“Ha!” I mocked. “Now you know how it feels to be interrupted.”
“Yeah, but shush.” He coughed. “So Lee steps up for the colour blindness test and it turns out he isn’t colour blind. We all cheered since we’d been doing it for everyone. But then the nurse takes out the animal cards. Before you interrupt, the animal cards are these silver strips of…let’s say paper. These strips have five animals drawn in black ink on them: a pig on the left side, a rhino next to it, a monkey in the middle, a giraffe, and an elephant on the extreme right. Got that?”
“Sure.”
“One of the animals is supposed to pop out such that the observer sees that animal as being closer to his or her eyes, same way as a 3D movie. Finding the right animal means passing the test. Lee couldn’t find it; the animals looked the same to him. The nurse tried three cards and Lee still couldn’t see the difference. She told him to wear his safety glasses and he still couldn’t see it. Nothing.”
He shifted in his in the bed. “So the nurse told him he couldn’t see 3D; well, the-monkey-in-the-middle kind of 3D. And the thing is, if Lee lied the first time and said the monkey was closer to him, he would have gotten away with it; but he didn’t, so the boss got involved and Lee had an early retirement. The other thing is that Lee’s disability didn’t matter. I mean, obviously he could see normal 3D; he just couldn’t tell which animals popped out from the paper.”
“What happened to him after that?”
“I think he got stabbed in a bar fight or something. And get this: he got stabbed in one eye. He even collected disability checks for it. But before that, he couldn’t collect the checks for not seeing the monkey in the middle.”
I had moved away from the window and reclaimed my seat near Matome’s bed. “He lost his job because of the monkey, but he couldn’t be compensated for it?”
“Yes.” Matome nodded. “It’s fucked up.”
“Yet somehow it makes sense to me.”
“Yeah, it makes sense in a fucked up way.”
“Agreed,” I said, nodding profusely.
“I have one last question about your story.”
“Ask away, my friend.”
“The story that was criticised for not being authentic, what was it about?”
“It was about a thirteen-year-old girl who drank poison so she could kill herself. She failed; so she spent the rest of her life trying to prove that she could fly. That was the only way her failed suicide would make sense to her. Otherwise, why did she live if there was nothing special about her?”
“I see,” he nodded.
“Do you believe it? I mean, do you think it’s authentic as a human experience?”
