“We’re wielding science against itself, don’t you see? There are many of us, men of learning and wisdom, and we’ve put you on the path, we believe, to the ultimate vision, to bear witness to the ultimate metaphor.” He grabbed his notebook off his desk where Henry had been reading it. “But you must stay with me, Henry. You must tell me what you see. Before this is all over, you may very well gaze upon the face God, of Creation itself. You must tell us what form it takes. You must allow your poet’s mind, that delirious eye, to be our microscope aimed at the heart of the cardinal metaphor!” The doctor began waving his pistol in the air as his voice climbed in pitch and ardor. Henry froze. On impulse he glanced at the mirror across the room, the one the doctor had always failed to cover up. He saw with alarm that his eyes were, in fact, no longer dice. Instead they had become fireworks, kaleidoscopes, maypoles, merry-go-rounds, all at once, spinning and sparking and spitting more colors than he ever knew existed. Henry lunged across the desk and grabbed the pistol from the doctor’s hand. It turned to raw meat in his grasp, its wet weight flopping across his knuckles. Then he turned it around, found a trigger made of gristle, and pulled it. A putrid jet of jellylike lymph arced through the room, stinking and steaming in the air. As serpents and vapors spewed from the whirlpool that had once been the doctor’s head, Henry heard his sister’s scream come from outside, from the rain-swept garden. He walked through a giant mouth that had opened in the wall of the room, careful to avoid its dripping teeth, and went to find her. ◊ “Eleanor!” he yelled into the storm as he trudged through the lush muck of the garden. The soft patter of rain had picked up once more, and the wind blew black clouds across the faint rinse of sunrise on the horizon. He realized he still had the gun in his hand—only the meat had melted into the flesh of his hand, and his hand had in turn become the gun, his thumb the barrel, his bitten nails the bullets. Caught by the gale, the very substance of his new eyes streamed through the wet spring air in front of his face like egg whites in a pot of boiling water. Each of his eyes, he realized, could now see itself, and Henry felt proud at having achieved such an exquisite paradox. He could also see that his eyes had begun to change form every few seconds: now diamonds, now jellyfish, now testicles, now nebulae. In a spasm of inspiration, he severed the thin tethers that rooted them to his head; free at last, they hovered balloon-like above of him. So bemused, Henry at last saw Eleanor among the trees, naked and dancing with the animals as those haunted children had the day before. He reached out to her with his new hand, and it screamed at her. She fell. Ribbons of seaweed sprouted from her lips, and the mud of the garden sucked at her body like a mouth. Day broke. Henry looked down upon his sister, his new eyes bubbling high among the apple blossoms, and he saw that she was good. She was, in fact, no longer his betrayer, no longer sister, no longer little Eleanor—but a giantess throbbing with the probability of every woman, every human, that had been or could ever be. She was at once an octopus, a factory, a galaxy, and she raised her muddy, myriad arms in a sensuous spiral to him. Henry scooped a bed out of the wet soil of the garden and took this monster, this mother, and he joined her, as he only should in this world of cubes and colors, his new eyes smiling and crawling with larvae in the raw sugar sun. ISSUe 6 23
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