Color Weak

*A short-story, novella, or novel, depending on my attention span:

As he buttoned his shirt for the third time in a third office, he smiled ruefully as he wondered when it was exactly that he began to die.  This third visit, the second second opinion was merely a formality, a chance to responsibly postpone the treatment for his cancer.  All the necessary biopsies had been done, so this last visit really hadn't been that bad, but he still didn't understand the continual need to get naked in a cold and silly half-decorated room.  He smiled again a bit more warmly as he wondered who in the world would have a fantasy about a romantic tryst in a hospital.

There was something new he garnered from this trip though, one passing question that put him into one of his typical metaphysical tailspins that he would enjoy for several hours. The question was simple enough, "Haven't you noticed the blood in your stool?" Normally, the doctor would have received the lecture about color weakness vs color blindness, but he just couldn't manage to summons the thesis with the proper amount of verve it required.  Instead, his color weak world began to slowly replay itself against the screen on the inside back of his skull. From his early teachers who thought he was slow or stubborn, to the myriad nuisances he suffered when people found out (what color is this? what color is your shirt? what color is that car? giggle giggle, giggle), right up to the point he realized his gift was done playing with him and  now quite possibly murdered him.  He smiled once more, admiring its persistence.
For as long as he could remember, his vision was never quite right. As a boy, he could only read for a minute or so until the words began to blur and overlap sloppily on the page -  Amblyopia, a word he stubbornly never learned to spell, while having even less affinity for its nom de guerre - Lazy Eye.  He did, however, enjoy wearing the eye patch at dinner for a few weeks. Then there were the presciption glasses he got in junior high, the ones he had so much fun picking out then never wore. But as he grew, the constant incredulity of his peers over his "color weakness" began to wear on him.  By the time he was eighteen, he had the odd distinction of harboring a fairly significant jealousy for the rest of the world who could see numbers inside of large circles constructed somehow of smaller, dull shaded spheres.  He was assured the numbers where there, but he never saw one - and often wondered what was worse, not seeing what everyone else could, or seeing things they could not - as deficit diplomacy goes, he began to secretly envy schizophrenics.
Besides the eighteen month prognosis, his affliction had really only changed his life in two pertinent was:  He was crushed when he discovered he couldn't be an electrician, and he could never dress himself, at least in any ensemble more complex than blue jeans and tennis shoes. Once and only once, he dared to venture out without his mother's oversight, and was ever so grateful it had been a cold day - after his first encounter in the school hallway, he wore his coat the rest of the day. Later in his life people assumed that he wore his jeans and T shirts as some sort of casual or rebellious statement, never guessing it was out of fear and a need to be safe.  Recently even, when asked how he knew he was dressed well and ready for the day, he only halfway kidded when he replied "When my socks match and my zipper is up."
He had other problems with his vision though, probably more indicative of the brain behind his eyes. Never being anywhere very long, he seldom got the opportunity to correlate his initial impressions of people with the inevitable  behaviors and attitudes that eventually betrayed them. He watched his family too in these new situations, and he knew his parents were not the people others saw. It wasn't long before he realized his own applications, literally reinventing himself from town to town, school to school, teacher to teacher, peer to peer - or so he thought.  There was never a sense of normalcy though, and he grew to rely heavily on the surrounding context for clues, something that would eventually benefit him when he would walk into Third World villages with no introduction or mandate other than the confidence of whatever persona he had adopted that day. He quit trying to see the world as it was, and began to shape it as he wanted it to be.  He had always thought this successful, but now chuckled as he realized his motus operendi  had eroded from that of Don Quixote to Mr. Magoo.
He was always perplexed by people that could hide their inner selves successfully for any extended period at all.  When walking into a situation, he often knew an appropriate manner, but could not keep himself from being himself anyway.  It wasn't until late in his life that he realized that the impressions he had made in those moments were only positive in that the witnesses were gracious enough to grant him the temporary delusion out of decorum, but didn't usually care to repeat the gesture too often. Even here, his vision had betrayed him, for the reflection of his own buffoonery must have been shining brightly in all but the most talented thespian countenances. This revelation, constructed about the time his bare feet hit the cold floor of the examination room, startled him as he realized there had been an entire world around him of people who publicly tolerated him, but then whispered and joked in every other crevice of his environment.  The thought of all this counter-existence enveloping him unknowingly for so long was overwhelming, and he returned quickly to the one virtue he had left - his ability to stop thinking about anything that disturbed him, ironically the same asset that had created and maintained his false sense of reality and self all these years.
Slipping his shoes back on, waiting for the doctor and nurse who had graciously and ridiculously stepped out while he dressed (after all, they had coordinated the humiliating assault he had endured in the name of medicine a few moments ago), he knew he had a lot to answer for in his past, and would probably ignore the admonitions and prescriptions this third physician would provide him, with feigned empathy, as to how he should maximize his remaining year and a half.  In his true and logical (but of course not stubborn) fashion, he would forgo the predicated mercy of Kubler Ross for the cold comfort of Freud and Lacan - having lived in his head this long, he preferred to die there as well.
To be continued..........