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BREATHING LIKE
HOUDINI

Chapter One

Crunching and popping past the house back the gravel driveway toward the rear of the estate, I see the cabin where we’ll try conjuring him. I see more than a few people milling about the lawn and others driving in behind me. I feel a cloud cross the sun and hear the wind rise. Something’s coming, they say, a low-pressure system out of the Southwest. But with a séance set to happen this Halloween afternoon here at Heathman Manor in suburban Melrose, Mass., it’s easy to imagine some deeper disturbance, a disruption in the natural order of things written in the scudding clouds film-flickering over tidy houses and the 40 mph gusts of wind animating fallen leaves into scratchy waltzing taffeta.

He would have loved this day, its tempest and melodrama, its mystery. But I doubt any of us in this weekend’s inner circle actually believes he’ll come around for it, in any form or fashion, for any reason. We’re all adults here, after all. Our group includes professors, entrepreneurs, writers, and real-estate brokers. We have creased pants, leather soles, and careers built on sound judgment. And we know that our presumptive ghost of honor’s habit of being a no-show at these annual seances isn’t just him being him but the dead and how they are. So why are we here? Because. A life without wonder is no life at all. He himself taught us that.

Once there was a man who was most alive when he wasn’t breathing. Sometimes he wasn’t breathing in Schenectady. Sometimes he wasn’t breathing in Boston or Buffalo. He was a roadshow escape artist who specialized in freeing himself from underwater death traps, and people flocked to see him perform. For a buck-fifty you got a front-row seat to watch the all-but-naked star of the show take and hold a deep breath, submit to being submerged chained or handcuffed in some odd torture chamber, and, minutes later, having done who knew what to break free and resurface, emerge dripping, vainglorious, and breathing, and breathing and breathing and breathing.

That is if nothing went wrong. Panic was Enemy Number 1. Not breathing all alone in the dark and cold, he was keeping company with death on death’s terms if not for the crowd’s movements and utterances. The way the water all around him conducted sound, he could hear with odd clarity audience members talking, shifting, even gasping one-by-one as they gave up on his challenge to not breathe as long as he. Indeed, he could hear most everything going on in the premium seats; modern-day escape artists who have replicated his getaway from a big, metal, water-filled milk can with the lid screwed down have heard it for themselves: sound borne crystalline on the whisper of still water.

Amid the gasping of audience members' giving up the ghost at his shows, something else could be heard if you listened, something in the interstices, a soundlessness like the silence of wonder or the quietude of faith, a sound so utterly noiseless it forced you to hear its negative presence in the rush of blood inside your own head, like holding a seashell to your ear. The mysterious not-there-ness of some audience members still holding their breath.

Mingling in the water with the sounds of the audience was something else, too, something more than the mere susurrus of fluid and time, something felt as much as heard. It was the beat of his own heart, a human sound that spoke at once to the evanescence and wonder of life, to the magic and uplifting moments as well as the fateful and the sad, to the things that forever abide as well as the things we stand to lose. To the hopeful and the haunted. And in this way his act was electrifying, for him as well as the audience, for holding his breath as he struggled to free himself from some cold, dark, underwater death trap for the entertainment of paying spectators forced him and everyone else in the house to live in the moment.

All this made him no ordinary entertainer, of course. If a musician dropped a chord or an actor forgot a line, the show went on. But if the death cheat dropped his secret key to the handcuffs on his wrists, not breathing might become a terminal condition. His lungs burning, he would meet his body’s physiological breakpoint, arrived to demand that something give, and he might inhale water, and then there would be no getting out of this alive, not anymore. And then his mind would turn to the strange wonderment of the doomed. So this is the day I die.

But that never happened; the curtain always drew back and there he was in all his glory. Cool, fresh air in his lungs. Cold water dripping from goose-pimpled flesh. Flamboyantly triumphant. In such moments the applause must have been intoxicating.

An observer standing behind him as he peered from the gunmetal-gray stage of, say, the Palace Theatre, peering into the haze of the lights turning the cheap seats to soup, would have beheld a spectacle in reverse, seen the glinting, teardrop chandeliers in the lobby, rows and rows of them stalking across the ceiling from the front door to the theater door, seen the ornate gilded scrollwork along the lip of the balcony, hazy in the smoke and lights, seen high up on the wall on either side of the stage, like the winking eye of God, a big, cursive “P” for Palace, seen lit by the stage lights as if afire a small, dark-haired man silhouetted large against the murky human particulate of the convulsing crowd. Viewed from behind, the star’s most striking feature, his gas-blue eyes, would have been hidden, but his slightly nasal tenor would have come through crystal clear. Laydeeez. Annnd. Gentulmennn.

Then, early one Sunday afternoon in autumn 1926, he stopped breathing for good. It happened in Room 401, Bed 2, off Corridor D, at the old Grace Memorial Hospital in Detroit, where he’d lain ill for several days while doctors did all they could, even bringing him takeout to satisfy his odd deathbed yen for Farmer’s Chop Suey. Had the legendary illusionist worked some sort of magic by leaving the earth on the eve of All Saints’ Day? The wife of one of his doctors wondered. But this was no act; this was death its own self.

On the Monday night after his passing, The Detroiter bound for New York City pulled out of Michigan Central Station with a special Pullman car just for transporting the galvanized-steel, bronze-accented coffin containing his remains, and he was taken to New York City and buried in a cemetery in Queens. And that should have been that. But something strange happened and continues happening, to this day. The faithful keep coming to watch him put on a show, gathering like clockwork for annual seances to see if the old death cheat has one last miracle in him, one final, impossible escape.

As I suspect is true of many other people here, I came to this year’s séance not actually expecting to commune with a man who’s spent a century sleeping with the nematodes but, rather, to forget my problems for the weekend. In the span of just 26 months, I’ve been laid off by two daily papers whose parent companies mandated dumping big salaries to save money as the newspaper industry withered and the economy tanked. The first layoff was in Texas. The second was in Wisconsin. Lots of upheaval leading to lots of upheaval. I’m a mess – stunned, ashamed, despairing, and lifeless, barely able to summon energy enough to tie my shoes. What I need is for today’s séance to bring me back to life. Maybe there’s a reason I landed in his hometown after losing the Texas job. I’m looking for something, I think. We all are, all of us here at the séance, and it must be important. Maybe it’s escape we seek. Maybe it’s freedom. Who can say which it is or even which is which? As the poet Mary Oliver once wrote, you have to keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

Parking my rented Chrysler near the cabin, I look at the clock on the dash. 12:25. The séance, spanning the moment of his death, begins in 45 minutes. I look around. The cabin is knotty pinewood. Leading up to it are tiki torches stuck in the hard earth amid rubber moldering corpses and other Halloween decorations. The flames of the torches alternately convulse wildly and burn strangely still. At the door of the cabin, loudspeakers issue forth with Bach’s Piano Concerto Number 1.

Soon someone will light the pillar candles, if they haven’t already. Soon the medium will say “Let’s send him love and light.” Soon we’ll fall silent, hands joined and senses heightened. And soon we’ll almost certainly be disappointed. But, for now, anything is possible. He knows the way here. He does. He came here once before, after all, when he was alive, on a train from Manhattan, bound for this very cabin, to see his friend, the medium Anna Eva Fay. What would someone waiting for him have felt, someone gone to the train station to welcome him? How would you know he was growing near?

The rails would have been like a tuning fork. Carrying forth the vibration of the approaching train. You could feel it if you put your ear to the track. See it if you looked to the horizon where white smoke rising heralded before anything else the approach of a train, like a ghost sent up to do reconnaissance. Headed Northeast through Rhode Island. Northeast from Westerly, from the state line on up to East Greenwich. The landscape sliding past much as it would be 50 years hence, 80 years, 100. No overhead electric wires. No signs of civilization. Only the Great Swamp.

On the water hiding common shiners and brown trout, lily pads floated. He must have seen the firmament arcing huge over that seething dark stew. He might even have seen an egret taking wing or noticed growing here and there, wherever it could, the purple blooms of the pickerel weed or the carnivorous slender pitcher plants that stood ominous and waiting.

Once, long ago, plant specialists thought pitcher plants came from Mars. They seemed so out of this world. They got their start growing in dry sand and there modified their leaves into the shape of a skinny pitcher so as to catch rain. The plant gives the water a sweet smell that attracts insects. It’s a pretty little death trap is what it is. An insect crawls in, slips helplessly down the slick lining of the pitcher’s interior and falls into the water at the bottom, there to drown and dissolve and become food for the plant.

Beyond the swamp, approaching and leaving Kingston, he would have seen fallow fields rolling away to the horizon. Looking out the window of the first-class parlor car, he also would have seen the sprawl of the summer fields. He may have seen the short lines for Narragansett Pier, Newport and Wickford where they joined the main line. And he couldn’t have failed to notice the busy corridor as the train was approaching Providence, where stretches of the line were three or four tracks wide. See the vital brick industrial buildings. See beyond that a vast and busy rail yard. See things that would not always be so. Things that time would change because that’s what time does. A vanishing world under glass. Through the eyes of a vanishing man.

I sink with a metallic rattling scrape into one of the folding chairs spaced carefully around the big circular table at the front of the cabin, and I realize I’m breathing like him. Which is to say not breathing at all.

“Let’s bring him back today,” someone says.

“Yes,” I say, “let’s.”

BY ROBERT L KAISER

Traffic East magazine, 2022

If the light in the baby was a portent, this was the moment foretold. Lying on the couch on a sunny June afternoon in 2021, many years removed from the raw, November day in 1988 when doctors pronounced the odd glow in his eye a sign of the cancer that would blind him, Ray Zylinski brooded. Here was his moment of truth. Would he himself determine the kind of life he led, or would the sightlessness that had informed his world ever since he was too young to make visual memories?

The 33-year-old Zylinski’s reality check had been ushered in over the juddering course of the past month and a half by a new job – a remote insurance claims rep position that had frustrated him for its half-baked assistive technology ever since he started it, on May 10, 2021. The experience had left Zylinski wondering if he should just quit, but how could he? This was his first mainstream, career-track position after working for more than eight years at a nonprofit social-services agency for the blind, Visually Impaired Assistance (VIA), on the edge of downtown Buffalo. The insurance position had been a bear to find and held the promise of tomorrow. It paid better and held potential for promotion. It made him a professional.

Landing a job is never easy, especially when you’re a riddle to prospective employers. You either never hear back about a job application, like when Zylinski applied to teach at a Texas school for the blind, or you have to withdraw from consideration because you discover the pay’s too low, like at that one grocery, or you find your prospective workplace is inaccessible by bus, as he did in pursuit of that warehouse job. Sometimes a company likes you but just can’t quite figure out what to do with you. (Again, with the grocery.) So it was that winning the insurance job had felt great; most of his life, Zylinski had lived for the moment, but this time–this time, by taking a claims rep job with a big company, he had done something keenly mindful of the future, of building something, of promotions and raises and retirement and buying a home for his fiancée, whom he was set to marry October 8, 2022.

Zylinski had wanted this job a lot and worked hard to get it–three rounds of interviews plus workplace-accessibility testing. But then he started working the job. How discouraging the live claims calls had been. That first month, in May, it had hailed golf balls in northeastern Texas, shattering windows in Amarillo and beating up cars and boats all over the place, and as the claims had come in they had grown more and more complex and the callers more and more impatient. It didn’t help that Ray was having trouble with the insurance company’s assistive technology. He had tested on it while interviewing for the job and had found it okay, but, because some things couldn’t be simulated, he hadn’t been able to try them, and now, as developing circumstances suggested a need to giddy-up taking Texas calls, he found himself going too slow. Before all was said and done, the Amarillo hailstorm would generate so many claims–more than 1,000 in two counties–the insurance industry classified it as catastrophic.

Unfortunately, the insurance company didn’t format its records very well, if at all, so the text-to-speech software had nothing to latch onto, nothing giving structure to documents that could help him find his way through policies as the claims-aftermath of the hailstorm was itself becoming a storm. As Zylinski set about scheduling rental vehicles, coordinating accident-scene management, and arranging towing services, he found himself overwhelmed. The insurance company didn’t have VIA’s ingrained awareness of everything a blind employee needs or how it all fit together; there were holes in the fabric that suggested things would unravel still more rather than improve.

This was a problem. Entropy and chaos are anathema to Zylinski, who keeps a bootheel on his disability by imposing order on the world around him and walking through it on his terms–a proclivity that extends even to his wardrobe, for which he has established, to help him get dressed, a color-numbering system. Red? That’s 5. Paisley? 15. Not long after I arrived one morning to interview Zylinski at VIA, I saw him striding toward me down the long corridor to the foyer, swinging his white cane side-to-side over the shiny floor as he walked. It was the first I’d seen him from a distance, and the effect was arresting. He had the posture of a drill sergeant, the build of a power forward, and the poised self-assurance of a politician. “I’m up against the wall here; go right around me, bud,” Zylinski said, not unkindly, to someone headed the other way, a man he heard coming and recognized as blind.

Zylinski knows when someone is near and sometimes even who it is merely by the jangle of a lanyard or the scent of Chanel or the telltale scuff-scuff-scuff of a habitual heel-dragger, and he uses that to his advantage–not only to order his world but also to build and maintain relationships, to know who’s there and how to navigate that person, literally and figuratively. He didn’t have that advantage fielding claims calls. Once, when picking up his fifth live call of the day, Zylinski found himself talking with a belligerent attorney. The lawyer was calling in two claims and was in a hurry, but protocol required Zylinski get information about the other car, the one that had started the pileup, and the attorney wasn’t having it. “I don’t care about the other car,” he said. “Why are you asking me all these questions?”

“I respect that, but I have a job to do and a process to follow,” Zylinski said. “Are you willing to bear with me?”

“No,” the lawyer shot back. “I just want to get my claim through.” Then he let loose this hailstone: “If you could just do your job well, that would be great.”

It was then, mercifully, that Ray’s partner, an experienced agent in Florida, reached in to turn down the gas. “Skip it,” he told Zylinski through his headset. “Just fill in the blanks you can’t get information for with zeros or N/A’s.” The intervention was at once a relief and a blow.

s a term, “workplace accessibility” is an ironic mess, itself so inaccessible it would seem to mean nothing. What workplace, where? Accessible how and to whom? Depends on the employee’s disability and the task. Workplace accessibility solutions range from the simple–an elastic band enabling a person with cerebral palsy to hold a pencil and write–to high-tech electronic equipment operable by head or mouth movements for people who can’t use their hands, according to the Washington D.C. Office of Disability Rights. There are also modified work schedules, reallocated duties, and job restructuring.

In the case of the blind or visually impaired, an employer might make a workplace accessible with Braille printers, computer software that converts text to spoken words, Braille labels on breakroom cabinets–or at least those Dymo labels with words spelled out in raised letters–or an in-out board made of fuzzy felt. But Zylinski and many other visually impaired people have discovered something: While the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act has made considerable progress helping disabled people buy things by requiring ramps and elevators along with the stairs in brick-and-mortar stores and speech-conversion software on retail websites, it’s not done so much to make it easier for the impaired to do their jobs.

Early this year, a study by the American Foundation for the Blind found many visually impaired people in the United States stagnating or failing in their jobs for lack of proper technology because many workplaces remain stuck in the 20th century. In answer to a question about what happens when IT staff at their place of employment can’t accommodate them, only 57 percent said that IT contacts experts or manufacturers while 23 percent said the issue was not resolved. The survey showed that, of those whose IT departments couldn’t help them, 32 percent ended up using their own technology, 25 percent saw their productivity decline, 10 percent asked for a change in responsibilities, and nine percent dropped the issue. Among the study’s recommendations was that it should be workplace policy that “all documents, tools, procedures, and procurement be accessible, usable, and compatible with assistive technology.”

Study participants reported using multiple types of software to do their jobs, and, in a typical work week, many used multiple web browsers and email clients. And there were a variety of accessibility challenges with mainstream technology like videoconferencing, instant messaging, and documents improperly formatted. Most requested accommodations from their employers such as assistive hardware or software or both. But while some received accommodations easily and quickly, others reported long waits, denied requests, or even job reassignment or termination. In fact, about one in five participants reported having considered not requesting a needed accommodation for fear of backlash from their employer, coworkers, or clients.

Zylinski had gotten around all this for years by working at VIA, which understood and fully accommodated the needs of the blind. There, he encountered no obstacles, himself included. Were Zylinski sighted, he may well be president of a bank by now. He’s smart and good with numbers, has impeccable people skills, and is well-liked. When he walked to the front of the building to await the arrival of the visually impaired man he was tutoring, 67-year-old Dennis Moore, Zylinski encountered VIA receptionist Michelle Tsoukatos. She seemed happy to see him. Leaving her counter, she started telling Zylinski about a phone conversation she’d just had with a caller seeking advice.

“Someone’s going to a wedding of a friend who’s getting married and who’s completely blind. She wants to know where she can get Braille wedding cards.”

“If she wants to send me an email, I could maybe make some,” Zylinski said, pointing out that he owns a Braille typewriter and printer.

“Apparently, the wedding is tomorrow.”

Zylinski chuckled. It came out in two quick huffs.

“That’s not something you can get at Walgreen’s,” he said.

Then: “Your client is outside,” Tsoukatos said, and Zylinski pivoted toward the door.

The four-story structure that houses VIA used to be a Borst-Damon truck dealership. Grant money enabled its conversion to an office building. Zylinski pushed open the front door and the heat and humidity of the day hit him in the face. The sun was bright and throwing shade from the boxy but sleek gray building onto the sidewalk and the structure itself, making elastic bands of shadow that would grow and shrink and shift through the day before disappearing for the night. In one of the shadows stood Moore. “Hey, Dennis,” Zylinski said. “How you doin’ bud? You ready?”

Moore says he uses 14-point type so he can read what he prints out. Zylinski thinks he actually uses 18-point. Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem enough; Moore still must dip his nose to within five inches of the page to see what’s there.

Zylinski is tutoring him on fractions and how to proportionally expand or shrink recipes so he can take the business-enterprise assessment and become a food vendor under a program authorized by the Randolph-Sheppard Act. The program provides blind or visually impaired people employment operating cafeterias, snack bars, vending machines, and other concessions sales on federal property.

Zylinski is good at what he does here, but not being able find a workable job outside VIA has, by his own admission and the accounts of family members, his fiancée Michaela Murray, and his best friend Chris Jones, left Zylinski at a crossroads, feeling unable to turn in the direction he wants to go. “When he’s trying to get a different job, he gets really frustrated because it’s really difficult to get a job while visually impaired,” Murray says.

“I know he’s struggling,” Jones says. “He’s trying to find a specific career. The job he has is nice because they have a computer system there that’s for him. But other companies, they have to buy all that stuff. Most don’t have that technology.”

That Zylinski hadn’t yet arrived at a reality check the scope of that brought on by his new insurance job says something about him. For most of his life he has met being blind with a certain defiance. When he was a kid, he liked riding a bicycle with Jones. Zylinski sat in front, pedaling and steering, using Jones’s voice for echolocation to navigate batlike. In this way, Zylinski was able to avoid colliding with cars. “For a blind person, he had no limitations,” Jones recalls. “He wanted to do everything.”

“He has no fear,” Zylinski’s father, Ray Jr., says of his son. “He doesn’t see what’s out there. So, he’s his own person. His own man.”

By his own admission, Zylinski is prideful to a fault, a trait almost certainly traceable to the blindness heralded by that milky glow in his eye when he was just a few months old.

ow odd, the light in the baby. A mother sees her newborn from a hundred angles. She holds him, plays with him, changes his diaper, feeds him, puts him in his crib. She sees the baby tilted this way and that, up and down and from this side and the other. And, in November 1988, as Pat Zylinski was holding Raymond, she looked at him from a certain angle and saw the white glow. Like a ghost, it haunted her. To Pat it was like the redeye you get in some photos, only white. To Ray Jr., it was like a clear little cloud. Milky light of nothing. Sun smudge in a leaden sky.

A day or two later, Pat took Raymond to see the pediatrician and the doctor promptly referred her to a specialist. Pat discovered what the glow was: A sign of retinoblastoma, the childhood cancer that would claim both of little Ray’s eyes before he was old enough to make sighted memories. Which is to say it was the beginning of a story – one about a blind man trying to make it in a society still woefully ill-equipped to accommodate the visually impaired, especially in the workplace; about struggle and ego and conflict and doubt and promise and crisis and love; about the dark and what light gets in.

Retinoblastoma has a high survival rate, but little Ray’s was the bilateral kind, which meant it was in both eyes, and something about it made the doctors want to hurry up his surgery and treatment.

His dad, Ray Jr., was working that day. He was on the crew building one of two new anchor stores at McKinley Mall in Hamburg. The other store would sell home goods. This one would be a department store. The weather was what you might expect on the eve of Thanksgiving in Buffalo. Biting and raw. A cold wind blowing out of a troubled sky. Not snowing but looking like it might. The air damp enough to lick. “Starting into the crappy season,” Ray Jr. recalls

Ray had been doing the same work since arriving at the construction site that morning at 7: digging the hole for the store’s foundation. Despite the weather and the draftiness of the backhoe’s cab and his having gloves with him, he worked the joystick barehanded. The gloves would have kept his hands warm and made them not so achy and stiff at the end of the day. He had been in construction for 16 years and it was taking a toll on his joints. But he needed to feel the ground as directly as possible, needed to feel its contours and textures and surprises, needed to make sure the bucket wasn’t biting into something it shouldn’t, like a power cable. Get hold one of those and you’d fry yourself and everybody around you, and knock out power to the whole mall, to boot.

When Ray had dug the foundation for Dick’s Sporting Goods at McKinley Mall, he had come close to tangling with a cable–so close another member of the crew had to call him off. I wouldn’t dig there, the guy said. That was a close call, and Ray learned a lesson he’d never forget. He also knew to be careful not to hit anyone while he was swinging that bucket around. Digging, swinging to the blind side, the cab on the left while swinging to the right to dump the dirt. Up, down, sideways, dump the bucket. Up, down, sideways, dump the bucket. Up, down, sideways, dump the bucket. It could lull you, which was a recipe for disaster. People were always walking up to check the hole. Engineers wanting to see and ask and talk about the work. Getting too comfortable up there in that cab wasn’t the best thing.

Ray would dig until the hole was five feet deep, then construction crews would put down the footer and pour the walls for the department store. Up, down, sideways, dump the bucket. Up, down, sideways, dump the bucket.

When someone came and grabbed him and told him he had an emergency phone call in the trailer, he put on his gloves as he climbed down off the backhoe.

What could be an emergency, he wondered.

Ray fast-walked the 150 feet from the backhoe to the trailer, climbed the stairs, turned right toward the desk, saw the phone receiver lying there, and picked it up.

“Hello?” he said. “Who is this?”

“Come to the Bryant Street Children’s Hospital,” Ray recalls hearing his wife say. She was sobbing.

“What’s going on?” Ray said.

“Just come here,” Pat said. “Now. It’s about Raymond.”

In the weeks to come, after her son’s cancer diagnosis and surgery, Pat Zylinski couldn’t stop thinking about the photos she had taken to K-Mart to be developed. Like many people, Pat was in the habit of waiting to take four or five used 110-film cartridges together, of saving them up. Now she was afraid to see what they would show. Had she seen the white glow in Ray’s eye as she was shooting the photos? Had she seen it, should she have seen it, early on, when she was shooting the first cartridge or two in this batch? If she had, Ray could have received medical attention sooner. “After he was diagnosed, I was scared to get the pictures, because maybe I would have known at two months.”

Eventually, however–weeks or maybe months after Ray’s cancer surgery and treatment–Pat braced herself and went to K-mart, settled up for the photos, and took home several fat envelopes full of prints. The photos spanned most of little Ray’s life. Included were shots of Pat’s parents from their visit after Ray was born.

Pat slowly examined each picture, then slid it off the top of the stack to reveal the one beneath. One-by-one. On and on. Looking for something in particular, the same thing in every picture: a tiny ghost looking back, that damn white glow. She wasn’t finding it.

But then something happened. There were a lot of photos, and as Pat thumbed through them she found at some point that her focus had totally shifted from looking for the white glow in Ray’s eye to looking at what was happening in the picture, what was actually happening in the picture, in this way to at once remember a moment and lose herself in it.

The white glow was nowhere to be found in the end. There wasn’t even a red glow. The photos moving past Pat’s eyes like scenes from a movie she once saw, long ago, were haunted by no secrets at all except for the vagaries of time.

omething simmered in Ray when he was young, and he understands it now as pridefulness. Understands, in fact, that he still wrestles with it. A pridefulness that sometimes manifests itself as chin-raised, fists-clenched defiance at odds with his best interests. Like when Ray’s school phoned his parents to say he had been “whacking” other kids, his dad, Ray Jr. says. “He would protect the younger kids, use his cane as a weapon. He didn’t like people getting picked on.”

Zylinski’s fearlessness and pridefulness could be a volatile mix. “Pride really comes into play when my financial status gets affected, or my personal image or reputation gets tarnished in any way,” Ray says. “I used to brawl a little when I was younger when my friends and I would go out partying. If anyone said something stupid I would instantly want to fight.”

Ray spent his early 20s “out all the time” partying, he says. Having made a habit of skipping classes in high school, he then had graduated to skipping life its own self. One night, when Zylinski was an hour into knocking back Labatt Blues and shots of Jack at a South Buffalo bar and was gazing straight ahead, as he’s wont, he heard someone shout from the other end of the bar. Hey buddy, why are you staring at my girl?

It didn’t take long for Zylinski to figure out he was the “buddy” the guy was addressing.

“I’m not staring at your girl,” Ray said. “I’m blind, dude.”

The guy didn’t believe it. He was drunk and wanted to fight.

“Fight here again and you won’t be allowed back,” the bartender warned him. But the guy wouldn’t dial it back and kept shouting at Ray.

“I’m not gonna sit here and get yelled at by some drunk asshole,” Zylinski told the bartender. To which the bartender said, “Do what you gotta do–just not in here.”

“Meet me outside,” Ray said. And before the guy knew what was happening, Ray had tackled him to the pavement and busted his lip with his fist.

“It’s really, really, really easy to fight people who have been drinking,” Ray said. “They love talking shit. While they’re talking, they let me know exactly where they are, and so I just use my instincts.

“It helps to be bigger than the next guy, and to be able to take a punch to get in close.”

One night at about 3 a.m., as he sat in a bar nursing one last drink, things began to change.

“I’m getting out of here,” the bartender said. She handed Ray a beer.

“I hate Pabst,” Ray said.

“Open it,” the bartender said. “On the inside of every cap is a playing card.”

Ray removed the cap and the bartender looked at it. There: the Queen of Hearts herself.

“Very nice,” the bartender said. “In 15 years, I’ve seen maybe five Queen of Hearts.”

Five days later, he got a call from someone with workforce development at Visually Impaired Advancement.

“It’s been a long time,” the caller said. “What are you up to these days?”

“A big bunch of nothing,” Ray said.

“Well, we’d like to bring you in to talk about a job.”

So began Zylinski’s first stint at VIA, which he would quit years later to take the insurance job.

everal years ago, something happened to help Zylinski grow up. He met Michaela. He was still a work in progress, still, by his own account, living by the moment, but getting ever closer to being the man the kind of woman he was looking for deserved.

They had met on a dating site, Zylinski and Murray. “I helped him, you know, picking out the right photos and having the right things to say in his little bio,” Chris Jones says. “What to say, what not to say. Every time he got a match, he wanted a description of what she looked like.”

One autumn day in 2018, Ray got a match with a woman named Michaela. She was slender, reserved, and soft-spoken. And yet, as the drummer in two bands–one playing Beatles songs, the other Grateful Dead–she was more than capable of filling a room with sound. Besides being a gifted drummer, she was also a self-admitted gimmick of sorts; you don’t see too many women playing the drums in a rock band.

Michaela’s photo showed a woman with a winsome face and big, dark eyes. “I told Ray she was very good-looking and seemed like definitely somebody for him,” Chris says. Ray wanted to know more. “Um, would you be all right with describing yourself,” Michaela recalls his asking the first time she visited his apartment, “because I don’t have the benefit of going through Facebook to look at pictures.” Her response? “I said I have curly hair and olive skin, which I guess kind of threw him off,” Michaela says. “I’m half White and half Black.”

During her first visit to his apartment, Michaela made an odd discovery about the layers of darkness involved in being blind. Though she visited at nighttime, all the lights in Ray’s apartment were off; when he pointed to something, Michaela had to turn on a lamp to see it. Who needs lights when you’re blind? Ray also works in a pitch-dark office with no windows and the lights perpetually off.

In the first days of their relationship, before they graduated from texting to in-person visits, Michaela had not known Ray was blind. She discovered it only when he told her his favorite video games were text-based and explained why. “I’d never met anyone blind before,” Michaela says. “At first you have thoughts that are kind of ignorant, like, what are they going to be able to do?” But then she met Ray and his big personality helped her “see past the blindness,” she says.

Their first date was at an Italian restaurant called Tappo. “When I met him in person I was actually in awe,” Michaela says. “I remember sitting down at the table with him, and I liked his smile and the sound of his voice and the way he laughed.”

On a cool and cloudy October day in 2020, as Ray and Michaela were celebrating the second anniversary of their relationship with a visit to Letchworth State Park, Ray suggested they walk to the waterfall.

“Oh, look,” Michaela said when they got there. There was a wedding.

“Oooh,” Ray said. He sounded disappointed, and before the day was through, Michaela would understand why. He had planned to ask her something at that waterfall, and now he needed a Plan B.

They got in the car, a 2007 Kia Rondo that was forever breaking down, and he started looking on his phone for somewhere they could go to dinner.

Then he said: “You know what? Never mind; they’re closed.” And he turned the phone off and reached in his pocket.

As soon as Michaela saw the ring she felt a rush of blood to the head and her body temperature seemed to shoot up to about 200 degrees.

“These have been the best two years of my life,” Ray said. “Will you marry me?”

Michaela was so happy she couldn’t answer for crying.

“Yes?” Ray said. “Is that a yes?

alk into Ray and Michaela’s apartment and you find yourself in an entryway just big enough to allow for removing your shoes.

Immediately to the left is the kitchen and straight ahead the living room. If you go into the living room, you pass a small closet to the right. If you instead walk into the kitchen, you find yourself in a narrow space with a stove, a toaster oven, and a refrigerator on the left and a microwave, sink, and dish rack on the right.

Walk the length of the kitchen and you come to a breakfast nook and a window, and, to the right, another way into the living room. There, you find two big windows on the left, a sofa and coffee table on the right, and, just beyond the couch to the left, a hallway.

Zylinski was alone in the apartment the afternoon he lay on the couch brooding about his insurance job.

Usually he spent his lunch hour eating; working remotely from home, he would go in the kitchen and cook a hotdog or warm up some soup or make a smoothie with Birdseye frozen fruit. But on this day he was too filled with dread to eat. When his phone alarm sounded, at 12:55 p.m., he would have to walk back to his bedroom office and reconnect to work. And then what? Continue working a job he didn’t like or quit only a month and a half into it? Though Zylinski was now free of that lawyer’s hectoring voice, he wasn’t free of his own, debating the impossible choice in his head.

I’m not going back. I can’t.

That’s stupid. These are little issues. You’ll get over it. It just takes time.

How much time? Can I put up with what I’ve been putting up with the last two weeks? Do I see the light at the end of the tunnel?

He tapped his watch to see the time. 12:15. Tapped it again when it seemed maybe half an hour had passed. 12:20. Into the living room of his South Buffalo apartment drifted a symphony of sounds from the street. Sirens, car doors, yelling, birds singing. Even with ears fine-tuned by blindness, Zylinski was too distracted to hear much of it.

The self-conflict he felt was not unfamiliar. He is prideful to a fault; he would be the first to tell you that, for being blind has taught him to see some things pretty clearly, including himself.

After lunch, he got off the couch, headed back down the short hallway, signed in to work, and quit.

Zylinski’s resignation came as a surprise to his employer.

“Can we put you back into practice?” his boss said. “This is kind of coming out of nowhere. Why don’t you take a couple days to think about it?”

But Ray had made up his mind. “I’m having a lot of difficulty working through this job, and this is only Level 1,” he said. “There’s a Level 2 in October. It’s just not going to work out. I’m really sorry.”

This wasn’t just any job; it was one in which you could cost the company a lot of money if you screwed up. “I guess it was a mixture of pride and not wanting to go in and say I can’t handle the situation,” Zylinski recalls. “I’ve never done that in my entire life, gone into a professional situation and said, ‘No, sorry, can’t do it.’ In fact, my reputation at VIA is exactly the opposite. It’s whatever I need to do to get a job done. So when I couldn’t do this, I think it was more of a mental blow than anything else.”

At 4, Michaela returned home from band practice to find her fiancée in a darker mood than she’d ever before seen him.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“I had to quit,” he said.

The frustration poured out.

“Sometimes being blind really sucks,” Michaela remembers Zylinski saying. “When trying to get a job, especially. That one was going to be enough for us finally to get a house.” Then he began to cry.

A night of sleep brought Zylinski back to life, if only barely. “The next day I woke up, and I was like, ‘Well, shit. I don’t have a job. What am I going to do?’” he recalls. The rent was coming due and he didn’t know how he was going to pay it. Stepping into the shower, he thought: I’ll take this one step at a time. Then, at noon, he went to a bar and got hammered. Jack and ginger, his go-to.

Ray drank until 4:30, when he heard his cell phone chirp. The caller was from VIA, from which he had resigned only a couple months ago to take the insurance job. There

BY ROBERT L KAISER

Traffic East magazine, 2022

f the light in the baby was a portent, this was the moment foretold. Lying on the couch on a sunny June afternoon in 2021, many years removed from the raw, November day in 1988 when doctors pronounced the odd glow in his eye a sign of the cancer that would blind him, Ray Zylinski brooded. Here was his moment of truth. Would he himself determine the kind of life he led, or would the sightlessness that had informed his world ever since he was too young to make visual memories?