by Zach Alan Michael
Sometime after moving to Kansas City, I started noticing these blurry spots floating around my field of vision—bunches of fuzzy things bobbing up and down and left and right. I’d experienced the fuzzy things before, but never this intensely. In the past, they drifted lazily by. In the past, they went away. This time, they didn’t drift. They would leap out of my field of vision, then right back into sight. Sometimes I mistook one of the fuzzy things for a fly, and it made me think of my eyes as piles of shit that the fuzzy things were buzzing around, sapping nutrients from. It made me feel unhealthy. It made my eyelids twitchy and my pupils sore.
Convinced that I had some terrible, degenerative eye disease, I turned to Google for answers. I typed: Eye floaters that won’t go away. I prepared for the inevitable declaration that I had glaucoma or cancer or an as-yet-to-be-discovered disease that would melt my eyeballs into jelly soup from the inside out.
I imagined taking a date to the movies, where she would be in awe of my nonchalant attitude toward blindness. If I lost my vision as an adult, I’d never be able to step foot in a movie theater again, she’d tell me. And I’d shrug. I’d say, It’s the story that’s the art for me. You don’t need eyes to see the story. We’d fuck that night, and it would be better than any sex I’d ever had. I’d wake up in the morning, and instead of staring up at the white plaster ceiling where the fuzzy things would whirl and twist, I’d see calm, black velvet and feel smooth skin next to me, beautiful skin that I didn’t need to see to believe.
I was frightened by the idea of blindness, but I was also excited. It was fucked up to be excited, but I was. I pictured myself with a bandage wrapped around my eyes and my family surrounding my hospital bed, teary-eyed and regretful and hands full of bouquets and teddy bears and get-well cards. I’d never see another movie again, but I could still listen to one with those special blind-person headphones.
Google said: Eye floaters that won’t go away are usually harmless and a normal part of aging. But this didn’t seem right. I was only twenty-five. I certainly wasn’t old enough to have bunches of fuzzy things clouding my vision. I reminded myself that I likely had a rare type of cancer in my eyeballs that was metastasizing by the minute. These weren’t your average eye floaters.
I switched to Reddit. There, I learned about retinal tears, painless little holes that can rip themselves into bigger, blinding holes called retinal detachments. I learned that they look just like eye floaters and require immediate treatment. u/Fanskar1 recalled how his cousin left his tears untreated until they became full-blown detachments and, upon one year of miserable and isolating blindness, killed himself with a steak knife in his parents’ kitchen. He wrote that, before the detachments, his cousin was the happiest man he’d ever met. The tears tore caverns in his retinas and drained the happiness out like sewage. They were vile phantoms that had haunted him to his grave. They were haunting me to mine.
I suddenly felt foolish for having romanticized my impending blindness. I didn’t need to be blind; I just needed the fuzzy things to go away. I called the eye clinic with the best online reviews, and told the receptionist that I needed new contacts. I didn’t want to sound overly paranoid about the fuzzy things, so I didn’t mention them. The receptionist took my insurance and put me on the calendar for Thursday.
On Tuesday, I was supposed to drive to Topeka for my brother’s basketball game, the last home game of his high school career, but I decided to stay home. I’d been avoiding driving when I could — the fuzzy things always running haphazard laps across the sky — and figured there’d be plenty of college games to watch soon enough. High school wasn’t important in the way high schoolers thought it was. That last home game, that last prom, that last bell — ultimately, none of it would mean anything to the average person five years down the line. Or at least, it shouldn’t.
I thought about my classmates. I thought about the sheer number of them who’d settled down four doors over from their childhood homes, who’d be sending their kids to their alma maters, extending their dynasties. Maybe high school had meant everything to them. Maybe they had found something to be proud of, something worth remembering and holding close.
I curled up in a blanket on the sofa, exhausted. I scrolled Facebook, counting the number of classmates who were pregnant or already had kids, until the sun finally set and I became hungry enough to microwave a Hot Pocket.
***
Tuesday blurred into Wednesday. I texted my dad and asked how the game went. I apologized for not showing up, swore to God I’d be at every baseball game. I’d fallen asleep with my contacts in, and now my eyes were dry and itchy. It felt like there were crumbs underneath my eyelids. I removed the lenses, dropped them in the toilet, and got a new pair. I loved putting on new contact lenses. For that first week or two, the world seemed so much sharper, bursting with detail and color. With the recent influx of fuzzy things, it was getting harder to appreciate the freshness of new contacts. For every tree that was a bolder green, there was a blemish bumping vaguely at the vibrancy. It made beauty less beautiful. It pissed me off.
I went back to Facebook and clicked on my old classmate Connor Wascom’s profile. Connor was the most popular kid in my class. He was a great athlete, a great singer, and, most frustratingly, a great person. His profile yielded no surprises. He was married to a beautiful blonde woman named Shelby, and they had two babies, Irish twins, both starry-eyed and smiley like their parents. He was working as a project coordinator at an electrical company in Wichita and, judging by the pictures of their new house, getting paid considerably for his time. This was the way it was supposed to be for Connor Wascom, the way it was always going to be. He’d been selected from birth to live the most charmed ideals of American life.
I thought about what I might’ve been selected for from birth, and the possibilities made me nauseous. A fuzzy thing cut across my phone screen as I clicked out of Connor’s profile and typed in a new name: Danny Zolck. Danny was the only kid in our class who had failed to graduate on time. He was a real-deal shithead, teaching freshmen about purple drank and setting fire to patches of carpet in his least favorite teachers’ classrooms. If there was ever an antithesis to Connor Wascom, it was Danny Zolck. Maybe he was in jail, or maybe he was dead. I was pretty positive that whatever updates Facebook had on him weren’t going to be good. At best, he would be an inspirational story.
But his face never popped up when I searched his name. I tried again, this time Daniel Zolck. When that didn’t work, I tried spelling Zolck like Zulk, Zulck, Zolk, Zoulk, Zoulck, and Zuhlk. I tried Instagram, then Twitter, then plain old Google. I searched Danny Zolck obituary and Danny Zolck arrest records. Nothing. It was like he no longer existed. I found this odd, but I also thought it made perfect sense. The antithesis of Connor Wascom, the polar opposite, the foil, was, of course, destined to be scrubbed clean from every fabric of society. I bet Connor didn’t even have one single fuzzy thing obscuring his line of sight. I bet he had 20/20 vision, could count on one hand the number of times he’d been to the eye doctor. I imagined the fuzzy things as status symbols — the purer the human, the purer their perspective. Danny Zolck, wherever he may be, probably had even more fuzzy things than I did, too many to count. I tried to equate my fuzzy things with the patches of carpet I’d burned in my lifetime. I worried that someday someone’s fleeting memory of me would possess them to look up my name on Facebook and that, when they did, nothing would be there. Maybe someone with the same name as me, but not me, not really. A blank space.
I quickly googled myself and breathed a sigh of relief when my various socials popped up. It’s okay, I told myself. I’m still here. The reminder was pacifying, like the song from a music box. I repeated it to myself slowly and surely, I’m still here, I’m still here, I’m still here, until I felt myself drifting into a dull, featherlight sleep.
***
Thursday, I woke up at nine, with thirty minutes to get to the clinic. I stared up at the ceiling and counted my fuzzy things. They were swirling around more than usual, like they knew their days were numbered. I tried again to attribute a great sin to each one, but the exercise gave me an instant headache. I wobbled into the kitchen and washed down two Excedrins with a can of Coke. I called my dad to ask about my brother’s game, but he didn’t pick up. I texted, Call back when you can plz. Then, Do you remember Danny Zolck? By the time I found my way to the car, I was already running ten minutes late.
At the clinic, the lady at the front desk was very kind and very lovely. She complimented my shirt while she double-checked my insurance information, and she didn’t even comment on my tardiness. When that was done, an even kinder, even lovelier technician called my name and took me to the back for my preliminary tests. Her name was Sammy, and she had just moved here from Colorado. She asked if I liked mountains, and I said that, of course, I did. I told her that I recently moved to Kansas City from Seattle. She asked why, and I said, “Shit, you’re asking me.” She laughed. Her smile was like a sun-soaked crack in the clouds.
I took my contacts out, and the world went blurry. I was sad to see Sammy’s face reduced to mere smudges of color. While she set up her equipment, I told her about my fuzzy things and how I feared they might be retinal tears. I’d been worried about sounding ridiculous and paranoid, but Sammy took the issue very seriously. She nodded gravely to every word, and this made me feel very validated. She said the scans would indicate whether or not I had retinal tears. She said my doctor was one of the best in the business and that he’d get to the bottom of things. She said, “You probably don’t have retinal tears, hon, you shouldn’t worry.” We talked about tall mountains and wide rivers while she pressed buttons and flashed bright lights at my eyeballs.
Afterward, I was ushered to the exam room, where Sammy gave me a bottle of water and set my contacts down gently on the counter. She said it was great to meet me, and I said, “Likewise.” I’d maybe fallen a little in love. My mind spun with the possibilities of seeing her again. It would be especially romantic to run into each other randomly, maybe at the grocery store or a park. More realistically, though, I’d have to schedule another eye appointment and hope she was working that day. If my fuzzy things were retinal tears, then I’d have no choice but to schedule another one. To be safe, I’d schedule it on a Thursday.
Sammy left, and my doctor took her place. His face was an indistinct mess, but I could tell he was older and bald. He asked me to tell him about my fuzzy things. I explained how they floated in and out of my vision all day, how sometimes I thought they were flies, how I was afraid I’d never be able to look at a clear sky again without the cool blue being polluted by flecks and dots and blotches. I mentioned retinal tears. I mentioned them with confidence. The doctor said I was not likely to have retinal tears. He asked if I’d been seeing flashes of light, and I said no. He asked if my vision seemed dim. No. Blurred? No. Had I lost any peripheral vision? No. He shook his head. I just had regular eye floaters, that’s all.
He walked to his computer and clicked a few folders before waving me over. Two blown-up pictures of the inside of my eyeballs popped up on the screen. They were repulsive, Lovecraftian messes of jagged red veins jutting from glowing orbs. He pointed to an orb. He said, “That’s your optical disk.” I asked what the optical disk was, and he said it wasn’t really important. He said he told me the name so that I wouldn’t think it was an abnormality. It was supposed to be there. I said, “Okay. How about the fuzzy things?”
The doctor shrugged. It wasn’t that they were supposed to be there, but they weren’t not either. They were just something that happened. Everyone had them.
I felt a little frustrated because I kind of already knew this. I’d googled it. The doctor must’ve been able to tell because he held up a hand like, woah, buddy. He told me about what eye floaters actually were: chunks of eye jelly (vitreous, if we’re being technical) that have liquified and cast shadows on the retina. He said that unless I had a bunch, there was nothing to be concerned about.
I pointed out that I did have a bunch, that I’d counted at least seven this morning, and he looked confused. He tapped the screen. He said he only saw three. Then the son-of-a-bitch pointed them out on my retinal scans one by one. I counted them too. One, two, three. The doctor said that retinal imaging doesn’t necessarily catch all of the eye floaters, but that he’d be very surprised if I actually had seven. And the most important part: No retinal tearing.
I knew I should feel happy. I did not have retinal tearing, which was good, and I might have been overdramatic about the exact volume of my fuzzy things. I was not going to go blind — at least, not on account of them. I asked the doctor if they would go away, and he scratched the back of his head. “No, not really,” he said. Likely, I’d stop noticing them as often once my brain adapted to their presence, but they would always be there, unwanted shadows cast sporadically across my faculty of sight.
I said, “Damn.”
The doctor said, “It’s not that bad. Everyone has them, man.” Then he told me that we should get started with the actual eye exam. I was here for contact lenses after all.
And so for thirty minutes, my eyes were strained and tested and flashed with searing light until it was determined that my vision was about the same as it was before. The doctor gave me a fresh pair of lenses. He shook my hand and left the room. I put my contacts on, blinked until my eyes adjusted to the clarity. Everything was sharp and obvious.
At the front desk, I paid two hundred and fifty dollars for the eye appointment and the new batch of contacts. The receptionist smiled as she swiped my card and said it was nice to meet me. I smiled back, but I didn’t say anything. I scanned the room, hoping for a final glimpse of Sammy. I told myself that if I saw her, I’d ask for her number, but I knew that I wouldn’t. I waved goodbye and left the eye clinic, unsure that I’d ever be back.
The sky was bright and blank. When I got to the car, I stopped to observe its endlessness. The fuzzy things were there, swerving and darting in the wide openness of it all, and they would always be there.
God. They would always be there.
It didn’t feel great to think—it may have felt hopeless—but it was a truth of my life now that would not magically transform into a lie. My vitreous had liquified and would forever cast shadows on my retinas. Even when I got used to them, which I would, they would appear on and off until my heart stopped and my skin liquified too. I wanted to hate my fuzzy things, but what would be the point? I could not spend every day until I died staring at brilliant, blue vaults of heaven and feeling only disgust for the vague blemishes scratching and clawing at the paint.
The fuzzy things kept doing their fuzzy thing dance. I counted them, spotting nine. Again, spotting four. I supposed that if they were truly harmless, it shouldn’t matter the exact number. I decided to try my hardest to never count them again. There was no forgetting them, but there was adjusting. I could acknowledge and advance; I could decide right now that counting my fuzzy things was a fool’s errand. I wanted to google the eye clinic to try and find out more about Sammy, but this also felt like a bad idea. It felt like how Facebook stalking my former classmates felt: embarrassing, pathetic. I wouldn’t mind being less pathetic. I wouldn’t mind never caring about what Connor Wascom or Danny Zolck were doing with their lives.
Danny Zolck. That motherfucker. He had it all figured out, I bet. Danny Zolck must’ve realized that the fuzzy things don’t go away, only retreat and obscure. He must’ve realized the futility of keeping score. I pictured him laughing until tears spilled out upon realizing the grand veracity of it all. His body hunched, his abs sore, he deleted Facebook right then and there, Instagram, and Twitter, too. He threw his phone in the air, and it cartwheeled down hard on the sidewalk. Or maybe he was dead, was rotting in a prison cell, and hadn’t faced any miraculous truth except the consequences of his actions. This, too, was okay.
In the parking lot, I deleted Facebook, just the account, not the app, not yet. I texted my brother. I said, Hey, dude, sorry I missed your game. How did it go? I was done waiting for a response from my father.
My doctor and Google were in agreement that everyone on planet Earth had fuzzy things playing tricks on their eyes. It meant you were getting older; it meant time was working as it should; it meant you were alive.
I have fuzzy things. Sometimes it feels like I have a lot. They’re as telling as a beating heart, and they scream to me, “You are alive!”
Yes. I am alive.
Yes. I am beginning to think I’m grateful.
______
Zach Alan Michael sells books in Kansas City, Missouri. His work has appeared in HAD, BRUISER, scaffold, and elsewhere.
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