I often believed, as a child, that I was a Cyclops. Before I could read, my mother would read to me stories of Greek mythology, and I would see in the one-eyed giants things of my own. Kin. I would imagine myself, back in those years, growing up to be twenty feet tall, the devourer of sheep, the tormentor of men. It is, perhaps, of some significance and irony that though always beastly, those storybook giants never struck me as wicked; only pained, misunderstood.
I don’t remember much of my mother: only scents and feelings, and that she was the only person who treated me like a normal boy. “Simon,” she would call me, her voice delicate, like everything about her. With her death in my youth, that name died too; she was the only one to use my real name.
Of my father I remember nothing. He disappeared the day the nurses placed this tragic being in his arms. On my first day at school, one girl who saw me began to cry, and as the teacher went to comfort her, he glanced at me with a look of such pity, disgust, and curiosity that I could never forget it. I have never seen my father, not even in pictures, but to this day I imagine him like that teacher.
Teachers. Peers. They were always a source of pain, of ridicule. My mother insisted I go to public school. “My baby has nothing to hide,” she would say. I hated school, but loved her too much to refuse.
“Mama, am I a Cyclops?” I had asked her one day.
“You are a normal boy,” she said. “Don’t let anyone tell you different.”
“The kids at school say I’m a monster.”
“They’re just jealous.”
“Of what?”
She kissed me. “Of you being so beautiful.”
She was the only soul to love this wretched, sad creature. After she died and I moved in with Uncle Vernon, I kept searching for comfort again. Maybe for her again.
When I was a teenager, Uncle Vernon bought me large, square sunglasses, the medical kind people whose eyes cannot take sunlight wear. My eye is in the middle of my head, above my nose, and it is twice the normal size--but the glasses were large and dark enough to hide it. Vernon bought them, I think, less for me than for him, but I found that I felt more free with them. When I moved to Pennsylvania at age fifteen, I told people I had sensitive eyes which must be always shaded.
My mother had filled me with such confidence, I felt little awkwardness in those years. At my old school, I was like that Greek giant--unwanted, frightened--but here, hiding my deformity, I could almost feel the happiness my mother had taken to her grave. I made friends. I went to parties. I was known as “Mystery Man”, because of the constant shades, which was infinitely better than my old epithets.
It was during those years that I fell in love.
Her name was Christina. She played on the school basketball team, had a black belt in karate, and always laughed at my jokes. I was her opposite--a reflective, sensitive youth who wrote poetry and played the flute and had never watched a football game. She even looked so different. Her olive skin to my paleness. Her dark eyes. My blue one. Christina. I lived for her.
“One day,” my mother had whispered to me on her deathbed, “you’ll meet a girl who loves all of you, the in and out.”
I thought that girl would be Christina.
“Come over to my house tonight,” Christina told me one day, when we were sixteen. “My parents are out of town.” Her voice was childish, innocent, but with an underlying suggestiveness.
She was the first--the only--girl I kissed. I still remember the taste of her lips: like powdered chocolate, milk, youth. I had never known hair could be so soft, and when I touched hers, a tear filled my giant, single eye.
“Should I turn off the light?” she asked, still all innocence. “You know... just so you can take off the glasses.”
I wanted to tell her then. So badly. But I wanted her more. We turned off the light and made love in invisibility.
“She is the one,” I whispered to myself the next morning. The love I had been seeking.
“Would you love me forever?” I asked her that winter, in her room in her bed.
“Of course!” She laughed.
“Even that I am always shaded?”
“I know your eyes are beautiful,” she said, “even if you must hide them from me.”
The one who would love your in and out. I could not hide it forever, could not ward off her hands forever as we loved in darkness. It was time to tell her.
“Christina,” I began... and told her... and removed the sunglasses.
And she started to scream. When I reached out to her, she began to flee. When I caught her, held her, she threw up. Just like that. All over my shoes.
It was then that I decided to go to medical school.
I devoted the rest of high school to studying. No television. No magazines. No music. No sleep, often. Just studying, poring over my schoolbooks over and over.
When I graduated, my worse grade was in gym class. I received an A-.
Hiding behind my shades, riding on the back of my scholarship, I spent years in medical school. As soon as I graduated, the true work began.
Unemployed, I spent my time moving from operating room to operating room, only peeking when I could not enter. For years I studied surgery on deformed faces. For years I read every book on the subject. For years, I planned.
Finally, fifteen years after I had sent Christina fleeing, I finished my project. In a little notebook, I wrote down the procedure that could give me normalcy. I called the operation “Odysseus.”
“And Odysseus drove the stake into the Cyclops’ eye,” the little, freakish boy had read in his favorite book years ago, “blinding him.”
So fitting that this Cyclops should suffer the same fate.
“Uncle Vernon,” I said to my old guardian that day, “let me look at you one last time.”
The old, balding man grunted and scratched himself, muttering over his beer. I looked at the rough, unshaven face. The man who had bought me the shades to hide myself. The man who could never bare the sight of my true face. Maybe, I found myself thinking, after the operation he could finally love me. I hated myself for thinking this.
I began searching for my Odysseus.
I posted ads in all the medical journals. I wrote to all the great surgeons. I visited hospitals, clinics. I scoured the country for the best. It was finally, a year later, that I was approached by Dr. Young.
She wrote me a letter. “I have heard about your procedure, and would like to do it. Let’s meet next month.” She was young--my age--but her record was impeccable. A brilliant surgeon. A genius. An artist.
The next month, I sat in a cafe in downtown Washington, waiting for her to arrive. I was sipping coffee when a woman stepped up and sat across the table from me.
“Hello, Mystery Man,” she said.
At once I felt hot. Sweat rolled down my back, and my heart began to beat.
“Christina,” I said. It was hard to speak. “Don’t tell me...”
She nodded. “I married ten years ago. I took my husband’s surname. When he died I stayed a Young.”
I covered my heart, breathing heavily. A waiter approached us, and I waved him away. “Jesus. And you want to...”
She smiled a small, crooked smile. I could swear her eyes were moist. “Always. Since that day.”
The next morning we met in my apartment, and I explained the procedure to her.
“In common English,” I said at the end, “you cut the eye out. You cover it with skin from elsewhere. Then you punch in two holes where regular eyes should be, and fill them with glass eyes.”
She gazed at me with a mixture of sadness, pity, and awe. “You’d be blind.”
“Big loss. What’s there for me to see?”
“Me,” she whispered.
I could not curb my tongue then. “Seeing you vomit on my shoes was a lovely sight.”
She did not remove her eyes from my shades. “Fair enough. I deserve that. But would you believe I’ve grown in fifteen years?”
“You haven’t seen me without my shades since then.”
She reached over, and before I could stop her, she tore the shades from my face. At once I turned around, covered my eye with my
hands.
“You don’t have to do this,” I said.
She grasped my head, forced it toward her. She pulled down my hands and held them down. Like that, she stared at me.
“I’m sorry, Simon,” she said. It was the first time since my mother died that anyone called me Simon. “Okay?”
“You make me feel ugly,” I said. It was the only thing I could think of saying. I felt so ashamed for her to gaze at me. For her to look upon the freak. Moisture filled my eye, but I could not look away.
“I know,” she said. “I’ve come to fix that.”
Over the next few days, as we prepared for the operation, we met daily. She told me about her life. She had married at twenty-two.
“To a model,” she told me. “Can you believe that? To a male model!”
But the man had been cruel and unfaithful, and when he died in a car crash, it came as both a blow and a relief. He used to beat their son.
“I’m sorry,” I said to these things, and I wished I could tell her about my own life--but I had none to tell of.
So we talked about our youth.
“I used to think I would marry you,” she admitted to me one day. She laughed; an uncomfortable laugh. “The silly dreams of a teenager.” She sighed. “You were my first, you know.”
“I know,” I said quietly. “And you mine.” My first and only.
“It’s me, isn’t it. You thought of this plan that night I ran.”
I said nothing. She knew the answer.
“I did love you, Simon,” she said, her voice almost trembling. “I don’t want you to ever think otherwise.”
No. I did not want to hear this now. “The operation is tomorrow,” I said. “I suggest you return to your hotel and get some sleep.”
That night I could not sleep, however. I turned in my bed over and over. Over and over, I turned on the lights, pulled out my mirror, and gazed at my tragedy: a single, oversized eye right in the center of my face, above my nose. The Cyclops. The monster. The freak that drove away my father, that made children cry, that made even my doctors wince. The freak that loved a girl, then sent her away screaming to become a surgeon.
I wished, then, like I had so often wished, to die. But I tightened my lips. Tomorrow it would be over. I would be a blind man. A normal blind man. I would not frighten anyone anymore.
The next morning, as I was getting dressed, Christina came knocking on the door.
“Wait,” she said before I could even let her in. “Let me say this first.” Tears swam in her dark eyes. “You decided to become blind because of me.” Her voice shook. “You don’t need to. Let me become blind instead. I can become blind to this, Simon. I can, truly. I don’t care, not anymore. Stay as you are, and let me become blind to it.”
She wrapped her arms around me, wept onto my shoulder. I stood there, not knowing how to feel, feeling everything perhaps, stroking that dark hair that was so soft.
There was no operation that day. The next month, we were married.
I will not lie to you. I will not say we had eternal bliss. It was difficult. At night, I could sometimes swear she shuddered in disgust. I could sometimes catch her gazing into my sunglasses, as if trying to peer past their darkness. I know she tried to ignore it. I know she loved me, and I loved her--more than ever.
Then one day, I found another doctor, and did the operation anyway.
When I came home, bandages over my face, she did not make a sound. I could hear her place down our little daughter and step toward me. Her hand touched my face.
“Why?” she whispered.
“Because of little Melanie,” I said. “Because of me. Because of you.”
From her voice, I could hear she was weeping, or close to weeping. “Not because of me!”
“For you, then.” I took her hands. “Christina, listen. I don’t blame you for anything. You were the only person, other than my mother, who could love me. The beauty learned to love the beast. I cannot become a prince, Christina. But I can become something better for you.”
“You will never see me again,” she whispered, and this time I could feel her tears; they wet my face and shoulder.
“I will keep seeing you,” I whispered, clutching her, unable to shed tears but crying inside. “You are in my mind’s eye.”