What Happened to My Eye?
I was staring into the mirror in the morning, stupefied; I’d never seen such a thing.
My left eye was swollen and the outside corner was red, hot to the touch. A puffy flap of skin under and around my eye made it hard to see, although my sight seemed to be unimpaired otherwise.
Larry walked in as I was staring into the mirror.
“Did I bump into a wall or something last night?” I asked. “Look at my eye!”
Larry glanced over and shook his head. “You’ve got a black eye.”
“It’s not black! It’s red. Or pink. Maybe I have pink eye!”
“You’ve got a black eye,” he said again, and walked out of the room.
I followed him. “How would I get a black eye? Did I get into a fight or something?”
“No,” Larry said. “Wanna go to the VFW?”
Football game! Beer all day!
“Yeah!” I said, and forgot about my eye. We drank all day.
By Monday, my eye was no longer red and puffy; it was bruised and black and blue and purple. Touching it made me wince, so I didn’t touch it. But I stared regularly into the mirror, baffled.
“What happened to my eye?” I asked Larry again on Monday night.
“You fuckin’ know what happened,” he said.
“I don’t fuckin’ know,” I said, “or I wouldn’t keep asking.”
“You fuckin’ know,” he said.
I did not know.
When my colleagues asked me at work, “What happened to your eye?” I responded, “I don’t know; I was drunk.” Everyone thought that was funny.
I laughed along, since it was the truth.
I didn’t drill Larry with questions, nor did I pester him. But I mentioned the black eye questioningly at least every couple of days, hoping that Larry would finally acquiesce to my request for information.
One day, when the black eye was almost completely gone, I said, “I sure wish I knew what happened to my eye. It’s so weird!”
Larry – who was chewing on a bite of sandwich at the time – swallowed and stared at me. Hard. He put down his sandwich and said nothing.
“What?” I asked.
“You really don’t remember what happened, do you?”
“No!” I said. “I don’t fucking remember! Do you know what happened?”
“Yeah, I know,” Larry said.
“Then why won’t you fucking tell me?”
“Because I hit you,” Larry whispered, as softly as I’ve ever heard him speak.
“No you didn’t!” I said.
He swallowed again, this time choking back tears. “I hit you,” he said. “You put the car into fuckin’ park when we were driving down the highway. You don’t remember that either, I guess. And I just … it was a reflex. I couldn’t stop myself.”
“You hit me?”
“Yeah,” he said. Then he picked up his sandwich, took another bite.
“I remember putting the car into park. I probably shouldn’t have done that.”
“You’re fuckin’ right you shouldn’t have!”
“But I don’t remember you hitting me. How can I not remember you hitting me?”
“I don’t know,” Larry said. He was chewing like normal now, no regrets.
“Huh,” I said. “I had no fuckin’ idea what happened.”
“Well, now ya do,” said Larry.
I was more interested in the fact that I had no recollection of the punch than I was interested in the punch itself.
Somehow I didn’t question that at all.