Crashing Through (9 page)

By 1993, when he was thirty-eight, Bashin had lost the remaining trickles of his vision. Still, he wouldn’t mourn. He just considered himself a sighted man who couldn’t see, and as long as one was sighted there was hope.

One of the few concessions Bashin had made to his decaying vision was subscribing to the
Braille Monitor,
the monthly audiotape magazine of the National Federation for the Blind (NFB). He had allowed two years’ worth of issues to pile up in a shoe box, too ashamed to listen. One day he felt a twinge of curiosity and popped a cassette into his recorder. He heard about blind archaeologists doing groundbreaking fieldwork, blind architects setting new trends, and all other manner of blind people doing whatever moved them. It seemed to occur to none of them to defer or postpone or fantasize. They acted. Bashin devoured twenty-four issues in a weekend.

He knew now that he had to address his blindness. But before he was going to go out and learn to use a cane, he needed to know absolutely that science couldn’t help him. He scheduled appointments with prominent ophthalmologists across America to learn firsthand if any of them could restore his vision. None of them could help him.

Bashin finally made his way to Detroit, where the NFB was holding its annual convention. All around him the blind moved freely and with seeming impunity, yet he couldn’t figure out how to go from his hotel room to the coffee shop downstairs. When he finally made it, he met several blind men who told him they’d just returned from Greektown, a mile away. Bashin couldn’t comprehend that—how could a blind person actually walk somewhere, find something, and then have a good time on top of it? Like the blind guy from Berkeley who’d toured Europe solo, these men had something special, and Bashin wanted what they had.

After he returned from Detroit, Bashin took a walk near his home and got lost. It was twilight and there was no one on the street, and he didn’t know which way to go. He was terrified. It occurred to him to just walk, but he also knew that he might walk the wrong way and get farther and farther from home, so he stood on the corner and waited, though he did not know what he was waiting for; he just remained, hoping someone would come along, and seconds or minutes or hours passed until he finally heard a footfall and pressed down his humiliation and asked for directions. He began his cane-training days later, on August 1, 1994, at age thirty-nine. The instructors told him he would always remember the day he’d first held a white cane, and they were right.

Soon Bashin was seeking out confident and cool blind people. He met many through NFB and in his new job as director of the Sacramento Society for the Blind, and he began to develop a feeling for what they meant when they spoke of being actualized. The Holy Grail of blindness wasn’t in becoming a superman. Instead, it was in making blindness just another of one’s many characteristics, in being ordinary for doing what one wanted to be doing, in being a guy who wakes up in the morning and says, “Damn, I’m late” rather than “Damn, I’m blind.” When he met Mike May, Bashin was impressed with his accomplishments. But it was May’s ease at being a regular guy that compelled him.

By late 1999, May’s friendship with Bashin had deepened. They might speak for hours by phone late at night or meet for an extended dinner at a Sacramento ethnic restaurant. Carving out that kind of time took work, but it was worth it to both of them.

Bashin listened in early November when May laid out the prospects for his stem cell surgery. He asked questions about the B-scan results and probed May’s knowledge of Dr. Goodman’s biography. He inquired about recent advances in the surgical technique. May recalled that Bashin had told him about his own probes into vision restoration, and asked if they contributed to Bashin’s curiosity.

“They do,” Bashin told him. “Over the years I’ve made investigations and done a lot of research. I didn’t want to impose that on you now because this is your time and your deliberation. I had decided that vision restoration wasn’t right for me at this point in my life. But I have to confess, Mike, that talking about your case has me thinking again about my own situation. Stevens-Johnson syndrome is one of those rare indications for the stem cell surgery. Theoretically, it can help me, too.”

“Well, I’d love to know your thinking on it,” May said. “It would be great if the conversation could benefit us both.”

May sounded out the risks for Bashin, a checklist that tolled more ominously with every recital. He didn’t have to tell Bashin that he couldn’t dream of vision adding anything to the depth of love and feeling he had for his kids; Bashin could hear it in the everyday stories May related about his family.

Bashin took it all in. He laughed and nodded when May listed beautiful women as among his top motivations to see. He made May promise to warn him before driving to Sacramento so he could have plenty of time to flee from the streets. Like Jennifer, he didn’t rush into counterarguments or solutions or advice. He considered his friend an explorer and heard his words as the sounds of a map unfolding. But as he listened, Bashin also found himself reflecting on a set of stories he had uncovered in the course of his own research into vision restoration. He did not speak of them now to May, nor was he certain he ever would. They were stories known to just a handful of people worldwide. They were stories unlike any he could have imagined.

B
etween the dawn of time and the year 1999, history had recorded no more than sixty cases of vision restoration after long-term blindness. The first dated to Arabia in the year 1020; the next was not chronicled for another seven centuries. Fewer than twenty of the subjects had been blind since age three or younger—like May.

Though the cases spanned a thousand years and were spread across the globe, the subjects seemed to share two primary characteristics. First, their new vision was strange and unfathomable. Second, they suffered a deep emotional crisis for daring to see.

None of the cases was better observed than that of fifty-two-year-old Sidney Bradford, a married cobbler from the working-class Midlands region of Britain. Bradford had lost his vision, likely to infection, at the age of ten months. He lived an active life, building things in the woodshop he had constructed, painting his house while on his ladder, and riding his bicycle through the countryside by holding the shoulder of an adjacent cyclist. He moved through the world confidently, even brazenly, rarely bothering with a cane, wielding his circular saw with impunity, and rushing into busy intersections as if daring cars to strike him. When a surgeon told him in 1958 that a series of two corneal grafts might restore his vision, Bradford signed up and got ready to see.

News of the planned surgeries made the local newspaper. A copy found its way one hundred miles to the desk of thirty-five-year-old Cambridge University psychologist Richard L. Gregory, a renowned expert on perception. Gregory knew the extraordinary rarity of such cases and immediately obtained permission from the hospital to visit. He barely had time to plan—the first surgery already had been completed—so he and his assistant, Jean Wallace, stuffed his car with every apparatus, test, illusion, Rorschach inkblot, camera, and measuring device they could fit, then sped west to the Wolverhampton and Midland Counties Eye Infirmary, near Birmingham. They arrived the day after the second surgery.

Gregory could scarcely believe that the man he met had been blind. Bradford guided himself about the hospital room and through corridors without feeling around or bumping into obstacles, and was able to tell the time immediately from the nurse’s clock no matter how many times Gregory moved its hands. He not only spotted a magazine that Gregory had brought along but read its title aloud. He could name virtually every object in his room, and his ability to perceive colors was excellent. Bradford thrilled to his new vision, and Gregory thrilled to have found him. When Gregory began to run tests and make observations, he found Bradford to be eager and willing, cheerful and outgoing. What he discovered, however, was more complicated.

Faces meant nothing to Bradford. He could not recognize a person by face, detect a person’s gender by his face, or make anything of facial expressions, and this was true no matter how hard he tried or how familiar the person. It wasn’t that faces were invisible or blurry to him—it was that they conveyed no meaning at all. When his wife smiled, Bradford knew neither that she was happy nor even that it was she.

His hospital window, some forty feet above the ground, afforded him his first opportunity to look out onto the world. At once, he believed the ground close enough to reach by foot if only he dangled himself from the ledge. He seemed to recognize objects only if he knew them by touch and expected them to be there, such as a parked car or the pocketwatch on his table. But when he came across things that hadn’t been called to his attention or that he didn’t anticipate, such as a building or an extra chair in the room or even a quiet person in the hallway, he seemed not to see them at all.

Bradford was keen to view Gregory’s color slides of familiar English scenes. But when the images were projected on-screen, he could say nothing about the objects depicted, and in fact seemed to see only splotches of color. When asked whether an object shown on the slide was positioned in front of or behind another object, he could not fathom a guess. To Gregory, it was clear that Bradford saw no depth in pictures. And yet, when moving about the hospital, he reached for and handled things quite readily.

Gregory wasted little time unpacking the classic optical illusions he had brought along. Among others, he showed Bradford the following:

The Zollner Illusion

Normal observers judge the vertical lines to be nonparallel, and many see “jazzing” in them. Bradford correctly judged them to be parallel and “all calm”—in other words, he was not susceptible to the illusion.

The Poggendorf Illusion

Normal observers see the slanted lines to be on separate planes. Bradford correctly perceived it as “all one line.”