Invisible man - Ralph Ellison [177]
"Brother, are you following me?" He stopped, squinting at me with Cyclopean irritation. "What is the matter?"
I stared up at him, unable to answer.
Then he understood and approached the table, smiling maliciously. "So that's it. So it makes you uncomfortable, does it? You're a sentimentalist," he said, sweeping up the glass and causing the eye to turn over in the water so that now it seemed to peer down at me from the ringed bottom of the glass. He smiled, holding the tumbler level with his empty socket, swirling the glass. "You didn't know about this?"
"No, and I didn't want to know."
Someone laughed.
"See, that demonstrates how long you've been with us." He lowered the glass. "I lost my eye in the line of duty. What do you think of that?" he said with a pride that made me all the angrier.
"I don't give a damn how you lost it as long as you keep it hidden."
"That is because you don't appreciate the meaning of sacrifice. I was ordered to carry through an objective and I carried it through. Understand? Even though I had to lose my eye to do it . . ."
He was gloating now, holding up the eye in the glass as though it were a medal of merit.
"Not much like that traitor Clifton, is it?" Tobitt said.
The others were amused.
"All right," I said. "All right! It was a heroic act. It saved the world, now hide the bleeding wound!"
"Don't overevaluate it," Jack said, quieter now. "The heroes are those who die. This was nothing -- after it happened. A minor lesson in discipline. And do you know what discipline is, Brother Personal Responsibility? It's sacrifice, sacrifice, SACRIFICE!"
He slammed the glass upon the table, splashing the water on the back of my hand. I shook like a leaf. So that is the meaning of discipline, I thought, sacrifice . . . yes, and blindness; he doesn't see me. He doesn't even see me. Am I about to strangle him? I do not know. He cannot possibly. I still do not know. See! Discipline is sacrifice. Yes, and blindness. Yes. And me sitting here while he tries to intimidate me. That's it, with his goddam blind glass eye . . . Should you show him you get it? Shouldn't you? Shouldn't he know it? Hurry! Shouldn't you? Look at it there, a good job, an almost perfect imitation that seemed alive . . . Should you, shouldn't you? Maybe he got it where he learned that language he lapsed into. Shouldn't you? Make him speak the unknown tongue, the language of the future. What's mattering with you? Discipline. Is learning, didn't he say? Is it? I stand? You're sitting here, ain't I? You're holding on, ain't I? He said you'd learn so you're learning, so he saw it all the time. He's a riddler, shouldn't we show him? So sit still is the way, and learn, never mind the eye, it's dead . . . All right now, look at him, see him turning now, left, right, coming short-legged toward you. See him, hep, hep! the one-eyed beacon. All right, all right . . . Hep, hep! The short-legged deacon. All right! Nail him! The short-changing dialectical deacon . . . All right. There, so now you're learning . . . Get it under control . . . Patience . . . Yes . . .
I looked at him again as for the first time, seeing a little bantam rooster of a man with a high-domed forehead and a raw eye-socket that wouldn't quite accept its lid. I looked at him carefully now with some of the red spots fading and with the feeling that I was just awakening from a dream. I had boomeranged around.
"I realize how you feel," he said, becoming an actor who'd just finished a part in a play and was speaking again in his natural voice. "I remember the first time I saw myself this way and it wasn't pleasant. And don't think I wouldn't rather have my old one back." He felt in the water for his eye now, and I could see its smooth half-spherical, half-amorphous form slip between his two fingers and spurt around the glass as though looking for a way to break out. Then he had it, shaking off the water and breathing upon it as he walked across to the dark side of the room.
"But who knows, Brothers," he said, with his back turned, "perhaps if we do our work successfully the new society will provide me with a living eye. Such a thing is not at all fantastic, although I've been without mine for quite a while . . . What time is it, by the way?"