In public, I often feel as if I’m performing my disability: People see the cane, the ultimate signifier of blindness, and expect me to be blind — which I am, only not in the way they expect. The cane and the word “blind” each suggest a total absence of sight, but then people see me make eye contact with them or read a street sign, and I can feel them (sometimes, in the most painful cases, even hear them) wonder why I’m faking it. I’m actually relieved when I inadvertently do something “authentically” blind, like touching my cane to an obstacle I had no idea was there. Having a disability in public can make you feel like a celebrity: People look, and look away, then look again. I feel like a method actor, immersively training for the role of a lifetime: a blind star. But how should a blind person act? What does real blindness look like?
As I watched the show, I became fascinated by what made Mattfeld look blind, even when she was standing perfectly still. I’d spent plenty of time around actual blind people — many of whom were in fact professional blind people, workers in the blindness industry, whose jobs it was to help the newly blind figure out how to do things like find the bus stop and cook dinner without sight. But now I wanted to understand what someone who acts blind professionally looks like — to observe up close how a convincing performance of blindness is constructed. So I flew to Toronto, to visit the set of “In the Dark” during its second season, to see for myself how it is done.
“I’ll be frank—there were times working on this book when I definitely felt like I was just diving into the water in the dark,” admits novelist Carolina De Robertis. She’s seated in front of a wall of books—“just a fraction, of course, of the books in the house”—in the home she shares with her wife and their two school-age children in Oakland, Calif., for a Zoom call. “At times, the only way I could continue to work on the book and really give it my best as a writer was to secretly call it the Weird Book…. Yes, just put a neon sign over the metaphorical door, it’s weird.”
There’s something to be said for the Blockbuster video store of my youth. It was what we had in the suburbs, and it suited the way my mind worked. I liked encountering movies as physical objects dispersed throughout a large room, arranged down walls (where the new releases went) and along shelves (where the older stuff tarried). I suspect the image of walking through such a room will one day amuse my children, four and two.
Still, I miss browsing those chunky, foxed VHS cases and, I suppose, their leaner DVD heirs. You could wander and let your eyes fall where they fell. The supply of any given video was finite, which meant you sometimes had to figure out a Plan B. You had to swivel, double back, hunker down, tilt your head. You could be aimless in a Wordsworthian way. You could meander. This aisle, maybe, or that one. Couples paralyzed by indecision stood around like Vladimirs and Estragons.
Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight?
Whom else from rapture’s road will you expel tonight?