The Half That You See

by Rebecca Rowland

  “You look unimpressed,” continued the officer, and he used his finger to pull down on the lower lid to reveal the red tissue behind the lid. “Baby Boy Blue, my mother used to call me,” he said.

  At that moment, some kind of disturbance took place in another part of the hospital. A loud bang, as if a gun went off or someone lit a firecracker. Officer Baby Boy Blue calmly looked over his shoulder and considered the resulting ruckus, several policemen running in different directions, doctors and nurses following. Then he turned back to me.

  His uniform looked so clean and unruffled. In fact, he must have read my thoughts because he said, “’Crazy how none of the goo got on my uniform. Like I said, just one person caused all of this. I just got unlucky, losing an eye. It just hung on my face, hanging by an optic nerve, so there was no choice but to cut it.”

  “You cut it yourself?”

  He seemed shocked by the sound of my voice but somehow pleased that I would finally interrupt him with a question. He put on his sunglasses and responded with a hearty laugh, even though I hadn’t made a joke. “Oh, son. Keep up the wonderful spirit. You’ll need it. Life is full of changes, and no telling how long you’ll sit here with everything going on. Here’s something to help you remember me forever.”

  He reached into his pocket and withdrew a plastic bag, the kind normally used for a sandwich. He placed it into my hand and turned to leave. Or at least, he must have left at some point, because when I looked up after studying the bag’s contents, I no longer saw him there.

  Inside the bag I saw a bloody mess of bluish white.

  When I recognized the iris, I understood that he had left me with his eye.

  And indeed, such a stunning blue.

  The scar under my eye never went away. It remained as a pink, slightly upraised line that, to me, looked like a slit that one could open up and peer into what lay underneath my face.

  The doctor who closed the wound said that by the time I reached my current age I would see no scarring, no sign of the injury. But obviously, he lied. Of course, I should make some allowances for that, given how flustered he looked while working on me. No doubt all the activity occurring in the hospital exhausted him, making him inattentive. Though much of the activity had died down, his hands shook and beads of sweat clung to his forehead. At one point, he even made a mistake. After sewing me up, he stared at my face with a troubled gaze.

  “Look up,” he said. “No, just with your eyes. Now look down.” He repeated these commands several times, trying to assess something he wouldn’t—or couldn’t—vocalize, and I did my best to follow them each time.

  Then he said something that puzzled me. “Now, look at the back of your head.”

  How could I do that?

  He told me two more times to look at the back of my head, and once I even turned my head, unsure of what exactly he wanted me to do, but that just seemed to fluster him more. “You can’t, obviously. I have to redo it. I have to take everything out and redo it all,” he said, sounding profoundly tired. “I have to redo everything.” He began removing the stitches under my eye, the whole process starting over again.

  Then once more, the commands began. “Look up.” I did. “Look down.” I did. “Now look at the back of your head.” Somehow, I suppose I did, because he looked satisfied this time.

  At some point during all this, I must have transferred the plastic bag given to me by the police officer to my pocket because later, at home, I found it there. I didn’t dare take it out until after my mother collapsed in her bed, exhausted from what must have been twelve hours of waiting at the hospital. I felt tired, too, but I didn’t sleep.

  Instead, I studied my new stitches in the bathroom mirror, noting how much they looked like the stitches the officer showed me. Perhaps the same doctor worked on us both. I moved my eyes the same way the doctor commanded me, trying to imagine what looked so wrong that he had to take all my stitches out. I even tried looking at the back of my head the way he commanded, but I still couldn’t fathom how he meant for me to do that. I tried it several different ways. Once, I managed to look so high up into my head that I nearly made my left eye disappear, showing just the white sclera with thick, red veins.

  That led to the discovery of two fascinating things.

  First, I learned that I could move my left eye, the one just above the stitched slit, higher up than the right. Second, when I did that, I could make my stitched wound open, if only by a tiny bit. I thought this was an illusion at first, but after trying it a dozen more times, it seemed that it really did part just a fraction, a bright red color showing beneath it and the glint of something glassy. Probably just a trick of the light.

  With all this experimentation, I nearly forgot about the plastic bag in my pocket.

  Extracting it, I noticed a yellowish liquid pooling at the bottom of the bag. Also, its color had faded, its striking blueness giving way to a foggy whiteness. Still, I had to acknowledge what the officer said: indeed, he once had an amazing set of eyes. Now, one of those eyes belonged to me, and I needed to hide it. I feared consequences and I followed all rules, even the ones not explicitly stated to me. I used the box containing the pieces of the unfinished Frankenstein model kit, and I placed the box inside a wood cabinet across from my bed, where it sat for years.

  During that time, I hardly thought about it at all. I practically forgot about it completely. Eventually, I lived in that house all alone, thanks to illness, disease, and death.

  In the days that followed my accident, I somehow lost my way in school, and in spite of numerous interventions, I never did well. I didn’t even graduate and soon after, took the only job I could find: a retail job in a store called Hellstorm Fireworks.

  Most people think of fireworks as something sold only two or three times a year, but actually, people buy fireworks all the time. What if, just for a lark, someone wanted to light off a Cornea Splitter or a Socket Rocket? They would need a special kind of store to help them satisfy that urge.

  We did good business, and they paid me enough to get by, though I couldn’t keep up the house as diligently as I would have liked. Not able to afford anything new, I kept all the old furniture, including the cabinet where I put the model kit box. But like I said, I practically forgot all about it.

  I liked my co-workers well enough, especially Jaycee, a girl my age. We entertained each other with jokes when things slowed down. We also speculated about the sort of spectacle that would result if someone decided to light every single one of the fireworks in the store at once. Colors beyond the known spectrum, Jaycee suggested, but that sounded nuts to me. I reasoned that if we saw new colors, they wouldn’t look like colors to us. They would look like—

  “What?” she asked.

  I didn’t have a clever answer, so I said the first thing that came to mind. “The color you see when you look at the back of your head.”

  That answer didn’t impress her—it just seemed to puzzle her, in fact—so we both stood there bored for a moment until she suddenly asked me, right out of the blue, if I knew any eye tricks.

  No one ever asked me before, and for a moment, I felt self-conscious, painfully aware of the slit under my left eye, wondering if its glaring presence on my face made her want to ask me this question. But she smiled at me in a way that restored some of my already-meager confidence, and I confided in her that I could, in fact, look at the back of my head.

  “What? No fucking way,” she said. “I demand you show me immediately.”

  “I can’t exactly show you,” I said. “I mean, if I roll my eyes all the way into the back of my head and manage to look at my own brains, how would you know?”

  She looked at me, obviously confused, so I continued: “If I look at my own brains, I’ll see them. But you won’t. I can’t exactly take a picture of the back of my head and show you.”

  “Fine, Einstein,” she said. “How about I show you an eye trick of my own? Then maybe you’ll find the courage to show me yours.”


  “Okay, deal.” We shook hands to seal the agreement. Then, taking a step back, she lowered her head and let her arms dangle at her side. She looked like a diver preparing for a record-setting leap. I saw her shoulders rise and fall as she took first one deep breath, then a second one.

  When she lifted her head, it took a moment to process the image before me.

  Her eyes bulged out in an extraordinary, almost cartoonish way, practically a half-inch further out of their sockets. They looked like enormous, bloated eggs, the whites dwarfing the bright blue irises, with angry networks of red blood vessels going everywhere.

  No telling how she read the expression of horror on my face. But she smiled wide and toothy, making a terrible spectacle.

  Nothing could make it worse, I thought.

  Until something did.

  Her left eye suddenly popped out, as if it could no longer withstand the pressure she put on it. It popped out and hung on her cheek, dangling by an optic nerve.

  The smile remained, as if she didn’t even know it happened.

  But if she wouldn’t react, I would.

  I lunged forward, hoping to take hold of the eye and help prevent her from losing it. I don’t know what I intended to do exactly.

  And my fumbling made her react.

  Using her hands, she covered her face, protecting herself.

  From me, apparently.

  When she lowered her hands, her eyes looked normal.

  “What’re you doing? Personal space, man,” she said, her left eye miraculously returned safely to its socket. I had to hand it to her: she accomplished an impressive feat. How had she put it back so swiftly, so deftly?

  “Your eye, it’s back in,” I said.

  “What’re you talking about, man?”

  “It’s popped back in.”

  “It wasn’t popped out, man. I was just trying to show you the world-famous Jaycee eye-crossing trick. I’ve been practicing since I was three. Not shitting you. You ever see anyone do it like that?”

  “No, I guess I haven’t.”

  She stared at me, waiting for more. I grew more confused as the period of silence continued.

  “Well?” she said finally. “Your turn?”

  I must have gawked at her, the thought of me popping my own eye out.

  “Your eye trick, man,” she said. “Do yours.”

  “Right,” I said with some relief. “You want me to look at the back of my own head.”

  “Yeah, look at your brain, man. Show me.”

  “Okay.”

  I didn’t need the kind of preparation she required. I just did it. I rolled my left eye as far as it would roll, wanting very badly to impress her. I didn’t need a reflective surface to know that it rolled all the way to the back of my head so that nothing by the sclera showed. By now, I’d learned to keep the right eye completely stationary while I did this, so I could watch her reaction the whole time. I could see her and the place where dreams form all at the same time. I accomplished the feat so perfectly that the two things—her and the place where dreams hide—practically became one and the same, and I almost didn’t notice the expression forming on her face.

  When I saw her look of horror, I stopped.

  She stared at the pink slit under my left eye, my scar.

  “Oh, Jesus, oh god,” she said, “what the fuck is in there?”

  I didn’t know what she meant. I just performed a perfect eye trick.

  She extended the tip of her finger, as if to touch my scar. But she stopped short, withdrew the finger without touching me, and walked away, perhaps remembering she’d wanted to avoid physical contact between us.

  I wouldn’t have minded if she touched me, but she never did, and she also didn’t speak to me again for the rest of the day. Nor did she ever speak to me again for that matter, all the way until the day she died.

  We didn’t notice she died, not at first. It seemed like she just decided not to come in to work, which suited me just fine. After all, when you work retail, especially fireworks retail, you don’t get rich; you just hope you’ll get by, and you need all the hours you can get, so when Jaycee didn’t show up for her shifts, I took the extra work and didn’t give her well-being a lot of thought.

  Not until the authorities showed up at Hellstorm Fireworks.

  They didn’t talk to me. They just wanted the boss, who left me in charge of the floor while he talked to the policemen inside his office. Normally, I would’ve assumed they just wanted to check some of our recent sales—when you buy fireworks, especially the big kind, you have to fill out a bunch of paperwork and show your driver’s license. But something about the demeanor of the policemen told me it had something to do with Jaycee not showing up for work.

  Sure enough, the boss called me over when they left.

  “Jaycee’s dead.” He said it just like that. No warning to prepare for bad or shocking news. He just laid it out in the simplest way possible. I don’t recall what I said or if I conveyed shock. I hope I conveyed concern.

  “You know if she had a glass eye?” the boss said.

  “What?”

  “A glass eye. They asked me if I knew whether or not she had a glass eye. Shit, half the people who come through the door here have glass eyes. Or burn marks. One of the two, at least.”

  “Why would they want to know if she had a glass eye?”

  “Beats the living fuck out of me.” Then he regarded me as if he’d just gotten a good look at my face for the first time and didn’t like what he saw. “Well? Do you know if she had a glass eye or not?”

  Naturally, I thought of her eye trick. I did see her eye pop out, no question about it. I didn’t imagine it, and a glass eye explained everything. She crossed her eyes—or her eye, I guess—with such intensity that she caused it to pop out.

  “I guess I did,” I said, finally.

  “Must’ve been an exact duplicate,” the boss said. “Probably worth hundreds. Thousands even. And you knew she had it. Know what this means, don’t you?”

  I didn’t.

  He said, “Means the police’ll want to talk to you. Probably show up at your house when you least expect it. Better be prepared. Have an alibi. Because,” he lowered his voice and leaned forward, “I suspect that whoever killed her performed some kind of mutilation on her. Took her glass eye. Why else would the cops be asking if I knew she had a glass eye?” He paused. “Alibi, kid. Make sure you have an alibi.”

  But I didn’t need an alibi. The fact that the boss said I needed one made me wonder about the conversation that passed between him and the authorities. Perhaps he knew more, or more than he confided to me. Perhaps he suspected me of something.

  Or perhaps he himself was hiding something. Some kind of guilt. A crime, one for which he needed me to take the blame.

  My house had grown old and fallen into disrepair. I don’t make the kind of money that can pay for regular upkeep. The neighbors complained about it, too—just not to my face. Instead, I received anonymous letters in the mail, very briefly worded and apparently typed on a manual typewriter. The more I think about it, the more I think the letters all came from the same person. Someone old, perhaps: a shut-in, someone who didn’t even know how to use a computer and had plenty of time to worry about declining property values.

  The letters said things like:

  Get it together! No more eyesores!

  Your blinds! Do something

  Look smart! Have some pride.

  How can you not see? Clean up your act!

  I didn’t take these correspondences well. Someone who writes such things to a neighbor should at least have courage in their convictions and sign the goddamn letter. I tossed them all in the trash. Didn’t even recycle them. After that, I made a point of leaving the window blinds crooked and allowing the vines to grow up the walls and windows. Soon, the house had an abandoned look.

  I couldn’t imagine the police wanting to come see me here. Especially not in the middle of the night.

  I hadn�
��t paid the electric bill in two months, so the house had no power, no lights, and I’d become accustomed to just going to sleep when it grew dark.

  When you sleep deeply and begin to dream, your eyes roll up into the back of your head. Imagine what you could see if you could remain conscious.

  My perception remains acute, even in sleep, so I could see the intruder even before I awoke. I knew he used a small pen-light to find his way to where I slept. He must have searched through the entire house, leaving my room for last. He sat at the foot of my bed and waited for me to awaken. Sitting up, I showed no surprise at his presence, nor at the sharp, narrow beam of light cutting into my face. Even though I now squinted, I’d already seen him very clearly.

  “It’s you,” I said.

  The thin beam of light streaming from his penlight didn’t waver when I said this. He seemed to study me for several seconds. Finally, he said my name.

  “Yes, yes,” I said, “you remember me?”

  “Remember you?” The light remained steady. I thought of what some people say about dying, that it involves moving toward a source of light. I felt like that now. I wanted to go into that light. “Did you know I was coming here?” he said.

  “Yes. Or no. Not exactly.” I told him how my boss warned me that I’d receive a visit from the authorities. “I just didn’t know he meant you.”

  “Me?”

  “Officer Baby Boy Blue.”

  Instead of replying, he moved the penlight so that it shown onto his own face. I saw the mirrored sunglasses and the unlined, white cheekbones, the lips turned up in a half-smile. He wore a police uniform, the exact one I saw in the hospital all those years ago. He moved the light around his form so I could verify that he’d returned.

  “I’m not here officially,” he said. “I just had a hunch, really. Looked like no one was home, so I came in to see.”

  “About the eye,” I said.