Anoptics

Short Story

The small, sleepy Dutch town of Monnickendam has garnered quite some unwanted attention at the hands of Hans Verweijen. Me. Let me start from the beginning, and reiterate that no one suffered as much as I did. It was me who suffered. Me. If I had known the repercussions of my experimentations, I would not in a million years have done the things I did. But curiosity really does kill, maybe not literally, but at least metaphorically in the form of a reputation. Not long ago my small optics shop was renowned for its overwhelming success in manufacturing anything from reading glasses to prescription sunglasses. Not to sound uppity, but I have a third eye, so to speak, when it comes to knowing people. I can easily slide into whatever mood suits my client best. For the elderly I reserve an earnest and charming tone, for the wealthy I become servile, praising towards the vain, flirtatious to the widow.  So being, even the farmer who’d never think of spending 300 euros on a pair of spectacles spent his hard earned money in my shop.

Yet, I admit, it isn’t only my mastery over the psyche that makes my small optician’s shop such a success, at least during the years before the incident. I admit, every now and then during my free time I would warp, rework, reshape, the lenses of each spectacle ever so slightly in order to alter the wearer’s vision. Now you might say “obviously, that’s the point of prescription glasses”, but then you are forgetting the very artistry of my craft. You see, it does not take a genius to know that one does not buy glasses to see better, but to look better. Physically. When one thinks he looks handsome, suddenly he can see crystal clear through -3 glasses, when in reality they ought to be wearing -3.5 or even -4.

You can imagine my gradual obsession with the notion of aesthetics. Those pretty creatures, those men with straight, angular faces, and well manicured facial hair, the women with small chins and big eyes, they simply do not understand the agonies felt by those average, or less than average folk like myself. For every setback they experience, we experience triple-fold, perhaps more. They have the luxury of going about their lives with an underdeveloped character, dim-wits, nastiness, and have it played off as cute, comical, admirable. We, and with we I mean myself and all those whose noses protrude over their mouths, whose eyes droop down on one side, and go up ever so slightly on the other, whose lips bulge out in the middle like an old-fashioned purse, we have to exert ourselves to improbable extents only to be marginally accepted. Because of my personal misfortunes, attributed to my person at the time of my birth, one shouldn’t be in the least bit surprised that I have my own theory on the notion of Aesthetics. A theory that I have used in the creation of my glasses.

In summation: beauty should be looked at as a ladder. At the bottom are the extremely repulsive, the barely perceivable, rat-like people of the earth. One step higher are those I’d consider below average. One higher, the almost average. Higher again, the average. And so forth. The important thing is not so much each individual group, but the system of hierarchy that plays within each step. Our ape-like brains automatically put like against like. You put one supermodel up against another. You put one man with a job in construction up against another man with a janitor’s job. The goal isn’t so much perfection. It is to be the best within your category. That is my theory on Aesthetics anyway, and I stand by it. Hell, I dedicated my life to it.

What about children, you ask? I have not the slightest clue. While I understand adults through and through, children remain a mystery to me. The problem lies in my utter disinterest in their wellbeing. If anything, I secretly despised them. And I would have continued happily within my disinterest if it wasn’t for the opening of my newly renovated optics shop. In order to bind my clients I knew I had to keep their damned offspring entertained. A difficult task, considering the supreme craftsmanship that goes into the making of a lens, and the short prefrontal cortex of a toddler.

I was worried, but not for very long. Without in anyway meaning to sound pompous, I tend to think of myself as an entrepreneurial genius. For a man such as myself, a true Monnickendamer, I have travelled a great deal. I speak some German and Latin. I read. I can hold a political discussion without raising my voice. As I said earlier, I am extremely well-versed on the notion of Aesthetics. I influenced, at least so I hope, the lives of many by advising the right prescription glasses to fit their eyes (and face). And the list goes on. But children? It took several days of pain-stacking analysis to come up with a plan.

Two weeks before the grand opening, the idea came to me, in the form of a dream. I hardly had time to fully return to awareness before I found myself on my feet, running down the two floors from my apartment to the opticianry.

I began working on my creation immediately, and came up with a name just as fast: Anoptics, or Animal Glasses. I would let the children see the world like any animal of their choosing.

I toiled with the plastics, as I did for most of my cheaper models, but I quickly found that it wouldn’t suffice. After some time I decided to dismantle one of my less-popular spectacles and set out to rework those.

As my hands labored tirelessly I, once again, noticed how beautiful my fingers were. Slim and long and elegant. Like the fingers of a liver surgeon or a watchmaker. In a way, I was a bit of the latter. While watchmakers take ownership of our temporal perception, us opticians take reign of the visual world. Which, in my opinion, is far more important. Though neither really can do without the other, come to think of it.

For those who do not know anything about optics, it is important to understand how the eye functions, and how it compares to that of an animal. The human pupil receives images in the form of light which the iris then regulates. At the back of the eye is the retina, made up of photoreceptors, transforming the information as signals through the optic nerve to the brain. In other species, however, such as the chicken, position and shape of the eye can mean the difference between life and death. Predators, like lions and tigers, who hunt by ambush, have front-facing eyes, which provide better focus and a greater ability to calculate distances. Contrarily, deer and goats have lateral eyes and horizontal pupils, which grant a broader field of vision. Some even have rotating pupils! Can you believe it? How could I possibly translate all this information into a lens?

I labored for hours. The first animal I chose was the Tarsier. Since their eyes are fixed in a cranial cavity and cannot rotate, I did not have to implement any especially difficult operations. All I had to account for were their huge corneas and the tapetum lucidum (excuse my Latin: a reflective layer of tissue on the back of the eye that reflects light), which give them excellent night vision. By the time I was finished it was two in the morning, so I took the glasses outside and stared into the night.

“Incredible!” I breathed. I really could see just about everything. As if a flashlight was held out in front of me, following my every move. Without the glasses the night felt especially dark, then incredibly clear again, beautiful and bright with stars when I placed them back on my hooked nose.

There was a path from the shop which led me across the field to a stile and on over the next field to a gate which opened on to a lane a little outside of the town. I walked for an hour or so, testing the spectacles. When I got home I was not in the least bit tired. No more than two, three minutes past before I was working on another animal: the Barreleyed fish. A more challenging operation considering their strange double eyes. The heads of these creatures are completely transparent and filled with liquid. I could only imagine the thoughts that went on in there. Inside the liquid are two ocular structures, consisting of two parts. The first is similar to our’s, so that particular operation took me a little under thirty-minutes. The second, however, took me all night, and well into the morning. After all, it is a diverticular eye, separated from the main eye, containing a curved mirror formed by layers of guanine. This mirror catches light and reflects it back into their main eye, allowing them to see up and down simultaneously.

I could not wear those particular glasses for more than two seconds before a terrible headache set my eyebrows and temples ablaze. That’s when the thought of perhaps going upstairs and trying them out in my bathtub, like a fish, emerged. So that is what I did. I filled the tub all the way to the top, and even put several bits and bobs into the water to make it look more like an aquarium. I dipped my head in immediately. Useless. The walls were too white, I needed more depth.

“Perhaps I should take the car to het Hemmeland? It’s only a fifteen minute drive... I could be back and showered by the time the shop opens...”

I did not need much convincing. Several moments later I was at the beach, stripped of my clothes, and in the water. It was a disaster. I had forgotten about salt’s effect on the cornea and sclera. I returned home exhausted, with two swollen eyes and a bad temper. I would have to transform them into goggles, but it was already ten o’clock.

Within fifteen minutes my first client would arrive, the old Ms. Vink. What to do. In my forty-something years working in the shop I had not cancelled an appointment once.

“No, I’ll have to see it through,” I instructed myself.

At precisely 10:15 the bell rang, followed by a loud knocking. I opened the door and she seated her large backside behind the phoropter. All I wanted was that she left quickly, so I could close the shop until my next appointment at three. But of course she wanted to talk, and because she scared me somewhat, with her big fur coat and short forehead, I, once again, let her do it. First she spoke about her miniature poodle, then about her grandchildren, then all the things she was getting at the grocery store later on. There was something very conniving about Mrs. Vink. Between her eyes lay a shadow of something evil. Her face was all mouth with two wet lips, always open, like a big, moist keyhole.

“Are you alright, Hans?” She asked, showing her yellow bottom teeth, “you’ve been acting strange all morning, and your eyes look red.”

“Oh, yes, I’m quite alright. Just tired. Shall we get on with it?”

“Oh, you are always rushing. Tell me about the shop, is it finished already? You’ll be closer to me. Such a nice location.”

“Yes, all preparations, besides some minor details, are done.”

“I’m sure it’ll look just amazing. And tell me, did you hear about…”

Before she had the chance to continue I fixed the phoropter neatly over her head, making her momentarily look like a beautiful, mechanical butterfly. I switched through the lenses rapidly, until we came to the one through which she saw clearest. Mrs. Vink tended to treat the art of optics more as a guessing game than an examination. When I removed the phoropter from her face, her eyes remained shut. I’m quite certain they’d been closed the whole time.

“Alright, Mrs. Vink, your sight seems to have improved drastically over the past week.”

“Improved? Oh no, that can’t be possible, do it again.”

“It seems to be entirely possible. You went from minus six, to plus one. I have never seen such results,” I said sarcastically. I felt impatient, and her wet bottom lip reminded me of a blubber fish, which in turn reminded me of the Barreleyed fish goggles waiting for me upstairs.

“We ought to do it again. You are obviously mistaken.”

“I’m afraid I simply do not have the time today.”

“I can come back tomorrow.”

“I am awfully busy with the renovation.”

“You said you were practically done. Oh, I’m sure you can fit me in somewhere. I’ll come after lunch.”

“As I said Mrs. Vink, I do not have the time.”

My heart bounced uncomfortably in my chest. Unfortunately, growing up as an only child, and being a bachelor without children, morphed me into an unbearable people pleaser, humiliated as I was by the thought of being the sole attendant at my own funeral. I am very quick to accommodate. Of course, on my own time I will curse their name and pray for some great misfortune to color their lives forever. But in their face, I simply cannot do anything but gratify and satisfy.

That particular day was different. The thought of getting back to my Animal Glasses made me jittery with anticipation. I just about took Mrs. Vink by the collar of her fur coat and hauled her out of the shop.

I spent the remainder of the morning dismantling and assembling my swimming goggles to fit the Barreleyes fish lenses. Then with the hours until my next appointment I began my work on a pair of mantis shrimp spectacles. Who could have thought that such a simple creature would have such incredible sight.

At 3:05 the bell rang. Jan de Jong was a short, thick-legged man with a hard, rotund belly, a round, red face, and two bulging pug-like eyes through which he could not see a thing. As always he was dressed in a cheap suit made of a shiny material and carried a large black briefcase, which made him look more important than he really was. He worked at the post-office.

Again I fitted the phoropter around the eyes, again I watched his mouth move from under it, sliding over one another like two slabs of glistening rubber. Again I told him his sight hadn’t changed since the week before, and again he told me about his wife.

I wondered whether my life had always been so monotonous. At precisely 3:20 I walked him to the door.

The following day was a Saturday. The thought of spending two full days on my Animal Glasses sent a happy shiver through my spine and arms. Around 10:00 I walked to the bookstore and bought an entire encyclopedia of the animal kingdom. It was as thick as the Bible, and much heavier. I leafed through it all morning, highlighting the creatures I wanted to recreate first, which were just about all of them. Right after lunch I started my work on the diopsidae antennae of the stalk-eyed fly. Right after I began working on the psychedelic eyes of the satanic leaf-tailed gecko. The following morning, Sunday, I started, and promptly finished, the cuttlefish, then the bat, and during my evening hours, the red-eyed tree frog. The following week I only took my Monday appointments, and, for the first time in my life, cancelled the rest. It was an enormously productive period. I created some forty glasses, some more detailed, some less.

Overtime I became excitable and twitchy, with always moving hands. My thin face could be seen angled over my desk at all hours of the day, my right shoulder slanted ever so slightly, as if my neck were not strong enough to support it properly. I was reduced to moth-like status, drawn entirely to the light of my lamp.

Instead of growing bored with my new hobby, I became more animated by the day. In fact, I no longer considered it a hobby at all. I could not help think that I was onto something much grander, much more profound than a simple trick of the eye.

“There really is a whole world out there. A world we cannot see with our bare eyes. A world of light, energy, waves, that is just as real, just as tangible as our own. And with that I do not mean those exotic cases such as from human to human. Like near-blindness or color-blindness, you can imagine that quite easily. What I am doing here, in my small little studio, is revolutionary.”

I admit, I got a little over my head. At times I referred to the glasses as living beings. Whenever I was out on the streets of Monnickendam, testing my glasses or simply stretching my legs, I could not help but feel a certain sense of superiority over everyone else. As if I had found something out that no one else would ever understand. For example, one afternoon I ran into Harriet Hendricks, whom I never liked . She was an unusually short woman, even in comparison to my small frame, and gave me the wobbly feeling of standing on an unsteady barstool. She was some ten years my senior, her face hung loose, held up by the strength of her lower eyelids alone. Each individual feature lay buried under folds of skin.

I was deep in thought when she came up behind me and tapped my shoulder.

“A penny for your thoughts?”

If there is a phrase I absolutely cannot stand, it is that one. I felt it physically — my lunch resurfaced in my throat.

“Come on Hans, two pennies!”

I began to cough, and shook my head, unable to answer.

“Well, I dare say, I thought there wasn’t much you wouldn’t do for a penny,” she had the hoarse laugh of a possum.

“I’m joking Hans, come on, don’t be so serious. I have to say, you look great. Tell me your secret, what have you been eating?”

I was about to open my mouth and show her, but stopped myself, swallowing violently. There was something about that woman I did not like one bit. A mischievous air that made me stumble over my words. She and her husband were one of my very best clients. But when she looked at me again, with that sly, smiling mouth that, yes, resembled that of a great big tuna, I could not compose myself. I began to “hooo, hooo, hooo” like the great Eurasian eagle-owl whose glasses I had finished just a few hours earlier. I even flapped my arms, as if they were wings, and pretended to fly away. Before I could stop myself, I was “hooo hooo-ing” until I got home. In hindsight, I am absolutely horrified by my absurd reaction. But at the time it felt strangely liberating, and I could not promise myself I wouldn’t do it again.

The following day I did something equally strange. As I went out for a walk I saw Naomi Rozendaal’s cat crouched on the counter of her small apartment, eating fish-heads out of a white saucer. The animal looked up at me with its big, green-yellow eyes and meowed. I just about meowed back, before I stopped myself out of fear someone would hear. Instead, I whispered: “don’t fear me, I am one of you” which made my whole body tremble deliciously.

Then on Tuesday of the following week, two days before the opening of my new shop, I took my chameleon spectacles, with their multi-directional sight, out for a spin around town. Like us humans, chameleons have good day vision, and horrible night vision. Their cone-shaped eyelids proved tricky to replicate as they are fused to their pupils, leaving just a small part of their pupils exposed. Without moving they can see 360 degrees around them.

Amazing. While I sat squat on a bench in Cornelis Dirkszlaan, my head facing out in front of me, I saw Ron Molenaar speaking with Willem de Keizer several steps behind. Ron always bought his jackets at the small thrift store several minutes out of town. Though there had been a time, I am sure, when they were considered stylish, now they looked too ridiculous for words. Those Victorian-era coats with high collars and big buttons down the front. Willem, contrarily, wore a nice coat of a military green color. His pants, however, were narrow at the knees, and wide around the ankles. You had to have a certain body to pull something like that off, and Willem didn’t have it. His was long and thin, like a birch tree. And come to think of it, Ron did not have the sort of face to be wearing a Victorian jacket either. It was long and narrow, with a slightly protruding chin.

Just a bit further down the street stood Albert Vries, the town’s doctor, who was known for wearing his white coat unbuttoned so everyone, female and male patients alike, could see his chest hair underneath. This was supposed to give the impression of confidence, though, to me, he looked more like an old peacock with half its feathers missing.

I was giving his face a good up and down when I suddenly heard: “Hello? Hans? Hello? What in the world is that thing on your face? A new pair of glasses?”

It took several seconds to maneuver my eyes from the back of my head to the front. When I finally managed I wish I never had. It was Mrs. Vink once again, walking her miniature black poodle.

“Hans, you don’t mind me saying this, do you? We’ve known each other for quite some time. But you’re acting a bit… off. It’s not just me saying it. You know I don’t care, you can do as you please. But are you quite alright? Please take those things off your eyes.”

In reality, I did mind. I wish she would go away so I could continue spying on Albert. But Mrs. Vink was just about as lonely as me, lonelier perhaps. At least I had my shop. She only had her miniature poodle, and from the looks of it, he didn’t have much longer.

“You are nervous about the opening of your new shop, aren’t you? You shouldn’t be. What could possibly go wrong?”

“I’m really not nervous at all. In fact, I am testing these new glasses…”

“New glasses? Those?” She asked, pointing at my face.

“Yes, these are my newest creation. They are Animal Glasses for the children to play with.”

“Animal Glasses? What in the world is that?”

As I mentioned earlier, they had quickly become much more to me than simple goggles for children. But how could I explain to this simple woman that conscious experience was no more than a widespread phenomenon that occurred to all life forms, not just humans? The fact that an organism has conscious experience at all meant that there was something to be an organism. And if there was something innate to being an organism, there must be an objective reality.

I considered hooo-ing like an owl again, but for some reason it didn’t feel quite right.

“I believe,” I said, speaking slowly, “that there is a whole world around us that we cannot see. It is possible that the very world we believe to be real is in reality a fraud, catered towards our survival through evolution.”

“It’s not very probable,” answered Mrs. Vink quickly, simply.

“Why not? Why not?” I insisted, pointing at the glasses, “you can try it for yourself.”

“Oh, I couldn’t. Really, I couldn’t.”

“Suit yourself,” I answered, annoyed.

“A reality other than the one we see? Impossible,” she mumbled again. Not so much out of interest, but out of fear the conversation would run dry and I’d get up and leave.

“It, in fact, is not impossible at all,” I answered. Though I never cared much about Mrs. Vink, her opinion suddenly meant everything to me, and I wished nothing more than to convince her.

“You see that bird, the sparrow up in the tree? What does it see? Tell me, it has eyes doesn’t it? So what does it see?”

“Who cares what it sees, dear. Even if it were to see anything, do you think its little peanut brain could make any sense of it?”

Now, with hindsight, I admit she made a rather good point. I also admit, now, though at the time my reaction seemed entirely valid, that I exaggerated somewhat. Before I tell you what I did, there is one thing you ought to know about Mrs. Vink. She wears a mink coat everyday, always, even when the weather is warm and summery, as it was that day. If it rained, she simply did not leave the house. The fur was almost pure white, but when you looked at it closer, as I did that day, it had a touch of grey in it as well, a deep grey, like uranium. And while usually I hardly noticed the thing, not at all actually, that day it stood out like a baboons red buttocks.

How dare she, that old prune, care for her poodle like her own child, and at the same time condone killing hundreds of minks? I am not normally particularly conscious of these ethical questions, I once considered it an odious business to get involved in the wellbeing of those things which can give me nothing in return. But fury and hate can overwhelm a man's mind to an astonishing degree, and in no time at all a plot was forming in my head.

Before I could make up my mind, my mind made up its own. I took her beloved coat from her frail body (don’t ask me how, I simply did), and forced it around my own. Once on, I started furiously re-enacting a mink to the best of my ability. Both in their natural habitat, as well as locked up in a small cage, cramped together, on their way to the slaughterhouse.

A strange way to behave, you might think, especially for a man like myself who cares so much about the opinions of others. To which I would answer, no, it is not strange at all, if you were to consider my situation. At that point I had grown entirely convinced of the unlikelihood of a certain reality, and so equally certain of the unlikelihood of any repercussions, that to do anything at all was in actuality equal to doing nothing. That, and my conviction of mankind’s utter inferiority in comparison to our more evolved counterparts. Such as the chimpanzee. Mrs. Vink was nothing more than an earthworm in comparison to the rest of the animal kingdom. Even in comparison to the human-race alone, and more specifically me, who at the very least knew about his shortcomings, and was well underway to doing something about them.

These thoughts kept me occupied for several seconds. All the while Mrs. Vink stood before me in a thin blouse and shorts of a similar material, both hands in mid-air, frozen rigid. Her wet mouth had drooped open even wider in surprise, as if a second before someone had been shot dead, right through the head. Ron and Willem came running over, and so did Albert, as well as several others who I recognized but can’t be bothered to name. It is too painful.

“My God Hans, what in the world has gotten into you?”

Several men approached me slowly, as if I was some kind of deranged animal, hands extended, heads back, grabbing at the coat.

I treated them no better than any predator treats their prey. With my thin, delicate fingers I slashed like an agile crab, first at Ron, then at Willem before escaping through a narrow passageway, coat and all.

I ran home as if floating on clouds of ecstasy, filled with a feeling of satisfaction so intense it jolted my arms and legs in constant little spasms.

Once back I bolted my door and sat at my desk for quite some time before making my way upstairs, downing half a bottle of valerian, and falling into a deep, dreamless sleep.

The following morning I woke up anxious. Not because of what I had done to Mrs. Vink, but because of what she had said about the sparrow’s peanut brain. I could not deny that what she said was, in a way, true. Surely the eyes did not account for the intellect. I had spent so much of my life focusing on sight, vision, optics alone, that I had completely forgotten about the intelligence needed to make sense of those perceptions.

There was, then, some essence, some intrinsic, subjective matter, that no amount of imagination or fine-tuning could acquire. Our experiences were the building blocks of our imagination, so our imagination could only lead us to wherever our experiences led us and believed to be true. It did not help to imagine what it was like to have webbed hands, or understand the world primarily through echolocation. If all this were the case, then, how could I ever know what it was like to be anything but my own, human self?

No matter how hard I tried, how well defined my lenses would become, how well versed I felt on the infrastructure of each individual animal, I would never know, never truly know, what it was to actually be that animal. My glasses told me only what it would be like for me to see like a chameleon, a pond-slider, a bronze-winged parrot. I was, and would always be, entirely limited to the resources of my own mind. Until I could change my fundamental structure, my experiences would always be human experiences. My glasses metamorphosed nothing.

Needless to say, no one showed up for the opening of my renewed shop. In fact, the only sign of an opening was a smashed window.

I have made a monstrous fool out of myself. The thought of lenses, of minks (I gave the coat back to Mrs. Vink, though she refused to meet my eye), everything, still sends a painful shiver down my entire body. There was even an article written about me in The Volkskrant a few days later: “Monnickendam Man Strips Elderly Woman of Fur Coat, Leaving Her Entirely In The Nude”. It’s horrible, really. So while at some point Mrs. Vink will get over the incident, in fact she seemed to be more popular than ever, I am now jobless and destined to a life entirely alone. If only I could create a pair of glasses to warp that reality.