Crashing Through

by Robert Kurson

  “Time to clean up in here,” he said to the boys, then watched them move about the room picking up colorful shapes. A tall lamp in the corner lit the room—there was no overhead light—providing superior contrast between the objects he was trying to see and their backgrounds. On the other side of the room, where it was darker, objects seemed to blend into their surroundings.

  Their room picked up, the boys changed into their pajamas and climbed into their bunkbed. May turned off the light, took out his guitar, and sang them a song. In five minutes they were out cold. May walked to their beds and kissed them good night. He never thought twice about being able to find them in the dark.

  Now exhausted, May and Jennifer agreed to retire for the night. On his way to the bedroom, May saw a blond carpet on the floor in front of him. He knew there was no carpet there, so he bent down to examine it. The carpet turned toward him and panted. May stood up and stepped over the blond mass.

  “Hey, Jen!” he said. “I just stepped over Josh!”

  May had stepped on his dog countless times since they had teamed up. Though beautifully trained, Josh had an uncanny off-duty knack for plopping himself down wherever the notion struck him. Avoiding him seemed like a big deal for both of them.

  May waited while Jennifer washed up for bed, then took his turn in the bathroom. He flipped on the light and began to look into the mirror. He’d felt conspicuous doing this in Goodman’s office, but with privacy he was free to really look. He stared at the man in the mirror and again was struck by the tallness of the fellow who stared back at him, and it startled him that he hadn’t realized how tall he was all these years, that this must be the visual equivalent of hearing one’s own voice on a tape recorder for the first time.

  He stepped closer and, in the way a radio station becomes clear as it’s tuned in, the man looking back at him grew more distinct, he suddenly possessed more details, more clarity; there was more to him. May stepped back and the man in the mirror again became more general, a mass of shape and color that was more John Doe than Mike May. He played with this changing fellow for a minute, back and forth, closer and farther, tuning the radio in and out, until he felt the confidence to really lean in and look, and when he did that a bushelful of gossipy details spoke back to him. Blemishes, wrinkles, freckles, a mole, the gray in his beard—it all struck him as intensely personal, and it occurred to him that if he could read these stories on his face then others could, too, and he backed away and thought to himself, “Enough of that.” He could not get over the idea that, for all these years, so much of him had been hanging out there for people to see, to simply like or dislike as they pleased.

  Now safely distanced from the details, he raised his arm and moved it around, watching an identical arm copy that motion in the mirror. He took his hand and, relying solely on its reflection, tested how close he could move it toward his head without touching his hair. He never grew tired of turning sideways and watching the man in the mirror turn away from him.

  The sight of his hands in the mirror intrigued May, so he looked down for a firsthand inspection. At arm’s length, he could see the general shape of a hand and fingers, but as he drew it closer to his eye the veins and wrinkles emerged, and he wondered, “Are those lines a good thing?” A moment later he’d found his toothbrush. He posed from several angles while watching himself brush his teeth in the mirror. Then he closed his eyes to see if he could find a visual memory of what he’d just seen. Even with his eyes closed, he felt like he could see the toothbrush.

  May went into the bedroom. Jennifer sat on the bed, held the back of his head in her hand, and reached in to apply medicine to his eye. Then they pulled each other close and hugged. One of them said, “What a day. Who would have thought…” But before the sentence was done they were both sound asleep.

  A series of vertical lines lay across May’s eye as he awoke in the morning. He knew he was looking at the ceiling, so he thought about why a ceiling might have lines drawn on it. He tapped Jennifer, who was just waking up herself.

  “Jen, is that a heater vent up there?”

  Jennifer rubbed her eyes and looked toward where May was pointing.

  “Yes, sweetie. It’s great that you can see that.”

  May looked around the room. Everything was still there; yesterday hadn’t been a dream—it was still happening, right where it had left off. He tried to remember if he had dreamed during the night, but he couldn’t remember a thing.

  Yawning, May walked into the bathroom and examined himself in the mirror, this time without his clothes. Jennifer entered a moment later. She, too, was undressed. Hustle-bustle boy noises echoed from the kitchen, where Ori Jean was helping Carson and Wyndham get ready for school. Jennifer stood next to May, shoulder to shoulder, and they looked at their naked reflection in the mirror, neither moving nor saying a word for several seconds, arms and hands at their sides, Jennifer’s skin a golden brown, May’s a pale white, the gentle rise and fall of their chests distinctly visible to May’s eye, each of them with the same calm body, each taking in the whole of the people in front of them rather than any individual parts, each realizing that they appeared to be a single person if they looked at their reflection in just the right way.

  Jennifer leaned over, kissed her husband on the cheek, and left the bathroom. May stepped into the shower and turned on the water. Glistening strings flew from the showerhead onto his neck and chest, exploding on contact and throwing dots of clear wet shrapnel before his eyes. He looked toward the showerhead and could see the tiny holes from which the water flowed, a kind of living metal flower, and he watched those holes spray until the room seemed to start swirling gray in front of him. He reached out to touch the swirl and his hand went right through it, and he stood there for a moment with his arm inside this buzzing dull color until it hit him that he was seeing steam. And for the next two minutes he watched the steam, a magnificent, evolving phenomenon he believed he could look at forever, one that no one could have fully explained to him, this idea that something could be there and not be there at the same time, that one could see something clearly and yet put his hand right through it.

  May reached for his shampoo. Ordinarily, he would have patted around to find it by touch, careful not to knock over Jennifer’s countless other bath products. He knew that the shampoo came in a blue bottle. He saw the blue and took it. Vision like that was power.

  After he dried off, May went to his closet to select his clothes. He found a pair of pants and a shirt he knew would match—most of his neutral wardrobe did—and looked to see if the colors were pleasing together, as he imagined people meant when they said that clothes matched. It all looked smooth to him.

  In the kitchen, his boys abandoned their toast and rushed to put a cereal box in his hand, asking if he could read its name. The letters were big, which helped, but he couldn’t read any of them instantly. He traced some with his index finger, perceived others as attached to each other, and struggled especially with those that were lowercase. Still, he identified the big first letter, an R, added in some deductive reasoning, and read his first two words: Raisin Bran. The boys cheered and ran to the pantry, pulling out all the other brands of cereal and asking their father to read those. May spelled out the words letter by letter, but again, by the time he’d reached the last letter, he’d often forgotten the first few, a source of great amusement to his boys.

  As he did on most mornings, May walked his sons to school. But for their clothing and different shades of blond, he could not tell them apart. At the schoolyard, some of the moms noticed that May was looking around. They knew that he’d undergone surgery and asked if he could see.

  “Well, I see you’re wearing a nice red sweater and have blue jeans on,” May said.

  “That’s right! Wow!”

  “And I can see that you’re both dazzlingly thin.”

  “You should teach our husbands how to see!”

  In fact, May could discern that the women were petite because he could se
e them next to a row of others. And he thought, “Man, people really do come in all sizes.”

  Back home, May went to work for the first time since his surgery. He returned business calls, typed e-mails, and didn’t bother trying to read his computer monitor—it was much easier to keep listening to his screen-reading software, as he had for years. In between, he described his new vision to Kim Burgess, a junior at UC-Davis whom he’d recently hired as an assistant. Burgess had long blond hair and, by all accounts, was a knockout. May found himself smitten by her hair and lost himself watching it cascade to the side when she answered the phone and fly back when she pulled it into a ponytail. He could see Burgess’s mannerisms, postures, gestures, and it was all in front of him, all there for the taking by his eye, for as long as he chose to look.

  During lunch at the backyard patio table, May delighted in his ability to use vision alone to reach for the milk carton and find his napkin after it fell to the ground. He could easily distinguish between Burgess and Jennifer based on their hair lengths and the color of their clothes. When the women spoke their heads bobbed, their lips flapped, their hands gestured. This bedlam at once amused and distracted him, and try as he might he could not keep track of what they were saying so long as their faces ran spastic like that, and he wondered, even as he continued to smile pleasantly at their stories, how they could keep track themselves of even a word that came from such facial commotion.

  Ready to return to work, May stretched and looked up at the sky.

  “Hey, Jen, what’s that white thing moving up in that tree?” he asked.

  Jennifer looked where he was pointing. She saw nothing. Finally, in a distant and tall tree, she saw the flapping white wisp of a kite’s tail. She could barely make it out herself—from this distance it appeared the size of a thread.

  “Wow, you can really see that?” she asked.

  “Yep,” May said.

  Jennifer looked again at the tiny piece of the kite. A minute ago her husband had had to press his eye against the milk carton to read the letter M. Now he had spotted a bit of fabric in a distant tree. She had believed that things couldn’t get more interesting than they had been yesterday. She was beginning to think she was wrong.

  Late that afternoon, five-year-old Wyndham poked his head into May’s office.

  “Come play ball with me, Dad!”

  May’s heart raced. Many of his happiest days had been spent chasing, throwing, and kicking balls. Yet during the year he’d contemplated new vision, he’d never imagined that he’d see one.

  “That would be great,” he said.

  Wyndham ran and got a red-and-white soccer ball, then joined his father in the backyard. They stood about fifty feet apart. Wyndham placed the ball on the ground.

  “Ready, Dad?”

  “Ready.”

  Wyndham kicked the ball on the ground. Instantly, May saw it rolling toward him, its bright white shape a perfect trill against the brilliant green grass below, and without thinking or planning he stepped to the left, shot out his foot, and trapped the ball under his shoe. For a moment, May simply stood there, astonished.

  “Nice play, Dad!” Wyndham shouted. “Now kick it back to me.”

  Jennifer watched from the kitchen window as May backed up a step, looked down at the ball, then swung his leg forward, connecting perfectly with the ball and sending it hurtling back toward his son, who barely needed to move to trap it himself.

  Wyndham kicked a few more on the ground. May moved and stopped them all. Then Wyndham got a new idea.

  He took a big approach this time and sent the ball flying not on the ground but in the air, off to May’s right. Instinctively, May moved right, lifted his leg, and knocked the ball down.

  “Whoa! That was so cool!” May exclaimed. “Do more like that, Wyndham!”

  His son obliged. May knocked them all down. Then, without either of them saying a word, they arrived at a new idea together. Wyndham placed the ball on the grass, took a couple of steps back, then ran forward, kicking the ball even higher to his father. May streaked back and to his right, stuck out his arms, and clenched his hands around the ball.

  “Yes! Great catch, Dad! Awesome!”

  May stopped and looked at his hands. The ball was still there, bright white with little red designs, in his control, like it belonged there, like they had rendezvoused from a long time ago.

  “I caught it,” May said.

  He asked Wyndham to kick more. Soon May was catching four out of every five his son sent streaking his way, including some that sailed over his head or required a running leap to reach. Even when he missed, he ran after the ball like he was four years old again. For an hour, he and Wyndham lost themselves in the game, in keeping score, and in each other. Kids had never taken it easy on May when he’d played sports as a boy, and as he made another running catch of yet another difficult kick, he felt like the best part about this game was that Wyndham never thought to, either.

  That evening, after his kids had gone to bed and the dinner dishes had been dried, May and Jennifer retired to their bedroom. She turned to the bathroom to wash up. He reached for her hand.

  “I want to look at you,” he said.

  Jennifer stepped forward, took May’s hands in hers, and kissed him, first lightly on the cheek, then more passionately, on the lips.

  “I’m really nervous,” she said. “But I want you to look at me.”

  She unbuttoned May’s shirt, pulled it off his back, and let it fall to the floor behind him. She pulled her own shirt over her head, un-hooked her bra, and let it fall to the floor, a white swoop he could see as clearly as the soccer ball. She lifted herself on her toes and leaned into May’s ear.

  “Stay here,” she said.

  Jennifer walked to the far wall and turned on the ceiling lights, then turned on the bedside lamps until the room glowed intensely bright. The light helped May find his clock radio, which he used to play some music. Jennifer pulled down her jeans. A moment later she was fully naked. And, she felt, fully bright.

  “Are you completely undressed?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Jennifer said, crossing her arms over her breasts. “It’s just me now.”

  May pushed off the rest of his clothes.

  “This is great,” he said. “I finally get to gawk at you.”

  Jennifer laughed and felt her face flush. She climbed into their bed and lay flat on her back.

  “Okay, I’m ready,” she said.

  May knelt beside the bed and began to draw near for a closer look. Jennifer pulled the covers over her body and up to her chin.

  “It’s cold in here,” she said.

  “If I have to go under the covers I’ll need a flashlight, and I think we’re out of batteries. That really leaves me no choice.”

  Jennifer slowly crept out, pushed the sheets to the foot of the bed, and lay back flat, arms at her sides, legs pressed together. It had been a long time since she’d felt so nervous and aroused all at once.

  Already, May found himself in a battle to keep his hands from Jennifer’s body. Her shyness only electrified that impulse. But he wanted to see what vision delivered by itself, how this most glorious object in the world, a woman, entered his world when he touched her with eyes alone.

  May walked on his knees toward the head of the bed. Suddenly, he could see Jennifer’s streaked blond hair, a different species than she owned while dressed and washing dishes, no longer well mannered and patient but swooped across the pillow like a fanned deck of cards, its blond and gold streaks a call of abandon into which it felt like he could fall in a hundred different places. He moved his glance to her forehead. There, lost between her eyes, he saw a stray lock of blond hair, innocent to the idea that it had been separated from all the rest, a private accent mark even his wife couldn’t see was there.

  “Look at me,” May said, still on his knees beside the bed.

  Jennifer turned her head to the right. Now he could see her mouth—the light vertical lines etched int
o her lips, the hills that fell to a valley at the center of her top lip, a reddish pink unlike any color he’d seen. She began to breathe a bit more heavily, which caused her lips to part just slightly, a distance that looked to May wholly different from a smile, a distance that, when combined with the sound of her breath, looked sexy to him.

  Jennifer tucked some fallen hair behind her head. May leaned in close.

  “You have smaller ears than I thought,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me before we got married that you had small ears?”

  “I do not!” Jennifer laughed, fluffing her hair back over her ears.

  May climbed onto the bed and knelt beside his wife, who remained on her back. He put his eye to her neck.

  “I can see the hollow of your throat,” he said. “Remind me to tickle that later.”

  “Michael! Oh, gosh, no tickling! I’m feeling wiggly enough already!”

  “Hey, what’s this?” May asked, pointing to a dark spot.

  “That’s a birthmark,” Jennifer said. “I’ve told you about that a million times, remember?”

  May did not remember, but judged it best not to admit it and keep looking. He lay on his side, stretched out, and set out to finally see what he’d been imagining, conceptualizing, and contemplating since age twelve: a woman’s breasts.

  He looked toward the middle of Jennifer’s chest for the dark circles of her areolas, but found them instead lying to either side.

  “That happens when you’re past forty and you’ve had kids…”

  “You’re beautiful,” May interrupted. His hands moved toward her breasts and finally he was powerless to stop them as they traced exploratory circles near her nipples and moved underneath for a fuller touch. Jennifer breathed deeply.

  “What do you see?” she asked.

  “It’s incredible how the color changes from the nipple to the areola to the breast. There’s so much going on. And I can see that your nipple is erect.”