Beneath The Surface

by Simon Strantzas

  “To see,” the priest said as he removed a small flask from the folds of his clothes and unscrewed its cap, “your eyes must first be cleansed.”

  He poured the flask’s contents into Herbert’s eyes.

  The pain was excruciating. Violent colors sparked behind his lids, and he kicked and writhed with new-found strength. All he could smell was an intensely putrid odor like boiling meat, and he screamed with an agony he could barely comprehend. The streams of colors in his sight began flicker, then one at a time go out, leaving behind a dark void that sucked in the light and the sounds and the pain. It drew him in too, and he fell into the deep black depths of unconsciousness.

  The next thing he was aware of was tar. Miles and miles of it, pressing down on top of him. He swam up slowly through it, the pressure dissipating as he moved faster, until he eventually broke through the surface with a gasp and opened his eyes.

  Unending darkness awaited him. And then a woman’s voice.

  “Are you awake? Can you hear me?”

  The words were muffled, distant, and in the darkness he could not be sure from where they came, nor if he had heard them at all. He tried to speak, but his throat was too dry to do more than cough.

  “Have a sip of this,” she said, her voice matter-of-fact, and he felt a plastic straw against his lips. He drank, but before he could get enough of the water it was taken from him.

  “Where am I?” he said. “My face . . . it feels numb.” He lifted his hand, but it was stopped quickly. He caught a hint of antiseptic. “Am I in a hospital?”

  “Yes. I’m Doctor Breen. Can you tell me your name?”

  “I can’t see anything. Are there bandages on my head?”

  “Please, Sir. Your name.”

  “Herbert. Herbert Sear. Are my eyes bandaged . . . what’s happened . . .?”

  “You were brought in two days ago. You were found in an alley, close to dead. Your wallet, your shoes, everything was gone.”

  “But why am I wearing bandages?” His breath began to quicken. “What’s happened to my face?”

  “The police are waiting outside to talk to you about what you remember.”

  “Will you please tell me what’s happened to my face?”

  She hesitated. He suddenly didn’t want her answer.

  “Mr. Sear, you’ve been the victim of a crime, a very serious crime.” She paused again, as though for effect. “We believe you’ve had a corrosive solvent poured into your eyes. There was nothing we could do. I’m afraid they’re gone.”

  She said this without emotion.

  The police came in and asked their questions, and when they left Herbert knew he would never hear from the officers again. Or see them. He would never see anything ever again. Left there in darkness, it was clear that there was no God watching over him, nothing that would rescue him from the world’s slow decay. Instead, everything he knew would continue on its downward spiral unabated as humanity frittered it all away. Herbert had foolishly wasted so many years searching an unwelcoming sky for answers where in fact there were none. It took a false priest in ill-fitting clothes to make him realize his mistake. All he had left to show for it was a future devoid of light.

  Over the following days he tried to come to terms with the absolute darkness, and his inability to tell reality from the dream that had become the landscape for the rest of his life. The world had been reduced to a series of sounds trickling in from elsewhere, none ever close enough to properly hear. There were clangs of bedpans and moaning patients on squeaking gurneys, all distant and unfocused. He reached up at times and touched the rough gauze that covered his burning face. It didn’t seem real, though the mounting pain beneath did. It reminded him every day of what he'd lost, what his thirst for answers had brought down upon him: the scorn of his maker.

  Herbert’s thoughts were interrupted by the clinical rapping of Doctor Breen’s footsteps as they echoed down the long corridors. He pulled himself to a sitting position and waited until the sound reached the side of his bed.

  “How are you today?”

  “Still blind.”

  “I know it’s difficult, but you must relax, Mr. Sear.” She touched his arm, but it brought him no comfort. “I have to change your dressing. The chemical burns are starting to heal, but there is still a risk of infection. I need to make sure the wounds remain sterile.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “Please, Mr. Sear.”

  She placed her cold hand on his back and guided him so he was hunched forward. As scissors cut through the gauze, the sound echoed in his ears like cardboard dragged across gravel. There was a slight jerk when she was done, and Herbert felt anxiety welling up inside his chest.

  She removed the mask of gauze slowly, and he felt pieces of his skin pulled with it. He exhaled, not realizing he had been holding his breath. The volume of hospital had increased ten-fold, but he didn’t dare touch his ears to silence it.

  The doctor said little. Herbert’s face was still numb from the medications he’d been given, but he could feel enough to know she was applying something cool to his burning wound.

  “You’re very lucky, Mr. Sear.”

  He coughed.

  “Your wounds aren’t as bad as I’d initially thought. I’ll arrange to have our resident reconstructive surgeon take a look and see what he can do. Perhaps the physical scarring can be minimized. I’m going to pull the final bandage away now. The skin has started to fuse with the gauze, so this may sting.”

  It took a fraction of a second, but the pain lingered on far longer. It was as though a million lights sparked right before his missing eyes, and he threw up his hands to shield himself.

  “Don’t hide your face. I need to see what’s happened.”

  She pushed his hands away, and Herbert suddenly fell silent.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  He could not form the right words. Before him was left the ghost of an image, a faint flicker in the blind darkness. It did not disappear.

  “I — I think I see a light.”

  Doctor Breen did not sound surprised.

  “That’s normal, Mr. Sear,” she said. “Your brain still expects the sensory information from your missing eyes, so it’s working hard to piece together a world it understands, even if that world doesn’t really exist.”

  “But, I can see . . .”

  “You can’t; those nerves have been severed. But your brain wants to see lights, so it’s cross-wired itself, and is misinterpreting the data from the other senses, or creating its own, to fill the void. But it’s a lie. You must come to terms with that.”

  The ghost flickered in the darkness, a thin stream of faint pink and orange.

  “Okay.”

  She applied more ointment to his face, the cool bringing some relief to the raging fire. All the while the thin light wavered, just visible in his blindness, and it remained until she placed new cotton pads over the place where his eyes had once been.

  “You should be thankful you survived,” she said as she snuffed the flicker out.

  He remained bedridden for days as he recovered from the assault. As he predicted, the police did not return, but the surgeons did, bringing with them teams of interns and voices drained of emotion. He turned them all away, at first politely, then with increasing anger. What did he care? What was the point? His existence had been reduced to nothing — the world was as black and as hopeless as it looked — and the scars that he was left with went far too deep to solve with a mere scalpel.

  He sat alone in his darkness, the sounds of the hospital around him so dulled by gauze he could not tell which of them were real. Twice he thought he detected something in the room with him, some displacement of air as though by a great mass, accompanied by a quiet fluttering like many feet walking upon the tiles.

  “Who’s there?”

  He listened, straining his ears beneath the bandages, but when he heard the muffled voice it was barely familiar.

  “We met a few we
eks ago at the church. I needed to see you.”

  The old man? Why had the old man come to see him?

  “Just leave me alone.”

  “I was there. You were unconscious and bleeding. I called the ambulance. Don’t you wonder why your life was saved?”

  Herbert turned his head away. “You didn’t do me any favors.” He scratched his face. The bandages were irritating his skin.

  “I just wanted to talk for a minute,” the old man said. “Think about what happened to you. What purpose did it serve?”

  “Purpose?” Blood pumped faster in Herbert's ears. It felt as though his skull were swelling, and the skin beneath his bandages began to crawl. If the old man noticed Herbert’s discomfort, he didn't acknowledge it. Instead, he went on speaking.

  “Don’t you think there was a purpose for what happened?”

  Every part of Herbert shook, revolted by what he heard.

  “You think there’s a reason? That there’s a God somewhere who cares what happens to any of us? There isn’t. Don’t you get that? There’s nothing. Nothing.“

  It was becoming harder to concentrate. The pain was spreading across his face and neck. He scratched his bandages harder to try and dull the sensation.

  “You shouldn’t do that.”

  Herbert ignored him, but the pain would not stop. Instead, it crawled deeper into Herbert’s skull.

  “My head . . . It feels like it’s burning!”

  “I’ll get the doctor.”

  Hundreds of feet moved as Herbert’s pounding head distorted every sound. The rattling carts and voices outside were explosions that tried to shake his sanity loose, and it was all he could do to hang on.

  He felt cold hands on his burning skin, and Doctor Breen’s voice as though from a great distance, asking what was wrong. He could barely get the words out.

  “My face! It feels like I’m on fire!”

  She said something else that Herbert couldn’t hear beneath his growing hysteria, and then there were more footsteps. Hands fell upon him, pinning him down, and he suddenly thought he smelled the foul odor of the Church of the Inner Sight. He struggled wildly, screaming for help, and did not stop until the prick in his arm filled him with a cold numbness that spread through his entire body, burying him once more in complete nothingness.

  He didn’t know how long he was sedated for, but when he woke Dr. Breen was speaking to him. Her voice was too loud.

  “Mr. Sear, how do you feel?”

  “Better.” Yet, his face felt strange. “What happened to me?”

  “Your wounds have started to heal, and as the nerve-endings regenerate they can cause some discomfort. It’s a positive sign, but for a while we’re going to leave off as many bandages as we can to minimize the irritation. Only the worst of it is still covered.”

  Herbert raised his hand towards his face, and then faltered. Sometimes, he forgot that he would never see again.

  He sat quietly and listened to the sound of Dr. Breen's pen.

  “May I ask you something, Doctor?” he said finally. “Do you believe in God?”

  The scratching stopped, and after a moment he heard her sigh.

  “I believe the world just goes on.”

  “But do you think there are reasons for everything? Do you think there’s a purpose behind what I’ve gone through?”

  “I believe — I think things just happen and there is nothing that guides them. The sun rises and sets by routine alone.”

  Neither said a word, then Doctor Breen cleared her throat, and her voice cooled again. “Do you still feel like your face is burning?”

  “Only around my eyes — around where my eyes were.”

  “Let me take a look.”

  Herbert pushed himself up, and his unsteady arms suddenly ignited his memory.

  “What happened to the man who was in here earlier?”

  “I asked your visitors to come back later,” she said, placing cold scissors against his cheek, “After you were awake.”

  He felt the scissors close.

  “There. It’s done.” She unwrapped what was left of the gauze, and then peeled back the pad that covered his missing eyes. And yet, even without those eyes, he could still see. There before him was a drab colored light in the shape of a woman, a pair of long streaks like gossamer threads stretching away from her face. He shook his head, but the image remained.

  He was able to see Dr. Breen.

  “There’s nothing out of the ordinary, Mr. Sear, but the wound is still bad.”

  He could see her.

  “I think we’ll leave the bandages on for a few more days though, just to let the area heal further.”

  But how could he see her?

  Herbert could not speak. She looked beautiful, like layers of colored silk moving beneath water. Everything around her was illuminated by a dim halo of light, but they were poorly drawn sketches: the angles were wrong, the lines hazy and unclear.

  Yet, he could see her with clarity. She seemed to be wearing large colored wings.

  “Mr. Sear? Did you hear me?”

  “Pardon?”

  “I need to redress your wounds. Please lean forward for me.”

  When she was done, Herbert was once again wrapped in the isolating darkness of the gauze.

  Dr. Breen left him and he struggled to comprehend what he had witnessed. Could his painkillers have created an illusion in his mind? That seemed the most likely scenario. And yet, what if that weren’t true? What if he actually saw Dr. Breen? What then?

  Somehow he had to be sure. After being beaten and robbed and mutilated all for the promise of understanding how God saw the world, what if that was exactly what he had been granted?

  He started to peel the lengths of gauze from his face, uncovering the wounds that were once his eyes, all the while listening carefully for some indication Doctor Breen or any of her nurses were coming to stop him. He felt a strange disconnection from his hands, as though his head were hovering a few inches above his body. With each successive untangling, his ears became all that much sharper, and the distant fire beneath his face receded farther. Blood rushed to his head as his hands reached the final loop, and when the rest of the gauze fell away, he was greeted by a world of dim brilliance.

  He could see the door to his room etched in the darkness, and beyond it teams of wing-shaped things moved and spoke and radiated that same drab light he had seen from Doctor Breen earlier.

  He stepped carefully from his bed and stumbled as he rediscovered his balance. Carefully, he walked to the door for a better look at the wondrous vision before him.

  Dozens of shapes floated by, each with a pair of thin wisps of light that stretched from its head and travelled down the hospital hallway behind. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen: the flickering dance of people’s souls.

  Or, perhaps the lights were angels. What if every person had inside of them a part of God — a spark that lit their life — and yet carried it unknowingly, oblivious to the beauty that lay dormant within them?

  He took a few more steps, still unsure of his new-found vision. Dead things remained nearly invisible to him, drowned in the dark edges of his blindness, and he did not get more than a few feet from his room before he was forced to stop. A halo of light moved past him as though he didn’t exist, threads trailing behind, and Herbert reached out only to have the two wisps dance around his fingers like motes of dust before continuing into the distance. There they converged with other tendrils, weaving into a thicker pulsating thread. Before he could follow though, Herbert heard the familiar sound of Doctor Breen’s footsteps.

  He retreated quickly to his room. There he found what remained of his bandages and wrapped them carefully around his head to disguise what he had done. He then returned to his bed and lay with his back to the door, praying his subterfuge would work.

  When Doctor Breen entered the room, he held his breath waiting for her to speak.

  “Mr. Sear, do you feel up to having visitors?
”

  He did not turn his head. He did not want her to discover what he had done.

  “Okay,” he said. “Thank you.”

  He listened to her sharp footsteps as she left, and then the soft footsteps of the old man returning. His echoed in the room, multiplying in number until he reached Herbert’s bedside.

  “Hello, again. Are you feeling better?”

  “Yes. Much better.”

  “Good. Have you had a chance to think about what I said before, about the purpose of what’s happened to you?”

  Herbert swallowed. The old man’s voice sounded different, though Herbert wasn’t sure if it was because of the poorly wrapped gauze.

  “I think you were right. I think God wanted me to see how things really were. He wanted me to understand the truth.”

  “And what truth is that?”

  Herbert hesitated. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to share his revelation.

  “Well, that he’s a part of us. That the beauty we all have within us is a part of him.”

  The old man made a strange noise, something like a snort, and Herbert suddenly felt a burning hand on his shoulder.

  “You should get out of bed.”

  “What?”

  “You need to come with me; we don't have a lot of time.”

  “I can’t go anywhere.”

  “But don’t you want to see the angels?”

  Herbert’s voice caught in his throat. Had he heard right?

  The old man grew impatient.

  “Get up. Let’s go.”

  Herbert slowly slipped his feet over the side of the bed and, with the help of the old man, stood on wobbling legs.

  “We have to get outside.”

  Herbert let himself be dragged quickly through the halls of the hospital. He thought at one point he heard the footsteps of Doctor Breen, but if she was nearby she did nothing to stop them. Nor did anyone else.

  Herbert wanted to remove his bandages so he might see the threads of light that were brushing his face like cobwebs, but the old man would not let go of his arm. Even when Herbert asked to slow down, they didn’t.