by Hoang, Jamie
No answer.
My paintings were an unfinished legacy—an image only partially complete. I hadn’t yet reached my full potential, but deep down I knew my days wielding a paintbrush were almost over.
“If I believed in you, would you give me back my eyesight?” I asked aloud. His expression remained stone cold and I badly wanted to punch the rock he was made of to get him to look down at me, to pay attention, because I was losing it.
I moved toward him, tears already running down my face, and when I reached the dark plinth upon which he stood, I pressed my body to the stone. With my cheek flush against the cool surface and my hand balled into a fist, I cried.
My sobs were manic. I couldn’t breathe, it hurt so badly. Pressing my forehead to the platform, I looked to the ground, afraid to make eye contact with anyone. I knew they could see me, but I ceased to care. Exhaustion outweighed embarrassment, and I just couldn’t be strong anymore.
I didn’t want to go blind. I didn’t want to go home. I wasn’t ready for any of the changes that were coming my way. And I didn’t want to be alone. Darkness had emerged as a phobia, which I had no choice but to cope with. The tears had blurred my vision completely, so I didn’t see the hand that reached across me, gently guiding my cement-indented forehead into his chest. Jeff pulled me into his arms and hugged me tighter than he had ever hugged me before. I was still sobbing heavily and my body must have given way, because he turned around and leaned against the wall for support.
When my breathing finally slowed to normal pace, he stroked my hair and said, “You’re gonna be okay.”
“I need to sit,” was all I could muster. Jeff guided me to the side, out of the pathway of tourists who no doubt wanted to take photos of Jesus without the hysterical girl crying in front of it. A few women handed me handkerchiefs and napkins, nodding in understanding as they moved past me. It wasn’t until later that I realized they must’ve thought the tears were the result of my being in presence of Jesus Christ. Too bad Jesus was about as real to me as Santa Claus. I admired those who could trust so completely in someone who felt the need to constantly test them and who time and again disappointed them. Of course, many could argue that perhaps my disease was a direct result of not believing.
Without letting me go, which I was grateful for because I might’ve just fallen, Jeff slid with me to the ground.
He sat with me in silence, and I cried for a long time. The uncontrollable repetition of hysterical breathing calmed to a few sharp intakes of air, followed by longer inhales and exhales, until finally I sounded normal again.
“Thanks,” I cracked.
He didn’t say anything. Instead, he hugged me tight and kissed the top of my head.
When we finally stood up, I leaned over the edge to look at the sprawling city beneath us, and Jeff stood beside me with his arm ever-so-slightly grazing mine.
Agreeing that Jesus was probably strategically placed facing the best vantage point, we scouted for a spot directly in front of him. When a little girl, her parents, and her grandma vacated a space, we slid in. I scanned the landscape by literally turning my body 360 degrees in place. The topography seemed to be a kind of paradise with beautiful beaches on one side and huge mountain ranges just beyond the sprawling city. Corcovado Mountain was the tallest point around, so the panoramic view was crisp and unobstructed, save for the statue of Jesus himself. Directly beneath, green foliage spilled down the mountainside and expanded to the smaller mountains nearby. In between the pointed ridges of green lay the city. White and gray buildings covered every flat section of Rio’s terrain, making it one of the most beautiful areas of industry.
Directly in front of us was the Atlantic Ocean, and the sun behind us cast an orange glow over the darkening horizon. I didn’t know which God I was praying to, but as I studied the landscape, I silently begged for a miracle cure.
The morning before our flight home, I painted my last piece: my eyes. I had to look in the mirror while doing this, because they were pretty nondescript. They were neither beautiful nor ugly, and because of this I hardly paid attention to their detail. People always said that the eyes were the windows into the soul, but I was hoping to paint a window into the world. Like the Mona Lisa, my eyes connected back to the viewer. I wanted to have a conversation with my audience. I wasn’t known for being a minimalist painter, so I had to resist the urge to paint the beautiful things I’d seen around the eyes. Seeing Black would be my most simplistic and bold painting to date.
The darkness was an allusion to the Rothko Chapel in Houston. As the place where my imagination first began to flourish, it was a nice bookend to my career. Designed by Mark Rothko in 1964, it was an octagonal room with dark canvases painted in dark colors, ranging from deep black to velvety purple, covering the walls. A sacred space, a sanctuary for people of all beliefs, the room was used for everything from personal meditation to small church services. It was the only place I’d ever been that gave me insight into the world using only the knowledge I already possessed in my mind.
My dad took me there when I was young because he liked the Broken Obelisk sculpture that sat in the open plaza in front of the Chapel. I regret never asking if he knew that the sculpture was dedicated to Martin Luther King, Jr. as a symbol of his broken dream after he was assassinated. As a kid I never thought much about the problems that plagued my parents. I wondered if he came there to ruminate on the difficulties of his job, marriage, or even dealing with me. It was also possible that he may have just enjoyed how its structure challenged him mathematically. The obelisk, snapped in half like a broken pencil, stood upside down so that its tip met the zenith of a pyramid. Two points of minimal substance met in a geometrically impossible center. It looked like an optical illusion, yet there it was in all of its dimensions.
My dad didn’t much care for the Chapel, but because I loved it so much he would sit with me for as long as I wanted. He and I probably visited the room a hundred times, but my most vivid memory was when I was six years old. It was a week after my sixth birthday and I was mad because he and my mom wouldn’t let me have a bounce house at my party. I was so angry with them that I didn’t speak for four days. He took me to the Chapel knowing I wouldn’t be able to contain myself, and that I’d want to talk, as I always did when we visited my favorite place. Begrudgingly, I sat down next to him and watched as the sneaker he had crossed over his knee bounced up and down while he patiently waited for me to give in.
We sat there for what seemed like hours but was probably only fifteen minutes. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and I stood up on the bench to press my small hands against his eyelids. “Daddy, what do you see?” I whispered.
My fingers, which now rested on my thighs as I waited for the paint to dry, tingled at the memory. I didn’t know the chapel was a place of prayer or meditation—I honestly thought we were supposed to stare at it and then close our eyes and see images. I thought it was a game. “I see a unicorn standing in front a waterfall. What do you see?” I urged.
He paused for effect and then replied, “I see my daughter growing up too fast.”
“Am I pretty?” I asked him, taking his words literally. I thought he could see the future.
“The fairest in all the land,” he smiled, looking back at me as I dropped my hands from his face.
I remembered feeling relieved, as if being beautiful were tantamount to my success in the future.
I noticed a few places where the white canvas beneath peeked though the black and I added touch-up strokes.
“That’s creepy-looking,” Jeff said, coming up behind me.
“And you wonder why I disregard your artistic opinions,” I replied, still analyzing the black.
He took a seat across from me on our balcony overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and said nothing for a long while. The impending journey home was uncertain for both of us, and I think we found ourselves reveling with nostalgia at the difference six weeks had made in our lives. I appreciated what the path represented
and I thought Jeff grew in many ways on this journey as well, but he was such a private person it was hard to guess what changed for him, if anything at all.
Picking up my iPod, which was resting on the table beside me, he asked, “What have you been listening to this entire time anyway?”
I looked up at him. “What do you think?”
“Tupac, Eminem, Kanye...”
I laughed, “Kanye actually did pop up, but it was mostly random. I don’t believe in God or love, but I do believe in the art of music shuffling.”
“The art of music shuffling? That sounds like some sort of Venice hippie bullshit.”
“Oh come on. You know what I’m talking about. You’ll be feeling so shitty and having the worst day, and then the perfect tune comes on the radio and makes you burst into song.”
“I never burst into song, but yes, I know what you’re talking about.”
“There you go,” I said. There was nothing new age or hippie about it.
“Then by default you believe in fate.”
“I believe in real fate, not the ideal one. Things happen that we can’t control, but I don’t think everything happens for a reason. They just happen,” I corrected.
“You’re a pessimistic fateist.”
I laughed, “If that’s a real thing, then yes, I guess I am.”
Our final descent into Los Angeles was surreal. From my window I could see familiar landmarks like the 405 freeway, the Santa Monica Pier, high rises clustered all along Wilshire Boulevard, Venice Beach…home. A mixture of relief and fear gripped me as the wheels of our plane hit the tarmac. My journey around the world was over.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Acceptance
“WOOF,” Tig barked.
“I know, I know,” I whispered. “Gotta work on the whole getting up thing.” I blinked my eyes, waiting for the small amount of light that I could still see to surface, but there was nothing. Dr. Rostin’s estimation of how long it would take for complete blindness to set in was wrong by about six weeks. Considered legally blind at eight weeks, I had my license revoked two weeks after returning from Brazil. I had been seeing virtually nothing for about a week, so the fact that today was the day I lost all ability to see was inconsequential.
The physical act of going blind was less dramatic than I had anticipated. What began in Italy continued gradually as my field of vision became smaller and smaller, like looking through a set of binoculars as the objective lens shrank little by little. Tig’s trainer, Tracy, had a cousin with Glaucoma, who described it as being able to see a paperclip clear across the room but tripping over the elephant in front of you trying to get to it. He was spot on. I thought it would be like clicking through a View-Master, except that every day the images would become progressively blurrier until eventually the blur turned to black. Instead, I had remarkably clear but narrow vision in the final few weeks. Depth perception, or lack thereof, was the root of my frustration—nothing was safe around me. I tripped or bumped into furniture, walls, signposts, newspaper boxes, and people—the latter being the least forgiving.
Falling off my bed was a morning ritual I didn’t bother to adjust. For some reason, I liked the physical jolt of falling, which separated my dream state from reality every morning. Two and a half months after making my way from Rio to Los Angeles, I had only just begun to figure out a system for my tiny studio apartment. But the place was a mess. I knew this not because I could see it, but because I couldn’t recall the last time I’d put anything away. Luckily I ate prepared foods with paper plates and plastic silverware, so at the very least the place didn’t smell. And, somehow, I usually knew where I’d last left things.
I knew that on my nightstand was a postcard of the Kemah Boardwalk from 1997—a memento of my weeklong visit to Houston shortly after returning from Brazil. Sorting out my parents’ affairs wasn’t something I could put off any longer. So, I was back for only three days before booking a ticket home.
I stood on the front lawn of my house, thinking it was smaller than I remembered. A quaint, one-story home with three bedrooms and a study held all of my adolescent memories. Almost as soon as I entered, my mind became inundated with them. I noticed, hidden at the foot of the couch, the wine stain from a glass knocked over when I was eight. They were watching a scary movie, my mom’s favorite genre, when I came running out of my room shrieking at the noises I heard. Just like the stupid characters in the horror movies who headed toward danger instead of away from it, I walked in on someone’s finger being severed off with a butcher knife. Never again would I sleep with my fingers and toes anywhere but neatly tucked beneath the blanket. My mom wasn’t thrilled about the stain, but it did earn me two weeks of sleeping between them in their king size bed.
Perpendicular to the couch on the wall closest to the door was the space they designated “Aubrey’s coloring area.” The second I learned to walk, they surmised that they couldn’t keep me from marking up the walls, so they decided to give me one and hope I’d stay confined to it. Oddly enough, for the most part, I did.
I was obsessed with the color green, though I can’t remember why, so almost all of the drawings were in varying shades of lime green, blue-green, green, and neon green. I remember hogging—and stealing—the green crayons from preschool because I loved the color so much. The wall was a four-year-old’s version of the view from our backyard porch. Perspective and proportions were completely out of whack, but my parents loved that wall. When I got older they punished me by refusing to paint over it, even though they knew it embarrassed me to have my friends see it.
“You should’ve thought about that before you went decorating our walls,” my mom would smirk.
I stood in the doorway remembering my mom and dad like characters in a movie. While my mom cooked, my dad would sit on the sofa reading some boring analysis of angles in relation to pressure and how it affected the structural integrity of whatever. When he got stuck, they would orally work out the answers to complicated math equations while I colored the wall. Had I not been the spitting image of the both of them combined, they probably would’ve gone back to check to see if I’d been switched at birth.
On a Tuesday afternoon, while I was waiting for a 3:00 p.m. meeting with my parents’ attorney, Eli, I stopped in at my favorite vintage store, Miss Daisy’s Shoebox. Thumbing through the postcards, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I had been to many of the destinations on the cards: the Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, Colosseum, Venice Beach, San Diego, the Hollywood sign, and Kemah.
I stopped.
It was a photo of the Kemah Boardwalk circa the 1990s and to the left of the frame, standing in line to buy ice cream, was Jeff and me at the age of twelve.
Our backs were turned away from the camera but I recognized my iron-on “peace” and “love” patches glued to the back pockets of my French-rolled jeans. Almost as a reflex, I jammed the card back into the stack only to instantly regret letting it go. My hands shook and my breathing accelerated as I searched for a couple of minutes before finding it again. The message on the back read: A beautiful Spring day in Kemah. Wish you were here..., and it was sent to a Gunnar White in Nashville on March 11, 1997.
Finding the postcard was like finding a piece of home, and it was one of only a few things I brought back with me before putting my parents’ house up for sale.
I had gotten several voicemails from Jeff since I’d returned. In them he said he missed me and asked if we could have dinner or even just grab a coffee, but I ignored the messages. Things were difficult enough without his added complication.
Knock knock. Michael was at the door.
“Just a minute,” I yelled, reaching for my walking stick and purple cotton robe, both of which hung at the edge of my bed. I felt ridiculous using Tig inside my tiny apartment, so even though I had dozens of bruises from running into furniture and door jams, I stubbornly guided myself to the door.
“Hi Michael,” I said as I let him in.
“How did you kno
w it was me?” he asked, taking my hand and leading me to the sofa. I heard the door close a few seconds later.
“Because you’re the only person crazy enough to come to my apartment at 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday,” I replied.
“I really wish you’d let me get you a maid.”
“Is it that bad?” I asked. “I woke up this morning with every intention of cleaning.”
“To be honest, I’ve seen worse, but that’s not the point. You really should let us hire you some help,” he said, his voice having moved away from me. I heard the refrigerator door open and close, then the freezer door, followed by footsteps walking back toward me. “Water and gelato. No wonder you’re so thin,” he said. I had lost a significant amount of weight, fifteen pounds, which was easily noticeable on my 5’2” frame, but it wasn’t for lack of food.
“I was never big on cooking,” I said, as if that explained the empty shelves in the pantry and fridge.
“I brought you three different dresses,” he said, laying them across my lap. “Try them on. Oh, and there was a box on your doorstep so I slid it in, it’s on the right side of the coffee table, okay?”
“Thanks,” I said.
My gallery opening was less than four months away and I was in a perfect state of denial. How had the last few months passed so quickly? When I agreed to have the opening I had just come back from Brazil, and I was certain that by March I would have my life organized. But being organized was the least of my problems.
Every day was a new adjustment. Things like dressing myself and taking a shower were a Sherlock Holmes investigation of feeling my way around my clothes for unique details and recognizing the bottle shapes of shampoo vs. conditioner. I did my best to feel for the seams on clothes but often wore tank tops inside out.
