Cockeyed (13 page)

“I'm sorry,” I decided to say, “I was just kind of daydreaming, and these are my old glasses, so I guess I didn't notice I was staring at you. Sorry about that. I didn't mean to creep anybody out. Not that I know of.”

She laughed, albeit slightly. I moved my foot under the table to check my cane. Everything from tip to handle was sufficiently out of sight, or so I thought. As apology for the creep factor, I asked if my accuser and her friend would join
me for a drink, which she accepted, with some reluctance. When she went to fetch her friend, I snatched my cane from under the table, collapsed it to its bundle of segments and stuffed the works into my satchel. So much anxiety over so little, I know, but there it was, my blindness packed away like the tidy stack of dynamite it is. If I was going to pass for sighted, at least for a while, I didn't want either of them to feel my cane under their feet and have to deal with, hey, how did that white cane get there? I wonder where the poor blind person is who left that behind?

It happens, too. I've left my cane all over the city, prompting hundreds of speculations about my own whereabouts and survival. It's easy to lose a cane. It's as easy as losing a pair of glasses or looking through the glasses on your nose and wondering where you could have left them this time. Pick up two grocery bags, one in each hand, and, voila, you forget your cane on the bus bench. Believe it or not, the principal cause is routine. I forget I'm blind all the time, even when I'm bumping around with extra difficulty. The cane, like blindness or even my gaze, becomes such a habitual part of life's rhythm that each is easily disregarded. Losing a cane can even happen despite a person's best efforts.

The most stylish case I know of happened to my only blind friend, Willy. Once he tried to get on the Skytrain, Vancouver's gaudy monorail, when the doors closed as he was about to board. The two doors snapped shut, stranding Willy on the platform. His white cane remained partially on board, clenched between the doors like a toothpick between teeth. Willy yanked and yanked, but the doors were too tight.
Within seconds the train departed and dragged Willy's aid along with it, the cane narrowly missing passengers waiting on the platform as it swept by like a scythe. That must have looked neat. I've often wondered what people at the next station thought when the doors opened and an ownerless white cane dropped at their feet.

If I couldn't control my blindness, at least I could control its introduction. If anything, I figured I would reveal my condition to my new acquaintances later, if the circumstance demanded it. I had to hope I wouldn't need the washroom anytime soon. If we got along and we were all comfortable and affable with one another, my blindness would be a surprise, maybe even a mysterious facet of character. A man can daydream. I might stand up to pay the bill, retrieve my cane, and snap it open with veteran grace, only to astonish the table with my casual delivery. My god, they would gasp. We had no idea you were . . . you are. . . . To that I would feign an endearing humbleness. Oh, you mean this, this cane? It's nothing, really. Oh my, how I always forget about my blindness. I guess it's just one of those things. A mysterious facet of character, perhaps.

That would be nice. More likely, though, I would get up to pay the bill, open my stick, and poke one of my new acquaintances in the forehead. She would be surprised and bleeding, but more surprised at the coldness of the beers I'd then knock over as I turned to apologize. Then I'd elbow somebody in the face, or everybody. Noses would break as I bulled my way out of the booth. That would be more my style. After paying the bill, I would also return to the wrong table, seduce the empty
chairs, and my two victims would take that opportunity to make for the nearest exit. Not that I want to elicit pity. Blindness, no matter how traumatizing, is a constant state of slapstick. Sometimes the innocent have to go down with me.

By this time in my pathology, I'd passed for sighted on many occasions, even daily, but in short intervals involving little movement. Sitting in a booth and chit-chatting is close to still life. I reasoned passing shouldn't be too hard. No forklifts, no Louisiana muggers, and no complicated zippers were here to contend with. All would be fine. I simply had to work at general eye contact and keep my hand on my beer at all times. Let go of that, and I'd grope around the table, pinching the air like a dumb crab. The trick is to focus people on what I'm saying, not what I'm doing. And keep all movements to a minimum, no matter what.

The conversation did play out well, after all, and I never did reveal my blindness. Nobody seemed the wiser. Passing for sighted can be fun when it works, although not entirely relaxing. It's a kind of holiday, though, hanging out with normalcy. I groused about skiing accidents, road trips, and other visual experiences I either updated from my sighted days or stole from my sighted friends. Most of the time, the art of passing depends on an intimacy with my own nostalgia. Otherwise it requires access to bullshit drowned in persuasive detail.

“Yeah, I've seen my share of crappy jobs, too,” I recalled at one point. “I had a job a few summers ago at, um, what's it called? The wheat, the wheat something. The wheat? Shit, it's gone.”

“Was it a bakery?” asked the woman who'd accused me of staring.

“No. Where all the wheat is transferred, down by the waterfront.”

“The Wheat Transfer?” asked her friend.

“No. It's like—”

“The Wheat Dock?”

“No, no, it's like collection, like wheat hoarding or something. I can't—”

My accuser enjoyed that. “The Wheat Collection Agency?” she said. “Did you rough people up for their bad wheat debts or something? Were you, like, a repo-man for wheat farmers?” She laughed, and I liked the sound of it.

“Yes, I had a gun, and I took back borrowed wheat—at the Wheat Pool! That's what it's called. The Wheat Pool. Anyways, seriously, I was actually a bin picker there.”

“What's a bin picker?” my accuser asked.

A bin picker was the most interesting job I knew, and one I'd never worked. My friend Wayde had been hired to it the summer after high school. It had always struck me as the strangest job, and I thought it made a good story. For five years I'd been a student. Not much hilarity or anecdotal thrill comes of nights with a broken spell-check.

“A bin picker is a person who hangs in empty grain silos. I wore, like, a nylon harness and they strung me from a winch. We wore goggles and air masks because it was so dirty. Our job was to chip the silo walls clean with a pickaxe. Or a hoe. Something like that. Anyways, I whacked all the grain off, whatever stuff stuck to the insides, just hanging in the air like
that for hours. Really suffocating stuff. Crummy work. Maybe as lousy as the summer I drove a forklift. God, I hate forklifts.”

By the end of the night, my accuser had softened up to me. We seemed more than happy with each other's company. Neither of us wanted to call it quits at closing time, so when her friend was off buying a bag of chips, my accuser asked me if I wanted to meet back at her place later. The pub had worked, for once. I had been found by the public. My story, and storytelling, were going places I hadn't planned. Such is desire's guidance, sometimes.

“Just give me a half an hour to drop my friend off,” she said, putting her jacket on. She wrote an address on a coaster and slid it into my shirt pocket.

“I'll see you there,” I said.

“I'll be waiting.”

Finding her apartment wasn't a problem. I gave the coaster to my cab driver and let him do the reading and the navigating. I knew I was in a bit of an awkward position, though, having withheld the whole blindness thing far too long. After all the stories I'd pinched from my friends' lives, too, it would be extra hard now to comfortably retrofit my life as anything other than theatre. I reasoned, with a boozy, horny compulsion, I'd best just keep up the sighted routine indefinitely. Why ruin a perfectly good night? When I reached her apartment building, I imagined I would be able to cane my way to the door without her spotting me. I hoped. Once inside, I'd find her apartment in the lit hallways, fold my cane back into my satchel, knock on the door, and wing it from there.
Couches are easy to find in apartments. If I'd entered and she'd asked me to find the TV remote, that would be game over.

What can I say in my defence? Nothing. How can I explain all this duplicity? Desperation might be a start, and basic reptilian instinct, I guess, anything to earn the desire of another. If I dig a bit deeper, though, the more interesting answer is that I would, at that time, have done anything not to appear blind. Sacrificing self-respect was a minor casualty. I couldn't cure blindness in myself, so I was doing my best to make a man and a life that excluded it as long as possible. It was a form of self-medication. Lies masked and deferred my symptoms. Sometimes.

When the cabbie pulled up to the building, I asked what number I was looking for. He said 107, and handed me back my golden coaster. I got out of the cab, under a bright street-light, and looked around, unable to make out the blocky features I attribute to an apartment building. No grids of light hung in the sky to suggest apartments, not even one with an I'll-be-waiting light in the window.

Before I shut the car door, I asked, “Where's the entrance?”

“Which one?” the driver said.

“What do you mean? To the building.”

“To 107? Man, I don't know. The path here is sort of an entrance. Follow the sidewalk to your left, and your address is somewhere in there.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

“Do you want me to guide you?”

“No,” I lied for the last time. “I'm fine.”

I shut the door, turned, then walked directly into a large bush. The cabbie rolled his window down and coached me further to the left. I felt a sidewalk under my cane. The concrete lead away from the street, but to what, I couldn't tell.

“The townhouses are just down there,” he said, and drove away.

The evening air felt cool on my face and refreshed my senses after the smoky bar and musty cab. All was silence except for the buzz of streetlights. The sound diminished behind me as I walked into what I now assumed was a townhouse complex. I caned my way along the main concrete footpath, tapping the edges to know my position and tapping the middle to ensure a clear way. I tried to create as little noise as possible, but it was hard to muffle each strike. Soon, when I did tap, I could hear the sound change, echoing off what were buildings, townhouses, on either side. In the new tone I could hear the deepening enclosure around me. At the end of each house's walkway was a small, decorative lantern, each of them dimly lit. The pattern suggested a horseshoe of houses, none of them illuminated, none of them enumerated in any way I could see.

Quietly I made my way to one of the darkened doors and felt for information. A mail slot and peephole, a little arched window, I recognized those, but no numbers. Back to the main walkway I retreated and approached the next house, again palming about in hopes of a raised number. Most people in the complex, I could only assume, didn't want to be found. Could be a witness protection housing project. Maybe the next door would be numbered.

When my fingertips felt the wood of the third door, a dog exploded into voice on the other side. I thought I could taste adrenaline. Mass market production kicked in, heavy distribution, too. Then my body shifted from startled to fully alarmed when the animal threw its weight, repeatedly, at the hinged bit of wood between us. The dog had its own desires, and my flesh was on its wish list. A man's voice bellowed from inside.

“Otto!! Otto, no! Ott-o, shut up or you're glue!”

On my next try, I picked a darkened door that just happened to sport a set of raised numbers nailed above the peephole. 1-0-3, I felt, so I counted four decorative lanterns down the walkway, and approached 107 at last. Again I palmed the door and the surrounding wall. No number confirmed the address. Fuck it, I thought, how could this be anything but 107? 103 plus 4 is 107. The math doesn't lie.

Unless they're duplexes. I did the new math. Being about three o'clock in the morning, and several pints past reasonable, it took me a minute to come up with number 111 as the other possible address I was about to wake. I debated what to do next. More hand-to-door number research didn't appeal. Instead, I tried my last covert option. The door handle. It turned.

Caution and propriety are resources of character I do call upon. Not often enough, maybe. For a few moments I puzzled at the handle, wondering if it was meant for me or if it was the most unfortunate temptation I would know in my short life. And where would that life go from here? Prison on breaking and entering charges? Would a judge buy my plea of poor math and dying retinas? Or maybe I was about to enter a
house of vigilante justice, its owners educated by the old copies of
Guns & Ammo
stacked on the coffee table. Then I heard my intended's phrase in my ear again. “I'll be waiting,” she said. Could this open door be what she meant? Was it some sort of friendly, trusting gesture or, better, some sort of playful kink? Was she really waiting, I mean, really waiting, somewhere in the house, for me to breeze in and assume some sort of role play? I was born in Langley. I don't know these things.

I opened the door a crack and poked my head inside.

“Hello?”

Nobody answered. I tried again, a little louder. Nobody answered.

My cue to go home couldn't be more plain. This was either the wrong house, or my new acquaintance had passed out as a lady-in-waiting. Either way, nothing good would come of this. Meanwhile, I'd already stepped inside to nose around.

At first I wasn't sure what to do with the door. When one breaks into a house, should one leave the door open for a quick getaway, or should one close it for a modicum of privacy? I left it open. When I was caught, it would support my claim I was just leaving.