Hearthmoss

The clock above the whiteboard had a second hand that stuck on the eleven and jumped two seconds to catch up. Wesley had watched it do that through four presentations. Photosynthesis, the bridges of the Roman aqueducts, a poster about sleep, something with a tri-fold board that kept folding shut. He had stopped listening somewhere in the aqueducts and started counting the jumps. The clock was wrong by about ninety seconds a class and nobody had ever fixed it.

Dana Holt went up last. She did not bring a board.

She crossed to the windows first and turned the rod on the blinds until the slats lay flat, and the gray noon outside went to a darker gray inside, the kind that made the projector readable. Then she woke the projector. Then she walked the rows and set a small white card face down on each desk, one card, squared to the edge, and went back to the front before the first card had been turned over.

"Leave them," she said. "You will use them later."

Her voice did not climb at the end the way the others' had. Mr.-Bridges-of-Rome had talked like every sentence was a question he hoped you would forgive. Dana spoke in flat closed lines and let them sit.

Ms. Coyle was at the side of the room with her grade sheet on her knee and her pen already moving. She had been waiting for this one. Wesley knew that the way the whole class knew it, because Coyle had spent a year aiming things at Dana, books left on her desk, a science fair form folded into her binder, the particular brightness teachers save for the student who will not light. Coyle was leaning forward. She was glad.

"My report is on a color you cannot see," Dana said. "Then I am going to show it to you."

She clicked to the first slide. A diagram of an eye in cross section, the standard one, the textbook had it on page forty.

"Light comes in. The back of the eye has three kinds of cone. Short, medium, long. People say blue, green, red, which is close enough." She clicked. Three overlapping curves. The curves were correct. Wesley knew they were correct because he had drawn them himself for the olympiad packet in October, and hers had the medium and long peaks crowding each other in the right place, which the textbook version got lazy about. "But the brain does not read the three cones straight. It pairs them and sets the pairs against each other. Red is wired against green. Blue is wired against yellow. One wire, two directions."

Click. A simple line with red on one end and green on the other.

"A wire cannot pull both ways at once. So the brain has no setting for a red that is also green. It is not that the color is rare. There is no channel for it. The wall is not in the world. The wall is in you."

Wesley waited for the mistake that would let him stop listening. He had a list of the usual ones ready. She made none of them. She said opponent process and she said Hering and she got the year close enough that it did not matter, and every fact that came out of her and held was a small door he had counted on being able to close, closing instead on him.

He set his pen down.

"There is a second thing your eye does that you were never told," Dana said. "It shakes."

Click. A black dot, centered, alone on white.

"Look at the dot. Do not look away from it."

The class looked. Coyle looked. Wesley looked, and because he knew what was coming he tried to beat it, and could not. The white around the dot began to crawl inward and dim at its edges, the corners of the field going soft and vague, the way a word you have written too many times stops being a word.

"The eye is never still," Dana said over the top of it. "It makes small jumps, hundreds a minute, too small to feel. The jumps keep dragging the picture onto fresh cells. If they ever stopped, if you could hold a picture perfectly still on the back of the eye, the picture would fade. The cells would give up. You would go gray. The shaking is the only reason you see anything at all."

"Okay," somebody said, blinking hard. "Okay, that's creepy."

The class laughed, the small relieved laugh of people glad a thing had a name.

Dana did not laugh. Her eyes had gone past the rows to the back of the room, to the door and the strip of window beside it, and they stayed there a moment too long before she came back.

"In 1983 two scientists asked a question," she said. "If the shaking is what keeps the colors apart, what happens if you take the shaking away."

Click. A grainy photograph of an apparatus, a chair, a head brace, a barrel of lenses aimed at where a face would go.

"They built a machine that watched the eye and moved the picture to match it. Every small jump the eye made, the picture jumped the same amount the same instant, so the picture never moved on the eye at all. It was held. Then they showed the eye a card. Half red. Half green. A hard border down the middle."

She let that sit.

"Without the shaking, the border landed on the same cells and stayed. The cells at the line stopped reporting. The two halves stopped being two halves." A click. The slide was only text now, a single line, her own words and not a textbook's. The subjects could not name what they saw. "Some of the people in that chair said the red and the green ran together into one color. Not a mix. Not brown, not yellow, not a checkerboard of the two. One color, the whole field, that had red in it and green in it at the same time, in the same place, and that they had no word for, because no one has a word for it, because you are built so that you will never need one."

A hand went up two seats ahead of Wesley. Priya, who also did olympiad, who also had the packet.

"That experiment didn't replicate," Priya said. "Right? I read that when other people tried it the subjects just saw an in-between color, or it faded out gray like your dot. Nobody's sure the forbidden color is even real. It might just be the border breaking down."

It was the correct objection. It was Wesley's objection, sitting in his mouth, and she had gotten to it first.

Dana looked at Priya. The look took a moment to arrive, as though it had to come a long way.

"That is the correct objection," Dana said. "The follow-up studies are real. Some people saw an in-between color. Some saw it fade. The honest answer that you will find if you look it up is that the science does not agree on whether the color is a true color or a glitch at the edge where the two fields meet."

Priya started to lower her hand.

"So I built the machine at home," Dana said, "to settle it. And it is a true color. And I have been able to see it ever since."

Nobody moved. A chair somewhere took a person's weight shifting and let out one short note and was quiet. Coyle was nodding, writing something long and pleased on her sheet, and the place where a hard question could have gone in had a shape to it, and the shape had already closed.

"You cannot build the chair," Dana said. "You cannot watch your own eye and move a picture against it in your bedroom. But you do not need the chair. There is an older, smaller way in, and it is on the card on your desk, and we are going to do it now, together, because it is the only part of this you will believe."

She came down off the front and into the rows.

"Turn the card over. Do not turn it over until I say. Coyle, the lights, please, all the way down."

Coyle got up and put the lights all the way down, because a student had asked her to, because the student was finally, finally running the room.

"Turn it over."

Wesley turned his card. A square of green filled it, saturated, even, the green of a traffic light close up, with a small black cross dead in the center.

"Look at the cross. Only the cross. Do not let your eyes wander off it. Thirty seconds. I will count."

She walked the rows while she counted, slow, and Wesley kept his eyes on the cross and felt the green start to do the thing the dot had done, dim and crawl, and underneath it something else, a pressure, the green getting tired of being green. She counted in flat numbers with no rise. When she passed his desk he felt her stop, just behind his shoulder, just for a beat, the way she had stopped on the back of the room, and then she moved on.

"Now," she said. "Eyes up. The white wall. Now."

He looked up at the white wall above the whiteboard and the wall was not white. A shape sat on it the size of his card, red, a red that stood off the wall and made its own light, brighter than the wall behind it, the way nothing painted can. Around the room people made the sound, the involuntary one, the oh. He knew what it was. His cones recovering, the green channel worn down so the red ran unopposed for a moment. A named thing. Self-luminous red, page forty-one.

It faded. Inside ten seconds the wall took it back and was a white wall, and the room was a room full of people laughing again, turning to each other, saying did you see it, saying that was so cool, saying do it again.

"You all saw the same thing," Dana said. She had gone back to the front. She was not laughing, and her eyes were on the back of the room again, on the door, and this time she gave a small nod toward it, the smallest tip of the chin.

Wesley followed her look. The door. The strip of window. The hallway empty behind the glass.

He decided she had nodded at the clock.

"That red is allowed," Dana said. "It is on the edge of what your eye can do, but it is allowed, it has a name, it goes away. I want you to remember that it went away."

(He heard someone say quietly: "Mine hasn't...")

She clicked the projector off. The fan wound down. In the dark room the only light was the gray coming flat through the blinds, and she stood in it and looked at all of them with an expression that did not match the room, that had nothing in it of the cool thing they had just done together, and waited for the noise to die so she could tell them the rest.

The laughing thinned and then it stopped, the way a faucet stops, a last drip and done. Coyle had quit writing. Her pen was capped against the grade sheet and she was sitting up a little straighter, smiling the smile of a person waiting for the good part, and she did not yet know there was not going to be a good part.

Wesley still had the red.

Not on the wall. The wall was clean, white, a white wall. The red lay in a thin line along the top edge of the projector housing where the plastic met the dark behind it, the same self-luminous red from the afterimage, and it did not move when his eyes moved. That was the wrong thing about it. An afterimage rode the eye. You looked left and it went left with you, because it was burned onto the back of the eye and the eye carried it. This stayed on the projector. He looked at the door and looked back and it was on the projector still, in the same place, the width of a thread, and a second piece of it had come up along the frame of the door, low, near the handle.

Residue, he told himself. The green was strong. He had stared at the cross the whole thirty seconds the way she said. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes until there were sparks and took them away and the room swam and settled and the red was on the projector and on the door frame, holding still, waiting for his eyes to come back to it.

"That red went away for you," Dana said. "It did not go away for me."

(Wesley heard someone whisper: "It hasn't gone away for me, either...")

Dana was at the front in the gray light with the dead projector behind her.

"I did the card the way you did it. Green, then the white wall. The red came up. I waited for it to go." A space where another person would have filled in a feeling. "In the morning it was on the ceiling over my bed. Then it was on the door of my closet, and the light switch, and the cord of the lamp. Not all of those. Some of those. I could not find the rule for which."

Somebody laughed, one note, and heard themselves, and stopped.

"After a while it was not only the red. There were other ones. I am not going to try to tell you the other ones, because there are no words for them and I tried for a long time and made myself sick trying. One of them is the color from the chair in the 1983 experiment, the one with the red in it and the green in it together. I have a name for that one. I call it Hearthmoss. It is on a lot of things in my house now."

Wesley wrote fixed to room not eye on his notes and his hand was not steady and the letters came out wrong.

"The colors were on the things first," Dana said. "It took me longer to understand they were on the things because the things did not belong to me. They were in the same place as my things. A chair where my chair is. A cup where my cup is. My father has a chair he reads in. It is taken now. Not by him." A space. "My mother is in the kitchen. She does not turn around when I come in."

She said it the way she had said short, medium, long. The way she had said 1983. The class heard a ghost story and a few of them smiled the uncertain smile, and Coyle's pen came off the grade sheet, and Wesley heard a girl report that her mother had stopped turning around, in the same flat voice she used for facts, and put it together with the chair that was not her father's, and felt his mouth go dry in a slow way, gland by gland.

"Then it was not the rooms," Dana said. "It was the people in them. I am not alone in any room. I have not been alone in a room since October. I do not think I ever was."

The door frame had a person's worth of the color on it now. Wesley was not looking at the door. He could see it without looking at it, at the edge of the side of his eye, a vertical column of something that was red and was green and was neither and was the height of a man, standing in the doorway with the empty hall behind the glass, and when he turned his head to put his eye on it directly there was the door, the handle, the hall, nothing, and when he turned back it came up again at the edge, patient, in the place where a person would stand.

His mind whispered back to him in her voice: I call it Hearthmoss.

And then it whispered: A cup where my cup is.

He looked down the row to make the edge of his eye let go of it, and the cast was on Priya's shoulder, two seats up, a smear of the same wrong color across the back of her sweater, or just behind her sweater, in the few inches over the seat where the air should have been empty.

"Wait," Wesley said.

It came out before he had a question. His pen rolled off the slope of the desk and hit the floor and he did not go after it. Coyle looked at him. Dana looked at him, the look arriving from its distance, and waited.

He made it into a question because he was a person who needed it to have an answer that was not the other answer. "If it does that. If it put those things in your house and took your mother and father... why would you have us do it? Why would you make us see it too?"

The second hand on the broken clock stuck on the eleven and did not jump.

"Because they asked me to," Dana said.

She raised her arm and pointed past them, over their heads, to the back of the room, the door, the strip of window, the place her eyes had been going all hour.

All at once, they turned to look... and found the room much more crowded than it had been before.

 

~End~