Blind Sight

by Meg Howrey

  “Who said something?” Mark asks him. “WHO?”

  Mark’s raised voice is so loud it causes a slight echoing bounce off the stainless steel appliances.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Luke says. “It’s not a big deal, really.”

  “I will,” Mark says, “fucking KILL whoever said that. I will fucking KILL them.”

  Full-blown adult-male rage lies outside Luke’s experience. This is not his uncle Louis speaking sharply to a grocery-store clerk, or Coach hectoring the team for increased sprint times. Mark’s anger: the sight of it, the sound of it, and most of all the unpredictable ramifications of it have caused a sympathetic surge in Luke’s own hormonal system. Luke freezes as he hears the sound of the screen door in the living room sliding open and children’s voices.

  “Tell me who said something.” Mark lowers his voice. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “I don’t want you to,” Luke says. “Really, I don’t. Please, Dad. Forget it. I don’t want you to be mad.”

  Two of the cousins’ children come running into the kitchen, red, white, and blue frosting smeared on their faces.

  “Holly and I had a cupcake fight!” says one, to Mark. “We smashed cupcakes in each other’s faces!”

  “That sounds like a pretty stupid thing to do,” Mark says, after a moment. “You’re supposed to eat cupcakes.”

  The children run out again.

  Luke looks at his father carefully. He cannot tell if Mark’s anger has subsided, or if Mark is shoring up for some larger and more violent outburst.

  “It will really upset me,” Luke says, “if you say anything. Who cares what they think, right? They don’t know us.”

  The muscles in Mark’s jaw move, but the rest of his face remains impassive.

  “It’s nothing to make a big deal about,” Luke says. “Chill.”

  At this, Mark rolls his eyes.

  “Chill,” Mark says. “Chill, my son says to me.”

  “Yeah, Dad,” Luke says. “Chill out. It’s a fucking barbecue.”

  “Wow,” Mark laughs. “Wow, Luke. You said ‘fucking.’ ”

  Luke smiles tentatively at his father, who, after a moment, puts his arm around him briefly. The two move through the house and into the backyard. For the rest of the afternoon, Mark does not leave Luke’s side.

  The next day Luke and Mark run to Mark’s old high school. They jump the fence of the athletic field, where Mark used to play football.

  “What position did you play?” Luke asks.

  “Quarterback. Second string. Yeah. I had one or two good moments, but I wasn’t, like, the star guy, really. I had a good arm, I guess.”

  “I wanted to play,” Luke tells him. “When I was little, but Sara wouldn’t let me. She gave me a bongo drum instead.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “The bongo drum was cool,” Luke says. “What was less cool was having to play it for Sara’s Ecstatic Dance Class.”

  “Hey, how come you call your mom Sara?” Mark asks. “And not Mom?”

  “We call her Mom sometimes. She once told me that sooner or later you have to see your parent as an autonomous person, and not just an extension of yourself. I guess she figured why not sooner than later.”

  “But you’re close, right? You seem really close.”

  “We’re close,” Luke agrees. “Yeah. But it worked, I think, her plan, because I do see her as an individual. I see her as a person first, and my Mom second.”

  Luke has said this before, but now he wonders if it is entirely true, and if it is, what exactly it means.

  “When I was a kid,” Mark says, “I think I heard my mom more than I saw her. She was like this constant yammering noise in my head.”

  “Well that house does echo,” Luke points out.

  “Does it?” Mark laughs. “I guess it does. Anyway, I just wanted to get away from all that noise.”

  “How come you wanted to be an actor?” Luke asks.

  “My drama teacher,” Mark squints into the sun. “He was pretty great. Mr. Holt. He was also my English teacher. That was the only subject I was really good in. Anyway, he got me to try out for the school play. King Lear.” Mark shrugs. “A high school production of King Lear. He had to make a lot of cuts. Yeah, he wanted me to play Edmund. You know the play?”

  Luke shakes his head.

  “Well, Edmund is the son of the Earl of Gloucester. But he’s the bastard son. There’s a legitimate son—Edgar—and Edmund is all screwed up about that. He’s mad at his father for loving Edgar more and he’s mad at the world for trying to tell him who he is, and what he can have, and what he is supposed to be, and all that. So Edmund plots against his half-brother, and for most of the play you think he’s a total villain. But in the end, he redeems himself. Anyway, Mr. Holt said that he thought I had talent.” Mark’s voice takes on an edge of sarcasm. “He could tell by the way I read things out loud in class and he thought I had a real feel for Shakespeare’s language. A sensitivity.”

  “So you did it?” Luke asks.

  “Yeah,” Mark says, his tone lightening. “I mean, whatever, a little high school production, but it was the first time I really felt like I was in the right place. I was more excited about rehearsals than … God, pretty much anything. And the audience, the first time, I was sorta nervous but the moment I stepped onstage I was just like … I just wanted everyone to know exactly what Edmund was feeling and I knew I could do it and … I knew I was good, you know? I was so pumped. Best feeling in the world. I kept playing football and everything, but I knew that as soon as I got out of school I was going to go to New York and become an actor. I used to talk to Mr. Holt about it. He gave me plays to read and books on acting. He helped me find a drama school. He was like, ‘Go for it. You have to follow your dream,’ blah, blah, blah.”

  “So he must be really proud of you.” Luke is thinking that he would be really proud of Mark, if he were Mr. Holt. “Do you keep in touch and stuff? Is he still here?”

  “I used to call him from time to time. Things were hard, for me, you know, when I was starting out. I shared this shit-hole apartment in New York with two other people. I worked at this restaurant, and an electronics store, moving boxes.”

  “And helping women with their VCRs,” Luke adds, not to be funny, but because that is what he is thinking.

  “Yeah,” Mark says. “Right. That was then. I was in over my head in so many ways. I got into some … I just, you know, struggled. It wasn’t like I never thought about you, Luke, or … I just didn’t know what to do.”

  “I know,” Luke says. He wants to get back to the story. “So anyway, eventually you started acting for real, right?”

  “I got a part in an off-Broadway play. Mr. Holt was the first person I called. He was so excited. And he came to see it. My mom didn’t even come to see it, but Mr. Holt did. He came and afterwards … he … well, he … I guess you could say that I wasn’t the only closet case at Grover High.”

  “Oh,” Luke says. Oh. “You mean … he …?”

  “It was sort of … awful. I mean, I thought of him as kind of a … well, not a father, but as, you know, a mentor, or whatever. And I guess I felt a little betrayed or something dumb like that. Anyway, I ended up punching him.”

  “You punched him?” Luke asks. “Like a real punch? Like, in the face?”

  “Sort of,” Mark shrugs. “I didn’t take a big swing at him. I told him that he was wrong about me, and that I wasn’t a fag, and he tried to kiss me and I hit him. And he cried. He stood there crying and saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ in this crappy little hotel room where he was staying, and I walked out and I never saw him or talked to him again. And he died a few years later. From bronchitis. So probably from AIDS, I guess, really. I don’t know.”

  Mark runs backwards a few paces and throws an imaginary football across the field.

  “Thou hast spoken right. ’Tis true,” he calls out. “The wheel has come full circle. I AM HERE.”


  “Is that King Lear?” Luke asks, after a moment.

  “It’s a good play,” Mark says. “You should read it.”

  “I will.”

  “Was all of that … was that … too much? ‘Too much information,’ as they say?”

  Luke thinks that is wasn’t too much. That he’s not that sheltered. Or firewalled. That he knows that life can be really messed up.

  “Relationships can be very complicated,” Sara has sometimes said. “But imagine a world where all people treat each other with love. Isn’t that a world you want to live in?”

  And Luke had always said yes, because that did seem to be the best kind of world. But now he begins to think this through. Did Sara mean that we should live in a world where we treat all people with the same amount of love? Because unless we love everybody exactly equally then we’ll be right back where we started, only people will be going to war over amounts of love instead of hate, or amounts of tolerance, or compassion. We would have said to Iraq: “Yes we totally love the people who flew the planes into the World Trade Center and we totally accept them and have compassion for them, but we have slightly more love for the people in the World Trade Center, so we are going to bomb your country.” You have to love everybody exactly equally or it won’t work. Luke concludes that Universal Love, like reincarnation, might be one of those ideas that are just mathematically improbable.

  Luke tells his father that he can tell him anything and Mark says, “Okay, but now you tell me about playing drums for your mom’s Ecstatic Dance Class. Because that sounds like a fucking riot.”

  And so Luke had told Mark about that. He watched his father throw imaginary footballs. He thinks about this now, sitting at his father’s desk, with his father’s high-school copy of King Lear in front of him. Luke is moved by the sight of Mark’s handwriting in the margins, notations in pencil indicating where a teenage Mark had needed to go onstage.

  Mathematics aside, Luke simply does not want to love his father with no more love than he has for everybody else. He wants to love his father particularly, exceptionally, uniquely. He would like there to be an “us” that is his father and himself, and a “them” that is everybody else. Weeks ago, Luke had wished to render the words “father” and “son” meaningless, beyond their biological markers. Today he wished to throw them across the field to his father, see his father throw them back. Today, Luke was willing to exchange even the idea of Universal Love for an actual game of catch with his dad.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  This latest essay attempt is pretty hilarious. My dad helped me write it. I’m saving it under the title “If All Else Fails!”

  We’re on the plane now. He’s asleep.

  He totally surprised me at the airport in Chicago. Instead of going back to Los Angeles, we’re actually en route now to Hawaii.

  “Seriously?” I asked, at the ticket counter. “We are seriously going to Hawaii?”

  “You ranked camping in the Sequoia National Forest above Hawaii,” he said. “And we’re definitely going to do that too. But I thought maybe you were afraid to put Hawaii first ’cause you thought it was too big a thing to ask for? I’m counting on the fact that everybody wants to go to Hawaii, right? Like, you don’t have a problem with Hawaii or anything like that?”

  I assured him that I have no problems with Hawaii.

  “We’re going to the main island,” he explained. “It’s less touristy. And I rented a little condo instead of doing the five-star luxury thing. I thought you’d like that better. We’re gonna rough it. Slightly smaller wide-screen television, ha-ha.”

  Then he pulled a guidebook to Hawaii out of his carry-on bag.

  “You’re in charge of itinerary,” he said. “Research and report back. I am in your hands.”

  “Well, what would you like to do?” I asked. “It’s your vacation too.”

  “I would like to know that we are doing what you want to do,” he said.

  Mark fell asleep shortly after takeoff, and I read the guidebook. I made a list: visiting the black sand beaches, snorkeling, hiking on the volcano. Definitely surfing.

  Then I pulled 50 Successful College Application Essays out of my backpack and read two successful essays. I set up my laptop and wrote things like:

  Glugglugglugdugglugglug.

  And then deleted them.

  Mark woke up and asked me what I was doing.

  “Yesterday,” I told him, “I had this great idea about how to turn all these random free-writes I’ve been doing into an actual essay. It’s supposed to be between three and five hundred words, right? Well, that’s about twenty-five lines if you use four hundred words as a target point. So all I needed to do was extract three of the best sentences from each of the seven free-writes and combine those sentences together.”

  “Yeah, but your free-writes have all been about different things,” he pointed out. “The sentences won’t go together.”

  That’s what I found out when I tried it. I don’t know why I didn’t realize that.

  “All the childhood stuff you’ve been doing is great,” he said.

  “Yeah, but it’s all really rambling,” I explained. “Like the other day I tried doing what you suggested … on being the one guy in a family of women? And I ended up writing, like, six hundred words about playing Barbies with my sisters.”

  “You didn’t have GI Joe? I had GI Joe,” he said.

  I had Spider-Man and Batman. The girls just had one Barbie each because Sara didn’t approve of Barbie’s shape. But Rory got one as a birthday present from her friend, and then Pearl had to have one so Sara got her African American Barbie. For diversity.

  “I love your mom,” Mark said, when I told him about that.

  “Yeah. So they would get the Barbies going, doing something, and then Batman would attack.”

  “Batman attacked African American Barbie?”

  “Well, both of them, because he wasn’t always in control of his inner demons. Then Spider-Man would show up, and battle Batman, and then rescue the girls.”

  I thought I was maybe making an interesting statement about human nature vs. environment. I was taught to be nonviolent. Sara wouldn’t let me have plastic guns or GI Joe. But there I was anyway, violently destroying my sisters’ peaceful global community.

  “You have to let me read that,” Mark laughed. “It sounds awesome.”

  “It’s maybe a little dark for an essay.” I showed him 50 Successful College Application Essays. “It’s hard to figure out a pattern with these things. This girl wrote how she has learned Important Life Lessons from watching Star Trek.”

  “I was on Star Trek,” Mark offered, yawning.

  “Really?” I laughed.

  “My first job in LA. I had four lines. They gave me a prosthetic forehead. My name was Tabor. That essay got someone accepted into college?”

  “This guy,” I told him, turning to another essay, “his sister had leukemia. It’s what made him want to become a research scientist.”

  “Okay, so either you need to sound all academic and ambitious, or you need to show what a wonderful human being you are?”

  “Right.” He’s pretty quick about these things.

  “I’d go for wonderful human being,” Mark said. “I mean you’ve got a 4.0, right? And you’ll probably ace the SATs or whatever.”

  “I should do okay,” I said. Aurora did tons of SAT prep and she got an astronomically high score. Pearl didn’t do any SAT prep and she lost a contact lens on the way to the test and had to do the whole thing with one eye shut. She still did almost as well as Rory. I’ll probably do a little prep, but I’m not worried about it. I test well.”

  “You’ve got cross-country,” Mark pointed out. “And your community service stuff: shoveling driveways and mowing lawns for free for the elderly, the school recycling program. I’m sorry I messed up the Belize thing. That would have looked good.”

  “I think I can write an academic essay, but I need another one that’s more personal.
It’d be great if I had one that was both,” I said.

  “It seems like you’ve got plenty of material. You just need to, what, narrow your focus?”

  “I know,” I said. “I just don’t know how to do that.”

  “Well, here,” Mark sat up. “Let me help. I’m a totally narrow person. We can write it together.”

  “Okay.” I opened a new blank document on my computer. “What should we write about? You need to give me a first sentence. That’s usually where I go wrong. It needs to be exciting so I stand out from the pile of applicants.”

  “What about Ecstatic Dance Class? That’s pretty juicy. I still think you can market this whole being-raised-by-women angle. I’ve milked the my-mom-was a-single-mom stuff myself. It totally works.”

  “I see dangers with that,” I said. “I mean, what did I really learn from playing the bongo for Ecstatic Women? I learned that women like to run around and yell as much as boys, only they don’t shove each other. They like to wave scarves. Some women, anyway; obviously not all women are into scarf waving. I learned that when you are a thirteen-year-old boy, it’s problematic to be in a room with adult women in leotards. I learned that the more grounded I am in my yang, the more free I am to experience my yin. But I don’t think a college admissions board wants to hear about my yang.”

  “That chick wrote about Star Trek.”

  “Yeah, but she tied it into lessons about a shared sense of purpose and collective humanity.”

  “We could all use grounded yang or what have you, right?” Mark asked. “Imagine if that was a thing that everybody did. Like, before the Senate sat down to make laws and pass bills and shit, they all ran around waving scarves while you played the bongo for them.”

  “That would be cool. Although I’m not sure that the Inner Goddess would be helpful with things like the federal deficit.”

  “More people would watch C-SPAN, though. Anyway, you learned a life lesson. It’s better to hit a bongo drum than a face, is all I’m saying. Your mother did well by you.”

  “Maybe that should be my first sentence?” I asked. “It’s better to hit a bongo drum than a face?”