Ben Segal
A car drive on a poorly lit road, fireflies, two glass eyes rolling loose in the passenger-side cup-holder. She takes them in her hand, presses them too closely together. Glass-friction soundtracks the way home, all those hours of distance, borders. Changing light and continuous land.
An automatic-opening garage door, a cool bed, a too soon morning. Three cups of coffee. Too much cream, a failing attempt at two thousand calories per day.
She is named Ellie, describes herself as early-mid-career, a sort of ordinal life-point.
She has a dead man's eyeballs in her purse. The glass ones are in her purse. The real ones, the nerve-stringed, blooded, bodily eyeballs, they're in solution, in their own glass with its own light bulb. Ellie keeps those at home.
*
A glass eye as lozenge. She can think of other things, she's read Bataille.
Glass eyes in photographs, glass eyes close-mic'd, recorded. Reams of magnetic tape sped and slowed. His grinding eyes, that awful drone. Her grinding eyes. The glass pupils are a bolder blue than the organics. Maybe it's just that they've faded, memories and photographs too. Maybe he called the eye sculptor and asked for the sharpest blue in stock. Ellie's tongue slides his eye along the back of her teeth, lips open to the microphone. Glass on enamel, a rhythm based on the width of her teeth.
Work time. She dries the eye, folds it in silk, sinks it to the bottom of her purse. An automatic-opening garage door, a short silent drive. Her name tag pinned through the weave of her shirt. Eight smiling hours of fixed returns, stipulations, new accounts. It's better than telling.
Pattern and routine, mounting of tapes. Ellie notices the visible aging of her skin, tries creaming it back in time, feels only moistened and odored. She's lit their case and is staring right into those blue desiccating eyes. Formaldehyde can only do so much. Glass though, glass is forever.
*
They met when he was old but not yet blind or dying. Ellie liked that she was too young for him. She pretended then that experience counted for something, that a man could age attractively. She liked that he held her hand gingerly.
He was the kind of William who never abbreviated his name, tucked in his shirts, purchased aperitifs. A tall William, past-handsome and easily summed up, not yet aware that his eyeballs had become microbial habitat. They had a good lunch and charmed each other.
There was dating, emotional intimacy, soft, tentative, vaguely unsettling sex. A month or so passed, enough time to establish the image of idyll. The truth of the early weeks is that they were just good enough to bear later exaggeration.
She remembers when William got the stinging in his eyes. It was nothing, scattered dull pricks. Then more pricks that were points of pain, throbbing constellations that intensified for days. Ellie became the bearer of icepacks, ibuprofen, tv trays of simple foods she'd fork into his mouth while William tried to retreat behind his eyelids. Their conversation fell to 'open your mouth's and non-linguistic grunts, asignifying expressions of air.
The pricks became bars of pain, crosshatched ocular burnings. William would have writhed if he could bear to move. Ellie called a neighbor and loaded William into her car. There were days of hospital lights, practiced bedside manner, so much sea foam green. Nothing could stop the degeneration of his eyes. They were already only a network of tunnels, eaten out by microscopic mouths.
So the eyes went. William liked to say he clawed them out himself, calmly and neatly, hardly even bleeding. Of course he had them taken out by a surgeon, had them professionally stored. He let her walk him out by his hand, drive him and lead him back to his now-strange house.
*
Ellie recalls it all as lists. Events and sense memories strung together with invented causal relations:
At first I had felt chained, like this man was in such pain, so helpless, that who was I to leave him? This blind old man who said he loved me until I echoed it; I was not the kind of person to leave someone like that. And who would believe I'd left him because of anything but his helplessness? So for a while I convinced myself that love was an orgy of sacrifice. I stayed on, let his hands move everywhere they wanted because it was therapeutic, because tactility was his new sight. Those old fingers have felt every cell of my skin and four or five inches into my openings. I'd come to be known by the changing of my surfaces, understood as topography, partitioned into different zones of dryness, of moisture, striations and lumps, vein bulges, hair lengths, thicknesses of nail, ribbings of calluses. What were angles became textures and densities. I began to craft myself not for eyes but for hands. I depilated constantly, abraded my skin, smoothed myself out, toned and let go muscles according to the register of touch. I was hideous to view, but I felt better than any person alive. I practiced some kind of intimacy on him, an approximation of communion, closed-eyed fingering of his empty sockets, of every reachable part. This was the best part of our association. Not the first weeks but this. We described each other, hands and words, in a vocabulary cleansed of visual reference. This was when I was not sure I was only pretending at love. We kept his empty eyes under disinfected cloth and I'd clean my fingers and reach into his orbits and he would say the kindest things about my skin. Then these kindnesses morphed, became tinged with suggestion and then reprimand. Was it that he felt so helpless while I plunged into him blindly by choice? We kept ourselves pressed together but embittering until he insulted the shape of my bones. He told me of osteotic shaving. I fled when he recommended pelvic alteration. His claim was total shock, maybe not even a lie. The sun hurt my unpracticed eyes, burned the skin of my sculpted body. The drive home to my parents' house was chapping and full of stares and I cried most of it.
Ellie again recites her diary or monologue and it's true or close. Her index finger rests on one of the glass eyes, rotates it idly on the table. Her interlocutor watches, itches to touch. He's another William, Ellie's age, more ragged than the old man. She brought him over after meeting him on the internet, an act that always feels a little like conjuring. He's listening patiently like the ad said, like she'd repeated when he first got there.
I rested and regained my visual composure in the privacy of my parents' home. Some weeks of eating properly, hiding in my childhood bed. Incremental backyard tanning, hair growth, return to a more acceptable idiom. And then I moved here, took up working again. William called and forgave me, which was more than I could forgive him for. But I let him call again and we talked, maybe once a month. Eventually I even saw him, went back for a day to watch him die.
The William across from her unfolds his hands from his lap and Ellie lets him reach forward. She places his index finger on the eye's pupil, flips on the contact mic on the table. It's his turn now.
*
The advertisement is for Williams. It runs often and the kinds of Williams who read these things all know the wording already.
William: Please do not respond unless you are named William. If I select you, we will meet at my home. I will give you a story and you will listen patiently without interruption. You will make certain sounds as instructed and you will tell me a story to match my own. I will record everything, audio only. We will wear very little and touch very little, but we will imagine having sex. We will not have sex. Please do not reply with a picture or biographical information except a copy of your driver's license or other state-issued id.
The first William is the dead William. This William—the ragged youthful William she'd lycra-ed and informed—this William is leaned over the table and pressing his weight into the glass eye. Ellie likes the noises of his exertion.
You want to see the real ones?
This William nods. They tend to when she gives them the choice. She pulls them out, lights up their case. The real eyes bob a little and string out their blood behind them. William is thinking about what it would be like to have sex with Ellie. He is. He puts the glass eye in his hand up to the glass case with the real eyes, rubs it along back and forth to look into them both. Ellie tells him it's enough, unpeels his lycra, puts him back in his jeans.
*
This obese William can't stretch on the black body suit she needs him in. Ellie tells him to call if he slims down.
*
This William she wants but holds back from. He tells her the things he wants most. The list is entirely physical.
*
This William she meets at her bank. He'd read her ad. She takes him home and fills his mouth with glass, makes him ululate while she traces out the hole of his ear. Again. Again and others.
It isn't therapeutic and it doesn't have anything to do with her fragile psyche. Ellie's convinced herself that art is a series of heightened gestures, oversignifying and emptily erotic. One day she'll cover walls with identical eyes all ordered up to look like William's. The sounds of her recordings will fill the room with echoing screeches, oblique percussion, clipped accounts of sexual fantasy. Enter William, flattened, universal, commodity-William. William her identity and hers. William invested with meaning to sell so she can quit the bank. Isn't it neat? The one thing she can't sell is the taste of sucking glass.