The Man With Hungry Eyes

A Fable by Mark Budman

A man came to a wealthy country in the North, and whatever the man laid his eyes on, would disappear. If he looked at a car, it would be gone, if he looked at a tree, it would vanish, if he looked at a dog, it would cease to exist.

He was scrawny like a starving dervish; his beard was dark as the crude oil that comes from the veins of the earth, and no one lived to tell what kind of eyes he had.

The authorities sent policemen to arrest him, but they were soon gone, too. The same thing happened to a contingent of soldiers. So the authorities sent an elite unit of a secret task force, cunning as a dozen Machiavellis, in berets the color of a moonless night, armed with guns that could shoot hollow-point bullets that exploded inside a human body, and could shoot backwards or around the corner, and they seized the man while he slept in the park. They bound his hands and feet, blindfolded him and carried him to their van that bore a sign of a well-known distilled water company.

Little Johnny who lived across, ran to his mommy.

“Mommy, mommy, men carry a bag, and it’s alive!”

“Go back to sleep, Johnny,” Mommy said. An hour before, Johnny had wakened her up to look at the green monster under his bed, and she had no more curiosity left in her.

The soldiers locked the man up in their underground vault under the watchful eye of a guard.

The next morning, two generals interrogated the prisoner. They belonged to the National Committee for Promoting Security and Preventing Terror and therefore could legally do what they wanted.

“Why did you do this?” the general with the green star asked. “Who sent you?”

“I am hungry,” the man said, in a thin and bloodless voice. His face was white, as though he had never seen the sun.

“Can’t you simply eat bread like the rest of us?”

“Or cake,” the general with the red star said. He remembered from his time in officers’ school, that “bread” and “cake” in this context sounded like an educated man’s talk. Was it a famous queen who said something about bread and cake? Or was it a successful warrior from the past?

“I’m hungry on a different level,” the man said.

The generals retired to a different room and argued about his fate.

“We should kill him,” the general with the red star said, and pointed his finger at the other general. “Bang, bang, bang!”

“We should force him to return everything that he made disappear,” the general with the green star said. “And then use him as a weapon against our enemies.

“I hate people like him,” he added.  “They are invisible. They are crawling up your shoe while you’re punching thin air.”

“I’d shoot him myself,” the other one said. “I can legally do that under our new security statue.”

While they bickered, a woman came to the guards at the entrance.

“I know how to handle the man you have,” she said.

She was a young woman with hair like amber, with eyes the color of gold, in a short skirt and a low-cut blouse. When the sergeant in charge saw her, his heart went out to her, especially when she leaned toward him. So, for the sake of the country’s security, he brought her to the generals.

“I’ll tell you how to handle the man you have,” she said. “But you have to give me what I want in return.”

“Name your price, and you shall receive it,” the general with the red star said, fingering the button with the flag of his country on his lapel. He remembered from his time in officers’ school that “shall” sounded like an educated man’s talk.

“Anything you want, within reason,” the general with the green star said. “You country’s gratitude will be in addition to any award you get, gratis.”

“I want to marry this man.”

The generals looked at each other. “Sure,” they said in unison.

“Just hold him upside-down, remove his blindfold, and he will disgorge everything he swallowed with his eyes,” she said.

They did what she told them, and the vault was soon filled with cars, trees and dogs.

“You can marry him now,” the general with the red star said, “but both of you have to stay in the vault.”

Then the generals argued once again. The general with the red star wanted to blind the man while the general with the green star wanted to use him as a weapon against the enemies of the country.  The general with the red star finally prevailed, arguing that they wouldn’t be able to control the creature. So they ordered a military surgeon to remove his eyes and send them to a military research center.

The newlyweds lived in the vault as a family, and nine months later the woman gave birth to a baby boy. As soon as the baby opened his eyes, the pediatrician disappeared. Then the vault door was gone, too. The woman took the baby in her hands, her husband held on to her shoulder, and they faded into the night.

In the morning, the minister of defense hissed at both generals and ripped their stars off, but that didn’t help the situation much. From that point on the entire country shuddered, peering into shadows, expecting that at any moment a car, or a tree, or a dog would disappear. They were afraid that even worse things would happen; maybe the next time it would be a plane, or a building, or even a relative.

Meanwhile, the couple lived in the tunnels under the little Johnny’s nursery school. They had one baby after another, each with increasingly larger and hungrier eyes.