Cockeyed (18 page)

I began to climb the handful of depot stairs when one of the cops blocked my way. He yelled at me, perhaps asking questions, and waited impatiently for answers in between. Clearly he took me for a protester, but I wanted him to see me as a blind man, not a dissident man with a stick. Any worry I had that my cane would cause a problem disappeared when the cop walked away, taking my gainful employment with him.

“No!” I shouted, “I'm blind. I don't see!” My cane was gone and I was paralysed on the stairs.

Had I been near our apartment, it might not have been such a big deal. Without a cane I could make my way around most of the school and, if pressed and in daylight, maybe a bit of our neighbourhood, but only because I'd memorized the routes and the number of steps before turning into the grocery store or turning into Apple Class. I didn't know how many steps to take into the train station or how many to take in pursuit of my confiscated cane.

The only thing that could travel was my voice. I yelled in the direction the cop had walked. I thought I could still see him nearby, standing with other cops and probably disarming my lethal mobility aid. I yelled a bit more, looked around at the indifferent crowd, then gave up. Maybe, I thought, Reg would step out and find me after waiting in the station. If not, eventually he'd phone Tracy, and she would come. I'd be obvious to rescue, stranded on the desert island of the busy front steps, immobile, caneless, and impatient to move.

But it never came to that. Another cop approached me and returned my cane. He said something, his tone quiet and apologetic. Twice in one day I'd taken my cane back. When I tapped the edge of the stair, my world at arm's length lit up all over again. I felt the light I'd carried from Vancouver to Pusan and almost lost.

I wish I could say my cane fixed our time in Korea. I was blind again, a strange salvation, but that didn't mean I'd arrived in the movie version of my life. For its happy ending, Tracy and I would've sat around the kitchen table and laughed at old torments and misadventures, confident all was put to rest. We'd liberated Excalibur and brought it home, my
cane. In the final scene, Tracy and I might drink tea at our table, smiling and talking with animation. The camera lens would dilate, bringing into the frame the old apartment teeming with cockroaches, our roommates, which, although familiar, seemed to be new, cute, and adorable, a satire of themselves. Just bugs. Our bugs. I'd like to say my cane was enough to conjure an image like that, but it wasn't. A final scene is the stuff of Hollywood and heroes with superpowers. My cane couldn't heal damage done, nor could it reset broken bonds between Tracy and me. It made our final few weeks easier, but mostly it gave Tracy enough distance and independence to remember herself apart from us. That's what she wanted and needed more of. Whether or not I would remain in the picture wasn't something either of us could see.

On my last teaching day, Apple Class spent the hour playing hangman. Cabin chose a word, and I helped him find its spelling in the dictionary. Under his sketch of the gallows he scored a blank space for each letter. Game on. The Megs and Kevins and Batmans shouted words and letters and flipped through their dictionaries. Most of them guessed the oddities, x and q and j, hoping, I suppose, they weren't as rare as they really are. Exotic letters. The hangman was well defined and on his way to the other side, but Cabin carried on, adding details with every incorrect guess. A bald man with glasses and two earrings came into focus. The correct word was “lion.” With their hysteria and applause, Apple Class declared my effigy to be the finest gag ever executed. That's how we said goodbye to him, together.

The moment Tracy and I returned from Pusan, we set out to rediscover our affections and repair our strained bond the only way possible. We separated. Within days of landing in Vancouver, Tracy booked a flight to Saskatchewan. She wanted to see her family. “A couple of weeks,” she said. “I just need a couple of weeks.”

Four weeks later, I flew to the prairies for a visit, hoping to size up the situation. I needed to find where Tracy's head and heart were at. Both were staying put in Saskatchewan. “Maybe another month,” she said, truly uncertain where she wanted to be or what she wanted to do, other than not be in Vancouver with me.

I waited some more, but when an email of hers mentioned a job in a clothing store, I knew I had to evaluate my own direction. I'd lived for the past month in a basement suite roughly the size of my left lung. Take a deep breath, and my subterranean digs emptied of oxygen. And mildew spores. Cash was running low, so I'd applied for a job as an administrative assistant for a nonprofit arts group. Without question, my organizational skills were as sharp as my vision, and I had no office experience to speak of. Luckily for me, none of this surfaced during the interview.

“Ryan, pretend it's a rough morning for a sec. Handle this situation for me. When you arrive at work to open the arts resource centre, several people are already at the door. Two clients want immediate help with grant applications—you know those artists, they just can't wait!—and a third wants to use our library, which isn't open till noon. Entering the office, you hear the phone is ringing and see the message light is blinking. The fax machine looks jammed again, and we're expecting an important document. Among the people waiting is a courier with a package you need to sign for. Think about it, though. The lights haven't been turned on yet, and the sign put out front. The alarm needs the code within a minute, too. So, wow, rough morning. I'd like to know what you'd do first.”

“First I'd tell everybody how weird this is. I'm in the same test situation from my job interview. What are the chances?”

I started the next day.

I'm still surprised how easily offices fall apart. Within a month, what hadn't emerged during the interview began to show. My filing system, for one thing, exhibited terminal signs of stress. My system involved three piles of paper: the first for “Things That Need Attention,” the second for “Things That Also Need Attention,” and the third for “Things That Probably Matter But I Don't Know What To Do With.” The third pile towered. Throughout my days I accomplished close to nil, despite putting in a solid eight hours. My ability to read print and find documents in filing cabinets was so slow that it pained even me. The only positive was that I always appeared to be reading or looking for
files. I was busy, just not productive. You'd think I typed a lot, too, but it was usually the same page, sometimes several times over, if I couldn't find the white out. Not that I looked hard.

Even though I accomplished little, my eyes and brain ached by five o'clock, unable to keep up with the visual demands of a day. I didn't fit, couldn't do what was asked of me, and didn't want to. Clearly I wasn't trying to make things better for myself, just using my old tactics of denial and avoidance. I wasn't really working or living. I was waiting for Tracy to come home. When she took the job in Saskatchewan, though, I realized that my filing system would collapse, perhaps even kill me, before Tracy would return and resume her old role. It was time to do things for myself, for the first time in a long time. I needed to find my own pace and forget the pace of a life lived at the end of another person's elbow.

To start, I quit my job and re-enrolled at Simon Fraser University, ready to complete my graduate degree. That was where I belonged. I even took a job there, as a teaching assistant. Now I always used my cane, was up front with my professors and students that I was mostly blind, and asserted that it might take me a little longer to read assigned books or to grade papers. Accommodations were made. Nobody flinched, and nobody fired me or threatened deportation. I encouraged myself, willfully, into living within my abilities and my body. I began to assert the need for help, but only when I really needed help. It felt good. Blindness proved easier to manage when I wasn't worrying about its burden on Tracy.

Maybe she understood that from my emails. I can still remember all the work I put into those few lines a day, sentences clotted with overwrought attempts at charm. I wanted them to register how relaxed, adjusted, hopeful, motivated, and satisfied I felt, excepting her absence. Maybe all that was enough to remind her of the young man I'd been before my self-imposed apathy and helplessness. Only she knows. Whatever magic transpired, one day, nearly half a year after we first landed back in Vancouver, Tracy appeared on my doorstep, a surprise, suitcases in hand.

We took our time. She would find her own apartment, and we'd give things another try, close but apart, independent and bound. Not too this, not too that. The Goldilocks theory of commitment. If I could bottle and sell whatever time and method resurrected us, I'd have my own infomercial. In the summer of 1998 I graduated and, after a job interview conducted with my fly down and my blindness, well, out in the open, Capilano College hired me and secured computer technology to help me with reading and teaching. I've remained there, grateful and content, ever since. What's more, Tracy and I found a nice apartment with old wooden floors and cherry trees out front. We moved back in together. We may have had a few remaining ghosts, but we had space to spare and plenty of storage.

The morning of May 12, 1999, I sat in my office, with a stack of unmarked essays on my desk. For me, procrastination always begins with voice mail. I decided to check the messages at home.

Two new messages. Both were marked urgent, so I felt vindicated
in having decided to waste time. When I pressed the button, both messages replayed my father's voice in my ear. His tone was terse, flat, yet somehow alarmed. Both messages shared the identical phrasing, too. “Ryan, it's Dad. Call my cell right away.” No goofy “Yello,” instead of “hello,” or “Bbye now,” as he always says. Something was off. I called him back and tried not to sound a little worried.

“Hi, Dad. What's going on?” He didn't answer, so my worry grew. “Dad? You there?”

Instead of words, his voice whimpered under his breath. It was gutshot. A pained and quiet sound. A thin, bleeding moan I'd never heard before.

“What happened,” I barked.

He began to weep quietly, then more of that moan. He couldn't answer, so without missing a beat, I jumped ahead and cut to the worst bone. “Who?” I said. Just, “
Who
?”

The phone went quiet. I couldn't tell if he was still there but carried on anyway. “Who, Dad? Who? Is it Ma?”

The cell phone rustled in my ear, the sound of it changing hands, then I heard a new voice, a woman's. She said, “Here, Miles, let me talk to him.”

“Ma?”

“Ryan?”

“What's—”

“Ryan, it's Auntie Angie. I'm—I'm so—”

“Where's my mother, Angie?” I felt cornered and disoriented, as if pushed into a cave. My eyes grew starry and buzzed with panic. “What happened, Angie?”

“I'm so sorry, Ryan. It's, it's Rory,” she said.

My body flooded with relief. This wasn't about my mother—it was about somebody else. Then, almost immediately, my little brother's name registered, and my relief hardened into an icy guilt. Angie continued to talk. She delivered the news as straight and clear as she could, as if teaching a child something new and difficult to understand.

“Ryan, listen to me. Rory took some pills last night,” she began. She spoke slowly. “We don't know much more at this point, but I'm here at the hospital with your parents, okay? Everybody did everything they could. He's gone, hon. I'm so sorry, but he's gone.”

“Gone?”

Something heavy arrived. Comprehension, its freefall, then a kind of pain that knocks you away from words. Your mind moves far from your body. You don't know if you are alive anymore, you are so numb, so empty, so blown.

“Rory? But, but he can't . . .” I searched for an argument, the one to cheat death with. I couldn't find it.

“I'm so sorry, hon.”

“Is there a note?”

“Can you leave work, Ry? Your parents need you, hon. Come to Langley Memorial Hospital. Everybody's here. Your mom, dad, Mykol, and Erin are all here.”

The list of names nauseated me. Already Rory was disappearing. He was at the hospital, too, yet not there, among my family's names. I'd recited that list the same way all my life: Mom, Dad, Rory, Mykol, Erin. A name was missing. The new order sounded alien and its expression empty. This wasn't my family.

“But I don't know how to get there,” I said, “We don't have a car.”

“Can you get a taxi?”

“Did he leave a note?”

“No, hon. There's no note.”

“But Tracy's at work.”

“Pick her up on the way, okay?”

“Who's there, Angie?”

“Listen to me, Ry. Call a taxi, then pick Tracy up at work, then come to the hospital. Okay? I'll wait for you out front.”

“But I don't have any money. I can't take a taxi.”

Trauma dreams its own logic. Mine believed, truly, that if I couldn't go to the hospital, Rory couldn't be there. Angie and I carried on this way, trying to sort through my shock, to get me in a cab. When I hung up the phone, I walked across the hall to a colleague's office. Maria, a good friend, stood in front of her bookshelf, looking for something. She said hi and sounded like a smile as I shuffled into her office. I didn't know what to do or how to begin. Angie's instructions were gone. I aimed for Maria's blur, wrapped my arms around it, and said, “My brother just killed himself. Can somebody help me go home?”

Maria and another colleague, Sharon, drove me to my apartment. We walked together to the car, my friends on either side, each holding an arm, guiding and hugging me at once. Soon I was in a taxi. From our apartment I'd called Tracy at work and told her what happened, imitating Angie's calm as best I could. Neither of us cried or said much in the cab on the way to the hospital. We held hands, and I fought
the urge to grip Tracy's, though I felt that if I didn't, I'd blow out the open window. “I'll be okay, I'm going to be alright,” I repeated. It felt like a test, to see, each time, if the phrase could ever be true.