by Jacqueline Doyle

My optometrist likes to talk.

He perches on the edge of his wheeled chair, rolling back and forth between the examination chair and his built-in work station, eager to discuss the ins and outs of vision.  There's a whole vocabulary involved, and Dr. B. has a rack of brochures in easy reach with titles like Astigmatism, Strabismus, Presbyopia.  Last year we talked at length about my eye floaters and spots.  Like my disappearing capacity to read fine print, they seem to be yet another symptom of advancing middle age.  He gazed at me steadily through his blended bifocals, his square jaw thrust forward,  pleased to have an audience.  "You see, the vitreous gel detaches from the back wall of the eye, forming clumps and strands, and they cast shadows when they drift between light and the retina of the eye."  Despite the explanation, they still seem mysterious, even ominous at times.  They nag at the periphery of my vision, like fragments of meteorites floating in outer space, suddenly looming out of nowhere, or like those strange creatures in the deepest, darkest areas of the ocean—vibrant, neon tendrils, tense and electric.  Knowing now that I'm seeing only shadows makes me feel like a denizen of Plato's Cave, viewing shadow puppets on the wall instead of the real thing.

Dr. B. has a trick question that he seems to enjoy every time he asks it.  "So, do you have trouble seeing when you drive at night?"  "Well yes," I answer, surprised that he's guessed that.  "Everybody does," he announces triumphantly.  And he's off on another explanation.   Humans lack the tapetum lucidum that allows nocturnal animals and sea creatures to penetrate darkness.  Animals have larger pupils, more rods than cones in the retina.  Where we grope in uncertainty in twilit shadows, they advance sure-footed and confident.

One of my eyes is considerably weaker than the other, and we discuss that every year, as he has me squinting at his eye chart, and comparing lenses.  "So which is better?  This one?  Or this one?"  He wants to know whether I wear my bifocals all the time, and I admit that I wear them for reading, but not usually for driving or other activities.  "You've learned to compensate," Dr. B. nods wisely, "but you're not really seeing things as they are."  Every year he brings up the same analogy, and I almost enjoy anticipating it.  "There's a tribe in the jungle."  He pauses so that we can picture it.  "This particular tribe is on hallucinogens all of the time.  They think what they see is reality.  When they go off the hallucinogens, the world doesn't look right."  He scratches his head, like one of the confused tribesmen, narrows his eyes and looks around. "I don't know, something's just not right," he says, in semi-falsetto.  "I don't know, but it's just not right.  This isn't normal."  He lets that sink in.  "You see, they think the world they see on hallucinogens is the real world."  In case I'm confused, he spells it out.  "So you think you're seeing the real world without your glasses, but in fact you're like the tribesmen on hallucinogens.  You've just come to think that world is normal."

I leave the office in throwaway plastic dark glasses, blinking at the light, and walk to my car.  Even through dark glasses, the sky is intensely blue. Ordinary shrubs and flowers in the office landscaping glow green, red, yellow, violet.  I turn the key in the ignition and lower the car visor. The sunlight is dazzling, simply dazzling.

Jacqueline Doyle lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she teaches literature and writing.  Her most recent creative nonfiction was published in Flashquake (Spring 2009).