Eye Contact - takahē

Your vision has slipped.

You didn’t notice it at first—it’s hard to notice things when they’re gradual—but it’s as if someone snuck into your line of sight every night and sanded down the horizon until its edges were soft and staticky, sharp lines vibrating.

The distance, now, is more distant.

You made the mistake of trying to watch a film with your dad, some Chinese one about a woman who doesn’t know she’s dying. The subtitles bled then congealed, pale scars at the bottom of the screen.

You lied, said you knew exactly what was going on. Dad said it was unsafe for you to keep driving. He gave you $250 for Christmas to spend on glasses. You have $200 left.

Someone—you don’t remember who—recommended an optometrist in Newmarket. You hadn’t driven that way in a while. You hadn’t been driving much at all, hadn’t much of a reason in lockdown, and every time you got in your car, you’d find yourself headed west or north, never east, never too close to Mount Eden. But today it’s like some plug was pulled in your brain: it emptied out and your muscles took over. You drive without thinking—Dad always says so. You slide between lanes and back into old routes, and without even realising, there’s Maungawhau, leaning over your shoulder, and there’s Lou’s old house in its giant shadow.

You two used to drink yourselves blind. Lou could trade fake names for free drinks, small winks for double shots with bartenders. You would down anything—cheap beer to straight gin—but mostly you considered yourselves winos. You perfected the purchase of a bargain bottle: light reds you could chill, sweeter whites you could practically freeze. Together, you ranked your favourites—a $9 Merlot with a yellow bird on its label, a Riesling you only ever found at the liquor store on her corner.

Once, you arrived late for a check-in to Melbourne, too drunk still, the morning after, to drive yourself.

My friend, you lied, my friend had a seizure.

You don’t know where it came from, except, maybe, the time you watched a woman collapse on Ponsonby Road, and her boyfriend just as fast beside her, turning her on her shoulder, absorbing her convulsions with as much of himself as he could. It seemed so obscure as to be genius.

The flight attendant looked unsure. She kept turning her head, hoping someone else would appear.

My friend had a seizure, you went on, I had to stay with her till the ambulance came.

You’re not much of a crier, which is to say you’re unprepared. You have no tissues. It wouldn’t matter if you could see for the tears. But they make the daylight brighter; they make it quiver. You know you’re at an intersection but you’re suddenly not sure of your turn. And then there’s tooting, and movement, and cars overtaking you, shiny and dangerous and all too near, and you need to pull over, you just need to pull over. You press the heels of your palms into your eyes until the darkness is crushed into flints of colour, small fires beneath your lids. This is how you notice you’re shaking: you tremble against your own hands, frightened to the touch. When you take your hands away, you can’t see. Everything swims as if in Vaseline. You drift towards the curb, then search for something to wipe your face, find a newspaper, rip out a sheet, scrunch, and blow.

The optometrist’s in Newmarket looks like any other: crisp and glossy and named for some nondescript white man, Tom something, or Daniel, or something Jones. There’s a woman at a desk in its doorway, as crisp and glossy as the store, taking temperatures and scanning QR codes. She steps back when you step forward; she looks away. You must appear sick—raw eyes and red nose, dripping. But she lets you inside anyway, and hands you a wooden box with three compartments.

Pick your favourites, she says, and you can try them on over there. She points to a velvet chair in front of a mirror in the corner. This shop is too expensive for you—you can smell it— something like amber or musk in the air, the warmth of cedar radiating from your hands. You decide to pick the first three pairs you can find, mime your way through. You sit down on the velvet, and finally see the prices, small and discreet on the back of the lenses, $699, $799, $899. That’s when you look up, see yourself in the mirror, see your face, smeared with newspaper ink.

You told Lou about your lie. She thought it was hilarious. That’s gold, she said, that’s pure gold. She said it to her psychiatrist. She was late, she said, because her best friend had a seizure; she told her group therapy counsellor that she hadn’t done her homework because her dog had started seizing. She never had a dog.

Most days, you feel like you are radioactive, like grief has split some atom inside your heart and sent the electrons spinning, trembling through your blood.

People can sense it, even if they can’t see it, even with a clean face and brushed hair. They give you a wide berth on the footpath and scatter when you enter the second store.

This optometrist’s is cheaper. There’s a two-for-one deal on, and thirty percent off everything else, as the big tacky posters tell you, over and over.

The two girls at the till look scared, or maybe just bored.

You try to choose quickly. Every pair you try on, you assess with just a glance, as if your own reflection is something illicit: that man you saw stealing a toaster at The Warehouse in town, porn on laptops at the uni library. Look down, look away.

The girls at the till seem awkward now. You are doing something wrong, but you are not sure what. You have misplayed some part in this routine.

I’d like to buy these glasses, you say.

Do you know your prescription?

No. I don’t have one.

You’ll need to book an appointment and come back. We might have one tomorrow morning.

It’s just, I don’t live that close. Do you have nothing today?

Not today. We’ll put them aside for you, your glasses. I’m putting the model number down here for you, next to your appointment time. Tomorrow at nine, see?

You lean towards the counter and she leans back.

I’m not sure I can.

I don’t mind.

It was a man who spoke, robed in a lab coat, drowning in white cotton, as if he had just been confirmed.

I don’t mind seeing you today. I can be free in an hour.

He was speaking to you, not them. He was looking you in the eyes.

In your car, at the lights, you squint at the street signs as if you might be able to read them. You can’t.

The white letters grow their pillowy fuzz, your eyes laze around their edges, picking out only capitals.

J____ S____. John Smith, you think, Jon Steward, Jessica Simpson, Jean-Paul Sartre. And then, Nausea, Being and Nothing, Hell is Other People. The car behind you honks.

The honking’s not personal, not really, you try to tell yourself. By which you mean, It’s not because you let your friend die. It’s not like everyone knows.

You didn’t learn to drive for a long time. You didn’t need to—since high school, Lou was always happy to pick you up. She loved driving. When you did finally learn, from a boyfriend who scoffed every time you stalled, you still preferred to be driven by Lou than to drive yourself. She would arrive in her little red Mazda, which always smelt like weed and mandarin peel, group therapy homework on the passenger seat. Sorry, she’d say, just chuck that on the floor.

You consider simply driving around, but there are too many one-way streets in this city, too many lanes to fall down and never come back from, too many motorways. There’s only one bar near here that you’d never been to together. It’s dark, even in the middle of the day, and the wine menu is long and boring. You pull down your mask to take a sip, but it does nothing, and neither does the next, until the glass is hollow and so are you, cocking your head for the last concave drip.

So you order another. This is the new world, which is really the old world with shorter opening hours, without Lou.

She died on the eve of lockdown, without funeral or fanfare. Except that it always felt to you that the country locked down because of her.

Opposite the optometrist’s is a consignment store where you dropped off clothes in a big bin liner during that lockdown. They’ve been hounding you to pick them back up ever since. Nothing sold. The shop attendant, shiny and young, ignores you at first, then hands you your clothes in a tote bag, someone else’s.

The optometrist takes you into one small room, then another. All you have to do is place your chin on plastic ledges and focus on keeping your eyes open as machines puff air into them.

You’re going to see a little red house, he says, and you do, on top of a hill at the end of a long path, white picket fences getting smaller. Then the machine blows air in your eyes. You press your hand to your left lid and your eye, that soft warm creature, twitches diligently against your fingertips.

Not so hard, he says.

You must always touch your eyes too hard, you realise, dark dissolving into darting lights, pink and green pixels.

You’re carrying around a lot, aren’t you?

He points to the tote bag of your unwanted clothes, discarded in the corner.

Christmas shopping? he asks.

You can’t think what to say, so you nod, the plastic rest bumping your chin.

When Lou had her first seizure, all you could think of was that stupid trip to Melbourne, where you Ubered yourself from bar to overpriced bar, downing Pet Nats and minerally oranges like they came from a cask, then nursed hangovers in a budget hostel, plastic bunks and padlocks on luggage, where everyone was eight years younger than you, where you waited until it sounded like the bathroom was free so you could throw up, where you shat your guts out. All you could think of was that it was your fault.

You only saw her seizure twice. The first time, you were in her bedroom, and you thought she was laughing, so you laughed too, you actually laughed at her. It’s lucky no one has any memory of their seizures, and no one else was there to see.

The optometrist flicks on a projector and the far wall alights with clinical hieroglyphics. The first few slides are easy enough. You stamp your way through the letters with the confidence of a six-year-old reciting the alphabet. A, C, D, V, Z. But then they begin to itch and blur: a T could be a J, a B could be an F, an M could be a W.

Time’s up! you want to shout. See how I’ve already failed? You keep laughing at your guesses, but he doesn’t find them funny. He just responds with the same soft voice, the voice of your father trying to get you into the pool at swimming lessons as a child, telling you it was okay to come last. That’s fine, he says. And this? he says. And this? He is immune to your failings, stoic in the face of them.

Now there is a lens in front of your face. He crouches down in front of you to adjust it. Look straight ahead, he says, which of course means looking at him. His are dark, but after a while yours adjust, and you can see his pupil.

You can feel his heat, or, more accurately, you can feel the absence of the room’s chill. Your cheeks warm. The cold finds a new home. You can hear his breathing, and you realise you haven’t heard anyone breathe in a long time, except yourself, maybe. And then you can hear yourself, something shallow and coarse and grating. And you realise that you haven’t heard yourself breathe, too, in all that time, or at least you haven’t been listening.

You worry he can smell the wine on your breath. Up this close, he can see everything wrong with you. But he’s only looking in your eyes.

The second time, you knew what was happening, and your first thought was that you wished you weren’t there. You wished you’d left her, earlier, alone. You were both drunk, hanging out in the damp and fluorescent lounge of the latest guy who’d tried to win her heart, some six-foot gaffer called Ted. Except that he’d gone to bed, and his flatmates had gone to bed, and now you two remained, sprawled across couches without padding, drinking the bourbon you found above the fridge. Lou, you said, Lou, though you were sure she couldn’t hear you, or maybe she could, you don’t actually know, but you knew she couldn’t respond. Lou.

You couldn’t look her in the eye. It was as if she wasn’t behind them. The shaking seemed to come from her chest. Each convulsion looked like an attempt to sit up, but she’d fall back down again, shaking and stiff. Defeated, over and over.

There was pressure behind your eyes. You kept rubbing them. Your head burned. Your body felt invisible, except where your back met the wooden panels of the couch. Moving seemed impossible.

In your pocket, your phone was dead. You didn’t think to search for hers. You just have to watch this, you thought, you just have to sit and watch her die—is that what happens? Is that how it ends? But you couldn’t. You weren’t up to it. You stumbled into the room Ted had gone into, at least the one you thought he had.

Lou’s having a seizure in your living room, you said.

Call the fucking ambulance, came a female voice from the patchy darkness. Use the fucking landline.

She didn’t die that time, it bears saying. She did die five months later, when she had a seizure behind the wheel. Her car went off a bank on the motorway and flipped.

Some people, who don’t know you at all, have said it’s lucky she didn’t kill anyone else. But you wish she had. You wish twelve thousand people died that day. You’ve been willing the Covid numbers up, secretly, of course, hoping for the cases where young people die, people in their twenties. Hoping for the world to stay in grief.

He trundles the machine to your right eye; its great arm swings in your direction in slow motion, until it stops gentle centimetres from your face. You lean in.

Tell me when it gets clearer. Tell me when it gets blurrier again.

You do not trust yourself to do this.

You do not trust yourself in medical environments. You could have been born one hundred years ago, a hysteric, or one of those sickly girls confined to white linen nighties and a childhood indoors. Point to the pain, doctors say, and your whole abdomen rages. Does that feel better? Does that feel worse? Who can answer honestly? Who can truly say they don’t lie? Yes, that feels tender.

Yes, that helps.

The letters, however, clean themselves up, dust off their angles, hollow out their innards. Now, maybe, or now. How clear is clear enough? And then they’re slipping again, drowning in light.

Back, you say, and he cranks the lens back by degrees.

There, you say, I think, I think there’s best.

Lou started taking her therapy seriously. She did her group homework. She cut back her drinking, which meant you did too.

No one knows where she was headed. You had planned to go to a party together up north hosted by her latest love interest. Not Ted, but some equally tall gardener or artist or something. She joked it was her Cinderella moment: home by twelve for the start of lockdown. You were supposed to be her driver. She was on new medication and hadn’t had another seizure since, but she was told to wait a year before getting behind the wheel. Then you bailed—said you were too tired. Really, you’d started drinking in the afternoon. You slept with your flatmate that night, a small mistake, in comparison. And Lou, it seems, decided to go to the party alone. Except she came off the motorway going South. Maybe she was headed to the airport. Maybe she was about to board a plane to Melbourne. You’ll never know.

I can’t actually see anything wrong with your sight, the optometrist says. You’re not naturally short-sighted. When I look inside your eye, the internal structure, it’s long-sighted.

That feels wrong. That doesn’t seem right. But then again, you trust him, more than you trust your own vision. People who lie don’t look you in your eyes. People who lie will tell you there’s a problem when there’s not, just to make you pay.

He tells you to spend less time on screens and gives you a print-out of exercises to try. You cannot see yourself in the line-drawn faces, cannot imagine holding your temples, looking down, then up, down, then up.

It was $30 for the visit. You consider going back to the bar, the one with the boring wine, but you head to the Glengarry’s on Khyber Pass instead.

Short-sighted. How could you not be? How could you be anything else?

You let the pimply assistant sell you on an $80 Chablis and a $30 Pinot. Why not? You have $170 left, and besides, your eyes can’t focus on the cheap shelves, can’t even read their labels. You make sure not to look at them when he’s talking to you, something about grip, something about long tannins; you make sure not to look when you pay; you don’t look when you leave.

On the way back to your car, you glance in at the optometrist, leant over the shoulder of one of the shopkeepers as she types something. The wine feels heavy in each hand. You go inside, not bothering this time to scan.

For you, you say. You want so badly to know his name, but now it feels too late to ask.

You don’t check which bottle you give him. He keeps your gaze, for a moment, without changing his expression, as if you’ve just spoken a foreign language, as if he’s working out what you said. But then he smiles, and he thanks you, and you can see that he means it.

Ruby Porter is a novelist, poet and PhD candidate. She has been teaching English literature and creative and academic writing for ten years. She was the winner of the Wallace Foundation Short Fiction Award in 2017, and the inaugural winner of the Michael Gifkins Prize in 2018 with her debut novel Attraction. Attraction was published in 2019 by Melbourne-based Text Publishing. It is distributed throughout Australia, New Zealand and North America.