“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.
VI.
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.
Flowers
On a bright Monday morning in February, Lois and Daniel were reading in their monochromatic living room — gray walls, gray carpet, gray furniture. It was the kind of room that could soothe a panic attack, or cause one. From the stereo Scriabin flung a cat’s cradle of notes.
The doorbell interrupted the Russian madman. Daniel was still in bathrobe and slippers — this was his day without seminars to conduct or office hours to show up at. Lois answered the summons. She was already dressed: stovepipe pants, tee, jacket, all black. Iterations of this uniform in various dark colors hung in her closet like a line of patient men. She had not yet put on her shoes. But even barefoot she was six inches taller than the lanky teenage boy in the doorway, though the offering of gladioli he thrust into her hands rose above them both. “‘Mrs. Daniel Bevington,’” the kid read from a yellow slip. Lois nodded. “There’s a note,” the boy said, and raced to a curbside van that bore the name of a local florist.
Daniel, noiseless as always, had followed Lois to the door. “Have we a vase long enough for those?”
“No.” You can’t really bury your nose in a gladiolus, but she tried. Meanwhile, boots pulled on because of the snow, he headed for the garage. She followed him, still barefoot, the purple shafts in her arms. He scanned the garage’s tidy innards, chose a tall rubber basket the color of earth, picked it up and rinsed it under the outside tap. Then he filled the thing halfway with water. He put it down and returned to the living room, Lois still behind him, her feet turning blue. He spread the automotive section of the newspaper on the floor in front of a bookcase. He went back out for the rubber basket. Lois went into the kitchen.
She laid the flowers on the kitchen table and loosened their wrapping. She slipped the note from between the stalks. Happy Valentine’s Day, it said. Love, Daniel.
She returned to the living room, the gladioli now horizontal in her arms. “Daniel! How sweet of you. So sweet.” She put the flowers in the rubber basket.
“I’m glad you like them,” he said, looking up, sounding briefly young, younger than their twin college-age sons, younger even than the delivery boy, who had probably thought he was fleeing a house of mourning.
“Like them? I love them,” Lois said. Especially since I’m not really dead, she added silently. She walked to Daniel’s chair and kissed him. This was the first time he’d sent her flowers since her lying-in.
He noticed that her eyes were unnaturally bright.
The doorbell rang again.
This time the truck was from a florist in a neighboring town. Another teenager said, “Lois Bevington?” He handed her twelve tall bloodred roses in their own vase.