by Fitch, Stona
I shook my head. “No!”
He nodded. They are of high quality, he wrote. Taken directly from a hospital. He jostled the eyes slightly in his hand, a magician palming quarters.
“No!” I shouted again. I shoved him against the wall and tried to get the pen from him. Thinking I wanted to write something, Blackbeard handed it to me. I pulled the pen back and shoved it as hard as I could into his thick middle.
He pushed me away and raised his black sweater. I saw a small red welt on the white skin of his belly. He touched it carefully to see if it was bleeding. Satisfied that no harm was done, he pulled down his sweater and straightened it. Then he rushed across the room and shoved me until I was backed against the wall, his big hands pressing my shoulders.
He shouted, spittle flying, but I couldn’t understand.
I said nothing.
Again, he took out a pen from his pocket, this time keeping it as far from me as possible.
I turned my head to read what he had written. The votes are in. We proceed. One final level and then you’re free.
“Free!” I shouted. ‘You’re going to cut my eyes out. You’re crazy. You’re all crazy!’
He shrugged, then wrote again. Our actions have been called brilliant by some, perverse by others. But we have been original. We have captured the attention of the world.
“Then leave me alone,” I shouted. “If you have a shred of human kindness, leave my eyes. You’ve taken everything else.”
Blackbeard shook his head, then wrote on the wall. There is a unity that we must achieve. Only then will our mission be judged a success. We must teach the world that this is what happens to apologists for globalization…
Blackbeard kept writing but I didn’t read on. His rants were as uninteresting written as they were delivered aloud.
“You’re actually going to cut out my eyes? Is such cruelty part of your program, your ideology?”
He shook his head and chose another place on the white wall to write. They won’t be cut out. Just removed and replaced. He held up the eyeballs in his hand.
“That isn’t the sort of operation that… it’s a different thing than before… you can’t do it, you just can’t.” My mind raced. I thought of the blind boy in Simms, his pink fingers running over the lead soldiers.
Blackbeard shook his head and wrote. It won’t be a problem. Removing an eye is easy. All it takes is a confident man and a coffee spoon.
At that moment the lights dimmed and went out completely. We stood in the darkened room. Blackbeard rushed back to the entrance. I leaned against the wall and stared into the dark, wondering if this was my induction into blindness, waiting just a day away. The lights came on again. The destroyed room was filled with its familiar debris, the walls thick with Blackbeard’s words.
Day 37.
Fear took hold. When this night was over, the Doctor would come one last time. I paced the rooms, the black snakes following me. I smashed furniture. I turned over the futon and made a barrier of it against the door. I took Blackbeard’s cheap pen and wrote on the wall of my innocence, begged anyone who could read my words to do something, anything to stop what was about to happen.
The insatiable audience waited, safe behind its computer screens. Their eyes weren’t scheduled for plucking. Their lives were not at risk. Those more guilty than I could ever be went unjudged, unpunished, and my anger at them burned. There was no justice in what was happening to me. As the sun brightened the windows, I fell asleep with the full weight of dread on my shoulders, sure of what the next day would bring. Blackbeard kept his promises.
Day 38.
By evening, I had heard nothing from Blackbeard or the others. No food arrived. Nin didn’t rescue me. The Doctor didn’t come with his bag. I raged through the apartment, screaming up at the ceiling. The snakes scattered at my approach.
The air thrummed with silence. I wanted to hear my footsteps again, or the sound of my own voice, shouting again in the empty apartment.
“I demand to be released!” I shouted. “This whole ordeal has gone on too long and you know it. Maybe you joined this group thinking it was a good chance to protest American domination. Fine. Your points are important and you’ve taken them to the world. But what you’re doing now is torture, pure and simple. It is the work of madmen. If you have any shred of…”
The red lights flickered off, then the room lights. I stood in the dim apartment for a moment. The whitewashed windows turned dark, and with this darkness I spun from a powerful vertigo. I stood on top of a very tall building on a starless night, unsure where the roof ended. I swayed for a moment, then knelt on the floor, my forehead on the cool wood. Even then, the floor careened. I turned to the side to let a stream of water and white lumps of day-old rice spray from my mouth. Putting my hands on the floor did nothing to stop the room’s gyroscopic spinning. They felt nothing.
I pulled my sleeve up and pressed my forearm against the floor. With my forehead and my arm against the floor I could give the darkness two points that I could be sure of – two points that drew a line across the floor. I stood, but the swaying began again. I turned back into a shuffling crab, moving into the corner where the futon once was. Here I stayed for hours, half-sleeping, lost. This was what it was going to be like after the Doctor replaced my eyes with the blue and green forgeries. I would be forever lost in a blackened gyre, a realization that made me panic even further, muttering a prayer into the floor to make it stop, willing the wood to rise up and protect me.
The lights came back on and I could see the destroyed apartment again, the futon still pushed up against the door, the trash piled deep along the edges of the room. The black snakes flickered on. No one came in to explain. Most likely, the darkness was a technical problem, solved now, enabling the audience to see me sitting cross-legged on the floor, eyes darting from place to place, watching it all.
Day 39.
I dreamt of the silence at the bottom of the quarry, so different from the silence here in the apartment. There the water blanketed the body, protecting it in its womb. Here I sensed that all sound had been ripped away from the earth. Silence brought the emptiness of January afternoons, the blue sky fading, a frigid wind stripping the city. When will this all end?
I woke slowly to the sound of voices.
“And there’s eleven left on the first…” a man said urgently.
“Find out what time… taken from the old…” said a woman. The voices cycled in and out of earshot, a radio playing in a swerving car.
“… and that was when I noticed that the…” said another man.
Then the first woman again. “It builds up year after year and then…”
Then nothing. I sat up on the floor, the room dim and empty. I rubbed my ears and heard nothing. I looked around the room and saw no one. Where were the voices coming from? Did the Black Hats have so much technology on hand that they could beam these voices directly into my mind? Or was I finally breaking down after more than a month of boredom and terror?
Blackbeard arrived at noon on a bright orange plastic plank, the kind used to carry accident victims from wreckage. Six aliens shuffled forward, bearing him into the room Cleopatra-style. Blackbeard held out the two glass eyes like ripened plums. His mouth moved, of course, but I could hear nothing and was glad for a fleeting moment that I couldn’t.
Behind him came the Doctor and Nin, both looking straight ahead without a glance at me. The Doctor’s unbuttoned white coat was marked with dirt and splattered with brown bloodstains. He looked at me for a moment and shook his head in resignation, as if to tell me that he didn’t want to be here either, but that nothing he or anyone else had done could stop this inevitable afternoon. I almost welcomed the arrival of this inane procession, if only to end the waiting.
The aliens put down the board and Blackbeard rolled off and swayed a
little as he stood. He walked over to the wall.
Please lie on the board and we will begin, he wrote in foot-high letters.
I ran past him into the other room. The aliens were close behind me. I turned at the whitened window and swung at the first one to get close, sending his mask spinning across the room. He lay in the corner for a moment, stunned, hands over his face. I held my throbbing hand. The blow had cracked the hardened surface and a drop of amber fluid slid down my wrist onto the floor.
The alien struggled to put his mask back on. He was just a kid, maybe sixteen or seventeen. His black hair was cut short in a military style which did little to toughen his soft, pale face. He looked up one last time, narrowing his eyes at me, sending out a palpable hatred. What made him so angry? Was it my what I had done years ago? Or was it the fact that he was no longer anonymous and protected? The world would know his face the same way it knew mine.
The others grabbed me and carried me into the room, where the board lay across two metal chairs. As I fought with all the strength left in me, they forced me down and fastened my wrists and ankles with tight straps, then tightened a final strap over my waist. I tried to lift my legs and arms but couldn’t. Thrashing as hard as I could only allowed me to raise my chest an inch. In the circle above me, I saw Blackbeard looking down at me from one side, the Doctor on the other. At the edges hovered a scrim of aliens. Above them all, the black snakes swayed, red lights burning.
“Don’t do this!” I screamed.
Blackbeard blinked. He took the two glass eyes and polished each on his black sweater for a moment. He handed them carefully to the Doctor, who put them carefully in the pocket of his lab coat. He took a syringe from the other pocket and held it up for a moment, eyebrows raised above his Zorro mask. I tried to knock it away. The needle stung my arm and a slow warmth spread almost immediately.
They waited for a moment for the shot to work its way deeper. My arms turned heavy almost immediately and I had to fight to keep my eyes open.
Blackbeard waved one of the aliens forward, the angry boy whose mask I had just knocked off. Blackbeard reached into his shirt pocket and held up a shining coffee spoon. He handed it to the alien he had chosen to be my surgeon. As he walked toward me, I saw the boy’s blank eyes behind the mask. His shaking hand came closer to my eyes, the spoon glinting in the bright room. In its rounded bottom, I saw my own face, eyes wide, mouth held tight in a rictus of fear. I turned to the side but eager hands reached out to hold me.
Nin shouted something else, two words, it seemed, and there was a sudden lull, a caesura that held the room still for a moment. The aliens at the edges, Blackbeard and Nin close together, the Doctor nearby. Once again, we found ourselves in an absurd still life, so strange but familiar.
Blackbeard grabbed Nin and pushed her in front of him. The room erupted in chaos. The aliens fought each other, fists pulling off masks, bottles flying, new aliens swarming in. Above it all, the black snakes glowed, recording every moment. After what seemed like a long struggle, Blackbeard came closer, holding Nin’s arm twisted behind her back. He reached down and unzipped my trousers, then pulled them roughly around my knees. I struggled, but the straps held me. Blackbeard shoved Nin’s head down and I could see her screaming over and over. Behind the scarf, her eyes were wild with anger. She tossed her narrow shoulders back and forth trying to get free, but Blackbeard kept pushing her forward until I could feel her fast breathing on my thighs.
Through the painkillers, I realized what was happening. Blackbeard loved the grand gesture, the photogenic moment that would keep our audience entertained. He wanted to introduce a trace of pornography to our predictable tableau of violence and torture. What could be more exciting to our audience than to watch my eyes plucked out while Nin took my cock in her mouth? What could be more completely over the top?
Blackbeard looked at me for a long moment, eyes lively, a naughty schoolboy. A concussion shook the room and a warm shower rained down on us all. Blackbeard recoiled against the wall, eyes open, blood rushing from the mouth hole of his mask. The aliens ran to him and pressed their hands over the cavern at the back of his head, trying to stop the blood with their hands. He slid down to the floor.
The Doctor waved them away with Blackbeard’s silver pistol. I struggled to sit up. I twisted my head to see Nin, not sure where she had gone. The Doctor kicked at the last aliens and they were gone, leaving Blackbeard wide-eyed and still, blood dripping from his mask.
The room was still for a moment. “Untie me,” I shouted, struggling against the ropes.
The Doctor put the pistol in the pocket of his lab coat and stood over me for a moment. Nin appeared at his side, calm, at ease even. She bent down, then reappeared again. She held the silver spoon’s handle delicately between her thumb and forefinger.
I screamed. Nin wasn’t the jailor who would hand me the key. There was no key, just the coffee spoon swinging back and forth in her fingers.
“How could you lie to me!” I shouted, then realized how foolish this question was. The lie was my own. I had been drawn in by her quiet ways, so different from Blackbeard, so much like my own. She had given me false hope, and I had willingly taken it and multiplied it a hundredfold until it actually seemed possible that she would help me.
She handed the spoon to the Doctor, who fixed his dark gaze on me. He reached toward me with the spoon, which grew larger and larger and then doubled. I squeezed my eyes closed, then felt a twinge in my right eye as he wedged the spoon’s edge between my eyelids. I struggled against the cool, sharp metal. A deep wave of pain swept over me and then the ceiling swayed wildly as he urged the right eyeball free and gently raised it higher and higher. The pain turned the room deep green and blurry. I couldn’t breathe.
As the room darkened, I took one final glimpse of the world. While the Doctor worked, his hands slow and unwavering, Nin stood still, head bowed as if in prayer. Nin was the first person I saw in my prison and she would be the last. Another sharp twinge and the world turned black, taking with it Nin, the deceiver, and the Doctor, the confident man with a coffee spoon.
Day 40.
I woke struggling. A low peak of pain throbbed behind my eyes. My mind was still fogged by painkillers. One hand had come untied and I reached up to find my head wrapped in a thick layer of bandages. In darkness or blindness, I wasn’t sure which, I untied my other hand with quick, desperate tugs at the ropes, then reached down to free my waist and ankles. I rolled off the orange board and onto the floor, sending the pain blazing.
I tore away the soft gauze wrapped around my head, unwrapping it as quickly as I could. After the gauze came two thick pads that covered each eye. I peeled back the pad on the right eye slowly. I could see nothing. Reaching up to it, I felt the hard glass beneath my eyelid, the searing in the socket. I threw the bandages on the floor and screamed as loudly as I could, hearing nothing, feeling only the electric vibration.
My fingers peeled back the edge of the pad that covered my left eye slowly. I saw my thickened fingers holding the bandage, then dropped it and watched it fall next to me. The eye was soft and warm, free of any pain. I blinked at the familiar disarray of the apartment. I laughed, so relieved that for a moment I forgot everything around me. For some reason, the efficient, reliable Doctor hadn’t completed his final task. Did he take pity on me? Or was his work interrupted?
I looked around the room, the fast shifting of my head making the right side of my face throb. The lights were on full and all of the snakes hung limply from the ceiling. Blackbeard slumped against the wall, chin bearded black with crisp dried blood. He had died with one arm half-raised, his mouth open, mid-scream. His silver pistol rested on his lap. I thought of trying to pick it up and fire another shot between his eyes.
I reached out and pulled away his mask, letting it drop to the floor. I had waited so long for this moment. Blackbeard’s face was pale and speckled
, his beard untrimmed, his nose long and noble. He was younger than I had expected. He looked completely normal, an assistant professor, a waiter at a coffeehouse, a musician.
I pulled back my leg and kicked him in the belly as hard as I could, sending his body slumping slowing to the floor, a statue of flesh, head wobbling.
For weeks I had dreamed of revenge, of giving Blackbeard at least some of the pain he had brought to me. He had tortured me. But it was Nin who betrayed me, Nin who told the Doctor to continue. I could still see the shining spoon dangling from her fingers.
I left Blackbeard and stumbled to the bathroom to look in the mirror. My blue glass eye was sunken and smaller than my real eye. It stared off to one side. A thin trail of blood dripped from the corner and down my face. I pressed the gauze pad back over the ruined eye.
I walked on, left eye forward, arms stretched out before me, a cyclops roaming slowly through the empty apartment, flat as a painting. Ahead waited the white door I had kicked, the door that I had dreamed of walking through for so long. It was open wide. I walked slowly toward it, unsure that anything I saw was what I thought it was. I waited for the Doctor to walk out from behind the door, ready to finish his task. One final ordeal. But no one stopped me.
The next room was huge as a warehouse and dimly lit by glowing computer screens on a row of desks. Cables sagged from the high ceiling and the floor was thick with paper. I could see the back of my apartment walls, the boards nailed into the cement floor. It was no more real than a stage set.
I saw the whitened windows. In front of them, a high-intensity bulb moved along an arc of wire. This false sun had lit my days. Numbers scrawled along aluminum marked the time – 14 heures… 16 heures. Beneath the sun was a large, detailed painting of a hazy world seen from a distance. Clouds hovered over the dim landscape of factories and fields. Here were the smokestacks I had seen when I managed to scrape off some of the paint. I shook my head. My ordeal was all as unreal as this set, the painted landscape, the light-bulb sun. But when I raised my hands, I could see they were still hardened and thick. When I turned my head, I could still feel the pain behind the socket where the glass eye now rolled. When I kicked over the painted world and smashed the sun, I heard nothing.
