Put on the glasses? The thought had never occurred to me. I held the glasses up to the lamplight and looked through them, but did not put them on. Up close, they smelled like lavender and brine. Although the “scales” of the lenses distorted my view of the fogged-in window, I suffered no change of perspective, no clarity or fuzziness. These were not prescription lenses.
The scrap of red cloth on my desk stood out from all the mundane, colorless bits of minutiae that had begun to take over my life—the bills, the relentless letters from angry artists, the descriptions of various tours of the city, all the awkward geography of my daily life. And in the middle of it all, a scrap of color, a scrap of blood, a scrap of message.
What harm, after all, could there be in putting on a pair of glasses?
I stared out at the fog-shrouded sky. I walked to the door. I opened the door and walked outside. The fog clung to my skin. The faint tinkle and chime of distant conversation. The melodious roar of a motored vehicle. The smell of flames. The taste of metal. Could these glasses allow me to see through the fog? Could they undo the mist? I still held them in my left hand, away from my body, as if they might explode and shower me with shards.
Before Dad Died.
I hadn’t seen or heard from Duncan in months.
I put on the glasses. They fit snugly against my nose, the arms sliding neatly over my ears; again they pulsed, as though alive.
For a long moment nothing happened, and in that moment I grinned. My poor brother had me staring through distorted dragonfly lenses into a world of mist. What was new?
But then the frames tensed, tightened around my ears. For a moment I experienced an intense heat, but so briefly that I did not have time to make a sound.
Then the glasses began to fill up with blackness. The blackness oozed from the top of the frames and, with a methodical precision, filled first one distorted scale and then the next. Slowly, as I stood there fascinated and horrified all at once, the liquid occluded my vision, replacing it with its own reality.
When the blackness was complete, the fog no longer existed, swept away, banished, along with all things unclear, diffuse….
My world now consisted of two…levels? Layers? The world I knew had become subservient to a second world. It is not so much that the world I knew disappeared, but that it, still sharply in focus, became the translucent background to a new world. I could distinctly see the street, the stores opposite my office, the street lamp on the corner, the two women standing under the street lamp, the pigeon asleep atop the lamppost, the facade of store fronts that extended down the street—every solid brick or stone of it.
What stood revealed, however, made my reality seem very poor indeed. How to explain it? I was never a very good painter—how now to paint with words a picture that few if any have ever seen? {Start with color. Start with symbols. Start with texture. Start with hue. Start anywhere, but start!}
Example: across the street, the printer’s store front…it was “painted over” with a living swath of minute, glowing red fungus. In amongst this fungus moved slow accumulations of emerald light, harvesting it. How can I describe it when I couldn’t even paint it for you? The vision defeats the pen. It would take a better writer than I to begin to describe the least of it.
Every building—every surface—had symbols and words written upon its sides: glowing and bold, in phosphorescent greens, yellows, reds, purples, blues. Arrows and road signs in a foreign language. The etched equivalent of clicks and whistles. Like the difference between the city before and during the Festival of the Freshwater Squid—when the lights festoon every balcony, every flourish of filigree. Now I was looking at the city as the gray caps saw it, I began to realize. Conveniently portioned out and mapped and described for their benefit. This was their city, still—this overlay the skin of their control. It was like a dream and a nightmare all at once. On the edges of my vision, I could see things moving in ways that seemed unnatural. In the air, a million spores leapt together, suffusing the sky in a vermilion orgy of renewal, the sky itself more dusk than dawn, the stars pale ghosts, larger and more opalescent than in our world. “Scents” hung in the air, in clouds and yet not-clouds, ripples and veins of texture that were not ripples or veins of texture.
BDD. BDD. I repeated the acronym over and over to myself. I tried to be calm. What had Duncan written? Follow the red. I should follow the red, and trust in Duncan.
Follow the red. There, before me, appeared a red path composed of tiny writhing tendrils. If I took off the glasses—could I take off the glasses?—I knew I wouldn’t see the path, wouldn’t see the fungus. Did I want to try to rip off the glasses and leave Duncan to his own devices? For a moment I hesitated, and then I followed the red path through the transformed city.
My self dissolved into…something else. How do I describe? How do I begin? Where do I begin? {Oh for Truff ’s sake, Janice! Start at the beginning. Proceed to the middle. Finish with the end. Muddle through.} The city darkened to black, with people like quicksilver flashes against that background, each composed of a thousand brushstrokes of individual whorls of activity. The red path erasing itself behind me, urging me on by erasing itself more quickly if I slowed.
Perhaps I should start with color. Perhaps I should try to paint it for you. The way an artist layers paints, these glasses layered information. Or, as an artist layers paints to reveal, to accentuate, some facet, some theme, some previously unknown truth, so these glasses revealed a different city, a city which the gray caps had returned to, recolonized, without our knowledge. {Never left, Janice, dear sister. They never left. The glasses didn’t reveal what was hidden. They merely showed what had always been there throughout the centuries.}
Everything had become a negative of itself so that the fog snuck in like coal smoke and the dark, hard brick of buildings became as light, as insubstantially white, as glass. Burned into this real world, the world by which we are assured of our own foundations, our own existence—by which I mean our bedrock; assuming, of course, that the world interpreted by our senses has any objective reality—burned into it, I tell you, were all the signs and symbols of the gray caps.
Superimposed. A nice word, but not the one I’m searching for, because this might imply some ethereal, unreal attribute for something that was all too unbearably real.
What I am trying to say is that the real world, the world I had known for over fifty years, no longer held true when confronted by this other world that existed on top of it and yet also within it.