Cockeyed (3 page)

Three years and two months later, on my eighteenth birthday, I would learn the truth. An ophthalmologist would tell me I suffer from a degenerative condition known as retinitis pigmentosa. Because of a gene mutation, one I was born with, my retina had begun to scar itself and decay. Little holes were
developing in my vision and had been developing for some time. Soon they would expand like blurry pools, band together, and narrow me into the slightest tunnel of sight. Later, perhaps, that last sliver of functional retina would eclipse, too. Either way, I would be legally blind within a few years.

But back in Great West's lunchroom, I didn't know anything about holes in my visual field. I only knew my life had stories and that a few of those had holes in them. Some things couldn't be explained, like the accident with Pat. A person I knew, my sighted self, was disappearing, but I didn't know how or why. To answer Greg, then, and to answer for myself, I defended my bad behaviour the only way I could imagine. I lied.

“I have an eye problem, Greg.”

He stopped making coffee. He didn't totally believe me, not yet, but he was curious.

“What kind of eye problem? “

“I have, well, I have this thing, like a spot I can't see through. I, well, I didn't want to tell you because it isn't a big deal, really, it's just sometimes I miss stuff because of it.”

It sounded like a reasonable lie. The distinction felt strong enough. My eyes were to blame, but not me. Who would question the diagnosis? Who would know any better?

Greg sprung with new anger, but an anger tinged with regret. “Why the hell didn't you tell me? You should have told me before I let you drive or even work the forks with Pat. For chrissake. You could've fallen or—”

“No, I'm fine, I just—well, I just found out last week, and
the doctor said it was no big deal, really, it's a small thing. Like you said, I have to pay attention. That's all.”

He sat down at the lunchroom table and thoughtfully stroked the corners of his moustache. He was no dummy. I'd just about killed someone on his watch, and I was blameless, as only a teenager can be. Generously, he gave me my only chance to repair the damage.

“Be straight with me. I mean it. Are you sure you've got this, this eye problem? I mean, it's okay if it was an accident; accidents happen. Just tell me the truth.”

Although we sat across from one another, I couldn't look him in the eye. I fixed my gaze past him, to the pinups on the wall. Miss June's smile mocked me knowingly.

“It's true, Greg. It was an accident.”

“Jesus. There's nothing they can do for you?”

A lump of guilt grew in me. I was deceiving someone I admired. I didn't want undeserved sympathy, just an excuse. Underneath it all, I could even feel a smaller but heavier uncertainty—maybe something really was wrong with my eyes. The reality flickered and then was gone. I was fourteen and immortal, part of the new order. Nothing could be wrong, so I supersized my lie.

“No, there's nothing they can do. The damage isn't something they can reverse,” I said. “But really, Greg, it's no big thing at all. I'm not getting worse or anything. I just have to pay attention, like you said.”

Greg looked both sympathetic and confused.

“But how are you supposed to pay attention to things you don't see?”

From that moment on, his was the question that blindness would demand I answer.

“I don't know,” I said. For the first time, I was truthful. “I'll have to figure it out, I guess.”

Although I never drove the forklift again, I steered clear of Pat. He didn't give a shit if I was Helen Keller. He didn't believe the forklift incident was an accident. Greg did his best to manage things and reminded Pat of his luck.

“You're a fortunate man,” Greg would say. “Bumbleton could've crushed your little legs. Jesus, they're already too cute and stubby to look at.”

Greg hired me back the following year. Pat wasn't with the company any more. A few months before I returned to work, grade ten under my belt and my clumsiness on the rise, Pat had delivered a liner and parts to a pool site in Maple Ridge. Backing his van up to the hole, Pat somehow clipped the customer's house and took a chunk for a drive. It was Pat's second major screw-up with backing into things. Greg fired him, and said even Bumbleton can spot a house.

Once I had imagined a summer of fortune for myself. I had hoped the simple difference of my job could race me towards my adulthood, even push me into a world some dead-end McJob could never serve-up. I thought I'd start by driving a forklift, and soon enough I'd be driving out of town for good and ahead with things. It may have been short-sighted at the time, but a future, I thought, could be found in a warehouse. It was true enough.

Instead of wealth, I found another fortune, the kind that is told. Somehow I'd bumbled into my fate as a blind man
before it was upon me. The story of my blindness began as a lie. Today I see the fortune I told for myself, and I see it in hindsight. That is nearing the only vision I have left. Maybe Pat's problem was something opposite. He really needed to look back more often, and more thoroughly. Tough luck, I guess. The guy never did get the hang of reverse.

 

Unbeknownst to my family, my physician, or the motor vehicle branch, by the age of seventeen, I was going blind behind the wheel of my father's 1982 Pontiac Acadian. Feel free to shudder. Other soon-to-be-blind people are on the road today enjoying a similar story, only they've still got some damage to do. Maybe you'll meet one of them at an intersection.

Driving beckoned me the moment I turned sixteen, but my parents thought I'd benefit first from a driver's education course. Or two. Maybe three. I was that hopeless. Not much of what I learned remains in my brain, but I do remember my teacher, a greasy-haired man who insisted I call him Buddy.

For several months, Buddy picked me up once a week in his school's red Ford Taurus. The car was equipped with an extra brake on the passenger side. Buddy liked to punch it through the floor when frightened. Pocked and battered, the car's condition suggested the nifty Siamese brake did little
more than relieve the pressure in Buddy's jaw. Nobody could say he was impatient with his students, though, and nobody could say he looked at the world from his car with anything other than safety on his mind. Oh, and ass. A large helping of ass weighed on his mind, too.

When he wasn't advising how to make a generous turn, Buddy gazed out the passenger window, as if avoiding eye contact with his job. Who wouldn't? It probably offered relief from spotting all the gory mishaps I could have steered us into. Some afternoons I could tell that the man was a sack of adrenaline and nerves. As he spoke he'd manically smear his hair across the bald spots on his head. His thoughts flip-flopped at dizzying speeds, all given voice, jumping from death to sex and back again, shaped by a stream of consciousness Freud would have enjoyed fishing in. The sidewalks and parking lots we passed provided his material.

“Holy mother of god! Did you see that honey in the elastic jeans? Slow down. The one going into SAAN's back there? What a butt. Jesus that was close! You gotta shoulder check, watch your blind spot. What an a-ass! It makes me—just pull to the right a bit so you don't ride the yellow line. That's right, a little more, don't be afraid of your side of the road. How does she get into those pants? What about blood flow, eh? Signal first! They're like paint.”

Sometimes I couldn't tell if Buddy was testing me in his own perverse way. Did his questions measure my awareness? Did the asses tell him if I noticed anything other than the car in front of me? Good drivers, he'd declare, observe everything around them. Everything. To underline his point, he'd
give an extra wipe of his hair. Sometimes I nodded and muttered something affirmative. I tried to demonstrate that I'd spared some of my abundant driverly attention for the assscape. “Yes, a very different butt from that one back on Fraser Highway, Buddy, quite different.” None of this made me a more attentive driver in the end.

Buddy's final report was unambiguous. He recommended another course before I bothered failing the driver's test. It took a lot of practice with my father until my parents felt everybody was safe. Somehow I passed my first road test with only a few demerits, which was unfortunate.

Because of all this I came a year late to driving. My licence, however, which I earned shortly before my seventeenth birthday, came a year earlier than my diagnosis with RP. The math is still chilling. I drove for thirteen danger-filled months, practically blind and legally reckless, unaware of what I was missing. And I mean barely missing.

Before I spill all the gory details, I should explain how it could happen. It's difficult to reconcile how I earned a licence. Some find it hard to believe that a person can be blinded, or slowly blinded, yet remain unaware of the vanishing points. Several explanations are clear to me now.

First, blind spots are not darkness or emptiness in the visual field. Those ideas are in and of themselves visual. Try looking at the floor with your feet. That's what blindness looks like. We can't see it, or see it even as an absence in our experience. An omitted image doesn't alert itself to your attention until, say, you shoot past a stop sign, and, wow, suddenly it appears in the corner of your eye. Only then does it
occur to you that something was out there, something that did not appear when it should have. Hard to test for that.

Another explanation is particular to my retinas and their degenerative pattern. Nobody tested me for night vision. An inability to see in the dark is one of the early effects of my disease. When it came to reading the eye chart and identifying the road signs, my eyes did their duty. But put those same signs under a street lamp on a foggy September evening—now that's another phenomenon, and one I would have missed.

I do remember the administrator checking my peripheral vision. He flashed a couple of bright lights to be caught only by the corner of my eye. Fine. Then he checked my central vision with the usual alphabet soup made into an eye chart. I passed that, too. But the real problem was everything else. Imagine your visual field, the dimension of all that you see, shaped like a dart board. I could spot the bull's-eye and the outer ring, but the middle or inner rings, they remained a Swiss cheese of tiny blurs my brain refused to see. My cognition, like anybody's, compensated for the small, missing pockets in between. I saw, in other words, by inferring what wasn't there, what connected the edges to the center of my sight. The holes weren't large, but they were growing, and a lot could disappear within so little. Roll a newspaper and hold it like a telescope to your eye. Huge, distant objects can fit inside. Far enough away, even a truck could drive through. Sometimes they did.

Finally, nobody tested for the depth perception I didn't have. Had the administrator of my exam seen me on the job, now waiting tables in a local café, he may have thought twice
about taking my picture and giving me a licence to cruise. At work, my hands regularly jammed through stands of water glasses when I meant to grab the first one. Dropping plates on a table with excessive force, as if in disgust at a customer's preference for blue cheese dressing over a nice balsamic, was a habit, too. Like my days at the pool factory, these manners were dismissed as traits of my character. Ryan, the clumsy guy who slams things. So moody, so distracted.

Sure, I sensed difficulty when I drove, but it came and went depending on the weather or time of day. Driving home at night from the café, the roads dark and wet with rain, I could vaguely detect the double yellow line. I thought, as my parents had said, the problem was my lack of experience. They also agreed it could be difficult to spot a painted line on a puddled street. What did I know? I wasn't going to dispute my parents' opinion or insist my difficulties were a tad worse than they imagined. Argue myself out of driving? I was seventeen, not some kind of safety nut. To help find the rainy night lines, I often relied on the raised cat's eyes, the solid reflectors that peppered most of the routes home. Not that I looked at them. If no other cars could help me position myself in my lane, I'd ride the cat's eyes and feel for the “clunk clunk clunk” under my tires. At night I drove Braille. Didn't everybody?

I kept the first accident to myself. The very afternoon I pocketed my driver's licence, I drove straight to my girlfriend's house to take her out for a spin and anything else a car might encourage. She wasn't home. As I left the winding streets of her neighbourhood, I fumbled with all the serious business of driving. I lit a smoke, or tried to, fast-forwarded a
Smiths tape I'd just bought, stopped and started the cassette player, listened for that Johnny Marr riff I liked, steered and clutched and shifted gears, and with the successfully tested corner of my eye, caught a stop sign as I sailed past.

The red shape flashed, disappeared from view, and then lit in me the sharp recognition that I was about to meet some kind of consequence, probably a loud and painful type. The view immediately brightened. The periphery of the narrow, residential street opened up, as did the surprised expression on my face. Fast-moving cars surrounded me, all of them motoring at a right angle to my own. I was about to spear the panel of a cube van, two cars were about to t-bone the driver's side of mine, and some other vehicles, the ones out my passenger window, looked like they were fleeing the scene. All I could do was watch in horror and awe as I rocketed across four lanes of traffic.