by Nick Gevers
“What about the eyes of chimps, for instance?” Nick chipped in. “Are they parts of A.I. as well? What about cats?—they see pretty well.”
Roderick waved away such irrelevancies.
The private viewing of Jon Bell’s Eye Watch You did indeed go viral over the next few days. The artist must have been rubbing his hands in glee, anticipating the transfer to a London gallery, or even a preemptive purchase by a collector for a large sum in Oxford itself.
A week later, sevenish of an evening, came a ring-ring.
“Tom Cooper here,” I said. I like to identify myself fully on the telephone since the way most people merely say hullo strikes me as silly. Is that you, yes it’s me. And what if you don’t immediately recognize which “John” someone is out of half a dozen possible candidates?
“Thank goodness, I managed it!” Roderick’s voice sounded at once anxious and exalted; and what did he mean?
“Can you and Nancy possibly come round right now? It’s fairly urgent.”
“Well . . . yes, I suppose—I’ll need to check with Nancy.”
“Do tell her it’s important. Would you mind ringing Nick to ask him as well?”
“Can’t you ring him yourself?”
“I mightn’t succeed! I’ll explain when you come.”
Jericho is the part of Oxford between Walton Street, former location of the Nuffield Ophthalmology Lab, and the canal; hence Roderick buying a house within what had previously been easy walking distance of his workplace. The building of the canal in the later eighteenth century, to bring coal quickly and cheaply to the city, caused a veritable ghetto of laborers and craftspeople, which became a crammed slumland of terrace houses, prey to cholera and other degradations. Nowadays the area is highly gentrified and expensive. Naturally the terrace houses remain small, but they’re very bijou, much desired by young professionals; and Roderick of course remained a bachelor.
Nancy and I had taken a taxi to his door, its pointed archway of bricks painted in red and yellow just like those arches in the Great Mosque of Córdoba in a minor key. In contrast his New Age neighbors on one side had gone for all the colours of the rainbow, up one side of the arch and down the other.
The door opened and Roderick blinked at us.
“Nancy? Nick?”
“Can’t you see properly?” she asked.
“Come, come.” He blundered ahead of us to his living room, where he located a comfy armchair into which he subsided with a sigh of relief. A framed print of Seurat’s pixelated Bathers hung over the fireplace, and an impressionist Monet lily pond by the window.
“What’s wrong?” asked Nancy.
Roderick held up his palms as though determined to count how many fingers he had.
“I’m seeing text scrolling down all the time. Beautiful text! You’re just like a vague mirage behind this golden curtain or waterfall. But I’m buggered if I can read any of it. The symbols aren’t any alphabet I’ve ever seen or ideograms or math or music . . .”
“When did this start?” I asked.
“About an hour ago. I just watched for a while, bewitched, trying to make sense of a single squiggle, but they never stay; they scroll down as I say.” His descending hand indicated the rate of descent, about a foot every couple of seconds. Personally I’d be able to read a document in English at that speed, but the task would become cumulatively exhausting.
Of course his grey eyes looked exactly the same as ever, although just to be sure I stepped closer.
“It’s retinal, damn it, Tom. You can’t see anything.”
“And you, er, reckon it’s the A.I.s communicating with you?”
“What else can it be? I haven’t been drugged by some security service and had super cyber contact lenses stuck over my iris. Precious data is passing away every moment, just supposing that I could understand it . . .”
“Maybe,” said Nancy to calm him, “after a while the message repeats and carries on repeating.”
Just then the doorbell rang and I went to let in, predictably, Nick, whom I quickly briefed in the hallway. Nick promptly took out his phone to find Google News, then other sites in swift succession.
He announced as he entered the living room, “No reports yet on the web of the same thing happening to other people. Hullo there, Roderick. So how did they zero in on you?”
“Maybe it’s a bit early for reports,” said Mary. “This only started an hour ago.”
“If it’s happening to many people there’d be reports already, believe me.”
“Maybe the victims, I mean, the contacted people can’t see clearly enough to send reports. Maybe they’re too distracted.”
“Oh well, of course that’s a possibility.” Nick stooped and peered at Roderick’s face just as I had done.
“I told you it’s retinal!” Roderick protested at whatever blur he was seeing. “You can’t see what I see! And they found me because my identity’s all over cyberspace at the moment, so they carried out an Oxford-specific eye-search.”
“For your eye-dentity,” I said.
Nick had spied a large notepad upon a bookshelf. Seizing and flipping the notepad open to bare pages, he produced a pen and thrust both at Roderick.
“Can you copy anything? Stick with a first line and follow it down.”
Roderick tried, bless him, but his bit of scribble was such a squiggly mess.
“Lost it already . . .”
“Can you write the quick brown fox?”
That Roderick could manage readably, but I could have done so blindfolded.
“Just testing,” said Nick. He blinked rapidly, as though trying to induce the same phenomenon in himself, to no avail. “Roderick, have you phoned Jon Bell?”
“It was hard enough calling Tom!”
“Conceivably your Mr. Bell might see this as another publicity opportunity, if he isn’t affected himself—ah, but does he have a blog?”
“The link’s in my laptop upstairs,” said Roderick.
“Oh, this cascade of golden lost opportunities!”
“Never mind, I’ll just search the Web.” Which Nick proceeded to do on his phone.
And before long he announced, “Excellent, Bell’s latest posting, some blather about artichokes, is only fifteen minutes ago. So he’s unaffected. I believe we shouldn’t tip him off till we’ve slept on this. Besides, Rod’s problem might simply stop if it’s psychological or neurological. Him getting overexcited. Like people having visions of angels.”
“This is real. Look, I do know about peculiar neurological visual effects.”
“But you aren’t a psychiatrist. Psychiatrists usually deal with visions.”
“Softly,” said Nancy.
“Why should you want to dismiss this,” demanded Roderick, “when it’s such a breakthrough I’m beholding? First contact with the retinal A.I.!”
“If they’re so artfully intelligent, they should have slowed the pace and made what you’re seeing comprehensible.”
“Give a chimp Shakespeare to read when it can’t even read,” muttered Roderick.
“Humans aren’t that dimwitted,” said Nick. “We can read starlight and understand it. The way you describe this seems more like trying to read something of huge significance in a dream—the words go out of focus because there isn’t actually any text, just a sensation of a text, a wish that there could be a text that reveals stuff. I’ve had dreams like that.”
“If only there was some way of showing you what I’m seeing!” roared Roderick in frustration. “Some way of displaying this! Of linking the back side of a retina to a monitor screen!”
I said, “I hope you aren’t thinking along Biblical lines: if thine eye offends thee . . .”
“Of course not! Is that what the A.I.s might be hoping? That I’ll psychotically pluck out my eyes? I doubt it!”
“Oh Roderick,” said Nancy, “what shall we do with you? Would you prefer to go to hospital for observation . . . or should we stay with you overnight and see what’s wha
t in the morning?”
“Observation? By my own peers, who will see nothing! I can’t inconvenience all of you. Only one of you needs stay. I shan’t do anything foolish.”
We exchanged glances. One of us. Was Roderick hoping that Nancy would volunteer? Woman’s nursing touch and all that . . .
“If we get you to bed,” I said, “since I know it’s a double bed, I can share it just in case.” I contrived some humor. “No monkey business, mind you! Acceptable?”
“I might keep you awake. I don’t know if I can go to sleep with what I’m seeing. It doesn’t stop when I shut my eyes. It’s permanent.”
“Till it stops,” said Nick. “Hospital might be better, for sedatives.”
“So you can sleep on the sofa here,” said Roderick quickly. “Thank you, Tom. True friend, and so forth.”
I said, “We can argue about bed or sofa later, but frankly I’m quite hungry. Should one of us pop out for a takeaway? Could you eat Indian, Rod?”
“Saffron rice and golden message . . . might be confusing.”
“Okay, fish and chips. Eat by feel. And I prescribe some strong beer to relax you.”
I’d packed Nancy off back home and Nick too. In loosened clothes I dozed on the sofa, living room and bedroom doors open. In the wee hours Roderick’s bellow of Tom! broke a dream.
Up I rushed. Switching on the bedroom light caused Roderick, upright in bed in his purple paisley pajamas, to throw his hands over his eyes, then peek cautiously through his fingers.
“It’s gone, it stopped, I thought I’d gone blind—”
“But you aren’t, are you?”
“Everything seemed so black after the golden dazzle. They’ve stopped downloading, Tom. Maybe those were instructions for building a device to display what the brain perceives . . .”
“Pretty stupid instructions if you can’t read them until after you’ve carried them out.”
“Maybe they’re all stored in my brain now.”
I thought. “Did you manage to fall asleep?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure . . . Why?”
“Put another way, did your conscious awareness switch off?”
“Oh, I see what you mean. Like a computer crashing, interrupting the message. No, I think I must have received everything. At least for the moment. What a relief.” He rubbed his scalp. “Is it all up here . . . or lost?”
Or never was, I thought. To what extent had the hallucination been for Nancy’s benefit, even though Roderick mightn’t be aware of this? I went downstairs to heat mugs of milk mixed with a lot of dark rum.
In the morning on the sofa—a clock showed six—the phone woke me, so I answered it, precise as ever: “Roderick Butler’s house. Tom Cooper speaking.”
“Who?” The voice sounded vaguely familiar, and hectic. “Never mind. Is he there? Please get him! Tell him it’s Jon Bell and something crazy scary is happening to me. It’s like a waterfall of lights—”
Rare Earth
Felicity Shoulders and Leslie What
Callum and his friend Juarez pushed in between commuters on the MAX train. A guy in a pirate hat frowned at Callum’s saxophone case, but most people’s eyes skipped over them—Juarez was made up in green-face for a zombie flashmob, and Portlanders tried to be too cool to react. There was enough weirdness to keep them busy not reacting: it was the day before Rose Festival started, an excuse for people to act crazy, if they needed an excuse. They’d even seen a guy wearing a turtle shell, which Juarez swore had something to do with the slow food movement. Juarez wore a camo jacket with his dad’s name, “Juarez,” stitched across the pocket. Callum’s coat was from his dad too, black motorcycle leather, inherited.
They had been downtown where Callum had been playing his sax for spare change. The light rail train started moving east toward the Burnside Bridge and home.
“How much did you make?” Juarez said. “Enough for a latte?”
“You know I’m saving my money.” Callum examined the coins he’d scooped out of his sax case. “Here, you take half.”
“All I did was meditate.”
“Zombie Zen is performance art.”
“Well, here.” Juarez shoved a big bag of venison jerky at his friend. “From my dad.”
Callum dug into the jerky. His grandma had slipped a snack bag into his coat like he was a toddler, but he wasn’t about to eat it. Peanuts and raisins older than he was, and a rock. She’d collected a shitload of these McNugget-sized things over the years, old and weird with translucent skins and blue veins inside. Like Grandma. He called them her crazy moon agates. They sure weren’t edible.
Juarez pointed out the window at the carnival rides on the waterfront. “You going to the Rose Festival this time?”
“Always. Gotta take Grandma Vera.”
“Pobrecito.” Juarez pouted exaggeratedly. “You want to come over for dinner? Homemade tamales.”
“Thursday’s pizza night. Besides, the Mommandant thinks I’m at home babysitting Grandma.”
“Or the other way around.” Juarez grinned, a bit ghoulish with his smeared makeup and dangling fake eyeball. He ducked off the MAX at his stop, and Callum scribbled in his spiral notepad for the last few minutes of the ride. Parasitic, he wrote. Copacetic.
Grandma Vera’s front door was blown open. The living room curtains were closed and the room dark except for Fox News on the TV. Callum left his sax in the foyer and rushed inside. “Grandma?” he called. “You here?” He imagined her wandering around barefoot, in her old night-gown. “Grandma!” he called, and didn’t breathe until he saw her toddle out of the kitchen and switch on a light.
“You’re just in time for snack.” The side of her lip was caught under her false teeth, giving her a goofy smile. She had trouble accessing the part of her brain that told her what to do next. RAM, he wrote on his spiral pad. Ramnesia. She was holding a Pyrex bowl of peanuts and raisins. He led her to the cleared spot at the dining room table.
“You shouldn’t walk around in the dark. You could trip,” Callum said. Grandma’s house was choked with clutter, stuff Vera called “ephemera” and his mom, Lily, called “fire hazard.” Rolled maps, cardboard boxes of old ration coupons and death certificates, stocks from companies even Wikipedia had never heard of. Civil War uniform buttons she called “undug.” Only the upstairs, where Lily and Callum had lived since his dad died, was clear. Vera had owned an antique shop in the Pearl District before it got fancy, but now she sold her stuff online. Except lately, she mostly bought things and forgot to sell. Her eBay feedback hovered around 34 percent positive. “Bid on Life magazine, got toaster,” one bidder had posted.
“I know where everything is,” she scoffed. She picked at the raisins, offered him some from her hand. He pretended to eat and hid them in his pocket with the others. She was wearing a butt-ugly velveteen choker with one of her crazy moon agates glued in the center. “That’s different,” Callum said.
“Charles gave it to me,” she said, and looked off into the distance.
Lily shouldered the door open and yelled, “How many times have I told you not to leave your instrument on the floor?” but she was carrying a pizza box and it smelled like garlic and pepperoni, so Callum got up to give her a hand.
“Would you set the table?” Lily said, waving him away. Her face was puffy, her voice tight. “What’s that thing around your neck, Mom?” She flopped open the pizza, her half Veggie Nirvana and theirs Omnivore Bliss. Thank God she’d gotten over veganism, because a pizza without cheese was just wrong. Lily didn’t say another word until they had finished the pizza and thrown away the paper plates. Of course the word was “homework.”
Grandma picked up the remote to change channels. Not the usual news-bots. Yellow balls of light bobbing across a meadow. More exciting than static, but not by much. “Turn up the sound,” she said. “I can’t hear what they’re saying.”
Lily took the remote and switched off the TV. “Homework,” she repeated, and Callum retreated upsta
irs.
He woke up to the Dandy Warhols on his old CD-alarm and Mom retching in their shared bathroom. She still hadn’t admitted she was knocked up. She was delusional to think she could hide it. This was middle school biology, not rocket science.
He hesitated outside the bathroom door, imagining Lily coming up with some lie to explain her morning barf ritual, maybe slandering last night’s pizza. Why did she need another kid anyway? Not like she was doing such a great job with him.
He decided to skip showering and get out while he could. After a kitchen raid, he walked to Hawthorne, inhaling the last quantum particles of Pop-Tart as the bus pulled up. He flashed his pass to the driver. The bus was almost empty, except for a Bible-bot finger-reading psalms in the front seat and a girl named Abby Reeves from AP English near the back. Abby wrote sestinas and dyed her hair the shade of a blue jay’s wing. Callum sloped toward the seat across from her.
He gave her a sideways nod, and balanced his notebook on the end of his sax case. Incognito. Inamorata, he scribbled.
The bus trundled off into light traffic. The sidewalks were all ghost town. Too quiet for a Friday morning.
Abby hooted, and he saw she was grinning. She shook her phone. “School’s canceled!” She walked across the aisle, and fell into the seat next to him. Her bag slumped over his sax case. “Callum, right? I’m Abby.”
The bus stopped on a red, long enough to read a newspaper box headline: “STRANGE GLOBAL PHENOMENA.”
Thanks, Oregonian, he thought. That explains things. “What’s up with school?”
“Canceled because of Martians,’ ” she said.
Usually she ignored him, so why was she playing him now? “Are you serious?”
“Sometimes,” she said. She pulled a netbook from her bag. Her camisole flashed enough boob to observe with peripheral vision. Abby tapped in CNN.com and turned the screen toward him. Her arm bumped his. Balls of light like on the TV, only red and swarming along some street in Idaho, overlapping, rising and falling like a stream. “OFFICIALS CALL FOR CALM,” scrolled below the image. “4 DEAD IN POCATELLO.”