The Eye of the Sound

Steve hears his own voice screaming, “That’s my eye! That’s my eye!” as he chases his eyeball down a Seattle street.

He thinks if he catches his eye and gets it to a hospital they can reattach it.

But they can’t.

The mail guy in the office told him he had eyes good girls love.

“Steel blue with brown speckles,” he said. “Nice guy eyes. Same as me.”

Of course, he says this to everybody. He said it to Greg, and he’s the one who ripped Steve’s eye out, which, steel blue with brown speckles and all, is bouncing quickly through the rain down Capitol Hill.

Steve chases his eyeball down Cherry Street. He’s trying to get it before it gets run over by a car or sinks into Puget Sound. He’s sure he can run faster than his eyeball can roll, and he’s sure he can get it before it reaches the sound, but he’s not and he won’t.

The eyeball recoils on slippery concrete past a coffee shop with a neon cherry sign. Steve thinks if he doesn’t grab his eye before it falls beneath the surface of the sound, the oysters will eat it.

They won’t.

Greg, who is Steve’s coworker, ripped out his eyeball because he was very, very mad at Steve. Not to mention all the other shit. Steve never volunteers to drive. He borrows money, small amounts, never paying it back. Also, Steve fucked his wife, Janet, who has a data fetish and everyone knows that.

All three of them are research analysts who work in Human Resources. That’s how they met. Greg invited Steve over for dinner, they talked about statistics and the human beings tied to them, they talked about their P values, Greg drank too much and passed out. This is when Janet made certain overtures, and this is when Steve and Janet hooked up thinking that there was no way Greg would ever find out.

He did.

Steve runs a couple of blocks and then watches his eye spring off the window of a Zip-Car and go tumbling left-ways down 1st Ave.

In front of a Starbucks, the eye bounces off the pump-heel of a businesswoman with a black umbrella. Her name is Meredith, and she sees Steve coming and stops on the sidewalk noticing only him, and only slightly the eye, because she’s had a long day and because of this she doesn’t recognize the eye’s an eye or that she’s met Steve before.

He doesn’t recognize her either. She’s Vice President of Human Resources at Fulfilmarama, the company where Steve works. They’ve had lunch and attended meetings together a half dozen times. Each instance she found him dull. Not incredibly dull, but dull, which is why she doesn’t remember him.

Steve doesn’t recognize her because right now he’s narrowly focused on some specific tasks.

His list of things-to-do has two items:

1. Get his eye and go to the hospital because hopefully they can reattach it because he’s pretty sure he’s heard of that kind of thing happening before.

2. Find Greg, tear out his eye and ask him how he likes it.

Down the street, Steve’s eye flies high and off a girl’s R2D2 backpack before it rolls past the “Damn the Weather” restaurant. The nineteen-year-old girl, who is wearing a stocking cap with kitty ears sewn into either side and one red and one blue Converse, doesn’t feel the bump against her backpack, but she gets out of the way of the screaming man who rushes past.

The girl’s name is Kat, she’s never met Steve, though they’ve walked past each other on several occasions because she’s just landed a job at Fulfilmarama, which isn’t really a good paying or fulfilling job, but Kat’s sure it’s better than doing nothing in Yachats, Oregon, because there’s seriously nothing there that anyone cares about.

When she applied for the job, Kat filled out a questionnaire (a personality inventory) that consisted of two hundred questions. The questions asked things like, “On a scale from one to five, how well do you get along with people?” or, “You are at a movie Theatre, the movie you want to see is sold out. On a scale from one to five, how likely are you to buy a ticket for a different movie and then try to sneak into the sold-out movie that you wanted to see?”

Kat was sure she was wasting her time when filling out this questionnaire and rubbed her temples five times, and blinked hard twenty-five times while she spent two hours completing the ridiculous thing.

The last question she answered was, “On a scale from one to five, please rate how much you agree with the following statement: Organization is one of my strong suits.” Two weeks later, she was working in a fulfillment center.

Steve told Meredith at one of their meetings that this questionnaire would help Human Resources hire employees who were temperamentally resistant to burn out, which meant they would be predisposed to staying with the company longer, thus mitigating the cost of training new hires. Data, he said, is the only way to make good decisions. Something of which Janet wholeheartedly agreed with.

Steve chases his eye to the corner of 1st and Washington where it ricochets off of a tree and rolls down Washington toward the Sound. He would like to ask people on the street to stop, to look, to see his eye and pick it up, but the only words that come out are, “That’s my eye! That is my eye!”

At the end of Washington Street, which intersects with the Elliot Bay Trail, there’s a chain link fence separating the street from the Alaskan Highway.

This fence should stop his eye. Steve knows this. After the fence is the highway and then the shore and then Puget Sound, and Steve lets loose a sigh when he sees his eye rebound off the fence and back towards him while he’s running toward it at the same time.

The eye is not five feet in front of him, when it bounces off the passenger cab of a Toyota Tacoma driving down the northbound lane, and then the eye is floating over his head, where it hits the helmet of a Vespa driver in the southbound lane, who also works at Fulfilmarama, and knows Kat and Meredith because he works in recruiting, though he never has and will never meet Steve because he works exclusively in personnel and would rather die than analyze data and would get rid of those stupid questionnaires if it were up to him because people are human beings, not statistics, and he never took Steve’s stupid personality inventory because he was personally hired by a friend for the job because he took a chance right out of college and helped hire for eBay when they were just first getting off the ground in San Jose.

The eye hits the passenger side door of a black Chrysler 200, it hits a white Ford Ranger on its rusted out left wheel well, it hits the wood paneling of a Chevrolet Caprice Wagon. Through all this, Steve dances in the middle of the highway like a juggling clown in a burning circus tent, going left then right and getting close but not close enough.

Finally, the eye flies over the fence separating the Elliot Bay Trail and highway, heading straight toward the sound, and Steve frantically jumps after it.

When the eye reaches the shore, Steve knows there’s no way he’s going to get there before it hits the water, and he’s right, so he goes diving off the rocks after it.

Steve cannot swim. The water is cold. The water is cold, and Steve cannot swim.

When the whole thing is over, Meredith and the Vespa driver will discuss ways in which they can hire people without putting applicants through a two-hour session where they rate how they feel about a variety of subjects on a scale from one through five, though they will ultimately reject the idea when they see how much money the company made due to their use. They will at all times pretend like they don’t know about Steve and the tragedy, and it will be awkward.

Greg and Janet will make up. Later, Greg will see Janet riding on the back of a Vespa with her arms around the Vespa driver, who has now embraced data analytics, and it will be awkward.

Kat will continue working in the fulfillment center where she and her coworkers will pretend they don’t notice the problems relating to their fair compensation, lack of meaningful benefits, and poor treatment, and it will be awkward.