I'm sure this change in Chapter numbers/sequence is going to confuse some. It confused me. I got ahead of my self.
Many thanks once again to resourceress7 (Marisa Bennett) for her words of encouragement, suggestions, and corrections.
Chapter Four – Crawling Before Walking
Auggie sat in a hard plastic chair at a table in the now almost familiar therapy room. On the other side of the table sat the irritating woman – a woman who treated him as if he were a child rather than the man he was.
"What's this?" she asked as he felt a cold metal object being placed in his right hand.
Once again he sat wordlessly and placed the spoon on the plastic plate to his right. This was freaking boring and did not get him closer to knowing how to use it to eat properly now and without making him appear inept.
Another metal object was placed in his hand. He carefully nested the fork on top of the spoon which lay across the table knife.
The sound of something being dumped out on the table reached his ears. His left hand was placed on top of a wooden box, as a wooden block was positioned in his other hand. He sighed exasperatedly. Not this again. He manipulated the object in his hand – a rhombus – now to locate that shape on the sorting cube. Good Gawd, this was childish. His nieces and nephews had mastered this by the time they were three years old. Then a realization hit him: in his mind, his brothers' children would always be the way they'd appeared to him the last time he'd seen them, well over a year ago. His heart sank
He sighed and deliberated for a moment and decided that for once he'd humor her and comply with this demeaning activity. His left hand skimmed the various surfaces of the wooden block, quickly considering each opening in turn. When he thought that he'd located the proper opening, he brought his right hand over to meet his left. He easily inserted the wooden block in the slot. He felt something brush against the back of his right hand. Another damn shape. Reluctantly he grasped the block and maneuvered it about between his fingers. An octagon? Once again he felt the sides of the larger hollow block. He tried to insert the block in his hand into what he thought was the proper hole. Damn. Not there. With increasing frustration Auggie's fingers fumbled over the sides once again.
Just as he thought that he'd located the proper slot, his hands froze and his body stiffened at the sound of the door to his right opening. The infuriating woman spoke briefly to the intruder, who crossed the room and turned on a water faucet to his left. Involuntarily Auggie turned his head to assess the new person so close to him in the room. This gave him no new information, and the lack of a defined person before him once again caught him off-guard. He could not assess the age, height, weight or status of this person. He listened intently as soft footsteps traveled to the other end of the room. He paid close attention as this person opened and then closed what sounded like a refrigerator and then that sound was quickly followed by some clattering noises. A plate? A cup? A glass? Damnit, what was going on back there?
As he become increasingly conscious that he had no good idea of what this anonymous person behind him was doing, his anxiety level mounted. Every fiber of his being came to razor sharpness as years of needing to know what was going on around him in order to survive sprang into action. Once again, the fight-or-flight response grew in him uncontrollably. This time he was not able to control his reaction. With a cry of frustration, the block in his hand flew across the room landing with a soft clunk some ways in front of him and then skittered off. He reached out on the table and found the rest of the blocks and sent them flying into his nothingness. A pen, a clipboard, and a plastic coil band of keys soon followed. Then he swept his arms across the table, sending the tableware to his right and the sorting block to his left clattering to the floor. He swung to his left in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. He choked back another cry of anguish and fought to control his rapid breathing.
"Okay Anderson, that's it. Get a grip. The time for raging tantrums is over. I understand that you're frustrated and afraid."
His teeth clenched, he let out an exasperated groan.
"And I have an idea of what you might be afraid of – becoming dependent."
He swung around in the chair to face her. The taut muscles in his jaw relaxed just a bit, and then tightened once again. How dare she presume to know what he was feeling?
"Ah," her tone softened a tad. "Let me tell you that if you continue to resist what we're trying to teach you, you won't build the skills that you need, and you really will become dependent. You need to let go of all this anger. It's counterproductive. We are here to teach you how to live independently and confidently, not how to become dependent on others. You are a smart man; use that brilliance to learn what we have to teach you. Yes, some of the tasks right now seem childish – the first time you learned to do these things by yourself you were a child. But, now you need new ways to do them, starting with tasks that used to be so simple; like an infant you have to learn to crawl before you can walk. Not literally, but I'm sure that you understand what I mean."
He was taken aback by both her words and her tone. His mind reeled as if she'd slapped his face. It had been a long time since anyone had dared to speak to him like that. Not since his mother had caught him coming in drunk the night of his high school graduation.
"Actually, right now, I am going to ask you to literally crawl. I'm tired of picking up after you. Get down on your hands and knees and find everything that you've thrown or swiped off the table this morning."
"And what if I just get up and walk out of here?" he asked indignantly.
"If you can locate the door and make your way to it without assistance, and without falling on your ass over the stuff on the floor, I'll take it as a good session. But from here on, if you throw it, or deliberately knock it off the table, you ARE picking it up."
He didn't fully understand his motivation to do so – perhaps it was her firm, no nonsense tone, perhaps it was that she had called him a man, perhaps it was that she indicated that she really understood him – but Auggie took to his knees and alternately swept one hand and then the other before him and to his side as he traversed the area between the table and the end of the room and back. As he located each object he identified it and held it out to her.
She took each one with a soft, "Thank you."
He should have felt humiliated, but he did not. For one of the few times since he'd been injured, he felt a small glimmer of pride, of accomplishment. "I don't think that's everything. Could you give me a little assistance here?"
She seemed to hesitate a moment, then said, "Not everything landed on the floor."
Slowly he rose to his feet and gingerly felt his way around the room. As his hand brushed past the door, he momentarily thought of walking out. No. Suddenly understanding dawned in him: he had been gaining knowledge of this room, even in his earlier state of panic. Now he knew that he had a point to make – to himself and to the infuriating woman in the room with him. His hand continued to ghost along the wall.
He bumped into a bank of waist high cabinets at the end of the room. Sweeping his right hand across the countertop, he examined every item his fingers located and named it. He even opened the plastic drawers of the cabinets he encountered, and announced their contents to her after a brief assessment. When he got to the counter in front of the window he announced, "There's a big window in this wall. I think that the sun is out today."
"How can you tell?" she said with a bit of surprise.
"The air current is slightly different here, and it's way warmer here than in the other part of the room." He moved a few paces to the left. "There should be a sink just about here. Yeah, there it is," he proclaimed as his left hand touched the porcelain clad steel basin. He turned and took several steps into the room, slowly arcing his right arm before him. When his thigh came in contact with the table, he allowed his left hand to brush along the table's edge as his right arm continued to slowly sweep before him. Once he had located the chair he sat, a self-satisfied smirk graced his features.
"This table and chair are about in the center of this room. There's more behind me, but I'm getting tired of proving a point. I know one thing, there are chocolate chip cookies somewhere back there. Any chance of you bringing me one as a reward? Or, are you going to continue tormenting me?"
He heard her retreat to the far end of the room, take two items from an upper cabinet, open the refrigerator door, take something from it, and close the door back. Shortly he heard her place two items before him.
"There's a plate with two cookies on it about a hand's width in front of you and a glass of milk at your two o'clock."
Carefully inching his right hand forward with his fingers slightly curled under, he located the plate and picked up a cookie and took a bite. After a few bites, he located the glass in a similar manner and took a swig. For the next few minutes he savored the cookies and milk. They were just about the best thing he'd tasted since the last meal he'd had before leaving for Iraq.
"Thanks. They were very tasty. Cooking class?"
"Yeah," she said with a tinge of surprise. "How …?"
"I've smelled good aromas on this wing, definitely not the stuff from the mess hall. And I didn't think that you'd let us out of here without teaching us how to get around in a kitchen. Maybe not gourmet stuff, but sustenance sort of meals. If you'd started out with something practical, I might not have been so scared and angry for so long. All I need to know is how not to be a total burden on whichever of my siblings is going to get custody of me now."
"What do you mean? Our goal is to have you ready to go back to work when you get out of here!"
"Work? Ha! All I've ever known is how to be a soldier, an officer. Well, that and computers and electronics. Don't see much future in either of those."
"You really need to be talking to your psychiatrist about these things,"
"Don't like the bastard. All he wants to do is talk about my feelings. Hell, I'm scared. I'm frustrated. I'm lonely. I'm supposed to be happy that I'm now blind? I haven't been happy since … Well, let's just say I haven't been happy in a long time. How is getting in touch with all of that going to make my life better? It's not. I had goals. I'll never reach them now."
"What were your goals?"
"Career-wise, those goals have to remain private. Classified. One day I hoped for a wife, maybe a family. A house in the suburbs. I don't see any of that happening."
"Maybe not that classified career goal, but there's no reason the rest of it can't happen. And you can set new career goals."
"HA! Who's going to want to be with a blind man with no job?" The niggling fear of no longer being attractive to women caused his heart to sink again. He'd always been able to get a woman, but would the ladies still love a blind guy?
"I shouldn't tell you this, but I'm married to a very successful man who just happens to be blind. He has a high-powered and high-paying career. I don't have to work, but I want to be here to help men like you become men like my husband – well-adjusted, successful, and mostly independent."
"Mostly independent?"
"Well, he does have some limitations, like he can't drive, he asks me to help him match his shirts with ties, and in unfamiliar places we often walk together using sighted guide techniques. But then there are things that I need help with. I'm a bit vertically challenged and can't reach things on the top shelf. He can. And he's amazing with computers, so he's my live-in tech support."
Auggie's eyebrows shot up briefly at the mention of computers. How much of that could he really do now? He put that thought away for the moment.
"Did he lose his sight after you were married?"
"No. He'd been blinded before I met him."
"Then you chose him? Didn't just stick with him after?" Auggie's heart beat a little faster - was that anxiety? Hope? Would anyone ever choose him now?
"Yes, I chose him. And I'm lucky to have him. He's a wonderful husband and father to our children."
"What's he do?" Auggie asked timidly.
"He's a lawyer. We met while he was in law school. I was one of the people who read books onto tape for him, or sometimes read things to him in person if they weren't available in Braille or already on tape or CD and he needed the information quickly."
"A lawyer, huh. Two of my brothers are lawyers. It's not something that I have an interest in."
"Don't have to. There are lots of other fields where blind folks can be successful. You said that you liked computers and electronics. You can still do that sort of stuff."
"How?" Auggie asked incredulous. He wanted to believe this woman, but after the hell he'd been going through, the things she'd just told him about having a career and a relationship hardly seemed real.