The Long Lavender Look by John D. MacDonald Page B

I've been wondering something."
    "Yes?"
    "I'm a silly old woman but I'm not foolish. Seems like you have the thought in your mind my Lew might be in some kind of trouble more than from Just beating up your best friend."
    "He might be. I don't know."
    "Then ... if he is, I hope you find out and I hope you tell Mister Norm. If he is, I want him put away someplace because he's getting so wild he might kill somebody, then he wouldn't have any life left at all. Better he loses a piece of his life and gets over what those pills done to him than lose the whole thing. Unless maybe ... already he killed somebody?" The dread in her voice was touching and unmistakable.
    "Are you thinking about Frank Baither?"
    "It was on the radio."
    "I think he was on duty when that happened."
    "Thank the Lord."
    She asked me to phone her if I heard anything about Lew. I told her to let me know if he came home. She said she could use the phone by counting the holes in the dial. I gave her the White Ibis number. I started to repeat it and she said not to bather, that her memory seemed to be getting better instead of worse as time went by. But she sure did miss the television. It was just shapes and light that didn't mean anything. She wished the cataracts would hurry and get ripe enough.
    As I drove back toward town I was thinking about that ancient and honorable bit of homely psychology, that myth of the ripeness of cataracts. The lens capsule can be removed as soon as it begins to get cloudy. But postoperative vision with corrective lenses is a poor resource at best, compared with normal sight. So the ripeness they speak of is the psychological ripeness of the patient, a time of diminishing vision which lasts long enough, and gets bad enough, so that the postoperative vision is, by comparison, a wonder and a delight. The patient is happy because the basis of comparison has changed.
    There are some extraordinarily cruel men in the primitive rural areas of India who travel from village to village curing cataracts for a few rupees. Their surgical tool is a long, very slender, very sharp and hard thorn. They insert it from the side, behind the lens, and puncture the lens capsule.
    The cloudy fluid leaks into the eye itself and is replaced, or diluted, by the clear fluid within the eye. Sight is restored. It is a miracle. In sixty to ninety days the patient becomes totally and permanently blind, but by then the magician is a dozen villages away, busy with new miracles.
    Perhaps they do not think of themselves as cruel men. In a country where the big city syndicates Page 38

    purchase children, and carefully maim and disfigure them in vividly memorable ways, and distribute them by truck throughout the city each morning to sit on busy sidewalks with begging bowls, and collect them at dusk as impersonally as one might empty coin machines, cruelty itself is a philosophical abstraction.
    The April night was turning cool, so after I stopped back at the White Ibis and picked up an old blue sailcloth sportcoat, laundered and pressed as a courtesy of the Cypress County taxpayers, I went to a place I had spotted when driving around the town. The Adventurer. A lot of blue neon, tinted glass, an acre of asphalt packed with local cars. Frigid air conditioning, exhaust fans hustling the smoke out, ceiling prisms beaming down narrow areas of glare on the Saturday night faces. Long bar packed deep, and people sitting at small tables, leaning toward each other to shout intimacies over the shattering din of a hundred other people shouting to be heard over the sound of a trio on a high shelf in the corner, three dead-faced whiskery young men boosting by about five hundred watts the sound of an electric guitar, electric bass, and a fellow who stood whapping at a tall snare drum and singing sounds which may or may not have been words into the microphone. The obligatory birdcage girl had her own high shelf. She was meaty and energetic, snapping her hair across her closed eyes,