Ficciones

the morning lena discovered color.......................

Many years later, as she faced the altar on her wedding day, Lena was to remember that pale morning when her father took her to discover color. He led a languid Lena - who had yet to fully awaken - by the hand to a small creek on the outskirts of town. In his pronounced and calculated manner, he unsheathed a quartz prism from a tainted handkerchief and angled it toward the tops of the rigid chestnut trees to capture the white light for his daughter.

As her husband revealed the glimmer of the wedding band, Lena recalled the wonder that consumed her little body upon seeing the pallid light pierce the quartz and dissolve into seven distinct colors ranging from the fantastic to the mundane. She remembered the granular texture of the tree stump coarsely brushing the underside of her legs and the distinct sound of each color as if it were humming the tune of its respective wavelength. But it was with the utmost lucidity that Lena relived the frustration and sudden distrust of her body that enraptured her as her father explained in a voice of unassuming gravity that he usually reserved for diagnosing his patients, “Lena, our eyes are blind to the full spectrum of color all color possibilities.”

Lena wept profoundly. On the most basic level of human understanding transcending the limits of her toddler-hood, her kindergarten consciousness disrobed and compacted a rainbow into a mere fragment of the electromagnetic spectrum of light. The idea of not being allowed to see every color seemed absurd, like a librarian barred from reading all the books in the library. As the doctor brushed the moist, limp blond hair from his daughter’s face, she imagined all the spectacular colors that she was forbidden to see swirling around her head in an dance of shadows and light. The sound of his daughter’s sobs upset the ophthalmologist, the resonance of which had always scratched upon his soul. In a futile attempt to console Lena, he impassively promised “whatever colors you have in your mind, I will paint them for you.”

The remnants of that day lingered with Lena throughout her childhood to the day of her wedding; a day on which she wept for many reasons, not all of which she could explain with logic. She was wept some for the fulfillment of love and some for the lost entropy of rainbows. But only on her wedding day did her father realize the fateful implications of exposing his only daughter to the stark reality that humans are physically incapable from seeing the vast number of existing light waves.

***

At seventeen, on the day of her graduation from high school, Lena was confused. She was born into the tail end of the American immigrant cycle[1], and was the first in her family to be conceived without the immigrant drive for self-made prosperity, yet still beneath the weight of expectations. Although never succumbing to the sin of lifelessness that infected her younger brother, Lena often referred to herself as “rather aimless.” Her self-diagnosed aimlessness was not merely a play at girlish modesty, but a mild attempt to regulate sporadic undulations of passion. She often wondered if passion (for the overlooked details of things such as the vestigial fifth pocket of blue jeans or for the animated mannerisms her friends used when exchanging saccharine niceties in public) was merely a sublimated form of her grandparents’ immigrant drive for achievement.

Lena was comfortable with the fact that she was born without the human drive for efficiency, and on occasion, even grateful. The root of her affliction with colors and reality was an involuntary adherence to the elementary principles of logic, which constantly compelled her to learn as much as possible and unravel the fiction of so many alleged ‘truths’ that children are indoctrinated with. But she also possessed the remarkable ability to ignore logic and proceed in the abstract. She was proud of her zen-like ability to react with an “engaged listlessness” and resented the negative connotations of her “conscious disinterest.” It was her only cure from the absurd, her medicine from the intrinsic contradictions of reality.

She would try to explain herself at the brief intervals of silence during dinner. “Even lions are lazy. They spend most of their time lounging in the sun or playing by the watering hole. They’re not studying.”

“Yes, they rest; after they are done hunting,” her father retorted.
“What should I be out hunting for? Wild falafel?”
“They are not worried about examinations Lena, because they are worried about surviving.”
“That’s my whole point Dad, they aren’t worried about surviving. They aren’t worried about anything.”
“What am I supposed to do with such children?” Perhaps, it is my own doing the father thought.

Lena relished the carefree demeanor of soccer-moms and children of privilege who were permitted to not have ambitions that stretched beyond the approaching weekend. Isn’t such aimlessness a customary rite of passage and even a committed lifestyle for the native slacker? Every young and affluent American is entitled to the luxury of mediocrity, but it was humiliating for the child of immigrants.

It was on her graduation day that the culmination of her family’s expectations and her personal aimlessness were forced to intersect. Indifferently, she sat amidst the sea of flat caps, dangling tassels, and starch black gowns attempting to partake in the unfamiliar ceremony of high school graduation. Earlier that morning her father had asked “What will you major in at the university? What would you like to become Lena?” She did not have an answer.

Just as light simultaneously maintains properties of both particles and waves, Lena was simultaneously aimless and driven, wooden and delicate, immigrant and American. Like light, she was not fickle, but fractured – she embodied both passion and indifference concurrently, alternating freely between the two. Lena was sad to leave her adolescence and excited to welcome a world beyond her home. She resolved to submit to neither passion nor aimlessness, but would act with the cohesive inconsistency of light, shifting forms at her whim.

***

In the summer of her twentieth year, Lena fell in love. Her courtship with her future husband started quickly and in accordance with most of the customary formalities. The ritual officially began on the campus of the small liberal arts college they both attended in rural Massachusetts under the auspices of a series of fortuitous happenings. Although both medieval literature majors from neighboring dorms, they had never overlapped until well into the Spring Semester of Lena’s sophomore year. While there is no definitive mating season for humans, Lena only began new relationships in the Spring or Summer. A practice she was loyal to more out of habit than because of timing or superstition. They met in the Chaucer section of the library under the legitimacy of daylight. A good omen for Lena, who held a strong presumption of doubt against anyone she met under the veil of night.

A full moon appeared reluctantly on the evening that Lena was to fall in love. He walked deliberately slow according to the design of the stone footpath between their dorms, striving to be neither early nor late. He liked to keep his hands in his pockets when was nervous, fiddling with coins, methodically counting them again and again by feel. He arrived at her all girls dorm with one pocketed hand counting coins, the other gripping a slightly wilted red rose he had torn from a bush along the way. He knew that ladies appreciated flowers, but was unaware of Lena’s strong affinity for roses for rather incidental reasons. She was not merely drawn to a rose’s organic seductiveness, but to its technical value. An immaculately crafted rose satisfied her childish penchant for geometric patterns, symmetry, and primary colors cultivated during an adolescence filled with mobiles, coloring books, and ophthalmology journals.

Lena opened the door of her room revealing a serene, parched-white dress spattered with infinitesimal sun-drenched daisies that flowed over her slight frame with the intimacy of a child’s first blanket, illuminating the contours of her frame without ever touching it. He found his words inadequate to communicate with her ethereal girlishness. It was obvious that she was a young woman, but the glaze beneath her rounded eyes embodied the vacancy and intuitiveness known only to young girls. It was an innocence blended with snobbery. He learned from the candlelight shimmering behind her eyes that a soul never gets old, only drained of its vibrancy through the accumulation of responsibilities. Gathering words to recite felt excessively labored in light of her bold timidity, and all he could offer was the rose.

Lena graciously accepted his flower offering, first delicately sniffing the rose bud then allowing herself to be led across the lobby, out the foyer and down the entrance hall steps. Before reaching the bottom of the stairs, she was unexpectedly overwhelmed by the atmospherics of the moment. The smell of his shirt, the cut of her dress, the jealousy of her roommate’s gaze, the calm of holding his hand. The gravity of the moment grew too intense, forcing her to wilt and reluctantly sob as she loosely let the rose fall. She did not cry because she released the flower or for the beauty of the wilted rose, but only for the lost veracity of color. She sobbed because the rose was not red, but red light waves reflected off the petals after the rose had already ingested the remaining six colors. Lena was disgusted at her constant struggle with reality, her inability to be immersed in the moment. “Beyond a rainbow’s inherent inadequacies,” she mumbled beneath her sobs, “there are no colors – only assorted waves of light in varying lengths and amplitudes.”

“Are you alright Lena?” He awkwardly gasped in confusion as he knelt to speak to her.
“I’m sorry, I know I’m being just awful. It’s just that if there are no real colors, then the world is only a playground of illusions. It’s like two bald men arguing over a comb.”

He was not so much confused as he was surprised. He didn’t let go of her hand and spoke in a whisper because it seemed appropriate. “Lee - nah” he softly rolled off his palette and spoke like a child reciting a memorized poem for the first time. “Saying there are no colors is like saying everything is relative. Even relativism depends on constants and the stability of universals.” Lena was skeptical, she had heard similar rhetoric from her father before, who refused to comprehend her affliction with color.

“Your perception of red is subjective because different people understand red in different ways. But the use of red has an universality across cultures and languages. Color is subjective, but we all work with the same tools of observation.”
“I know” she sighed. “My father is an ophthalmologist.”
“All I’m trying to say is things are as real as you want them to be.” She knew from that moment on that their marriage was an inevitability.

***

At 23, on the day of her wedding, Lena was vibrant. Usually, she never felt alive unless asleep - distant - creating her own universe far from the constraints of reality. On the day of her wedding, she felt that good awake.

A fourth of the cerebral cortex and nearly twenty percent of brain activity is devoted to sight and the mind’s creation of color. Standing between her husband and father, she wondered what percent of the mind was dedicated to marriage or monogamy, or the instinct to procreate. If so much brain matter and energy was dedicated to create a world of color, what other blueprints for reality is the brain encoded with? Was love logical or programmed? “Both,” she answered aloud - she liked that. “Excuse me,” the rabbi whispered. “Go on,” she said slightly embarrassed.

The ophthalmologist stood proudly beside his daughter in a contrived regal stance. Lena noticed he had grown more rounded since the onset of his blindness, and that his belly was pushing the limits of the cummerbund. She had warned him about attempting to remove his own cataracts, but the consequences were indelible. A few extraneous slights of the hand caused by a misperception of the movements of his reflection in the surgical mirror had left the capsules in both of his eyes completely opaque. Although nostalgic about the ability to see, Lena found he took a mild pleasure in the marked improvement of his posture since that cloudless afternoon he inadvertently blinded himself.

Lena caught him staring toward the direction of her voice, struggling to imagine the shape and color of her smile. She recalled the morning he took her to Moose Creek and how she cried terribly when he showed her that only a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is visible to the human eye. Later that afternoon, he tried to comfort her by telling her of Stomatopods that have the ability to see polarized, infrared, and even ultraviolet light. Lena recalled being temporarily eased, and crying even more profoundly upon the discovery that Stomatopods operate with sixteen primary colors, while she was limited to the monotony of red, blue, and yellow.

Ultimately, it was the ophthalmologist’s blindness that made his daughter’s affliction of color. She began to notice changes in her father that surprised her, alterations that chiseled away at her caricature of him as a clinical man only capable of reserved affection. He had learned to empathize with her suspicions about the fidelity of reality and understand the listless sensation of unreality that a mistrust of your senses carries. Blindness led him to the same unnerving axiom that Lena was forced to consume as a child: so much of reality - or other people’s reality - is so drastically different than our own.

He had told her that it was many years ago in medical school that for the sake of science, he had resolved to stop believing in coincidences or in the tenets of chaos. “If you believe in a sustained chaos,” he professed, “then you give up on any order in the universe. Even the simplest of children understand that beauty is observing patterns and symmetry in chaos.” Lena was one of the few children who grasped this concept all too well and it tortured her. She blamed her asphyxiating sense of consciousness for forcing her to pierce holes in the details of existence and find the inevitable dissonance in design.

On her wedding day, her father’s blindness finally allowed him to see what his daughter had already learned that fateful morning, and what her husband had understood so clearly on the night of the full moon. As her father elegantly whirled her across the dance floor beneath the gaze of their family and friends, he came to see the paradoxical beauty of showing Lena the limits of color as child, and finally understanding the grace of world’s absurdity on the night he was to give her away. He grew both pensive and proud. “Dad?” She asked. “What are you thinking about?” His stare was slightly askew. “Everyone sees everything Lena, it is merely a question of whether or not you decide to pay attention.” Curious words of encouragement Lena thought, but she found them poignant nonetheless.

[1] America’s magnetism has always attracted rigorously entrepreneurial immigrants willing to leave the familiarity of their native culture in exchange for the freedoms of America. This self-selective system attracts only the most devout believers in individualism embodied by America’s founders. The children of first generation immigrants are injected with the expectations and dreams of their parents seeking fulfillment in the success of their children. The third generation is free from the burden of having to watch their parents struggle to earn a comfortable lifestyle. Although the offspring of an identical genetic line, without the physical memory of their immigrant roots, the subsequent third generation is easily lulled into mediocrity. Lena is a member of this third generation.