New Eyes

Two women have a seizure in very different locations, halfway across the world. One in a motel bathroom, the other on a busy commuter train. Or one by the bank of a river, and another in the backstreets of a slum. Or one in an abandoned stairwell, and another at the foot of a dictator’s statue. Neither woman remembers the seizure. Any checks performed by the ones who can access a doctor reveal no lasting damage. What they do all notice, sooner or later, is that the colour of one eye has changed. More than that – the eye itself has changed, it is a different eye. The pattern of blood vessels has changed, the strength of the neural connections altered. It is the eye of the other woman. One doctor in France examines such a woman. He sends a sample to the lab, and they tell him it must be a mistake – that this is somebody else’s DNA.

There is nothing that connects the two women in these circumstances. They have never met each other- indeed, barring the most bizarre coincidences there would be no meeting in which theirs would make sense. Why would they meet? Neither has expressed their desire to go elsewhere, to holiday in or migrate to the nation or city the other woman resides in. The doctor who has examined the woman in France thinks privately of spontaneous mutation, not daring to speak his other theory – his correct theory – even to himself. But what mutation can act in so prescribed a manner? One of their eyes – not always from the left to the left, or from the right to the right – has been swapped. Some of the women needed glasses or contact lenses, or had resigned themselves to cataracts, and their new eye confuses matters a great deal. Some of the women had perfect vision and now need to wear corrective eyepatches. One woman lost her lazy eye, but the eye given to the other woman is very much active. It stares straight and fixedly at any point she chooses.

The doctor sits in his lab, trying to smoke out a hypothesis. He calls his friend, a physicist, and asks him about teleportation. He’s heard that is possible now. Only with very, very small objects, his friend replies, after a long pause. And even then, calling it teleportation gives people the wrong ideas. The doctor shares what he has learnt so far. He is sure he could find a genetic match for his patient’s eye, somewhere. A woman in Tanzania, perhaps, has it, or a woman in Belarus. The physicist pauses again, on the other end of the line, and for a while it sounds like he has walked away from the phone. When he speaks, he says the distances involved, the complete alignment of the new eye with the old nerves and blood vessels, to say nothing of the earth’s barrelling through space…it would be impossible, totally impossible. He talks more and more softly, referencing books long since out of print, until the doctor, covering his face with his hand, says that he got the picture, and thanks him for his time.

The doctor is stultified. He talks to his colleagues at lunch and presents his evidence so far: the woman he is treating, her name is Chloe Montaigne, Chloe has the eye of another woman in her skull. And yet she is fine. It brings her no distress. She quite enjoys relaying the story at parties. Well, why don’t you just find the other woman, his colleagues say, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. That’s bullshit, says a more sceptical member of the lunch group. Why not just present it as what it is and be done with it. There is a certain kind of elegance to that approach, the doctor thinks – it’s giving up, yes, but tossing the problem over to the hands of a mysterious and brainless creator, a blind demiurge. It is disturbing, all of it, very much so, but life is often disturbing. Things happen without reason. A woman loses an eye and gains another. It is done, it has happened, and there is very little anyone can do about it now. Chloe doesn’t respond to his emails. And so it slips out of the doctor’s life, buried under the growing pile of casework that the other patients generate in the day-to-day.

True, the mystery is not solved to his satisfaction, but I don’t think any of us are interested in the solution so much as this doctor’s journey and it what it tells us about him. He feels a constant itch at the back of his mind, that case of the woman he once saw in his clinic with the mismatched eyes. She has since been emptied back into the world and disappeared. Her absence leaves frayed threads behind. His friend the physicist still thinks often of their conversation many months ago, it dogs him, in fact, and when they catch up again he presses for some kind of follow-up with the woman. Are there other facets to the story that might illuminate the greater whole. How many facets do they need, the doctor replies. They might have all of the pieces of the puzzle in front of them; there may be thousands or millions missing. They don’t know. At that they both drink glumly, and conversation eventually turns to the prosaic, of grants and pensions. The doctor suspects his physicist friend is hiding something from him. There were so many ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ in his claims of matter instantly relocating from one place to the other.

Here we might suggest that the doctor, going about his day, bumps into another woman with differently coloured eyes? Perhaps he’s on the metro, and a woman briefly lowers her sunglasses to reveal one sapphire, one emerald, scanning the morning paper? He asks her and she says it just happened one day, she fell down and she got up and then it was like that. No. This doesn’t happen. He continues his work, deepening his studies of the inner eye and becoming somewhat of an expert in that field. The swapping continues, around the world, without rhyme or reason. The next city over, a cleaner collapses in her coffee break and finds her glass eye displaced on the floor, looking back at her. She doesn’t see a doctor about this. She gives fervent thanks to her god and then goes in silence.

Even if this lucky woman did decide to see a doctor, even if her case caught this specific doctor’s attention at some conference or another, how would he figure out the eye has been swapped? It would require tremendous resources brought to bear, a worldwide cooperative of ophthalmologists searching the deep space of humanity with fanatical patience. Even if he does, through some miracle uncover this facet – say, his wife and her friend are both at a barbecue, they seize, and return with exchanged orbs – well, how on earth did that happen? His thinking straddles a thin wedge of biology and biochemistry, the transfer of molecules and the consumption of energy by a smattering of cells. His friend the physicist would prove no more suitable, despite his lofty credentials. So tell me, how should this story end? Because it’s going to end with women having seizures before coming to with significant and unalterable changes to their ocular situation, in random pairings, across the face of the constantly moving planet, skipping across the webs of our few systems of record-keeping and note-tracking before the march of time breaks them down and all we are left with are miracles, passing like water through our cupped hands.