The Point of Vanishing

by Howard Axelrod

  Maybe this is what the Pakistani doctor meant when he’d explained to me that I’d lost binocular stereoscopy, the only means of perceiving depth. He said a normal person uses his eyes in concert: the disparity between the information his two eyes relay to his brain enabling him, by a kind of instant triangulation, to locate objects in space. Without the use of both eyes, a person can no longer perceive depth; he can only judge it with the help of depth cues, the same cues everyone uses instinctively: the size of known objects (bigger when closer), parallax (when you turn your head, objects farther away don’t move as much), and occlusion (if an object is partially blocked, it’s behind the object blocking it). So, the doctor explained, I would probably be able to manage in daily activities, especially as my brain adapted, but I still wouldn’t perceive depth—I wouldn’t have that clear sensation of space, of myself moving through a realm of dimensionality. This change, he said, could prove disorienting for some people.

  And it was. Later that morning, I poured orange juice straight onto the kitchen table, pouring a good two inches in front of the glass. In the bathroom, there was no second bathroom behind my reflection, no space behind me, the whole room just a flat plane like a photograph. I kept wiping at an unsettling white spot on my nose—was it crust that had slid down from the crust sealing my eye?—before realizing the spot was just on the surface of the mirror, just a toothpaste stain. And out my bedroom window, while I was gazing at the Boston skyline trying to gather myself, a horribly enormous black bird blotted out the Hancock building. Its shape was monstrous. It was overtaking the entire tower. I stepped back, flinching. Then I saw. It was just a fly, crawling up the outside of the windowpane.

  Mom and Dad were trying to adjust, too. My third night home, Dad asked at dinner if I wanted to consider pursuing the matter legally.

  “Legally?”

  “It’s just an option. Something to consider.”

  “It wasn’t Peter’s fault.”

  Dad rested his fork on his plate. He looked like he hadn’t been sleeping well. The pouches under his eyes were deeper than usual. “In a legal sense, fault might not be what you think it is. I’d give it some thought if I were you.”

  “It was an accident,” I said.

  “It’s something to consider.”

  “It wasn’t Peter’s fault, Dad. It was no one’s fault. It happened so fast.”

  “I put a call in to Neil Sugarman. He sends his best, by the way.”

  “It just happened. Things like this happen, Dad.”

  Mom gave Dad a look across the table and he fell quiet. The sounds of silverware continued. The meal went on. But the next night at dinner, he brought it up again. When I told him that I appreciated his offer, but there was nothing he could do, he looked stuck. Earlier that evening, when he’d come home from work, he’d given me a get-well card. On the front cover was a photograph of a hound dog wearing Coke-bottle-thick glasses, slumped at the edge of a porch. “Men of Thebes, look upon Oedipus,” Dad’s cramped handwriting began on the blank space inside the card. The quote, I knew, was from Oedipus Rex. We’d studied Sophocles my senior year at Roxbury Latin: Oedipus, unaware of his own identity, kills his father, has sex with his mother, then puts out his own eyes for shame. Dad, who wasn’t very comfortable expressing his emotions, often relied on Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations for important occasions. Maybe he’d thought that something from the classics, especially for his English-major son, would be appropriate. Maybe he had looked up blindness. The lines were the final haunting lesson of the play: “Though Oedipus towered up, most powerful of men, in the end ruin swept over him … let no man, in mankind’s frailty, presume upon his good fortune, until he find life, at his death, a memory without pain.” From “men of Thebes,” I’d read the way a hungover man moves across a room, not wanting to start things spinning. I knew Dad hadn’t read the play and couldn’t have meant to imply that I deserved the accident. I knew, as his note at the bottom said, that he thought the quote was about vulnerability: “Sophocles’ reminder of our vulnerability to mankind’s frailties was exemplified in the starkest of terms this week by your accident. The bizarre and random nature of the event is almost unfathomable. I am so very proud to be your father.” But I also knew nothing in our relationship had prepared us for this conversation—and a shared language wasn’t going to suddenly form now, just because we needed one. The conspiratorial looks we exchanged watching the Celtics on TV, or as Mom launched into another non sequitur at dinner, were nowhere near sufficient for the task. The language we did share had been developed for the way life was, the way life had been. Dad couldn’t help me. And I couldn’t help him to help me, as much as I wanted to.

  “Well, just give it some thought. That’s all I’m asking.” He kept brushing imaginary crumbs from the table. He was a good poker player, but without cards in his hand he was easy to read. Why was I blocking his effort to help me? I changed the subject, told Mom the steak was delicious. She moved the conversation along. Dad was seated to my right, and when I leaned forward, he vanished in my peripheral vision. It was easier that way.

  A few nights later, Peter called. Mom was cooking dinner, and I’d come downstairs for her company. Before dinner had always been one of my favorite times with her. As she dipped chicken in egg yolk or grated carrots for a salad, she existed in a spotlight of her own making, telling stories, making observations, until she couldn’t remember where she’d started, and I’d have to run the conversation back for her like a court stenographer, having been trying the whole time to understand her by the gaps in between, by the jumps of her mind.

  But now she wasn’t talking. The whole week her face had been stricken with the look of a child with urgent news who has been told to keep quiet. For Mom, the world was made of stories. Stories about work, stories about that day’s encounter at Star Market, and even the stories of strangers, which she’d ask about when she could—if a person looked even mildly approachable—and which she’d speculate on when she couldn’t. “There’s a story there,” she’d say, as we left a restaurant or a store, a couple standing in silence. But now she didn’t know what stories to tell or to whom. Years later, she’d admit the period after the accident was the one time in her life she avoided acquaintances at the market: she didn’t want to have to answer questions.

  So when Peter called, I seized the opportunity to shape the story myself. Mom was at the sink, grating carrots with deft flicks of her wrist. She was pretending not to listen to my conversation with Peter. And I was pretending, too. Because it wasn’t really Peter I was talking to, it was her.

  “I’m doing fine. The pain isn’t bad. And listen, Peter, it was no one’s fault. It could have happened to anyone.”

  The other end of the line got quiet. Mom’s hand with the grater remained motionless at the sink. Her effort not to look at me was palpable.

  “Freak accidents happen. And given that this was a freak accident, I’m lucky it wasn’t worse. Not a car accident. You know, something like that. It wasn’t your fault, Peter.”

  He asked when I would be back at school. My right eye was beginning to throb, as though it wanted to speak for itself. The pain had become less concentrated, less like a fist—but it felt like there was a part of me pressed up behind my eye, still trying to look out. I turned slightly away from Mom, towards the window. Keeping my voice level, I told him I’d be back at Adams House by Monday.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “It’s just, I talked to the House Tutor, and he said you could take exams after the summer. You don’t have to rush it.”

  I turned farther towards the window. “It won’t be rushing.”

  “You’re sure? I mean, you looked, you know, pretty roughed up.”

  Anger was seeping through the cracks in my body. It felt like legions of spiders scurrying under my skin. An incitement to riot. Every shadowy, disaffected part of me was being summoned. All the roughnecks were emerging from their caves. They strea
med through my blood with instant, built-in justification—they didn’t come out for nothing.

  I waited, looking out the window at the rhododendron. I couldn’t let Mom see. I let the enormous purple flowers remind me of tennis season, of prom, of bumblebees. Mom couldn’t tell Peter wasn’t talking. I didn’t care if the silence was making him squirm. Finally the militia retreated enough for me to stand my ground. “I feel good, Peter. I can read, I can study. Finals won’t be any problem.”

  He began to say something, but I cut him off. I kept my voice slow. “Thank you so much for calling, Peter.”

  As I hung up the phone, Mom wiped at her eyes with the back of her wrist. A few carrot strips hung from her fingers. She held onto either side of the sink. “I don’t know how you do it,” she said.

  She looked at me with a slowness that was rare for her. In it, there was respect, even surprise. The conversation had gone almost precisely as I wanted. But as I left the kitchen, I felt a strange lightness in my chest. I was not the son Mom was seeing. She believed I had a resiliency I did not have.

  3

  After the rains, they were everywhere—with their intricate, involute shells; their strange, long, wandering antennae. Large snails, small snails, the less glamorous, dark, houseless slugs. An invertebrate invasion. They inched along the rotting wooden beams in the long grass, along the edge of the dirt drive rutted and sheared by the rain’s muddy flow, along the foot of the dilapidated shed. They left their glinting, silvery mucous trails on fallen leaves, on blades of grass—their runic bracelets of slime the only evidence they had actually moved. The slugs tended to group in tiny gangs of three or four, but the snails generally kept to themselves and could be anywhere. I began to admire them. They really were their own houses. I’d pass them in the morning on my walk, and, unlike the squirrels, they never scurried away.

  One particularly raw afternoon, the rain calmed to a slanting drizzle, I went outside and squatted down in the grass. The sky was a wet newspaper, its headlines blurred; even the woodsmoke from the chimney smelled damp. The late fall afternoon had filled the house with a heaviness of waiting. The trees stood bare and forked out the windows, the snow had yet to fall. My daily rituals were what they were. Waking with dawn, tending the fire, making the slow walk up through the trees to the vista that looked out at the mountains. I was getting better at making no sound, better at spying squirrels before they spied me, better at not thinking. My senses were becoming more attuned, attaching me by so many silken threads to the morning light, to the subtle changes in the air, to the movements of the wind and the rain. The echoes of Boston were fading, as though the weeks were miles, as though I was getting farther away. I still had pangs for conversation, especially at night after dinner, but they were becoming less painful, less of an accusation, and more just nostalgia for a different way of life. So much of loneliness, I realized, was social envy, the desire to be included, but with no prospect of being included, that layer of loneliness sifted away. Solitude wasn’t so bad, I told myself. But I also knew these late fall days were a kind of minor league, just preparation for the winter. The squirrels were preparing, thrashing through the leaves and gathering acorns; the trees were preparing, scattering their last leaves to the wind; and I needed to be preparing, too. Not just with a cupboard full of Ramen noodles and wood stacked shoulder high in the garage, but with something else. Patience, maybe. A deeper kind of attention that might endure when there was little but snow to see.

  Which is probably what sent me outside to sit with the snails. The desire to practice, to prepare for winter’s slowness. And the desire to see more—to keep getting closer to something that was real. Or maybe it was just the need for company. The need to be in the same place with another creature, to not be so alone with the barren trees. I assumed my loneliness wouldn’t feel so raw once the snow fell, but I didn’t like waiting.

  Towards the top of the yard, slouching along by the moss at the edge of the birches, I found one. It was dainty. Small and lacquered brown, its blue-grayish body lightly stippled on either side of its shell. Its antennae probed haphazardly, like hands in the dark. When I waved my own hand overhead, they retracted with surprising speed. Two crows drifted by, their wing beats loud and papery. The rain soaked entirely through the seat of my jeans. The antennae reemerged. The snail began to move. Or did it? It seemed headed towards a patch of nearby moss, but who could tell at this speed? I left off studying its shell, the bending of the grass, the painfully slow emission of slime. My only effort was to keep an open gaze, the way I imagined the snail did, absorbing whatever offered itself to my eye. I lasted maybe fifteen seconds. There was so little to see. I tried again. But the snail was barely moving. And I kept hitting some barrier—like the day, or just my brain, wouldn’t let me drop below a certain speed of seeing.

  As I tramped back down to the house, annoyed with myself, as though I had failed our first date, I remembered something from my Psych 1 class in college. We’d read about studies that showed that sighted people have all kinds of blindness. When subjects were flashed an image of an airplane without wings aloft in the sky, they would respond that the plane had wings; when shown a gorilla running through the middle of a basketball game, they would respond that there’d been no gorilla. Even more amazing, when an experimenter ducked behind a desk—in a show of looking for papers—and a different experimenter stood up in his place, subjects didn’t notice that the person had changed. Not only did their brains fill in the wings, remove the gorilla, and see the new experimenter as being the same as the old, but they also had no doubt they knew exactly what they had seen. I’d loved reading about those studies senior year, loved knowing that people were missing out on a hard and fast reality, just as I was. Everyone’s reality was a construction of their brain. Sometimes I even thought I saw more than most people, simply because I’d become aware there was so much I wasn’t seeing. If everyone’s reality included blind spots, if that was simply the nature of perception, and my own perception was constantly being reminded of its blind spots, wasn’t I seeing a little more than most? It was a comfort to think I hadn’t only lost something—to think I’d been given a way of seeing, or not seeing, that was potentially profound, if only I could figure out how to use it.

  But remembering all this didn’t help with the snails. Day after day, soggy pants after soggy pants, I tromped up into the grass to try again. I didn’t just want to be aware of what I wasn’t seeing—I wanted to see more. To be aware of the gaps, the blind spots, and to see into them. But I wasn’t getting very far. I could last about five minutes without wavering from a kind of smooth attention, then maybe seven minutes, maybe even ten. But at some point I always hit a wall. My mind would start to wander. I’d think about lunch or about the wind. The snail would be probing away as patiently as ever. I’d rejoin him for a few minutes, but my focus would drift off again. I couldn’t stay with him, couldn’t keep pace with the slowness. The snail kept beating me. And I found myself getting frustrated, feeling the size of my foot as I stood up, the angry speed waiting in my legs.

  One chill morning, the sun sliding out and silvering the puddles in the road, I decided to go for a bike ride, only my second since I’d moved in. Snow wasn’t too far off, and I wanted to get a little exercise while I could, to feel myself moving. The muddy ruts wound past the meadow, straightened alongside the open field, and faded in the slow rolls beneath the canopy of branches. With each sharp wind, the branches let loose brief, shimmering showers, like a woman shaking out her hair. It was good to be propelling myself forward, good to smell the ferns and the wet rocks, good to feel my blood moving in my veins. I’d grown so accustomed to walking speed that now riding speed felt wildly fast. The wet dirt sucked at the tires, a thin spray of mud pinwheeled up onto my hands. I felt like I was absorbing the world with my face. I pedaled faster, picking up speed on the downhill slope, when up ahead, right in the middle of the road, between two muddy puddles, I saw the largest snail I’d ever seen. Its she
ll had to be the size of my fist. Its body stretched out on either side of it. It was right in the middle of the road, right in the middle of my path. My speed felt so good. I knew I should turn the handlebars, but my hands were not turning the handlebars. The signal from my brain was growing weaker. My body was growing in strength. My leg muscles were singing and I pedaled harder. I crushed the snail’s shell with the front tire and crushed it again with the back. The crackling was loud and thrilling. Blood rushed to my face as I sped up the far side of the rise. I felt fast, cruel, powerful. Guilty and relieved. I felt human.