“With a Finger in My I” by David Gerrold

First appeared in Harlan Ellison’s Again, Dangerous Visions. Reprinted by James Gunn in his major SF retrospective collections.

Summary

The story is simple, or maybe not so simple. The narrator cannot see because he lost his pupil. In fact, he’s lost a number of things like his sunglasses which he can find if he stops looking for them. He finds the doctor’s office by not looking for it as well.

He asks to see a doctor. And the receptionist points one out. He asks for a doctor to look at him and a doctor looks him over and charges ten dollars. An argument with the receptionist ensues.

Discussion (spoilers)

The doctor who does look him over, discusses how people have been creating their own realities their beliefs. He goes home, overhears a discussion of finding one’s self (which he ignores because he wouldn’t be able to if he did it), and of drug altering reality. His apartment’s wallpaper is peeling—a probable to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous story about going crazy (“The Yellow Wallpaper”).

Gunn saw this in the tradition of Borges and Kafka—absurd surrealism. Gerrold discusses a critic who saw this as a tale about how language creates reality, which is true to an extent, but one would also have to append drugs and/or belief systems. Perhaps it is through language that these others have affected reality. Or vice versa.

It does seem a cut above Gerrold’s “In the Deadlands”—which did not make the cut (see link)—not only due to the stronger narrative, but also to its provoking thought about the nature of our reality. Surely many have wondered about how even our thoughts or words might affect it. Plus, it’s playful and seems to enjoy its own invention.

In Gunn’s anthology, it is curious how much emphasis he places on Gerrold’s connection with Star Trek (as a college student, he sold the franchise a teleplay that would become one of the most popular episodes of the original series), yet Gunn doesn’t select an excerpt that shows space opera tradition—guys in a spaceship battle an alien problem—but something that, if anything, flies in the opposite direction. On the other hand, both Star Trek and this story have paid homage to Lewis Carroll.