“So I just slipped the guy a fin…”
I get shivers.
I call Anneliese nearly every night, although most times we keep the conversation short. We are developing a counterintuitive theory that long phone talks during periods of separation tend to fray more than they bind. You have two people, both executing the responsibilities of the day, each quite understandably focused on the view from their respective perspective, and if the conversation goes on too long, a subtle one-upmanship emerges in which each person attempts to prove to the other that life on this end of the phone is no bed of begonias, either, and before you know it, long-distance pillow talk becomes an interruptive and blameful downer. Perhaps one day I will recant, but for now I vote for short phone calls. I do try to drop a sweet note in the mail here and there. Raised by a sometimes-single mother who climbed poles and strung telephone wire for a living, and having been a single mom herself for three years now, Anneliese is not given to pining over the tenor of my angst as I gaze out a hotel room overlooking San Francisco or order room service in Albany.
But gosh, it lifts my heart to hear her voice.
Three years ago this month, I was walking across a plowed field beneath clear skies when a shadow fell across my left eye. At first I thought it was a prodigious floater. I blinked hard and rolled my eyes, but the shadow remained. There were no symptoms—no dizziness, no headache—so I chalked it up to some trick of light and continued walking. Half an hour later, while trying to read a book while perched in a deer blind, the dark shape kept sliding on and off the page. It eased through the periphery of my vision, only to dart away when I tried to pin it. I could study it best when I gazed up and off to the left, in the manner of a boy caught looking at a pretty girl at the coffee shop. After some time, I could make out that the black spot had a shape: a fuzzy-edged delta of darkness, growing from a narrow point, then widening in a slight curve before squaring off at the edge of my visual field. The wedge shape made me nervous. It reminded me of the visual field cuts I saw diagrammed during nursing classes on stroke. I hiked out of the woods at sunset. It was a Sunday, so I called a friend who worked in a hospital emergency room. She in turn referred me to an ophthalmologist acquaintance. He was carving jack-o-lanterns for his grandchildren when I called, but said he would see me.
It was contextually otherworldly to follow Dr. Olson into the dark, empty clinic as he flipped the lights on and led me down the hall into an examining room. I was worried about my eye, but found the examination process strangely comforting. For one thing, in times of uncertainty we always like to place ourselves in the hands of someone with knowledge, and Dr. Olson is trim and apt and conversational. He seated me in a comfortable chair with an adjustable footrest. We did the standard vision test, the letters on the wall, which always transports me to grade school when they test your eyes. I passed. He had me stare at a copy of the Amsler Recording Chart, which is basically on the order of graph paper. By closing my right eye and staring at the chart with my left, I could trace the darkened area with my finger to give Dr. Olson an idea of the shape and extent of the affected area. He gave me my own copy of the chart to take home and told me I should check over the next few days to make sure the shape wasn’t growing. Then he put drops in my affected eye and killed all but the ambient light. While we waited for my iris to dilate, we talked about Wisconsin Badgers football games and Manhattan and pumpkins. The mood was relaxed and intimate, like a candlelight dinner. When it came time for him to peer inside my eye, the world narrowed down to the BB-sized point of light burning in the aperture of the opthalmoscope, and all of it at the center of the still, silent clinic. Everything but the light was muted. There was something of peace and clarity.
Dr. Olson said there wasn’t much to see in there, just a tiny whitish spot at the confluence of an artery no bigger than a thread. A lesion, he called it. The good news was there was no bleeding, no reason for me to be rushed off to surgery, no sign of a tumor or otherwise. The bad news, which Dr. Olson gave me straight up, was that the black patch was likely there for good. There was a shot that peripheral circulation might restore some of the vision over time, but this was unlikely. He would want me to come in tomorrow during regular hours so he could do a full battery of tests, but for now I could go home.
At some level, all one-eyed people are mystic, if for no other reason than they quite literally see things differently than the general mass of us. Jim Harrison lost the sight in his left eye at age seven when a little girl stabbed him with a bottle, or that’s one version. The blind eye figures regularly but not obtrusively in his novels, plays, and essays. I came to Harrison embarrassingly late, first reading him sometime around 1995. Every day since, I have tuned to his key and tried to write a line he might find credible. Relevantly or not, I find the best stuff tends to come sometime around two or three in the morning, when my left eye—lazy for years—droops closed and I just leave it shut.
Perhaps as a result of living one stick-poke removed from total blindness, monocular characters tend—in conversation and comportment—to convey an equanimous blend of fatalism and exuberance. I own a little patch of land next to a farmer and part-time trucker named Jerome. Jerome lost the sight in his left eye the year he turned sixty. He’s getting treatments to restore full vision, but they have been ineffective and the eye is paining him. “I told the doc, ‘Just yank’er out!’” says Jerome, slapping a pair of pliers resting in a worn leather holster he keeps threaded on his belt. He moves with the barrel-chested stiffness of a man who has spent decades bulling his way through hard luck, boulder-studded fields, plummeting milk prices, and damn government shysters, all the while keeping things together with a pair of pliers. I’ve known Jerome for a while now, and I believe him about yanking the eye, because last year he swiveled a quarter turn to get his good one on me and then shared his creed: “Mike, I pay my bills and treat people square…but now and then you gotta do something just to keep’em wondering.”
Hank Carhart would agree. Hank is one of those small, lean, roughneck-looking kinds of guys whose two main possessions are a motorcycle and a dog. You see him and you think bar fight. Hank is a one-eyed land surveyor. There’s a good joke there somewhere. When he was a kid the neighbor kid shot him in the right eye with a BB gun. “Just like Mom told ya, ‘Be careful with that thing, you’ll put somebody’s eye out!’” he says, blowing cigarette smoke and laughing at his own joke. “It was like that Christmas movie where the kid catches one in the glasses…I peeked out from behind the tree and took one in the looker.” He quickly adds, “I was shootin’ at him, too, so it was legit.” Code of the West.
On the advice of doctors, Hank kept the sightless eyeball in its socket, but by his mid-thirties it was giving him nonstop headaches, so he had it plucked. “Enucleation,” he says. “I asked my doctor what we were lookin’ at for a time frame, and he said, ‘Well, I can’t get you in today,’ like it was a haircut, man!” After the eye was out, Hank wore an eye patch, but not for long. “It attracted freaky chicks,” he says. “Freaky chicks and freaky people in general. The patch is a total weirdo magnet.” Once a complete stranger asked for a peek. “I told him, man, you’re the kind of sick fuck who would come up to a guy with a wooden leg and ask him to dance!” These days Hank wears tinted glasses (“Mostly to protect my good eye”) and lets people gawk. As for myself, I once bought a patch at Walgreens, intending to wear it while writing and thus strengthen my lazy eye, but I have not been stringent and will be lucky if I can find the patch come Halloween or freaky chicks.
I intend, by the way, that the one-eyed category include the esotropic. It is the great curse of cross-eyed people that a convergent gaze tends to serve as the international symbol of comedy. Arraigned with Jerry Lewis I will plead guilty on that count. If, in a moment of levity, I am moved to pull a face, I tend in nearly all circumstances to stick out my tongue and cross my eyes. Perhaps cavemen did the same. What a burden it must be for a cross-eyed man to project solemnity. As an aside,
I must confide I have long harbored an absurd jones for slightly cross-eyed women. I find the look vulnerable and specifically foxy. Think Karen Black and Barbra Streisand, circa 1970s (circa 1970s being pretty much implied by my use of the term foxy). I once dated a woman who went faintly cross-eyed whenever I leaned in for a kiss. My heart would melt. Until this very moment, it never occurred to me that the reaction may have been symptomatic of my presence or the angle of attack. I would never attempt to kiss my neighbor Bob the One-Eyed Beagle, but I have studied him closely and believe he has special powers, if only because he is a cross-eyed butcher with ten fingers. That, and he regularly says things like “That woman was hotter than bumblebees in a tuna can,” which qualifies him as mystic in my book.
The morning following my initial exam with Dr. Olson, I returned to the clinic for a complete workup. On the drive down, I kept chasing the shadow across the windshield. It wasn’t your standard pie-shaped wedge. It had more of a wave to it. Kind of a fat longhorn shape.
Unlike the secret hideout of last night, I arrived to a well-lit waiting room filled with people. Most of the patients were thirty years older than I. I reported in, sat down with a magazine, and got immediately bugged by the shadow skittering back and forth on the page. I was experiencing the standard feelings of fragility and petulance precipitated when life taps our knuckles with the hard wooden ruler of mortality. Evidence of our impermanence is available on a moment-to-moment basis, and yet we constantly deny it. Two days ago, on Saturday, in that same deer stand, I had looked up from my book into the gray hardwoods and was struck by the astounding passivity of vision, how all the available light—even when presented in the limited chromatics supplied by a grove of leafless trees—floods through our cornea to be transduced and painted on the brain. I contemplated this and made some notes toward an essay on the wonders of vision, then discarded the idea as trite. It was a dose for both the romantic and the ironist in me when less than twenty-four hours later, that vision became corrupted.
For the first test of the day, I went to a small room, put my chin in a cup, and peered into a machine that tested my visual fields. Once I was positioned, I was given a little handheld clicker and the lights were turned out. The device flashes pinpricks of light throughout the range of your visual field. When you see a flash, you are to click the clicker. It’s soothing at first, to be in another dark quiet place, peering into a miniature planetarium, but it seems the stars are wired to one of those switches they use for intermittent Christmas lights. Before long, you begin to doubt yourself, triggering the switch and then wondering if you just clicked a floater. Your eyes dry out and you don’t blink for the fear of missing another peekaboo constellation. But it’s nice and quiet in there. When I finished and came back into the light, Dr. Olson put dilating drops in each eye and sent me back to sit in the waiting room.
I gotta say I enjoyed the eye drops. I wrote some lines on a piece of white paper while waiting for them to take effect. At first, I could fight back, bring the line into focus as it began to blur. Then the black line began to break apart into what looked like 3-D layers of black, yellow, and red yarn. I took out my notebook and wrote a sentence in looping cursive and couldn’t distinguish between the letters. Everything became fat and prismatic. Outside it was raining, and I could hear the hissing tires of traffic passing by the clinic. All those people on their miscellaneous errands, and it struck me as it has before that the first thing you crave when your health is threatened is the carelessness of mundane days. A white blur of a woman at the front of the waiting room leaned through the doorway and said, “Michael?” and I gathered my things, but by the time I got to the doorway, she was leaving the room with an old man. An old lady crept past me with her walker and when she got to the window the receptionist pitched her voice higher and spoke louder and slower, which indeed the old woman might have appreciated, but I found grating. I fear I will not age well and, given a walker, may use it as a weapon.
The next “Michael?” was for me, and soon a woman was taking pictures of the inside of my eyeball, which, if I may say so, is the aural equivalent of stuffing lit firecrackers in your ears. The light hits you like a physical blow, wham, wham, wham.
When I finally made it to the examining room and a figure strode in claiming to be Dr. Olson, my eyes were so blasted I just had to take his word for it. He said the photographs had pretty much reinforced what he saw previously with the opthalmoscope, that the blanched patch at the arterial junction remained but had not worsened. He said the visual field test confirmed the blind spot but revealed nothing else unusual. He says, all in all, my right eye appeared to be a little better than my left, but that’s as it always has been. When he called in his partner for a look and a consult, it was apparent they were both baffled. “We both agree that you have had a vascular incident,” says Dr. Olson. “Something has occurred to disrupt the blood flow at the point where the white lesion is located. What isn’t clear is why or how. The white spot looks like it might have been there for a long time, but the rapid onset of your blind spot doesn’t jive with slower infections or an edematous process. We call this sort of indeterminate problem a ‘tweener.’” (A few years later, when I had a kidney stone, the ER doc looked at the CT scan and declared that it, too, was a “tweener.” Those folks at the American Medical Association are slacking off.) He went on to say the injury was consistent with something acute, the lesion with something more long-term. “Whether the stricture occurred as a result of the artery swelling or growing closed or from a clot or other object becoming lodged isn’t clear.”
The bottom line? Apparently something had floated down my bloodstream and parked in one of the teensy arteries that feed the light-sensitive back wall of my eyeball. The cells died, and the black wedge was there for good. The doc’s diagnosis: “Branch retinal artery occlusion with visual field defect.” After scheduling me for blood tests and an ultrasound and echocardiogram to rule out a stroke and other problems, he sent me on my way, and I set about the business of learning to ignore the fact that my vision would be heretofore obscured by a silhouette in the distorted shape of a Nabisco Bugles snack.
Before I set off on book tour, we taped a plastic wall map of the United States to Amy’s bedroom wall. She is usually long asleep by the time I get free to call, but every night before bedtime stories, Anneliese helps her track my progress with an erasable marker. At three and a half years old, it’s tough to tell what her interpretation of all this might be, but we hope it gives her some sense of why I am away.
In Oakland, I attend a release event for the book Quirkyalone, and pick up a free T-shirt for Anneliese. She and I have discussed this Quirkyalone thing before, because we are both taken by author Sasha Cagen’s definition of Quirkyalone as “a person who enjoys being single (but is not opposed to being in a relationship) and generally prefers to be alone rather than in a couple.” I have often foundered when people have accused me of fearing or despising commitment. On the contrary, I can look to any number of couples in my life (my parents first among them) who have the sort of relationship to which I aspire—but these aspirations have never overridden my enjoyment of solitude and independence. Cagen says Quirkyalone is not anti-love, it is pro-love. It is not anti-dating, it is anti-compulsory dating. Anneliese and I have discovered that in the months prior to our meeting, we were both nosing around online dating services, but not making a move. We were both looking and even longing, but neither of us could muster a sense of desperation, blessed as we were with full lives and good friends. Everything gets turned into a sweepstakes. Society is always trying to sell you tickets. “You’ll be a lonely old man,” people have told me. Maybe, I say. Or maybe I’ll be delighted with my freedom. I have been through the standard convulsions of love—swept up, swept away, swept under. I have, at times, wept at the thought of separation. Other times I couldn’t wait to get away. I have lain in the dark wondering how I will ever be happy again. But in time, I always was happy again, each heartbreak reduced to
layers of thin veneer, or, in the tougher instances, a carbonaceous little ball to be left alone in the deepest recesses of the gut. The lesson seemed to be, take happiness as it comes, don’t try to get it cornered or run it down from behind.
As far as I can see, the main drawback to this Quirkyalone business, is, well, designating yourself “quirky.” I am reminded of a passage in the book Gridlock, by Ben Elton, in which he writes that people who put a sticker on their computer “amusingly proclaiming” that “You don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps” are guaranteed to be “dull, dependable and sane as a pair of corduroy trousers.”
I spend most of my West Coast time alone, chauffeuring myself around in a rental car. I was delighted at one point to find myself hammering down Highway 101 on my way to San Mateo when AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll)” came on the radio. When the bagpipe solo cut loose, I kicked that Hertz Mazda up another ten miles an hour.
After California, I fly to Seattle. Then Portland, Oregon. Then Denver. I’m not big on flying. My palms get sweaty and my chest gets light with every takeoff and stratospheric bump. I’ve read the statistics on flying versus driving but my adrenal glands aren’t buying it. This morning as I packed at 4:00 A.M. before catching a taxi to the airport, I turned on the television and caught a documentary about the Red Baron. This struck me as inappropriate preflight viewing. Once while waiting in the boarding lounge before flying out on a writing assignment, I opened a magazine to the first page of a comprehensive postmortem piece on the crash of ValuJet Flight 592. I set it aside and boarded the plane only to find the fellow seated ahead of me holding a newspaper open high and wide to a full-page spread documenting the crash of Swissair Flight 111.
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