In the [Insert Appropriate Sensory Organ] of the Beholder- 2

Continuing where part one left off; this is not a natural break in the story, just a practical one, but feel free to review the sections separately, since the length makes it impractical to do anything else.

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His hair shone like the flat stump of the mannequin's neck. At this angle, Sander could see a little of his left eye, which was was open behind the tinted lens. The pointed part, where the eyelids came together. A glint of wet sclera and the pink-membraned tear duct, that was all, caged with thick pale lashes and tucked into the smooth dry skin of the socket.

Sander, without really noticing, began to slip back into his original discomfort and sense of displacement. He had a shapeless inexplicable feeling that time was hardening around him. Like casting bronze. There was the blind man, and the mannequin, yes, but there were also the memories of them as they were a second ago, and the second before that, layering instead of fading, and so the image gained strange depths. Waxed in his sight. He tried looking away, but the composition of the room drew his eyes towards their misshapen shadow, and he found looking at the shadow more disturbing yet than looking at them because it could have been the shadow of any pair of lovers. It could have been him and Marit, as they were hours ago, their farewells in the foyer of their shared apartment. Splitting and joining and splitting as the man rocked on the balls of his bare feet. So Sander looked back. At him, or them.

“Six,” said the first blind man.

“What?” Sander said.

"I would give her a six," said the first blind man. "For attractiveness."

“Ah-- right,” Sander said.

He marked it down. “Thank you very much for your participation in this study, Mr. Visser. You will receive your monetary compensation by mail in one to two days. If the check has not arrived by Friday, feel free to notify the university.”

“Yes, yes.” The blind man’s voice was pitched to convey dismissiveness, although he lack of the usual hand gesture or any movement of the head made it sound faintly artificial.

Sander became aware that the blind man’s hand was still on the scooped small of the mannequin’s back.

“I’ll just get these out of your way,” he said.

“All right,” the blind man said.

Slowly, very slowly, he ceased to be in contact with the mannequin, without ever joggling his arm that Sander could see: his fingers stayed spread and hooked, his elbow bent and sharp, as the millimeters of distance multiplied between his hand and the sticky fogged handprint, which clouded the realistically dimpled plastic expanse above the jut of the buttocks.

Sander gripped the mannequin about its polished ribcage. The lowermost ribs were suggested by corners of plastic and these dug into the webbing of thumb and forefinger; but he did not slide his hands down to the waist. He had a thing about sweaty hands, and this seemed worse, to have to touch the moistness and to get none of the warmth and the assurance that here was someone undeniable.

He lifted the mannequin.

“Mr. Arons,” said the man. The syllables were hitched a little. Halting.

“Yes?”

“What-- what is your study about?”

He put the mannequin down.

“Er,” he said. “I’m not sure I--”

“It doesn’t matter now,” the man said. “Whether I know or not. It won’t affect the data.”

There were ways that it could, Sander knew. But he was embarrassed and uncomfortable and the ways were unlikely. He said, “No. It won’t.“

“Well?“

“Well,” Sander said. “It’s an experiment to, well, to try and determine how much, uh. How much of a role culture plays in what heterosexual men think is desirable. Because so much of our culture is visual. It’s sort of a thought experiment, this test, at least it was originally, but the professor and I didn’t see--” he winced, stumbled on, “--any reason it couldn’t be enacted.”

“No reason,” the blind man agreed. “So. You are seeking men who have been blind from birth, to study their sexual tastes through the use of voluptuous dolls, to study how they are different from seeing men in their wanting. I have got that right?”

He did look very small. He was a mere few centimeters shorter than Sander, and Sander was quite tall, and yet.

“If,” Sander said absently. “Not how. Otherwise, yes, completely.”

Something happened to the man‘s mouth. Sander wasn’t sure what-- isolated from the eyes, the mouth was unreliable, almost a creature independent from the face-- but it might have been a hint of softness, or gentleness, or not. And something happened also to the man. Sander did not quite catch the movement, but he saw the man’s shadow, the patch of naked dark on the floor, he saw its shape expand and lose some of its sharpness, the lacy edges of the light rolled back. A silent sigh.

“And mine?” he asked.

“Yours?”

“My tastes. Are they--”

Sander read what he had written on the clipboard. He blinked at the bubbled-in circles; the sheet snapped in and out with his eyelids‘ shuttering. Different from seeing men in their wanting, he thought, hearing the words more clearly than he had when they were being said: they ran uneven over the scrape of his pulse deep in his ears.

“Identical,” he told Mr. Visser, calmly. “To those of the average sighted man.”

“Ah,” the man said quietly. His hand dropped to his side. The elastic cuff of the sweatshirt’s baggy sleeve slipped down over his knuckles.

“Have a nice day,” Sander said.

“I will.”

Sander left him standing there, a meter from his doorway. He stored the mannequins in the back of the van, and he replaced the clipboard in the glove box, and he settled himself back into the seat’s hollows of feverish sunned leather.

He experienced a certain measure of mixed relief and pity and self-satisfaction.

He drove.

It was out on the freeway, and after that, that he spent an indeterminate amount of time deconstructing his reactions to the man’s house. The later, yes, that was then. With noon slowing his blood and his thoughts fitting together like thoughts to do immediately before sleep, a logic removed or rather canted a few degrees off the ordinary.

And in fact the room they gave him, at the hotel he was due to stay in for the next four nights until he‘d gone through all the congenitally blind men in the area; it actually bore a much closer resemblance to the guest bedroom in his grandfather’s house than the blind man’s home had, which clarified his conclusions still further. Also, unrelatedly but significantly to him, it was very pleasant to roll his socked toes through the yarn loops of the room’s carpet, and to watch greenish afterimages knotting up the cool gloom after half an hour of headache-y brightness when the sun’s belly lowered to slice through the upper rim of the windshield.

His stomach clenched inside him. He did not really want to go down for lunch, though; his eyes were sore as bruises and he felt uneasy about the prospect of other people, tourists. He took his laptop out of its case, instead, and, sitting down on the bed, he opened it, its keyboard balanced on his knees. When he had logged on he found that the small window’s skirt of sunlight cut across the upper corner of the screen, muting the contrast of text-on-background like gauze and picking out the fur of dust and fingerprints. It seemed inane to scoot sideways and probably mess up the blankets or drop the laptop or something in order to avoid such a petty irritant, and he very deliberately refrained from doing it; but his gaze flicked to the corner now and again, and checking his email was a much more disjointed process than usual.

His girlfriend came online.

He opened the chat window. She wrote “Hello” and “how’s the investigation going, Freudster?” and he didn’t know what to answer. He was conscious of missing her, badly, although they had parted less than five hours ago. They wouldn’t be able to meet up for at least two weeks.

“Video chat?” he typed, instead of answering.

“At the library so no, don‘t want librarians to fry me.”

“Just video, I mean.”

A beat.

The chat window opened up as under a magnifying glass.

She grinned at him, a trifle grainily. The video quality was poor and did her no favors: she looked pale as a drowned thing, and sections of her face broke up into pixels with every twitch, and she twitched often, she was full of nervous energy, Marit was, like electricity trapped in a jar. It was good, though, to see the comically exaggerated expressions of her face, familiar and sharp.

Her full and bloodless lips formed an O. “You’re looking grim,” she wrote.

“You’re looking zombie,” he replied

“Beautiful zombie?”

“Always,” he lied.

She tapped the glass of her side, which was a truly bizarre sight, the flattening and whitening of a tapered fingertip miles away. It had the effect of shoving him into the hard unreality of this contact. Seeing her without hearing her high fast-paced voice or smelling the sweat-and-soap-smell of her skin or. Or touching her.

Touching her, he thought, and tasted subtle panic, the gradual nightmare panic that comes in shallow waves and leaves a residue on the soul. The blue-veined acid-stained insides of her wrists (not a hobby; she studied chemistry at the university, liked to mock him for being in a soft science), he thought, there was no grasping them, no feeling the fine bones shift.

And her small waist, and the sweep of it into her padded hips, a ratio almost ideal; he might glimpse it if she stood up, or pushed back the chair, but he would not curve his hands around it for weeks yet, or feel the muscles straining, the restless joy that was never more than barely suppressed.

“Well, I like _you_ for your braaaaaaains,” she typed, and Sander wished with sudden and unprofessional violence that he could know, could know, that his love of her body was between them and their genes alone. That his wanting was a universal constant; that in every culture, if it had been them, it would have had to be them, the slick heat of their mouths and the friction of their skins. That if he had been born blind, it would have meant-- nothing at all.

He breathed. His throat tight. He rocked, a little, on the mattress, springs squeaking under him.

(Other people might have been a good idea after all, he considered.)

“You know,” he wrote, “I don’t think I want to think that I only find you unbearably sexy because I’ve been marinating in this particular culture for so long.”

He watched her eyes flick as she read; the blue of the screen, floating reflected on her clear corneas, almost disguised the dark opaque brown of her irides. She raised her eyebrows. “You’re not actually allowed to extrapolate from one data point, you know. I take it your first blind man bore out Karremans’ hypothesis?” she typed, slower than she had her other messages, and tried, he thought, to compensate for the camera’s level, to make eye contact, and did not quite succeed.

“It’s a secret,” he told her. She laughed noiselessly. He glanced away from the dark of her mouth that was like the old dark of houses, to the triangle of sunlit screen, and counted off flayed seconds in the cup of his head. His lonely wanting gathered, acrid, under his tongue.