be trying to hold the room in place. My bookcase, my desk, my chairânothing was quite as solid as it was supposed to be. Every object looked like it had lost its outer coating. As though it had become a suggestion of itself, a mock-up for a rehearsal of some kind, until my real bedroom was ready to return. Iâd always been especially proud of my trophies: the batters so dignified and balanced in their stances; the basketball players rising up effortlessly into jump shots; the gavel, for adebate tournament Iâd won, poised at an angle as though it were rapping a bench for order. But now they just looked like trophies in a store window, with no substance behind them, no real victories holding them up.
I kept looking around my room, testing. My eyes still tracked together, and with any movement of my left eye, my right eye balked with pain. There was the swampy heaviness of the lid, the battered feeling of the eye itself, and that interior pain, no longer as piercing as a constant bee sting, but thicker, with a kind of dull vibration. The doctors had given me only Extra Strength Tylenol, which seemed like a very bad joke.
Didnât I at least get drugs?
On the other hand, no drugs meant the injury really couldnât be that bad. Two Tylenol sufficed for a hangover from too many Scorpion Bowls at the Hong Kong. Maybe the strangeness of my room was just a trauma jet lag, just the shock of everything that had happened and a bad nightâs sleep. The ER doctor had mentioned something about an adjustment period, the brain adapting in fascinating ways, but I hadnât really been listening. I wasnât interested in adjustments.
But as I emerged from my room and came to the top of the stairs, it was clear there wouldnât be a choice. I could see each stair clearly enough, but couldnât gauge the drop between them. There was just a series of lines, the distance between them getting smaller as they reached down to the foyer. They looked like a suggestion of stairs, a possibility of stairs, but nothing I could trust. I waited, like a skier at the top of an expert trail, trying to visualize my descent. It didnât matter how many times Iâd taken the stairs not bothering to look. Matt, who was more than six feet tall by the time he was thirteen, had always been the one who had difficulty with the stairs, the one whose perpetual effort to catch up with his own body generally reminded me of how good I had it physically. But now the stairs looked treacherous, unfixed, fantastical. I gripped the wrought-iron banister.My foot dangled. The plush blue carpeting received the ball, then the heel, the iron of the banister solid under my palm. It wasnât until my foot struck carpet that I knew for certain where the stair was, but the next stair was still in question. It didnât matter that memory and common sense told me each stair was the same distance down. My brain trusted my eyesâand my eyes said there was no telling where the next stair might be, no telling if I would step and not find anything solid, no telling if my foot wouldnât just keep falling, pulling the rest of my body down. I took another step, resting both feet on the same stair. I just needed to listen to my eyes less, to trust my other senses more. Appearance
was not
reality. I could almost feel my brain struggling to adapt. Vision no longer knew best. It could no longer be in charge.
Maybe this is what the Pakistani doctor meant when heâd explained to me that Iâd lost binocular stereoscopy, the only means of perceiving depth. He said a normal person uses his eyes in concert: the disparity between the information his two eyes relay to his brain enabling him, by a kind of instant triangulation, to locate objects in space. Without the use of both eyes, a person can no longer perceive depth; he can only judge it with the help of depth cues, the same cues everyone uses instinctively: the size of known objects (bigger
I kept looking around my room, testing. My eyes still tracked together, and with any movement of my left eye, my right eye balked with pain. There was the swampy heaviness of the lid, the battered feeling of the eye itself, and that interior pain, no longer as piercing as a constant bee sting, but thicker, with a kind of dull vibration. The doctors had given me only Extra Strength Tylenol, which seemed like a very bad joke.
Didnât I at least get drugs?
On the other hand, no drugs meant the injury really couldnât be that bad. Two Tylenol sufficed for a hangover from too many Scorpion Bowls at the Hong Kong. Maybe the strangeness of my room was just a trauma jet lag, just the shock of everything that had happened and a bad nightâs sleep. The ER doctor had mentioned something about an adjustment period, the brain adapting in fascinating ways, but I hadnât really been listening. I wasnât interested in adjustments.
But as I emerged from my room and came to the top of the stairs, it was clear there wouldnât be a choice. I could see each stair clearly enough, but couldnât gauge the drop between them. There was just a series of lines, the distance between them getting smaller as they reached down to the foyer. They looked like a suggestion of stairs, a possibility of stairs, but nothing I could trust. I waited, like a skier at the top of an expert trail, trying to visualize my descent. It didnât matter how many times Iâd taken the stairs not bothering to look. Matt, who was more than six feet tall by the time he was thirteen, had always been the one who had difficulty with the stairs, the one whose perpetual effort to catch up with his own body generally reminded me of how good I had it physically. But now the stairs looked treacherous, unfixed, fantastical. I gripped the wrought-iron banister.My foot dangled. The plush blue carpeting received the ball, then the heel, the iron of the banister solid under my palm. It wasnât until my foot struck carpet that I knew for certain where the stair was, but the next stair was still in question. It didnât matter that memory and common sense told me each stair was the same distance down. My brain trusted my eyesâand my eyes said there was no telling where the next stair might be, no telling if I would step and not find anything solid, no telling if my foot wouldnât just keep falling, pulling the rest of my body down. I took another step, resting both feet on the same stair. I just needed to listen to my eyes less, to trust my other senses more. Appearance
was not
reality. I could almost feel my brain struggling to adapt. Vision no longer knew best. It could no longer be in charge.
Maybe this is what the Pakistani doctor meant when heâd explained to me that Iâd lost binocular stereoscopy, the only means of perceiving depth. He said a normal person uses his eyes in concert: the disparity between the information his two eyes relay to his brain enabling him, by a kind of instant triangulation, to locate objects in space. Without the use of both eyes, a person can no longer perceive depth; he can only judge it with the help of depth cues, the same cues everyone uses instinctively: the size of known objects (bigger
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