by Andrew Potok
Late one evening, Linda took me out for an unplanned, unusual lesson. In her car, I put my blindfold on, and we tore away on a crazy circumnavigation of Newton and environs. The screechy, jerky, hairpinned ride, plowing in and out of driveways, going round and round in parking lots, was meant to thoroughly confuse my sense of direction and orientation, which it did. Linda stopped at a curb on some silent street, opened the door, and said: “See you at the shoe-repair place. It’s open late tonight.” Then the sound of her speeding car faded into silence. I was Amundsen nearing the South Pole, Columbus on a starless night. I stood for a while and listened hard. What had at first been silence became the very muted hum of continuous traffic. I took it to be the Mass. Turnpike and decided to make that my temporary goal. After four or five blocks, the noise of the pike was joined by the noise of a street with stoplights. I heard cars whine to a halt, then, all together, start again. I knew I wasn’t far from the shops. A few more blocks, and I heard the small tack hammer and grinder; I smelled the waxes, the resins and polishes. A Crusader, I had found Jerusalem on the first try.
Since St. Paul’s, I’d hardly used my cane.
Inside Chalk Farm station, I stopped by the news seller who was untying bundles of papers. It was still not cane time, I decided. But it did occur to me to run back, get Charlotte out of bed, and make this trip on her arm again. Standing there, my eyes adapting a little, I saw the overhead lights, people’s shadowy movements, and I heard the sound of the space. Walking ahead, I saw a hint of a vertical rhythm, which I interpreted as the stair railing. I went toward these descending stairs, which I fear as much as a foggy landing at O’Hare airport. As the soles of my shoes balanced precariously on the top step, I felt as giddy as when I think of the man who walked a tightrope one morning between the towers of the World Trade Center. But once the top step is under control, the rest are no problem. I went down quickly, making up lost time.
A long, windy passage and another flight of stairs still separated me from the platform. I heard feet echoing in the vaulted tunnel and felt totally disoriented. I took out the cane and unfurled it into its full, extended position. I saw the faint glimmer of tracks below, through an arched opening that made no spatial sense to me. I began to walk, tap left, tap right, the metal cane ringing plink, plink, as two women with shopping bags walked by me. They turned up the circular stairs and their voices, amplified by the cavernous space, floated easily down. “Why don’t they keep these people off the streets?” one of them asked the other. “Don’t they have nice clubs of their own?” When I reached the platform, I put away as inconspicuously as I could the most conspicuous object I have ever known. I hated it! With it, I had become the stuff of people’s nightmares.
Before St. Paul’s, on one of my frequent trips to New York, I ambled over to the Lighthouse to look at a white cane close up. I bought a newspaper lest I should be confused with a blind man. In an upstairs room where canes were dispensed, I asked for one.
“Is it for you?” the lady asked. I didn’t understand why she suspected.
“For me? Of course not,” I chuckled. “No, not for me.”
“We need to know the person’s size,” she said.
“It’s for a friend, a blind friend . . . about my size,” I said.
When she handed it to me, I couldn’t believe its extraordinary length. It stretched from the floor to just under my chin. How am I going to get this goddamn thing home? I thought.
I took it to my mother’s apartment on Fifty-seventh Street, carrying it like a body splint, under my coat. Its neon whiteness and screaming red tip stuck out underneath and made me walk stiffly, with a slight tilt. The doorman of my mother’s building stopped me to chat. “Well, how are things in New Hampshire?” he asked.
“Vermont,” I corrected.
He saw the long white thing under my coat and couldn’t keep his eyes off it, looking up, then down. The crook of the cane had poked out under my chin. Neither of us knew what to say. “Well, see you later, Pete,” I said, still needing to get past the man at the desk.
Waiting for the elevator with two other people, I took the cane out and began to examine it as if it were a Celtic staff with intricate carvings depicting planetary movements. But, no matter what I did, it was simply a blind man’s cane. And it was in my hands.
In the apartment, I made myself a cup of coffee, while the cane leaned against an exquisite Empire damask-covered wall. One of my first paintings, a small Cézannesque landscape in an elaborate gilt frame, hung just to its right.
I practiced on the Persian carpet. I tapped and I hit things. I nearly put a hole in the satin couch. The cane got stuck under a French Provincial armchair and fell from my hand. Its clumsiness was extraordinary: it scuffed everything; it couldn’t be contained. It barely went through doorways and was too large for the bathroom. Turning corners required careful planning, and my mother’s soft bedroom, with its pretty crystal bottles, silver trinkets, and mirrors, was not a safe place for it to be.
I resolved to take it out for a walk in the park. Leaving my coat inside so that I wouldn’t be tempted to hide the cane again, I went out into the hall. Striding down the long corridor to the elevators, I encountered, as if for the first time, the door to the incinerator. I simply couldn’t go beyond it. There, my first cane fell seventeen floors into a blazing fire. I felt suddenly light and young.
Two more canes suffered the same fate on different occasions. I hoped they had an ample cane budget at the Lighthouse, because I was sure that mine weren’t the first or the last to meet a similar end.
I hugged the wall now at Chalk Farm, fearing the tracks. A little electric sign a few feet above my head flashed the direction of the next train, and, by jumping a little and squinting, I saw the difference in configuration between MORDEN VIA BANK and VIA CHARING CROSS. I changed at Euston, following people along an up escalator. At Victoria, a vast shell of iron and glass, I was unable to read the enormous computerized board announcing all the tracks, times, and destinations.
“Excuse me,” I said to a man with a briefcase, “could you tell me when the next train to East Croydon leaves. . . .”
“It’s all up there,” he said, pointing to the board and speeding by me.
“The East Croydon train?” I tried again, addressing a squat, limping woman who seemed not to be in a hurry.
“What’s the matter, chappie?” she said, giving me an angry glance. “Blind or something?” And she hobbled on by.
With the cane I was clearly damaged goods, but without it I was a confusing figure. Why so slow, why so clumsy, why so many questions? It’s awkward to begin my request with: “I am almost blind, madam, so would you . . .” “Blind, are you?” she might say, not believing a word of it. “Where’s your white stick then?”
I have said many times, “I left my glasses at home and would appreciate a little assistance,” but like a kid who is too big to sneak under the turnstiles, I feel I have outgrown that one. Preying on my blind unconscious is the story, circulated among the partially sighted, about the Boston cop who beat a young man senseless for reading a paper and carrying a white cane.
“My poor mother is really blind, you son of a bitch,” he was reputed to have muttered between blows.
I have hardly been a model of compassion and trust when confronting abnormality. I used to be transfixed by the sight of a man without legs, pushing himself down Forty-second Street on a noisy little dolly. I sometimes followed his creaky contraption hoping to catch him being lifted into his Rolls-Royce, for a rumor went around our ghoulish teenage circle that he really was very rich. I was sure that somehow he had cleverly concealed a trapdoor in his cart, inside which he had packed his legs like flounder fillets. I watched the blind around the Lighthouse, trying to accommodate themselves to their canes, groping, smashing into delivery wagons, resting by familiar fire hydrants. I always observed but never confronted “abnormals”; until I joined their ranks, I had no idea how to behave in their presence.
> When I arrived at Helga’s, exhausted and spent, shaking a little and just barely on time, I met Dirkson, the author of one of the letters from the day before. He was her part-time chauffeur. He was sitting in his red Austin reading a paper when Helga stuck her head out the door and yelled, motioning him to come in. He quickly got out of the car and jogged through the rose garden, then in its first sweet-smelling bloom.
“Sit you down, you smart little Cockney, and tell Mr. . . . Mr. . . . What-do-you-call-it . . . your story. Go on, tell it,” she commanded.
“It happened,” said Dirkson, “on the very first day, the first bees. It hurt like the dickens, let me tell you, but when I stepped outside, it was like a veil had lifted. Everything was a hundred shades brighter. It was a miracle.”
Helga sat quietly, proud, as though she were Picasso listening to yet another rave review.
“Some people are just like me,” he continued, “right, Mrs. Barnes? It happens real quick. Others take a longer time, but I’ve seen it happen over and over again.”
I thought only of getting Dirkson alone. I needed to hear him repeat it all away from her. To my delight, Helga said: “Dirkson will drive you to the train after your bees today, won’t you, Dirkson?”
I got six bees, and when she finished, she spotted the folding cane, which had half slipped out of my coat pocket onto the couch. “What’s that?” she asked. “Not a white stick, is it?”
“Yes, that’s what it is,” I confessed.
“Well, we’ll get rid of that ugly thing soon enough,” she said. “A white stick, eh, Dirkson? How do you like that?” Dirkson looked down a moment and grunted. “Well, off with both of you blighters now. Cheerio! Cheerio!”
“She told me you were nearly blind,” I said as soon as we got into his car. “She said that you were bumping into brick walls. Is that really true?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I thought my life had ended. I didn’t know what I’d do next, how I’d support my family. . . .”
“When did it start? Are you night-blind? Who said it was RP?” I asked all at once.
“I’m now forty-three,” he said. It was my age exactly! “I first noticed something wrong when I was eighteen, in the army. I couldn’t see at night. After that it got worse and worse until I was bumping into things, unable to move about by myself. I went to Moorfields, and they told me it was retinitis pigmentosa.”
“You know, don’t you, that it’s supposed to be an incurable disease?”
“Oh, yes, of course,” he said. “She’s told me often enough. ‘I’m the only one in the world who can cure it,’ she says over and over again. And she can, too.”
He drove deftly through two roundabouts, which require excellent side vision. Being driven by Dirkson, an ex-RP, made the possibility of my driving more palpable. I put myself easily in his place.
“I had six weeks of treatment,” Dirkson said, “and now I can do anything. I drive day or night. I read the paper. I can see a long way.” He passed a couple of cars. “See that car way up there?” he asked, pointing. I couldn’t. “Well, I can read the registration plates.”
I sat back and tried to relax. Why shouldn’t the same thing happen to me? “Do you really know others who got their vision back?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, quite a few. I knew the Casey girls, old McDole, Heathcroft, the bank clerk. Now there’s a fellow named Tom Something-or-other who’s improving fast. Also a South American. Oh, yes, plenty of them.”
“It might happen to me,” I said.
“It probably will,” Dirkson answered. We arrived at the East Croydon station.
“I was a painter, you know. A picture painter, that is. She says I’ll be painting again. . . .”
“If she says so . . .” he said. “But you mustn’t worry. You must be patient and try to put up with whatever she has to dish out. It can get rough in there.”
“Oh, Christ,” I said, “I can put up with anything. I’ll stick to her like a leech.” We sat in his car, at the head of a line of taxis in front of East Croydon station, one of us a veteran of the Helga Barnes story, the other on the brink of her miracle. I felt chosen, plucked, along with Dirkson, from the ailing, limping crowd. I turned to look at him, wanting our eyes to lock and bear memorable witness to this moment, but Dirkson stared out the window, straight ahead.
“Well, good-bye,” I said. We shook hands. “I would like to see you again and talk more.”
“Yes,” said Dirkson, “and good luck.”
Inside the cold, dank station, where everything required eyes—the newspapers, the schedules, the clocks, and the announcements—I knew that it would only be a matter of time before I was a fully sighted participant like the rest. I bought a paper to rehearse. I ran down the ramp to the platform. I stood close to the drop of the tracks, practicing sighted nonchalance. In the train, I initiated several conversations with travelers, whom I found charming, even fascinating. The ride passed quickly and smoothly. All my train connections were perfectly executed. I asked for help once inside the Victoria underground. A very attractive woman could not have been nicer, reading the electric sign for me with kindness and, I thought, some interest. I hadn’t even realized, until I was walking swiftly along Eton College Road, that the back of my neck was growing immense with bee swelling.
SIX
AT THE END OF THE FIRST WEEK, I became violently ill. The back of my neck was distorted by mounds and craters, some as tight as a drum, some soft and mushy like a halfdeflated balloon. Everything from the shoulders up ached with pressure, but the backs of my eyes throbbed as if the nerve endings there were plucked violin strings. I was hot with fever, nauseated, and weak. Frightening though this was, I hoped it might be the agonizing rebirth of sight.
Charlotte, who was worried, dialed Helga’s number for me. “Mrs. Barnes,” I murmured, the sound resonating in my skull, “I’m terribly sick.”
“Thank God for that,” Helga crooned. “That’s what I’ve been waiting for! Stay in bed, darling. Now we will have results.” She was exhilarated. “You see, I know what I’m doing.”
“How long will this go on, Mrs. Barnes?” I asked.
“Don’t worry, angel,” she said, “this is a sure sign that the bees are working. They are pushing out all the filth, clearing your body. . . .”
“What are they clearing?”
“The black depression,” she began, “the evil medicines, the sluggish fluids pumped by your glands, the terrible fungus of retinitis pigmentosa.”
My head reeled and I passed out. When I awoke a few hours later, the room was dark, and I panicked, not knowing where I was. Charlotte came in from the kitchen. The bed was soaked, I hoped with the escaping pollution of my overcivilized body.
“She said the only medicine you were allowed to take is Alka-Seltzer, so I got you some,” Charlotte said.
“Alka-Seltzer? Jesus.”
“I asked if I could call a doctor, and she yelled at me.” Charlotte sat down beside me and mopped my brow with a cool washcloth. I lost consciousness again.
The next time I awoke I was better, but my fingers didn’t recognize my misshapen face and half-closed eyes. I ran them over my bulbous cheeks, mouth, and ears, though I was careful not to press too hard, fearing I might squish the distended flesh like an overripe plum.
I was rarely sick, and this attack made me feel wasteful and dull, as if I were all body. I was unable to distract myself, though I had brought my tape recorder and some hurriedly chosen tapes of books I really didn’t want to read, books that had entered my life with my graduate work and job in the hospital. I had a box of Carl Rogers, another of Fritz Perls, a third of Yalom’s The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy. But the last thing I wanted was to focus on the “here and now,” my own or anyone else’s. Even recalling the sense of some therapeutic ideal seemed trivial and paltry. I wanted to skim the waves on the backs of dolphins or soar, in the friendly clutches of eagles, over strange landscapes in a distant past.
The old dome-shaped radio next to my bed picked up two channels, one thumping with rock, the other pounding and groaning with Sir Edward Elgar. I spent the evening slipping in and out of de Chirico landscapes, a delirium accompanied by the martial ooze of Elgar. The night brought me a whiff of old childhood nightmares. I recognized the metallic odor, the tingling in the skull, the acrid taste in my mouth.
As I tossed and turned, midway between sleep and waking, a gallery of gaunt, pale figures appeared, dressed in oversized black trousers and waistcoats and large drooping bowties. They wagged their bony fingers and, through their yellow teeth, they hissed: “Sickness is a higher form of life.”
“More sensitive,” said one.
“More restless,” said another.
“More alert.”
“More precarious.”
They praised a life fraught with danger and disturbance. A decrepit figure slumping in a high-backed chair, his chin resting on the crook of his cane, whispered: “Wherever something new is being formed, there is weakness, sickness, and decadence.”
I stood on a podium in the center of a hall, an easel in front of me, a paintbrush dripping with color. My whole head bulged with grotesque lumps and open sores. Though I could see, I had no eyes.
“The return to health is a setback, a subversion of genius,” a poet said to me. “Only illness is truth.”
I slobbered paint and spittle over my canvas while all of them praised my work.
“It is obviously years ahead of its time,” said one.
“Once in a generation!” someone said.
“In a century!” another corrected.
They argued about compensation and the fabulous feats of cellular regeneration. They talked of lizards, hydra-headed fish, segmented worms. They talked of the energy of madness, the sublimation of the senses, the nobility of pain. I recognized among them little ugly Michelangelo; short-legged, syphilitic Schubert; blind, mean Milton; gimpy Byron; Beethoven, deaf and petty.
