Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume 5 An anthology of stories

Call-Me-Anne’s employment interview, she realized. What they were trying to tell her with that wasn’t at all clear. That missing sense. Or maybe because they had the sense, they were misinterpreting the situation.

“Nell? Nell? ”

She tried to pull her arm out of the social worker’s grip and couldn’t. The pressure was a mouthful of walnut shells, tasteless and sharp. “What do you want?”

“I said , are you sure?”

Nell sighed. “There’s a story that the first people in the New World to see Columbus’s ships couldn’t actually see them because such things were too far outside their experience. You think that’s true?”

Call-Me-Anne, her expression a mix of confusion and anxiety. Nell knew what that look meant—she was afraid the situation was starting to get away from her. “Are you groggy? Or just tired?”

“I don’t,” she went on, a bit wistful. “I think they didn’t know what they were seeing and maybe had a hard time with the perspective but I’m sure they saw them. After all, they were made by other humans. But something coming from another world, all bets are off.”

Call-Me-Anne’s face was very sad now.

“I sound crazy to you?” Nell gave a short laugh. “ Scientists talk about this stuff.”

“You’re not a scientist, Nell. You were a librarian. With proper treatment and medication, you could—”

Nell laughed again. “If a librarian starts thinking about the possibility of life somewhere else in the universe, it’s a sign she’s going crazy?” She turned her head away and closed her eyes. Correction, eye. She couldn’t feel very much behind the bandage, just enough to know that her right eyelid wasn’t opening or closing. When she heard the social worker walk away, she opened her eye to see the silver wires had come back. They bloomed like flowers, opening and then flying apart where they met others and connected, making new blooms that flew apart and found new connections. The world in front of Nell began to look like a cage, although she had no idea which side she was on.

Abruptly, she felt one of the wires go through her temple with that same white-hot pain. A moment later, a second one went through the bandage over her right eye as easily as if it wasn’t there, going all the way through her head and out, pinning her to the pillow.

Her left eye was watering badly but she could see Call-Me-Anne rushing back with a nurse. Their mouths opened and closed as they called her name. She saw them reaching for her but she was much too far away.

And that was how it would be. No, that was how it was always, but the five senses worked so hard to compensate for the one missing that people took the illusion of contact for the real thing. The power of suggestion—where would the human race be without it?

Sight. Hearing. Smell. Taste. Touch. _________.

Contact .

The word was a poor approximation but the concept was becoming clearer in her mind now. Clearer than the sight in her left eye, which was dimming. But still good enough to let her see Call-Me-Anne was on the verge of panic.

A man in a white uniform pushed her aside and she became vaguely aware of him touching her. But there was still no contact .

Nell labored toward wakefulness as if she were climbing a rock wall with half a dozen sandbags dangling on long ropes tied around her waist. Her mouth was full of steel wool and sand. She knew that taste—medication. It would probably take most of a day to spit that out.

She had tried medication in the beginning because Marcus had begged her to. Anti-depressants, anti-anxiety capsules, and finally anti-psychotics—they had all tasted the same because she hadn’t been depressed, anxious, or psychotic. Meanwhile, Marcus had gotten farther and farther away, which, unlike the dry mouth, the weight gain, or the tremors in her hands, was not reversible.

Call-Me-Anne had no idea about that. She kept trying to get Nell to see Marcus, unaware they could barely perceive each other anymore. Marcus didn’t realize it either, not the way she did. Marcus thought that was reversible, too.

Pools of color began to appear behind her heavy eyelids, strange colors that shifted and changed, green to gold, purple to red, blue to aqua, and somewhere between one color and another was a hue she had never found anywhere else

and never would.

Sight. Hearing. Smell. Taste. Touch. __________.

C-c-c-contact …

The word was a boulder trying to fit a space made for a pebble smoothed over the course of eons and a distance of lightyears into a precise and elegant thing.

Something can be a million lightyears away and in your eye at the same time.

Sight. Hearing. Smell. Taste. Touch. ___________.

C-c-c-con…nect.

C-c-c-commmmune.

C-c-c-c-c-communnnnnnnnicate.

She had a sudden image of herself running around the base of a pyramid, searching for a way to get to the top. While she watched, it was replaced by a new image, of herself running around an elephant and several blind men; she was still looking for a way to get to the top of the pyramid.

The image dissolved and she became aware of how heavy the overhead lights were on her closed eyes. Eye. She sighed; even if she did finally reach understand-ing—or it reached her—how would she ever be able to explain what blind men, an elephant, and a pyramid combined with Columbus’s ships meant?

The musty smell of surrender broke in on her thoughts. It was very strong; Call-Me-Anne was still there. After a bit, she heard the sound of a wooden spoon banging on the bottom of a pot. Frustration, but not just any frustration: Marcus’s.

She had never felt him so clearly without actually seeing him. Perhaps Call-Me-Anne’s surrender worked as an amplifier.

The shifting colors resolved themselves into a new female voice. “…much do either of you know about the brain?”

“Not much,” Call-Me-Anne said. Marcus grunted, a stone rolling along a dirt path.

“Generally, synesthesia can be a side effect of medication or a symptom.”

“What about mental illness?” Marcus asked sharply, the spoon banging louder on the pot.

“Sometimes mentally ill people experience it but it’s not a specific symptom of mental illness. In your wife’s case, it was a symptom of the tumors.”

“Tumors?” Call-Me-Anne was genuinely upset. Guilt was a soft scratching noise, little mouse claws on a hard surface.

“Two, although there could be three. We’re not sure about the larger one. The smaller one is an acoustic neuroma, which—”

“Is that why she hears things?” Marcus interrupted.

The doctor hesitated. “Probably not, although some people complain of tinnitus. It’s non-cancerous, doesn’t spread, and normally very slow-growing. Your wife’s seems to be growing faster than normal. But then there’s the other one.” Pause. “I’ve only been a neurosurgeon for ten years so I can’t say I’ve seen everything but this really is quite, uh…unusual. She must have complained of headaches.”

A silence, then Call-Me-Anne cleared her throat. “They seemed to be cluster headaches. Painful but not exactly rare. I have them myself. I gave her some of my medication but I don’t know if she took it.”

Another small pause. “Sometimes she said she had a headache but that’s all,” Marcus said finally. “We’ve been legally separated for a little over two years, so I’m not exactly up-to-date. She sleeps on the street.”

“Well, there’s no telling when it started until we can do some detailed scans.”

“How much do those cost?” Marcus asked. Then after a long moment: “Hey, she left me to sleep on the street after I’d already spent a fortune on shrinks and prescriptions and hospitalizations. Then they tell me you can’t force a person to get treated for anything unless they’re a danger to the community, blah, blah, blah. Now she’s got brain tumors and I’m gonna get hit for the bill. Dammit, I shoulda divorced her but it felt too—” The spoon scraped against the iron pot. “Cruel.”