by A. A. Bell
‘How do I do that?’
‘Ben can show you when you go back.’
‘It’s easy,’ he said. ‘You’ll be surprised at how much mobility you can have around this place now that it’s being upgraded with all the latest whiz-bang technology.’
‘But they’ll only work so long as you keep earning your privileges,’ Sanchez cautioned.
‘We’re running low on time, people,’ Van Danik reminded them. ‘If we’re going to be successful in presenting Mira to our financiers as a viable public test case, we need to identify the true nature of her medical condition so we can demonstrate just how badly she’s been let down so far by current medical practice.’
‘Public?’ Mira echoed.
‘But can we stay focused on her current diagnosis for now?’ Sanchez suggested. ‘Surely you’re already making progress enough for your financiers? I’ve got five hundred clients here who could benefit from this style of psychoanalysis. There’s another ten thousand in other centres across the country and two million around the world, and that’s just the valid mental-health cases. Imagine all the hypochondriacs!’
‘What does he mean, public?’ Mira said.
‘And what about crime victims?’ Sanchez continued. ‘Have you considered how something like this might help people like Ben?’
‘What does he mean public?, Mira repeated.
‘Public,’ Zhou replied, ‘as in telling the world what’s happened to you so we can make sure this kind of misdiagnosis for mental health never happens again.’
‘You’re a gold mine,’ Van Danik added.
‘You’d make money out of me? Is that what you mean? I’ve only just achieved freedom from my jail cell and you want to put me on show in a media circus?’
‘This isn’t a prison,’ Ben reminded her, ‘and it wouldn’t have to be a media circus.’
‘Actually, it would,’ Zhou said, ‘temporarily. It would be for the greater good, though. Also, Mitch wasn’t suggesting you were a gold mine of money, Miss Chambers. That’s only the end result for our financiers. What he meant by calling you a gold mine is that you can help us to showcase so many different problems that other people might be suffering too — problems that our project can help to address, like unlocking memories of seriously traumatic events, including crimes. That’s a very worthy enterprise.’
‘Murder, mystery and misdiagnosis,’ Van Danik added. ‘Mira, you could show so many people that facts and symptoms don’t always point to the truth.’
‘My father didn’t murder anyone but himself,’ she complained. ‘And I don’t want to go public. People already think I’m a freak. I won’t do it!’
‘Then we might as well pack up now,’ Van Danik snapped.
‘No!’ Ben pleaded. ‘We’ve come so far. Can’t you do just one more batch of questions to help her get to the truth behind her ghosts and partial visions?’
‘What’s the point?’ asked Van Danik. ‘If she won’t keep her end of the deal to cooperate?’
‘Wait!’ Mira drew a long breath and sighed heavily. ‘I did make that promise.’
‘In all fairness,’ Zhou said, ‘we omitted to make our purposes clear — what we’re getting out of it, I mean. And how much effort you may still need to put in.’
‘You were clear when you explained it to Ben during his first visit, though, weren’t you? About him being a public test case?’
‘Yes, but it’s not fair to expect you to assume the same arrangement applied to you and this,’ Zhou said. ‘Nobody could have guessed the depths of your trauma. Indeed, we don’t need to go there anymore, since Ben already fills that area of need for a test case, so we can continue to focus only on the misdiagnosis of your medical case, if that’s all you feel comfortable with.’
‘But that’s the worst part. Everyone will be looking at my eyes.’
‘I can acquire cosmetic contact lenses for you,’ Zhou offered. ‘Then your eyes will look normal, even if one of the paparazzi makes a grab to snatch your sunglasses.’
‘Your case will need to be properly documented,’ Van Danik explained, ‘but nobody needs to see you except our financiers, a couple of carefully selected photographers and a panel of impartial specialists.’
‘You can handle that,’ Ben reassured her. ‘Then you’ll be free to get on with your life. Free to do whatever you want, wherever you choose, and you’ll have done something really meaningful with your life by helping others.’
‘I can’t bear to hope that far ahead,’ Mira confessed. ‘But I did promise to cooperate, and they have helped me to understand some of my problems already … I just … I’m scared, Ben. I’m really scared of all the terrible things I might remember — and what if I learn something about myself that I can’t forgive?’
‘I’ll be with you all the way,’ he promised.
‘As shall we,’ Zhou agreed. ‘First, though, I think we could all do with a little break.’
‘I thought you said you were in a hurry?’ asked Ben.
‘We are,’ Van Danik said. ‘He meant have a break for a week or two.’
‘Why can’t we finish today?’ Mira asked.
‘I think you deserve a break most of all,’ Zhou said. ‘Even if you feel up to more now, I have to admit that I’m stumped. I’ve never seen anything like your eyes before, and if we’ll only be focusing on them and the string of misdiagnoses of your mental health for a public test case, then I’ll need time to figure out how to look inside those biological wonders of yours without damaging them. We’ll also have to go back through all the data we’ve recorded so far to come up with a new set of questions to test a few scenarios.’
‘How long will that take?’ Ben asked.
‘A day or two,’ Zhou replied. ‘If we don’t get it done before Monday, though, it could be a fortnight or more before we get back this way again, which brings me back to my suggestion for a break of a week or two.’
‘Then there’s something else you need to know,’ Matron Sanchez said. ‘Mira’s booked in for surgery on Monday.’
‘She’s what?’ Ben blurted. ‘When did this happen?’
‘And why?’ Mira cried. ‘Ben’s already taken out my stitches.’
‘I’m your legal guardian, Mira, and your rights as an adult —’
‘I’m twenty-two!’
‘You’ve been declared a ward of the state for life and your rights as an adult are —’
‘Now void. I know, I know. But surgery? Why?’
‘You’ve been on the waiting list for ten months; that’s seven months before you came here.’
‘Waiting list for what?’ Mira demanded. ‘What are they going to do to me?’
‘It was meant to be a surprise,’ Sanchez replied. ‘A good surprise.’
‘Just tell her,’ Ben pleaded. ‘She hates secrets.’
‘Well, the technical term for it is a lensectomy by phacoemulsification — basically, it’s just day surgery to extract your faulty lenses and replace them with artificial ones. You may be able to see normally afterwards, Mira. If not, you won’t be any worse off, and you won’t even need to stay in hospital overnight.’
Mira’s mouth fell open in surprise. ‘I’ll be able to … to see normally? Are you kidding me?’
‘I’m told the procedure has a reasonably high success rate.’
‘You have to cancel it!’ Zhou protested. ‘Her eyes are unique! Who knows what else we could learn from them?’
‘Do lenses still work after they’ve been taken out?’ Mira asked.
‘Normally,’ Zhou replied, ‘but —’
‘You can have them,’ she said excitedly. ‘I won’t need them.’
‘He can buy them,’ Sanchez argued. ‘He can afford them.’
‘I can’t do either after that surgery,’ Zhou snapped. ‘Phacoemulsification uses ultrasonic vibrations to shatter each lens so the small fragments can be sucked out to make way for the new lenses. Once they’re shattered, they’re useless to us. But I can remove y
our lenses without damaging them anymore than they already are — later, that is, after they’ve been fully tested and documented.’
‘Can you replace them with artificial ones that work too?’ Ben asked.
‘With funding, yes,’ Zhou said. ‘I’ll make sure it’s part of the deal with our financiers.’
‘Provided,’ Van Danik warned, ‘that we get the nod from them to proceed with Mira’s case publicly in the first place.’
‘There is that possible snag,’ Zhou conceded. ‘So don’t get your hopes up just yet, Miss Chambers.’
‘Too late,’ Sanchez replied on her behalf. ‘Her hopes are already high, and I’m not about to cancel her surgery based on promises or possibilities from financiers who may never get back to you. If you want to defer her surgery, I’ll need to see your offer in writing before Monday morning.’
‘I need time to choose, though,’ Mira declared. ‘I want a say in this too.’
TWENTY-THREE
Alone in her room much later that afternoon, Mira danced around her table wearing her sunglasses, jumped and bounded on her bunk and skipped in and out of her ensuite, but nothing expended her excitement. Her heart pounded, like time ticking, as her independence, and Monday’s surgery, drew ever nearer.
With hot eyes and a sudden ache in her stomach, she noticed the Braille anthology on the table. Usually, it helped her to pass the empty eternities until her meals arrived. She raised her glasses and the book disappeared, replaced in the same instant by piles of shabby crates of potatoes, all blue, ghostly and weightless but packed so tightly and ceiling high that she choked at the illusion of being smothered by them.
The delusion used to terrify her — so much so, that after everything else she’d been through it had been enough to drive her to beg Fredarick to cut out her eyes. Instead, he’d pitied her enough to stitch them closed, convinced that one day soon, she’d change her mind. And now here she was.
Playing with the glasses intrigued her. Each time she lowered the invisible glasses over her eyes, the claustrophobic blue potatoes disappeared.
Better still, and heaven of all heavens, she could feel almost everything she could see in her room. It reminded her of being at home, where she’d been able to see without glasses all the rooms and furniture built by her great-grandfather. Anything built, shifted or repaired differently since then had dissolved into invisibility, just as her own body had done during early puberty.
Even so, she could make no sense of it. Had her great-grandfather lived here at one stage too and woven a similar magic?
As she danced around the room again, she remembered the visions of horse riders and giant ghostly beasts that she’d seen through different-coloured glasses in Ben’s car. Shades of yester-year. The phrase echoed in her head, like an ache fading. Her mother had often hummed that phrase before she flew away — died, Mira reminded herself.
The ache in her belly swelled to consume her with grief — until her ghostly door burst open and the brown spectre of Neville hurried in. His shoes and the door remained silent as he manoeuvred around the table with a wheelchair holding a ghostly girl bound securely by her wrists and ankles.
Mira leaned closer to the girl, unable to see her down-turned face, but sensing the familiarity of someone who’d disappeared gradually between her ninth and twelfth birthdays. All grown-up now and sedated but — she soon noticed — only pretending to be completely out of it.
A ghostly female assistant brought in a trolley full of hot meals and laid one on the table, while Neville’s ghost untied one of the girl’s hands and wheeled her closer to the meal.
The assistant left and the wheelchair-bound girl sprang drunkenly into action, grabbing hold of her dinner plate and smashing it into Neville’s groin, collapsing him into a silent, screaming heap with food scattered all around him.
Mira laughed, but only briefly — her expression mirroring that of the ghost girl as they both realised what would happen next.
The girl swiftly untied her other hand and legs, but shrieked soundlessly as the man grabbed her ankle. She grappled for her fork and glass from the table and attacked him with both, then scrambled over him to the door, fumbling blindly for his electronic key along the way.
The door opened just as the girl reached the key slot and two more burly ghosts burst in to wrestle her roughly into submission on the ground. Crushed under the weight of their bodies, she remembered that their clothes had smelled strongly of lemon antiseptic. But she couldn’t smell it now. Then she saw the needle.
Mira stroked the girl’s ghostly arm while her handlers inspected the needle and bumped an air bubble out of the tip. Her hand passed through the girl’s skin and Mira winced, remembering her pain.
Was it only a week ago? It seemed like an eternity, but she could remember just three days with Ben and two, maybe three, days in the middle without him. Oh, how slow and hopeless her pitiful existence had seemed before she met him!
‘You’ll sleep now,’ Mira whispered as the needle pierced the girl’s ethereal skin. ‘And when you wake up tomorrow, you’ll meet Ben.’
The girl struggled, defiant to the last ebb of her strength.
‘Shhhh,’ Mira crooned, and began to sing her mother’s favourite verses from the poet trees, just as she and her papa had done on many restless nights for her mama.
Grief burst up in a wellspring, tears welling to sting her eyes. She poked at them behind her sunglasses … too late. The sleeping girl blurred, then dissolved, as did the chest of drawers in the corner of her room. White pain stung her eyes, and she glimpsed a wall, like a lace threshold, and then saw through it to the rest of the ghostly furniture in her room, which became solid, each piece with their own mix of colours.
Real colours?
Mira wondered if she could see again through her tears and the magic of the mirrored sunglasses. Or was it wishful thinking for Monday?
She gasped in doubt and astonishment, enduring the pain, and during that brief moment of clarity she glimpsed her own body. She saw that her tracksuit had the words Serenity Centre printed into the cloth of the chest pocket so smoothly that she could never have detected it simply by touching it. Underneath it was a warning: VIP: Visually Impaired Person. If found, please call police or Serenity Centre. Underneath that, in larger print, were two phone numbers.
So escape had never been a possibility for as long as she’d been wearing that logo, she realised, and she tore off the jacket, her tears thickening and blurring her sight even further.
White pain stung her eyes, piercing deeply into her brain, and she saw through another threshold. The clarity vanished, replaced by a pale golden light that grew so bright, it blinded her. She blinked, and when she opened her agonised eyes again, the table had disappeared, along with her body and everything else in the room. The walls swiftly followed and within seconds she was standing ankle deep in rich golden grass, with a tropical forest behind her and a broad sweeping view of the golden bay ahead. No sign of any buildings. On the water, she could see foamy lighter trails from strange hovering watercraft and golden ghosts on fat skis that required no boats to pull them.
In the distance, a storm brewed at sea, while the early effects of its mischievous breezes teased the palm fronds above and around her. The golden grass bowed reverently under its touch, but she couldn’t feel any of its playfulness upon her invisible skin.
Mira glanced behind her to the edge of the rainforest and saw the overgrown ruins of the Serenity Centre’s administration building, now clasped deeply in the gnarled fingers of thick vines and palm forest. Mesmerised, she dared not blink, wipe her tears or lift her sunglasses in case the vision disappeared.
She walked towards the ruins with her arms outstretched — and bumped heavily into the cold reality of her invisible cell wall.
PART SIX
Echoes of Dying Innocence
A fraudulent intent,
however carefully concealed at the outset,
will generally, in the end
, betray itself
Titus Livius
TWENTY-FOUR
The cat in the alley behind the Drift Inn crouched over the ceramic bowls of milk and fish scraps that kitchen staff had put out for her and regarded the shadow-lurker with her golden-moon eyes.
He smelled of breath mints — the same as her favourite kitchen hand — and although smoke rose from his cigarette like the curl of an arrogant cat’s tail, not once did he raise the little fire stick to his lips. Instead, he held the smouldering tip low, like a signal fire, allowing the ash to fall into a small peaked mound beside his army boot.
Twice he spoke to her. Her eyes squinted in acknowledgement each time and he nodded politely in return; just two predators in the same alley, one with a full belly and the other still hunting.
Light spilled from the fire exit at the nearest end of the hotel and a head leaned out to survey the darkness between them. The cat smelled a rat: the two-legged variety. She dashed away from the newcomer, taking cover behind the large rubbish bin nearby. Motionless, the human predator remained in the shadows, waiting for his prey to come to him.
‘Sergeant Hawthorn?’ called the rat.
‘Here!’ The shadow-lurker raised his cigarette to reveal his location, then stubbed it out in the ash with the toe of his boot.
‘Your mission?’
‘Easy as breathing, sir. I was beginning to worry about you, though.’
The rat grew braver and crossed the moonlit alley to join the other man in the shadows. ‘I could say the same thing, Sergeant. I needed the merchandise this afternoon. Where were you?’
‘Likiba Isle. An unexpected detour, sir. Sorry I couldn’t warn you in advance.’ He reached into his trouser pocket and withdrew a small silver cylinder, about twice the size of a bell for a cat’s collar. ‘Schematics, interrogation notes, output data — you name it, you got it. I even copied the transcripts of all the test cases — except for the last-minute case this afternoon, of course.’
The silver toy flipped into the air and the rat caught it one-handed, his other hand buried deep in the pocket of his dinner jacket.
