The man with the torn iris

I work with a man with a torn iris, in his right eye. The iris of the left eye is normal, perfectly round, a full stop swollen in a pool of lunar blue. But the iris of the right eye is torn straight down the center, as if a small knife had been inserted into the pupil and dragged down to where the azure meets sclera.

I am entranced by this tear in his iris, even though I know it's impolite to stare. In conversation I make full, panic-inducing eye contact, and I wonder if this is rude. The eyes are where you anchor your gaze so as not to stare at cold sores, cleavage, and scars. Where are you supposed to look when the eye itself is disfigured?

Every day, I wonder how it happened. I imagine a chilly schoolyard under a sky the color of old socks, the clatter of two boys dueling with sticks. I imagine the sharp end of a twig striking just so, the shrieking and then the two boys going pale at the sight of blood and what looks like uncooked egg whites. I imagine instead a rock fight, a capricious neighborhood cat, a night of too much teenage drinking. I do not imagine for a moment a child born with this eye. The tear is too jagged, too much like the edge of a torn aluminum can. It has too much of this world in it.

The tear is like a castle window where the wall below has been kicked in, by time and by trespassers climbing through in the dead of night, to drink beer and laugh and shatter brown glass against the old stone walls. The iris is the color of shallow tropical water, of a tide pool. And somehow the pupil opens into the tear like a maw beneath the surface, an impossible cave the depths of which are death-black and unreal.

And it is perhaps the blackness of the eye behind the tear that is the most unsettling, the blackness into which light pours and lands against cones and rods and retina and undergoes its transformation into meaning. And as I hold my breath and stare into the eyes of the man of the torn iris, I wonder: does he see more, or less?