“What color is this?” Eddie asked, holding a swatch of fabric above his head.
The cashier sucked her teeth. “Green,” she said. She motioned to the next customer in line to join her at the register.
He wrinkled his forehead and gave the piece of fabric a long hard look. “Are you sure it’s not dark gray?”
The cashier shook her head rolled her eyes at the customer she was serving. This was the fifth time Eddie had asked her to identify the color of a piece of fabric. “Why do you keep asking me if you’re not gonna believe me?” The stick-thin woman she was serving stood perfectly still looking the other way so as not to get involved.
“Never mind,” he said. He wandered back into the store to weave through the countless aisles stacked high with bolts of fabric. He used to love this. He became a fashion designer because color excited him so much. Now the only saw black and white just like his French bulldog, Matilda. Seeing the world in shades of gray was so difficult that he wondered how his poor Matilda made it this far in life.
The colors first started to fade late one evening while Eddie was working on the final stitches for a custom evening gown order for one of his best clients. The gown was a rich royal blue, but at some point during the evening, it started to look more like weathered denim than deep blue silk. It was as if the fabric had faded in the space of a few hours. Thinking the problem was just not having enough light, Eddie turned on the overhead. It didn’t change anything, but it did help him realize something else. As he looked around the room, all of the colors were faded. The bright pink sofa sitting against the white wall was a pastel pink. The yellow and blue modern art that hung above the sofa had lost its former vitality. Even old Matilda’s coat was missing a colorful spark.
Thinking he was just tired, Eddie went to bed. Panic set in the next day when everything still had that faded look in the morning. As he worked, he noticed it getting a bit worse. It was like everything was suddenly acid washed, and he certainly did not think that was a good look.
Eddie decided he needed medical help. Since his eyes were the problem, he went to see the ophthalmologist. The ophthalmologist couldn’t help him. He told them to go see his primary care doctor. When Eddie arrived at his primary care doctor’s office looking terribly sweaty and unkempt the doctor shrugged and told him to see an ophthalmologist.
“But I just went to the ophthalmologist, and everything keeps getting worse!” He yelled. By this time the whole world had faded into shades of gray. The doctor agreed to order some tests, but the test turned up nothing.
Eddie spent almost a month sitting on the pink velvet sofa with Matilda’s heavy head in his lap watching reruns of Project Runway on television and sulking. His life was over. How could he be a fashion designer if he could not see color? He considered killing himself by drinking Drano like the girl in Heathers. He even went as far as to pour the viscous liquid into his America’s Next Top Model mug. It smelled of bleach, and the idea of swallowing it turned his stomach so that he changed his mind and dumped it down the sink hoping to speed up the slow kitchen drain. Then he checked his Instagram account, and then a Snapchat, and then scrolled through Grinder for a little while before giving up on everything and turning off his phone. He considered taking all of the sleeping pills in his medicine cabinet, but after laying them out on the coffee table couldn’t do that either, so he went to sleep.
When Eddie finally dragged himself to the fabric store, he was hoping for a miracle. He felt that being around so much color might force his eyes to recognize it again, but it didn’t. Every piece of fabric was black, white, and fifty shades of gray. “Dreadful.” Eddie sighed. His heart tightened at the thought of never seeing fuchsia, chartreuse, and burnt sienna again. He was about to break down and sob right there in the fabric store when he noticed a fabulously textured fabric next to him. He reached out and touched the corner of it. It was exquisitely soft. He pulled the entire bolt from the rack and went to the center of the store where the workers cut the fabric. “What color is this?” he asked no one imparticular.
The woman behind the counter looked over her square reading glasses at him and said, “Gray.”
Eddie laughed aloud like a Disney villain.
The woman raised an eyebrow at him. “Are you all right?” she asked.
“Now I am.”
Eddie bought four yards of fabric and used it to make a simple shift dress. That dress was the beginning of the revitalization of his career. As a minimalist fashion designer, he focused on simple lines and neutral colors. Before he knew it, he became the designer to watch in New York. When fashion magazine reporters asked him how he got as far as he had he would always say, “It’s simple. I learned to make my disability my strength. It took a lot of work and reworking, but eventually, it all worked out.”