No one wants to wake up in a hospital. Whether you nodded off in a waiting room or are tucked into a hospital bed by a few thin blankets, the shock of waking in such a place, a land of sterile lights and medicinal smells, of bad coffee and worse food, of broken promises and unfulfilled hope, is jarring to the soul.
And that’s how Ahmed woke: with a sudden gasp, as if he’d felt the long, skeletal fingers of the Grim Reaper brush against his cheek.
But it was only some woman. Maybe a doctor? A nurse? He wasn’t sure but he didn’t feel like he had the wits to work through it either. His mind felt heavy, weighted down with so much uncertainty.
“Is he okay?” She asked.
Ahmed, or maybe not Ahmed, maybe it was Brian, just stared at the far wall: a whiteboard with some writing on it that he tried to understand but the letters were moving around, switching between English, German, French, and even hieroglyphics.
“Yes,” another voice said. Some man. He had a deep voice. Not-sure-if-he-was-Ahmed wondered if he did any singing.
He turned his focus to the woman again, the spark of recognition trying to fire in the mess of his neurons, the connection between the event and the people and the hospital working into some semblance of understanding, the glaring fluorescent lights almost creating a halo behind her head. Turning to look more at the room, he realized that there were other people there as well, looming over him. Thinking it was odd that he couldn’t place any of these people right away, or recall any account of what had happened to him, he thought it odder that he recognized he was in a hospital.
“Something happened, didn’t it?” Ahmed, now beginning to realize that was his name, asked.
Still, it didn’t escape him that what had ever happened, to whomever he was, it was significant because his field of vision was suddenly filled with several concerned faces looming over him.
And then, in the sterile hospital rom with the marginally dark curtains pulled tightly over the window, the only window that probably looked out over some nondescript parking lot, it all tumbled into place, like getting the little steel ball bearing to the center of the plastic maze he had played with so often when he was a kid. This was his family. That was his wife. He was Ahmed.
He’d been attacked by a man with a knife.
“I was attacked,” he whispered and his wife leaned in closely, who despite the permeation of Pinesol and anti-bacterial soap, smelled of life and newness, whispered how much she loved him and how much she had been worried and, for god’s sake, not to look into a mirror.
And that’s when Ahmed noticed that something was wrong with his vision. It might have been the utter blackness of his right eye that gave it away, or the fact that he couldn’t see the person off to his right without looking directly at them, although it sounded an awfully lot like his son who he knew lived in London and hated to fly so he wondered, for just a brief moment, if he was hallucinating under the effects of powerful pain medication; whatever the reason, he was undeniably sure that whatever horrific events had befallen him had involved his right eye.
Ahmed attempted to speak a little more loudly, but found his vocal cords as unresponsive as his right eye. Thankfully his wife understood what he needed and brought a small cup of water with a straw to his face where, in a very undignified manner with his tongue wagging about, he was able to get a few sips of ice cold water which, quite contrary to what he had expected, actually burned his throat. He waved the cup away groggily.
“Ahmed,” his wife said, “it’s okay. You are going to be okay. You were attacked. They say you were stabbed 27 times.”
Attacked, he thought. Attacked by whom? Is that why my eye doesn’t work? Was I attacked by Odin? Did he pluck out my right eye to replace the one he had given to Mimir? Or perhaps, rather than going to the event I was supposed to attend, I veered off into the forest where I lost a fight with Illuyanka and he took my eye? Or am I even a man at all? Am I a reincarnation of Horus, and Set took my eye again?
These were the inner ramblings inside Ahmed’s head, bouncing off neurons and particles of morphine, as people bustled about his room now that he was awake. Apparently it had been a great and uplifting piece of news on the hospital floor and nurses, surgeons, medical administrators and, he was sure, even some pottering old woman wheeling along with an IV stand, had come in to gawk at him and express their happiness at his being okay.
All the while though, as his mind grasped at strange ideas of godly eyes and ancient animosities, his wife’s face drifted in and out of his now limited field of vision, her smile like the sun after a cold and dreary winter day until he succumbed to a sudden need to sleep and he drifted off into a troubled slumber.
***
“So what exactly happened?” Ahmed croaked after he had woken up again. Thankfully, the lights in the room were dimmed and the little sips of water didn’t burn as badly as they had before, although his throat still felt like he had swallowed hot coals which the doctor, who kept popping in and out but swore he would stay longer soon to discuss his eye, said was from the intubation tube.
“You don’t remember anything?” His wife asked. Thankfully, his oldest son, the one who hated to fly but hated the thought of losing his father even more, stood next to his wife now which made it much easier for Ahmed to see them both.
“No. The last thing I remember is getting ready to walk onto the stage.”
The pained look on his wife’s face almost made Ahmed want to burst into tears, the idea of how much he had worried her almost worse than the pain of his injuries.
“Some man tried to stab you,” she said as she dabbed at his face with a soft cloth. “Some brave people that were there tried to stop him but after he had stabbed you in the eye, he burst into flames and then was gone.”
Ahmed had as much trouble comprehending the idea of the man bursting into flames as he did being stabbed on stage before something as innocuous as speaking to an audience of people interested in his writing.
“So he was a wizard, then?” Ahmed whispered.
His wife only gave him a soft, understanding look as she sat down and took his hand.
“I don’t think he was a wizard. Now, understand that I only heard this from someone else who said they heard it from one of the people who got close enough to actually grab the guy before he burst into flames and vanished, but apparently what he said was that he was getting revenge for the curse you put on his family.”
Ahmed had a characteristically expressive right eyebrow. Despite his best intentions at controlling it, his eyebrow would often arch and wiggle, dip down, stand on end, and do all sorts of other calisthenics when so inclined. Despite the heavy gauze bandage over his right eye, Ahmed was sure the eyebrow was doing its thing.
“He said that he was taking away your eye so that you could never write again. That his grandfather had read something you wrote, some story in a magazine years ago, and that it had affected him so profoundly that his life had never been the same.”
Ahmed tried to imagine the man’s life and could, for just a second, almost feel his misery. But the brief spark of empathy was interrupted by something completely incongruous:
“He said all that before stabbing me in the eye?”
His wife smiled softly again.
“Well, you probably know, Ahmed, that they say time slows down in those moments, so he probably could have read entire passages from his favorite book and still managed to stab you without anyone being able to reach him. So, actually, he said much more. He said that his grandfather felt cursed, that he was never able to see clearly out of his right eye again, and that when he saw his son, the father of the man who stabbed you, the curse passed to him as well. Apparently, though, the father never looked at his son again and so, he was spared the curse but he wasn’t spared the anger. And that’s why he came looking for you. The whole family felt that if they could just take your eye, if you could never write again, then the curse would be lifted. But apparently the man was a terrible aim with his knife as he stabbed you all over the place until he finally hit your eye.”
“Then he disappeared? In a gout of flame? Or was it more smoky, like a thick cloud, a sudden darkness and then, poof, he’s gone like a parlor illusionist.”
“Yes, something like that.”
Ahmed was quiet for a bit, something his wife assumed was related to the pain medication and the need to rest, and when he spoke next, it wasn’t to her specifically but more just musings out in the open, like a homeless man on the street corner talking to no one in particular but to everyone all at once.”
“Perhaps he was a Jinn,” Ahmed whispered, staring up at the soft fluorescent light with his one good eye. “Perhaps I had rubbed the wrong lamp at some point or written some combination of words as to reach into the Kaf and anger a powerful being so that it came to seek its revenge.”
Ahmed quieted again and his wife held his hand. The incessant beeping of machines and the soft hum of electrical equipment filled the silence. He turned his head and looked past his wife at the window, where the curtains didn’t quite fill the frame and he could see a slice of open glass. As his mind wandered about Jinn and curses, about a lifetime spent with words and the idea that his had angered someone so much as to want to do him harm, he had an almost mundane realization that outside was winter, that a pallor of dreary gray clouds lay over the parking lot and the little slice of the world he could see, and he wondered if the weather was more responsible than his words.
But nothing really made sense about any of it. The attack. His writing. His missing eye.
Maybe not everything needs to make sense, he wondered.
He turned to look at her face, remarking to himself how lucky he was to get another chance at love so late in life, how close he had come to losing that chance; admiring the soft curve of her chin, the slight dimple in her left cheek when she smiled, and how her brown eyes lit up even the most crowded rooms; and asked in a soft voice,
“Is my writing really that bad?”
***
“New eyes are all the rage you know,” Doctor Jones said, sitting in a chair beside Ahmed’s bed. His wife sat next to the doctor holding a large binder and flipping absentmindedly through the pages.
I wonder how I would describe this man, Ahmed wondered as the doctor talked, his lips moving but no sound really coming out. He’s so…ordinary. White coat. Stethoscope around his neck. I guess you would say he’s caucasian. Brown eyes, brown hair. He’s just so ordinary. Perhaps I would need to make him blue, dispelling the illusion he was using to hide his true identity.
And in that moment, when he focused on the doctor again, his voice gradually rising in volume, he saw the doctor for what he truly was: a Jinn. His skin was, in fact, a deep blue, almost bordering on purple, and a delicate golden horn curved out of his right temple. The end of the horn was bejeweled with a sparkling ruby. The whites of his eye were golden and the irises a vibrant green and they sparkled with understanding and recognition behind a pair of ordinary round spectacles like Harry Potter might wear. While his head was bald, his prince’s braid, which hung over his left shoulder, was thick and jet black, and a small tuft of black hair on the tip of his chin gave him an almost beatnik quality. His wide ears were lined with small gold hoops and other tiny baubles.
With the doctor unmasked, Ahmed began to smile.
“I must say I’m quite surprised to see you so accepting of the idea of a new eye,” the doctor Jinn said, his voice now deep and rumbling, sweet and ominous. “Well, like I was saying, people are having an eye removed willingly right now, often their right eye for whatever reason, and having them replaced by all sorts of technological wizardry. Some people sport telescopic lenses, like you might have seen adorning the face of a Borg on StarTrek: The Next Generation, others it might be some stream punk contraption that wraps around their head with brass and green glass. Others still are opting for something less subtle but perhaps even more pronounced, like a cat or snake eye, with a long slit and the color of emeralds.”
His wife, trying to be upbeat about the whole process, turned the binder that she was holding so that Ahmed could see it more clearly. The room lights, now turned up to facilitate the whole doctor-patient interaction, glared off the slick pictures in the book. But even from his vantage point, elevated a little by the hospital bed, Ahmed could see the page his wife had stopped on. It was a picture of someone walking on the streets of the Big City, smiling, happy, their right eye replaced with a futuristic digital screen that displayed an eight-bit eyeball and he wondered if, like an Apple Watch, they could change the face with different digital eyeballs. He waved for his wife to bring the book closer and she propped it up on the edge of the bed so that Ahmed could see the picture more clearly. In the background of the picture, he could see how everyone from high-powered financiers, strutting about in their suits and briefcases, their bluetooth earpieces thrumming with mega deals and stock tips in the cold morning air, to the guy with his hotdog cart, pedaling twice-reconstiututed-mixed-from-every-part-of-every-animal sausages at 9am in the morning sported some strange new right eye. There were even homeless people with new eyes received in shady under-the-bridge and back-alley procedures, sporting second-rate parts from third-rate 7-Eleven shelves right next to year-old deodorants and stale peanuts.
But Ahmed didn’t remove his own eye. It had been taken from him.
Perhaps the man who stabbed him in the eye, missing his brain by the slimmest of margins, perhaps something just north of the Planck scale, and the chance of causing truly catastrophic damage, but ultimately changing the very nature of Ahmed, had wanted Ahmed’s 75-year old eye as a neo-hipster response to all of the technological eyes out there; he would have been the only 24-year old walking the streets of the Big City with an old eye. Or perhaps he’d hoped that by taking Ahmed’s eye, he would get to see everything Ahmed had seen, get to pass judgment on the events of his life, or even better, be able to see the world as Ahmed sees it, be able to understand why he was who he was. Why he wrote what he wrote and how he had crafted the curse that ultimately ruin is family’s life.
Whatever the reason, Ahmed had just stepped onto the stage to talk about his latest project when the man had rushed up from somewhere in the crowd, brandishing the knife as he yelled, “only the blind can lead us to freedom!”
And suddenly, as if his mind had pressed the play button on the VCR lodged somewhere in his brain, he saw the whole thing but, just like his wife said, in slow motion. Time seemed to inch forward, creeping on spindly legs like a spider waiting to strike an unsuspecting fly caught in its web, allowing Ahmed to remark at every time-heavy step his assailant took: why didn’t I yell at someone, why did I just stand there, that woman’s scarf is really pretty, did I leave the door unlocked, is this man actually going to step onto the stage and try to stab me? It was a thousand and one thoughts that roared through his brain as the images progressed, linear and pieced together yet somehow disjointed like a bad flip book.
Maybe I left my body in some sort of astral projection, he thought, now aware that he was no longer in the hospital room but was, instead, back on the stage only his wife and the doctor were sitting in the front row, horrified as the man plunged the knife into him over and over again, striking erratically as if he had no more control of his body than Ahmed did. In a way, it did feel like he was displaced from his physical form for he felt no pain as he watched the man stab him, saw the knife enter his eye, and then, finally, saw the man disappear in a gout of flame. Then the images ended and all he saw for a second was a white screen, himself standing on seemingly nothing, suspended in negative space, somehow between the real, physical world of the hospital and the memory of his attack.
“You know, you could have any eye you want,” a voice said from behind him. Ahmed turned around and there was the doctor, only not the doctor. This time it was the Jinn, his iridescent blue skin shimmering in the light that came from nowhere and everywhere all at once, naked as the day that creation breathed him into being.
Ahmed tentatively brought his hand up to his face, feeling where his eye used to be, feeling for the scar of having something so personal taken from him. But there was just an absence there, as if he was somehow incomplete and just waiting for the final part to make him a whole person.
“I could give you an eye like a jewel that could color the world in rainbows, cast happiness across everyone you looked at until the entire world was full of love and joy.”
And then he felt the jewel in his face. It was heavier that his other eye and it felt strange. He spun around as the buildings, streets, trees, cars, people, cats, dogs, oppressive heat of the summer day, slammed down around him bit-by-bit, or pixel-by-pixel, until he was immersed in the busy scene of a city day. Maybe it was New York. Maybe it was London. Or maybe it was some city he had imagined before, one of the invisible cities that, as Marco Polo, he might have to describe to Kublakahn on his way back to reality. But even has he struggled to see everything at once, to process the feeling of familiarity he felt standing on the sidewalk, the green leaves rustling above him, the brownstones behind him filled with the laughter of families he might have broken bread with on some summer day, he took a sharp intake of breath as the late morning sunlight struck his jeweled eye just right and cut the world apart with rainbow knives.
“No,” Ahmed whispered as he continued to look around, watching the smiles spread across people’s faces as he looked at them, as the rainbow leapt from his eye to their lips. “It doesn’t feel right.”
The city vanished, replaced by the whiteness again.
Ahmed remembered watching the movie The Matrix. This must have been what it felt like when Morbius took Neo into the construct, he thought, wondering why he suddenly remembered that moment of all moments.
“Well then, perhaps something more technological? I could give you an eye that would turn the world digital, allow you to manipulate the binary DNA of everything. Make people taller. Shorter. Prettier. Nicer.”
Ahmed looked at the Jinn for a moment, the temptation of such an offering tantalizing.
“Less violent?” Ahmed asked.
“Less cursed,” the Jinn replied.
Ahmed felt jerked back into the city and this time, when he closed his other eye, his vision was green and everything seemed like it was written in code, pulsating bits of digital reality. He put his hand up to his face and coils and cold metals coming from a lens like a small magnifying class that now covered the absence where his eye once was. But he could also feel it pressing into his skin, snaking its way along an optic nerve that no longer functioned, plunging into his brain to show him this world as it truly was. For each way that he turned, each thing that he saw, he could see it’s truth, see the confident business man as a scared child, see the small dog as lion, see houses for the places of warmth and loving they were.
“Apparently I liked The Matrix more than I thought I did,” he mumbled. He panned around the street as people headed to work, or the grocery store, or to some place where they were planning on doing something they shouldn’t do, and he wondered, for just a second, if this was more real than he thought it was. To test his theory, he looked at the nearest person, some generic finance guy in his suit, swinging his briefcase, talking loudly on the phone but looking like he was uncaring about the words he was saying, and saw him in all the good things that he did every day, the random acts of small kindnesses. He saw him taller and more handsome. He saw him shorter and uglier. But no matter how the eye changed the man, he didn’t see anything other than the goodness. And that scared Ahmed for he knew, just like the man that had attacked him, people had more stories to tell than just the one. In fact, the entire world did. He put his hand over the new eye and watched the man continue to walk down the street. This time, though, he could see the shadow following him. Taking his hand down, putting it back up again, taking it down, that’s what he realized the problem was: when he looked out through the new eye, nothing had a shadow. The entire world was bathed in light and wonder and happiness which, given his current state and what had happened to him, might be a welcome relief. But he knew in his bones that it wasn’t the truth of it. Everything had a bit of shadow to it, even himself. And seeing the world without that dimension seemed almost like a lie.
“No,” he said to himself, “I don’t think this eye will do either.”
And then he was back in the white, his right vision again just a blank spot. He couldn’t decide if it felt normal yet or if it was like an absence waiting to be filled. He had once heard about how people who had lost limbs could still feel them working. Phantom limbs, Ahmed mused, suddenly remembering the book he had read about it. Their brain eventually rewired itself, recreated the internal image of the body to account for the loss. He wondered if that would eventually happen to him.
“Okay, let’s try this one. I am sure you will appreciate it,” the Jinn said as he flipped through the binder of eyes that was now suddenly resting in his hands. He tapped on a page and then pointed at Ahmed. The blank white canvas of reality puckered and shrunk, then exploded outwards around Ahmed who found himself standing on the street again as people flowed past him. A different Big City but, at the same time, just another Big City.
The first thing he felt, rather than saw, was an insatiable and sudden desire to open his mouth and breath fire at all the people around him. But he knew that was only a feeling and seeing was more than just what was going on inside his head so he tried to concentrate on the eye and suddenly saw that some of the people streaming past him were shrouded in a golden light. While most shone just with a pale light, others were almost blinding. Ahmed spun around on the sidewalk, feeling an intense and unsurpassed joy as he gazed upon these people who seemed to be so different than the others. And he realized the golden light wasn’t specific to any one kind of person. Tall people, short people, black people, white people, adults, children, people with canes and limps and even some down on their luck, sitting around coffee shops and restaurants with out-stretched hands and bruised hearts.
That’s when Ahmed felt the card in his hand. Looking down, he read, “Dragon Eye. Capable of piercing the veil to see the goodness of people.” It was a very plain, white card, almost like an index card with the words carefully typed. Ahmed smiled as he looked up again, realizing that, in fact, everyone was shrouded in gold. For some, though, it was very difficult to see, almost like a dusting.
“Imagine that,” he said. “To go through life and see everyone for the good that they are.” And he wondered if his attacker were there, if he would have any golden light to him. The thought soured the smile on his face and he looked down at the card again where he saw some fine print he had missed at the bottom: may also instill the insatiable desire to breath fire. Use with caution.
He didn’t know if that meant he could breath fire or not but there was only one man he would want to roast alive.
“Still, to see so much goodness in the world,” he mused as he looked up again and watched the world for what it might be rather than for what it was. Or do I have that reversed?
“Perhaps we can try something else,” the Jinn said. But Ahmed didn’t answer. He just stared at the blue being, whether he might be an Ifreet or Maarid was beyond Ahmed’s knowledge of the Jinn, and watched the smoke curl around his feet and legs, shrouding them in mystery, revealing but not quite defining. And in that moment, as the memories of the man stabbing him floated through his subconscious, Ahmed realized that was his shadow now: the hate he had for that man and what he had done. He would never forgive him, never understand him. It was a fire that burned underneath Ahmed’s skin, smoldering, always there and he didn’t want to have something, some new eye, that wouldn’t allow him to see it. That hate and fire was as much about him as the love he had for his wife. Even if he never acted on it, never allowed it to consume him, never stoked it and let it flare off his skin like a Phoenix, it was still a part of who he was now.
Would people with different eyes see me differently now? Would they not see that part of me, but only the good? If I wore a different eye, would I never acknowledge the source of my own anger and hate when it flared at the grocery store? Would people not understand why I was irritable and angry and bitter if all they could see, through their new eye, was my goodness?
“What do you think I should do? Jinn are wise and old, venerated. Do you have an opinion?”
The Jinn just smiled and shrugged his shoulders.
And it was once again, the doctor shrugging his shoulders, sitting on the side of Ahmed’s bed with his wife, the binder still propped open against the bed rail. Ahmed turned his gaze from the doctor, who carried an expression of recognition and understanding, to his wife and just stared at her. He thought of all the ways that he failed her every day, of all the ways he supported her every day, of all the bad times and the good times; of all their times, the acceptance of what has happened in their lives, the desire to forget, the need to grow, and always walking hand-in-hand down the road.
“So, will it be this eye?” The doctor asked as he put his hand on the binder, one finger tapping the open page.
Ahmed smiled at his wife who smiled back and everything made sense even if it didn’t make sense.
“No,” Ahmed said as he closed the binder. “I think I can see just fine.”