Cockeyed (26 page)

But my window only seems to want to let things in, not let me out. I remain a fixed body in space and imagination, unless I force myself to go beyond the sounds in my ears and what I can know that way. In hearing, I receive audible traces from a rough and undetailed world. I hear a dog bark. It is a dog and it is barking, and it is outside somewhere. End of story. I could try to imagine more, but the sound reveals little, making the distance from my window a hefty work of fiction and one slender fact. The dog has no colour, no yard, tidy or unkempt. From what I hear, the dog isn't tethered to a clothesline beside a house with a plastic tarp for a window-pane.
Unlike seeing, I can't hear the dog from different angles, to witness its scrawniness. I'm without some curiosity because listening won't do. I have to either be told the details or go across the street to touch everything I can get my hands on and probably get bitten. I can't do any of it from my window. My curiosity is stuck here, inside me.

One afternoon my friend Karina and I were talking over lunch about the aches and pains of student life. You might say we were whimpering about the minor boo-boos that come with reading a lot.

“The nice thing about taped books,” I explained, “is that I don't get as much of that scholar's stoop, anymore—you know, from hunching over my desk. Now I just lie in bed and strap on my headset. It's a luxury. The only problem is staying awake.”

Karina smiled, I think. “And at least you don't get sore eyes from reading anymore.”

“But I do. My eyes are still hardwired into reading. Maybe the ache is from focusing, in its broader sense, but I don't know. About an hour of listening to Martin Amis still gives me a dull pain behind my eyes. I like his fiction, so it isn't the book. It's also not the same kind of ache Canadian novels give me. The British sentences are just, well, just so written. It's like I can't convince my body I'm listening to speech.”

That is an old argument Tracy and I have, too. She'll ask me what I'm doing, and I'll say I'm reading. Then she'll say, no you're not, you're listening. Karina had heard that shtick a few times before, so I didn't bother to milk it again.

“I always get muscle aches in my eyes after a few hours of
reading,” she said. “Doesn't matter what. The closeness does it. All these words in your face, one at a time and filling your periphery. I love reading, but there's a limit.”

Karina would know, too. She's soldiering through her doctoral dissertation, something complex about the history and literary construction of Afro-Canadian settlements in the prairies. To prepare for her two big field exams, she read on average twelve hours a day, every day. I've never regretted bailing on my Ph.D. Occasionally Karina reminds me of at least one reason why—my pain threshold is too low. About as low as my tolerance for academically afflicted writing, the real soul-crushing stuff. I wouldn't want to die with one of those sentences on my mind, and I probably would have.

“There are times,” she went on, “when I don't leave my apartment for days. I read for hours without a break and feel like all I want to do is stand in a field and look as far as I can in any direction. I want a view, but I don't want to see anything. I just want something like an eye stretch.”

“Why not just shut your eyes?” I asked. “What's the difference?”

“Closing my eyes is too much like nearness, like reading. It's black and it's in your face, sort of crowding you. Gazing down a prairie road stretches me and the muscles in my eyes. I don't necessarily want to see anything. Just look out.”

“Like a kind of blindness for the sighted?”

“Exactly,” she said and laughed so I would know she was smiling.

In my ears I've known a similar feeling to Karina's crowded eyes. In the restaurant where we'd met, the acoustics were
terrible. Large windows and polished concrete floors encouraged noise to ricochet and amplify. On top of that, the owners, like so many hip restauranteurs, drowned the soundscape in deep drum and bass tunes. Rumour is that loud bars and restaurants condition a sense of privacy at a table. Because we can barely hear each other, the implication is that nobody else can eavesdrop.

But, for me, loud noises clutter and impede intimacy, wedging uncomfortably between us. All this bombastic competition for my ears. It pries me from the person with whom I'm speaking. If anything, it manufactures more irksome distance between us. I respond as if someone won't stop waving their hands in my face. Quiet, whatever approximation of silence I can find in the world, is my gaze down a prairie road. Silence is my unfocused view, a space in which my ear stretches to retrieve the furthest irrelevant signal it can detect, just to know how far there is beyond this confined and crowded body of mine. When you are blind, you are always close to your body, imprisoned by its sensory limits.

That's why I often feel stuck, here in my body, here in my office, with an open ear and an open door. I feel as if I've grown stiff, weighted in place, fixed in position, unable to turn my head to a car crash. Because I am out of sight, I imagine myself, to some degree, as out of sight to others. “He” is hidden from view, he is way, way down, somewhere deep within these ears.

Just past Starbucks and McDonald's, Tracy turned our Honda Civic south. We left Broadway for Knight Street's two and three lanes of angry eighteen wheelers, all hauling western Canada's supply of galvanized patio furniture, pleather luggage sets, soda pop syrups, inkjet cartridges and all the other bumpf of civilization. You name it, you'll find it trucking along Knight Street in Vancouver.

We drove with the windows down and the radio on. The bold lettering of cube vans promised Tracy's eyes a variety of expensive personal abstractions. One had all our home renovation needs. Another would motor organic produce to our door, and a third's red lettering promised a better environment through a cloud of blue exhaust. These monsters sandwiched themselves around our little car and ushered us down the road. Even though I was in the passenger's seat, it was loud enough, what with the windows down, that I had to yell to Tracy, who drove. The fragrant summer air from a few blocks behind us gave way to a generic stink. I had a question for my gal.

“Do you think I'm about to come into my own? I'm about to become a gentleman of property, you know.”

I hung my arm out the window, the way my father did when he drove with one hand. I remember how he relaxed in this pose with a cigarette. He's quit smoking recently, and although my eyes keep me from driving, only a shred of will keeps me from smoking. I hung my arm out the window anyway, trying to resemble the image I have of adulthood in a car.

“Well, how do I look? Don't I look like a man about to be a man of means?”

Tracy didn't examine me. She looked in the rearview mirror and brushed her bangs. I think she did.

“‘Gentleman of property'? Gentleman in itself is a stretch, but you're about to buy a sofa, bub. I don't think owning a sofa makes you a gentleman of property.”

I drew my arm back into the car and reached for the tuner button on the radio.

“Couch,” I corrected, “we're going to buy a couch, not a sofa.”

The stereo's blurry face plate glowered at me from the dashboard. It made me think of the storm trooper helmets from
Star Wars
. I pressed its right eye and waited for the tuner to scan and find a song appropriate to our quest for a new couch, our initiation into big ticket ownership.

The tuner stopped on the local university station. A band of three or four men mumbled through an interview about their group's particular sound. One of them described a blend of calypso, punk, and techno-bluegrass. “Yes, yes,” the interviewer agreed, all espresso and enthusiasm. “I can hear that,” he said. I couldn't.

“Why not a sofa?” Tracy asked and changed the station. “Sofas and couches are the same thing.”

Joni Mitchell's voice piped through the speakers. In her high, breezy flutter she sang that chorus about paradise and parking lots. When I was a kid and I heard this song on the radio in my mother's station wagon, I always thought Mitchell was saying “they paid paradise to put up a parking lot.” I'd wondered who Paradise was and why he made parking lots. The song never resonated with me much. I screwed up my face at Tracy's question and Mitchell's falsetto.

“We're not buying a sofa,” I said. “Sofas are American. Jesus, I hate this song.”

“And couches are Canadian? What about chesterfields?”

“British. We're probably closer to chesterfields than sofas, but I don't think IKEA would have anything I'd call a chesterfield. Sounds too majestic. Swedish minimalism is never that decadent.”

I reached out and changed the station again, jumping through four call-in shows before switching to FM.

“A couch,” I added, “is what we're buying. That's a term for chesterfield with common sense.”

Continuing south, we were about to cross the Knight Street Bridge. I still hadn't found the right soundtrack. I thumbed the scan button again, this time landing on a local locker room guitar station. If you listen long enough, it's clear these stations only rotate four or five emo-metal songs per day, but we were running out of choices, so I stopped scanning for a loathsome moment.

Emo-metal, or “emotional metal,” is the marketing term for this generation's own saccharine, power-chord enemas. It's clearly art for commerce students, but we had to listen because I sometimes like to quiz Tracy's pop culture repertoire. One of those typical angst bands, the kind with a single-word name, belted out some sludge about how they were all fixing to die because nobody understood them. Or something in that ballpark. I couldn't understand the words. The quiz began.

“Now, listen here, buddy, which of the many emo-metal bands are we currently enjoying? In the spirit of modern education, I'll give you a multiple choice format. Is this composition by (A) Creed, (B) Staind, (C) Moist, or, tricky, tricky, (D) none of the above?”

Tracy gave pause and tipped her head back, as if taking in an unidentified smell. If I know Tracy's face, I bet it puckered, as if noting crap in the air.

“I don't know. Uh, is it Moist?” She squeezed the word out in two syllables like a blob of toothpaste. “Moy-yist. What a horrible word.”

“Final answer?”

She didn't say anything, then added, “Yup, sorry.” She'd probably nodded.

“Oh, I'm so, so sorry, Moist is not the answer. Moist is not even an emo-metal band.”

She hit me on the shoulder, “Yes they are!” Thump. I felt like a TV with bad reception. “Moist is too an emo-metal band.” Double thump.

“No, the literature says Moist is an art-rock band with some pretense to gothic roots. Mostly because of their cryptic and stupid lyrics about how macabre human nature is. This is Staind, buddy, Stay-nd, Christian rock, admittedly, but emo-metal made flesh. Tune your delicate ear to the differences here. You can tell emo-metal from something like Moist because, without the music, emo-metal vocals sound like New Country. It drives the emo-metalheads nuts when you point this out. Garth Brooks could do this stuff, if he wanted, and he pretty much does.”

Tracy punched another button on the storm trooper's face. A classic rock station came in, the one that has two male deejays who tell fart jokes and coyly allude to liking dope. George Thorogood played his version of John Lee Hooker's “One Bourbon, One Scotch, and One Beer.” The station's ball-scratching hosts burst into song, making it their own. “One Cuban, one Scotch, and one quee-eer . . .”

We both punched the radio's off button.

By now we were on the Knight Street Bridge, crossing the Fraser River from Vancouver to the suburb of Richmond. Tracy checked the side view mirror and turned the car into the outer lane, ready to exit when we reached the other side. At mid-span I looked out my window and down at the flat brownish waters. The blinding fluid in my retinas mingled and matched with the river's motion, or what I imagined must be there, the waves of light and shape in my eyes wiping the river's lively detail into a flat brown sheet. A brown paper bag of water. I scanned to the edges of the empty bag and up into a large cluster of featureless wavy blocks. Warehouses, I
thought, not tall enough for office buildings. Maybe a few malls. From a distance it was hard to determine the difference. That goes for a lot of things.

“Oh, I wish you could see this,” Tracy jeered. “I knew it. There's the sign.” She pointed at the blocks. “You thought I couldn't find it, but it's right there, chump, in yellow and blue, so you can stop knotting-up inside about getting lost.”

I have to admit Tracy does have an uncanny clairvoyant power for finding places. I've never seen her open a map, and I've tried to thrust a few into her hands. Once I bought a map as a less-than-covert gift from a gas station somewhere near Sooke, on Vancouver Island.

“Here's your Happy Planet juice, some chips and—look!—I got us a map.”

She feigned thankfulness and binned her new map in the glove box. We pulled out of the gas station as she assured me that the resort is just over here somewhere. When Tracy says whatever we're looking for is just over here somewhere, it means we'll drive half an hour in some general direction and, eerily, pull into the best parking spot, not a wrong turn from start to finish. Indeed, I gave up driving when I started driving into things, but I never gave up trying to control the wheel.

The morning Tracy asked me if we ought to go to IKEA to buy a couch, I should have known better than to ask if she knew where the closest IKEA was located, exactly.

“It's in Richmond. Somewhere in Richmond.”