47 - Bury My Heart in the Forbidden Garden [October 5th, Age 14]

How does one begin to describe what had happened to me?

Even with the wisdom of hindsight, it’s hard. I can only recall the colors—the pulsing buzzing that rang around my head; the burning through my fingers. The heat through my face. The cold through everything else.

And I can remember Bell. Waiting for me.

I did not think for a long time after that. I spent countless hours—about a day, but infinite hours—with myself, locked in a soul-melting soundless chant. A mantra that I could not put to words. A catatonia that felt like failure.

I was, and then I was not.

I don’t think about that part of my life anymore. With this exception alone, I go about my days as if this had never happened. It’s contradictory to revel in the good parts of my days at the Radiant and ignore the elephant in the room, but I do it anyway. I live in contradictions. I do not make sense. I have long since given up trying to make sense.

Solving myself isn’t a productive use of my time.

I don’t think about this anymore. Going blind became a memory of watching a national tragedy on TV—your vision tunnels; you imagine, against your will and in brief flashes, what it would be like to be there; the memory implants itself in your head, time-stamped and all, forever. I know the day that I went blind. The day comes and goes every year, and every morning I take a deep breath and I close my eyes and I do not remember.

I can’t afford to. I don’t have the time.

Maybe it’s unhealthy to do that. It’s gotten easier over time, though, and after recent events it almost doesn’t bother me anymore. The person who went blind four years ago was someone else entirely. A fourteen-year-old girl who looked like me, talked like me, felt like me. A girl who was named Erika Hanover—the daughter of Hal Hanover—but wasn’t me. It was someone else. A perfect stranger, perfectly detached.

I don’t think about it for a very simple reason. I’m stronger now than I was then. Not by all that much—I don’t get as many opportunities to flex now that I’m more or less on my own—but eighteen-year-old me would beat fourteen-year-old me in a fight, most likely. The years have been kind to me, somewhat. It comes and goes, like everything else. I go from place to place. I have good days and bad.

Eighteen-year-old me lived through blindness. It is simply a part of her now. It isn’t good, it isn’t bad—it just is. Qualifiers slip off it. It slots right into the empty space in my identity where a middle name would have stood—something for me and me alone; something nobody else really needs to know.

But I know the way I cope isn’t perfect. It can be broken. I know because it broke me once, and I can only assume it could break me again.

I don’t think about it much because it scares me. In the present day, it’s the only thing that does.

If not about it, I think around it a lot. The days leading up the October 4th of my fourteenth year. As far back as my youngest memories—as far back as the day I was brought home from the hospital that Hal told me of across years of snippets and side-mentions. I consider if there was anything I could have done differently. If I’d made a mistake somewhere, somehow—but never in the context of if I could have prevented it. I knew full well that there was nothing I could do to stop it. It came over me like an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, a meteor-crash. It was a biblical flood. An act of God. And even I, as someone close enough, could not possibly have stopped it.

But I often consider if I deserved it.

I don’t think of myself as a bad person. I don’t really think of myself as a good person, either. I try not to use qualifiers before my humanity. Personal experience says it leads down bad roads, and it’s hard enough just existing, let alone existing on a side of a slippery binary.

I’ve done good things and I’ve done bad things. I’ve done brave things and I’ve done cowardly things. I’ve saved lives and I’ve ended them. I’ve been compassionate and I’ve been cold. I’ve been calm and I’ve been rage. But I’ve only ever been Erika. I’m not qualified to make that kind of judgement about myself, and even if I could, I don’t think I’d want to.

Thinking about whether or not I deserved what happened to me is a sort of roundabout way of going about that, though. As we all know, good things are supposed to happen to good people, and bad things are supposed to happen to bad people—and as we all know, it doesn’t always work out that way. More than a few saints were punished by horrible deaths. More than a few tyrants died peacefully in their sleep.

The truth is that I don’t really understand all these qualifiers, and I don’t really want to. They go over my head. The distinctions are too rooted in context and in the minds of their beholders. The swirling gray in the middle is too big. I lose myself in the circular system.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

And because of that simple reason, I don’t think about it. And because of that reason, I never think about the root time—those two days when I was lost.

I don’t think about them because I am afraid I will find an answer.

But now I am making an exception. I’m going to remember it, just this once. I’m strong enough now. Time has passed and I have become well again.

I can.

0 0 0

Bell led me by the hand back to the factory. I don’t know how long I was out there. I don’t know how long it took her to find me. I don’t know when I went out, or when I decided to try to go somewhere quiet.

I don’t know where I was. I never tried to locate it. As far as I’m concerned, on October 5th, when I went out, I wandered out of the universe.

And Bell travelled across dimensions to take my hand again.

She led me somewhere close. I don’t know where; but when she gently pulled my hand down to tell me to sit in the tall grass, it triggered a memory of the fields outside the factory where I was laying when I found out that Bell had come back.

But I didn’t see the factory. I didn’t see anything.

My field of vision was a sensation of light, and nothing more.

Bell’s voice came to me, after we’d been sitting for a few moments in silence. The wavering grass in the low wind keeping me rooted in reality. The fingers brushing my crossed legs catching the whirlwind in my mind.

She said, “Erika—you’re almost there.”

Bell had not spoken to me since she took my hand from that distant place I’d gone. I couldn’t begin to determine what she was thinking. All I can say is that she knew what I wanted. And she knew I couldn’t have it; but she didn’t have an alternative at the time. Leaning on “because I said so” to convince me.

I did not make a conscious decision to give her one chance to make a case. Some other part of me did—my heart, maybe, or my other vital organs in a signed petition.

She went on. “If you can beat this, you can beat anything. This is the only thing that anyone can ever use against you—but only if you let it win.”

The words found their places, their slots, in the grand registry of my brain’s language. They sat there in their notches like perched birds. I could walk down the aisle and look up and point at all the beautiful words, their plumages bright and beautiful with the memory of lost colors, and I could see them and love them and not understand a single sound of their song.

I didn’t move.

“You’ve already done this,” Bell said. “When you saved Cygnus from the ambush. You blocked two attacks without seeing them. How did you do that?”

Her tone. Her tone was off. The words that flew in weren’t the right colors—they were muted, grayer. I watched them come in and take their spots, and I just smiled and smiled and smiled.

“Erika,” Bell said, again.

My name came in and the birds scattered. The hall became a cacophony of painted noise—and settled in the center was the vulture, the television-static winged beast—

I hunched forward. Breathing harder. Breathing faster.

A little cry escaped my throat.

There was a snap, and off to my left there was a bloom of cool air—and just as suddenly as it came, it dissipated.

“Give me your hand,” Bell said, quietly.

My hands weren’t mine. I’d already given them away.

Bell took my hand, opened my fingers, and pressed into my palm a shredded clump of dandelions, cool and moist—the wetness of their bleeding bright in my palm, a perfect outline of every place they hurt highlighted vivid in my awareness.

“Did you feel it?” she asked me. “When I picked them.”

The cold spot in the air—

Slowly, my head moved. Up and down. I felt it.

“That was how you did it that time before,” Bell said. “You don’t need to see water to use it. You can feel it. When we stopped the New York goons in Utica—you didn’t see that truck, did you? You felt it. You put a cloud out there and you got them without ever seeing them.”

That was someone in the past. It wasn’t me. I wasn’t there, now. A set of bones wrapped in muscles wrapped in skin.

“It’s not going to be easy,” Bell said. “It’s going to be hard. I don’t want to lie to you, even if that might—even if that might make this easier. But I know you can do it because you’ve already shown me—shown all of us—that you can. You can feel the world around you with moisture in the air.”

The cold shape of a dandelion in my hand.

And Bell whispered—“Please, Erika.”

And I remembered the time when I saved Cygnus’s life. When I deflected the rocks because they moved the water vapor in the air.

I was omnipotent then. I was invincible then.

And now—

And I took the moisture from the dandelion, and I pulled it all out, letting the plant shrivel in my hand, and I cast that moisture in all directions, but mostly in front of me, because that was where the voice was coming from, and I wanted to feel it.

The droplets spread into a thin fog, so light that it was invisible, and they pressed forward, and as they passed around Bell her outline became clear. She emerged from the darkness as a cool sensation, a shape I could touch—six feet tall and change and sitting on her knees, face drawn tight in anticipation, waiting for me to realize who I was again.

And I turned my face to meet hers. Where I knew it was.

I felt Bell breathe. A deep one, a sigh. Had she been sweating? Her forehead was moist, too.

But I knew it was not the same. It never would be.

I began to tense, and Bell saw it and grabbed my hand.

I shocked to attention.

“Erika, this is something you can master,” Bell said. “It’s going to be hard for a while, but then you’ll get used to it, and then you’ll do something better than just see. You’ll feel. You’ll know. You’ll—you’ll be invincible.”

The word.

It drifted into my head and it took its perch, kingly in stature, and I knew the meaning. It was not just a pretty bird to look at, a sound to go in one ear and out the other.

It was who I could be. Who I strove to be.

Who I was.

The word turned its head to me and I—

Slowly, because I had to ask for permission.

Slowly, because I had to steal back what I had leant out.

Slowly because I did not know what could happen past this single action.

Slowly I got to my feet and I stood.

And I turned my head down, to stare with empty dead eyes at the crouching Bell.

I am invincible.