The Faces of Utter Strangers

An excerpt from GENTLEMAN GEORGE as published by ‘Roadworks’ in 1999 and re-published as AFTER YOU by the ‘Dabbling With Diabelli’ book in 2020…

As ever, floating in his eyes were thousands of little particles that most people were never able to see. That he had the knack of pinpointing them was once discovered almost by accident when his eyelids were closed in a room darkened except for a TV screen on strobe mode. And, then, he could see the floaters, wobbling up and down like a cross between ballroom dancers and cells under a microscope.
Most normal people, when they shut their eyes tight, either in direct sunlight or in complete darkness, they can conjure forth variations on psychedelia: kaleidoscopic patterns and darting pointilliste dream-paintings. And all manner of self-imaginings. Like tiny faces never seen before: the faces of utter strangers that sometimes smiled, sometimes cried and, even, sometimes, grew plug-ugly, thin-lipped and squeeze-eyed. Yet, all in the mind. All in an era which was too new to count.
George’s strobe-induced floaters were a different kettle of fish, however. They were not in the mind nor in some unreachable epoch. They really did live in his eyes. Feeding off the optic juices, no doubt. Playing Tag with the odd corrosions that come off the retina. A game of Hide-and-Seek amid the rods and cones. Pinning-a-tail-on-the-donkey’s-beady-eye. A Scaletrix of squint- eyed toboggans. And he could watch them. Watch the floaters play all sorts of games. Until he stopped.
As the strobes set in, one floater bore an actual human face. A speck wading through the glaucomal ooze came into full view, sporting a moustache, a full head of hair and a double-chin that concealed where the neck ended. George could not believe his eyes. Felt like having an Internet’s dream of itself. The face was microscopic, but the curve of George’s eyeball seemed to magnify it sufficiently to discern features.
It spoke. Or appeared to do so. George’s ears were, of course, not acute enough to catch what was going on in the eye- sockets. But he tried to lip-read the mouth, with his own mouth beating time with it. The face seemed to be asking for help – or was it offering help?
George did not recognise the face. Probably an anthropomorphisation of the European single currency. The moustache caused him to assume the male gender. It was definitely nobody he knew. Perhaps not a moustache at all, but a blindfold that had slipped down leaving its eyes about to sag out like breasts.
But now the face had gone. And, having gone, George could no longer refer to it, since he did not want to give credence to an interstellar reality that he was convinced could never exist.
He shut his eyes tightly, as he switched off the screen strobe. He very rarely had the sound on. He was much happier now, since he could play mental Tag with his own specks of inner imaginings, rather than with real specks in the eyesight.
Better to visualise horror, than actually to see it. He strained his ears to catch any sound from the corner of his eye. But there was only the dropping of a pin . . . or a pricking out of an enlightenment, one that came from the direction of the optic fuse itself, rather than from any external source. He was a Brainwright, you see. Not a gentleman at all.

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My review of A MOTE by Walter de la Mare: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/10/02/a-mote-by-walter-de-la-mare/