Chapter 2

        L.K.  de Vista turned out to be remarkably similar to what Neal had imagined him to be.  This was disconcerting.  The diminutive doctor was strikingly stereotypical with his orange robe and orange skin, his bald head and sunken cheeks.  He was even possessed of a quirky accessory and a bodily misappropriation; he wore a single black eye-patch and had hands the size of heavy winter gloves.   Neal didn’t trust things that turned out to be too much what he expected, knowing that he was a little nutty, and that it was often not a good sign when reality matched too well with his dementia.  Of course he relished times when the universe decided to make exceptions to its dogmatic decorum, but it nothing short of creepy when its crooked conversions happened to match up with his own ridiculous imagination.  Nevertheless he greeted the (hopefully) good doctor with the gusto of a lazy long-lost relative who had just run out of cash, spreading his arms wide in the fashion of modern monkeys and bellowed hopefully “Welcome, good Doctor!”

        L.K. did not understand English well, but he could sure speak it, “I believe my fine sir, that it is my place to extend my Welcome to you…” with a small bow.

        “Yes you might think so, but I assure you, it is my burden, as I am everywhere I go, and I must welcome you to my presence, the best place anyone could be, the panacea possessed by yours truly, alone, and blessed upon only the most fortunate of orange garbed souls.” (Neal realizing this could refer just as well to the man’s fleshy shell as to his traditional garb).  He was nervous, that’s why he was being such an egotist.  There was nothing that Neal distasted more than the ego, both of the individual and the group, which was why he was on a consistent campaign against personification.  The way he saw it, people had enough of themselves without foisting human traits upon all the other beings.  In fact, he considered it a much more noble pursuit to minimize the anthropomorphism of oneself and others rather than vice verse.  Much more valuable to stress the similarities between primate biology and the external world than to extend our particular brand of consciousness onto other objects, after all, our brains were wired up to do just the opposite all on their own, without any help from us.  Someone had to take the other side!

        L.K. was the model of good manners, despite the piratic appearances, and could just as well imagine that someone from the Pacific Northwest would find this an unpleasantly warm day, so instead of making a comment about how badly he wanted to get down to business so he could take this man’s money and move him along, he actually said, “Please accompany me into the laboratory so we may discuss your operation.” Luh-bore-uh-tore-ee, is how he said this word. 

        Neal was here to have one of his eyes taken out.  That’s why he was baking himself on the slope of Cerro el Plomo in Central Chile, looking down on the sprawl of Santiago, consciously towering over a tiny orange man with large hands and an eye patch in front of a tent, from which various sterile smells wafted upon the otherwise very natural hot South American air.  He had heard about L.K. from E. who had in turn heard of him from her Aunt, who had heard of him from him, when she had taken him out dancing when he was in Kourou on “business”.  His business back then had been one slightly different, he was a traveling salesman, now he had graduated into a stationary salesman and much preferred this promotion; make the suckers come to him, L.K. had always been a home-body.  Though the Aunt didn’t know it, she had actually given L.K. the idea for his new business as they gyrated themselves around on the basement floor of a house party to awkward cultural music in an awkward state of mixed drug confabulation.  She said “Whatever comes to the eye, Leave it be.” Quoting some ancient Buddhist poem. 

        Recipe for danger: Young stranger in a strange land falls in love, takes drugs, dances until dawn, has each and every molecule of his brain vibrated by South American beats for hours on end, and listens to esoteric religious poetry in a language he does not understand.  Nothing safe or uninteresting is likely to result.  What L.K. thought his recent love interest meant by this quotation we will never know, but it did lead to him pursue a different course of action which culminated in his becoming an underground doctor, operating from a cliff on a mountain and making exorbitant amounts of money by plucking out peoples’ eyeballs, on a purely voluntary basis. 

        Under normal circumstances, Neal would probably be able to see through such a dangerous scheme, but when circumstances are normal, they have never been in more dire need to be introduced to the presence of something more interesting, and Neal was always happy to oblige.  Sure it was a gamble, and sure the odds were long, but the payoff!  Neal was a great talker, and he talked himself into it.  Now here he was and it was too late to back out, that dizzy, self-constructive, feeling of high-speed inertia had taken hold of his lapels and he had succeeded at pushing his consciousness to his coattails where it belonged, and plunged head-first under the antiseptic flap of the little tent, following a tiny gourd colored man into the air conditioned interior. 

        It looked, and smelled, as though he had travelled through time to his childhood dentist’s office, complete with the funny chair with the spotlight hanging off of it, Neal almost shuddered at the thought of upon what that light would soon shine.  He took off his shoes, so that he would have some more time to think about things, but unfortunately all he thought about was the act of untying his shoes, his brain again rebelling on him.  L.K. kept up his perfectly intoned Butleresque badinage, “Thank you sir, for your podiatral politeness, but please know that it is not necessary to remove your footwear upon entrance to my humble facility.”.  Always polite, and with a fait British accent, Neal was only later to learn that L.K. had picked up the language by translating P.G. Wodehouse novels into Spanish to pass his teenage years, leaving him with the verbal manner of a very proper, though accident prone, and all too clever for his own good, little orange butler in a mountain man’s approximation of a black and white three piece suit, which as it turned out was a dirty orange robe, one had to make do with what one had on hand, had one not?  One could have construed much of L.K.’s speech as a very convoluted, very remedial, lesson in arithmetic. 

        Even though L.K. did not have any more appointments.  That’s right, no more, not just today, or this week, or even month, he had nothing more scheduled at the current moment (not that he needed to, what with the price of this operation which had of course been steeply increased due to the Bush presidency, which had caused the value of the American dollar to drop as low as the country’s morale), as you see the vast majority of his customers were American, of course, despite this fact, he was nevertheless in a very large rush to get the show on the road.  As, you see, L.K. was mortified of the human body.  He was disguted by the softness, the squishy, smelly, whole of it.  The very touch of it through his thin translucent gloves gave him the urge to vomit, which he thankfully was typically able to subjugate until the “patient” was out of range, but invariably occurred within an hour of the deed.  He wanted nothing more than to get this thing over with. 

        Neal used the built up inertia to get himself into the chair and then stopped it cold, now he needed it frozen, to weigh him down and keep him from doing anything stupid, like NOT having one of his eyeballs taken out and turned around backwards.  That is, after all, what he was doing here.  L.K. was famed throughout the world for his innovative procedure.  Soon Neal would, as already 7 others before him all great successes by the way, according to L.K.’s brochure at least, have a very local anesthetic applied to the left side of his face, at which point, L.K. would be making a minor incision, reaching a blunted hooked tool into Neal’s head, and pressing it gently on the rear of his eye, until it was gently forced from its fitted socket, and removed from his skull.  At this point, the eye would be placed upon a special hand-crafted eye stand, while the operation continues.  L.K. would go into the orbital cavity and work loose the attachments, which brought the visual information from the retina back into the brain, he would loosen and stretch those as much as he could and carefully coil them in a little bundle on the floor of the socket.  Then he would be free to go back to the eye itself, pick it up, pull it out as far as it could go, while still connected by that tenuous biological cord, and then turn it around. 

        “One may have a seat; Your ocular operation will commence now.”  As Neal sat he counted on his fingers, but was still stuck going “One, one, one, one…s**t”.  And before he knew it, L.K. had stabbed him with a needle and he couldn’t feel something close to 1/3 of his face, and the ride began…

        Slip-sliding away, expertly ejected, the bulbous searching sushi roll slid from its custom fitted pocket palace, exposing the first time its naked flanks.  Runaway youngster seeking fame and fortune through time honored tactics, revealing what wasn’t meant to be seen, taboo of the flesh, lawless tramp-tease, statutory indiscretions, bloodshot cream from a broken udder, oceans filled with semi-transparent wet t-shirts shot through with laser rays of radioactive eels, a slow fly-over we watched the curve of the ocean, slowly overcoming the delicate suction and then a faintly audible pop, nearly causing as it always did, L.K. to drop his lunch on his prone patient.  Of course, from the inside this was more of an explosion, a gunshot, a rocket launched through the impenetrable fuselage.  Then came the veins, stretching out like parakeet pantyhose being gently removed by an amorous lovebird. 

        Amazingly, it seemed to be working, Neal could still see, he couldn’t feel, he wasn’t in control of the eye any longer, and as the vitreous stretched, the picture came to look as though it was being projected on a sheet, from an ancient projector of a movie shot with a fish-eye lens.  Everything was elongated, and slow, and had flashes of black.  The visual system being set up to accommodate for saccades, and eye which was finally held still, was not interpreted properly by our mis-wired brains.  Such clearly jury-rigged creatures, when we are finally fixed, when the world is brought to us in a more objectively accurate way, our brains don’t know what to do with it and f**k up.  If nothing else, this drove home that lesson to Neal. 

        He knew what an iguana must feel now, and it was god-dammed confusing.  No wonder those creatures with the independantly movable eyes are so retarded-seeming, they have to spend all their time trying to figure out what the hell they are looking at!  L.K. moved with the adroitness of an amateur, but to be an amateur in a field all your own had its advantages, no one else could tell you with authority that you weren’t doing a good job, and indeed as Neal didn’t know what it would be like to have his eyeball handled by someone who knew what they were doing, though that L.K. was probably doing a fine job at it. 

        His field of vision was working, and working great!  Just as Les had seen the cityscape overlayed on that patch of moss back in Portland, Neal now had the same thing, but more lasting.  One of his eyes was still transmitting normally, the view of the office, and the slit of tent flap that hung open, giving him a shot of Mountain Air and Stantiago in the distance, while his other eye was getting an up close and personal take of those giant mitts of which his host was possessed.  And then ever so slowly it started to turn around, L.K. had pulled out a little over 2 inches of stringy springy goo, and was now able to get down to the business at hand.  Neal held his breath, it was finally time to b***h slap that mistaken module back into line, surely this would work.  The eye turned around, and pointed right smack dab into the other one.  Neal made eye contact with Neal, he tasted the apple of his eye, he met his maker. 

        Neal made a strange yelp/sob/wahoo, L.K. would probably have described it as:

        “Sounds of one who saw

         that this flash of joyful awe

         annihilates hope.”

        It was a little like looking in a Zulu voodoo mirror, or perhaps the feeling you get when you, crossing the desert, collapse aside a powerful mirage, and see your own reflection in the night-black sand, or (dare we consider) like looking into the eye of your twin brother in the darkness of the womb the moment you peepers appear.  It was a world-rocking, consciousness altering, unforgettable and powerful experience, but it didn’t fix his problem.  So he started problem solving, he shut his other eye.  With the conflicting singal significantly reduced, his visual processing system was back on track, it wasn’t overlapping two virtually identical images into a strange multi-dimensional cocktail, but instead, was getting a, slightly warped, but nonetheless stable projection of the area in and around his intact eye.  “I need more, back us up, Scotty!” he blurted.

        “If I may be bold

         kind sir I would point out that

         would not be too wise.” L.K. effortlessly adding another work of art to the universal soup, referring to the assumption that much more stress on the optic nerve would at first render the image virtually useless, or perhaps even snap it off.  It was much safer for the rest of the patients life if they allowed Mr. de Vista to use his special heated scalple to simultaneously sever and cauterize the nerve at once, and remove it properly.  A snapped off one could lead to complications which could so eaisily be avoided, well, easily if one wasn’t dealing with someone who was paying you about five thousand dollars a minute. 

        Neal’s adamancy turned out to be good for no one, though he did get what he wanted.  L.K. tugged on that overripe grape tomato like the captain of a tiny boat fighting for his life, he sprayed more of his stretchy goo on the cord, and he chanted a quiet haiku-formed prayer,

        “Thank the gods for pacts.

         Their absence; no comfort could

         Be found for us quacks.” 

        Neal didn’t hear him, Neal was concentrating on his visual cortex.  It was a little like backing into a tunnel, the edges bent out until they turned black, colors didn’t quite work, they were such as he had never seen, they looked monochrome, but felt vivid, it was the most brilliant black and white he had ever seen.  Things stretched beyond recognition, at least he thought so, but he really had nothing to which to compare.  By the time he caught a glimpse of familiarity (his hair and chin), it was a wicked funhouse mirror, but the interior was still as blank as a tape of the inside of a black hole’s coffin at midnight in Alaska in winter.  No dice.  No bones about it; no face.  Now he could be sure about it at least.  There was always doubt to be had that those others even had a face under there that he just couldn’t make out, he knew for sure he had a face, but he just couldn’t see it. 

        When the eye finally winked out with a tiny wet reddish pop, like a fly sitting on the surface of a volcanic lake, like a deflated balloon popped underwater, like a professional diver breaking the surface as heard from a hot-air balloon; Neal was plunked into darkness.  He snapped his remaining oculus open just in time to see his elegiac host rushing from the tent as though the mountains had just paged Dr. Squeamish for a stomach pump.  L.K. was still holding Neal’s eye, with a little red leech with a frayed tail waggling off the back. 

        “Dr.” L.K. de Vista tossed a human eyeball off the side of a small cliff of a very large mountain in central Chile, giving it a great view of Santiago, sky, and stack, and chased it with a prodigious stream of uncharacteristically unmannerly upchuck.  This eyeball was quite normal in many respects being quite exceptional at many things, not including solo aviation.  It whipped around, as graceful as a calliope in a hurricane, spinning its makeshift tail like a drunken gymnast’s baton.  Gravity seemed, for a time, as though it couldn’t be bothered with the orbiting orb, at least until it had mopped up its business with the barf, but it got around to it.  A disembodied eye is a great actor when asked to portray two contrasting yet complimentary emotions, absolute utter terror and unadulterated surprise, it being fully unencumbered by the hindrance of the lid.  Neal’s left peeper succeeded admirably at both, alas nobody was there to see it save a couple of aloof seagulls, a tough crowd, tough crowd.