Scott Nicholson - Head cases

“God, please help me see things as they are.”

A simple prayer, one that Elvin Meister thought even God could understand. Of course, God was also the same perverted architect who had built Overton from the ground up, with its threatening spires and plenty of shadowed, teeming alleys. Such a God could not be trusted, but Elvin had been taught that prayers never hurt, even if they often fell on deaf ears.

Elvin’s eyes had been bothering him for some time. He’d first noticed a month ago, when the talking head on the television screen grew ears that were slightly elongated and pointy, like those of a marsupial.

“Gretta,” he’d said to his wife of seven years. “Does the picture look strange to you?”

Gretta, busy in the kitchen with clattering dishes and a gurgling coffee pot, gave her usual impatient sigh and said, “The Tylers down the hall just got a flat screen and we’re still stuck with an antenna,” she said. “Of course the picture’s strange.”

She’d passed judgment without bothering to glance at the screen, and when the man’s eyes narrowed and his pupils turned a deep shade of red, Elvin decided the color aspect was shot and hurriedly flipped off the set before the image disintegrated further.

But he couldn’t chalk off last week’s incident to scrambled electrons or burned-out picture tubes. He’d been walking to his job at the corner deli, where he spent his days elbow-deep in sauerkraut and shredded corned beef, when the thing fluttered past his feet. He thought at first it was a pigeon, one of the thousands that strafed the city with fecal fusillades. But this one had been darker, more leathery, and vastly less feathery than its flying kin, and Elvin could have sworn, just before it disappeared into the rusted gap in an eave, that it had a long, decidedly non-avian tail. In fact, it had resembled a strip of shoe leather, coiled and quivering.

He hurried on down the sidewalk. The faces around him, those dots of eyes and gash mouths that marked the millions, seemed even more blank and washed-out than usual. Elvin fought an urge to grab a passerby, peer closely into a face, and demand acknowledgement. In Overton, you wanted to be invisible and ignored. That was the way, and the sooner you accepted it, the longer you lived.

If you could call this “living.”

He’d made it through that day, convinced he was merely going through one of the phases Gretta had always ascribed to him. Moody, paranoid, given to long hours by the window, scarcely talking. These selfish fugues didn’t happen as often as she claimed, but Elvin had to admit a certain truth in her words. But he couldn’t discuss such things with her. There were certain matters of which one didn’t speak.

Until last night.

After separate showers, him going last so she could have as much hot water as she desired, he was brushing his teeth when he stared into the grimy mirror and saw his ears exhibiting the same distorted growth as the television announcer’s.

“Honey?” he’d said.

She was already under blankets, propped up on three pillows, a celebrity gossip magazine on her austere lap. Of course, she wouldn’t budge from such a position and resented any suggestion that she might. “What is it now?”

He touched one ear, his inquisitive fingers rubbing the tip. It was rounded, defying the reflected image. But in the mirror, his fingers were tipped with long, yellowed, and cracked nails.

Elvin dropped his hand and it knocked against the sink. It was normal, wrinkled, with tufts of wiry hair. His hand. Not the hand in the mirror. He’d dared another glance, half expecting to see some sort of discoloration in his pupils or irises.

No. Still him, and his ears were back to normal.

But what was normal?

“What is it?” Gretta’s voice rose in pitch and brittleness. Apologies were in order.

“Nothing,” he said. “I was wondering if I should put toothpaste on the shopping list.”

“How should I know? You’re the one who brushes his teeth eight times a day.”

It was true. Phobia of germs. Which Gretta didn’t mind, because it saved needless kisses. He peeled back his upper lip, saw one of his incisors had grown pointed. His mouth closed with a plop, he turned out the light, and then made for bed, falling asleep without benefit of either prayers or matrimonial affection.

He could have convinced himself those were brief delusions suffered by a hapless fantasist if not for this morning’s breakfast. The eggs, sunny side up, had oozed red when he probed them with the fork. Gretta, an adequate cook, had remarked on his lack of appetite while she cleared the table. As she busied herself with pots and rags, Elvin slipped away and called in sick at work, then made an appointment with the eye doctor.

It was in the waiting room where Elvin had witnessed that simple prayer for clear vision, cross-stitched into brown burlap material and hung on the wall in a simple frame. Elvin repeated the words to himself, measuring their simplicity.

“God, please help me see things as they are.”

“Excuse me?” A woman across from him in a worn vinyl chair peeked over the top of her interior design magazine. Her lips quivered like two encased snakes.

He grinned and pointed to the wall. “I wonder if that’s some sort of eye test,” he said. “See how the letters are fuzzy? Get it? They’re threads.”

She frowned and returned to her magazine. Elvin was about to continue, to make the comparison between the bad lettering and the way telemarketers whispered into the phone when trying to seduce you into buying hearing aids. Instead, he decided to take the framed sign’s message to heart and assume her tight lips signaled a desire for solitude.

Solitude. The most precious commodity in Overton. Elvin often thought he was the only one who held such a philosophical leaning. It wasn’t the kind of thing one could talk about in coffee houses. After all, they’d all come from somewhere. And they’d all ended up here together.

“Mr. Meister,” came a voice from the interior door, and he found himself shepherded through a series of halls by a thin, good-looking woman whose taut rear end somehow managed to devolve into a sack of wiggling rats by the time she deposited him in an examination room.

No blood pressure check, no inquiries into his medical history. No insurance forms, no paperwork of any kind. A most unusual office. And the room had no eye charts, no soothing instructional posters, no advertisements for prescription medicine. In fact, the room resembled the antechamber of a holding cell. It was devoid of all furniture except a single padded chair with metal armrests.

A clock hung on the wall. It was the old-fashioned kind with a twitching arm that counted off seconds. Except this one seemed stuck. The long, needle-like appendage quivered as if preparing to leap into an undetermined future, but some invisible wire held it back.

Elvin sat in the chair, trying to ignore the irritating clock.

Face. It had a face.

And it was staring at him.

He flicked his eyes to the clock. Just the dumb hands pointing to three and seven, the second hand caught in an eternal spasm. Numbers ringing a round, white background. No red eyes, no elongated ears.

A face without a mouth, no sharp, threatening teeth behind a sick grin.

He turned the chair until it was facing the opposite wall. He had no idea how long he’d been waiting. He guessed five minutes, though it could have been ten thousand hummingbird hammers of the dead second hand.

At last the door opened. A round face, a real face, the eyes swollen and distorted behind thick lenses, appeared in the crack.