Джералд Керш - On an Odd Note

Now while Rurik was playing pinochle in the death house, there came to him a certain Father Jellusik who said that Dr. Holliday, the eye surgeon, wanted Rurik’s eyes. The condemned man, laughing heartily, said: “Listen, Father, the D.A. offers me my life if I sing where the dough is stashed! And now somebody wants my eyes. No disrespect, Father, but don’t make me laugh. D’you think I never heard how you can see things in a dead man’s eye?”

Father Jellusik said, “My son, that’s an old wives’ tale. I have it on reliable authority that a dead man’s eye is no more revealing than an unloaded camera.”

Rurik began, “Once I looked into . . . well, anyway, I never saw nothing. What do they want my eyes for?”

“An eye,” said Father Jellusik, “is nothing but a certain arrangement of body tissue. Put it like this: you are you , Rurik. If one of your fingers were chopped off, would you still be Rurik?”

“Who else?”

“Without your arms and legs, who would you be?”

“Rurik.”

“Now say you had an expensive miniature camera, and were making your will. Wouldn’t you give it away?”

“To the cops, no.”

“But to an innocent child?”

“I guess I might.”

“And the eye, you know, is nothing but a camera.”

In the end Rurik signed a document bequeathing his eyes to Dr. Holliday, for the benefit of this remarkable surgeon’s child patients, many of whom had been born blind. “You can’t take ’em with you,” Rurik is alleged to have said; thereby letting loose a tidal wave of emotion. One would have thought that Rurik was the first person ever to utter this proposition. The sob sisters took him to their bosoms, and put into his mouth all kinds of scrapbook philosophy, such as: “If more folks thought more about more folks, the world—” et cetera, et cetera. His last words, which were: “Hold it, I changed my mind,” were reported as: “I feel kind of at peace now.” The general public completely ignored the fact that there was a little matter of two and a half million dollars which Rurik had, to all practical intents and purposes, taken with him.

The few that thought of the matter said: “They’ll track that money down. It’s got to be somewhere, and they’ll trace it. The FBI will throw out a net.” But in point of fact, Little Dominic and MacGinnis being dead, no one had a clue to its whereabouts. It was buried treasure.

For years previous to the execution of Rurik Duncan, Dr. Holliday had been performing fabulous feats of eye surgery. To him the grafting of corneal tissue from the eye of a man recently dead to the eye of a living child was a routine affair which he regarded much as a tailor regards the stitching of a collar—good sewing was essential, as a matter of course, but the thing had to fit. And, somewhat like certain fierce tailors of the old school, he was at once savagely possessive, devilishly proud and bitterly contemptuous of the craft to which he was married. I know an old tailor who never tired of sneering at himself, who would have nothing to do with his fellow craftsmen because they were, in his opinion, mere tailors; but who ordered King Edward VII to get out of his shop and stay out, because His Majesty questioned the hang of a sleeve. Dr. Holliday was a man of this character—dissatisfied, arbitrary, unsatisfying, ill-natured, impossible to please. He had something like a contemptuous familiarity with the marvelous mechanism of the human eye, but would allow nobody but himself to talk lightly of it. He became famous when he grafted his first cornea. When the reporters came to interview him he appeared to be angry with the world for admiring him.

Irritable, disdainful, his face set in a look of intense distaste, and talking in an overemphasized reedy voice, he could make the most casual remark offensive. Reminded of his services to humanity, Dr. Holliday said, “Human eyes, sheep’s eyes—they are all one to me. As eyes, a fly’s eyes are far more remarkable. Your eye is nothing but a makeshift arrangement for receiving light rays upon a sensitive surface. A camera with an automatic shutter, and damned inefficient at that. They do better in the factories. I have repaired a camera. Well?”

A reporter said, “But you’ve restored sight, Dr. Holliday. A camera can’t see without an eye behind it.”

Dr. Holliday snapped, “Neither can an eye see, as anybody but an absolute fool must know.”

“Well, you can’t see without your eyes,” another reporter said.

“You can’t see with them,” said Dr. Holliday. “Even if I had the time to explain to you the difference between looking and seeing, you have not the power to understand me; and even if you had, how would you convey what you understood to the louts who buy your journal? Let it be sufficient for me to say, therefore, that the grafting of a cornea, to one who knows how to do it, is probably less difficult than an invisible darning job done to hide a cigarette burn in your trousers. Vision comes from behind the eye.”

One of the reporters who wrote up things like viruses and astronomy for the Sunday supplement said: “Optic nerve—” at which Dr. Holliday swooped at him like a sparrow hawk.

“What do you know about the optic nerve, if I may ask? Oh, I love these popular scientists, I love them! Optic nerve. That’s all there is to it, isn’t it? A wiring job, so to speak, eh? Plug it in, switch it on, turn a knob—is that the idea? Splice it, like a rope, eh? My dear sir, you know nothing about the tiniest and most insignificant nerve in your body, let alone how it is motivated—and neither do I, and neither does anybody else. But you will suck on your scientific jargon, just as a weaning baby sucks on an unhygienic rubber pacifier. It is an impertinence, sir, to talk so glibly to me! ‘Optic nerve’—as if I were a chorus girl! Can you name me thirty parts, say, of the mere eye—just name them—that you talk with such facility of optic nerves? Have you considered the extraordinary complexity of the optic nerve? The microscopic complications of cellular tissues and blood vessels?”

The reporter, abashed, said, “I’m sorry, Dr. Holliday. I was only going to ask if it might be possible—I don’t mean in our time, but some time—really to graft a whole eye and, as you put it, splice an optic nerve?”

In his disagreeable way, unconsciously mocking the hesitancy of the reporter’s voice—this was another of his unpleasant mannerisms—Dr. Holliday said, “Yes sir, and no sir. One thing is impossible and that is to predict what may or may not be surgically possible or impossible in our time. But I can tell you this, sir, as expert to expert: it is about as possible to graft a whole eye as it might be to graft a whole head. As every schoolboy must know, nervous tissue does not regenerate itself in the vertebrate, except in the case of the salamander in whom the regenerative process remains a mystery.”

A lady reporter asked, “Aren’t salamanders those lizards that are supposed to live in fire, or something?”

Dr. Holliday started to snap but, meeting the wide gaze of this young woman, liked her irises and, gently for him, explained, “The salamander resembles a lizard but it is an amphibian, with a long tail. An amphibian lives both in and out of water. Have you never seen a salamander? I’ll show you one . . .” And he led the way to an air-conditioned room that smelled somewhat of dead vegetation, through which ran a miniature river bordered with mud. In this mud languid little animals stirred.

A man from the south said, “Heck, they’re mud-eels!”

At him Dr. Holliday curled a lip, saying, “Same thing.”

The Sunday supplement man said, “Dr. Holliday, may I ask whether you are studying the metabolic processes of the salamander with a view to their application—”