After Image

She was sneaking through her house quietly, embarrassed about what she remembered of the night before. Why can’t I just handle change with grace? she thought. It was starting to sink in, and with it the need to talk with Eli was taking precedence over the fact that she wanted to pull the covers over her head and pretend the world didn’t exist while Ms. Viola Lavallee was adjusted to new things. She peered tentatively around the corner into the living room, peeking just her head just around. She saw Eli reading one of her psychology books on her couch. She heard the floor creak beneath her foot as she shifted and Eli looked straight into her eyes. She bit her lip and fled around the corner, feeling sheepish for doing so.

“Sorry about last night,” she said still hiding behind the wall.

“It was early and a lot to take in. I’m sorry I sprung it on you the way I did,” Eli replied. He made no move to get off the couch, but did place the book aside. Viola finally stepped around the corner and entered the living room completely. She was wearing a brilliant blue kimono with a golden obi tied around her waist. Confident clothing to make myself braver, she had thought when dressing herself.

“I guess today is the day we confront the laws of physics and shout at them, you got it wrong?” she said. She sat in her wingback chair across from Eli. “I pulled you into existence from my imagination, didn’t I?”

Eli sighed and ruffled his hands through his hair pulling his hand down his face trying to rub reality back into it. “I know that sounds completely and utterly absurd, and most of all it should sound absurd to me, because if that were true it would mean that I was not a person before you conjured me out of thin air. But, there is this feeling in the pit of my stomach that just tells me that it’s true; that you pulled me into reality. It explains the way we look alike. I was reading your dream journals.” He paused here and Viola noticed that there was indeed a pile of her dream journals lying about; As well as sheets of plastic and ink pads.

“No one reads my journals,” Viola said. She felt her heart beating faster again. Afraid of what Eli was going to think of her because of what he had read. He didn’t seem fazed by her comment at all, but more enraptured in his explanation of things.

“I’d say in about a good - what? Sixty percent of your dreams - you are a male. What if that is who I am. That person you dream yourself as when you don’t feel like a woman?” He grabbed her hand and pushed her pointer finger onto the ink pad and pressed it hard into the plastic sheet. He grabbed another one from off the couch next to him and placed them a top each other. “Viola, I am the You, you wish to be.”

He handed her the two sheets of plastic and she held them up to light. Her fingerprint superimposed on top of his was a perfect match. Not a close match. A perfect match. “I am sure if we do the rest of the fingers they will all be exactly the same. Just like our eyes. You noticed that right away.” No eyes and no finger prints are alike. Not a single one in the whole world can match another human beings and we match, completely, line for line, scar for scar. Not even identical twins have the same finger prints and they have the same genetic makeup.

“I don’t know how I feel right now,” Viola replied. How was she supposed to feel? How did one feel when they came to the sudden realization that they wished another human being into existence? “If I created you, Eli, what does that mean? You still have free will, right? I haven’t taken that away from you? I wouldn’t create a person without free will. I wouldn’t create a person. That is perverse. That is just wrong. I created a person, a human being in the eye of my mind. No one should be able to do that. That’s like genetically engineering a child to perfect specifications. You can’t do that. That is so completely wrong.”

Eli took hold of Viola’s hands and she looked up trying to hold back tears. What am I?

“Don’t think of it like that. Whatever you did, it wasn’t out of malice. It wasn’t even intentional. No one can fault you for not knowing what you could do. Besides, I’m glad to be here at the least.” His words made the tears tumble down her cheeks.

She thought for a moment and laughed through her tears. “Well at least I know why I had a cerebral hemorrhage. Not lightning. Something way weirder. There has to be a scientific explanation for this though. Magic is just science that you don’t understand yet.”

Eli nodded. “You were doing it in your sleep last night, but it didn’t manifest the way I did. It wasn’t solid. I couldn’t touch it, just see it, like a projection. You were yelling something last night about it starting because you stopped writing?” Eli prompted.

Little wheels clicked into place and began spinning deep within Viola’s mind. Stopping writing; that seemed to be the key. So why? What did all of these strange happenings have to do with her no longer writing? She thought of the burning sensation in her hand that day in the shop and her hand air writing and all those nights when she woke up in the middle of the night with that same burning in her hand needing to write out her dreams. Was writing a way of releasing her imagination in this world safely?

“Eli, I think when I write… when I write it makes my imagination manifest in the real world. I think that was what was controlling this. I stopped, rather abruptly, writing and my hand burns sometimes so fiercely to write that I think I am going to light on fire. I have to release it, like some sort of extra energy. When I stopped writing, it had to find another outlet. My imagination needs a way to be real and so it started manifesting physically when I stopped writing it. Another bridge into reality. But it’s not like that all the time. I mean I have dreams all the time that I chose not to write down, like they are unimportant. What makes my mind decide what needs to be in reality and what can be ignored?”

“If we assume it has something to do with energy transference, maybe your body, no your mind - if that was where the damage was when you had that big release when you pulled me over was - needs time to accumulate enough. You usually had big bursts of writing inspiration right? You didn’t write all the time, only when you felt compelled to?”

“My writing was sporadic, yes.”

“So an energy build up. Specifically energy built up in your mind, feeding on your imagination. You mentioned palinopsia the other day, causing you to have after images. Does it get worse when you feel you need to write? What about the ice-pick headaches, do they come more frequently when you need to write?”

Viola frowned in concentration, thinking about everything Eli was confronting her with. “Yes, yes. You’re right. The palinopsia and ice-pick headaches are always worse right when I feel I am bursting with the need to write.”

“So you could use those as triggers, couldn’t you? If you could figure out when you are full of this energy that you use to… Image?”

“Oh that works good; I like that,” Viola said and tried out the word: “Image.”

“Okay Image. If you track the energy by using those triggers, maybe you could control how, what, and when you Image things.”

Viola could feel excitement building up inside of her. It’s like I have a super power, she thought and her smile widened. “I could always just write again. This would all stop,” She said looking at Eli with a serious deadpan face. They both looked at each other seriously for a few seconds and burst into laughter.

“As if,” Eli said, “you discover you have this hidden power and you are just going to write nonsense on sheets and sheets of paper instead of exploring it?”

“That doesn’t sound like me at all. You’re right.” Viola already felt her mind searching, trying to find this supposed energy build up within her. Trying to feel it like another limb she could use.

“I think we have a long and interesting day ahead of us,” Eli said picking up the psychology book he had been reading and delving back into it. Viola looked at him with a sudden twinge of envy. She may have created him, but there were a lot of things about him that were very different from herself. He wore change like an old shirt, whereas to her it felt like stepping on hot coals. She looked at her hands and balled them into fists, trying to squeeze out the fear that was broiling inside her. Take that fear and master it. Make it work for you, not against you. She took in a deep breath and let it out slowly, closing her eyes and opening them again. When she looked around the room, it had shifted. It was soft and slightly out of focus; the feeling inside of her washing from fear to anticipation. She felt electricity travelling down her spine, sending shivers through her arms, hands, legs and feet. You wanted an adventure so badly, Vye Lavallee, well here it is. Don’t watch it pass you by. Take its hand and let it lead you on. She smiled again. I changed once only a few days ago, I can do it again and again and again if I need to. I can.

“I think this would work better if we were outside,” Viola suddenly said. They had spent the last couple of hours trying different things to get her palinopsia to appear. She was thinking about when it was the worst and outside looking into the sky it was always worse than when indoors in low lighting. Eli headed over to the coat rack and tossed her crimson Victorian jacket at her and pulled on his own long tan overcoat. With his dress shirt and cargo pants on, along with the Converse shoes, she couldn’t keep from grinning and wanted desperately to shout “Allons-y!”

“Wait a minute, I am going to have to change if we are going outside,” Viola said running into her bedroom. Silk summer kimonos didn’t really agree with winter jackets. Instead she pulled on some jeans and grabbed at random a T-shirt from her closet. When she put it on she realized that it was her Stay Calm and Don’t Blink shirt and she laughed at that. Well it matches Eli’s outfit at least, she thought and slipped her jacket on. As she pulled on her leather boots at the front door, Eli pulled the door open letting in a blast of cold air. She saw big flakes of snow drifting down from the sky and a thin layer already coating the surface of the world.

“Looks like it finally started snowing,” Viola said and walked out into it. She loved and hated snow. It was so beautiful to look at, even better to take walks in because it blanketed the world in silence. She loved the cold; it made her mind work faster and much more creatively. But she hated having to drive in it. If she were able to stay cozied up in her home for the winter, she would be quite content. “Let’s go down by the Kicking Horse River. It’s secluded enough down a ways,” she said.

They wandered down the road from her house until they came to a bridge. Just before crossing it, she took Eli down a side road made of dirt and they followed it for about twenty minutes until they were surrounded by the forest. She stopped near an outcropping of rock that looked over the river which was covered in a thick ice, only a pathway in the middle open to the running water below. “This is one of my favorite spots. Look you can still see the steeples over the treeline.” She pointed to the snow covered mountains. Eli followed her gaze and smiled.

“It’s ridiculously cold out here,” he said shuddering with the cold. Viola unwound the scarf she had taken from the hat rack and tossed it at him.

“You don’t need this?” he asked. Without waiting for a reply he wound it around his neck covering the bottom of his face and the tips of his ears.

“It’s actually not that cold,” she replied. She stared into the river below her, watching the flakes of snow hit and hiss as the water dissolved them. Then she started seeing sparkling clear snow falling amongst the real snow. “I think it’s starting,” She said to Eli. “What should I do?”

“It’s all guess work, but, I dunno, think of something that you want to be real,” Eli said.

Viola stared at the rock she was sitting on, concentrating. She could see a long silver pen like object in her mind with a glowing blue tip. She could see it clearly in her mind’s eye, but nothing was happening. It wasn’t even superimposing on the world like her imagination often did. “I don’t think this is working.” She could feel her right hand burning as she concentrated. She flexed it trying to rid herself of the sensation. It wouldn’t leave. She could feel the itch to write overflowing in her mind. “I just really want to write.”

“Well what else do you do, to get yourself writing?” Eli prompted.

Viola thought and took out her phone, scrolled through her music until she found the song she was looking for, Cyouwa Oto by Kokia. She hit play. “I listen to this song. I only have to listen to this one song and I can write anything.” The music began slowly, Kokia’s voice reverberating into the chill air. At one minute and twenty-two seconds Eli heard counting in the song and thirty-eight seconds later the chorus of the song started and he watched as Viola fell into a trance, her eyes was no longer seeing what was before her. She was somewhere else completely. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a silver pen-like object appear from nowhere. He stepped up to Viola and put his hand on her shoulder and pointed at the object.

“Grab it,” she whispered, still lost in the music. Eli went forward and tried to touch the object, but it wasn’t there. Just an image.

“I can’t grab it. It’s not really there,” Eli replied. Viola looked at the silver pen with the glowing blue end and felt her hand burn like fire. She walked over to the object and reached for it. When her finger came into contact with it, there was a spark of static electricity and the object solidified, becoming real. She picked it up and looked it over. She pushed some buttons on the side and it hummed to life with a strange whirring sound.

“I couldn’t touch it. Whatever energy you used to call it into existence, it needed physical release into the object for it to be pulled here. What is that?”

“It’s a screwdriver,” Viola replied and laughed. “I have no idea how to work this thing, but it’s sonic!” She was dancing on the rock now laughing and squealing.

“Sonic screwdriver?” Eli asked grabbing it from her hand as she turned in circles.

“I think it’s the real deal too!” Viola said.

“But where did the idea for this come from?” Eli asked holding the screwdriver in his hand in confusion.

“It’s from my favorite television show actually. I only thought of it because of what you are wearing, and the shirt I randomly grabbed. It felt like a Whovian moment. But really I wonder if it works.” She grabbed it from Eli’s hand and ran full tilt up the hill back towards her house. She was out of breath when she finally reached her door. Checking to make sure it was locked, she looked at the screwdriver in her hand. “Hope it is on the right setting. Haven’t a clue how to change the settings.” She pushed the screwdriver against the door and pushed the button making the screwdriver whirr in her hand. She heard a click as the lock opened on her door and she bounced up and down in triumph.

“It’s really real!” She said as Eli came up behind her also out of breath. “I mean not just a toy like the one I have. I mean really a working Sonic Screwdriver. That is… that is… Brilliant!”

She opened the door to her house and pulled off all her winter clothing still holding the screwdriver in her hand. “Eli this is crazy. I can’t believe this. This is…” She turned around suddenly lost in thought and began to pace the room. “I could make anything. I mean anything! Do you know what this means?” She turned suddenly and grabbed Eli in her arms and shook him. “Do you know what this means?”

“No Viola, I don’t have a clue.”

“Either do I. This is amazing! I could. I could have anything I ever dreamed of! I wonder how big of a thing I could make? I mean I made you didn’t I? So complex human is not beyond my grasp. Obviously I don’t have to know the entire working mechanics of a thing to make it.” She pointed at the sonic screwdriver in her hand implying she had no idea how it worked at all. “I wonder if I could make a car. I’ve always wanted a Mini Cooper, and I could Image it and even better I could make it like a solar powered one with hand print starter.” She looked at Eli with mischievous eyes and dashed out the door again. She ran to the parking lot and pushed play on her phone, letting Cyouwa Oto play again. Before Eli could even come round the corner to try to stop her, he saw an orange Mini Cooper standing in the parking lot just out of phase with reality.

“Viola don’t touch it. You don’t know what it will do to you. You had a cerebral hemorrhage when you Imaged me remember?” He shouted but could already see it was too late. A flash of blue electricity snapped the Mini Cooper into existence. Viola turned around and grinned at Eli.

“Did you see that? This is brilliant. I can’t believe this!” She was just taking a breath to speak again when Eli saw the look on Viola’s face change and she collapsed to the ground.

“Viola!” He ran up to her and grabbed her just before she hit the ground. “Have a little restraint will you. You are going to kill yourself. You have limits to learn.” He was speaking to no one at this point. Sighing, he picked up the unconscious girl and walked back into her house for the second time in less than a week. She was like a kid in a candy store, eating as much as she could without thinking of the tummy ache that was going to happen afterwards. It’s a good thing I am here, to keep her under control. He laid her in her bed, let Makoto curl up next to her and wandered back into the living room. Picking up the psychology book on the couch he went back to reading. Maybe there are some clues about all of this in here. Not that human beings actually know that much about the brain. I hope she’s all right.