When I laid the image down on the dining room table, I had a visceral memory of one of my patients hurling a photograph at me as he yelled at the top of his lungs, “Fuck them!” I hadn’t thought of Lorenzo for a long time, but looking down at the empty eyes in the picture, I recalled his tirades during sessions and how I had braced myself for the verbal assaults before he arrived. I left those sessions feeling as if I had been physically battered. Lorenzo was twenty-three. His parents had brought their son to me and were paying for his treatment. There were several cases of bipolar disorder in his extended family, and I worried that he might be showing signs of it. I considered prescribing lithium, a very low dose, but when I mentioned it, he objected violently to taking any drug, and not long after, I realized that Lorenzo was lying to his parents and using me as a pawn to justify his behavior: “But Dr. Davidsen says it’s all right.” I ended the treatment. Lorenzo had sent the picture he threw at me to his parents with a single change. He had taken a razor blade to the photograph and scratched their eyes out.

Someone was stalking Miranda, and I guessed it was a person she knew. Unlike the earlier Polaroids, which were probably taken surreptitiously, this was a full-face portrait, the kind of photograph people usually pose for. The mystery person had either taken the picture or had somehow gotten access to it. The only thing I felt certain of was that the sender wanted to disturb the recipient. It was an overtly aggressive act, and this made me think the perpetrator was a man, but I knew I could be wrong.

I had to show it to her, of course. If the image came through me, the unpleasantness might be softened somewhat. Wiping out eyes is a cheap trick, a cliché borrowed from horror movies, but the lack of originality didn’t make it any less effective. As Inga once pointed out to me, since Plato, Western philosophy and culture have had an ocular bias: vision is our dominant sense. We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone’s eye, we look into a mind. A person without eyes is disturbing for the simple reason that eyes are the doors to the self.