10: New Eyes
+ a new album
Peter and the group decided to stay after the band left, lounging around the same table they were at to begin with. With the band leaving the crowd left with it, and now on the formerly-crowded stage there was a solitary elderly man with an acoustic guitar, strumming away and humming to himself as though he was the only patron of the place; he droned aimlessly to his own ear, giving himself the subtle performance of a lifetime.
“What’s the deal with this place?” Peter asked. “How come money isn’t a thing here?” (He had also tried to explain money to the people of Anastasia, and consequently got nowhere).
“Peter,” a macho and mustached man named Anger spoke up, “with all due respect, we’re much more interested in where YOU come from. Say, what kind of things did they teach you in school?”
“Math, science, history, english, art, music, gym. I think that covers it.”
“Sounds like what we all had.” Everyone nodded with Anger. “But what else?”
Peter got confused. “Driver’s ed when I was 16. Replaced my gym class for a little while.”
“You’re forgetting the biggest one, Peter.”
“Hit me.”
“Magic.”
Peter moved his head to the side, his ear poking towards Anger.
…
Roman made it out; with a few sweaty and pancake-makeupped dancers at The Stooges show, they had left the bar entirely sober, somehow. Through a few alleyways, past old chainlink contagions and dumpsters, up four whole flights of stairs, and through two different locked doors requiring two different strange beatnik roommates and passwords to gain entry.
Roman had met The Scorpios. There were too many of them for there to be one cohesive leader; their leader was whatever music was on that made them move. Some were cavemen and used for physical intimidation, typically engaged in underground fighting rings and theft for fun. Others were writers and folk musicians. One of them, a silent writer wearing glasses and sporting a French knit hat, scribbled in a notebook, taking in the whole room and detaching themselves from the action in an effort to preserve the bohemian nature of these good people.
Writing bad poetry about having fun with other people at an hour reminded Ricky of childhood hopscotch by himself or that sand was falling through his fingers, especially since new blood came in tonight and new people meant new times. He flipped the notebook full of beautiful ideas shut and threw it into his pocket to participate.
Their name was Roman; unclear gender, pale skin, tall and a tad bit gaunt. Quiet, polite, musically inclined it seemed from what the other Scorpios said. Their posture seemed natural at four stories high in an apartment that rocked when it got windy.
Roman had agreed to a ritual and sat on the couch to watch its preparation. Suzie lit candles: black, waxy obelisks dripping residue onto the hardwood ground.
“Do you drink, Roman?” June asked. She had dyed black hair, a black sweater and sunglasses on as she poured herself a drink, moving an empty glass in front of Roman as they witnessed the candles, the flames on the tips of wicks puffing up into the sky, almost like Herculean solar flares.
Roman thought about the question which made them think about drinking which made them think about Warrin which brought the stench back into the nostrils. They almost turned green on the spot.
“Haven’t had anything in a while.”
“Sober?”
“Just uninterested.”
“What a bore. Try this.”
Suzie brought the large bottle out. It was like a yellowed, bubbly glass bowling pin with no label. Inside, a thick oily liquid rested.
“What the hell is it?”
The room answered with “Venom.”
“What does it do?” Roman asked as Meito, another Scorpio, was already pouring glasses for everyone.
“It stings,” Ricky said. “Try some and lay down inside the salt circle,” Ricky told Roman while sipping on some Venom from a mug. “Makes you relax.”
…
“There is no way that you have magic here,” Peter said. “That’s like one of the few things that mainly everyone can agree on. It doesn’t exist.”
Anger’s friends got quiet as he glared into Peter.
“Let me take you outside and show you something.”
Peter and Anger went alone outside.
“Anger,” Peter began, “I feel like I’ve known you from Earth.”
“Shhh. Just watch.”
A man in a blue shirt across the street was fighting another man who wore a grey shirt, swapping fists and battering the others’ face until it resembled deli meats and slaughterhouse disposals.
“What do you think they’re doing, Peter?”
“Fighting.”
“Over what? ‘Money’ as you call it?”
The crowd around the men cheered and booed like watching two gladiators and a starving lion bite primally into each other. The blue shirt landed a concrete fist into the grey shirt’s jaw. He fell back and the blue shirt heard cheers around him as he jumped up and down, holding his hands up.
“They’re fighting over time, Peter. You lose the fight, you lose years of your life. Simple as that.”
“You’re lying.”
The man in the grey shirt was helped back up. His hair had turned white, and his face had become wrinkled. He shook hands with the man in blue, spit a bit of blood up, and walked away with assistance from a friend. The winner literally glowed in the nighttime with victory in his skin.
…
Roman laid back and heard the chanting. The dozen-or-so people there rhythmically connected like madmen, like a vicious echolalia in the room.
HAaaaaaa HAaaaaahhhh HAaaaaa HAaaaaahhhhh
Each person bounced off each other’s voice, howling as though wild. Roman thought they were starting to really feel the effects of the venom- they were feeling light-headed, a bit high, fairly floated off the drink.
It was a couple minutes later that Roman was entirely suspended in the salt circle, as though cradled by the hands of God itself in midair. They experienced a joy unlike any other once their eyes opened, sending them crashing straight to the floor. Suzie, Ricky, and June all started cheering for Roman on the ground, pouring them some more venom. Roman didn’t care to ask because the truth was more simple when unsaid; they levitated.
…
“Do you read much, John?” Amos Gang asked.
“Used to, sir.” John sat on the sweaty leather couch by himself as Amos Gang sat with his legs sloppily thrown over the arm of his chair, almost as though it was his personal throne. On the other arm was a beautiful young woman doing an awfully good job at pretending her natural romantic tendencies led her to the sagging embrace of the 90-year-old man.
“Well, let me read this story for you, then. It’s a piece I’ve been working on: it’s called
A Story About John and His New Eye
It had happened overnight: on the night before March first, he had no eye there. But upon the wailing alarms of next morning, it was already blinking and ogling at his pre-shower greasy depiction on the back of his right hand, grown around the hair and knuckles. It was just as green as his eyes, leaking after a yawn just like the other two. It cried with him as he let his fears out into his empty pillow in an empty apartment. The eye hurt just like the others did, sore and searing, needle-like stabbings in the eye. John got high to calm down, and the third eye became red and bloodshot. It was an oddball addition to his body, but it would have felt no different than a second mouth that also became dry, a second set of ears that tuned apathetically into the news. The change of the eye was a case of pure cosmetics.
After a couple days with the new eye and reminding himself of its uselessness, he finally made himself comfortable with it, absentmindedly combing what remained of his hair (normally concealed with a black dollar-store bandana) through his fingers and knew the eye was there as its pupil dilated, entranced by the ceiling. It was a difficult thing to process the eye without screaming bloody murder, wishing to kill it with a fork or a knife or the ballpoint tip of a stolen pen from the pharmacy, seeing what kind of juices would come out of it once skewered…
The first person John talked to after finding the eye was his mother, and he only talked to her because she called first. They talked on the phone about his former girlfriend and the curse she put on him, his finances in a strange wreckage, the cost of rice lately. As John held the phone up to his ear, he could hear beyond the sound of his mother’s voice a squirming of the third eye. He could feel it oscillating on the other side of his skin. It shifted, moving the skin around it, from one side to the next, bouncing delightfully on the back of his hand.
The strangest part about the eye was that he just could not see a damn thing out of it. It was indeed an eye but it did everything an eye did besides see. He was handling all the recent phenomenon with a surprising level of nuance and peacefulness apart from the lack of vision this eye suggested.
After the doctor poked and prodded, there was really nothing that he could do. Nothing to fix. The doctor just told him to drink enough water, walk enough steps per day, eat healthy, don’t smoke.
The tarot reader thought the eye to be a joke; thinking it was plastic, she scratched the eye. It shrieked, audibly screamed at her. She got so startled that her large crystal ball lit up by third rate old sad burning light bulbs got knocked to the ground, breaking violently in half. The eye winked at her as John profusely apologized and ran out of the the woman’s space.
Only John and God knew about the eye; in fact, John had prayed for the first time in years towards God, asking for guidance, strength, peace. Three days later he had a new eye.
It was 23 days from the point he last prayed when the eye began to see. It did not see what he saw, however; it seemed to give the meek and faded objects around him a shine he had not known previously, it seemed to breathe a new life in. When he used the eye to watch a film or finally flip through a rustic paperback, it gave him clarity to see for the first time, to truly understand artwork beyond “it’s good” for the first time ever.
He came to John in a beautiful form: golden wings, ten million eyes of his own, no marks indicating the “male-ness” of God. God glowed like glitter in the sun, like the red-hot sun in your eyes. God told him directly to grasp his forehead with his right hand and SEE.
John obeyed when he woke, knowing it would only benefit him to keep searching this feature. But when the palm touched the forehead, he felt himself for the first time; he was cold yet boiling and feverish, he was dripping with sweat yet dry like outside summer produce. He was never better but he was, deep down, a miserable man.
“I wish I was blind,” John said.
And so the eyes listened. The moment he said it all three of the eyes shut off.”
…
John wiped the tears from his eyes and thanked Amos for the piece. Then his eyes stopped working.