Honeydew: Stories (18 page)

And what of the unique Lyle during these years? Well, he had things to occupy him: school, cello, baseball, walks at night with Marcus or David or Pansy. Music was blessedly colorless. When he stood in center field, the sky showed him its myriad blues and the field its hundreds of greens, but none of that distracted him from the flight of the sphere, a headless wingless bird, a ball white and off-white and off-off-white. Nothing distracted him from the task of predicting the bird’s destination and putting himself beneath it, mitt at the ready.

He played in the school orchestra. Once in a while he went to a party and talked to whoever seemed left out—talked awkwardly but soothingly, or maybe soothingly because awkwardly.

He thought about someday becoming a doctor. He liked looking at anatomy plates, vivid to begin with, garish under his inspection. He wondered whether his vision, trained, might develop an X-ray component. Marcus doubted it. They discussed diseases of organs other than the eye—diagnosis, treatment, treatment failure.

But despite the error-free fielding record and despite the mild friendships with his peers and despite the comfort of nocturnal darkness in the company of one of the three people he loved, Lyle, heavy with his secret, often felt sorrowfully alone.

When he was sixteen, he began to spend Sunday mornings with last year’s biology teacher. They drove to a nature preserve and then hiked its trails. And then one Sunday, during a forbidding rainstorm, she invited him to forget nature for a day. She was forty, the ideal age to relieve a sensitive boy of his virginity and satisfy his curiosity too. He noted that her areolae were not sepia, as novels said, but pulsing pink rose mauve…This dear woman would be fired without a hearing if her generosity became known—he knew that, and he realized how uncalibrated were the rules that claim to protect us from one another. But Lyle was used to keeping things to himself, and anyway he would never betray Ms. Lapidus. Their Sunday-morning explorations continued—in the nature preserve if the day was bright, in bed if otherwise.

He shared his secret with her—she would not betray him either.

“But, wow!” she said, turning to look at him, her head on her palm, her elbow on the mattress.

“Wow? It’s an affliction.”

“Really? By me it’s an opportunity. Think of the things you could do with those special eyes. Detect art forgeries.”

He blinked at her.

“You could tell the difference between Rembrandt’s paint and pseudo-Rembrandt’s paint,” she explained. And on another occasion she said, “You could identify altered substances. Traces of banned pesticides.”

“Or find the fault lines in a rock,” he unenthusiastically contributed.

“Or see a smear of makeup on a man’s tweed shoulder.”

“Huh?”

She told him that adulterers usually tried to keep their activities hidden, and that their wronged spouses often hired detectives for a substantial fee. And on yet another rainy Sunday she suggested that he could identify fish misnamed by dishonest restaurants. “And sometimes they serve brains masquerading as sweetbreads, or maybe it’s the other way around. You could bring miscreants to court.”

He didn’t answer. He was again looking at her breasts. The areolae were mauve, yes, but mostly by contrast to what he now noticed as yellowish skin; and when he raised his eyes he saw that her sclera were curdling. To foresee the coming of disaster—that was not how he wanted to use his gift.

“Would you do something for me?” he managed.

“Just about anything,” she confessed.

“Would you have your doctor do an MRI of your abdomen?”

“What? I feel fine.”

“And a pancreas biopsy,” he said, and began to cry.

Another year. And then, one August afternoon, Marcus emerged from the lab and found Lyle practicing hoop shots by himself.

“I have a story to tell you,” Marcus said.

“Okay.” When Lyle read, the black letters sometimes shuddered on the page. But when he listened, his closed eyes found a sort of repose behind the patchwork cerise of his lids.

“It’s a Jamaican tale,” Marcus said.

“Oh, then about Anansi.”

“Anansi plays a part. But it’s about a young man.”

They sat on the ground, their arms around their knees and their backs against the trunk of a beech, as if they were in a Caribbean village leaning against a guango.

Marcus began:

“Once upon a time there lived a youth who was never happy unless he was prying into things other people knew nothing about. Especially things that happened at night. He wanted secrets to be laid bare to him. He wandered from wizard to wizard, begging each of them in vain to open his eyes, but he found none to help him. Finally he reached Anansi. After listening to the youth, the spider warned:

“‘My son, most discoveries bring not happiness but misery. Much is properly hidden from the eyes of men. Too much knowledge kills joy. Therefore think well what you are doing, or someday you will repent. But if you will not take my advice, I can show you the secrets you crave.’

“‘Please!’

“‘Tomorrow night you must go to the place where, once in seven years, the serpent-king summons his court. I will tell you where it is. But remember what I say: blindness is man’s highest good.’

“That night the young man set out for the wide, lonely moor belonging to the serpent-king. He saw a multitude of small hillocks motionless under the moonlight. He crouched behind a bush. Suddenly a luminous glow arose in the middle of the moor. At the same moment all the hillocks began to squirm and to crawl, and from each one came thousands of serpents making straight for the glow. The youth saw a multitude of snakes, big and little and of every color, gathering together in one great cluster around a huge serpent. Light and colors sprang from its head. The young man saw brilliance usually denied to mortal eyes. He saw iridescence, bioluminescence, adularescence, opalescence. Then the scene vanished. He went home.

“The next day he counted the minutes till night, when he might return to the forest. But when he reached the special place, he found an empty moor: gray, gray, and gray. He went back many nights but did not see the colors. He would have to wait another seven years.

“He thought about the colors night and day. He ceased to care about anything else in the world. He sickened for what he could not have. And he died before the seven years was out, knowing at the end that Anansi had spoken truly when he said, ‘Blindness is man’s highest good.’”

After a while Lyle said, “But, Dad, not complete blindness…”

“No. Fables are not literal. Freedom from supervision…supravision…overvision…hypervision…”

“Freedom from second sight,” Lyle added. “I can have that freedom?” He turned toward Marcus. His remarkable eyes, an unremarkable brown, seemed to swell a little—tears had entered from the ducts.

Marcus put his arm around the boy’s shoulders, scraping his elbow grievously on the back of the tree. “I think so.”

The next week, Marcus appeared at dinner with a pair of spectacles—rimless, with wire earpieces. The lenses were constructed of hundreds of miniature polyhedrons.

“Prisms,” said Pansy, and went on dishing out
lapin aux pruneaux.

“Involuted prisms,” refined David, who now lived with the family. He had become comfortable at last with his celibacy and inwardness; he was sometimes even talkative.

Marcus turned to Lyle. “These are for you,” he said, and he handed the eyeglasses to the boy. “Put them on whenever you like.”

“They will give you a different kind of vision,” David said. “And, Lyle—it’s all right if you don’t like the spectacles.”

Lyle did not put them on inside. He went out onto the lawn with its commanding beech tree and its flowering bushes. He looked around at the normal thousand-color summer scene—normal to him, at any rate, though he understood it to be his alone. Now maybe he’d know a competing normal. He put on the glasses.

It was as if someone had turned out the lights or a thick cloud had passed in front of the sun. Most creatures see things less brilliantly in the dark, he knew that. He was seeing things less brilliantly. The house, made of flat stones, was gray. Perhaps the gray contained some gold. On the laboratory’s green siding, each slat cast a slightly darker green on the one beneath it. The beech tree was a combination of brown and red. The geraniums were a shade of magenta—one shade of magenta. He looked at his skin. Plain tan. He looked at the sky. Blue, slowly deepening—it was dusk now. Dark blue.

He went inside. “I like the glasses.”

“And the colors?” Marcus asked.

“Duller. Many fewer. Motionless. Perspective is less noticeable. Things seem to have only a touch of a third dimension. I’m glad for the…diminishment. Now I have two ways to see. Thank you, Dad. Thank you, David. You’ve given me a wonderful present.”

“We have given you a choice,” Marcus said. “Always an ambiguous gift.”

Lyle said suddenly, “Spiders—what’s
their
vision like?”

David said, “Spiders usually have eight eyes placed in two rows on the front of the carapace. The eyes have a silvery appearance. The retinas have relatively coarse-grained mosaics of receptor cells, and their resolution of images is…”

“Poor,” said Marcus, finishing David’s lecture and answering Lyle’s question at the same time.

Lyle wore his gift every day, all day, until he went to bed—and even then he took the new glasses off only after he’d turned out the light. His classmates were incurious about the glasses—they were teenagers, after all, not interested in much outside themselves. But Lyle’s new and commonplace vision gave him new and commonplace manners. He no longer stared into space, his conversation became less effortful. Girls phoned him. He got included in more activities. Marcus and David made sunglasses for him, and swimming goggles, biking goggles, wraparounds for chemistry lab. They made him a pair of pince-nez, which he wore to a Halloween party, along with a stiff collar and a frock coat and a false beard. “Chekhov,” he explained. He joined the chess club. The club met Sunday mornings. His Sunday mornings were free. Ms. Lapidus had recently died.

In the lab Marcus and David were now constructing wide-angle micro-optical lenses. The lenses could be implanted—and were, after the proper trials—in a sufferer’s eye. They made new tools for photography and tomography. They made corneal inlays. Pansy was running the business aspect of the enterprise, and managing the staff of five. Having learned so much about the tricks of the eye-brain double play, she became expert at standard optical illusions, and then invented some of her own, with which she beguiled the twin sons who had been born to her and Marcus. (“Their complexion is Unglazed Bisque,” Lyle said of his brothers, remembering the old paint wheel.) Pansy began a side venture selling games of her own design. Some elaborate inventions she used at the twins’ birthday parties, held in a newly built room off the lab. The kids’ friends entered an illusory universe for half an hour, then gobbled up Pansy’s sweet-potato ice cream, which was real.

At eighteen Lyle was accepted at St. John’s. He was looking forward to reading the Greats. The day before he was to leave for Annapolis, a thick autumn mist enveloped Godolphin and Godolphin alone—the sun was out in Boston. A graduation gift from Anansi, Lyle thought. He walked down to the river. There the mist rested, soft and colorless. Slowly, deliberately, he took off his glasses.

Mist. Still mist. Then, gradually, colors returned, filled the scattered bits of moisture. According to the laws of physics, each drop should have contained a rainbow—but no, on this eve of departure, the drops, directed by the spider, were breaking the laws, each producing a singular shade for his pleasure, all together producing a universe of colors. Purple deeper than iris, laced with yolky lines. Bronze striped with brass. He saw the indigo of infected flesh, he saw the glistening fuchsia of attacking bacteria, he saw the orange of old-age crinkles that wait invisibly on every smooth young arm. Yes, all colors, in all their headachy variations, colors as they had once been.

His man-made glasses, his trickster specs, had made life less sorrowful, but at a cost. They had deprived him of this sheen of blue blue blue violet seeping into blue blue violet violet pressing itself into blue violet violet violet that yearns to become shadow. Vanilla hectored its neighbor papyrus. There was moss concealing like a mother its multigreened offspring. There were squirming nacreous snakes, slightly nauseating. Much is properly hidden from the eyes of men, Anansi had said…Chartreuse slashed like lightning across his vision from upper left to lower right and also from upper right to lower left, both slants remaining on his retinas that were so cursed, so blessed. Where one diagonal intersected the other in this chartreuse chiasma rested an oval, deep within the intersection, for of course the mist in which these shapes and colors shudderingly resided was three-dimensional or maybe three-and-a-half, and it was in motion too, the color drops assaulting one another in a chromatic orgy. The oval within the chartreuse X was scaled with overlapping hexagons of nearly transparent turquoise—there must have been hundreds of turquoises, each different from the other by so little, so little, yet, by that little, different.
What’s your favorite color?
people used to ask, as they always ask children.
Red,
he would answer, divining even then that they had no idea how many reds there were: a cloud at sunset, a cloud at sunrise, blood from a scratch, blood from a nose, a run-over cat; the dappled skin of a tomato, with all reds swimming upon it…He wondered, not for the first time, who his original father was.

He put his glasses back on. Mist returned to mist, ordinary mist, mist in whose every drop curved what people called the spectrum, such a paltry number of colors. This sight was no truer a reality than the glory of a few minutes ago; no less true either. Truth had nothing to do with the witness of the eyes. What he saw now was simply what other people saw. He chose their limited vision; he meant to live in this world as an ordinary man. He would not remove his glasses again.