Big Green Eyes
Being Chapter Seven in the tale “The Only Way Was East.”
My older brother Gabe only ever told my younger brothers and I one bedtime story before my mother forbade him from ever doing it again:
Once upon a time, there was a girl who lost her soul. She wasn’t sure if it had been taken away from her or, like a bad penny, it had fallen out and run away. Because that’s the thing about losing your soul: you never can quite remember how it happened.
One night around midnight, while looking for her soul, the girl wandered into a dark forest. Soon she was lost. She felt a terrible breeze blow right through her, but she was used to that. That’s what happens when you don’t have a soul to keep you warm. But this breeze was different. Like it was coming from a hole in the soul of the sky.
When she looked up she saw something small and black perched on a branch in the moonlight. It was a moth staring down at her. But it didn’t have a moth’s normal eyes. These eyes were green and twice the size, and when they looked at her, they looked into that empty room in the house of her heart. The one she never told anybody about.
She screamed. She ran out of the forest. She got in her car and started driving. But the big green eyes followed her. They were in the eyes of the owls and the ravens flying out of the the trees. They were even in the traffic lights as they turned from ‘stop’ to ‘go’. All of them intensly yet impassionately staring at her and only her, not the other people walking by on the sidewalk below. They didn’t seem to notice the giant evil eyeballs above them.
She screamed and sped down the street, not knowing where to go but only that she should keep moving to keep the green glare off of her. She kept driving until she ran out of gas and ditched the car on the side of the road. She ran into the park, tears falling down her face.
But when she looked up and saw the moon, it wasn’t a moon but one huge green eye the size of the sky. It was observing her, with nowhere else for her to run. Exhausted, she nearly collapsed next to a boy on the park bench at the top of the hill.
“There you are,” the boy said. He knelt down to her and helped her up. “I’ve been looking for you,” he said. And when she looked at his face she saw his wide smile, and his huge green terrible eyes...
And he left it there. “I’ll tell you the rest tomorrow,” he said. Up until that point all of our bedtime stories had been neatly tied up in a bow to send us peacefully off to sleep. So to leave us hanging with so many unanswered questions and the image of the big green eyes in our minds was just too much for our little bodies to handle.
Garrett, Gianni, and I ran screaming out of the bedroom to find our mother, all three of us giddy with excitement and fear. We wrapped ourselves around her legs and told her how scary the story was. Mom, who up until a moment ago was cooing “Biddy Biddy Bom Bom” to Chacha while rocking her to sleep looked at Gabe and smiled. She took the baby’s limp hand, pointed it at him dictator style and mimed out in a baby voice: “Looks like dat was da fiwst and da last bedtime story fwom you buddy!” We all laughed, but we also knew she was deadly serious. From then on it was back to the routine “Chronicles of Naria” or “Amazing Tales from the Bible.”
My older sister Rocky poked her head out of her bedroom as Taking Back Sunday blared in the background to ask what all the screaming was about. Gabe just shrugged and left the hallway for his own room. He was only trying to do a favor for my mom, and I’m sure that he didn’t have any specific ending in mind. He was probably making it up line by line as he went along with no idea where the story would take him.
But I remember distinctly looking up at my mother, my whole body wrapped around her legs in fear, and looking back at Gabe casually strolling away and I thought “this isn’t what I wanted.” Sure I was protected, but now I would never know who the boy was, or why the girl had lost her soul, or what it was like not have a soul, and if she would ever find it again.
I lay awake that night, staring at the ceiling and listening to the mountain-crumbling snores of my father from down the hall. What if I lose my soul? I thought.
Years later, after Gabe had two daughters of his own I called him on the phone and asked him if he could humor me and finish the story of the big green eyes. He told me that he was sorry but no, he couldn’t. He didn’t even remember telling it to us in the first place.
“Hey, Gio. Listen, don’t pay me back for those cigs OK? Just give me a dollar and buy me a drink later? I’m out of cash and I really want to tip that Colombian stripper. She changed my life.”
We were in the strip club in TJ, but I was miles and years away thinking about that bedtime story. Without a response, I pulled out my wallet and handed a dollar over to Calluna before returning to my thoughts.
I kept that story with me my entire life. How could he forget? It was such an important moment in our lives and it was the ONLY bedtime story he ever told us. But memory is slippery. Maybe I imagined that whole night, created it and placed it into my consciousness like a gambler who slips an extra card into the deck while nobody is looking.
But I never let go of the hope that I might get some inkling, some clue about what that story meant. Then, one day while we were on the phone, Gabe asked me something:
“Do you remember the day Papasan died?”
(Papasan was our father's father who got the name because he transplanted his family to live in Okinawa, Japan for a few years while he sold real-estate for the Air Force. My dad was in high school at the time. We never had a “Grama” and “Grampa” in our house. Instead, we had a Nana, a Tata, a Mamasan, and a Papasan.)
“No. I don’t remember. Why?”
He said that one night when he was very young — I must have been a baby and Giani, Garrett, and Chacha weren’t even born yet — he was having a sleepover with our cousin, Mike-Mike. In the middle of the night, he woke up for no reason at all and looked out the window.
There was a black moth sitting on the branch.
It was staring at him while he slept, and he took note of its huge swamp-colored eyes. He and the moth looked at each other for less than a second before it flew away. Caught. He was so afraid he couldn’t get back to sleep. He just lay awake in his bed wondering how long the moth had been watching him, and why.
The next morning, my brother and cousin were woken up tenderly and told that Papasan had died the night before. Gabe was young then, probably the same age I was when I first heard the bedtime story, but he could never for the rest of his life shake the suspicion that our Papasan’s death had something to do with those terrible, terrible eyes.
