My body physically recoiled. Dizziness, vertigo took hold of me, the apartment walls shrinking in. There on the coffee table, set so as to stare straight into me, was a grisly, desocketed eyeball, yellowing, alone, sitting on dried and curling blood, a stringy nerve draped over the table edge. I was short of breath. Turning for the door—I couldn’t stay—I wanted to puke. As I stumbled toward the concierge’s desk, I must have been babbling something incoherent, my pleas met with nothing but blank stares and confusion. I needed to leave.

“Okay, start again from the top.” The officer’s face was flat and refused to reflect emotion back at me. His eyebrows were permanently knit, head tilted back slightly as if to always look down upon me. I’d been directed into a small room nestled along a twisting hallway, a table and two chairs, starkly lit, waiting in the center. I now heard myself.

“There’s an eye on my table.”

The officer asked about the state of my apartment, my activities throughout the day, details about the eye. Having taken my statement, he instructed me to wait and left the room. My head was spinning, thoughts stepping over one another. But the one question I couldn’t shake was: Who? Who had done this? I had no enemies. No friends either, but that was precisely the point. My existence was boring, inoffensive, entirely unnoteworthy. This much I had even told the officer (he had asked if someone might have motive). Motive… indeed, why would some body leave me an eye? Whose eye? And just the eye? I could make no sense of it. An intense foreboding, this abstract sense of doom, was suffocating me.

I must have sat there for a couple of hours, pulling my hair, wringing my hands. The door opened. I shot up. It was the officer.

“You’re free to go.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“It’s a pig’s eye. The police have concluded their investigation. You’re free to go.”

“I don’t care if it’s a pig’s eye. What do you mean I’m free to go? I could be in dan—who breaks into someone else’s apartment and leaves a pig’s eye? This is psychotic! You want me to just, go back after that?”

The officer stopped me and, in blank tone, recited, “No sign of breaking and entering, no sign of conflict, no sign of theft. In your statement you said there is no motive for threat.” Ushering me out, he continued as if it were some consolation, “Look, it’s likely some weird prank or, who knows, maybe you’re trying to pull something. We found no reason to suspect foul play, but if anything else happens, let us know.”

I was dumbfounded, too shocked to process what was happening to me. They swept me out of the station before I could even begin to protest, and I soon found myself frozen at the doorstep of my apartment building.

“No reason to suspect foul play,” they had said. No broken windows? No traces of a perpetrator? Had I locked the door this morning? But surely I must have; it was instinct to check the handle on the way out. Someone must have broken in. It would be impossible otherwise. The building has cameras. Yes, how could I have forgotten! The cameras would have seen something—must have seen something. Once again, I approached the concierge, this time more composed. The building’s security footage, I needed to see it.

The concierge led me to a room with an array of monitors, a security guard giving me a nod. It was with urgent desperation that I managed to convince the unamused guard to allow me review the day’s tapes. But scrubbing through each camera’s video feed, I started to feel lightheaded. My fingers were tingling. The door never moved. My stomach slowly started to drop. I tried to swallow. A knot was forming in my throat. The windows too. Untouched. Nothing. There was nothing. I couldn’t breathe. I looked again, the guard’s tired gaze boring into the back of my head. I must have missed something. Still images. Truly nothing. Something was very wrong. It was inexplicable. The whole day, nothing happened. The eye had just appeared. That is all. I felt sick.

There was a complete darkness. I lay sleepless, staring into space, tethered only by a musty smell permeating the hotel room. There was no eye this morning. Did I really see an eye? No—why do I ask? The police would have told me if there were no eye. There must have been an eye. But how did it get there? This question echoed louder now than ever. Had I really seen nothing this morning? Eyes don’t simply appear, or at least, they never have before. No one entered my apartment. No trace of a soul. Maybe the cameras were wrong. Or the guard fixed the footage. But that would make no sense. But neither does a materializing eye. So maybe there was an eye this morning, but even so, that doesn’t resolve how it got there. Because then someone must have left it the day before, or the day before that. Did I leave the eye? No one else did. But where would I have even gotten an eye? Why would I have set it on my table? My heart was beating in my head, an anger and frustration rising to meet my increasing confusion. But the blood on the table was dried; the eye had been there. I had left an eye on the table. Yes, that was it. It had to be it. That eye which so shocked me was somehow a surprise I’d set myself. No one else could have left the eye. There is no world where eyes materialize. I must have forgotten. Reason left no other way. Though how could I trust reason if I’d forgotten the eye? I must be mad. But reason requires no trust, for facts can’t lie: there was an eye.