The Boy Discovers
The boy stares at the ceiling in his bedroom. He’s been staring for what feels like hours now though the clock just above his door tells him it’s only been half an hour at most. The thoughts in his head are too jumbled to let him sleep, especially the one that sits at the back of it, nagging him about his earlier conversation. It whispers about a third eye, about an eye no one can see but is there, resting in the middle of his forehead. He rolls onto his side, perhaps the wall will be so uninteresting that sleep will claim him.
It doesn’t, mostly because his eyes never make it to the wall. Instead they land on the drawing that Gabe did earlier that day, he’d taped it to his wall when he came back from his class. He’d forgotten it was there in his frustration over sleep but now it was clear, even when he blinked he could still see it on the back of his eyelids. Open the eye in the middle of his forehead. That sounds crazy, just as crazy as trying to stand up without standing up but what harm could it do. He traces the shape of the third eye carefully. Purple sclera, blue iris, purple pupil. The iris is an oval, almost a slit like a cat’s eye.
He takes a deep breath and rolls onto his back once more. The ceiling is the last thing he sees when he closes his eyes, breathing slowing like he’s been taught in the room with white walls.
With only the light from the hallway to try and pry his eyes back open again, he breathes. He lets himself still, getting calm, getting heavy, his breathing slow and methodical. When he feels as though he is a stone he imagines the eye from the drawing, purple sclera, blue iris, purple pupil, in the middle of his forehead, wild and staring. He draws the shape over and over again, solidifying it in his head before he moves on to the next step. He pictures it closed now, not squeezed shut but closed as his other eyes are. He imagines only the light from the hallway, barely playing on the curve of his cheek, too dim to reach his hairline. He pictures himself calm and at rest.
With butterflies building in his stomach, on his next exhale, he imagines what the extra eye must be able to see. The ceiling and it’s many cracks, the rectangular outline of light and shadow. His bare room, ready for sleep. He thinks long and hard about that and then he tells himself that the third eye is opening, that the skin is parting to reveal the purple and blue that make up the addition eye.
One moment he was imagining what he might see, now he was seeing it. The cracks in the ceiling are all there, tiny two dimensional spiderwebs with no residents. It’s clearer than it was before, when his eyes were open and restricted by the limited light in the room. Now everything seems a little less heavy on the contrast, shadows more grey than black, whites tinted with a faint layer of purple. It reminds him of the time he put on a pair of coloured sunglasses, the world’s colour palette skewed. He’s not sure how he feels about it, deciding it’s time for a drink of water. Maybe splashing his face with something cold would help wash away the uncertainty in his stomach.
He sits up then slips to the floor, waiting for the chill of cold tile to run up his spine as it always does. It never comes. The floor doesn’t feel warm to his feet but it also doesn’t feel cold. Vale is glad, he isn’t sure where his slippers are and it would take more time to find them than it will to go to the bathroom. He spins just once, just to make sure that they aren’t near the head of the bed and sees something that makes him freeze in place.
Looking at the bed he sees himself, still laying there, eyes closed, face turned up towards the ceiling, breathing slowly and calmly as he’s been taught.
He’s not sure how much time passes. He didn’t look at the clock before this, looking at it now would tell him nothing. All he knows is that it’s a long moment of silence that he spends just standing there, staring down at himself. If it wasn’t for the gentle rise and fall of his stomach beneath the blanket he would think himself dead. At least this way he can see that he is in fact still breathing and when he puts a hand closer to his face it feels warmer, a tingling in the palm of it that travels out to his fingertips that tries to draw the rest of him in. Was this what the doctors were so keen for him to do? Was it this that they meant when they told him to stand without standing, to walk without moving?
He’s not sure and it’s not like he can ask anyone, not now. All he can do is sit back down on the bed and see if he can line himself up with his body, open his real eyes again. His fingers touch the blanket and it feels strange, as if he’s wearing a thick pair of winter gloves over his hands. The bed is there, he feels the pressure of it but he doesn’t really feel the surface of it, the texture. He could climb onto the bed, try to sleep properly or he could take a little walk, an invisible one, just like the tests are always trying to get him to do.
Curiosity beats his anxiety, taking his feet towards the door rather than the bed. The door stumps him for a moment, uncertain if he can push it open in this state or not since everything feels a little strange, as if the air around him was a little more liquid than gas, like it shifted and rippled with his every step. Turning the handle of the door isn’t any harder than it is normally but pushing it open takes far more effort than he expects. It swings slowly on it’s hinges, barely moving at all. When the gap is big enough he slips through it and lets the door go, watching as it returns to its original place, movement just as sluggish.
The hallway is just as quiet as his room, the silence pressing in against Vale’s ears. The faint sound of something at the end of the hallway is so muffled he can’t tell what it is but it doesn’t matter. It’s a beacon to him, calling him down passed all the closed doors with their too high windows. His feet shuffle against the floor, taking him down until he reaches the nurse’s station. The same man as usual sits there, nurse Jake, book in hand, though he is not alone this time. Watching a small flickering screen is Gabe, cross legged on the floor.
A peek on the screen reveals another show like the one that Gabe was watching the first time they met. Rarely does Gabe ever want to watch anything but one of the strange alien shows. He claims that though he knows them to be hoaxes, he likes to watch them anyway. He often points out that there’s no way of knowing if aliens are real or not so it’s good to gather as much informations as possible on them. Once Vale asked about ghosts, if it was the same for them, questioned triggered by some cheesy looking ghost hunting show that followed one off Gabe’s. The older boy just said he already knew as much as he needed to about ghosts. That hadn’t made Vale feel better at the time and he still didn’t really like to think about it.
Vale shouldn’t be out of bed, he knows that. Gabe has special permission for many of the rules he doesn’t follow. It’s one of the reasons he admires the older boy so much, because he seems so cool with his late nights and back talking to the nurses. Valeri doesn’t plan to mimic him, at least not at this point in his life and seeing the nurse sitting right there makes his heart start to race. It’s a strange sensation, knowing that back in his body his pulse is thudding in his ears but it doesn’t make him tremble, at least not this part of himself.
Slowly, as if moving through water instead of air, Vale raises his hand and waves it in front of Nurse Jake’s face.The man’s only reaction is to turn to the next page of his book. The boy repeats the action a second time only for it to continue to be ignored. His next test is to walk between Gabe and the TV set. The older boy likes to sit as close as he does to make that sort of interruption far less likely to happen and when it does he often snaps at the source. Valeri braces himself for the scolding then takes three steps to cross in front of the screen before pausing. The only sound is the slightly muffled speakers and the turn of another page in the nurse’s book. Neither one’s expression has changed since Vale joined them. He’s invisible, at least like this he is and the thought makes his heart race, a vague sensation of fluttering in his chest.
Without a word Vale takes a seat next to his friend. He’s afraid to make a peep in case that breaks the spell and he gets in trouble. Silent as can be he starts to watch whatever strange alien documentary Gabe has on tonight. It’s spookier than some of the others the boy’s already seen though he’s not sure if that’s because of the show itself or the time of night. Even if Vale isn’t afraid of the dark like some baby, he still finds everything just a little creepier when the shadows are closer, darker like this. A loud shout from one of the rooms makes him jump, he might claim not to be scared but he is on edge after the video clip about an alien autopsy.
He’s the only one who jumps but he’s not the only one to react to the shout. Gabe tears his eyes from the screen for a half moment before they drift back to his show. Nurse Jake huffs and gets up, book left face down and open as he heads in the direction of the disruption clearly annoyed with having to stop in the middle of whatever adventure was locked in the book’s pages. Vale takes a few big breaths to calm himself, pointedly trying to ignore how odd it is to not feel a heaving in his chest to go along with the expansion of his lungs. Settling again he returns his attention to the TV for all of a minute before the next thing scares him.
“Vale is that you? You figure that astral stuff out? That’s cool.”
Gabe hasn’t turned to look at Vale but he does address him directly which startles the boy so much that the next thing he sees is his ceiling, eyelids heavy, back in his body. Gabe is right, he has done it, he’s managed to astral project on purpose. He’s got no idea what that means for him or his life but right now it does start up a very nice fantasy that involves going home. The boy has no clue yet but he’ll never see his home again and this is just the first step he takes away from it forever.
