house bustling with the members of a soberly dressed and Lilliputian family. His sister, of course, had seen only eggs and bread on the table before them, and could do nothing but clasp her brother’s hands and coo into his ear as he whimpered in confusion. “It’s getting worse,” Henry concluded. “Can’t you figure out what’s the matter? Don’t take me wrong, Doctor. I’m grateful for the operation, to be able to see again. And you’ve been very generous letting Eleanor and myself stay here while I recuperate. But I… I fear I’m going mad. I haven’t had the blessing of sight since I was seven years old. The world looks strange enough to me as it is. But now? I can’t tell which visions I should heed as reality and which I should dismiss as apparition.” Dr. Islington put down his pen and steepled his fingers. His eyes twinkled under a heavy brow. “Henry, I can’t tell you with certainty what’s happening to you. But I do have a theory. This procedure I used on you, as you’ve known from the beginning, is an experimental one—a marvel only possible in this enlightened new century. But rerouting the channels of your brain to bypass the tissue damage that had blinded you all those years ago… to be honest, I was operating a bit blind myself.” The doctor gave a low chuckle then shifted himself in his chair as Henry, unaware that he was staring, bore into the man’s face with his eyes. “What I believe is occurring,” Dr. Islington went on, avoiding Henry’s gaze, “is an awakening. A rebirth of what the philosophers have called the mythopoeic mind. See, Henry, before science eclipsed the scientist himself and recast the human psyche in its own rigid image, our minds were much more fluid and intuitive. Our perception was wildly subjective. Long ago, for instance, two individuals from two different tribes of man could look at the same object—a stick, say, or a snake— and see two wholly different things. The wars of that pre-scientific era weren’t simply conflicts over resources. They were battles between epistemologies, between distinct interpretations of sensory input, between irreconcilable empirical realities. In a way, men fought over the right to see the world the way they wished, and to populate that world with objects and gods of their own invention.” The doctor paused for a moment to peer out the window of the examination room, his eyes lingering on the artful arrangements of shrubs and stones in the garden beyond. “What I’m proposing, Henry, is this: These are no mere hallucinations you’ve been witnessing. They are what I would classify as mythopoeic manifestations. In short, sir, they are metaphors.” Henry rubbed his temples in hard, small circles, as if trying to accelerate his inner processing of the doctor’s ideas. “If you’re right,” Henry said eventually, his voice rising, “then what about my eyes? What are these dice supposed to be goddamned metaphors for?” The doctor answered Henry with an unreadable expression. Then he smiled at the younger man. Henry made every effort not to scream as the doctor’s face suddenly flowered into a violent, bruise-colored cloud. The smoky mass spread upward from his starched collar to the ceiling, seething all the while with tiny figures that ISSUe 6 appeared to be either locusts or vultures. “Why, it’s obvious, Henry,” the doctor’s voice echoed from deep within the purple nimbus that had been, just a moment ago, his head. “The dice symbolize uncertainty. Everything that is not yet known. Wasn’t your entire operation, after all, a gamble?” ◊ That night Henry laid awake and listened to the apple trees beyond the garden swish in the stiff wind of an incoming storm. The trees, he comforted himself, at least sounded like trees. Eleanor had been right. The night was much easier for Henry. As the doctor had explained to them soon after the operation, while Henry’s eyes were still bandaged, less light means less visual stimulus entering the brain. The closer Henry could come to his previous state of absolute blindness, the less he was prone to these terrific visions. Even then, there seemed always to be a glee the doctor exhibited in hearing about and recording in his notebook Henry’s latest phantasmagorical episode. A hiss from outside his window jolted Henry out of his thoughts. “Brother, it’s me. Come down.” He parted his curtains, and even in the dim light he could see Eleanor’s long, pale hair undulating in the wind. As lightning danced in and out of the racing clouds, her locks took on the appearance of tentacles. Henry squinted. “What are you doing out there?” he whispered back. “You’ll wake the doctor. Come back inside.” He heard her laugh, the same mischievous giggle she’d had since they were children. Then the luminous mass of her hair--now blonde, now green, now blonde again--bobbed away in the lightning-charged darkness toward the garden. ◊ As Henry slept that night, he dreamed he and Eleanor were both children again. They played upon the gleaming new tracks the rail company had stitched across the fields behind their grandmother’s house. All manner of beasts, machines, and combinations thereof crawled along those tracks as Henry groaned and turned in his bed: steam engines curled first into nautili, then into pachyderm-shaped gramophones, and then into electric-eyed cats that licked their sparking fur with ferrotype tongues bearing images of comets and atoms. Around that mad factory, that assembly line of illusion, Henry and Eleanor darted and laughed, gorging themselves on the ripe, metallic berries that sprang as if by magic from their footprints until their lips were blue and their bellies sore. Henry awoke with a start, the storm still raging and the sky like ink. As he savored the already fading images of his dream, he remembered what their mother had said years ago after hearing Henry babble wild tales of the menagerie in grandmother’s fields: “You will be a poet someday, Henry. In the age of steam and electricity, a poet. God help you.” That was before the auto accident, before he’d gone blind. True to his mother’s prediction, 21
22 Publizr Home