To be blinded by the sun you stare directly at it. You fight the urge to turn away or shut your eyes and wait while two new organs are received into your body, each one a tiny appendix, thoroughly useless, removable if necessary. It would be more difficult than committing suicide, thought Seth, more difficult than pulling a trigger or shifting forward a few millimeters at the edge of a bridge. He didn’t think anyone had ever gone blind that way.
Seth’s eyes were starting to burn.
However. What if evolution reroutes instinct through the brain stem so that without confirmation based on a logical appraisal, desire remains just that, powerless and unfulfilled. The future mind would finally have an absolute veto over the heart, having evolved to distrust it after a million years of heartache. Seth, eyes welling with tears, but not from sadness, imagined a world filled with blinded groping figures navigating by smell, touch and sound. Sight would be just a memory, the world having waited for a mental calculation to complete (rate of photons beaming down optic nerve compared to rate at which blindness occurs, or something like that) before turning away from the sun. The calculation would always be correct and would always complete well after the world had gone permanently dark. But perhaps it would be better that way, the heart now just another lobe of the brain, not able to feel anything without the brains assent, not able to flinch away from sunlight, but also not able to kill within a second of being looked at askance.
Suddenly, the world became a shade darker and figures edged into view. Someone had outfitted him with sunglasses, someone had saved his sight. A hand slapped his back. Laughter engulfed him. He saw Roderick's face emerge point-blank and the white light became white marble, nearly as bright, but in the shape of a spacious foyer.
"Didn't you even read the invitation? Sunglasses. Required." Roddy seemed amused. It was something about Seth nearly going blind. Usually Roddy was only amused by Seth's clothes. As a Fashion and Design major he was constantly amazed at the different combinations of ugly that Seth's wardrobe could produce. To Roddy, Seth was already blind when it came to fashion. Maybe, thought Seth, Roddy had mistaken this thought for irony.
Seth, of course, had not read the invitation. He had not even planned to go to the "Staring at the Sun" party, except that Roddy, after a week of hectoring, had changed tactics and hinted that the party was going to be "boring", less a debauched social mixer than a painfully literate affair, with actual debates, and intellectuals dressed in shag, not much different from lecture hall, except for the proximity to the mumbling professor-types. Seth was intrigued with the idea of a party that wasn't really a party, a structured gathering that would be as social as the rules of debate would allow. But it was a trick. The party really was a party, one he could not back out of because Roddy was moving him further from the door with a plying hand.
Mounted on the edge of a balcony overlooking the foyer, from which two curls of staircases rose up, were spotlights, all of them trained on the front door. Seth looked back and saw guests coming in wearing sunglasses. Their shadows rose up on the walls and loomed over a chandelier hanging from the domed ceiling. He wondered if he had stayed long enough in the effusion of light to permanently etch his shadow on the wall. He searched the wall, looking for a dark pattern in his likeness and then Roddy stopped plying and pulled him out of the foyer and into another room.
"You could have gone blind," said Roddy. "And look at what you would have missed."
The room complied with the theme of the party. Intermingled with the guests were tall vases filled with blooming sunflowers. The bright flower buds seemed to be slowly following the guests as if each guest was a little sun around which the flowers were beginning to orbit. Roddy shoved Seth lightly in the ribs, as if he knew Seth wasn't getting it and that did it; Seth was jarred loose from his thinking world and into another. The sunflower girls, he realized, were the tall blooming vases.
"Roddy, what is this place?" said Seth, awe-struck and rhetorical. Roddy just smiled like he knew but wasn't telling. Beautiful women navigated between groups of guests. Each woman wore three sun flowers, one on each breast and one between her legs, the petals spread explicitly around the soft orange center that didn't hide the woman's sex so much as offer a reinterpretation. They expertly balanced trays of drinks on their long nails, which were, of course, painted yellow. They were the sun flower girls. He could have thought of them as servers, but that word failed, in some important way, to deliver on the promise being made to him by this place, where the sun was not enough, its promise not great enough, its light not tantalizing enough, to afford the guests a purchase on the thing they desired, which was to experience the sun and its abundance as a decorative luxury. The sun, no more or less arresting than a $10,000 crystal place setting.
For a moment his faculties were short circuited and then violently regained so that he began blurting out thoughts like an over-stimulated child.
"Roddy do you know what this is like, this room, this entire 'Staring at the Sun' experience? It's like an argument against the way we think about evolution, its like, you know, like, the mind has a veto over the heart..."
Roddy held a finger to his lips, plucked a martini from a passing tray, and nodded into his cell phone. Seth went quiet and stared, unaware that he was staring, unaware that he even had the capacity to be aware.
"Are you coming? Are you already here? Um-hmm. Ah-hah. Where? Where are you?" After each question, Roddy's eyes would shift to Seth, as though he was negotiating the sale of his friend. Seth suddenly felt inconsequential next to Roddy. There was Roderick, in the kind of distressed denim that would be featured on the cover of next months GQ, his t-shirt, proclaiming, "I have the income of a Third World country." His smile was more of an ironic crinkle than a warm invitation to smile along with him, and his stance reminded Seth of a dangerous piece of broken glass half-hidden under sand, glinting light aggressively in your eye, blinding you until it was too late and you were cut wide open. To Seth, Roddy was fashion and drama and danger; everything he abhorred publicly and was fascinated with privately. He secretly wished those qualities were within his grasp and it was his decision to turn away from them that made him who he was, not the fact that he simply lacked them and always would.
"Seth," Roddy said, and now his arm was on his shoulder and a haze of dry martini wafted from his mouth, drying the sweat on Seth's forehead.
"Seth are you listening to me? Because here's the scoop. You're not going to leave this party until you meet Marta. I know you want to leave. I know you thought it would be different. But I'm going to do you a favor that you will find, in later years, cannot be repaid by writing my term papers. Tonight, my friend, I'm going to usher in your long overdue manhood."
"What?"
"Laid fool, I'm going to get you laid."
At moments like this, Seth was acutely aware of their differences, and had to force himself to remember how they became friends, which reminded him that he was Roddy's friend, something more than a mannequin on which to visualize outfits, which was how Roddy treated most people. He had met Roddy when a party for Fashion and Design majors overflowed into Seth's dorm hall. Seth was at a critical juncture in a role playing game that had been going for three days straight. Roddy burst in on the cloistered players and demanded to know where the gin was kept. No one spoke, and Seth flitted the 20-sided die between his fingers, waiting for the upended geek decorum they had nurtured for half a week to re-settle after the strange man left. But Roddy did not leave. He began upending board games and searching the mini-fridge. Boxes labeled Monopoly and Dungeons and Dragons and Shoots and Ladders were flung open, spilling dice and cards and fake money onto the floor. Roddy even came close to knocking over the main 3-dimensional game board that was arrayed with figures of trolls, sorcerers, and knights. To Seth it was almost sacrilegious. After Roddy began going through Seth's closet, tossing items of hand-me-down clothes onto the floor, Seth got up and firmly took hold of his shoulder.
"I'm going to have to ask you to leave."
"I'm going to have to ask you, for the SECOND time, where is the gin? Where are you gremlins hiding it? And what's this. A velor shirt, circa 1971?"
"Hey. Give that back, it's a gift from my parents."
"A gift? My friend, it's simply that your dad got too fat and handed this down to you. A gift, who would give such a thing as a gift!?"
"Ok, you've insulted my dad and you've vandalized my room. I'm going to have to...I'm going to have to..."
"What, you're going to have to what? Challenge me to a game of quidditch? Cast a spell on me?" The other role-players were beginning to drift away, fearing violence that could not be controlled by a die roll. Seth had never hit anyone and was trying to estimate the damage to his hand if it met Roddy's sharp jaw.
And then, Roddy grabbed a piece from the board.
"Cassandra!" Seth cried, too startled by the act of desecration to strike the blow he had been pondering. Had Roddy mistaken the game piece, Cassandra the keeper of the torch of Umulatu, for a bottle of gin? Was it possible to be that drunk? Seth began to plead for the return of the piece, unsure what Roddy had in mind. He kept his distance, as if the little metal figurine was a hostage, and any abrupt behavior on his part could lead to her destruction. Roddy's face became sober, and he raised a finger in a way Seth would become used to. It was Roddy's way of indicating that something had penetrated deeper than the thin layer of thoughts that made up the mantle of his brain, a section equal parts fashion history and cocktail recipes, the 1% of his mind that occupied 99% of his time.
"Who is this?" Roddy asked, his voice altogether different now, no longer mocking.
"It's Cassandra, goddess of fire and keeper of the torch of Umulatu. What are you going to do to her?"
"What is she wearing?" Roddy asked.
"What is she wearing?" Seth repeated, perplexed.
They both studied the finely made metal figurine. Roddy held it respectfully in an unclasped hand, letting it lie loosely in his palm. With his other hand he traced the curves of her long robe and plucked at the die-cast hem of her mini-skirt.
"This is it," Roddy proclaimed in a low voice, "this is my thesis project. The fashion of metallic game figurines, a short history of fantasy role-playing’s collusion with fashion."
Seth, intrigued that someone like Roddy would be intrigued by something he was intrigued with, even tangentially, said, "There's an entire philosophy behind the game. It's more than just demons and wizards. It's a belated attempt to assert certain lost values, or at least pay homage to them, through the only means at our disposal, the only social function that's acceptable for doing such things, which is a game. Honor, forthrightness, loyalty, its all encoded in these figures, in their clothes, in the colors of their clothes."
"Do you think you could explain it to me," asked Roddy, now looking embarrassed that he had torn Seth's room apart in a vain search for alcohol.
Seth had always secretly wanted a student, someone who was purely ignorant of the games and their symbolism. When he was with his friends, cynicism and self-deprecation would waver at the edge of their conversation. They were jaded game players. There was nothing new that could ever give them the thrill of that first experience rolling dice to determine the outcome of a complicated, albeit false, life. Here was his opportunity to regain that thrill.
