Both Eyes Blinking Back Copyright © 2019 by Ralph Robert Moore.

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Published in Black Static #68, Mar-Apr 2019

I always tense up when someone makes a telephone call on a TV show or in a movie. Don't you? Because I know they're going to disappoint me. I'm thinking, Please don't say the telephone number. Please don't say the telephone number. But they always do. "Yes, and the number is [area code]-555-" And they've lost me.

It's as bad as when some actor lifts a pair of binoculars to her or his eyes, and in the point of view of the magnification we see double circles, a figure eight lying on its side.

Because that's not the view you get through binoculars. If you look through binoculars, you see a single circle. Not two circles side by side. So that tells me the moviemaker doesn't care about details. They're just going through the motions. I lose interest.

The three digits after the area code are known as the 'central office prefix' in the United States. There is no central office prefix for 555 followed by the final four digits of 0100 through 0199, and so movies and TV shows use it all the time (so no one calls a real number), which immediately tells you what you're watching is fake. And lazy.

I read somewhere once that cats respond to you blinking at them with both your eyes. Apparently, according to this long-ago article, it means, I love you.

Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't.

But I started doing it with all our cats. The only cat who responded to my blinkings was Sheba. He was a loner, hiding in our backyard, at the base of a stand of green canna, but he'd come out each evening when we got home from work in the city to be petted and cooed at by us. Ignoring the food we set out for him until we went back inside, leaving him out there on his lonesome as the wide sky overhead darkened.

Once Summer ended, and the nights got colder, we decided to take him inside. Because otherwise he would freeze to death in the lowering temperatures. By then we had a lot of other cats, and none of them liked him. He'd try to pal up to them, and they'd reject him.

I saw him go up to them one day, all those different-colored paws on the carpet, different sets of whiskers, and it must have taken a great deal of courage to make that padding approach, I guess it worried him that they weren't accepting him, and he blinked both his eyes at them, just like I taught him to do.

And they didn't blink back.

Poor, lonely Sheba.

He got a little bit neurotic after that.

Who could blame him?

One morning, I raised my head off my white pillow in response to a loud cracking sound outside our bedroom window. In the heavy winds, a tree had fallen across the paths in our backyard. Little vulnerable Sheba, on the white carpet in our bedroom, swung his orange head up towards me in bed, blinking both his worried blue eyes. Is it okay, Daddy?

I blinked back with both my eyes. It's okay, Sheba.

Details are important, and they need to be authentic. Know what turns me off when I'm watching a horror movie? Someone has to escape in their car, twists their key in the ignition, and the engine keeps turning over, without starting. Or a woman is fleeing in the woods, suddenly falls, sprawling across the path, has trouble getting up again from the dirt and the leaves as her pursuer gets closer.

How many times has that been done already? The movie maker is lazy. He or she is just going through the motions. Thinking about lunch.

Life is details. That's what we remember. That's what makes an account real. Not the big events, marriages, births, deaths, but the small details. 'Who touches this, touches a man.'

One time while Mary and I were living in the San Francisco area, in San Mateo, we met mid-day for lunch, bought a pair of delicious white-wrapped roast beef sandwiches at a local deli, and slid into a slot at a nearby park, one with over-sized goldfish in the central pond, listening to our car radio, telling each other about our day so far, crunching our teeth through our rolls, down through the crust into the moistness and the meat, when a gray pickup maneuvered into the slot ahead of us, the driver hopped out, lowered the gate at the rear of his pickup, pulled down a long plywood board, slanting it to the tar of the road, then helped an enthusiastic three-legged dog tap down that plywood slant, steady itself on the tar roadway, then go frisking lopsidedly across the green grass of the park. That's an authentic detail. Just saying in your story two lovers 'loved each other' is not an authentic detail.

After Sheba died, we gradually lost a lot of our other cats. They died on a towel between us on our bed, or in our arms, or in one case in my armpit. Doesn't matter. They all died.

Thor was the only male cat from Lady's litter.

He was 'my' cat, just like other cats were Mary's. I think it was a male bonding thing. He was the only male cat in the household; I was the only male human in the household. But I may be wrong.

I tried the both eyes blinking thing with him, for years, and he just ignored it. Ignoring what humans want you to do is a cat thing, right?

Then one time years and years later, when he was no longer a kitten, but now an older cat who wasn't quite as spry as he once had been, with more than a touch of gray about him, we were lying in bed together, an ordinary day, watching the weather report on TV, and he raised his head, looked up at me, as he never had before, and very deliberately blinked both eyes at me. Stunned, I blinked both eyes back at him. But that was it. Was he telling me, after so many years, he loved me? He had appreciated all I had done for him across his life? I think so. And I'll never forget that detail. That…deliberateness. For that one moment, we connected.

And isn't that what details are? Details, authentic details, are a gift from one to another. This is a moment of what life is like.

The only time I've ever seen the view from binoculars presented accurately, one large circle instead of two smaller circles, was on the TV show Breaking Bad. Another good reason to watch that brilliant series.

And it would be so easy to use a different central office prefix that would also be fake, but at least not as instantly recognizable as 555. Any central office prefix beginning with a 0 or 1, for example, is not a valid telephone number under the North American Numbering Plan (NANP). Movie makers could easily use one of those numbers, but most of them don't. Because they don't give a shit about details.

I read a story once, and I regret I don't remember the author's name so I can give them credit, where someone walked down a flight of stairs in a building, the stairs had a metal handrail, and as the person walked down the stairs, their hand lifting off the metal hand rail, settling back down on it lower on the rail for balance, their wedding ring kept hitting against the metal of the rail, giving off a small metallic, musical clang.