Imbroglio

by Andrew McEwan

Old age; a safer way to die. Does electricity grow old? Thoughts are electric, the man thought, nameless, contemplating the fall. More a dive, really, a long aerial descent, his body arced, arms outspread like wings…that didn’t work. The rush of air drowned any last contemplation, any meaningful dialogue between body and soul. Probably just as well, as he might have changed his mind.

  Too late now. The scrub he hurtled toward, the concrete that raced up to meet him, these things were everything, blurred into a green-grey mass of which he was soon to be part, lungs and heart compressed, liver and spleen burst, stomach torn and kidneys squashed from anus, thence to frighten passers-by, a human smudge on the face of an embankment thirty metres beneath the carriageway. He’d chosen this bridge as he was fond of it, anonymous and with no identifying marks. He wasn’t even sure if it had a name. For twelve years he’d crossed it on his way into town, a weekday commute both numb and energizing, the journey itself routine while the arrival was one of promises and expectation, delight at the prospect of the coming hours. He was an optician. He looked inside people’s eyes. He saw the veins red-streaking the backs of vitreous orbs, fluid filled sacs feeding the umbilicals of optic nerves. He liked to think of the eyes as foetuses, ones never to be born, a symbiotic relationship between themselves and the head in which they swam, exchanging information with a brain shy of the light of day.

  The brain needed a translator. It could not look upon the outside world. It supplied the eyes with blood in return for images electrically decoded, interpreted via two spherical bodies, independent yet working in concert.

  How honest were these eyes? he often wondered, leaning over a patient in the dark of his office, shining a false light upon pupil and iris, invading with battery empowered bulb the soft interior of each delicate instrument. Could they be trusted? He liked to think so; they were beautiful and pure. No falsehood or deception was in their design. They might be fooled, and frequently were, but they always owned up to their mistakes in time.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, but the doctor is no longer available.’

  ‘He’s not?’

  ‘No, sir; he’s left the practice…’

  Michael was puzzled.

  ‘He’s passed on,’ the receptionist explained, a tangible reluctance in her manner that was irresistible.

  ‘I don’t follow…’ said the love apple, maintaining eye contact, his naïveté feigned and with the aim of discomforting the woman, his motives entirely mischievous and altogether, he imagined, puerile.

  A delightful kind of torture. He simply desired the truth; the facts to be stated. No beating about the bush.

  It worked.

  ‘He’s dead. He committed suicide. Nobody knows why.’

  ‘I bet I do,’ Michael stated.

  ‘Pardon?’ She was shocked; so shocked she didn’t believe what she’d heard. She was giving him the opportunity to retract, to pretend he’d spoken otherwise. But Michael was having none of it.

  ‘I bet I do,’ he repeated, pulling his chair closer and leaning on the reception desk.

  ‘How? Did you know him personally?’ Her hand was at her throat. Frightened but intrigued, her voice had dropped to a whisper.

  He looked left and right to make sure no-one was eavesdropping. ‘There was no note, right?’

  ‘I don’t believe so. The police never said.’

  He smiled. ‘I have it.’ He nodded.

  Her expression now mixed fascination and terror. ‘You?’

  He leaned back, bending the tubular metal chair.

  The receptionist was lost for words. She would have to raise her voice to ask anyway, so just mouthed like a fish while Michael reclined in his glory, satisfied she was his to land.

  How old was she, about forty-five?

  ‘If you’d like to take a seat along the hall another doctor will see you.’

  ‘Thanks.’ And he got up, having imagined it all.

  The interloper’s office was cool, recessed lights behind non-reflective grids. There were glass fronted cupboards, a chair with big armrests…

  ‘Right – Mr Tomatoes, just a routine check, is it?’

  ‘Eh…’

  He wore glasses, the optometrist.

  ‘Ah, no; I see. This is your first visit.’

  ‘Actually…’ Sat in the chair he found it difficult to talk. His eyes wandered, taking in racks of varicoloured lenses and stainless steel ornaments. They’d snatched him from the hall and pressed his head against a series of plastic and foam stops, instructed him to peer at a little red and yellow boat on a blue ocean, photographed the backs of his eyes and subjected those same orbs to jets of pressured air in order to see how they’d react. They’d wobbled. They’d watered. He’d almost swamped the yacht.

  It had happened before. He knew what to expect. Still, it was impossible to do anything but react.

  Like an electric shock. The air hit his eye and he jumped. A most subtle and amusing torture, he conjectured. Anything for a laugh.

  So this wasn’t his first time in a chair with big armrests.

  Michael, though, allowed that truth to lapse.

  The optometrist slotted a pair of examination frames behind his ears having dimmed the lights. He dropped a pair of lenses into the frames and asked Michael to read the letters projected onto the far wall.

  Michael complied, struggling around the third line, guessing thereafter, unable to distinguish between his F’s and E’s.

  The projected image changed. The lenses too; like swimming through a series of different pools, the density and constituency of the medium altered both perspective and visual range. Underwater, his field of vision was concentrated. There was only darkness to either side.

  The lenses changed. Things slowly came into focus. A slow process of evolution was evident, his fish eyes gaining in complexity over aeons, honed by nature and his environment into instruments of aquatic penetration, able at a distance to discriminate between foe and food. They were organs of great sophistication. E’s and F’s left readily identifiable imprints; colours were distinguished and shapes identified, given meaning and names. He was better able to negotiate obstacles static and motive, reefs and shoals. He moved through this universe with a confidence not previously experienced, advantaged in the war of survival, the pool still with those shadows at the extremes of his contextual range, silent and threatening, quietly foreboding, but as he swam toward the clear light the reality of his focus mitigated the harsher unknown.

  ‘Michael?’

  ‘Eh…’

  The frames were removed, the lights dimmed further.

  The optometrist shone a light in his eyes, cop fashion.

  Panic ensued…

  A hot cold bath, the icy burning of trauma quelled in an instant by a fascination with the projected image of his veins, the canals of Mars streaking the office wall over the torchbearer’s shoulders. He seemed to be falling toward them, into them, a reddish backdrop of receding fear inviting him to embrace this world of dilute blood and fire, to mingle with its warlike persona, each changing a little or a lot, the effect on the other measured by future scenarios. He saw a whole galaxy of possibilities, spectra of colour and noise, plot and counter plot hinted at in the interaction of canals, their branching like fates, the territories they separated either allied or antagonistic, armies honed to a fierce readiness, gleaming under the fitful light of stars.

  ‘Okay then. Everything looks fine.’

  A bead of sweat froze halfway down Michael’s back.

  The lights came up again.

  He was handed his prescription and invited to browse beyond the office walls, to peer into cases and balance pieces of wire and plastic on his nose. His myopia, although not serious, was detrimental to watching TV and driving. He required lenses to supplement his own.

  After several minutes of this an assistant enquired if he ‘…needed any help.’

  Michael wasn’t sure what she meant. He just sta
red in silence. Hot air circulated, rippling off cabinets and office furniture, tables, desks and chairs about which persons scuttled, some on unfamiliar territory, while others – uniformed, alike in blouse and skirt – moved with a predatory surefootedness, slinking about obstacles to come on their prey with a disabling smile. He was her victim now, yet unsure how to react. Her teeth, white and even, lacked menace. They didn’t appear sharp. He leaned closer for a better look, causing her to step back. ‘Erm…’

  Somebody across the room decided to laugh. The sound, brief and self-conscious, shook the large shop windows and caused the gilt to peel. Lettering fractured like burnt skin, changing colour and flaking away. The love apple’s sweat glands guttered, the descending moisture a torture of extremes, once more cold and hot as the fluid raced down his sides, finding refuge in his socks. There was a sudden squelching weight in his shoes. The assistant gulped. A customer modelling Calvin Klein squinted into a mirror, his exaggerated lack of vision making the whole How Do I Look procedure a mockery of self-deception; it became impossible to lie in the face of no facts, the image presented a blur of flesh and shape viewed through a price tag. Of course, he’d like them anyway, frames expensively fabricated, once with their proper focal depth attached to convince their owner of value, not vanity, a fashion accessory with a practical slant.

  Michael was perhaps jealous. He couldn’t afford as much. He thought of the opposite extreme, of cheapness, the irony of tack; but wasn’t sure he could pull it off. No style was just as much a statement, he conceded. The whole irony thing was a lifestyle choice you needed a lifestyle to perfect.

  But what of the assistant?

  She was asking questions pertinent to his health.

  And, ‘Uh-huh,’ was all he could say.

  ‘Would you like to try something on?’

  ‘Maybe another time,’ he stated.

  Only by this time the person was laughing again; and pointing.

  They weren’t laughing at him, he realized. Their laugh was an absurd expression of surprise. Not necessarily amused surprise, either, just surprise in general. They bent their bodies in several directions at once, like drunken weather vanes, cockerels whose orientation was not dictated by wind – lest it be from their arses. They pitched and rolled as if on high seas, accompanied by polite giggles and embarrassed titters, a partner gazing round and finding Michael’s beleaguered eye, one of two with plus signs yet to be translated into a curvature of plastic. He had no difficulty reading their language, no problem with their F’s and E’s. He judged them summarily and despatched them, rightly or wrongly, into one of two realms of perdition, that is: either the correct or incorrect one.

  ‘Okay, okay…’ he then agreed, needing a change of perspective. ‘Direct me, kind lady, to the mid-price range of spectacles, and adorn my face with the apparatus of seeing better.’

  Only by this time her smile had faded and she’d walked away. He was talking to an insect the size of two house bricks, which flapped its thin-veined transparent wings and winked conspiratorially.

  ‘Angular boy…’

  That’s what she called him, one night after sex, their hips nudging and torsos conjoined. His penis lay on her thigh, dreaming fitfully.

  ‘Annng-ular boy.’

  Her voice in his neck reverberated sweetly.

  He had a nose for complications, she thought, unnecessary detail he felt obliged to magnify and upgrade. Victim to his own imagination, Michael Tomatoes’ was a world of obtuse angles and acute bends, twists and vistas in his sensory tree-scape he peopled with chimeras and animated using anything from somnolent old ladies in the park (the fungal excretions of sodden wooden benches, decades of old lady sweat having warped their pithy DNA) to blurred sepulchral visages glimpsed through the windows of passing ghost trains; these last common enough, as locomotives and their carriages often whistled past his toes in the most unlikely places. His living-room, for example.

  ‘I’m not paranoid.’

  ‘I didn’t say you were,’ Vanessa explained. ‘They’re after you, after all.’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘Those invisible people.’

  She said this with an invisible nod, as if party to a secret he no longer recalled.

  Taking the piss, he realized.

  Too late…

  His wife had noticed it first. Putting the cat out of an evening, half in shadow, crouched under the windowsill, one eye and three legs showing. She’d thought it a reflection, leaves and cobwebs, perhaps a crisp packet wedged between brick and concrete, giving that uncanny metallic stare.

  But the cat didn’t appear next morning. And there was no sign of the paper boy.

  Then her husband began acting strangely. He was impossible to rouse, looked as if he’d been awake all night playing backgammon with a bunch of elderly Chinese, drinking Absinthe-laced tea and smoking unusual tobacco. Morning saw him with a four day growth of beard, a tongue like bacteria-friendly linoleum and the most improbable, throbbing erection. It stood proud of his linen pyjamas and refused to be mitigated. Red and hungry, his tumescence shone, some nine inches of crooked flesh the hardness of granite and the hue of - from top to bottom - aubergine, rhubarb, strawberry and pomegranate.

  He stared at his penis briefly, delirious.

  She was afraid to touch it.

  Then the head swelled, turning yellow like a particularly virulent zit, the gland next opening in mimicry of a flower; slow motion, the violent release of seed a measured explosion, darts of semen jetting in every direction like pieces of shell from the mouth of a choking octopus, armoured pods of a life potential…

  The member wilted. The air hummed. The wife clutched her breast. The doctor, in obvious pain, did his best to remain calm. But the future was spelled out: words short as days.

  Walls and ceiling were impregnated. The bedside lampshade was torn. His beloved’s knees slowed the tiny rivulets of blood flowing from beneath her night-dress, creating ox-bow lakes in their dimples as the blood negotiated rougher terrain.

  The humming rose in volume; was the hum of flight organs quadraphonically arranged.

  The sound he could not escape.

  Not, thought Michael, in a million years. The sugarfly had drank from his eyeballs as he slept, slaking its thirst for images and its hunger for ideas. It preyed on the imaginations of unguarded poets, men and women whose brains spawned verse, whose lives were a song unheard. It enriched them briefly; or, as here, drove its victims insane.

 

  Three: Other Earths Tabulated