After making a deposit of berth fees for my boatyard, I’m going as usual out the bank to the steps, feeling the nub of my cane hitting the first void (that’s the word I use for any place where the cane refuses touch, comes up empty-handed, so to speak), not thinking, of course, because all this touch-and-feel stuff is second nature to me—translating the taps, vibrations up the cane to my hand and in turn into my brain, where the sensation is translated to the dimensions of space. And, in any case, I know the bank steps well from years of using them pre – sight loss, nothing to it, six wide stairs of—what? Not marble, maybe sandstone—and just as I’m to the first step, feeling for the drop, this hand takes my elbow and a voice says behind me, Let me. I push back slightly, saying Back off, because I hate help most of the time and especially when I know the place and layout and have the whole thing premapped in my head, yet even more so when it’s a clammy hand on me, a sopping wet palm. Then next thing I’m going through the air and there’s an explosive flowering of sparks in my eyelids (a classic flowering of sparks, probably from the pressure of the brain striking so violently against the cerebral sac), or not so much the eyelids but back near the center of my brain. Then I’m being transported to the hospital, waking to the jitters of bad truck shocks over the potholed main streets (another ability one learns with sight loss is naming streets based on pothole thuds and thumps and various brands of pavement and blacktop—there is a shocking inconsistency in the various grades of paving materials, a conspiracy of gradients), feeling on my way to the hospital partly used and violated because there is still a cold sort of faint impression on my elbow, the point where I think the man touched me—and his voice is hovering in my ear, that Let me. And then I’m being tended in critical care, hardly hanging on, with severe hemorrhaging (I’m told later) and a very bad contusion along my temple.
Near-death experiences abound. I’m angelic. I’m lifted through the joists and beams of the hospital and am flying out over the town. I’m fully vested with sight. The Hudson is fantastically blue. It hooks to the west near Indian Point, the domes of the power plant spewing steam. To the south through the milky haze of a summer day is the thin gray conjoined monolith of the World Trade Center on the horizon; and to the left of it, the needle point of the Empire State Building injecting the sky. Holy. Holy. Holy. I’m vested with visions. I see it all.
It is this vision alone that has sustained me through it all, kept me alive. It is this vision—because it was so good and pure—that I count as actually seeing. It makes me want to thank the man who helped me down those steps, to offer him my hand, to plant a check for at least a thousand dollars in his hands. It is true that before the fire rose up to take my eyes I was so used to seeing the open vistas of the Hudson that I hardly knew I was seeing them and took for granted the simple sight of the Westchester shore. Sailing a boat itself is an extremely visual experience, much more than people would ever imagine: the luffing sails always in need of trimming, those small little wavelet ripples along the taut cloth near the top of the mast, the heeling of the boat against the horizon.
This blind guy was just about to take a tumble—I mean quivering right over the edge of the steps, not even bothering with his cane, tucking it up under his armpit, because he was using both hands to stuff some bills back into the narrow bank envelope and was having a hard time because the bills were soft and finger-worn, like a sow’s ear (or as soft as chamois). He was approaching the steps a bit sidelong, just about to the steep and narrow risers—built to look grand and stately when seen from the street. Being versed in architectonics, an engineer expert in spotting structural deficiencies, I noticed the disharmony in the whole setup, which included this man who was going toward the steps as I moved about two yards behind him. Then he did a frozen midair poise, a stasis, holding there, his seersucker suit wrinkled around his hips, a big stain of yellow across the back of the coat (one of those stains that appear when you pull the coat, reeking of moth flakes, out of winter storage). I knew the man not by name but by his reputation as the owner of the old boatyard, who had suffered from a freak accident (according to some) or by foolishness (according to others), spackling down a gluing compound while igniting a Camel Light and thereby creating a massive cloud of dull blue flame that devoured his boat and his eyesight. As a divorcé (everyone knew), he carried a lonely demeanor along with his blindness; by this I mean beside his blindness or compounded by it. You could tweeze this aspect out of him if you tried hard, separate it the way a prism might separate light, so that you knew his wife, Janice, who had remarried and might be seen picking her kid up from the front of school at times, hadn’t just left him because of the blindness (you gave her the grace of that doubt) and probably had left him for much better and clear-cut reasons, one of which was his nasty temper. He was seen taking a hammer to the last of his boats, a blue-trimmed day cruiser—blindly groping his way over the hull and smashing the bulkhead before one of his yard hands grabbed him from behind and subdued him. Rumor has it that it took at least five men to get him calmed down. He fought like a man who couldn’t see, clawing the air with his fists, kicking whatever he could, clutching whatever was there to grab. Perhaps this gave me pause, this violent tendency—or the hearsay of it, the rumor itself solidifying into something larger than this man. Rumor also had it that he hated like hell to be helped in any manner and was prone to taking his cane to the side of your head if you did so much as offer up a careful hand on the elbow, and had even fought valiantly against a warning device to help guide the sight-impaired across the streets of our fair town. The fear that he might slam his cane into my brow restrained me. I did nothing. I waited half a second and let him take that step. I did give a bit of a warning shout, just before he went down. It was a squeak, my wife said, like air being released through the taut neck of a balloon. Off he went into the air, head over heels. My shoes felt heavy on the steps. I went down and cradled his heavy head and stated firmly that someone should call 911. You’re not going to hit me with your cane, I was thinking, you’re not going to hurt anyone. But I was saying, You’re gonna be all right, pal. It’s going to be all right buddy. You ain’t slipping away from us yet. Hang in there. Hang on. Help is on the way. It’ll be here soon. Don’t move. Don’t move at all. Just stay right there and breathe easy. Take nice easy breaths. Don’t go. Don’t go at all. Just a few minutes and you’ll be on your way.
A small car had blown from the bridge. He heard it in a news report, but when it happened, exactly, he can’t remember—and now it’s like any old news report, nothing but a premonition. A small Toyota compact was swept from the bridge during one of three days of high winds. (This was back when small Japanese-built cars were a novelty, and many in Michigan shrugged and said, “See what buying one of those little tin shit cans will do to you?”)
A fine drift of snow moved over the meeting point of two massive, surging bodies of water; it covered the lurking currents. He imagined the car floating down, making a swan dive into the icy reaches.
Those currents battling each other between two great lakes at the Straits of Mackinac, pounding past St. Ignace, surging along Nine Mile Point. Into this unimaginable fury of currents she falls, angelic with her hair lifting up and her face settled into terror and then grace (it’s five or so seconds before she hits the water) or whatever you want to call it as for the first time, perhaps in years, she becomes completely placid, almost joyous. The car hits the choppy foam and lingers upright until it lists (some might say romantically) to one side like a great ship sinking, the water spilling the rubber seals, cracks, anyplace it can until a bubbling froth no one will ever see rises up and she’s gone. All that in two minutes. There are those who have stopped on the narrow span, one of the longest suspension bridges in the world, braving the wind, to gaze down at the dark water. They wave and point, finding nothing in the surge and snow and night-dark except perhaps what they imagine to be a glint of fender, a fleck of what was but is now completely gone—rising out of the blinding wind and snow.