If you can see everything about a man, what can't you see?

Today an interesting interaction occurred on the train. A boy saw something he’d never seen before. It wasn’t much of a big deal, but it made him quite curious. On his way to work the boy saw an old man step on the train. What made the man interesting were the glasses on his face, the ones around his neck (hanging from a glasses chain), the one in his shirt pocket, and the magnifying glass he held in his hand. The boy wondered why this man could possibly need so many ways to see, and continued to stare at him. He was a short elderly asian man, other than the glasses, he was wearing a bucket hat, a fishing vest, a button down shirt, brown pants, sandals and socks.

The first thing that grabbed the boys attention, was when the old man stepped onto the train he was carrying two large stacks of newspapers. At first the boy figured that the man was a distributor of some sort, but the papers didn’t seem packaged at all, and he even spotted a few magazines within the stacks. The job didn’t exactly match his age and attire either.

What really made the boys focus on him begin, was while the man was moving into his seat, he put one stack of papers on the seat, then another on the ground. Just before the man leaned back into his artificially cushioned seat, he grabbed one of the papers off of the stack on the ground, and proceeded to put his feet up on it, like a footrest. He looked as comfortable as a father reclining into his sofa chair, with his daily paper, after a long day.

While the man was reading his newspaper, he noticed the boy staring at him. At first he tried to ignore him but between glances something seemed off about the boy. The man also saw something interesting on the train that day. However, most people have a completely different definition of interesting than this man.

The reason this man needed so many ways to see is because those lens and that magnifying glass allowed him to see everything about anything. The ones that hung from a glasses chain around his neck were normally the dream glasses, the sunglasses in his shirt pocket were the sin glasses, the magnifying glass helped him see someones truth, and the glasses he normally wore were just normal prescription glasses.

He happened to be wearing the dream glasses, while he was reading the newspaper, because he wanted to understand what the journalists’ intention was when she published the article he was reading. Even though a journalist normally aims to be objective and informative, nobody is truly able to do anything without a certain sense of subjectivity. It turns out, she just wanted to give the public another reason to hate the government. The old man was a bit of a conspiracy theorist and so he enjoys reading papers while wearing the dream glasses.

When he noticed the boy out of the corner of his eye, he saw him outside of the frame of his glasses. Then when he glanced at the boy again within the frame of his glasses, the boy looked the same. That’s what was interesting. Nobody looks the same when the man sees them through those lens. Outside of the frame everybody looks how they normally do, but when the man looks at someone through the dream lens he can see how somebody imagines themselves once they’ve gotten everything they’ve ever wanted. If the boy looks exactly the same through the dream lens as he did normally, then that would mean he’s already achieved everything he’s ever wanted, or he just wants nothing.

The man continued to stare at the boy in search of the slightest hint of desire. On the other hand, the boy felt as if the old man had caught him staring once their eyes had locked. The boys eyes darted away while the the man was scanning him down. If the boy wanted fame or notoriety, there’d be paparazzi surrounding him and he’d at least look like a professional of some sort, yet the boy was wearing subaverage streetwear, which only suggested that he was unemployed. The old man was bewildered, there was no way this boy reached nirvana, when he was barely out of his teens.

The boy had settled on the idea that this mysterious old man had some form of OCD, or that his eyesight was so exceptionally bad he had to use several different lenses in order to avoid straining his eyes. The OCD could also explain why the man needed so many papers. The boy was quite proud of his deduction since he considered himself an excellent judge of character, but when he glanced at the old man again he was wearing sunglasses. The old man switched from the dream glasses to the sin glasses because there was the possibility that this boy could be a sociopath. Since most sociopaths are unable to make longterm plans, that might be why it seems like he has no dreams for himself.

When viewing people through the sin glasses everything around them is dark, but their bodies are a burning bright yellow. They look as though, they themselves are a walking sun. The brighter someone appears to be, the heavier the weight of their sins. If this boy is truly a sociopath, he wouldn’t give off any brightness at all, and all the man would see is a dark silhouette of the boy. In reality the boy gave off a dim light, but it was an average brightness that the man could find anywhere else. The boy was looking right back at the old man at this point. Since the sunglasses were in the way, he couldn’t tell that the old man was still staring back at him.

The boy was more concerned with figuring out why the man was suddenly wearing sunglasses. He wondered what changed while the train was moving. What caused the change? The boy began to completely second guess his deduction. The boy couldn’t find a reason for the man to put on sunglasses. Nothing came to mind. He couldn’t figure out how sunglasses could possibly help this man see on the train. He couldn’t come up with any reasons, and ironically neither could the old man. Suddenly someone stepped into the old mans’ frame of view, that was so bright he flinched and had to rip the sin glasses off his face.

“Excuse me sir, could you please spare a few dollars or anything?” A homeless man with an incredible sense of guilt had stepped in front of him. The old man snapped at him, and with a deep accented voice he yelled “No, I have nothing for you, please leave me alone!” The old man wasn’t normally this cold but he didn’t want to break his focus away from the boy. The homeless man threw a saddened look at the old man and continued asking other people around the train car.

The old man switched back to the dream glasses, and the boy snapped his eyes away again. The man’s eyes never broke away from the boy, he wasn’t thinking about his actions, he just wanted to see why this boy seemed to want nothing. Then he switched to his regular prescription glasses, and kept bouncing between those and the dream glasses, looking for the slightest difference that he may have missed.

The boy was watching the man frantically switch glasses from the corner of his eye. At this point a few other people had taken notice of the old man’s strange behavior, and they all began to stare at him with weirded out expressions. The man abruptly stopped, took off all the glasses, and picked up the magnifying glass.

The magnifying glass would be his last effort and it would surely show him everything he wanted to know. They normally show him a short story of images that depict a persons entire history, and the reason behind their dreams and even their sins. He didn’t use it from the start because he needed to get uncomfortably close and look a person in the eye to see their truth. The old man could obviously care less about anyone’s comfort anymore.

The homeless man eventually stepped in front of the boy, and made the same request of him. In that moment, the old man put the magnifying glass up to his face and rushed across the train car. Once the boy told the homeless man he didn’t have anything, the homeless man stepped away, and the boys eyes immediately met with the eyes of the old man again. The old man was now less than a few feet from him and stepping closer,

His eye was magnified to the size of a tennis ball, while he held the magnifying glass up to his face. The boy was terrified. He didn’t know what to say, and he tried to look away but the old man kept following his eyes with the magnifying glass. The train eventually pulled into the station, and once the doors opened the boy slipped past the old man and ran off. The boy no longer had any idea if the man had OCD or weak eyes, at this point he just assumed the old man was crazy. The surrounding onlookers would agree. The old man went back to his seat and tried to make sense of what he saw.

The stories present themselves by forming images and shapes in a persons iris. The images circle around the pupil relating to one another in a way that the old man is able to decipher a story from. It’s similar to the way cave art and hieroglyphics tell a story. However, when he looked in the boys eyes there was just one image spanning across his entire iris. It was an image of the boy himself. Nothing particularly special about the image it was just his face, his shoulders and his arms.

When only one image appears in someones story, it means they’ve been determined with only one goal in life. The image would normally correspond with the goal, but it was no different than when he looked through the dream glasses. All he saw was the boy. The oddest thing was that the images normally repeat themselves around the pupil, they never span across the iris in a giant way. In the boys case, the image of his face was centered at the highest point of his iris, his shoulders and arms connected on the left and right side of the iris, and its easy to assume that his chest was in the center but his pupil was centered over where his chest would be, like a dark hole.