Crashing Through (24 page)

That night, he poured a cyclosporine tablet into his hand. He could see the tiny pill on his pink fingers. And he wondered, as he did every night when he took this medicine, what the long-term effects would be, if he’d be made to pay for this journey into light.

Sendero delivered May to Louisville, Kentucky, for the Fourth of July. At night, he met up with friends at the Buckhead Grill, just across the Ohio River in Indiana, where the group sat down to dinner and awaited the fireworks. At first thunder, everyone rushed to the restaurant’s deck for a riverfront view. May’s stomach tightened. The sound of explosions always returned him to his backyard in Silver City, New Mexico, to the moment the world ignited and blinded him at age three.

It was safest to keep one’s eyes covered during explosions. May looked. Flying crayons of light mushroomed over his head, dripping neon greens and reds down the black sky and dropping blue knit umbrellas onto the river. Every explosion was sudden and unpredictable and impossible not to see, which is to say that they thrilled him in ways he hadn’t known, which is to say that they terrified him in ways he’d known forever. During the grand finale his exhausted eyes begged to close, but he kept them open because even when he was three he had always needed to know what things were like.

Certain that the explosions had ended, May finally closed his eyes. A friend suggested that the group walk back to the hotel across the historic Second Street Bridge. Ordinarily, May would have looked the bridge up and down, but this time he was content to keep his eyes closed and join in discussions about the rhythm of the fireworks and the beauty of the night. Near the center of the bridge, he drifted out of the conversation and into his surroundings. To his left he could feel the shadow of the wind and the stillness of the Ohio River. To his right he could see the onrush of cars, their headlights darting, horns shouting, tires tracking. He walked in a straight line over the rest of the bridge. It felt like he could fall if he leaned to either side in just the smallest of ways.

After May returned from Louisville, he told Jennifer about his ambivalence about fireworks and about his narrow walk along the Second Street Bridge.

“How are you doing, Mike?” she asked.

May yearned to tell her what he’d been thinking lately: that it had been more than four months and this vision should have sorted itself out by now; that in ways his vision was getting more overwhelming rather than less; that the words
lifetime
and
unending
had begun to enter his thoughts. He choked off the idea of giving voice to these ideas. He was Mike May. He always found a way. So he told her that he was fine and they put their heads on the pillow, but May didn’t sleep. Instead, he thought about how strange it felt to have no answers, to know of no one who could explain what was happening to him, to have no one in the world who could say whether this was going to be forever.

A few days later, the phone rang in May’s home. A lively young woman with a lilting British accent asked to speak to Michael May.

“This is Mike May.”

“Hello, Mike, if you don’t mind me calling you Mike,” said the woman. “My name is Ione Fine. I’m a research scientist at the University of California–San Diego. My colleague saw you on TV. I don’t know if you know this, but cases like yours are extremely, extremely rare. But it’s the sort of thing I study. I’d like to ask you a few questions, and I imagine you might have some questions for me. I wonder if you’d be willing to talk to me for a few minutes.”

CHAPTER
THIRTEEN

Dr. Ione (pronounced Eye-
oh-
nee) Fine had proposed to fly May to San Diego for three days of observation and testing. It sounded like a rigorous schedule, but he agreed. It seemed there might be answers in San Diego. May needed to know.

Fine picked him up at the San Diego airport in late July. From the moment they shook hands in the terminal May knew he’d better be on his toes. Fine’s conversation danced like Ping-Pong balls in a lottery machine, ricocheting from descriptions of her vision lab to her love for dogs to the structure of the brain to a great Mexican restaurant she knew in the area. He worked to decipher her accent, an elegant British taffy flecked with girlishness and, when she delivered a quip, a bit of mischief. He could tell she was pretty. He could see it in how she moved. He could hear it in the way men spoke when she asked directions to the parking lot.

Driving to her lab, Fine introduced herself. She was twenty-nine years old and was working at UCSD with a renowned vision researcher, Professor Donald MacLeod. She’d become interested in the effects of long-term visual deprivation after working on a case of vision restoration with a subject who’d had limited vision but hadn’t been close to being totally blind.

“You mean I’m special?” May teased.

“You’re so special I almost didn’t call you,” Fine said. “The bloke I live with, Geoff, who is also a vision scientist, saw a little report about you on TV. He said, ‘Ione, you’ve got to come here and watch this!’ Now, I know these kinds of cases are never for real, and I was a bit annoyed with him anyway because he wasn’t helping with the cooking. So I kept turning the asparagus, got a little snappy with him, and said, ‘No thanks, very much. I won’t watch.’”

“So how did you end up calling me?”

“My supervisor, Don, and another colleague watched the same report, and they nagged me. So I finally figured, Okay, to get these people off my back I’ll call this Mike May character and confirm that his case doesn’t qualify as blind-for-a-lifetime. Then I can have some peace and quiet.”

“Why did you think I wouldn’t qualify?”

“People never do. They either went blind later in life, or they had some useful vision while blind, or they had their sight restored not long after going blind. To find someone like you, who was totally blind since early childhood and had his vision restored so many years later, is incredibly rare. There are probably fewer than twenty cases like yours known to history.”

“How many?”

“Fewer than twenty documented in the history of the world. The first case goes back to ancient times. People like you just don’t happen.”

May sat there dumbfounded. He’d had the sense that he was alone in his journey. Now he knew it.

For her part, Fine didn’t mention the deep depression that seemed inescapable among his predecessors, though she was aware of it from reading the literature. She’d made a mental note to stay on guard for signs of it.

Fine asked May about his life. He told her about his accident, about the force of his mother’s example, and about his new GPS product, which he’d placed on her dashboard so he could know where they were going.

“Do you still hold the downhill speed-skiing record?” she asked.

“Still do,” May said.

May asked about Fine’s life. She told him that she was born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland, and went to college at Oxford when she was seventeen. She was the daughter of Kit Fine, a renowned philosopher, and Anne Fine, the author of many of Britain’s most beloved children’s books, including
Mrs. Doubtfire.

“That’s one of my favorite movies ever,” May said. “I like the story, the humor, the goofiness of Robin Williams. It didn’t need much description—it’s so much about his dialogue. Even his facial expressions are usually echoed by something he says.”

Fine made a mental note about the facial expressions. Then she looked toward May.

“The book is even better,” she said.

Fine parked her car and walked with May to her office. Inside, she laid out her plans for his visit. She told May she was going to subject him to a battery of tests, each designed to assess the quality and nature of his vision, each with the goal of answering—for the first time ever—the following questions:

•
What effects does a near lifetime of visual deprivation have on the brain?

•
Why is May good at certain visual tasks but poor at others?

•
Can May improve?

The questions resonated in May’s gut. These were the ones he had been asking himself, in various ways and at various levels, for months. Now a young woman from Scotland who hadn’t even believed him to be real was proposing to answer those very questions.

“Do you think you can do it?” May asked.

“Well, this stuff has rarely been studied,” she said. “The case histories are pretty sketchy. We can’t blind people at birth to experiment on them—ethics boards get fussy about things like that. And there aren’t any other subjects like you around. But we can try. We can definitely try.”

Before anything, Fine wanted to measure May’s acuity—his ability to see the detail in the world. She knew from talking to Dr. Goodman that May’s eye and optics were near perfect, but that his visual acuity was poor. She wanted to see how poor.

She seated him at arm’s length from a computer monitor, then sought to determine the accuracy with which May could discern alternating black and white bars in a patch of screen half an inch wide. People with normal sight can see the pattern until there are between sixty and one hundred bars. May could see only one black and one white bar. Any more than that and it looked gray. Other tests showed similar results. His ability to see detail—what Fine called “high spatial frequencies”—had fallen apart. That’s why he had to be close, sometimes inches away, in order to make out the detail in things. Fine gave May the results, and she didn’t mince words.

“You’re terrible at detail,” she said.

“Is it my eye?”

“No. It’s almost certainly your brain. And you seem such a bright chap.”

May laughed. He asked why, if he was so poor at seeing detail, things didn’t look blurry to him. She explained that when the brain encounters the high spatial frequencies that imply an edge, it sharpens them on it sown. The sharpness of edges is basically an illusion performed by the brain, she said, and everyone’s brain did it.

“But I still don’t see the detail inside the edges. You do.”

Fine explained to May that his brain was like a camera that took very low resolution photographs, even worse than the cheapest convenience store security camera. If someone was asked to touch up one of those security photos, they could probably sharpen all the edges in the photo, because the edges would be easy to guess. But they could never hope to fill in the remaining details—say, the burglar’s face or the pattern on his shirt—because the camera hadn’t captured that level of detail in the first place.

May sat for a moment in silence.

“That’s exactly how I see,” he said finally. “Thank you for that.”

Fine next wanted to test May on his ability to do simple form tasks. May asked if it made sense to test him on anything now that she had determined that he couldn’t see details. She reminded him that he could still see some details from up close, so she would simply enlarge the images on the test screen so that his acuity wouldn’t be the issue.

He sat very near to the computer monitor for a new series of tests. He was able, with little effort, to name letters of the alphabet; recognize if something was to the left, to the right, above, or below something else; detect the change in orientation of a bar; and identify simple shapes like squares, circles, and triangles.

Next, Fine showed him a series of common objects, including a boot, a guitar, a bucket, and a frog. Instinctively, he tried to touch the objects, despite knowing that they were simply images on a flat screen. He struggled with all of them, searching each image for clues, drawing on all his powers of reasoning, assembling hypotheses and then straining to make his best guess. He identified just 25 percent of the objects. People with normal sight routinely identify them all, even when the fine detail that was invisible to May is removed. Fine noticed that the few he got right—like the guitar and boot—seemed to have a very particular shape that was recognizable from almost any angle, while those he missed—the bucket and frog—depended strongly on the angle at which the photograph was taken. May had trouble with any image that required a sense of the depicted object’s depth—as well as its outline.

Fine scribbled some notes. She was struck not just by May’s seeming inability to perceive an object in depth but by the immense amount of work he exerted in trying to identify those objects. She could see that none of it came automatically to him. And she could see him laboring.

“How are you doing, Mike?” she asked.

“I’m a little tired but I’m fine,” he said. “I’m proud that I recognized the guitar.”

The day was growing late, so Fine closed her lab and drove May to a restaurant for dinner, where they met her soon-to-be husband, Geoff Boynton, a vision researcher at the nearby Salk Institute. They were joined by Don MacLeod, a brilliant and soft-spoken Scot who supervised Fine’s work at the university. May found the men as engaging and warm as he did Fine. Over a long dinner they talked about May’s GPS, their fondness for dogs, and the strange nature of May’s vision. None of them sounded surprised when he described the disparities in his visual abilities. None of them seemed shocked when he said that faces meant little to him. It felt good to be among people who seemed, in ways, already to know him.

Near the end of the meal, Fine asked May if he knew about a man named Molyneaux. May said that he did not.

“He was a Dubliner, and a friend of the great philosopher John Locke,” Fine said. “His wife had a sudden convulsion coming out of church and getting into a carriage. Within a year she was totally blind. In the late 1600s, he posed a question to Locke that was debated by some of the great philosophers of the time. He asked Locke to imagine a man, blind for life, who had learned to distinguish a cube and a sphere by touchalone. If that man were made to see, Molyneaux asked, would he be able to tell, by sight alone, which one was the cube and which one was the sphere? Locke and others argued that he could not.”

“I could see the difference between a square and a circle right away,” May said.

“Well, Mike, you might be the answer to Molyneaux’s question,” Fine said. “My father is a philosopher, so my whole childhood was spent with philosophical arguments. Just once, I’d love to end one, shut them all up! But there might be a problem or two with proclaiming you the answer.”

Boynton and MacLeod smiled. They loved it when Fine got on a roll.

“First, you weren’t born blind. We don’t know if your three years of vision aided your ability to distinguish shapes when the bandages came off. Second, maybe you could tell the cube from the sphere because of their two-dimensional shapes—same as you can tell a circle from a square. But what if Molyneaux had asked if the newly sighted man could distinguish between a triangle and a pyramid? Or a square and a cube? In other words, would the newly sighted man see the pyramid and the cube in depth?”

“That might be different,” May said. “I don’t know if I could.”

“Well, we have a lot more tests to do,” Fine said, raising a glass of wine for a toast. “Here’s to finding out.”

May stayed the evening at MacLeod’s house, then drove with Fine to her lab the next morning. When they arrived, she told him that she would be testing him on faces.

“Uh-oh,” May said.

Fine positioned him perhaps a foot away from a large computer monitor.

“I’m going to show you a series of photographs of faces,” she said. “Tell me whether they are male or female.”

The slides began. May studied each face. Again, he seemed to be laboring, to be consciously and deliberately assembling clues, building a theory, and thinking through his decisions. He scored only 70 percent in judging gender. Subjects with normal vision score 100 percent. Fine suspected that he was using clues like hair length and jewelry to judge a face’s gender, so she showed him another series of faces, this time with hair and jewelry removed. His scores dropped to near random.

“I’m just guessing on these,” he said.

Next, she asked him to judge whether a person in a photograph looked happy, neutral, or sad. As before, May struggled to find clues, this time trying to determine if the corners of the mouth were positioned higher or lower than its center—a clue to whether a mouth was smiling or frowning. He scored only about 60 percent on this test, not much above chance. Subjects with normal vision would get them all right. Fine then showed May short movies of people smiling to see if motion somehow helped him detect facial expressions. It didn’t.

Finally, Fine showed May a series of photographs in which a person’s face had been scrambled or inverted—perhaps the eyes, nose, and/or mouth had been flipped upside down or put in the wrong place. Such images are almost always disturbing to normally sighted people.

May studied the faces for several seconds. After a while, he reported that something seemed wrong about them, but he could not say what it was. He had no emotional reaction to them.