This was the first time he laid on an operating table. In the months preceding, he had gradually unraveled. First his mind, then his intellect, his heart, and now his body. It happened on a humdrum Wednesday noon at work, when the sunlight percolated ink-stained shades and made the office sleepy and the light from his laptop screen biting.
It happened in a blink. He rubbed his eyes. Closed it for a few seconds to make sure. He couldn’t see out of his right eye anymore. He excused himself early that day, head bowed, demure, face shaded, and hurried home. “What’s wrong mate?” His colleague Dan called after him. He didn’t answer.
He knew his eye was dying when he saw it in the mirror. It was the color of winter, jaundiced and infected with spidery red capitularies crawling on the whites. His iris gleamed, dead center, but he was trying to look right as hard as he can, so hard that he felt the muscles around the corneas tear and his temple pulsate. And still, his eye stared straight ahead. Something seemed to move beneath the waxy membrane. He caught a glimpse of it with his other eye, like rings of wriggling worms. He would hear them too, moist and squirming. His scalp crawled.
The doctors were baffled. They took turns examining it, poked and prodded it, and after three nights of observation, informed him that an exploratory surgery was necessary.
The smell came first. That smell… caustic, rusty. Once upon a time, it had made him vomit. Now though, it just made him sad. They inserted a thin speculum into the crevice around his eye so that the eyelids could be rolled back and fixed, exposing its tender core. He could smell the metal too. It was cold, so cold that it felt searing. Or perhaps that was them cutting into him. They had bandaged his other eye and gave him an injection. The anesthesia worked, partially. He couldn’t move, but he still felt the scalpel paring into the ligament that kept the eye in place and several sharp objects inserted into the sclera. The pain… he felt the rest of his body shudder. But he said nothing. It was penitence.
The room fell silent. The surgent pulled something out. It felt like… strings? With it came a pungent order, the twisted saccharine smell of rotting flesh. He heard metals clanging and a nurse retching, and horrified whisper.
“What the fuck”.
It was two days before he regained consciousness. They had moved him into a room at the far end of the wing. The room had three beds, but he was its sole occupant. He heard the sounds of anxious relatives drifting in from far beyond, a world away, and dissolve in the eerily silence. He lay inclined on the furthermost bed by the window. His IV drip bag had run dry for while now and blood had backed up the line, all the way into the drip chamber. The room was hastily set up, and he hastily housed there.
He clicked on the buzzer a few times. A nurse came, looking a pale as she removed the needle and muttered, “the doctor’s on his way”, before fleeing the room.
He was gazing out of the window drifting. Whatever medication they were giving him made him groggy. He had arrived in the city on a night just like this, in the heels of autumn, in his cindering late twenties, two dead-end jobs wrapped in glitter, pursuing dreams he no longer remembered. City lights weaved a web of neon and he flew into its mandibles, willingly. But the years of loneliness have made him bitter. He sought absolution, he found only ashes here.
That was before he had met her. And before he lost her.
Knock. Knock.
The Doctor entered. Tentative. Eyes darting. “We have some, uhm, findings, to discuss after the surgery, Mr. North.” Not even a how are you. His searched his words for a moment, and failing to find it, took out a tablet.
“These are your patient records,” the Doctor said. “The bottom line is, your blindness was caused by a… mass… that grew in the vitreous – the liquid that fills your eye. Your… condition…. is something we have never encountered before and with your permission, I would like to send this to some Ophthalmology experts”. He clicked on something on the screen and passed the tablet to him. “This is what we removed.”
It was a picture of a small clump of auburn mixed with slime and blood.
“We tested it. It was human hair”.
Of course it is. He thought. He remembered running his hands in them, burying his nose in them, kissing them. He remembered the tickling sensation they made and how she hated tying them up, even when they fucked with her on top. They smelled like the sea and petrichor and moonlight. He was intoxicated by them.
And he couldn’t bear the thought of being parted from them, so when she said was leaving, he felt something snap inside. She wanted to leave, so he made her part of him forever, every piece of her, one day at a time. But her auburn hair, he buried next to that bench by the river – their spot, where they’d sometimes sit and watch the skies opening up to join the ocean, and dreamed of a life together.
Seeing his silence. The doctor excused himself.
Lights went off. He sat in silence, waiting, thinking of her.
It happened in a blink, his remaining eye, the light in it was gone.
This is what happens when you are hospitalized during Halloween week.
#00117F 