After graduating college, Bashin moved to Sacramento and began syndicating science stories he wrote for newspapers and magazines. One of his pieces became a finalist for a National Magazine Award, the industry’s highest honor. He continued to research the latest techniques for vision restoration, always hopeful for breakthroughs, always disappointed that nothing could resuscitate his trashed corneas. His heart broke one day when he took a kill fee for a major magazine piece he’d been assigned but could not complete because he could no longer read his own notes.
His vision continued to worsen into his thirties. Once in a great while, however, the central spot in his corneas would clear and a great whoosh of world would flood in. When that happened he would drink in the cascading images, whatever they were. He didn’t need sunsets; he could lose himself in the saturated green of a traffic light or swoon to the grooves cut into escalator steps or marvel at the latest women’s hairstyles. These moments of visual clarity were like opening a backward photo album: his mother had wrinkles, his house needed paint, a new grocery stood in the lot where he’d once played ball. In the mirror, he could see that his sideburns had grayed. All of it was happy consolation because all of it meant he could see.
By 1993, when he was thirty-eight, Bashin had lost the remaining trickles of his vision. Still, he wouldn’t mourn. He just considered himself a sighted man who couldn’t see, and as long as one was sighted there was hope.
One of the few concessions Bashin had made to his decaying vision was subscribing to the Braille Monitor, the monthly audiotape magazine of the National Federation for the Blind (NFB). He had allowed two years’ worth of issues to pile up in a shoe box, too ashamed to listen. One day he felt a twinge of curiosity and popped a cassette into his recorder. He heard about blind archaeologists doing groundbreaking fieldwork, blind architects setting new trends, and all other manner of blind people doing whatever moved them. It seemed to occur to none of them to defer or postpone or fantasize. They acted. Bashin devoured twenty-four issues in a weekend.
He knew now that he had to address his blindness. But before he was going to go out and learn to use a cane, he needed to know absolutely that science couldn’t help him. He scheduled appointments with prominent ophthalmologists across America to learn firsthand if any of them could restore his vision. None of them could help him.
Bashin finally made his way to Detroit, where the NFB was holding its annual convention. All around him the blind moved freely and with seeming impunity, yet he couldn’t figure out how to go from his hotel room to the coffee shop downstairs. When he finally made it, he met several blind men who told him they’d just returned from Greektown, a mile away. Bashin couldn’t comprehend that—how could a blind person actually walk somewhere, find something, and then have a good time on top of it? Like the blind guy from Berkeley who’d toured Europe solo, these men had something special, and Bashin wanted what they had.
After he returned from Detroit, Bashin took a walk near his home and got lost. It was twilight and there was no one on the street, and he didn’t know which way to go. He was terrified. It occurred to him to just walk, but he also knew that he might walk the wrong way and get farther and farther from home, so he stood on the corner and waited, though he did not know what he was waiting for; he just remained, hoping someone would come along, and seconds or minutes or hours passed until he finally heard a footfall and pressed down his humiliation and asked for directions. He began his cane-training days later, on August 1, 1994, at age thirty-nine. The instructors told him he would always remember the day he’d first held a white cane, and they were right.
Soon Bashin was seeking out confident and cool blind people. He met many through NFB and in his new job as director of the Sacramento Society for the Blind, and he began to develop a feeling for what they meant when they spoke of being actualized. The Holy Grail of blindness wasn’t in becoming a superman. Instead, it was in making blindness just another of one’s many characteristics, in being ordinary for doing what one wanted to be doing, in being a guy who wakes up in the morning and says, “Damn, I’m late” rather than “Damn, I’m blind.” When he met Mike May, Bashin was impressed with his accomplishments. But it was May’s ease at being a regular guy that compelled him.
By late 1999, May’s friendship with Bashin had deepened. They might speak for hours by phone late at night or meet for an extended dinner at a Sacramento ethnic restaurant. Carving out that kind of time took work, but it was worth it to both of them.
Bashin listened in early November when May laid out the prospects for his stem cell surgery. He asked questions about the B-scan results and probed May’s knowledge of Dr. Goodman’s biography. He inquired about recent advances in the surgical technique. May recalled that Bashin had told him about his own probes into vision restoration, and asked if they contributed to Bashin’s curiosity.
“They do,” Bashin told him. “Over the years I’ve made investigations and done a lot of research. I didn’t want to impose that on you now because this is your time and your deliberation. I had decided that vision restoration wasn’t right for me at this point in my life. But I have to confess, Mike, that talking about your case has me thinking again about my own situation. Stevens-Johnson syndrome is one of those rare indications for the stem cell surgery. Theoretically, it can help me, too.”
“Well, I’d love to know your thinking on it,” May said. “It would be great if the conversation could benefit us both.”
May sounded out the risks for Bashin, a checklist that tolled more ominously with every recital. He didn’t have to tell Bashin that he couldn’t dream of vision adding anything to the depth of love and feeling he had for his kids; Bashin could hear it in the everyday stories May related about his family.
Bashin took it all in. He laughed and nodded when May listed beautiful women as among his top motivations to see. He made May promise to warn him before driving to Sacramento so he could have plenty of time to flee from the streets. Like Jennifer, he didn’t rush into counterarguments or solutions or advice. He considered his friend an explorer and heard his words as the sounds of a map unfolding. But as he listened, Bashin also found himself reflecting on a set of stories he had uncovered in the course of his own research into vision restoration. He did not speak of them now to May, nor was he certain he ever would. They were stories known to just a handful of people worldwide. They were stories unlike any he could have imagined.
Between the dawn of time and the year 1999, history had recorded no more than sixty cases of vision restoration after long-term blindness. The first dated to Arabia in the year 1020; the next was not chronicled for another seven centuries. Fewer than twenty of the subjects had been blind since age three or younger—like May.
Though the cases spanned a thousand years and were spread across the globe, the subjects seemed to share two primary characteristics. First, their new vision was strange and unfathomable. Second, they suffered a deep emotional crisis for daring to see.
None of the cases was better observed than that of fifty-two-year-old Sidney Bradford, a married cobbler from the working-class Midlands region of Britain. Bradford had lost his vision, likely to infection, at the age of ten months. He lived an active life, building things in the woodshop he had constructed, painting his house while on his ladder, and riding his bicycle through the countryside by holding the shoulder of an adjacent cyclist. He moved through the world confidently, even brazenly, rarely bothering with a cane, wielding his circular saw with impunity, and rushing into busy intersections as if daring cars to strike him. When a surgeon told him in 1958 that a series of two corneal grafts might restore his vision, Bradford signed up and got ready to see.
News of the planned surgeries made the local newspaper. A copy found its way one hundred miles to the desk of thirty-five-year-old Cambridge University psychologist Richard L. Gregory, a renowned expert on perception. Gregory knew the extraordinary rarity of such cases and immediately obtained permission from the hospital to visit.
He barely had time to plan—the first surgery already had been completed—so he and his assistant, Jean Wallace, stuffed his car with every apparatus, test, illusion, Rorschach inkblot, camera, and measuring device they could fit, then sped west to the Wolverhampton and Midland Counties Eye Infirmary, near Birmingham. They arrived the day after the second surgery.
Gregory could scarcely believe that the man he met had been blind. Bradford guided himself about the hospital room and through corridors without feeling around or bumping into obstacles, and was able to tell the time immediately from the nurse’s clock no matter how many times Gregory moved its hands. He not only spotted a magazine that Gregory had brought along but read its title aloud. He could name virtually every object in his room, and his ability to perceive colors was excellent. Bradford thrilled to his new vision, and Gregory thrilled to have found him. When Gregory began to run tests and make observations, he found Bradford to be eager and willing, cheerful and outgoing. What he discovered, however, was more complicated.
Faces meant nothing to Bradford. He could not recognize a person by face, detect a person’s gender by his face, or make anything of facial expressions, and this was true no matter how hard he tried or how familiar the person. It wasn’t that faces were invisible or blurry to him—it was that they conveyed no meaning at all. When his wife smiled, Bradford knew neither that she was happy nor even that it was she.
His hospital window, some forty feet above the ground, afforded him his first opportunity to look out onto the world. At once, he believed the ground close enough to reach by foot if only he dangled himself from the ledge. He seemed to recognize objects only if he knew them by touch and expected them to be there, such as a parked car or the pocketwatch on his table. But when he came across things that hadn’t been called to his attention or that he didn’t anticipate, such as a building or an extra chair in the room or even a quiet person in the hallway, he seemed not to see them at all.
Bradford was keen to view Gregory’s color slides of familiar English scenes. But when the images were projected on-screen, he could say nothing about the objects depicted, and in fact seemed to see only splotches of color. When asked whether an object shown on the slide was positioned in front of or behind another object, he could not fathom a guess. To Gregory, it was clear that Bradford saw no depth in pictures. And yet, when moving about the hospital, he reached for and handled things quite readily.
Gregory wasted little time unpacking the classic optical illusions he had brought along. Among others, he showed Bradford the following:
The Zollner Illusion
Normal observers judge the vertical lines to be nonparallel, and many see “jazzing” in them. Bradford correctly judged them to be parallel and “all calm”—in other words, he was not susceptible to the illusion.
The Poggendorf Illusion
Normal observers see the slanted lines to be on separate planes. Bradford correctly perceived it as “all one line.”
The Necker Cube
Normal observers not only see the cube in depth, but see its front side shift positions back and forth with their continued gaze. Bradford perceived neither the depth nor a shift, asking, “What is depth?” when questioned on the matter.
Perspective Size Illusion
Normal observers perceive the men to be of increasing size from left to right, though in fact they are equally tall. Bradford, to begin with, did not know the figures to be people. After being told, he was asked for their relative size, and said, “The first man looks smaller, but the last three look the same.”
Bradford remained a cheerful, if easily fatigued, subject. He proved able to recognize capital but not lowercase letters, likely due to the fact that he’d had access to block versions of the former but not the latter at school. Using the ballpoint pen his wife had given him as a gift—his first-ever writing instrument—he managed to scratch a barely legible version of his name, along with rudimentary drawings of things he knew by touch, such as trucks and tools. Nothing, however, was reflected in his drawings that he had not already known by touch. He could clearly discern the quarter moon—evidence of good visual acuity, or sharpness—but was surprised to learn that a quarter moon was not shaped like a quarter piece of cake. Gregory and Wallace conducted more tests and made more observations, then arranged to meet with Bradford after his discharge to see the rest of the world.
Bradford burst forth from the hospital and onto the Birmingham streets. Marvelous was everywhere to him, thrilling a foregone conclusion. Everywhere he turned he discovered another color or movement or object worthy of his gaze.
Days after his discharge, Gregory and Wallace went to meet Bradford in London. But when they gathered on the first night, Bradford did not seem his usual cheerful and curious self. Instead, he appeared fatigued, and his companion reported that he hadn’t been much interested in the passing visual scenes during the ride into London. When questioned on the matter, Bradford told Gregory that the world seemed a drab place.
The next morning, Gregory and Wallace set out with Bradford for a walking tour of London. He came to life in Trafalgar Square, where he marveled at the blankets of pigeons that flew all around him, laughing as he used his new vision to follow their swoops and dives, stroking their bodies to know what they were like. But when Gregory led him to other city landmarks, Bradford again seemed tired and apathetic—buildings bored him, streets looked dull, the parade of faces meant nothing. Unexpected nearby noises did little to attract his gaze; he just kept looking straight ahead but seemed not to see much at all.
Bradford even moved differently than he had before. While blind, he had marched into intersections. Now, however, the cars attacked his eyes from every direction, and he could not move for a deathly fear of being struck. If Gregory hadn’t dragged him by the arm they might not have budged all day. Even when they reached the safe side of intersections, Bradford struggled to step up, often mistaking a shadow for a curb. This was not the world he had spent a lifetime traversing so confidently.
Gregory proposed a trip to the Science Museum in South Kensington, where he hoped its collection of machines and tools—the long-standing stuff of Bradford’s passions—might spark the man’s interest. Bradford struggled, however, to understand the exhibits, these meaningless shapes behind ropes that remained maddeningly beyond his touch. He could say virtually nothing about the simple lathe that Gregory showed him, though he knew the tool’s function and had long dreamed of using one. Gregory persuaded an employee to open the glass case, allowing Bradford a chance to touch. He closed his eyes and fervently ran his hands over the lathe. Then he stepped back, opened his eyes, and declared, “Now that I’ve felt it I can see.” After that, using only his eyes, Bradford could describe how it looked. Gregory knew he would never forget this moment. It was as if touch had switched on Bradford’s vision.
The group next visited the zoo at Regent’s Park. Gregory was friendly with the zoo’s head of mammals, the famed zoologist Desmond Morris, and had arranged for Bradford to be allowed into some of the cages. Before they began, Bradford was asked to draw a picture of an elephant, which he managed in rudimentary form. A half hour later, when Gregory took him into the elephant’s cage, he walked around the animal three times without noticing that it was there. He laughed at the sight of two giraffes peering at him from above, the only occasion on which Gregory would see Bradford laugh at something he saw.
Gregory and Wallace stayed another day with Bradford. They were careful not to press him, as vision seemed heavy labor that tired him greatly. He continued to struggle with curbs and, on more than one occasion, nearly plummeted off a staircase for failing to perceive that there were steps below. He remained baffled by faces even when he studied them closely, and knew that he could spend days with someone and still not recognize that person’s face when it came time to say good-bye.
And he noticed chipped paint.
He might pass a lamppost or a park bench and stare intently at sections where the paint had
peeled, and when he understood what he was seeing he would go listless and turn away. When Gregory asked of his distress, Bradford said that he had expected to see a more perfect place when his bandages came off, that he had always imagined the sighted world as a kind of heaven. Now he knew it was less than that. He could see it in the frayed wood and stained fabrics and smudged windows he encountered daily, that no matter which way he turned things fell short of what he’d hoped they would be. He could see the truth in chipped paint and it disappointed him.
Six months later, Gregory and Wallace made a trip to Bradford’s home. He continued to describe the world as drab, and though he had used his vision to help build things and tend to his garden, he still lived much as he had while blind, keeping the lights off at night, shaving in the dark, and showing little interest in films or television. He could do more than he could before, yet this seemed its own burden, as few were inclined to continue admiring a man who wasn’t supposed to be blind anymore.
Though he could make no sense of faces, Bradford somehow found his own to be repulsive and his wife’s to be ugly. He was greatly let down, he told Wallace, to discover that his wife wasn’t as beautiful as he’d expected. He continued to note the imperfections in the things he saw, and to express his disappointment that the world was not as he’d wished when he was happier, in times when he was a different man. “We formed a strong impression that his sight was to him almost entirely disappointing,” Gregory would later write. “He was not a man to talk freely, but was obviously depressed, and we felt that he had lost more than he had gained by recovery of sight.”
Crashing Through Page 9
