Enucleation Means to Remove an Eye

by Jason Sanford

 

Introduction

Ask Waidt a question about cutting out the human eye. He has all the answers:

Every time Waidt drives up to a hospital to do an enucleation, he sits in the parking lot for a few minutes and reads the answers on the little notebooks and binders in his briefcase. Waidt hates hospitals—almost as much as he hates being around people. To stay focused he memorizes all of his answers:

Now, sitting in his car outside the Wetumpka Hospital, Waidt knows he shouldn't do this enucleation. A conflict of interest. Could lose the damn job. Could screw everything he's wanted since being a little boy.

Waidt practices his answers.

* * *

The Story

When Waidt walks in the front door of the Wetumpka Hospital, he carries his briefcase in one hand and his surgical kit and sterile icebox tucked under the other arm. Waidt is so tall and big-muscled that the icebox with its obnoxious orange and black LIVE ORGANS sticker fits discreetly under his armpit. His supervisor once remarked that Waidt looks like a well-dressed construction worker or professional wrestler. Waidt likes this impression because it lessens the chance that someone will interact with him.
He walks up to the information desk.
"I'm from the Alabama Eye Bank. I'm looking for the McBride family."
The bored receptionist waves Waidt toward one of the back halls. Waidt's never liked hospitals, and he knows this is because of bad memories from being in this very waiting room as a kid. He was five then, and sick with fever, his hands so heavy that bringing a thumb to mouth to suck imagined away into impossibility. He and his mother waited in this room for hours before being seen by a doctor, who looked at Waidt for one minute and then sent them home with a dismissive, "It's only a fever."
As he walks down the hall, Waidt sees Charles's family waiting for him. Before they notice him, he backs up and heads for the nearest bathroom.

* * *

Understanding

Waidt's answers about enucleation and donating eyes are written on laminated sheets, which he keeps in a three ring binder:

Once, while Waidt was preparing for a training session on interacting with donor families, the director of the Alabama Eye Bank saw him reading through his answers. She had been flirting with him all morning-asking if he worked out, mentioning how much she admired tall, silent men with muscles. When she saw his notebook of laminated responses, she took the notes and passed them around for everyone to see how organized Waidt was. "I wish I had more men like you working for me," she said with a sexy smirk.
Waidt simply smiled and nodded.
What Waidt didn't say was that we had to write everything down or he couldn't function. The doctors had different names for it—some called it compulsive, others a disorder—but every physician he'd seen had said it was so rare that they didn't know what to do except dope him up on different drugs and see what happened. Waidt still had a drawer full of prescription bottles from these different, unsuccessful experiments.
In practical terms, Waidt's condition meant that he panicked whenever anyone asked him for anything, or asked what he thought about something, or wanted any opinion from him at all. If he hadn't prepared his responses in advance by looking through his lists, all he could do was smile, and nod, and pray that people didn't think him dumber than he felt.

* * *

The Story (with a bit of understanding)

In the hospital bathroom, Waidt washes his hands in hot water, lathers, then rubs with a hard circular scrub before drying under the blower. He does this before he meets people because a book he once read said it gives one's handshake a warm, human touch. He liked the suggestion because he relies on people liking him. If people are angry or dislike him it became harder to know in advance what he should say or do.
It was only three hours ago—at 1:00 in the morning—that Waidt received the phone call about Charles killing himself. Unfortunately, Waidt's new lover Philip had answered before Waidt could even stir. "It's for you," Philip had said, rolling under the covers with the receiver. Waidt dug for the phone as a muffled voice mumbled "Hello, hello?"
At first Waidt panicked when he recognized the voice of Charles's sister, but as he listened he calmed down. Charles was dead, Barbara said. Could he come and remove Charles's eyes?
Waidt wasn't sure what to say. Philip was laying there so Waidt didn't want to grab his little notebook—the one full of notes on what to say when unexpected people called from the night stand.
So when Barbara asked him to do Charles's enucleation, Waidt fell back on the safe answer to everything: "No."
"Why not?" Barbara asked.
Waidt glanced at Philip. His eyes were closed, so Waidt grabbed the notebook. He pretended to write down information while flipping through the lists of answers until he reached the section on the Eye Bank.
"Can't you just call the eye bank?" Waidt read into the phone. "Someone in Montgomery could come do the enucleation."
"Maybe he'd have wanted you to do it. Besides, it's a suicide."
Waidt nodded to himself. When the eye bank hired Waidt, his trainer stated simply, "Avoid suicides, avoid murders." When asked why, the man mumbled about the paperwork of unnatural deaths, as if suicide and murder victims were awash in forms and signature slips while natural deaths passed with the simple blessing of organ removal.
Waidt flipped through his notebook some more, but couldn't find a decent response fast enough. His eyes fell on a sentence and he read it:
"I'll call the eye bank and find a way to do it."
Waidt wrote down where Charles was then hung up. By this time Philip was staring at him, so Waidt walked into the other room to dress.
Once he was alone, Waidt tried to feel Charles as dead, but couldn't. Some part of Waidt believed that his skin should run cold or his stomach clench up at the news but he felt no physical reaction at all, as if his body refuted everything Barbara had just said.
Waidt still hated Charles, and still missed him.
After dressing, Waidt walked into the kitchen to pull out his notebook on Philip, which he kept hidden behind a box of cereal. Waidt had been spending time with Philip for a few weeks, and this was the first time Philip had actually stayed overnight. Waidt read through his list of responses and possible things to say, wrote a new response onto one line, then walked back into the bedroom.
"Where are you going?" Philip said from the bed. Waidt tugged the sheets so Philip's thigh—muscled and tanned from the spa—emerged for a moment before Philip jerked it back under the covers.
"I need to do an enucleation. You wanna get breakfast when I get back?"
Philip already knew that Waidt did enucleations as a way of paying for college, and to Waidt's relief Philip merely nodded and rolled over and went back to sleep without asking any more questions.
It was only after he was driving toward Wetumpka to cut out Charles's eyes that Waidt realized that inviting Philip to breakfast hadn't been what he'd meant to say. Those words had just popped out—unplanned and unrehearsed.

* * *

The Story

Before leaving the hospital bathroom, Waidt flips through the possible answers to questions donor families may ask. The notebooks and lists relax him-focus him onto a manageable list of options so he doesn't say "Blue" when someone asks "What is two plus two?"
Once he feels confident, he walks out to find the McBride family in a small enclave at the end of one hall—father, mother, and Barbara, all sitting on a bench beside the candy and coke machines.
"Mr. McBride, Mrs. McBride, My name's Waidt Satorius. I'm from the eye bank." As Waidt shakes hands with Charles's father, he notices a sudden look of puzzlement on Mr. McBride as the older man locks in Waidt's face.
"You were a friend of Charles's, weren't you?" Mr. McBride asks. He is in his mid-fifties, with a line-worn face and taut skin that crashes off his steep forehead into a hollow of cheeks and rising chin.
Waidt is ready for this question. "Yes sir."
Waidt waits for a response, but Mr. McBride doesn't even nod. The impulse to nervous smile runs Waidt's face as he wonders if Mr. McBride ever knew the truth about him and Charles.
"Did Barbara inform you about the donor program?" Waidt asks.
"Yes," Barbara says. She is wearing a pressed clean nurse's uniform, with no smudges on her nametag. Waidt didn't know she was a nurse, and his mouth starts to open to ask her about the irony of Charles—who hated anything to do with blood and gutsh—having a nurse as a sister. Inappropriate, he thinks, clenching his lips shut. Not a good thing to say. "Do you have any questions?" he asks instead.
"Can't say I have," Mr. McBride says. "Just what's he going to look like laid out in the funeral with no eyes?"
"You won't notice. Funeral homes fix things so no one can see the enucleation." Waidt mentions briefly the mortician's clay that fill empty eye sockets, or the high-tech ocular prosthetics that give an eye heft and swell behind sewn-shut eyelids. He feels confident because the right answers are flowing out of him, with no gaps in thoughts and no puzzling looks from anyone.
"I'm just not sure Charles would have wanted this," Mrs. McBride whispers from beside Barbara. "He fought any doctor trying to cut on him. I mean, that's what the Egyptians did and look where it got them."
"What the hell are you talking about?" Mr. McBride asks.
"Charles said they used to cut out the dead people's organs and keep them in jars. I don't think he'd want something like that."
"It'd be good to donate the eyes," Barbara states.
Waidt doesn't know what to say to all of this, so falls back on a previous answer. "You won't notice. Funeral homes fix things so no one can see the enucleation."
"Already discussed that," Mr. McBride says like Waidt is stupid. He tsks-tsks his head and asks where to sign.
When they are finished with the paperwork, Waidt shakes hands with the parents and walks down the hall to Charles's body. Barbara follows him.
"I want to observe," she says when they are out of sight of her parents.
Waidt doesn't have an answer for this.

* * *

Understanding

In eighth grade, Charles became the first person to every understand Waidt.
Until then, Waidt had kept everything hidden. His mother taught him to wake every morning and plan out responses to whatever might come up. If something new came his way, she told him to keep quiet. "You're not stupid," she'd said. "But if people think you are, they'll get you going down the retard track at school and that'll make you stupid."
School wasn't a problem for Waidt. He was great at homework, and teachers only asked him questions on what they were studying. Otherwise, Waidt kept quiet. Waidt was big even as a kid, and by the time he was thirteen he stood six foot three with 250 pounds of muscle. Waidt rarely spoke and when he did he always seemed to have just the right answer. People said he was a smart giant. He liked this and let people go on thinking it.
Then came eighth grade and Charles. Waidt had seen him around before, but they had always been in different classes and on different schedules. Now, though, Waidt began running into Charles everywhere. He'd see Charles watching him in the classroom, on the football field, and even on the bus coming and going to school.
One day Charles walked up to him.
"Are you stupid, or is something else going on with you?" he asked.
Waidt didn't know how to respond, so he kept silent and just walked on, playing his role as the shy, quiet giant.
The next day Charles asked him the same question. Waidt had tried to prepare a response that morning—something on how he saw answers everywhere, answers to everything that people could ever possibly ask (if they only knew how to ask everything)—but he had been unable to prepare enough before Charles approached him, so he simply walked away yet again.
This went on for the next two weeks. Every day Charles would ask Waidt what was wrong with him, and every day Waidt found different reasons not to prepare an answer for Charles.
Finally, on a Monday afternoon while Waidt walked to football practice, Charles caught up with him again.
"Well?" Charles asked.
Waidt looked down at Charles, who was so scrawny and short that it would take two of him to equal one of Waidt. He could beat up Charles. He could turn him bloody. But instead, Waidt simply smiled.
"When people ask me questions, I see so many possible answers that I don't know which to say."
Charles nodded at that and said that made sense.
"I didn't prepare that answer," Waidt said. "I mean, it just came out."
If Charles understood the significance of that, he didn't let on.

* * *

The Story

Charles lies on an examination table in a small hospital ward. A green drop cloth covers him so only vague mounds and crevices hint at what's beneath. Barbara stands next to the table, running her fingers along the metal surface.
Waidt walks to a table in the opposite corner of the room and opens his briefcase. He makes a big show of flipping through some official-looking paperwork, but what he's really doing is looking through his notebook for what to say. His eyes hit on a fall-back list titled "Catching Up with Friends and Family." Waidt doesn't count Barbara as either of these, but he quick-scans the list and feels more at ease.
"How'd you get this job?" Barbara asks as Waidt opens the plastic bag containing his sterile tools and begins placing them on an instrument table.
"I'm just doing this till I get through graduate school. I'm studying to be a archeologist." Waidt wonders how many times he has said that exact sentence, then shuts his mind before he begins to answer that question aloud.
"Do you need any help?" Barbara asks. Since he has no ready-made answer for Barbara, he ignores her and keeps arranging his tools. He still marvels at how easy-to-use his instruments are. There is the scalpel to cut the extraocular muscles and the conjunctiva, and a spoon-shaped tool to slice the optic nerve. Fours snip snips, one gouge, and out pops the eye. It amazes Waidt that removing an eye requires only one week of training. Still, the job's good, lets him travel the state, and Waidt prides himself on never dropping an eye. A silly thing, he thinks, but one slack day and plop, there goes the cure of sight.
"I've never dropped an eye," he says. Barbara nods awkwardly while Waidt bites his lip for letting that comment pop out.
Waidt places the container for the eyes on the table. They remind him of giant contact lens cases—if those cases were filled with pink-soda-pop-like liquid. A small notation on the case states that eyes must be removed within twelve hours of death.
Charles died almost nine hours ago.
"I'll need a 10cc blood sample," Waidt says, following back on his memorized enucleation conversation list. "To test for sepsis and other diseases."
"The doctors took several samples to look for drugs. Will that do?"
"Yes." He looks to her. Barbara's face is more puffed up than he remembers, and her dirt-dust hair is thin. Barbara's three years older than him, so she must be 28 or so. Silly to think she would always be so much older than me, he thinks. When he and Charles were in eighth grade, those three extra years seemed massive, like a forever dividing line between her and them.
Barbara hands Waidt Charles's medical records. Waidt flips through them while writing on the donor medical history form. He sticks a copy of the death certificate behind the clipboard.
"He didn't have any infectious diseases that I'm aware of," Barbara says. "And he died of suicide. What more do you need?"
Waidt keeps quiet. The urge to flip through the records rips him. He wants to pour into Charles' life, to read about those diseased moments he missed during their years apart. But Barbara is watching, so Waidt simply scans the most recent reports and closes the folder.
"Everything looks okay. If the blood tests come back fine and the corneas pass examination, they'll be good for donation."
Waidt lays Charles' medical folder on the table and slips his clipboard and form into his briefcase.
"If it makes any difference," Barbara says, "I covered his eyelids with damp cotton wool. To keep the eyes moist."
Waidt doesn't have a response, but he wonders: Didn't the Egyptians do that when preparing a body for mummification?

* * *

Understanding

When Waidt realized he could talk freely around Charles, they began spending as much time together as possible. Waidt was amazed at how all their conversations flowed so naturally.
Once, during a Saturday-night sleepover at the McBride house, Charles and Waidt stayed up to watch The Mummy on late-night cable. Charles hated dead bodies and bones and any hint of blood and guts, but Waidt wanted to see the pyramids and mummies. They laughed at the hokey plot and silly effects, while Charles closed his eyes during the cheesy gruesome parts. During commercials they talked about who was dating whom and who had grown over the summer.
But mostly they talked about Barbara. She was sixteen then and had just gotten pregnant. Not so much that Waidt could really tell—"She just looks a bit paunchy," he told Charles—but Waidt and Charles were fascinated by her condition. "I mean, she's really done it," Charles whispered, and Waidt got excited. 'IT' was a big deal. Despite what older people said, sex really did happen among teenagers. Barbara was undeniable proof.
Charles swore Waidt to silence. "She only told my parents today; at least wait until she confesses it at church tomorrow before saying anything." Waidt agreed, not bothering to tell Charles that he had no one to tell the news to. Charles's family was really religious. Waidt occasionally went them to the Wetumpka Church of Christ, and he tried to imagine standing before those couple hundred frowning people and confessing something of his own. The thought whip-jerked his stomach to sickness.
Waidt and Charles tried staying awake through the late-night movie but fell asleep on the sofa. Waidt woke later to find his head resting on Charles's leg and Charles's hand on Waidt's chest. Waidt didn't know how to react. In grade school he'd been taught about touching. "Is this a good touch," the teacher would ask, touching the groin of a mannequin. "No," the students yelled. "Is this a good touch?" she asked, touching the hand. "Yes." "Is this?" She kissed the dummy.
"No!"
Waidt figured that what Charles and him were doing was a bad touch, but he really didn't care. As he fell back asleep, he wondered what body part inside himself made warm feelings come alive.
He woke again later that night to a movement in the TV's hueless glow. It was Barbara, staring at him from the den's doorway. Waidt strained to see her belly but it was hidden beneath her T-shirt and loose shorts. Her stare flashed Waidt's mind to the animals he'd seen on Wild Kingdom, and he giggled…then shut up, afraid that Barbara would think he was laughing at her. But Barbara surprised him by smiling. "Don't let Dad catch you two," she whispered. "He'd kill both your asses."
Waidt didn't know what to say, so he simply smiled and nodded as Barbara walked back to her room. Waidt could easily see Charles' father killing them both so he eased off the sofa and Charles's thigh and slept the rest of the night on the floor.
The next morning Barbara confessed her pregnancy in church. Waidt went to the service with Charles. They sat on the rear row—"The devil's pew," Charles muttered—and watched as Barbara walked to the front during the invitational hymn. Waidt could only see the back of Barbara's blue cotton dress and still couldn't see any pregnancy. He asked why she couldn't confess her sins in private.
"She can," Charles whispered, "but everyone's gonna know soon enough, so it's better for her to confess publicly."
Waidt watched as Brother Jed, the preacher, stood and walked over to where Barbara sat. They talked for a little bit, then Brother Jed walked back to the podium.
Waidt didn't hear the words Brother Jed spoke, or the prayer he led for Barbara. Instead, he watched the reactions of Barbara's family. In the row behind Barbara, her mother cried with silent gasps. Her father refused to bow down as he prayed, instead raising his hands to his nose and lips. Waidt imagined how they felt. Imagined what it'd take to make his own mother feel that way.
Charles gently squeezed Waidt's knee. "What a shit service," Charles said.

* * *

More Understanding

Aside from Charles, Waidt has only known a few people he could talk freely to. His mother is one of them. And, for one brief moment when they first me, Philip is the other.
He first met Philip at the Atlanta airport six months back. Waidt was flying to a summer archeology internship in Egypt. Because he liked to arrive early for any scheduled event, Waidt sat for three hours next to a handsome man in a beautifully rough Thai-silk suit, who introduced himself as Philip. Philip was much smaller than Waidt, skinner too, with long arms that stretched out as if trying to embrace everyone around him.
They talked. When Waidt was around strangers, he sometimes tried relaxing and letting his words come as they might. If he said total nonsense, that was okay. He'd never see the person again.
"How'd you get interested in archeology?" Philip asked. "Never heard of that before."
"Got my first kiss during a museum movie. About mummies. The kiss, I mean."
"Did it there, did he?"
Waidt grinned.
Philip said he'd love to hook up after Waidt came back. He lived in Birmingham. "Ever go that way?" he asked.
Waidt smiled. "My university sometimes let's me. I mean, I go to the university there."
"Ain't life just one giant coincidence," Philip said.
Waidt spent his three months in Egypt being in love with the image and brief meeting of a strange man in an airport. He wrote down every word they had exchanged, studied the conversation to try and figure out why he had been so relaxed—and able to talk—when usually he couldn't give two good words to people.
On returning he spent a solid week preparing a conversation list before looking up Philip. So many people you meet in the world, he thought. So rare to return to them, to walk up to their door and then speak the perfect conversation.

* * *

More Understanding

At the start of summer break after eight grade, Charles invited Waidt on a church trip to Nashville to see a museum exhibit about ancient Egypt. Charles's preacher, Brother Jed, had organized the trip. "It'll give you a new perspective on the days of Moses," Brother Jed said. "Make you appreciate the lives you've got today."
Despite Brother Jed's optimism, the youth group was silent and in an ill mood as the church van left Wetumpka.
Barbara was swelling—she was eight months pregnant and grumpy and chubby and breaking out in little zits all over her face. Her boyfriend, Scott, sat next to her, acting overly protective and fatherly. "Barbara doesn't want to marry him," Charles whispered. "She says he's got no future and she's too young." Charles seemed indifferent to the guy who'd knocked up his sister. "Shit, she was just as involved as him," he explained.
The only other kid in the van was Colton, who Waidt knew in passing from high school. Even though he was closer in age to Scott and Barbara, Colton hung out with Charles and Waidt and made bad sexual jokes about every passing motorist. "I mean, did you see her hooters," he'd say. "I like a woman who doesn't need airbags in an accident."
At the museum, the first stop on their tour was a film on the preparation of mummies. Waidt and Charles sat several rows behind Colton and ignored his ritualistic cries of gross and cool and assorted bad jokes as the film detailed the pulling of the brain through the nose, the removing of the internal organs, and the wrapping of individual toes in cloth.
Charles kept his eyes closed through most of the film. Near the end, he leaned over to Waidt. "That what you wanna do, huh?" he asked. "Brain through the nose type stuff?"
"I just wanna see it," Waidt said lightly, "not do it. They don't do this stuff anymore."
But he thought: Be cool if they did. Waidt thrilled to think of bodies opening, to see the mysteries of life removed along with the heart, liver, and stomach. He wanted to touch what everyone hid inside and see how their secrets compared to his.
Then, in the dark of the theater, Charles leaned over and kissed Waidt. A little peck, just on the cheek. Suddenly, Waidt felt that Charles was seeing him for the first time. Spiritual
x-ray—like the kind used to study preserved bodies through mummy's wrap—looking right into Waidt's soul.
Waidt smiled and turned to his right. Barbara sat three seats down, staring at them. "Stop that," she whispered too loudly. From two rows up, Colton turned to look as Waidt sunk into his chair. "What are they doing?" Scott asked Barbara, and Brother Jed sat up from the front row to tell them all to shut the hell up. When the film ended, Charles stood up silently and filed out with the rest of the youth group to see the exhibits. Waidt hid in his seat until a new audience came in and the movie reel rewound and "Mysteries of the Mummies" played again.
Canopic jars, Waidt thought. They stored the hearts in canopic jars so they'll always be around.
Two-thirds of the way through the movie Brother Jed tapped his shoulder and led him from the theater. Everyone else stood impatiently in the lobby and stared. Barbara's fingers notched under her expanded belly; her teeth bit the color from her lower lip.
"Guess he didn't understand the movie the first go round," Colton snickered. Charles refused to look at Waidt. After another hour in the museum, Brother Jed drove them all back to Wetumpka.
A month later Barbara had her baby.

* * *

The Story

"I'm ready to do the enucleation," Waidt says. He knows he should instead be asking if Barbara really wants to witness this, or stating how sorry he is for Charles's death, or saying something like that. Instead, Waidt folds the cloth down to Charles's waist. Patches of cotton wool cover are strapped over both eyes with white hospital tape. Charles has no shirt on and his school-glue white chest sinks down, as if he'd sagged around life never getting any exercise. In the middle of his chest is an inch-wide hole surrounded by powder burns.
"Twelve gauge," Barbara says sadly. "Charles must've spent all day sawing the barrel off with that rusty saw of Dad's." She then slips into a stoic, medical tone. "Entry-wound front, exit wound in back. There's little left to his inside chest cavity or his back."
Barbara's analysis disgusts Waidt, and her alternating sadness and lack of emotion makes him want to be sick over Charles, to cry over the dead skin and stiff blood. Waidt jerks around to go wash up but his foot snags on one of the table's legs. Without thought, he slaps his hand down on Charles's chest to steady himself. Charles' lungs and ribs sink with a straining sound and don't rise back up.
"Fuck," Barbara hisses. Waidt walks to the sink and scours his hands almost raw before donning his gloves. "I'm ready to do the enucleation," he repeats, trying to act professional again.
Barbara delicately rubs Charles' chest, as if looking for a way to expand it back out. "Charles died at the hospital," she says. "He lived almost an hour. Doctors said they'd never seen anyone live that long with a shotgun to the chest."
With the cloth draped down, Waidt's eyes are pulled from Charles's burned chest hole to his rigid nipples and lips. Question jump before Waidt. He thinks: What did you ponder while waiting to die? Thinks: Did anyone farewell kiss those lips before you died?
Waidt takes the cotton off Charles' eyes, eases the right eyelid back for inspection. The eyeball is moist and hazel colored, with flecks of brown and green boxing about the iris. Waidt had forgotten that. He wishes he could picture Charles's eyes from when they were alive. The colors dim after death without the little jerks, lifts, the reactions to light that give eyes any meaning, he thinks.

* * *

More Understanding

Reactions to light. Waidt remembers those reactions from the time he and Charles camped in the woods behind Charles's house. It was two months after that awful museum trip to Nashville. Waidt and Charles started the night sleeping outside the tent so they could watch the pine tree silhouettes sway to the wind and the satellites arch the dark sky. They did this for hours until Charles suddenly noticed something.
"What's that flickering among the stars?" he asked.
"Bats, I guess." Charles hated bats. Almost as much as he hated blood and guts. They ran into the tent and huddled together with arms wrapped tight. To calm Charles down, Waidt shined his flashlight about the tent in a warm ball of light. Every time the flashlight beam passed over Charles's eyes, his pupils shrunk to little dots. Eventually Charles relaxed. They started laughing at the idea of a bat swooping from the sky to rip off their faces.
"Bats," Charles said. "'Least it wasn't my father swooping down on us."
The next morning, Charles and Waidt ate breakfast in the McBride's den, where Barbara was feeding her month-old baby a bottle. Occasionally Barbara's mother would come by, make a comment or two about Barbara needing to boil the bottles or let the baby's rash air out, but mostly she left her daughter alone. As for Barbara's father, during all Waidt's time in the McBride house he didn't see him speak one sentence with Barbara.
"He's still mad," Charles whispered. "Gets mad, stays mad." He told how their parents moved like numb ghosts around her—in a dreamy oblivion to Barbara and her baby unless they tripped over the pair. Even her boyfriend Scott rarely came around when Barbara's parents were there. He cursed and bitched about how Barbara was being treat, but she refused to allow him to confront her parents.
"It's like they want her to go away," Charles said.
That afternoon, Waidt and Charles were sitting in the backyard under the sweetgum tree, drinking cokes and talking, when Barbara walked out with her baby.
"Read something today," Barbara said, standing in front of them. Her baby was asleep in a shoulder sling, his face resting peacefully between her breasts.
She continued. "It's in the newspaper. About this queer. About selling his ass in New York."
Charles sat silent. Waidt squirmed.
"You gotta know he's gonna die." She showed them a clipped-out picture of an almost naked man, skinny and worn out with bruises on his arms. He was unbelievably pale, as if drawing away from life.
"Uh huh," Charles said.
"You two better stop this shit or I'll tell Dad," she said to Charles. "And your mom," she said to Waidt.
After she left, Waidt's breathing panicked into shakes. He couldn't imagine the hell that'd come from Charles's father finding out about them—and his mother, she'd die, he knew she'd die.
Charles, though, didn't seem scared at all. He just watched his sister go in the house, then took a long drink of his coke as she closed the door behind her.
"She's trying to keep the shit she's got from coming onto me," he said.
Charles waited for Waidt to say something, but suddenly Waidt couldn't say anything. A million things he could say ran his mind, but none came out. Instead, his mind leapt to his list of fall-back conversations, to the things he always said when he needed to get away from people.
"I gotta go home."
Charles looked at him and nodded. "Yeah. That's okay. I'll be here."
From then on, Waidt didn't call Charles or see him. When Charles came by, Waidt hid in his house until he went away. When he saw Charles on the street, he stayed silent. Once, Waidt worked up a great thing to say—an explanation of how he had gotten scared and was now unable to talk to Charles, just like he was with everyone else in his life. However, when he tried to tell Charles these words nothing coherent came out. Finally, Charles stopped calling or coming by.
Now Waidt regrets his fear. He and Charles had been so much the friends. He thinks, Charles knew how I was. He should have made more of an effort.
He thinks: Why did I let him down?

* * *

The Story (with some final understanding)

Waidt releases Charles' right eyelid and checks the left eye. It too is moist and the same hazel color as the other. But instead of the green and brown jumping around, the colors seem to swirl. He glances back at the right eye—its colored parts spike out in a star pattern while the other eye swirls.
The differences no one notices, he thinks.
When school started that fall, Waidt still found himself still unable to talk with Charles. But now Charles was pissed, and even though Waidt was twice his size Charles turned into a bully. Charles found out the combination to Waidt's locker. Waidt would leave class to find his books and letters scattered all up and down the hallway. Little violations. Waidt began to fear rounding the corner to his locker.
The last time it happened, Waidt was picking up his victimized books when Charles walked down the hall. Criminal returns to the scene of the crime, Waidt thought. They were both late for class and alone. Charles marched down to Waidt and stood with one foot on his books, like Napoleon surveying a worthless victory.
Waidt jumped and punched and missed. Before Waidt knew what happened, Charles pinned Waidt's neck and ran his nose across the smudged tile floors. "Don't ever fight me," Charles said.
"No," Waidt whined. Waidt hated how he could whine. That afternoon the principal called Waidt into his office for starting the fight. "Can't understand why you and Charles don't get along," the principal said. "He's a fine young man."
Waidt nodded, unable to speak. The next day Waidt bought a padlock and spent the rest of the school year being the only kid with two combinations on his locker.
The last time Waidt saw Charles was in the snack food row of the Piggly Wiggly. They'd both been out of high school a year and both had been hurt. Waidt wore a cast over a broken arm. Charles wobbled on crutches, his right leg in a cast, trying to reach a bag of chips on the top shelf.
"What'd you do, play in traffic?" Waidt asked. He'd heard that Charles had gotten hit by a car, and had been saving that comment all year.
Charles raised his fist and rocked front and back on the crutches. "Put them up, faggot," he said.
Waidt raised his cast—maybe to explain that he'd broke his arm on a diving board, and therefore couldn't fight—or maybe to backhand Charles. Before he could do anything Charles swept Waidt's feet with one crutch. Waidt fell and smacked his broken arm on the tiles. Charles smashed the floor broadside with his cast.
The store manager called the ambulance. She mumbled about barring all teenagers from her store as the EMTs strapped Charles and Waidt onto different gurneys.
"Faggot," Charles sang out. "Faaaggot!"
At the hospital, the doctor on duty waved Charles and Waidt off to one side of the hall. "Low priority," he said, so Charles and Waidt lay on the gurneys for two hours, staring up at the peeling paint. At one point a nurse came over and said they were entitled to one phone call each, then became flustered when Charles pointed out that they hadn't been arrested and besides, this was a hospital, not a jail.
The nurse said she'd be back, then walked off. Charles started laughing.
It amazed Waidt that Charles wasn't afraid of being in a hospital, that he could just lay there and laugh when his age-old fears of doctors and cuttings and blood swam all around him.
"What's so funny?" Waidt finally asked, the question popping out like when he and Charles had been friends.
"Well, shithead, in the movies this'd be the point where we old friends would have some mystical revelation and suddenly—poof—understand the other's point of view. You see the pain you've caused me; I'd see what I've done to you."
"And?"
"No 'and.' Just funny how much I still hate you."

* * *

The Story

Waidt lifts the scalpel and cuts the first muscle.
"You enjoying this?" Barbara asks.
Waidt doesn't answer. He cuts the four muscles and clips the optic nerve and pop…out comes the first eye. He places it on the eye stand, cornea up, in the open container that Barbara holds, then pops out the other eye. He then snap shuts the containers, packs them in the cooler, and he's done.
Afterward, Waidt walks to a bathroom to wash up. While there he also prepares a quick list of things to say, things he's dying to ask Barbara.
"How'd you get my number?" Waidt asks Barbara when he comes out. "How'd you know I worked for the eye bank?"
"Charles mentioned your eye bank job last year," Barbara says. She then points to a small black address book in her chest pocket. "He had every number of every place you've lived since leaving here."
Waidt stares—no reaction—refusing to let Barbara get inside him.
"Guess he still cared," she says.
Is that your way of making up, Waidt thinks, or are you still trying to hurt? But Barbara just stands there, silent, then follows Waidt to the hospital exit. If she's has any reaction to all this, Waidt can't tell.
"We can't reveal who the cornea goes to, but we can forward a letter if you want to send one," Waidt says.
"We might do that."
Waidt pauses by the door. He wonders what Barbara is hiding inside herself. He wonders about something Charles said once, in the short while before they came apart. "You can't know what it's like to have an older sister, to have someone looking out for you," he'd said. "She'd never let anyone hurt me." Waidt thinks: Did I threaten Charles that much? Did she get too scared? Did she envy him and me?
But there are no mystic revelations at the hospital doors.
"May I see his address book for a second?" Waidt asks. He hadn't planned to say this, but the words pop out.
Barbara hands it to him. He flips, ABCDE all the way to S and Waidt Satorius. It's true—every address and number is there, some in pencil, some in blue pen. Even Waidt's address in Egypt for those three months.
"Must've gotten the numbers from my mom," Waidt says. "Care if I keep this?"
"Sorry. No. I've got to call everyone Charles knew and tell them." Waidt ponders not obeying and simply walking off with the book. Maybe Charles wouldn't want her to have it. And what's she going to do: wrestle him down in the parking lot? Race him along the highways and run him off the road? What more can she do? Waidt bets that Charles would just walk away, address book in hand, with never a look back to all that's happened.
But Waidt simply hands the book back with a shrug. Barbara thanks him again and walks back inside the hospital.
In his car, Waidt places the cooler in the passenger seat and secures it with the seatbelt. He then writes down a few things to say, fishes around for his cellular phone, and calls Philip.
"It's me."
"You coming back?"
"Yes. I'll drop the eyes off and be back in time for breakfast."
There is big pause, as if Philip is waiting for something more.
"It'll be nice to talk over breakfast," Philip finally says. "Think you'll feel like really talking this time?"
Silence.
Philip mutters, "Yeah yeah, that's what I thought. Do what you've got to do. We have plenty of time, you know."
"I know."
Waidt hangs up and drives out of the parking lot, wondering if he'll ever be forgetting his answers.

© 2006 Jason Sanford

 
Jason Sanford's short fiction has been published in The Mississippi Review, Pindeldyboz, Diagram, Beloit Fiction Journal, and other literary journals, and he is the recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship. He also edits the online magazine storySouth. Because of his work judging the popular Million Writers Award for best online fiction, he was the subject of an 6-page interview in the 2005 Novel and Short Story Writers Market.