by Evan Dara
I used to work as an attorney, for Bidley, Roston, on South Dearborn Street. Chipperness. Fine posture. Barbarous shoes. ’Til 1 AM. Six nights per week. Specialty was small-business litigation. Fury, rage, soul-incineration. Every exploitation possible. Among the clients, of the clients. Of the bosses. Had to get out—
—Took a leave, and started to work on an illustrated book for children, Ilene continued. Why not? As a lawyer, I’d seen childish behavior. Nonstop. Now use it to become the next player on Potter’s Field. Had drawn when I was a girl, in Bloomington. Teachers said I was good. Gave it up, but followed the graphic world. Like Moebius, early Ware. Before the affectation. Felt good to go back …
Had a story, pretty good, started to work. Needed to know if it could go. Not much savings, not much time. But bought a drawing table. Big pivot wheel. Took up half the second bedroom. Big flat surfaces, to be filled with sketches. And with colors, nice colors. It was good …
Had a friend at Little, Brown, the publisher, Boston. Distinguished, now part of Time-Warner. Arranged for me to show a few drawings, present my idea. They went for it. In two weeks. Contract, advance, FedEx’d Chinese cricket-cage gift. Deal. All terms I could live with. Could live with very well. In fact, I was thrilled …
So here: let’s go. Let me tell you the pitch. The pitch, maybe a little filled out, for
Anders, the Lonely Optician
Once, in Glasgow, Scotland, in a time near ours, lived an optician named Anders. His name wasn’t Scottish. But neither were his thoughts. That’s why, he told himself, he didn’t know many people. Yes, he waved Hello! when he passed Mrs. Buchanan next door. She would bring him plum crumble for Easter. And there was Ryan, from his days at school, with whom, once every summer, he flew store-bought kites …
But his week was in dread to Saturday night. And to Sunday afternoon, too, if the sun stayed away …
He did not like eating his rump-roast dinners alone. Rump roast wasn’t as good when it was eaten alone …
True, Anders started to hiccup – a bit – when customers as cute as Alicyn Blake came in to his optician’s shop. And, true, Anders took his temperature often. He did have his skin condition, the Phloofza, which made his knuckles unpleasantly reddish. And his thoughts often drifted to the bluebells poking up near Glencoe …
Anders knew all that. But he was lonely all the same …
Anders spent his days grinding lenses, so people could see better. He spent his evenings riding search engines. He had a simple computer, and frail. He had fixed and refixed his frail computer so many times, he could do it in the dark. Still, the internet let him see all sorts of things, beyond what his thin window let in …
Between home and work, Anders would walk down by the Clyde, Glasgow’s deep-water port. He saw its vast tankers, coming from everywhere, going to everywhere. He saw its towering cranes, its thick-tire trucks. He saw all the lifting and loading, all the dockside bustle-tussle …
But Anders wondered: where was he in this worldly world? All these things, all this spurring and commotion. A universe of things in permanent transit. But they didn’t even say Hello. Sealed in their containers, big as train-cars, the things didn’t even show him what kinds of things they were. They just passed by. They didn’t see him at all …
And all his grinding: who saw that … ?
It made Anders feel small …
So much bustle-tussle …
Anders cried at the Clyde …
He ran back to his optician’s shop …
Blank page, Ilene said.
—For three long weeks, lights burned in Anders’ shop, Ilene continued, long past when people were awake to see them. Anders was tired during the day, when customers came. Then he closed his shop entirely for several days. Never before! One night, he was seen carrying his fixed and refixed computer into his workplace, through the back door …
Then, one Thursday, Anders walked into McNamara’s Jolly Time Market, four doors from his shop’s door. McNamara’s Jolly Time Market sold household goods, hardware, and sundries. Anders nudged through the market aisles, and picked out a rake, a fluffy pillow, and a hose in a circle. He went to Simon McNamara, and spoke past McNamara’s long mustache to ask for the hose’s price. Fourteen pounds twenty, Simon McNamara’s mustache said. Can I wrap it for you? “Afraid not,” Anders said, and returned the hose to its hook at the back of the store …
When, later, Anders re-approached the cash register, with rake and fluffy pillow, Simon McNamara’s mustache asked him if there had been anything wrong with the hose. Not at all, Anders said. Simon McNamara eyed him quizzically. Anders smiled. Here, Anders said. Take a look. He removed from his face his aluminum-frame glasses. He bade Simon McNamara put them on …
Harlph, Simon McNamara said, looking through the lenses. What’s … ?
Anders smiled, highly widely, as Simon McNamara scanned his Jolly Time Market. Simon McNamara’s jaw started to bobble. And when Margaret Knox, a customer of long standing, who happened to be standing nearby, saw the shopkeeper thus a-bobble, she took the aluminum-frame glasses from his face and put them on her own …
My God, she said …
Anders smiled again …
My God, Margaret Knox said. How do I get a pair of these’m for me … ?
Thus was the grand premier of Anders’ Glasses. It was the optical invention that would make the world see him …
The invention was simple. Anders knew that he only knew two things. But those two things had never been put together …
So he’d worked all day and he’d worked all night, and he found a way to put eyeglasses and the internet together. He used radio signals, ingenuity, and a tiny transmitter hidden in the glasses’ aluminum frames …
Then he found a way to grind lenses that would feed into a search engine. (It was simple!) …
In turn, the search engine would see if anything seen through the lenses was for sale on the net. Anywhere on the net …
And then the engine would show the seen things’ best available price. It used little orange tags bearing a number. One end of each little orange tag tapered to a point. And the point pointed at the seen things …
It really worked pretty good …
True, the glasses made their wearers’ worlds rather orange-y. So, to let other colors in, Anders’ Glasses limited its searches to things costing twelve pounds or more …
But no one ever complained about the world shifting orangeward. For the first time, people knew if they were getting a square deal …
Which turned out to be pretty handy in negotiations with merchants …
And people liked that …
They liked it a lot …
Anders called his invention Buy-focals …
The next day, Anders made a pair for Mrs. Dobbs, who was pleased. Then he made a pair for Nick Sutherland, likewise. Then he made a pair for Mr. Krane, the industrialist, who gave Anders many, many pounds for the chance to make even more pairs of Anders’ Glasses, and offered profit participation in same, although he asked for Anders, on certain subjects, in certain circumstances, to hold mum …
And it goes on from there, Speranza said. You can imagine: Anders’ Glasses gets big. Then real big. Not a nose un-Anders’ed. The words Point of Purchase and Best Possible are heard frequently. Price-tags flying over Glasgow like pennants in a winning season. Anders gets rich. Anders gets unlonely. No more Phloofza. Girls like crazy. Rump roast tasting good. Talk of biggest-ever Edinburgh-exchange IPO sounding good …
Then throw in a wrinkle, iron the wrinkle, wrap it up. IPOver and out. Back cover of Anders all in orange …
That was the pitch …
As I said, the publishers signed pronto, Speranza continued. Wanted the story, wanted rights to the underlying idea. I said sure. Needed the money. Wanted the validation. Had left one career, had to start another. Was abundantly giddy …
Partied for two days, shot six percent of the advance, bought new watercolor-specific brushes. Let one
person know at the law firm. Heard back from four others. Week in St. Barts to chill. Had the most wonderful pear-honey pie, met someone on the plane back. Sat at my drawing table. Had six months to submit.
—Worked hard, worked well. Nice words and lines, some nice colors. Getting along exceptionally well with the guy from the plane. Maybe three nights a week. Plus weekends, ’til Sundays at six. Michael. Big internist. Liked the same Vietnamese restaurant. The same workout sequence. Talk without coda. Snuggle harmony. Mm shoulders …
But back to work. So back to work. Going well. Lines, colors. Came up with a good wrinkle. To throw in. Who knows – maybe from my experience. Out of law, in with Michael. All good. Finished words on sked, images on sked, wrapped on sked. Then took a week. Just to look at it. See if OK. Was OK …
OK? So here: here’s the rest. With its lovely, final, expanded title. Here’s the rest of
Anders, the Lonely Optician
or
Hallelujah, It’s Another Day
And so, highly fortunate fortune showered upon the optician Anders. He now had ample time for his hobbies. He played Boggle, a fun board-game, with his many visitors. He looked at his ant-farm. He smoked his pipe. He motored about in his Bentley …
To keep his hand in things, he would, from time to time, grind a few lenses. He could now afford an assistant, so he hired a local woman named Sally. Mostly she helped with cleanup and assembly. Sally was 31, and quiet, with fizzy brown hair bunned back. Though somewhat slow in movement, Sally was trustworthy, and good with the small screwdriver …
One day, Anders’ girlfriend, Monique, asked for her own pair of his famous glasses. Monique had gales of black hair, an admirable capacity to smile, and wore makeup about her eyes that made her look like a cheetah. Or so thought Sally …
By the next afternoon, Anders had finished the smile-sought glasses. He blew the last glass-dust from his grind-zone. He made sure the tiny transmitter sat securely in the aluminum frame. Taking off his ragged smock, he passed the pieces to Sally for assembly. Then he went next door to wash up …
Ten minutes later, he returned to the workroom and tried on the new glasses. But, immediately, he saw that something was different. That something was wrong …
He looked through the glasses again …
Yes, something, definitely, was wrong …
It had become hard to see! …
Anders took off the glasses, and held them to his eyes. Soon, it became clear what had happened. The lenses had been put into the aluminum frame backwards. He again put the glasses on, and confirmed that he was looking through them back to front …
But now, the glasses were not working …
Anders’ Glasses were not pasting up price tags …
The world was not orange-y …
And he thought: Hm. These will not please Monique. They won’t please her at all …
What did Anders do, behind his backwards glasses … ?
He wept. He wept and wept. He wept and wept and wept …
The glasses, it seemed, were letting him see, but in a different way. Perhaps they were reversing circuitry. Rather than posting prices, they were …
Well, Anders wasn’t exactly sure what they were doing. Because, in his glasses, the price tags had disappeared. Instead, he saw lambent glows …
Before, there had been many, many price tags. But now, the glows came from everything. Everything that was seen by Anders’ Glasses …
It was like those paintings by that old Italian, Tintoretto. Where every single figure had its own glow …
At first, Anders thought these were not good glasses. He thought they would blind him. Blind him with lambent glows …
But then his eyes adjusted. And when they did, he found he could see better than ever …
So Anders wept …
Wept to see all the lambent glows …
He ran out into the fields behind his Glasgow home. Where every grass-shank and hedge-hollow and tree-thrust was aglow …
Every cloud-pat. Every droop …
He laughed and chortled and sprang. He chimed and gloried and pirouetted and showed …
He, too, was aglow …
Blank page, said Speranza.
—That night, Speranza said, Anders took Monique to The Hussar Husserl’s Pub …
They sat in chairs. From where he was sitting, Anders could see the upward taper of tap handles; fingers enhancing semantic meaning; affirmations of pegs by floating coats; necks nicely engineered for the job; graduated shadow under a shelf …
Lambent, all …
Anders and Monique sat, and sipped, and chatted …
The next morning, at 9:01 AM, Mr. Krane, the industrialist, called and said he wouldn’t be calling Anders any more …
Concerned, Anders called Monique. And found that her number led to rapid, repeating beeping …
He went outside, to his Bentley, to go to Monique. He saw two large men, in loose, capelike coats, winching the Bentley onto a large flatbed truck, and the truck exhausting away …
While he was outside, a quiet boy from the neighborhood approached and handed him a sheaf of papers. It had a big first word, Eviction …
Anders went indoors. His pipe tobacco had been invaded by crawly nits …
Mr. Krane then called, and said Anders had to return every pence he had been given, plus twenty-two days’ compound interest …
The phone rang again. It was the hospital. His brother had been hit by a passenger van in Brixton. The brother he never knew he had …
Anders took his temperature …
While waiting, he stopped denying his gum recession …
He saw that activity in his ant-farm had slowed …
The phone rang, and a man, who identified himself as an orderly named Felipe, said Monique was in a drug-detox center downtown, screaming his name …
Anders wondered if he should attribute his risen temperature to this …
Anders heard, in his head, the word stoop, and started to …
The fire in his workroom extinguished itself before gaining the parlor …
Mr. Krane called and said he would forgive Anders’ debt if Anders neither made nor made reference to his glasses ever again …
The activity in the ant-farm slowed to mouse-dropping level …
He unforgot an article about bronchial peril from microparticulate glass-grounds …
He wondered why he never had a single bad feeling about his mother …
Because if he had one, he realized, the avalanche would follow …
Which made him feel bad …
He questioned the funfulness of Boggle …
A phone caller said Anders had been specially selected, and asked him to participate in a longitudinal study of genetic disorders …
A visitor said that Mrs. Buchanan, next door, had moved away, and that the new owners, the Fergusons, from Tongue, drew Anders’ attention to the fact that his herbaceous border extended four-point-five centimeters onto their property …
Symptoms. Hysterical symptoms. Atypical symptoms. Inexplicable symptoms …
Symptom-free. Unsymptomatic. Asymptomatic. False positives. False negatives …
A phone caller, unidentified, said Monique had passed away in the detox center. But that she was still screaming his name …
A patch of the Phloofza rose up, reddish, scaly, in the saddle between the pinkie and ring-finger knuckles of his left hand …
Two sheep arrived in his front yard. Four wolves arrived out back …
Anders understood that he hadn’t lost his ancestral language because he had never learned it …
Anders took to his bed. By then it was night. Cave-quiet, and dark as destiny. His was a turbulent sleep. Demon-dreams, deep sweats, a new, sharp, devilish hole in his right nightstocking, directly atop his first two toes …
He thrashed and crabbed and guttered through the long night. He rose four times to make sick. Gut-sickeningly sick …
The next mo
rning, Anders woke at dawn – wet and sticky, rancid, brewed. His nightgown was gummy, his toe-hole a torment. He heard raw howls, he saw hovering black masses both inside and out. He went to the window and said, Hallelujah, it’s another day …
Er, um. But cute, right? Life-affirming. Well, something-affirming. Uplift. Heart …
Regardless, Speranza said. Got it done. Pages in sequence, colors in place. So, as I said, after wrap, took a week. Just to look at the thing. Which, did.
—Then took another week. What did I do during this Another Week? Made salads. Mostly endive salads. Pruned my Rolodex. Cleaned blinds, strip by strip. Threw out shoes. Read international news …
I didn’t send it. To Little, Brown. Don’t know why. But didn’t. Boards too big to go into the mail. Terms inadequate. I don’t know. Could imagine what they’d say. Where’s the tension? and What the hell happened to Sally? and such. So, unsending …
Weeks go. Then a month. Overdue by now. Then an e-mail from L, B. Then a note. Nice, friendly: Just wanted to check in and … Friendly, amicable. Then Michael began to ask. About the thing. Also nicely. But an ask …
So had to. Had to. So did. Michael had asked again. Probably tired of paying for me. So, did …
Packaged up easily. Out to L, B via UPS. Pretty easily …
Then the wait. The wait. One month. Two. No word. No note. Why so long? Was this usual? Rattled around, in, throughout my apartment. Watered plants. But didn’t want to call. So just waited. It was more than two months! – April 4 to June 12. And then their note was perfectly sweet: Wonderful. All very pleased. Thanks for letting us … And enclosed was the second check, second half of my advance. Once again, signed …
Well. Overjoyed. Brought in fragrant, yellow roses. Called, heart dancing, my editor at L, B, Nigel Pitt. But didn’t leave a message. When he wasn’t in. Still, overjoyed. Shivery-overjoyed …
And then – the wait. The wait again. What to do? No contact. Months go by. Months. I’m thinking of starting another, but want to hear first. I’m thinking of getting out of the apartment more; don’t. Happily, I can pay for Michael now, with my little advance money. So, happy. When we order in. And after months, Michael asked to see it. The thing. The book. So I did, I showed it to him. Had to. Color Xeroxes of the boards. Read the words out as we went. He said Really good …