc being also the kind of person who is an Early Harpsichord enthusiast would be very small. Satisfied, Luke goes to bed.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Mark and I flew into Chicago yesterday. We checked into this really nice hotel and then went to the Natural History Museum for a few hours. When Mark told me this plan he said it was so that we didn’t have to get off a plane and immediately into a car, although we flew first-class which is extremely comfortable. I also offered to do the driving but Mark said, “No, let’s take it easy.” Later, at dinner, I suggested we take one of the late-night architectural tours you can do in Chicago by boat, on the river that runs right through downtown. There was a pamphlet about it in my hotel room.

  “I don’t know anything about architecture,” I said. “But it looks pretty cool.”

  “Actually, I’m sort of … meeting someone here tonight,” Mark said.

  “Oh,” I said. (That’s when I realized why my dad got me my own room, on a different floor from his.)

  “It’s someone I see from time to time,” he said. “When we can.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said. “No problem.”

  “Hey, I can cancel,” Mark said. “Well, not cancel, but push it back till later. That does sound cool.”

  “No, no, it’s okay,” I said. “Maybe we can do it on our way back or something.”

  “Seriously, Luke,” he said. “If it’s important to you …”

  “Hey, I can just go on my own,” I said. “That’s fine with me. I like doing stuff on my own.”

  After dinner, Mark went to his room, and I went to mine. I thought maybe I would just take it easy and read or something, but I was restless. I was also a little pissed, I guess. Anyway, I ended up doing the boat tour, and I’m glad I did. I think that I will make a good solitary tourist someday, because I have an excellent sense of direction, and I don’t have problems talking to strangers. I met a really nice couple from Bangladesh on the boat tour, and they ended up giving me their address and inviting me to their home and everything, if ever I am in Chittagong.

  This morning Mark drove because he said getting out of Chicago was tricky. I didn’t ask him anything about anything. During the drive, we played music and kind of thought our own thoughts. There wasn’t much scenery on the way from the airport to Grover. Basically just really flat fields on either side of the highway.

  Grover itself reminds me of Acton a little bit, if you flattened Acton out. Sort of like Acton on a two-dimensional plane.

  “You are now officially in suburbia,” Mark said, when we entered the town.

  “We seem kind of far away from a big city, though,” I pointed out. “Like if this is a suburb of Chicago, it’s really sub.”

  “It’s super suburbia,” Mark agreed. “It’s über suburbia.”

  “Über-burbia,” I suggested.

  “Über-burbia,” Mark said, nodding. “Well done, my young apprentice.”

  We drove past the hospital where his mom works as a nurse, past a Dairy Queen where Mark worked one summer, and past Grover High School, where he played football and acted in school plays.

  “Yeah, there it is,” he said, as we drove past the high school. “The scene of my troubled youth.”

  “How troubled were you?” I asked.

  “Oh, I had a ton of friends,” he said. “I wasn’t this amazing genius student, like you, but I did okay. I hung out with the jocks in football season, and the drama kids in the spring. You’re gonna see about ten million photo albums at my mom’s of this. Be prepared.”

  The house where Mark grew up is a regular-sized house on a street called Maple, although I haven’t seen any actual maple trees on it. We pulled into the driveway and the front door opened and this really short woman all in pink clothes came out waving both hands and Mark said, “That’s my mom.”

  “What should I call her?” I asked quickly.

  “Everybody calls her Bubbles,” he said, opening the car door. “Hey, Mom.”

  I got out of the car. The woman made a little rush at Mark, sort of bumping his chest with the top of her head, and he tried to catch her by the shoulders, but she had already moved away and turned to me. I wasn’t sure if we were going to hug, or what, so I just tried to stay physically neutral, and she clasped me by the elbows, and sort of flapped my arms up and down while looking me over. “So you’ve found Luke,” Mark said behind her.

  “You’ve found Luke,” she said. “You found Luke, after losing him all these years, you stupid motherfucker.”

  She’s this little tiny thing, this grandmother of mine, and she looks a lot younger than Nana. She doesn’t have any gray hair and she was dressed all in pink, with pink tennis shoes. She is a little bit chubby, or maybe what you might call voluptuous, and what with the arm flapping and her being so much shorter than I am, I found myself, for the second time in my life, sort of confronted with a grandmother’s breasts. Only looking down this time, instead of up, and this grandmother wasn’t naked, which was a relief. I was still taking all this in, along with the fact that she had just called my dad a “stupid motherfucker,” and that I was supposed to call her “Bubbles,” when Bubbles released me and said,

  “Okay, you better come inside before the neighbors all come out and try to take pictures of my movie-star son. Get the bags, Tony.”

  “Careful,” my dad said to me, when we first went into the house, “we are in a knickknack booby trap.”

  �
��I heard that, asshole,” Bubbles said.

  First she gave us a tour of the house. Mark needed the tour too, because he had to see all the improvements. She has a new couch, a new TV, a new TV stand, a new washer and dryer, a new microwave, and a new shoe rack. I’m thinking that my dad must have given her the money for all these things, because after she showed us each item, she would do that head-butting thing at my dad’s chest and say, “That’s my good boy.” And each time my dad would try to grab her shoulders and she would move away. This seems to be the way they embrace each other. There are indeed pictures of my dad all over the house, in frames with fabric or lace around them. Almost everything in Bubbles’s house is trimmed with something, and most surfaces are covered with little figurines. Bubbles has a lot of collections. She has a collection of things that are strawberry themed, and she has a collection of miniature horses. There are groups of china angels, and groups of glass-domed paperweights with skylines of different cities under them. She also seems to like teddy bears, and birds.

  In the hallway, there is a lineup of pictures of my dad, class photos and team photos, stuff like that. I can see from these that when he was my age he wasn’t some big muscle guy at all, he was actually more my size. Bubbles gave me a high-speed caption explanation of each photo:

  “OkaycanyoubelievethisskinnybabyIhadtotiehimdowntocuthis

  hairbrokehisarmfallingoffaswingsetatschoolIalmostsuedthosemoth

  erfuckersandnowhewouldntsmilefortwoyearsbecausehedidntwant

  noonetoseehisbracesokaynowwearesmilingseeandImadeallthecos

  tumesforhisschoolplaysseehetookthisgirltopromshewasatramp.”

  Later we had dinner.

  We sat in Bubbles’s kitchen nook and drank lemonade out of glasses with strawberries printed on them, eating grilled-cheese sandwiches (according to Bubbles, Mark’s favorite food), and talked, sort of. My dad would ask Bubbles how work was going and Bubbles would say something like, “You want see some shit, come to work with me. I got this woman now, whole right side of her body looks like burnt ham. Three kids, husband. Husband is like, What are the options? I’m like, Options? Options are you get in there and tell her you love her, you sack. See, they laid off two of the psych nurses, so there’s nobody to counsel these people but us.” And then Mark and I would say, “Mhmm” or “Wow” and then Bubbles would say, “We all had to take this seminar: sensitivity training, they called it. I’m like, I’ve been a nurse for thirty-five years, you think I need to be more sensitive? Let me tell you something, when the shit goes down, you don’t need to be more sensitive, you need to act right. This guy, he wants to stand out in the hallway while his wife is lying there half dead, and he wants to know if we can skin-graft her back to normal. You think I should be sensitive with this guy? The other day, Nancy got this guy …”