Blind Faith
The technician’s name is Brittany. Bubbly. Bright smile. She’s been chewing the same piece of gum since high school. Her lanyard says ASK ME ABOUT TRANSITIONS.
She holds out her hand.
“Glasses?”
I give them to her.
This is how the world ends. Not with earthquakes, fires, or floods. With a woman named Brittany taking away the only thing between me and the furniture.
She folds them once, sets them on the counter, and the room immediately goes dull.
She sits me in the chair and points me at a mirror across the room.
The mirror throws letters back at me. Familiar lineup. Big ones up top, then smaller, then a row that may as well be the bottom of a well.
“Read down as far as you can,” Brittany says.
I read down as far as I can.
Then I read one more line, because it’s a test, and where there’s a test, a man wants the A.
I squint the last three letters into existence.
“Z. O. B.,” I say, with conviction. Brittany smiles, writes something down, but doesn’t call my bluff.
Instead, she tells me to press my chin into a little plastic cradle.
She swings in a white plastic box at the end of a metal arm and parks an inch from my face. Brittany’s thumb works a tiny joystick until my softened world collapses to a tunnel.
“Look at the orange hot-air balloon,” she says, which is not a real balloon but a photograph of a balloon, blurry now, floating in a field that doesn’t exist.
“Try not to blink,” she says, and then the machine spits a hard, cold puff directly into my open eyeball.
Every animal instinct I own files a formal complaint.
“One more,” she says.
One more?
Before I can do the math, she does it again.
She swings the blowgun out of the way, pulls a metal mask down over my face, and starts flipping lenses.
“One?” she says. “Or two?”
There is no difference between one and two.
There has never been a difference between one and two. One and two are the same smeared row of letters bleeding into the wall forty feet away, and I am being asked to swear, under fluorescent oath, which version of blurry I prefer.
“Two,” I say.
“How about three?”
Sure. Why not? I pick three. I would pick anything. I am a man choosing between identical doors in a hallway with no exit, and Brittany is writing down my answers as if I’m not a drowning man being asked to rate the temperature of the water.
Brittany steps in close.
A bottle appears in her hand like a coin from behind a child’s ear.
I never saw her reach for it.
There is no drawer, no tray, no rustle—just empty fingers and then poof! a little bottle appears.
Now she’s coming at me from the side, on tiptoe, the way you’d approach a horse you didn’t want to spook.
I know what’s coming.
There is no part of me built to let a stranger’s fingers anywhere near my open eye.
Every cord in my neck pulls tight, and my hands grip the arms of the chair, and the eye wants to close, the eye is begging to close, and she says, “Hold it open for me,” and I hold it open for her, and the whole time, everything inside me wants to stand up and punch Brittany square in the face.
The drop stings. Ice cold.
Are these refrigerated?
Then the other eye, which has watched the whole thing happen to its brother and braces anyway, for all the good it does.
The world goes soft at the edges like a photograph left in the rain.
She tells me it’ll wear off in a few hours. She tells me she hopes I didn’t drive myself here. She tells me this with her back to me in a darkened room that may as well be a broom closet.
Then she leaves, and I sit there alone, essentially blinded, waiting. For what, I do not know.
A man in a lab coat shuffles in, mumbles something, and sits at a desk, back to me, an arm’s reach away. He rattles the mouse on the desktop until the screen crackles to life.
Approximately 17,000 clicks and 14 screens later, he pushes away from the desk with a spin and rolls toward me.
“Chin in the cup. Forehead against the top here,” he points.
He straps on a miner’s halo, clicks on the sun, and lifts a glass porthole between us.
The room disappears.
My pupil becomes a doorway, and he leans in like a locksmith.
He swivels his chair this way and that. Softly grunts. Glides from one eye to the next. More grunts. Looks for ninety seconds. Scribbles something. More soft grunts. Then says the word “astigmatism” the way my mechanic says “transmission,” and leaves.
I sit in my cold, dark cell awaiting execution.
Sweat beads along my brow. I consider planning my escape, but think better of it.
Eventually, Brittany comes back.
She tells me I’m free to go. Hands me my glasses.
I put them on, and my outlook improves. I peer through the darkness, find the mirror across the room, the lineup, but can’t find “Z. O. B.” anywhere on the chart.
Brittany helps me out of the chair, steadies my elbow like I’m her grandfather. And then opens a door into another world.
You’ve never seen light like this.
They’ve done something to the light in here while I was away. It comes from everywhere and nowhere, no shadows, no source, a white glare that illuminates the entire interior of your skull.
The walls are lined floor to ceiling with frames, hundreds of them, each one perched on little chrome arms reaching out of the wall like the showroom is offering them to you personally.
There is carpet the color of granite, soft jazz, and a mirror every three feet, because they want you to look, they need you to look, the entire architecture of the room is a machine built to make you look at yourself.
Then a voice. “Ready to try on some frames?”
I turn, and there’s Susan. Her lanyard says so. And so does she.
Susan’s job is to hand me frames faster than I can process what to do with them.
“Here, let me take those old frames,” she says.
And here’s the wrinkle. To put new frames on your face, you must remove the lenses that are the only reason your face is currently aimed at anything.
So you do.
You watch Susan fold up your real glasses and set them on the glass counter where you’ll never find them again, and you slide the new empty frames onto your nose, and you turn, hopeful, toward the closest mirror.
I cannot see a thing.
I can’t see the frames, my face, whether the frames are on my face.
I am looking into a mirror three feet away, and there’s a flesh-colored smudge in it that I’m told is me, wearing a darker smudge that I am told is four hundred dollars.
I lean in.
The smudge leans in.
We regard each other, the smudge and I, the way you’d regard a stranger across a foggy parking lot at four in the morning, both of you wondering who’s going to swing first.
Those look great on you, Susan says.
Susan is twelve feet away.
She’s also a smudge.
The whole room has become a Monet that somebody coughed on. I have no way to verify her claim. I have no way to verify anything.
I am being asked to evaluate my own face—the one thing I have carried with me every second of my life—and I have been rendered, by the very act of trying, completely unable to find it.
So I take those frames off, Susan hands me another pair, and the whole thing happens again: the fold, the slide, the blind lean, the smudge, the verdict from the smudge in the corner.
Great.
Those are great too.
Everything is great.
I’m trying on a hundred dollars, and then two hundred, and then four, one indistinguishable blur after another, and the only data I have is the number on the little card hanging off the arm, and the numbers are the only thing in this entire blazing room that I can read.
A man walks into a building because he cannot see.
They confirm, with science, with the cold hard puff of it, that he cannot see.
They drop chemicals in his eyes to make sure he really cannot see.
And then they walk him into the brightest room in the building, hand him a series of objects he is incapable of perceiving, stand him in front of a mirror, and ask him to decide which version of his own invisible face he’d like to pay a week’s wages to wear for the next two years.
And he does it.
That’s the thing.
He picks a pair.
Everybody picks a pair.
I chose the tortoiseshell. The ones a man wears when he wants you to think he reads.
I pay for them at the counter, where Susan’s been hiding my old glasses for me, the ones I was certain were lost forever. She slides them back across the glass so I can see well enough to sign.
Susan says they’ll call when the new ones come in. Two weeks. Maybe three.
I put my own glasses back on, and the world snaps shut around me, sharp and complete, every frame on every chrome arm suddenly visible, hundreds of them, all the faces I would never wear.
Then I walk out through the showroom that’s finally come into focus, having just bought, blind, the one face I’d never gotten to see wearing any of them.