Under the Influence.

My old friend Hubcap Charlie could always be relied upon for clairvoyant counsel, although such advice was often delivered in an inopportune time, place or manner. As his understudy, apprentice and apostle, I learned to hoard away those prescient nuggets of wisdom, guarding them preciously in my mental cache of hobo acumen, a virtual bindle I’ve carried over my shoulder ever since. I live with the conviction that each such prescription will find its use one day.

I now recall one otherwise un-noteworthy campfire under an otherwise un-noteworthy North Dakota sky over which Hubcap Charlie told me this: beware the eyes that see all and reveal nothing.

And I’ve already told you about Kiran.

As a child growing up in Louisiana, I was deathly afraid of two things—magicians and New Orleans voodoo. As I spent a good part of my childhood traveling the state and the region with circus performers, my phobias intersected in the human form of certain performers claiming to hypnotize circus-goers on the spot. Outwardly I always swore that I knew it was all fake, a contrived sort of magic only meant to fool the weak-minded. But I stayed away from them nonetheless, just in case.

When I first saw Kiran, it was her eyes that caught me. As jet black as Hubcap Charlie’s North Dakota sky, they anesthetized the rest of my senses. In each eye, all I could see was a giant black iris, like a solar eclipse leaving nothing but a sliver of radiating white corona around the silhouette of the moon.

Kiran not only saw deep inside me, but controlled me with her gaze. And yet her eyes revealed next to nothing to me. Although I heard her voice and listened intently to her story, her eyes gave no hint of her perception of our encounter. I felt as though she knew me—that she saw me—and yet that I could never know her in the same way.

From that first glance, her eyes alone effortlessly captured and held my attention. I was helpless to resist, willfully weakened into submission, fixated on her gaze, and haven’t been released ever since.

After our brief encounter over hot chocolate that day, I have remained in the trance that she left me in. Even as I busked on the Metro, coached in the classroom and otherwise went about my former life, I knew that I wasn’t all there. I was under her spell and wouldn’t be whole until I found her again. And yet I had no way of finding her, no way to trace that trance back to its source.

Weeks passed and I resigned myself to my catatonic state. At first my roommate Tommy was annoyed, then, in turn, vexed, anxious, concerned and finally, downright worried. He told me to snap out of it, this wicked affliction that gripped my mind day and night. He refused to give it a name, but we both knew what it was. It left me under a hypnotic spell, a curse, and there was only one thing that could break it. And he couldn’t give me that one thing.

Tommy is of an enviable disposition that shields him from such distractions. He has the good fortune of being immune to womanly witchcraft. His armor is never pierced, his soft underbelly never exposed to their trickery. The downside is that he can’t fully understand my predicament. His only advice is to wave it all off; another bus will come along shortly, he says. Right, but another bus won’t take me where I need to go.

As we verbally jousted over the issue, he insisted that I at least get out of the apartment (now a very adequate timeshare unit just off of the place Saint Sulpice). He said that if I were to remain in a trance, I should at least get out and stretch my legs, creeping out the locals like any self-respecting real zombie would. So we went for a coffee.

At the corner café, Tommy took a table outside while I went in for two espressos. I shuffled in, walking through the same misty fog that I had been in for weeks. I heard myself say deux cafés and then suddenly saw them on the counter before me. Through my mental haze, I looked down and spotted them sitting on the coffee saucers before me—two perfectly round jet black circles surrounded by thin rims of white—just like her eyes. I was seeing them everywhere, I thought, and it only got worse. As I glanced up to hand two coins to the creature behind the counter, I saw them again in her face. It was her. I had found Kiran.