Lenses of the Past - A Short Story

Written by Malik Gay

For years now, one question has lingered on my mind regarding addiction. What is the world’s most addictive substance? In my time as an artist and art dealer, I’ve crossed paths with painters, sculptors, and architects, many of whom have told me heroin. Its ability to make even the direst of circumstances dissipate and carry its users into a state of ecstasy has destroyed countless creative minds. The pursuit of heroin and the sensation it provides leaves broken homes, shattered communities, and both physical and emotional destitution in its wake. More than a few good men and women I’ve known personally have fallen victim to the dangerous vice.

Others say that sex is the most addictive feeling known to man. Most people, including the loneliest of souls find solace in the warmth, elation, and closeness felt by the pleasures of one’s touch. Even those lacking the emotional stability necessary for long-term personal relationships seek out a regular cardinal release and sense of intimacy. Many theorize our society’s obsession with the act by just how indoctrinated we’ve all become.

We turn on our TV, phones, computers, open our magazines, look at pictures, walk down the street, and it’s all there in front of our faces. Unlike heroin, physical attraction and the desire to procreate is wired into our core. On a fundamental level, it determines how we dress, who we sit next to, and how we speak and behave. Sex has even inspired some of history’s greatest artists to manifest their imagination into reality. Muses have served as inspiration since the beginning of creative art.

And then there’s alcohol, which I’ve never lent any credence to. Yes, intoxication, while easy to achieve, has never inspired much in my opinion. I will say that it has allowed humanity to view itself at its darkest. Like sex and heroin, alcohol serves as a life raft to those shipwrecked by the regularity of one’s mundane existence. The winos and drunks who fall victim to its effects like to pretend as if life is not the murky and stunted journey it appears to be, when in fact it proves the contrary. Quite a few times I found myself turning to the bottle when life seemed its most melancholy and hopeless.

But despite the reprieve of drugs, sex, and alcohol, one substance above all has trumped the feeling of escapism I’ve long searched for.

Nostalgia. Since my late 30s, I’ve ached with an insatiable urge to return to a point in time where people didn’t care what I made but instead cared that I made anything at all. A sacred time before those around me wanted anything, whether it be money, favors, knowledge, or simply insight into how I thought and behaved. When all that was needed was the comfort of friends, the reassurance of family, and the unequivocal admiration of one woman. In my journey, sacrifices were made, the people I held dear were left behind, and all that remains are meaningless possessions and hollow titles. The nostalgia that once inspired my greatest works had now given birth to my addiction to the past.

The present meant nothing to me and neither did the future. I yearned for the smell of barbecue roasting over an open flame during those hot summer months. The twisting pain I’d feel in the pit of my stomach from laughing too hard with my cousins during family events. It was usually at times deemed inappropriate, resulting in a firm scolding from my mother. And while embarrassing at the time, it’s missed all the same. Nothing will top the creaking floorboards of my childhood home, which served as warning alarms all those nights my brother and I laid awake after our bedtime.

And finally, there was the soft touch of my once great love. The enchanting aroma of her perfume combined with her sensual touch made time feel as if it was inconsequential. We’d spend days in bed in that studio apartment of ours without an ounce of guilt. The smell of burnt popcorn would fill the room as we wasted the day watching old movies and making love. There’d be no gallery to attend or interview to conduct. It was me and her as the outside world stood a witness to young love at its most innocent.

Then, time ran its course. Gone were the family barbecues. As time passed, family became less of a value or tangible asset and more of a theme used in my exhibitions. Distance, illness, and sour emotions regarding my success and fortune led to a lack of communication. The creaky floorboards and mismatched color toned walls that once belonged to my mother’s house would soon be no more than a pile of discarded debris.

Among the myriad of cars, clothes, awards, apartments, and individuals that claimed to be my friends, memories were all I truly owned. Nostalgia not only led to a distortion of reality but caused me to ignore it completely. The days of channeling my addiction into my work had come and gone. Those too became memories I wished to return to. The mansion I considered home was nothing except a cage with exits that I had no desire to escape from. My days would be spent staring at a blank ceiling, reminiscing on the good days gone by. When I closed my eyes, all I could see were the faded smiles of those that once mattered a great deal to me. As I rubbed my face against a soft silk pillow each night before bed, I pretended that it was her, swallowing me in her deep embrace. They said I’d lost my grip on reality when the truth was reality had never been more vivid.

After years lost cycling through my fondest of memories, I decided it was time to get back to work. My latest venture into the human psyche would be my magnum opus, though it could not be achieved alone. What remained of my fortune would be used to cultivate the world’s greatest minds. Artists, scientists, doctors, mathematicians—there was no expense spared. And when it was all said and done, society would look upon my work in envy of what I now possessed.

The Great Reflectors is what the press would soon call them. This was no installation or painting or sculpture; just what appeared to be a pair of contact lenses surgically attached to my retinas. Scientists and mathematicians worked on the logistics while artists assisted with the design. The doctors—some of the world’s best and brightest—were brought in to ensure what I was doing was medically feasible. There was the obvious health risk, but that didn’t matter much to me. If I couldn’t accomplish what I sought out to, I was better off dead anyway.

By the time the lenses were unveiled, many did not know what they were looking at. I stood before an audience of hundreds at my art gallery in Soho, Manhattan. Only to me though did the place appear empty. Questions were asked yet none were answered personally. That was because I could not hear nor see them. Despite their name, my new lenses did not reflect light or vision but rather memories. While the outside world continued to push forward through time, my senses of sight, smell, and hearing would be relegated to memories from my past. The doctors and scientists had been successful in rewiring my synapses and nerve endings in conjunction with the portion of the brain associated with memory. It would take my assistants to explain to the press what I had achieved.

With The Great Reflectors, what remained of my life would be spent in the past. As I walked down a New York City street, the cars were no longer the modern and curvy hunks of metals I had become accustomed to. Instead, they retained their bulky, vintage builds as I remembered from my childhood. Even the air smelled different. The suffocating polluted smog that hung above the city was gone and in its place was clean air and blue skies. Skyscrapers no longer towered into the indefinite heavens and The World Trade Center stood in proof of all that America had accomplished.

But this is not why I had invented the lenses. Part of me is ashamed to say that the creation of my art has mainly stemmed from selfish desires and ego-driven pursuits. With my rise in popularity and the world starting to take notice, I began to lie to everyone—myself included—to believe that the work erected was for the good of the people. Thanks to the lenses, the truth had finally laid itself bare. I would be the only one to wield them. Nostalgia was my personal vice, and while I wished to help those in need, reality as we know it would cease to exist if the lenses became available to anyone other than myself.

The first stop would be the site of my childhood home. It was where countless family events were hosted and slumber parties were spent reading comic books and eating junk food until early hours in the morning. Though the home had been built, demolished, and built again in its wake, the lenses allowed me to see, smell, and hear it just as I remembered. The creaking of the floorboards with each step. The obnoxious beeping of the microwave that would go off whenever I was unable to reach the food before the timer hit zero. It was all there and in rich detail. Even the dust particles orbiting around my room like distant stars in the night’s sky. I just couldn’t get enough. That was until something swept across my senses.

It had been the faint sound of a child weeping. Clearly a memory, but one long forgotten. Following the sound downstairs and into the kitchen, the weeping grew louder. The sniffling and hyperventilating brought about a painful and repressed memory. It was at the kitchen table where I would nurse my brother’s injuries after our stepfather had returned home from work. He was typically drunk and in a bad mood. Among the thoughts of playdates, barbecues, and my mother’s cooking, this memory—stored deeply within the recesses of my mind—had been awakened by the lenses.

Next was the apartment shared with my great love on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Heading up to that fifth-floor studio, it was just as I remembered. She was always something of a slob, constantly leaving her discarded sweaters and boots along the freshly vacuumed floors, and yet I loved her in spite of it. Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, Stephan King, among other authors filled our bookshelves. We’d take turns reading to one another after dinner and before bed though we’d rarely get through a chapter without falling asleep. The bathroom smelled of her tropical Sea Breeze shampoo, the one I’d find absolutely tantalizing, making me want her even more.

Then there were my earliest paintings that dangled from the walls. At the time, the paintings that didn’t go straight in the trash found a place under the bed until one day she insisted that I start hanging them around the apartment. I could hear her soft docile voice telling me, “No will love your work until you do.” They were just the words I needed to hear, convincing me to drop my dead-end sales job and start painting full time. The bedsheets where we’d waste the weekends away still smelled of her Dolce & Gabbana perfume. It was that along with the lingering scent of lavender lotion she’d use that’d have me hesitant about washing the sheets come laundry day.

But soon came the taste of ashes in my mouth. Police and EMT sirens outside our building were so loud that they bordered on deafening. And then there was the choking sensation of smoke, following the burning of cedar. It felt as if the walls were closing in on me as I pushed and shoved my way through the mass of people crowding the hallway to my apartment. It was like one of those Chinese finger traps; the harder I fought, the more trapped I became until finally I made it to the door of my apartment.

While I was away at my first ever art deal, there'd been an accident. An incessant buzzing filled my auditory senses as the police tried to explain what had happened. Somehow the apartment had gone up in flames and she was gone. Nothing remained of the apartment except smoke, cinders, and years of happy moments lost to the fire.

Again, this was a memory I hadn’t attempted to resurface and here it was, staring me in the face. And it would only continue. For each pleasant memory related to sight, smell, taste, or sound, there was one equally as dark and ominous. Where there was love, there was abuse. Where there was joy, there was pain. My obsession with nostalgia had given birth to its darkest aspects.

I already knew what the doctors would relay before the message was delivered. There was no way to remove the lenses without permanent damage to my eyesight. Every sensation I’d felt over the years allowed me to visualize the moments throughout my life I’d held so close. And now, due to my own greedy obsession, I faced the possibility of never gazing upon all the beauty life had to offer.

Through all my reminiscing, I never stopped to think about how the past was built on a foundation of present events. Have the good days passed me by? Yes, but by obsessing over them I’ve failed to create new ones. Like the family I no longer have or the great love I could no longer hold, the lenses served as both a testament of true sacrifice and selfishness. And now with a future as black and vacant as my present, the past is all I will ever truly possess. And I’m never letting go.

The end.