Green Eyes

Chapter 4

Every morning at nine-thirty or thereabouts an astringent odor of aftershave stung Donnell’s nostrils, and the enormous shadow of Dr Edman hove into view. Sometimes, though not this morning, the less imposing shadow of Dr Brauer slunk by his side, his smell a mingling of stale tobacco and sweat, his voice holding an edge of mean condescension. Edman’s voice, however, gave Donnell a feeling of superiority; it was the mellifluous croon of a cartoon owl to whom the forest animals would come for sage but unreliable advice.

‘Lungs clear, heart rate… gooood.’ Edman thumped Donnell’s chest and chuckled. ‘Now, if we can just get your head on straight.’

Irritated by the attempt to jolly him, Donnell maintained a frosty silence. Edman finished the examination and went to sit on the bed; the bedsprings squealed, giving up the ghost.

‘Had a recurrence of that shift in focus?’ he asked.

‘Not lately.’

‘Donnell!’ said Jocundra chidingly; he heard the whisk of her stockings as she uncrossed her legs behind him.

He gripped the arms of the wheelchair so his vertigo would not be apparent and concentrated on Edman’s bloated gray shape; then he blinked, strained, and shifted his field of focus forward. A patch of lab coat swooped toward him from the shadow, swelling to dominate his vision completely: several pens clipped to a sagging pocket. By tracking his sight like a searchlight across Edman’s frame, he assembled the image of a grossly fat, middle-aged man with slicked-back brown hair and a flourishing mustache, the ends of which were waxed and curled. Hectic spots of color dappled his cheeks, and his eyes were startling bits of blue china. Donnell fixed on the left eye, noticing the pink gullies of flesh in the corners, the road map of capillaries: Edman hadn’t been sleeping.

‘Actually’ - Donnell thought how best to exploit Edman’s lack of sleep - ‘actually, I had one just when you came in, but it was different…’ He pretended to be struggling with a difficult concept.

‘How so?’ Papers rustled on Edman’s clipboard, his ballpoint clicked. His eyelids drooped, and the blue eye rolled wetly down.

‘The light was spraying out the pores of your hand, intense light, like the kind you find in an all-night restaurant, but even brighter, and deep in the light something moved, something pale and multiform,’ Donnell whispered melodramatically. ‘Something I soon realized was a sea of ghastly, tormented faces…’

‘My God, Donnell!’ Edman smacked the bed with his clipboard.

‘Right!’ said Donnell with mock enthusiasm. ‘I can’t be sure, but it may have been…’

‘Donnell!’ Edman sighed, a forlorn lover’s sigh. ‘Will you please consider what our process means to other terminal patients? At least do that, if you don’t care about yourself.’

‘Oh, yeah. There must be thousands of less fortunate stiffs just begging for the chance.’ Donnell laughed. ‘It really changes your perspective on the goddamn afterlife. Groping, bashing your head on the sink when you go to spit.’

‘You know that’s going to improve, damn it!’ The blue eye blinked rapidly. ‘You’re retarding your own progress with this childish attitude.’

‘What’ll you give me?’ Jocundra stroked his shoulder, soothing, but Donnell shrugged off her hand. ‘How much if I spill the secrets of my vital signs?’

‘What would you like?’

‘Another whore.’ Donnell jerked his head toward Jocundra. ‘I’m bored with this one.’

‘Would you really prefer another therapist?’

‘Christ, yes! Dozens! Orientals, Watusis, cheerleaders in sweatsocks for my old age. I’ll screw my way to mental health.’

‘I see.’ Edman scribbled furiously, his eye downcast.

What gruesome things eyes were! Glistening, rolling, bulging, popping. Little congealed shudders in their bony nests. Donnell wished he had never mentioned the visual shift because they hadn’t stopped nagging him since, and he had begun to develop a phobia about eyes. But on first experiencing it, he had feared it might signal a relapse, and he had told Jocundra.

Edman cleared his throat. ‘It’s time we got to the root of this anger, Donnell.’ Note-taking had restored his poise, and his tone implied an end to games. ‘It must be distressing,’ he said, ‘not to recall what Jean looked like beyond a few hazy details.’

‘Shut up, Edman,’ said Donnell. As always, mere mention of his flawed memory made him unreasonably angry. His teeth clenched, his muscles bunched, yet part of his mind remained calm and watchful, helpless against the onset of rage.

‘Tall, dark-haired, quiet,’ enumerated Edman. ‘A weaver… or was she a photographer? No, I remember. Both.’ The eye widened, the eyebrow arched. ‘A talented woman.’

‘Leave it alone,’ said Donnell ominously, wishing he could refine his patch of clear sight into a needle beam and prick Edman’s humor, send the fluid jetting out, dribbling down his cheek, then watch him go squealing around the room, a flabby balloon losing flotation.

‘It’s odd,’ mused Edman, ‘that your most coherent memories of the woman concern her death.’

Donnell tried to hurl himself out of the wheelchair, but pain lanced through his shoulder joints and he fell back. ‘Bastard!’ he shouted.

Jocundra helped him resettle and asked Edman if they could have a consultation, and they went into the hall.

Alone, his anger ebbing, Donnell normalized his sight. The bedroom walls raised a ghostly gray mist, unbroken except for a golden fog at the window, and the furniture rippled as if with a gentle current. It occurred to him that things might so appear to a king who had been magicked into a deathlike trance and enthroned upon a shadowy lake bottom among streamers of kelp and shattered hulls. He preferred this gloom to clear sight: it suited his interior gloom and induced a comforting thoughtlessness.

‘… don’t think you should force him,’ Jocundra was saying in the hall, angry.

Edman’s reply was muffled. ‘… another week… his reaction to Richmond…’

A mirror hung beside the door to Jocundra’s bedroom, offering the reflection of a spidery writing desk wobbling on pipestem legs. Donnell wheeled over to it and pressed his nose against the cold glass. He saw a dead-gray oval with drowned hair waving up and smudges for eyes. Now and again a fiery green flicker crossed one or the other of the smudges.

‘You shouldn’t worry so about your eyes,’ said Jocundra from the door.

He started to wheel away from her, upset at being caught off guard, but she moved behind his chair, hemming him in. Her mirror image lifted an ill-defined hand and made as if to touch him, but held back, and for an instant he felt the good weight of her consolation.

‘I’d be afraid, too,’ she said. ‘But there’s really nothing to worry about. They’ll get brighter and brighter for a while and then they’ll fade.’

One of the orderlies sang old blues songs when he cleaned up Donnell’s room, and his favorite tune contained the oft-repeated line: ‘Minutes seem like hours, hours seem like days…’

Donnell thought the line should have continued the metaphorical progression and sought a comparative for weeks, but he would not have chosen months or years. Weeks like vats of sluggish sameness, three of them, at the bottom of which he sat and stewed and tried to remember. Jocundra urged him to write, and he refused on the grounds that she had asked. He purely resented her. She wore too damn much perfume, she touched him too often, and she stirred up his memories of Jean because she was also tall and dark-haired. He especially resented her for that. Sometimes he took refuge from her in his memories, displaying them against the field of his suffering, his sense of loss, the way an archeologist might spread the fragments of an ancient medallion on a velvet cloth, hoping to assure himself of the larger form whose wreckage they comprised: a life having unity and purpose, sad depths and joyous heights. But not remembering Jean’s face made all the bits of memory insubstantial. The hooked rugs on the cabin floor, the photograph above their bed of a spiderweb fettering a windowpane stained blue with frost, a day at a county fair. So few. Without her to center them they lacked consistency, and it seemed his grief was less a consequence of loss than a blackness welling up from some negative place inside him. From time to time he did write, thinking the act would manifest a proof, evoke a new memory; the poems were frauds, elegant and empty, and this led him to a sense of his own fraudulence. Something was wrong. Put that baldly it sounded stupid, but it was the most essential truth he could isolate. Something was very wrong. Some dread thing was keeping just out of sight behind him. He became leery of unfamiliar noises, suspicious of changes in routine, convinced he was about to be ambushed by a sinister fate masquerading as one of the shadows that surrounded him. There was no reasonable basis for the conviction, yet nonetheless his fear intensified. The fear drove him to seek out Jocundra, she in turn drove him to thoughts of Jean, round and round and round, and that’s why the weeks seemed like goddamn centuries, and the month - when it came to be a month and a little more -like a geologic stratification of slow, sad time.

One summerlike afternoon Jocundra wheeled him out to the stone bench nearest the gate and tried to interest him with stories of duels and courtship, of the fine ladies and gentlemen who had long ago strolled the grounds. He affected disinterest but he listened. Her features were animated, her voice vibrant, and he felt she was disclosing a fundamental attitude, exposing a side of herself she kept hidden from others. Eventually his show of boredom diminished her enthusiasm, and she opened a magazine.

High above, the oak crowns were dark green domes fogged by gassy golden suns, but when he shifted his field of focus he could see up through the dizzying separations of the leaves to the birds perched on the top branches. His vision was improving every day, and he had discovered that it functioned best under the sun. Colors were truer and shapes more recognizable, though they still wavered with a seasick motion, and though the brightness produced its own effects: scroll works of golden light flashing in the corners of his eyes; transparent eddies flowing around the azalea leaves; a faint bluish mist accumulating around Jocundra’s shoulders. He tracked across the glossy cover of her Cosmopolitan and focused on her mouth. It was wide and lipsticked and full like the cover girl’s; the hollow above her lips was deep and sculptural.

‘How do I look?’ The lips smiled.

Being at such an apparently intimate distance from her mouth was eerie, voyeuristic; he covered his embarrassment with sarcasm. ‘What’s up in the world of bust enhancement these days?’

The smile disappeared. ‘You don’t expect me to read anything worthwhile with you glowering at me, do you?’

‘I didn’t expect you could read at all.’ Flecks of topaz light glimmered in her irises; a scatter of fine dark hairs rose from her eyebrow and merged with the hairline. ‘But if you could I assumed it would be crap like that. Makeup Secrets of the Stars.’

‘I suffer no sense of devaluation by using makeup,’ she said crisply. ‘It cheers me up to look nice, and God knows it’s hard enough to be cheerful around you.’

He turned, blinking away the patch of clear sight, considering the blurs of distant foliage. It was becoming increasingly difficult for him to maintain anger against her. Almost without his notice, as subtly as the spinning of a web, threads of his anger had been drawn loose and woven into another emotion. Its significance escaped him, but he thought that if he attempted to understand it, he would become more deeply ensnared.

‘I have a confession,’ she said. ‘I read through your notebook this morning. Some of the fragments were lovely…’

‘Why don’t you just look in the toilet after I go…’

‘… and I think you should finish them!’

‘… and see if my shit’s spelling out secret messages!’

‘I’m not trying to pry out your secrets!’ She threw down her magazine. ‘I thought if you had some encouragement, some criticism, you might finish them.’

Halting footsteps scraped on the path behind him, and a scruffy, gassed voice asked, ‘What’s happenin’, man?’

‘Good morning, Mr Richmond,’ said Jocundra with professional sweetness. ‘Donnell? Have you met Mr Richmond?’

Richmond’s head and torso swam into bleared focus. He had a hard-bitten, emaciated face framed in shoulder-length brown hair. Prominent cheekbones, a missing lower tooth. He was leaning on a cane, grinning; his pupils showed against his irises like planets eclipsing green suns.

‘That’s Jack to you, man,’ he said, extending his hand.

The hair’s on Donnell’s neck prickled, and he was tongue-tied, unable to tear his eyes off Richmond. A chill articulated his spine.

‘Another hopeless burn-out,’ said Richmond, his grin growing toothier. ‘What’s the matter, squeeze? You wet yourself?’

A busty, brown-haired woman came up beside him and murmured, ‘Jack,’ but he continued to glare at Donnell, whose apprehension was turning into panic. His muscles had gone flaccid, and unable to run, he shrank within himself.

The brown-haired woman touched Richmond’s arm. ‘Why don’t we finish our walk, Jack?’

Richmond mimicked her in a quavery falsetto. ‘ “Why don’t we finish our walk, Jack!” Shit! Here they go and stock this place with these fine bitches, and they won’t do nothin’ for you ‘cept be polite!’ He bent down, his left eye inches from Donnell’s face, and winked; even when closed, a hint of luminous green penetrated his eyelid. ‘Or don’t you go for the ladies, squeeze? Maybe I’m makin’ you all squirmy inside.’ He hobbled off, laughing, and called back over his shoulder. ‘Keep your fingers crossed, sweetheart. Maybe I’ll come over some night and let you make my eagle big!’

As Richmond receded, his therapist in tow, Donnell’s tension eased. He flicked his eyes to Jocundra who looked quickly away and thumbed through her magazine. He found her lack of comment on his behaviour peculiar and asked her about it.

‘I assumed you were put off by his manner,’ she said.

‘Who the hell is he?’

‘A patient. He belongs to some motorcycle club.’ Her brow knitted. ‘The Hellhounds, I think.’

‘Didn’t you feel…’ He broke off, not wanting to admit the extent of his fright.

‘Feel what?’

‘Nothing.’

Richmond’s voice drifted back from the porch, outraged, and he slashed his cane through the air. The rose-colored bricks shimmered in the background, the faceted dome atop the roof flashed as if its energies were building to the discharge of a lethal ray, and Donnell had a resurgence of crawly animal fear.

After the encounter with Richmond, Donnell stayed closeted in his room for nearly two weeks. Jocundra lambasted him, comparing him to a child who had pulled a sheet over his head, but nothing she said would sway him. His reaction to Richmond must have been due, he decided to a side effect of the bacterial process, but side effect or not, he wanted no repetition of that stricken and helpless feeling: like a rabbit frozen by oncoming headlights. He lay around so much he developed a bedsore, and at this Jocundra threw up her hands.

‘I’m not going to sit here and watch you moulder,’ she said.

‘Then get the fuck out!’ he said; and as she stuffed wallet and compact into a leather purse, he told her that her skin looked like pink paint, that twenty dollars a night was probably too high but she should try for it, and - as she slammed the door - that she could go straight to Hell and give her goddamn disease to the Devil. He wished she would stay gone, but he knew she’d be harassing him again before lunchtime.

His lunch tray, however, was brought by the orderly who sang, and when Donnell asked about Jocundra, he said, ‘Beats me, Jim. I can’t keep track of my own woman.’

Donnell was puzzled but unconcerned. Coldly, he dismissed her. He spent the afternoon exploring the new boundaries of his vision, charting minuscule dents in the wallpaper, composing mosaic landscapes from the reflections glazing the lens of the camera mounted above the door, and - something of a breakthrough - following the flight of a hawk circling the middle distance, bringing it so close he managed to see a scaly patch on its wing and an awful eye the color of dried blood and half filmed over with a crackled white membrane. An old, sick, mad king of the air. The hawk kept soaring out of his range, and he could never obtain a view of its entire body; his control still lacked discretion. It was a pity, he thought, that the visual effects were only temporary, though they did not suffice of themselves to make life interesting. Their novelty quickly wore off.

The orderly who brought his dinner tray was tanned, fortyish, with razor-cut hair combed over a bald spot and silken black hairs matting the backs of his hands. Though he was no more talkative than the singing orderly, Donnell suspected he could be drawn into a conversation. He flounced pillows, preened before the mirror, and took inordinate pleasure in rubbing out Donnell’s neck cramp. Gentle, lissome fingers. On his pinky he wore a diamond ring, an exceptionally large one for a person earning orderly’s wages, and Donnell, seeking to ingratiate himself, to learn about Jocundra, spoke admiringly of it.

‘It belonged to my grandmother,’ said the orderly. ‘The stone, not the setting. I’ve been offered eighteen thousand for it, but I held onto it because you never know when hard times might snap you up.’ He illustrated the snapping of hard times by pinching Donnell’s leg, then launched into an interminable story about his grandmother. ‘She had lovers ‘til she was sixty-seven, the old dear. Heaven knows what she did after that!’ Titter. He put on a dismal face. ‘But it was no picnic being raised by a dirty old woman, let me tell you.’ And he did.

Donnell had been hoping to weasel information about Jocundra during the course of the conversation, but the orderly showed no sign of allowing a conversation, and he was forced to interrupt. The orderly acted betrayed, said he had no idea where she was, and swept from the room with a display of injured dignity that evoked the angry rustle of taffeta.

Then it dawned on Donnell. She wasn’t coming back. She had deserted him. How could she just go without telling him, without arranging a replacement? Panicked, he wheeled out into the hall. As he headed for the foyer, hoping to find Edman, a ripple in the carpet snagged his wheels and canted him into one of the potted ferns; the brass urn toppled and bonged against the floor. The door beside it opened, and a thin blond woman poked out her head. ‘Shh!’ she commanded. She knelt by the fern, her nose wrinkling at having to touch the dirt. She had the kind of brittle prettiness that hardens easily into middle-aged bitchdom, and as if in anticipation of this, her hair was done up into a no-nonsense bun and tied with a dark blue ribbon.

‘Have you seen Jocundra?’ asked Donnell.

‘Jocundra?’ The woman did not look up, packing down the dirt around the fern. ‘Hasn’t she left?’

‘She’s left?’ Donnell refused to accept it. ‘When’s she coming back?’

‘No, now wait. I saw her on the grounds after supper. Maybe she hasn’t gone yet.’

‘Laura!’ A querulous voice leaked out the open door; the woman wiggled all five fingers in a wave, a smile nicked the corners of her mouth, and she closed the door behind her.

It had been easy to tell Jocundra to leave when he had not believed it possible, but now he was adrift in the possibility, all solid ground melted away. He skidded down the ramp into the parking lot. The lanterns above the stone benches were lit, bubbles of yellow light picking out the blackness, and fireflies swarmed under the oaks. Toads ratcheted, crickets sizzled. She would be - if she hadn’t left - at the bench near the gate. The flagstones jolted the wheels, his chest labored, his arms ached, a sheen of sweat covered his face. Something flew into his eye, batted its wings, clung for a second and fluttered off. A moth. He crested a rise and spotted Jocundra on the bench. She wasn’t wearing makeup, or was wearing very little, and she looked hardly more than a girl. He had always assigned her the characteristic of sophistication, albeit of a callow sort, and so her youthfulness surprised him. Her melancholy expression did not change when she saw him.

‘I don’t want you to leave,’ he said, scraping to a halt a couple of feet away.

She laughed palely. ‘I’ve already left, I just went into New Orleans for the day.’ She regarded him with mild approval. ‘You made it out here by yourself. That’s pretty good.’

‘I thought you’d gone,’ he said, choosing his words carefully, not wanting to appear too relieved. ‘I didn’t much like the idea.’

‘Oh?’ She raised an eyebrow.

‘Listen.’ He balked at apology, but gave in to the need for it. ‘I’m sorry. I know I’ve been an asshole.’

‘You’ve had good reason to be upset.’ She smoothed her skirt down over her knees, then smiled. ‘But you have been an asshole.’

‘Could it be my nature,’ he said, rankled.

‘No, you’re not like that,’ she said thoughtfully. She slung her bag over her shoulder. ‘Let’s go on in.’

As she wheeled him toward the house, Donnell felt strangely satisfied, as if some plaguing question had been put to rest. The fireflies pricking the dark, the scrape of Jocundra’s shoes, the insect noises, everything formed an intricate complement to his thoughts, a relationship he could not grasp but wanted to make graspable, to write down. Near the house another moth fluttered into his face, and he wondered - his wonder tinged with revulsion - if they were being attracted by the flickers in his eyes. He pinched its wings together and held it up for Jocundra’s inspection.

‘It’s a luna moth,’ she said. ‘There was this old man back home, a real Cajun looney. He’s blind now, or partially blind, but he used to keep thousands of luna moths in his back room and study their wing patterns. He claimed they revealed the natural truth.’ She shook her head, regretful, and added in a less enthusiastic voice, ‘Clarence Brisbeau.’

‘What’s wrong?’ Donnell loosed the moth and it skittered off, vanishing against the coal-black crowns of the oaks.

‘I was just remembering. He scared me once. He got drunk and tried to kiss me. I was only thirteen, and he must have been almost sixty.’ She stared after the moth as if she could still see it. ‘It was spooky. Stripes of light were shining between the boards of the cabin, dead moths on the floor, thousands clinging to the walls. Every time he gestured they fluttered off his arms. I remember him walking toward me, dripping moths, talking.’ She adopted an accent, like French, but with harsher rhythms. ‘“I’m tellin’ you, me,” he said. “This worl’ she’s full of supernatural creatures whose magic we deny.”’