Barney Sees His Nose

Chapter 1.

In his room, he remembers.

When it first occurred to Barney that he could see his nose, and could always have seen, and always would see, said nose, Barney wept. Not once had he noticed his nose before. It made his acquaintance last October, appearing in the form of a translucent flesh colored patch nestled against the inner bottom quadrant of each frame that his two eyes provided, creating an omnipresent peach vagueness, a pale shammy, intent on sullying the lower half of his periphery.

Barney had come to this realization sitting with his legs splayed across uneven steps, basking in the shade courtesy of the Student Union Building’s imposing stature, in a meek corner by the Quad. While the Texas heat trilled on the back of any neck set to brave the outside air, students still shuffled about, undeterred, chattering as they went.

Despite being so early into the semester, Barney found himself behind on multiple mandatory chapters, so he tried his best to purge the ambient chit chat from his consciousness, though he could not. He heard every summer plan and nostalgic recollection, every awkward courtship and evasive rebuttal, every stilted greeting and casual acknowledgment that wafted through his vicinity, making the act of comprehending “The Memory Palace” - beyond the tepid forward, at least - difficult, to say the least.

Though he knew the actual act of reading the requisite chapter to be untenable at the particular time, maintaining the appearance of reading whilst eavesdropping on stray student clusters seemed plausible. That he knew as within his grasp, picturing the image he hoped to portray to a credible tee.

Was Barney reclined in a public area not generally suited for reclining? Check. Was his book held lightly sprawled in hands idling on an ungainly gut? Check again. What about his noggin? His noggin tilted upwards at an angle not quite conducive for reading the text as it was positioned, forcing his eyes to strain downward and his head to tilt further, so as to achieve the desired glasses-sliding-down-the-ridge-of-the-nose effect.

This is how Barney first discovered his nose.

Squinting at the text, disassociating the letters unto mere symbols - his preferred means for stimulus whenst pretending to read - he noticed an ill-defined patch of pink pigment dogging his field of vision. His eyes darting further downward, he identified this pink pigment as the flesh that brimmed the edge of his sockets. Trailing the line of flesh up their natural contour Barney noticed a blurry, unfocused dab of color that he realized, upon his horror, was always there, always present, despite his previous lack of awareness of it having been always there, always present.

When he shut one eye the transparent flesh color sharpened into shape through the other, allowing the ill-defined pink blotch to be identified as - as, well, he feared - a nostril. He supposed that his brain had always filtered the image of his nose from his field of view, though now that he was aware he could see his nose, and could always and always would see his nose, Barney knew his brain would never grant him slack on that front again.

A familiar tingling sensation hit his fingers. His stomach began to feel as though it were retracting and expanding at the same time. His eyes darted, but he noticed that, when he looked to the left, he could see the bridge of his nose in his right eye, and vice versa. Pupils pointed upward, he noticed his brow poke into view.

His eyes welled, but the tears did little to obstruct his recent discovery, only distorting the intruding stimuli to fresca levels of impressionism. It was not as though his nose was particularly large or particularly protrudant. It was of a reasonable, possibly average, length and radius. Barney realized, in the moment, that this phenomena proved true for every individual, yet, while most creatures gifted with eyesight likely synthesized discordant visual input into a cohesive whole, disregarding omnipresent obstruction, he had unique cause for fear. Barney knew, Barney knows, he does not have the ability to ignore. Barney must harp.

In his room, he remembers.

Still pretending to read, requisite first chapter of “Memory Palace” still posturing, the sun moved and the shade followed in dogged step. Inundated with this epiphany, heart beating a half-step, a full step, too fast, gracing him a minor panic attack, Barney wept in full view of his cohorts as they trafficked past. He wept for he then knew his nose would intrude upon every image he saw henceforth; a pervasive blob of color ready to tarnish any future moment, any future memory.

It was as though Barney’s nostrils had contrived a new mechanism in which his flesh could fetter his chances of escaping himself. Never in his life had he a temperament suited for the ilk.

In his room, he remembers Mrs. Abernathy, a grown woman with pigtails that jutted out the side of her head, weilding chalk against chalkboard in kindergarten. He remembers the occasional cuts on her legs as well. He remembers the suspenders he wore and how his parents thought suspenders were a good idea. He cannot remember a bow tie, though he supposes his parents skipped on that accessory out of financial restraint rather than taste.

He remembers sitting criss-cross applesauce on the rug alongside his classmates as Abernathy presented simplistic diagrams detailing Dolphin anatomy - this being a private kindergarten, after all - using an overhead projector.

“And we call this the Dorsal fin,” she had said, whilst gesticulating with a long wooden pointer.

Dorsal fin. What a useless thing to say to a crowd of five year olds, though useful if the aim is phonetic fun.

Dor. Sal. Dor-sal.

Dorsal. Dorsal fin.

No doubt a myriad kindergarteners went home that day parroting “Dorsal Fin” to their parents, no doubt delighting them in the process, proving the twelve grand, or whatever tuition had cost at the time, was not heading toward the way of the disposal. The parents, in turn, could parade their “Dorsal fin” spouting five year old around the table at dinner parties, shoving their child’s newfound vernacular smack against other adults who had balked at the idea of shelling out thousands for their kid’s kindergarten education.

It was when sitting on this rug, as Abernathy continued on about Dorsal fins, that an inkling predictor for his future troubles, his future obsessions, took hold. The rug, let gently down in the “reading corner” portion of the room adjacent to the group tables, sported a large, colorful, albeit truncated, periodic table per its design. Abernathy arranged her students’ seating on the rug by assigning an element to each kid.

Barney was assigned Bohrium, Bh, which meant he had the closest spot to Abernathy when she projected slides, which meant that she, and her slides, presented themselves in the background, while the overhead projector itself composed the foreground, which meant that Barney developed a peculiar fascination with his ability to shift items into and out of focus.

This being the time when Barney first came to grips with the discordant images his eyes presented. He discovered when focusing on Abernathy in the background while maintaining his attention on the overhead projector in the foreground, having been postured in such near proximity, the overhead light craning down on the slides would become transparent in the same way, as Barney promptly discovered, a finger would when held closely in between both eyes. Alarmed upon attempt of such (Abernathy dithering about recent fMri developments and the potential for neurological research, as it pertains to dolphins and hypothesized language centers of the brain, before a throng of drooling children), Barney raised his hand.

“Yes, Barney?” Abernathy asked.

“My finger is see-through. I think it’s wrong; it’s see-through,” five year old Barney offered, looking stricken.

“I’m sorry, dear. I don’t think I understand what it is you are trying to say.”

“I can see through my finger. I think something is wrong.”

After class was dismissed at an even twelve-thirty, Abernathy eventually sorted out what it was that Barney was trying to say. “Oh, honey, your finger isn’t transparent and you, unfortunately, do not have a magical ability to see through solid objects” she had said. “That’s just how are eyes work. We have two eyeballs which we see things with. Since the eyes are spaced apart, we’re not really seeing just one image; we’re seeing two, but our brains interpret these two images to make one big one.

“And that gives us depth perception, meaning: how we tell how far things are or how close things are. It’s called binocular stereoscopic vision; what you are noticing are just when objects are out of focus, so-”

Barney stared hard and nodded, thumbing his suspenders, not listening to a single word his teacher said.

“- Just remember to focus for now on,” she ended. “Huh, buddy?”

Binocular stereoscopic vision - another useless thing to say to a five year old. What would have been useful, he ruefully wonders, sitting in his room, would be to have humored him with the notion that he had a magical ability to see through solid objects as though they were transparent. That, at least, would have save him a lot of grief.

The grief he encountered when his mom grew frustrated with the habit he formed following the after-school chat with Abernathy. The habit: keeping one eye closed for long periods of time. The pro: Barney never had to deal with the strange phenomenon of things being see-through. The con: his depth perception suffered greatly, and the effect: a balled up wad of trash landed one foot short of the trash can, culminating in the consequence: his mom pushed him to the floor, leaving his forehead a cue card for hardwood, before imparting the following:

“What the fuck is wrong with you, you idiot?!” she yelled. “Why are you so weird, doing that shit with your eyes all the time? I think you’re retarded. That must be it, right? You’re retarded, aren’t you?”

Barney wept once more, though he defended himself through stutters, which did not help his case. Further not strengthening his case, was his new obsession with drawing two-dimensional renderings of three-dimensional cubes by means of drawing two separate squares and connecting the corner by line, as shown in the following:

After drawing one of these - and he drew thousands of these - Barney would sit and stare. The point of interest lay in the perspective; he would shift his focus from the top left square to the bottom right square, flipping which square he determined to be the front facing side of the cube. Sometimes the cube would present itself as though he were looking at it from the top down, or upwards, from the bottom up. Seeing the cube transform before his eyes, as he wavered perspectives in his mind, flipping back and forth with rapidity, was addictive. It was as though the shape changed dramatically in principle, even though the actual vectors remained stagnant.

His mom appeared less enthused by his obsessions, which, at this point, she defined as compulsions. “He’s off with that deranged, sick behavior again,” she would say loudly, gnawing at her cuticles per habit, alone in Barney’s presence, speaking as though he weren’t present. “I’ve been really thinking about getting the state to haul him off before he really hurts someone. Not in my house. This sick shit will not stand in my house.

“Will someone call somebody, please? There’s something wrong with this kid; I know it. He’s an absolute psychotic; a dangerous, useless moron.”

But Barney, at five, at six, at even seven, simply liked the cubes. He only learned to hide his scrawls to more avail, and, to his credit, he still felt bad, Barney remembers, about the cubes, about his proclivity to keep one eye shut at a time. His mom claimed him psychotic. His classmates agreed, and Barney learned not only to hide his predilections when it came to strange tricks of the eyes, but learned to feel ashamed as well, becoming wise enough to keep these stray patterns of thought to himself.

Now, in his room, Barney sits slumped on a couch. He has spent a majority of his time slumped on that couch since that day in the quad, still reeling, several months later, from the discovery of his nose in his periphery.

He grinds up some mid-level cannabis - purple OG Banana Kush, as his drug dealer, Ben, called it when he presented the baggie (“Just take a whiff, dog; dank as fuck”) - in a metallic grinder, readying the weed for the glass bowl slotted in his bright orange plastic bong that resembled more of a traffic cone than a smoking apparatus.

Having lost the original plastic stem, he swiped the glass bowl, which belonged to a separate elaborate glass bong, from a friend. When replaying the incident in his mind, Barney sees his friend, his friend Sara, wrapping up her bong in bubble wrap, half the bubbles having been already popped, either for sport or by accident, and remarking a farewell.

“So, I guess I’ll see you later, right?”
...

“Well, fuck you, I guess?” With that she slammed the door, leaving him alone in his dorm, as he preferred, without paying mind to the glass bowl, belonging to her glass bong, left on the coffee table.

Barney believes this happened though it never did. He fancies, ardently this the truth, though it is not. Barney is not utilizing a bong left neglected as though he would return it upon Sara’s request. If she were ever to return to the pad, Barney would hide the bowl from any anticipated line of sight. He would hide the bowl because Barney is not borrowing anything. Barney stole.

Thumbing a lighter, he slowly cranes his head to survey his surroundings with one eyelid shut. Nothing more than the usual. The waning daylight seeps through the open glass paneling in an angle that seems to suggest: Look around you, Barney. Do you not notice the dirty, dirty by days, boxers hanging off the right corner of the flat screen display? Do you notice the boxers are frayed? The way in which loose tobacco is splayed about; littering the crumpled tissues, ripped Doritos bags, and the spare remote spared of its batteries and the discombobulated smoke detector, sitting on the nightstand, spared of the same, and the Oreo chunks, empty glasses, paper plates, paper towels, and pithy paper cranes - the construction of which being closer to what could empirically be recorded as productive behavior than anything else Barney displayed in the past several months.

The days seem to just slip away, don’t they Barney? Sara said that. Sara would not say that, though he prayed, to dead air, that she would. She would not. She would come to this place. She did. Sara did. Barney used to love Sarah - be in love with Sara - but he no longer did. He stopped. He stopped when he noticed she started to reciprocate his feelings. Disgusting.

Her liking him was disgusting - an act which Barney could not see past; could not forgive.

He lights up. He is getting high. He is getting as high as a kite; a kite constructed out of four collapsible metal poles, like those found in an elder pop-up tent that never popped up as neatly or as quickly as promised, and a light floral patterned fabric, with three streamers hanging off the end - one yellow, the other two red - flapping in the sky; flapping because of the wind; the same wind that whips and lashes Barney’s face when he saunters outside his confines for a cigarette belonging to a pack belonging to a carton that he bought duty-free six miles out of town on the reservation (the res) on the cheap.

This marijuana - Barney calls it marijuana, not weed nor ganja nor dope nor herb nor kush nor reefer nor rope - was purchased through his drug dealer, whom is also his friend but also his drug dealer, who wears a baseball cap. He wears it backwards. The drug dealer’s name is Ben which is a name that also belongs to Barney’s father, though if Barney were in second grade and on a playground, a playground on a schoolyard, on a schoolyard during recess, Barney would infer that perhaps his name, his drug dealer’s name, his drug dealer’s name if it were not already Ben, might be Timmy, probably because of the baseball cap; the baseball cap he wears backwards.

A knock on the door.

Barney sits upright and stumbles a bit. Might be the RA a’knockin’ after noticing the pungent smoke now, probably, lining the halls, though this does not compute; the RA long since learned not to approach this room so as not to approach this proverbial can of worms in which Barney now lives, and has lived for some time now.

Another knock on the door.

“It’s Sara; Open up.”

He does not answer; he loads another bowl, lazily taking a drag, before sauntering to the peep hole; with one eye open he looks. There is Sara, her hair tousled just enough. She looks wonderful in that blouse - pink fabric, pink cheeks.

“Please, I know you are there. Please open up. I need you, right now. I really do. I have no one else to talk to. Please...”

The fish-eye lens as used by the Keyhole rendered the outside occupant unable to peer back through. The wide angle of view that fish-eye lens also distorted edges to present a hemispherical image. The tears streaming down Sara’s face looked, in their own little way, both globular and alien.

Barney turns back to his couch. The knocking ceases. He notices his phone and the ninety three unread text messages and the forty one missed calls. He does not check his voicemail, he does not check his phone much these days; the current incoming message going unread. Had he read the message it would read:

MOM: Where have you been?! The whole family is coming to see you. We want you to see the new house!

Jax, Johnny, and Louise - he misses them; he does. Dad, even Mom - them too. Barney will never see them again. He will only see his nose and the matter of all stray matter floating through his periphery: the omnipresent pink blob, the floaters worming to the edge of sight, as they always do without ever leaving. Not ever. Not once.