The Fathoming
He rarely looks you in the eye.
Spenser knows this, of course, is aware that in groups large or small, he tends to talk to tabletops, windowframes, that spot behind you on the wall just above your left shoulder. It’s nothing personal. Some people talk with their hands. Some pause, use their breath to dramatic effect. Spenser converses at oblique angles. It doesn’t really bother him, even when he feels you shifting or leaning to steal his gaze.
But when Spenser gets his glasses, this interpersonal tic becomes more conspicuous in his mind. The dark rims seem to frame his line of sight, inviting all comers to bracket his shyness, take the measure of it. The glasses feel heavy on the bridge of his nose and squeeze the sides of his head, triangulating a target dead centre of his skull. He feels hidden behind his glasses, shielded, but somehow exposed at the same time.
The glasses. Now that he has them, the irony is that Spenser can’t determine when his eyesight might have truly started to fail. How long has it been this bad? Only in beginning to repair his vision does he fully appreciate its ruin.
Spenser went for his first test when he couldn’t ignore the squinting any longer. Traces becoming creases becoming furrows at the corners of his eyes. He is certain that the quality of his sight is somehow linked to the elasticity of his face. When he floats up through himself and catches his reflection in the black mirror of his phone, he is struck by a slackening around his eyes and under his chin. Nothing taut, nothing tensile. It is as if every non-essential fibre in his body has been cut, microscopic sappers working subdermal missions throughout the night and gliding out on morning’s first conscious breath.
The eye doctor had dazzled him with an array of tests. Dark rooms, flashing lights, hand-held clickers, droplets, collared headrests. Spenser’s heart was pounding — he felt as if he was in direct competition with everyone who had ever passed through her office, as if his impairment would be scaled against all the wanderers who had come before, seeking guidance in their various stages of blindness. She had prepared Spenser for the puff of air that would be shot at each socket — 3, 2, 1, now — and he steadied himself, eyeball quivering in anticipation, but still lurched when the tiny blast hit him, unprepared for the disdain of the mechanized breath spitting in his face. The doctor showed him a three-dimensional scan of his eye and this was a marvel, seemingly beyond the capabilities of any technology he had encountered as he was led from station to station. The image of his eye screamed at him in alien flourescents, oceans of oranges and nightvision greens being fed by a tangled network of bloodred tributaries and channels. Optic estuaries and inlets. Everywhere, the glow from floating patches of bioluminescent plankton. Worlds within worlds.
←PREVIOUS EPISODE← →NEXT EPISODE→
_________