The Window That Drinks Air

The poster on the wall showed an eye sliced in half like a fruit, and Soren had been staring at it for ten minutes.

"Everything has blood in it," he said. "Cut your finger, blood. Cut your lip, blood. Bite your tongue, blood."

"Gross," Maya said, spinning the exam chair.

"No, listen." He tapped the poster. "There's a part with no red lines. The front. The clear part. Look."

Maya stopped spinning. She came and looked. He was right. The whole inside of the drawing was a tangle of tiny red rivers, branching and branching, all the way out to the edges. And then, at the very front, the clear dome over the colored part, nothing. No rivers. Empty.

"Printer ran out of red," she said.

"It's labeled," Soren said. He read it. "Cornea. Avascular."

"What's avascular."

"No vessels. No blood." He frowned at it. "That doesn't work. Everything needs oxygen. Blood carries the oxygen. If there's no blood there's no oxygen and the part dies."

Maya put her finger lightly against her own eye, over the lid. "It's not dead, though. I'm using it right now."

"So how does it breathe."

They both looked at the poster like it owed them money.

Maya's cousin Priya leaned in from the hall, keys in her hand, ready to lock up the second the rain let up. "You two solving optometry?"

"The clear part has no blood," Soren said. "How does it get oxygen?"

Priya shrugged, half out the door already. "It just does. It's special. Don't touch the machines." And she was gone again, hunting for the umbrella she'd lost behind the front desk.

"It just does," Maya repeated. "That's not an answer."

"It's the opposite of an answer." Soren got out his notebook and copied the word. Avascular. Under it he drew the empty dome.

Maya was thinking about windows. She didn't know why yet. "It has to be clear," she said slowly. "Right? It's the window. That's the whole job. You can't see through blood."

Soren looked up. "So it can't have the red rivers. They'd be in the way."

"They'd be in the way of seeing." Maya pressed her hands flat together. "So it gives up the blood to stay clear. But then where does the oxygen come from if not the blood?"

The room was quiet except for rain.

Maya turned and looked at the door Priya had gone through. At the air. At the whole open mouth of the room. "It's on the outside," she said.

"What's on the outside."

"The window. It's the only part on the outside." She was talking faster now. "Your liver's deep inside. Your heart, inside. The window is right out front in the air. It touches the air."

Soren got very still. Then he flipped back two pages and started writing fast. "It breathes the air directly. It doesn't need blood to deliver oxygen because the oxygen's already touching it. It just. Drinks it. Off the air."

"Off the air," Maya said "Nothing else in the body does that." Soren's pen had stopped. "Everything else gets its oxygen handed to it by blood. The cornea is the only part that goes outside and gets it itself."

Maya was already at the front desk, pulling open the drawer where Priya kept the sample boxes. Little foil packets. Contact lenses.

"Maya, don't."

"I'm not opening them." She held one up. On the back, in tiny print, a phrase she read out loud. "High oxygen permeability. Lets the eye breathe."

Soren came over. "Lets it breathe. So a lens sits right on the window."

"Right on it. Covering it."

"Covering the part that breathes air." He looked at the foil. "So if the lens didn't let air through. If it blocked it."

"Then the window can't breathe."

They both stopped.

Maya said it first, quietly. "What does a part of you do when it can't get oxygen and there's no blood coming to help."

Soren turned back to the poster. To all those red rivers stopping politely at the edge of the clear dome. Stopping where they'd always stopped, his whole life, everybody's whole life.

"They come and get it," he said. "The vessels. If the window's starving, the blood comes in to save it. They grow. Into the clear part."

"Into the window." Maya put the packet down very carefully. "You'd be able to see them. Red rivers growing across the clear part."

"The body fixing itself," Soren said, "by ruining the thing that had to stay clear."

Priya came back in, umbrella found, triumphant. "Rain's stopping. Put the samples back, please, those are sterile."

Maya didn't move. "Priya. If someone wears bad contacts, the cheap ones that don't let air through, too long."

Priya's triumph faded a little. She came over and looked at the drawer, at the kids' faces. "Then sometimes vessels start growing in where they shouldn't," she said. "We watch for it. It's a real thing. How did you two get to that?"

"The poster," Soren said.

Priya looked at the poster like she hadn't really seen it in years. "Huh," she said. "Yeah. It's the only tissue that does it. Breathes straight off the air." She shook her head. "I forget that's weird."

Maya was looking at Soren, and Soren was looking at the eye sliced open like fruit, at the one clear place all the blood agreed to stay away from.

He lifted his hand to his own face, not touching, just hovering a centimeter off his open eye, in the moving air, feeling nothing, feeling the ordinary cool of the room going in.

Maya did the same, palm up, the air going past it, going past both of their eyes, the way it always had, the way they'd never once felt it happen.