Love and First Sight

by Josh Sundquist

  There’s a knock at my door.

  It’s Dad. I can tell from the knock.

  “Will?”

  “Come in.”

  He does. I turn and watch a formless, shifting array of colors as the door opens and he walks into my room and sits on the bed, the mattress exhaling under his weight.

  “Seems like you’ve pretty much conquered those blocks now,” he says.

  “I guess so.”

  “Ready to graduate to real objects?”

  I resent his implication that my progress isn’t real because I’m learning with toys. “These are real shapes.”

  “Sorry, you’re right. You’re doing great. But now that you know basic shapes, maybe it’s time to try to identify complex ones?”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “I’ve got a good example downstairs. You might say it’s a gift to congratulate you on winning the election yesterday. Want to check it out?”

  We go downstairs. I follow the sound of his movements, walking by touch with my eyes shut. But every few steps, I open my eyes for a second, take just a quick, dizzying peek at the moving hallway.

  Dad says proudly, “Here it is, Will, your first complex object to identify by sight.”

  We are in the side hallway, which we’ve always kept clear of furniture. Only some photo frames hanging about shoulder level. He squares my shoulders so I’m facing the wall.

  “You want me to look at the photos?” I ask. I could probably handle that. I mean, at least I now know how to tell the difference between a framed object and the wall it’s hanging on.

  “No, there’s something else here. See if you can figure out what it is.”

  I wonder why Dad is doing this. Probably because I’m his son and he wants me to successfully adapt. But I can’t help wondering if a part of him—maybe a part he’s not even aware of—might actually want to push me to failure. He told me not to get the operation. He warned me tasks like this one would be overwhelmingly difficult. If that’s the lesson he’s trying to teach here, I want to prove him wrong.

  So maybe this is a trick question: I’m supposed to search and search and give up, only to realize there is no object.

  “Dad, I’ve walked by this wall and touched it a hundred times. There’s nothing else here,” I say. In other words, I see what you’re trying to do here, Dad. And I’m not amused.

  “No, I moved the object here from another part of the house.”

  This strikes me as suspicious. “Why not just move me to that part of the house?”

  He chuckles. “Will, obviously if I took you to the place where this object normally is found, you would know what it is based on context. Bringing it here makes it challenging.”

  There’s a smile in his voice. He sounds kind of excited about this “challenge” he’s created for me.

  But as far as teaching methods go, wouldn’t it make more sense to give me some easy ones to start off with? Why not let me build my confidence by, say, going into the kitchen and finding the blender and the coffeemaker? Going into the living room and finding the TV? That kind of thing. Why deliberately make it more difficult by bringing an object out of its native habitat?

  “Fine,” I say with annoyance. “I’ll attempt your ‘challenge.’”

  Instinctively, my hands draw up from my waist the way people say gunslingers draw from their holsters in Western movies.

  “Sorry,” I say. “Old habit.”

  Dad grunts something indecipherable.

  I scan the wall with my eyes. It seems to be white. That’s something I’ve learned this week: Most walls are white. I never knew that when I was blind. I guess I always thought most walls were black. Some of the kids at my old school, who weren’t totally blind, told me how they’d invert the colors on their computer screens so that the background is blue or black, to make the white text and colored images easier to see. And I know people like to hang colorful decorations on their walls. So I’d always assumed they’d want black walls to make the decorations more visible. Apparently I assumed wrong.

  Below the mass of white and the rectangles of the picture frames, I observe a complex, multicolored object. The shapes bounce and swirl as I try to pin them down with my gaze. I feel like I am angling my chin to look at it, which suggests it is below my eye level. So I squat. Sure enough, the object appears to grow in front of me. It’s now massive and a little overwhelming. I decide to break it into its component shapes, figure them out one at a time. But whenever I identify a single shape and move on to another, I lose track of the first one and have to start all over again. It feels like when I couldn’t count the dots on that die.

  The task is even more difficult for me because the shapes overlap one another. Presumably if I had a better understanding of depth, I could differentiate which shape is at which depth, but because the world appears essentially flat to me, all the lines run together, crisscrossing, bending, curling over one another. Is that line important? How about this one? Which lines make up the most essential outline of this object?

  “Want a clue?” Dad asks.

  “No,” I snap, sounding angrier than I intend to. I don’t want to let on that his little challenge is getting to me.

  When I read braille, I move from left to right. So I decide to try that method.

  I step back and stare at the left side of the object. After a while, I notice a circle. It is crisscrossed with an incalculable number of lines, but there is definitely a circle around the edges. I move right from the circle to the middle of the object. That section is complete nonsense to me, all the colors and shapes stacked up on each other. I move to the right again. After a while, I notice another circle, similar to the one on the left. Two circles. One on each side.

  “I’ve got it!” I say, jumping up, ready to prove Dad wrong with my realization. “It’s a pair of glasses!”

  “No, guess again,” he says, disappointed.

  Two circles. One on each side.

  “A dumbbell? From the weight set in the basement?”

  “It’s much, much larger than glasses or a dumbbell.”

  Well, if he’s trying to demonstrate that I can’t judge size, he’s right. I can’t. Yet.

  But then it hits me. Two circles. Two wheels.

  “A bike!”

  “Yes!” he exclaims, clapping me on the shoulder. “A bike!”

  I reach out and touch the circles, and the rubber treads light up for me: Tires, say my fingers. I run my hands along the center, and it names itself: Metal bike frame.

  “You probably thought—” I begin to lash out at him for his attempt to stump me, but he interrupts.

  “It’s for you!”

  “What?”

  “A gift! For you!” He’s almost giddy now. And let me emphasize this: My father is not an emotional man. I witness him get this excited maybe once a year, like when the Tour de France is on TV or something.

  “I can’t even walk, Dad. Much less ride a bike,” I say, confused.

  “That’s why I got it for you!”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I know you can’t walk by sight yet, but soon you’ll be able to. And soon after that, you’ll be able to ride a bike. I want you to know that I believe in you. I believe you’ll one day be able to ride this thing.”

  I’m speechless.

  “Will, I know I advised you not to get the operation. And maybe I wasn’t as supportive as I should have been. But you are braver than me, son. You are in some ways… in some ways more of a man than I am. And that’s why you went through with it anyway. Now you can see. And one day, we’ll go on a bike ride together.”

  “Thanks, Dad.” It means a lot. More than I can express, or want to express.

  “Think of it as an early Christmas present,” he says. “Or, hey, next week is Thanksgiving. It could be a Thanksgiving present.”

  I add, “Guess we don’t need the tandem anymore, huh?”

  “Oh, no, we’ll save it,” he says. “One day I�
�ll be too old to ride, and I’ll need you to steer me around on the tandem! HA!” He lets out his dorky one-syllable laugh.

  I can’t help but laugh, too.

  CHAPTER 22

  On Wednesday, I ask Cecily to drive us to Mole Hill Park so I can witness my first sunset. She guides me up the million stairs, and we sit down in the grass in the same spot where we sat after the homecoming dance.

  Once we are settled, I finally open my eyes and discover the usual visual mayhem—colors smashing into one another, lines colliding in a noisy fight for my attention.

  “Is the sun setting yet?” I ask.

  “Not yet.”

  “So what are we looking at here? The entire city?” I ask, blinking rapidly, as if by fluttering my eyelids I will bring the view into focus.

  “Basically,” she says. “It’s a good panorama. I mean, it’s a small city. Someday you should go up in the Hollywood Hills and look at Los Angeles at night. I’ve gone there with my dad before. But anyway, the diminutive skyline of Toano, Kansas, will have to do for now.”

  “Can we see my house?”

  “No, but we can see mine.”

  “Really? Where?” I ask.

  I’ve still never been to her house. So this will be my first chance to experience it, and I will have the chance to do so with eyesight as we sit here on this hill. I wonder if her blinds are open? I hope so. I want to be able to see in through the windows. I want to look into her room and find out how she’s decorated her walls.

  “Oh, it’s… well, you probably wouldn’t be able to see it. Don’t worry about it.”

  “No, I want to.”

  “I know you do. But… I live in a pretty crappy house.”

  “I don’t know what a house is supposed to look like. You could tell me it was a palace, and I wouldn’t know the difference by looking at it.”

  “All right,” she agrees. “How do I point it out to you?”

  “Just wave your hand in a circle around it,” I say.

  “My hand? It’s way smaller than my hand.”

  “Your house is smaller than your hand?” I ask, confused.

  “Are you joking? Oh, right… perspective. Sorry,” she says. “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking—”

  “It’s fine,” I say, embarrassed that I still get confused by these things.

  “Well, yeah, from this distance, my house is tiny. Like a little speck. All you can see is a black dot, which is the roof.”

  I’m still a bit curious about whether I would be able to see through her windows, but from what she’s saying, I guess the answer is no. And I don’t want to ask because, well, it’s impossible to make that question not creepy.

  “No problem,” I say, giving up on seeing her house, at least for now. “Besides, there’s something I’d much rather look at.”

  “What?”

  “You.”

  She giggles. Or coughs. Or something.

  I turn my head to face her. I am kind of hoping something deep inside, like my heart or whatever, will be able to identify her through pure emotional instinct. Everything else in the world may be blurry and confusing, but her face will jump out in instant high definition, radiant with beautifully articulated and meaningful lines. But this doesn’t turn out to be the case. Instead, I see only the normal ocean of shifting colors, currents of hue riding into my brain via my eyes.

  “Well?” she asks quietly.

  “I do see a lot of green,” I say. “I guess that’s the grass? Unless you are green?”

  “No, I’m… not green,” she says, as if it had been a serious question rather than a joke.

  “Wiggle your head around so I can see it,” I say.

  I hear a swoosh of hair, and as I do, a swirl of colors lights up in front of me: Yellow and tan and pink and light brown…

  This is Cecily. This is her face.

  “Okay, I see you,” I say. “Do you mind if I, um, invade your personal space?”

  “Yes, you can invade my personal space.”

  I move toward her so her head fills most of my field of vision. She holds her breath like she’s nervous.

  A face is a complicated thing. Even before the operation, I appreciated that. It has many parts: rippling contours shaped by the bones underneath the skin, many small spots of hair—eyebrows, eyelashes, sometimes a beard or goatee—and so many different parts—a mouth, a nose, eyes, and ears. Of course, I can’t make out any of this on Cecily. I know what each of these things would feel like if I reached out my hands and touched her. But the gaze of my eyes reveals no such detail. Just unrecognizable sensory data, a jumble of shapes and colors.

  Even though I don’t know how to connect this visual to the physical knowledge I have about faces, I can connect the sight to the knowledge that this is Cecily’s face.

  I reach a hand up, and it lands quietly against her cheek. With the touch of my fingers, the cheek identifies itself to me. I slide my hand over to her nose, and it immediately stands and declares, I am a nose. In that moment, my eyes make out a triangle of skin-colored light pink. Her nose.

  I bring up my other hand and run my fingertips around her eyes, which she shuts in response to my touch.

  But her eyes, those windows into the soul, as they say, are the territory of her face I am most desperate to explore. Using my hands like two bookmarks to keep from losing my place, I put my pointer fingers on her eyebrows and my thumbs on the top of her cheekbones.

  “Open your eyes,” I say.

  She does, and with the tactile input of my fingers around them, I am able to quickly locate the perfect green circles of her irises surrounding the deep black of her pupils, and to see all this floating in the larger white space of cornea. Around her eyes and above them, on her forehead, her skin fades into a deep purple, darker than the skin on her jaw and cheeks and nose.

  The green of her dual irises have tiny flakes of yellow in them, as if sprinkled with gold. I might not be able to see through the windows of Cecily’s house today, but I’ll happily settle for her soul.

  “Green with specks of gold.”

  “Yes,” she says.

  I see her previously white corneas turn red and feel warm moisture pool against my thumbs. I swipe my thumbs to wipe the tears, and she pulls me around the neck and buries her face against my shoulder.

  CHAPTER 23

  When I get home, I am still high on the ecstatic rush of being so close to Cecily’s face. It almost felt like… like she wanted to touch my face, too, like maybe with her lips.

  I demand that both of my parents stand in front of me for a thorough examination. I connect the field of brown on the bottom half of Dad’s head with the prickly bristles of his beard. I associate the thin horizontal lines on Mom’s forehead with the neat ridges of her eyebrows, but while doing so, it occurs to me I could go look in a mirror right now and find out what I look like, all of which suddenly makes me relatively uninterested in my mother.

  I go to the upstairs bathroom and shut the door. It’s my first time seeing a mirror. It looks much like the rest of the world—or, at least, the way I see the world—a swirl of indistinguishable colors and undifferentiated lines. But from what I understand about mirrors, I know at least some of these colors in front of my eyes are my own reflection. A reflection of my face and my body. I am standing right in front of myself.

  I bob my head to try to pick out my face in the mirror by its motion, but the movement also has the unwanted side effect of shifting my field of vision. Instinct tells me to instead reach my hand to touch the surface, and I am startled when my fingers collide with the hard glass of the mirror instead of the colors and shapes it’s reflecting. This strikes me as the funniest thing ever, and I burst out laughing.

  Then an idea hits: perspective. If things get bigger the closer you move to them in real life, wouldn’t that be true in the mirror, too? Can I just put my eyes right up to the mirror and then slowly move my head to search it?

  I move my face right up to the mirror, and as I d
o so, I see a yellowish mass explode in the center. I whip around, closing my eyes and reaching out my hands to find what is happening in the bathroom. But there’s nothing there. I turn to the mirror again and move in more slowly toward it. When my nose is up against the glass, I put my hand against my cheek, and I see a broad movement. That’s when I realize: It’s my face. My face is the yellowish mass. My face is what I see moving.

  I find my eyes and stare into them. They are brown, as they have apparently been since the surgery. I wonder what they looked like before—“cloudy blue” or “milky blue” is how people always described them. My nose seems to be disproportionately large, which is disappointing. No one wants to discover they have a much larger nose than they expected. Or maybe that’s something that always happens in mirrors, or at least when you are only a couple of inches away from one? My hair is brown and short. My forehead is wide and uniform in color. My lips are a darker shade than the rest of my face, and I remember that this color, the color of my lips, is similar to the one I noticed on the upper half of Cecily’s face, around her eyes and forehead. I wonder why her skin changes color around those areas but mine does not.

  Later that night, Mom asks, “Did you see Cecily’s face tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “What did you think?”

  Many words comes to mind: Beautiful. Perfect. Radiant. But I don’t feel like any of them are Mom’s business.

  “It was nice,” I say flatly.

  And it’s for this reason—Cecily’s face—that I don’t wear the eye mask underneath my glasses to school on Thursday. I keep my eyes closed while I’m walking so I don’t get dizzy, but I want to be able to open them during journalism class and examine her from afar for all of third period. Which is exactly what I am attempting to do, and I am reasonably certain I’ve finally located her when Mrs. Everbrook says, “Will?”

  “Yes?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Um…” I consider bluffing with a vaguely generic answer (“I agree with what most people have been saying but disagree with others…”) but figure Mrs. Everbrook will see through it since she was apparently able to tell that I wasn’t paying attention in the first place. “Sorry, my mind was elsewhere.”