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Stranger things have happened, even here in this apartment.
Which wasn’t to say I was expecting the boy, strung limp and bloody-faced between the tattooed arms of two rival gang members, but when your clientele tends towards the criminal – drug runners, lackeys, miscellaneous thugs, people in the wrong place at the wrong time - you are never not expecting something.
They didn’t knock. They never do. I was ten minutes into my soap opera when the door slid open, depositing three grimy men onto my pink floral rug. It took me a moment to place the two on either end: Reno with his silver lip piercings, from the Blue Bones in the southern city, and Gustaf, in his maroon skullcap, from the Adderheads in the north. Between them was a young man I didn’t recognize, unconscious, brown skin and black curls hanging over a thin-boned face that was absolutely pouring blood.
I paused the soap opera. “Boys, you’re ruining my carpet.”
“Miss May,” panted Reno. “We-”
“That’s Doctor May to you. Go on, put him on the table. What’s happened to his face?” I followed them into the kitchen, cramped with a man-sized dining table and surgical instruments spilling out of the cutlery drawer. As they set him down on the pink gingham tablecloth, I slipped out of my bathrobe, into the white coat draped over a chair, and slid my cat’s eye glasses down from my forehead to my eyes. With a careful finger I drew the boy’s hair back from his face. In an instant it was clear what had happened to him, even as Gustaf said, shooting uneasy glances at Reno, “Broken glass. Got in one of his eyes.”
I stuck a syringe full of Pentothal in the boy’s arm, then reached for the tweezers. “Gang fight? New recruit?”
“No. Just a pedestrian. He was passing by when the window broke, and he got - well.” Both men winced and looked away as I slowly, carefully, maneuvered the biggest shard from the boy’s right eye. By some miracle, it had gone in sideways, damaging the front part of the eyeball but leaving the optical nerve intact. The rest of his face had been untouched.
“Will he be alright?”
That was Reno. I didn’t look up. “He’ll live. The eye will have to go. As will both of you. Go on, out. You’ve told me everything I need, now let me work.” They left, shamefaced, and before the door closed I called, “And no fighting inside my building!”
Silence, then, just the kitchen clock ticking away the seconds.
It was past midnight when all the glass was out, but my mind was racing. As I’d said, the optical nerve was intact. Sure, the eye would have to go, but with a transplant the kid would be able to retain the use of both eyes. If I’d still been employed at the general hospital, it would have all been lined up already. Quality drugs, quality transplant, quality equipment. As it was, I had only what I’d been able to pocket when they’d revoked my license and booted me from the staff. Not exactly state-of-the-art stuff. Fine for patching up bullet holes and stitching knife wounds, but delicate procedures like this...no chance in hell.
Not fair for the kid, just an innocent bystander - relatively innocent, in any case - especially for one that looked like he was going places. When the glass was dealt with, I’d done a cursory once-over to check for other injuries, and all there’d been for me to notice was that the kid had been dressed like a young professional. Not expensively by any means, but Reno had also dropped off a briefcase with the university logo stamped on it. The kid was a student. He’d been trying. And this - who knew what this would change?
Back-alley doctors don’t deal in miracles. Most of us don’t, anyway. But if we’re being honest an idea had been tickling the back of my mind ever since I’d realized the kid needed a transplant. It wasn’t a good idea by any means. If I’d still been employed at the hospital, just suggesting it would have gotten me fired ten times over. But here in my apartment, in the middle of the night, blood all over my tablecloth, there were no forms to sign, no higher-ups to ask permission. The kid was either going to lose an eye, or he wasn’t, and that was entirely up to me. If I could have woken him up and asked him, I would have, but the thing about transplants is that they need to happen fast. And what kind of kid, given the choice, would choose to lose one eye?
I injected him with another round of Pentothal, just to make sure he stayed out, then I was dashing back into the living room, soap opera still frozen on the television screen. For an apartment that was a glorified three rooms, I’d amassed quite a bit of clutter, but this object in particular was one I spent a lot of time looking at. I reached past shelves full of old lipstick tubes, decorative vintage syringes, vases of false pink and red flowers, until finally my fingertips brushed against cold glass. I grasped the jar and drew it out, and sure enough, there it was, the object that had fueled the obsession that lost me my license.
The jar’s surface was marred by years of my fingerprints on the glass, but inside the ghostly green of formaldehyde was clear as ever. And floating in that formaldehyde was an eyeball. Human-sized, trailing a knot of veins, utterly ordinary except for the fact that the iris was bright fuchsia. I darted back to the kitchen, slippers sliding on the wood.
I know what you’re thinking.
That this would never work, that the eyeball had been suspended in formaldehyde so long it was probably pickled by now, that there was no point transplanting dead tissue with more dead tissue.
But it wasn’t so. You see, the second extraordinary thing about the eye in the jar was that it wasn’t dead. I’d bought it, probably illegally, from an old lady behind an antique store some years back - cliché, I know - and she’d been able to tell me nothing of its origin, only that the eye would move occasionally, that the nerves would twitch, that when it fixed on you, you couldn’t help but feel it was really seeing you. Somehow the eye had survived being ripped from its owner, survived days, months, maybe even years in formaldehyde. Impossible things exist, I knew that, everyone did, but until that day I had never seen one with my own eyes. I simply had to have it.
Perhaps it had all been leading up to this moment, I thought, half-serious, draining the formaldehyde down the sink and cleaning the eye, so it rested in ice on a steel tray, gazing at me as I cleared away the remaining mess of the boy’s right eye. Perhaps this was even fate. A boy, losing his eye, brought to me, who happened to have an extra eye, impossibly still living in its formaldehyde bath.
I’m not going to lie, I was terribly excited as I finished the transplant. Unprofessionally excited, some might say - although there had been nothing professional under this roof to begin with. ‘Unethical curiosities’ had been a phrase passed around quite a bit that fateful day I’d lost my license; if only they could see me now.
It was over surprisingly fast, considering it was probably the best job I’d ever done. A work of art, a surgical masterpiece. The eye fit perfectly into the boy’s socket, and the nerves - it was the oddest thing, but I could have sworn the nerves joined by themselves, like they’d been reaching for each other, like the pink mystery eye had somehow known it was about to be part of a body again.
I wiped my hands on a clean section of pink gingham, bits of cornea and vitreous humor joining the blood dried in dark, heavy patches. Maybe I’d look into getting a new tablecloth. Now, however, I let the lab coat slip from my shoulders to the floor, exposing the red tank top and pink checked flannel pajama pants I’d been wearing before the gang members had interrupted my evening. Like a sleepwalker I crossed the living room, barely managing to lift my fuzzy slippers from the floor, and collapsed atop my mess of a futon, atop fluffy blankets and floral duvets and an old stethoscope.
The boy would sleep through the night, and probably most of the morning. When he woke I’d give him a bottle of painkillers, I thought, the good stuff, not the pharmacy stuff, because I was a good, caring person...and then my eyes were drifting closed and I was asleep before I could finish the thought.
~
I woke bolt-upright, positive the stethoscope digging into my side was an assassin’s knife before dragging it out and flinging it groggily across the room. My eyes unwittingly caught the clock hanging lopsided on the wallpaper. It was twelve o’clock. The boy. Instead of burying my face in the coverlet, I groaned and slid off the futon, pleasantly surprised to find that my slippers were still on my feet from last night, although one of them was a bit bloodstained. The worst of the disorientation would have worn off by now, but no doubt the kid would still be confused, and scared. Maybe I’d offer him breakfast. Cup noodles, or painkillers, or tea...
I opened my mouth to do just that, but froze on the kitchen threshold, lips parted, tank top hanging off my shoulders - because the kitchen was empty. The kid’s briefcase was gone as well. The only sign he’d ever been there was the newly stained tablecloth and the dried splatter of last night’s blood leading from my doorway to the kitchen. If he’d been a gang member, I would have assumed somebody had come and collected him - a colleague, not an enemy, because this was neutral ground - but as it was, nobody but Reno, Gustaf and I had known the kid was here. He must have gotten up and walked out by himself.
For a moment, I stood there with that image. The kid waking up and half-falling off the table, collecting his briefcase and stumbling out the door, so disoriented that he didn’t pause to look around.... I shrugged and went to make myself some tea. Oh well. He’d be fine. It wasn’t like this city was particularly big or hard to navigate. He’d find his way home and that would be that. If someone commented on how his right eye had mysteriously changed color - well, who knew if he’d even remember how it had happened? It wasn’t like he’d seen my face. And if he did manage to find his way back here, no doubt it’d be to thank me.
I opened the curtains, stuck a honey ginseng teabag into the glazed pottery mug that had been sitting out by the sink, and went back to finish my soap opera.
~
It was five o’clock in the evening when there was a knock at my door. I paused, in the middle of unloading the plates in the dishwasher that had been sitting there for several months now. The knock came again, fast and irritated, and when I didn’t open the door in the second that followed, the person on the other side began to knock continuously, furiously.
I sighed and set the plate down.
Perhaps some back-alley doctors would be wary of opening the door to an irritated anonymous caller, especially when they catered to gang leaders and criminal lords, but the fact was that I was the best. If anything happened to me, who could patch up criminals as well as I did? It was an unspoken agreement that my apartment was neutral ground, and that anyone who harmed me would have the wrath of every other criminal in the city to contend with.
I slid open the door, with a monotonous, “What.”
A tall, spare figure barreled past me into my apartment, hands clenching and unclenching at their sides, practically spitting with anger. “I knew it, I knew this was the place where it happened! You drugged me so I’d forget - nice try - but I am going to sue you for everything you’ve got, and then I’m going to make sure you rot in jail for the rest of your days, because what kind of scum does that to a person? I don’t care who you are, I’m-”
He spun around, saw me, and stopped, panting slightly. Then he frowned, mouth hanging comically open. He glanced to one side, then the other, eyes narrowing at the red floral wallpaper, the fluffy rug, the trail of blood droplets leading into the kitchen that I’d yet to clean up.
Then he looked back at me with such disbelief that I might have laughed were it not for the hypnotic pink of his right eye. I watched as whatever images he’d had of a gloomy, dimly lit apartment and the dark, evil-hearted doctor who lived there dissolved before his eyes. His gaze flicked up, then down, clearly not expecting a thirty-year-old woman in pajamas, vivid red hair in a ponytail with tufts escaping all over her head, cat’s eye glasses perched atop her forehead, and last but not least, fuzzy slippers.
I crossed my arms and examined him in turn. He’d been a good-looking kid when he was all bloodied up, and now he was still good-looking, just...cleaner. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his clothes were wrinkled, the same clothes he’d had on last night only with a jacket over them, buttoned hastily over the blood stains on his white shirt. His hair was sticking up in every direction, like he’d been running his hands through it.
But his eye - his eye was what caught my attention. The transplant appeared to have settled in perfectly, blinking and swiveling and seeing, as though it had belonged to the kid all along. Normally you’d give it a few weeks, even months, before so much as letting the patient remove the bandage over their eye and start exposing it to light, but somehow this kid had healed overnight. Literally. Remarkable.
“So,” I said casually. “I take it you’re not here to thank me, then.”
The kid sputtered - actually sputtered. “Wha - thank you?”
“Yeah. Like that. You’re welcome.”
“I - no. You’ve ruined my whole life.”
“Nice to meet you too.”
“No. No, no, no. It is not nice to meet you - in fact, I hate your guts. This is all your fault! Everything is your fault.”
Sensing he was going to be here a while, I slid the door closed, and leaned against the doorframe. “That’s a little extreme, don’t you think? Some folks might even say I did you a favor. You know...middle of the night, emergency surgery, blood spurting ten feet out of your gaping eye socket - not that you’d remember any of this-”
“You did this without my consent. That’s illegal. That’s ten kinds of unethical.”
I raised one eyebrow, not moving, not straightening, the picture of unimpressed. “Only ten?”
“You could go to jail for this. Should go to jail for this. I could - I could-”
“You could what - stutter? No, please, go on.”
The kid’s mouth opened and closed like a fish.
I sighed, and straightened, deciding to cut him some slack. “Alright. Look. You got dumped here in the middle of the night, bleeding like crazy from your eyeball - so I fixed you. Sorry if that’s...not what you wanted. But if I hadn’t done anything, you would have lost your right eye. I figured any eye was better than no eye.”
“You could have taken me to a hospital.”
I snorted. “The ones who brought you in were gang members. They don’t go to the general hospital. Even if they did, it’s miles away. By the time they got you there, who knows if a transplant would’ve still been a viable option? Tissue is tricky. These things have to happen fast. I made a snap decision, and now you can see with both eyes. You’re welcome.”
The kid stabbed a finger at me. “That is not what you did.”
Fighting the urge to roll my eyes, I slumped back against the doorframe. “By all means, tell me what I did.”
“I told you, you ruined my life! You made me part of your freaky experiment and now they won’t leave me alone. I’m sick of it. I want you to remove whatever weird special vision crap you put on me, because it is way too much trouble-”
My head snapped up. I’d been examining the chipped red lacquer on my index finger but now my hands fell to my sides. “What did you say?”
The kid took a step forward, gesturing violently at his eye. “You heard me. Take it off, and if that means you have to take the eye too, then fine, because I am not being part of your experiment, I did not consent to these freaky - whatever they are-”
With one hand I caught his wrist, and with the other I slid my glasses down to the bridge of my nose. “Calm down,” I said in my doctor voice. “Tell me what you mean. Are you experiencing visual hallucinations?”
The kid yanked his wrist away and laughed bitterly. “As if you don’t know. Visual hallucinations - please. I’m not that stupid, I know they’re after me-”
“Who? Who’s after you? Kid, I swear, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The young man laughed again, helplessly, bordering on delirious. He took a stumbling step back and nearly lost his balance. It occurred to me that there were still a fair bit of drugs in his system.
Before he could protest I grabbed his elbow and dragged him into the kitchen, forcing him to sit in the chair closest. As he buried his head in his hands I grabbed a clean-looking mug and made him a cup of tea. I set it down in front of him and he lifted his head ever so slightly to gaze at it.
“It’s tea,” I said sharply. “Drink it. Don’t look at me like that, it’s just ginseng.”
I waited until he’d had a cautious sip before asking, “What’s your name?”
His eyes flicked up to me, narrow, suspicious. Eventually, he said. “Amal. Amal Harper.”
“Well, Amal, I’m Madeline May. And it looks like I’m your doctor. So why don’t you walk me through everything that’s happened since you woke up in my kitchen.”
Amal Harper took a deep breath. He was still looking at me like I was going to pounce on him and plunge a syringe into his arm, but he said, heavily, “I woke up in your kitchen. Six o’clock, like I always do. It was still a bit dark and I was...really out of it. My head was spinning and I was dizzy and I couldn’t make myself walk right, but I knew I had to get to my first class at the University, so I grabbed my briefcase and I just - left. I was so focused on getting there that it didn’t even really register that I was in someone else’s apartment until I was outside on the street, and then I noticed the blood on my shirt. And for some reason I was really calm about it. I just thought, I can’t go to class covered in blood, people will notice. So I stopped in the bathroom and cleaned most of it off, and I put on the jacket from my briefcase. Luckily there’s not a lot of people around the University that early, and the ones that are don’t notice much. So I - I went to my first class, and I sat there, and it felt like my body was spinning even though I wasn’t moving. And I kept seeing these long, dark shadows gathering in the corners of my eyes. But I kept thinking, it’ll be alright, I just have to pay attention to the professor, I have to pay attention to what she’s saying, and I was just...hanging on to the professor’s voice like it was a lifeline, like it was the only thing keeping me conscious. It was just - it was bizarre. And when the class ended it finally clicked that I was - high - or something.” I must have raised a skeptical brow because he added, rather defensively, “I didn’t know! I told you, I was really out of it, and it’s not like I do a bunch of drugs anyway. I’m a straight A student. What - why are you laughing?”
With an immense effort I stopped chortling behind my hand. “Oh. Nothing. It’s just - you were supposed to sleep a lot longer. Those were powerful drugs. And you forced yourself up to go to class. Because you’re a good student. And here I was, thinking that you’d been - I don’t know. It’s just funny.”
“I’m glad you’re amused,” said Amal, stiffly. “Because I wasn’t. I went through the rest of the day feeling like I was about to pass out, or throw up. I spent most of it studying alone in the library, trying to have a normal day - not that I could concentrate one bit, thanks very much, because one, I’d been drugged, and two, I kept seeing these weird glowing creatures climbing over the tables trying to get to me. But when I focused on them they’d dissipate. I’d have thought they were just hallucinations, only one of them touched me, and it felt prickly, itchy, like when a caterpillar crawls on your arm. I thought - I don’t know what I thought - but I kept looking at them, and they kept vanishing, and when I finally headed off to my last class the first person I saw gasped and said, what happened to your eye? And I just looked at her, because I didn’t know, the only time I’d looked in the mirror was that morning when I was washing the blood off, and I wasn’t paying attention to my eyes because I was focused on the blood, and even if I did notice it then it wouldn’t have registered, because I was trying so hard to stay conscious. So I went and I looked in the mirror and I almost passed out again, because that wasn’t my eye. And it finally hit me that I’d seen all the weird creatures out of my right eye, not my left. And everything came rushing back - sort of. I don’t remember how I got here last night, but I remembered the window breaking, and waking up here the next morning, all laid out on your table like I was a corpse or something. So I realized that you did it. You fixed my eye, and gave me this freaky new cursed one. It was hard to remember, but I eventually retraced my steps here, and the entire time those glowing creatures followed me, and those weird long shadows, and I don’t know what sort of experiment this is, but I’ve had enough. I can’t concentrate seeing them. It’ll drive me mad.”
He took another sip of his tea, and waited, one eyebrow raised, for my reaction.
I said, “Huh.”
Amal’s other eyebrow shot up. “That’s it? Don’t you care?”
“Oh, I care,” I said. “I care very deeply. I’ve just always wondered what that eye did, and now I know. Thanks for telling me.”
His hands clenched around his mug. “You - no. You can’t keep me in the dark like this. I have a right to know. What is this eye? Where did it come from? Whose was it, before you stuck it in me? Why can it see spirits, or ghosts, or whatever they are? Why are they...attracted to it?”
I shrugged. “Beats me. No, honestly, I have no idea. It was floating in a jar on my shelf for the past few years. You know, formaldehyde, the works…”
The kid wrinkled his nose. “You gave me a preserved eye? Yuck.”
“Well, yeah, in theory, but the eye wasn’t dead. It never had been. The tissue was still living.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Of course it’s not.”
“Fine then, where’d you get it?”
I shrugged again, taking a sip of my own tea, which had grown rather cold. “I bought it from an old woman behind an antiques store one day. She couldn’t tell me anything about it, just that it was alive.”
“So - so-” Amal was shaking again. “You just gave me some random eye that you bought from some old lady that couldn’t tell you where it came from? How is that right? How is that remotely ethical?”
“It’s called being resourceful. Using what I have on hand. Like I said, I figured any eye was better than no eye.”
“But you didn’t know what this one did! It could have come from anywhere! It’s bright pink, for god’s sake!”
“Yes, it looks good with your skin tone.”
“No!” Amal spat. “I mean, it could have been poisonous. It could still be! Humans don’t have bright pink eyes, did you ever think of that?”
“It had crossed my mind, yes. Physiologically speaking, however, it had the structure of a human eye, so I figured it would work with a human body. And clearly I was right.”
“Fine, it works. But what am I supposed to do about the side effects? Seeing these spirits, or whatever they are? They like this eye. They’re always staring at it. Following me around. I don’t like it, it’s creepy.”
“Spirits, huh? What do they look like?”
Amal paused. “Well, so far I’ve seen these long shadows. Weird stretchy ones, with blanks for eyes. They just gather, pool in the corners of my eyes, and they don’t move around. Then there are the glowing ones, like...like floaties, or like splotches on a heat cam. Only these ones are bright pink and green, and they wear their skeletons on the outside of their bodies.”
I set my tea down, impressed. “Are there any of them here in my apartment? In this room?”
He cast a furtive glance over his shoulder, then shook his head. “No...not here. I haven’t seen them go in any houses, now that you mention it. Spirits have a thing about thresholds, don’t they? I suppose the library was a public space-”
“Speaking of the library, you said one of them touched you?”
“Yeah.” Amal rolled his sleeve back to his elbow and showed me his wrist. Sure enough, there was a sort of rash there, the size of a thumbprint, only where most rashes were red or pink, this one was dark lavender, comprised of raised squiggly lines.
“Huh,” I said, bringing his arm to my face. “Spirit burn.”
“You know what this is? You’ve seen it before?”
“No. I mean, I just figure. Most people don’t see spirits, so we’re probably not meant to, for whatever reason. And if we’re not meant to see them we’re definitely not meant to touch them. Me, for example, I can’t see spirits and I’ve never had a problem with them in my life.”
“So you’re saying they’re after me because I can see them.”
I drained my mug of tea and set it down on a big spot of blood in the tablecloth. “I don’t know. Beats me.”
“Well, figure it out,” snapped Amal. “What if they’re malicious? What if they want to kill me?”
Shrugging one shoulder, I stood and began to make myself another cup of tea. “Sucks for you.”
The kid drew a quick, sharp breath. “Seriously?”
The microwave beeped as I pressed the two-minute button. “What do you want me to say? I’m a doctor, not a shaman or a - whatever you call people who see spirits.”
“I’m a law student.”
“Not the word I was thinking of, but sure.”
Now Amal was on his feet too, chair shoved back. “I mean, I can’t deal with this. I came to you for help and so far, you haven’t helped at all.”
“I thought you came to sue me. No, don’t get mad - have you ever thought of seeing an exorcist?”
He snorted. “Right, yeah. I should go see some religious nut who’ll carve my new eye out with a thrice-blessed ceremonial dagger. No thank you.”
“Well, then, you could always become a superhero. Kids do that, right? Special powers, communing with spirits, saving the world-”
“This is not a special power! You’re not even taking this seriously. What am I supposed to tell people when they ask me why my eye is this color?”
I took my tea from the microwave and blew on it. “Medicinal contacts.”
Amal opened his mouth, presumably to yell at me some more, then paused. “Medicinal contacts?”
“Sure, why not? Say you got something in your eye and it scratched up the lens, and now you have to wear a special contact to protect it while it heals. The bright pink is chemical.”
His hand darted to his right eye, as though he was going to touch it, then settled for curling a strand of hair around one of his fingers. “That’s...not actually a bad idea.”
“No, it’s not. And here’s another not-actually-bad idea: research. Things with pink eyes, body parts that live on their own, disconnected from a body, what spirits do to people who can see them - you’re a law student, you know the drill.”
“Fine,” he said, eyes narrowing. “But what about you? Shouldn’t you be doing it too, since this whole mess is your fault? What about taking responsibility? I still haven’t knocked the idea of suing you and tossing you in jail.”
I laughed then; I couldn’t help it. “Kid. You don’t want to sue me. You wouldn’t even get me to court.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because: I heal criminals. And do you know some of the top people criminals bribe? Judges. And cops too, before you get any more ideas.” He was still frowning defiantly at me, so I tried another tact, “Think of the scariest gang lord in the city. Odds are, he or she’s been sitting right where you are, getting stitched up or otherwise saved by yours truly. You think they’ll be happy to hear that some kid’s going around, trying to get me arrested? I might be the safest person in the entire world.”
Amal’s frown had only deepened. Finally, he heaved a sigh and scrubbed a hand over his face. “Why am I studying law?” he breathed, more to himself than to me. “In this city, of all places? What’s the use, if people like you are still-”
“Still saving lives? Geez, I don’t know. Sorry, kid.”
He straightened, and the look he gave me was too weary to be disapproving. “That’s the first time you’ve apologized to me.”
Then he was brushing past me, out of the kitchen, out of the living room, and out of my apartment, sliding the door closed behind him with a barely audible click.
For a moment I stood there, trying to reconcile the fact that he’d left with all the things I’d still meant to say to him. Not ‘sorry’, but useful things like ‘cover your left eye and tell me if you can read the top line of this newspaper article from across the room’, or ‘come back if your eye starts itching, or burning, or if you start seeing an unusual number of floaties’.
Besides, I’d already apologized to him, hadn’t I? At some point, early on in the conversation? And even if I hadn’t, what did the kid expect? I wasn’t his mother, much less his spiritual therapist. I guarantee that if it’d been Gustaf or Reno that had needed the transplant and gotten the pink mystery eye, they wouldn’t have come complaining to me, no matter how many spirits they saw.
Well, whatever. I’d done my job. In fact, I’d given up a valuable specimen for this kid, and if he didn’t appreciate it, then that was his problem.
After what I’d just said to him, I didn’t think he would try to get me arrested. And the transplant seemed like it was doing fine. As long as it didn’t give him any problems, I probably wouldn’t be seeing the kid again.
Amal Harper, I mused, one last time, then went to finish unloading the dishwasher.
~
Two days later, I was awoken by a furious pounding on my door.
I blinked, squinting fuzzily at the clock. It was just past two in the morning. Through the gap in the curtains the sky was dark as pitch.
I allowed myself a long, drawn-out groan, then rolled ungracefully from my mass of blankets and went to see who it was. I’d have been better off sleeping during the day, I thought vaguely as I reached for the doorknob. Criminals, and their ungodly hours…
But no sooner had I slid the door open then I was confronted with the fiery glare of none other than Amal Harper. Despite the fact that he was wearing a different version of the clothes I’d last seen him in - tight slacks, a button-up shirt - he looked like he’d just rolled out of bed. The dark circles under his eyes looked positively bruised. The look on his face was murderous.
For several seconds I stood there, swaying slightly on my feet, weathering Amal’s fury. Then he stormed past me, into my living room, and spun around to stab a finger into my face. “Do you have any idea what just happened to me? No, you don’t, so let me tell you: I was almost kidnapped. Twice! And tonight, when I was home studying? There was someone in my room. They’d crawled through my window! A cult member, with a robe and a mask and a weird voice, who tried to convince me to follow them, and when I told them to get out or I’d call the cops, they tried to - guess what - kidnap me. Again!”
Silence followed.
I waited for him to catch his breath then I began to trudge towards the kitchen. After a moment he followed me, slumping into the chair where he’d sat last time. Wordlessly I made us both tea, then leaned against the wall opposite him, certain that if I sat down I’d only fall asleep. “Don’t you have a friend you can tell all this to? A law school buddy? A therapist, maybe?”
Amal snorted. I took that as a no.
“Fine,” I said, resigning myself to staying awake for another hour at least. “Details.”
He took a deep breath. “The day before yesterday I was walking to class and this guy started followed me. He was huge, with these spiraling red tattoos down both his arms, wearing this cheap mask like you’d get from a Halloween store. He didn’t - he didn’t do anything, just stood at the corner and watched me walk into the University building. When I looked through the window, he’d gone, and I didn’t see him again. Then, yesterday, on the way home from class, these guys tried to corner me down an alley. They were both wearing balaclavas over their faces, so I thought it was just a mugging, but neither of them was very - I don’t know - good at it. They didn’t even try to go for my bag. And they were both wearing these old-fashioned suits, and they had these handkerchiefs that smelled really sweet that they kept trying to press against my face - that’s chloroform, right? Anyway, I shoved one of them away and dodged the other, and then I just ran. Today seemed totally normal, no weird guys following me, or so I thought until I was at home, sitting at my desk trying to write an essay, only it was taking a really long time and I couldn’t concentrate and then someone cleared their throat behind me. Like they were trying to be polite. I whirl around and there’s this person standing in the middle of my room. In these dark purple robes and a flat white mask over their face, with three concentric circles painted on it, like a cartoon eye a kid would draw, all drippy, really poorly done. I honestly thought I was hallucinating, then they sort of bowed their head, and told me in this weird whispering voice that they were sorry to bother me but would I mind coming with them. And I was like, no way, I’m not going anywhere with you, get out of my apartment before I call the cops. They just - looked at me then, tipped their head to the side like they were confused, then they came forward and started tugging on my arm, really pathetically, and I yanked my arm away and went for my phone, but before I could dial they’d crawled out my window. I realized that must have been how they’d gotten in as well, because my door makes a lot of noise and I’d’ve heard it open. Even though my apartment’s on the third story, which makes absolutely no sense. But none of this makes sense.” Amal dropped his head to the tablecloth, the picture of defeat.
I stared at the top of his head. “Huh. You don’t know what any of these people wanted?”
“Considering the circumstances, no, I didn’t stop to ask any of them.”
“But none of them tried to hurt you.” He lifted his head to gaze at me disbelievingly, so I clarified, “None of them pulled a knife or a gun on you. The guy with red tattoos just followed you, the two people in the alley just tried to kidnap you, and the robed person in your apartment just tried to get you to go somewhere with them.”
Amal scoffed. “Right. They just tried to kidnap me. Silly me, I should have tried to make friendly conversation.”
Pointedly ignoring that, I said, “All these people had the opportunity to hurt you. But they didn’t. None of them physically harmed you. I think you should take that as a good sign.”
The kid burst out laughing. It was not a happy sound, instead delirious and spiteful. “A good sign. Of course. I should take all this as a good sign. Lucky me, everyone’s out to get me. Lucky me, I lost my eye-”
His next laugh sounded almost like a sob. Not moving from the wall, I said, “I’ve had dealings with some of the major cults in this city - the Cthulhu cults, the Zoroaster cults, the Druitts - but none of them wear masks like what you described. It sounds niche. The man with the red tattoos on the other hand - could be cult, could be gang. You said he was huge, so he’s probably some sort of bodyguard. If he’d been ordered to take you, he would have, so odds are he was there to observe and report back. The balaclava people - that’s trickier. Old-fashioned suits makes me think religious order, but whoever they are, they’re not very organized, not used to kidnapping people. Could be the intellectual type. Either way, you can’t determine your next steps until you figure out what they all want with you.”
“It’s the eye,” he said flatly. “Isn’t it.”
“It’s certainly not your personality.”
“Then why didn’t they go after you? Why aren’t you the one getting stalked and kidnapped? You said you had it for years.”
“In a jar,” I said. “Surrounded by formaldehyde. Possibly it’s different now that the eye is up and walking around, in a body again, active for all intents and purposes.”
“Yeah, but why?”
I shrugged one shoulder. “Like I said. Gotta ask them.”
He groaned. Then closed his eyes, rested his forehead on the table, and groaned again. “I hate this.”
~
At the end of the week he was back to tell me that a man and a woman in suits and dark glasses had been hanging around the University, driving a black car with tinted windows.
The next night he’d come home to find a group of people in hoods around his apartment, chanting and sprinkling a sulfuric yellow powder around the perimeter. They’d scattered at his approach, but much to the joy of his landlord, the powder wouldn’t come off.
“They want to worship me,” he said, gazing miserably into his lap.
It was two weeks later, and he’d taken to coming over almost every other day, occasionally in the middle of the night. I was starting to think the kid didn’t sleep. Every time I saw him he was thinner, eyes more haunted, appearance generally more unkempt. The kid was coming apart at the seams. As for me, I was steadily running out of tea bags.
“Good morning Doctor May, how are you today? Oh, I’m fine, just hacked off this guy’s leg after it got chewed by a hellhound, how are you? How’s school? How’re the various unknown factions and entities trailing you around the city? Oh, they’re good? How nice talking to you, Amal-”
He gave me the death glare he did so well. “They want to worship me,” he repeated. “The cult, or whatever - the weird one, the ones who wear the drippy eye masks and purple robes - I finally got one of them to talk to me, after I caught them painting symbols on the wall of my apartment building. They said the eye of Mimasta had chosen me as its divine vessel, and if I allowed them to, they would worship me in preparation for - but then my landlord came out waving a broom, yelling about thugs and ruffians and graffiti, so they ran off and I didn’t hear the end.”
“Well,” I said. “Worship. Are you going to take them up on that?”
“Um, no?”
“You sure? Lounging around all day, getting fanned by palm fronds, hand-fed dates by scantily-clad young men and women - that doesn’t appeal to you?”
He was looking at me like I’d gone mad. “No! God, no. I have exams, and besides, why are you so sure it’d be dates and palm fronds? You know how some cultures treat their gods? Do you know what counts as worship? Sacrifice! Entrails! Blood, death, cannibalism, mutilation, even for the vessel themselves!”
I shrugged. Amal ran an agitated hand through his hair and it stuck up in messy tufts.
“I looked, you know,” he said. “Hours in the library, trying to find some mention of Mimasta, and you know what? There’s nothing. Which honestly shouldn’t have surprised me at this point, but god, I just want to know if I’m going to be sacrificed! That’s all!” He was up now, pacing, hands curling at his sides. “I was so freaked out last week during the lunar eclipse that I barricaded myself in the library and spent the night there. And the other day I swear I saw the woman in the black car flash a badge at someone - a badge, like she was government, or pretending to be government, and I really don’t know which one is worse.”
“If that eye belonged to a god, then it would explain everyone’s interest.”
“Sure, fine, in theory, but how do we know this Mimasta cult even knows what they’re talking about? Who knows if Mimasta is even a real thing? It sounds like a made-up word. And besides, there have to be loads of gods with pink eyes, so how do they know it’s this one? Why would it be in a jar, sold by some random old lady?”
“Black market, most likely,” I said, tracing a finger around the rim of my mug. “They trade in just about anything. Weapons, occult artifacts, pickled parts of ancient gods, you name it.”
“Ancient?” said Amal. “So you think this eyeball is all that’s left of this Mimasta?”
“Could be. Gods get old, just like everyone else. And humans pickle them and sell them off in parts...just like everything else.”
Amal fell back into his chair. “Oh no,” he said, a thought hitting him. “They’re not going to try and resurrect this Mimasta, are they? Through me, somehow? Through this eye?”
“Kid, I don’t know. You’re asking the wrong person. Anyway, don’t tie yourself in knots with all the what-ifs. You’ve learned something, and it’s not panning out like you’d hoped - fine. Either you keep asking around or you try to ignore it all and finish your degree. No point stressing over things you don’t know.”
He was quiet for a little while and I’d just begun to hope that he would take my advice and ignore the whole thing when he leaned forward suddenly across the table.
“That is the worst advice I’ve ever gotten,” he snapped. “There are literal spirits swimming around me whenever I leave my apartment, cult members follow me wherever I go, government agents or people pretending to be government agents have staked out my university, and I possibly have the eye of an ancient god in my head, which means people may or may not want to sacrifice or dissect me. But hey, no point stressing over things you don’t know. Really sage advice, doctor.”

Description
Stranger things have happened, even here in this apartment.
Which wasn’t to say I was expecting the boy, strung limp and bloody-faced between the tattooed arms of two rival gang members, but when your clientele tends towards the criminal – drug runners, lackeys, miscellaneous thugs, people in the wrong place at the wrong time - you are never not expecting something.
They didn’t knock. They never do. I was ten minutes into my soap opera when the door slid open, depositing three grimy men onto my pink floral rug. It took me a moment to place the two on either end: Reno with his silver lip piercings, from the Blue Bones in the southern city, and Gustaf, in his maroon skullcap, from the Adderheads in the north. Between them was a young man I didn’t recognize, unconscious, brown skin and black curls hanging over a thin-boned face that was absolutely pouring blood.
I paused the soap opera. “Boys, you’re ruining my carpet.”
“Miss May,” panted Reno. “We-”
“That’s Doctor May to you. Go on, put him on the table. What’s happened to his face?” I followed them into the kitchen, cramped with a man-sized dining table and surgical instruments spilling out of the cutlery drawer. As they set him down on the pink gingham tablecloth, I slipped out of my bathrobe, into the white coat draped over a chair, and slid my cat’s eye glasses down from my forehead to my eyes. With a careful finger I drew the boy’s hair back from his face. In an instant it was clear what had happened to him, even as Gustaf said, shooting uneasy glances at Reno, “Broken glass. Got in one of his eyes.”
I stuck a syringe full of Pentothal in the boy’s arm, then reached for the tweezers. “Gang fight? New recruit?”
“No. Just a pedestrian. He was passing by when the window broke, and he got - well.” Both men winced and looked away as I slowly, carefully, maneuvered the biggest shard from the boy’s right eye. By some miracle, it had gone in sideways, damaging the front part of the eyeball but leaving the optical nerve intact. The rest of his face had been untouched.
“Will he be alright?”
That was Reno. I didn’t look up. “He’ll live. The eye will have to go. As will both of you. Go on, out. You’ve told me everything I need, now let me work.” They left, shamefaced, and before the door closed I called, “And no fighting inside my building!”
Silence, then, just the kitchen clock ticking away the seconds.
It was past midnight when all the glass was out, but my mind was racing. As I’d said, the optical nerve was intact. Sure, the eye would have to go, but with a transplant the kid would be able to retain the use of both eyes. If I’d still been employed at the general hospital, it would have all been lined up already. Quality drugs, quality transplant, quality equipment. As it was, I had only what I’d been able to pocket when they’d revoked my license and booted me from the staff. Not exactly state-of-the-art stuff. Fine for patching up bullet holes and stitching knife wounds, but delicate procedures like this...no chance in hell.
Not fair for the kid, just an innocent bystander - relatively innocent, in any case - especially for one that looked like he was going places. When the glass was dealt with, I’d done a cursory once-over to check for other injuries, and all there’d been for me to notice was that the kid had been dressed like a young professional. Not expensively by any means, but Reno had also dropped off a briefcase with the university logo stamped on it. The kid was a student. He’d been trying. And this - who knew what this would change?
Back-alley doctors don’t deal in miracles. Most of us don’t, anyway. But if we’re being honest an idea had been tickling the back of my mind ever since I’d realized the kid needed a transplant. It wasn’t a good idea by any means. If I’d still been employed at the hospital, just suggesting it would have gotten me fired ten times over. But here in my apartment, in the middle of the night, blood all over my tablecloth, there were no forms to sign, no higher-ups to ask permission. The kid was either going to lose an eye, or he wasn’t, and that was entirely up to me. If I could have woken him up and asked him, I would have, but the thing about transplants is that they need to happen fast. And what kind of kid, given the choice, would choose to lose one eye?
I injected him with another round of Pentothal, just to make sure he stayed out, then I was dashing back into the living room, soap opera still frozen on the television screen. For an apartment that was a glorified three rooms, I’d amassed quite a bit of clutter, but this object in particular was one I spent a lot of time looking at. I reached past shelves full of old lipstick tubes, decorative vintage syringes, vases of false pink and red flowers, until finally my fingertips brushed against cold glass. I grasped the jar and drew it out, and sure enough, there it was, the object that had fueled the obsession that lost me my license.
The jar’s surface was marred by years of my fingerprints on the glass, but inside the ghostly green of formaldehyde was clear as ever. And floating in that formaldehyde was an eyeball. Human-sized, trailing a knot of veins, utterly ordinary except for the fact that the iris was bright fuchsia. I darted back to the kitchen, slippers sliding on the wood.
I know what you’re thinking.
That this would never work, that the eyeball had been suspended in formaldehyde so long it was probably pickled by now, that there was no point transplanting dead tissue with more dead tissue.
But it wasn’t so. You see, the second extraordinary thing about the eye in the jar was that it wasn’t dead. I’d bought it, probably illegally, from an old lady behind an antique store some years back - cliché, I know - and she’d been able to tell me nothing of its origin, only that the eye would move occasionally, that the nerves would twitch, that when it fixed on you, you couldn’t help but feel it was really seeing you. Somehow the eye had survived being ripped from its owner, survived days, months, maybe even years in formaldehyde. Impossible things exist, I knew that, everyone did, but until that day I had never seen one with my own eyes. I simply had to have it.
Perhaps it had all been leading up to this moment, I thought, half-serious, draining the formaldehyde down the sink and cleaning the eye, so it rested in ice on a steel tray, gazing at me as I cleared away the remaining mess of the boy’s right eye. Perhaps this was even fate. A boy, losing his eye, brought to me, who happened to have an extra eye, impossibly still living in its formaldehyde bath.
I’m not going to lie, I was terribly excited as I finished the transplant. Unprofessionally excited, some might say - although there had been nothing professional under this roof to begin with. ‘Unethical curiosities’ had been a phrase passed around quite a bit that fateful day I’d lost my license; if only they could see me now.
It was over surprisingly fast, considering it was probably the best job I’d ever done. A work of art, a surgical masterpiece. The eye fit perfectly into the boy’s socket, and the nerves - it was the oddest thing, but I could have sworn the nerves joined by themselves, like they’d been reaching for each other, like the pink mystery eye had somehow known it was about to be part of a body again.
I wiped my hands on a clean section of pink gingham, bits of cornea and vitreous humor joining the blood dried in dark, heavy patches. Maybe I’d look into getting a new tablecloth. Now, however, I let the lab coat slip from my shoulders to the floor, exposing the red tank top and pink checked flannel pajama pants I’d been wearing before the gang members had interrupted my evening. Like a sleepwalker I crossed the living room, barely managing to lift my fuzzy slippers from the floor, and collapsed atop my mess of a futon, atop fluffy blankets and floral duvets and an old stethoscope.
The boy would sleep through the night, and probably most of the morning. When he woke I’d give him a bottle of painkillers, I thought, the good stuff, not the pharmacy stuff, because I was a good, caring person...and then my eyes were drifting closed and I was asleep before I could finish the thought.
~
I woke bolt-upright, positive the stethoscope digging into my side was an assassin’s knife before dragging it out and flinging it groggily across the room. My eyes unwittingly caught the clock hanging lopsided on the wallpaper. It was twelve o’clock. The boy. Instead of burying my face in the coverlet, I groaned and slid off the futon, pleasantly surprised to find that my slippers were still on my feet from last night, although one of them was a bit bloodstained. The worst of the disorientation would have worn off by now, but no doubt the kid would still be confused, and scared. Maybe I’d offer him breakfast. Cup noodles, or painkillers, or tea...
I opened my mouth to do just that, but froze on the kitchen threshold, lips parted, tank top hanging off my shoulders - because the kitchen was empty. The kid’s briefcase was gone as well. The only sign he’d ever been there was the newly stained tablecloth and the dried splatter of last night’s blood leading from my doorway to the kitchen. If he’d been a gang member, I would have assumed somebody had come and collected him - a colleague, not an enemy, because this was neutral ground - but as it was, nobody but Reno, Gustaf and I had known the kid was here. He must have gotten up and walked out by himself.
For a moment, I stood there with that image. The kid waking up and half-falling off the table, collecting his briefcase and stumbling out the door, so disoriented that he didn’t pause to look around.... I shrugged and went to make myself some tea. Oh well. He’d be fine. It wasn’t like this city was particularly big or hard to navigate. He’d find his way home and that would be that. If someone commented on how his right eye had mysteriously changed color - well, who knew if he’d even remember how it had happened? It wasn’t like he’d seen my face. And if he did manage to find his way back here, no doubt it’d be to thank me.
I opened the curtains, stuck a honey ginseng teabag into the glazed pottery mug that had been sitting out by the sink, and went back to finish my soap opera.
~
It was five o’clock in the evening when there was a knock at my door. I paused, in the middle of unloading the plates in the dishwasher that had been sitting there for several months now. The knock came again, fast and irritated, and when I didn’t open the door in the second that followed, the person on the other side began to knock continuously, furiously.
I sighed and set the plate down.
Perhaps some back-alley doctors would be wary of opening the door to an irritated anonymous caller, especially when they catered to gang leaders and criminal lords, but the fact was that I was the best. If anything happened to me, who could patch up criminals as well as I did? It was an unspoken agreement that my apartment was neutral ground, and that anyone who harmed me would have the wrath of every other criminal in the city to contend with.
I slid open the door, with a monotonous, “What.”
A tall, spare figure barreled past me into my apartment, hands clenching and unclenching at their sides, practically spitting with anger. “I knew it, I knew this was the place where it happened! You drugged me so I’d forget - nice try - but I am going to sue you for everything you’ve got, and then I’m going to make sure you rot in jail for the rest of your days, because what kind of scum does that to a person? I don’t care who you are, I’m-”
He spun around, saw me, and stopped, panting slightly. Then he frowned, mouth hanging comically open. He glanced to one side, then the other, eyes narrowing at the red floral wallpaper, the fluffy rug, the trail of blood droplets leading into the kitchen that I’d yet to clean up.
Then he looked back at me with such disbelief that I might have laughed were it not for the hypnotic pink of his right eye. I watched as whatever images he’d had of a gloomy, dimly lit apartment and the dark, evil-hearted doctor who lived there dissolved before his eyes. His gaze flicked up, then down, clearly not expecting a thirty-year-old woman in pajamas, vivid red hair in a ponytail with tufts escaping all over her head, cat’s eye glasses perched atop her forehead, and last but not least, fuzzy slippers.
I crossed my arms and examined him in turn. He’d been a good-looking kid when he was all bloodied up, and now he was still good-looking, just...cleaner. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his clothes were wrinkled, the same clothes he’d had on last night only with a jacket over them, buttoned hastily over the blood stains on his white shirt. His hair was sticking up in every direction, like he’d been running his hands through it.
But his eye - his eye was what caught my attention. The transplant appeared to have settled in perfectly, blinking and swiveling and seeing, as though it had belonged to the kid all along. Normally you’d give it a few weeks, even months, before so much as letting the patient remove the bandage over their eye and start exposing it to light, but somehow this kid had healed overnight. Literally. Remarkable.
“So,” I said casually. “I take it you’re not here to thank me, then.”
The kid sputtered - actually sputtered. “Wha - thank you?”
“Yeah. Like that. You’re welcome.”
“I - no. You’ve ruined my whole life.”
“Nice to meet you too.”
“No. No, no, no. It is not nice to meet you - in fact, I hate your guts. This is all your fault! Everything is your fault.”
Sensing he was going to be here a while, I slid the door closed, and leaned against the doorframe. “That’s a little extreme, don’t you think? Some folks might even say I did you a favor. You know...middle of the night, emergency surgery, blood spurting ten feet out of your gaping eye socket - not that you’d remember any of this-”
“You did this without my consent. That’s illegal. That’s ten kinds of unethical.”
I raised one eyebrow, not moving, not straightening, the picture of unimpressed. “Only ten?”
“You could go to jail for this. Should go to jail for this. I could - I could-”
“You could what - stutter? No, please, go on.”
The kid’s mouth opened and closed like a fish.
I sighed, and straightened, deciding to cut him some slack. “Alright. Look. You got dumped here in the middle of the night, bleeding like crazy from your eyeball - so I fixed you. Sorry if that’s...not what you wanted. But if I hadn’t done anything, you would have lost your right eye. I figured any eye was better than no eye.”
“You could have taken me to a hospital.”
I snorted. “The ones who brought you in were gang members. They don’t go to the general hospital. Even if they did, it’s miles away. By the time they got you there, who knows if a transplant would’ve still been a viable option? Tissue is tricky. These things have to happen fast. I made a snap decision, and now you can see with both eyes. You’re welcome.”
The kid stabbed a finger at me. “That is not what you did.”
Fighting the urge to roll my eyes, I slumped back against the doorframe. “By all means, tell me what I did.”
“I told you, you ruined my life! You made me part of your freaky experiment and now they won’t leave me alone. I’m sick of it. I want you to remove whatever weird special vision crap you put on me, because it is way too much trouble-”
My head snapped up. I’d been examining the chipped red lacquer on my index finger but now my hands fell to my sides. “What did you say?”
The kid took a step forward, gesturing violently at his eye. “You heard me. Take it off, and if that means you have to take the eye too, then fine, because I am not being part of your experiment, I did not consent to these freaky - whatever they are-”
With one hand I caught his wrist, and with the other I slid my glasses down to the bridge of my nose. “Calm down,” I said in my doctor voice. “Tell me what you mean. Are you experiencing visual hallucinations?”
The kid yanked his wrist away and laughed bitterly. “As if you don’t know. Visual hallucinations - please. I’m not that stupid, I know they’re after me-”
“Who? Who’s after you? Kid, I swear, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The young man laughed again, helplessly, bordering on delirious. He took a stumbling step back and nearly lost his balance. It occurred to me that there were still a fair bit of drugs in his system.
Before he could protest I grabbed his elbow and dragged him into the kitchen, forcing him to sit in the chair closest. As he buried his head in his hands I grabbed a clean-looking mug and made him a cup of tea. I set it down in front of him and he lifted his head ever so slightly to gaze at it.
“It’s tea,” I said sharply. “Drink it. Don’t look at me like that, it’s just ginseng.”
I waited until he’d had a cautious sip before asking, “What’s your name?”
His eyes flicked up to me, narrow, suspicious. Eventually, he said. “Amal. Amal Harper.”
“Well, Amal, I’m Madeline May. And it looks like I’m your doctor. So why don’t you walk me through everything that’s happened since you woke up in my kitchen.”
Amal Harper took a deep breath. He was still looking at me like I was going to pounce on him and plunge a syringe into his arm, but he said, heavily, “I woke up in your kitchen. Six o’clock, like I always do. It was still a bit dark and I was...really out of it. My head was spinning and I was dizzy and I couldn’t make myself walk right, but I knew I had to get to my first class at the University, so I grabbed my briefcase and I just - left. I was so focused on getting there that it didn’t even really register that I was in someone else’s apartment until I was outside on the street, and then I noticed the blood on my shirt. And for some reason I was really calm about it. I just thought, I can’t go to class covered in blood, people will notice. So I stopped in the bathroom and cleaned most of it off, and I put on the jacket from my briefcase. Luckily there’s not a lot of people around the University that early, and the ones that are don’t notice much. So I - I went to my first class, and I sat there, and it felt like my body was spinning even though I wasn’t moving. And I kept seeing these long, dark shadows gathering in the corners of my eyes. But I kept thinking, it’ll be alright, I just have to pay attention to the professor, I have to pay attention to what she’s saying, and I was just...hanging on to the professor’s voice like it was a lifeline, like it was the only thing keeping me conscious. It was just - it was bizarre. And when the class ended it finally clicked that I was - high - or something.” I must have raised a skeptical brow because he added, rather defensively, “I didn’t know! I told you, I was really out of it, and it’s not like I do a bunch of drugs anyway. I’m a straight A student. What - why are you laughing?”
With an immense effort I stopped chortling behind my hand. “Oh. Nothing. It’s just - you were supposed to sleep a lot longer. Those were powerful drugs. And you forced yourself up to go to class. Because you’re a good student. And here I was, thinking that you’d been - I don’t know. It’s just funny.”
“I’m glad you’re amused,” said Amal, stiffly. “Because I wasn’t. I went through the rest of the day feeling like I was about to pass out, or throw up. I spent most of it studying alone in the library, trying to have a normal day - not that I could concentrate one bit, thanks very much, because one, I’d been drugged, and two, I kept seeing these weird glowing creatures climbing over the tables trying to get to me. But when I focused on them they’d dissipate. I’d have thought they were just hallucinations, only one of them touched me, and it felt prickly, itchy, like when a caterpillar crawls on your arm. I thought - I don’t know what I thought - but I kept looking at them, and they kept vanishing, and when I finally headed off to my last class the first person I saw gasped and said, what happened to your eye? And I just looked at her, because I didn’t know, the only time I’d looked in the mirror was that morning when I was washing the blood off, and I wasn’t paying attention to my eyes because I was focused on the blood, and even if I did notice it then it wouldn’t have registered, because I was trying so hard to stay conscious. So I went and I looked in the mirror and I almost passed out again, because that wasn’t my eye. And it finally hit me that I’d seen all the weird creatures out of my right eye, not my left. And everything came rushing back - sort of. I don’t remember how I got here last night, but I remembered the window breaking, and waking up here the next morning, all laid out on your table like I was a corpse or something. So I realized that you did it. You fixed my eye, and gave me this freaky new cursed one. It was hard to remember, but I eventually retraced my steps here, and the entire time those glowing creatures followed me, and those weird long shadows, and I don’t know what sort of experiment this is, but I’ve had enough. I can’t concentrate seeing them. It’ll drive me mad.”
He took another sip of his tea, and waited, one eyebrow raised, for my reaction.
I said, “Huh.”
Amal’s other eyebrow shot up. “That’s it? Don’t you care?”
“Oh, I care,” I said. “I care very deeply. I’ve just always wondered what that eye did, and now I know. Thanks for telling me.”
His hands clenched around his mug. “You - no. You can’t keep me in the dark like this. I have a right to know. What is this eye? Where did it come from? Whose was it, before you stuck it in me? Why can it see spirits, or ghosts, or whatever they are? Why are they...attracted to it?”
I shrugged. “Beats me. No, honestly, I have no idea. It was floating in a jar on my shelf for the past few years. You know, formaldehyde, the works…”
The kid wrinkled his nose. “You gave me a preserved eye? Yuck.”
“Well, yeah, in theory, but the eye wasn’t dead. It never had been. The tissue was still living.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Of course it’s not.”
“Fine then, where’d you get it?”
I shrugged again, taking a sip of my own tea, which had grown rather cold. “I bought it from an old woman behind an antiques store one day. She couldn’t tell me anything about it, just that it was alive.”
“So - so-” Amal was shaking again. “You just gave me some random eye that you bought from some old lady that couldn’t tell you where it came from? How is that right? How is that remotely ethical?”
“It’s called being resourceful. Using what I have on hand. Like I said, I figured any eye was better than no eye.”
“But you didn’t know what this one did! It could have come from anywhere! It’s bright pink, for god’s sake!”
“Yes, it looks good with your skin tone.”
“No!” Amal spat. “I mean, it could have been poisonous. It could still be! Humans don’t have bright pink eyes, did you ever think of that?”
“It had crossed my mind, yes. Physiologically speaking, however, it had the structure of a human eye, so I figured it would work with a human body. And clearly I was right.”
“Fine, it works. But what am I supposed to do about the side effects? Seeing these spirits, or whatever they are? They like this eye. They’re always staring at it. Following me around. I don’t like it, it’s creepy.”
“Spirits, huh? What do they look like?”
Amal paused. “Well, so far I’ve seen these long shadows. Weird stretchy ones, with blanks for eyes. They just gather, pool in the corners of my eyes, and they don’t move around. Then there are the glowing ones, like...like floaties, or like splotches on a heat cam. Only these ones are bright pink and green, and they wear their skeletons on the outside of their bodies.”
I set my tea down, impressed. “Are there any of them here in my apartment? In this room?”
He cast a furtive glance over his shoulder, then shook his head. “No...not here. I haven’t seen them go in any houses, now that you mention it. Spirits have a thing about thresholds, don’t they? I suppose the library was a public space-”
“Speaking of the library, you said one of them touched you?”
“Yeah.” Amal rolled his sleeve back to his elbow and showed me his wrist. Sure enough, there was a sort of rash there, the size of a thumbprint, only where most rashes were red or pink, this one was dark lavender, comprised of raised squiggly lines.
“Huh,” I said, bringing his arm to my face. “Spirit burn.”
“You know what this is? You’ve seen it before?”
“No. I mean, I just figure. Most people don’t see spirits, so we’re probably not meant to, for whatever reason. And if we’re not meant to see them we’re definitely not meant to touch them. Me, for example, I can’t see spirits and I’ve never had a problem with them in my life.”
“So you’re saying they’re after me because I can see them.”
I drained my mug of tea and set it down on a big spot of blood in the tablecloth. “I don’t know. Beats me.”
“Well, figure it out,” snapped Amal. “What if they’re malicious? What if they want to kill me?”
Shrugging one shoulder, I stood and began to make myself another cup of tea. “Sucks for you.”
The kid drew a quick, sharp breath. “Seriously?”
The microwave beeped as I pressed the two-minute button. “What do you want me to say? I’m a doctor, not a shaman or a - whatever you call people who see spirits.”
“I’m a law student.”
“Not the word I was thinking of, but sure.”
Now Amal was on his feet too, chair shoved back. “I mean, I can’t deal with this. I came to you for help and so far, you haven’t helped at all.”
“I thought you came to sue me. No, don’t get mad - have you ever thought of seeing an exorcist?”
He snorted. “Right, yeah. I should go see some religious nut who’ll carve my new eye out with a thrice-blessed ceremonial dagger. No thank you.”
“Well, then, you could always become a superhero. Kids do that, right? Special powers, communing with spirits, saving the world-”
“This is not a special power! You’re not even taking this seriously. What am I supposed to tell people when they ask me why my eye is this color?”
I took my tea from the microwave and blew on it. “Medicinal contacts.”
Amal opened his mouth, presumably to yell at me some more, then paused. “Medicinal contacts?”
“Sure, why not? Say you got something in your eye and it scratched up the lens, and now you have to wear a special contact to protect it while it heals. The bright pink is chemical.”
His hand darted to his right eye, as though he was going to touch it, then settled for curling a strand of hair around one of his fingers. “That’s...not actually a bad idea.”
“No, it’s not. And here’s another not-actually-bad idea: research. Things with pink eyes, body parts that live on their own, disconnected from a body, what spirits do to people who can see them - you’re a law student, you know the drill.”
“Fine,” he said, eyes narrowing. “But what about you? Shouldn’t you be doing it too, since this whole mess is your fault? What about taking responsibility? I still haven’t knocked the idea of suing you and tossing you in jail.”
I laughed then; I couldn’t help it. “Kid. You don’t want to sue me. You wouldn’t even get me to court.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because: I heal criminals. And do you know some of the top people criminals bribe? Judges. And cops too, before you get any more ideas.” He was still frowning defiantly at me, so I tried another tact, “Think of the scariest gang lord in the city. Odds are, he or she’s been sitting right where you are, getting stitched up or otherwise saved by yours truly. You think they’ll be happy to hear that some kid’s going around, trying to get me arrested? I might be the safest person in the entire world.”
Amal’s frown had only deepened. Finally, he heaved a sigh and scrubbed a hand over his face. “Why am I studying law?” he breathed, more to himself than to me. “In this city, of all places? What’s the use, if people like you are still-”
“Still saving lives? Geez, I don’t know. Sorry, kid.”
He straightened, and the look he gave me was too weary to be disapproving. “That’s the first time you’ve apologized to me.”
Then he was brushing past me, out of the kitchen, out of the living room, and out of my apartment, sliding the door closed behind him with a barely audible click.
For a moment I stood there, trying to reconcile the fact that he’d left with all the things I’d still meant to say to him. Not ‘sorry’, but useful things like ‘cover your left eye and tell me if you can read the top line of this newspaper article from across the room’, or ‘come back if your eye starts itching, or burning, or if you start seeing an unusual number of floaties’.
Besides, I’d already apologized to him, hadn’t I? At some point, early on in the conversation? And even if I hadn’t, what did the kid expect? I wasn’t his mother, much less his spiritual therapist. I guarantee that if it’d been Gustaf or Reno that had needed the transplant and gotten the pink mystery eye, they wouldn’t have come complaining to me, no matter how many spirits they saw.
Well, whatever. I’d done my job. In fact, I’d given up a valuable specimen for this kid, and if he didn’t appreciate it, then that was his problem.
After what I’d just said to him, I didn’t think he would try to get me arrested. And the transplant seemed like it was doing fine. As long as it didn’t give him any problems, I probably wouldn’t be seeing the kid again.
Amal Harper, I mused, one last time, then went to finish unloading the dishwasher.
~
Two days later, I was awoken by a furious pounding on my door.
I blinked, squinting fuzzily at the clock. It was just past two in the morning. Through the gap in the curtains the sky was dark as pitch.
I allowed myself a long, drawn-out groan, then rolled ungracefully from my mass of blankets and went to see who it was. I’d have been better off sleeping during the day, I thought vaguely as I reached for the doorknob. Criminals, and their ungodly hours…
But no sooner had I slid the door open then I was confronted with the fiery glare of none other than Amal Harper. Despite the fact that he was wearing a different version of the clothes I’d last seen him in - tight slacks, a button-up shirt - he looked like he’d just rolled out of bed. The dark circles under his eyes looked positively bruised. The look on his face was murderous.
For several seconds I stood there, swaying slightly on my feet, weathering Amal’s fury. Then he stormed past me, into my living room, and spun around to stab a finger into my face. “Do you have any idea what just happened to me? No, you don’t, so let me tell you: I was almost kidnapped. Twice! And tonight, when I was home studying? There was someone in my room. They’d crawled through my window! A cult member, with a robe and a mask and a weird voice, who tried to convince me to follow them, and when I told them to get out or I’d call the cops, they tried to - guess what - kidnap me. Again!”
Silence followed.
I waited for him to catch his breath then I began to trudge towards the kitchen. After a moment he followed me, slumping into the chair where he’d sat last time. Wordlessly I made us both tea, then leaned against the wall opposite him, certain that if I sat down I’d only fall asleep. “Don’t you have a friend you can tell all this to? A law school buddy? A therapist, maybe?”
Amal snorted. I took that as a no.
“Fine,” I said, resigning myself to staying awake for another hour at least. “Details.”
He took a deep breath. “The day before yesterday I was walking to class and this guy started followed me. He was huge, with these spiraling red tattoos down both his arms, wearing this cheap mask like you’d get from a Halloween store. He didn’t - he didn’t do anything, just stood at the corner and watched me walk into the University building. When I looked through the window, he’d gone, and I didn’t see him again. Then, yesterday, on the way home from class, these guys tried to corner me down an alley. They were both wearing balaclavas over their faces, so I thought it was just a mugging, but neither of them was very - I don’t know - good at it. They didn’t even try to go for my bag. And they were both wearing these old-fashioned suits, and they had these handkerchiefs that smelled really sweet that they kept trying to press against my face - that’s chloroform, right? Anyway, I shoved one of them away and dodged the other, and then I just ran. Today seemed totally normal, no weird guys following me, or so I thought until I was at home, sitting at my desk trying to write an essay, only it was taking a really long time and I couldn’t concentrate and then someone cleared their throat behind me. Like they were trying to be polite. I whirl around and there’s this person standing in the middle of my room. In these dark purple robes and a flat white mask over their face, with three concentric circles painted on it, like a cartoon eye a kid would draw, all drippy, really poorly done. I honestly thought I was hallucinating, then they sort of bowed their head, and told me in this weird whispering voice that they were sorry to bother me but would I mind coming with them. And I was like, no way, I’m not going anywhere with you, get out of my apartment before I call the cops. They just - looked at me then, tipped their head to the side like they were confused, then they came forward and started tugging on my arm, really pathetically, and I yanked my arm away and went for my phone, but before I could dial they’d crawled out my window. I realized that must have been how they’d gotten in as well, because my door makes a lot of noise and I’d’ve heard it open. Even though my apartment’s on the third story, which makes absolutely no sense. But none of this makes sense.” Amal dropped his head to the tablecloth, the picture of defeat.
I stared at the top of his head. “Huh. You don’t know what any of these people wanted?”
“Considering the circumstances, no, I didn’t stop to ask any of them.”
“But none of them tried to hurt you.” He lifted his head to gaze at me disbelievingly, so I clarified, “None of them pulled a knife or a gun on you. The guy with red tattoos just followed you, the two people in the alley just tried to kidnap you, and the robed person in your apartment just tried to get you to go somewhere with them.”
Amal scoffed. “Right. They just tried to kidnap me. Silly me, I should have tried to make friendly conversation.”
Pointedly ignoring that, I said, “All these people had the opportunity to hurt you. But they didn’t. None of them physically harmed you. I think you should take that as a good sign.”
The kid burst out laughing. It was not a happy sound, instead delirious and spiteful. “A good sign. Of course. I should take all this as a good sign. Lucky me, everyone’s out to get me. Lucky me, I lost my eye-”
His next laugh sounded almost like a sob. Not moving from the wall, I said, “I’ve had dealings with some of the major cults in this city - the Cthulhu cults, the Zoroaster cults, the Druitts - but none of them wear masks like what you described. It sounds niche. The man with the red tattoos on the other hand - could be cult, could be gang. You said he was huge, so he’s probably some sort of bodyguard. If he’d been ordered to take you, he would have, so odds are he was there to observe and report back. The balaclava people - that’s trickier. Old-fashioned suits makes me think religious order, but whoever they are, they’re not very organized, not used to kidnapping people. Could be the intellectual type. Either way, you can’t determine your next steps until you figure out what they all want with you.”
“It’s the eye,” he said flatly. “Isn’t it.”
“It’s certainly not your personality.”
“Then why didn’t they go after you? Why aren’t you the one getting stalked and kidnapped? You said you had it for years.”
“In a jar,” I said. “Surrounded by formaldehyde. Possibly it’s different now that the eye is up and walking around, in a body again, active for all intents and purposes.”
“Yeah, but why?”
I shrugged one shoulder. “Like I said. Gotta ask them.”
He groaned. Then closed his eyes, rested his forehead on the table, and groaned again. “I hate this.”
~
At the end of the week he was back to tell me that a man and a woman in suits and dark glasses had been hanging around the University, driving a black car with tinted windows.
The next night he’d come home to find a group of people in hoods around his apartment, chanting and sprinkling a sulfuric yellow powder around the perimeter. They’d scattered at his approach, but much to the joy of his landlord, the powder wouldn’t come off.
“They want to worship me,” he said, gazing miserably into his lap.
It was two weeks later, and he’d taken to coming over almost every other day, occasionally in the middle of the night. I was starting to think the kid didn’t sleep. Every time I saw him he was thinner, eyes more haunted, appearance generally more unkempt. The kid was coming apart at the seams. As for me, I was steadily running out of tea bags.
“Good morning Doctor May, how are you today? Oh, I’m fine, just hacked off this guy’s leg after it got chewed by a hellhound, how are you? How’s school? How’re the various unknown factions and entities trailing you around the city? Oh, they’re good? How nice talking to you, Amal-”
He gave me the death glare he did so well. “They want to worship me,” he repeated. “The cult, or whatever - the weird one, the ones who wear the drippy eye masks and purple robes - I finally got one of them to talk to me, after I caught them painting symbols on the wall of my apartment building. They said the eye of Mimasta had chosen me as its divine vessel, and if I allowed them to, they would worship me in preparation for - but then my landlord came out waving a broom, yelling about thugs and ruffians and graffiti, so they ran off and I didn’t hear the end.”
“Well,” I said. “Worship. Are you going to take them up on that?”
“Um, no?”
“You sure? Lounging around all day, getting fanned by palm fronds, hand-fed dates by scantily-clad young men and women - that doesn’t appeal to you?”
He was looking at me like I’d gone mad. “No! God, no. I have exams, and besides, why are you so sure it’d be dates and palm fronds? You know how some cultures treat their gods? Do you know what counts as worship? Sacrifice! Entrails! Blood, death, cannibalism, mutilation, even for the vessel themselves!”
I shrugged. Amal ran an agitated hand through his hair and it stuck up in messy tufts.
“I looked, you know,” he said. “Hours in the library, trying to find some mention of Mimasta, and you know what? There’s nothing. Which honestly shouldn’t have surprised me at this point, but god, I just want to know if I’m going to be sacrificed! That’s all!” He was up now, pacing, hands curling at his sides. “I was so freaked out last week during the lunar eclipse that I barricaded myself in the library and spent the night there. And the other day I swear I saw the woman in the black car flash a badge at someone - a badge, like she was government, or pretending to be government, and I really don’t know which one is worse.”
“If that eye belonged to a god, then it would explain everyone’s interest.”
“Sure, fine, in theory, but how do we know this Mimasta cult even knows what they’re talking about? Who knows if Mimasta is even a real thing? It sounds like a made-up word. And besides, there have to be loads of gods with pink eyes, so how do they know it’s this one? Why would it be in a jar, sold by some random old lady?”
“Black market, most likely,” I said, tracing a finger around the rim of my mug. “They trade in just about anything. Weapons, occult artifacts, pickled parts of ancient gods, you name it.”
“Ancient?” said Amal. “So you think this eyeball is all that’s left of this Mimasta?”
“Could be. Gods get old, just like everyone else. And humans pickle them and sell them off in parts...just like everything else.”
Amal fell back into his chair. “Oh no,” he said, a thought hitting him. “They’re not going to try and resurrect this Mimasta, are they? Through me, somehow? Through this eye?”
“Kid, I don’t know. You’re asking the wrong person. Anyway, don’t tie yourself in knots with all the what-ifs. You’ve learned something, and it’s not panning out like you’d hoped - fine. Either you keep asking around or you try to ignore it all and finish your degree. No point stressing over things you don’t know.”
He was quiet for a little while and I’d just begun to hope that he would take my advice and ignore the whole thing when he leaned forward suddenly across the table.
“That is the worst advice I’ve ever gotten,” he snapped. “There are literal spirits swimming around me whenever I leave my apartment, cult members follow me wherever I go, government agents or people pretending to be government agents have staked out my university, and I possibly have the eye of an ancient god in my head, which means people may or may not want to sacrifice or dissect me. But hey, no point stressing over things you don’t know. Really sage advice, doctor.”