“Moses fled his offices that night. I ran in dark, unraveling my despair. I trained to Far Rockaway, perhaps because of its lamenting name.
“I walked by a tumult of waves only equaled by the tumult in my breast. How? I cried, how can you have been half-deaf for a lifetime and not known it! And known it only now when through some fluke, the sense, the gift, returned, how, how?!
“My only answer was a great stroke of thunder wave upon the sands.
“So much for straw number one that broke Hump Number One of this odd-shaped human camel.”
There was a moment of silence.
We rode swaying on the bus. The bus moved along the golden shore road, through a gentle breeze.
“Straw number two?” I asked, quietly, at last.
Dr. Brokaw held his French sunglasses up so sunlight struck fish-glitters all about the cavern of the bus. We watched the swimming rainbow patterns, he with detachment and at last half-amused concern.
“Sight. Vision. Texture. Detail. Aren’t they miraculous. Aweful in the sense of meaning true awe? What is sight, vision, insight? Do we really want to see the world?”
“Oh, yes,” I cried, promptly.
“A young man’s unthinking answer. No, my dear boy, we do not. At twenty, yes, we think we wish to see, know, be all. So thought I once. But I have had weak eyes most of my life, spent half my days being fitted out with new specs by oculists, hee?
Well, comes the dawn of the corneal lens! At last, I decided, I will fit myself with those bright little teardrop miracles, those invisible discs! Coincidence? Psychosomatic cause and effect? For, that same week I got my contact lenses was the week my hearing cleared up! There must be some physio-mental connection, but don’t hazard me into an informed guess.
“All I know is I had my little crystal corneal lenses ground and installed upon my weak baby blue eyes and—voilà!
“There was the world!
“THERE were people!
“And there, God save us, was the dirt, and the multitudinous pores upon the people.
“Simon,” he added, grieving gently, eyes shut for a moment behind his dark glasses, “have you ever thought, did you know, that people are for the most part pores?”
He let that sink in. I thought about it.
“Pores?” I said, at last.
“Pores! But who thinks of it? Who bothers to go look? But with my restored vision I saw! A thousand, a million, ten billion . . .pores. Large, small, pale, crimson . . .pores. Everyone and on everyone. People passing. People crowding buses, theaters, telephone booths, all pore and little substance. Small pores on tiny women.
Big pores on monster men. Or vice versa. Pores as numerous as that foul dust which slides pell-mell down church-nave sunbeams late afternoons.
Pores. They became my utter and riven fascination. I stared at fine ladies’ complexions, not their eyes, mouths, or earlobes. Shouldn’t a man watch a woman’s skeleton hinge and unhinge itself within that sweet pincushion flesh? Yes! But no, I saw only cheese-grater, kitchen-sieve skins. All Beauty turned sour Grotesque. Swiveling my gaze was like swiveling the 200-inch Palomar telescope in my damned skull. Everywhere I looked I saw the meteor-bombarded moon, in dread super closeup!
“Myself? God, shaving mornings was exquisite torture. I could not pluck my eyes from my lost battle-pitted face. Damnation, Immanuel Brokaw, I soughed, you are the Grand Canyon at high noon, an orange with a billion navels, a pomegranate with the skin stripped off.
“In sum, my contact lenses had made me fifteen years old again. That is: festering, self-crucified bundle of doubt, horror, and absolute imperfection. The worst age in all one’s life had returned to haunt me with its pimpled, bumpy ghost.
“I lay, a sleepless wreck. Ah, second Adolescence, take pity, I cried. How could I have been so blind, so many years? Blind, yes, and knew it, and always said it was of no importance. So I groped about the world as lustful myope, nearsightedly missing the holes, rips, tears, and bumps on others as well as myself. Now, Reality had run me down in the street. And the Reality was: Pores.
“I shut my eyes and went to bed for several days. Then I sat up in bed and proclaimed, wide-eyed: Reality is not all! I refuse this knowledge. I legislate against Pores! I accept instead those truths we intuit, or make up to live by.
“I traded in my eyeballs.
“That is I handed my corneal-contact lenses to a sadist nephew who thrives on garbages and lumpy people and hairy things.
“I clapped back on my old undercorrected specs. I strolled through a world of returned and gentle mists. I saw enough but not too much. I found half-discerned ghost peoples I could love again. I saw the ‘me’ in the morning glass I could once more bed with, admire and take as chum. I began to laugh each day with new happiness. Softly. Then, very loud.
“What a joke, Simon, life is.
“From vanity we buy lenses that see all and so lose everything!
“And by giving up some small bit-piece of so-called wisdom, reality, truth, we gain back an entirety of life! Who does not know this? Writers do! Intuited novels are far more ‘true’ than all your scribbled data-fact reportage in the history of the world!
“But then at last I had to face the great twin fractures lying athwart my conscience. My eyes. My ears. Holy Cow, I said, softly. The thousand folk who tread my offices and creaked my couches and looked for echoes in my Delphic Cave, why, why, preposterous! I had seen none of them, nor heard any clear!
“Who was that Miss Harbottle?
“What of old Dinsmuir?
“What was the real color, look, size of Miss Grimes?
“Did Mrs. Scrapwight really resemble and speak like an Egyptian papyrus mummy fallen out of a rug at my desk?
“I could not even guess. Two thousand days of fogs surrounded my lost children, mere voices calling, fading, gone.
“My God, I had wandered the marketplace with an invisible sign BLIND AND DEAF and people had rushed to fill my beggar’s cup with coins and rush off cured. Cured! Isn’t that miraculous, strange? Cured by an old ricket with one arm gone, as ’twere, and one leg missing. What? What did I say right to them out of hearing wrong? Who indeed were those people?
I will never know.
“And then I thought: there are a hundred psychiatrists about town who see and hear more clearly than I. But whose patients walk naked into high seas or leap off playground slides at midnight or truss women up and smoke cigars over them.
“So I had to face the irreducible fact of a successful career.
“The lame do not lead the lame, my reason cried, the blind and halt do not cure the halt and the blind! But a voice from the far balcony of my soul replied with immense irony: Bee’swax and Bull-Durham! You, Immanuel Brokaw, are a porcelain genius, which means cracked but brilliant! Your occluded eyes see, your corked ears hear. Your fractured sensibilities cure at some level below consciousness! Bravo!
“But no, I could not live with my perfect imperfections. I could not understand nor tolerate this smug secret thing which, through screens and obfuscations, played meadow doctor to the world and cured field beasts.
“I had several choices then. Put my corneal lenses back in? Buy ear radios to help my rapidly improving sense of sound? And then? Find I had lost touch with my best and hidden mind which had grown comfortably accustomed to thirty years of bad vision and lousy hearing? Chaos for both curer and cured.
“Stay blind and deaf and work? It seemed a dreadful fraud, though my record was laundry-fresh, pressed white and clean.
“So I retired.
“Packed my bags and ran off into golden oblivion to let the incredible wax collect in my most terrible strange ears . . .”
We rode in the bus along the shore in the warm afternoon. A few clouds moved over the sun. Shadows misted on the sands and the people strewn on the sands under the colored umbrellas.
I cleared my throat.
“Will you ever return to practice again, doctor?”
“I practice now.”
“But you just said—”
“Oh, not officially, and not with an office or fees, no, never that again.” The doctor laughed quietly. “I am sore beset by the mystery anyway. That is, of how I cured all those people with a laying on of hands even though my arms were chopped off at the elbows. Still, now, I do keep my ‘hand’ in.”
“How?”
“This shirt of mine. You saw. You heard.”
“Coming down the aisle?”
“Exactly. The colors. The patterns. One thing to that man, another to the girl, a third to the boy. Zebras, goats, lightnings, Egyptian amulets. What, what, what? I ask. And: answer, answer, answer. The Man in the Rorschach Shirt.
“I have a dozen such shirts at home.
“All colors, all different pattern mixes. One was designed for me by Jackson Pollack before he died. I wear each shirt for a day, or a week, if the going, the answers, are thick, fast, full of excitement and reward. Then off with the old and on with the new. Ten billion glances, ten billion startled responds!
“Might I not market these Rorschach shirts to your psychoanalyst on vacation? Test your friends? Shock your neighbors? Titillate your wife? No, no. This is my own special private most dear fun. No one must share it. Me and my shirts, the sun, the bus, and a thousand afternoons ahead. The beach waits. And on it, my people!
“So I walk the shores of this summer world. There is no winter here, amazing, yes, no winter of
