There were many things that marked Doloise different from the creatures of which she was formed, but, alas, a sense of humour was not one of them.  When I asked her if she was serious, it wasn’t even a rhetorical question, mostly a ping against the laws of my universe.

I was rescued from having to respond to her unusual requests by Nellie coming to our table with a very, very large gentleman next to her.

“Ah, my little Nellya says you are to speak with me!” the man said, in a tone slightly less loud than a bellow. 

See, this is a man-woman thing right here.   Nellie seemed to cringe at the volume.  Me, I took it in stride.  I didn’t need to match it – that would have spoken of submission. 

“That depends,” I said.  “Are you Ivan?”

Nellie’s eyes caught the light as she gave me a put-upon expression, but I ignored it.  Hey, it could have been that I wanted to compliment the cook, right?

“Indeed!  I am Ivan!  The Great and Terrible! Ha-ha!”

He really spoke like that, with capital letters and exclamation points.

Actually, I kind of liked the guy, in his over-the-top manner.  Not everyone can actually punctuate their sentences with a good “Ha-ha!”  It either came naturally, or took a lot of practice.  You couldn’t just wake up in the morning and start out saying, “Ha-ha!” with any real verisimilitude. 

His smile, though, didn’t reach his eyes.  I looked at his face for a moment and then, with a little shiver of concern, met his gaze with my own.

See, eye contact means something.  It means a lot of things, really, and all of them are somehow intimate.  It’s one of the real ways people with visual difficulties are handicapped, because it means an entire sense, another way of finding out who the people near you are is similarly left to other adaptations.  We learn about people in other ways – we can use our nose although it doesn’t paint the same kind of picture (yet another visual metaphor) outside of instinctual opinions.   And when we look into the eyes of someone else, we can’t help but project a little of ourselves into it.  We’re not just seeing the eyes, we’re focusing on every little cue in the expression.  We’re analyzing and comparing and our mood has as much to do with what we see as the subject’s.

I, for example, was in a darned good mood from the food, tempered with the concern for Doloise’s situation.  Well, and then Ivan showed up and I had to tighten that down for the moment, to put on my “work face” as it were.  So I saw joviality.  And I saw sadness.  And I saw concern.  I saw someone I could like, someone who enjoyed life.  Someone who was a darn good cook, by the way.

And I saw that he had a hole in his heart, a large gaping darkness.

Some of the heavy hitters have some tricks, they say, about meeting the eyes.  It’s a kind of identity not unlike a true name, and once they have your gaze they can work great knowings upon that.   (“Knowings” often called “seeings” for that reason.)  I knew Ivan was a sorceror, and I didn’t care.  I’m constantly being reminded of the eye contact rule with Doloise who, if she slept, would still sleep with the shades.

Of course, if she was a real girl, that would go away.  Kind of like Pinnochio’s nose, right?

Ivan smiled, and I was chilled.  Because something else was looking out at me, not from his eyes, but from his heart.  The metaphorical one.  The one we talk about when we paste that funny shaped symbol on our bumperstickers.    It tasted dry, just like the moments before the lightning bolt, like the slither of a large snake against the stones. 

“You are OK!” he said.  He thumped his fist on my arm, and then took the bill from the table.  “I get this!  You do not pay! ”  He looked at Doloise.  “You do not bring,” he used what I think were the same words Artur said meant “Lord’s House” “back here, though.  Cannot trust everything she sees.”  He said the last almost as if it were a joke.

Kinda ironic, that.