Blind Man's Bluff by James Tate Hill

Author:James Tate Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2021-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

Worries about where you’ll be next year grow by the day. You also fear that your modest strides toward independence won’t travel with you to a new town. Your spartan diet of eggs, cereal, and canned soup isn’t a menu you’d like to continue deep into your twenties, but for nearly a year you’ve obtained these groceries without assistance. Armed only with directions you received over the phone, you found a place to get your hair cut—even if the student stylists at the beauty school haven’t been the most consistent stewards of your sideburns and left part. It’s the terror of starting over, of once again having to rely on others, that compels you to place a call to student disability services.

It’s a stab in the dark, but you’re curious if technology has come any farther from where it was a few years ago. Your sophomore year of college, the director of the Learning Center led you to what seemed to be a storage closet. With the flourish of a magician’s big reveal, the elderly, hunchbacked woman showed you a computer with several components attached, an ungainly setup a 1970s police chief might refer to as the mainframe. She pressed a few buttons on the keyboard, clicked the mouse. HAL 9000 began to read in a slow, cadence-free voice more primitive than the narrator of your talking dictionary. It took you a full minute to recognize the passage as content from your textbook for biological psychology. After futile hours trying to decipher the mispronounced names of neurotransmitters, you pleaded for the return of your human reader.

Your prior interactions with this university’s disability services didn’t go well. The meeting with the director while you were in high school, the one who advised you to aim for a report card of straight C’s, dissuaded you from coming here as an undergrad. More recently, at the start of this master’s program, the office gave you a referral to a student reader for the handouts and books you couldn’t obtain on cassette. The second week of the semester, the girl with whom they put you in touch phoned to say she was super stressed with her own classes and wouldn’t be able to get your reading done that week, leaving you to read twelve pages of poems with your magnifier, word by word, letter by letter. In class, you had a lot more to say about the shorter ones. The Bible-thin pages of your critical theory compendium, the font not quite as large as the ingredients on a pack of chewing gum, went unread.

Three semesters later, you’re counting doors in an unfamiliar building until you reach the office of the cheerful woman you’ve spoken to on the phone. Her detailed directions suggest she’s used to students with less sight than you have.

“Technology’s come a long way just in the last few years,” says the orange-haired woman, who reminds you of a young Mrs. Garrett from The Facts of Life. Often when someone knows about your disability before you meet, their warmth is layered with condescension, but not this woman.

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