I have this very vivid memory.
I’m around ten years old, and sitting cross-legged on the carpet in my grandmother’s living room. My living room, as I still think of it, because she raised me from a baby until about seven years old. I’m older now, yes, but not by much; old enough to begin forgetting details about my time here, not yet to start grieving for them.
I am not alone. My father’s here, silent in an armchair at the corner of the room. A large mahogany display case filled with China brought from China blocks my view of him.
I’m playing with an empty silver teaspoon, turning it this way and that so its taffeta-like contours can catch some light from the monstrous chandelier above us.
Suddenly, I get the urge to see it fly. Discover if its wing-tipped handle was designed with aerodynamics in mind. My thumb and index finger grip the teaspoon like they would a paper plane, pinching it just at the point where it begins to curve, otherwise known as its neck. I weigh for control and speed, exaggerate the speed. As soon as it leaves my hand, the spoon disappears from view.
I do not see where it lands. Instead, my father’s scream fills my ears like some kind of screech from hell.
The next thing I remember feeling, as my ears settle into the excruciating sound, is the weight and texture of the thing in my palm. Like a little ticklish marble, a gummy bear clothed in lashes.
My father’s diffuse scream soon solidifies into a plea:
“My eyeball! Please, my eyeball! Somebody help find my eyeball!”
With a start, I realize what I’m holding. I raise my eyes to watch my father cup the right side of his face as though preserving some precious liquid oozing out of his newly-denuded eye socket, and close my hand into a fist.
If my father blames me for his loss, he’s too preoccupied to show it. Like a man on fire, he starts shuffling erratically around the room, then makes a run for the kitchen, situated to the right as you exit the living room into the central hallway of the apartment.
For a while, everything quiets. Whoever’s in the kitchen must have calmed my father down. As always: easily set off, just as easily pacified.
I take this opportunity to inspect my treasure. This is his missing eyeball, alright, no doubt about it: that infinite black pool of iris cannot be easily replicated. I flip it around, suddenly curious about its back. A mass of veiny, boring white greets me and I realize my treasure might not be worth keeping. Might not, in fact, be a treasure at all. Just a misplaced piece of someone else. A foreign thing, unusable because unearned.
I crawl towards the kitchen and knock on the solid white door. It opens and there stands my father, large as life, his naked emptiness obscene, his hand outstretched in my direction.
You were easily able to picture all this, weren’t you?
What if I said it was all fake? Fake not like fiction, but like my father never having lost his eyeball and me never, ever having held it in my hand.
Why, then, do I remember it all with such clarity?
Once, in primary school, I told this story to my teacher, in front of the whole class. She was a wise and understanding woman, so I was hoping for an honest judgment. Laughter boomed around me. She quieted everyone down, then made the gentle suggestion it had all been a dream. I have written before about dreams, specifically about how weird it is that we remember some and not others, so I suppose it’s possible.
The trouble is, I don’t remember waking up from such a dream. One day, the memory was just there, as though a video file had been downloaded into my brain.
I play it back sometimes, when in need of an escape. Real or not, it sits as one of my most cherished memories, because it preserves a side of myself I no longer see much of these days: an Andrei innocent enough to believe something like that might be real.
From the archives:
Funeral Blues - On the death of my first teacher.
On Dreams - Why do we remember some dreams and not others?
This makes me remember dreaming, waking thinking the dream was true, then feeling RELIEVED after realising it wasn’t!!
Funny how children everywhere do the same things…I used to play with a small spoon, flicking it left and right to catch the light.