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.
V.
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…”