Michael Martone - Seeing Eye

“You,” I said, “were from Fort Wayne in the movie.” And he looked a little relieved. “The astronaut you played was from Fort Wayne, and the apes took that as another bit of evidence of your hostile intention.”

“Oh,” he said, “I had forgotten.”

“I’m from near there,” I said.

I wanted to tell him that back then it had been important that someone like himself had come from that part of the planet even if it was all made up. And now I was here with him waiting for what would happen next.

His head was huge, I remember. As big as the moon. And when the news of his character’s nativity seeped into the cockpit of the car, we pounded fists on the padded dash, hooting and whistling. We flashed the car lights and honked the horn until the steering wheel rang. For several minutes, all the cars rocked and flashed, the blaring horns drowning out what was being said on-screen. It seemed at any second these hunks of metal we rode in would rise up and come alive. But they didn’t.

They told me to wait, so I wait. They gave me a burlap sack and pushed me out of the car into the ditch next to a field. I watched the taillights disappear. They told me they would drive the snipes my way. “Wait here.” And I do.

Stars are in the sky. I’m in a mint field. The branches of the low bushes brush against my legs, releasing the reeking smell.

I think, suddenly, they are not coming back. Back home, they are waiting for me to figure out they are not coming back. They are thinking of this moment, the one happening now, when I think this thought, that they are not coming back, and then come home on my own.

But, I think, I’ll wait. While waiting, I’ll think of them waiting for me to return home with the empty burlap sack. They’ll think that I haven’t thought, yet, that I was left here in the mint field, that I am waiting for them to drive the snipes my way. I’ll let them think that.

In the morning, I’ll be here, waiting. They will come back looking for me. Dew will have collected on the mint bushes. The stars will be there but will be invisible. And I won’t have thought that thought yet, the one they wanted me to think.

The imaginary quarry is still real and still being driven my way.

This is my office. The clock on the wall is mine. It is in the shape of a black cat. Its tail hangs down. When the tail moves one way with each tick, the cat’s eyes move the other way. Usually, I am home by now. This is my salt tank and those are my fish. Those are my couches. Those are my chairs. This table is for the kids and their little chairs. This cigar box full of broken and dull crayons is mine. I am waiting for Mrs. Gustafson to bring Bobby in after football practice so I can fit him with a plastic mouth guard. The Formica tabletop and the waxy scribbles are mine. The stack of magazines is mine. This Highlights is mine, and no one has circled the hidden pictures in the Hidden Pictures. I have already found the comb in her bonnet and the bird in the elbow wrinkles of the man. I have yet to find the spoon, the lightbulb, the banana, the pencil, the loaf of bread, the carrot, the ball, the vase, the mitten, the umbrella, the ladder, the iron, and the flashlight. It is a picture of the gingerbread man running away. They hide everyday things in a picture of a fairy tale.

I treat kids, mostly, and the roller skaters who wander in from the boardwalk with a chipped tooth from a fall. A bloody incisor in the palm of my hand. I wear a smock with bunnies sometimes or bees. Bright colors, never white. I keep rubber spiders in the light wells to cast shadows overhead. Mobiles twist in the salt breeze. I warm the explorer in my hand. Have three flavors of fluoride from which to choose. I let the children use the hand mirror and look at my teeth. I keep a treasure chest behind the desk filled with plastic dinosaurs, airplanes, and toy soldiers. They bring me their baby teeth. They think I am the tooth fairy. I give them quarters and take the teeth home to Suzy, who says one day she will think of something to do with them. But I find the teeth everywhere, little bits of bone. They will last longer than anything else in the world. The smiles I see here in the chair are all spotty, only temporary. What future do I see in it but braces, orthodontia? All my work gone when the kid’s eleven. The baby teeth just hold open a space in the head. Washing out a mouth I tell its owner to rinse and say my name into the funny sink next to the chair.

I have very large hands. My paddles. A hand going through the water has the same amount of surface area whether the fingers are open or closed. They proved that in wind tunnel tests. They were always proving things about the water in the air.

It’s all the same. Thicker and thinner.

I could feel the water. Get its feel. I could feel the water splashing into the gutter on the other side of the pool. I could touch the wall before I touched it. I could feel feeling going out of my fingers and spreading through the pool like dye. I could feel the molecules slamming into each other.

But my hands are too big for a dentist. My hands make my patients gag. My fingers can’t tell between a premolar and a molar. When I wash my hands with the green soap before I touch a patient, for a second I feel the old feeling. I leave my hands wet. “Open up,” I say. Underwater, my hands are two fishes. I watch them through the milky light.

I think Suzy was happiest when she was being saved. The books I did on swimming always had a section on lifesaving. She was always the victim. She has pictures Leifer did. The close-up of the carry where I have pinned her arm behind her. Her other arm is thrown up over my shoulder. Floating dead, her eyes are closed. It is quite tender, actually, the way I am looking down at her, my head cocked to the side, my other arm riding above her breasts. Her makeup perfect even wet. The longer shot as I drag her along. Our bodies all broken into lines by the water I am sculling. My head and her face above the water. Her hair is trailing into the ripples of water. In one, I am carrying her by the chin as I would someone unconscious, but her eyes are open, her eyelashes wet. What was I saying to her? My double-jointed thumb was pulling her mouth down and tight. Then there is the series where I am lifting her out of the pool. Holding her hands on the edge with my own as I climb out. Then bending down to pull her up and over. Pictures are what marriage is all about.

On the boardwalk, the men and women grind by on roller skates. In dry swimsuits, they swim along, arms paddling backward. They float down sidewalks. It is another liquid, a thinner medium. There was a dance once called the swim. They dance it with their eyes closed as they slide past. Antennae grow from their ears, little backpack radios, earplugs, headphones.

“All I want to know is can you do it?” he said from the chair. I’d told him what I was going to do.

“Do what?” I asked.

“You know, man, with the filling. You hear about it.”

“Those are accidents,” I said, mixing the cement.

“Well, make one happen. I want my molar to pick up KABC. But it doesn’t have to be that station. I just thought it would be the easiest. All those watts.”

When I was swimming, I couldn’t hear a thing. But maybe the ocean. Like the one in the seashell. A sound like metal. You can hear the tide sizzle on the beach. The skaters hiss along. Their eyes closed, their mouths working.

Swimming laps, I would imagine a woman walking on the water a few steps beyond the reach of my stroke. Sometimes, she would trip on a wave and, if she stumbled completely, look at her elbow as if she had scraped it. Sometimes, she would drop pieces of her clothes as she walked. Around her feet would be circles that would expand and disappear when she walked. As I was about to touch the wall, she would step out of the pool as if she were stepping ashore from some boat.