Somewhere in the Multiverse, by Shifra Steinberg (2019), oil on canvas, 200x120cm
The small, sleepy Dutch town of Monnickendam has garnered quite some unwanted attention at the hands of Hans Nagel reads De Volkskrant. Hans Nagel. Me. Let me start from the beginning, and reiterate that no one suffered as much as I did. It was me who suffered. Me. If I had known the repercussions of my experimentations, I would not in a million years have done the things I did. But curiosity really does kill. Maybe not literally, but metaphorically, in the form of a reputation. Until recently my small optics shop was renowned for its overwhelming success in manufacturing anything from reading glasses to prescription sunglasses. Not to sound uppity, but I have a third eye, so to speak, when it comes to knowing people. I can easily slide into whatever mood suits my client best. For the elderly I reserve an earnest and charming tone, for the wealthy I become servile, praising towards the vain, flirtatious to the widow.
Yet, and since I have nothing left to lose I will be entirely honest, it wasn’t only my mastery over the psyche which made my small optician’s shop such a raging success. I admit, every now and then, I would warp, rework, reshape the lenses of each pair of spectacles ever so slightly, to alter the wearer’s vision. You might think “obviously, that’s the point of prescription glasses,” but then you’d disregard the very artistry of my craft. One does not buy glasses to see better, but to look better. Physically. When one thinks he looks handsome, he suddenly wants not one pair of glasses, but two or three in all kinds of different colors.
You can imagine my gradual obsession with Aesthetics. The pretty creatures, those men with straight, angular faces, and well-manicured facial hair, the women with small chins and big eyes, they simply do not understand the agonies felt by those average, or less-than-average folks like myself. For every setback they experience, we experience it triple-fold, perhaps more. They have the luxury of going about their lives with an underdeveloped character, dim-wits, nastiness, and have it played off as cute, comical, admirable. We, and with we I mean myself and all those whose noses protrude over their mouths, whose eyes droop down on one side and go up ever so slightly on the other, whose lips bulge out in the middle like an old-fashioned purse, we have to exert ourselves to improbable extents only to be marginally accepted.
Because of my personal misfortunes, attributed to my person at the time of my birth, I have developed my own theory on Aesthetics. One I implemented on my glasses. In summation: beauty should be looked at as a ladder. At the bottom are the extremely repulsive, the barely perceivable, rat-like people of the earth. One step higher are those I’d consider below average. One higher, the almost average. Higher again, the average. And so forth. The important thing is not so much each individual group, but the system of hierarchy that plays within each step. Our ape-like brains automatically put like against like. You put one supermodel up against another. You put one man with a job in construction up against another man with a janitor’s job. The goal isn’t so much perfection. It is to be the best within your category. That is my theory on Aesthetics anyway, and I stand by it. Hell, I dedicated my life to it.
What about children, you may ask? Does my theory extend to them? I have not the slightest clue. While I understand adults through and through, children remain a mystery to me. The problem lies in my utter disinterest in their wellbeing. If anything, I secretly despise them. And I would have happily continued within my dislike if it wasn’t for the opening of my newly renovated optics shop. In order to bind my clients I knew I had to keep their damned offspring entertained. A difficult task, considering the supreme craftsmanship that goes into the making of a lens, and the short prefrontal cortex of a toddler.
I was worried, but not for long. Not to sound pompous, but I am a bit of an entrepreneurial genius. For a man such as myself, a true Monnickendamer, I have traveled a great deal. I speak some German and Latin. I read. I can hold a political discussion without raising my voice. As I said earlier, I am extremely well-versed in Aesthetics. I influenced, at least so I hope, the lives of many by advising the right prescription glasses to fit their faces. The list goes on. But children? It took several days of painstaking analysis to devise a plan.
Two whole weeks passed before the idea came to me, in the form of a dream. I hardly had time to fully return to consciousness before I found myself on my feet, running down the two floors from my apartment to the optical laboratory. I began working on my creation immediately, and came up with a name just as fast: Anoptics for the adults, or Animal Glasses for the children. I would let the children see the world like any animal of their choosing.
I toiled with the plastics, as I did for most of my cheaper models, but it wouldn’t suffice. I’d have to dismantle one of my less-popular spectacles and rework those. My slim, elegant fingers labored tirelessly, like those of a liver surgeon or a watchmaker. In a way, I was a bit of the latter. While watchmakers own our temporal perception, us opticians take reign over the visual world. Which, in my opinion, is far more important. Though neither really can do without the other, come to think of it.
I went over my notes. How did our eyes compare to those of an animal? The human pupil receives images in the form of light which the iris then regulates. At the back of the eye is the retina, made up of photoreceptors, transforming the information as signals sent through the optic nerve to the brain. In other animals, however, such as the chicken, position and shape of the eye can mean the difference between life and death. Predators, like lions and tigers, who hunt by ambush, have front-facing eyes which provide better focus and a greater ability to calculate distances. Contrarily, deer and goats have lateral eyes and horizontal pupils which grant a broader field of vision. Some even have rotating pupils! Can you believe it? How could I possibly translate all this information into a lens?
I labored for hours. The first animal I chose was the tarsier. Since their eyes are fixed in a cranial cavity and cannot rotate, I did not have to implement any especially difficult operations. All I had to account for were their huge corneas and tapetum lucidum (excuse my Latin: a reflective layer of tissue on the back of the eye that reflects light), which give them excellent night vision. It was two in the morning by the time I finished, so I took the glasses outside and stared into the night.
“Incredible!” I breathed. I really could see just about everything. As if a flashlight was strapped to my forehead, the night sky suddenly illuminated in front of me. Without the glasses the night reduced to black, with the glasses, it became incredibly clear again, beautiful and bright with stars.
A path led from my shop, across a field to a stile and on over outside town. I walked for an hour or so, testing the spectacles. Upon my return home I was not in the least bit tired. No more than two, three minutes passed before I was working on another animal: the barreleye fish. A more challenging operation considering their strange double eyes. The heads of these creatures are completely transparent and filled with liquid. Just imagine the thoughts that go on in there. Inside the liquid are two ocular structures, consisting of two parts. The first is similar to ours, so that particular operation took me a little under thirty minutes. The second, however, took all night, and well into the morning. A diverticular eye, separated from the main one, contains a curved mirror formed by layers of guanine. The mirror catches light and reflects it back into their main eye, allowing them to see up and down simultaneously.
I could not wear those particular glasses for more than two seconds before a terrible headache set my eyebrows and temples ablaze. “Perhaps I should go upstairs and try them out in the bathtub, like a fish…” So that is what I did. I filled the tub all the way to the top and sprinkled a bag of loose-leaf salad from the fridge in there too, like seaweed, then dipped my head in. Useless. The walls were too white, I needed more depth.
“Perhaps I should take the car to the beach? Het Hemmeland is only a fifteen-minute drive… I could be back and showered by the time the shop opens…”
I was convinced immediately; within moments my bare feet were in the sand, my naked body shivering in the wind, glasses secured on my hooked nose, running towards the water. It was a disaster. In my excitement I had forgotten about salt’s effect on the cornea and sclera. I returned home exhausted, with two swollen eyes and a bad temper. I would have to transform them into goggles, but it was already eight forty-five. Within fifteen minutes my first client would arrive, the old Ms. Vink. What to do? In my forty-something years working in my father’s shop I had not canceled an appointment once.
“No, I’ll have to see it through,” I told myself. Seeing things through had become a bit of a life’s motto for me.
At precisely nine o’clock the bell rang, followed by a loud knocking. I opened the door and seated her large backside behind the phoropter. It was of the utmost importance that she left quickly, so I could close the shop until my next appointment at three. But Ms. Vink being Ms. Vink, and me being me, she wanted to talk, and I let her do so. She scared me with her big fur coat. Her face was all mouth with two wet lips, always open, like a big, moist keyhole.
“Are you alright, Hans?” she asked, showing her yellow bottom teeth. “You’re acting strange, and your eyes are red.”
“Oh, yes, I’m quite alright. Just tired. Shall we get on with it?”
“Your generation and their rushing. Sit down, will you. Tell me about the new shop, is it ready? That new location will be closer to me, you know. Such a nice location. The best, really.”
“Yes, everything is just about done. Just working on some minor details.”
“I’m sure it’ll look just amazing. And tell me, did you hear about…”
Before she had the chance to continue I fixed the phoropter neatly over her head, making her momentarily look like a beautiful, mechanical butterfly. I switched the lenses rapidly, until we came to the one through which she saw clearest. Mrs. Vink tended to treat the art of optics more like a guessing game than an examination. When I removed the phoropter from her face, her eyes remained shut.
“Alright, Mrs. Vink, your sight seems to have improved drastically over the past week.” “Improved? Oh no, that can’t be possible, do it again.”
“It seems to be entirely possible. You went from minus six, to plus one. I have never seen such results,” I said, sarcastic. I felt impatient, and her wet bottom lip reminded me of a blubber fish, which in turn reminded me of the barreleye fish goggles waiting for me upstairs.
“We ought to do it again. You are obviously mistaken.”
“I’m afraid I simply do not have the time today.”
“I can come back tomorrow.”
“I am awfully busy with the renovation.”
“You said you were practically done. Oh, I’m sure you can fit me in somewhere. I’ll come after lunch today.”
“As I said Mrs. Vink, I do not have the time.”
My heart bounced uncomfortably in my chest. Growing up as an only child, and being a bachelor without children, morphed me into an unbearable people-pleaser, humiliated as I was by the thought of being the sole attendant at my own funeral. I am quick to accommodate. On my own time I will curse their names and pray for some great misfortune to color their lives forever. But in their face, I simply cannot do anything but gratify and satisfy.
But that morning was different. The thought of getting back to my Animal Glasses made me jittery with anticipation. I just about took Mrs. Vink by the collar of her fur coat and hauled her out of the shop.
I spent what remained of the morning dismantling and assembling my swim-goggles to fit the barreleye fish lenses. Then, because I still had some time until my next appointment, I began my work on a pair of mantis shrimp spectacles. An animal which, despite its overall insignificant appearance, has incredible sight.
At just over three o’clock the bell rang. Jan de Jong, my next client, was a short, thick-legged man with a round, red face and two bulging eyes through which he could not see a thing. As always he was dressed in a cheap suit made of a shiny material and carried a large black briefcase, making him look more important than he really was. He worked at the post office.
Again I fitted the phoropter around the eyes, again I watched the mouth from under it, lips sliding one over the other like two slabs of glistening rubber. Again I told him his sight hadn’t changed since the week before, and again he told me about his wife. Had my life always been so monotonous? At precisely ten past three I walked him to the door.
The following day was Saturday. The thought of spending two full days on my Animal Glasses sent a happy shiver through my spine and arms. Around ten o’clock I walked to the bookstore and bought an entire encyclopedia of the animal kingdom. It was as thick as the Bible, and twice as heavy. I leafed through it all morning, highlighting the creatures I wanted to recreate first, which were just about all of them. Right after lunch I started my work on the diopsidae antennae of the stalk-eyed fly. Once done I began tinkering on the psychedelic eyes of the satanic leaf-tailed gecko. The following morning, Sunday, I started, and promptly finished, the cuttlefish, then the bat, and during my evening hours, the red-eyed tree frog. The following week I only took my Monday appointments, and, for the first time in my life, canceled the rest. It was an enormously productive period during which I created some forty glasses. And instead of growing bored with my new hobby, I became more animated by the day. My thin face could be seen angled over my desk at all hours, my right shoulder slanted ever so slightly, as if my neck were not strong enough to support it. I no longer considered it a hobby at all. I could not help but think I was onto something much grander, much more profound than a simple trick of the eye.
“There really is a whole world out there,” I thought to myself. “A world we cannot see with our bare eyes. A world of light, energy, waves that is just as real, just as tangible as our own. And with that I do not mean those exotic cases such as from human to human. Like near-blindness or color-blindness, you can imagine that quite easily. What I am doing here, in my small little studio, is revolutionary.”
I admit, I got a little over my head. Whenever I found myself out on the streets of Monnickendam, buying supplies or stretching my legs, I felt a certain sense of superiority over everyone else. As if I held within my thin fingers the very kernel of reality. And though I managed to largely rein in this enlightened sense of self, one afternoon I ran into Harriet Hendricks. Being an infinitely small man, her tall frame always brought out the worst in me. I simply could not contain myself.
“A penny for your thoughts?” she asked.
If there is a phrase I absolutely cannot stand, it is that one. I felt it physically—my lunch resurfaced in my throat.
“Come on Hans, two pennies then!”
I began to cough, and shook my head, unable to answer.
“Have I finally found something you wouldn’t do for two pennies?” she laughed her hoarse, possum laugh.
“I’m joking Hans, come on, don’t be so serious. I have to say, you look great. Tell me your secret, what have you been eating?”
There was something about that woman I did not like one bit. A mischievous air hung around her, and the closer I stood, the more it suffocated me and made me stumble over my words. But, as fate would have it, Mr. and Mrs. Hendricks were my best clients. They even partially funded my new optics shop. And though I had always prided myself on my self-control, on my ability to manipulate any situation to the greatest advantage of both myself and my interlocutor, that afternoon I could not keep it in. When she looked at me again, with that sly, smiling mouth that resembled a great big tuna fish, I broke out in terrifying cries.
“Hooo, hooo, hooo,” I screeched like the great Eurasian eagle-owl whose glasses I had finished just a few hours earlier. Harriet’s fish mouth had gone sour, her small eyes fixed upon mine. I flapped my arms like long, barred wings and pretended to fly away. Before I knew it, I was “hooo hooo hooo-ing” all the way home. It was the most fun I’d had in years and I could not promise myself I wouldn’t do it again.
No more than two days passed before a similar event unfolded. As I went out for a walk I saw Naomi Rozendaal’s cat crouched on the counter of her small apartment, eating fish heads out of a white saucer. The animal looked up at me with his big, green-yellow eyes and meowed. I just about meowed back, pulling the edges of my mouth backward as I whispered in his tongue: “Don’t fear me, I am one of you.” My whole body trembled with delicious electricity.
Then on Tuesday, two days before the opening of my new shop, I took my chameleon spectacles, with their multi-directional sight, out for a spin around Monnickendam. Like us humans, chameleons have good day, but terrible night vision. Their cone-shaped eyelids are fused to their pupils, leaving just a small part of their eye exposed, allowing them to see in all directions without even the slightest rotation.
While I sat squat on a bench in Cornelis Dirkszlaan, my face looking out in front of me, I spotted Ron Molenaar speaking with Willem de Keizer several steps behind. Ron was wearing one of his jackets that he bought in a small thrift store several minutes out of town, and though there had been a time, I am sure, when they were considered stylish, now they looked too ridiculous for words. Those Victorian-era coats with high collars and big buttons down the front. Willem, contrarily, wore a nice, military green jacket. His pants, however, were narrow around the knees, and wide at the ankles. You had to have specific legs to pull something like that off, and Willem didn’t have them. His were long and thin, like a birch tree. Then there was the town’s doctor, Albert Vries, to their right several steps down the street. As usual he wore his white lab coat unbuttoned so one could see his chest hair underneath. This was supposed to give the impression of youth even though, to me, he looked more like an old peacock with half its feathers missing.
I gave his face a good up and down when suddenly I heard: “Hello? Hans? Hello? What in the world is that thing on your face? A new pair of glasses?”
It took several seconds to maneuver my eyes from the back of my head to the front. When I finally managed I wish I hadn’t bothered. It was Ms. Vink once again, walking her miniature black poodle.
“Hans, you don’t mind me saying this, do you? We’ve known each other for quite some time. You’re acting a little… off. It’s not just me saying it. You know I don’t care, you can do whatever you please. But are you quite alright? Please take those things off your eyes.”
In reality, I did mind. I wish she would go away so I could continue spying on Albert. But it was a hopeless situation, Ms. Vink was just about as lonely as me, lonelier perhaps. At least I had my shop. She only had her miniature poodle, and by the looks of it, he didn’t have much longer.
“You are nervous about the opening of your new shop, aren’t you? Is that what it is? You shouldn’t worry your round little head about it. What could possibly go wrong?”
“I’m not nervous at all. In fact, I am testing these new glasses for that very occas—”
“New glasses? Those?” she asked, pointing at my face.
“Yes, these are my newest creation. They are Animal Glasses for the… children…”
“Animal Glasses? What in the world is that?”
As I mentioned earlier, they had quickly become much more to me than simple eyewear for children. But how could I explain, to this simple woman no less, that conscious experience was a widespread phenomenon that occurred to all life forms, not just humans? That because an organism had conscious experience meant that there was something to be an organism. And if there was something innate to being an organism, there must be an objective reality. I considered hooo-ing like an owl again, but for some reason it didn’t feel quite right.
“I believe,” I said, speaking slowly, “that there is a whole world around us that we cannot see. It is possible that the very world we believe to be real is in reality a fraud, catered towards our survival through evolution.”
“Highly improbable,” answered Ms. Vink quickly, simply.
“Why? Why?” I insisted, pointing at the glasses. “See for yourself.”
“Oh, I couldn’t. Really, I couldn’t.”
“Suit yourself,” I answered, annoyed.
“A reality other than the one we see? Impossible,” she mumbled again. Not so much out of interest, but out of fear the conversation would run dry and I’d get up and leave.
“It, in fact, is not impossible at all,” I answered. Though I never cared much about Mrs. Vink, her opinion suddenly meant everything to me, and I wished nothing more than to convince her. “You see that bird, the sparrow up in the tree? What does it see? Tell me, it has eyes, doesn’t it? So what does it see?”
“Who cares what it sees, dear. Even if it were to see anything, do you think its little peanut brain could make any sense of it?”
Now, with hindsight, I admit she made a rather good point. I also admit, now, though at the time my reaction seemed entirely valid, that I exaggerated somewhat. Before I can tell you what I did, there is one thing you ought to know about Ms. Vink. She dons a despicable mink coat everyday of her miserable existence. Everyday, even when the weather is warm and summery, as it was that Tuesday. If it rained, she simply did not leave the house. The fur was pure white, but when you looked at it closer, as I did that day, it had a touch of gray in it as well, a deep gray, like uranium. And while usually I hardly noticed the thing, not at all actually, that day it stood out like a baboon’s red buttocks.
A terrible thought came to me: how dare she, that old prune, care for her poodle like a son, and at the same time condone the manufacturing of such a coat? The paradox shocked me. I had never been particularly conscious of ethical questions. At one point I had even considered it an odious business to get involved in the wellbeing of things that can give you nothing in return. But fury and hate can overwhelm a man's mind to an astonishing degree, and in no time a plot had formed in my head.
Before I could make up my mind, my mind had made up its own. I took her beloved coat from her frail body (don’t ask me how, I simply did) and forced it around my own. Once on, I started furiously re-enacting a mink’s hysterical cries to the best of my ability.
A strange way to behave, you might think, especially for a man like myself who cares so much about the opinions of others. To which I would answer, no, it is not strange at all, if you were to consider my situation. By that point I had grown entirely convinced of the unlikelihood of a certain reality, and so equally certain of the unlikelihood of any repercussions. To me, then, to do anything was really to do nothing. That, and my conviction of mankind’s utter inferiority in comparison to our more evolved counterparts. Such as the chimpanzee. Ms. Vink was nothing more than an earthworm in comparison to the rest of the animal kingdom. Even in comparison to the human race, and more specifically me, who at the very least knew about his shortcomings, and was well underway to doing something about them.
These thoughts kept me occupied for several seconds. All the while Ms. Vink stood before me in a thin blouse and shorts of a similar material, both hands in mid-air, frozen rigid. Her wet mouth had dropped open in surprise as Ron and Willem came towards me.
“My God Hans, what in the world has gotten into you?”
Several men approached me slowly, as if I was some kind of deranged animal, hands extended, heads back, clawing at me.
I treated them no better than any predator would treat their prey. With my thin, delicate fingers I slashed like an agile crab, first at Ron, then at Willem before escaping through a narrow passageway, coat and all.
I ran home as if floating on clouds of ecstasy, filled with a satisfaction so intense it jolted my arms and legs, making my run look more like a gallop.
Once back I bolted my door and sat at my desk for quite some time before making my way upstairs. I downed half a bottle of valerian and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
The following morning I woke up anxious. Not because of what I had done to Ms. Vink. No, I could not care less about her wellbeing. A predator’s apathy had calloused my brain. No, what worried me was what she had said about the sparrow’s peanut brain. Though it pained me to say it, she was, in a way, right. Surely the eyes did not account for the intellect. I had spent so much of my life focusing on sight, vision, optics alone, that I had completely forgotten about the intelligence needed to make sense of those perceptions.
There was, then, some essence, some intrinsic, subjective matter, that no amount of imagination or fine-tuning could acquire. Our experiences were the building blocks of our imagination, so our imagination could only lead us to wherever our experiences rendered true. It did not help to imagine what it could possibly feel like to have webbed toes, or winged arms. How could I ever know what it was like to be anything but my own, human self?
No matter how hard I tried, how well defined my lenses would become, how well versed I felt on the infrastructure of each individual animal, I would never know, never truly know, what it was to actually be that animal. My glasses told me only what it would be like for me to see like a chameleon, a pond-slider, a bronze-winged parrot. I was, and would always be, entirely limited to the resources of my own mind. As long as I couldn’t change my fundamental structure, my experiences would always be human experiences. My glasses metamorphosed nothing.
Needless to say, no one showed up for the opening of my revamped shop. In fact, the only opening was a smashed window.
All in all, I have made a monstrous fool of myself. The thought of lenses, of minks (I did return the coat to Ms. Vink, though she refused to meet my eye), everything still sends a painful shiver down my entire body. As I said, there was even an article written about me in De Volkskrant a few days later: “Monnickendam Man Strips Elderly Woman of Fur Coat, Leaving Her Entirely In The Nude.” It’s horrible, really. And while at some point Ms. Vink will get over the incident, in fact she seems to be more popular than ever, I am now jobless and destined to a life entirely alone. If only I could create a pair of glasses to warp that reality.
Yet, and since I have nothing left to lose I will be entirely honest, it wasn’t only my mastery over the psyche which made my small optician’s shop such a raging success. I admit, every now and then, I would warp, rework, reshape the lenses of each pair of spectacles ever so slightly, to alter the wearer’s vision. You might think “obviously, that’s the point of prescription glasses,” but then you’d disregard the very artistry of my craft. One does not buy glasses to see better, but to look better. Physically. When one thinks he looks handsome, he suddenly wants not one pair of glasses, but two or three in all kinds of different colors.
You can imagine my gradual obsession with Aesthetics. The pretty creatures, those men with straight, angular faces, and well-manicured facial hair, the women with small chins and big eyes, they simply do not understand the agonies felt by those average, or less-than-average folks like myself. For every setback they experience, we experience it triple-fold, perhaps more. They have the luxury of going about their lives with an underdeveloped character, dim-wits, nastiness, and have it played off as cute, comical, admirable. We, and with we I mean myself and all those whose noses protrude over their mouths, whose eyes droop down on one side and go up ever so slightly on the other, whose lips bulge out in the middle like an old-fashioned purse, we have to exert ourselves to improbable extents only to be marginally accepted.
Because of my personal misfortunes, attributed to my person at the time of my birth, I have developed my own theory on Aesthetics. One I implemented on my glasses. In summation: beauty should be looked at as a ladder. At the bottom are the extremely repulsive, the barely perceivable, rat-like people of the earth. One step higher are those I’d consider below average. One higher, the almost average. Higher again, the average. And so forth. The important thing is not so much each individual group, but the system of hierarchy that plays within each step. Our ape-like brains automatically put like against like. You put one supermodel up against another. You put one man with a job in construction up against another man with a janitor’s job. The goal isn’t so much perfection. It is to be the best within your category. That is my theory on Aesthetics anyway, and I stand by it. Hell, I dedicated my life to it.
What about children, you may ask? Does my theory extend to them? I have not the slightest clue. While I understand adults through and through, children remain a mystery to me. The problem lies in my utter disinterest in their wellbeing. If anything, I secretly despise them. And I would have happily continued within my dislike if it wasn’t for the opening of my newly renovated optics shop. In order to bind my clients I knew I had to keep their damned offspring entertained. A difficult task, considering the supreme craftsmanship that goes into the making of a lens, and the short prefrontal cortex of a toddler.
I was worried, but not for long. Not to sound pompous, but I am a bit of an entrepreneurial genius. For a man such as myself, a true Monnickendamer, I have traveled a great deal. I speak some German and Latin. I read. I can hold a political discussion without raising my voice. As I said earlier, I am extremely well-versed in Aesthetics. I influenced, at least so I hope, the lives of many by advising the right prescription glasses to fit their faces. The list goes on. But children? It took several days of painstaking analysis to devise a plan.
Two whole weeks passed before the idea came to me, in the form of a dream. I hardly had time to fully return to consciousness before I found myself on my feet, running down the two floors from my apartment to the optical laboratory. I began working on my creation immediately, and came up with a name just as fast: Anoptics for the adults, or Animal Glasses for the children. I would let the children see the world like any animal of their choosing.
I toiled with the plastics, as I did for most of my cheaper models, but it wouldn’t suffice. I’d have to dismantle one of my less-popular spectacles and rework those. My slim, elegant fingers labored tirelessly, like those of a liver surgeon or a watchmaker. In a way, I was a bit of the latter. While watchmakers own our temporal perception, us opticians take reign over the visual world. Which, in my opinion, is far more important. Though neither really can do without the other, come to think of it.
I went over my notes. How did our eyes compare to those of an animal? The human pupil receives images in the form of light which the iris then regulates. At the back of the eye is the retina, made up of photoreceptors, transforming the information as signals sent through the optic nerve to the brain. In other animals, however, such as the chicken, position and shape of the eye can mean the difference between life and death. Predators, like lions and tigers, who hunt by ambush, have front-facing eyes which provide better focus and a greater ability to calculate distances. Contrarily, deer and goats have lateral eyes and horizontal pupils which grant a broader field of vision. Some even have rotating pupils! Can you believe it? How could I possibly translate all this information into a lens?
I labored for hours. The first animal I chose was the tarsier. Since their eyes are fixed in a cranial cavity and cannot rotate, I did not have to implement any especially difficult operations. All I had to account for were their huge corneas and tapetum lucidum (excuse my Latin: a reflective layer of tissue on the back of the eye that reflects light), which give them excellent night vision. It was two in the morning by the time I finished, so I took the glasses outside and stared into the night.
“Incredible!” I breathed. I really could see just about everything. As if a flashlight was strapped to my forehead, the night sky suddenly illuminated in front of me. Without the glasses the night reduced to black, with the glasses, it became incredibly clear again, beautiful and bright with stars.
A path led from my shop, across a field to a stile and on over outside town. I walked for an hour or so, testing the spectacles. Upon my return home I was not in the least bit tired. No more than two, three minutes passed before I was working on another animal: the barreleye fish. A more challenging operation considering their strange double eyes. The heads of these creatures are completely transparent and filled with liquid. Just imagine the thoughts that go on in there. Inside the liquid are two ocular structures, consisting of two parts. The first is similar to ours, so that particular operation took me a little under thirty minutes. The second, however, took all night, and well into the morning. A diverticular eye, separated from the main one, contains a curved mirror formed by layers of guanine. The mirror catches light and reflects it back into their main eye, allowing them to see up and down simultaneously.
I could not wear those particular glasses for more than two seconds before a terrible headache set my eyebrows and temples ablaze. “Perhaps I should go upstairs and try them out in the bathtub, like a fish…” So that is what I did. I filled the tub all the way to the top and sprinkled a bag of loose-leaf salad from the fridge in there too, like seaweed, then dipped my head in. Useless. The walls were too white, I needed more depth.
“Perhaps I should take the car to the beach? Het Hemmeland is only a fifteen-minute drive… I could be back and showered by the time the shop opens…”
I was convinced immediately; within moments my bare feet were in the sand, my naked body shivering in the wind, glasses secured on my hooked nose, running towards the water. It was a disaster. In my excitement I had forgotten about salt’s effect on the cornea and sclera. I returned home exhausted, with two swollen eyes and a bad temper. I would have to transform them into goggles, but it was already eight forty-five. Within fifteen minutes my first client would arrive, the old Ms. Vink. What to do? In my forty-something years working in my father’s shop I had not canceled an appointment once.
“No, I’ll have to see it through,” I told myself. Seeing things through had become a bit of a life’s motto for me.
At precisely nine o’clock the bell rang, followed by a loud knocking. I opened the door and seated her large backside behind the phoropter. It was of the utmost importance that she left quickly, so I could close the shop until my next appointment at three. But Ms. Vink being Ms. Vink, and me being me, she wanted to talk, and I let her do so. She scared me with her big fur coat. Her face was all mouth with two wet lips, always open, like a big, moist keyhole.
“Are you alright, Hans?” she asked, showing her yellow bottom teeth. “You’re acting strange, and your eyes are red.”
“Oh, yes, I’m quite alright. Just tired. Shall we get on with it?”
“Your generation and their rushing. Sit down, will you. Tell me about the new shop, is it ready? That new location will be closer to me, you know. Such a nice location. The best, really.”
“Yes, everything is just about done. Just working on some minor details.”
“I’m sure it’ll look just amazing. And tell me, did you hear about…”
Before she had the chance to continue I fixed the phoropter neatly over her head, making her momentarily look like a beautiful, mechanical butterfly. I switched the lenses rapidly, until we came to the one through which she saw clearest. Mrs. Vink tended to treat the art of optics more like a guessing game than an examination. When I removed the phoropter from her face, her eyes remained shut.
“Alright, Mrs. Vink, your sight seems to have improved drastically over the past week.” “Improved? Oh no, that can’t be possible, do it again.”
“It seems to be entirely possible. You went from minus six, to plus one. I have never seen such results,” I said, sarcastic. I felt impatient, and her wet bottom lip reminded me of a blubber fish, which in turn reminded me of the barreleye fish goggles waiting for me upstairs.
“We ought to do it again. You are obviously mistaken.”
“I’m afraid I simply do not have the time today.”
“I can come back tomorrow.”
“I am awfully busy with the renovation.”
“You said you were practically done. Oh, I’m sure you can fit me in somewhere. I’ll come after lunch today.”
“As I said Mrs. Vink, I do not have the time.”
My heart bounced uncomfortably in my chest. Growing up as an only child, and being a bachelor without children, morphed me into an unbearable people-pleaser, humiliated as I was by the thought of being the sole attendant at my own funeral. I am quick to accommodate. On my own time I will curse their names and pray for some great misfortune to color their lives forever. But in their face, I simply cannot do anything but gratify and satisfy.
But that morning was different. The thought of getting back to my Animal Glasses made me jittery with anticipation. I just about took Mrs. Vink by the collar of her fur coat and hauled her out of the shop.
I spent what remained of the morning dismantling and assembling my swim-goggles to fit the barreleye fish lenses. Then, because I still had some time until my next appointment, I began my work on a pair of mantis shrimp spectacles. An animal which, despite its overall insignificant appearance, has incredible sight.
At just over three o’clock the bell rang. Jan de Jong, my next client, was a short, thick-legged man with a round, red face and two bulging eyes through which he could not see a thing. As always he was dressed in a cheap suit made of a shiny material and carried a large black briefcase, making him look more important than he really was. He worked at the post office.
Again I fitted the phoropter around the eyes, again I watched the mouth from under it, lips sliding one over the other like two slabs of glistening rubber. Again I told him his sight hadn’t changed since the week before, and again he told me about his wife. Had my life always been so monotonous? At precisely ten past three I walked him to the door.
The following day was Saturday. The thought of spending two full days on my Animal Glasses sent a happy shiver through my spine and arms. Around ten o’clock I walked to the bookstore and bought an entire encyclopedia of the animal kingdom. It was as thick as the Bible, and twice as heavy. I leafed through it all morning, highlighting the creatures I wanted to recreate first, which were just about all of them. Right after lunch I started my work on the diopsidae antennae of the stalk-eyed fly. Once done I began tinkering on the psychedelic eyes of the satanic leaf-tailed gecko. The following morning, Sunday, I started, and promptly finished, the cuttlefish, then the bat, and during my evening hours, the red-eyed tree frog. The following week I only took my Monday appointments, and, for the first time in my life, canceled the rest. It was an enormously productive period during which I created some forty glasses. And instead of growing bored with my new hobby, I became more animated by the day. My thin face could be seen angled over my desk at all hours, my right shoulder slanted ever so slightly, as if my neck were not strong enough to support it. I no longer considered it a hobby at all. I could not help but think I was onto something much grander, much more profound than a simple trick of the eye.
“There really is a whole world out there,” I thought to myself. “A world we cannot see with our bare eyes. A world of light, energy, waves that is just as real, just as tangible as our own. And with that I do not mean those exotic cases such as from human to human. Like near-blindness or color-blindness, you can imagine that quite easily. What I am doing here, in my small little studio, is revolutionary.”
I admit, I got a little over my head. Whenever I found myself out on the streets of Monnickendam, buying supplies or stretching my legs, I felt a certain sense of superiority over everyone else. As if I held within my thin fingers the very kernel of reality. And though I managed to largely rein in this enlightened sense of self, one afternoon I ran into Harriet Hendricks. Being an infinitely small man, her tall frame always brought out the worst in me. I simply could not contain myself.
“A penny for your thoughts?” she asked.
If there is a phrase I absolutely cannot stand, it is that one. I felt it physically—my lunch resurfaced in my throat.
“Come on Hans, two pennies then!”
I began to cough, and shook my head, unable to answer.
“Have I finally found something you wouldn’t do for two pennies?” she laughed her hoarse, possum laugh.
“I’m joking Hans, come on, don’t be so serious. I have to say, you look great. Tell me your secret, what have you been eating?”
There was something about that woman I did not like one bit. A mischievous air hung around her, and the closer I stood, the more it suffocated me and made me stumble over my words. But, as fate would have it, Mr. and Mrs. Hendricks were my best clients. They even partially funded my new optics shop. And though I had always prided myself on my self-control, on my ability to manipulate any situation to the greatest advantage of both myself and my interlocutor, that afternoon I could not keep it in. When she looked at me again, with that sly, smiling mouth that resembled a great big tuna fish, I broke out in terrifying cries.
“Hooo, hooo, hooo,” I screeched like the great Eurasian eagle-owl whose glasses I had finished just a few hours earlier. Harriet’s fish mouth had gone sour, her small eyes fixed upon mine. I flapped my arms like long, barred wings and pretended to fly away. Before I knew it, I was “hooo hooo hooo-ing” all the way home. It was the most fun I’d had in years and I could not promise myself I wouldn’t do it again.
No more than two days passed before a similar event unfolded. As I went out for a walk I saw Naomi Rozendaal’s cat crouched on the counter of her small apartment, eating fish heads out of a white saucer. The animal looked up at me with his big, green-yellow eyes and meowed. I just about meowed back, pulling the edges of my mouth backward as I whispered in his tongue: “Don’t fear me, I am one of you.” My whole body trembled with delicious electricity.
Then on Tuesday, two days before the opening of my new shop, I took my chameleon spectacles, with their multi-directional sight, out for a spin around Monnickendam. Like us humans, chameleons have good day, but terrible night vision. Their cone-shaped eyelids are fused to their pupils, leaving just a small part of their eye exposed, allowing them to see in all directions without even the slightest rotation.
While I sat squat on a bench in Cornelis Dirkszlaan, my face looking out in front of me, I spotted Ron Molenaar speaking with Willem de Keizer several steps behind. Ron was wearing one of his jackets that he bought in a small thrift store several minutes out of town, and though there had been a time, I am sure, when they were considered stylish, now they looked too ridiculous for words. Those Victorian-era coats with high collars and big buttons down the front. Willem, contrarily, wore a nice, military green jacket. His pants, however, were narrow around the knees, and wide at the ankles. You had to have specific legs to pull something like that off, and Willem didn’t have them. His were long and thin, like a birch tree. Then there was the town’s doctor, Albert Vries, to their right several steps down the street. As usual he wore his white lab coat unbuttoned so one could see his chest hair underneath. This was supposed to give the impression of youth even though, to me, he looked more like an old peacock with half its feathers missing.
I gave his face a good up and down when suddenly I heard: “Hello? Hans? Hello? What in the world is that thing on your face? A new pair of glasses?”
It took several seconds to maneuver my eyes from the back of my head to the front. When I finally managed I wish I hadn’t bothered. It was Ms. Vink once again, walking her miniature black poodle.
“Hans, you don’t mind me saying this, do you? We’ve known each other for quite some time. You’re acting a little… off. It’s not just me saying it. You know I don’t care, you can do whatever you please. But are you quite alright? Please take those things off your eyes.”
In reality, I did mind. I wish she would go away so I could continue spying on Albert. But it was a hopeless situation, Ms. Vink was just about as lonely as me, lonelier perhaps. At least I had my shop. She only had her miniature poodle, and by the looks of it, he didn’t have much longer.
“You are nervous about the opening of your new shop, aren’t you? Is that what it is? You shouldn’t worry your round little head about it. What could possibly go wrong?”
“I’m not nervous at all. In fact, I am testing these new glasses for that very occas—”
“New glasses? Those?” she asked, pointing at my face.
“Yes, these are my newest creation. They are Animal Glasses for the… children…”
“Animal Glasses? What in the world is that?”
As I mentioned earlier, they had quickly become much more to me than simple eyewear for children. But how could I explain, to this simple woman no less, that conscious experience was a widespread phenomenon that occurred to all life forms, not just humans? That because an organism had conscious experience meant that there was something to be an organism. And if there was something innate to being an organism, there must be an objective reality. I considered hooo-ing like an owl again, but for some reason it didn’t feel quite right.
“I believe,” I said, speaking slowly, “that there is a whole world around us that we cannot see. It is possible that the very world we believe to be real is in reality a fraud, catered towards our survival through evolution.”
“Highly improbable,” answered Ms. Vink quickly, simply.
“Why? Why?” I insisted, pointing at the glasses. “See for yourself.”
“Oh, I couldn’t. Really, I couldn’t.”
“Suit yourself,” I answered, annoyed.
“A reality other than the one we see? Impossible,” she mumbled again. Not so much out of interest, but out of fear the conversation would run dry and I’d get up and leave.
“It, in fact, is not impossible at all,” I answered. Though I never cared much about Mrs. Vink, her opinion suddenly meant everything to me, and I wished nothing more than to convince her. “You see that bird, the sparrow up in the tree? What does it see? Tell me, it has eyes, doesn’t it? So what does it see?”
“Who cares what it sees, dear. Even if it were to see anything, do you think its little peanut brain could make any sense of it?”
Now, with hindsight, I admit she made a rather good point. I also admit, now, though at the time my reaction seemed entirely valid, that I exaggerated somewhat. Before I can tell you what I did, there is one thing you ought to know about Ms. Vink. She dons a despicable mink coat everyday of her miserable existence. Everyday, even when the weather is warm and summery, as it was that Tuesday. If it rained, she simply did not leave the house. The fur was pure white, but when you looked at it closer, as I did that day, it had a touch of gray in it as well, a deep gray, like uranium. And while usually I hardly noticed the thing, not at all actually, that day it stood out like a baboon’s red buttocks.
A terrible thought came to me: how dare she, that old prune, care for her poodle like a son, and at the same time condone the manufacturing of such a coat? The paradox shocked me. I had never been particularly conscious of ethical questions. At one point I had even considered it an odious business to get involved in the wellbeing of things that can give you nothing in return. But fury and hate can overwhelm a man's mind to an astonishing degree, and in no time a plot had formed in my head.
Before I could make up my mind, my mind had made up its own. I took her beloved coat from her frail body (don’t ask me how, I simply did) and forced it around my own. Once on, I started furiously re-enacting a mink’s hysterical cries to the best of my ability.
A strange way to behave, you might think, especially for a man like myself who cares so much about the opinions of others. To which I would answer, no, it is not strange at all, if you were to consider my situation. By that point I had grown entirely convinced of the unlikelihood of a certain reality, and so equally certain of the unlikelihood of any repercussions. To me, then, to do anything was really to do nothing. That, and my conviction of mankind’s utter inferiority in comparison to our more evolved counterparts. Such as the chimpanzee. Ms. Vink was nothing more than an earthworm in comparison to the rest of the animal kingdom. Even in comparison to the human race, and more specifically me, who at the very least knew about his shortcomings, and was well underway to doing something about them.
These thoughts kept me occupied for several seconds. All the while Ms. Vink stood before me in a thin blouse and shorts of a similar material, both hands in mid-air, frozen rigid. Her wet mouth had dropped open in surprise as Ron and Willem came towards me.
“My God Hans, what in the world has gotten into you?”
Several men approached me slowly, as if I was some kind of deranged animal, hands extended, heads back, clawing at me.
I treated them no better than any predator would treat their prey. With my thin, delicate fingers I slashed like an agile crab, first at Ron, then at Willem before escaping through a narrow passageway, coat and all.
I ran home as if floating on clouds of ecstasy, filled with a satisfaction so intense it jolted my arms and legs, making my run look more like a gallop.
Once back I bolted my door and sat at my desk for quite some time before making my way upstairs. I downed half a bottle of valerian and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
The following morning I woke up anxious. Not because of what I had done to Ms. Vink. No, I could not care less about her wellbeing. A predator’s apathy had calloused my brain. No, what worried me was what she had said about the sparrow’s peanut brain. Though it pained me to say it, she was, in a way, right. Surely the eyes did not account for the intellect. I had spent so much of my life focusing on sight, vision, optics alone, that I had completely forgotten about the intelligence needed to make sense of those perceptions.
There was, then, some essence, some intrinsic, subjective matter, that no amount of imagination or fine-tuning could acquire. Our experiences were the building blocks of our imagination, so our imagination could only lead us to wherever our experiences rendered true. It did not help to imagine what it could possibly feel like to have webbed toes, or winged arms. How could I ever know what it was like to be anything but my own, human self?
No matter how hard I tried, how well defined my lenses would become, how well versed I felt on the infrastructure of each individual animal, I would never know, never truly know, what it was to actually be that animal. My glasses told me only what it would be like for me to see like a chameleon, a pond-slider, a bronze-winged parrot. I was, and would always be, entirely limited to the resources of my own mind. As long as I couldn’t change my fundamental structure, my experiences would always be human experiences. My glasses metamorphosed nothing.
Needless to say, no one showed up for the opening of my revamped shop. In fact, the only opening was a smashed window.
All in all, I have made a monstrous fool of myself. The thought of lenses, of minks (I did return the coat to Ms. Vink, though she refused to meet my eye), everything still sends a painful shiver down my entire body. As I said, there was even an article written about me in De Volkskrant a few days later: “Monnickendam Man Strips Elderly Woman of Fur Coat, Leaving Her Entirely In The Nude.” It’s horrible, really. And while at some point Ms. Vink will get over the incident, in fact she seems to be more popular than ever, I am now jobless and destined to a life entirely alone. If only I could create a pair of glasses to warp that reality.
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Shifra Steinberg is a writer from The Netherlands currently living in New York City, where she is pursuing an MFA from Columbia University. Her debut novel Imaginary Order was published in January 2023 with Austin Macauley Publishers and is available at most major UK and US bookstores. She also posts bimonthly short stories and essays on her Substack Absurdus.
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