The Half That You See

by Rebecca Rowland

  “This wasn’t done in secret.”

  Colin didn’t really want to take the tablet from her but couldn’t think how to refuse. He asked, “Is Beth upset?”

  Denise raised her hands. “She’s upset. I’m upset. It’s upsetting.”

  The clip started in his normal classroom. Marcus Potts and Heather Buzu were giggling into the camera, Potts saying, “Check it out! He’s fucking lost it, man.”

  Then cut to Colin himself, standing in the front of the classroom, beside his table. The white board behind him showed The War of the Roses.

  “This was just last week. Thursday, I think.”

  On screen, Colin was standing there, but that was all he was doing. He looked frozen in place, his mouth slightly open as though he was in the act of saying something, his right arm out from his side a few inches. Potts, clearly holding a phone, backed up, recording himself as he approached Colin. Another student bounced between them, laughing, and someone else ran around the back, apparently playing some sort of tag game around Colin, who remained immobile. There was a lot of noise in that room.

  Now Potts and Buzu were standing either side of him, posing and giggling. Buzu stood on tiptoes and pretended to kiss his cheek. She said, “Bin like this five minutes, innit.”

  Then Colin seemed to give himself a shake and come back from wherever he had been. He blinked and frowned and looked around. “What are you doing out of your seats? Sit down and simmer down, you lot. Now, where were we?”

  He turned to look at the white board, and started talking, resuming his lecture on the Plantagenets.

  Colin, sitting in his living room at home, found that he could recall that moment, when he chased the students back into their seats, the struggle to get them focused on the medieval struggle for the English throne.

  “I sound surprisingly Scottish.”

  Denise put her hand on his. “Colin, what’s happening? Where were you?”

  Colin knew very well where he had been, but it wasn’t something he wanted to tell his wife.

  He started the clip again, frowning as he stared more closely at himself, the students hopping and playing around him. Laughing. Shouting even.

  He jerked suddenly, and pointed. “Did you see that?”

  “See what?”

  He moved the curser back again. “Don’t you think the kids look kind of…blurry?”

  “It’s been taken on some kind of phone.”

  “The classroom isn’t blurry. I’m not blurry.”

  “You’re standing still! They’re not.”

  “And look, right there.”

  Colin replayed again, and again as Denise stared, not at the screen, but at him, staying quiet.

  “Can’t you see it? It’s like a jump in the film. Like all the kids wink out, just for a fraction of a second. And the sound goes. It’s silent.”

  “You’re scaring me now.”

  Colin tried over and over to catch the moment, the millisecond. Finally, he pointed. “Look.”

  The frozen image was badly out of focus. But it seemed to show Colin standing in a completely empty classroom. One with no children in it. Denise pressed her lips together and made an obvious attempt to stay cool.

  “What do you think you see?”

  Colin pointed to the screen. He wanted to say, You asked where I was? I was right there. On my own.

  “Doesn’t that look odd to you?”

  “It’s a blurry still from a video taken on a phone, by a kid who was jumping around because his teacher had gone into a trance.”

  When he didn’t reply, she asked, “Are you still going to that therapist? The Button Lady?”

  “Occasionally.”

  “You need to make an appointment, and show this to her.”

  The reason Colin called Dr. Tambini “The Button Lady” was, unsurprisingly, because of a button. A big, fake plastic one that sat on a table beside her clients. It wasn’t attached to anything, but it could still switch things off. It represented safety. She had told Colin, you can talk about anything in here, anything at all. If things ever get too heavy, to find yourself in the deep woods and don’t like it, just press the button and we move on to something else. Kind of like a reset.

  He had never pressed the button. Now, Denise stood right in front of him and put her hands on his arms.

  “You’ll go and see her?”

  “Ok.”

  “And bring this with you, I’m serious. She needs to know, Colin.”

  “Best seats in the house.”

  Colin had said those words the first time he took Beth to see London Pulse, and now it was what she said every time. Colin had hated the idea of going to football or netball, all those crowds, shouting and getting excited, but Beth’s pester power was significant, and she had no qualms about laying on the emotional blackmail.

  Now, sitting in the reserved section to see Pulse take on Bath, watching the netball players fly back and forward only feet away, she leaned towards him and said, “I’m scared. But I know I have to.”

  Beth never admitted to being scared, about anything. It was as though she was determined to avoid admitting to anything negative.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The operation.” She indicated the players, moving so gracefully around the court. “If it works, I can play netball. I’ll be good at it.”

  He compressed his lips and looked away, wondering why she had chosen this moment to talk about the surgery, but glad, for once, of the noise and distraction.

  “I bet you will.”

  “I was good at volleyball, before I got ill.”

  “I know.”

  “So, netball. It’s what I want to do.”

  “I don’t see why not, the height of you. And there’s nothing to be scared of.”

  “There’s a one in twenty chance I won’t wake up.”

  Right on the money. He had to put something into it, make sure his voice was normal. “Who told you that?”

  She shrugged. “You can find that stuff online. I’ve got a seventy-five percent chance of full recovery, so I can play netball. Twenty percent chance of failure. Five percent chance of dying during the op.”

  He nodded, and watched the game, unwilling to trust his voice for the moment, so there was a pause before she said, “So, I’m scared. But I have to do it.”

  At that moment, the crowd roared and Beth raised her banner. “Yay! Go Pulse!”

  Colin put his laptop on the table beside the fake white button, showing the scene of him in the classroom, Potts and Buzu bouncing around in the foreground.

  Dr. Tambini frowned. “It’s like a deep trance state. Can you recall this?”

  “I can recall something, but not this exactly.”

  “What can you recall?”

  Colin took a deep breath and brought up the blurry screenshot, himself alone in the room. “This. I was imagining everybody disappearing.”

  “But they didn’t.”

  “So, how do you explain this image?”

  Tambini seldom looked surprised but she looked surprised now. “Why do you think it even requires explanation?”

  “This is from the film Potts made. Everybody but me winked out.”

  “Colin, think. That makes no sense. If Potts wasn’t there to record the image, it wouldn’t exist.”

  “I guess.”

  “Just because an occurrence isn’t easily explained, that doesn’t mean something mystical has taken place. It just means we can’t see how it happened. I’m more concerned that your comfortable fantasy of solitude is turning into something much more significant. Maybe I shouldn’t have encouraged it.”

  Colin stayed quiet, staring at himself alone in the classroom.

  “Here is a question for you, and I want you to really think about it. Imagine, for a moment, that you could do something, so you could change things so fundamentally, you were living in an empty world? Would you do it?”

  “What sort of thing?”

  She thought fo
r a moment, then her face cleared and she pointed to her ridiculous, oversized button.

  “What if you could press that, and everybody…” she clicked her fingers, “… was gone?”

  “Everybody?”

  “Everybody in the world. They would just wink out.”

  Colin stared at the button and shook his head, but Tambini wasn’t letting it go yet.

  “One press of the button and you’re deliciously alone, in complete silence, your fantasy. Aren’t you tempted? All you have to do is reach out, and it’s done.”

  “I love Beth more than anything else in the whole world. I’ve told you that.”

  Tambini threw her hands up. “Exactly! Exactly. So, why is this a fantasy that you find so soothing? The one you use to lull yourself to sleep.”

  “I’ve wondered about that. Is it bad, d’you think? Evil?”

  Tambini had been leaning forward, but now she sat back.

  “It’s just a fantasy, Colin, nothing more. The important thing about a proper fantasy is that it can’t come true. It’s safe, and you don’t need to feel guilty.”

  She pointed to the screen, Colin standing in the classroom. “But this instantaneous trance state is a worrying development. Have you ever been tested for epilepsy?”

  The M25 on a bank holiday Monday. Colin had argued against going anywhere, saying the roads would be so crammed with cars it would be hell on earth. Now they had been stopped for twenty solid minutes, not moving at all. A refrigerated lorry to the side of them was pumping out particularly hot and noxious exhaust fumes, looming high over them. Up ahead, somebody was laying on the horn, really going for it, which seemed beyond pointless as nobody was going anywhere.

  Four solid lanes of stopped traffic, baking in the sun. The car directly in front of Colin managed to move forward about ten feet and a shiny black BMW to his right made a sudden surge into the space, stopping at a radical angle.

  Denise threw her hands up. “What the hell did he do that for?”

  An arm snaked out from the driver side of the BMW, raising an angry finger. Even though the windows were all closed, Colin could hear the guy shouting, a woman in there too. It sounded like the word fuck repeated over and over.

  He turned to the side, where the refrigerated lorry seemed somehow closer than before. Higher. Feeling hemmed in and pressurized, he forced his shoulders to sink, using the relaxation techniques Tambini had taught him, making his secret little circle with the thumb and forefinger.

  Colin closed his eyes for a moment, no more than a few seconds, and then opened them again, picturing same scene, but with him alone in the cab and no other cars or lorries in sight. The M25, all four lanes, gloriously empty. Nothing in the mirror and a straight long road ahead. He put the car into gear and moved forward, picking up the pace on the wide tarmac, all the way to seventy and kept going.

  It was a joy, really. The Audi was no slouch and he let the needle come up over a hundred, plenty left in the engine yet. It maxed out at around 130, the road flying under the wheels now, but still it felt smooth, under control. Reaching top speed, all sound fell away, nothing from the engine and nothing from the road, so that he flew along in deep silence.

  Behind him, the sudden intrusive blare of a horn, many horns, the deep-throated honk of a lorry in there. Denise was pulling at his arm, “Colin! Colin, what’s wrong?”

  Beth was leaning between the seats, shouting something like, Dad, wake up. Sounding panicked. The road ahead was clear now, for a long way, cars streaming by on either side, many of them sliding into the empty lane in front of the Audi.

  Colin shook himself and went to put the car in gear, but Denise grabbed his hand.

  “No! Colin, you’re not well. Don’t try to drive.”

  He glared at her and threw her hand off. “I’m fine. I’m just fine.”

  He eased the car forward, and the sound of the horns died away.

  It had been a horrible day of traffic jams and the beach, when they reached it, had barely enough room to lay a blanket. At the back of everybody’s mind was the incident on the M25.

  Colin managed to help Beth into the sea—she had been on the school swim team only two years ago—but all she could do was float now, with a little help from her father, and she soon became chilled.

  Finally home and in bed, Colin had been lying awake for almost an hour, none of his usual tricks or fantasies soothing him to sleep tonight. Denise snored lightly against his shoulder, as she had done since a minute after she put her book aside. In the hallway, Eleanor padded around, her breathing loud and wheezy, muttering. Outside, the usual racket of late-night traffic. Somebody shouting, angry.

  He took a long breath and counted down from ten, trying to make himself relax. He imagined himself somewhere walking out from the apartment block, really striding out, putting distance from all the problems and worries that it represented and himself. It wasn’t hard to put the yards in, then the miles, because he was the only person in all of London. The streets were empty. The houses were empty. He came to a pub and walked in, smelling the old beer smell. The lighting was low and he wandered around the back of the bar, pouring himself a glass of beer, which he took back outside, sipping it as he wandered.

  After a while, he had to admit to himself where he was going, but that was ok. He came to a stop finally at the house Dr. Tambini used as her clinic, pausing as if for breath.

  Colin knew why he was there, what he was about to do. He pushed into the hallway and stood for a moment, listening, hearing the low rumble of a man’s voice coming from her studio.

  He entered without knocking, seeing his therapist look up in surprise, and a small, overweight man twisting in the chair, eyes wide.

  Tambini came to her feet, palms out. “Colin! You can’t just…”

  He ignored her. Ignored the man, spluttering with irritation. He took three long steps to the table with the big white plastic button, hand coming up. He smiled at her as he pressed, and saw her momentary confusion before she was gone.

  Colin came awake as usual, just before the radio-alarm sounded. He reached out a long, slim arm and turned the volume all the way to silent, just as he did every morning. Then he lay for a while in the deep silence of the city. It was so profoundly quiet, he could hear his own heartbeat. He swept his arm across the other side of the bed, and smiled to find that he was completely alone.

  Daughters of the Sun

  Matt Masucci

  Nestled between the slash pine and saw palmetto, all the violence of Florida’s flora, someone stood on the far shore from his house on the pond. As the fog breathed, small eddies of white mist shifted and curled revealing again the person, naked and unmoving. From this distance, though, he could not determine the gender.

  Chilled air filled his lungs, made him feel alive, and even brought him out of the fog of last night’s nightmare. He whistled. It echoed over the water before the mist consumed the sound, just as it shrouded the person again. The mist would clear soon, revealing the entirety of the lake, its small island, and the far shore. Beyond stood mangroves and cypress, pines covered in kudzu, and a world draped in Spanish moss.

  He whistled again. The mist whistled back.

  Cornelius crashed out of the brush off to his left. The golden retriever ran up to him, not nearly as nimble as he used to be.

  But then, neither was the man.

  The mist departed, thinning before clearing completely. It would be back tomorrow.

  He saw the far shore now, all greens and browns with a hint of red from the Brazilian pepper-trees, readying for blooms.

  Still, the person hadn’t moved.

  Hurried, he forced down a slice of dry toast and second cup of coffee. The propranolol pill hit his stomach, and a warm liquid poured down over him, then slid under his skin, until it pooled in his fingertips. The doctor had said it would help him control his blood pressure but to let him know if he experienced any side effects.

  “Like what?” he had asked.

&n
bsp; The doctor had closed his medical file. “Anything out of the ordinary.”

  He had laughed at the doctor. “I don’t know anything about ordinary.”

  Cornelius wound about himself next to his food dish. He wasn’t up for more exercise, so the man headed out on his own. He grabbed a machete from the shed. It hung on a rusty nail. He should have taken better care of the blade, but it was a consumer’s world, and a new one would be cheap. He gave it a quick sharpening with a whetstone before setting out toward the lake.

  Walking past the water, he heard the echoes. The echoes grew louder like the beating of an approaching drum. Worms in his brain, writhing, clumped together, like bait wriggling in black dirt. The beating of his heart filled his ears. Flashes of bulbs, of photographs, photographs that spilled out of a dropped manila folder. Blood the color of pitch in black and white. Little pools of void.

  Then, silence again.

  The moment passed. Stickers from the bushes covered his legs. They broke through the denim, pricked his flesh. They prick and attach, but they do not let go. They infect. They take over. They look for a new home.

  He was not their home. He ran the back of the machete blade along his pants leg and shook them off.

  Despite the chill in the air, which faded some with the rising sun, a sweat broke out across his head and under his arms. From an outside observer, he might look like he was working his way through dense tropical jungle rather than through the saw palmetto. Off to his right, the morning fog cleared enough to see the island with the old banyan tree. Tall, rooted, complex.

  In the thick foliage across from the house, he made out more of the figure. It appeared to be a person, although it could have been an abandoned mannequin from some kids partying in the woods. It wouldn’t have been the strangest item he’d ever found.

  He hacked through kudzu and creeper vines with the machete to reach the body but steered clear of hitting any trees. Killing the invasive plants didn’t bother him much, but he didn’t want to damage any of the old growth, part of the reason he bought this property for his retirement.