The Remedy
“Doctor, my aunt is no medical expert, though she is a kind and generous woman, which would make her suitable then for this profession. I went to her originally hoping that her gentleness could soothe me, or perhaps she might share a bit of wisdom that women naturally possess as nurturers and caregivers. You can imagine my disgruntlement then when she suggested I was being haunted by demons and promptly prayed that I should be relieved and urged me to confess and purge my guilty pleasures. She has blessed me many times before bed for a week straight and I still have felt a dark presence looming. The eyes want to return. And now, finally exasperated with my cantankerous fright and lacking the energy to spend her nights taking care of me, she has requested our cook to come up to the room with me following dinner and have tea! The strangeness of her remedies. Though it has rather helped me to have an older gentleman to briefly distract me from this hallucination, his conversation merely average stimulation. I am used to entertaining a different sort of men, certainly younger but also more scholarly, aspiring to learn from my tongue and grow into a mind like mine. With older gentlemen, and perhaps you might concur, they tend to want to teach you.” He paused here to chuckle a bit and then he continued. “Indeed, one could say that they want to prescribe your troubles! Is that why you pursued medicine, Doctor?”
The doctor’s puzzled face gave a polite smile, but the eyes behind his glasses shifted to his clipboard.
“Mr. Culwin, I do not doubt the tendencies of us older gentlemen working to prescribe as you say. I also do not deny that you are a man of great knowledge and talent. Bettering the charisma and esteem of those young men is quite admirable. May I ask then, what could there be making you worry that you are deserving of these awful eyes? It seems as though you have nothing to worry about.” The eyes behind the glasses looked closely at Mr. Culwin’s neat, dainty hands resting on the point of his knees, one being a base for bouncing the other. He looked back up to his sleep deprived eyes, which said something to the doctor that was confirming what he was thinking.
Mr. Culwin replied, after he stopped bouncing his knee, lowered his knee to rest next to the other, like two close comrades, gave the doctor a polite smile, and took a moment to think,
“It is my job to observe a person closely. I interact with a lot of people but I’m not easily impressed. That is why I am a mentor; the goal is to be able to mine a student’s craft and make it match a genuine genius. Oftentimes, that brings the students to me, asking of my ability to nurture their skills and encourage their ideas. I do this with great pleasure. It is rewarding to see young buds transform because no matter how long they take, each of them can bloom brilliantly in their respective way and I must engage with them all. And sometimes that distracts me from the life I should get settled into, finding an ideal match that is capable of intriguing me further than my students. They would have to know my craft and be disciplined to work with my standards for the relationship to prosper, and quite frankly, I find most people void of that level of skill. Many people seem to need a prescription for their vision! How droll is the common mind and the common mind is too focused on settling.
What I admire most about my students is that they want to settle with a person by incorporating them within their own individual pursuits and dreams, not only being a person to guide but guiding with a partner that respects and compliments your expertise. Most people aspire to accomplish nothing for themselves but glowing moments of pride within the accomplishments of their children and their marital arrangements. I’ve found that though I get distracted and thus weaken the possibilities of finding that person for me, I, for one, have already expressed my difficulties in being intrigued in those who have no room to bloom. So I joyously shepherd the wondering wanderers who seek the path to their own glowing moments of pride, and I only hope they will see me as a person that did not hinder their journey…I should hope very greatly that my mentees will undoubtedly express with fervor their gratitude and virtually feel connected to me. Almost as if I were a partner that they can envision themselves guiding with. Great minds do think alike…
And it’s because of this that I do not settle, which causes me to always worry what people might think of me. What assumptions this choice might cause them to make. It has always disturbed me,” he finished, “but never frightened me.”
The doctor handed him his prescription. Mr. Culwin shuddered then, noticing a familiarly firm look in the eyes behind the glasses.
Mr. Culwin took his newly prescribed medication as directed. He even continued his nightly tea and continued talking with the cook because of their pleasantness. The cook, named Ralph, kept an eye on him for a bit, to make sure he was on his way to sleep soundly, and the next day they would discuss any symptoms or issues he encountered. For a few days, Mr. Culwin experienced a loss of appetite and felt slightly weak accordingly, but he did not see sight of those eyes since his talk with the doctor.
After a week he was comfortably settling into a chair in his study with the writings of one young fellow he was monitoring; he thought perhaps he had heard someone entering and looked up into the menacing gaze of those eyes. He was terribly frightened, so unnerved by their sudden appearance amidst the recent peace from the medication. If it was not trouble of the mind, he determined, it had to be trouble with his eyes. They were getting worse and now the eyes were appearing more frequently. He promptly ran out of his aunt’s home and visited the oculist.
When he had finished explaining his problems, the oculist peered closely at his face. He picked many different frames and asked Mr. Culwin to tell him what he thought of each, in terms of how they made him feel wearing them. The first pair were round spectacles and they made him feel exposed. The second, gold-rimmed and thick, made him feel like he was staring even when he didn’t want to be. The ones with a dangling side chain made him feel like he was hiding from a crime with his aunt’s glasses as his disguise.
The oculist peered very closely at him again and then said “Mr. Culwin, I do not see issue with your eyes. I assumed the vision you’ve been seeing is an illusion of the soul, not confident that you’re being seen the way you wish. You fear that one might see a monstrous or vicious side of you that perhaps you see internally. The glasses were thus just a way for you to feel a bit more reassured that these eyes you see are not real unless they are reflecting your own. Let these aide you in exerting yourself fully to the challenge of taking a clear look at your fears for you to face them.”
So Mr. Culwin left with a slightly crooked and thus discounted pair of thick black-framed glasses with a window for lenses. He returned to his aunt’s home and found the young fellow there he was planning to review in conversation with the aunt and poor Alice Nowell. The women marveled at how dashing Mr. Culwin appeared and cooed until he had taken the young fellow, named John, to the study. When he began to start his narrative of critiques, John stopped him and said, “Sir, I have not been able to stop wondering of these glasses. Why have you developed a need them now?”
He then gingerly covered Mr. Culwin’s hand and earnestly squeezed. Mr. Culwin felt a gaze much stronger than the one in John’s eyes, and he turned to see them nowhere around. His face settled on the reflection of the two in his mirror. It would be the last time he would gaze upon such a sight. To the horror of John and the fright of the aunt and poor Alice Nowell, Mr. Culwin broke those glasses and stabbed himself in the eyes with the frames. Through his screams he begged “Don’t look at me!” and cried “I can’t bear to see myself the way you all do…but I can’t bear to see myself the way I do either! THAT is why I envision it for my young lads.” As he continued to scream and cry out, the faces surrounding him transformed into the faces of judgment he knew he could not bear.
