Flip

by Christopher J Fox

Matthew’s pearl dimmed and became opaque while the pale, glowing filaments that emanated from the front of it increased in intensity and luminosity.

  His focus shifted. He was looking out the side of his pearl when we were talking, and now it has turned and faced frontward, looking down the direction he’s going. Amazing.

  The filaments flowed backward over the oblong body of the pearl and neatly wove into a tight thread behind it. Aida didn’t know what those filaments were or why they persisted as a trail left behind by every pearl. She would ask Matthew when he returned.

  Considering Matthew’s pearl, Aida wondered about her own appearance. In her mind’s eye, she still pictured herself with a body, arms, hands, legs, and feet all in the right place. With a bit of mental effort, she could resolve the contradiction of knowing she had a body, but she just couldn’t see it. What bothered her, though, was thinking she had no face here in the Wave World. Much of a person’s identity is tied up in the appearance of his or her face, and she knew major psychological problems occur in patients who’ve suffered serious damage to their faces. When the mental models of patients’ faces no longer match what’s in the mirror, they lose their identities, their self-images.

  Aida pictured her face in the mirror as she’d seen it this morning when she was getting ready.

  I’m not gonna give that up. I still look the same, she reassured herself.

  Matthew hadn’t mentioned anything unusual about her appearance, but then again, he hadn’t mentioned anything about her appearance at all, so she really didn’t know what she looked like, did she?

  Well, that’s not a comforting thought.

  She tried to calm her mind. Looking out at the wonder around her helped.

  This is truly amazing, she thought, then got annoyed that she couldn’t find the right words to describe what she was seeing or what it meant to be able to see it. Her annoyance got in the way of calming herself.

  Just be here now. This is where you are. Let everything else go by and disappear over the waterfall. She tried to take a mindful breath in and release it slowly, but that couldn’t happen without a body. This realization and the realization that she couldn’t do anything about it added to her mounting frustration. It occurred to her that this is how people who survive a stroke or who lose a limb might feel. They’re accustomed to having control of their body and then suddenly don’t. Acceptance of their condition is always the first step toward relearning and regaining control.

  At least they can feel themselves breathing. I can’t even close my eyes and shut this experience off! she fumed. With effort she pushed the frustration away again. Okay, so I can’t do any of the things I usually would do to calm down. I’ll just have to try to keep focused on something.

  Aida allowed her eyes to be caught by a movement that was out of step with the rest of the intricate ballet. An opaque pearl had broken off from a group of others and glided silently in her direction, its vibration out of harmony with everything else. As the distance between them closed, she could tell that the person was upset and then, in a rush of intimate sensitivity, that they were very upset but were trying to hold it together on the outside.

  This isn’t some random stranger. I’m feeling her emotions! The connection was deep, and Aida realized, as the distraught pearl began to orbit hers, in part she, herself, felt complete and at home.

  This was her daughter.

  Natalia!

  The joy of being reunited with her daughter blended with the immense relief of finding something familiar. She enfolded Natalia in her love and held tightly to the lifeline that had been tossed to her.

  The rest of the Wave World fell away from Aida’s notice as she saw only Natalia’s pearl. The sensations of holding Natalia rose up from the deep wells of her memory. Her view of Nat’s pearl and the memories of Nat’s warm embrace clashed in a cognitive dissonance and gave Aida a sense of being unbalanced, like when she was first learning to ride a bike as a child. She loosened her hold on her memories in order to cling more tightly to the pearl, and then the two competing visions annealed into a balanced reality.

  Aida saw Natalia sitting on a footstool with her back to a window. Her head was in her hands, and she was dozing off. She went to hug her daughter, but this time she had no hands, and a quick glance down confirmed the rest of her was missing as well.

  I’m not fully here. This isn’t like the airplane or when I was on campus. I must be like a ghost—I’m just seeing this.

  Determined to make contact, she reached out to her daughter again, only this time she imagined placing her hand on Natalia’s back. In her mind, she felt the indentation between her daughter’s shoulder blades, as well as the slow movement of each breath. Her back was taut and rigid, filled with the tension of a terrible day.

  She’s all locked up; she always carries her stress in her upper back.

  Aida let her mental hand linger there and was surprised when she felt the muscles in her daughter’s back give a small release.

  That’s it, sweetie. Relax. Breathe.

  She smiled inwardly and noticed in the intense sunlight Natalia’s golden-brown hair showed its red highlights. She had it pulled back in a quick ponytail and had missed several strands, which were tucked behind her ears.

  The footstool Natalia was sitting on was an institutional tan color and looked like it should have a matching chair. Her messenger bag was at her feet. Schoolbooks and a laptop peeked out of it. The floor was eggshell white, with flecks of blue and gray; it too looked institutional.

  She’s in my hospital room, next to my bed.

  Out of curiosity, she wanted to see how she looked. Maybe she could even see some of the monitors, which might help her decipher what was going on.

  Aida pulled back a little bit to try to take in the rest of the room but found she could only see Natalia. The scene around her daughter devolved into an indistinct white blur, as if she were looking into the room at Natalia through a pinhole. As she watched Nat, she wondered when Greg would arrive and when Matthew would speak to him. Natalia’s breathing slowed, and Aida could tell she was moving into a deeper sleep.

  The scene, which before had been silent, now added a soundtrack: the slow, steady beeping of the heart monitor.

  My heart monitor. Thank God! This proves I’m still alive and I still have a body. Despite the distress the current situation was causing Natalia, Aida was relieved to be in the hospital and receiving proper care.

  Above the steady rhythm of the monitor, she heard a gentle tapping on the doorjamb, but Natalia didn’t budge. Aida sensed that another pearl had approached at an oblique angle, one that would touch her path and then move off a short distance only to return later, like a stone skipping across the surface of a pond. She took a guess as to who it might be, and then she took a gamble.

  “Natalia, get up. The doctor’s here,” Aida said in that commanding tone all mothers have. Natalia’s head snapped up out of her hands, and Aida heard the beginning of what had to be her daughter saying “Mom,” but the sound was cut off just as soon as it began as the pinhole winked closed.

  The transition back to the Wave World wasn’t as jarring this time; perhaps she was getting used to this. As she had thought, another pearl had approached the two of them at a flat angle, touched them, and glanced off. It was now slowly paralleling the two of them a short distance away. From what Aida could see, neither her own nor Natalia’s path had been drastically changed by this gentle contact with the doctor.

  Fascinating. This was very different than the hard, acute angles the paths of the people on the plane took after the accident or when I helped get the survivors away from the burning wreckage. Our interactions with people change the course of their lives and our own.

  It was something she had always known, but to see it played out in front of her with real people experiencing real consequences drove the point home as it never had before.

  How easily we get wrapped up in our own concerns and needs, and in doing so, we fo
rget our actions affect others, she thought. But it isn’t just the actions of people—or the interactions of pearls as they appear here—that can change the course of a person’s life. Events change them too, like the accident on the airplane, and that line that hit me and took me back to campus for a moment. The lines—they’re events, moving through the world—and when they wash over the pearls, the pearls can be moved.

  “Did you see into your daughter’s experiences?” said an unfamiliar voice. “My name is Max. Matthew asked me to keep you company. It looked like you did, and if you accomplished it so soon, you have an incredible gift.”

  A semitransparent pearl was playing peekaboo with her through the dark, undulating background. “He said I wouldn’t be alone. Is that you over there?” she asked.

  “I’m right here,” replied Max as his pearl moved into full view. “Can you see me?”

  “Yes, I can see your pearl. You’re not as closed off; you’re almost semitransparent.”

  “But can you see me as you just saw your daughter? Go ahead and give it a try. Focus just on me. You’re right—I’m open to your seeing me.”

  Aida studied Max’s pearl, starting from a broad view and then diving in to smaller and smaller details. Both ends of the elongated pearl were an off-white eggshell color and completely opaque. The milky threads that came out of the front end bent around at a hard angle to flow backward over the entire body of the pearl. They were easy to see against the blackness of the background but became the sheerest of white silk, almost invisible, when she looked at the body of Max’s pearl through them. Then they wove into a tight, solid rope as they came together off the back of the pearl like a snail’s trail, telling the story of where the pearl had been.

  The edges of the pearl vibrated and, in the speed of their motion, became indistinct to Aida’s eyes. The closer she looked, the less certain she was of the edge’s location at any moment. Max’s pearl filled her entire view now. She moved her focus away from the edge and toward the brighter center, where the surface of the pearl was more like oiled paper, diffusing and spreading the light that came from within.

  “There you go. You’re getting warmer now.” Max’s voice was distinct and close; she heard the tip of his tongue slide off his top teeth when he said “There,” as though he were only an inch away and whispering into her ear. “Bring your focus in a little tighter on the light.”

  Based on a lifetime of experience, Aida expected she’d squint, looking straight into a light source as she was. But the light expanded and caused her no discomfort. In the middle of the light she saw a figure, a man of color seated on a cushion and dressed in a simple loose-fitting robe. His head and face were clean-shaven, but the deep creases around his eyes and mouth told his age.

  “I can see you!”

  “Yes, it’s me. Congratulations! What you did in your few short hours here took me four years to learn. Now back out and do it again.”

  “How do I do that? Back out, I mean?”

  “Just let go a little bit. You might try looking away.”

  When Aida looked off to one side, the image of Max, in his robe, on his cushion, vanished.

  “Oh! That was different. I just jumped right out. It wasn’t like the long dive in when I was focusing on you the first time.” Feeling empowered, she set herself to trying again, exhilarated at the sense of control.

  “It always takes longer to find something when you don’t know what you’re looking for,” Max said. “It’ll be faster the more you practice.”

  This time Aida went straight to the center of Max’s pearl and let the light block out everything else. She reached in, and there he was, sitting on the cushion, just as before. Without letting go, she tried to zoom out to see more of the room he was in, but again the edges of the pinhole got in the way and blocked her view.

  “Why can’t I see more of where you are? I can see you clearly, but only a little bit of your surroundings.”

  “In order to see the physical, me, as you are doing right now, your focus is so narrowed that you can see only me. There simply isn’t room to see much of anything else.” Max’s explanation was gentle, as if to a novitiate. “Your reality is greatly influenced by what you choose to focus on, and the purpose of all types of meditation is to learn to control and direct your focus. You must be a long-time practitioner to have come so far so quickly.”

  “Actually”—the excitement drained from her voice as she spoke—“I’m not meditating, and I wasn’t meditating when I came here. I practice mindful breathing when I do my yoga and while working on my research. What you taught me just now…it’s the first time I’ve felt like I’ve had some control since I got here,” she said, deciding to feel better about where she was.

  “Matthew told me your situation was…different. I now see why he said that. You’re having a remarkable experience, Dr. Doxiphus. You should consider that perhaps there’s a reason for it.”

  Missing his point entirely, she replied, “There’s always a reason; there’s always a causal event.”

  Max was silent for a moment. “Aida,” he suddenly said, “you need to let go. Someone’s coming to you and your daughter.”

  Excited, Aida looked away from Max, exchanging her laser-focused view of him for a floodlight view of the Wave World, hoping the new arrival was Greg. Natalia was still orbiting and had been for some time; her filament trail had formed a spiral around Aida’s perfectly straight line, both paths showing their immediate past. Another pearl was coming straight at her; it would hit her broadside when it got there. Aida focused on it, trying to peer inside, anticipating seeing Greg, but was disappointed when she was stopped cold; the eggshell exterior of the pearl was an impenetrable wall. She didn’t feel any connection with this pearl. He or she was a stranger.

  Hmm, not Greg. Well, I can’t see who you are, but I can see where you came from.

  Aida followed the approaching pearl’s trail and saw that it continued straight back for short distance to where it had been entangled with a second trail. She followed the path of the second trail forward from the knot and caught a glimpse of the second pearl just before a black wave of the background obscured it.

  The two of them talked or interacted somehow. The second one deflected this approaching pearl’s path toward me, then hid itself.

  The other pearl had reached her now and was slowly orbiting just like Nat had but on the opposite side, always keeping Aida between them. Now that it was closer, Aida tried to peer inside again. The rigid shell proved to be a thin veneer, but underneath she met a dense white fog that obscured her vision just as effectively as the outer shell had earlier. She pressed against it but couldn’t make any further headway. After pulling back out, Aida realized the encounter had left her with the impression that this was a woman who was there to get something from her—she was in a hurry and was anxious. She definitely wasn’t there to help Aida. Matthew’s warning came back to her: in the Particle World she was in a catatonic state and vulnerable; people could do anything they wanted to her. She pictured herself in a hospital bed, powerless to defend herself against this person.

  This isn’t right. She shouldn’t be here. What’s she doing to me?

  “Get away from me! Don’t touch me!” Aida screamed in impotence at the stranger. “Nat, stop her!” she said, reaching out to her daughter. Nat’s pearl sped up in its orbit, vibrating in anger, trying to catch up to the stranger, only to be outmaneuvered. In a move Aida had never seen before, Nat broke from her orbit and leapt directly between Aida and the stranger, her fury palpable. Aida loved her daughter for it, but seeing Nat endangered went against the core of Aida’s being.

  Oh, God! No! No! Nat’s protecting me with her body!

  “Nat, get out of here!” But Natalia’s pearl didn’t budge; it was glued to Aida and followed her straight along. After an eternal moment of panic later, the woman’s pearl left the two of them with a hard ninety-degree turn and disappeared into the rolling black waves. Aida felt Natalia’s a
damant resolution soften as the woman moved away. It was replaced with the nauseated shakes of an adrenaline letdown.

  She had been so focused on her daughter and the woman that she didn’t notice another pearl that had been carried to them on the crest of an event wave; it moved along with them. Nat’s steady spiral around Aida slowed and changed into more of a straight line that paralleled her own, the better to interact with this new pearl.

  As Aida watched, Natalia’s violent vibrations settled down. A quick check told Aida this wasn’t Greg, though it was a male, and he was clearly having a calming effect on her daughter. She tightened her focus on him and, in a camera-shutter click of an instant, she caught the image of an anxious young man in a medic’s uniform. Why would a medic…she stopped in midthought. Ah, this is probably the man who worked on me and brought me in, but why did he come back?

  As the three of them moved along together, Aida found no answer to her question, but at least there was a certain peace and balance between Natalia and the medic that she found comforting.

  I’ll have to keep an eye on this one; he seems to be good for Natalia.

  Aida turned her gaze back to the webs of consciousness. The most distant ones are like stars, she thought, except that in an hour’s time, real stars would have moved against the dark background, and these had been fixed in place since she first had seen them. She noticed the larger groupings of pearlescent light had shifted their positions against those distant stars; the change in position was most likely from her own motion. From this, Aida reasoned that parallax still applied in this view of the world, and that was comforting too. The laws of physics are universal!

  Almost imperceptibly, the stars in the distance sank below the triad of herself, Natalia, and the medic as she watched in surprise.

  What in the world?

  Her view of the distant stars pitched at hard angles up and down while Nat and the medic remained steady with her. A powerful event wave was passing through the three of them, making them bob like corks on an ocean breaker.