The Afternoon a Camera Went Off Inside My Own Eye

The bench by the window

My workshop is barely wider than a corridor. It sits off a side street in Johannesburg, tucked between a tailor and a shop that cuts keys, and on a good day the light comes in low and golden across my bench at about four in the afternoon. I have worked at that bench for close to thirty years. There is a leather pad worn to the shape of my forearms, a row of screwdrivers so fine they look like they belong to a surgeon, and a loupe that has pressed a faint ring around my right eye socket for so long that my wife says it is part of my face now.

I repair watches and clocks. Mechanical ones mostly, the kind with a heart you can hear if you hold them to your ear. People bring me their grandfathers' pocket watches and their mothers' mantel clocks, things that stopped keeping time years ago, and they stand at my counter and tell me stories while I turn the pieces over. I have learned not to rush them. The story is usually the real reason they came in. The ticking is just the excuse.

To do this work you need your hands and you need your eyes. The hands I never worried about. Even now, in my late fifties, they are steady on the small screws, steadier than men half my age. But the eyes are the whole trade. A balance wheel pivot is thinner than a human hair. A hairspring, coiled flat, can be thrown out of true by a speck of dust you cannot even feel. Everything I earn, everything I am good at, lives inside a circle about the size of a five rand coin, seen through a lens that makes that circle fill the world.

So when my sight did something strange, I had more to lose than most.

The shower of black

It was an ordinary Tuesday. I had a small carriage clock open in front of me, a pretty French thing from the 1920s, and I was easing a wheel back into its place when the right side of my vision filled with specks. Not one or two. A sudden shower of them, like someone had flicked ink off a brush across the inside of my eye. Little dark threads and dots, drifting and swimming whenever I moved my eye to follow them.

I sat back. I blinked hard. I did the thing we all do, which is to decide it is nothing. Tired eyes, I told myself. Thirty years of squinting through a loupe. I rubbed at my eyelid with a knuckle and leaned back into the work.

Then it happened. A flash of light at the very edge of what I could see, off to the far right, bright and quick and silent, exactly like a camera going off in a dark room. There was no pain. That was almost the worst part. Pain would have made sense to me. Pain I could have respected. This was just light where no light should be, a flashbulb inside my own head, and then gone.

I told nobody. I am ashamed to write that now, but it is the truth. I packed the French clock back into its box, I locked the workshop, and I drove home through the afternoon traffic telling myself that by morning the floaters would have settled. Men like me do not make a fuss. My father worked with a bad back for forty years and called it weather. I come from people who believe that most things pass if you ignore them long enough.

The curtain

For two days the floaters hung around but did not get worse, and I let myself believe I had been right to wait. I even caught myself feeling clever about it. Then, on the Thursday, something began to change at the bottom of that same eye.

It is hard to describe unless it has happened to you. It was as if a grey curtain had begun to rise from the floor of my vision, or a shadow was leaning in from below, soft at first, so that I kept tilting my head to see past it. I would look down at the bench and part of what should have been there simply was not. I moved the loupe. I moved the lamp. I cleaned the lens three times. The shadow stayed, and by the end of the day it had crept higher.

That was the moment the fear arrived properly, and it arrived all at once. I was holding a watch in my palm and I realised I could not see the lower half of the dial without turning my whole head. A man who cannot see cannot do what I do. There is no version of my life where I keep that bench and lose that eye. I thought about the key cutter next door, and the tailor, and how both of them need to see fine detail too, and I thought, with a cold feeling in my stomach, that I had perhaps already left this too late.

My wife took one look at my face over supper and made me tell her. She did not shout, which was worse than shouting. She just put down her fork and said we were not waiting until morning to decide anything.

Finally getting it checked

She phoned a cousin of hers who works at a medical practice, and the cousin did not hesitate. A sudden shower of floaters, she said, with flashes and a shadow coming across, is not something you sleep on. You see an eye specialist, and you see one now. She gave us the name of an ophthalmologist in Johannesburg and told my wife, quite firmly, that we should treat it as urgent rather than wait for a routine slot. I remember standing in the kitchen holding the phone and feeling two things at once, foolish for having waited two days, and grateful that someone was finally telling me what to do.

I had always lumped eye doctors together with opticians in my mind, the people who check whether you need reading glasses. I did not really understand, until that week, that ophthalmologists are proper medical doctors who deal with the eye as an organ, who can look right into the back of it and treat the kind of damage I was busy pretending I did not have. For a man who takes mechanisms apart for a living, I had been remarkably incurious about the most important mechanism I owned.

The examination itself was strange and humbling. They put drops in to widen the pupil, and for a while my careful, close-up eye could not focus on anything at all, which frightened me more than I let on. Then the doctor looked into the back of my eye with a bright light and a lens, the way I look into the back of a clock, and I understood that I was the mechanism on the bench now. That I was the thing that had stopped and been brought in. I did not enjoy the feeling. I have spent my whole life being the one who fixes, not the one who is opened up and peered at.

The verdict was a retinal tear. The lining at the back of my eye had torn, the doctor explained, and that was what had thrown up the floaters and the flashes, and the shadow I had watched creeping up was the warning that it could pull away further if it was left. If I had waited much longer, it could have become a far more serious problem. The treatment, done there and then, was quicker and calmer than the fear I had carried in with me, a focused light sealing the tear down so it could not spread. I sat very still, the way I ask my own customers to sit still, and I let someone else do the fine work for once.

What I see now

The shadow stopped rising. Over the following days the curtain settled, and the floaters, though a few of them still drift across on a bright morning, no longer scare me. I know what they are now. I went back for the follow up without being nagged, which my wife noted with a small satisfied look she did not bother to hide. The opthalmologist checked the seal had held, and for the first time in weeks I let myself breathe out properly in that chair.

I think differently about my eyes these days. I used to treat them like the lamp and the loupe, tools that were simply there, that would always be there, that owed me their service because I had always relied on them. Now I understand that they are the most delicate thing on my bench, more delicate than any hairspring, and that noticing a change and acting on it is not weakness or fuss. It is maintenance. I would never let a customer run a seized clock without oil and expect it to keep good time. I had been doing exactly that to myself.

The French carriage clock is finished now and back with its owner, keeping time on a shelf somewhere in the northern suburbs. I never told her how close I came to not finishing it at all. But every time I settle the loupe into that worn ring around my eye and the small bright world swims into focus, I feel a gratitude I did not have before. I can still see the pivot. I can still see the story on a customer's face. And when something at the edge of my vision does something it should not, I will not drive home and wait two days. I have learned, late and the hard way, that the one sense my whole life rests on deserves the same close attention I give to everyone else's broken, beloved things.