I guessed it was on the left, but a couple of campers disagreed.
“No,” Jason said, “that's Eddie's room.”
“I locked my door,” Eddie said. “We can't go that way.”
I thought Jason was going to melt on the spot. “Here,” he conceded, “how about I just show you guys where it is and if there's a fire, promise to use that door, okay?”
That seemed reasonable to everybody. We followed him down the hall and discovered a new door. Everybody got the hang of how to open it and run for our lives.
All of this points to one thing I admire about blindness and the blind. We have an incomparable ability to throw a wrench in bureaucracy, whether we mean to or not. Our bodies are collectively so idiosyncratic and uncooperative, as are some of our personalities, that we don't lend ourselves well to goals like efficiency and standardization. I mean, you can't standardize the movements of this many blind people, and you can't take anything about us for granted, either. That's the bureaucratic goal, right? We went through the insurance drill so that the insurers could assume all the blind folks knew how to get out of the building. As if. I doubt if any of us could have left the building the same way twice. It was a gentle, even an unintentional, anarchy.
Not all mornings began with such a scene. In fact, Tai Chi was the main morning activity during camp. I took a liking to
Tai Chi. Jesus, no, I didn't do it, but I enjoyed my coffee at the far end of the dining hall while a handful of others, down at the opposite end, did their best to strike a pose. From where I sat, I could squeeze bits of the action into view. Carson, our novice, led the show. He was a fellow camper and one of my favourite people.
“Now, make a wing,” Carson said one morning, “but make it high-up and flat, like a tipping sailboat.”
Carson likely saw at some point in his life. The imagery he used suggested as much. I noticed he took a lot of analogies from the ocean. I wondered if he'd lost his sight in a boating accident or something. Our Poseidon. I imagined birds nibbling at his eyes. Hitchcocky stuff.
To describe a Tai Chi move to newcomers, blind newcomers, is difficult. Inkblots would be a similar challenge to put into words. Carson hadn't thought his lessons through. Not everybody had seen a sailboat, let alone the tipping kind. Carson had to bust out the technical manual and try again.
“Or think of it this way,” he said. “Take your right hand, bend at the elbow and turn it inward at the wrist and open your fingers, like a starfish, and then, holding your elbow up as high as you can, pull a hand towards you, the right one, like you are calling somebody, but keep the hand and arm parallel to your chest, more like you are raking than calling somebody, maybe. Now turn your wrist and swim, extending the arm out, follow through, always follow through, and return and swim out again and . . .”
A half a dozen people contorted. They looked like they'd fallen out of trees and busted their elbows and shoulders.
Carson had said swim, but few did. Some updated the chicken dance, others went fly fishing, and Eddie broke into an impromptu round of shadow boxing. Carson hadn't said anything about how fast the arm should go, so Eddie's pace went rapid-fire, a rhythm to match his morning dose of Van Halen. Liza's arm slowly stirred a pot of soup.
While all this was happening, Carson's lower body maintained an elegant pose, angled but relaxed. His students, however, ignored everything but their flapping. Some remained rigid, while others slouched into their normal bad postures. Eddie bent low at the knees, it appeared, with his legs wide apart, going for a lead singer crotch-shot, the kind struck before belting a high note.
I guess if you don't mention it to the blind, it isn't there. If you give the upper part of me guidance, the rest of me wouldn't know what to do. You'd think Carson, and the rest of us, would be conscious of such things with one another. Nope.
I expected, of all places in the world, this would be the one where sighted habits were dropped. They weren't. People sat around the breakfast tables and spoke to one another without identifying themselves or whom they meant to address. Cheryl might have asked something like, “Are you going to glue macaroni owls at the crafts table this afternoon?” Everybody would carry on chewing until somebody said the obligatory, “Are you talking to me?” All six dining tables sounded like a rehearsal from
Taxi Driver
. You talking to me? You talking to me?
It happened in the halls, too. Cruising around the lodge, its
disorienting design, if we heard someone approaching, we said hello, but never, “Hello, it's Martin,” or “Hello, it's Eddie.” Even I forgot to add my name to my voice. The hallways echoed with a casual anthem: “Who's there?” All day and night, “Who's that?” and “Who's there?” If you hear the questions often enough, you begin to wonder at the depth of the answer. I don't know, I wanted to say. I don't know who's here. Who are we? Who are you? Could any of us really say?
Likewise, you'd think of all places in the world, this one would have been gesture-free. Nope. Everybody, me included, carried on flagging and pointing, and as you'd expect, none of us followed. We were so used to living with sighted people that we couldn't even be blind with one another.
Carson, from what I could tell, was the only one who avoided any of the above. Sometimes he avoided answering anything. Beyond his morning Tai Chi class, the guy was basically a ghost, walking the beach alone, or hanging out quietly on the edge of a chatty group, just listening. His self-reliance was a likeable trait. Enviable, even. Something in his character, some core resignation to his blindness, carried him. He maintained an eerie peace I wish I could know, a peace without irony, cynicism, or victimization propping it up. Those were the defences of choice for most people I met. Me, too.
While it's fair to say Carson kept to himself, unlike me, he didn't hide from the group in his room. His tactics differed and weren't born of fear. Within days I was running out of strategies to avoid people. Soon I borrowed one from Eddie. Headphones. I wore my walkman when I wanted to be left
alone. It could have been surgically attached to my ears, I wore it so much during the first few days.
Initially I kept the sound off. I thought I'd developed a great way to say to people that I wasn't available. What I failed to see was the obvious. Nobody saw the headset, so conversations continued to follow me around the lodge and down to the beach.
To avoid everybody in a fresh fashion, I walked down to the lodge's dock for a swim one afternoon. It was raining, so I figured I'd be on my own for as long as I could stand the frigid water and whatever creepy stuff brushed against my toes. When I reached the end of the dock's wooden planks, I heard an extra set of footsteps behind me. They were Carson's. I asked if he came for a swim, but he said he didn't know how. He thought he'd just listen. And he did. Not a word passed between us. He likes to listen, that's all. I hoped one day to learn how to do that, too.
Seamus was my other pal. I first met Seamus, and took a liking to him, on our third day. A bunch of us joined Jason that afternoon for an annual camp highlight. We drove across the island to touch the big tree. It really was a big tree. Eight of us circled it. Then we all touched it. Good trip. Felt good, like a big tree, in fact.
Avoiding Seamus would have been hard. He loved to talk. More than that, he loved to tell you what was happening right here and now in the realm of the brutally obvious. On our way to the tree he sat in the back of the van and lobbed all his observations and descriptions at me.
“Hey, Ryan,” he said, “how's the front seat?”
That wasn't small talk for Seamus. He overwhelmed it with curiosity, like he'd just discovered I'd once been clinically dead and now he needed to know how the experience measured up.
“The front seat is good, Seamus.”
According to the counselors, Seamus was a camp regular and diehard. He squirreled away a little money every month, not an easy feat with a disability pension, to make the annual trip to camp. Seamus was perhaps in his fifties, but due to other conditions related to his blindness, his mental development had arrested around the age of six, maybe. From what I could determine, he had salt-and-pepper hair and was easily rattled. The only cure for his anxiety was the same as anybody's. He talked.
“Yep,” he continued, “it's one good seat. I sat there last year. A really good front seat. Nice. This seat isn't so bad. I like it. I get to sit with two people, but you only sit with one. You got the window open?”
“Uh, nope.”
“The window is good. I like wind. Wind, window. Wind and windowâhey, they're almost the same. It's a good seat, Ryan. I sat there last year, you know.”
“I'm sorry, Seamus. Did I take your spot?”
I'd had an autistic student freak once when I borrowed his pen. Seamus's condition wasn't clear to me, so I worried I'd upset some natural order. My concern baffled him.
“No, it's not my seat,” he said, as if I'd picked it up and handed it to him. “It's your seat. This, this is my seat, in the back. You're sitting in the front seat, Ryan. That's your seat.”
I didn't know what else to do or how to carry a conversation with him. Didn't matter, though. Seamus carried it for us, taking an inventory of all the possible subjects from the immediate environment. Troubled by a lull in dialogue, he narrated what was happening around him, so that you could pick something from his collection to talk about, be it an ashtray, temperature, funny sounds, what your name rhymed with, whatever he could find. He was an unrivaled surveyor of reality's lesser phenomena.
“Well,” he continued, sensing our pause, “yep, the front seat, a good one. Ryan's in the front, and Jason's driving. We're driving together, and I'm in the back. Hey, the air conditioning is on, right, Jason?”
“Yep, it's on.”
“It's good air conditioning, eh?”
“Works well.”
“Are you cold, Ryan?”
“Nope, just cool.”
“Air conditioning, air is con-di-tioning, ing-a-ling. It's a song! It's keeping us cool on our way to the big tree. Me, too, way back here. I'm sitting back here, Ryan. Yep, here we are, cool in the van and driving to the big tree. I've got my sandals on. Ryan's in the front seat, and Jason's in theâhey, I sat there last year, Ryan, but now you're sitting there. It's a nice seat, eh?”
And so on, until we arrived at the big tree and touched it.
Seamus irritated most campers, but something happened to me after fifteen minutes of listening to his consciousness. His effect switched from annoying to, I don't know, something like
spiritual. His inventory of every moment caused a mild trance-like state in me. Comfort comes of describing what's happening all the time. I guess, in a way, it felt like the old days when I could relax my focus and idly look around. Seamus did it for all of us. Seamus looked around with words.
Some of the Aristocrats had no patience for him. They thought much of his constant difficulty and banter was a show for attention, not a medical reality. The Aristocrats were our right-wing equivalent of people who worry that somebody isn't really disabled, or disabled enough, only abusing the system for its perks. It happens. I've been accused by sighted people of not being blind enough for whatever it is blindness gets me. Like what, I don't know.
But to have carried on Seamus's epic monologues and to have needed the amount of help he did was an immense labour. If it was deliberate and unnecessary, wow. Christ, if I'd tried to pull it off, the perks would have to be pretty blue chip to have justified the effort. Having a counselor help me unlock my room doesn't strike me as cashing in on the lottery of personal aid, nor as an incentive to have recited “left foot, right foot, left foot,” while we walked to the big tree. I'll never understand those who accuse disabled folks of milking their status.
What I liked even more about Seamus, more than his narration, was his lack of self-consciousness. No matter how much help or what kind of help he needed, no matter how many groans came from the Aristocrats, he asked for assistance, was unapologetic, and displayed no shame. We were the ones who were embarrassed for him, some of us, sometimes,
but not him. That bugged the hell out of the Aristocrats.
I think they didn't want the association of Seamus as a peer in blindness. He made them look bad or feel awkward about themselves. He defined how they might or could one day appear to the sighted. Maybe a little of that identification, that fear, had once been in me, too. Maybe that had been part of my anxiety about other blind people to begin with. I didn't want them defining me.
Seamus's room was across the hall from mine. If his roommate wasn't with himâpoetic justice dictated that to be MartinâSeamus was easily disoriented by the lodge's maze-like design. Half the time he tried his key in my door. Because I was often in my room, keeping dry and calm, I redirected him. Otherwise he would have spent, and did, a frightening amount of time trying and retrying his key in my lock.
“Seamus, your room is across the hall.”
“Martin? Is that you? I can't get my key to work.”
“No, Seamus, it's Ryan.”
“Hey, Ryan! How's it going? Did you make a candle today? What are you doing in my room?”
“This is my room, Seamus. Yours is across the hall.”
“I can't get my key to work. Maybe I have the wrong one. Do you have my key?”
“Your key doesn't work because this is my room.”
“Oh. I see. This is your room.” Seamus began to drown in confusion. Something in the world defied the laws of physics. “I don't mind if you're in my room now, but where's my stuff? Did Jason move my stuff?”