It was a cruel day in April when I first felt the overwhelming weight of the Evil Eye burden itself upon my back. I had gone to have lunch with a dear friend of mine from high school, whom I hadn’t seen for quite some time. We had grown distant, you see, and whether it was out of nostalgia or chismotic curiosity (I do not know which, exactly, had overpowered me at that moment), I sent him a brief and plain message as a means of establishing a renewed connection. I had not expected to hear back from him so soon, yet it was a mere second afterward when he had responded in kind to my brevity. By sheer coincidence we had happened to live no further than two blocks from one another, the same neighborhood, the same city, and for an amount of time which approximated each other. The only real difference seemed to be the fact that I was always doing things an hour ahead of him. Whereas I would work during the day from eight o’clock to four, he would do so from nine o’clock to five. If the one of us went for drinks afterward, I would arrive at five, and he at six. As it happened, we both had formed the habit of frequenting the same diner, on the same weekdays (every Saturday, twelve o’clock), and enjoyed the same meals from the establishment. Given the obvious difference in schedules, our fated day of reunion would be established for around twelve-thirty.
As I walked down the sidewalk towards the greasy spoon, I saw a figure which seemed to be a strange shade of my own visage, I had already arrived and sat down at the patio. As I came closer to the reflection, it became clear that it had in fact been my friend from so long ago. Yet, his face moved in strange ways, contorted oddly, an approximate smile, contorted so greatly into exaggeration. The top of his gums were on full display as his upper lip had curled into that bizarre crescent. As I edged closer towards the table, he jumped forth from excitement and shook my hand with an extreme force, causing some mild pain in my shoulder.
“Heelooo my friend!” he said “It’s been soooo loooong, hasn’t it?”
As he spoke, he moved the whole of his maw, as though the jaw and tongue and lips were all operating as separate agents.
“I suppose it has,” I said. “You seem rather, uh..chipper?”
“Weeeell of course, it is a most wonderful April afternoon. The spring sun’s warmth is just beginning to break through!” It had been deeply overcast that day, I had actually remarked to myself that the gloom of gray might ruin the whole event. It was then that I noticed another odd fact about this figure, there was a dullness of his eyes, dry. Those pearls in his eyes were painted and unpolished marble. In fact, the rest of his face seemed to mimic this, molded clay on frame rather than flesh on bone. Despite all of this, and my great sensation of unease, I continued to lunch with him.
The waiter set down some glasses of water at our table, then when asked if we had wanted anything else to drink, we both declined. I then decided to allow him to ask the first questions, but was soon displeased to find a great field of silence strewn before us. And when the waiter came back to take our orders, he did as before, and asked for the same meal that I had. With our plates of food placed before us, I noticed that he only moved in to bite only after I had done so before. Every bite occurred one after the other, every cut of meatloaf, every glob of mash, every scoop of peas, each mouthful found its way to be even closer to my own movement than the one which preceded it. My friend had become a sort of delayed mirror, a snapshot of the second which I had just lived, an utter and nigh complete replicant.
There was one exception to that meal, however, in which I felt the façade fade away. A moment in which the life fled back to his cheeks, and the light returned to his eyes, where he could act as a unified whole, rather than as an assemblage of various fleshy machines. When this return emerged, he turned his head back and forth, scanning the area with a fervor.
“J-John?” he said, “H-how are you here?”
“Sorry? We agreed to lunch? Are you alright?”
“No, no, not good. The last thing I remember…what do I remember? Yes…YES! I remember. I went to a party with Dean,” another classmate of ours, “I thought he seemed off…”
“Sorry? Please, slow down, I’m not understanding-“
“He copied everything about me, everything, every detail, hell, he must’ve gotten surgery to look like me.”
He continued to prattle on, over, over, and over; a cascading rush of words ran mad from his mouth. It was then, during this unceasing will of words, that the crushing weight came crashing upon me. I felt millions of pinpricks stab every inch of my body, and all around me I could only see them all staring at me. Me! Not my friend. Everyone in the luncheonette, every man, woman, other, they all stared at me with their wills, and I felt every thought of disgust as though it were a sensation of great pain. Every minute detail of my image that I hadn’t carefully preened and prodded, every inch that was visibly insidious, I felt the disgust at every stretch of hideous flesh was a painful growth.
The rest of the events of that lunch remain to me only in fragments. I remember screaming in agony, only for the pain to grow from having done so, the cruel and wanting stares demanding an apology for the act of my image. I then kept myself quiet by biting down on a napkin, and though the pain was still great, I was able to march onwards. My friend, still rambling, had entered into a fierce rhythmic chant, “Beauty, Beauty is in, Beauty is in The Eye, The Eye, The Eye.”
Lacking the will to respond, I took great effort to leave. No one tried to stop me, but they all stared, all of them, all with the same eye. Though every glance came from a unique angle, I could feel it all, all the same, the same thing watching me. Even the familiar faces I saw on my way back had become strange to me, or perhaps they were strangers wearing masks, I can no longer be certain. And through those masks, where their eyes should have been, was The Eye, only The Eye remained to watch me.
I somehow made my way back home, the darkness had become comforting for the first time. It was only there, with all the blinds sewn shut, that I felt safe from the thing. I decided then that I needed to change, to look different, to act different, to
become a stranger to THE EYE.
I would assume an alternate identity, and melt away into it. Only once I have achieved this completely, will I have truly escaped it.▲
