How Robin Lost His Eye
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So one night, Robin goes and stands outside on the street and lo and behold, a falling star comes rippling through the atmosphere and lands right in his eye socket. I kid you not. He told me it sounded like a thousand French horns blowing, or trumpeting elephants. That it felt like electrocution, a livid crash of hot and cold, or like you’ve pissed yourself. His real eye spilled everywhere. When I opened the door to him that night, it looked like a large enchanted slug had slithered down his face, leaving a trail of wet glitter. He saw all kinds of things walking over. Shimmering faces. Blue engines, exploding with white-hot sparks. The first thing he said was, “I can see the other world now. Our real home.” And I said, “Oh, jeez, Robin, you’d better sit down.”
So Robin sat, with one half of his face a starry mess, while I got my phone and called the paramedics. They asked me if he was responsive and I said, “He seems to be entering a Zen-like state of consciousness.” Actually, he was glistening. Like, there were glowing specks on his face between the freckles. The ends of his hair exhibited signs of bioluminescence. When I waved at him, still talking to the dispatcher, he smiled slowly, one corner at a time.
“You okay?” I said, away from the phone. Robin held out his palm. I looked at it and I thought for a second he was holding a strange raw egg yolk. “Holy Jesus!” I said to the dispatcher. “I think that’s his cornea.”
By the time I hung up, Robin’s eye socket was flaring with activity. Like a tiny supernova. The veins in his face were pulsing violet, inflamed, where the star seemed to have entered his bloodstream. I tried to touch him, just gentle on the head, and he felt like he was on fire.
“I’m going to get you a cup of chai spice,” I said, since over the course of our curious nights together, I had learned that tea calmed him. Robin grinned. All the hairs on his skin gleamed golden. “What were you thinking anyway?” I said as I went to the kitchen. “Standing outside like that? Don’t you know you’re just asking for trouble?”
Robin said some things, mostly describing how it felt and in effect evading my question. He’s always had these stupid romantic tendencies. For example, he smokes. How can someone who ignores the adverse health effects of smoking be trusted to stargaze responsibly? He probably just spread his arms out and looked. Not to victim-blame, but is it any wonder he got shot in the face?
“I feel like Donyale Luna,” Robin was meanwhile saying, “walking the streets of Paris high on acid.” Then he was up off the couch and dancing. His arms stretched long, undulating with light. I stood there with the kettle in one hand, shocked. There was something surreal about this whole thing, not just in the fact that a star had descended intact from the heavens, but that Robin was saying names like Donyale Luna and shimmying across my carpet. I mean, the first time I met the guy he held a knife to my throat and said, “Your money or your life!” The start of an interesting friendship… Anyway, my point is, he used to be the repressed violent type.
“Robin,” I said, “you don’t want to overexert yourself.”
Robin threw his head back and laughed. Stardust ran off his cheek and out the corners of his mouth. Then he said, “Why don’t I put some music on?” and picked out a record, Sun Ra Arkestra, I think, which melted between his fingers. Robin looked at me as if to say, Well, that was something.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said with a grimace. Robin collapsed back on the couch, like a king falling happily into his sarcophagus. A flurry of firefly specks lifted off him. In the distance, I thought I heard the first whiff of a siren.
“You know, we don’t have to worry about anything here,” Robin said. “All will be taken care of.”
“I’m glad you feel that way,” I said. In all honesty, it was refreshing to see him like this. In the past, Robin had harbored a contradictory mix of recklessness and nerves. Like, that time he tried to rob me, he threw up. He was wild enough to try out a life of crime but too tightly-wound to pull it off. One minute, the blade was at my throat and the next, Robin was muttering, “Hang on, please,” and discreetly puking into a flower bed. Then he wiped his chin and said, “Okay.” At that point, I was too compelled to run. I remember thinking to myself, Who commits robbery on a nervous stomach? I was living in a new city then, an American abroad, and I think I was speaking only the bare minimum of words each day to keep from disappearing. Anytime I met someone new, I perked up inside.
Robin gave up on the mugging after that and tried to split, but I chased him down the street shouting, “You seem like an intriguing person, do you want to be my friend?”
He thought I was dangerous, of course, and eventually outran me—I don’t have any wind, ever. But I kept haunting the neighborhood for the next few nights, loitering, window-shopping, petting dogs on leashes until finally, while I was leaning against a lamppost eating an apple, a policeman came up to me and said, “Whatever you’re planning to pull, you’d better pull it.”
“Oh, no,” I said, “you’ve got me pegged all wrong. I’m not–”
“Are you a pervert?” said the cop.
I swallowed the apple in my mouth. “No.” I do have a penchant for wearing long coats. “I just–”
“I’ll be keeping a close eye on you,” he said and strode off. I had wanted to ask if he’d arrested any inexperienced hooligans lately, but to my good fortune, I ran into Robin shortly thereafter. He was sitting in a cafe window, drinking Earl Grey. The look on his face was so glum, so pathetic, like a kitten on a poster, I thought I had arrived in the knick of time to prevent his suicide. I remember the weather was priceless that evening, dark, foggy, with every window casting a perfect reflection on the wet pavement. A clock tower shone yellow in the sky. I came up and tapped on the glass next to Robin’s booth, scaring him out of his wits.
I waved.
Robin studied me, not recognizing. I smiled fakely, like for a school picture. Then I held up one finger and intimated that I was going to come in. Robin sat waiting in a state of alarm.
Meanwhile, in the living room, I could hear Robin saying, “I think I’ve got it figured out now.”
“Uh huh,” I said, steeping the tea. “That’s a first.”
Then I smelled something prickly and acrylic and when I looked back at the couch, a plume of blue smoke was curling up the wall. Me, I just panicked. The kettle went flying through the air—because I threw it—and exploded over the couch with a gush of boiling water, much like a falling star itself. A pillar of flame roared up where it landed, a pillar that I realized was Robin, popping and hissing and thrashing back and forth like a furious snake. I was screaming words, I don’t know what. Probably “Jesus Christ my friend’s on fire somebody help me ROBIN!” And then the ambulance came streaking into the driveway with all its lights ablaze, drenching the living room in licks of blue and red with Robin quivering in the middle with pieces of himself evaporating in purple dollops of heat. I had to hold my arms up against it to keep from going blind.
It’s hard for me to remember what happened after that. The next thing I know, I was waking up in the hospital with bandaged hands. Friends kept visiting me, their faces puckered with confusion or tears. When I asked about Robin, they said, “Oh honey, stars don’t fall like that.” Robin, they said, was unstable and I never should have let him in that night. “But his eye…” I kept saying and they would press their lips together like I was too foolish to live.
I’ve been in the hospital awhile now. Robin, I believe, is here too, because I keep seeing him standing over my bed all charred with one eye left. He wants to hold my hands, which is problematic, because I always sit up howling with my blisters leaking everywhere and then the nurse comes running and Robin is nowhere to be found. And I can hear the French horns and trombones and trumpets bursting through my ears like dying elephants. I keep thinking, in those moments, about our conversation in the cafe that night, when I sat down across from him, slightly damp and drippy from the fog but brimming with enthusiasm. Robin’s face was so pale that his freckles stood out on his nose like a sprinkle of pepper.
“What’s with the long face?” I said.
“You…” he began, and then swallowed. “You’re not Ship?”
“Who?” I said.
“My old friend. You look–” He almost said “exactly” but then corrected it to “a lot—like them.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”
“That’s why I tried to rob you.”
“What a friendship!”
Robin shrugged, fidgety from my presence. “Well,” he said. “I was angry. Or I would be. If they were here.” Looking back, I should have clocked the symptoms of someone crazy with loss. He had a certain shine to his eye that you only see in people who can cry at any moment. It must have acted like a landing strip for that star, such bright dark pupils. I was about to ask why the anger, but Robin leaned across the booth and brushed some of the hair off my forehead. That seemed like quite an intimate gesture between strangers. I didn’t hate it. “You’re sure you’re not…?” he said.
I admitted that I wasn’t sure of anything these days, since my adherence to the social contract had deteriorated, but as far as I could remember I had never been called Ship. Robin nodded seriously and sipped his tea. “Do you believe,” he said, staring out the window, “that everyone has a doppelganger? Somewhere?” That sounded plausible to me and I said so. “Or like a double?” Robin continued. “Like an evil twin? Like there’s an id and a superego of each person in the world…”
That sounded less plausible to me, so I just said, “Hmm.”
Robin pulled his gaze away from the window. “Before Ship left,” he said, “they promised I would see them again. Perhaps in some other form.” The conversation got away from me after that, with Robin going on about how he was convinced Ship had somehow gained access to another world and disappeared into it, where they could truly be themself. “They said something about how I wouldn’t be able to see them,” he said, “until I found my true eye…”
When I related this episode to one of my hospital visitors, they clucked their tongue and told me it was a simple case of Robin not being able to accept his friend as they are and therefore being unable to cope. “So he self-immolated,” they said. I squinted at them, trying to figure out who it was. My eyesight is still a little spotty, with blobs of unclassified colors swimming through it. Sometimes I wonder if, by staring into Robin, I burned holes in my retina, like staring into an eclipse. To my visitor, I said, “But what about the star?”
With emphasis, they said, “There was no star.”
To which I laughed, because of course there was. “Seeing is believing,” I said by way of an explanation.
So here I am, still in recovery. When I ask the doctors for a timeline, they get vague and noncommittal. I’m not worried, though, because I’m starting to get in on that sense of bizarre and quasi-mystical peace that Robin was prattling on about. Like when he said, “You know, we don’t have to worry about anything here.” Or when he said, “I can see the other world now. Our real home.” It sounded pretty crackpot at the time, but I have to give it to him. Sometimes, usually in those excruciating instants when I’m screaming over the brass section and my whole line of vision is crackling like lightning, or like film burning up in a projector, I can see it too.
Sasha Hodge is a writer, comics artist, and student studying Peace Studies and French at the University of Missouri. A native of the Midwest, their writing explores themes of mental illness, queer identity, family life, and war. As a visual artist, they are drawn to found materials, recycled papers, and other items that can be acquired for free.
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