Sky Genie is supposed to be a summer job—that’s about as long as he can fake his way through cleaning spots off glass—but the money is twice what Shiner would make anywhere else, so he stays, takes it day by day. He wears his Blind Guys—the dark, wraparound sunglasses that protect his eyes. Sometimes there’s a glint off the windows that gets stuck in a moment of rainbow, and Shiner thinks it must be God winking at him. He sits in the harness off the side of a building, squeegee in hand, and dismisses what doctors have told him—that wavy vision and rainbow halos are yet more signs that his sight is, at last, beginning to fail him.
By the time he was in seventh grade, his given name, Matt, had been dropped for Shiner because his birthmark looked exactly like he’d been punched in the eye, but he welcomed this nickname because it replaced “Raisin Eye”—what kids had called him up until then. It was the darkest hue of a port-wine stain; his entire right eyelid was purple and smeared off to the side. The skin, which had always been soft, has recently become just barely tender-tough, like a tangerine peel.
Mo is Shiner’s window partner; they are Sky Genie’s two-man high-rise crew. How he landed Blanca makes no sense. Mo isn’t especially handsome or rich. He is tall and weedy, with delicate hands and a slight hook to his nose. But Blanca is head over heels. Maybe he’s hung like a horse, Shiner thinks—supposedly it’s the tall, skinny guys who are packing. Then again, guys with tiny hands are supposed to indicate the opposite.
Blanca is Shiner’s age, just out of high school. She is tanned and long-legged, with black-coffee hair and dimples so deep they look pierced when she smiles. She sells Real You makeup at a mall kiosk, which is how Shiner met her, selling Bling Tone! crystal phone cases at the next kiosk over. They knew each other’s spiel, but Shiner wasn’t any good at his. All day long he heard guys hit on her, and she heard people ask about his face.
Mostly girls bought the phone cases, with an occasional boyfriend asking something like, “Damn, how’d you get that shiner?” He played along, imagining twenty different scenarios in which he would have come to Blanca’s defense in a bar somewhere, walking away with the kind of black eye that would actually fade as her admiration for him grew.
He never came clean to a stranger that it was a birthmark, but Blanca asked him about it early on, pulling her bangs aside to reveal her café au lait birthmark on her forehead; she told him that hers changed; it got darker when she was angry or sad.
“Does that ever happen to you, with your birthmark?” she asked, nodding toward his eyelid.
“No,” he said. “Mine stays like this.” But in that moment he was stunned by a new sensation: his birthmark pulsed, back and forth from his eyelid to his ear, as if signaling to him—one word then the other: Look, listen. Look, listen.
• •
The day they met Mo, he had been passing by the kiosk, stopping like guys do when they get a glance at Blanca. But he didn’t pile it on right away. Mo stopped to ask if she had makeup that could cover an old tattoo, then turned to bring Shiner into the conversation as if they were old friends. As if he were his wing man. After he got her number, Mo told Shiner he could make twice what he made at the kiosk if he wasn’t afraid of heights; there was an open position at his work while the owner’s son hitchhiked Europe for the summer. The following Monday, Shiner started at Sky Genie.
Now every day during her break, Blanca brings Mo homemade lunches—tamales, creamy lasagna rolls, grilled sandwiches, tortellini salads, always with a cookie or a brownie—and Mo never says so much as thank you, never walks her back to her car, barely kisses her cheek as she leaves with longing in her eyes.
Today when Blanca drops off lunch, Shiner watches the shape of her walk back toward her car. He catches his own reflection in the mirrored windows of the building they are cleaning. Shiner can still make out the features of his face, but there’s the small blind spot deterioration in the center, textbook, the way it happened for his grandfather, blurry in the middle, with complete clarity on the edges. Just make it through the summer, he tells himself. He began this June thinking driving was still a possibility, and sometimes he still thinks about it when he boards the #57 bus to Sky Genie job sites.
Mo is watching Shiner now. “Think she’s hot?” Mo asks. They watch Blanca’s reflection get into her car.
“Come on,” Shiner says. “She’s a great girl.” He turns so he can see her from his peripheral.
“But you think she’s hot, right? Everyone does.”
“You’re a lucky guy,” Shiner says. He can’t tell if Mo is showing off or jealous that he’s checking her out.
“You could nail her,” Mo says.
Shiner looks up.
Mo shrugs. “I wouldn’t care. I had her once, you know, and we’re friendly and all, and damn, who can say no to that food? But she keeps coming back.” He shakes his head. “. . . and I’ve got a six-foot exotic dancer, you know, over at the Penalty Box,” Mo raises his eyebrows. “Penny. God, you should see this girl. She is serious.” Mo cups his hands out over his chest as though he is holding invisible basketballs.
After work, Mo holds his phone out to Shiner. He scrolls through dozens of photos of naked women, each posed on a black velvet couch. Shiner looks at their ankles and faces, a dainty hand thrown over a forehead. He glides his blurred spot swiftly over nipples and navels.
“Side hobby,” Mo says. “Took photography classes back in community college when I thought I was going to be the next Ansul Adams and shit. Got some professional lighting and set it up in my living room. Put up artsy-looking nudes—you know, something unusual about each of them. When girls see that, they think I’m an artist.” He scrolls some more. “Penny,” he offers, holding the phone out to Shiner.
Penny looks like she could throw Mo around. Shiner imagines her tackling him.
“You should get these lights at your place, man,” Mo says. “I’m telling you. Say ‘nudes,’ never ‘naked.’ Instant panty-dropper. You gotta make it look classy, not dirty. Once in a while, when I get a girl like Blanca . . . she makes it more like art.” He continues to scroll through his phone and holds it out. “See?”
Shiner turns away before he can catch a glimpse. He busies himself with mixing up a new bucket of solution. “You take the photos with your phone?” he says. “Are these girls idiots?”
“No, man. I got a big fancy camera, cheap, from my old teacher, for the more artsy stuff. But I usually tell the girls we are taking test ‘boudoir’ photos with the phone.” Mo whistles while he works—his spirit and conscience seemingly light. “Boudoir,” he says again, faking a French accent, laughing.
In bed that night, Shiner looks at his collection of flyers from Perfection, a cosmetic laser center, and studies the before and after photos as best he can, admiring the unobstructed skin of people who’ve had their birthmarks and tattoos removed. But he knows this dermatologist would be like the rest—no reputable doctor will touch his birthmark without clearance from an ophthalmologist. The flyer, which shows the dramatic after-photos, also states: Results Not Typical.
The next week, Shiner steps off the bus at the mall and walks toward Sears, where Blanca’s VW is parked. She asked him to meet her after work to help her with a new product for Real You.
The heavy rain makes their meeting feel covert. When he ducks into her car, the windows fog, and her scent of wet wool and strawberries surrounds them.
She asks if she can take pictures of him for a before-and after-demonstration. He removes his Blind Guys and sets them on the dashboard, allows her to snap his “before” shot. It occurs to him that Blanca has never asked him about his Blind Guys the way Mo did—Shiner just told him he got headaches from the window glare. He hopes she has no idea.
Blanca takes a white, zippered case from her purse, revealing an array of organized silver tubes, a plastic mixing pallet, and several brushes. “Lean forward,” she says. She looks closely at his eye—with no indication of curiosity or disgust—just simply recording its appearance, perhaps assessing which color to use. His birthmark pulses Look, Listen, and he complies, memorizes the moment. Her fingertips tilt his chin.
The new product can cover a tattoo, she says. The old stuff couldn’t. She tells him now that when she met Mo, he had also asked her for body makeup for his models. “Did you know he’s an art photographer? He went to art school. He doesn’t tell many people. He has a whole gallery in his apartment.”
Shiner swallows. “Art school, huh?” He begins sweating as Blanca mixes thick, creamy makeup and then touches it, calm and sure, to his eyelid with a silken paint brush. She blends it with a small, white sponge.
She angles the rearview mirror so he can look at the results.
Shiner can’t stop staring at his reflection. He tries as best he can to take it in, moving to get the whole picture within the edges; it’s thrilling to see a symmetrical face, the skin on his eye smoothed, the stain removed.
“God,” he says, suddenly brave enough to look directly into her eyes. “I want to kiss you.” He starts at himself for saying such a thing. “For this, I mean . . .”
She grins, dimples denting in adorably, and puts the makeup away. “I’m glad you like how it looks. I mean, I don’t think you need makeup, you know?” She meets his eyes again. “It’s just . . . I thought it might make things easier for you sometimes. Stupid people asking stupid questions. It’s nice to have an option. To take a break from all that and just live your life.” She gives him a small bottle of blue liquid. “The makeup stays on in rain, or if you sweat, and you can’t wash it off with soap, even. Dampen some cotton with this and rub gently. The makeup will slide right off.”
She takes an “after” photo. “OK then, if I use these?” she asks. “The only other ‘before’ and ‘afters’ I have are my own, and well, your results are much more impressive. That’s what people are looking for, you know?”
“Sure,” he says.
She touches his chin again, admiring her work, and his heart speeds up.
“Always be gentle with your face, Matt.”
The next week, Blanca arrives while Mo is still up in the harness. She tells Shiner that she has sold out almost everything since using him as the face of Real You. “But the company finally sent me a bunch of free samples, so I can bring those by.”
The thought of actually having makeup in his possession feels strange. But he could ask her to show him how to apply it, and he loves the thought of having her fingertips on his face again, so he agrees.
When Mo comes down, he kisses her cheek—the first time that Shiner has seen him express any affection toward her. “Oh, babe,” Mo says, “I’m sorry. Thought I told you. I have to go to the DMV during my break today. My registration is overdue.”
Her face falls, and she crinkles the fold of his brown lunch bag. Shiner imagines her birthmark, hidden under her bangs, darkening.
“OK,” she says. “Well, I wish you’d told me before I made your lunch.”
“Give it to Shiner,” he says. “I bet he’d love to taste your cooking.” He winks at Shiner, kisses her cheek again, and then gets into his truck. “Back in forty-five,” he says, waving.
Blanca watches him drive into traffic and then turns to Shiner.
“I once read that men are like rubber bands in a relationship,” she says. “They pull away and stretch farther and farther, but then eventually they reach their limit and snap back to be close again. Do you think that’s true?”
Shiner snorts. “I think he deserves someone to snap a rubber band around his balls, ditching you like that.”
Her dimples dent in, and she holds the brown bag out to him. “You want lunch?”
They share a tamale in the park. She is quiet, so Shiner asks her how she makes tamales. She begins to explain and then interrupts herself.
“You know,” she says. “He was so fascinated with me at first. Now it’s done.” She closes the bag of tamales. “I was too open, too soon.”
Shiner is puzzled. “What does that mean?”
She searches his face for a moment and then shrugs, zipping her sweatshirt higher on her neck. “Forget it.”
As she jams her hands into her pockets, Shiner notices a scratch in her skin just at the cuff of her sleeve, and he wants to fold the sleeve back, to kiss her palms, to examine every inch of her. Instead, he thanks her for lunch. “Blanca,” he says, willing his voice not to shake, “If you can’t get to a man’s heart through cooking like yours, I don’t think he has one.”
When Mo returns from lunch, he brags about his nooner with Penny. This time he shows off nasty photos he has taken of her in his truck.
“You’re a piece of shit,” Shiner says.
Mo laughs.
The next day, Blanca leaves Shiner a message: she won’t be bringing lunch by today, and that he should stop by her work to get the samples.
When he arrives, her dimples are filled solidly with sadness. He doesn’t want to ask what is wrong; he knows it must have to do with Mo.
“Last night a girl called me,” she says. “She told me to leave her boyfriend alone. Said she went through his texts. Said she has been watching me at the mall. Here. Said she has pictures of me. . . .” She lets out a slow breath. “I swore to myself I wouldn’t put you in the middle,” Blanca says. “But I just need to know . . . do you know anything about this?”
He holds her limp hands and swallows with difficulty, his birthmark pulsing, Look, Listen. He cannot help but think that now, it is telling him to come clean. “Blanca . . . he never went to art school . . .”
“What did he tell you?” she says, suddenly angry. “What did he show you?”
“I’m trying to tell you . . . you need to see who he is!”
She walks hotly back toward the kiosk. Then she turns around. “I’m afraid he is going to use photos of me. Bad ones, Matt. I need you to help me. And I’ve got to get his phone. He has a few of me on there, too.”
Mo plays poker on Monday nights; that’s when Shiner does the work.
Pocketing Mo’s key to make a copy at lunch hadn’t been difficult—he just waited for him to use the toilet mid-morning—but the copy Shiner had made was no good. He jiggles it in the apartment’s lock, cranking the knob one way then the other, pulling the door toward and then against the frame to no avail. After a few sweat-soaked moments, he shoves his shoulder into it one more time, hard—and falls into Mo’s entryway, the door jamb slightly warped.
Shiner expects a dusty and littered apartment, but it’s clean, spare. The black velvet couch in the living room is surrounded by umbrella lighting. Mo’s bed has a crisp orange coverlet. On the walls of his bedroom, kitchen, and hallway is a homemade gallery with frames and lights and title cards. All are naked women; some look plastic and worn. There are also a few with imperfections: a breast augmentation gone awry, a series of photographs of women’s feet—one with an extra toe on each foot. Shiner averts his eyes; he’s an intruder.
And then, there’s Blanca. She wears a white bathrobe in the first photo and looks freshly showered, her wet, dark hair partially wrapped in a towel, her dimples deep and happy. The robe, slit open to her waist, reveals her dark abdomen, a belly ring. In the next photo, she is seated, back to the camera, robe at her hips.
In a series of photos that Mo titled Stems, Thorns, Scars, he has photographed her completely nude—robe dropped, she faces the camera to reveal her arms and legs that are covered with dozens of two-inch cuts—some fresh, some healing, some white scars protruding from her dark skin.
Blanca had believed these images had been snapped in a moment of admiration. Or maybe it was more than that. Maybe she believed Mo saw her the way he sees her now.
Shiner lets his eyes soak up every detail of her in case he loses his vision by the time he has her for real. Then he unfolds the big Macy’s shopping bag with the handles and piles into it the framed photos of Blanca.
At home, Shiner puts the Macy’s bag in his closet. After he showers, he finds his pack of oversized Braille playing cards; they were his grandfather’s, and he made sure he got them when they cleaned out Gramp’s house. He and Gramps used to play cards on his back porch, the Red Sox on the radio, the summer rain hitting the tin roof. His Gramps had said the cards were how he learned Braille.
Shiner deals himself a hand now, carefully putting the rest away. He studies the backs, which are a slick, bright blue with an intricate angel-wing design. The longer he studies them, the more the wings blur. He removes his glasses, turns out the light, and puts his hand of cards on the bedside table. He waits as long as he can to pick them up again, touching each Braille face with his fingertips, wondering which card he’s drawn.
The next morning, he and Mo work on one of the tallest buildings in the city—sixty stories high. They check each other’s harnesses. Shiner finishes the last of his Starbucks and lowers himself to the topmost tier of windows; as he does so, he notices a long wire hanging to their left, its shadow near the building’s corner. “Hey, Mo,” he begins, pointing to the wire with his chin, but the wind picks up and Mo interrupts him, whistling a happy tune.
“Why haven’t you taken Blanca off my hands?” he asks Shiner.
“Not sure what you mean,” Shiner says. The wire is out of sight now, but the edge of its shadow blows briefly into his peripheral vision―like a bird flying by.
Look, listen.
That piece of shit, Shiner thinks.
“Come on,” Mo says. “You could have had her and made my life easy. Now I got to deal with this bullshit. Girl fights. Drama. And that crazy Blanca. You know, she fucking broke into my place last night and took shit that was my property. Framed photos. I was getting around to making a gallery.”
Shiner works the squeegee from side to side, wipes it off, and moves to the next window. There is a surge of pressure in his eyes. Look, Listen, like a call to attention: this is a moment to step up.
Mo is above him, whistling again. “I thought you were my boy. You know you want her, so why didn’t you just have her? Now I look like an asshole.”
“You are an asshole,” Shiner spits. “Have some balls.”
Mo kicks at Shiner’s line, laughing as Shiner panics, his harness and chair swinging slightly. The wind picks up a bit—at this height, the wind is intense. “You two would be perfect together,” he says. “You look like a raisin and she’s a goddamn mess. Can’t wear short sleeves even. She’s got fucking issues. Tiny little razor blades in the change compartment of her purse. She showed me. After I photographed her, I had nightmares. It made me feel like shit, man, guilty. I feel bad for her, I do—but I mean I can’t dump her for it.”
Shiner is still reeling from hearing the word “raisin”; the rest of this information pushes heat through his body, up through his face, ears, and eyes. He thinks of every kid who ever called him that. He thinks of the way Blanca handled his face, her light touch, transmitting magic.
“Hey, Mo,” he shouts up to him. “What does Penny do with you after she bench-presses you?”
Mo kicks the line and Shiner sways hard. “How do you like swinging from eight hundred feet, asshole?” He kicks the line again.
Shiner looks into the window he’s cleaning—an empty mail room. He uses one of his suction cups to get a good hold of the window and catch his breath. He thinks he might vomit both from fear and adrenaline. “Calm the fuck down, Mo. Come on. What kind of pathetic fucker do you think I am?”
“I know you told her about Penny.”
“You’re wrong.”
The wind picks up.
“You talked shit about me,” Mo shouts. “You told her I wasn’t an artist. She told me!”
“If you’re an artist for tricking girls into taking off their clothes,” says Shiner, “then I’m a goddamn magician for making streaks disappear from windows.”
Mo dumps his bucket on Shiner, the ammonia water just missing his eyes and soaking the front of his uniform, down his pant legs and into his boots, then down, down sixty stories to the sidewalk. Shiner takes the long-handled squeegee and jabs Mo in the shins, swinging him slightly. Mo climbs out of Shiner’s reach, around the corner of the building, and begins to whistle again, laughing.
Mo is nearing the strange wire—never touch a wire, Shiner remembers from PSAs on television, from the man from the electric company who came to speak to his fourth-grade class. Shiner is about to shout out a warning, and then he stops. No. Let him look out for his damn self.
“I shouldn’t be surprised you whistle while you work,” Shiner shouts, “You sound like one of the seven dwarfs! Hi ho, hi ho, you piece of shit!” At that, Mo swings back around the corner as if he is attempting some sort of Spider Man move, but his squeegee catches on something and he snaps back, out of reach. A startled flock of pigeons roosting on the roof’s ledge swoop up in a panic.
The rescue crew that took Mo’s limp body down said that the high-voltage wire must have been damaged during a recent roof job. Shiner can’t un-see it now—Mo’s boots kicking at the glass, teeth clenched, clothes in flames. His left arm was stretched out, as if pointing angrily to the trouble with the squeegee. Shiner wondered aloud: why hadn’t he just dropped it? The crew explained: There is a voltage limit that allows someone to let go of an electrified object; past that threshold, your muscles contract involuntarily, making it impossible to let go.
After they take Mo down, Roger, the boss, hands Mo’s phone to Shiner. “I have to call his family,” he says. “But can you call the girlfriend? I know you knew her.”
At the mall, Shiner sits on the bus-stop bench and scrolls through the pictures on Mo’s phone. They are categorized in folders by girl—all posed in harsh light, either on the black velvet couch or in Mo’s truck. Finally, he finds a folder labeled “Blanca,” and his thumb hovers before clicking it open. A video. He tries to resist but decides to just watch a few seconds—if anything gets dirty, he decides, he’ll shut it off.
She turns, back to the camera, and slides the robe down to the floor. Her naked body in motion takes Shiner’s breath away. Her arms and legs, as cut up as they were in photos. Off camera, Mo asks her, “Why do you do this?”
“Because I wanted you to see me,” she says.
“No,” he said. “The cutting. I don’t understand it.”
“I walk around,” she said, “holding in that feeling, like, when you are trying mightily to not cry. You know, like when your throat tenses up in a knot? This releases it.”
“Why would you want to cry?” Mo asks.
Shiner shuts it off. He thinks it would kill him to hear her secret meant for Mo.
Before he enters the mall, he deletes the videos and photos of Blanca. He finds the cloud storage and clears that, too. Outside, there is a fountain surrounded by bird sculptures. He drops the phone into its water, watching until the screen goes dark, until the phone dies. Then he goes inside and finds Blanca.
• •
It’s the end of the summer now. The boss’s son will soon be back from his trip, but there’s an opening now, of course, if Shiner wants to stay.
He finds reasons to stop by the mall, but at the Real You kiosk it’s still Blanca’s replacement, an older woman with garish red hair. His before and after photos are still there, helping to sell the product. He leaves Blanca messages, tells her he has the pictures she wanted.
Shiner knows Blanca probably won’t come, but he uses the makeup before work anyway. When he blends it into his skin, it revives the feel of her fingers on his chin, the scent of her, and the sound of her voice. Even his taste buds are primed for her warm cooking, but without the real her actually there, his birthmark is not fooled: it is silent, it no longer gives him messages or the courage to do something. Except to wait for her.
And then, one day, as he lowers himself to the ground, he hears it. Look, Listen. Blanca is there, silent, smiling, smelling like strawberries.
She asks if he still has the pictures.
“Yes. I can bring them to you.”
“I don’t know what you must think of me.”
He wants desperately for her not to be embarrassed. “I know the photos were private.” But it’s no use. He cannot lie about seeing them. “What I’m saying is: Look. Nothing could change the way I’ve always thought of you.”
“I asked you to get them, Matt. I knew you would see them.” She taps his Blind Guys playfully. “This gig, it’s almost up? You’ll be back at the mall?”
“I made it through the summer,” he says. “I only have a week left.” And he wonders if they are talking about the same gig being up.
“It’s dangerous work,” she says, and the weight of her statement chokes them silent.
Look, listen.
As he steps toward her, she stops him, takes his Blind Guys off and looks at his birthmark, grinning. “You haven’t blended it quite enough,” she says. “You have to apply it in better light.” She touches his face, and to his surprise, this releases tears from his eyes. Then she lets out a sob, tracing his brow. “I can do it for you, Shiner. Let me help you?”
He holds both of her hands, looking down at them in a blur.
That afternoon, as Shiner descends each floor to clean the next window, he sees the people working inside. Some are startled—women clutching their chests and smiling politely as he drops into view like a spider. Others glance and look away, uncomfortable with the sudden proximity. If they knew his name, he thinks, they’d probably assume it’s because he’s the guy who cleans windows, the guy who makes the glass shine.
