by Ted Dekker
Who was she?
You are beautiful, Christy. So beautiful.
Outlaw’s low, tender voice rumbled through her mind like an aftershock, and she blinked with it. Why, she wasn’t sure, but a snippet of that meaningful memory slipped into her veins.
Lawson was talking again, but she wasn’t hearing the words.
For a brief moment, maybe two seconds, she remembered. It was what he had said to Austin. If there’s no longer any problem, there’s no longer any need for correction.
Otherwise, she thought, where do the corrections end? What is good enough? Can perfect be measured by a scale or a law of better or worse? It either is perfect or it isn’t at all.
She thought it, and, in that moment, it made perfect sense.
And then she could no longer grasp the thought. What if the canyon really was just an illusion?
“… to put you under again,” Lawson was saying. “Just in case we go for the whole caboodle, if you know what I mean.”
“Not really.”
He glanced down at her as he reached for the doors that led into the operating room. “Make you fat again, Alice. To give you some appreciation for what is.” He pushed the door open and stepped in. “Don’t worry, we can always take it back out.”
She wasn’t sure what to make of that. It sounded horrible, but she was suddenly past horrible. It was what it was. She could either accept it or resist it. And for now she was too tired to resist it.
The pungent scent of ether greeted her as she crossed the threshold and scanned the room. The same team who’d worked on her before stood by the bed, this time accompanied by Nancy, who was the only one not dressed in scrubs.
Paul Bigoti, the surgeon, white mask already in place. Linda, his assistant, smiling warmly. The anesthesiologist, a red-headed man whose name Christy had forgotten.
See with new eyes. Turn on the lamps.
But hers were back on the bedroom floor, shattered.
Everyone has lamps.
“Let’s get started then, shall we?” Lawson said. Evidently, he’d decided to stay this time.
Linda helped Christy to her feet and led her across the room, and all the while Christy’s mind was half gone.
Gone on the inevitability of it all.
Gone on what was or wasn’t.
Gone on anything but shuffling one foot in front of the other and wondering if Austin was okay.
They helped her back onto the surgeon’s table and prepped her, and she let them do it all without a single question. It was what it was. She felt oddly at peace.
It was while she was staring up at the bright, circular lights that the words came again, like a voice beyond her mind.
Beautiful, Outlaw said. As you are. Without a single change. Your only problem is the one you make for yourself by being unaware of just how beautiful you are right now, in this moment.
She remembered the words very clearly, and their meaning sank into her bones.
Perfection needs no correction.
I am perfect. As I am.
Her heart rate surged with this single awareness. She both felt it and heard it because they’d already hooked the electrodes to her wrist and the monitor began to chirp with new urgency.
See, Christy. See.
The mask was over her face, and the anesthesiologist began to count her down.
“Ten.”
“Nine.”
“Eight…”
But Christy wasn’t saying ten, nine, eight. She was whispering, just barely into the mask.
“Help.”
“Me.”
“See.”
And then she wasn’t saying anything because she surrendered to those words and faded into the white lights above her.
“OPEN YOUR eyes, Christy.”
Christy heard the words far away, as if they were an echo of a voice that had not spoken. She lay still, thinking that she might be dead and had heard an angel.
She wasn’t concerned about being dead, because if dead was, it was. Somehow that seemed obvious to her.
Then she remembered that she was on the operating table, and they were putting her fat back into her body. They were trying to make her beautiful even though she didn’t need to be made anything.
That was interesting. It wasn’t alarming or worrying, only interesting. Not even interesting, really. It was, in fact, a bit absurd.
She felt silly giggles bubble up in her chest, and she let one out, like a tiny hiccup.
Strange… She was laughing?
Christy let her eyes flutter open, half expecting to see the operating table below her, like she had once before. Instead she saw that she was standing near the door staring at the surgeon, his assistant, and the anesthesiologist huddled over her, with Kern Lawson and Nancy Wilkins looking on from either side.
They were talking in low tones, pointing, hard at work on her body. Seeing it with her own eyes, Christy felt fear begin to edge back into her mind.
With her eyes closed, she’d thought the notion preposterous.
With her eyes open, she was suddenly uncertain. Maybe even afraid.
“We have an irregular pulse,” the anesthesiologist said.
The surgeon glanced at the monitor. “She’s lost a lot of blood. Heart’s just working to keep up.”
She was losing blood? She thought they were putting fat in, not cutting her open.
“What are they doing?”
She jerked her head to the right and saw the girl who’d spoken three feet away. A patient, staring with casual interest.
The girl looked over at her. “They’re operating on you?”
Christy knew the girl. It was Alice Ringwald, who she’d seen Lawson take to the basement on that first day.
“Alice?”
The girl smiled. “Hi, Christy.”
“Are… Are you…” Christy glanced at the operating table and saw that no one had turned to the sound of their voices. “Are you really here?”
“Sure I am. As much as you are.”
“I mean really here? Why can’t they hear us?”
“Because they’re here too,” Alice said. “The whole world is here.”
“Where?”
Alice lifted her hand and tapped her head with a finger. “Where everyone dreams.”
Christy’s meeting with Outlaw came back in a rush. Was he only a dream too? But something had to be real. Either what Lawson said or what Outlaw said was true, not both.
“I think we’re seeing now,” Christy said. “Really seeing.”
“Sure we are. But it’s only a dream.”
No. No, she couldn’t accept that.
Everyone has lamps.
She was seeing with her lamps on now. She was seeing that she wasn’t the girl on the table, that she was more, far more. She was seeing because she was near death, and her eyes had been opened.
But could she see, really see, when she was fully awake and out of this place? That was the real rub.
“They think I’m you,” Christy said.
Alice laughed. “That’s just Fisher trying to cover his tracks. They don’t want you out.”
“But is this place even real?”
“If you say so.”
“And if not?”
“Then it’s not.”
There’s only a problem if you say there is.
“The thing is,” Alice said, looking at the operating table. “I don’t think they even know they’re not in control.”
“We are?”
“Sure. Of what we see. It’s a dream. That’s why I come here. It’s just a dream.”
No, that’s wrong, Christy thought. Not all of it was a dream.
She stared at her form on the table, breathing up and down, out like a light. That was the illusion. It was the problem of her own making. That body on the table was only ugly if she said so. In truth, imperfection had already been corrected. The law was dead. Out. Perfection was in. She was alive. Perfect. As she was, outside of this illusion.
And she kept forgetting that.
You don’t have to understand everything right now, Outlaw had said, but you are going to have to decide if you trust me, or trust Lawson.
She looked at her hands and saw the same hands she’d always had, neither skinny nor fat nor anything. Just… there. Hands.
“It’s an illusion,” she said. “My whole life has been run by illusions.”
“Then maybe you should unplug them,” Alice said, as if it were an afterthought.
You’re not your body. You’re not your mind. You’re not your emotions. You’re not even your beliefs.
The meaning of all this dropped into her awareness like a star from heaven, and she suddenly knew what she would do.
Without thinking another thought, Christy stepped forward and headed across the room toward that body on the table.
It was her false self that was confused, thinking that it knew what ugly was and stewing in it, trying to be good enough when there was no such thing.
The ugliness had been corrected a long time ago through forgiveness. It was time to forgive herself and surrender to the truth.
She walked up behind the anesthesiologist. “Excuse me,” she said. But he didn’t move.
She tapped him on the shoulder and he turned, took one look through her, and returned to his task. So he could feel her but not see her.
They had her stomach open and the doctor chipping at her rib cage with a small chisel. Evidently he intended to remove a few of her ribs.
Ribs that weren’t really a part of her any more than her ugliness was. She wasn’t sure about all the logic, but she knew this plain as day, as if a light had come on to reveal the truth.
Lamps.
Everyone has them.
She felt no anger or even frustration as she looked at the five people working to fix her body and mind. They were clueless, thinking they were doing what they needed to do.
There was Lawson, just now lifting his phone to respond to a page or a call, one eye on the operation.
There was Nancy, writing something on a clipboard.
There was the anesthesiologist, glancing at the monitor, probably wondering what had caused the sudden surge in her heart rate.
There was Charlene, dabbing at the blood around her ribs with a sponge.
There was Paul Bigoti, proudly executing the finest of his work as he chipped away.
Forgive them, for they know not what they do.
The thought must have come from her formative years, Christy thought.
Then she stepped up the tray next to the surgeon, picked up the longest of three stainless surgical knives, leaned over the body on the table, and, using both hands on the handle, plunged the knife down with all of her strength.
She felt a jar as the blade struck a rib just below the breastbone before slipping past and sinking deep into the body’s chest.
Into the heart.
The reaction was visceral, violent, and immediate, and it happened all around her, as if she’d stepped into a pack of rats feeding on a piece of cheese.
The body arched while her hand was still on the blade’s handle. She didn’t know if they could see the knife—they probably could—but they definitely saw the body spasm as the blade pinned its heart to the back of its ribcage.
As one, they jumped back, startled. How often did one see a blade plunge into a body of its own accord?
But it was as far as they got. The moment the monitor flat-lined, the world around Christy changed. Not just a little bit, but a lot.
Kern Lawson was there one moment, eyes wide with the phone in his right hand, and gone the next. He simply vanished.
So did Nancy Wilkins. Just gone.
As was the surgeon. And Charlene. And the anesthesiologist.
The only thing left was the surgical table itself, with her bleeding dead body on its sheets. And then it was gone too. All of it, including the bed and the knife in her hand. It was as if someone had pulled the plug on a hologram.
Christy blinked and slowly looked around the room. It wasn’t the hospital room. Where there had been an operating room with a checkerboard-tiled floor and all of the new equipment and instruments necessary to conduct the most advanced procedures, there was now only a small, very old, concrete room.
No sign of Alice.
She knew where she was immediately. This was the room that Nancy had helped her find, a secret place of fear deep in her mind. The basement room, though not as dark as before.
Directly ahead, vertical bars ran the length of the room, caging her in. In the center of that wall of bars, a door, also made of bars.
But this too was only an illusion, wasn’t it? An illusion that no longer held any power over her.
Christy slowly walked up to the barred door, placed her hand on the old metal latch, and twisted the handle, knowing—hoping, pleading—that the door would open.
But it didn’t. The handle simply vanished in her hand. And the bars with it. Even the concrete walls… All gone.
She stood alone in a large white room with freshly painted walls, dressed in a blue smock and matching pants. A single door stood in the far wall.
Her breath came steady, her pulse was strong, and she thought: The illusion is gone. I am free.
Her body began to tremble.
She stood there in the middle of the empty room for a long minute, drawing deep breaths, hardly able to contain the gratitude sweeping through her body. Tears broke from her eyes and slipped down her cheeks.
Be still and know. Know with your being, not your mind.
And she did. She knew as she had known nothing else, not even the love that Outlaw had shown her.
She knew that she was home. That she belonged, one with her father. She was complete, wholly restored without even a hint of any need for further correction.
The only question that remained now was whether Austin knew as well.
Moving on feet that hardly felt connected to the floor, Christy walked to the door, opened it wide, and stepped into a vacant corridor that looked like it was freshly painted with gray paint and was newly carpeted. Patient rooms lined the hall, each with shiny new silver knobs.
She briefly wondered whether or not she and Austin had actually used those rooms, or if that too had been part of the illusion.
No, we actually used them, she thought.
She wasn’t sure where she’d find Austin or if she’d find him at all—for all she knew, she’d only imagined him as well. But she’d last seen him with Lawson, and so she would start there, at what had been Lawson’s office.
She headed toward the elevator at end of the hall, awash with amazement. Just a typical hospital corridor, newly upgraded and ready for occupancy.
She, on the other hand, was no longer typical. Because she, unlike most, had seen her true perfection.
She was seeing.
Lamps on.
Christy found the elevator working, as she knew she would. She exited it on the main level. Again she encountered the kind of hallway one would expect to see in a hospital wing that had just been remodeled.
She headed toward the administrator’s office, indicated as such by a sign on the door.
Had Outlaw drawn her here? Was he even a real person?
It didn’t matter, really. She was. Real and seeing things differently.
Her fear was gone, not only mostly, but completely, because it had been sustained by an illusion that was no longer part of her reality. The mere notion that she might be ugly or in any way less than perfectly beautiful felt as ludicrous as the claim that the world was really flat.
How long had she and Austin been here? The question dawned on her as she veered to the door that had led into the recreation room. Pushed through.
Inside was an empty room with counters on the far wall. A sink. A refrigerator. Scattered cans of soup and empty bags of chips were strewn on the counter and on the floor.
From a construction crew? Or had she eaten the food wh
ile in a state of delusion?
She walked up to the refrigerator. Beside it sat a white five-gallon pail with paint crusted on its surface. A trash pail left over from the construction. Austin’s street clothes were stuffed into it. Next to it, his shoes.
So he was here. Or at least had been.
Christy reached into the pail and pulled his jeans and shirt out. Her own were wadded up underneath his. They’d put them here themselves, trapped in this illusion.
Her red blouse wasn’t torn but it was dirty. Somehow the world had shifted when she’d opened the door into the boiler room—her shirt had torn getting out of the crawlspace. The illusion had begun then, when she’d crawled into the boiler room in the basement.
She opened the refrigerator. A nearly empty jug of water, nothing else. Maybe they’d eaten food from the refrigerator and cupboards, leftover from whoever had used this room as a lunch room, likely a construction crew.
Christy closed the door and glanced over her shoulder to be sure that she really was alone, then quickly shed her smocks and dressed in her own clothes, wondering where they’d found the blue uniforms. Maybe the basement?
Ignoring their shoes, she grabbed Austin’s shirt and jeans and walked back out into the hall toward the administrator’s office, directly ahead.
She took a deep breath and pushed the door open, not sure what to expect.
A reception room, laid out exactly as she had always seen it, sans the furniture. The door into what had been Lawson’s office rested shut across the room. There then?
She crossed the room and pushed the door wide.
Like the rest of the wing, Lawson’s office had no furniture. Unlike the outer office, however, it was not vacant. There was a man huddling in the far corner, arms wrapped around his knees, rocking slightly, whispering something she couldn’t make out.
“Austin?”
He jerked his head up and gasped. For a full second he sat there staring, mouth parted and eyes wide. His eyes closed, then opened again.
“It’s okay, Austin. It’s me.”
He cried out and scrambled to his feet, eyes darting this way and that, as if he couldn’t see her.
“Christy? You’re in here?” he asked, frantic.
“Yes.”
“How… How did you get in? It’s dark.”