Ultraviolet

by R. J. Anderson

  “He was jealous, you know,” she said, breaking into my thoughts. “I think he kind of liked you.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Kirk, of course.” She gave me an incredulous look. “You really do live in your own little world, don’t you?” Then without waiting for an answer she grabbed a tray and marched up to the counter, leaving me alone.

  I ended up sitting with Sanjay, twirling spaghetti around my fork while he explained to me the aliens’ secret plan. Apparently they were transmitting mind-altering waves through people’s cell phones, using the Big Nickel—the world’s largest replica coin, which stood on a hillside just a few kilometers away—as an amplifier. He also told me about a scientist at Laurentian University who had invented a helmet that made people see God, or sometimes aliens, which he said proved that God was actually just a superintelligent alien being who had brainwashed people into worshipping Him. I listened politely, but I could just imagine what my devoutly Catholic mother would have said to that.

  . . .

  “I have a question,” I asked Faraday at our next meeting. “If there’s no connection between synesthesia and mental illness, why are you studying psych patients?”

  “That’s a good question,” he replied. “And I hope that one day, I’ll be able to answer it for you. But at this point I think it would be better to keep that information confidential, in case it influences your response.”

  Which seemed to be the truth, as far as I could tell. Though admittedly, I was a little distracted by the silvery curves that looped around his words, and the way his voice felt like a warm hand stroking the small of my back.

  Still, I wasn’t so charmed by the way he sounded that I hadn’t noticed a few of the less attractive things about him. The acrid scent that sometimes wafted from his skin, for instance. How his outfit, while clean, never seemed to change. Or the shadows beneath his eyes that suggested he needed more sleep than he’d been getting. Not that those couldn’t be explained away as the effects of jet lag, light packing, and too much institutional soap—but even so, they made me wonder.

  On the other hand, Faraday had met me in a mental hospital, watched me vomit into a wastebasket, and still gone out of his way to assure me that having synesthesia didn’t mean I was insane. I owed him for that. So I swallowed my curiosity and said, “Okay.”

  “Excellent. Now, why don’t we start by talking about your alphabet?” He reached into his briefcase, and took out a sketchbook and a box of colored pencils. “Could you give me a rough idea of the colors you see when you look at, or think about, each letter?”

  I sorted through the pile, and wrote a large A at the top of the page in blue before overlaying it with violet. Not exactly the shade I saw in my mind, but at least it didn’t make my skin crawl. “A is calm,” I said, half hoping to surprise him, “and confident, and always in control.”

  “Is it friendly?” asked Faraday. “Or more of a distant sort?”

  He didn’t seem fazed by the idea that letters had personalities as well as colors. So apparently that was normal for synesthetes too. “It’s not unfriendly,” I said. “Just a little reserved. It’s my favorite letter.” I didn’t add that Sebastian Faraday had five of them—more than anyone else I’d ever met.

  He scribbled a note on his pad. I glanced over to see what he’d written, but I couldn’t recognize any of the symbols. They were mostly green, though, and gave me a tugging feeling in my left shoulder. Some kind of shorthand?

  “Go on,” he said.

  I examined the pinks and reds with a critical eye, and decided on a light application of magenta with a haze of candy red around it. “B is female,” I said as I drew the letter, “and extroverted. It’s something of a Southern belle, if you know what I mean. C—” I set the red pencil down, hesitated between the light blue and the light purple, and finally chose the latter—“is lavender, sort of translucent and silky. It’s shy, and it doesn’t have any gender.”

  “Do any of these letters have tastes?” asked Faraday. He was leaning across the table with his chin propped on one hand, obviously fascinated.

  “Some do,” I said. “A tastes like blueberries—the kind that grow wild around here, not the big watery ones you get in stores. B is like those candy hearts they sell around Valentine’s Day. And C doesn’t have a flavor exactly, it’s more like a very light perfume. Then there’s D.” I began to layer shades of blue and green, trying to get the right intensity of teal. “D has hidden depths, it’s sort of mysterious. . . .”

  Over the next thirty minutes I worked my way through the alphabet and all the numbers from zero to nine, while Faraday jotted more notes in his indecipherable script and asked questions that showed he was paying close attention to everything I said. Not even Dr. Minta had ever given me that kind of audience, and it was hard not to feel flattered— even though I reminded myself it was all in the interests of science.

  “Wonderful,” said Faraday, when I had finished. “Thank you, Ms. Jeffries.”

  “Call me Alison,” I said. After the wastebasket incident, it seemed ridiculous to be formal—especially since he’d already learned more about the workings of my mind in three sessions than I’d told anybody else in my entire life.

  “Oh, well, in that case, you can call me Sebastian,” he said. Then he caught me looking at him as though he had sprouted tentacles from both ears, and added in a more cautious tone, “Or perhaps not?”

  No, definitely not. Calling him Faraday without the formal title was familiar enough for me; I couldn’t possibly call him Sebastian without blushing.

  “You’re . . . the strangest psychologist I’ve ever met,” I said, when I got my voice back.

  He rubbed the back of his neck, looking sheepish. “Yes, I suppose I am. I’m afraid neuropsychology’s always been more of an academic subject for me—I’m not really experienced in dealing with the public.”

  I smiled. I couldn’t help it. “That’s okay,” I said. “I don’t mind.”

  . . .

  “So how are things going with you and Dr. Faraday?” asked Dr. Minta. “Do you enjoy the testing? Have you learned anything interesting about yourself?”

  I bit my lip. Maybe Faraday was right, and I ought to tell Dr. Minta that I was a synesthete. But I’d kept that part of myself secret for so long, and with good reason, that talking about it felt uncomfortably like stripping naked. Besides, there were things about my cross-wired senses that even Faraday didn’t know yet—like the nameless colors that still haunted the edges of my vision, or the cosmic orchestra that tuned up outside my window every night. Until I had more confidence that all my perceptions were harmless, and that there was no connection between my synesthesia and what I’d done to Tori, it might not be safe to discuss it with anyone else.

  “It’s hard to put into words,” I said slowly as my brain scrambled for a semi-truthful answer. I could lie now without making myself sick, but that didn’t make the taste any less unpleasant. “Just . . . he said that the way my mind works is unusual, but he doesn’t seem to think that’s a bad thing.”

  “Ah,” said Dr. Minta sagely. “And you found this encouraging because . . . ?”

  “Maybe it’s okay for me to be different,” I said. “In some ways, I mean.”

  The words were so inane I nearly choked on them. But Dr. Minta nodded, as though I’d said something profound. “Yes,” he said. “You should be proud of your uniqueness, Alison. You’re an intelligent, creative young woman, and you have a lot to offer the world. All you need to do is open up a little more, and give the rest of us a chance to get to know you.”

  It was definitely time to change the subject. “Speaking of being creative,” I said, “have you thought any more about whether I could bring my keyboard?”

  Now that the drugs were mostly out of my system, I could read again, and I’d been working my way through some old favorites my father had brought from home, like Dune and Watership Down. But not even the pleasure of a good book could make me f
orget how much I missed my music.

  Dr. Minta’s smile faded. “Oh. Yes,” he said, and I knew then that he’d forgotten about it. “Well, as I said before, there is the problem of the cords, so it would have to be set up in a supervised area, and locked up securely whenever you weren’t using it. I’d have to talk to the nurses, and see what they think . . .”

  Which was an answer in itself, because the nurses already had enough to do. “Never mind,” I said colorlessly.

  “No, no,” Dr. Minta said. “I’ve just thought of an idea.”

  The gleam in his eye made me wary. “What is it?” I asked.

  “Well, music is obviously important to you, and I would very much like to hear you play. I used to be in a band myself, did you know?”

  Always these little kernels of self-revelation, tossed out with a flourish, as though he expected me to pounce on them like a hungry duck in the farmyard. “No, I didn’t,” I said in my most indifferent tone, though my fists had clenched and my insides were spiraling like a drain. I had always been good at hiding behind words, but music left me transparent, and the last thing I wanted to do was give Dr. Minta a private concert.

  “Perhaps we could set up your keyboard in here,” he continued, his round face alight with inspiration. “I could bring my guitar, and we could improvise together.”

  If the idea of playing for Dr. Minta had been bad, the idea of playing with him was even worse. Lightning flashed around the edges of my vision, and my temples began to ache. “I’m sorry,” I said, “can we talk about this another time? Because I really need to go.”

  He looked surprised. “Well . . . I suppose, if you—”

  “Thanks,” I told him, getting up and heading for the door. “I’ll see you later.”

  Only he didn’t, and neither did anyone else, because I spent the afternoon in bed with a migraine.

  EIGHT (IS BROWN)

  Fortunately, Dr. Minta didn’t bring up the subject of music again. I could tell that he wanted to, especially at our next session, but I managed to distract him by mentioning that I was missing Kirk, and we spent most of our time talking about that instead.

  Kirk had been Dr. Rivard’s patient (or as Kirk oh-so-sensitively liked to call her, “Dr. Retard”), and the details of his case were confidential, so Dr. Minta couldn’t tell me where he’d gone or how he was doing. But he did say that Kirk was a survivor, and that he was smart enough to come back to Pine Hills if things got too much for him, so if I hadn’t heard anything it was probably good news.

  Unfortunately, my concern also led Dr. Minta to ask whether I’d been in love with Kirk, which caused me to choke on my licorice jelly bean and cough sticky black particles all over his sofa. But once I recovered I managed to explain that no, he was only a friend. A younger friend. Dr. Minta looked dubious at that, but he didn’t press the point. Instead he gave me an extra helping of bland sympathy and the suggestion that I try to make some new friends, which made me feel more desolate than ever.

  But no matter how depressing I found my sessions with Dr. Minta, I always looked forward to spending time with Dr. Faraday—and I wasn’t the only one. I saw him at the nurses’ station, nodding sympathy as Marilyn complained about her staffing issues; I saw Sharon talking animatedly to him over coffee; I even saw him with Roberto at one point, although they didn’t seem to be having a conversation so much as a friendly mutual silence. For someone who was only at Pine Hills three afternoons a week, Faraday did a surprisingly good job of appearing omnipresent.

  Still, he spent more time with me than anyone else, and I liked it that way. Especially since I still had so many questions about my synesthesia, and he was the only one I knew who could answer them. In our last few sessions, we’d talked about my near-photographic memory, the way certain sights and sounds made me feel as though I were being touched, and how I felt pain as orange while pleasure came in shades of purple and blue. According to Faraday, all those things were quite normal for a synesthete, which was reassuring. But I hadn’t yet dared to ask him about the thing that worried me most—the fear that my sensory abilities had something to do with the way I’d disintegrated Tori. And that if I got angry enough, or scared enough, I might do it again.

  “What fascinates me,” Faraday said toward the end of our fifth session, “is that you have so many different forms of synes-thesia at once. Do you sometimes find it overwhelming? When you hear a particularly loud noise, for instance?”

  For a moment I was tempted to tell him the truth. Not about killing Tori: I couldn’t bear to have him think of me as a murderer. But the way my senses had overloaded afterward, and how it had landed me here. Faraday had always been so easy to talk to, willing to accept even my most evasive answers without judging me or pressuring me to say more, that I could almost believe he’d understand this as well. I lifted my head, met those inquiring violet eyes with my own . . .

  And lost my nerve completely. “Sometimes,” I mumbled, and looked away.

  . . .

  “Before we go,” said Sharon at the end of our Wednesday Life Goals session, “Cherie has an announcement to make.”

  With obvious reluctance, Cherie got to her feet. “Uh, I’m going home tomorrow,” she said. “So I guess this is my last session with you guys.”

  Sharon beamed, and led the rest of us in a ragged round of applause. “Does anyone want to say something to Cherie about her achievement?”

  An awkward pause followed, while Sanjay muttered something about tracking devices and Roberto studied his thumbs. Finally I said, “Congratulations, Cherie.”

  She gave me a wan smile, which broadened unexpectedly into something more genuine. “Hey, Kirk!” she exclaimed, and when I looked around there he was, hanging from the doorframe like Spider-Man and flashing his manic grin.

  “Kirk,” said Sharon, “please get down.”

  “Oh, come on,” he said, sliding down the frame and bounding over to sling an arm around her shoulders. “Don’t fight it. You know you love me.”

  For an instant Sharon’s disapproving expression wavered, but she kept it under control. “You know the rules, Kirk.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said, releasing her only to spin around and grab Cherie instead. “Hey, Skinny, did I just hear you got the green light? Score!” But she barely had time to blush before he looped his other arm around me, fingers digging into my ribs as he pulled me against his side. “But you’re gonna stick around, right, Ali? ’Cause I came back just for you.”

  “Kirk,” said a cool soprano voice, as Dr. Rivard appeared in the doorway. “I’d like you to come with me, please.”

  “She can’t get enough of me,” he stage-whispered. “See you later, my lusty wenches.” Cherie squealed as he pinched her, and I slapped his hand away before he could do the same to me—but he only winked as he sauntered off.

  “Back again,” muttered Cherie as we left the therapy room, her eyes following Kirk’s bouncing figure down the corridor. “Seriously, this is the third time just since I came. It’s like he enjoys it here.”

  I’d never seen Kirk quite this manic before. He acted like a happy drunk, but there was a wild, almost desperate look in his eyes. I wondered what he’d done, or threatened to do, before they brought him in. “His life outside must be pretty horrible if that’s the case,” I said.

  Cherie gave me a scornful look. “Right, and my life’s all rainbows and ponies? Like that has anything to do with it. Once I’m out of here, I’m never coming back.” She quickened her stride and broke away from me, heading for the TV room.

  I watched her go, shame creeping over me as I realized that tonight would be Cherie’s last night at Pine Hills, and that even after four weeks as her roommate, I still didn’t know much about her. True, we’d only had one therapy group in common, and even in our free time we lived by different schedules—she liked to stay up late and sleep in as long as the nurses would let her, while I often went to bed early just because I couldn’t think of anything better to do. But I c
ould have at least tried to get to know her. And I hadn’t.

  I hadn’t really tried with Kirk, either. We’d bantered back and forth, and for a while he’d been the closest thing to a friend I had in this place. But we’d never talked about anything important. Maybe Dr. Minta was right—I was too reserved and cautious, too fearful of letting others in. Just because I’d had a few bad experiences with people didn’t mean that it always had to be that way, and maybe I just needed to find the courage to open up to someone. To let them know me as I really was, the way I’d always longed to be known.

  It wouldn’t be easy. But I knew where I wanted to start.

  . . .

  “I’ve been wondering,” I said to Faraday the following morning, trying to keep my voice light even though every muscle in my body was screaming at me not to do this. “Have you ever heard of someone’s synesthesia changing? Like . . . getting a lot stronger, all of a sudden?”

  Faraday propped his long legs up on the library table, one ankle crossed over the other. The sunlight slanting through the windows behind him chased gold across his broad shoulders and kindled odd, glittering lights in his hair. “Well,” he said, “some drugs have been known to temporarily cause synesthesia, or make synesthetic experiences more intense. Is that the sort of thing you mean?”

  “Not really,” I said. “I mean that if a synesthete had some kind of, uh, stressful experience, could it affect them in that way? Or even give them new kinds of synesthesia they’d never had before?”

  Faraday looked thoughtful. “I’ve heard of people losing synesthesia due to depression, or even with age. But to suddenly develop new sensory modalities . . . I’d have to look into it.” He gave me a sidelong look. “What kinds of synesthesia are we talking about? Theoretically.”