Page 64 of The Sign for Home

“Yes. You can haircutting.”

A few minutes later Hanne leads you and Snap into the back room of the café and sits you in a chair. The back room is much warmer than the front. Suddenly, Hanne pulls off the new dry T-shirt and again you are half-naked in front of a woman who is not your mother or the nurse in your doctor’s office. Then she takes scissors out and starts cutting your hair. As she clips, she pushes your head and hair around. Her fingers slide along the back of your neck and it makes your skin leap to attention. Are Hanne’s face and body beautiful, like Cyril said? Hanne blows on your face to remove pieces of hair that have stuck on your cheeks and eyelids. Her breath smells like coffee and oranges. Her armpits smell like deodorant. When she stands on her tiptoes to cut the hair on top of your head she presses her pelvis against your hand and her breasts lean into your ear. There is a clear demarcation between the scratchiness of her bra and the softness of her flesh. You smell her skin.

The Devil makes your penis strain against the material of your still-wet pants and underwear. What you want to do with Hanne is a very bad sin. But you are lonely. You have not been touched in a long time. You reach up to feel her wrist again. Red star red star red star.

27PROTACTILE

Monday morning. Cyril is back to work and all excited about something called Protactile. You aren’t exactly sure what he’s talking about, but he doesn’t stop touching you even when you are signing. One part of Protactile, other than always touching you, is tapping your arm, which is supposed to be like someone narrowing their eyes and nodding thoughtfully. At first it is distracting, but then you start liking it. It lets you know people are listening and makes you feel like you’re more part of what’s going on. Halfway into his demonstration Cyril notices that your hair is cut and that your shirt is not buttoned all the way to the neck.

“What happened to you?” Cyril asks like he is surprised. “Who cut your hair?”

“You didn’t do this?” Molly asks suspiciously, which Cyril (who is interpreting) emphasizes by describing her expression.

“No,” Cyril says. “Not me. I just got back last night.”

“I see,” Molly says, but you know she doesn’t believe him.

“Well, you look great,” Cyril says, tousling your hair. “You look like a real college man now. So tell us, who cut it?”

You are nervous and worried that your face might give you away, so to change the subject (and also because you are still very curious) you ask Cyril to show you and Molly more about Protactile. Your trick works because Cyril gets so excited his hands are almost shaking when he explainsthe philosophy behind it. Like how you are always touching the person you’re talking to(constant touch)and that Protactile was invented completely by the DeafBlind. Then Cyril tells you other things he learned, something called Haptics that could help with interpreting.

“Let me show you guys an example!” Cyril says.

Then Cyril asks Molly to interpret while he sits in a chair behind you. Then he asks you to lean forward a bit and takes his fingers and draws a square on your back and explains that this square represents the room in which you are sitting. Then he draws the desks across the front of the room and three small circles behind each desk. He says these are the heads of the students that just came into the room and sat down next to you. Then he shows you how he would point to the different heads and show if they were laughing, crying, or walking out the door.

“This is fascinating,” Molly tells Cyril, which is not something she has ever said to him before. “Could you show us more? This could be very useful.”

“Sure,” Cyril says, clearly happy that Molly is being nice to him for a change. Then he asks you, “Do you like it, Arlo? Or is it confusing?”

“I like it,” you say. “But still confusing.”

Cyril continues to do the touch signals on your body, and you begin to connect them with what is happening around you. More students come in and sit down. One of the students in the back leaves to go to the bathroom. Instead of using the space in the air you can’t see, Cyril tells Molly to use your chest to walk the student across the room. Molly and Cyril never take their hands from you the whole time. Electricity ignites all over your brain, causing the hair follicles on your arms and the back of your neck to vibrate. Suddenly you are a DeafBlind spaceman who left a very quiet planet a long time ago and are just arriving back on Earth, in a classroom, surrounded by a crowd of noisy people.

“Now I understand!” you say excitedly. “Wow! Protactile very cool!”

For the time you are learning about Protactile and Haptics you don’teven think about what you did with Hanne and what will happen if Molly and Brother Birch find out. Now, all you want to do is learn more of what Cyril has learned.

“Conference, interesting things… what else?”

Cyril tells you how every summer there are special camps in Maryland and Washington State where hundreds of DeafBlind people go, and where you could go too. He also tells you that Seattle is the best city in the country for the DeafBlind, because they have lots of DeafBlind people who know about their rights, and it is where Protactile was developed. Cyril also says there are places in New York State where you could get training to become more independent and maybe live on your own someday. When he says this, Molly’s signing becomes more hesitant, like Cyril is saying something she is worried can hurt you.

“Conference show new tech equipment?” you ask, changing the subject.

Again Cyril gets excited and describes a very small refreshable braille display—much smaller than your SBC—and explains how DeafBlind people can just plug it into their iPhone and be able to read the news or books or send and receive emails and text messages while they are walking around. You’ve already read about such equipment on the internet a long time ago, but because Cyril is so excited you say:

“That! I crave! I wish have iPhone too!”

“Why don’t you?” Cyril asks, as though he is asking both you and Molly. “You should talk to the Abilities Institute. It’s a pretty key piece of equipment for the Deaf and DeafBlind. There’s even an organization called iCanConnect that helps DeafBlind people pay for equipment. I found the website online. I’m sure something could be worked out. Right, Molly?”

You wish Cyril hadn’t said that. Now he has made Molly very uncomfortable, because she has already advocated for you with Brother Birch and the Abilities Institute about the new cell phone and new portable keyboard.Brother Birch told Molly and Mrs. Shuster no. Brother Birch said the subsidies wouldn’t pay for all of it and more importantly, he worried that it could lead you astray and put you in danger because of what’s happened before. Maybe Molly explains this to Cyril, or maybe she says something else. You can feel in Cyril’s hands that whatever Molly said has bothered him. This is another thing about theconstant touchthing: it lets you feel that there are secrets inside someone’s body.

“Anyway,” Cyril says, moving to the front of you to sign for himself, and changes the subject. “The main speaker at the conference was a DeafBlind woman named Tabitha and she was brilliant.”

Molly tries to do the Haptics on your back, but she’s not as good as Cyril and you ask her to stop. Then Cyril tells you more about the DeafBlind Tabitha woman. How she works at a place called the Laura Bridgman Center, where they have lots of trainings for the DeafBlind to make their lives better. He tells you how Tabitha is fighting for SSPs to be mandated by law for all DeafBlind people so they can have more access to the world. Tabitha is also fighting so all parents of Deaf babies will learn sign language. You wonder what it would have been like for your mother to have really known sign language so you could have talked to her before she died. Would you have grown closer? Or would you have learned things that made you grow distant?

“I wish you could have met her,” Cyril says, which confuses you at first since you are thinking about your mother. “Tabitha is the head of the whole center. The top boss!”

“Top boss?” you ask in disbelief. “DeafBlind?”

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