The Window That Drinks Air

The storm had knocked out half the lights on the street, so Maya and Soren were stuck in the optometry office where Maya's cousin Priya worked, waiting for the rain to let up.

Priya was in the back, sorting trial lenses by the glow of an emergency lamp. She had given them a stack of old eye photographs to keep them quiet. Real ones, printed big, of the front of people's eyes.

Soren spread them across the exam chair's armrest. He liked the ones that showed the colored part, the iris, ringed in tiny red threads where the white of the eye began.

"Look at these," he said. "Blood vessels everywhere. Like rivers seen from a plane."

Maya picked up one photo and held it close. Then she held up another. Then a third. She kept doing this, her eyebrows pulling together.

"Soren," she said. "The middle's empty."

"What middle?"

"The clear part. The window over the iris." She tapped it. "Rivers all around the edge. Then nothing. They just stop."

Soren leaned in. She was right. In every single photo the red threads crowded right up to the rim of the clear dome at the front, the part you looked through, and then quit. Not one vessel crossed it.

"Maybe they're too small to see," he said.

"No." Maya shook her head. "You can see ones thinner than a hair out here. If they were in the middle we'd see them. They're not there at all."

Soren got out his notebook. He drew a circle, then a smaller circle inside it. He shaded red right up to the inner edge and left the center bare.

"That's a problem," he said slowly. "Everything alive needs blood. Blood carries oxygen. A bit of you with no blood vessels should be a dead bit."

"But you can see through it," Maya said. "That's the whole point of it. If blood went through it, it wouldn't be clear. You'd be looking at the world through a sheet of veins."

They both stopped.

"So it has to be empty to work," Soren said. "And it has to have oxygen to live. And those two things fight each other."

"Priya," Maya called. "How does the front of the eye breathe?"

Priya came to the doorway with a contact lens balanced on her fingertip. "The cornea," she said. "The clear part. It's the strange one."

"How strange," said Soren.

"It's the only tissue in your whole body with no blood supply. Not one vessel." Priya seemed pleased they had found it. "It drinks oxygen straight out of the air. Right off the front of your open eye."

Maya went very still.

"From the air," she repeated.

"From the air. And it gets its food from the clear fluid behind it, the aqueous humor. So it stays perfectly see-through." Priya turned the lens on her finger. "Which is the whole headache of my job, honestly."

"Why a headache?" Soren asked.

"Because people put these on top of it." She held the contact lens toward the lamp. "And a bad lens, an old one, one somebody sleeps in night after night, it sits on the cornea like a lid. Seals the air out."

Maya looked at the photographs again. At the empty clear center. At the red threads waiting all around the rim.

"And then," she said.

Priya raised an eyebrow. "And then what? You tell me."

Maya was quiet. Soren watched her do the thing she did, where her eyes moved like she was reading something nobody else could see.

"Then it gets hungry," Maya said. "The cornea. For air. And if it can't get air from the front..." She put her finger on the rim of the clear part, where all the rivers stopped. "It calls the rivers in."

Soren's pencil froze.

"The vessels grow," he said. "They grow into the clear part. To bring the oxygen the air used to bring."

Priya lowered the lens. She wasn't smiling anymore, but not in a bad way. In the way of an adult who has just been beaten to the end of her own sentence.

"It's called neovascularization," she said. "New vessels. They creep in from the edge. We watch for it. It's one of the first things we check."

"So the eye fixes itself," Soren said.

"It tries," Priya said. "But the new vessels cloud the window. The thing it does to save itself is the thing that blurs the view. That's why we fit the lenses so carefully. So the cornea keeps breathing and never has to send for help."

She went back to her trays.

Soren wrote neovascularization in slow careful letters. Then he stopped writing and just looked at Maya.

"Think about it," he said quietly. "There's a piece of you, right at the front, that's been holding the rivers back your whole life. On purpose. Just by breathing."

Maya pressed two fingers gently over her own closed eyelid. Behind it, the smooth round dome.

"It's holding the line right now," she said. "While we're talking. Drinking the air in this room."

"This room with no good lights," Soren said. "In a storm."

"It doesn't care about the lights. It cares about the air." Maya took her fingers away and blinked, slow. "Every blink is a breath. We just never knew which part was breathing."

Soren looked down at his circle, the red ring crowded right up to the empty middle. "All the famous parts of you have blood," he said. "Heart. Brain. The cornea's the loner. And you can't see a single thing without it."

The storm was easing. A gray light came back into the street, then into the room, then onto the photographs, lighting up the clear empty windows in every printed eye.

Maya picked up the top photo and turned it so the returning daylight passed straight through the part with no rivers in it.

"Open your eyes wider," she said. "Let it drink."

Soren opened his eyes as wide as they would go and held them, not blinking, feeling the cool air of the room settle onto the front of each one.