The Secret Goldfish

Iswell with a solicitous desire to help the blind man tick tick ticking his way ahead of me out of the bank, with an almost imperative desire to help at all costs, no matter what his needs. No question about it, I’m going to help him through the doors and out and into the street after properly guiding him down the stairs. Counting my bills, fanning the crisp ones out, at the same time closing in on the guy, all the while also searching memory banks for more information on the blind man, putting together fragments of gossip—the owner of that boat with the fire, his house clearly available to my mind’s eye, wondrously large, situated on about five acres of expensive land stretching in wide vistas of rolled lawn all the way down to the river. Almost ready to burst with the desire not only to take his elbow but to touch it, too, to feel the sharp (is there a sharper, more protruding object in the human body?) bony nub of it in my hands, and to help him down the walk whether he wants it or not. No matter what his feelings are on the matter, I’m bound by some deeper internal duty to help him out and in doing so, of course, as will be pointed out to me later, after the fall, when his blood is pooling around his head, to help myself out as well by satisfying my compulsion to help.

My desire to help guide the blind man when I see him through the bank doors is just tiny, nothing much, a very small seed in the core of my fruitless heart. Microscopic is the way I describe it to the police during the inquest into the fall and the so-called riotous aftermath. Not duty or a sense of right and wrong but maybe a small hint that if I do not help this man who is swaying toward that fateful first step, then in some way I will be indicted as one who did not come to the aid of a fellow human, no matter how sordid or pathetic that human might be, which was the case, because this man stank of urine and God knows what—dirty from top to bottom. This image of his face stuck with me through the whole process: here was a man with a fine estate and with so much to his name, putting aside the damage he suffered in that horrible fire, who has let himself go to seed. His face was not only blemished by the scar tissue, which would be expected in such cases, but was also dirty in an industrial sense, with grit and grime and smears of what seemed to be axle grease smashed into his pores. Coming upon him and trying to take hold of the very fine nub of his elbow, bony and sharp, I thought of that Walker Evans photo: a man in the moth-holed cap presumably just out of the coal mine, clutching his shovel handle, staring half blankly into the lens. Not a bit of charm or irony on that fucked-up face. A face void of insight. A blank face holding all the blank portents of humankind. The blind man’s face was similar but gave the impression that it might be cleaned up with a good scrubbing: just a nail brush and a bar of lava soap. My desire was only to clean up this man, to move him toward some place where he might be able to bathe, to rub his back with a brush, to scrub beneath his nails, to shave, to buff his feet with a pumice stone, to shampoo his scalp, to dab a cloth under the fold of his ears, to sprinkle aftershave across his face, to trim his nose hairs, to pluck his brows, to clip his nails, to exfoliate his skin, to brush his shiny hair; a desire to move him at least in the direction of all this had me slightly ahead of the blind man, nudging him and therefore causing him to misstep and tumble forward. Unfortunate as it is, the story does have its elements of humor, I am told: the acrobatic, clownish nature of his fall. His foppish Chaplinesque bowlegged tramp moves as he fell. The whole thing is certainly grist for the rumor mill. Many are afloat regarding the event: I pushed him./ I was angry and insisted that I help him./ I didn’t help him./ I didn’t come near him./ I was still in the bank counting my money when he fell./ I gave him a good hard kick in the ass./ He staged the whole event in order to sue me./ He was suicidal and found the most intricate manner to kill himself—so intricate he could not have planned it in such detail./ He pushed me./ I pushed him back./ We pushed each other and fell simultaneously./ He wasn’t blind./ He was a fraud./ I was the one who was blind—legally, though I could see colorless masses across my field of vision./ I wasn’t near the bank. I was in the Grand Union.

When I came out of the bank the blind man was being hoisted into the ambulance, one of those boxy affairs, more a truck than the kind we used to have, which were low and sleek station wagons, making me aware, on seeing the man being hoisted in, that the hearse, a direct relative to the ambulance, hasn’t kept up with the evolution of styles, or else has stayed back in the past for some good reason. A blind man is being put into the ambulance, I thought, because one of the EMS technicians had put his cane neatly alongside of him, though not under the blanket but next to the man and held down by the Velcro straps. The blood was clearly evident, and I heard talk near me of what had happened, that the man had taken a tumble, had fallen head over heels, someone said, no kidding, actually did a little somersault/cartwheel on the way down, you should’ve seen it, this blind guy comes out and this other guy comes behind him to help and it looks, well, it looks as if this man gives him a push instead of helping, and then next thing you know the blind guy’s falling. Down amid the crowd I spot blue shirts, badges, notepads out, a man in handcuffs, or not cuffs but those little elastic straps they use when they arrest a bunch of people at once, demonstrators and the like, mass arrests more than anything, but sometimes used instead of handcuffs to avoid the stigma of metal cuffs; this very elegant man in a fine suit coat and a tie, thin, maybe gaunt, very European-looking, I think, a slightly bewildered look on his face, eyeing the crowd as it closed in on him with ears cocked (if ears can cock) to hear his side of the story, and he’s looking through the crowd right at me, and we exchange what seems to be a kind of knowing glance, though I’ve never seen him before, I don’t think, not sure, doing a search of my memory because in this town you mostly know everybody. I don’t know him. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen him before. But to be sure, I get a bit closer, shoving through the crowd, and get up near him and see that he is a very dainty man, very refined up close with a very thin veneer of sweat over his whole face, from top to bottom. He nods in a knowing way that says he somehow recognizes me, too, and is going through his own mental records to try to make the connection. But before he can speak—because his mouth is open—he is whisked away, held on both sides by the cops who have to get him through the crowd, which is closing in, a few people shouting and calling him an asshole and saying he should be shot, pushing a blind man down stairs like that, until out of impulse I am shouting at him, too, going with it, yelling, You’re the most vile bastard on the face of the earth, how dare you push a poor soul down the stairs, a blind man no less, blind as a bat, blind as Lear, how can such evil be allowed to coexist with all the good things of this earth? And so on and so forth as I work my way as close to him as I can, so that I’m hanging over him, right behind the cop, as he’s forced down into the car seat, though he isn’t resisting at all.

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.

BLOWN FROM THE BRIDGE

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.

That day she went down to the Lower Peninsula to visit X, who managed a food market in Traverse City. They went driving, two lovers alone. Now they’re parked in his tan Chevy Nova at the end of Mission Point. See them? Her boyfriend has his pants shackling his ankles and she has her shirt above her shoulders. A beastly, dark night, raging gusts rock the car on its shocks. The words whispered aren’t much different from the radio noise, vows floating over static, meant more to tickle the timpanic membrane than anything else—and gooseflesh on her arms proves to him that his breath in her ear is arousing, and the words she speaks, with her lips against his neck, don’t come anywhere near his ears, but he feels them anyway, a soft, moist flutter of lips and tongue. It is the solitude and joy in this stuffy car in the center of the absolute rage of the elements that amuses, draws us to them, makes us wish there might be some way to pluck her out of the car, to warn her of her pending fate. Twenty yards down the sand, Lake Michigan churns wildly with the same violence that sends supertankers to their grave, and yet they are going at it, finding handholds, testing new courses with their fingers. The external rage of wind that will in a few hours send this girl’s car off the bridge now helps them to feel that the only solace and relief and safety in this world lies in the intermingling of their bodies, while outside the earth breathes hellfire.

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