The National Bureau of What the Hell is Going on with Eyes.
By "Jackalope Girl."
If you want to hear about my eyes, I have to tell you a story about what I used to see through them. It goes like this. I was sitting at a bar, yeah, a lot like this bar, and I was talking to somebody across it, just like we are. He asked me about my job.
"Uh, I take pictures of Eyes," I said, understanding for the first time how ridiculous it sounded just as it emerged from my mouth. "For the national bureau, of uh, what happened to our eyes. You know."
The beautiful man staring across from me at the bar sniffed air out of his nose, the winds seeming as though they were going to blow me over. He took another sip of his beer, and I watched his arm move. It was that the calm, easy movement of joints that can only come from masculine athleticism. He was exactly the sort of man I always dreamed about meeting at a gay bar, but was too shy to talk to: about ten years older than me, with a scraggly beard across his face and a strong-willed disposition. A kind of guy who does this all the time.
"And how's that working out for you?" He asked.
"Uh, I guess it, you know, it beats digging holes or running delivery. It's been getting hotter." It was always getting hotter.
"It's always getting hotter," he said.
"This one's nice though, because they don't really care who's eyes you're taking pictures of. Their quota is just 100 pairs of eyes per day, no questions asked as to whose eyes, or where you took them. So I like to go to the train station, or the airport, or the bar, you know, and just ask questions."
He turned a bit, arching his neck towards something else - another person, I worried - but then turned to face me. I couldn't look above the bridge of his aquiline nose, like some magnetism stopped me from seeing the moneymakers he kept tucked in his brow. "So it's like a gig, app type thing," he ventured.
"No, no - you know how eyes are with computers these days, that's the whole problem. So I keep them in an envelope, like this." I showed him the long bone-white envelope I kept all the photos in, trying not to let anything spill out. He glanced, flipped it (again with his wonderful fingers), and handed it back.
"So you want my eyes in your collection, is that it?"
I realized the uncomfortability of the stool I was sitting on. The cushion was so thin against the metal it was barely there, letting the steel dig into my backside. I noticed the room was was loud, Thick waves of bass reverberated through the thin wooden room. Despite this, there were only around four or five people at the dimly lit seats, and none were dancing.
I had taken the job for express purpose of responding to men's questions like this: I had seen the ad for the Bureau on a huge billboard, next to military recruitment banners. It showed a collage of a thousand fucked up eyes, and said, in the usual new bombastic, "non-PC" tone of the ruling party, "FIND OUT WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON. AND GET PAID!" I was out driving with my one buddy in Bakersfield, trying to find something to fucking do, and I said that taking photos for the bureau would be great for the pickup game. Saying "can I take a picture of your eyes" would be a great way to turn up the heat while still keeping some sense of plausible deniability. He said I was such a bottom, but thought it was pretty funny. But he also said eye photographers were some of the most fucked up people he knew. "You'd fit right in," he said.
I remembered my friend's chapped lips uttering those portentous words as I told the man at the bar "Sure," and lifted up my camera, checked the roll of film, slid it back in, and adjusted the lens. "Open 'em up real big," I said on autopilot, words I said five hundred times per week, "like an eye exam." Even while taking the photograph, I didn't look into his eyes.
The conversation went around a bit after that, in ways I can't recall - what he did for work, how are the Sharks doing, isn't it getting so much hotter these days, and so on. I walked back to the apartment, holding my envelope and roll of film in my hand.
You know how fucked towns everyone hates like Bakersfield have a housing crisis these days, and drugstores don't have a darkroom anymore, so my studio apartment ($2000 a month, thank you) is all I had for the whole operation. I moved on remote control through the complex to my apartment door, where the gory crimson light always bathed me. I threw on some prog rock, treated the day's film, and hung it up on the strings above me (This is my room decor, I tell myself staring up at the hundred reels on crossing wires). Then I could finally let the alcohol hit me, pushing me down into the stale sheets of my twin bed. It was a fitful sleep - I can't remember what I dreamed.
The next day, I was awoken by a tiny stream of sunlight baking my eyelids. Bleary, it took me a moment to realize the gravity of the situation - the darkroom compromised. But when the thought did strike me, I rushed to the blackout curtains, grabbing a roll of electrical tape to further stamp out the morning sun. Frantic, I checked my photos of eyes, made sure they were good to send. The last of them, hung up on the wire, was the visage of the perfect man from the bar. Keeping my shaking hand stable, I took a moment to examine the photo. Looking upon his eyes for the first time, I saw how deeply infected by the syndrome they were - on his left, a grey-brown iris spilled out like ink onto to his sclera, the pupil dripping like a tear. His right eye had no sclera at all anymore, only a great horizontal "frog's pupil" freamed by a blotched, bloody coating. They looked like spills of dubious substances on the table of a family restaurant, or maps of an unseen planet. These were my man's eyes? I tried to reframe the memory with those horrid bulbs attached to his face, and yet the edited image just would not congeal in my mind. Despite the heat, I shivered. With tongs, I plucked all of the photos from their perches, imprisoned them in another bony envelope, and stamped them with the roll of postage they had given me on sign-up. "FEDERAL GOVERNMENT POSTAGE - OFFICIAL. TO: THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON WITH EYES."
The whole eye-syndrome situation has been tough on everybody, and people like to say it's impossible, that it doesn't make any sense. I'm not so sure. Cameras and eyes have always been a little bit at war - it's a struggle between types of seeing. I heard once that the first camera was called the "camera obscura," and it was really just a trick of the eye. And even then the eye fought the camera, because the image came out upside down. Maybe that was the realest camera, arresting us with the clear fact that what you are looking at is a fantasy. Flash photography always used to fuck with eyes too, made people look like they had fire bursting from their brows, like demons.
People can't quite pin down the date or even the year it started (people start looking for the "first instance" of the syndrome, and it keeps stretching back further and further, maybe to the invention of the camera), the whole uneasy cease-fire between the ways of seeing fell apart. Try and take a picture of a human face with a phone camera, you'll have to turn it around since they stopped making them with those little selfie cams, and see what happens. You might get a photo of pure white, your face distorted and warped, maybe your face with skin instead of eyes; it's anyone's guess how the computer will interpret your individuality.
The eyes themselves have mutated too: maybe they got angry. Everyone's eyes are a world to their own now - multicolored, multishaped, asymmetrical orbs are the gems set in within all our masks. It's only a matter of degree as to how far they've warped from the "original" plan. Nobody's sure of the cause, but people sure do love to yap about it on their podcasts. You get your scientists with their paper-thin hypotheses and the conspiracy theorists with their crackpot plots, old geezers with the wildest explanations of all. We are awash in neat stories about our eyes, and yet they continue to dribble out, like pupils leaking from our irises.
You're young, but you must remember the panic when the syndrome started ramping up, when people woke up and saw in their steamy mirrors glimpses of their new faces. People back then thought we'd enjoy the individuality of having unique eyes, since people always used to compliment those kinds of things. But the only people who to love these are the eye surgeons, who make a killing. People loved images of themselves, much deeper and more intense than I think anyone realized. Without selfies, group photos, live-action movies, tiktoks, things started to get claustrophobic. The panic swept over the country swift and hard. There were riots even here in Bakersfield, people set fire to the cornfields and oil derricks, letting it all burn as they screamed for someone to do something. The liberals in their dulcet tones droned that the matter would be understood scientifically very soon, and they would introduce a program of measured means-tested loans for eye surgery if significant emotional distress was measured, and we really would love to do more but it's a rapidly evolving situation... and that's how the "Screamin' Eagles Party" showed up, with its loudmouthed candidate shouting at the top of his lungs, "WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON WITH OUR EYES?! WE'RE GONNA MAKE IT FUCKING STOP!!" They've been in power for a decade, I think, term limits removed, and everyone I talk to says they're doing a great job. But I'm not really political.
So that's where I got my job, at a bureau set up to make good on an insane campaign promise. I don't know what they do with the eye photos. The process of taking film photos of eyes is able to capture them them for a while. When I first started the job I hung a few up cause I was proud of my work, but after a month or too they started to distort just like a digital picture, but worse. I'd start to see teeth on the eyes, or hair, or worst of all, eyes within eyes. I took them down real quick, stuffed them in the trash. So my theory, worth as little as it is, is that I'm mailing these photos direct through federal postage straight to a furnace. But I wouldn't know, I've never actually met someone who works for the Bureau. I just mailed them my application and got back a hire letter with instructions.
The fact that I never saw another Bureau employee, just their letters, of course meant that I'd think about conning the Bureau. Yeah, I've thought of sending them scraps of paper in the mail, or just empty envelopes, less to defraud the government of its funds and more just to provoke a response out of them. I've wondered often what would happen - would I recieve a letter? An order? Would I even get to meet a representative of the Bureau? Their discipline would have the advantage of finally getting to see some glimpse of the workings of the organization. And yet, every time I've moved my hands to stamp and send that empty envelope, they stop in their tracks. The truth is, I have some kind of pride in my work. I couldn't explain it to you. There's something very important hiding inside those eye photos, and I don't care where they go, I just need to know that someone somewhere took them.
I even took a lot of care to get a good crop of eyes - I tried to get some more normal ones, some typically deformed ones, and I never let a truly deranged set of peepers get away from me. I thought about the furnace where my photos might go a lot, but I also thought about a bureaucrat up in DC (in my mind she is a middle-aged white woman with bleached-blonde bangs and pictures of her cats in her cubicle) flipping through my photos, filling out forms about them, and thinking "finally, some good ones" as she does. Maybe the furnace thinks that too.
I thought that maybe there's some kind of geographic component to the whole syndrome as well, for no real substantiated reason. That's why my favorite spot to take photos of eyes was the airport. Bakersfield terminal is small, cramped, and decaying, glossy whites and polished steel having yellowed and rusted since its heyday. There's a single baggage carousel where local travelers stand and stare, waiting listlessly for their bag to come to them. I can get about twenty photos per flight standing by the carousel and asking how people's trips were, though the T.S.A. folks scowl at me the whole time.
The whole affair with the man at the bar had shaken me up, and I wanted to a good, clean day's work, so that's where I headed after my dreadful morning. That day's crop was thirty people from Pheonix, mostly folks escaping that barely-livable city. Their glazed, glossy stares gave a perfect view of their condition, and this group was truly fucked. An absolute parade of oddities lay before me: pure blacks and whites, white pupils in red oceans, gold and silver veins coursing along. I worked through the crowd, spattering my usual lines: "Long wait for these bags, huh" "Yeah, how was your flight?" "Actually, I'm here with the bureau..."
A family of four were the last people I met that day. There was an older white man in a "Congo war veteran" baseball cap, a latina woman in a flowing red dress, and two young boys barely held back from trying to ride on the circling luggage. All four had eyes completely covered by an undulating gray color. I was almost transfixed by the eddies and movements in their eyes, and it struck me with the memory of staring at static from a CRT television as a child. I stammered through my questions, addressed to the mother. The husband and wife argued about whether to let me, they worried about their image. But the woman agreed, and the man was smart enough to listen to his wife. I took four real good photos, symmetrical and even, though it didn't capture their motion.
I was about to go to the next group of people when one of the boys tapped me on the leg. I turned and faced him. "Sir I have a question," he said. I was always fond of little kids, and this one had a cherubic face if you didn't make eye contact.
"Sure, buddy, what do you wanna know?"
"Have you ever tried to take a picture of your own eyes?"
"Well," I began, and then my mouth stayed open. Had I ever tried to take a picture of my own eyes? It seemed like a rather obvious thing to do, maybe the first thing an eye photographer should do. Certainly I had tried it at some point. Yet, as I thought of all the photographs I had ever taken, I could never recall snapping a picture of my own.
In fact, as I thought further I realized I could not imagine my eyes in my mind's eye. I had no photographs taken, never sat for a portrait, I don't even think anyone's described them to me - eyes are a rather impolite topic of conversation. But this whole line of thinking was ridiculous, I thought to myself, because of course I've seen what I look like in the mirror! But then again, my darkroom studio doesn't have any mirrors, I covered them all up since I worried they'd interfere with the development process. And I've got a fear of public bathrooms, I worry about all the germs that they have in there. When I do go in I rush in and out, head down. Staring at this boy and his television eyes, I realized I had no idea what I even looked like.
"I'm not sure," I said.
I got this feeling that I had to resolve this before I took another picture of any kind. I felt that taking photos without this knowledge would be perverted and dishonest, essentially a form of voyeurism. I fast-walked across a creaking people mover out of the airport and back to my decrepit Toyota, slamming the door once inside. The car seat felt disgusting, covered in crumpled reciepts and grime I didn't have time to clean. I gulped hard, shook and quaked, almost feeling feverish. My sweating hands grabbed the rear-view mirror and pulled it down to meet my eyes.
I was a young, white, twenty-six year old guy. I had light brown hair that tousled and curled into knots. My skin was fair and clear, and my eyebrows were thick and well-shaped. My face was sort of narrow, more like a triangle than an oval. I had two unremarkable brown eyes.
First, I wondered if it was a trick of the light. I moved my head around, looked in different directions, got out and looked in the left mirror and the right. Unremarkable brown eyes. Sort of hazel, kind of pretty in the right light. And completely impossible.
Perhaps it was the car that was incorrect, or some kind of fatal air around the airport, I decided. I drove home, trying hard not to speed down the highway, trying hard not to look at the prostelytizing THE SEALS SHALL SOON BE BROKEN signs. I did a terrible job of parallel parking next to my house, and ran past the apartment lobby back into the scarlet embrace of my room. Dashing into the bathroom, I tore down the black tarp obscuring my mirror. I thought perhaps the darkroom light would illuminate my real eyes, just like they had for my photos. And yet this mirror betrayed me too. My unreal, ideal eyes stared right back at me. They were beautiful, you could get lost in them. And I knew it was a lie, I couldn't have eyes like these, no one has eyes like these anymore. At first I raged against the mirror, angry at the trick it was pulling. But I knew this couldn't be the true cause, as mirrors have no agency.
I realized that this must be a new feint by eyes in their war of seeing. If cameras and computers rebelled against eyes, corrupting them, then eyes could just as well edit the reality they see, placing perfect eyes upon my face, never letting me know the extent of the damage. It was horrific, for now I wondered if my perception of my own eyes was just a single example of the tricks being played on me. How could I be a photographer with no sense of such a basic reality?
I fumbled for my camera, brought it into my hands. I must have checked the film a dozen times before working up the courage to bring it to my face and snap the photo, the flash bulb blinding me for a moment. I just waited and stared for the hours of the development process. There wasn't even a question in my mind if I should be doing anything else - how could I do anything else but wait?
I wept when I saw the image come into view, the sobs getting stronger as the image became clearer. My two, immaculate white eyes with their mahogany irises and geometrically perfect inner pupils stared right back at me from the glossy paper. They taunted me as I hung them up to dry. They were the last photos I sent to the Bureau.
You've been avoiding looking at me the whole time I've been telling you this, haven't you? You asked me about my modifications, and now I'm giving you an answer. It's okay, I'm not a medusa or something. My eyes aren't going to kill you.
Yes, they're artificial. Samsung-Huawei Model F-66 camera-eyes, to be exact. Usually for veterans or the blind, but I knew a guy at a black clinic down in LA. After I took that photo of my eyes, he was the first guy I called up. His rate was real steep, I had to sell just about everything in my apartment. I ended up taking a greyhound down to LA with nothing but a sleeping bag, a knife, and my camera. I sat down at a bench next to a sleeping homeless guy, a couple blocks from the clinic, raised the knife to my eyes and, slashed them out. It was easy, like pitting a cherry. It didn't hurt at all. I used to brag I knew my camera so well I could take a photo blind, so I cupped the biowaste in my hands and took the last film photo of my life. I've never looked at it once.
