By Joel Deutsch

I scrawled my signature where a precinct worker had his finger pressed down on what looked to me like a blank page in the voter registration book. Now I would request that someone accompany me to the voting booth. I’d done my homework. No explanations needed, not about the candidates or the state and local issues, either. Punch, punch, punch. Five minutes, tops. Probably less.

But then someone grabbed me by my elbow so abruptly that I almost dropped my white cane, and led me away to a smaller table.

“Sit down,” he said, pulling out a chair. I sat and found myself looking at a small, light-colored box. I ran my hand over it. It had a plastic shell. On its top surface were raised left , right, up and down arrows plus a large button encircled by a protective ridge to prevent it being accidentally pressed.

“this is our blind voting machine,” explained my new friend, hereinafter to be referred to as Dave. “You’re the first one to use it this election. Put these on.” He handed me a pair of headphones.

I listened but all I could hear was the chatter of the crowded room. I took off the headphones.

“Dave?” I asked. But Dave had disappeared. After a few long moments, he was back.

“What?” he sounded exasperated.

“Nothing’s coming over these, I said,” holding the phones out to him. “Have you ever tried to work this yourself?”

“That’s not necessary,” Dave huffed. “I don’t have to know how to use it. Just put on the headphones like I told you.” And then he was gone again.

this time, a man was already in the midst of reciting some instructions I’d missed the beginning of.

“Dave?” No answer. I set the headphones on top of the machine, got up and found my way over to the end of the main table. “Where’s Dave?” I asked the poll worker closest to me. A man, it turned out when he spoke.

“he’s not here.”

“Where did he keep going before, when I was trying to use that blind voting machine?” I asked. “did you see?”

“He had to do something on the computer over there against the wall. That’s how it works.”

“then where’s the precinct captain?” I asked. “I haven’t voted yet, and I can’t work that thing by myself.”

“Dave’s the precinct captain,” the man said. ” Now look, just leave me alone, okay? I’m busy, and you aren’t helping me.”

Despite my better intentions, I lost it. “It’s you who’s supposed to be helping me!” I snapped. I returned to my little table, took a seat again, and tried to regroup. I felt all around the side panels for some kind of start, pause and stop switches, but found nothing other than the tiny chrome ring of the headphone jack.

Maybe I should just forget it and go home, I considered ruefully. American democracy would surely survive without my participation this time. But the thought failed to console. I just couldn’t accept being so absurdly disenfranchised.

“Remember me? We folded our clothes next to each other at the laundromat a few weeks ago.” The voice was female, thirtysomething.

Veronica, let’s say was her name. She was an actress, and I’d enjoyed our chat much more than I’d enjoyed talking to the man who bent my ear by the dryers on another laundry day about how the pyramids at Giza had to have been built by extraterrestrials, or the Hillary Clinton supporter who, during the Presidential primary campaign, assured me that only affirmative action could have gotten Barak Obama elected President of the Harvard Law Review

“I’ve just finished voting,” she said, and I saw you sitting here. “Is there anything I can help you with?”

A few minutes later, out on the sidewalk, my savior introduced me to a male friend who was waiting for her. They’d offer me a ride home, Veronica said, except that she was on her way to an audition for a commercial. As she spoke, I found myself wondering what Veronica actually looked like, beyond the nearly generic medium-sized human figure my eyes could still see was there. I wondered what her friend looked like. Wondered what the long line of restless shadows waiting to get into the polling place looked like.

Actually, I wonder all the time what everybody looks like. And, not having exchanged a smile, a frown or even just indifferent glances with anyone for something like ten years, I am always wondering at one level of consciousness or another how a person survives such profound isolation as the loss of faces, let alone the total invisibility of other human beings, which will be my lot if I should outlive my last photoreceptor cells, brings on.

“You know,” she said, “you kind of surprised me.”

“How?” I asked.

“I mean, you voted exactly the same as I did, on everything.”

I understood. I was probably about twice her age, and I was wearing ordinary, off-the-rack casual clothes, not exactly the sartorial semiotics of hipness and liberality in Los Angeles.

I thanked Veronica for her help, wished her good luck with the audition, and headed off for the nearest bus stop while she and her friend went the other way to get their car. One end of my I Voted sticker was already unpeeling itself from my shirt pocket, and as I walked along I pressed it back down. Maybe if I’d worn a cotton shirt instead of permanent press polyester that morning, I thought, the sticker might have stayed put, and maybe Veronica wouldn’t have been quite so surprised.

This story first appeared under the title Almost Independence Day in the Fall 2008/Winter 2009 issue of the online literary quarterly R-KV-R-Y

http://www.ninetymeetingsinninetydays.com/

By Joel Deutsch

The waitress set down my coffee and laid a pair of large menus on the table. “I’ll come back when your other party gets here,” she said.

“Wait,” I entreated. “Would you mind telling me the salads?” I didn’t want to start off this first date by asking to be read the bill of fare.

She flipped open one of the menus and held it up. “Here,” she said, tracing down the middle of a page. “These are the salads.”

Her gesture was a blur of flesh against blankness, bringing to mind other, more intentionally mystifying sleights of hand. A Lake Tahoe blackjack dealer, years ago making conjurer’s passes over the green felt. A young hustler I once watched running a card scam from the tattered rear seat of a 22 Fillmore trolley bus on a rainy winter afternoon in San Francisco.

“I can’t read that,” I told her. “I’m partially blind.” For a while, I had tried saying, “Partially sighted,” a glass-half-full euphemism being promoted in the blindness community. But the fragile solace of the phrase depressed me, and, requiring as it did a kind of logical double-take to comprehend, it confused almost everyone.

I felt the waitress sizing me up. She probably noticed the uncommon tint of my glasses, a shade of yellow used by pilots, skiers and people like me with eye problems such as retinitis pigmentosa to enhance contrast. Maybe she noticed, too, that I wasn’t looking at her straight on but a little sideways, trying to work around the gaps in my vision. Her face was a soft-focus portrait shot through a Vaseline-smeared lens. For me, this was pretty good. If not for the noon-hour sunlight from the window, I would have seen only a cameo shadow of her head.
Apparently resolved that I was in earnest, she recited the list, a predictable chain-restaurant selection: Chinese chicken salad, Cobb, Caesar, small or large dinner salad of mixed greens. For this date, I could have suggested a pleasant trattoria a few blocks from my apartment with better food and a menu I knew by heart. But I had chosen this place because it was closer to where Susana said she lived. And, once I explained about my vision, she’d be impressed at how intrepid and wide ranging I was, despite my only means of transportation being the buses of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

As my sight had deteriorated in the last few years, so had my social life. I became preoccupied with the falling away of capabilities, the continual challenge of adaptation. I wasn’t feeling like a very good catch. And when I did get myself together and go out to mix, low vision confounded my best efforts.

Love comes in mainly through the eyes. Noticing each other to begin with. Reckoning by glances and body language, whether accompanied or not by words, what we think of each other and what, if anything, we are prepared to do about it. Now, unable to make reliable eye contact, I miss the essence of seeing, knowing all the while that I am being seen. Horrified by presentiments of even keener isolation yet to come, I placed a personals ad in a local news weekly.

The ad mentioned nothing about my failing sight. I wasn’t bent on fraud, I was just trying to give myself a fighting chance. Once contact was made, I would disclose all.

There were a few interesting phone conversations, a couple of uncomfortable meetings at cafes. Then I heard Susana’s message on the personals system voice mail.

She was a teacher. She read good literature. She even wrote, a little. Her social and political values were not uncongenial to my own. The odds looked promising.

What I saw of Susana when she arrived—form-fitting jeans and sweater, dark hair crowned by some kind of rakish little cap or beret—made me think of better times. I was nervous. But the compatibility factor seemed as strong as I’d hoped. And, thanks to the window light, I managed to get through my salad without having to use my fingers, even once. When the moment seemed right, I came clean.

“Maybe it’s not obvious,” I began, “but I can’t see very well. I have a problem with my eyes . . .”

“Go on,” she said. “I wondered when you would say something.”

As I elaborated, I tried to gauge Susana’s reaction. But she just sipped her water and said nothing, and her face was too blurred to supply me with any nonverbal clues. To my relief, though, the little that she said when I finished sounded more sympathetic and respectful, even admiring, than pitying or repulsed. Good, I thought. Maybe something was happening here. I proposed we get together again soon, and held my breath.

“No,” she said, flatly. “I can’t do that. I can’t go out with you.” I observed that we’d been getting on nicely. Enjoyably. A lot in common. Yes, she agreed, that was true. And I was a great guy, a man of qualities. So what was it, I asked, fairly sure that the problem wasn’t likely to be my balding pate or my few badly sung bars of an old Tito Rodriguez song. But I needed to hear just how she’d put it.

“I have this fantasy,” Susana said, “about what would feel right, the next time I’m with a man. And what I imagine is long rides in the car. Road trips. Down the coast to Baja. Or up to the Sierras.”

Stupidly, I couldn’t see where she was going with this. “Sure,” I said. “I like to do those things, too. Just because of this . . . “ I gestured toward my defective eyes.

“In the fantasy,” she interjected, “it’s not my car. And it’s not me that’s driving. It’s the man. And you can’t do that.”

“No,” I said, “I can’t.”

Hanging from the grab rail of a packed, home-bound bus, I wondered: Was the woman simply a monstrous narcissist? Or had she brought to our meeting needs and expectations even more acute than my own, found me more appealing than I could tell and felt criminally betrayed upon my disclosure of the RP, even though all she had risked was coming out for lunch?

But then again, I thought, this was Los Angeles, and maybe it was just as she had said. Her litmus test of manly capability, failed. Where the man belonged was behind the wheel. In the driver’s seat.

A week or so later, checking my personals messages, I was startled to hear Susana introducing herself and inviting me to call, as if we had never met. I found it inconceivable that she had done this in ignorance, that my ad and voice greeting had set off not even a trace of a memory. I wondered if her psychology might be so convoluted that she wanted to reconsider but needed to set it up as an accident so as to save face. I knew full well that this was a fanciful, desperate conjecture, and, anyway, who in his right mind would want someone that neurotic? I called.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “I thought something sounded familiar.” Like a boiler room telephone solicitor, she had been making her calls from a list she had compiled of intriguing personals box numbers, with only the odd descriptive word or phrase as annotation to remind her of details. Beside my box number may have been scribbled “loves music” or “writer” or “works out,” but apparently not “the half-blind guy I had that lunch with.” She had simply forgotten to cross me off the list.

If it was closure I needed, it was closure I got. I thanked Susana for the explanation, wished her a good life, hung up and moved on.

This story first appeared in The Los Angeles Times Magazine, in Not Fade Away, a multimedia website created by San Francisco’s Exploratorium, as well as on the Macular Degeneration support Web site.

By Joel Deutsch

It felt like instant karma. Payback for almost running over an unsuspecting kid a few years ago because I hadn’t been smart or brave enough to quit driving when I should have.

On a bright, warm September Los Angeles afternoon, I was strolling down Fairfax Avenue past CBS Television City and Farmers Market, headed for the neighborhood Lucky, my purposeful stride belying the fact that my eyesight was more than three-fourths obliterated by Retinitis Pigmentosa. But so it was.

Despite ongoing research into gene therapy, stem cells and retinal transplantation, among other potential remedies, there as yet exists no treatment or cure for this predominantly inherited condition that afflicts something like 100,000 Americans. And so my irreplaceable photoreceptor cells, which in most people last a lifetime, keep wiping themselves out by a process of bio-suicide called apoptosis, with nothing to be done about it.

The world looks like a hazy, unfinished painting. After a few nasty mishaps when the deterioration first became severe. I learned to scan ahead radar-like as I walked to catch at least a glimpse of approaching hazards. I owned a long, white cane, but I didn’t have it with me. Isn’t a cane, I thought, for when life feels constantly like coming awake in a strange house in the middle of the night? Doesn’t “blind,” after all, simply and unequivocally, mean sightless?

I’d considered carrying a cane if only as a signal, to forestall incidents like the time I stumbled into the side mirror of a bus while hurrying clumsily to board, and the driver, climbing out of his seat to readjust it, inquired sarcastically if I was blind or something. To simplify the process of asking strangers for help, as from time to time I must.

But I wasn’t about to do it. No way. For one thing, I had this spooky foreboding that to take up the cane would be a dangerous capitulation, would bring on total blindness even faster. Magical thinking, I knew. Primitive. A child’s metaphysics of causality. But I couldn’t help it. Besides, I’d be marking myself disabled, for all to see, destroying whatever vestige of masculine appeal I’d managed to preserve into middle age. I’d become just another blind guy, groping his expressionless way along on some pathetic errand of the terminal, aging bachelor. So the cane, as always, was hanging by its elastic handle loop from a hook inside my living room closet, gathering dust.

Now I was passing beneath the protruding eaves of one of the Farmers Market buildings, grateful to be shielded from the sun’s dazzle by more than just the brim of my baseball cap. A few feet away, the midday traffic rushed by in a din of car engines, horn blasts, diesel rattle, and the concussive thump of mega-watt, bi-amplified hip-hop bass.

Suddenly, something charged past me, tugging at my T-shirt sleeve. Through my remaining islands of vision, like a bird darting across a slit in a castle turret, flashed the profile of a small face, a boyish body hunched forward over handlebars, a flurry of legs churning.

“Damn,” I yelped, edging over more toward my side. I probably looked, I knew, as if I might be playing a crazy, private game of chicken, had meant to surrender those few extra inches of clearance at the last second, but had simply miscalculated. When the truth, of course, was that I had no warning at all. Anything moving faster than walking speed can slip from blind spot to blind spot, completely undetected. Skateboards betray themselves by their clatter, but not so bicycles, with their rubber-tired stealth. I took a deep breath and resolved silently to be yet more vigilant, in the future.

And then something slammed into my shoulder, the same shoulder, Another flashing image of a small boy, pedaling. But this time, I was flung from my feet. I felt my skull collide against asphalt. I had a dim but troubling realization that my body was laid out full length across the northbound curb lane of Fairfax and that I could, in a heartbeat, be crushed and dismembered. Fueled by a burst of adrenaline, I made a mad scrambled back to safety.

At the point where I had left the sidewalk stood a short, elderly woman. trailing a two-wheeled wire shopping basket behind her. Crazy,” she clucked empathetically, “crazy. They almost killed me, too.” She spoke with the old-time Yiddish accent that is rapidly giving way to Russian as the Fairfax District and neighboring West Hollywood become the Southern California version of Brooklyn’s Little Odessa.

“I’m fine,” I assured her, and as she continued on her way, I brushed myself off, gingerly checking for damage. My head was bruised and bleeding, my shoulder ached, the forearm I tried to break my fall with was a mass of lacerations, and my cap was missing, probably pulverized into blue cotton oblivion. Dazed, but nonetheless still in need of groceries, I proceeded with my shopping and trudged home to a stinging shower and some bed rest.

The next time I left my apartment, there was a nylon day pack slung jauntily from one shoulder, the kind students carry their books in. The kind in which the kid I knocked down that time with my Tercel was carrying his. And in my right hand, I held the long white cane. Not tapping it in an exploratory arc. Not yet. But bearing it before me like a protective talisman, a Mosaic staff. And feeling relief mixed with horror at the sight of people making way for the blind man I was still in the process of becoming.

This story previously appeared in Not Fade Away, a multimedia website created by San Francisco’s Exploratorium and on the Macular Degeneration support Web site and in the online literary quarterly r.kv.r.y.

By Joel Deutsch

I always loved going to the movies.

I loved the big screen, the popcorn, the transient, sweet sense of being in communion with a room full of strangers. I loved the growing accumulation in my memory of scenes, shots, dialogue and soundtracks, of heroes and villains and stars. I didn’t even mind waiting in line, or complain about the rising price of popcorn, as long as I could find a few films worth seeing amidst the glut of blockbuster eye candy and brain-rot. But then, as the deterioration of my sight crossed into new realms of dysfunction, the cinema began fading out of my life.

A merciless retinal death squad started intercepting images before they could reach my brain. Actors’ faces became unidentifiable silhouettes. “Hey,” I whispered to my friend in surprise, at a screening of Wayne Wang’s Smoke, one of the last movies I tried to see in the theater, “Is that William Hurt, the guy standing on the left side?” I hadn’t been able to decipher the opening credits, and had just then recognized the familiar actor’s voice with a start.

Critical bits of business–love scenes in darkened rooms, money changing hands under tables, the lifted eyebrow–were completely lost. Fast cutting created not kinetic excitement but the effect of strobe-lit, senseless Rorschachs. Two hours into the epic-length Schindler’s List, I had to abandon my puzzled date to spend 20 minutes pacing around the lobby before I could go back inside. I was exhausted, not by my renewed sorrow and outrage over the Holocaust,
but by the desperate effort just to see Steven Spielberg’s grim pageant clearly and, failing that, not to fall apart. I never saw the little girl dressed in red, the symbolic spot of color in a black and white scene that was being heralded as a masterful, painterly stroke.

Soon after that debacle, I said goodbye to the multiplexes and neighborhood art houses, and resigned myself to only renting videos. With the 20″ RCA three feet from my face and the Brightness and Contrast controls cranked up radically, I could make a movie look almost normal again. Whenever my eyes grew tired, I could call an intermission, and there was always the Rewind function for reviewing anything I suspected I had missed. So I still had the movies, if not quite as they were meant to be shown.

Which is not to say I didn’t long for the immersion and spectacle of the big screen, as well as being part of an audience. I did, very much. So when a postcard arrived inviting me, as I managed to make out under my illuminated high-power reading glass, to come to Paramount Studios for the premier of a process called Theater Vision, demonstrated with Paramount’s recent hit Forrest Gump, my curiosity and expectations were aroused. Perhaps at least some remnant of my movie-theater past could be salvaged, after all.

At the door, an attendant hands me my Theater Vision equipment, an FM receiver no larger than a beeper, and a single earphone. “Just turn the little wheel until you hear something,” he says, ushering me inside. The Theater Vision commentary, I remember from the invitation, is broadcast from a tape synchronized with the regular soundtrack, so as to slip neatly into its silences.

The house, its lights turned up for the benefit of those of us to whom illumination levels still matter, is filled nearly to capacity. I can make out a lot of white canes and a fair number of guide dogs in the Down position on the floor beside aisle seats. With our blurry sight, our tunnel vision, with our perception only of light, or darkness, we have come to watch, or at least sit again in the presence of, the movies.

In the several years since the passage of the 1991 Americans with Disabilities Act, the vision-impaired have been regaled with a host of adaptive modifications to the public environment. There are Braille-encoded ATM keypads (though, absurdly enough, no alternative way to read the information on the ATM display screen, yet) and elevator buttons. There are chirping traffic signals, at least in such benevolent cities as Santa Monica. And now, there is even a way for the blind to “access,” the movies.

Settling myself in one of the few remaining seats, I am conscious of a small but desperate hope that Theater Vision will be a revelation. That it will be like standing blind on the floor of Yosemite Valley while the perfect guide–a combination poet, painter, forest ranger and geologist–causes the hooded visage of Half Dome, the implacable face of El Capitan, and the skinny, sparkling tumble of Yosemite Falls all to body forth once more in my visual cortex, as life-like as virtual reality.

The program opens with a round of speeches celebrating the promise of technology, the grit of the blind, and Paramount’s generous hand in the development of Theater Vision. A youth chorus performs two inspirational songs that make the treacly “We Are the World” of ten years before sound as edgy as heavy metal. Finally, the stage is cleared the house lights go down, and the curtains are drawn back.

I wiggle the button-size earphone into place, turn on the little receiver and locate the Theater Vision frequency in time to hear our narrator, sportscaster Vin Scully, read the opening credits, and then intone, “A feather floats down through the sky over downtown Atlanta.” I can see that the feather shot is well lit and held for a long time‹although I wouldn’t have known it was Atlanta. Fine. Some sort of interference keeps breaking up Scully’s voice. I adjust my receiver, and the sound improves, marginally.

Forrest (Tom Hanks), enters and joins a middle-aged black woman on a bus stop bench. The woman looks weary, perhaps from hard work she is a little too old to still be doing. But the script forces her to submit to the story-framing device of Forrest’s unsolicited monologue. Rosa Parks as the Wedding Guest. And the narration goes something like, “Forrest Gump sits down on a bus bench next to a black woman. Okay, whatever.

The plot moves through the travails of Forrest’s handicapped boyhood, his miraculous recovery, the blossoming of the friendship that becomes his first love, his tour of duty in Viet Nam, his audience with J.F.K. I have to fiddle continuously with the little unit, trying to get Vin Scully’s voice to come in clearly. And even though the copy he is reciting is dull, I try to be grateful for at least being tipped off what to notice. But my patience wears thin. For instance, there’s the scene where Forrest’s girlfriend is bent on relieving him of his blessedly oblivious virginity and Forrest doesn’t seem to be getting her seductive drift. So she, young, lovely, and inexplicably longing for his goofy touch, makes the simple, cunning gesture of removing her blouse. Her back is to the camera. I can see well enough to know that we’re being shown Forrest’s face, the reaction shot. But I can’t see his expression, just his silhouette seated motionless across from hers. I try to picture his astonishment. I want to hear something like, “Forrest’s jaw drops. His eyes tell us that even he, slow, simple Forrest, knows this moment will be forever indelible.” But all I get from Theater Vision is something like, “Forrest just stares.”

“Forrest just stares?” Still I keep watching, waiting for the promised redemption of Theater Vision, doing my valiant best to hold disbelief suspended.

At this, I ultimately fail. I can’t stop myself thinking about how thrilled I was when, to underscore Forrest’s arrival in Viet Nam, the dark, slashing opening chords of Jimi Hendrix’s version of “All Along the Watchtower” erupted from Paramount’s state-of-the-art audio system and pounded the auditorium like a Rolling Thunder bombing run, and I realize that this was the first moment of Forrest Gump I enjoyed, and that the thrill was purely auditory. Eyesight to the blind? I don’t think so. This Theater Vision thing hasn’t restored my failing sight with words; that’s what poetry does. Pablo Neruda describes waves breaking against the cliffs like spider webs. He says Death is standing in the harbor, dressed in the uniform of an Admiral. These images, I can see. “Forrest just stares,” I can’t.

“There must be some kind of way out of here,” goes Hendrix’s opening line. And so there is. Well before the movie is over, I pluck the bug out of my ear, brush past a row of bent knees, and make it out to freedom, dropping my Theater Vision receiver onto one of the damask-covered tables set up for a post-screening champagne reception before stepping out into the dark, sprawling Paramount lot to find my way to the bus stop.

To be deprived of the movies is not, for me, just to lose a beloved source of stories that nourish, illumine or at the very least divert. In Los Angeles, where movies and the business of making them are widely followed with more ardor and fidelity than the play of world events, where implication and nuance are subtext and the past a back story, it also means the loss of common cultural coin. Falling out of touch with the movies punches a big, leaky hole in the oil can of social lubrication.

But, movies for the blind? To paraphrase Clint Eastwood’s last words in Magnum Force, you’ve got to know your limitations. The problem isn’t just narration about as evocative as a stock market wrap-up or freeway report on drive-time radio. It’s something much more fundamental. From the Lumiere Brothers’ sci-fi reels and the nickelodeon melodramas that astonished turn-of-the twentieth century audiences, film is first of all and more than anything a fiction of images. It is an artifice of frames and compositions, brightness and shadow. It is a pulsing of shots, camera angles and post-production edits, within which things appear to move and incidents to occur. Sergei Eisenstein, pioneer of montage, would turn over in his grave, I think, to see the medium being interpreted this way, as if a movie were a traffic accident, needing only for its material facts to be reported. Descriptive narration will not render the sinister, vertiginous chiaroscuro of The Third Man and Double Indemnity. It will not paint the vastness of battlefields and the snapping of vivid war-pennants against the sky in Ran. It will not translate the impish and dangerous glint in Bruce Lee’s eye as he thumbs his nose in Enter The Dragon or convey the beautiful, heartbreaking effect of DeNiro’s slow-motion boxing-ring ballet in Raging Bull. A film does not exist apart from itself, does not yield up its essence to being told. A Bordeaux administered intravenously is simply not wine. There are things, sometimes, that a person should just give up.

As I’m waiting for the bus at the stop outside the studio gate, a shouter comes up the sidewalk, a skinny white guy who I guess to be in his 40’s, wearing an old Army field jacket. Every few steps, he yells something garbled but unmistakably vicious, out of some arsenal of useless, pointless rage. Suddenly he clams up and disappears behind the bus shelter, where I catch a murky glimpse of him, standing against the wall by the gate, trying to pick the street number, 5555 , off the cement with his fingers. I think about how a computer deletes a file by just erasing its address. I wonder if he believes he’s working some voodoo like this on Paramount Studios. I think about how people begin to vanish when you can’t see their faces anymore.

My bus arrives. The man leaves off picking at the wall, fires a volley of obscenities at the driver as I mount the steps. Pulling away, I can still hear his screams through the glass and steel and engine noise, fading with distance.

This story previously appeared in the Los Angeles Times and in Not Fade Away, a multimedia website created by San Francisco’s Exploratorium.

By Joel Deutsch

“Cuando alcances mi edad habrás perdido casi por completo la vista. Verás el color amarillo y sombras y luces. No te preocupes. La ceguera gradual no es una cosa trágica. Es como un lento atardecer de verano.”

“When you attain my age, you will have almost completely lost your sight. You will see the color yellow, and shadows, and lights. Don’t worry yourself. Gradual blindness is not a tragic event. It is like the slow, grave sunset of a summer evening.”

—Jorge Luis Borges, “El Otro” / “The Other”

When the train left the station
It had two lights on behind

The red light was my baby
And the blue light was my mind

—Robert Johnson, “Love In Vain.”

I discovered Borges’ “the Other” fairly recently, when my Parisian e-mail friend, Nicolas, fellow member of an Internet Retinitis Pigmentosa forum, recommended it to me. That Borges had lost his sight by degrees, I was aware, but I had never before come across any reference to this in his fiction. The “Love In Vain” lyrics, by comparison, I have known for years, whether as keened eerily by Robert Johnson himself on scratchy old recordings in that unearthly voice of his or delivered in an English parody of a blues drawl by Mick Jagger, decades later.

Watching helplessly as the world dissolves into a chaos of bright ghosts and dark vacancies is not, for me, so gentle an experience, does not call up the bucolic images that the Borges quotation suggest to my Midwest childhood memory of suburban summers. It does not recall for me fireflies pricking the gathering July dark with their tiny, airborne strobe-flashes, or ice cubes clinking in tall glasses, or muted talk and television sounds filtering outdoors through screens. My immediate response to the sanguine reassurance of the Borges passage was disbelieving, disdainful, to the point of rage, and the rage was quickly followed by depression.
But, soon after, in a grieving moment, “Love In Vain” came into my mind, the very sorrow of the song, the unapologetic, unqualified bereavement of it, making much more sense to me and, in the way that music can do, bestowing catharsis and consolation, all at once. And then I thought of this image, also involving a train, that seemed to say how I felt, myself.

I am the only passenger on a subway car that is plunging headlong into a tunnel I know to be endless. I can smell the fetid odor of old stone and sparking metal, hear the clatter and shriek of wheels on tracks. The tunnel’s Particulars—tiles, distance markers, call boxes–fade out with ferocious speed, and the tunnel itself becomes just a backward-rushing shadow, its concrete embrace more sensed than seen.

Panic. A vacuum in the belly, a racing in the heart. Now the light inside the car itself starts to flicker. I feel an urge to jump up and rush to the rearmost door of the train, to look backward out its thick glass window. But I know if I do that, what I will see. A shrinking point of light holding my last sight of the last station, with its posters, its turnstiles, its few midnight travelers strung out along the platfform like the isolated figures of Edward Hopper’s paintings. And the point of light will compress itself relentlessly around that tableau, crush it down to an atom of recollection, to the visual equivalent of an amputee’s phantom limb. So instead, I stay planted in my seat, rocking gently down the line to darkness, just trying to think of a good tune to whistle to myself when I get there.

Borges passage trans. J. Deutsch
This story previously appeared in Not Fade Away, a multimedia website created by San Francisco’s Exploratorium.

By Joel Deutsch

A few at a time, lugging food baskets and beverage coolers, the people I am joining for a July Fourth picnic come into a small public park in Pacific Palisades and make their way over to the two long wooden tables and a barbecue that earlier arrivals have staked out. Because the park sits nestled in a hillside only a few miles from the ocean and the coastal fog has not quite evaporated, the light is misty, the air moist and cool.

When our head count has risen to a congenial dozen or so, I remain the only amerikanetz, the only one native to this country whose birthday has brought us together. For the rest, life began somewhere in the vast geography of the former Soviet Union. And all of them, as I already know and am to be reminded today, experience the displacement, the challenges, the bewilderments, and the hard-won triumphs typical of nearly every ethnic group’s fitful initiation into this incomparably seductive and perplexing nation.

It is at the invitation of my friends Irina and Dima that I am present here today. Irina, a perceptive, insightful graduate student in psychology in her mid-twenties, grew up in a city on the Volga. When we met, several years ago, she was struggling to refine her English and attending a community college with hopes of eventual admission to UCLA. Now, with those goals, and more, attained, she is fluently bilingual and comfortably, confidently bicultural. So is Dima, thirtyish, a cultivated, gracious former Muscovite who works as a programming specialist on the design of such things as the high-resolution optical systems used for scientific research and space exploration. My friendship with him and Irina has opened a vista for me onto the contemporary Russian-speaking community centered around West Hollywood, so insular in language and custom as to have remained completely opaque, otherwise.

Snacks and drinks come out: a serving dish of thinly-sliced onions, dressed in vinegar and pepper, a bowl of pickled cucumbers, soft stacks of pita-like Armenian bread, bags of potato chips. To drink, there are sodas, and beers, and the ubiquitous liter bottles of Gerolsteiner mineral water, a German brand currently much in favor. Thus supplied, we sit around talking.

Work is an omnipresent concern, the quest for a steady job that calls on one’s better abilities and pays decently a ready topic for conversation.

Borya, a dark-haired, open-faced man from Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, says he is happy today because his new position as a Metropolitan Transit Authority mechanic is working out, thus capping off a long, difficult period of scraping by on part-time situations while his language skills and his luck were improving.

Grisha, a burly, bearded software developer with a mischievous smile, holds a university-level engineering degree but had to cram to learn computer science when, once in the U.S., he found his diploma to be a mismatch for existing opportunities. His wife Tanya, whose yellow outfit is a brush-stroke of sunlight against the muted, rustic scenery, had just graduated medical school when their visas came through, and now, in order to practice as a doctor, needs to do a residency and acquire certification, formidable tasks made yet more daunting by the fact that she has to study English as she goes.

Professionals with backgrounds outside a few high-demand technical fields often find even a roughly lateral career transition impossible. True, some fare not badly at all, snagging the brass ring of an upper-middle class income, a nice new Camry or Accord, maybe a modest investment portfolio. But many others do not. There exists a virtual subculture of overqualified individuals, especially middle-aged men, for whom English, against all their advances, remains an inscrutable, walled city, and a second career anything like the first a distinct unlikelihood. Former film directors, educators, and industrial technicians are delivering pizza and driving cabs because there is nothing else to do, and because they perhaps know, at some level of consciousness, that they are the heroes in the newest layer of immigration narratives that their children’s children will hear recited, years hence, from the safe nests of their own unequivocal residency. And, too, because at least a modicum of self-respect can yet be salvaged by recalling, even in dark moments, some version of the Buddhist understanding that all work, elegant as well as rude, is just chopping wood and carrying water. Equally vital, equally worthy ways of being of service.

Nina is a pianist and former music teacher from Ukraine whose eyes light up at the mention of the Beethoven sonatas or the Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues. I ask what kind of work she is doing now. Drawing blood for testing at a medical office is the answer. Her husband Sasha, once a choral conductor, has at least been able to stay closer to music by becoming a piano tuner. He is not at the picnic because a client with an engagement today required his pre-performance services.

“I am good at drawing blood,” says Nina, “I am skillful, and I am quick, and when I am finished, the patients thank me for what I have done for them.”

But no amount of either occupational success or accommodation quite relieves the queasy, persistent sensation of having fallen headlong through some looking glass into a hyped-up, glad-handing hallucination of a new society. I’m always trying to help, to interpret. Irina and Dima have assured me on other such occasions that I am under no obligation to play solicitous ambassador or anxious host to every discomfited foreigner I meet. But, sensible as their advice may be, I persist, conceivably because so many post-Soviet immigrants come here to escape the anti-Semitism forever rampant in their homelands, and I am the child of Eastern European Jews. Or just because of never having felt completely at home, anywhere, myself. Whatever the reason, I go on trying to mediate between our cultures, ameliorate discomforts, quiet apprehensions.

Now the skewered chunks of shashlik meat sizzle aromatically on the grill, and new side dishes, including a green salad and roasted potatoes straight from the coals, are put out to augment the others. More sodas are poured, more cans of beer popped. And interspersed with other conversation, come some of the familiar, inevitable questions about life in America, Southern California more particularly.

Grisha is my interrogator du jour. He wants me to decode the promiscuous amiability of public encounters, where complete strangers act as if they like you before they even know your name, and then toggle off the too-ready smile as soon as the transactional moment has passed.

“You turn around and they look completely different,” he says. “Like someone with a split personality.”

“Those people at the mall have nothing either for you or against you,” I assure him. “And they don’t really have fraudulent intentions.”

“Then why do they behave this way?” Grisha asks. “To me, it is very insincere. It makes me nervous.”

I propose that may be just the grim centuries of well-learned Russian skepticism and prudence butting up against the tacit American social agreement to greet each other with displays of good cheer and good will, any troubled thoughts suppressed and natural reticence concealed, lest offense be inadvertently given or some chance of friendship, love, or profit, however slim, be discouraged, swept away forever in the fast waters of our hit-and-run life in the agora.

“Okay,” says Grisha. “I see what you mean.” Possibly he accepts my explanation, probably he doesn’t. But now he wants to talk about the arts.

“Tell me this,” he demands, as I tear into the delicious shashlik, “where are the real films, the real plays?” I grab a piece of Armenian bread. “And where are the poets that people will fill up a stadium to hear them read?”

I explain that, though the clamorous marketing of blockbuster productions tends to obscure the rest, we have our thoughtful movies, and, in the theater, our own Chekhovs, not to mention our Mamets and Shepards, as well. I do concede that we have no single poet as widely known as Yevtushenko once was, but then probably, I think to myself, neither does the new Russia, half asphyxiated in its democratic incubator by a miasma of brain-candy mass culture.

Abruptly, the inquest leaves off, like an outworn protocol dutifully or compulsively fulfilled, as if Grisha is actually tired of asking such questions, whether or not the responses he gets really satisfy him. For now, enough is enough, and we abandon our self-appointed diplomatic posts to enjoy the food and the company and the pleasure of a sweet, free summer day.

After awhile, the men get up a game of cards called preferans, while some of the women spread blankets on the grass to relax and chat. I slide over next to Dima for a look, but all I can figure out about the game is that it involves three or four players, and whoever deals has to sit out that hand and keep score. Preferans is such an institution, explains Dima, that it has its own universe of jokes, slang, and proverbs, much like poker in that respect but otherwise more strategically complex and less dependent on luck, as is clear from the web-like graph Dima shows me on which negative and positive points are recorded. Dima returns his attention to the game, and I, as if watching a foreign film without subtitles, space out pleasantly, lulled by the impenetrable phonetics of the men’s card-table repartee.

Over the course of the afternoon, another crew has arrived and begun playing softball on the park’s diamond, filling the air with excited shouts. I try to imagine what they must sound like to Russian ears, their voices almost barbed with confidence, so relentlessly major key, all those flattened vowels, all those utilitarian consonants devoid of gutturals or trills, the pitch rising at the ends of declarative statements as if to file down the rough edges.

A generous plate of sweet poppyseed rolls appears on the table along with thermoses of coffee and tea. The preferans scores are tallied up, the cards put away. As we are eating our desserts, a young woman trots up in jeans and sneakers. Someone, she says, has sprained an ankle running bases and do we have any ice they could use to hold down the swelling? No, replies one of the men after checking a container where a few forlorn, wet soft drink and beer cans remain. Sorry, no more ice.

Thanks anyway, says the girl brightly, and she jogs away. We finish our sweets and start packing up to leave.

It is late, past sunset. As I stand by the table, watching the softball game continuing in the twilight, one of the women I haven’t spoken to yet comes over and stands beside me.

“Can you explain something, please?” she asks.

“Sure,” I say. “I’ll try, at least.”

“Well,” she says, “can you tell me why people enjoy playing baseball? Or even watching it?” If there is an edge of sarcasm in the question, it is very slight, more defensive than anything. She really wants to know. I wrack my brain for a useful answer.

“I have watched it on TV and I have tried to learn about the rules,” she adds, “but even so, I do not understand why it is popular.”

Seldom is baseball called the National Pastime any more, and when it is, the phrase is enclosed in ironic, invisible quotes and haunted by the truth of just how far basketball and football have driven it down. Regardless, there is something ineradicable about the game, something in the heart, that is increasingly difficult to account for and nonetheless deserving of the attempt.

I would seem an unworthy apologist, considering that when I left my childhood I turned my back on team sports, for reasons of temperament and because I shared a generational distaste for many traditions, even those as benign as this one. But there are moments in middle age, more of them every passing year, when I find myself helpless in the grip of some unbidden nostalgia, ever more aware that we never know for sure how many babies we throw out with the bath water in the attempt, when young, to make the world anew for our willing habitation.

In such a moment, though, and this is one of them, all the resonant and adhesive things about baseball come flooding back to me, proofs and reminders of its power to astonish and console. The Indians’ often brilliant, if ultimately doomed performandce in their ill-fated 1954 World Series against the Giants. The rousing swell of the organ music, my own pint-size team jacket, the pungent squiggle of brown mustard down the middle of uncountable sweat-beaded hot dogs in their white-bread buns. And a half-remembered, heartbreaking poem about the grace and power of legendary Pittsburgh Pirates right fielder Roberto Clemente that I read somewhere after he died in a plane crash. All this flashes through my mind in milliseconds, and I think I have to say something.

But then I realize that I don’t. That her comment, and all the other puzzled observations I field from this group, are at bottom expressions of grief and anger at the thought of having lost the way back home. Because emigration, however right and necessary, permanently strikes the stage set where identity was forged, a role originated, dries up the sea of first language where one swam without having to give conscious thought to the act of breathing. It is almost as if the precarious Cold War strategies of bluff and standoff had been undone, as in “Dr. Strangelove,” by a single mistake, and Kiev, Riga, Minsk and St. Petersburg have all been wiped out by nuclear warheads, after all.

Finally, the leftovers and implements are gathered up, the trash discarded. Irina and Dima beckon me to come along. “Hang on,” I say, and grab my sweater from the bench where I left it.

The woman is still gazing over at the softball players. As the visuals fade out, the audio track of the game comes forward: the crack of the bat, the scuffling of Nikes and Reeboks on the base-paths, the smack of a hard-thrown ball against the pocket of a leather glove.

“I don’t know,” I tell her, shrugging, moving to leave. “I guess you have to learn it when you’re very young.”

She smiles, in a way that confirms my suspicion that she understood this already, and probably much more, besides. I say do svidaniya, and she says “goodbye,” and I drape the sweater over my shoulders and follow my friends out of the park, wondering how much longer the softball people are going to keep it up in this fading light.

This story previously appeared on WorldHum.com.

By Joel Deutsch

“Nobody with a good car needs to be Justified.”
–Hazel Motes, the self-blinded preacher in “Wise Blood,” by Flannery O’Connor

All my life I was crazy about cars, starting with the family
Studebaker designed by Raymond Loewy that looked like one of the
World War II fighter planes I drew all over my school notebooks.
Within days after turning 16, like every other middle-class
American kid growing up anywhere but Manhattan, I got my driver’s
license and took off. And so began a vast archive of car memories,
moments and places recalled through bug-spattered. rain-streaked,
sun-dried glass. I assumed the trip would never end.

But, unknown to me, the encoding in my DNA was relentlessly
transmitting suicide instructions to my eyes, one of a class of
genetic retinal pathologies called retinitis pigmentosa. Which led,
after a few decades of normal vision, to a state where I could no
longer see at night or make out faces clearly from more than a few feet away,
and that under bright light.

For reading and writing, there were optical magnifiers and a
computer program that enlarged the text on my monitor. For driving,
though, there was nothing, no clever new adaptive technology, no
compensatory strategy, nothing but the prospect of relinquishment.

I couldn’t imagine a life without wheels. So, holding my breath and
trusting to luck and reflexes, I stayed on the road, a little
too long.

The phone on the night stand rang, shattering my last dream of the
morning.

“Hullo,” I mumbled, peering over at my clock radio with the jumbo
two inch high red LED display. Just past 6:30.

It was the woman from the Substitute Unit of the L.A. Unified
School District, brisk and focused as a taxi dispatcher.

I didn’t know how much more substitute teaching I could take. I
couldn’t make out the students’ faces beyond the front row. I
couldn’t, without assistance, read roll sheets, notes from the
office, textbook passages or [handed-in assignments.

But even more upsetting was the sheer ordeal of simply getting to
work. By this time, my eyesight was severely compromised. Traffic
signals had started vanishing and reappearing~the whole signal box,
not just the bulbs-as if conjured in and out of sight by
mischievous sprites. Street signs were unreadable. Cars loomed up
at me out of nowhere, and pedestrians materialized in the middle of
empty crosswalks.

The woman from the Sub Unit read my assignment from a sheet on her
desk. I was to fill in for an English teacher at a middle school
halfway downtown.

Straight into the sun. Another harrowing commute.

Why, you might reasonably ask, would someone with vision so
impaired persist in driving? Romance. Practicality. Pride. Denial.

When I was a teenager, I had a stack of Hot Rod and Custom Car
magazines that dwarfed everything else in my bedroom bookcase. I
pored lovingly over the pictures: the burly postwar Fords, the lean
mid-’50s Chevys, the gleaming bodies shaved clean of jutting
Detroit chrome, the running gear pumped up and re-machined to burn
the rear treads off a set of Goodyears in a single standing start.

The cars in my real life were less fierce, less perfect. But so
what? They started, they ran, they carried me down the highway of
dreams. Like the ‘41 Chevy coupe I drove to Mexico from Ohio in
1966, vaporizing a quart of oil every hundred miles all the way to
San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato State, and back. Like the VW
microbus with its salt-rotted floorboard that carried me over the
Bay Bridge into San Francisco a year later during the Summer of
Love.

Now I had a 10-year-old Tercel that took me anywhere I wanted to
go, with the tape deck blasting Los Lobos or Mozart or Coltrane.
Driving wasn’t everything, just life, liberty, the pursuit of
happiness, and the promise that I would never, ever grow old, that
I would not fade away.

If I stopped driving, what would I do? There is just a beleaguered
fleet of buses roaming L.A., trying gamely to run on time and
connect at enough points to be useful. True, there are also two new
light-rail commuter lines and the halting start of a subway system.
But the rail service, by design, has little to do with in-town
travel.

Ask an Angeleno (who drives) how far it is from here to there when
both ends of the trip are within the metropolitan area. “Twenty minutes,” goes the most
common answer, with the inevitable addendum, “unless it’s rush
hour.” Car time. But if you don’t drive, a morning doctor’s
appointment in Beverly Hills, a business lunch in West Hollywood, a
five-minute stop at an office supply store on the Miracle Mile and
a trip to the supermarket become agenda items spread over several
pages of a weekly calendar.

I had always assumed that you rode the bus in L.A. only if you were
not a player, not a contender. Riding the bus meant being sucked
into a symbolic, bottomless vortex of personal failure. I was
terrified.

I did stop using my car at night, which often meant staying home
alone. But that was the lowest I was willing to bow to
circumstances.

The question arises as to whether an individual with impaired
vision is morally obligated, even with some functional sight
remaining, to stop driving. There are some people with RP who even
insist that their retinal pathologies make them safer drivers
because they are forced to be more vigilant.

In my case, denial was abetted by a sympathetic ophthalmologist and
the California Department of Motor Vehicles. I managed to get my
driver’s license renewed solely on the strength of a note from the
doctor attesting to my fitness to drive. This in the face of my
inability to decipher anything below the top two lines of the DMV
eye chart.

I had the Beverly Boulevard route to the school pretty much
hammered from long experience. Whether I could see the traffic
lights at first glance or not, I knew which cross streets had them,
and I’d become pretty good at telling the color of a light by
watching traffic.

I made it through all the major intersections-La Brea, Highland,
Vine, Western-like a champ, talking myself down the road. The
lettering on the store signs, the big ones I could still see, went
from English to Korean to Spanish.

At Vermont, I took a right, went two blocks, and there was the
school. Praying that a phantom 18-wheeler wasn’t bearing down
through one of my blind spots to pulverize me in mid-turn, I took a
left into the street and began to peer along the curb for a parking
space. Across from me, headed the other way, was a short line of
double-parked cars, parents dropping off their kids. I couldn’t
have been going 10 mph.

Suddenly. The sickening thud of my front bumper hitting flesh and
bone. My right foot coming off the gas and slamming down on the
brake pedal. The car stopped just short of an airborne boy, maybe
12 or 13, levitating a few inches above the pavement as his
unzipped nylon school bag launched itself from his shoulder and
spewed notebooks, pencils and personal effects all over the street.

The kid lay sprawled in a heap on the pavement. A car door slammed
somewhere off to my left, and then a woman, his mother, was
kneeling beside him, crooning and fussing, her face a mask of
incredulous fury completely at odds with her tender ministrations.
By the time I managed to turn off the engine and get out, she had
helped him hobble back to their old Toyota sedan and lowered him
onto the back seat, where he sat with the door still flung open,
dazed and splay-limbed, holding his back. It never even occurred to
me to go and see how the boy was, I felt so shaken, so ashamed, so
uninvited. I just stood next to my car, watching as people emerged
from nowhere. Someone went to a phone and called 911, and then
sirens came speeding toward us up the avenue.

The paramedics lifted the kid onto a gurney, asking him questions
and taking his vital signs. As the mother stood behind the
ambulance watching them shove the gurney inside, I finally got up
the nerve to approach her. She was talking in Spanish with a man
who had come over from the auto body shop across from the school.

“Lo siento, señora,” I said. “Lo siento mucho. I’m very sorry. She
wouldn’t even look at me. The man from the body shop wasn’t so
reticent. “I seen it, man,” he snarled. “You seen him and you just
keep going.” And I thought, yes, that’s exactly what it must have
looked like.

They took the boy to a hospital emergency room, and the bystanders
drifted away. I found a parking space and waited on the curb for the
LAPD, who showed up an hour later to take the accident report.

“I just didn’t see him,” I admitted, which was true. The officer
didn’t ask me anything about that, but simply said the kid shouldn’t
have jaywalked in front of my car, which was also true. She got my
signature, tore off a copy of the report for me, and drove away.

Somebody told me they knew in the school office what had happened.
If I wanted, I could go home. I did want to go home. Desperately.

I got back into my car, fastened my seat belt, started the engine,
felt how much I was shaking, and turned it off. I went into the
office, borrowed the phone, and got my friends Adrian and Gina out
of bed out in Marina del Rey. Adrian drove me home, with Gina
following, and put the Tercel back in its space behind my apartment.

I filed reports with my insurance company and the DMV. Then I called
the school district and requested that I be called only for
assignments that were a walk or a direct bus ride from home. The
request was denied. So much for substitute teaching.

The next few weeks, I spent a lot of time in my apartment, only
leaving home for errands I could accomplish on foot. I tried taking
the car out one more time to the neighborhood Laundromat. But even
that short trip, eight blocks up and back, unnerved me.

So, finally facing facts, I put the car up for sale and surrendered
my driver’s license for a California ID card, which looked, photo
and all, exactly like my license and bore the same number they had
given me 25 years before at a San Francisco DMV office, next to
the Golden Gate Park Panhandle, where the Grateful Dead played for nothing from flatbed trucks amidst the aromatic eucalyptus trees, and everything was new and infinitely possible.

No one ever contacted me about the accident. Not my insurance
company, not the school or the DMV, not a personal injury lawyer. I
felt justified in assuming-thankfully-that the boy wasn’t hurt too
badly.

But still, every time I think about it, my hands remember the weird,
rubber shock of the impact through the steering wheel, and I see the
whole thing all over again. The boy bouncing off the hood of the
Tercel in slow motion. The books flying. The gurney sliding into the
open mouth of the ambulance. The rage and disbelief on his mother’s
face. Some things, some of us only learn the hard way.

Lo siento, señora. Lo siento mucho.

This story previously appeared in The Los Angeles Times, in Not Fade Away, a multimedia website created by San Francisco’s Exploratorium, and on the Macular Degeneration support Web site .

By Joel Deutsch

I was elated when Walt Disney Concert Hall finally debuted to architectural and acoustical acclaim. In my youth, I’d soaked up the symphonic repertoire in Cleveland’s elegant Severance Hall during the orchestra’s celebrated time under the direction of George Szell. Later, I’d heard many memorable Los Angeles Philharmonic programs from whichever section of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion I could afford. So I couldn’t have been happier that Frank Gehry’s new civic landmark was welcoming its first audiences and finding its voice.

But I could only imagine what the hall looked like, inside and out. My hereditary retinal degeneration had left the world looking like Janet Leigh’s murky view through the shower curtain in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” At my first concert, I would have to make do with the indistinct shards of imagery my decimated retinas and stalwart visual cortex could patch together. If only someone could guide me, I thought, someone articulate, generous and patient. Hoping for the best, I called the Los Angeles Music Center.

And so it was that on a warm weekday morning before the Oct. 1 opening gala I found my way to the box office to wait for Carolyn Van Brunt, the Music Center’s Americans with Disabilities Act compliance officer and director of guest services.

“I’m no architectural expert,” she cautioned me as we began our tour of the building’s exterior. I assured her that it didn’t matter. On the Web, with the help of my screen reader program, I’d pored over articles describing the hall’s idiosyncratic asymmetries, its billowing curves, I imagined, making it look something like an extraterrestrial Spanish galleon about to sail over Bunker Hill. All I needed was for her to help me make sense of the place.

She led me to a nearby wall. “Now look,” she said. “Can you see where it changes?”

I peered and noticed a two-tone effect a few feet up from the courtyard floor.

“Go ahead,” she said. “Touch.”

My fingers encountered stone below. That was the travertine base, Carolyn said, the same kind of rock, quarried in Italy, that clad the Getty Center, which I saw more clearly when the cultural center opened a few years before. Its roughly cut surfaces were riddled with fossilized creatures.

“Now slide your hand upward,” Carolyn said, and my fingers brushed across a thin lateral boundary onto a vertical terrain of sheer steel. “It’s flat like that until way up above,” she explained, pointing overhead beyond my limited visual range. “And then it curves outward.”

Yes, I thought. Yes. This is what those articles had described.

Up, down and around Carolyn led me, making vivid everything she could: a passageway between two upthrust steel walls, one matte-surfaced, the other so polished that I thought my glimpsed reflection was someone else. An amphitheater, trees and flowering shrubs, a rose-shaped fountain made from shards of Delft china whose water spilled into a gigantic, subdivided bowl of open petals. The area that had to be veiled with dark mesh to stop reflecting sunlight into condos across the street.

Back on the ground floor, Toni Conrado, Disney Hall tour supervisor, took me around the interior. He showed me grand stairways, mezzanines bathed in light from lofty skylights and a ballroom-cum-dance floor with its own sound engineering booth. Then he brought me into the concert hall itself.

People like to imagine that the blind develop extraordinary acuity in their unimpaired senses. It comforts us to believe that if fate pulls a black hood over our luckless heads, our fingertips will come alive with new nerve endings, our sense of smell become as keen as a bloodhound’s, our ears pick up sound in the frequency range used by bats.

But the reality is that we simply start paying more attention to the sensory input. Those bereft of their eyesight attune themselves intently to touch, smell and hearing because they must, and the wiring of their brains develops accordingly, but only with conscious effort and dogged practice. As far as I know, there are no blind martial arts wizards able to dispatch their opponents with sightless lethal grace. A rose I hold to my nostrils today, half-visible,
smells no sweeter than it would have smelled 10 years ago, clearly seen. And I have not acquired the power to overhear whispered conversations, or discern every one of the harmonic overtones when my cellist friend Paul Cohen draws his bow across a single string.

That said, coming into the auditorium, I wondered if someone else would feel as I did—as if I had entered an old-fashioned music shop and found myself enveloped by the aromas of rosewood and spruce and the faint, luxurious fragrance of open instrument cases lined with velvet plush. I told Toni.

“It’s the materials,” he explained. “Except for the oak flooring, they tried to use kinds of wood that musical instruments are made from.” No wonder the first interior wall I’d passed had reminded me of my acoustic guitar.

We had the place entirely to ourselves. I climbed a few rows up and tried out a seat. I felt cradled in a natural enclosure, both awed and comforted, the way I have felt standing amid the towering sequoias of a Northern California redwood grove.

I imagined how the distinctly different ensembles for a Mozart concerto or a Mahler symphony might sound, spare and transparent for the Mozart, ample and full-textured for the Mahler. Toni described the auditorium’s angles, its seating arrangements, its lighting. Then he led me to the foot of the stage, and we ascended past the pew-like benches behind it to where the gigantic organ pipes rise toward the ceiling. I could follow their shafts only a few feet over my head, but I had read descriptions of the odd, crooked tangle they made high above, and I could feel how massive and stout they were where they began. I thought of Bach, of course, and of Fats Waller too.

Afterward, my mind still echoing with multisensory reverberations of Delft china, light and shadow, steel and stone and wood, I savored lunch in the café, exhausted and happy. When you carry the white, red-tipped cane of the blind, you never know what will happen. Sometimes well-meaning people grab you by the arm and drag you across intersections like a naughty child, sometimes they tell you how nice it is that people like you and Stevie Wonder and the late Ray Charles always have music to fall back on.

And then, sometimes, they give you back the disappearing world, or at least a beautiful bit of it.

This story previously appeared in The Los Angeles times Magazine, in Not Fade Away, a multimedia website created by San Francisco’s Exploratorium, and on the Macular Degeneration support Web site.

By Joel Deutsch

We met as I was walking home from Classic Produce up on Fairfax late one afternoon. The broccoli, bananas, apples and spinach sat comfortably heavy in my nylon backpack, my long white cane held out before me to warn strangers that, although I might not yet be totally blind, my vision is severely impaired.

I passed the cramped strip mall with the bagel baker, the fast-food sandwich place, the carpet store, the Latino tailor, the Korean tailor, the white stucco place on the corner whose bright red doors I’d seen open only twice in more than 10 years, both times with a line of pretty young women waiting outside, probably responding to a casting call. As usual, the place was closed up tight.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, an elderly man fell into step beside me and just started talking. Taken by surprise, I looked him over as well as I could. He was a small man, clean shaven, dressed in an open-collared shirt and a nice sport coat, with the kind of fedora my father wore to the office, when the Rosenbergs got the chair, when Larry Doby made his spectacular outfield catches for the Indians, my home team, in the 1954 World Series.

My new companion spoke with the Yiddish accent of people who emigrated from Central and Eastern Europe decades ago. After the briefest exchange of civilities, he launched into a monologue that was a mishmash of autobiography, grand pronouncements and personal revelations. I listened, sensing in him an urgent need to tell and retell a life’s worth of stories while time still permitted.

His name was Tibor. “Can you say that?” he asked.

“TEE-bor,” I said. “Right?”

“Very good, very good,” he said with an approving nod. “Some people, they can’t understand it.”

He’d been born and raised in Hungary. But then came the harrowing, dislocating years of the Holocaust, and he fled through many countries, first to escape extermination, and then in search of a new, safe home, which he ultimately found here in Los Angeles. We passed the bead store, the shoe repair, the big 76 station with several thirsty vehicles suckling at the gas pumps. I found myself wondering if my white cane had somehow invited Tibor to approach me, or at least to do so with less fear of rejection than he might have felt otherwise. If so, he had chosen well.

Vision impairment, after a life of normal sight, has made me feel as if I’m inside a fish bowl made of one-way glass. I’m visible to others, but I can’t see them seeing me. I have lost the ability to initiate or simply anticipate most random social encounters. As a result, I now permit, even welcome, many intrusions I would reflexively have fended off just a few years ago.

Tibor’s monologue segued into religion. His Orthodox Judaism was not only the foundation of his life, but its roof, walls and windows as well. Every morning, every evening, he told me, he attended worship services at a shul near his apartment. In between, sometimes late into the night, he participated in study sessions, where he and other men from the congregation analyzed biblical commentary and debated the fine points of Jewish law under the guidance of their rabbi.

A block more, and we turned up my street, which was his street, too, as it happened.

“Your English is very good,” Tibor suddenly remarked. “Very beautiful.”

“Thanks,” I said. “but I was born here. It’s just natural.” Which was not exactly the truth. I thought of all those weekend afternoons my parents, immigrants themselves, drove me to Miss Wittenberg’s house for group elocution lessons. I remember a class performance, a stage, a suit and tie. I think I recited an original poem about Hopalong Cassidy, my ’50s television cowboy hero.

“I would like to speak English like that also,” Tibor said. “Do you think you could teach me?”

“You speak very well,” I assured him. “I understand everything you say.”

“No,” he said. “It is not that. Languages, I know. Six of them. But I want to speak English without the accent. I’m an old man, yes. But I would like to learn.”

Tibor, I know now, was at least 75 years old that day. Both common experience and neurological science confirm that until approximately the onset of puberty, we can acquire languages with minimal difficulty, complete with the inflections of native speakers. After that, even though we can learn to communicate in another tongue, we are unlikely ever to sound as if we were born to it.

Which is not so tragic. My world would be the poorer without the sinister, fawning German inflections of Peter Lorre, the macho-hysterical Cubano outbursts of Desi Arnaz, the irreplaceable musical voices of my friends from other countries.

“No, I don’t think that would work,” I said, expecting him to object, and readying my explanation. But Tibor discarded the notion without argument.

“OK,” he said. “Fine. It was just an idea.”

It was as if wishful thoughts like this came to him all the time and, unlike most of us, he allowed himself to speak them aloud before letting them go in deference to reality.

We had reached my place. “This is where I live,” I told him. “It’s been good talking to you.”

“It is my pleasure,” he said. “Such nice English.”

I shook his hand. “Take care of yourself.”

“Zei gezunt,” he replied, the Yiddish for “be well,” and walked on up the street. Several months later, once more in the late afternoon, circling, clattering news helicopters swarmed overhead, as in a Vietnam vet’s flashback. I turned on the radio. Minutes after taking off from the Santa Monica Airport, a single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza had lost its powers of flight 3,000 feet above Tibor’s address and dived straight down through two floors of rental units and
into the building’s parking garage. The building exploded in flames as if hit by a bomb. The pilot and passengers, of course, were obliterated upon impact. Apartment occupants were horribly burned, rendered homeless, traumatized in the extreme.

Tibor was the only tenant reported killed. His rabbi, interviewed by the Los Angeles Times, supposed Tibor was trying to get some rest after joining in a late-night Shavuot holiday study session and then rising early for a long sequence of morning prayers in the sanctuary, before returning yet again for the next round of worship that evening. So there he’d been, exactly in the wrong place at the
wrong time.

Secular as I may be, I never would deny the power and reality of another person’s fervent vision of the universe, including Tibor’s. And one thing I know: If Tibor is where he would have expected to be now, whichever of his six languages he may be speaking, every syllable of his every utterance is absolutely perfect, exactly as it is.

This story first appeared in The Los Angeles times magazine.