The Beholder: a short story, first draftish

[d e s d e m o n o]

Editing, this needs it.

However.

First you should know that it is based off of this article.

Read that, then read this, then FIX THE ENDING FOR ME USING A MAGIC WAND, please?

*

THE BEHOLDER

The first subject's apartment was extremely open.

Upon seeing it, Sander did not actually take a startled step back, but he did redistribute his weight as if he were about to, his knees unlocking under him. Somehow he had expected the homes of the blind men to be poorly lit and perhaps low-ceilinged in the bargain, with drawn damp curtains that did not dry from laundering to laundering. His own maternal grandfather had lived in a house of that character; and while he did not remember his grandfather in any great detail-- there was some long-standing disagreement between his mother and him, and Sander had been taken to visit him perhaps twice a year at most-- he retained a reasonably clear impression of the way the man had moved: gingerly, holding his body in such a way as to ensure that he did not brush up against anything more solid than he was; and this uneasiness was what he really associated with blindness, Sander would decide, later, blindness in this case a catch-all word for the practical difficulties of navigating a space using evidence gathered through senses other than sight. The house and its dense shadows and limp curtains were just a frame for the conceptual linking.

Later. Later he worked it all out to his own satisfaction. There on the doorstep, though, little pockets of surprise popped in his mind, one after the next, as he pivoted slightly on his heels (his neck ached too much to twist; it had been a long drive) to complete his initial impression of bright space. He registered, again, the extreme openness of the subject's apartment. Its layout involved no walls or subdivisions. A few folding screens of varying degrees of translucency; that was it.

The air felt still but not stale on the bare skin of his face.

And there was, yes, plenty of light, moving through the cool motionless air in a fine pale weave: cottony parallelograms of it lay thin on the floor, and fattish blobs of it welled up on the bright edges of mirrored surfaces, disappearing if he closed one eye only to reappear halfway along the length of another shining thread, like the round lumps that often form in wool if a novice is spinning it at an uneven rhythm. After a month of cleaning up his girlfriend Marit's attempts to find a purpose for the handloom she had bought at Ikea in a drunken shopping spree, Sander was very familiar with this phenomenon, as Marit preferred to call it.

Like most people, Sander found it helpful to do this, to take the new image and put it in terms he understood. He sometimes worried about the extent to which his girlfriend’s eclectic and shortlived hobbies gave shape to his viewing of the world, but not right then; then it was a comfort and not to be sniffed at.

“Good morning,” the blind man said.

He sat at a small, circular glass table with cast-iron legs in the kitchen area, quite near the door. No place had been set in front of him. He appeared small, there, with light splitting around him as fibers around a shuttle, and with his shadow pulled long across the tiles of the kitchen's floor, its wispy head separated from the body by the shallow gritty furrow where tiles changed over to varnished hardwood planking. He wore a loose darkly colored pullover that might have been either dark blue or dark green, which hung in heavy, almost cartoonishly rounded folds off his limbs. In one hand he held a half-eaten apple fritter. Little white crusts of glaze glinted in the deep corners of his mouth.

“Are you the researcher?” he asked.

“His assistant, actually,” Sander said. He smiled; remembered; stopped smiling. The blind man inclined his head in such a way that it appeared he was staring at Sander's mouth behind his sunglasses, and for a brief panicky moment Sander thought that perhaps there had been a mistake, and this man was not blind at all, and was dumbfounded by the tense contractions of Sander's face. Then he realized that the man was simply directing his attention at the source of the sound. He coughed. “Yes. Sander Arons is my name. And you are Mr. Bastiaan Visser, correct?”

“I am,” the man said.

“Would you mind if I brought the equipment for the experiment into the house, Mr. Visser?” Sander asked, stuttering a little on the rehearsed words. Sander would not, personally, have thought to ask, but he was glad that Professor Karremans had suggested it. It was not comfortable to look at a home, another person’s home, and know that the person who lived there had never seen what you saw, and it made him eager to get explicit permission for all his other intrusions.

The man paused to consider it; and not in a perfunctory way, Sander thought. It was difficult to read the small shiftings of his face. He was fifty-six years old according to the survey he had filled out, and his cropped hair was not so much graying as grayed, yet he looked younger than his reported age. The wrinkles in his soft face were faint, like the tracks of birds on dry sand, and the fleshy parts of his flat cheeks did not have the looseness characteristic of fifty-and-over Anglos. Possibly this was a result of never really having a reason to form expressions, and thus never overworking the small muscles around his mouth and eyes (particularly eyes); possibly blankness was a side effect of congenital blindness.

Sander carefully ended this train of thought there, since Professor Karremans’ advice was not to speculate while conducting the research. He made note of it, though; he suspected that he would want trivial distractions on the long drives from address to address, whether in the form of idle theories or amusing voicemail messages from Marit or keeping an eye out for road kill.

“Not at all,” the blind man said, eventually.

“Okay,” Sander said. He breathed out. “I'll be right back.”

He left the door open, to make transportation easier for all concerned, and went around to the back of the van.

The mannequins were not heavy but he made two trips, because, well-- because it felt odd to hitch his arms around their waists and hold the pale headless bodies like he would someone else's disobedient child. Besides, the silent naked street, reflecting heat while the many-storied houses slept upright under layers of slushy clear gray snow, these things made the perspiration-slick back of his neck itch like he was being watched in his handling of the props. Overhead the sky was vibrantly and texturelessly blue. He squinted up at it while he went back and forth across the driveway, and in minutes his aching eyes began to see staticky stippling that did not in point of fact exist, as if what he were looking at was a concentration of blue dots-- not with white between, just volumeless dots floating in a void.

Sander worked more quickly, having looked at it. When the mannequins were set up, facing the table, he dashed out one last time to retrieve his clipboard from the glovebox, and shut the door behind him.

The mannequins looked less uncanny inside where the glare of the sun was softened a little with hanging dust motes, he considered. Rather beautiful in the impersonal way of furniture, all sleek plastic curves and fluid lines. The white of the plastic was a shade warmer, also: milk- or bone-white as opposed to the jarring manufactured white they were outdoors under a truer light. It made more sense, here, to connect their silhouettes with, say, Marit’s, when she was wearing wired underclothes that forced the asymmetries out of her (normally terrible) posture and the hang of her small breasts; the idea of asking the subject to grope them and pretend that they were women seemed less ridiculous, and the reflective polish of the plastic was inviting enough. Mr. Visser, who had gotten up at some point during the set-up, hovered between the two. His fritter was gone. Up close, Sander had a good view of the vulnerable shadow of his jaw and his small delicate ear, flat against his skull. He wondered what it was that had allowed the man to determine the mannequins’ location so exactly; Visser owned a cane, but Sander knew that precisely because it was still leaning by the door. The sound of the thuds when they were placed? Sander’s footsteps? Luck? There didn’t seem to be any polite way to ask.

He told the man: “Before you are two mannequins, A and B.” He glanced at his clipboard. “A is a little to your left and B is a little to your right. I need you to touch them both, one at a time. Feel them. And then you will score their respective attractiveness for me on a scale of one to ten. Focus your hands on the waists and hips, please. Do you understand?”

The blind man nodded, once. He turned to the left and laid his square hands on the slight swell of A's stomach, bulbous fingers splayed over its convexity. And then he simply-- held them there. For at least a minute. Head bowed.

Sander was on the verge of asking him to go on when he apologized, stringing the words together like beads on a bracelet, all without physically acknowledging Sander in any fashion.

After that he picked a brisker pace. His palms skimming polyester raspily, he circled the slim waist, and fit the heels of his hands to the shallow dip of each hip, and cupped the stiff full roundness of the thing's hollow bottom; and then he did it again, and again, mapping the volume of it onto the flat of his hands thoroughly enough that Sander suspected that if he removed the mannequin the man would be able to sculpt it out of oxygen and floating illuminated dust, cutting up the air as accurately as Marit had molded the clay for her bronze casts. The right shape at the right time in the right place: the model woman's stylized profile reduced to a process in his mind, a patchwork of isolated impressions rather than a complete picture absorbed in a single glance.

The man stepped back.

“How would you rate her?” Sander said.

“Attractiveness,” the blind man said, a little drily. “Let us say, an eight. A beautiful body.”

Sander filled in a box. “And now the other, if you please.”

“Of course.”

The man performed the same intimate examination of B. The patterns traced on top of patterns, becoming more tender with every pass. This time without hesitation. And the steady repetition did something to Sander, who followed the man's wrists with his gaze more closely, this time, his eyes rolling by slight degrees in their sockets. After a minute he began to see afterimages when he blinked. Faint reddish flashes. And he grew painfully aware of the tension in the tendons of the man's forearms. Visser was describing the arcs of the body, yes, but he was also defining them, applying delicate measured pressure to the planes of imitative flesh, as if to leave his mark on it even as it marked him.

His hair shone like the flat stump of the mannequin's neck. At this angle, Sander could see a little of his left eye, which was was open behind the tinted lens. The pointed part, where the eyelids came together. A glint of wet sclera and the pink-membraned tear duct, that was all, bracketed with pale lashes and tucked into the smooth dry skin of the socket.

Sander, without really noticing, began to slip back into his original discomfort and sense of displacement. He had a shapeless inexplicable feeling that time was hardening around him. Like casting bronze. There was the blind man, and the mannequin, yes, but there were also the memories of them as they were a second ago, and the second before that, layering instead of fading, and so the image gained strange depths. Waxed in his sight. He tried looking away, but the composition of the room drew his eyes towards their misshapen shadow, and he found looking at the shadow more disturbing yet than looking at them because it could have been the shadow of any pair of lovers. It could have been him and Marit, as they were hours ago, their farewell ******** in the foyer of their shared apartment. Splitting and joining and splitting as the man rocked on the balls of his bare feet. So he looked back. At him, or them.

“Six,” said the first blind man.

“What?” Sander said.

"I would give her a six," said the first blind man. "For attractiveness."

“Right,” Sander said. He marked it down. “Thank you very much for your participation in this study, Mr. Visser. You will receive your monetary compensation by mail in one to two days. If the check has not arrived by Friday, feel free to notify the university.”

“Yes, yes.” The blind man’s voice was pitched to convey dismissiveness, although he lack of the usual hand gesture or any movement of the head made it sound faintly artificial.

Sander became aware that the blind man’s hand was still on the scooped small of the mannequin’s back.

“I’ll just get these out of your way,” he said.

“All right,” the blind man said. And slowly, very slowly, he ceased to be in contact with the mannequin, without ever joggling his arm that Sander could see, so that his fingers stayed spread and hooked, his elbow bent and sharp, as the millimeters of distance blossomed between his hand and the sticky fogged handprint clouding the realistically dimpled plastic expanse above the jut of the buttocks.

Sander gripped the mannequin about its polished ribcage. The lowermost ribs were suggested by corners of plastic and these dug into the webbing of thumb and forefinger; but he did not slide his hands down to the waist. He had a thing about sweaty hands, and this seemed worse, the moistness without the warmth and the assurance that here was someone undeniable. He lifted it.

“Mr. Arons,” said the man. The syllables were hitched a little. Halting.

“Yes?”

“What-- what is your study about?”

Sander put the mannequin down.

“Er,” he said. “I’m not sure I--”

“It doesn’t matter now,” the man said. “Whether I know or not. It won’t affect the data.”

There were ways that it could, Sander knew. But he was embarrassed and uncomfortable and the ways were unlikely. He said, “No. It won’t.“

“Well?“

“Well,” Sander said. “It’s an experiment to, well, to try and determine how much, uh. How much of a role culture plays in what heterosexual men think is desirable. Because so much of our culture is visual. It’s sort of a thought experiment, this test, at least it was originally, but the professor and I didn’t see--” he winced, stumbled on, “--any reason it couldn’t be enacted.”

“No reason,” the blind man agreed. “So. You are seeking men who have been blind from birth, to study their sexual tastes through the use of voluptuous dolls, to study how they are different from seeing men in their wanting. I have got that right?”

He did look very small. He was a mere few centimeters shorter than Sander, and Sander was quite tall, and yet.

“If,” Sander said absently. “Not how. Otherwise, yes, completely.”

Something happened to the man‘s mouth. Sander wasn’t sure what-- isolated from the eyes, the mouth was unreliable, almost a creature independent from the face-- but it might have been a hint of softness, or gentleness, or not. And something happened also to the man. Sander did not quite catch the movement, but he saw the man’s shadow, the patch of naked dark on the floor, he saw its shape expand and lose some of its sharpness, the lacy edges of the light rolled back. A silent sigh.

“And mine?” he asked.

“Yours?”

“My tastes. Are they--”

Sander read what he had written on the clipboard. He blinked at the bubbled-in circles; the sheet snapped in and out with his eyelids‘ shuttering. Different from seeing men in their wanting, he thought, hearing the words more clearly than he had when they were being said: they ran uneven over the scrape of his pulse deep in his ears.

“Identical,” he told Mr. Visser. “To those of the average sighted man.”

“Ah,” the man said quietly. His hand dropped to his side. The elastic cuff of the sweatshirt’s baggy sleeve slipped down over his knuckles.

“Have a nice day,” Sander said.

“I will.”

Sander left him standing there, a meter from his doorway. He stored the mannequins in the back of the van, and he replaced the clipboard in the glove box, and he settled himself back into the seat’s hollows of feverish sunned leather. He experienced a certain measure of mixed relief and pity and self-satisfaction.

He drove.

It was on the freeway that he spent an indeterminate amount of time deconstructing his reactions to the man’s house. The later, yes, that was then. With noon slowing his blood and his thoughts fitting together like thoughts to do immediately before sleep, a logic removed or rather canted a few degrees off the ordinary. And in fact the room they gave him, at the hotel he was due to stay in for the next four nights until he‘d gone through all the congenitally blind men in the area; it actually bore a much closer resemblance to the guest bedroom in his grandfather’s house than the blind man’s home had, which clarified his conclusions still further. Also, unrelatedly but significantly to him, it was very pleasant to roll his socked toes through the yarn loops of the room’s carpet, and to watch greenish afterimages knotting up the cool gloom after half an hour of headache-y brightness when the sun’s belly lowered to slice through the upper rim of the windshield.

His stomach clenched inside him. He did not really want to go down for lunch, though; his eyes were sore as yellowing bruises. He took his laptop out of its case, instead, and, sitting down on the bed, he opened it, its keyboard balanced on his knees. When he had logged on he found that the small window’s skirt of sunlight cut across the upper corner of the screen, muting the contrast of text-on-background like gauze and picking out the fur of dust and fingerprints. It seemed inane to scoot sideways and probably mess up the blankets or drop the laptop or something in order to avoid such a petty irritant, and he very deliberately refrained from doing it; but his gaze flicked to the corner now and again, and checking his email was a much more disjointed process than usual.

His girlfriend came online.

He opened the chat window. She wrote “Hello” and “how’s the investigation going, Freudster?” and he didn’t know what to answer. He was conscious of missing her, badly, although they had parted less than five hours ago. They wouldn’t be able to meet up for at least two weeks.

“Video chat?” he typed.

“At the library so no, don‘t want librarians to fry me.”

“Just video, I mean.”

Beat.

The window opened up as under a magnifying glass. She grinned at him, a trifle grainily. The video quality was poor and did her no favors: she looked pale as a drowned thing, and sections of her face broke up into pixels with every twitch, and she twitched often, she was full of nervous energy, Marit was, like electricity trapped in a jar. Her full and bloodless lips formed an exaggerated O. “You’re looking grim,” she wrote.

“You’re looking zombie,” he replied

“Beautiful zombie?”

“Always,” he lied.

She tapped the glass of her side, which was a truly bizarre sight, the flattening and whitening of a tapered fingertip miles away, and had the effect of slamming him into the hard unreality of it. Seeing her without hearing her high fast-paced voice or smelling the sweat-and-soap-smell of her skin or. Or touching her. Touching her, he thought, and tasted subtle panic, the gradual nightmare panic that comes in shallow waves and leaves a residue on the soul. The blue-veined acid-stained insides of her wrists (not a hobby; she studied chemistry at the university, liked to mock him for being in a soft science), he thought. Grasping the fine bones. And her small waist, and the sweep of it to her padded hips, a ratio almost ideal.

“Well, I like you for your braaaaaaains,” she typed, and he wished with sudden and unprofessional violence that he could know, could know, that his love of her body was between them and their genes alone. That his wanting was a universal constant; that in every culture, if it had been them, it would have had to be them, the heat of their mouths and their shared skins. That if he had been born blind, it would have meant-- nothing at all.

He breathed. His throat tight. He rocked, a little, on the mattress, springs squeaking under him.

“You know,” he wrote, “I don’t think I want to think that I only find you unbearably sexy because I’ve been marinating in this particular culture
for so long.”

He watched her eyes flick as she read; the blue of the screen, floating reflected on her clear corneas, almost disguised the dark opaque brown of her irides. She raised her eyebrows. “You’re not actually allowed to extrapolate from one data point, you know. I take it your first blind man bore out Karremans’ hypothesis?” she typed, slower than she had her other messages, and tried, he thought, to compensate for the camera’s level, to make eye contact, and did not quite succeed.

“It’s a secret,” he told her. She laughed noiselessly. He glanced away from the dark of her mouth that was like the old dark of houses, to the triangle of sunlit screen, and counted off flayed seconds in the cup of his head. His wanting gathered, acrid, under his tongue.  

[Spastic waffles]

Hey des!

Well, this guild has taught me that my idea to be an editor would not have been a good career choice. lol

Your ending.

I think it needs a bit of clarification...I wanted/it would have helped if I had seen a bit more into the mind of the narrator. It would've made everything more clear and easy to read. I kind of know where you're trying to get with this, but there just wasn't enough detail to convey the point. Maybe make the conversation a bit longer, or even just narrate a bit more. I kind of understand why he was upset but I felt like it was an effort to piece it together.