WHAT THE EYE REVEALS

Jason Shults

We’d booked the last available flight from LAX, wanting to milk the weekend for every last drop. But that was before the actual trip. Now it’s three A.M., Monday morning, and both of us have school in less than six hours, myself as professor and Bob as student, though at different colleges. I teach math at the university, and Bob’s studying anthropology at the community college. Or maybe it’s agriculture. Something beginning with A, anyway.

We throw the bags on the bedroom floor, strip off our clothes, and climb into bed. As always, I’m aware of the differential in mattress shift, his long lean body barely making a dent in the foam and coils, while my somewhat rounder, denser (and yes, older and balding) form sinks like a doomed soul toward the center of the earth. Bob reaches away to turn off the nightstand lamp, and then rolls toward me, drawn there by gravitational forces. His arm flops across my chest, and his familiar scent—a scent vaguely reminiscent of hay and honey and freshly-baked bread, the homespun scent of a farmhouse, of a gentle childhood—fills the air around me. For a moment, the underbelly of his arm scratches itself on the coarse black hair of my chest. I lean forward, trying to sniff Bob’s arm, trying to gain more immediate access to his pheromones. I can smell my own body, too, sweat-caked with travel, but the stench fails to overtake the honey and hay. Even in darkness, Bob is golden, overpowering. I breathe deeply, but the chemical attractors can’t completely quash the residual bitterness between us, a low-grade mutual enmity picked up during our trip to L.A.

“Julius Caesar, maybe,” I say, lying back against the pillows.

“Mm?” says Bob.

“Me. In a previous lifetime. Probably Julius Caesar.”

“And who was I?” Bob says.

Brutus, is the answer I want to give, but I don’t. Backstabber, usurper of power. Or Cleopatra, betrayer in love. What I say instead is this: “My faithful slave girl, of course. Secret love of my life, the only person faithful to the very end.” I sigh dramatically, trying to lighten the dark air. “But forgotten in the cruel crush of history.”

“At least you remember me,” Bob says. “That’s all that counts, right?”

I sneer into the darkness, but of course Bob can’t see it. I almost say it aloud, one or the other of the things I’m thinking. Brutus. Cleopatra. But before the words reach my throat, I hear Bob’s soft snores, feel his arm relaxing against my chest, feel myself sinking even lower into the bed. My own breathing eases. Images come, unbidden. I’m lost in time, slipping into a world I’ve invented for someone else’s sake, for the sake of a relationship that I feel hasn’t quite lost its last momentum. A slave girl, blonde and slender, stands above my bed waving palm fronds. A cooling breeze comes from nowhere, and I lie there, pampered, the taste of grapes in my mouth, the taste of honey, the taste of freshly baked bread. Past and future, reality and imagination, melt, meld into one another, love and betrayal becoming just two ways of saying the same thing. Later on, I sleep.

The next morning, I’m not quite myself. For one thing, I’ve had dreams, unrecallable in entirety, grasped only as fleeting images, emotions. They linger throughout the morning and well into the afternoon, these internal tropes do—slaves and tricksters, feelings of lust and exposure—climbing like monkeys on the sleep-deprived circuits in my skull. I rote my way through a Calc One class, stumble through Introductory Topography. The students, all of them ridiculously young, seem not to notice my sudden ineptitude. Words come from my mouth, chalk-lines squeal from my fingertips, and none of my bleary communications are any less comprehensible than usual, apparently. By three o’clock, I begin to think I might just make it unscathed through this dreadful, waterlogged day.

When the bell rings, the last cattle call of the day, I amble into the classroom. It’s a small room, a small class, just six students seated around a rectangular wooden table. Special Topics, the class is called, a theoretical title for a purely theoretical class. In here I’m not the teacher, but serve instead some more mundane function: class monitor, or maybe figurehead. Untrue, of course, but it often feels that way. Only the best and brightest ever make it this far through the program, and mostly they manage on their own. But in the fifty-minute sessions, three times weekly within this room, just hearing the students theorizing, brightens up the remainder of my otherwise backsliding and bleak career. I’m continually surprised by their imaginations, and this helps me survive, in some fundamental way. Questions pop up from nowhere, the students always looking for the envelope’s furthest edge. It’s my job only to show them where the edge lies, and why it lies there. Occasionally, I’m useful.

The special topics change from semester to semester (chosen by secret ballot at our first meeting). For this class, the students have chosen to prove the existence of zero, a not unsolvable proof, but approaching impossibility, straining against the limits of the human mind.

I call the class to order, but after that I drop my tired body into a chair, sit back, watch as the nimble-minded youngsters toss ideas like Nerf balls around the room, squeezing them, reshaping them, sometimes tearing them to bits. The discussion becomes heated when one student, having worked quietly while the others talked, throws his hands up, stands suddenly, and nearly screams, “It doesn’t exist! Of course! Of course! How can a nullity exist at all? Don’t you see? Don’t you see? It can’t be proven!”

He’s hastily attacked from all sides, indicted, ridiculed, and rightly so; the problem strains the limits of reason but doesn’t break them. The answer exists, somewhere, waiting to be found again. The young man, all of maybe nineteen, grows red in the face. Instantly he becomes obsessed with his eyeglasses, pushing them up his jutting nose, pushing them up again when they immediately slide down. He tweaks the earpieces at his temples. Repeatedly, he pushes his longish brown hair behind his ears, from where it promptly falls forward again, into his face. He says nothing, only gawks spastically at those around him. He’s a fidgety mess. He seems struck dumb by the reactionary storm, and I feel badly for him, but also I feel energized by the vigor of the attack. Such fervor, such ire, and all of it caused, literally, by nothing. I can’t help but laugh.

Trey Rothman—the boy’s name—runs from the room. I follow. He’s gone, invisible, by the time I reach the hallway, but I hear the echoing clunk of the men’s room door shutting at the far end of the hall. Wearily, not really wanting to play the part of father or therapist, I trudge down the hallway, pull open the bathroom door, and go inside.

Trey is leaning over a sink. I can see the denim fabric of his baggy jeans shuddering at the knees, the slight motion fueled by anger, fear, embarrassment. I walk toward him, place a hand on his bony shoulder and feel that it, also, trembles.

“Nothing to get so upset about,” I say, as gently as I can. I’ve never quite understood the rules of pathos, of empathy. I pat his shoulder twice before letting my hand settle onto it again.

“Even you,” he says, shaking his head slowly back and forth. He looks up, into the mirror in front of him, turns his eyes so that they meet the reflection of mine. In a soft, low voice, he says, “You laughed at me.”

I take my hand away from him, stick it into my pocket. I stand back, search for inspiration in the blank green tiles of the walls and floor. A student walks into the bathroom, sees us, and promptly turns to leave. I wait until the door clunks shut again before I speak. “I was laughing at the situation, Mr. Rothman. I wasn’t laughing at you. Trey? A thousand other mathematicians have made the very same mistake you made, and every one of them has been attacked in precisely the same way. You should consider yourself in good company.”

“So it was a mistake, what I said?”

“A good mistake. A mistake that’s on the right path.” I slump, trying to seem sympathetic. Maybe I really am being sympathetic, maybe this is what it feels like, I don’t know. I lean against the wall of one of the toilet stalls and press my naked scalp against the cool steel divider. “When it’s all said and done,” I tell him, “I’m willing to bet that you’ll be the one to solve the zero proof.”

He turns then, and faces me, standing upright. Earlier he’d laid his glasses on the lip of the sink, and now he puts them on again, adjusts them, crosses his arms over his chest. “You really think so? You’re not just shitting me to make me feel better?”

“I don’t know how to make people feel better, Mr. Rothman. It’s not in my repertoire.”

We stand in silence a moment longer, until I begin to think the crisis has been finally and ultimately averted. But Trey speaks again, verbalizing the second half of a thought.

“—Because I don’t get the whole symbol thing. I mean, how do we get from things to symbols of things. You’ve got one thing, and then you’ve got the symbol for it. Where does the meaning come from? The numeral zero and the nothingness. There’s no bridge between them.” He opens his arms and flutters them in the stale, damp air. “It sounds so stupid, but…”

“It’s not stupid. You’re just going too far. We’re talking mathematics here, Mr. Rothman, not Wittgenstein. You have to think about the problem on a more practical level. You’ve jumped ahead. You just need to slow down. Back up. Start again.”

He thinks about what I’ve said, and then nods definitively, but says nothing. A ghostly smile passes over his rosy, pimpled cheeks, his lips twitching almost imperceptibly, his eyes quickening with a sudden light. And then it’s gone, and an infinite seriousness overtakes him. He moves forward, toward me, removing his glasses yet again, placing them deftly on the sink behind him. He reaches out, touches my upper thigh with one hand, grasps my elbow with the other hand. And still he comes closer, until my nostrils prickle with his sweet and rapid peppermint exhalations, closer, until I can feel the radiant warmth of his skin on my skin, until I can see the pupils of his eyes, dilating, and the fractal patterns of the green-and-gold irises, trapped like feathers beneath tiny domes of glass.

“We’d better get back to the others, Mr. Rothman,” I say.

He kisses me quickly, and we leave.

After class, Bob and I go shopping for our supper. At Delicacies—an overpriced market in an upscale strip mall—we pick up a frozen mushroom-and-spinach lasagna, a pre-made salad, a bottle of cheap but decent wine. Outside, once we reach the car, I begin prattling about something or other, surface-level nonsense I’m mouthing to try to mask my underlying distress. I’m sure that Bob will notice the something wrong, that he’ll see Trey Rothman’s advances scratched indelibly into my very being, an acid etching, detectable by some new way in which I move or speak, some new gesture or facial tic. I pile two brown bags into the backseat of the car, and manage, for the first time that evening, to venture a look directly at Bob. He’s noticed nothing, isn’t even looking at me. His sight is aimed dreamily at the Pets-a-Lot, the mall’s monstrous anchor store, a hundred yards away.

“You ever wanted a dog?” Bob says.

“Not particularly.”

“Cat, canary, goldfish? Anything?”

I shake my head, and then, because Bob is still aimed Pets-ward, I say aloud, “I don’t see the point.”

“To have something to love you unconditionally? You’ve never wanted that?”

“I thought that’s what you were for, what I’m for. Love and whatever.”

“Unconditionally?” he repeats.

“Sure,” I say.

Finally he turns to look at me. “Really?”

I lock the car, grab Bob’s arm, and lead him toward the gaping maw, through the sliding doubled jaw, into the shrieking, cackling, gullet of the beast.

Puppies, kittens, fish. Gerbils, hamsters, guinea pigs. Bob examines each specimen as if his life depends on his choice of pet. He taps on the glass, squats, peers into the shadowy recesses of bedding and tiny toys, considering each animal’s potential, like a dowser might make his way slowly across an open field, divining where the water hides. There in the store, dogs galumph against their owners’ leashes, straining to chase other dogs, straining for no reason at all. Passing with their owners through the narrow aisles, hounds and purebreds press themselves against Bob’s legs—Bob’s legs but not mine. They slobber on his pant cuffs, sniff at his leather shoes, before being dragged away.

“Saint Francis,” I say.

Bob’s looking at an empty rabbit hutch, a giant specialty model made for people whose love of bunnies goes way beyond the norm. It stands maybe five feet tall, six feet long, four feet deep, perched high on curving, claw-footed legs. The frame is made of carved maple, the wire fencing coated with clear and hitech nontoxic polymer (or so the attached flyer says). There’s a litter tray of galvanized aluminum beneath the wire flooring; a set of wooden shutters attached to the hutch’s front can disguise the fact the thing is a cage at all.

“Jesus,” Bob says with a whistle.

“Saint Francis,” I say.

“What?”

“I’m thinking,” I say, “that maybe you were Saint Francis in a previous lifetime.” A loose bird flies through the ceiling rafters overhead, distracting me momentarily from my thoughts. When the bird perches, I return to what I was saying. “This animal thing you’ve suddenly hooked on to. Where’d it come from?”

“I grew up on a freakin’ farm,” Bob says. “Sometimes I miss the moos.”

Bob shuffles a little way down the aisle, touching everything as he goes. Hamster wheels, gerbil treats, fluffy little bags of batting designed especially for rat beds.

“Or maybe you really were Jesus. It’s possible, I guess.”

“Forget about it already,” he says. “It didn’t mean anything. For god’s sake, it was just some guy in a turban trying to make an extra buck.”

“Twenty extra bucks,” I say.

“Whatever.”

“And it doesn’t bother you at all, what he said? You don’t even see the possibilities, the possible wrongness?”

“I believe in what I see in front of my face,” Bob says. He holds up a miniature log cabin, a countrified mouse-house, and then sets it back on the shelf. “Not what some guy on Venice Beach tells me about who I was in a past life. Or who you were.”

“I was nobody, apparently.”

“You’re here now.”

“Our karma’s not connected,” I say, repeating what the turbaned psychic had said less than forty-eight hours ago. “I’m no good for you, Bob.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“I believe that you believe it.”

“I don’t,” Bob says.

“But you’ve been infected with the idea. That’s the way those people work, planting little seeds of doubt. Why do you think I never read my horoscope? I want to live my life, not worry about how I should be living it.”

“So here I am, living my life,” Bob says. He spreads his arms wide, marches in place. “See?”

“But you’re wondering if he might, just might, have been right. Aren’t you? Aren’t you?”

Bob closes his eyes, squinches his face into something close to anger.

A family—a blue-collar dad and stay-at-home mom and two girls of maybe four and five years—appears from nowhere. They gather around the rabbit hutch, ooing and ahing. The girls play with the latch until they manage to open the hutch’s wide front gate. The mom and dad whisper to one another, pointing, stroking the smooth wood, plucking their fingers against the insulated wire mesh. I hear the words “layaway” and “Christmas,” and then the family disappears again, all of them but the smallest girl.

Bob has vanished too. I choose not to follow him. He’ll fume for a while before deciding to come back, before deciding that he has no choice but to indulge my silliness, to soothe away my self-doubt, provide for me a rational balm by torturing his argument into some logical, emotionless set of axioms I’ll be able to understand. It’s happened before. It’s always happened before.

The little girl is cooing like a pigeon. She’s got the hutch’s door open, her head inside it, and is shaking her hair wildly like an epileptic. I’m not certain if I should be concerned or not. The parents are still nowhere to be seen. At the back side of the cage, I crouch, look in through the mesh. She seems to be okay; only playing. A playful mood hits me as well, I’m not sure why, and I decide to go along with it. I cluck at the girl, bring my fingers to the wires, thumb and forefinger pinched together as if I’m holding bread crumbs or tasty grubs. I’m beginning to feel ridiculous, superfluous, like an old lecher, when she finally takes a step forward, hand and knee. She smiles, catching the thread of the game. She rocks back and forth, teasing.

“Here pidgey, pidgey, pidgey,” I say.

The little girl laughs, scootches herself forward until her entire body is held within the hutch. As her foot slips in, the laces of her sneakers catch the door, which closes behind her. I hear the latch drop firmly into place.

“You’re sleeping with somebody,” someone says. It’s Bob. He’s looking at me through the mesh, disgusted. For a moment I’m not sure what he means. I’m only thinking how bad it looks, me here with this little girl locked inside a cage. But Bob calmly opens the door. The girl climbs out and runs off, skipping into the bowels of the fluorescent monster.

“Jesus, Bob,” I say. “I’m not sleeping with anyone.”

“You want to, then. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Why you’re so hung up on this karma crap. You want me to leave you.”

We both stand, looking at one another over the top of the hutch. I try to mimic his expression of disgust, but can’t quite manage it.

“Let’s go home,” he says.

The previous weekend, we’d gone to Los Angeles for the Warhol Retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Bob had seen an advertisement somewhere and nearly begged me to tag along with him. I’d never been much of a Warhol fan, but I enjoyed Bob’s company, especially when we were alone together in crowds. I don’t know if I’d call it vanity, but I got a thrill out of watching people watch Bob walk by, looks (gapes) I’d never attained myself, no matter how primped and pomaded I was, even back when I’d had hair. And more than that, I liked Bob. I enjoyed being in his company, in crowds or otherwise. We’d been together for nearly four years, and I still found him as appealing as ever. He was simple, straightforward, honest, a counterbalance to my hidden dark side—a dark side which never really expressed itself, but which nevertheless lay in wait for the appropriate moment to lunge forward and ruin my life, as I was sure it someday would. And Bob was a tether to goodness, an anchor, a chain linked to the childhood virtues; Bob was faith, hope, and charity incarnate. Truly.

Saturday was Warhol, all day. Uneventful. Subdued. Muted whispers in a white space. That evening at dinner, Bob raved about the exhibit, but I couldn’t see the point. Dead people in primary colors. Soup cans. Brillo boxes. But I enjoyed Bob’s excitement. At the restaurant, I listened to his chatter, watched as linguini got slurped between his grinning lips.

Sunday we went to Venice Beach. The day was a pleasant one, midseventies in mid-March, a few cottontail clouds in an Easter-egg sky. Around us were the smells of a hippie carnival—patchouli, funnel cakes, pot smoke—carried in a sweet, salty air that made you want to drink deeply of all the smells. The motion of the people against the stationary backdrop of the beach, ocean and sky, was almost joyful. And the variety of the people themselves—their attitudes, performances, talents, and lack thereof, their states of undress—was dizzying.

Bob stopped at every other booth along the paved walk, eyes wide and jaw dangling. He giggled more than I’d ever heard him giggle. By noon he’d gotten two temporary henna tattoos (a Celtic cross on his right wrist and a jagged tribal armband around his left bicep). He’d stripped off his shirt to show them off. And he’d filled his belly with fifteen kinds of sugar.

“Your faces show your past, my children! The future is in your eyes!”

At a booth down the walk, a showman of some sort barked out a pitch.

“See the unseen, my children. Know the unknown! Twenty dollah! Only twenty dollah to know it all!”

Bob shouldered his way through the crowd, careful not to corrupt the intricate traceries of the henna armband. I followed in his wake.

“So you want to know your future, my child?” the barker said. “You want to know your past?” He was holding out his arms, waving us closer. He wore nothing but a turban, blue as the sky, wrapped around his head, and around his waist a cloth like a diaper. His tan looked fake, orangey, but he couldn’t have faked the emaciation: twiggish arms and legs barely thick enough to stand on. His belly pooched out and caved inward at regular intervals.

Bob was holding out his hand to me, wanting money.

“What?” I said. “You’re not really thinking about doing this.”

“Sure. It’s a holiday, for Christ’s sake. Try to be fun for once.”

I handed him the money but didn’t stay around to watch.

I wanted water. Clear, clean, simple water. Not fruit smoothies, not colas, not lattes, espressos, or hyper-sweetened teas. I was beginning to feel coated, inside and out, by grime. I was sticky with the place and wanted cleansing.

When I got back from the water fountain, Bob was frowning. The psychic/guru/diaper-man was frowning. The two were seated cross-legged on a dark red rug on the sand, facing one another. Neither noticed that I’d approached.

“Nothing?” Bob was saying.

“No, no connection at all.” The man pulled Bob forward, ran his calloused fingers over Bob’s lips, nose, and the small creases at the corners of Bob’s eyes. “I’m sorry, my child.”

At the edge of the paved walk, I shuffled a foot in the sand, making enough sound to get Bob’s attention. For the tiniest fraction of a second, Bob’s face, as he turned to me, seemed strained, tightened, guilty. I wasn’t sure I recognized him, wasn’t sure that the man sitting before me was actually Bob. But then he rose, thanked the face-reader, and took my arm. We continued down the walk.

“Well?” I said.

“What?”

“What’d he say?”

Bob shook his head uncertainly.

“Nothing about your past or future?”

“Nothing much,” Bob said. “He said I think too much.”

“You? Really?”

“That’s what he said. And that I was a Buddhist novitiate in a previous life.”

“Really? You?”

“But that I was killed before becoming a real monk. In Tibet. By a tiger.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”

Bob shrugged his shoulders. “No biggie.”

We stopped to watch a fire-eater, then moved on.

“Nothing about me?” I said, finally. I’d been waiting for Bob to bring it up on his own, how we’d been together for lifetimes, how we were only fulfilling our destiny by loving one another in this life. “Anything? Hmm? Anything about me?”

“Nope,” he said. “Nope. Not a word.”

On the following Tuesday, during the first minute of my office hours, Trey Rothman walks in.

“I’ve done it,” he says. “I figured it out. Finally!”

“What’s that?”

“The zero proof. And it was so simple! Like you said, I was on the right path all along.”

He closes the door behind him as he comes in. He sits in a chair beside my desk, perches on the front-most edge of the seat. He’s leaning forward, legs primly aligned, fingertips flexing against the hollow metal spine of the spiral notebook on his lap. I can see the tiny brown hairs on his knuckles as his fingers move, the big white moons beneath the ragged nails. I look at the bones of his wrists, the tendons taut as harp strings, the veins, pulsing. I feel myself becoming aroused by every stupid, negligible detail of his body. I turn to my desk, scratch a pencil against the student paper I’ve been grading, pretend to make corrective marks.

“It was all because of you,” Trey says.

I realize it’s just flattery, just words of seduction, but for a moment I let myself be caught anyway. I sit back in my chair, clasp my hands behind my head. I imagine us in some columned outdoor chamber, far in the past. I, Socrates; he, ephebe. A young Plato, possibly. We’re wearing togas trimmed in gilt. Lounging affectedly. Talking deeply, intensely, about the very structure of the world. Forms, he’s saying. Ideals. The true nature of love, the duality of every living thing. And soon I realize he’s surpassed me in inventiveness, that I’ve been outmoded by the future, by more incisive arrangements of water, earth, fire, and air, and I know for a fact that someday even he, Plato, will betray me, misquote me, put words in my mouth that I never said, attribute to me thoughts I never conceived. I won’t be remembered as I truly was. I’m lost. I’m doomed.

Even my fantasies end in despair. The word escapes me before I know I’ve said it: “Hemlock.”

“Professor?”

“Get out.”

Bedtime. Naked again. We’re saying nothing, Bob and I. He reaches to flip the lamp’s switch, to plunge us into darkness, but I grab his arm, stop him.

Am I good for you, Bob? I say it without saying it.

I touch his chin, pull it toward me. I look into his eyes, something I rarely do. We know each other too well to look at one another so intently. Bob looks back at me, but I can’t see his eyes, not really. The shadows are too strong, the lamp placed improperly.

I mount Bob’s belly, feeling him breathe beneath me. I straddle him, awkwardly arranging my legs for comfort, and pull the tabletop lamp closer to us, lighting both our faces. I lean over him, look closer.

Am I in there, Bob?

Deep black mirrors stare out, surrounded by clear yellow irises. The yellowness is Bob, all that he ever was, all that he ever will be. But the tiny black centers, the blackened hearts of the daisies, the emptiness contained with them—

“What?” Bob says.

“Nothing.”