Cosmo (17 page)

And by Helen Keller, I mean, of course, Helen Adams Keller (1880–1968), the activist, lecturer, author, socialist, academic and, most famously, the deaf-blind, born beneath the sprawling English boxwoods and strangling ivy, the cloying scent of magnolia and honeysuckle, rose and smilax, that cloaked the grounds of Ivy Green, the 640 acres of land surrounding the simple, white-clapboard home of Virginia-cottage construction on North Commons Street in Tuscumbia, Alabama, built by Helen's grandfather a year after Alabama's integration with the growing Union. The daughter of Arthur and Kate Keller, granddaughter of Charles W. Adams, ex-brigadier-general for the Confederate Army, distant relation of Robert E. Lee and of hardy Massachusetts stock, with familial roots stretching back to the cultural hub of Zurich, Switzerland. The little Helen born with the powers of sight and hearing but who was tragically stricken at one year and seven months with a bellicose inflammation and congestion of unclear origin that forever deprived her of these basic sensory gateways to the exterior world. The Helen who, although already capable of using over fifty gestures and signs to communicate (however crudely) by seven years of age, was destined for a more significant education due to the reputed linguistic successes of Laura Dewey Lynn Bridgman, of New Hampshire (formerly of Hanover), who was famously known as the first deaf-blind American child to gain a considerable education in language (reading and writing English) after receiving instruction from a Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe at the Perkins School for the Blind in south Boston, which was recommended as a suitable facility for Helen's education by the scientist, engineer, inventor and influential innovator Alexander Graham Bell, who was contacted by the Keller family at the recommendation of another doctor. The young Helen who was assigned to the tutelage of Anne Sullivan Macy, originally of Feeding Hills, Massachusetts, the twenty-year-old former student of the
PSB
(herself being visually impaired from trachoma), who arrived at Helen's cottage at Ivy Green in March of 1887 to reside with the Keller family and to provide Helen with a rigorous introduction to the world outside the black and silent prison into which she had been so cruelly sentenced by childhood illness (the Anne Sullivan Macy who would remain Helen's close companion and confidante for the rest of her [Anne's] life). The child-Helen whose portal to the hitherto enigmatic world of shape and touch relied upon grasping that people, places and objects (nouns) bore specific and individual names – or, as Helen was shown over many arduous and combative and frustrating lessons from Anne Sullivan – that these shapes could be differentiated from one another by unique arrangements of letters, drawn upon her open palm until the life-altering and moving connection could be made: that the letters drawn upon her hand
corresponded
with the objects she touched, that they had a physical
referent
outside of their own shape and feel (Helen's first ‘word' understood being water, or W-A-T-E-R, associating the word with the feeling of cold well water pouring over her hand – as is dramatized in the 1957 telefilm, the 1959 Gibson stage play and [famously] the 1962 film
The Miracle Worker
, among other theatrical and cinematic interpretations, including the 1919 silent film
Deliverance
[not to be confused with the 1972 Burt Reynolds/Jon Voight film of the same name], the 1954 documentary
Helen Keller In Her Story
[winning the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1955], the 1984 made-for-
TV
movie
Helen Keller: The Miracle Continues
and the 2005 Bollywood film
Black
, which won dozens upon dozens of screen awards). The Helen who, once having grasped this basic linguistic notion of sign and signified, moved with Anne Sullivan in 1888 to the Perkins School for the Blind to receive instruction, and six years later to the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York, from where she travelled to the Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Allston, Massachusetts, where she learned from Sarah Fuller, of Weston, Massachusetts, herself a disciple of the teachings of Alexander Graham Bell (a determined advocate for the education of deaf and blind people). The Helen who enrolled in the Cambridge School for Young Ladies, now known as the Cambridge School of Weston (a high school in Weston, Massachusetts), at sixteen years of age, before gaining admittance to Radcliffe College, the women's liberal arts college, one of the Seven Sisters colleges and coordinate college for Harvard University, now known as Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (a college education funded by the industrialist, financier and philanthropist Henry Huttleston Rogers, a leader of Standard Oil, who was introduced to Helen by American writer and public speaker Samuel Langhorne Clemens, otherwise known as Mark Twain, who was a great admirer of Helen's efforts to triumph over her disabilities and a similarly committed anti-capitalist) and from which she graduated at the age of twenty-four with a Bachelor of Arts and the profound distinction of being the first deaf-blind person to ever earn such a degree. The intrepid Helen who continued to learn to sign words and to read Braille, and through discerning the vibrations issuing from other people's mouths during conversation, burned with a great desire to speak as others did, learning to understand what others said to her by placing her fingers (her sense of touch enhanced by her lack of vision or hearing) upon their faces; and with this method, she was soon able to articulate words, speaking for the rest of her life (albeit with the understandable distortions of a deaf person), and even giving countless speeches to packed halls of eager admirers. The plucky and courageous Helen who thereafter committed her life to the causes of the underprivileged, under-represented and overexploited. The Helen who eagerly joined and promoted the cause of the
SPA
, or Socialist Party of America (in particular, supporting the campaigns of Eugene V. Debs, a union leader and co-founder of the Industrial Workers of the World, who ran for presidency in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912 and 1920 [this last attempt made from within prison]). The Helen of vehement suffragist, pacifist and socialist sympathies, working tirelessly against industrial oppression and capitalist exploitation, joining the Industrial Workers of the World in response to perceived inefficiencies of the
SPA
and conceived as the remedy for ongoing systems of oppression and subjugation that reduced the role of women, children, people of colour and those with disabilities to slavery, lending her assistance to the co-founding of the
ACLU
(or American Civil Liberties Union) and the
HKI
(or Helen Keller International organization) – despite such political and social efforts being routinely glossed over by American interpretations of her life and work in order to downplay the connections between oppression and capitalism, socialism and Christianity, that defined and motivated the rest of her life. The literary Helen of numerous and widely translated writings – most famously the 1903 autobiography,
The Story of My Life
(not to be confused with the 1988 Jay McInerney novel
Story of My Life
), written when Helen was a mere twenty-two years old while studying for her Bachelor's degree, and the text that provided the basic source material for
The Miracle Worker
and other dramatic interpretations of her turbulent youth.
The Story of My Life
followed, in 1908, by
The World I Live In
, giving its readers insight into Helen's day-to-day struggles and observations and beginning with a description of how it feels to pet and scratch her dog, claiming that ‘in touch is all love and intelligence' (Helen being a renowned lover of canines throughout her life, even introducing the Japanese Akita breed to the United States after visiting the Akita Prefecture in the Tohoku Region of northern Honshu, Japan, in the 1930s, and falling in love with an Akita known as Kamikaze-go [and younger brother Kenzan-go] given to her as a gift from the Japanese government immediately before the global turmoil of World War II began, ending Helen's trips to the Land of the Rising Sun [and soon-to-be Axis power] for some time).
The World I Live In
followed in 1913 by a collection of socialist essays dubbed
Out of the Dark
, which was eventually followed by the story of Helen's conversion to Swedenborgian Christianity,
My Religion
, in 1927 (posthumously re-released as
Light in My Darkness
in 1994). The Helen who received the highest civilian award in the United States – the Presidential Medal of Freedom – in 1964, awarded to Helen by Lyndon B. Johnson, then President, and who was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. The Helen who died peacefully in her sleep – sleep being the only time when, we may presume, she could see, or hear, regardless of what those images and sounds were, or how accurate, as with Milton in the heartbreaking ‘Sonnet XXIII' – on the first of June (the birthday of Marilyn Monroe, Andy Griffith and Alanis Morissette) in 1968 at 3:35 p.m. at eighty-seven years of age at home in the town of Easton, of Fairfield County, Connecticut, accompanied by Winifred Corbally, long-time companion, who sat by her side while she drifted off into that last, gentle sleep. The Helen who endures in memory as one of Gallup's Most Widely Admired People of the Twentieth Century, the visage upon the 2003 Alabama State quarter, in name as the Helen Keller Hospital of Sheffield, Alabama, and as many streets in Spain and France and Israel and Portugal, and the enduring Helen Keller Services for the Blind. The Helen depicted in the Edward Hlavka statue in the United States Capitol Visitor Center, featuring her as a child standing beside the famed well of her youth where the linguistic connection was first made, the statue adorned with a plaque bearing her famous quotation, ‘The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched, they must be felt with the heart': a pedestrian-enough sentiment (and one no doubt copied and reinterpreted on countless greeting cards, fridge magnets, shared images on Facebook, picture frames, coffee mugs and dog sweaters) that, through its nauseating iterations and mass-produced expression, generally slides beneath the radar of conscious acknowledgement, becoming a part of the sentimental mush of capitalist apologetics and opiating reassurances, of the surface glut of meaningless information absorbed in each blink and breath; but we must remember that such mass production has denuded the profundity of such a quotation. This is the Helen Keller who could not see or hear; all aesthetic beauty – the face of a lifelong friend, the glory of a desert sunset, Handel's ‘Lascia ch'io pianga,' Michelangelo's
Pietà
, the laughter of children – was denied her, utterly. The Helen who simply cannot have known whether the most beautiful things in the world could not be seen: she had to trust to the only beauty she could interpret and experience – which is an interior beauty, in its quiet surges of emotion and proud breakthroughs of intellect and moments of religious yearning, of faith. And part of our pity for Helen, the Helen who inspires in all mature observers a deep sadness as easily as she inspires awe and respect, stems from this quotation – do we
trust
her claim that the beauty of the
inside
can defeat the entire world without? And can we confront our sadness in reflecting on what our own hearts feel, or are incapable of feeling? Simply, is there anything inside us equal to or worthy of the beauty of the world? We trust that Helen's black and silent interior world is beautiful, tough, determined, disciplined and divine – the place that inspires all our admiration, adoration and even fear – more beautiful than, perhaps, a baroque aria or the roofs of Florence at dusk or the blue teardrop of the Earth from a satellite's photograph or the first cries of our newborn daughters and sons – perhaps. But this is also the Helen who is now a black space, circumscribed by the square parentheses of birth and death, ashes interred in the Washington National Cathedral in the darkness of the mausoleum next to lifelong friend and teacher Anne Sullivan, and all interior flowers lost to our imagination, passing into dust, leaving us to search our own stomachs for something to trade or offer to match the world in its variety and savagery – a world rising all the more indifferent to us in her absence.

WIDE AND BLUE AND EMPTY

 

 

 

J
une slips into her refurbished office room at 10:49 p.m., full mug of decaf steaming in her hand, and logs in to
ICQ
Messenger. Finding Chris offline, she minimizes the
ICQ
Messenger window (heart sinking slightly, but only just – their
ICQ
date is set for 11:00) and begins a game of e-solitaire, promising herself she won't wait for more than fifteen minutes before logging off and heading to bed.

It is silent on the second floor of June's 2,000-square-foot, semi-detached, four-bedroom home – a property of nine-foot ceilings and deep-set cold cellar, two-car garage and oak floors, gourmet kitchen and walk-in pantry – as she waits for her son, Christopher, living across the province in a tiny apartment in Ottawa, to log in to
ICQ
and to chat with her. June mouths the word warily –
chat
– feeling a delicious tingle of anticipation. Having bought the internet only three months prior, June still approaches the web as a wild and newfangled landscape, still tinged with the risks of danger and provocation. Every time she logs on she feels bold and daring, strangely and surreally modern. She feels especially sophisticated considering that she, fifty-four years old and feeling absolutely ancient, could actually be in a
chat room
, and that soon her son might join her and write her text messages
in real time
, his written phrases appearing in a cute pc window with its accompanying
Uh-oh!
sound bite. It wasn't exactly how she envisioned the future, but it was certainly exciting.

Now at 11:33 p.m., June stares into the ghostly illumination of the monitor, her hands bleached and spectral as she sips a second mug of coffee and her eyes leap from card to card, from hearts to clubs to kings, feeling strained and irradiated by the garish forest green of the card table, the bright light in the dark room. She minimizes the window mid-game and restores
ICQ
: Chris's name still
offline
, written in the red italics of ex-communication. June tsks, lifting the mug of coffee with her left hand while using her right to battle with the mouse that she bought (
stupidly
, she thinks) from a local Dollar Saver. Due to some malfunction in the mouse's ball, she is forced to repeatedly brush her wrist across her mouse pad (featuring a reproduction of van Gogh's
Starry Night
). She takes extra care with every left-handed sip, worried that she might dribble hot coffee across the keyboard: frying circuits, spoiling controls, corrupting mystery.

She tenses. Somewhere close – on her pie-shaped lot, perhaps, or near the cedar hedges of her yard – an animal begins to yelp. A raccoon, she guesses, listening to its high-pitched cries pierce the deep quiet of the Forest Hill night. She holds still, waiting for it to stop. When it doesn't, she closes the
ICQ
window, opens e-solitaire and resumes her game.

After Chris's most recent and rather disastrous visit home, June dared only a kind of
laissez-faire
motherhood – a most careful dabbling with ‘his life' that was ‘not hers' to order and correct. She continued writing him weekly email checkups and sending him occasional Hallmark cards with folded fifty-dollar cheques, yet now more conscious of the threat of smothering and more carefully aware of the freedom and flush of adolescence (case in point: Chris's frequent LiveJournal.com entries, blissfully unaware of propriety or decorum, detailing some debauched embrace in what untold alley of Ottawa on
what
untold substance …). It's been a silent and suffering discipline not to call him at least biweekly to see if he's okay or eating well or getting enough sleep (those bags under his eyes, that stupid eyeliner and nail polish – who was he kidding?). Not that it seems to matter: his number keeps changing, or the number he gives her turns out to be a ‘cellphone,' perennially low on batteries or forgotten in another pair of pants. In any case, Chris prefers longhand letters sent via Canada Post – ‘we should actually
write
each other, Mom,' he said – which, according to June, communicates absolutely nothing of the moment (the way emails can at least transmit a sense of the living, breathing present). All denied for Chris's absurd love for the romantic, turning even a simple
hello, how are you?
into a Victorian chore.

And yet, despite her excitement over chatting, ‘her pro-chat stance,' in Chris's terms, June is still somewhat leery of the internet. She has long ago mastered data entry and keyboards, word-processing and spreadsheets and presentations, but there is still something otherworldly and anarchic about the net. It's as if its hidden engineers – its gods of coding and
HTML
, silicon and microchips – are secret barons of porn and chaos, inimical to June or to anything she might stand for. As if at any moment she might stumble upon a scene of gore or obscenity, or arouse the attention of a mainframe-destroying virus. She knows such thoughts are inane, but still: there's no good government, no caring parents, online; it's the dominion of a million brilliant and hateful children. But her little sessions of sipping coffee and playing e-solitaire and staring hopefully at the
ICQ
window demand at least the semblance of
surfing
, of browsing the bizarre and daunting passages of the web. To do otherwise would be to allow the connection and opportunity to go to waste.

So tonight, as she has done for the past several nights, she researches a new recipe (for catfish), scans reviews for new movies now playing in theatres (
Billy Elliot, Dr. T and the Women
), hunts for directions to a new factory outlet (Fabricland) and refreshes her email inbox once every few minutes, to see if her friends from Vancouver or the office have sent her a joke or tame piece of political satire or warm-hearted meditation on post-divorce dating (always with a jab at Marcus, her ex) or advanced age, as if these subjects could be warmly received (age being especially
un
pleasant, and in no way amusing, though June always emails these friends and co-workers back to express appreciation for the joke or maxim. No, decidedly
not
pleasant, and
not
funny, and especially not helped by that
godawful
raccoon, now crying in what sounds to June like unrefined agony.

At 11:39 p.m., Chris's name is still red, offline. Forty minutes late. She minimizes the window and hits the
RESET GAME
option on the e-solitaire screen. The raccoon, or cat, or skunk, or demon, continues its violent protest against dying, alone and cold and likely in tremendous pain. June unconsciously covers her ears, bites her lip.
Fuck off
, she thinks, without anger, and with a swelling of pity.
Please
.

She is back to a somewhat stable routine, if a bit stultifying; the nights of wine and crying, hating herself and each of the last twenty-six years of her married life (great, self-pitying bouts of hatred, enormously silly yet undeniably grave) have abated, receded, as more time separates her from the moment of Marcus's sudden departure, with Chris across the province and increasingly withdrawn into his new world of friends and classes. With her hands on the keyboard, she looks to see if the room can be tidied, but it's never messy – not
messy-messy
, in any case, only a tad disorderly; and besides, she rarely sits in the office, it being the square room of masculine efficiency she subtly feels like she is violating (though Marcus has been gone now for five months, it still feels like his room – where he did his work, where he retreated). She stares at the black, flawless oak of the desk. She stares at the forbidding shadow of the closet, the metal shelf, the sticker of Minnie Mouse that Marcus once stuck to the side of the monitor (his old nickname for her). She stares at her hands, pale and ghostly in the ghoulish light of the screen. She turns over the mouse and peers into the plastic casing surrounding the ball, trying to see what roll of lint is causing the jam, but finds nothing, the problem lodged too deeply within the mouse's arcane inner workings to mend. She realizes that she hates the mouse, but she is afraid as always that she might buy a replacement that doesn't ‘hook up' or correspond to the specific systems installed and she'll end up looking
stupid
, again. She imagines, in a moment of frustration, that maybe the reason Chris hardly ever appears online is that she has done something foolish to her
ICQ
configuration, something that limits their time together or blocks her id or whatever. The thought of this – that the silence so obstinate and relentless between them has potentially been her fault, her own technological ineptitude – makes her feel even more frustrated, so much so that she craves a cigarette – a Camel cigarette, the brand she smoked a lifetime ago – and she wants to smoke it in the office and watch the smoke wreath through her fingers before the pale light of the screen. But she hasn't smoked in twenty years – some thoughts are simply crazy.

Halfway through another game of solitaire, an unwell 11:45 on the monitor and the animal croaking wetly beyond the window, June drifts back to Chris's LiveJournal page and scans his most recent update. At the end of his last visit home, Chris left for the Greyhound station in haste, leaving his username and password scrawled on a slip of paper and leaving himself logged in to his account on June's desktop – thus unintentionally giving June access to all of his posts, even those tagged as ‘private' or ‘friends only' (needless to say, June was not one of Chris's LiveJournal ‘friends'). June felt somewhat unethical about reading them, but then again, she rationalized,
he
left himself logged in on
her
computer, and he was the one who'd (once again) left her waiting for another forty-five minutes on
ICQ
. This whole LiveJournal crap was even more bothersome for the hypocrisy of it all: why go on and on about longhand letters when you keep a daily web diary, and one barred from your own mother? June read, and greedily, feeling entitled to know.

His most recent entry described his plans for earlier tonight: he was heading to his friend Gloria's apartment around seven to watch a taped copy of this week's
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. June had never met Gloria, though by scanning previous entries she gleaned that she was in Chris's journalism program. In fact, June had yet to meet many of Chris's new friends from Ottawa, and certainly no one from this new group described online – Chris, Gloria, a homosexual (!) couple named Ian and Blake, and another boy named Corm (sometimes described by Chris, in what surely must be some inside jest, as ‘cute'). Chris referred to the five of them as ‘the Scooby Gang,' which immediately sounded too twee and dainty for Chris, who'd spent his high school career in the dungeon-warmth of his basement bedroom with sci-fi and fantasy books and movies and comics, and gawking, greasy-haired role-players. Referencing
Scooby-Doo
was definitely weird for Chris; she felt it must be in some relation to
Buffy
(in June's estimation, a show so silly and ironic that its actors and writers must be laughing at their audience). Chris's new friends are definitely ironic, and artsy (all arts majors, or artists, or writers), and queer, and aggressively sexual and drunk and nonchalant about drinking and drugs and partying, and all of this comes out through the cheeky, affected style that Chris uses to compose his journal entries. Lots of
Oh, hello theres
to start entries, or
ta tas
to sign off. Black slang that would hardly suit the bookish boy from two years before: things were
pimpin'
or
wack
or
da bomb
– then shifting bizarrely into an uppity sort of British vocabulary – Chris was
chuffed
to see his friends,
knackered
when tired or
daft
to have missed a class. It was peculiar in general for Chris to even maintain such a self-exposing, extroverted platform – this is not the kid who left for Ottawa, not the nerdy, morose boy who hardly ever talked about girls and whose sense of humour was more darkly absurd than irreverent and ‘saucy.' By now,
Buffy
should have been long over; he should be home. The most likely situation is that Chris has forgotten about their
ICQ
date, or selfishly prioritized his friends over his promise to his mother, but June begins to conjure that third, more distressing option: perhaps he is hurt, or in some kind of trouble. He isn't used to living on his own, after all. She stews, clicking the glowing solitaire cards in time with one of the raccoon's more hiccup-like wails.

If she ever catches Chris online
without
a pre-ordained meeting time – if something in the arrangement of planet and zodiac actually arranges to have her sitting in these rare, late-night moments at the same time as him – half the time she can tell he's absorbed in work because his typed responses are slow, staggered, similar to the way he spoke when he was fourteen, in bass monosyllables, as he stared down at his plate at dinner and his father ate noisily and heartily beside him. When he is so obviously distracted she waits for each of his responses with what feels like divine patience, eventually giving up on any opportunity for meaningful conversation with an ominous ache somewhere in her gut, and tells him that she loves him and that she (lying)
really needs to go
, which, ironically (an irony not lost on June), elicits his only quick response (
see ya!
) during their entire stilted conversation. Sometimes she gets angry, thinking that if he were doing something so important or distracting, he shouldn't have signed on in the first place. Or thinking,
Jesus, who does he think I am, some girl chatting with her friends in the dark? There's no one else here, he knows he's the only name on my list
.