“And what were the shapes?” the optician asked.
“They didn’t make any sense. One of them was a vulture sat on a perch—”
“—A vulture?”
Douglass ignored the incredulity in Dr. Guidon’s voice. His attention was pulled towards the orange tentacles, which had now left the optician’s coat and were floating benignly near the shuttered window at the back of the office like the dismembered remnants of a jellyfish.
“Yeah, a vulture,” he forced himself to continue the conversation, “but part of the same stuff was a big tractor wheel, and then behind that, lots of babies heads, about the size of my thumb.”
Dr. Guidon leaned forwards. “When you say ‘the same stuff,’ what do you mean by that, Douglass?”
“It’s all the same colour. This time it was bright blue with purplish outlines, but it changes.”
“So by ‘stuff’ you mean, colour?”
“Yeah, but not only colour. It’s the same sort of texture. Sometimes it’s too thick for me to see through, other times, it’s transparent. When things appear together though, they’re always the same stuff; the same sort of thickness and colour.”
Dr. Guidon silently scribbled some notes onto an age-yellowed note pad, a frown ruffling his bare scalp. Douglass watched the pen twitch across the paper, refusing to turn his attention to the bright pink shrub swelling into existence near the door to his left.
“So, Douglass,” the optician rested the pen next to the notepad, “can you tell me when you first noticed these strange occurrences?”
“Every since I was a kid,” Douglass shrugged, “probably since I was born, in fact. I can’t remember ever not seeing them. I used to run around the house, grabbing at the air, trying to catch them. When Ma asked what I was doing, I used to tell her I was playing with the ‘Fluttering Flies’”
“The Fluttering Flies?”
“Yeah. That’s what I used to call them, my Ma said.”
Dr. Guidon nodded without looking up from the bundle of papers he had pulled from the brown folder on the desk.
“Okay, Douglass. It says here that you had an eye test back in February and the results were twenty over twenty, is that right?”
“That’s what she told me.”
“In that case, I can’t see any point in repeating the tests. I would however, like to examine you for a few other things that may be upsetting your vision. If you could just take a seat over there.”
Douglass sat at the low desk near the back of the room as Dr. Guidon took a seat opposite him. Between the two men was a white plastic frame, with two silver arms protruding from either side that bent to meet in the middle to support a metal plate.
“Now, if you could just place your chin on the metal rest in front of you, Douglass,” the optician said.
Douglass leaned forward, placing his head into the frame. Dr. Guidon then focused a pencil of yellow light straight into Douglass’ left eye, and then pushed his own eyes against the microscopes on his side of the desk. White threads began to grow from the edges of the ceiling, like seaweed fronds made of electricity. The optician had told Douglass to sit very still, and so he did not resist the materialisation. A pale blue aura began to spread from the fronds, and then from the aura, little blue cubes began to float around the office behind Dr. Guidon. Some of the cubes bounced lazily off of each other as though gravity had hardly any pull on them. Others sat heavily in the middle of his vision, allowing the lighter, drifting shapes to touch them and then slowly merge with them to create a larger cube.
“Right, I can’t see anything further here. You can relax now, Douglass.”
Douglass took his chin off of the metal plate and rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands. Windmills of red light spiraled furiously beneath his closed lids. When he opened his eyes again, the red windmills reeled from sight and evaporated as they passed through the white plastic frame on the desk.
“You’ve said that you were driving back from Dover recently, when you had a particularly bad bout of these, what you call ‘Fluttering Flies’?”
“That’s right.”
“Had you been driving for a long time when it started to happen?”
Douglass’ tongue poked involuntarily at the corner of his moustache as he tried to recall his journey back from Dover.
“Well,” he said at last, “I suppose you could say it was a long time. I was coming back from Nice, so I’d had to drive up most of France the day before, and then get the truck on the train.”
The optician looked up from his notes. “You drive a truck?”
“Yeah, all over the place. I’m out of the country most of the year.”
Guidon nodded and then stood to make his way back to the desk near the door, gesturing for Douglass to follow.
“Your symptoms are not unusual Douglass, and you should certainly not be concerned by them. Many people experience similar visual disturbances every day—just rubbing your eyes can momentarily cause you to see colours that are not really there. I think, having read your notes, and then having spoken to you today, that you are suffering from what is known as Closed-Eye Visualisations, or CEV’s as we like to call them.”
Douglass could only answer with a look of perplexity. A small green sphere with two antennae rose up from behind the optician’s left shoulder.
“Now, the name is rather misleading, because subjects do not always experience the phenomena exclusively when their eyes are shut.” Douglass watched the sphere emanate ripples of green into the air from its antennae.
“It is caused,” Dr. Guidon continued, “by something we call phosphenes, which are the false appearance of lights, experienced by subjects who have had some stimuli act upon their retina or visual cortex other than light. Prolonged periods without visual stimulation can result in CEV’s manifesting, and driving for long periods of time across quite blank and nondescript motorways would certain qualify. They can also be caused by hallucinogenic drugs, such as LSD. Are you currently taking and drugs Douglass, prescribed, or otherwise?”
“No.” Douglass frowned incredulously.
The optician leaned back in his chair, nudging the green sphere behind him towards the window.
“Then it seems likely to me that these apparitions are caused by the strain put on your eyes by driving long distances. Does your job involve a lot of night driving?”
“It’s mostly night driving.”
“I see. And presumably you sleep in a motel or hostel when you’re working abroad?”
“No. Chief wouldn’t pay for that. We park up and sleep in our cabs.”
“In the truck?”
“Yes.”
Dr. Guidon looked smugly sympathetic. “Well there are several things we can do at this stage, Douglass.” An enormous oblong of light began to rise behind the optician. It was held together by quivering blue threads. “There is the option of you getting another job.”
Douglass shook his shaggy head.
The optician nodded and continued, “No, I didn’t think that would be an option.”
Douglass shrugged and ran a finger and thumb over the edges of his moustache, as a tiny cyclone of neon pink light coiled on top of his protruding stomach.
“So what can you do then?”
The optician beamed with crooked teeth.
“It is my opinion, Douglass, that your job is causing a significant amount of disruption to your vision. This is the reason you are seeing shapes and colours. Your brain does not instantly recognise these shapes, and so does its best to translate them into something meaningful. Your subconscious will play a large part in this translation, all the more so because you are tired and getting broken sleep by not resting in your own bed. My recommendation is therefore that you pick up a pair of non-prescriptive night driving glasses from the stand in the waiting room. Put them on whenever you’re driving at night, and this should help to decrease the wear and tear on your eyes. I would also suggest that you pop over to the health food store across t
own, and get yourself a jar of valerian root. Just take it as the directions suggest, and you should find that it will help you get a full night’s sleep, which will in time help your eyes recover from the strain of driving, and will also allow your subconscious to recuperate and stop interfering with your vision.”
The optician stood up and closed the tatty notebook on the desk.
“We’ll see how it goes, Douglass, and make you another appointment, let’s say, for three months time. If by then we’ve seen little or no improvement, we can look at alternative methods of treatment.”
A reflective, petrol-coloured sphere wobbled in front of Dr. Guidon’s mouth, and then gave birth to a smaller sphere which hovered around his right cheekbone. Douglass squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them again, his eyelids unleashed a myriad of sparkling white snowflakes into the room. He took the appointment card and sloped back into the waiting room to collect his night driving glasses.
~*~
His house looked gloomy, despite the sun that seemed to blanch the rest of the street. Not that he could really call it his house; he had only visited it three times in the past two years. He stood for a moment in the cold shade of the driveway, wishing he was brave enough to admit to his wife that he smoked. He was nervous about seeing the kids again. They seemed to grow more distant from him with each passing visit.
The television flickered behind the net curtains of the front window, brightening the otherwise dreary lounge. Douglass fumbled in his overalls and found his keys. The porch door opened into the empty lounge with the television in the corner blaring banal cartoons to an absent audience. Schoolbooks and action figures littered the red velvet sofa by the wall nearest the stairs. Beyond the sofa Douglass could hear the chatter of his family mingling with the drone of the radio in the kitchen. He picked his way carefully over the games console and half-constructed toy train track on the floor, and opened the kitchen door.
The babble of the disc jockey in the kitchen behind him only served to frame the silence he was greeted with in the dining area. His family looked up from the meal they had almost finished, and frowned at him as though he was something absurdly unpleasant. Sasha, his teenage daughter muttered something that sounded like ‘oh no, not you,’ and his twin sons simply looked away from him and continued their conversation about a creature they were trying to defeat on the fourth level of something called Bloodlust.
A soapy steam washed over him as he opened the door to the utility room. In amongst the humming refrigerator and shuddering tumble drier, somewhere behind the makeshift string clothesline, his wife was hanging up another day’s laundry. He uttered a tentative ‘hello,’ trying to make himself heard over the clamour of machinery.
“Oh, it’s you.” His wife didn’t look away from the beige towel she was hanging to dry.
“Who were you expecting?” he said, trying to push some humour through the steamy air.
“Anyone else.” She stepped out from behind the towel, eyeing him briefly as she bent down to pick up the overflowing laundry basket. Douglass tugged nervously on the corner of his moustache as his wife pushed past him and stomped into the back garden. He shuffled after her.
The sun outside was dazzling, and Douglass squinted against its rays as two fluorescent yellow ovals rose up in front of the weeping willow tree at the back of the lawn. “Don’t make that face.” His wife didn’t turn from the washing line as she spoke. “You look even uglier when you make that face.”
Douglass sighed and stepped back into the shade under the trellis. This cold, loveless family was his only reward for all the hours he spent on the road to keep a roof over their ungrateful heads. Not that they saw it that way, of course. As far as they were concerned, he’d upped and left for some big continental adventure eight years ago, shortly after the birth of the twins, leaving the family to fend for themselves. How could he expect them to appreciate him, to love him, when—if you added it up minute for minute—they’d probably seen more of the boy who delivered the Bristol Bugle rag every afternoon, than they had of him in the past three years.
“So, how have things been?” Douglass asked, flattening the ends of his moustache against his lips.
“What do you care?” Again, his wife didn’t look at him.
He stood in the awkward silence for a moment, thumbing the calluses on his palm before saying: “I got some night driving glasses from the optician’s. He said they should help my eyes.”
“So you’re not mad then?”
“Leave it out, Fran. The GP’s already said it’s not hallucinations I’m having, remember? He said there’s nothing wrong with my head—it’s my eyes that don’t work properly.”
“Yes, well that’s a matter of opinion.” She seemed to mutter this to herself. As the clouds separated, the sun’s heat seemed to starch the conversation out of the garden again. Douglass watched a bright blue circle attached to a thin pole of light climb at a right angle into the sky. He tried to think of something else to say, something she wouldn’t be able to shoot down so precisely.
“Chief called on the way back. He wants me in Italy tomorrow afternoon, so I’ve got to be up at five to get down to Dover.”
“Nice for you.”
“Well, I wish I could spend a bit more time with you and the kids.”
“You’re in a minority of one there then.”
There was no talking to her when she was like this, and the children would only mirror her mood as they always did. Douglass pulled himself out from under the trellis and sloped back into the utility room to pick up some newspaper to polish his boots with.
He slept on the sofa that night. He would have to be up before dawn if he was going to make it to Italy by the afternoon, and it wasn’t fair that he should wake his wife up as well.
He felt lonely as he looked over the toys and books discarded over the thick pile carpet. It would be four months until his next visit home, four months before he would see Sasha, Mark, or Oliver again. He missed them bitterly while he was away, and yet now, a part of him was excited to be leaving the gloom of this house, and getting on the road again. He rested his head on his hold-all, watching a luminous purple cylinder snake out from the side of the television.
The ferry journey to Calais was uneventful. He ate beef bourguignon with poppadoms for breakfast, watched a sci-fi movie with a few of the other drivers, then tried to ignore the diesel stench and allow the boat’s motion to rock him to sleep.
He made good time from Calais down to Nice. It was a hot day on the continent, and his eyes had been making beings and buildings out of the sunlight for the whole journey. He stopped twice on his way through Paris, and once in Avignon to dose up on coffee, and to read the next chapter of the novel he had found on the seat next to him during one of his many ferry crossings a few months back. After a mild interrogation from the Italian transport police, he crossed the border to Ventimiglia at four p.m., left the motorway, and began making his way along the winding Roman roads towards the city’s port.
He hated driving in Italy, especially northern Italy. The roads were left to ruin, and the air was hot and dense with car fumes. He took a left into the old part of the city, reaching into the passenger well for his water bottle; he knew these roads so well, he could have almost driven to the port with his eyes closed. The traffic flanking the river was reduced to a crawl. Douglass pulled on the handbrake and leant forward in his seat.
White shafts of sunlight glared through the windscreen, and he squinted as a sudden pain shot across the back of his eyes. The white noise of the city rushed into his cab as he rolled down the window. It was the wrong time of day to be caught in traffic in this part of the city; the sun was unrelenting. He drummed idly on the hot black rubber of the steering wheel, thinking about what his wife had said about him being ugly. He pulled down the sun visor to stop himself squinting, and rubbed the pain in his eyes away with back of his palm, which sent purple plates of light spilling over his hands and through the door of his cab.
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Ignoring the impatient car horns from the traffic behind him, he suddenly became aware of a humming sound. It was coming from outside, so faint it was almost drowned by the clamour of the city. The heat and the river would undoubtedly provide a Mecca for mosquitoes, and Douglass shuddered, rolled his window up a little and scratched his back. The traffic in front began moving forwards again, and Douglass pushed down the handbrake and slowly eased the truck forwards.
A flicker of pink and purple to his left made him turn quickly. A cascade of giant luminous shapes were tumbling over the parade of shops. They were round and bubbly, and something about them reminded Douglass of fridge magnets. As they slowly bounced away from the buildings, the dull humming noise seemed to shrink away into the distance with them, only to then rise in volume as they fell back towards the roofs of the cafés and bars.
Douglass turned his head back to the road. They’d never made sounds before, he thought nervously. It’s my eyes, they’re the problem, not my ears.
The top piece of the steering wheel winked out of existence suddenly, and in the gap created, a luminous blue triangle appeared, twirling slowly in between the two black rubber ends. He could see tiny detail overlaying the triangle that almost gave it the appearance of a cross-sectioned lounge from a doll’s house, all made of fuzzy blue light. The spinning light sounded like a kettle coming to the boil.
I’m hearing things too, he thought. Seeing and hearing things. Well, I guess Fran was right: I am mad. Mad and ugly.
He drove on towards the bridge, forcing his eyes to ignore the swabs of bright colours that were pushing in from the sky. Gotta to stay focused on the road, he told himself. He took a quick left over the bridge, and began to climb a steep narrow hill, flanked by precariously tall buildings that stooped like crooked old giants against the skyline.
Not far, he said through gritted teeth, I’ll drop off these cigarettes, then pull into a lay-by and get some rest.
Something was hovering in the space where the passenger door had been; something made of yellow and green light. His eyes flitted from the road to the passenger side, to the road again. It seemed static anyway, whatever it was, and he thought how bizarre it was that he actually took some comfort from this. He could see the asphalt road rushing past through the gap where the curved light sat. A flurry of winged purple blobs suddenly buzzed up past the curved light and swarmed around the cab. They brought the smell of new television sets in with them.