Blindspot

Blindspot There are two kinds of blindness. The first kind is full of darkness and the things you didn’t see coming. The hurtling cab as you step off the curb, the sudden unexpected pink slip, the wife’s suitcase finally packed and waiting in the front hall. The second is a blinding light. It carries only those things you cannot unsee. The losses that arrive in small black hours. The incandescent regret burned into the dark of your memory. The mistakes you can’t see past. And vision, if it ever comes, is not cheap. You must pay. And sometimes it takes a kind of blindness to finally see. Years ago I lived near a home for the blind in New York City. It was a non-descript building, so plain it was nearly invisible. It had a huge all-seeing eye on a sign and beneath it the words “We Seek Vision.” Some graffiti guy spray painted the eye black that summer. I was living in a rent-controlled apartment on the Lower East side off Delancey. There was an old man who lived next door. Just a thin plaster wall in a turn of the century tenement between us. He was crazy for old standards. Tony Bennett. Mario Lanza. Billie Holiday. The kind of songs that are graceful in the way we all wish life could be, but never is. He was hard of hearing so he always played the music a little louder than he should. Some nights I’d be trying to sleep and he’d have Fly Me to the Moon, The Very Thought of You, The Way You Look Tonight up loud. It was like he was trying to teach Manhattan all he knew about love and regret. That summer he kept playing the old Sinatra classic, I’ll Be Seeing You. His wife had died a couple years earlier. It was their song so he used to put it on late at night trying to kill the pain. Sometimes when the music wasn't enough he would drink too much. In the middle of the night he would put on this scratchy record and turn it up. I could hear the skips as the needle dropped. It was like Sinatra was trying to sing above the scratches, like he was singing for every wounded heart in the history of heartbreak. There was a struggle in his voice, an attempt to lift the weight of loss before falling back beneath it. It sounded heroic in a way, like he was trying to wrestle his heart free from the ache it carried. Then as he realized that he would rather bear the pain than lose the memory of love, his voice collapsed into silence. It was that failure that made it beautiful. Like even now what was left of love was greater than the man and pain was just the price of having felt it. “I’ll be looking at the moon… but I’ll be seeing you.” Some nights I could hear the old man half singing half crying along with it. And I’d put my hand on the cold plaster, like it was his shoulder. Some nights he let it go on skipping, repeating itself over and over until dawn. “I'll be seeing . . . seeing . . . seeing you.” Drunk I guess. Back then I’d be clear of trading by four in the afternoon and after staring at the screens motionless for ten hours I’d just want to move. So I would run a few miles, many times over the 59th Street Bridge. Trading is a little like learning a foreign language. Day after day you watch the numbers flash red and green. You learn to read them like Morse Code. Over time they begin to whisper about opportunity and loss. Eventually, you learn to weed out the self-deception that comes dressed like hope. You teach yourself to separate those outright lies from the truth hidden beneath them. The numbers begin to dance and after they do it’s like going to the ballet each day. Except the dance is never the same. And, of course, no one bets on which ballerina will ascend and which will fall on her face. The truth is, trading requires tunnel vision. It takes a kind of blindness. I woke one day that summer just like ten thousand others, trying to see my way through the numbers to what I wanted. Money is a little like the express lane on the highway. Everybody thinks it’ll get them where they want to go quickly. But there’s really no way around the traffic. Around the doubt and heartache and time. It always takes time. Back then I was in a hurry. I was looking for some short-cut money street to happiness and success where the lights were always green and the traffic always thin. But that day something was terribly wrong with one of my eyes. A small black cloud had appeared overnight, floating in my field of vision. When I tried to see, it would run to the edge of my sight. When I tried to look past, it would return, hovering there. I kept washing my eyes trying to clear it away. But it remained, suspended there, not really blocking me from seeing, but floating. Like a small black ghost. I had taught myself to speed read. That was me looking for the express lane. Back then I thought faster was always better. But that morning as I was flipping through pages and numbers the small black ghost kept slipping into view, bobbing there wordlessly, winking at me. Like it was trying to tell me some secret. By midday it hadn't cleared so I made an appointment with an eye doctor. She was a solemn Arab woman in a white coat with her hair wound in one of those tight buns on her head like she was trying to tie down her own dreams. She asked me in a deep monotone, “So what does the problem seem to be?” I cleared my throat and said, "I woke up with a small black ghost in my vision." There was a very long pause, then finally she said, “Do you mean an actual presence. . . or a blindspot?" We stared at each other in silence until I said, “What’s the difference?” She shined a hard sharp light into my eyes, then finally turned it off and said, “What you’re describing could very well be early stage retinosis, a kind of permanent blindness." Seeing the expression of horror on my face, she patted my arm. Her hand was cold. She asked me to describe the ghost. "It looks a little like a silhouette of Abraham Lincoln’s head. Like on a penny. . . in miniature." I said. She didn’t know who Lincoln was but she ordered some tests and said she would call me with the results later in the week. On the way home I made a note of the school for the blind and later went for a run. I started circling it on my route. Trying to memorize the geography, the cracks in the sidewalk, potholes, whatever. Just in case. And running, I began to notice for the first time various blind people near the school. I’d usually see them standing on the corner trying to cross the busy avenue. They were always concentrating hard, listening to the traffic. Full of worry and a silent determination. But underneath it all a simple kind of courage. More than just about anything, more than intelligence or strength or even beauty, if you want get my attention, show some courage. The moth in me, drawn to it like a light. One day I saw this old blind man trying to make his way across. He was mis-shaven and a little disheveled, like he had dressed in the dark. He was standing there, the way someone who can’t swim stares out at a river he has to cross. I could see he was worried and a little afraid but determined, too, to make his way. Brave. And I could feel my heart’s wings begin to beat against the glass. Trying to get closer to his light. As I looked at him, the black ghost ran into my field of vision. It winked at me over and over, like it was trying to make me see something in him. I walked over to the old man and gently touched him on the sleeve. His head craned around trying with blind eyes to see who was there. In a low voice I said, “I’m crossing the avenue, Mister. Why don’t you take my arm? We could go together." A look of surprise burst through the worry. Relief flooded his features. "Yes, thank you . . . bless you . . . thank you," he said in a thick eastern European accent of some kind. Jewish, I guess. So I gave him my arm and we began to make our way across. For him I suppose it was like the Red Sea parting. A miracle. For me it was a chance for my moth heart to walk arm in arm with courage, hoping secretly that somehow some small part of it might rub off on me. By beating my wings against it. I lied about where I was going and took him all the way to his bank to deposit his social security check. He turned, and unseeing, looked up into my face. “Maybe if you see me again, we could walk together?” “Yes, of course,” I said. He smiled and said, “I’ll be seeing you,” then and as I turned away he called out, “I’ll wait for you!” The eye doctor called the next day. She said I had a common problem called a vitriol deposit. It was entirely benign. I was not going blind but would always have that blindspot. That little Abraham Lincoln winking at me like he was trying to emancipate me. I thanked her, then thought of the old man and his complete darkness and courage and decided a blindspot wasn’t so bad.There are worse things than having Lincoln trying to free the slave of you. In the days and weeks that followed I began to notice the blind people from the home on the street all the time. It was like the blindspot had made them suddenly visible to me. And every time, drawn to their courage, wanting to be their eyes for a few minutes, I would offer an arm. And we, complete strangers, would find our way across together. That summer I had a recurring dream. In it I’m running along for hours, some kind of marathon. I'm alone and lost in a deserted neighborhood that looks like Bushwick Brooklyn. All the brownstones are burnt out. All the streets cut up to steal the pipes. Packs of wild dogs. I see an old man standing on a dark corner. As I approach, he turns toward me and I can see he has a white cane. I stop and say, “Mister, I’m lost. Do you know the way through this place?” He turns toward me and suddenly, in the dream, I don’t know why but I am sure it's God. He whispers, "Take my arm and we’ll cross together." But the street is dark and the dogs are howling. I back away. “No. You don’t know the way. How could you? You’re blind!” He raises his face and with scarred and darkened eyes looks right through me. "I’ll find my own way!" I holler. And in my unbelief, I stumble away into the dark. He calls out again and again, “I'll be seeing you." Then finally whispers, “I’ll wait for you.” And so He did. Night after night in my dreams He waited on that deserted corner, waited for me to rise above the small black ghost of myself and someday make all the things I cannot see clearly into a kind of light. Later that month, it was fall now, I was running along listening to Bob Seger sing that dark mysterious passage from the end of “Night Moves,” about autumn closing in. I saw a young woman on the corner waiting for the light. She had that same old haunted bravery as she tried in vain to wrestle the worry down. She was Mediterranean, fragile features, luminous unseeing eyes. I took a deep breath and told Lincoln that I was just going to offer her an arm. He nodded at me, wavered, and ran away into the margins. Coward. I approached her and in a low, calm voice said, "Miss, I’m crossing the avenue. If you like we could cross together." She turned her face to me. A little worried about this stranger in the dark, but more afraid of the avenue. So she smiled bravely, said thank you, and took my arm. Together we waited for the light and I thought, What a wonderful world. A guy that fears he’s going blind given courage by a blind girl. So of course I did the witty Irish thing. I can’t really help myself. And in a few blocks I could feel her beginning trust me. She told me her family had a genetic disease. It took the sight from each of them in time. I said nothing, thinking about myself and the flashing numbers, watching my ghost in the margin. But I was suddenly afraid of what I might never see. When I didn’t respond she said, “It's all right. I came to expect it long ago. I accept it now . . . even cherish it. There is a kind of comfort you know, in the darkness." I felt my black Irish heart swell a bit. Like it was growing just a little bit larger from breaking around the edges. I lied and said I was going downtown just so I could walk with her. I remember hoping she was walking to Brooklyn or Jersey or China. Anywhere for another minute or hour or year with her courage. But she stopped at a doctor’s office near Canal Street, thanked me and turned away inside. I stood there for a long moment. “I’ll be seeing you,” I said, then ran into the traffic. The next day I told a trader buddy about her. Every trader is a shameless coyote, driven by the most obvious kind of hunger. He was no exception. A hard guy who would cut a stranger’s throat for a nickel. He shook his head and muttered under his breath, “Really? Has it come to this? Picking up blind girls on the street?” Then turning away he said, “For the love of God, what's next? Hanging out in front of deaf-mute schools?" He didn’t understand. He couldn’t see. We all have our blindspots. She had a regular doctor’s appointment twice a week. And I managed to time it so we would meet. By chance. And she became familiar with me and eventually at ease. One day arm in arm I suggested maybe we stop for coffee. She looked a little worried but the worry broke into laughter when I said, “Ok, no coffee. Tea then." So we did. It became a regular thing. And I began to think of us as Blind Beauty and the Beast. But here’s the thing. Cause there’s always always always a thing. With shameless coyotes and men, it's never enough. Nothing is. Even too much. It’s always the next trade, the next hope, the next woman. The next next next. Always that pull for something more. Always dropping what’s in our hands to reach out blindly for something else. And what I wouldn’t give now to once more walk arm in arm with her kind of blind courage. But I was full of the never enough and the next so I figured the thing to do was to very gently suggest a date. Not a “stumble into the night take your chances” date. A real date. A “pick you up and go looking for the corner of Hope and Happiness” date. A “hold hands like you can actually get a grip on the future and make it become what it should be” date. A “find any ramp into the express lane of her heart” date. So the next day, drinking tea, I said, “You know, I’ve been thinking. Maybe we could go out some evening." I remember how she bit her lip and stared up at me A little worried. A different kind of avenue to cross. “What would we do?” she finally asked. “Well,” I said. “Movies are probably out.” She laughed, a little nervous. “We could go out to dinner if you want. There’s a good Italian place on 31st.” She looked down and whispered to herself, just loud enough so I knew she meant for me to hear, “It’s been so long since anyone asked. . .” And I felt my heart break at its edge. I’m an articulate man. Sometimes even eloquent. Wordy SOB. But I had to deal with hard guys for a lot of years. And all hard guys understand is flat hard words. Words that slap and cut. So I became accustomed to using them, because I was forced to. Sometimes they can be both blunt and sharp. Sometimes they are even monstrously inappropriate. They hide in the traffic of my speech, gliding gently along, then suddenly without warning veer into view, causing terrible collisions. I make no excuses. It was cut into me long ago, like hieroglyphics. I could just as soon erase it as the Sphinx could sand away its own walls. She raised her chin and trying once again to see me stared up with her dark eyes. "I don’t even know what you look like," she said. “I know.” I thought, That’s the point. It's the blindness that lets you see the real me. Down deep I felt the brakes in me begin to fail. I felt the varnish being stripped from my words and I tried to choke it down. “I’m average looking in a beat up kind of way," I said. "Had my nose busted half a dozen times trying to build character. I’m solidly in the 70th percentile of the Subway Quotient,guys you see on the train.” But that wasn’t enough. "Yes," she said reaching out a hand. “But what do you—yourself—look like?" I paused, fighting down the urge. I thought of the sign with the all-seeing eye painted over black. I heard myself ask—traderspeak, “Is that really material?" “Material? Of course," she said. “Every girl wants to know. . .” Her voice trailed off. The hard guy in me began to holler. He was running up my throat now, through my mouth, trying to reach the air. I leaned across the table and muttered, “Yes, material. Is it material?” She gasped, but there was no stopping now. “What difference does it make?” I said. “You’re blind!” And the air went out of room, and the world, and my heart. That was all it took. Two words. Shock and hurt etched across her face as she struggled to her feet. And the loudmouth, the hard guy, disappeared back down my throat far beneath the thunderstorm of her tears. Effin coward. I tried to take her arm. But she yelped, “No!” and, feeling for the door, rushed out into the darkness. Lincoln slipped into view, shaking his head from side to side. Honest Abe. I ran after her but she stumbled into the traffic. A cop stopped, helped her across, and put her in a cab. I stood there calling her name over and over long after she was gone. The traffic light flashed red above me. Like it was winking at me. I started running at night. It felt truer, like running along in the dark matched some other part of me that couldn’t see. I wanted to find the darkest street in the city and run down it with my eyes closed just so I wouldn’t have to see my own blindspot. And I began to run around Calvary Cemetery. It was like some part of my heart was looking for a place to bury itself. A pack of wild cemetery dogs chased me one night. I remember howling at them, “Faster! Come on! Do your worst!" The bite would have been nothing compared to the way my own heart had begun gnawing away at itself. It would have been a relief if they took me down. A month of sleepless nights later I finally dragged myself back to the home for the blind. I bought a bouquet of flowers from the Korean place on the corner. It was pathetic in the way only a man can be. Impossibly small and impossibly hopeful. Like trying to cure cancer with an aspirin. The Korean looked at me like he had looked at a thousand other fools trying to cover the fumes of regret with some five-dollar fragrance. I rang the bell. And rang it. And rang it some more. They called up to her but she wouldn't answer. I went back thirteen days in a row asking if I could talk to her for just a minute. On day thirteen an old man came down to where I was standing on the stoop. He was Mediterranean, very slight, entirely blind. “Young man," he said. “My daughter won’t see you. She can’t see you . . . ever again.” I felt as if I was vanishing, that I would never be seen that way again, the way she saw me, without eyes. I argued. I pleaded. I hollered like a man at the bottom of a well hollers for mercy. Finally I grabbed his shirt and, startled, he looked straight through me with dark unseeing eyes. He whispered into my ear, “Young man,” then with real tenderness like only he, a blind man, could see how lost I had become. “Young, young man,” he whispered, “I have no vision. But you’re the blind one.” I let go. It sounded like I had been condemned to darkness. And suddenly afraid that he was right, I retreated down the steps and away into the shadows. That night I got blind drunk. The way a man does when he doesn’t want to see any part of himself or this God-awful world anymore. I staggered home and fell into bed praying once more for dark and dreamless sleep. And I was at its very edge when I heard the needle drop. Sinatra began to sing through the wall. He was singing above the scratches. Once more singing for every heart staggering along through a darkness of its own making, each searching, reaching, calling in vain for what it needs but knows it will never find. “I’ll be looking at the moon…but I’ll be seeing . . . I’ll be seeing you.” And when I could not stand another instant I stumbled up and out, down those tenement steps, into the street and the darkness. I ran and ran through the streets and alleyways until, lost and exhausted on some dark avenue, I fell to my knees. “Who’s there?” I heard someone call. Looking up, I saw an old man, the one from the corner. He had a white cane. Hearing my ragged breathing, he approached. “Who’s there?” he repeated. “Are you lost? Do I know you?” I hesitated. “I think so.” “Yes, I remember now,” he said, reaching out. Then quietly he said, “Why don’t you take my arm? We could cross together.” I looked into his face, into his scarred and dark eyes and saw my own. I let him take my arm. I stood, leaned on him, and he leaned on me. The light changed and, barely above a whisper, the old man said, “I told you . . . I told you I’d wait for you.” So much of living is blind. Blind fate and luck and justice. All stumbling through the dark of every human heart. All trying just to see clearly. Some things can’t be seen. And some can’t be unseen. But it’s those things you lose that you will carry forever. Love is blind, too. I’m sure of it. I’ve walked arm in arm with it. I still do some nights in my dreams. And though I now know Faith is blind, somehow,in that dark it still found me. Sinatra’s voice rose all around us. The sound reached out above the alleyways and side streets, above the sightless souls and the stumbling hearts of Delancey, each trying to beat away its own blind failings. Each singing above its own self-inflicted scratches, skipping forever, like a broken record. "I'll be seeing . . . I’ll be seeing . . . I’ll be seeing you.” “It’s all right,” the old man whispered. “We all have our blindspots.” Mine is shaped like a small black ghost.