I Have Lost My Way(19)

“It got me thinking,” Dad continued. And then he was off to the races, his latest theory he wanted to try out. If a blind man could see with other parts of his brain, what else might we be able to do? “We put up roadblocks in our mind that limit us. But we can remove those blocks too. What was it William Blake said? ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.’”

His speech started to pick up speed, as it did when he really went on a tear. Soon he would be breathless, the thoughts coming too fast for him to keep up. “Do you see? Do you see?” he asked. “What if we could unlock, if we could just set our minds free?” He stopped to knock himself on his temple, not softly, to make a point, but with intensity, like he wanted to punch his brain.

I gently grabbed his hand and held it in my lap until he calmed down.

“Don’t you see?” Dad’s voice was a reverent whisper. “What it means is that the only limitation on how we live our lives is up here.” His touched my temple this time, gently. He reached for two strips of heavy cotton, cut, I saw, from one of the few sets of intact bedsheets we still had.

“Let’s go into the forest,” Dad said. “Let’s go see if we can’t expand our consciousness.”

I didn’t want to expand anything. I had homework to do. An SAT prep course to register for. The day’s dishes were still sitting on the table, and dinner needed to be started. But I knew if I didn’t go, Dad would go without me.

He wanted to walk deep into the woods, but I managed to steer him toward a clearing not that far away, a place clear of obstacles, cliffs, large boulders. It was where, four years earlier, we had scattered Grandma Mary’s ashes.

“I’ll do you first,” Dad said.

“Okay.” I had no intention of staying blindfolded, of echo-locating. I was here to make sure Dad didn’t fall off a cliff.

I let Dad put the blindfold on me. He tied it tight, and the darkness was sudden and absolute. I carefully sat down on a fallen log, so Dad, who wasn’t dumb, would think I was participating in this activity and not just humoring him.

At first, I felt the familiar, itchy crawl of impatience. How long would this go on? But as I sat there in the darkness, something strange began to happen. It was like someone turned up the volume of the forest. I could hear the sound of a leaf falling to the earth, of it degrading to mulch. I could hear the beavers pushing stones into the river. And then I was hearing past the forest. In the darkness, I heard a bell ringing in a far-off church. I heard an airplane flying at forty thousand feet. I heard the sound of a girl singing. And then the other senses kicked in. I smelled dates, as if the seeds Grandma Mary and I had planted had borne fruit. I tasted flavors I could not describe.

That was the maddening thing about my father. Just when you wanted to write him off as a nut job or a Peter Pan, he would make you go traipsing blindfolded through the forest and you would touch the hem of something mysterious.

“God damn it!” Dad yelped. “Shit!”

I yanked off my mask and light returned, and the secrets the forest had been ready to tell quieted themselves.

There was Dad, clicking wildly, flailing his hands, teetering toward a ditch.

“Dad!” I took off running. “Dad, wait!” I caught up with him a few feet before the ravine, but he kept going, wildly windmilling his arms around. “Dad, stop!” I reached out to yank him back, but he jerked forward, snapping a green tree branch that ricocheted back with the force of a whip.

I didn’t feel pain. It was only when I felt the blood, warm and trickling down my cheek, that I knew something had happened.

“Dad,” I called. “I think I’m hurt.”

He didn’t turn around. “You’re fine,” he said.

The blood was running into my mouth now, the vision in my left eye going murky.

“I’m bleeding.”

“If a blind man can see, you can handle a little blood.”

It was more than a little, but I knew when he was too far gone.

“Put some leaves on it,” Dad said. “Who knows? Maybe they’ll have antibacterial properties like the tree frog.” He’d watched a documentary about that years ago.

“Dad!”

“You can’t discover things if you don’t take risks. You’ll be fine.”

“Dad.”

“Imagine if Frodo and Sam gave up every time they hit a hiccup. Imagine that.”

I knew better than to argue with him when he got like this. My choice was either to go back home and take care of it or to wait out here with him.

I waited out there in the woods for at least another hour, as my father expanded his consciousness and I bled into soggy leaves. By the time we got back to the house, my eye had swollen shut. I went into the bathroom and cleaned up the cut as best I could.

When I came out, Dad was in the kitchen, cleaning up the dishes and running the garbage disposal, something he never did.

“That was life-changing, wasn’t it?” he said. He glanced at me, finally noticing the wound. “You should put some ice on that.”

Except there was no ice in the freezer, and it was late and I had to start dinner. So I put a washcloth on it, figuring it would get better. It had stopped hurting and was beginning to itch.

I stayed home from school the next day because I’d slept badly and I looked awful. The eye was puffy and swollen shut. I briefly thought about going to the doctor, except we didn’t have a doctor aside from the one Dad went to at the free clinic in town to get his meds. I thought of going to the ER but worried about how much it would cost and what would happen if it got back to Mom. I was getting too old for custody battles, but I couldn’t be too careful.