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by Rebecca Jefferson

My second-grade teacher was a second-rate poet. For one of our elementary school's semiannual pageants, our class was supposed to represent colored pencils. Definitely silly, but we were much better off than the kindergartners, who had to portray paste. All we had to do was wear different colored outfits and recite the little verses our teacher had written for us, one pertaining to each color. I was black. My stanza went something like this: "Black is the color of night,/And of the pupils in our eyes,/And our eyes are the windows to our souls." Not exactly earth-shattering poetry. I still remember it, though, because at the time it set me wondering. It was the last line, really. If souls have windows, knowing people is easy. Anyone can see into a window, if the light is right. I thought maybe, if I looked deep enough, I could see all the way to the bottom. I could know everything about someone just by looking. I could know everything.

I'm not sure when I first became obsessed with knowing what was inside people. I remember that one of the first fictional characters I ever identified with was a man in my book of Aesop's fables. He complained that the gods should have made human beings with windows in their chests so that their thoughts could be easily read. I couldn't have agreed more. All I wanted was to know. It infuriated me to no end that I could see the world, and I could see what other people looked like, but I couldn't see what the world looked like to other people. I didn't care that everyone's eyes saw essentially the same things. The things themselves were not important. It was the way they were seen that mattered, the way they got twisted around inside other eyes. For Christmas, when I was nine, I asked my mother for telepathy. What I got was a book about palm reading and a trip to the movies.

Before we walked into the movie theater, my mother told me she was going to test my telepathy. "I want you to look at the people in the movie. Look in their eyes," she said. "Look very closely. See if you can tell me what they're thinking." I did my very best, watching intently as set after set of two-foot eyes fluttered across the screen. I was surprised at how easy it was. I even found myself knowing exactly what everyone would do next. To this day, all I really remember about that movie is one pair of eyes, inhumanly large and impossibly blue. When it was over, I told my mother about my fabulous psychic revelation. She listened with unnerving serenity. She was so calm! Didn't she realize she had a phenomenon on her hands? When we got home, I asked her what we were going to do about me and my gift.

She smiled knowingly. "We're not going to do anything, Rebequita," she said.

Nothing! I was shocked. "But Mami, I'm gifted!" I exploded. "Don't you believe me?"

"Honey, don't you realize what just happened?" she asked. I shook my head. "Those people in that movie weren't people at all. They were characters, played by actors. You're a smart girl, you know about actors. They pretend. They put on different clothes and become different people. When you were reading minds in there, what you were really doing was understanding the characters, and how the director was using them. That's a very good thing to be able to do, but it's not telepathic. You can't tell me what the actor was really thinking when those scenes were being filmed, can you?"

I bit my lip and stared at the floor. I was bitterly disappointed. I had been so sure that I could see beneath the surface of people, and as it turned out, all I could see was another aspect of the surface, something that had been laid out on purpose, to be seen.

"So I'm not gifted, then?" I asked sadly.

"Of course you are," my mother re-lied decidedly. "You just have to learn to think in layers. And don't worry. People may be actors, but most of them aren't very talented. In time, you'll learn to see. Now, why don't you show me what you can do with that palmistry book?"

I showed her, all right. In the course of three years, I learned and actively practiced palmistry, handwriting analysis, Chinese face reading, and a hundred other things. If there was any way that the external could shed light on the internal, no matter how incredible or unscientific, I wanted to know about it. The idea of actors on a screen still fascinated me. I was determined to find a way to see through them, and understand who they really were, in spite of their skill. To me, they were like Mrs. Whatsit, in Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, so swathed in coats, cloaks, kerchiefs and scarves that their shapes were almost impossible to determine. And I was a girl with very large scissors. I figured, if I could cut through the disguises of people who had to fool me for a living, regular people wouldn't stand a chance. The major problem at this point was the camera. It created angles, deceptive shadows that could, and did, distort my observations. There were limits to my craft, limits imposed, ironically, by the very thing I was striving to understand. Being made to see what was happening behind the director's eyes, as reproduced by a machine, was keeping me from analyzing the actors. Finally, I admitted defeat. I decided that the perception of a person's physical characteristics is not enough. Their physical presence is necessary.

Particle physics teaches that human beings are mostly empty space, pin-sized bits of matter, blown apart and distributed over an immense void. After learning this, I started to picture the insides of people as vast empty spaces, dotted with tiny points of light, arranged in incomprehensible geometric patterns. I saw people as miniature floating universes, hidden within star-cloaks of skin. To me, empty space represents mystery, and infinity. When I knock on a bronze statue and find it hollow, I don't think of it as empty. It's just filled with something I don't understand. In a similar manner, I do not think of people as empty. They are like the universe. Inside, under the skin, they are infinite. But since the human mind is at a loss to understand infinity, we interpret it as emptiness. Thus, we prefer not to compare ourselves to bronze statues. We don't like to think about what is in us the way we think of the air that becomes trapped inside a metal skin, when the bronze is first given its form. We don't want to think of ourselves as a layer of solidity molded over layers of empty space. We fear the void. We fear the space within each other and within ourselves. And can we be blamed? Emptiness is a frightening thing. Especially in our wallets. Or in our beds, beside us at 3 A.M., when we wake with a start, and gasp.

I began to think the mysteries inside other people could be felt, the way hollowness can be felt inside a statue. After all, how do we distinguish sleep from death? Through the skin. How do we know that other people are alive? We are taught to recognize the signs: They are warm. They breathe. They pulse. They live, under our fingers. On an even more elementary level, touch is proof of existence. We know other humans exist because we feel them. We touch them. We put out our hands, and they are there. But what's inside the skin is just as much of a mystery as what's behind the eyes. It's impossible for me to know what my touch feels like to another person. I have my own ideas of a soft touch and a firm one, what's a whisper and what's a death grip. But I can't assume that these hold true for everyone else. I have no way of knowing just how the contact feels, much less how another mind interprets its nature.

As a matter of fact, interpretation became the major difficulty in my experiments with touch. It took me a very long time to understand that my level of comfort with contact was not exactly acceptable to my American acquaintances. I grew up in Costa Rica, where I was taught to kiss my relatives on both cheeks and my friends on just one. In that culture, gender meant nothing. Guys or girls, I would still hug my friends spontaneously, and grab their arms when they said something funny. Even now, it is impossible for me to really feel close to someone without touching them. They don't feel real to me, somehow. I don't know what they feel like, both upon the skin and underneath it. I can't know who they are, because I don't even know if they're really there.

Here in the U.S., however, people tend to shrink from contact, especially between the sexes. It makes them nervous, uncomfortable, even squeamish. I could feel this awkwardness, this self-conscious revulsion, through the skin of the first people I met here. I was teased relentlessly in middle school because I had kissed a girl on the cheek, in greeting, on the second day of school. I still get strange looks from people when I kiss my friends on the cheek. It was impossible to know which were the people who interpreted all touch as sexual, and which knew it for what it was. It was impossible to know, until I tried. And even then, people would yield out of politeness, and try to hide their discomfort from me. I began to suspect that this hidden discomfort was what festered into the unexplained bitterness that ended all of my childhood friendships. It was no use trying to explain. No one can easily eliminate with words what they have learned from the earliest experience. I had run into another brick wall. I felt it was impossible to know people without touching them, but when I touched them, they would snap shut, like Venus flytraps, and refuse to let me in.

The moment I realized this, it occurred to me that people were like roses in full bloom. They have row upon row, layer upon layer of silky petals, clustered together so tightly and so carefully that they seem to be the entire flower. But the rose has its own deviousness. The real source of the scent is hidden. Its petals are a distraction, a sort of disguise, and a very good one, at that. So good, in fact, that when humans fashion fake roses, they make only the layers of petals, and put nothing at the center. Apparently, we are no more skilled at imitating flowers than we are at imitating people. An actor can reproduce the layers of skin with layers of makeup, and the layers of emotion with layers of skillful lies. But in the same way that a craftsman can't imitate the source of a rose's scent, an actor cannot reproduce the infinity inside another person.

This had been my problem all along. I hadn't thought in terms of inner layers. I had been studying people the way a method actor studies for a character, which happens to be the same way we are taught to study people when we are very young. We are taught so unconsciously! Our parents tell us, without thinking, "Oh look, Suzy is crying! That means Suzy is sad." Before we have any real understanding of sadness, we are taught to detect it on the surface of another's skin. We are taught to understand people in terms of their outer layers. We are taught to know them by their looks, their style, the way they express their emotions, in short, by what they choose to show us. I had tried to know people by look and by feel, never understanding that these are simply different layers of the things people lay out on purpose, to be seen. I had peeled off only the outer petals of the rose. My confusion had brought me to a premature halt. Or was it my conscience? The windows to our souls have obviously been equipped with large wooden shutters, which can be clapped together at will, to keep out curious observers. This set me to wondering: Am I a peeping Tom? Am I trying to look in where no one has the right to see?

I had a strange encounter with this question one day in my Art History class. We were studying some slides of Sumerian religious artifacts. The lecture hall was dark. I had to take notes by the light of the slides themselves, which clicked across the screen in the front of the room with a slow, dead rhythm. My professor had begun the class with his usual inexplicable cheerfulness, but by this time, his voice had begun to echo the movements of the flickering slides. Slow, dead. Slow, dead. Before long, my breathing sank into the rhythm, and my head began to droop. On the outskirts of consciousness, I heard him say, "Statuette of a worshipper. Sumerian, of course. Found buried near a temple in Uruk. Thought to be the image of an actual person. Perhaps it served some sort of religious function. Circa 2700 B.C. Purpose unknown. Sculptor unknown."

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I heard a voice say, "Open your eyes. You like unknowns."

My professor continued. "Here you may see a close-up of the figure's extraordinarily large eyes. They are inflated to inhuman proportions, being almost twice the size of its hands."

The eyes of the statue were the first thing I saw when I opened my own. I was immediately reminded of the movie I had seen when I was nine, and the one pair of eyes I had been unable to forget. The image of the statue taunted me, as the actors had. "You cannot see into me," it seemed to say. "There is nothing to see. You cannot even know the name of the one who made me. You cannot place a name upon me. You cannot hold on to me. If you touch me, I will not yield." Well, of course the statue wouldn't yield. It was made of stone, for crying out loud! But somehow, that was irrelevant. People do not yield, either. If it is willed to do so, the human mind has the power to assume the properties of stone. The eyes of a human can project the same cold refusal as the eyes of this statue did. They can say, as the statue seemed to, "I will not tell you what is in me. I will tell you nothing." And they would be right to say so. Silence is their right, as well as their privilege. Just as actors have the power to project any image they choose, so the eyes of a human being have the power to withhold, and to show only what they wish others to see.

Maybe my second-grade teacher was right. Maybe eyes are the windows to our souls. But if they are, it doesn't mean much. Windows are only inanimate openings. It's fairly easy to trick them. For instance, the blinds on my bedroom window are broken. When I get dressed in the morning, I stand in a dark corner, doing my best to stay out of the light that filters, unwanted, into my private sanctuary. I may not be able to close the window, but I can avoid it if I choose to. I can hide whatever part of myself I don't want to show. Other people are able to do this, just as I am. Other people have the right to do this, just as I do. But even if I were permitted to see inside, even if it were within my power, it would do me no good. My mind is no better than other human minds. I cannot wrap my puny powers of perception around infinity, and hope to give it form and limits. No. The best I can do is watch carefully, speak softly, and hope to be allowed the chance to look in the window, resigned to the shadows and dark corners that will inevitably exist. I must learn to be content with what I do know: that the space within is, and will always be, infinitely greater than the space without.

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