Sometimes the easiest way to help Seamus was the wrong one.
“Yeah, Seamus, Jason moved your stuff across the hall. Martin's, too.”
“But I don't have a key for that room.”
“Jason said your old key will work fine. Give it a try.”
I heard him cross the hall and the deadbolt unlock. Martin had left his radio on, the volume loud. He'd tuned it to an oldies station, for the ladies at camp who were into that kind of groove. Johnny Cash filled the hallway as Seamus opened the door.
“It worked, Ryan! Okay, gonna go into my new room now. Now I've got to make sure all my stuff is here. I'm gonna go into the room now and shut the door and check all my stuff. Okay!?”
I called back, through the door, “You betcha, Seamus.”
“Here I go. Gotta lock the door behind me. Here I go . . .”
One morning Seamus appeared well before sunrise. I woke to his key scratching in my lock and started up our routine.
“No, Seamus. It's my room, Ryan's room, yours is across the hall.”
“Who's-ssat?”
Seamus sounded upset. Different.
“Ryan. It's Ryan, Seamus. Your room isâ”
“Ryan? I canned find my deef! I canned find dem.”
“Your teeth?”
“My deef.”
“You want some help?”
“Yesh, pleash.”
I got out of bed and opened the door. There stood Seamus in his pajamas with his cane. No teeth. I couldn't see that they were missing, but I could hear it.
We walked to the common bathroom, the last place he could recall wearing them, and began the search. Because it was so early, I decided not to get Jason up. Maybe the dentures were somewhere obvious. Two blind guys began their search for a pair of teeth. We felt for them. Everywhere.
Now that he had some help, the teeth didn't seem to matter to Seamus so much, and his panic dissipated. I touched shelves and countertops while Seamus wiped the bathroom floor with his hands. He chatted affably all the while.
“Do you have an elecdric rayshor?” he asked.
“Nope. Just a regular one.”
“I'm nod allowed do have one. Do you like id bedder?”
“Yep.”
“I'm nod allowed do have one, bud I've god a nyshe elecdric rayshor. And afder shave called Brud. I like Brud. Wanna shmell?”
“Maybe after we find your teeth.”
“Okay. Hey, maybe I can dry your rayshor and you can dry mine. Do you like elecdric rayshors?”
We carried on until we'd fingered every surface of the washroom. Seamus's worry was pretty much gone, too, as if he couldn't care less if he ever got his teeth back. As long as somebody was there with him, things were top-notch. No embarrassment, no apology. Neither of those occurred to
Seamus as a consequence of blindness. For him, helplessness and the occasional fuck-up guaranteed company. In his mind, it was all good. I liked that about him very much.
On our way to his room, prepared to give it all a thorough touch, Seamus knocked a cup over with his cane. He'd left his dentures in water for the night and left the cup on the floor, outside his room. It still seems appropriate. His teeth couldn't wait to get up and talk, just like their owner.
Neither Carson nor Seamus had pretensions. They didn't look at themselves and imagine what the sighted saw or try to be like the sighted. The Aristocrats did both, though. That self-conscious regard causes so much trouble for us, me included. If I walked into a wall in front of someone who sees, I'd be embarrassed. If I did that in front of most people at camp, even though they're blind, too, I'd feel a twinge. More than anything else, I liked Seamus and Carson because I wouldn't feel troubled if they were my audience. They were the kind of blind I hope to be one day. I took that hope with me when I went home early, and we said goodbye.
I didn't have a horrible time at camp, but I'd had enough. I thought my time would have been a lot worse, a lot sweatier, but as I say, I grew to admire a few people, and what they taught me. “Activities” are never something I've sought. Swimming was good, though, and who couldn't enjoy an afternoon of blind people wandering through a stone maze or touching a tree? A really big tree. We didn't gang up on each other's underwear or anything that Cub Scout-nostalgic, but I'd had enough. I will always be the camper who goes home early. That won't change with age or blindness, and it surprised me.
I'd had enough of being blind there, just there, at camp. To live with a group of blind people was tiring. Dedicating our time to activities and conversations that acknowledged, eased, reinforced, or celebrated that we are all of the unseeing kind wasn't enough to keep me in my bunk. Being accommodated was exhausting. I wasn't used to being treated the way a blind person should. I needed a break. Funny enough, going home, to all the sight-centred things of Vancouver, that sounded pretty good. In the city, my blindness is more or less ignored, which helps me ignore it, too.
I came to camp to confront my fear of blind people, and I think I came to some understanding. My cure, I hoped, began with this: there is no such thing as a blind person. That was my discovery, as odd as it may sound. My old horror was that I am, could be, or must become a blind person, as if I could dissolve into that phrase, be that featureless and deleted. But there is no such thing.
Consider the icon for disabled washrooms, the one with the white stick-figure in a wheelchair. It says this room is not for men or women but for the disabled. To know that little wheelchair picture describes everybody and nobody is my new relief. That icon isn't me. It's not Seamus or Cheryl or the Aristocrats or Eddie, either. Stephen Hawking, my former partner, Jane, all the ADHD kids in the world, and Terry Fox are supposed to fit in that same washroom. We're having a big party in here. But few of us have anything more in common than Carson and my brothers or Tracy and Liza might share. As I say, the deaf have a language, which makes community and identity. But other disabilities, like blindness, may fool us
into thinking we have our own culture. Disability, in general, likely doesn't have one at all.
Those of us on the island couldn't see. We had that in common. But we couldn't see in such radically different ways, and fashioned such disparate lives out of blindness, that I have to wonder how faked a community can get. Some of us needed the artifice. Seamus did. He needed and enjoyed the island and its support. He'd stay there, if he could. But my need was different. Is different. I needed to go home. I need to always go home in the end. The fear is real. What if, one day, I recognize myself in another blind person? How would I get myself back, then? That was what I use to sweat. How would I get home?
This time, escaping camp was simple enough. I called Tracy. She took the ferry over and picked me up two days early. When I said goodbye to Seamus, he seemed puzzled.
“But camp isn't finished, Ryan. There's two more days.”
“I know, but I'm ready to go home. I've got some other things to do.”
“But there are two more days,” he insisted.
“Tell you what, Seamus. You can have my last two days. They're all yours.”
He couldn't believe my naïveté. “You can't give me your two days, silly. I'm already going to be here.”
“Well, how about you take my seat in the van, then? The front seat. It's all yours.”
The idea pleased him, and he agreed. “Last year I sat in the front seat,” he reminded me. “It's a good seat, isn't it?”
“You bet,” I said. “Nothing like it.”
From What I Hear
I often stop at the Santa Barbara deli on Vancouver's Commercial Drive, a street in the heart of our Little Italy. The deli has a long and busy steel counter, its many glass coolers filled with meats and cheeses of every sort and strength. The place is popular, so you have to take a number and wait your turn, which I do, usually with the help of some other regular who notices me pawing about the countertop for the number tags. Groping raises my notability, and I rely on it as a way of getting help. I'd ask, but sometimes people are as hard for me to locate as the number tags.
Besides the marbled pancetta, what I enjoy most here is the brutal consequence of the deli's speed. When your number comes up, a worker will call it once, twice, and at most three times, and fast. If you happen to be down the aisle somewhere squeezing eggplants, well, you're shit out of luck, buddy. Get a new number.
The regulars know that, so we stand alert and on guard. Not even if my number is another three or five away can I afford to feel safe. The regulars like me are easy to spot because we are vigilant, even respectful in our patience, to the coordinated mathematics before us. All day on Sundays we come and go in orderly bunches, stoic and humble, as if
waiting for the sacrament itself. It's a terrific dance. Nobody wants to miss their turn.
The Pavlovian imprint is strong and mildly addictive. I get a buzz when my number is called. I've learned to holler “Here! Here!” and wave my tag above the heads around me, heads that smile when somebody else misses a turn. Then, having declared myself “Here!” I move to the counter with a feeling of pride and privilege. I am here, and it is my turn. They are there, and it is not theirs. Somebody else's desires and orders will not be given consideration. Not yet. This is what it means to be called to the counter. It is to be given distinction. Definition from others.
I don't take my deli worker for granted, and I hope she won't take me for granted, either. The next crucial moment to pass between us is when she takes my number and places it on the pile. With this she may say “Hi,” or she may say “I'll take that,” or “Just a sec,” and then she'll step away with my tag. Her work begins, as does mine, now, but my job is specific to blindness.
From those few words I have to form an intimate recognition of her voice. From the four or five others working the counter, I must discern hers alone. When she returns she'll ask, “What would you like?” I may not recognize her voice, and I may, therefore, miss the fact it is me she's speaking to. That happens all the time and makes for a heap of mutual awkwardness. I'll often stare at my deli worker blankly, unaware she spoke to me, while she wonders, perhaps, if I'm lost in an acid flashback, or if I'm deaf.
The blind and sighted difference between us is hard to
explain in the high speed of commercial life. Usually I'll pretend to scratch my nose or rub my temple with the hand in which I hold my white cane, allowing it to peek above the deli cases so she'll see I don't see her. But that doesn't guarantee her use of “Can I help you?” will become any more precise. As a quick repair, she may see the cane and try to be more definite with, “What can I get you, sir?” That only slightly augments my odds of recognizing her voice, what with the number of sirs with chorizo cravings around here.
What fascinates and spooks me about this crisis is my disappearance. I can vanish into the language others use. Then I can be found, and I am only found, in specific addresses, not as “you.” I respond to “Can I help you, Ryan?” but not “Can I help you?”
As a pronoun, “you” assumes I will recognize myself in language. It assumes I will see the sentence's intention for me and take it upon myself, for myself, like the beloved, the intended. But I can't, or I won't.
Too often I have answered questions meant for others standing beside me. I fail, in this respect, to see myself in the desires and addresses of others. I don't catch the cues in their faces, the arrows that give feather and flight to “you” and direct its meaning at me, and me alone. It is to risk narcissism, then, to take “you” for myself in public spaces and to thereby admit that I do not know who I am here in relation to others. “Who are you?” I ask myself. Only “Ryan,” in his precision and familiarity, gives me presence and relation to others. For them, of course, it's an uncommonly overstated need for distinction.
To refer to another as “you” is to call upon a peculiar arrogance, too. Arrogance means “to claim for one's self.” When I am crossing at the corner of Main and Broadway and someone beside me asks, “Hey, where are you going?” I must decide whether to claim the pronoun for myself. If I don't, and the person walking with me waits for my answer, I've suggested that they are not welcome, that their question is invasive and unwanted. That may not be the case at all. On the other hand, if I wait and I hear another voice answer for me, telling me two friends are having a private conversation as they walk, having just bumped into one another at this moment, then I'm correct in leaving the language around me to others.
The arrogance that gives value to the word “you” is always about this predicament. I risk my own misplacement in the world vocalized around me. To not risk it, though, is to disappear myself until I'm given service by my name. It's all very biblical, really. Adam did this for animals, once. God reputedly said, hey, all these critters are going to work for you, just give them all names, first. It makes sense. How else would anybody or anything know when it's their turn?
The other, stranger face of “you” is in my new life as “he” or “him.” Even though I require myself to be more distinct in the flow of public movement and more precise in language, some people avoid the problem and bypass me altogether. They may address, as often happens, Tracy instead of me. In that case I'm reduced to the remote social blur of “Would he like a menu?” or “Will you order for him?” It's enough to drive a guy underground.
So I went there. Tracy and I went underground once, one hundred and thirty metres down, on a tour of the salt mines just outsideâand, er, underâKrakow. We were on our honeymoon, of course, the kind taken in a Polish salt mine. I wanted to go somewhere dark. That might make it equally memorable for the two of us. Tracy, as always, was game for anything.