Leaving Brooklyn Read Online Free Page A

mother called it, and kept the bad eye open, that I could see through the edges of solid objects like pillows or doors—see the margin of what was on the other side of the door. And so I squinted and peered through the corners of my pillow to see bits of the blue and orange clowns and dancers stenciled on my wall in repeating yellow squares. I could make the figures jiggle and dissolve, and see parts that were out of range when I had both eyes open. With my good eye shut I could even see a different design of leafy branches through the casement window, and different patterns of stars, maybe the stars as they were in another time or place. I could vault out of my time and place and be somewhere else in history, in the world.

    This was not pure fancy: the center of my vision was in front of my “good” left eye rather than over the bridge of my nose; it follows that my world was two inches to the left of everyone else’s. But logic doesn’t nullify anything, it is only a little breeze. I did have the power to glimpse what was behind things. And because these secrets were mine alone, I was greedy for them. What is politely called curiosity in children is greed. The objects of greed are shaped by what we feel we have in short supply. I was told I didn’t see in the regular way, so I had to acquire special sights. I had to know what was behind everything. I had to peel whatever I saw.
    If I knew something others did not, the opposite was true too. What would be forever denied me was “depth perception.” I could see nothing extraordinary through the viewing machines at the top of the Empire State Building, while others gasped at the panorama. With only one eye, they told me, everything was flat and in the same plane, and therefore I was doomed to live in a flattened version of the world. This was painful to hear, and not true. I saw gradations of distance. I was a good judge of distances, a whiz at punch ball in the streets. It might be true for them , when they shut one eye, but I had learned to compensate. This fact an eye doctor volunteered years later, though I couldn’t remember consciously learning anything of the kind. My eyes and hands and body learned. But if I had indeed invented distance and proportion for myself, who could know it better?
    There was something people saw with their two eyes pressed against those machines, though, and the girl I was feared she would die without knowing what it was, because no one who had it could explain it, just as you can describe a landscape to a recently blinded person, but where are the words to explain “cloud” or “shadow” or the act of seeing them to someone blind from birth? And even if I suddenly had it, I might not recognize it or like it, just as some people blind from birth and suddenly given sight cannot make out the world at all, cannot reconcile the light and dark patches they see with their inner vision or comprehension
of objects, and take weeks or months to accept the shapes and patterns of the world, or maybe never do, and live longingly in exile from their own perceptions.
    Most things cannot be explained unless the listener has some prior inkling of them, which doesn’t augur well for traditional forms of education. We learn what we have the nerve paths prepared to receive—grammar and justice and cause and effect for all, music or quantum physics for a few. Socrates believed his students had an innate, if dormant, grasp of the principles of geometry and logic and justice, but formal learning in Brooklyn was very far from Socratic; each student was a tabula rasa on which teachers doggedly inscribed four reasons for British imperialism, three reasons for the outbreak of World War I, three products of Brazil.
    Whatever depth perception there was in Brooklyn was flattened by the collective will, but I couldn’t know that. I knew only that I would never see depth as others saw it. And so I persistently