Steroids: I wake up with the oily taste of chemo in my mouth—even the flavor of coffee slides off my tongue. I don’t belong in bed, but I don’t fit in out in the world either. I have a sense of myself as a broken camera—focusing on something out on the horizon (the future, cure, recurrence, death) and then, without warning, zooming in on a blade of grass (what is that weird taste in my mouth, is that a new lump, thank you for this beautiful card, this beautiful meal, did anyone remember to pack a snack for the kids). And then zooming out to the horizon again, and then back, and then again. I can’t figure out where I’m supposed to point this thing.
I know I can’t sit inside for one more minute so I head for the woods, where today it is so brutally green and alive it almost hurts, and I feel I am being drugged with the scent of wisteria. At first I am nearly running—I cannot slow my body—and I can feel in my chest and my fingertips the thrum of some electric-like current and my heartbeat in my ears. But then my breathing takes over and I start to slow down—and that steadying step pulses in the leaves and roots and through the moss that lines the forest floor.
There is a striking sketch from the late 1830s by transcendentalist artist and writer Christopher Pearse Cranch that was made to illustrate the concept of the “transparent eyeball” in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Nature. Emerson felt that nature was the closest we can get to experiencing God, and he believed that in order to truly appreciate nature, you must not only look at it and admire it, but also be able to feel it taking over the senses. The transparent eyeball absorbs—rather than reflects—what it perceives:
Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite spaces,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.
In the Cranch illustration, a giant eyeball on long, gangly legs and bare feet stands in an open meadow with hills on the horizon. The eyeball wears a top hat and an Emersonian waistcoat. It’s a funny and beautiful image, and it is exactly how the drugs make me feel: I am a ludicrous eyeball: I edit nothing out: All currents circulate through me and I take them all in. Emerson rolling in his grave: Steroids and chemo are the closest I get to God.
*
One afternoon my dad stops by on the way home from work to tell me he heard on the radio that all humans have a physiological blind spot located about twelve to fifteen inches out from our faces. My dad, a retired builder, now works as a handyman at several apartment complexes in town. He wears a pager and gets beeped at all hours of the day and night to replace a kicked-in door, reseat a toilet, refloor a flooded kitchen, rekey a lock. He doesn’t mind it at all. In fact, I think he loves it. He hates sitting still, and in this job he gets to zip around town in his minivan listening to NPR and dash in and out of hardware stores and people’s lives.
“I’m hardly ever bored,” he says. “And I get to hang out mostly in my own world—and that’s where I make the most sense.”
He’s known for being a little spaced-out and sometimes saying off-the-wall things. There was this famous time in my early twenties when my mom and John and I all smoked a joint together before going out to dinner at a fancy restaurant, and my dad—who smoked one joint too many in the ’60s and ’70s—abstained. We all agreed he had never seemed more lucid or made more sense.
About the blind spot: He tells me that apparently it is the place in the visual field where the optic nerve passes through the optic disc, right where all the light-receptor cells are located. We rarely notice it because our other eye can often see what is happening, and if not—if the blind spots overlap—our brain does the work of filling in the missing information.
“Kinda cool, huh?” he says. “Interesting metaphor. We’re perfectly imperfect designs.”
Cool—unless all you are is one single giant eyeball. The blind spot stretches and grows.
We look it up on my laptop and find an online test that simulates the blind spot—a plus sign and a circle next to each other on a white screen. Sure enough, the circle completely disappears when you shut one of your eyes and hold the screen about a foot away.
“I wonder how big the blind spot could be, hypothetically, before your brain wouldn’t be able to compensate accurately,” I say.
“I like the idea that it’s inaccurate at any size,” says my dad. “One little spot of guesswork everywhere you look.”
On chemo, I’d like to crawl inside that blind spot, whatever its size—scrunch up my body and disappear. That, the brain imagines, is a drop of rain on a windshield, the abdomen of a bee, a tanager on a high branch, a crescent of moon—no—wait—a full moon.
*
The thing with blind spots: you never see them coming. The night my dad graduated from high school he was in a head-on accident with a car he never saw. When his vision was later checked, they discovered he was nearly blind. Youngest of six kids: high-powered often-absent father, self-reliant mother with aristocratic New England breeding who did not do anything she was not called to do—and preferred taming horses to taming children, and a family with too much of a Puritan edge to consider employing help. He ran wild and mostly below the radar—never had his eyes checked, his learning difficulties diagnosed, or was taken to a lesson in anything. His parents didn’t even give him a middle name.
“I was amazed to discover that tree branches were full of individual leaves and that brick walls were an arrangement of hundreds of separate red stones,” he remembers. “I had never considered the idea of grout. After the accident, when I first got my glasses, I walked around in a state of constant disbelief.”
Somehow he survived. Somehow he grew up into the most competent person I know. He can: ride a horse, head a soccer ball, fry a chicken, fix a washing machine, fix an engine, tether a boat in a storm, dance the foxtrot, build a tree house, work out a tune on the piano, calm a baby, win at rummy. He never complains about anything, even though in my lifetime so far he’s been struck by lightning, been bitten by a brown recluse, and lost his life partner.
*
My parents met in San Francisco in the early 1970s. My mom was living in the Haight, recovering from her first marriage, which had ended when she came home early one day to discover her husband in his underwear in the living room with another man.