Sal

SAL

He owes his life to his capacity to be of therapeutic use to his sick sister, otherwise he would not have been chosen in the first place. (source)

The circumstances of my birth were never any kind of secret.  My parents were open with me and my sister from the days of my earliest memories and I suspect that they talked freely about them in the time before that.  They loved me too; deeply and dearly in a way that had nothing to do with anything other than the fact that I was their son.  As young as I was the story meant little to me; I had no contextual frame to help me understand the implications of what my life meant.  Bit by bit, year by year I gradually came to comprehend that families like ours, children like me, were few and far between.  If my parents’ hope had been to spare me the sudden shock of a discovery about my origins then they were successful.  I never had that sickening moment of epiphany that I know a few others like me suffered or that I’ve heard individuals talk about who discovered, as adults, that they were adopted rather than the natural offspring of the people they called Mom and Dad.

Me and Jane were always close too.  We still are even though none of us have seen her or spoken to her in almost three years.  Not even a text message or an e-mail has arrived from her simply to inform us that she still lives and breathes on this world.  Just as I can tell that we are still close, I know she’s still alive and, I think, happy.  I would sense it if this were not true, just like when we were growing up I always seemed to know what she was feeling and thinking even when we were apart.  It was like we were part of one another which, in a way, we were but I don’t go in for any of that mystical, spiritual bullshit.  Our link, as unusual and manufactured as it might be, resulted from nothing other than a set of scientific procedures and biological, genetic circumstance.  Simple as.  If we happened to be closer than other brother and sister pairs it wasn’t because our minds or souls or some other metaphysical appendages were linked.  We were just lucky to share an affinity, to get on well and to have an awareness of one another even at a distance.

When people find out what I am, it’s not uncommon for them to assume that I must have resented Jane.  How could I?  It’s not like she had any more choice in the matter than I did.  She was only 18 months old when the entire process started.  Besides, I love my sister and I want, no, need her to be alive in this world.  How could I feel any ill will or anger toward her?  Just as she didn’t ask to be born sick, to come into this world dying at a faster rate than the rest of us she never put up her hand and asked our parents or her doctors to do what they did.  I was a last resort, chosen at a time when she was too little to comprehend that she desperately needed options and that I was a choice of final, heart broken desperation.

The only ongoing point of irritation I ever felt toward my parents, a little blister that still flares up from time to time, is my name.  They never called me by anything other than the diminutive Sal though, like all children of our economic class, they made sure I could spell it in its entirety by the time I went off to school at the age of five.  S-A-L-V-A-T-O-R-E.  I never gave that name much thought.  Everyone called me Sal, I thought of myself as Sal and that was pretty much as far as it went.  On occasion I might have wondered how I wound up with such an exotic name when my sister was simple, plain Jane.  If I did I was proud of that difference in some minor way.  It wasn’t until I was fourteen, in 2055, that it occurred to me how ridiculous my parents were to call me Salvatore.  Maybe they shortened it to Sal because they realised this themselves.

As I said, my parents never made any secret of the fact that I was created, chosen because my sister was desperately ill.  Born with a rare condition called Fanconi Anaemia, something that unlike most children we could both pronounce and spell from an early age, she had been in and out of hospital on regular basis from the time she was weeks old.  In her case the disorder, inherited through an unlikely and unlucky combination of our parents’ genes, progressed quickly.  Her bone marrow started to fail, her body could not fight off infections and from the time she was ten months old she lived in a sterile room at the research hospital.  Blood transfusions were regular and, despite the trumpeting that surrounded its creation nearly a decade earlier in 2030, MaD SID, the Marrow Donors Strategic International Database failed to produce a suitable match.  Our parents were forced to watch Jane play a waiting game with death.

Her best chance of actually living rather than existing for a handful of years or months longer, from transfusion to transfusion, in that sterile hospital suite was through a donation of cells and bone marrow from a sibling.  Ideally that sibling would provide an exact match to Jane, reducing the risk of her body rejecting the donated material.  It was also the case that, under normal circumstance, any additional children our parents brought into the world  would suffer from the same Fanconi Anaemia killing Jane.  Could you do that?  Bring a child into the world knowing there was a likelihood, however small, that you and your partner had issued your baby a death warrant?  That question, right there, and my own answer to it means despite any incomprehension or frustration, even the occasional tinge of resentment I might feel toward my parents fades into unimportance.  I am here, living and thinking in this world and like all humans I have a fierce loyalty to my own life.  For the most part I am happy.  How can I possibly resent or second guess my parents when what they chose to do not only saved Jane, but also ensured I was born healthy?  If a donor had been found I would not have been born at all.

The procedure had been around since some time either side of the transition between the 20th and 21st centuries; I’ve never paid enough attention to remember the dates when the first of us came into this world.  I have met some of the others, even Charlie Whitaker the very first, and though some part of me had hoped for it, had watched video accounts by some of the others claiming otherwise, I felt no shock of recognition or spark of shared identity.  They were just some other people.  Charlie was just some guy decades my senior with whom I had nothing in common.  As in all the other cases our parents underwent IVF treatment.  A set of embryos was created and then each was tested for two things: the anaemia and to see if it provided a match for Jane.  Luckily for Jane, our parents and me a  healthy match was found after the first round of IVF and implanted in our mother.  A smidgen under nine months later I was born.

At my birth cells were harvested from my umbilical cord to help treat Jane.  A short time after that some of my bone marrow was donated to her.  One year on and she had moved back home, had needed no transfusions, though still visited her doctors regularly.  By the time I was old enough to start remembering the events of life Jane was healthy.  She no longer spent nights in hospital and, if she had to visit the doctor a bit more often than other children, she only ever did so to receive an entirely clean bill of health.  I don’t think either of us really questioned it.  I know we both got a bit tired of our parents droning on and on about how she had been ill, how I had been “chosen” – that’s the word they always used, “chosen” – as her saviour sibling and life had changed for the better.

It wasn’t until I was 14 when the debates were raging and the international moratorium on these treatments and the creation of saviour siblings was enacted that I realised how strange my existence seemed to some people.  The vehemence of both sides of the debate surprised me, especially those fundamentalists who seemed to think that the scientists were playing god and that those like me were offered as some sort of false idol or ersatz Christ.  All my parents wanted to do was save their little girl.  All the doctors wanted to do was ease her suffering.

I understand the ethical concerns that ran through the whole debate and the procedure itself.  At some level it is entirely true to say that I would not exist if my sister hadn’t needed me.  I was simply the lucky embryo, the one in a batch of embryos that met certain requirements and so was brought to term.  The rest were destroyed.  My parents never loved me less for the circumstances of my birth, they never treated me as anything other than their child.  In fact I think I had more freedom than my sister ever did simply because the habit of worrying about and protecting her was so deeply ingrained in them both.  I certainly never felt any weight of responsibility for my sister.  How many people worry about the things they can’t remember, the events they had no control of when they were busy drooling and burbling in their nappies?

The one thing that does sometimes get on my nerves is just what I said it was.  My name.  Here I am, one of these so-called saviour siblings and my parents decide to call me Salvatore.  I guess I’m just lucky that we aren’t Spanish or South American, that we aren’t Catholic as well, otherwise I might have wound up being called Jesús.

Still, everyone calls me Sal so most of the time I can forget about the ridiculous, boastful name I was given.  As for all those other ethical issues and debates that, despite the moratorium, still seem to flare up from time to time I can’t say I care too much.  I’m here, I’m alive.  How could I want it any other way?

I do wish I could talk to my sister. . .

 

Vardman Grows Up

Since the middle of last week I’ve been stealing a quarter of an hour here, half an hour there to work on a very self-indulgent piece of flash fiction.  It was inspired by two things.  The first was a comment I heard over the festive season.  The second was a notoriously short and difficult chapter from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.  Anyone who hasn’t read that particular work will, at best, simply be bemused by what is below.  Those who have will understand exactly how self-indulgent I’m being.

Originally this piece was just a way for me to fill some spare time one afternoon, but I’ve found myself coming back to it fascinated by the puzzle getting speaker’s voice right presents me.  I even went so far as to record myself reading it so I could hear what works and what fails.  Because listening to my own voice always makes me cringe and because I wanted to hide under my desk after I listened to myself reading for 3 minutes or so I immediately thought of posting that file here.

After all nothing says it’s Monday like a bit of public self-humiliation, right?

 <span><a href=”http://soundcloud.com/outspoken-omphaloskeptic/vardmangrowsup”>VardmanGrowsUp</a> by <a href=”http://soundcloud.com/outspoken-omphaloskeptic”>Outspoken Omphaloskeptic</a></span>

Fall On Your Knees

A few weeks ago I decided I’d devote a bit of my spare time to writing a piece of flash fiction that I could read aloud over Christmas.  The result can be found below.  If anyone can tell me where the hell this stuff comes to me from I’d be grateful.  Meanwhile, I suppose I should wish all of my visitors a very merry Christmas.

Fall On Your Knees

I’ve never been religious, but on Christmas Eve 2006 I achieved an unlooked-for state of ecstasy.  It was my first Christmas as a married man and I was relishing the fact.  We were at my mother-in-law’s house.  The presents were wrapped.  The tree was trimmed. There was a large turkey in the fridge that I would begin to roast early the next day.  Aunt and Uncle were present and my good friend, my brother-in-law, had arrived from London just a few hours earlier.  It wasn’t going to be a white Christmas, but the clear skies made it cold enough to chill the bottle of vodka I had stashed in the garden.  Under the impenetrable cover of going out back for cigarettes, Uncle, Brother-in-Law and I were able to have large swigs of the icy spirit.  Uncle contributed an herbal sacrament to our cause and our festive mood.  By 10 that evening I felt a great love for everyone present as well as those that weren’t, a strong anticipation of the next day and an incredible, though as it turned out, misguided competency.

The Christmas tree was leaning.  Not badly; there was no danger of it toppling over, not yet.  The Women, Mother-in-Law in particular, were bothered by this small imperfection.  Fixed to one of the dark wooden beams just above the tree’s tip was a hook.  This made the solution obvious.  They had a hook, a leaning tree and some fishing line; what could be simpler?  This is, however, a family of fine Devonish stock with the unsurprising result that they lacked the necessary height to reach the top of the tree, let alone the hook set into the ceiling.  Feeling the fully flush of my competency I offered my services, all six feet of them .

I had been watching Mother-in-Law as she stood on a chair and tried to lean toward the top of the tree.  The girth of its lower branches was making her job difficult and her balance precarious.  Wife and Aunt were offering loud and contradictory advice.

“Put the line around the hook first, then the top of the tree.”

“No, it will be easier to get it perfectly straight if you do the tree, then the hook.”

I jumped in: “Here, let me.”  I could not keep the American swagger out of my voice.

I managed to loop the clear filament around the tree top with little trouble though there were vague noises being made at my back about not treading on the wrapped parcels piled at its base.  As I reached toward the hook on the ceiling I missed it once, then twice.    This was going to require rising onto the balls of my feet.  I started that process and, I don’t know how or why, toppled forward and to my left crushing my kidney against the back of a chair and knocking the tree over on its side.  Water spilled from its heavy base and, once it was upright, we all shifted and wiped the wetted parcels as dry as possible.  Luckily, no one was due to receive delicate electronics.  This done, I tried again and got it right.  I’m not sure how soon after that I went to bed.

Christmas day dawned cold, clear and pristine.  I congratulated myself on being the first one up and while my head did offer some slight complaint I remained in the grip of my ecstatic enervation of the night before.  The festivities would not be starting for an hour or so, and I had two hours or more before I needed to begin my day in the kitchen, my favourite part of Christmas.  I decided to take my dog for a walk.

As we emerged from a small wood near the river into a ancient apple orchard dusted with a covering of frost like icing sugar, a pheasant rose from some long frozen grass at our feet.  The dog, all sense and obedience over-ridden by his primitive instinct, tore off after the bird.  I followed, yelling in small panic, losing ground behind their greater speed.  Some of my shouting must have finally penetrated the dog’s mind as he began to turn and head my way.  Just as he did so, eyes fixed on his metronomic tail, I failed to spot a small hole just in front of me.

At precisely that instant another man, with a different, better behaved dog, emerged from the edge of the wood to my left.  He spotted me in time to see me brought roughly but perfectly to my knees like a supplicant in grateful observation of the day before us.  Through my ecstasy, my pain, unbidden, came the words of a raw, unintended meditation:

“Jesus Christ.”

The Spider and the Pussycat

The Spider and the Pussycat or My Kind of Fairy Tale

We ran out of milk six weeks before my thirty-second birthday.   It was a Tuesday.  There was nothing else for it; off I went.  As I made my way to the corner shop, change jingling in my pocket, I got to thinking about how far I’d come and wondering if I’d actually gone anywhere.

There I was, walking down a street of houses not more than ten years old.  In their repetitive regularity they weren’t a world away from the simultaneously comforting and amnesiac developments of my upbringing in the suburban sprawl of Southern California.  Passing under a line of anonymous and stunted trees I realised that this foreign country had, in many ways, become more intelligible, more explicable to me than my native land.   A decade on from my arrival I was married with two dogs and a mortgage that combined to produce more than a fleeting sense of comfortable contentment.   I was also unemployed, possibly unemployable, and still just childish enough to wonder in my heart what had happened to some of my more grandiose ambitions.

I bought my milk – 2 pints of semi-skimmed (2% in my previous, American tongue) – from the same cigarette-scented, bottle-blonde who I always saw in the shop.   After visiting the place a few times a week for three years she’d finally accepted me as a regular and begun, six months earlier, to acknowledge me with the term of her particular approbation: “love.” Sometimes, if possessed by a particularly chirpy mood, she’d let me know which beers would soon be on special offer.

As I walked home, dreaming of the bran flakes I’d soon be dousing in milk, I passed one of the neighbourhood cats. In his luxurious tawny coat and with an air of regal indifference he was sunning himself in the early autumnal sunshine perched atop a fat black spider in front of number twenty three. When I came to a stop to marvel at this spectacle he cast a disinterested and disdainful glance in the direction of my amazement.  I took his point.

That’s also when I remembered: between the ages of 11 and 14 I had an intense and aching longing for an Alfa Romeo.

These days I don’t know what I’d do with one.

 

Character Development II: Looking for Bounce

Back in May I posted a story called Cripple that formed part of a still ongoing exercise to give life to a character squatting heavily in my imagination.  The speaker of that piece is a nasty man and, as I’ve been investigating the reasons (he sees them as a valid) for his way of seeing things I’ve found out about the event outlined in the story below.  I’ve also discovered that he is a friend or acquaintance of the character I’m trying to bring to life rather than the character himself which has surprised me.  It’s also reassured me a bit as well.  If I can ever spend some serious time with him I have a feeling I’m going to like Bounce but at the minute other people and events keep getting in the way.

That’s about enough out of me other than to point out that this is a draft so criticisms and suggestions are, of course very welcome.

Trouser Snake

The summer that I was twelve my family had been living in Southern California for roughly eighteen months. I’d completed a year and a bit at Wagner Elementary, made a few friends and self-consciously developed my first crush. Meredith Hanson was the tallest, blondest girl in my class.  Because I had a crush on her I didn’t speak to her or, really, even in her presence.  My crush was born out of a sense of obligation, my desire to mature.  Along with all of my classmates I’d be starting at the junior high in the autumn and I had the firm impression that it was about time I started to demonstrate an “interest in women” as Bounce put it.  He was, by his own admission in the same boat as me, not that either of us had any real idea what we meant by the phrase.  We were interested in girls but in that early, first-stirring adolescent way that renders so many boys mute and apparently even more immature than they are capable of being.

By a stroke of luck Bounce’s younger sister and mine were on the same soccer team that summer.   That meant that when our mothers took them to practice at the school we had an excuse to meet up and spend some time playing one-on-one or three-on-three basketball on the asphalt courts before making our own way to further adventures or, more frequently, his house or mine.  The hot, acrid dust smell of the playing surface being pounded by the ball and the dull metallic thud of the same ball on the industrial-strength, rust-spotted backboards provided a rhythm and beat to the sunshine and parched heat of our summer.  There were not nets for the ball to swish through whispering promises of the future sporting glory Bounce and I foresaw so we contented ourselves with telling our own prophecies and the destinies of one another.

Sometime near the halfway point of that summer Meredith’s soccer team began practising at the same time as our sisters but on a different group of fields adjacent to the basketball courts.  I had confided my crush to Bounce and he agreed with me that such proximity was a great opportunity.   I could see and be seen by Meredith without obviously putting myself in her way.  We started spending longer than usual on our warm-up routine practising our reverse lay-ups in particular with the idea of displaying our talent and dedication to what we called “the game.”  Being a good friend Bounce was, during our games, very vocal, shouting praise and amazement whenever I made what we ranked as “a good move.”   In our adolescent wisdom we figured that my sporting prowess was likely to melt Meredith’s heart.  Because a number of other girls our age and from our class were on Meredith’s team I did my best to return Bounce’s favours.  He was, he said, keeping his options open, “but definitely on the market.”

One particular day that I’ll never forget was the kind of hot, clear day that shines like a jewel in Southern California’s crown. It was the kind of day they put on posters and in movies.   Thing is, those movies and posters don’t give you any sense of just how hot it can actually be.  Even the smog was in full retreat and the San Gabriels seemed to have taken two giant steps closer to the coast and the town we lived in.   Bounce and I had been through our warm-up and bounced, battered and shouted our way through three or four games of one-on-one. The heat gave me the perfect excuse to take my t-shirt off and, I thought, tempt Meredith with the alluring sight of my five foot eleven inch, 125 pound and completely hairless frame. It wouldn’t be long before I’d regret doing so.  It was at least two years before I realised that I was little more than a tall, skinny collection of skin and bones. Self-awareness often comes too late I guess.

While were taking a break for some water Kevin and Kirk, The Twins, showed up.  They were two years older than us but one year above us in school having been held back to repeat the sixth grade, the grade we’d just finished.  The Twins were known to be a rather rough and tumble team with little interest in boys our age apart from the sport bullying them provided. At the same time they were undoubtedly cool so when they asked to go two-on-two against Bounce and I we didn’t hesitate to accept.  Playing with them would make us look good.

Though Bounce and I didn’t turn out to be the hoop stars we envisioned ourselves becoming we were good enough to beat Kevin and Kirk in threequick, one-sided games to twenty-one points.  That was probably a mistake.  My loud crowing about our victories and superiority on the court was undeniably ill-considered.  I wasn’t really paying attention to Kevin and Kirk though, being too concerned with Meredith’s reactions, imagining her watching my every move, to notice how the twins were taking the situation.  Bounce later told me that he was busy trying to see if any of the other hot girls our age were paying him particular attention.  Still, even then Bounce had a kind of sixth-sense about when to keep his mouth shut that I suspect was at work as well.

After the third game Kirk whispered something in Kevin’s ear and ran off in the direction of their house.  As he did so he crossed one corner of the field Meredith’s team was practising on.  Kevin said they wanted to show us something “awesome” and led us to the shade of a tree near the corner Kirk had just crossed. Curious and glad of a chance to cool off we happily followed and waited, unsuspecting, for Kirk’s return.  Ten minutes later he came walking up with a boa constrictor of nearly four feet draped over his neck, its front end wrapped twice around his left forearm. They had, they told us, been asked to look after the snake by their uncle, an oil company engineer who had just left for a six month stretch overseeing some project in the Middle East.  After passing the snake back and forth a few times with Kirk, Kevin, who was standing just beyond the tree’s shadow with his back to the girls running some drill at our end of the field asked if I could hold it for a minute.

I agreed, stepped forward a handful of steps into the uncompromising brightness of the sunshine.  Kevin placed the snake in my hands and, to my puzzlement, took four or five big, quick, hopping steps away to my left.   At the same time Kirk, who was behind me, grabbed my shorts and yanked them, along with my boxers, down around my ankles shouting “Hey, look at me!”  At the sound Meredith and all her team mates turned to see me, only 20 yards away, completely naked and holding a large snake, the white flesh of my thighs and pre-pubescent boyhood reflecting the unflinching Californian sun.   I was so stunned I stood frozen, unable to react for two or three seconds that still seem like they lasted long minutes.  Then I gently put the snake on the ground, pulled my shorts up and ran off leaving my t-shirt and basketball behind.

Bounce found me a while later in a shady spot between the school buildings bringing my forgotten shirt and ball along with his quiet condolences.  He did his best to assure me that not one of the girls would care about or even remember my apparently serpentine self-exposure when school started again in the fall. I appreciated his kindness and at the time I almost believed him.

We played plenty of basketball over the rest of that summer but Bounce and I stuck to an unspoken plan of not doing so when our sisters or classmates were practising.  If our mothers noticed the change and wondered about it they never said anything.  I guess it’s possible one of the mothers of a girl on Meredith’s team saw and told them about what happened something that never occurred to me at the time for which I am glad.  By the time school started I almost felt grateful that the scene of my humiliation had happened during summer vacation.   At least I’d had time to get beyond the first and most intense stage of my embarrassment where even hearing the word snake caused my ears to burn and brought a deep, hot blush to my face.

During lunch on the first day of junior high Meredith and group of her friends paused near the table I was eating at. She smiled and said “Hey, look at me!” before she and her friends walked off giggling.

character development

It’s been a long time, years in fact, since I wrote fiction in anything other than fits and starts.  Recently, however, I’ve found the time and inclination to start writing a few bits and pieces of fiction.  The ideas for characters and stories are coming thicker and faster than I can keep up with them.  This is nice, but it’s also a bit daunting.  I can write a decent essay, but my skills as a fiction writer are atrophied and under-developed.  What follows is a draft of a short story I’ve been tinkering with for a few weeks now.  It’s not really meant to be a finished piece in itself, but instead to serve as a way for me to develop a character that’s been haunting a lot of my ideas, to let him find his voice and speak his own words.

I won’t say too much more other than that I’m curious to see what kind of response this guy gets if he gets any response at all.  Also, his views are not mine, but then, if you you can’t work that out from reading what follows then it’s even worse than I thought.

Cripple

Just like everyone else in this world I have my failings. I am working on them though. I think and consider and try to be a better person and, though I say it myself, I’m doing an okay job. Still, sometimes things just go wrong and I don’t know see it coming. I guess that’s part of being human and living in an imperfect world. Still, I trust the people who know me would describe me as a good guy, a moral person and perhaps even someone worth listening to and learning from. After all, we’re all fragile, screwed up in some special way. It’s how you deal with your own screwed-upness and evidence of it in other people that’s most important.

Just take the disabled. Anyone who claims that seeing somebody in a wheelchair, or wearing a prosthetic limb doesn’t repulse them at some level is lying. It’s a natural, ancient human response to feel uncomfortable when you see a cripple at the very least. If things are bad enough you might even feel sick – harelips and the wasted legs of a lifelong paraplegic always do that to me. The thing is, if you want to be a decent even a moral person you have to put that disgust aside – that’s where philosophy and conscience and the intellectual pursuits come in. As I’ve already said we’re all screwed up in our own way. All of us start out and live a great deal of our lives as some sort of cripple. It’s just that in the case of the physically deformed and mangled the shortcomings are so obvious that the ancient part of the brain looking for strong members of the tribe can’t help but react. It’s a Darwinian thing but you really have to study the theories like I have to understand what I mean. Trust me when I say you can learn to ignore that little voice and pretend there’s nothing wrong. That’s all the cripples really want, a pretence that everything’s okay, that they’re just like everyone else even when they aren’t. After all, someone like me can learn to fight his perfectly natural and inborn prejudices by thinking about things and training himself to follow a kind of practical morality or philosophy. I’m still an impatient person, for example, but I’m doing a pretty good job of controlling the uncontrollable and misplaced rage I’ve always had. Somebody who is born without a foot or whose nerves are severed just above their waist has no real hope of truly improving themselves. Any aides they have will be artificial, their weakness is permanent and some part of their own minds are just as disgusted with their crippled form as the brains of perfectly whole-bodied people. For that cripples deserve our sympathy and understanding even if we don’t like to look at them. They’re forced to wear their failures permanently and in public for all to see and know they’ve no real hope for change.

I mention all this to begin with because I want to make a few things clear. First, as you can see, I’m not a prejudicial man. Cripples have a place in this world and as imperfect human beings ourselves we have a moral duty to treat them right and, if possible, help them feel better about their second-rate existence. Second, I’m not one of these holier-than-thou, overly idealistic types who tries to deny that part of me doesn’t like to be around the handicapped or that my discomfort and disgust is the result of some sort of prejudice. It’s not. As I’ve explained I’ve made a real effort to work against that unease and act right. Third, even though I’ve put in the hard work to reach these conclusions sometimes, out there in the world, things still go wrong. Maybe part of it’s my fault. I’ll keep working on being a better person, but that doesn’t mean I always know precisely what’s gone wrong. It’s also the case that you can’t control what other people do or understand. I think you’ll see what I mean a bit better if I tell you about something that happened to me the other day.

I had to go to the eye doctor. My vision isn’t that bad but the prescription for reading glasses I was given years ago didn’t seem to be working any more. As it turns out I have to wear glasses all the time now, so even if I’m not actually handicapped I do have a measure of physical infirmity that, when I use my imagination and strong intellectual powers, lets me understand how it must feel to be a full-blown cripple. At this point, though, that’s neither here nor there; I suspected I needed a new prescription but what I want to tell you about happened or at least started before I ever saw the eye doctor.

I’ve been incredibly busy with work so even though I knew I needed to have my eyes examined I was hoping to put it off for another few weeks. Then on Thursday night my glasses broke. It’s no surprise really given how old and abused the things were. At any rate I was left with an unrepairable pair of specs which kind of forced the issue. The soonest I could book an appointment was late last Saturday afternoon, not ideal but I had no choice but to jump at the chance. It was a bit of shame really because Saturday was the first time the weather’s been nice for quite a while now. Instead of being able to get out and enjoy it properly I found myself walking into the city centre as the time for my appointment drew near.

It was crowded and I hate crowds. Fat women red with heat were doing their usual trick of using push chairs as offensive weapons to ensure the occupation of the pavement to the exclusion of all others. Stupid, thuggish adolescent boys were preening for obnoxiously loud and sloppily under-dressed hussies with the aide of mobile phones blaring out tinny versions of the latest, unlistenable hits. Everywhere I turned somebody was standing slow and rude, smoking and in the way wearing their mental and social incapacities with a sense of pride and entitlement. It was a paradigmatic example of why I hate crowds and prefer to stay at home when possible instead of slopping around the city centre with the dregs. Still, even though it pained my sensibilities to be amidst the crowds I was able to remain outwardly calm and civil by taking a strictly philosophical approach to the whole situation. After all, I reminded myself, I may not be as stupid and rude as the currents of people I was fighting against, but I’m not perfect either. What’s more at least some of these people don’t know any better, they don’t realise how disgusting they are and as human beings they do have a right to move about the city. It wasn’t easy, but by reminding myself of these things and keeping in mind my own desire to maintain the philosophical and mental development that I’ve achieved over a lifetime of hard thought and harder work I made it through to arrive for my appointment with about ten minutes to spare.

My appointment was with one of the opticians that works out of the local branch of a large chain of stores that sell glasses and contact lenses to those of us who need them. I have to admit when I first used them seven or eight years ago I was a bit suspicious of what kind of advice I would get and how much things would cost. As it turns out the opticians working in these places have no financial stake in the sale of corrective eye wear and due to the economies of scale available to the company as a nationwide chain their prices on glasses in particular are more than competitive. The only real downside to the place is the fact that you find yourself thrown in amongst the general public and moved along a rather impersonal conveyor from the waiting area, to initial consultation, back to the waiting area, to the full examination and if necessary back to the waiting area and then to an advisor and trainee optician to select your glasses and have them fitted. I wasn’t looking forward to the whole process. I knew by how busy town was that the shop would be noisy and crowded and as you would expect I was dreading having to sit and wait in the company of some of very same yobbos I’d been dodging through town. Again, I retreated into my philosophy and ethical logic as a means of keeping myself under control and steeling myself for the ordeal ahead. As it turned out, however, my entry into and wait for my consultation weren’t that bad. Initially, in fact I had an opportunity if not to enjoy myself then at least to be elevated above the taint of the situation I was in and behave in an edifying way.

I began to feel like the tide might be turning as I approached the double-doors leading into the shop. Just ahead of me was a young woman in a wheel chair who, due to the backward sloping incline in front of the doors and the stiffness of their hinges was having a bit of trouble making her entry into the shop. Nobody inside was taking any notice of the poor critter and I was able, without being asked, to pull open a door for her. Busy as she had been with the door she hadn’t noticed my approach and when she realised I’d come to her rescue she looked up at me with grateful surprise and relief clear on a pretty face notable for its full lips and frame of long dark hair. The girl may have been in a wheelchair but, apart from the thin, straw-like wastes where her legs should have been she was actually very attractive. Had she had the long, shapely legs that should have been the natural accompaniment to her striking face and voluptuously contoured chest she would have been just my type. In fact, with the glasses she was wearing she could have played the naughty teacher or librarian in one of those classic music videos from the 1980s by a proper rock band like Van Halen apart, of course, from her total inability strut her stuff in a pair of high heels and a short skirt the way really classy women can. If it hadn’t been for the damn chair she would have been just my type which is sad when you think about it. For a woman like that to be so close to being beautiful only to have it spoiled along with her chances of getting a real hunk of a man by a pair of useless legs has got to be more frustrating and cruel, feel more unfair to her, than life does for some cripple with average or worse features. After all falling just short of a goal or success is harder to deal with than always knowing you’ve no chance.

At the time some version of this flashed through my mind, a lot of it at the subconscious level I’ve trained myself to be more aware of than most, and I can be sure I didn’t let any trace of disappointment or pity show on my face. In fact, by concentrating on the unfulfilled promise of her upper half and exercising the charm that has always come natural to me I was able to put her at her ease smiling at her with a flirtatious twinkle in my eye, executing a half bow and saying in a debonair tone ‘After you, madame.’ I think she could tell that even seeing her in her chair I could almost imagine her as the kind of woman a guy wants to be and be seen with and that she appreciated me letting her know. All in all it was a double bonus. I was able to perform a good deed for her and make her feel good about herself while also reaping the benefit of feeling better about where I was and proud of my ability to be such a decent kind of guy even though I have to make my way through such a shitty world. I followed her into the shop, made myself known at reception and was asked to take a seat in the portion of the shop known as the waiting area.

Given the conveyor like process I mentioned above staging area might have been a better term for the collection of uncomfortable plastic chairs arranged along three and a half sides of an inward facing rectangle with a gap in the remaining half of one of the long sides. There were two rows of chairs arranged back to back in the rectangle’s centre. Everything, furniture walls, carpet, the uniforms of the employees, was some variation of a basic brownish orange and there were enough seats for about thirty people in all and only one of them was free. Again, I was lucky I’d been preceded by the woman in the wheelchair rather than someone with working legs; if I hadn’t I would have had to stand around like some feckless slob. As it was she travelled with her own seat which she was parking into the gap on the open half side of the rectangle and right next to the one free chair. I sat down as she finished manoeuvring herself into position with the kind of concentration and fiddly adjustments that don’t really achieve anything and that you usually only see when you watch your wife or girlfriend trying to parallel park. It was then I noticed that her chair was not just another version of the usual model.

Instead it was somewhere between the kind of wheelchair you normally see people in – the type that you’d find in a hospital or airport – and those low-slung, ultralight jobs that participants in the paralympics use for racing. It wasn’t as low to the ground as those, but it had a low profile and its frame looked to be made out of some sort of aluminium alloy. The wheels were cambered inward at the top, had carbon fibre spokes and were dotted with blinking blue LEDs activated when they turned. Even though it was a wheel chair it was actually kind of cool. I was curious about it and, as the almost-beauty saw me looking thought I might as well ask about it. It’s not like I had anything better to do. Even if I’d had an intact pair of glasses I wouldn’t have wanted to read the old newspapers on offer on an orangey brown shelf and I certainly wouldn’t have willing conversed with the wheezing, leperous looking man to my right or the two fat boys accompanied by what I suspect was a pederast facing me from the central row of chairs.

It turned out that the chair was made from aluminium alloy of a type originally used in racing bicycles. Her brother, who was some sort of engineer, had made it for her as a kind of learning exercise when, a few years back, she started to compete in the wheelchair versions of long distance road races like the London marathon. She’d been born with whatever problem she had but it was only when she’d finished university and had been working in an office for a few years that she started to participate in such events as a way to keep fit and to raise some money for various charities. As it turned out she was something of a natural at such events, had she started younger she could have been a paralympian, and she began to spend more and more time training and racing. She’d been to New York and Boston for marathons, participated in other shorter races all over the world and was planning, so she said, on completing her fifth consecutive London Marathon later this year. She’d had a crappy, second-hand and second-rate racing chair at first but the more time she spent on the road the more she’d coveted a really high-end model. Unfortunately there was no way she could ever afford one; apparently like the bicycles that you see in the Tour de France they’re hugely expensive, so her brother agreed that if she bought the raw materials he’d make one. The chair she was in and used on a daily basis was the result of his initial learning process as he became comfortable and confident with the materials. She said that the thing was more comfortable and less work to use than kinds of chairs she’d had her whole life. She’d come up with idea of adding the LEDs to the wheels herself.

I have to admit I was impressed both with the origin of the chair and the quality of her brother’s handiwork as well as the woman herself. There she sat, an almost-beauty in her early to mid-thirties who had every reason to be depressed, even angry about her lot in life. But she wasn’t. Instead she was passionate about her training, determined to set a personal best in her next marathon. In general she was well-spoken, intelligent and something of a pleasure to talk to. Animated in conversation she was nice to look at. The sparks of enthusiasm and determination flashing in striking green eyes and the play of her shapely lips as she spoke, thought and smiled made it almost possible to forget the withered things below. For minutes on end it was actually possible for me to forget that I wasn’t speaking to a whole woman. Maybe that’s where the problem started. I don’t know.

From my initial questions about her chair we continued on to have the best kind of half-superficial, waiting room conversation possible in such a situation. It was a good thing too, for both of us, given how long we were kept waiting. She told me about her job (some sort of administrative work for some research institute or other of the type women who work in offices think is important) and asked about mine. She was very well read which, when you think about it, isn’t too surprising, and it turned out that we had a few favourite authors in common even if she did say that her favourite book was Geek Love. To my astonishment she admitted with a complete lack of embarrassment that while she liked music by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones she couldn’t stand Van Halen, Lynyrd Skynrd or Deep Purple. Nobody can have perfect taste though and she more than made up for her poor musical judgement after I had taken a quick call on my mobile phone. I have the theme tune from Dr Who set as my ringtone and after I’d hung up on the idiot on the other end she smiled, asked me if I was having ‘TARDIS trouble’ and admitted that ever since she’d been a small girl it had been her favourite show. From there we got to comparing notes on our favourite series and episodes as well as our favourite Doctors. In retrospect that’s when I made my first real mistake.

I admitted that even as a full-grown man with a job and responsibilities I still harboured a pronounced vestige of my boyhood dream of being the Doctor. True, these days I dream about being the actor who plays the Doctor rather than a real-life version of a fictional character. Also, as I pointed out, I’m a bit too thick about the middle to be a convincing time-travelling hero with a glamorous assistant. She laughed and told me not to be so silly, that I wasn’t overweight at all which should have been a clear warning to me that a misunderstanding was taking place. Then she admitted that she envied the power the Dalek’s had to fly or levitate making a joke about how that would finally enable her to defeat her lifelong enemy: stairs. That’s when I think what finally happened became inevitable.

Had I been on my guard and thinking properly I would have realised that she’d misinterpreted my friendliness and charm as well as my self-deprecating joke about my weight. I may not be George Clooney, but I do cut a decent figure that puts me firmly out of the league of some wheelchair-bound woman no matter how smart or friendly she is even if she does have a pretty face and the emphatic suggestion of a nice pair of breasts lurking under her top. I’d over done the charm and she’d got the wrong idea. I can’t really blame her though, the poor thing, I’d be a real catch for a woman like her and no matter how many times reality teaches a person otherwise one of the great things about the human spirit is its continued capacity for hope and optimism. Instead I missed all of this busy as I was congratulating myself on remaining calm despite having to deal with crowds and a long wait and in making the best of bad situation by befriending this woman. After her joke about the stairs I also gave her too much credit for an implicit understanding of some really difficult ideas that usually people don’t understand unless, like me, they’ve spent a lot of time intellectualising over them.

Just after our Dr Who conversation I was called in for the first bit of my exam, went back and forth until about an hour later I emerged from the shop with a new prescription and having placed an order for some new glasses. For somebody with a sharp mind like I’ve got this kind of process is painful unless you have something meaty to chew on in your mind, so to speak, and you can kind of drift away from the humdrum stuff you’re having to do that doesn’t require any real brain power. See, my own failure to recognise certain warning signs meant I was engaged in an intellectual consideration based on a false premise. I thought the handicapped lady understood one thing when she meant another.

I won’t confuse you with the specific details or by mentioning any names (you probably wouldn’t recognise them anyway unless, like me, you have an academical bent) but it’s important that you understand what I was thinking about and why I was confused. A lot of really important writers and philosophers have written about humour and its uses over the years and one of the things the smartest among them have recognised is that humour can be used as a kind of protection. Making a joke about something robs it of the ability it might have to hurt us. Most people do this instinctually and in a half-hearted way. If you can do so at a conscious level, while you understand the theory, it becomes a very powerful tool. Take me for example and the conversation I’d been having. I know I’m a bit overweight and that at some level that’s fine. I’m not twenty years old any more but it’s still potentially painful for a man like me who always combined the best of intelligence and personality with a very well-developed body to know I’m not quite the specimen I used to be. When I joke about it that potential pain vanishes in a puff of smoke. As I sat and read out lines off of charts, told the optician which of two lenses an image looked clearer through, and selected my new glasses the main part of my brain was attributing something similar to the lady in the chair. I was thinking how strong she was, how lucky she had been to have reached some understanding of this particular use of humour and to be able to apply it to herself in the form of the joke about the Dalek and the stairs. True, I thought, nothing could ever completely negate the pain being an incomplete person must bring with it but I thought she was clearly making the best of her situation. Lots of cripples don’t even want to mention what’s wrong with them and here she was able to look her situation full in the face and make jokes about it. Not too many people are born with the kind of mental fortitude that takes and I thought I’d recognised another deep mind in her. Boy was I wrong. And boy, did I find out the hard way.

When I left the shop and began to head home I came across the woman I thought shared something of my intellectual nature wheeling herself down the street. She suggested a coffee and, given what a rare thing it is to find somebody whose mind is kin to my own I accepted expecting a free-ranging, quick flowing conversation of a type most people can’t keep up with let alone understand. We stopped in a cafe, one of those chain places with chairs that look more comfortable than they are, ordered and chatted for a bit and, in the full-flush of my misapprehension of what she thought was going on and her capacity for deep thought applied to her own life I told her a joke I’d heard years before and hadn’t thought again of until just that moment. It goes something like this:

One day a man gets fired from his job and arriving home earlier than usual find his wife in bed with his brother. She announces that she’d only ever been with him for his money, his brother says he never wants to see him again and they throw him out of his own house. He’s depressed. He loved his job and was devoted to his marriage, thought his brother was his best friend. He drives around aimlessly for a few days, sleeping in his car until he reaches a small seaside town where he checks in to a hotel with a view of the beach and a long fishing pier extending into the sea. That night he decides he will live through one more day but will end his now meaningless existence when the sun goes down if God does not send him some sort of sign to carry on. He sleeps fitfully and early in the morning in a fog shrouded dawn walks the length of the pier. At its extreme end he can’t see back to the land, in fact, he can’t see more than three feet in front of him. That’s when he hears someone crying. He thinks this could be it, this could the sign he asked God for if, in the depths of his pain he can ease the the wounded heart of another.

He follows the sound until a shape begins to materialise in the mist. It’s a woman, clearly paraplegic in a motorised wheel chair she can operate by pushing a stick with her chin. He approaches and tells her his story and listens to her as she speaks of the frustration and pain of being disabled and unloved in a difficult world. She admits she was trying to kill herself but that she couldn’t build up enough speed in her chair to break through the rails at the pier’s edge or to throw herself over them into the grey sea. After a time she tells the man that she thinks he was sent to her by God to stop her killing herself and asks a favour.

‘What’s that?’ he asks.

‘Could you hug me please? I’ve never been hugged.’ And he does, picking her up from her chair, embracing her and allowing his heart to speak to hers.

A short while later she makes another request: “Could you kiss me? I’ve never been kissed.” He thinks that everyone deserves at least one kiss in life and though she is no beauty gives her a tender, if chaste, kiss on the lips.

The fog is even heavier when after a bit more conversation she blushes and says to him ‘You can refuse if you like, but would give me a French kiss?”

‘Let me guess,’ he responds, ‘you’ve never been French kissed.’

‘No.’

Though he does not relish the prospect he thinks that if God really sent him this sign, put him to this task he should see it through, that if he can bring himself to entwine his tongue with hers he will be well on his way to being a happier, better person than he was when he left his hotel room or at any other time in his life. Shutting his eye tightly he kisses her the way long-parted, doom-struck lovers kiss in the movies. Nobody watching would know that he is not filled with passion for her. He thinks that’s the end of things.

‘I’m just going to say this. Earlier this morning I thought I’d be dead at this point so I’ve nothing to lose really. Will you screw me, here, on the pier, in the fog. Then we can go our separate ways. I’ll be a new woman and we never need see each other again.’

He’s taken aback. ‘You’re sure that’s what you want? To be screwed here in the fog? That’s not something you can undo.’ He can’t believe she’s asking this of him, that God would go so far.

‘Yes, I’m sure’ she responds.

He asks her three more times if she’s positive and every time her answer is ‘yes.’

He looks around and sees they are still isolated in the now wool-thick fog. They may as well be the only inhabitants of an island far out at sea they are so separate from the rest of the world. He thinks, sighs and grits his teeth. He approaches her and lifts her from her chair and then, with a grunt, throws her over the edge of pier, hears but cannot see her enter the water and says ‘there, now you’re screwed.’

Doubled over as I was with laughter I didn’t immediately notice my companion was silent. Thinking she was my intellectual equal it never occurred to me she’d fail to see how funny this story really is or that laughing at it would demonstrate her own capacity to move beyond her misfortune. I realised something was wrong as she began to back away from the table knocking into a couple seated behind her and nearly upsetting their table-full of hot drinks. Pale, she stared at me and said one single word in a quiet, steely tone before rolling out of the shop with tears streaming down her face.

‘Bastard.’

And there I was, alone again in the stinking, ignorant crowd left only with the growing realisation that, without intending to, I told her a version of a fairy tale she’d had no right to hope for with an ending she wasn’t capable of learning from.

I am sorry I hurt the poor thing’s feelings even if it was ridiculous of her to think what she did. Cripples deserve sympathy and consideration, I still believe that, but what happened to me does go to show that you can’t give them too much, or be too nice to them. If you do they misunderstand their own place in the world and what kinds of opportunities they can reasonably expect in life.

Besides, admit it. It’s okay, you can be honest. You’re only admitting the truth to yourself. If you didn’t laugh at the joke you wanted to. Either that or you’re some sort of cripple.