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You could’ve fallen or—”
    â€œNo, I’m fine, I just—well, I just found out last week, and
the doctor said it was no big deal, really, it’s a small thing. Like you said, I have to pay attention. That’s all.”
    He sat down at the lunchroom table and thoughtfully stroked the corners of his moustache. He was no dummy. I’d just about killed someone on his watch, and I was blameless, as only a teenager can be. Generously, he gave me my only chance to repair the damage.
    â€œBe straight with me. I mean it. Are you sure you’ve got this, this eye problem? I mean, it’s okay if it was an accident; accidents happen. Just tell me the truth.”
    Although we sat across from one another, I couldn’t look him in the eye. I fixed my gaze past him, to the pinups on the wall. Miss June’s smile mocked me knowingly.
    â€œIt’s true, Greg. It was an accident.”
    â€œJesus. There’s nothing they can do for you?”
    A lump of guilt grew in me. I was deceiving someone I admired. I didn’t want undeserved sympathy, just an excuse. Underneath it all, I could even feel a smaller but heavier uncertainty—maybe something really was wrong with my eyes. The reality flickered and then was gone. I was fourteen and immortal, part of the new order. Nothing could be wrong, so I supersized my lie.
    â€œNo, there’s nothing they can do. The damage isn’t something they can reverse,” I said. “But really, Greg, it’s no big thing at all. I’m not getting worse or anything. I just have to pay attention, like you said.”
    Greg looked both sympathetic and confused.
    â€œBut how are you supposed to pay attention to things you don’t see?”

    From that moment on, his was the question that blindness would demand I answer.
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. For the first time, I was truthful. “I’ll have to figure it out, I guess.”
    Although I never drove the forklift again, I steered clear of Pat. He didn’t give a shit if I was Helen Keller. He didn’t believe the forklift incident was an accident. Greg did his best to manage things and reminded Pat of his luck.
    â€œYou’re a fortunate man,” Greg would say. “Bumbleton could’ve crushed your little legs. Jesus, they’re already too cute and stubby to look at.”
    Greg hired me back the following year. Pat wasn’t with the company any more. A few months before I returned to work, grade ten under my belt and my clumsiness on the rise, Pat had delivered a liner and parts to a pool site in Maple Ridge. Backing his van up to the hole, Pat somehow clipped the customer’s house and took a chunk for a drive. It was Pat’s second major screw-up with backing into things. Greg fired him, and said even Bumbleton can spot a house.
    Once I had imagined a summer of fortune for myself. I had hoped the simple difference of my job could race me towards my adulthood, even push me into a world some dead-end McJob could never serve-up. I thought I’d start by driving a forklift, and soon enough I’d be driving out of town for good and ahead with things. It may have been short-sighted at the time, but a future, I thought, could be found in a warehouse. It was true enough.
    Instead of wealth, I found another fortune, the kind that is told. Somehow I’d bumbled into my fate as a blind man
before it was upon me. The story of my blindness began as a lie. Today I see the fortune I told for myself, and I see it in hindsight. That is nearing the only vision I have left. Maybe Pat’s problem was something opposite. He really needed to look back more often, and more thoroughly. Tough luck, I guess. The guy never did get the hang of reverse.

Pontiac Rex
    Not seeing something, not seeing an indication of
something, does not lead automatically to the conclusion
that there is nothing.
    â€”Hans Blix, The Guardian , June