The Reddest Red (March 2037)

There are 2,700 eyes in my bedroom. My landlord, an eccentric, tetrachromat old man, manufactures them downstairs; when I moved in, it was on the condition that my half of the second-story Manhattan loft could multitask as a storage space for his spare glass eyes. I had been busing tables and living out of a rag-and-bone apartment in Queens when he stopped me on the street and told me I had the most magnificent eyes.

“They’re gray,” I replied. “This whole city’s gray. Find your gray somewhere else, old man.”

“That, miss, is where you are mistaken,” he said. He took me by the arm and explained to me, as we walked, that the world I saw was dreary and doglike compared to his. He taught me, over coffee that suddenly seemed less brown and more deep-fall amber, that his was a world of reds past sunsets and greens of Scottish forests blooming between the cracks in the sidewalk. He offered me a place to live and to draw. Hours later, his phone number safely penned on my left arm, I asked him what color my eyes were.

He smiled kindly. “Fourteen steps into your imagination past violet.”

I roll out of bed and pad into the kitchen, the smell of coffee making my hair stand on end. The loft’s a pretty, albeit bare, space, with a glass vase of flowers on the windowsill and a wrought-iron Juliet balcony butting up against the back windows of an old art studio. Every morning, he and I sit in plain wooden chairs and read the newspaper, and I find myself studying his hands—burned, from years of maneuvering hot glass, with twisted, rootlike fingers and scars predating memory winding up and down his wrists. I like to read the front-page articles and skim the headlines; he reads the obituaries.

“Let me know when you see Pierson in there, would you?” I say, unceremoniously shaking open my paper to a bold, black headline—Governor passes new law consenting to ‘clean-sweep’ of city streets. “Honestly, aren’t there worse things in this city than the homeless population—and why’s it called a ‘clean-sweep,’ why won’t they call it what it is?”

“They’re politicians.” He takes a slow sip of his coffee, and I wait for him to continue. 

“They like cleaning up the streets, or giving the impression of doing so—hence ‘clean-sweep,’ I believe—because they like Wall Street looking smart.”

“Wall Street looks piggish, and it’s not because of the homeless,” I say, huffily. “There’s no accountability—just because they can’t see the people they’re hurting from up on their high horses, can’t look them in the eyes, they think they don’t exist.”

He lays his newspaper on the table and stares at me, his glasses sliding precariously to the tip of his nose. “Why does this bother you so much?”

“I don’t like that the system running my life, and my streets, doesn’t care about the people it controls!” My hand comes down hard on the table, and he takes my paper away from me as though I were a child.

“You shouldn’t be saying things like this,” he murmurs.

I stalk off. Charcoal awaits my fingers, and I lie down on the cracked wooden floor of my room, my vision swimming with eyes and the gray-blue patches on the bottom left of my quilt. I snag a pencil from under my bed and turn over, sketching absently onto the floor—eyes, eyebrows lowered in concentration—I rotate a hundred and eighty degrees and draw eyes there, too, letting my toes smudge my first sketch as I craft a narrowed pair with expansive eyelashes, blowing the black dust so it catches on the cobwebs in the corners of the room. I cough. My hands are black and it’s spreading up my wrists like my disgust, and I jump up and scrape my palms frantically, sure I can feel ink from that damn newspaper caught under my fingernails.

With a breath, I force myself to slow down, force the room back to walking speed, and collapse at my desk, letting my head fall into my hands and the charcoal adorn my cheeks. 2,700 glass eyes bear down on me, studying my greasy hair, my hunched shoulders, my black handprints on the corners of the desk from where I used it to steady myself. Accountability, I think. Those eyes hold me accountable.

I retrieve a small cardboard box from the recesses of my desk and crack open a Mason jar of brown eyes. I wander back into the kitchen, knowing he’s in the shower, and take the front page off the newspaper, crumple it slightly, and use it to pad the box. Shaking two eyes into my hand, like pills, I press them into the paper, then scrawl on a piece of scratch paper— “You made my home illegal.” I seal it, copy the address from the contact page of the Manhattan government website onto the label, and tuck it into my pocket. Accountability. Hefting my portfolio and shrugging into a coat that smells like cigarettes and cologne, I lock the door to the apartment behind me and head out onto the streets. I drop the parcel at the post office before laying my work on a free table at the Monday art market, and I let those two brown eyes glimmer in my mind all afternoon.

That night, my key pauses in the lock on the door to the loft, stopped by the sounds of a light crackle and a low baritone, and when my numb fingers finally permit me into the room all thoughts of my spur-of-the-moment political statement are driven from my mind. My landlord has pulled an ancient gramophone—nothing like the silver radio and television set he keeps downstairs—from the depths of his workshop, and is singing along to some unknowable folk song in a distracted way, his hands occupied on the stove. I lay my coat, art, and scarf down quietly, but he turns around anyway—those thousands of eyes keeping him informed, as always. Sometimes, they’re unnerving; tonight, they reflect the glow of the stove like candles, turning the room into a chandelier.

“Mon cherie, dance with me,” he says, and I can smell the paint residue trapped in his shirt collar as he spins me into a waltz, laughing and leading me confidently enough that I don’t have to think about the steps.

“What’ve you been drinking?” I ask, and he pinches me where his hand sits at my waist.

“Retirement,” he says, “and a smidge of whiskey.”

I pull away from him. “Retirement?”

“Indeed. There is no job in glass eyes; only company.”

“Then why do it at all?”

“Because eyes are the study of God.”

I guide him to the table, turn down the gramophone. “How do you figure?”

“Because God is society. Rather, God is whatever society lacks—it fills in the gaps in our knowledge, our morals, our history, until we can feel whole. That is why the eyes are God; our sight brings us the pieces of the world that we need to feel complete.”

I don’t point out that glass eyes can’t see. Instead, I take his hands across the table, feeling the fragility there, and say, “Maybe lay off the whiskey, yeah?”

“You think me a silly old man.”

“I’d like to reserve judgment.”

“May I give you some advice?”

I stay quiet.

“Do not go writing to the government,” he says. “Do not go playing in the Capitol building with signs. Do not go making statements. I have seen your art, your talent, cherie, and that is not where it belongs.”

I drop his hands. “I can’t believe you can accept being ruled by a body that doesn’t think you’re worth protecting.”

“We can look after ourselves. The more isolated they are from us, the better. If you look to long into them—if you want them to acknowledge you, to hear you—if you spend your time seeking their recognition, it will drive you mad.”

The next morning, I mail two more packages: blue eyes, saying, “You have left my religion behind”; and gray, with, “I sell my body to pay hospital bills.” I proceed under the assumption that my landlord could not possibly miss three pairs of glass eyes. Three progresses to six, then twelve, then thirty, and eventually I have to go buy bigger boxes because I need to—need to—enclose a pair of eyes for every complaint I have, every slight I see the government making against the world, every story I want to tell about the woman who doused herself in silver paint yesterday morning and stood unflinching on the sidewalk for hours trying to scrape coins from the wallets of the men who owned all of 37th Street and Macy’s, alternately being photographed, robbed, and groped. I write notes raging against the fat bankers who wear Wall Street like a belt, using it to keep their Armani hems out of the muck of the inner city; I write like I’m writing to God, with about the same level of responsiveness.

After three weeks of this, I feel like I’ve exhausted my campaign; I’ve sent them hazel, blue, green, gray, black, brown, violet, mismatched pairs, and whatever else I can think of, alongside rants, news clippings, stories, snippets taken from the streets and cleaned up, magnified, into things that have to be read and considered. I’ve brought Queens straight to their doorsteps, from the gossip stolen from the parlor on the South Side to the Polaroids of the old man and his dog sleeping under the chess tables in the park. I’ve made sure that every time our governor sits down at his desk, the whole of the city is watching him do it.

It’s a particularly dreary night when I come home after delivering what I think will be my last package. I press into the apartment, grateful for the radiator’s warmth and the chance to extricate myself from my rain-dense coat, to find my landlord at the table with twelve empty Mason jars.

He meets my eyes coldly. “I told you not to do anything like this.”

I sit across from him. “I needed to do something. I needed them to know that the city sees what they’re doing—” and the city feels it like a kick in the ribs, every time.

“That was not your place,” he says, his voice barely a teakettle hiss, and I slam both my palms into the table, hard enough that it tips toward me and several glass jars fall.

“It is exactly my place! It is my place to be heard, recognized—to have a voice in how my own life is run!”

He laughs, then—a colder, crueler laugh than I have ever heard. “They’ll never hear you,” he says. “Every eye in this blasted loft can be sitting in that office, but never yours.” He leans toward me, roughly takes my chin in one scarred hand— “I’ve never made eyes that color before.”

If there is one thing, one thing at all, that I need, it is this. I cannot be the only eye in the city that does not grip the governor by his throat and tell him that I am legitimate. I stand purposefully and pass the knife rack on my way into my bedroom, daring him to stop me, because I’m sure he knows what I’m thinking (don’t tell me those eyes can’t see right through me), but he doesn’t move an inch. This is the statement I want to make, and it’s bigger than my charcoal sketches at the Monday market. He was right—the eyes are like God, and right now, what our society longs for most is recognition. “You can find your gray somewhere else, old man.”

A week later, one final package arrives at the Capitol building. The official in charge of opening the mail cringes when he sees it, but wraps the tape knife around it anyway, holding it away from his face as he opens it. Had my landlord been there, he would’ve seen a single eye the color of purple rain and lavender—fourteen steps into the imagination past violet, he’d say. The official just sees gray, accompanied by a smudged, red-splattered note that states, “Every eye in the city rests on you now.”