The Pallbearer

I was guarding my son one on one when I made the mistake of reaching just as he was about to make his move. The ball bounced hard off the blacktop, and as it accelerated, for a ball deflected travels with greater velocity than one merely tossed through the air, it smashed into my right eye. 

My lid must have shut, but the impact was otherwise unmitigated. I bent over, pressing my hand against my face, feeling the pain as a taut throb, like a string hooked at the socket and pulled toward the back of my skull. Then, as I had been raised and as I had in turn raised my son to do, I shook it off and finished the game. As we walked home, lightning flashes burned through my vision, a worrying symptom. I waited to see if they receded, which they did after a few hours, but flares like an aperture snapping open on the side of my head disrupted my peripheral vision whenever I moved my eyes laterally, so the next morning I went to an optometrist. 

Peering into my cornea, she detected no visceral damage, but to be sure she had me schedule an appointment with a specialist. The latter was an Asian American woman who seemed the same age as my son, which is to say she could have been my daughter. Was I really so old? Ordinarily, she said, such an impact would not cause permanent injury, but the combination of my severe myopia and, yes, my age did put me at risk. She had me rest my chin on a shelf in front of a viewfinder that peered into a metal box, a contraption that reminded me of the arcade cabinets I played as a child for games like Sea Wolf and Battlezone.

I shifted my face left and then right, while keeping my injured eye connected to the viewfinder (the other was blocked by a sliding shade), then held my chin aloft over the unhelpful chin rest; in the end, to get the cursor in the machine to “lock,” I had to gaze into the box in the most unnatural posture possible: with one eye, face slightly turned, butt lifted out of its seat, chin pointed up.

It did become something like a game, one I controlled not with a joystick but the movement of my eye, which the cursor, now duly locked, tracked. As I was directed to look to one side, then the other, up and then down, the butterfly-cursor flitted across a bleary, bloody Martian sunset, punctuated by flashes, whether the effects of the screen or my own altered vision I could not tell. Beyond the distraction of ratcheting numbers in one corner, which seemed to be coordinates mapping the cursor’s position, I did come to understand that what I was looking at was not an alien landscape, but a vast, indeed infinite, interior, reflected and projected back at me, and that the flashes were snapshots being taken of the back of my mind, viewed through the circular windows of my eyes.

My retina remained affixed, the specialist proclaimed, and the flashes would prove temporary, which they did. The transparent floaters I was seeing were the byproduct of the viscous makeup of my eyeball liquefying from the ball’s impact, but these too would grow less noticeable over time; all our eyeballs liquefy over time, I was told, so the only effect this accident would have was to hasten that implacable progress.

By the next week I was confronted with an event to render my basketball injury trivial and nearly forgotten: another loss in what had been a hard year of death, not the kind told in headlines, but closer to home. We were not immune from the circumstances of the world, so some could be rationalized, hard as they were to take, but others visited with such freakishness that, piled among other incidents, they made for a feeling of being singled out and of the next case occurring without sense or warning. This was such an unwelcome case. Interestingly all the family funerals I had attended so far that year had been on the Buddhist side and did not involve burials; this was the first to occur on the Christian side, and I was to be a pallbearer. 

My wife and I were neither Buddhist nor Christian and sometimes found ourselves caught in between their bickering and other times the object of attempts at conversion. If you pressed me about it, I would say we were superstitious in a Chinese way. As such we had trepidations regarding my role, for the funerals were only the deadliest aspect of a year of lesser ailments and minor misfortunes, my ocular mishap being one of these, but we had come to suspect the ceremonies to be at the root of it. When we consulted a spiritualist, it was confirmed, for my wife and I shared our birth year and were told this year we would be susceptible to tragedy, from which we were to insulate ourselves as much as possible; however, I could not forgo my filial responsibilities, for as much as I subscribed to superstition I was also a possessor of a vaguely Confucian high-mindedness. The solution the spiritualist put forward was to place a spell upon my person, literally so, in the form of a red envelope stuffed with objects of seven different colors, mixed in with salt and some grains of rice, which I was to carry in my coat pocket to ward off the ill effects of my death-borne duties.

The flashing had stopped, as promised, and I had already grown accustomed to the prominent new floaters. Those who suffer from more acute near-sightedness likely know what I am talking about: transparent oddities, varying in shape from mere bubbles to amoeba-like conglomerations, that drift dreamily before one’s eyes when one is not focused on them, but dart to the corner of one’s vision with the quickness of ghosts when one tries. Now they only made themselves known to me in broad daylight, generally outdoors, and the day of the funeral turned out to be one that took place, for all the sober air I associated with Christian ritual, in the bright Californian sunshine. There were eight of us all together. I took the lead spot on the left bringing the casket to the hearse. Maybe it was being in front, but it seemed I was bearing more of the weight; it is true at any rate what they say about it being heavier than you think. We repeated our roles, in reverse order, lifting it out of the hearse to the plot. During the burial prayer, I beheld the tree branches refreshed with leaves of the new spring intertwining with objects in my eye. In that light that made the world transparent I seemed to be looking through a champagne flute, with bubbles rising in lines through the air and a finer, fainter illumination appearing as a kind of underlayer to the more obvious one. 

When I returned home, I followed the spiritualist’s directions and did not immediately step into the house. Instead I took out the red envelope and placed it as if handling an explosive into a metal bowl on the sidewalk. I had brought a stove lighter and tried setting fire to the envelope and its contents in order to dispatch the bad omens absorbed by the package back to the spirit realm. The ocean wind picked up, as it typically does in the afternoon this time of year, and blew the fire out. Finally I positioned the bowl behind myself and a tree and added some dry leaves to allow the flames to catch. A few passersby turned their heads, probably wondering what I was up to, but none of them stopped to ask.

First published in Hellarkey II (2023). Much gratitude to the publisher, Malarkey Books, and the editors Lauren Bolger, OF Cieri, and Eric Williams.