Beep. David WanczykЧитать онлайн книгу.
there, I crouched into a third baseman’s posture: knees bent, head tilted, totally ready to get in front of something I’d never see coming. It occurred to me—things occurred to me a lot while I couldn’t see—that there was something metaphorical about being a blind third baseman. Stuff can pass by without you knowing it, or surprise you and hit you in the throat. But if I acted ready, hands in front, maybe I’d be ready.
During the game against Long Island, I had six hit my way, and I fielded three of them before the batter scored. Once I stopped bobbling a ball, I’d hold it away from my body and shout “up,” but regardless of the result, I was always both relieved and frustrated at the end of a play (finding a beep ball feels like finally unsticking a pants zipper).
Having a successful impact on a game you can’t see, meanwhile, an impact which none of the other competitors can see either, leads to storytelling, and blind men congratulated me on great plays that definitely weren’t. Sometimes, because of the speed of the beep or the sound of the scuffling, they did know that one of their teammates had achieved something special. On the flipside, as an inexperienced player, it was hard for me to figure when I’d made a huge blunder. A ball through the legs or agonizingly out of reach isn’t necessarily an error, but high-level players and coaches will tell you that snafus are certainly avoidable. So while some of the pressure’s off, any old unplayable poke down the line can sprout into a myth about so-and-so’s lack of mobility, lack of effort, lack of hearing prowess, lack of human goodness. Blame explodes, and everyone’s potentially right about his interpretation of a play.
“Put twelve blind guys in a room,” Ron told me, “and everyone’s a king. No one can tell them any different.”
One of my few triumphs during the Long Island game was also a humbling failure of agility. In the field, I heard “four,” and the beep came closer. I moved one step to my left and got the ball off my nose. I felt a little moistness like I was about to bleed. This is what I’d been waiting for. Suffering! Authenticity! Beep Ball Passion! (But also Helplessness! And Nostril Pain!). I could take one off the schnozz and live to tell about it, even if I hadn’t made the cleanest play in the world.
Beep ball always includes this mix of impressive athletic straining and comic relief. As exciting as it is to watch three or four guys dive, one after another, the game can also be a blooper video. Missed dives can seem awesome or goofy, but because the fielders don’t know how close they are to collision or to collecting the ball, there’s added urgency. Alfred Hitchcock once said that “surprise” is a sudden explosion and “suspense” is a bomb under a table that the characters don’t know is there. Beep ball’s characters hear the ticking and know the bomb’s close, and every play is a rush to defuse it.
Scratched up, I finished the inning, and the other players said “Where you at?” to the bench as we ran off. The volunteers yelled, “Keep coming, keep coming.” They clapped their teammates in, but April McKaig, the Athens coach, grabbed me.
“C’mon, sweetie,” she said as she took me by the elbow, and I felt, for one split second, the comfort and terror of total reliance. As far as she was concerned, I was blind, and until out number three of inning number six, I was going to stay that way.
• • •
At the World Series, people often treated me as though I couldn’t see. When I bought a Dr. Pepper from a concession girl who guided my hand to the can, it seemed rude to correct her. Others would open doors for me or move into that slightly higher register some people use when talking to those they perceive as weaker. Bruce Stewart, a volunteer for the Indy Thunder, even said, “I can’t help noticing your visual impairment.”
The thing is, I don’t have one, not really. But I do have a pretty severe strabismus—the dreaded wandering eye. When I’m tired, I look like I’m trying to scope out my own left sideburn, and as for actual vision trouble, doctors have told me that my brain fuses images to make up for the fact that I’m not apprehending the thing that’s directly in front of my nose. This leads to some weird moments of near–double vision. While I’m reading, I can see a wall hanging to my left and the right side of the book, but not the left side of the book. On top of that, I’m color blind to a certain degree, and I don’t always see in 3-D (the movies with the protruding fireballs never do much for me). Rembrandt reportedly had this stereoblindness: the eyes don’t work well together and the scene flattens.
I actually don’t know for sure whether my sight is different from the average Joe’s, though. I’m officially 20/20, or thereabouts, and the only troublesome impairment—beyond sensitivity to light—is cosmetic. A doctor warned me once that my adapted brain might not know how to deal with a surgically realigned left eye, so I’ve stuck with the one God gave me, not wanting vanity to rob me of any of my sight. Plus, there’s nothing more unappealing to me than the idea of a scalpel slicing my eye flesh.
Mostly I get along, but I am self-conscious about looking straight at other people. In high school, things were worse, as is the case with most unconventionalities. I got called “Lazy Eye,” and one comedic genius would squint at me for a full minute at baseball practice, chasing me around as he impersonated the way I looked in bright sunlight. My eye, I’ve figured, was probably the way some sophomore girls described me in the concise cruelty of adolescence. I wasn’t the tall guy, or the silly one, or the dude tooling around in the sweet Mercury Topaz.
“Oh, him,” the sophomore hotty might have said to her hotty compatriot, their eyes peering out in perfect, devastating alignment.
As I read—slowly—I’ll always underline descriptions of characters’ eyes, and no line ever got to me as much as this one from Jane Eyre: “His eye wandered, and had no meaning in its wandering: this gave him an odd look, such as I never remembered to have seen. For a handsome and not an unamiable-looking man, he repelled me exceedingly.”
I’ve wondered if my eye has sometimes given people a hard-to-put-a-finger-on-it feeling that I’m unusual to be around. And more importantly, I’ve worried that there’s serious degeneration of my vision on the horizon. Maybe the brain will give up ten years from now, tired of holding together panel one and panel three of the herky-jerky animation in which panel two is missing. Or maybe, in a few months, I’ll see a world of peripheries with no center.
Many people at the tournament asked me what I was really looking for as I reported on beep ball. What was my goal? I’d tell them how fascinating I found the sport and the stories of the people involved, that’s all. I figure they asked me because they wondered if I had a personal connection to blindness. Thankfully I don’t. But I do sometimes catch it glancing at me out of the corner of my eye.
• • •
As I led Athens to a 13–1 loss against Long Island, Ching-kai Chen and Taiwan Homerun battled the formidable Rehab Hospital of Indiana X-Treme, and as we rounded noon on the first day of the series, the sun and the tempers heated up.
Chen lost most of his vision in the instant his motorcycle collided with the car of an elementary school teacher back in 2009. He’d been a star handball player, and in pictures from before the accident he leaps diagonally toward the goal, holding the ball in his left hand high above his head. With his shock of black hair, he cuts a reckless figure as he flies.
In the motorcycle accident, which occurred during his sophomore year in physical education courses at Changhua Normal University, Chen suffered fractures to his right cheekbone and a traumatic brain injury, as well as some temporary damage to his hearing. He was found to have severely deteriorated vision.
Chen had always been athletic growing up—flexible, fast—and because of his handball experience, he has a talent for leaping around converging bodies. But he did this over and over again during the first day of the 2013 tournament, alarmingly. While I saw Chen avoiding collision like a stuntman, his teammate, Rock Kuo, says that’s not always the case: “He has good physical conditions; however, sometimes he bumps into others like a bull in order to catch a ball. This has made other players afraid of being hurt by him.” He wasn’t bumping into anyone in the series, though, and that drew attention his way. Chen routinely treated