EYE DISEASE
Charles is sitting in his van counting the money in a special envelope that he keeps tucked under his mattress. He lives out of this van, which he bought years ago, back when things were heading south. He isn’t really homeless, no matter what people say about him. He doesn’t live under a bridge. His trusty van, a Chevy, is both his transportation and his home.
“Fifty-seven, fifty-eight,” he counts softly to himself. He reaches up to adjust the glasses on his nose, to move them to a more comfortable position. “Sixty.” Then he looks down. “Or did I skip one?” He is tired, and he thinks he’s losing track. He needs a cup of coffee. That might clear his head. But coffee is expensive, and it isn’t really necessary. For going on a month, he’s been drinking only water in order to save every dollar that he can. He’s saving up for glasses. He has four pairs, all old; the oldest, he thinks, is over twenty years. They all have something wrong with them.
Charles thought he could get by with them, that he would replace them when things got better in the future. But things never did get better, and in fact, they seem to be getting worse. One by one, all the little things that he relies on to get him through each day, all these things are slowly failing.
Not too many years ago, people used to call him Charlie. That was when he knew people. But he discovered with chagrin that when he became what people thought was homeless, his friends all fell away. The situation was just too awkward. So now he thinks of himself as Charles. Charlie is too familiar, a nickname given by a friend.
Without friends, he has reverted to his quiet, formal self. Not a self with contacts, which he wore for many years, but a self with only glasses. That’s why his glasses are all so old. He didn’t wear them regularly until his stock of contacts ran out two years ago.
When he called the optometrist to see what it would cost for an appointment to get new ones, he had been quoted an outrageous figure. Almost three hundred dollars. And maybe more if something turned out to be wrong or some other test was needed. That’s what the receptionist had told him. And that was just for the appointment. It didn’t include the contacts. So it seems he is stuck with glasses.
He takes off the pair he’s wearing, the pair that is the best, at least from the point of view of seeing. The lenses are still quite clear and not too scratched. The problem is that they hurt him. One of the plastic nose pads has come off, leaving a sharp little piece of metal that rubs against his nose. At first, it just left a red mark, not painful, just a little irritation. But as the months went by, it has become an open wound. And now today, as he takes the glasses off and rubs his nose again, he checks his little shaving mirror and finds it isn’t looking good. The wound is looking rather nasty, ringed with yellow, with blue and black around the edges. Could it be infected? He dabs peroxide on it. The trouble is, he needs to put the glasses on again. He needs to drive today, and he can’t see well with the others.
He drives to a little place called Arizona Eyemart. The store has discount glasses ready, they claim, in just an hour. That means someone there must make them. Which means that maybe someone there can fix them.
When he gets there, he closes all his curtains. He removes his shirt and wipes his body off with a paper towel and a squirt of liquid soap. Then he puts on what he believes to be his cleanest shirt. He gathers all his other glasses and squeezes out through the driver’s seat. The sliding door is broken, and he doesn’t have the cash to fix it.
Outside, the sun is shining brightly. It is unseasonably warm. He goes inside the Eyemart, where a woman at the counter eyes him and at last decides to greet him.
“Can I help you with anything?”
“Can you fix broken glasses?”
“Sometimes. It depends on what it is.”
He sets down all four pairs of glasses, and he shows them to her one by one.
*
Michelle thinks it’s just my luck to get the crazy homeless guy. She takes one look at him, his scruffy face, his dirty shirt, his faded jeans and baseball cap, and she knows that he is homeless. And then when he leans in, she can smell his body odor and the awful smell of rotting teeth.
The glasses that he shows her are ridiculously old. And what he wants is ludicrous. The first pair is only a set of lenses.
“The frame is broken, but the lenses are still in good condition. Can you put them in another frame?”
He obviously has no conception of the modern process of making glasses.
“No, we don’t do that here. I’m sorry.”
The next pair he shows her is taped together at the bridge.
“This one has some sort of coating on the lens, and it’s coming off, you see.”
Sure enough, the coating is flaking off.
“I can’t see well out of these.”
No kidding. But Michelle tries hard to be polite. “No, I imagine not.”
“Can you remove the coating?”
“The coatings are meant to last for several years, but when they start to come off like that, there’s nothing you can do but throw them out.”
The man looks as though he had been slapped.
Michelle taps her fingers restlessly upon the counter.
He pushes a third pair toward her, this one with a missing nose pad.
“Can you repair the nose pad?”
She picks them up and looks at them. “Did you buy these here?”
“No, I got them at some place in California.”
“We can’t fix something like that unless you bought them here.”
And at last the fourth. This pair has a somewhat decent frame, though the style is one that hasn’t been made for almost twenty years.
“The lenses are scratched in these, so bad I can barely see. Can you put new lenses in them?”
“Well, only with a valid prescription. But normally, our technicians don’t work with frames that weren’t purchased here. If we cut a new pair of lenses to fit them, and then something happened when they went to put them in the frame, if the frame broke somehow, you would have to pay for the lenses, which were cut for this pair, and now they can’t go in any other frame.” Michelle forces herself to smile. “So you see, it’s really in your best interest. You could end up paying and getting nothing.”
“So you can’t fix any of them?”
“It doesn’t look that way. But there’s an optometrist right next door. You can get a new prescription and pick out a brand new pair. We have frames starting at just $29.”
“How much is an appointment?”
“I’m not sure. But they’re open now. Someone there can tell you.”
Michelle touches the glasses cases, pushing them slowly toward him. “Do you want these back? Or if you want, I can throw them out.”
The man grabs them up as if they were made of gold. He doesn’t thank her for her help, and she thinks he’s very rude.
*
Shannon sees a hand set down a pair of glasses on the counter. She glances up from her computer. The man who’s standing there turns toward her, and she sees a gaping wound upon his nose. It’s oozing something that looks like a combination of pus and blood.
“Hello. Are you here for an appointment?” The man doesn’t look like he ever had an appointment in all his life.
“I need a new pair of glasses, and I don’t have a prescription. That’s all I need. Not any fancy tests. Just a prescription for the glasses. How much is it for that?”
“We have an opening right now. The appointment is $130 unless you have insurance.”
“Why is it so much? When I all I want is glasses?”
“We can’t just give you a prescription. We have to check for eye disease.”
“I don’t have the money for both the appointment and the glasses.”
“The prescription’s good for an entire year. You could buy the glasses later.”
“But I need them now to see.”
Shannon tries not to roll her eyes. She looks up, but away from him. The blood and pus are really quite disgusting. Is it possible he hasn’t noticed his face is oozing? But maybe he’s so strung out that he simply doesn’t care.
“Do you want the appointment today or not?”
The man doesn’t answer, just slowly turns away and walks out the door.
Thank God, Shannon thinks, as the door clicks shut behind him. At least he didn’t make some kind of scene. These people shouldn’t be allowed in public. Then she sees he left his glasses lying on the counter. She picks them up and turns them over in her hand. They’re ancient, and she notices one of the nose pads on them is missing. It figures. The guy can’t take care of himself, so how could he take care of a pair of glasses? If he got new ones, he would probably only break them.
She starts to throw them in the trash, but then she thinks better of it. He might come back to get them, and if they aren’t here, he might make a scene. She puts them over beside the mail.
*
Dr. Nichols picks up the mail and glances casually through it. Next to it is a pair of strange old-fashioned glasses. He picks them up and looks at them and realizes they’re broken.
“What are these doing here?” he asks Shannon, his assistant.
“Some weird guy came in earlier and left them.”
“Weird?”
“Homeless.”
“What did he want?”
“An appointment for glasses. But I don’t think he had enough money.”
“Well, you can’t help ‘em all, Shannon.”
“No, I guess you can’t.” She glances at his briefcase. “Are you leaving early?”
“Yes, didn’t I tell you?”
“I think you did. I just forgot.”
“I promised my son I would go to his soccer game.” He heads toward the door. “You can close up OK?”
“Oh, I’ll be fine, Dr. Nichols. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Alright then.”
He unlocks the car and puts his briefcase on the passenger seat beside them. Then he realizes he’s still holding the broken glasses. He glances back at the office, but he’s about to be late already, so he simply puts them on the dash.
The traffic is congested as he drives through the tangled mass of restaurants and stores and other businesses. As he nears the suburban neighborhood where he lives, the traffic starts at last to thin. The game is in the local park. He was hoping to stop at home first to change, but it doesn’t look like he’ll have time. He pulls out into the intersection and suddenly everything goes black.
*
When Shawn arrives on the scene of the accident, he sees this one is bad. His partner Janet knows it too. She scrunches up her nose.
“I hate it when they’re fatal.”
He touches her shoulder reassuringly. “I know. Why don’t you question the other driver and the guy who called it in? I’ll talk to the paramedics and see about the victims.”
There are two vehicles involved, a brand new Nissan SUV and a beat-up Chevy van, the kind that people live in. What’s it doing in this neighborhood? It seems rather out of place.
The SUV is totaled, and the driver appears to be already dead. The paramedics are pulling up right now. They’ll want to get him out as soon as possible. As he’s taking down the position of the vehicles, he looks down at all the glass. There’s something there among the shards. He picks it up and finds a pair of glasses. Somehow they made it through the wreck. The lenses aren’t even broken. Just a nose pad missing. An easy fix, he thinks, with one of those little repair kits from the drug store.
The paramedics come over and pronounce the driver dead. The officer walks over to a man in a nearby car.
“Did you see the accident?”
“Yes, I’m the one who called it in.”
“What happened?”
“Well, that van just slammed right into the SUV. It was crazy. He didn’t slow down at all, like he didn’t even see it.”
“What direction did the van come from?”
The guy points. Shawn walks over to the location to see the scene from that perspective, but he doesn’t find it helpful. The sun is in his eyes, and he doesn’t see anything unusual.
Janet’s walking toward him, and he goes to meet her.
“What’s up with the other driver?”
“He’s not all there. I think he’s drunk or something, but I don’t smell alcohol.”
“Maybe drugs or pills. We’ll have to do a blood test.”
“What’s that you’ve got there?”
“Oh, just a pair of glasses. They must have been thrown right through the windshield.”
He twirls the glasses absentmindedly.
“Did you arrest the guy?”
“Should we?”
“Yes, we’d better. As soon as backup gets here, we’ll take him down to the station.”
He goes over to the other driver, a scruffy guy in glasses. Janet cuffs him and puts him in the squad car. She’s a model of efficiency.
There’s nothing really for him to do. He finds the glasses reassuring. It helps to move his hands.
The guy looked somewhat out of it, and he realizes he could hardly make out his eyes. They must have been cloudy. Yes, it must be pills or something.
A horn blares loudly behind him, and Shawn drops the glasses on the pavement. This time they aren’t so lucky. This time the lenses break. He kicks the glasses over toward the shoulder with the rest of the debris before going back to the car to grab his cup of coffee. He hopes it hasn’t gotten cold.
*
JENNIFER HANDY’s fiction has been published in A Plate of Pandemic, MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, Twisted Vine Literary Arts Journal, and is forthcoming in Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment.
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