After Image

When Viola made it back to Tytonidae’s Codex, she found Jerome talking with Eli. Makoto was rubbing up against both of their legs trying to get attention. When the cat saw Viola enter, she switched tactics and tottered up to her master. Viola took her up in her arms and wandered into the back room, setting Makoto down on her workstation as she removed her jacket. When she turned around, Eli was standing in the door frame in a new set of clothes. He was wearing cargo pants with a white T-shirt underneath an Egyptian blue dress shirt with only two of the buttons done up. The blue shirt made his eyes almost glow, reminding Viola of how similar his eyes were to hers.

“You ready to learn the ropes?” She asked. Eli responded by pulling a chair from the corner of the room up to her workstation.

The day passed by relatively quickly after her outing with Will and soon they were back at her home packing in bags of new clothes that Eli had acquired.

“You will just have to stack the clothes on the bookshelves, Eli. There should be plenty of room.” Since I destroyed almost my whole collection, she added in her mind. She let Makoto out of her carrier case and wandered into the kitchen to grab the cat some soft food and some leftovers from their previous dinner last night.

Eli re-emerged from his makeshift room with a text book in hand. It had a bright orange cover and read Psychology, eighth edition.

“You sure have a lot of books on psychology in there. Did you study it in college?”

Viola placed the leftovers in the microwave and replied. “Never went to college actually. I have been working at Tytonidae’s Codex since I was in high school. I always found higher learning to be completely boring. I learn at a different speed than everyone else. It’s easier just to buy the books and learn it on my own.”

“Does that mean you know a lot about amnesia?” The microwave timer went off and Viola pulled out the plate of food and handed it to Eli. She set her own plate in the microwave next.

“A bit. I know that you still have access to your implicit memories, the ones that you don’t consciously recall, but still are able to act on. You still retain your knowledge of language and such. The part of your memory that you can’t access is your explicit memory, the one that you consciously pull to the forefront. The brain is very complex. It is not completely understood. Traumatic experiences can trigger you to block access to memories subconsciously because they are too painful to remember. Or you might just not have the right trigger in front of you to access a pathway. That is where positional memory works well, like if you think of something while in the bathroom, walk out and you can’t remember what you were just thinking of, if you walk back into the bathroom, sometimes it will trigger the same synapse and recall the memory.”

“You remember all that off the top of your head?” Eli asked, as they both sat at the kitchen table.

“I remember things that I find interesting. There is nothing more interesting than understanding how the mind works.”

“So what did you learn from these books about how your mind works?”

“I learned that unlike most of the rest of the world, my mind works in pictures instead of language. So when constructing a conversation, like this one, instead of hearing the words I want in my mind, I instead see pictures that form the idea I want to get across.”

“You see pictures in your head, all the time?” Eli replied. “So if I say, star what do you see?”

“The sun, well in this case the sun. If we were talking about a movie star I see Ewan McGregor.”

“Always Ewan McGregor?” Eli was laughing.

“Most of the time. He is my favorite actor. I am also gathering your mind is language based and not visually based.”

“You guess correctly.”

“I feel kind of sad for you in a way. The things that I see sometimes are so wonderful and indescribable. I know, because half the time I try to write down what I see in my mind’s eye and it doesn’t come out right at all. That is what I get for trying to translate pictures into words. Maybe I should be a painter instead of a wordsmith.” Not a wordsmith anymore are you? She fell into silence with this thought.

“Anything else I should know about your mysterious mind?” Eli asked feeling the silence as a miasma.

“Well other than the visual mind I have, I also have a few brain disorders. Nothing that makes me insane or anything. I have primary stabbing headaches for one. It’s when the nerves in your head don’t work quite right and they misfire at random. Sharp pains lance through your skull. They feel like you are being stabbed with in ice pick, they are even sometimes called ice-pick headaches. Mine are mostly associated with my eyes. They are annoying but not life threatening.

“Also I have what I refer to as snowy vision. It’s really called palinopsia. Your brain is supposed to filter out the stimuli coming in from your eyes and make the images clear, getting rid of excessive detail. My brain doesn’t have that filter. So instead of a clear image I kind of get visual snow. It’s see-through, but still there constantly. It’s worse in bright lights or low lights. It also makes me have excessive after images.”

“After images?” Eli asked.

“You know, when you stare at something too long you impose the image on your eye and because your eye is in constant motion it sometimes inverts the colours and you can see kind of a halo around things or if you close your eyes you can see like a green or red version of it on the inside of your eyelids, or even when you look away and a shadow of the thing follows. That’s an after image. It only takes me about one to two seconds to form one of those at any given moment and they last for a long time. Most of the time I call it a ghost image. As if a clear version of the thing I am looking at is trying to pull itself away from the original. It is all very distracting and headache causing.”

“I’m kind of overwhelmed by your knowledge,” Eli said.

“Sorry, I tend to ramble on and on when someone gets me started talking about things I like.” Viola got up from the table and cleared the dishes, rinsing them and putting them into the dishwasher.

“Not to be rude or anything,” she said once she had cleaned up, “but I am not really used to having someone around all the time. I’m just going to go read in my room until I’m tired. You can have the run of the house all you like.”

Eli watched her turn and flee to her room, closing the door firmly behind her just after Makoto made her escape into the room as well. Left alone in her house, he went back to his own makeshift room. He looked his new life over, a mattress on the floor, clothes lining the empty bookshelves and no personal items at all to even try to prompt his memory to return. He noticed Viola’s camera equipment in one corner of the room and remembered the strange white dress that he had seen last night. Something more is going on here than Viola wants to admit, he thought as he grabbed her DSLR camera and put it on a tripod in the corner of the room. He set it up for video capture, found the infrared control in her bag and waited. If what he was thinking was going on was correct then he would at least have some evidence to show Viola in the morning to convince her. She was a scientist at heart, as Eli felt he was as well. She would not deny the evidence.

It was in the early morning hours when it began. Eli was slumped in the corner of the library when he heard a drop of water hit the ground, the echo highlighting a cavernous space. The water drop startled him awake, causing him to press record on the camera. When he stood up, he realized that the walls of the library had melted, leaving the bookshelves, camera, his bed and himself instead in a massive cave. Stalactites dropping from the ceiling covered in water met their cousins, the stalagmites, on the floor below. In the middle of the cave was a lake, water dripping into it from the ceiling above. He saw a spiral of rocks leading up into the ceiling where there was a break to the surface above. The sun was shining through the ice that seemed to cover the middle of the cave roof. He could see a girl walking up the rocks, jumping from one stone pillar to the next ascending into the icy sky. The girl was not Viola. She was much taller than Viola was, with flaming red hair and pale freckled skin. When Eli watched her reach the top of the cavern the view shifted suddenly and the blinding light of the sun was over top of him, shifting clouds passing through the sky casting shadows on the ice-covered ground below him. The girl stood staring at the ground only a few feet from Eli and he walked over to her. He tried to touch her hair and instead his hand passed through air. A mirage. The girl did not even realize that he was present. She knelt to the ground and put her hands on the surface of the ice. Eli followed her downward gaze. He saw a giant eye looking at him. An icy blue cat eye embedded in the ice surrounded by a vicious looking lizard face. She’s dreaming of dragons. He thought. He looked around the scene for Viola and saw no one but the red headed girl. Is the red head Viola? A large cracking sound broke his thought and he realized that the giant dragon beneath his feet was trying to break free. Forgetting for a moment that none of this was real, he screamed, “Viola wake up!” The library returned with a suddenness that Eli hadn’t expected and realized he was holding his breath. He looked at the camera across the room and pushed the button to stop recording.

Viola came rushing into the room holding a metal bat. “What’s wrong?” She asked. She was huffing slightly from the sudden adrenaline rush of having been startled awake.

“You weren’t perhaps dreaming of a dragon encased in ice were you?” Eli asked as he took the camera from the stand and pushed past Viola into the living room.

Viola dropped the bat and looked at the clock, it read quarter past three in the morning. ”Did you seriously yell a blood curdling wakeup call at three in the morning to ask what I was dreaming about. I want to kill you right now,” Viola said, yawning as she followed Eli into the living room. She saw him hooking her camera up to the Blu-ray player. “What are you doing?”

“Seriously though, what were you dreaming about?” Eli replied.

Viola thought for a moment and sat on the couch. “Let’s see, I was spelunking I believe. Found this really gorgeous cavern with this enormous lake in it and –“

“- Pillars that reached to the ceiling. You jumped from one to the other until you got to the top. Once there you were standing on an ice field where a white dragon with ice blue eyes was trapped. The ice was starting to break apart –“ Eli interrupted.

“- And your shouting woke me up. Did we just share a dream or something? How did you know all that?” Viola asked in shock. Her stomach was flipping with the strangeness of it all.

“It’s stranger than that, Viola. Just watch this.” He pushed play on the camera and she could see Eli spring to his feet suddenly surrounding by bookshelves inside a cave. She watched her dream play out with reality superimposed on top of it. She suddenly realized she wasn’t breathing.

“What is that? What is going on? Oh wait, I’m still dreaming. Oh thank god I am still dreaming. Okay I want to wake up now. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.” She was pacing the room trying to wake herself up. Eli caught her as she passed by him.

“I promise you, Viola, you are awake,” Eli said in a calm soothing voice. It made her break into tears.

“This is it. I’ve gone insane. Completely bonkers. Because only schizophrenic people think that what is in their imagination is real. It all makes sense now I had a psychotic break. I need to the phone the doctor.”

“Viola calm down. Just calm down. I saw your dream too, remember? What happened was real.”

Viola looked up at Eli and touched his face. “You feel so real.”

“I am real.”

“No you’re not, Eli. Because if you are seeing the things I am seeing, if you can know my dreams, can film them on tape, that means I am imagining you as well. That would explain the whole why you look like me and why you have no past. I made you up. I pulled you from my imagination. Oh god, oh god. This is all because I stopped writing. I went insane because I stopped writing.” Viola pushed away from Eli and went back into her room. She ran to her desk, grabbed a notebook and pen and sat on the floor madly scribbling away on the blank pages. “Okay, so if I went completely insane because I stopped writing, if I start writing again everything will go back to normal. No more dreams superimposing on reality and no more fake people only I can see.”

Eli was standing in the doorway watching Viola have her panic attack not entirely sure what to do to make it stop.

“Viola, stop. You are not the only one who has seen me. I am not a figment of your imagination.” Not anymore at least.

“Stop talking to me. You are not real. Go away,” Viola responded. She was still scribbling in her notebook.

Sighing Eli glanced around the room for anything he could do to snap her out of her hysteria. He saw her phone on the nightstand and grabbed it. He glanced through her contact lists, saw Jerome near the top and dialed. Jerome answered almost instantly.

“Having another insomniac night, Vye?” Jerome asked as he picked up the phone. He didn’t even sound startled to be answering the phone so early in the morning.

“Sorry Jerome, it’s Eli. I didn’t wake you did I?”

“Eli? Oh Vye’s cousin. No, of course not. I barely sleep anymore. Is there something wrong with Viola?”

“I think she is having a panic attack. She thinks I’m not real and won’t acknowledge I am even here,” Eli replied.

“I’ll be right over,” Jerome responded and hung up the phone before Eli could reply.

Fifteen minutes later Eli heard a key unlocking the front door. Jerome came in with a coat covering his pajamas. He put the coat on the rack and followed Eli into Viola’s bedroom. She did not turn when they entered. Did not even acknowledge there were other people in the room until Jerome spoke.

“Hey there Vye, having trouble sleeping tonight?” Jerome prompted, putting a friendly hand on her shoulder. She stopped writing when she heard his voice and turned to him with tears in her eyes.

“It’s official, Jerome, I’ve gone insane. You better take me to the hospital,” Viola replied. She was shaking in terror. She had cousins with mental illness. Schizophrenia ran in her family. In the back of her mind she had always been waiting for the day when she came down with the illness as well. It was one of her worst fears to lose her mind. If she lost her mind, there would be nothing left of her. She wouldn’t be Viola Lavallee anymore, she would be a shell harboring a broken brain.

Jerome sat next to her on the floor. “Just take some deep breaths. In through your nose, hold it, and let it out through your mouth.” Jerome repeated these instructions until Viola complied. After a few moments she felt her chest relax and she could breathe properly again.

“Now, Vye, what is with all this crazy talk? Did you have a bad dream?”

The mention of the dream made tears come to her eyes. “Jerome when I came to the shop today was I alone?”

“Of course not, you had Makoto with you.” Jerome replied.

“Just Makoto? No one else was with me?”

“You introduced your cousin, Eli,” Jerome said pointing in Eli’s direction. Viola looked along his arm to the end of his finger and finally to Eli who he was pointing at.

“So, Eli is real? I didn’t make him up. You can see him? You can really see him?”

“My word, Child, of course I can see him. Why wouldn’t I be able to see him?” Jerome asked. Viola just burst into a full out cry and curled into Jerome.

Jerome looked at Eli with a confused look on his face. “Is this because she hasn’t been writing? She gets so sad when she doesn’t write.”

“Has she done something like this before?” Eli asked.

“Not usually this bad. But there are quite a lot of nights that I spend talking to her on the phone trying to encourage her to write to make herself feel better.”

Viola pushed up from Jerome and smiled. “I’m sorry, Jerome. Sorry you had to come over so early in the morning. I just had a really bad dream. Sometimes – “ she choked on her words and started again, “Sometimes my dreams bleed into real life for a while after I wake up.” She thought about the tape. She thought about Eli. She thought about the mess of words that she had scribbled onto the paper and tried to hold back the jittery feeling in her bones.

“Well, how about you get back to bed. Eli will be here to look after you. I don’t expect you at the shop today, all right, Vye? Just rest some.” Jerome said, kissing Viola lightly on her forehead, heading out of her room back towards his jacket and eventually his own warm bed.

When they were alone again, Viola looked at Eli. He could see her vibrating. “What is happening?” She asked, hoping Eli would have the answers.

“I don’t know, Viola, but let’s worry about it in the morning, all right? Get some rest and we will tackle this development in the morning.” He helped her to her feet and into her bed. Viola felt as if there were too many questions burning around inside her head for her to sleep, but as soon as Eli had clicked the door shut and Makoto had hopped up onto the bed to curl in the crook of Viola’s neck, she was instantly asleep. A blissfully dreamless sleep.