On Seeing Someone
by Cole Cohen
The glasses that were supposed to mimic loss of central vision arrived while you were away; first at a work conference in Baltimore you hadn’t told me about and then another conference after that, I forget where now. I waited for a couple of days to pick the package up from the mailroom, until I felt more like seeing the world from your perspective. My work as a writer feels so abstract compared to being a doctor. We’re both working on the problem of cognition just from different ends, and anyway anyone who has tried to heal knows that it’s also an abstract art, with its own setbacks and triumphs often appearing out of order and without warning. I thought that I might be well suited to care for the person who cares for all of the other people, or at least it felt nice to think of myself as someone like that.
When I finally ripped open the bubble wrapped mailer I found a pair of paper frames that looked like what one would wear to a 3-D movie. The lenses were made of flimsy plastic. When I put them on they kept sliding down my nose so that I couldn’t get my pupils to line up with the dark circles in the center of each lens. I held them to my face and looked around my bedroom in an attempt to see it as you might but my eyes kept shifting and fighting the experiment.
I watched YouTube videos hosted by a man with the same condition as yours on a channel where the logo mimicked the skull and crossbones logo coat of arms used by the stunt TV series Jackass but instead of two crutches there were two canes. I wanted to know what it was like without having to ask. Which seems like a bad plan but you said that you hated answering all of the questions you got and I could relate, since I regularly field rude and ignorant inquiries about my neurological condition.
I hate that I’m writing about you because I’ve been around long enough to know that this is my way of controlling the story of who you are to me when I’m afraid that it’s gone farther than I expected, out beyond my reach. I know that the first-person directed confessional is in some ways a performance of vulnerability, pretending that the reader isn’t in here with us. This is an act of distancing, pinning you to the page for my own study. I don’t know what’s going to happen to us when we walk outside of the room of this paragraph but I have a feeling that it isn’t good. I know that this can’t last much longer.
The first time that I entered your new apartment by the hospital, with the rented furniture and hotel paintings and the dinosaur sheets on your bed because your daughter was in that phase and the two sinks in the bathroom (this blew my mind, two sinks), past the waving doorman, I stood out on your balcony looking down on the river and felt like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. What a terrible movie. I watched the trailer for it in bed that night when I got home. Julia in her thigh high boots spreading her long legs in the gigantic elevator, Richard Gere drawing her a bath in his bathroom with two sinks. In the final clip of the trailer, they stand on the tarmac in front of his private jet. “What happens after the prince rescues the princess?” Gere asks. Julia smiles her minted grin, “She rescues him right back.” But the rescuing you needed was more the fire brigade kind. When I met you, two months after you left your wife, you were still holding the match that torched your house down.
When we met, the 1985 Kate Bush song ‘Running up That Hill (A Deal with God)” was having a moment in pop culture, revived by a Netflix show. A friend sent me a video of Big Boi, from the hip-hop duo Outkast, breaking down the meaning of the song. “So, it’s two people in a relationship and the woman is saying that if she could she would make a deal with God to swap places, so the man could understand how the woman thinks and the woman could understand how the man thinks and then they would have a better relationship…Does the dude want to swap places, too? Do he really? Think about it.” I wonder if he’s alluding to the accompanying music video, which is an extended modern dance routine in which Kate Bush, in a grey leotard and matching palazzo pants leaps and grasps toward the camera while a man in the same uniform repeatedly catches her and pulls her back. I’ve heard before that the song is about a woman wishing that she could switch places with a man but when I listen I hear references to disability, about wanting someone to know what it’s like without being asked.
I wrote an essay once about the French phenomenologist Maurice Mearleau-Ponty’s thoughts on testimony and, how I can never be a validating witness for another person’s experience because my sense of perception isn’t typical. I realized how self-involved that sounded after I pointed at the crows flying outside my kitchen window and your face fell flat. I’m sorry that I called you Harry Potter when you tried to explain your interest in alchemy to me. I did want to hear what you were going to say; maybe this is my way of asking. Writing is its own supposed transformation of matter.
The activist Mia Mingus has a theory that she calls “access intimacy”, about the experience of when someone anticipates the access needs of a disabled person. She calls it an “eerie comfort.” After I met you, I described it to a friend as “really hot.” For access intimacy to work both people don’t need to have a disability, you only have to want to see the world as someone else does. I once visited a friend’s campus to talk with her writing class. She guided me through her foreign labyrinthine campus to her classroom and when our discussion ended she excused herself from the class to walk me back out to the street and pointed me in the direction toward my home. This cost her very little and it meant the world to me that she was willing to consider briefly my lived experience.
It isn’t a perfect system. We made a plan in bed one night that you would navigate for me and I would read you the street signs but we never really left the apartment. Before you came over for the first time, I flipped on and off the light switches in all the combinations that I could think of, trying to anticipate what would work best for you. When you walked in and turned them all off I stifled a laugh. When I said that we should go hiking I didn’t know that you thought that I couldn’t, that I would fall down and tumble off the trail. I laughed so hard at your warning that you excused yourself to go the bathroom. I wonder sometimes if access intimacy really exists, if anyone could ever really know each other that deeply. This is to say that I’m sorry, not that I apologize but that I have regret. I wish that we had asked the questions. I don’t understand why sight is so often used as a metaphor for knowing when seeing is not the same as understanding.
The semester that we met, I was teaching a a literature class on fairy tales so I was extra tuned in to cultural myths about princes and princesses, like Pretty Woman. During a class discussion about Bluebeard and the consequences of forbidden female desire in these stories, one of my students brought up Cupid and Psyche, who can only have sex in the dark because of Cupid’s devastating beauty. If Psyche turns on the light Cupid must return to his world. Obviously, I’m Cupid in this story. One night Psyche, suspicious that she’s actually sleeping with a monster, turns on the lights. Cupid immediately flees to vanish forever. I know that you’re scared but don’t turn on the light, let’s just sit here together on my couch in the dark waiting for the Uber for a little longer.
Cole Cohen is the author of the memoir Head Case (Henry Holt, 2015). She lives in Portland, Oregon where she teaches at Pacific Northwest College of Art and is currently working on an essay collection on the theme of accessibility- emotional, physical, and institutional.
Image source: Alexander Andrews/Unsplash
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