The night is cold and clear as Ray Ellis moves his telescope gingerly across the sky, monitoring the Blaze Star for an overdue nova when it happens. A flash of white-gold light in the dark pierces the heavens, a needle slicing from infinity down to his eye. Ray recoils from the fat cylinder of the telescope, grabbing at his face as he arcs backward, and he feels his heels brush the back of his head. He hears what sounds like a child’s shriek and he realizes it is his own voice, then he begins to twitch in the frost-covered grass.
His face is wet and his head is on fire, throbbing out from his left eye in a burning pulse that feels like it’s splitting his skull. The lens shattered, he thinks through the burning haze. A shard is somewhere in my eye. His fingers are twitching and one nail catches on the hem of his shirt.
The frost is melting against his right eye, and he savors the chill but wishes his burning left wasn’t pointed skyward. He tries to fix its gaze dead ahead, to ignore the beautifully wheeling colors above him, fearing the shard he feels may bury itself deeper if he moves too much. This fear battles for control against his hindbrain that has set his body to twitching and loses. He can feel the same ache deep inside his right eye and wonders why his brain is doubling the pain in some misguided quest for symmetry.
The sliding door on the other side of the fence creaks open. “Hello?” Ed Maler croaks, his Camel-soaked rumble ominous in the night. “Who’s there?”
Ray tries to call out but it catches in his throat. He feels a low gurgle but can’t force any noise out. The uncut grass tickles his nose.
“Was that you, Ray?” Ed croaks again. Ray can hear his porch creak as the old man crosses. He can hear him on the other side of the fence, peering between the gaps in the privacy fence. The old man mutters something about “fucking telescope” and the porch creaks once more before the sliding door squeals shut.
Ray lies there long enough to feel the dew start to refreeze on his shirt cuffs. When he rises, everything throbs, but especially his eyes. He shuffles inside and leaves the lights off until he reaches the bathroom. He throws the switch and the gray-green walls blind him, the light buzzing above in its outdated fixture.
His face is red and wet, but free from blood. Ray is astounded by how puffy he looks but reminds himself it is three in the morning. His left eye is swollen and bleary—a shock of bright red behind the purpling fat lids that struggle to open. He sees no trace of blood beyond the burst vessels and wonders whether the lens shattered or not, but he can still feel something in his eyes. When he moves his left eye up and down he feels something shifting deep within. He knows the right is free of whatever is making the left ache, but he feels a gentle pulse in it to accompany the roaring throb of the other. It feels gritty, like the face full of sand he got in the Indiana dunes years ago, and he wonders about glass dust rather than a single shard.
Ray tries to get saline into his eyes but gives up, his flesh tight and burning against the solution. He falls atop his bed and sleeps, dreaming of the arc of a golden flame along the Coronae Borealis.
•••
In the late morning, he cannot see out of his left eye. Shadows dance across his vision, a twisting ballet of almost-there shapes that he can’t quite focus on. When he closes his left, a ghostly double-image of them imposes across his right eye’s line of sight. He lays in bed and watches them dance across the chopping blades of the fan before he returns to the bathroom.
The swelling has gone down, but his left eye looks worse. Nearly all of the white is filled with bright red blood and his iris looks almost foggy, its pale brown lost beneath a gray haze. His pupil reacts to light and dark, but he feels something pressing within it as it does. Ray pulls back his eyelid, trying to find the shard of glass he felt the night before, but finds no debris—only angry red tissue. He pours more saline in, hoping to flush his eye and recoils as white-hot light flashes through him, a pain intense as what he felt on the lawn.
Ray resigns himself to a weekend of foggy vision on the couch, abandoning his telescope in spite of the clear skies and potential for the nova’s detonation. Bright lights stab his head with racking pains, so he pulls the blackout curtains and leaves the house lights off. Time dilates and Ray isn’t certain of what day or time it is unless he checks the clock, dim behind the twisting dance of the shapes filling his vision.
When he next wakes, he is ravenous and disappointed to find his vision is worse. It’s dark in his house, but he can’t quite tell whether it’s midnight or midday when he is able to discern the 12:57 from the clock. Ray stumbles to the kitchen, his stomach groaning and empty. The sweats he’s been in since Friday afternoon hold a deep funk that clots his sinuses with an almost fruited stench. He shoves the smell of molded orange peels aside and scrabbles in his fridge for the packet of bologna, handing rolled slices one by one into his mouth before the cool air. He squints against the refrigerator light, the stuttering brightness twisting into wisps as the jiggling shapes dance before his vision.
Ray attacks six slices of bologna before he stops, trying to observe the network of wrinkles on his knuckles. He can’t make out the faded tattoo of the thumbs up symbol he’d inscribed on his thumb during a college bender two decades before. He holds his hands up before his eyes, and he can see them, but as he moves his right deeper into the fridge the v fades to a fleshy blob overlaid with dancing gray shapes. He can feel a swishing in his vision, as if the shapes are swimming through his inner eye.
“Shit,” Ray says, and he starts to cry, the tears burning his left eye. He spends the rest of his Sunday on the couch, listening to the birdsong outside. The Schmidt-Newtonian telescope still stands outside. A blue jay perches on its casing, examining itself in the bright reflection of the corrector plate.
When he thinks it’s nighttime, Ray stumbles down the hall to the bedroom. He piles the dirty clothes beside his closet’s sliding door, then lays on his side of the bed. His bedside table holds several half-emptied plastic water bottles, the other is empty.
Ray settles back against the pillow, staring at the undulating shapes twisting and reforming until their dance and his throbbing skull lull him into a fitful rest.
•••
When he wakes, Ray dictates a text message to his boss. There’s no way data entry would go well for him in this state. He considers who else he should text and decides not to. Ray pours coffee and burns toast while he waits to call the optometrist. The throbbing has eased but he thinks his vision is worse again today. The shapes are doubling across both eyes and make him dizzy when he tries to look past them. What he can see in the bathroom mirror is that the swelling around his eye has gone down. When he thumbs a flashlight, his pupils contract, but Ray sees a flash in his left like an emerging cataract.
He sets an appointment and schedules an Uber to take him to the optometrist’s office. He worries that he should have gone to urgent care or his GP’s office instead, but he’s found no blood or sign of glass in his eyes. It must be a trauma from that flash of light, he convinces himself, worried for his retinas.
Ray battles the vertigo that grips him and crosses to the sliding door. He wants to check the eyepiece, to see if the Newt had shattered. That would give him peace of mind. It’s still early, before the autumn heat has burned off the frost and the chill of grass scraping his ankles sets Ray on edge.
He chastises himself for leaving the Newt out for so long. It hasn’t rained, but overexposure could move up his calibration schedule and create real headaches for viewing quality. So can retinal damage, he thinks, and lays his hands on the telescope body. He tries not to adjust its targeting in case his vision returns—the overdue nova from T. Coronae Borealis is what he wants so badly to experience. He pulls the eyepiece from its housing and heads inside, loathe to try and examine it where a drop might truly shatter the glass. He hears Ed’s sliding door and waves quickly before ducking in.
Ray returns to the couch and holds the eyepiece to his bad eye. His breath catches in his chest and he stares through the haze of twisting shapes, trying to focus on the glass itself rather than the limited view through it. He sighs and swaps eyes, looking for irregularities in his field of view, anything to suggest a shard had erupted from the lenses within. But Ray sees nothing. Finally, he presses a finger to the eyepiece, accepting that he’ll have to battle the resulting smudge for weeks, but no glass bites his flesh, only the smooth coolness of the terminal lens.
•••
Ray puzzles over this on the drive to the optometrist’s office. The driver, a young man whose Honda stinks of weed is playing some form of electronic music he’s never heard before and the beat matches the pulse returning to his eyes. How could his vision have been so ruined if there was no glass to bury itself in his eye? He thought of the flash of light and wondered if it had burned a hole in his retina. An abandoned Rally’s bag crinkles beneath his feet as he shifts and considers the possibility he may be blinded and unable to see the nova.
•••
“This was a mistake,” Ray says. “You’re not hearing me.”
Dr. Shaw closes the folder she’s been busying herself with. “And you’re not hearing me, Mr. Ellis.” Her voice is cold and rigid, nothing like the warm greeting she’d had for him ten minutes before. “Your retinal scans are fine. I see no evidence of trauma to either eye. I know this is hard to hear, but I think you may be experiencing some form of a psychosomatic stress response.” She stands and crosses the small room to the computer desk.
Ray feels ridiculous sitting in the stiff leather exam chair, the metal apparatus full of knobs and lenses hovering just to his side. Through the twist of gray figures he can see that she’s again staring at his retinal scans—he recognizes the smear of green and yellow on the computer screen.
“Your macula and retina are in great shape,” Shaw says. She goes on about his fovea centralis and optic nerve, questions him about his use of sunglasses during the day, his diet and vitamin intake. Ray again tries to press her on the light he observed and whether that could have caused the damage, but she chuckles and says that she’d only expect retinal damage if he’s observing the sun with his telescope.
“It’s not that I can’t see anything,” Ray says and clenches his teeth. “It’s like there’s something between my eye and the world, like I’m looking at it through a film. There’s these dark gray shapes overlaid on everything like static.”
He thinks she nods, but can’t tell if the shapes and his low-grade dizziness are just making the world tilt once more. “Some people do have problems with floaters in their vision,” Shaw says and a light appears in front of his face. She moves the scope from his bad eye to his good eye and asks him to look up, to look left, to look right. “But I don’t see any evidence of cataracts. You appear to be in perfect ocular health. Make sure you’re getting enough rest and drinking plenty of water.” She opens the door. “Maybe take a break from the computer screens too.”
She chuckles when Ray takes a deep breath before pushing up from his seat. At the door she tells him to stop and discuss payment with their receptionist. “You weren’t due for your annual yet, so VSP won’t kick in on this one. And you’ll need to update your emergency contact too.”
Ray nods and staggers down the hall, shapes rapidly twisting before him.
•••
Ray hasn’t left the house in weeks. The shapes have become more defined, their overlay less a blinking afterimage and more a gauzy overlay. Even the ghostly doubling he sees in his right eye has become bolder, the honeycomb of shapes making each day difficult to make it through at all.
His beard itches, but Ray is afraid to try shaving again. The day after his appointment he nicked his neck and it bled for hours, weeping alongside his bad eye.
He’s been getting by thanks to grocery deliveries, but he knows things are going to fall apart soon. Ray’s ignored calls from his data processing center for weeks and now they’ve stopped calling. A stack of mail sits on his kitchen table, the text too small to read through the shapes that taunt him. Even when he closes his eyes they continue to dance before him, shining with a neon green backlight.
At times he tries a DIY eyepatch made out of a washcloth and medical wrap, but this only makes the shapes grow bolder in what was his good eye. “Psychosomatic,” he mutters when he tries to turn on the faucet and accidentally punches the wall instead. “It’s all in your head.”
He stares at the mirror above the sink. Of course it’s all in your head, he thinks. It’s always been in your head. He hates what he can make out of his reflection, the dark circles beneath his eyes and unkempt beard. He thinks his exterior is finally matching who he is on the inside. Ray can’t see his own eyes clearly—they blur before his vision and the shapes grow more active when he tries to stare back at himself. The sloshing sensation has gotten stronger as the shapes become more concentrated and he feels off-kilter most of the time now.
He knows something is really wrong with him, psychosomatic or not. He’s booked an appointment with his GP, but it’s weeks away, and he’s fairly certain he’ll end up in a psych hold at its end.
The Newt still stands in the backyard, but he’s covered it with a tarp against the occasional rain. The grass is knee high now and lousy with biting flies and grasshoppers. When he goes out in the daylight, Ray wears sunglasses—bright light makes his eyes openly run with tears. He hears Ed muttering in disgust when he’s in the yard but does his best to ignore the old man.
At night, Ray quietly weeps on his half of the queen-size bed. He sets no alarms and doesn’t call anyone for help. He doesn’t think anyone would come.
Ray dreams of the nova—the thermonuclear detonation flashing in its small corner of the night sky, matter consumed and utterly transformed into a momentary brightness in the cosmos.
•••
The next day, something in Ray has shifted. The shapes no longer twist and dance across the ceiling, but sit fixed in their honeycombed cells, the ghostly twins in his right eye also unmoving. He can see past them clearly for the first time in nearly a month. His face is wet and he realizes his own tears of relief are comingling with the slow, persistent weeping he’s accepted as the new normal.
In the bathroom, his depth perception has returned. Ray turns the water on with his first try, then sees himself in the mirror. A gasp sticks in his throat.
His left eye is transformed. A golden hexagonal grid like the compound eye of a mantis has consumed his former light brown iris. His bloodshot sclera is gone, also covered by the geometric web. He blinks, and his eyelids cover the grid. When he opens them, it remains. His eyelids are shot through with fine red lines branching out into his head. One reaches across the bridge of his nose, merging into the red tissue surrounding his healthy right eye.
Ray starts to breathe fast and shallow, then licks his lips and laughs through the hyperventilation. He tastes sugar water. He cries at the sweetness and panics.
The shapes turn in his vision, covering his field of view, and he finally sees them for what they are—not crystalline floaters, but a beachhead for something in the heavenly darkness, a scouting party looking through one end of their telescope. Their fluid forms stretch in tendrils or reach in extended claw shapes, showcasing how they can transform themselves and whatever they inhabit. He is their focusing lens, and soon, he feels with an airy certainty, he will be their doorway to step through.
•••
The day is bright and clear. Ray enjoys the warmth of then sun, though he’s wearing sunglasses and a ballcap against the brightness. The grass scrapes his knees and a grasshopper leaps to his shoulder and scrapes its legs together before it springs once more. He pulls the faded blue tarp from the telescope and replaces its eyepiece, previously lost among the detritus of his half-empty home.
The world still awaits TCRB to explode in its cyclical nova. He hasn’t missed it yet. Ray knows that it will be visible to the naked eye and wonders what the eruption of light might look like to his transformed vision, how his new tenants might dance in the wash of its light.
“Ray,” Ed croaks from the other side of the lichen gray fence, “I need to talk to you.”
Ray sets aside the tarp and crosses to the fence. “What’s up, Ed?”
“You’ve gotta get your shit together, Ray.” He can’t see Ed clearly, only catching glimpses of his pink skin and shock of white hair through the slats, but his voice is gruff.
Ray laughs. “What do you mean?”
“What do you mean what do I mean?” Ed blusters and scoffs. “Look at yourself. Look at your house. Look at your yard. You are losing it. You’re not taking care of yourself or your property and I’m sick of it. Do you know how many mice I’ve caught since you threw in the towel and stopped mowing? I could make hay out of your lawn.”
The old man goes on, talking about their HOA and county code enforcement, common courtesy and health. Then he stops and asks, “Are you even listening to me?”
“Loud and clear,” Ray says and turns to go. He wants to check the alignment of the telescope and then nap; the nova may arrive that night.
“You act like you’re the first person to lose someone,” Ed says. “But you gotta keep moving. Are you even working? Do you even care? Sure, you might be beat down, but you don’t need to lose your house over it.”
Ray clenches his teeth. “Leave me alone, Ed. And grease your door—I’m sick of its noise and yours.”
“Mow your fucking lawn, Ray,” Ed shouts back, then starts to hack and cough. Ray hears the snap of a lighter and smells the acrid bite of cigarette smoke.
Ray goes back inside and draws the curtains, listening to the chirp of grasshoppers outside his window. He sits on the couch amidst the nest of water bottles and food wrappers that he can now see clearly. He accepts the mess and closes his eyes to watch the shapes shimmy and reform again and again in anticipation of the night sky.
•••
The night is cold and clear and Ray is marveling over how sharp his transformed left eye can see the stars and nebulae when T CrB goes nova. A pinprick of light expands and explodes in the lower left of the constellation, its arc of brilliance swelling in bright white that thrums and pulses in the lens. Ray flinches, but nothing pierces his eyes, and he sighs in relief. The light folds and twists in his kaleidoscoping vision and he laughs, wishing he had a means to document the nova as he sees it now.
Then it happens. Ray feels his golden eye pulse and swell against the lens and he cries out in the night, high and sharp, as the gold light that pierced him a month before erupts from him, tearing through the Newt and rebounding off mirrors to rocket upward, a beacon in the night sky. He falls back, grasping at his eye, and gasps at the beam still streaking into the night sky. His yard is awash in green-gold light, and the grasshoppers chirp in response to the sudden noonday brightness. And then it ends, the beam rocketing off to whatever message recipient the shapes are reaching out to.
Ray can feel his mind shifting along with them, drawing itself into new shapes. He doesn’t feel so horribly lonesome anymore.
The sliding door squeals next door. “What the fuck are you doing, Ray?!” Ed barks from the deck.
Ray turns and tastes the sweetness of his tears, then smiles. “Stargazing, Ed,” he says. “How about I show you the light?”
Ray walks to the fence and grasps the top of the posts, then pulls himself into Ed’s yard. The old man chokes out, “What the fuck did you do to yourself?” then runs to the house and tries to throw shut the squealing glass door. Ray follows him, his golden eyes full of light and dancing shapes.
