by Joe Heap
‘We’ve dimmed the light. Can you see anything?’
Everything is blurred. There is light like Nova has never known before – insistent light, pushing into her eyes. As she watches, the brightness curdles. She concentrates, balancing on the edge of this new threshold, trying not to fall forwards or back. There are no shapes yet, only clots of light.
‘I can see light … much brighter … I’m not sure yet.’
‘There’s no rush. We’ll wait.’
Nova keeps watching the blobs of light as they become more defined, their colours separating out. Then something changes, like someone opening a door into a room where music is playing. One second there is only muffled noise. Then, suddenly, there is detail.
‘I can see you … I think.’
The thing in front of her seems vast, terrifying. She turns away – her heart is pounding.
The world is a dangerous place when you can’t see what’s moving around you, the tracks and arcs of objects passing by, but she has never felt fear like this. This isn’t a fear for self-preservation; it’s like holy terror. The image in front of her seems to press physically onto her eyeballs.
‘Is … is that your face?’
‘Yes,’ she chuckles. ‘I’m sorry that it had to be your first.’
Nova’s audience murmur their laughter – she is funny! she is cute! she is an inspirational video! Nova turns back to face the doctor. Instinctively, she reaches out to touch the thing in front of her. She doesn’t even try to flirt – she feels sick. The thing feels like a face. But the image is so unfamiliar, she can’t match the two.
A raiding party has landed in her skull. The disciplined divisions of her sensory stimuli – officer ranks of sound, touch and smell, and the deck-swabs of balance, temperature and so on – are being forced back by this pirate band. At the back of her brain, where the optic nerves terminate, a steady stream of invaders is flooding the posts where touch and hearing have long stood sentry. These raiders aren’t afraid to hack through synapses, burn neuronal bridges, in pursuit of their prize.
Nova looks again. Her own hand, which she is seeing for the first time, blends into the mixture of shapes and colours that swim and blur. This seems to be a nose, but when she lets it go, it drifts from its rightful place. The eyes, burning like terrible stars, move in irregular orbits around each other. Eyes watching eyes; circles watching circles. She searches for new words – flaming, flaring, blazing … There is a flash of white things, clustered.
‘It’ll take some getting used to,’ the doctor says, ‘but for now, congratulations.’
‘I asked for brushed steel. It says brushed steel in the plans.’
‘It is brushed … lightly brushed.’
‘Lightly? At a microscopic level? Because my optometrist tells me I’m 20/20, and that beam looks kinda smooth to me.’
The foreman sighs.
‘Look, Ms Tomassi, this is just the way it is. Sometimes there’s variability between what we order and what arrives, and you have to improvise.’
‘Improvise? I’m an architect, not Charlie Parker. I did the creative part already, and it’s here.’ Kate stabs the papers so hard the foreman winces. ‘So don’t talk to me about “variability”. They pay me to design their ideal office, and they pay you to build my design. You should have sent this shit back as soon as it arrived.’
‘Well, it’s unpacked now.’
Kate rubs her 20/20 eyes with thumb and forefinger. Her head is throbbing.
She feels like she’s going to e-x-p-l-o-d-e.
‘All right. We’ll use them for the hall. Sand them, paint them black to match, nobody’ll know the difference.’
‘Thanks.’
‘But from now on, check the order before it’s unpacked, or I’m sending it back on your account.’
The foreman says nothing. Kate looks over his plans, gathering her thoughts. The office is across the road from Borough Market, a consultancy firm with aspirations of cool. She prefers the office on the page to the one taking shape. The ratios are perfect on paper, but translating them into real objects is imperfect. It’s like the film of a favourite book – it might be good, but it’s never the same as what is in your head. Not that she has the time to read books.
‘How’s the corner office coming on?’
‘Half done. The frame looks great.’
She has designed an exposed wooden frame for the room, with window panes that make it look like a river boat, or an old train carriage. They’re going to love it.
‘Let’s take a look.’
She picks up her phone and shop-bought macchiato, leaving her hard hat on the table, and follows the foreman to the other half of the office. Pine beams are being divided by a circular saw, aluminium panels riveted, and, over in the corner, an arc welder is connecting two girders. She glances at the dazzling blue fire.
‘What do you think?’ The foreman points. It’s just the frame, without any of the panels or windows, like a three-dimensional drawing.
‘Looks good. Is it sturdy?’
‘See for yourself.’
She steps into the doorway and gives the beam a hard slap.
The frame, in fact, is not sturdy. The upper section is loosely pinned together by a carpenter who will return later to finish it off. The lintel, released by the impact, swings down without warning. At the last moment, Kate dives out of the way. The lintel hits the floor, the sound echoing through the room.
‘Shit! Kate …’ the foreman breathes.
‘That was too close,’ is all she can say.
She feels the tingle in her hands and feet, the pulse fluttering in her throat. She gets to her feet and starts to walk away from the frame. She wants to say something to the foreman, to curse at him, but the words won’t come out.
She feels the room tilt
once,
and
twice,
and
threeeeeee times.
She stumbles forwards.
‘You okay?’ the foreman asks, more amused than concerned.
Kate doesn’t respond – she can see a shape forming in front of her. It’s a circle. The circle shimmers, and it reminds her of a childhood memory. In bed at night, when it was dark, she would close her eyes and press the heels of her hands into her eyes, until a mysterious light built up, stars sparkling to life in the darkness, and a shimmering circle would appear before her. It was a sort of secret magic.
The circle is there now, without her summoning it.
She smiles at the appearance of this old friend before falling to the floor and blacking out.
Kate wakes but does not wake. She is no longer asleep, but this does not seem like waking either. Her brain is bubbling like a boiling pan. Memories roll fatly to the surface and break.
BUBBLEPOPPINGTINSELBREATHINGPOLARBEARANDITWOULDBESOSIMPLETOSTAYINBEDALLDAY
Kate can taste marshmallow cocoa – the sort her father made on cold winter Sundays, before church. The warm drink sloshes around in her mouth, and she can feel the half-melted mini marshmallows, until it all fades away and she catches a glimpse of where she is.
PULSARS!FLARING!!INDEEPSPACE!THELAWNOFGRASSBEHINDHERHOUSE!AND!!COLALOLLIPOPS!!GONEFUZZYUNDERTHECOUCH!
Kate is lying on her back on a gurney. There are people around her, but she can’t see any of their faces. All the people are wearing clothes of a single colour – blue and green and crimson – and this makes Kate want to laugh. She is moving down the corridor, but then another memory blister bursts, and she is gone.
Kate is standing in the middle of the road, waist deep in snow. Usually, she wouldn’t be allowed to stand in the road outside their house, and wouldn’t want to anyway – it is always busy with traffic. She has never seen snow like this before, and more miraculous than the snow itself is the way it has upended the usual rules. There are no cars, no noise, and today there will be no school.
PILLPOPPINGPERFECTPRANKSTERPRISTINEPRALINEPROPANEPROPELLERPRANK
A house party,
last year of university. Kate feels the subwoofer rumble of the bass in her chest. Cheap disco lights stain the room red-blue-green in endless repetition. She sips the ‘party punch’, which is equal parts tropical squash, peach schnapps and vodka. She’s here with friends – her flatmates – eager to get shitfaced now their dissertations are turned in. Kate has a final bit of coursework to complete and has vowed to have only one drink.
She’s sitting in the corner of the room, watching the windows weep while everyone else gets off with one another. Brian comes over and starts chatting to her. Kate has known Brian – or known of him – since first year. He has a reputation for not owning a towel, or shower gel. She feels sort of sorry for him, but her sympathy only goes so far. In the humidity of the room, Brian is a lot to take.
She must have backed up into the corner, trying to politely reply to his line of conversation – about how shit the music is – which Brian only takes as an invitation to draw closer. She tries to get out of the conversation several times, tries to catch the attention of each of her friends. Everything has failed when a hand rests lightly on her shoulder.
‘Oh, hey! I should get you that drink I promised you.’
Kate looks up into the face above her, noticing that this person is a stranger. But, if she hesitates, it’s only a moment.
‘Oh, yeah. Sorry, Brian – I’ll catch you in a bit, yeah?’
The mystery man offers his hand, pulls Kate up to standing, and silently they walk out of the house, through the kitchen, Tony grabbing a couple of beers from an ice bucket on the way out.
The night air washes over her, a total-body feeling something like love.
‘You want this? Tony offers her the bottle, smiling. She nods, and he opens both beers with a tool on his keyring.
‘How did you know, in there?’
‘How did I know that the cute girl pressed into the corner, trying to breathe through her mouth, wanted some fresh air?’
Kate laughs, hoping he can’t see her blush in the dark. ‘He’s not so bad, Brian …’
Tony says nothing, a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth.
They stand and watch the night sky, sipping beer, while the house heaves and sweats behind them, and the delicious cold dries them out and makes their skin taut.
WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UUUUUUUP
Kate is in a new room, and the gurney has stopped moving. The colour-coded people are moving around her, but she still can’t see their faces. She tries to hold on to this place, this room, but it’s difficult when nobody is talking to her. If she could just have a conversation … but Kate sinks down, as though under the waters of a lurid bubble bath, choked by rainbows and glitter.
JELLY AND ICE QUEEN BEE BONNET
She is sitting at her dormroom window, holding a crayon and looking out over the grounds. In front of their building is a winding path, with patchy grass either side, and two trees, one beech on their side of the path and one sycamore on the other.
Kate has drawn the view from her window many times, in pencil and charcoal, with pastels and watercolours, but every time it looks a little different. This is because she is not very good at drawing, she thinks, and smiles. But the act of drawing is relaxing. Unlike her architectural drawings, on paper or on a computer, there are no wrong answers with a painting. She doesn’t have to worry about getting the dimensions wrong, or having the fire doors in the right place. In a week’s time she will be moving out of dorms, going home until she can find a job in London.
Today she is drawing with the box of kids’ crayons her flatmates got her as an affectionately jokey goodbye. Kate likes the crayons. The waxy smell reminds her of childhood in a nonspecific way, the same as poster paint and spaghetti hoops. She puts down one crayon (Dandelion) and is reaching for another (Granny Smith Apple) when her phone starts to buzz in her pocket. Kate takes it out and looks at the caller.
Mum and Dad Home
Later, Kate will think that she knew, from the moment she saw the caller, that something was wrong. But that’s not quite right. She answers the phone, and it’s at the moment of hearing her mother’s voice that she feels her stomach twist.
She doesn’t say much for a minute. A minute is all it takes. When the call is done she checks the call log on her phone. One minute and nine seconds.
That was all it took to erase her father.
She sits frozen for a minute more, looking at the phone in her hand, at the view out of her window, at the half-finished drawing. How stupid, it suddenly seems, to have drawn this view over and over. When was the last time she spoke to her father? She used to call every week, but recently she has been too busy.
She thinks of her father, suddenly unwell on the bus, feeling the pain radiate through his shoulder and down his arm. She thinks of how long it has been since he heard his daughter’s voice. There is no grief – not yet. All Kate feels is a furious hatred of herself. She wants to feel pain, to do something truly awful to herself.
Kate dials another number on the phone, listens to the dialling tone and it’s only when she hears the voice on the other end that her tears start to fall. Her voice sounds far away.
‘Hi, Tony, it’s me … Kate … would you … would you come to my dorm? Please?’
HE LOVES ME HE LOVES ME NOT HE LOVES ME HE LOVES ME NOT HE …
There is no memory this time, but Kate has gone somewhere deep within herself. Everything is going wrong, mixing together and bubbling over and melting out of shape … she can no longer separate sounds from smells, tastes from words, faces from days of the week. Everything is jumbled up, and Kate doesn’t know how she’s ever going to sort this mess out.
The circle shimmers in front of her.
Outside – in the world beyond Kate’s skull – a plastic mask is placed over her mouth, and she breathes the thin gas seeping from it. The bubbling world inside her brain fades by degrees, then is gone.
Kate ceases to be.
Five
May
NOVA SITS ON A plastic chair in the alcove where they keep the communal phone. The ward is quiet at this time of night, and Nova misses the noise. She doesn’t want to be overheard. They have taken away her mobile phone, to stop her from using the accessibility features, on the premise that total immersion is the key to learning a new language. For the first time, ‘total immersion’ seems to Nova like a synonym for drowning.
There are a lot of rules to learn. They’re like rules of grammar, and Nova is listing them all in her head. Maybe one day she’ll be able to write them down.
RULE OF SEEING NO.1
If object A occludes object B, object A is closer than object B.
This rule is simple enough, but tricky to put into practice. Everything is two-dimensional to Nova – streetlights through the window look like bright stains on the glass, clouds in the sky look as close as the polystyrene ceiling tiles in the ward. Nova remembers a quote from Jorge Luis Borges – going blind at fifty-five, he described losing his sight as a process by which ‘everything near becomes distant’. Learning to see is like the opposite of that – everything that was once spaced out is now tightly compressed around her. The sky pushes down; walls vacuum-pack her.
RULE OF SEEING NO.2
Objects look smaller as their distance increases.
Again, this rule is easy to understand, but judging how big something should be is difficult. She cannot tell the difference between the colourful gumballs in the bowl by the nurse’s station and the squishy yoga balls they get the patients to sit on for rehab. Often, she will reach out to grab an object, only to be told it’s on the other side of the room.
The hospital doesn’t have a ward solely for people learning to see. Nova is in the Stroke Rehabilitation Unit. A lot of the exercises are the same, they tell her. She feels bad for thinking it, but the sounds of the other patients – slurring their names and shuffling around – make her skin crawl.
RULE OF SEEING NO.17a
There is no consiste
ncy between which objects are transparent, translucent, opaque or reflective. For example, a lightbulb can be transparent or translucent. Water can be transparent or opaque, depending on the conditions.
RULE OF SEEING NO.17b
Objects can display more than one of these properties at once. For example, soap bubbles can be transparent and reflective, at the same time.
Nova has four phone numbers written on a scrap of paper, but deciphering these marks could take ages, and she’s only got ten minutes. Why does she feel like she’s being punished? The first number is her parents’ landline, but she can’t face their questions right now. They haven’t seen her yet – they wanted to be there, when the bandages came off, but she told them to wait until she was out of hospital. In case it didn’t work, she had said. The second number is Alex’s mobile, but he’s changed it recently and she doesn’t know it off by heart. She will see him soon anyway. The last two numbers are John’s and Rebecca’s.
Though she has forgotten many things about Rebecca, Nova can still remember her phone number clearly. She’s surprised the number hasn’t changed – Rebecca loses things faster than she can acquire them. Credit cards and umbrellas, scarves and sunglasses all get left on public transport or in bars. Books and films lent to her go missing and never resurface. Rebecca seems naturally resistant to these things, shedding them like oil off a non-stick pan. Nova can’t understand how something as insubstantial as a number has clung on.
She dials, and thinks of hanging up when the line clicks.
‘Yeah?’ Rebecca says. There is noise in the background, a crowded room.
‘Becca? It’s Nova.’
‘Who? Hang on – I’ll go outside.’
There is a lot of rustling, garbled voices, and the line gets quieter.
‘Yello?’
‘It’s Nova.’
‘Hey, babe. What’s this number?’
‘I’m calling from the hospital.’
‘Oh, hey, yeah! Shit!’
‘You forgot.’ Nova accuses.
‘Not forgot! I just didn’t think you’d still be in there.’