Daughter of Time 1: Reader (4 page)

In this place, I was both lucky and unlucky. Lucky, because it soon became clear that I was special. Even before they realized my progress, I
did
begin to see
something
when other stimulus was removed. As that something became more clear, I was able to more and more confidently find my way through the trials they erected for me, even though I did not understand the purpose. Even if I did not understand
what
it was I was doing. As my eyesight began to fail—so that soon the dark glasses did little to take away what was almost gone—I began to develop a conscious new sense. Patterns, substance,
something
was becoming clear to me, and I gained the power to succeed. At that stage, that was all that mattered, some end to the displeasure and cruelty. I was crushed and nearly broken. It didn’t matter why, as long as the pain stopped.

Soon, I became all the rage with the men and women in white coats. How they fawned over me and smiled, happy with their little animal that was performing so well. I was isolated even more from the other children. Around that time, the operations began.

It was good that I met Ricky before they started the long series of surgeries. Ricky was the only kid I knew who seemed able to smile in this sterile place of fluorescent lights and metal corridors. Silly and fat, a few years older than me, and an obsessed Red Sox fan who could name every player and team statistic since 1908, Ricky became my only friend. The others were too hurt, too traumatized and too afraid to open up to anyone, and like shocked lab rats, they huddled to themselves. Ricky braved many beatings showing some sort of life, some sort of humanity in this place. And once or twice he even made me smile. Doesn’t sound like much, but in this place, a smile was a miracle.

I asked him once how he had the courage to dare the things he did. He laughed over the lunch food. “My fahther,” he said, with the full-mouth “ah” of Boston, “beat me worse than this many nights, after he’d been drinking.” He leaned close to me, glancing over his shoulders, and back, looking into my eyes, eyes that saw him only as a blur now. “These whitecoats, they’re mean jerks and all, but they ain’t nothing compared to a good drunk.”

“Ricky, why are we here? What do they want from us?” It was the first time I had asked anything like that since I arrived.

He shook his head. “They won’t tell, and we ain’t gonna find out. What’s important is not them, but
us
. What
we
want, why
we’re
here. If we make it all about them, well…” he pointed around to the other kids, “we’ll just end up like them. You got to find your reason, Ambra. And hold on to it. Don’t let them be your reason, or take yours away.”

I didn’t really understand what he meant then, but his words stayed with me, circling in my mind. Months later, when things got worse for me and I nearly lost myself to despair, his words landed somewhere deep inside and planted themselves, growing slowly but steadily into a great oak tree. A tree with deep roots and colossal arms, and ten thousand leaves blowing in the wind of my soul. His words imploring me to find my reason, any reason, saved me.

It wasn’t much later that they took Ricky away. He knew it was coming. “I can’t make heads or tails of these tests,” he told me. “I’m not what they want, Ambra. They won’t be keeping me long.” He sounded sad but not defeated. I always remember that tone in his voice, when you know that you can’t win, that the end is there, but no matter what the powers do to you, you won’t ever give in or stop being you.

I don’t think I would have made it through the next two years without remembering his inspiring words to me that day. Months and years of having monsters cut on you, carve up your skull and brain, and for such a terrible purpose—I would have given up, my soul would have been broken. But even as they did these things, I found my way. I found my reason.

Deep into the past I retreated, and out of the past I slowly stumbled into my future.

6

True knowledge comes only through suffering.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning

He was younger than the other whitecoats, with a sparse beard and longish black hair. At least that’s how I remembered him from the many times he had worked with me. Now, he was a featureless blur, and I knew him by his voice.

The excitement was too much for him. He bubbled over with words that he should not have been speaking to me.

“You’re special, Ambra,” he said as he took the helmet off my head. “We’ve never seen a child like you before. You’ve mastered all the navigation drills, succeeding in ways we don’t even understand. And the other things you are doing…what are you doing in there, Ambra?”

When they ask you a question, you have to answer.

“I don’t know, Sir.”

He stared at me for a long moment. “No. You probably don’t.” He sighed and turned away from me. “We haven’t had a visit in a year. Soon they will come back, and we will lose you.” He sounded genuinely distressed. Not for me, to be sure, but for losing his prize guinea pig. Then something brightened his tone.

“But next week a new phase in your training will begin. Next week is your first surgery!” he said excitedly, seeming to expect me to understand the import of the statement. My expression clearly depressed him.

“You know what the surgeries are for, don’t you?”

I was still naive enough to think back to the original excuses these criminals had given my parents before they murdered them.

“No. Maybe…for my tumor?”

His voice lit up. “Yes, Ambra. Very good. For your tumor.” Talking to me like I was three years old.

“They will take it out, finally? It’s getting hard to see.”

There was a long pause. I became very afraid. In my small hope I had spoken without being addressed first, and perhaps I had said something wrong. It had been some time since I had been beaten and a long time since they had shocked me. The thought of either made me start to sweat.

Finally, he spoke. His voice was sad. “Yes, we’ve noticed your visual impairment. It is not unexpected.” He set the helmet down with a thud on the counter. “Come, our time is finished here. I won’t see you for a few weeks, not until after your recovery. Over the next few months, we’ll see how you progress.”

That was the first hint of what they were planning for me, and the first sense I had that what was happening was part of something larger than me, or even this place.
Who
would come soon? What was navigation? And why was what I was experiencing and responding to in their tests so important to them?

But I had little time to learn more. The morning came, and I was whisked into a prep room, shaved bald, and had my scalp drawn on with Magic Markers. I was then wheeled into the operating room under bright lights and the gaze of several blurry figures I assumed were the surgeons. A needle was stuck into my arm, and I saw a shape that must have been a bag of some liquid feeding drops into my veins.

Suddenly, the room shrunk to a point and I was on the outside of the universe. Just as suddenly, it was back to full size. I heard myself say “Wow.” Again it happened, and I felt farther away from the universe than ever. The third time ended in blackness, broken by a strange awakening of pain and dizziness that blinked out in a moment and a final return to consciousness lying in a bed.

I could tell that my arm still had a tube wired into it, and my head felt twice its normal size. I reached up to touch it, and it was a large swollen thing, wrapped in bandages. Sitting at my side was a blurry shape, the voice recognizable. It was my talkative scientist friend.
Dr. Talkative
.

“You’re awake, Ambra. Good. That’s
good
. The operation was a success. Aren’t you happy?”

My throat hurt, and I could barely gargle out words. “Is the tumor gone? Why can’t I see better?”

“No, Ambra. The tumor is still there. It will
always
be there, growing larger and larger. We’ve created space for it. We’ve opened space for further growth inside your brain and opened the back and top portion of your skull. It will grow outward now much faster, so much pressure and hindrance removed. You have a temporary new skull of composite material in place with a greater circumference. It will have to be replaced, of course, as the tumor grows further. And that growth will be aided by the new blood supply. The surgeons are very talented. They routed vessels from the occipital lobe over to the tumor. To better nourish it. Of course, this will accelerate the loss of vision, but that cannot be helped at this point. All that matters is the tumor. Your
gifts
come from it, Ambra. It is your space-time eye!” he chirped out, laughing. “God, you are going to be a star!”

He patted me on the arm and stood up, walking out of the room and leaving me feeling like some terribly twisted form of life.

And sure enough, a month later I was totally blind.

7

I myself am time inexhaustible, and I the creator whose faces are in all directions. I am death who seizes all, and the source of what is to be. 
—Bhagavad Gita

My dad used to say every cloud has a silver lining. So what do you get for being stricken with a giant, literally head-splitting tumor that destroys your sight and a fake skull and grafted skin to cover the extra surface area of your head that will never grow a hair that leaves you looking like the cross between a bulbous-headed alien and a middle-aged man? You could say I was given extraordinary powers and a central part to play in a power struggle between good and evil. But I never wanted any of that. At the time, I got Ricky’s Red Sox hat.

I don’t know how he did it. It shouldn’t have been possible with all the security and paranoia of this place, but somehow, he managed to smuggle in his Red Sox hat, keep it hidden from them all that time, and then hide it my room, stuffing it inside the metal tube that served as one of the legs of my bed. I was lucky to find it, or maybe it was inevitable. My sight going quickly, I began to use my hands and feet to feel out everything around me. I had to learn to move about on my own to some degree, and I took the first “steps” toward that in my room, touching everything, feeling the walls, furniture, even the air as it changed directions and taste, telling me if a door was open, or a window, or if some machinery had been switched on. As my sight died, my other senses were growing—including my
other
sense, but I’ll get to that later.

In the weeks of recovery following my surgery, after being transferred from the medical wing back to my cage, I had lots of time to do nothing. And it seemed that the cameras didn’t care anymore what I did. One day, feeling around, I found the cap, stuffed in the tube, rolled up and mashed so that it would never recover its intended form again. But it was Ricky’s hat, all right. I knew that from the smell and his description of the 2084 World Series Champions emblazoned in raised letters on the side, as well as the Ricky Hernandez signature scrawled inside in permanent marker that someone described to me later on. Complete with phone and address in Boston.

I think one of the first steps I took away from the pit of madness I was close to falling into, was putting that cap on, and not giving a damn what they would do to me. My head was already too big for a normal human hat, and this was just operation number one. I unsnapped the back, left it open, and it fit. Kind of. The grafted skin was tender and sore, but I wore the hat anyway, and it covered the new addition to my body, giving me an almost normal appearance again. My hair would grow in over time from the part of the scalp that still had hair, slightly above the cap, so that from a distance, if you didn’t look too closely, I might just look like a normal redhead wearing a Red Sox cap.

I took to wearing it all the time. At first, the whitecoats sounded slightly disturbed by it, but then—
a
miracle!
Since I was now their budding superstar, I got special privileges, and they let me wear it and stopped commenting. I guess they wanted to keep me happy, keep me performing.