“I didn’t mean our guys were bastards, Roddy.”
“You’re tired of hearing this, aren’t you?”
“No!”
“Yes, you are. You’ve become complacent.”
“You’re wrong. I’m as angry about what’s happened as you are.”
“You have no idea how friggin angry I am about anything. Was it your family that mucked it all up while selling everybody salvation? Hell in a handbasket… let’s give peace a chance… fill in the blank…”
“Roddy, I-”
“Do you even have a family, Rose? Are you anybody’s great-great-anything? You can’t know what life is like for me. You can’t have any friggin idea the generational burdens I carry. Sins of the great-great-grandfather…”
Every time Roddy turned on his heels, facing Rose, she flinched.
“Then who are the bastards, Rose? The stupid shits who perverted my great-great-grandfather’s discovery and turned his good to evil? Why don’t they call themselves the Lennon/Onos? No, they curse my family, curse me!”
Rose’s head replayed known history: The Bachyritas had successfully put down an insurgency of foreign-born revolutionaries through primary employment of the guerilla device that allowed the army the shrewdness of “pit vipers.” The signals of these “Brain-Ports®” were routed to soldiers’ helmet-mounted cameras, allowing them to zero in on the enemy. Heat-sensitive signals were sent to a device on the soldiers’ tongues as fizzy tingles, but their brains read the information as though they were “seeing.” The one thing the rebelling Ungatosonrisas couldn’t hide was the heat their bodies generated.
But Roddy told the story with more panache than the chronicles. That and his blue, blue eyes flashing angrily made the words worth hearing over and over again.
“Ole great-great-grandpa Paul was a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin. He explored brain plasticity as it relates to sensory substitution and brain-machine interfacing, in his search for a way to help the blind ‘see.’ Not a bad thing, huh? Anyway, his team-a team, Rose-routed camera images to different parts of volunteers’ bodies. Trial and error, Rose. Basic shit. But what he found was that the tongue was more useful than tasting stuff like lemons, peppers, chocolate…”
Rose remained quiet as she rummaged through the papers stacked on her desk, scouring the photographs of paintings where the artists had added reading glasses of the famous to lend an air of scholarship and intelligence.
“Damned military.” Roddy was making those grumbling sounds of his. “What could he have been thinking to have surrendered anything to them? He should have taken the BrainPort® and fallen down a hole somewhere. Gotten lost. Or given copies to the Ungatosonrisas. Leveled the playing field. Imagine that.”
Rose perched two papers directly in front of her eyes and squinted at the images. One was a copy of Tommaso da Modena’s painting of Cardinal Hugh of Provence seated at his desk, scribing away with rivet spectacles. At another desk on the other page by another artist sat a bespectacled St. Jerome. The latter was the patron saint of scholars and, in some quarters, the patron of glasses. Hadn’t Roddy had her convinced that lying to the masses had been invented by the Bachyritas? Yet both the church men had lived and died before spectacles had come into use, and both works of art had been created a long time before Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita had lived.
Rose tossed the papers back on her own desk and laughed. It was just a small chuckle, really, but enough to shake Roddy from his familial conundrum.
“You think this is all a joke, don’t you?” Roddy’s puffing face told Rose that no matter what she said right now, it would be the wrong thing. Roddy threw up his hands and lowered them in fists on her desk. “Dammit, Rose, you have no idea what it’s like being a Bach-y-Rita.”
“I’m one of the faithful, Roddy.”
“Faithful? Faithful? What the hell does that mean?”
Rose backed against the nearest wall. When Roddy flew into one of his rants, it was useless to attempt reason; all she could do was try to avoid “accidentally” getting in the way of his flying hands.
He must have seen her fear, because Roddy chuffed and ha-rumped and then fed his explosion into his private office. It seemed the entire wall shook as he slammed the heavy wooden door. On the other side a few loud noises arose-books being thrown about, no doubt, or a chair in the way of his foot-and then there was quiet again.
Rose compressed herself against the wall a little harder until the familiar click of his lock broke the silence. It was only when she heard herself exhale that she realized she hadn’t been breathing at all.
A month ago, when a bundle of historic spectacles had arrived, Roddy had gone ballistic over the haphazard way the specimens had been bundled. His airborne fist struck a bullseye on Rose’s face.
She tried to contain the bleeding, but he’d broken her nose. Blood shot everywhere, drenching the papers on her desk and splattering several of the newly arrived spectacles she was to catalog and archive. The incident also caused her own brass frames to snap in the middle. Nobody fixed glasses. Few even wore them. If people had sight problems, they were either fitted with pleasure goggles for occasional use, left to squint, or offered a miracle surgery that gave them instant 20/20 vision. Only the perfect vision eventually dwindled to a horrible, painful blindness.
She’d managed to put off the required medical follow-up visits for her nose, returning to work just two days ago without a clearance. She was afraid the doctor might have strayed from her nose injury and decided to toss in a vision exam. That she couldn’t risk. If anyone else found out her eyes were beginning to show their age, she’d be reassigned.
When Roddy had first caught her struggling to read a report, he seemed angry. He’d grabbed the box-cutting knife and aimed it at her only to slam it down at the last second, hacking into a newly arrived box, plucking out a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and placing them gently on her nose.
“Scared you at first, huh?” Roddy said.
“I hadn’t cataloged those yet,” Rose said.
“I know. I’m a bad boy, huh?” Roddy’ s playful grins were nearly as magical as those eyes of his.
“But…”
“It doesn’t matter, Rose. No one will ever know but us.”
“But they’re numbered. And they belonged to somebody famous.”
“Ha! Famous? Who cares?” Then Roddy took the remainder of the box of glasses and tossed them all into the trash. “For some reason we catalog these spectacles. For some reason our jobs matter just now. But once we do all the research, checking the facts, comparing notes, examining the specimens, and entering it all down in our journals, then what?” Roddy’s glower along with his fists set firmly on his hips told Rose he was truly expecting an answer from her.
“We… rebox the specimens, attaching the catalog number, and send them to the archives.”
“Which are where?”
Rose gave that some thought. Was she supposed to know that? She’d never thought to ask.
Roddy removed her glasses, gusted a breath of fog on the lenses, then wiped them clean with the tail of his shirt. “My dear Rose…” He replaced the glasses on her face, adjusting them carefully. “There are no archives. Everything is destroyed once we finish with them. They think I don’t know, but I do.” His sarcastic laugh followed him all the way into his office.
Despite Roddy’s unchecked brutality, he loved her. She knew he did. That’s why he’d given her the glasses and hadn’t told anyone about her failing eyesight. That’s why she hadn’t lost her job when the accident happened.
Roddy loved her. He was just afraid to let anyone into his miserable life. He was ashamed of what his family had done to society. If only he’d drop his own fear of truly sharing himself with her. Not inside some bag, but in one of the windows. Then people would know Roddy Bach-y-Rita and Rose MacGregor were making love and not war.