Specification by Scotch I was looking at my eyes, my face like five or six inches from the mirror, not really fighting the urge to blink, but standing there in front of the mirror, gazing with this kind of almost exigent sense of fascination at my eyes. My eyes are green, but more than green. Like unnatural green, not aquamarine or verdigris or emerald, like not even bright or fluorescent green, but this completely visually impossible hue of nacreous beaming infinitely deep green, my irises, looking something like they're backlit from inside from multiple angles, looking like they're aliasing cloudily between coruscant shades sometimes, like maybe low-freq television snow or the perpetually-undulating amorphous reseau of light that the surface of a pool casts on the bottom, only cast in that weird vitreous green. And the irises' edges are tinted with grey, simple grey, to the extent that grey can be simple. d. Oh the eyes well that was your mother's idea, something about like how there was this guy, I think was an artsy indie film actor, years ago, he's dead now, she was completely teeny-bopped by this guy, real sort of nasty kind of good-looking young hunk -- m. Mmm God oh orgasmic tone, that was my boy T. L. Deauvaunt-Roquelaure, I had it so bad for him -- d. -- like he had this really pretty buff smack-addict look to him, inasmuch as that's really possible, stubbly, you know -- m. -- high scooped cheekbones, stiletto chin, eyelashes like clutching anenomes oh God -- d. -- talentless heavy-accented emigrated Eurotrash basically but he had these really weird like neon-looking green eyes that chickies got bigtime weak in the knees for -- m. -- such a beauteous luscious young slab of man-meat, but so emotional and talented and original, with pecs like burlap sandbags -- d. -- all those arthouse pictures of his, full of gratuitous full-frontals, I mean, the rest of the films were grainy and blurry and ill-lit except for those shots, like -- m. -- gorgeous gorgeous mussed peroxide-and-vanilla hair, little long strands that would swoop down over his face and encircle an eye and just hover there and frame his face and those real eyes and be so artistic and ooh send me and my ladies into like total sauna, to this day even, and that wasn't even in the scenes your dad mentioned, which [deep breath] mmm I don't think I can even talk about what they did to me without some ice cubes and a change of clothes. d. OK dear I think that's enough, he's fucking dead. Me. Um. How about you go back to the part where you said 'that was your mother's idea.' So this staring and reflecting (n.p.i.), which is something I do pretty often and have done for years, ever since my eyes turned this color when I was fourteen (and they in every sense of the word literally turned this inexplicable green nearly overnight back then; before that my irises were entirely the simple grey, and over the course of maybe a week or two in this fourteen-year-old October I watched, as one might watch the day-to-day development of a serious pimple, this alien green matter worm its way out from around the pupil like some implacable malignant growth, like a storm gathering and blotting out the sky, as if this green had been lying dormant somewhere back behind the ciliary processes and just decided to emerge, pushing the simple grey out into the diffident periphery and forever changing my appearance), it's not narcissism or anything like that. It's nothing to do with me. It's just this utterly overwhelming transfixion with the green itself, a stirringly incredulous wonder that anything could be that color, that that color could even exist. And I never could suss out where this green comes from, hereditarily. No one in my family has it; I come from a long line of various dullish browns and the occasional hazel. I'd supposed it was just random, a biological fluke, a thought which actually made me pretty miserable and which no amount of mirror-staring could really soothe. m. Right, well. Well as I just said I was so in the ruts for T. L., and this was after I met your dad, and he was good about it, your dad, considering, and even though he didn't care much for T. L. -- d. Heh. m. -- we did agree, we both thought that those crazy green eyes were just the most beauteous things we'd ever seen, absolute bar nil. I mean, they couldn't even make contacts like that. d. Yeah so when young Monsieur D.-R. purchased the proverbial rural expanse, I forget exactly how, I suppose your mother thought it a fitting tribute of sorts to have -- m. I just loved those eyes so much. Me. [blink] m. Don't worry dear, hee hee, it's not like that, we didn't make you to look like him, it's not like I'm going to jump you or something. d. Oh for Christ's sake. Me. [shudder] m. Jumped in front of a subway, by the way, he did. They could've saved what was left of him, put him on machines, but he hit the third rail pretty good, most of him. [poignant sigh] God, I sobbed for months. d. Oh yeah, the eyes were like vaporized. Total closed-coffin affair. Me. I'm not getting anything here, nothing whatever. On more than one occasion I've thought that I was adopted or illegitimate or frozen-popped; but the first possibility was summarily taken care of by the fact that, due to the then-and-still-trendy (but no less retrospectively fucked-up) act of videotaping the birth of one's child, I've had the unique experience of watching my own slimy anatomically-explicit placenta-wrapped squip into life in high-grade full-color stereo VHS (zoomed so intensely and hyperventilatingly by The Dad that it's almost colposcopic), a viewing ordeal I wouldn't wholeheartedly recommend to the average life-loving twelve-year-old (for one thing because it's gross, and for another thing because any way you slice it it's tough on the consciousness, seeing yourself being born), even if the parents do think it's beautiful and moving in that treacly sort of fruit-of-our-loins kind of way. m. I'm saying, we just thought it'd be cool for our kid, you, to have these beauteous green eyes like T. L. Deauvaunt-Roquelaure had, nothing too deep in it at all, we just thought it'd look great, which it does. d. An aesthetic thing, a memorable little flourish, something brash and ornamental on top of all the heavy stuff. Me. Heavy stuff. m. All those indexes. Took forever. d. Indices. Yeah, remember, all that configurative stuff we did way back when, that big specification binder for you, we told you about it. Me. Uh no you didn't. d. Yes we did. I know we did. Me. No, you really didn't. And the second and third options were also for the most part laid (n.p.i., you'll see) to rest by the sizable and suspicious stacks of cheaper and smaller camcorder-sized videotapes kept in an innocuous trunk in my parents' walk-in closet, which I happened upon and investigated on my own in late May of when I was sixteen -- an investigation which I began by viewing one of the tapes on the TV/VCR unit in my room (after hooking up the camcorder, obviously), taking note of the little rectangularly digital date/time display (they tended toward being the wee hours of a Saturday or Sunday a.m., but not always, all in years notably antedating the other videotaped event I mentioned) in the upper starboard corner of the screen, a screen whose picture I had to watch for a few moments before I was able to discern the younger-but-unmistakable faces and all-too-familiar identities of the nubile youthful couple having athletic, excessively vocal, unspeakably messy non-missionary bordering-on-deviant sex right there for the camcorder and now in front of my sixteen-year-old beyond-iridescent depthless green eyes (doing irreparable damage to my then-nascent jackhammering libido, what with the whole need to reconcile the visceral teenage arousal the tapes awakened in me with the gut-wracking fact that the stars of this homemade but logistically ambitious porno were my fucking parents [n.p.i., sort of]; and all that exacerbated by the metaphysically flattening revelation that I might be witnessing my own biological origin somewhere amid the throbbing flesh and splayed limbs [a revelation actually quite disturbingly confirmed by my discovery of one videotape labeled in red marker with my name and a question mark which a subsequent viewing and observing of the onscreen date/time display placed the recording yes circa a good nine months before you guessed it], but I still further dented my psychological chassis after this initial trauma by continuing to, whenever my parents weren't home or awake, watch lengthy stretches of the voluminous [exactly 116 extended-play eight-hour tapes, each consisting of back-to-back series of inside-an-hour episodes of pretty concentrated activity; you do the math] video Collection in my room just out of sheer perverse curiosity [videlicet the popularity of car accident rubbernecking or televised surgical operations], and yes I watched them all, chronologically, and it took me all fucking summer, and it's still an effort to look my parents in the eye these days), and then some. d. OK here it is. Huge fucking thing, here you go. Me. Oof. d. Yeah, so you see, look, see [flip flip], it's got all these like parameters and things, and your mother and I went through this whole thing -- m. Like about 1400 pages or something, was it? d. -- and there's indices and subindices and subsubs and on and on [flip flip flip flip], hierarchical organization, like, under -- m. Actually pretty cool, this whole thing, though it's probably better nowadays. Everything really well organized and put into plain English so we could understand exactly what we were doing. We told you about this before. d. -- under, for instance, uh, actually dear it's more like [flip] 2188 pages, and that in this blindingly tiny print. Anyway, here [flip flip flip], and here [flip flip flip flip flip flip], see how it's set up? All in fairly simple terms, explained like, into lay-speak. We filled out this whole thing before you were even a twinkle in your mother's eye. m. Oh, you. Me. [full-body shudder] So I knew that I was a natural product of The Mom and The Dad -- what with the birth vid being rather ironclad if unsavory proof of my whereabouts at the time; and the Collection being if not ironclad then at least shockingly persuasive proof that pretty much their entire Paphian history was extensively documented (leaving little if any motive, let alone off-camera time, to go be adulterous, although that's admittedly kind of an overly-optimistic logical link), keeping in mind that while watching the birth vid with me and The Dad, The Mom, in a rare and uncharacteristically bubbly and honest fashion, emphatically sung and danced the praises of the Pill (this, at twelve, being the beginning of my neuralgic discomfort with these kind of subjects), which I can only like assume means that she's ordinarily fertile -- even if the involvement of the Pill disqualifies me from being truly "natural," let's be realistic and modern, shall we. But then now there I was, back staring into the mirror at the inscrutable green, floating through all the standard lucubration as to whence these green eyes could possibly have come. And gradually, bubbling insouciantly to the surface had come the obvious thought that I'd never actually asked my parents about it -- or, for that matter, anything even remotely connected to the subject of my inception (i.e. if I was planned, what gender they preferred, how they came up with my name, etc., stupid details like that which actually run astronomically root-deep into my sense of self), since I lived in this like constant dread of a) being subjected to the horror of the birth vid again and b) being somehow suspected of getting into the Collection (like their discovering my fingerprints in the dust on the trunk, or detecting my footprints sunk into the carpeting, or finding a tape out of order, even though the first two were ridiculous and for the third one I'd taken painstaking efforts to put everything back chronologically and neatly and appropriately rewound), since I so vividly associated the traumatic birth/conception video material with the parent-child relationship and everything having to do with it. I was so paranoid. So there was my quandary. Stuck between two clinically esoteric cases of silly psychological turmoil: the near-obsessive desire to know how my green eyes were physically and genealogically possible, and the cottonmouthing aversion to any even marginally procreative matters. m. Oh don't look like that, honey, remember, your dad and I put so much time and thought into all of this, into this you. d. That's right, I mean, this isn't something to be taken lightly, that was explained to us in detail, and we spent so much time reading up on the subjects, they gave us these lists of suggested readings, and we did quite a bit of it, because you know we're not about to like just sit down and chuck out some arbitrary numbers in a situation like this, and when -- m. I mean parenting is like such a volatile area, it's so hard these days, there's so many factors and things that could go wrong and even if you do everything exactly to the letter as they say to do it in all the books, things still go wrong and we have no control over what happens to you, how you turn out, there's just so many -- d. -- but we made sure to consider all the ramifications, looking down the road a ways, thinking about the future, setting some things in motion later and some sooner, really devising a good plan, a good broad design, room for expansion and elaboration, all while not trying to screw anything up, because like any number of missteps could spell major fuckups for you somewhere along -- m. -- and we had some people helping us out, and we had all these guidelines, and it cost us a lot, but oh we felt it was so worth it, because the end result would be an ongoing process, that's what they said, it would outlive us, you would, and we followed all the theoreticals and all but -- d. -- but they ultimately left the particulars up to us, and I think we really did our best. The Mom and The Dad are no longer quite the lithe and virile love-crazed young saplings the Collection shows in graphic comprehensiveness that once they were, and indeed it's an even more drastic subconscious stretch to even realize that they're the same people. They've aged gracefully but not especially attractively. Without getting too Oedipal here, the Collection shows The Mom (when you can get a good look at her face anyway) back in her twenties as a really stunningly beautiful and passionate and devilishly wild sex kitten with a sculpted glistening nymph-like physique and like droolingly contortionistic ability -- yet now The Mom looks like someone went and violently pulled ill-fitting flesh-colored Spandex over that exoskeletal once-come-hither face, and you can imagine that that same someone injected some serious hips-and-thighs ballast into The Mom like so much airpuffed creme into a Twinkie, and she's got kidney-level breast sag, and she dyes her Medusa hair with this obscure foreign-made ultra-organic henna-and-nightshade extract (this horrible shit that comes in deathlessly vile neo-new-age colors with scary names like Purge and Deep Bruise and Oubliette and Aorta), and she walks like an insect that's like had all but two of its legs torn off. As for The Dad, in the Collection tapes, he's also in his twenties and has the polished but unbalanced gorgeousness of a brooding pleated-pant model with the body of an untoga'd Greek god, chiseled-but-rippling muscle definition and sexy sweat-drenched long hair, and a level of prowess and stamina that would make most men blush (and not just in terms of latent homoerotic leanings; we're talking slackjawed blinking incredulity and envy and just an overarching feeling of failure from there on out whenever in the presence of a woman) -- and now the man looks like a poorly-welded piece of installation art, his face like a hunk of coral under like a post-lobotomy-stubble hairdo, his muscles long since faded into the furniture and this freakishly downward-listing protuberant bubble of a gut rising out of his lower torso and emphasizing his sinewy tinkertoy legs (since whatever shorts/pants he's wearing are always seam-rippingly tight at the waist but leave the leg material totally flapping). Aging looks like a form of grotesque mutation on the two of them. I have no idea what happened. It's really depressing. m. Oh please don't look so angry, don't, we did this for you, honey, this was an act of love. d. An act of love, yeah, it was and is, we wanted you to be perfect, we didn't want to leave you at the mercy of circumstance, what was it, all the endless infinite loops of horrible things that impress upon you as we watch you grow, as the world twists and shapes you, right, see, we wanted you to be all above that, to transcend that, we wanted -- m. We wanted you to be your own person, to not have to like bend to the will of the world as you become that person, like we did, your dad and I, when we were growing up. I mean, my childhood was like totally traumatic, and I was so miserable, I mean, you have no idea -- d. -- and we wouldn't want you to have any idea, it's just terrible, you're not missing out. m. -- and then but then we also took that into account, in your specifications, because we figured it's something like healthy to have a little of that kind of soul-searching, uh -- d. Disquietude. m. -- right, that, because that should be a part of everyone's life, it's a natural part of living, and anyway your dad insisted upon it because he used to write a lot of poetry in college, and no way would he have been able to express himself so completely mmm beauteously like that unless he had some deep kind of existential anguish to draw upon, and -- d. Poetry's so fun. You should try it sometime -- we did make it so that you've got a natural talent for it. But my parents are morons, is the long and the tall of it. They're like little children trying on grownups' shoes and clothes that are obviously too way big, unable to fill the space inside the clothes, so they have to just kind of goofily shuffle around, tripping over their own unwieldy feet that are so poorly contained in those bulky giant-sized shoes, dragging overlong empty sleeves and rumpled dress trains limply and uselessly behind them. Except the clothes aren't removable; the children can't just slip out of the outfits. They're stuck in there. And so it was that I ended up asking them about the eyes, and so it was that they ended up telling me the unspeakable truth about what they did, and the unspeakable stupidity that led to it, and so it was that I sat there on the floor with an unbelievably huge plastic-coated black five-ring binder that looked like it came from some subterranean Pentagon vault, the binder open and crushing my legs beneath the weight of the reams of paper inside it, and so it was that I sat there sobbing silently and and furiously and uncontrollably in front of my parents' frightened uncomprehending faces, their fucking unforgivable faces showing nothing but speechless disbelief and impenetrable stupefaction; and suddenly all I could see was their beautiful horrible young faces upturned in sweaty erotic ecstasy on the TV screen, again, deliriously fucking their fledgling brains out with wild abandon, the colors dim and blotchy on the lo-grade Collection videotape after all this time, but still unequivocally preserving the simultaneous violence and tenderness of their passion, the cheapness and pricelessness of their puerile debauchery, all in front of me, their creation, their result, who sat paralyzed and watched their sybaritic revelry with equal parts arousal and disgust, years after the unpleasant (to me) but inevitable (to them) fact. m. But.... but... it'd be the same anyway, this is no different from... My tears were really hot and felt like acid dripping down my face, like they were burning through my skin and dissolving me with threadlike cuts, bit by bit. They fell on loose-leaf pages full of spec after meticulous spec of innumerable physical attributes. All seeming to correspond with mine. Flip flip flip flip. They rolled off my face and down onto pages specifying my countless preferences for things like foods and literature and sexual partners and room lighting. All were mine, matched pretty exactly. Flip flip flip. They hit the paper and blurred the words on pages that said ridiculous things like Emotional Self-Resonance and Intellectual Meta-Awareness and Existential Inquisitiveness. I didn't even bother looking. Streamlined, calculated, systematized. Customized and unique, itemized and preordained, a snap-together paint-by-numbers project of unfathomable complexity -- and the shots were called by, of all people, my insipid sophomoric parents? I couldn't believe it, anything of it. But I was not me anymore. There was nothing I could call myself. They'd preset the very introspection I was now undergoing. Or something. And with a sudden and terrible helplessness of non-being, I felt myself disassembling, as every decision I'd ever made, every mannerism I'd ever possessed, every thought and dream and desire and need and hope and fear and doubt and certainty, every feeling of consciousness and pride and self-worth and love and hate, everything, each one detached and drifted off and settled out, separating like oil and water, and each part further separating into its own constituent elements, until I felt my identity gestalt softly explode into some surreal deterministic mess, nothing but a compendium of infinitesimal cogs all spinning in tandem, owning nothing that I was. I tried to try to scream but couldn't. I wanted to rebel against myself, to will myself otherwise than specified, but that would be my high Motivational Divergence quotient in action. There was no circumvention. I wanted to gouge out my T. L. Deauvaunt-Roquelaure eyes. I wanted to empty my mind of everything, stop the machine, but that would have been something else, some other page in the binder. I got tired of thinking of this. I think how it went was that I ended up staggering into the kitchen and like grabbing a knife and in a blind sobbing rage holding the blade to my wrist, shaking, and in off-the-chart desperation screaming to my parents that I would kill myself, right in front of them, ruining good their little project and investment and ending this disgusting thing which they'd done to me twice (once by just doing it, once by telling me about it) and this would finally rid me of me, and I closed my soaked eyes and began drawing the blade over my skin, into it; and then it was that The Dad smiled calmly and looked relieved and gingerly pointed out that they'd given me a very high Will-To-Live factor, and I found myself noticing dully and somehow like impassively that I couldn't bring myself to make the cut, and this made me begin breathing very slowly and hollowly; and again I sank down to the floor and I looked up at The Mom and The Dad and they weren't even my parents anymore; they were tall smooth ice sculptures, dripping, decaying, looming over me disproportionately as the sun shone through them, transparent and dazzling, painful and harsh like kliegs, glinting off of the whitish fluted flaws cutting swaths through them at odd angles, the light refracting and prisming into burning beams of color, and the colors spoke to me, of things of vast and horrifying scale, hurting my eyes. And a lovely, lovely calm washed over me. I moved closer to the mirror, gazed further into the unimaginably lustrous pulsing green. My pupils widened, the black pools swallowing up the color, edging outward until the impossible green and simple grey felt like they were merging. I saw myself mirrored in my pupil. I tried to look closer into the iteration and see myself in the reflection's reflection of my eye, but it was too deep in and I couldn't focus and it was too dark and I blinked and stood back and the green influorescently rushed back into my irises before I could look away.

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