End of the Century (12 page)

WHEN
A
LICE STEPPED ONTO
W
ESTMINSTER
B
RIDGE
, she got her first look at the London Eye. It was just like she'd seen on television the week before. But she'd been seeing it for a lot longer than that.

It was an enormous Ferris wheel and looked for all the world like a gigantic bicycle wheel, spokes radiating out from the hub to the rim, but in the place of a tire were little pillbug-shaped pods of glass and steel spaced at regular intervals. It stood right on the banks of the Thames River, across from the Houses of Parliament and up a bit. According to
Frommer's
, it was an “observation wheel,” whatever that was, but was the tallest one in the world, so Alice supposed that made it the tallest Ferris wheel in the world, too. She'd been up in the Texas Star at the State Fair, which was supposed to be the biggest one in North America or the Western Hemisphere or something-or-other, but if it was half as tall as the London Eye, Alice would have been surprised.

Luckily, Alice wasn't scared of heights. Not really. She was scared of
falling
, but not from heights. She was scared of falling off of anything, tall or short.

So the idea of falling from the top of a four-hundred-foot-tall Ferris wheel wasn't any more scary than that of falling from the top of a flight of stairs. And she'd done that once and survived, hadn't she? More or less, that is.

But when Alice saw the London Eye, she didn't just see a giant Ferris wheel. Or an enormous bicycle wheel surrounded by metal pillbugs. She saw an eye, looking out over a city. You had to squint a little to see it as an eye,
but it was there, all the same. And it was this image, the eye looking out over the city, that had brought her here.

She'd been seeing that eye and that city since she was seven and a half years old, since a few months after the accident, the first one, not the one that no one at school liked to talk about. The eye above the city had been the central image of her very first “episode,” as her grandmother called them, or “temporal lobe seizure,” as the doctors later called it. Of course, her grandmother Naomi had been going through a Catholic phase at the time and had been convinced that the episodes were evidence of demonic possession and had taken her down to the church and insisted that the priest give her an exorcism. The priest had refused, and Alice's grandmother had to continue to look further and further afield until she was able to find a clergyman willing to administer the rites. Of course, she also took Alice to a curandera, who shaved her head just in case she had lice; a palm reader, who smelled of mentholated cough drops and stale tobacco; and a hairdresser who dabbled in the occult, who couldn't bring herself to sacrifice a live chicken and so instead performed a few cleansing rituals with a frozen turkey her grandmother brought from the supermarket. Alice's mother had been busy with the postal contract unit, pulling double shifts after the death of Alice's father a few months before, and didn't know how much school Alice was missing until the school sent around a truant officer. Then the trips to the crazy-eyed hairdressers and disreputable priests stopped, and when Alice's mother found out about the episodes, all of those weeks later, she rushed her to the doctor, who hooked her up to an EEG and diagnosed her with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy.

As soon as Alice started taking the anticonvulsants the doctor prescribed, she stopped having her episodes. For a while, at least.

Here is what Alice saw during her episodes:

An eye over a city. (What city, she didn't know.)

A jewel or diamond or crystal that seemed to shine with an inner light.

Large black birds. Lots of them. (Originally Alice thought they were
crows, or maybe even oversized grackles, but when she saw a nature documentary a while later, she knew she'd been wrong. They were ravens.)

A small body of water, a pond or lake, the surface motionless as glass, smooth and featureless as a mirror's face.

A man she didn't know whose eyes were ice-chip blue.

Alice had missed so much school that she was held back a year, and when all of the other kids moved on to the third grade, she stayed back in the second. She didn't have any more episodes, not until she was almost sixteen and a freshman in high school. But the images she'd seen in those weeks stuck with her, and she was forever doodling them in the margins of her schoolwork or drawing them in art classes. In particular the eye above the city. The eye was giant, Alice had remembered that, but there hadn't been a face, or another eye, or even an eyebrow and lashes. More a giant eyeball floating in midair. And the city was indistinct, more the abstract suggestion of a city than an actual place.

Alice started keeping a diary around the time she was nine years old, and by the time she was eleven had graduated to spiral notebooks that she carried everywhere. Like most girls that age, she was paranoid about people reading her innermost thoughts but couldn't afford a diary with a lock and key, especially not considering the fact that she filled up a new one every few weeks, no matter what the days and dates preprinted on the pages. So she had to devise another way to keep her thoughts secure, and started writing backwards. Right to left, mirror-image style. The idea at first was that she would hold the pages up to a mirror to read them, but after a little while she found it as easy to read backwards as it had become to write that way, and so she didn't bother. That she wrote almost exclusively in purple ink was just a question of aesthetics.

It wasn't until later that she discovered that Leonardo da Vinci had written backwards in his own journals, for much the same reason. And later still before Mr. Saenz told her all about how Lewis Carroll had been a temporal lobe epileptic, too, and that he'd written backwards in his notebooks, as well. When Saenz told her that Carroll had used only purple ink, it seemed like it must have been fate.

In any event, in the pages of her mirror-written, purple-inked notebooks, Alice frequently sketched the image of the eye over the city, along with her compulsive lists of television shows she hated, books she'd read, kids at her school who ignored her, and all of the places she would go if she were ever able to leave home. London was usually on this last list, but as an afterthought, far down the pecking order, somewhere after Disney World but before Six Flags Over Texas.

It wasn't until she'd seen a news story about tourist attractions in England, the night after her grandmother's funeral, that Alice knew anything about the London Eye, but as soon as she'd seen it on screen, she'd recognized it as the image from her episodes. Of course, by this point, she'd started thinking of them as
visions
, instead, but all the same. There was the giant eye above the city, just as she'd seen when she was seven and a half, and like she saw again her freshman year. And suddenly, Alice knew what one part of her vision, at least, was trying to tell her. She had to go to London. She had to go to the London Eye. And there, she hoped, she would find out what the rest of the vision meant. It was the only thing that made any sense at all.

Alice's arrival at the London Eye was something of an anticlimax. If she'd been expecting the heavens to open up and a host of angels to descend, she'd have been disappointed. Not that she had, of course. But still, something a little dramatic would have been nice.

Instead, she'd stood in one line to purchase her ticket—seven pounds, or about eleven dollars American—and then gone to stand in another line to wait her turn. And waited. And waited. And waited.

It was some hours before her turn came around at last, hours of shuffling forward slowly, with a pair of German tourists in hiking boots and brightly colored T-shirts in front of her, bandanas tied jauntily around their necks, and a group of London schoolchildren behind her, kept in line and more or less in control only by the sheer force of will of the teachers who were with them, one at either end of the group, merrily carrying on a conversation at the top of their lungs over the shouting of the kids, pausing occasionally to bark reprimands at this kid or that for cutting up or for stealing each other's action
figures or whatnot. Finally, she mounted the ramp that zigzagged back and forth, carefully watched over by a guy in a uniform, but Alice couldn't tell if he was a cop or a security guard, not that it mattered. Then she and the German tourists and half of the school kids, accompanied by one of the teachers, were ushered into one of the glass and steel pods. They looked less like pillbugs up close, and more like some impossibly large lozenge. But more distressing was the fact that the things
didn't stop moving
. The wheel kept on turning, slowly but inexorably, and as the pods slid by the deck, the doors opened, the people on board jumped off, the people waiting on the deck jumped on, the doors closed, and the pod climbed back up into the sky.

Now
Alice started to worry about falling. There was maybe an inch of daylight visible between the edge of the deck and the pod, so it wasn't likely that she could fall through, but if anyone could manage to do, it was Alice. Maybe she'd suddenly shrink down to the size of the action figure between one step and the next, and find herself plummeting through the gap and out of sight. She'd fall into the green-gray waters of the Thames, and that would be that.

But she didn't shrink to the size of an action figure, and she didn't fall through the gap but jumped on board the pod, and when the door slid shut behind her, she finally started breathing again, and her pulse started to slow, if gradually.

Then the wheel turned, and the pod climbed into the sky.

Alice thought about pictures she'd seen in books of medieval engravings of the wheel of fate, which never stopped turning. In the pictures there was always a king sitting at the top, thinking that he would never fall, and some poor bastard being crushed underneath. But the pictures also showed that some schemer was on the side of the wheel heading up, and some unfortunate soul was on the other side heading down. The lesson of the wheel was that it kept on turning, no matter what, and that today's king could be tomorrow's poor bastard crushed underneath. Which meant, by analogy, that Alice was on the way up, right? So what happened when she reached the top of the wheel? And, more worrying, what happened when she started to come down again?