The Monster of a Thousand Eyes, Part 1

Dr. Leo Gramb cinched his tie, tamped the files on his desk, and pushed a button on his office phone.
“Gretchen? I’m ready for the next.”
The person Gretchen brought in was a normal, respectable-looking man of thirty-five, with a lean figure and a face well framed by brow and jawline. He leaned a little on the secretary’s hand as she led him into the expensively furnished office, but raised his head to smell the sea breeze that came through the open window and brushed his hair back from his face. He was, to all appearances, a fit, educated, well-balanced American citizen, but for one disturbing feature.
His eyes were taped shut.
Gretchen led the man to a chair and silently left the room.
“May I get you something to drink, Mr. Moyen?” said Dr. Gramb.
“No, thank you.”
“Is your room comfortable?”
“Comfortable enough, yes.” The man cocked his head. “Are you still standing?”
“Would you prefer I sit?” Dr. Gramb asked. When there was no answer, he lowered himself into a leather armchair.
The man visibly relaxed. “Will you do me a favor?” he asked.
“Of course.”
“Describe where we are.”
“You might see it for yourself, Mr. Moyen, if you’ll just open your eyes.”
“I’d rather not.”
Dr. Gramb slipped a cigarette from a packet he kept in a drawer and lit it. The man’s nostrils twitched.
“Tell you what,” said the doctor. “I will describe the room we’re sitting in, the view from the window, even the islands in the distance, if you will tell me why you have tape across your eyes.”
“It’s a long story.”
“You have a long stay with us.”
“I’ve told it before.”
“Not to me. I can’t promise I’ll believe you, but I will listen. Do you smoke?”
“No,” said the man. “When you hear my story, you’ll understand why.”
Dr. Gramb’s chair stretched as he settled into it. “Then let us begin.”
“Yes,” said the man. “I’ll start at the beginning.”

***

My name is Ray Moyen. I trained in the ophthalmology school at Columbia. Yes, big dreams. Those particular rose-colored glasses were shattered when I found myself running an eye clinic in a small town in the middle of the country on the way to nowhere. It was the town I grew up in, and I told myself I would never set foot there again unless I was desperate. Well, I was desperate. Desperately in love with a girl from high school. It doesn’t matter what her name is. She went on two dates with me to the most expensive places in town and then got married to a car mechanic. The only explanation I ever got out of her was that she liked to see what her husband did for a living. Ironic, isn’t it? That the eye doctor’s work is invisible?
I stuck around. Maybe I was still desperate. I was afraid to put my home address on a job application. I was too proud to contact med-school classmates and ask them for a place to stay in New York. I’d survived once in the big city and wasn’t sure I could do it again. Everyone I knew was here, in this town you could walk through in half a day, where the highest form of entertainment was a folk band that played at the bar every couple of weeks. The sad thing is, they were pretty good. Could’ve made something of themselves.
Still, there’s a certain satisfaction that comes from doing good work that no one will ever see. I was the best eye doctor in the county. I’m not bragging. It’s a fact. People would drive sixty miles to get my prescriptions. I even did surgeries with equipment that would be on a garbage heap in New York. I practically used knitting needles to sew optic nerves. My work was as close to a miracle as anything that ever happened in that dump of a town.
Until a genuine miracle happened.
It was a Thursday morning appointment with a farmer named Neb Jones.
“How’s your prescription, Neb?” I said, getting a head start on the paperwork as I entered the room. “Need something stronger?”
I was already pulling the phoropter into place over his beaky nose.
“Actually, doc, my eyes are fine.”
“Fine’s not great, Neb. Let’s try a stronger one.”
“I mean I don’t need glasses at all.”
I stopped scribbling on the pad and looked at him. His rough brown face was alight with pleasure.
“All these years wiping grime off those glasses, losing them, running them over with a plow. Gone!”
“Did you get surgery?” I asked. I was the only eye surgeon in two hundred miles.
“I don’t have money for that.” said Neb. “I used Panoptix.”
He shook a little white bottle at me, just like a man in a commercial.
“Take two drops just twice a day! You’ll see the upside straight away! Catchy, right? I made it up myself.”
“How long have you been taking those?”
“Since January or so. Easiest thing in the world.”
“You should be careful using eye medicine that’s not approved by the FDA...”
“What do I care about the FDA? I can see!”
I checked him against the chart and it was true. The man had perfect vision. Better than perfect. He could read the numbers on the label of the plastic garbage can I kept in the corner for used rubber gloves.
“You don’t have to tell me where you got your surgery done, Neb...”
“I didn’t have surgery, Ray! I’m telling you, it was these eye drops.”
“Let me see what’s in it...”
I reached for the bottle. Neb’s honest face twisted in fury as he wrenched the medicine out of my reach and jumped up from the seat. His eyes were dilated and he was panting like an enraged bull. After a moment, his breathing quieted.
“I’m so sorry, doc. I thought... I thought you were going to take it away.”
I reached toward the counter where I had put my paperwork and fumbled for a pen. I never took my eyes off him.
“Can you tell me where you got that stuff, Neb? Panoptix?”
“Sure, Ray. Sorry again.”
“No need to apologize. People are sensitive about their eyes. Now...”
“Yeah, I got it from my cousin in California.”
I pressed him for his cousin’s name and phone number and wrote everything down on the back of my hand. Then, as casually and cheerfully as I could, I saw him to the door.
The door hadn’t shut before I was at my laptop, looking up “Panoptix.” No mention of it in the pharmacies. Not a whisper of it in medical journals. Clearly not tested. I jotted a quick note in an optometry forum asking if anyone had come across this mysterious drug.
The phone rang. Cynthia yelled from the front office that it was for me.
I should explain about Cynthia. I shared office space with an insurance company, a watch repair man, and a gun range. (Patients sometimes stopped by for a quick checkup after they realized, during shooting practice, they couldn’t really see the target.) Cynthia was the central cog of that machine. She fielded phone calls for everyone. She knew everyone’s business. And she knew none of us could fire her.
“Ray, pick up that phone! Your girlfriend’s outside!”
“Tricia’s here already? What time is it?” I yelled down the hall.
“Time for you to get your eyes checked!” Cynthia yelled back.
The road was lined with parking spots, all of them empty, but Tricia’s green Subaru straddled two spaces at an angle. She was sitting in the passenger seat, her bare feet on the dashboard.
“I thought you’d fallen inside someone’s mouth,” she said.
“You’re thinking of a dentist,” I said, sliding into the driver’s seat. “I work on eyes.”
“You most certainly do,” she said. She tipped her sunglasses down her nose and shot me a broad white lifeguard smile that sent electric shocks down my back.
When my high school girlfriend married her mechanic, I swore off the entire female half of the human race. Even my mother I saw begrudgingly. After ten months of wallowing in misery, I was sitting on a metal bench in Rotary Park trying not to think about anything when I heard someone speak to me.
“Nice GATs.”
It was a girl. A young woman, really, with long wavy hair, jeans, a loose-fitting T-shirt with the words “You’re the man,” and a tattoo. She was the only woman I had ever seen in my home town with a tattoo.
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“Your shoes. German army trainers. Common Projects, right?”
When you travel in other countries, it can be disorienting to hear people using different words for familiar things. You just need a drink of water, but you don’t know the words. This was the opposite. I knew all the words Tricia had said, but here, in Rotary Park, they were as out of place as they would be on Mars.
“I majored in fashion design at State before I got kicked out,” Tricia was saying. Her eyes dared me to ask why she got the boot. I bit.
“Your parents pulled the plug, huh?”
“Word gets around fast in this place.”
“That’s not gossip. You just told me. Nobody gets kicked out of State. But they do get hauled back home.”
She sat down next to me on the bench. “So, what hauled you here?”
“I’ve always wanted to come back to this place and help this community,” I lied.
She laughed. She had a big smile, big enough to hold a lot of happiness.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“What’s yours?”
“Ray.”
“I’m Tricia. Want to smoke a joint?”
“Hell, yes.”
The next eight months were New York all over again. We stayed out late, watched obscure films, argued about art and politics. I was electrified by her existence and for almost a year I forgot that I hated living in this town of broken dreams.
But eventually, even Tricia, electrifying Tricia, needed to know where all of this was going. And I didn’t have a good answer.
We pulled up to Papa’s, the local Italian restaurant run by a German family named Morgen, and settled into our favorite booth by the window, where we could, with impunity, judge the appearance and behavior of passersby.
“There’s Mr. Smeers. I heard his great-grandfather owned a slanderous newspaper.”
“Or didn’t use toilet paper.”
“Oh, my gosh, I haven’t seen a windbreaker like that since the 90s!”
“And with Birkenstocks? Does she even own a mirror?”
We were unified in our judgment. What else did a couple need? Stability? A job that made something you could see and touch? Grease on your fingers at night? I made a noise in my throat.
“Can I take your order?” Jimmy Morgen beamed down at us, as proud of his first full-time waitering job as if he hadn’t been working in his dad’s restaurant since he could walk.
“I’ll have a meatball sandwich,” I said.
Tricia was poring over the menu. “I don’t think I’ve ever tried... Trippa? What’s that?”
Jimmy made a face. “My dad always wants people to order that. It’s basically pig guts.”
“I’m intrigued, but not today. Got any sushi?”
Jimmy said he would check and disappeared. Tricia smirked at me. I smiled back and picked at the fake flowers in the middle of the table, trying to think of a topic of conversation that wouldn’t mysteriously lead to “Let’s talk about us.” Talking about what you’re doing is romantic suicide.
Tricia had said something.
“Sorry, my mind wandered. What was that?”
“I was just saying that Emily told me a weird story last night. She said her mom was having really bad allergies, so she borrowed these eyedrops from her sister who’s in town, and...”
Son of a bitch. She’d walked in. With her car mechanic. Didn’t even glance at us. Jimmy (no sushi in sight) sat them on the other side of the room. Everyone knows everything in this town.
“I just wondered if you’d ever heard of anything like that?” Tricia said.
“Like what? Sorry, I wasn’t listening.”
“Everything ok?”
“Yeah, yeah. Just say that last part again.”
She glanced over at the couple on the other side of the room, her facing away from us, his big car mechanic hands wrapped around his water glass like it was a grenade. Tricia scooted out of the booth and headed right for them, swooping around checkered tablecloths as she went.
“Tricia!” It came out in a sort of choked yell.
Tricia planted herself beside their table and crossed her arms so her tattoo was at eye level.
“Saaaaaraaaah, so good to see you!”
Sarah. Now you know. Sarah Griffin. Her husband, the wheel-greaser, was named Wes, but everyone called him “Griff.”
“Tricia!” Sarah looked pleased, but she didn’t stand or even put down her menu. “How’s your show doing?”
“My show?”
Even from across the room, I saw the confusion on Tricia’s face.
“Aren’t you putting on a fashion show?” Sarah asked. “I saw some poster about the cutting edge of fashion and assumed it was you putting your degree to good use. My mistake.”
Sarah’s laughter set my teeth on edge. I was at their table before I realized I had crossed the room.
“Howdy, Ray,” Griff said. His voice was surprisingly high for such a burly man.
“Hi, Griff, Susan,” I said with as much politeness as I could dredge up. “Please excuse us. Tricia has a conference call with  Hugh Ramses in about 30 minutes and we really need to get going.”
Tricia stared at me. I nudged her in the direction of the door.
“Hugh Ramses? I’ve never heard of him,” said Sarah.
“The fashion designer? His designs are too avant-garde for this parochial town. And he doesn’t like to be kept waiting. Come on, Tricia.”
“I’ve heard of him,” put in Griff in his high, soft voice. “He had a profile in the New York Times the other day.”
I stared at him. Tricia came to the rescue.
“Yes, wasn’t that cool? We really do need to go, sorry.” She had her sunglasses on and was already headed for the door.
“Ray?”
Sarah pushed back her chair and stood. “I’m sorry, I should have come over right away, but, you know, things have been a little awkward between us and I didn’t know how to...”
She sniffed and pressed her finger against her eye to hold her mascara in place. Griff reached over and squeezed her hand.
“I need to tell you how grateful I am,” Sarah said, beginning to cry. “It’s a miracle, just like in the Bible.”
She threw her arms around my neck and sobbed into my shoulder. Griff’s eyes looked a little damp, too. I swiveled a bit to shoot Tricia a baffled look. With her sunglasses on she looked like a ticked-off actress.
“I don’t know what you’re thanking me for,” I said once I had untangled Sarah’s arms and retangled them around her husband.
“Seeing the wedding pictures meant a lot to her,” said Griff, blinking hard. “She’s been blind almost Sarah’s whole life.”
Tricia butted in. “Who’s been blind? Apart from, you know, everyone here.”
“Sarah’s Grandma Alice,” said Griff, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. “She wouldn’t tell us where the eye medication came from, but Sarah knew. You’re a stand-up guy, Ray.”
Sarah sobbed and Griff patted her back and Tricia glared and I looked from one to the other, completely lost.
“Excuse me, Mr. Moyen?”
Jimmy was at my elbow.
“Yes, what is it?”
“I’ve got your sub ready to go, if you like. And I found sushi!”
Tricia made a sound of disgust and swept out of the restaurant.
Two miracles. Two cures. Two sights restored, all in a single morning. I couldn’t explain it, but I knew one thing: I had had nothing to do with either of them.
From the street came the squeal of tires and the crunch of automobiles.
Startled into action, I dashed outside. Tricia stood on the sidewalk, but her Subaru was in the middle of the intersection, facing us, with a crumpled minivan behind it. Long dark skidmarks followed all four tires.
The engine roared.
“Is someone in there?” I demanded.
Tricia nodded dumbly.
The engine roared again, accelerating. The Subaru started to shake.
“Do you know who it is?” I shouted about the din.
Tricia nodded again.
“Then who...?”
The Subaru sprang forward, hopped the curb, and lurched straight toward us.
I shoved Tricia to the ground and sprawled on top of her. The engine snarled as it passed by. Then there was the sound of a thousand shattering dinner plates as it burst through the glass wall of the store front behind us and screamed to a stop, caught in the aluminum frame of the building.
Griff hurtled out of the restaurant, followed by Jimmy, who was as white as his apron.
The building next to Papa’s, which was now open to the elements, was the Sheriff’s office, and in no time at all, the car was surrounded by deputies who wrenched off the door and hauled out the driver.
Once I had helped Tricia up and made sure she was all right, I shouldered through the small crowd to see who the maniac was.
When he saw me, he gave me a huge grin.
“Well, hello, there, doc!”
It was Neb Jones.