Alyzon Whitestarr Read online

  Another silence, this one longer and as heavy as a block of metal. The smell of cloves grew stronger, but there was also a peppermint smell. “You have been here a month,” Dr. Reed said.

  I was so shocked I didn’t know what to say.

  “It’s somewhat unusual for a blackout caused by concussion to last so long, but not unheard of; in any case you are awake now,” Dr. Reed said briskly. She stood up. “Well, I’d better let your father know the good news. He’s walking the grounds.” At the door, she hesitated. “Try to rest and don’t worry about anything.”

  After she had closed the door behind her, I felt limp with exhaustion.

  * * *

  “Alyzon?”

  Da’s voice groped for me, and I let it lift me gently to wakefulness. The room was still dark, and Da was kneeling beside the bed. Again I could smell coffee grounds but, as with Dr. Reed’s scent, it was weaker than when I had first woken. Oddly, the pine-needle smell seemed stronger than when I had first smelled it before. Then I reminded myself that I wasn’t smelling any of those things. It was my confused senses making them up, and it would be a lot worse without the sense-numbing drugs Dr. Reed had prescribed.

  “Da, Dr. Reed said I’ve been asleep for a month,” I whispered. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Nothing permanent, I swear,” Da promised. The pine-needle smell seemed to get stronger. “Dr. Reed says you can come home in a couple of days. They just want to do a few tests first.”

  “What sort of tests?”

  “They’re a bit puzzled about why you slept so long.” Maybe I looked scared, because Da touched my hand lightly, and at once I seemed to feel his fear pressing against me like a hot panting dog.

  I shifted my hand away. “What happened about Mum’s show?”

  Da gave a breathy laugh. “The last thing Zambia has wanted to think about is exhibiting.”

  “You didn’t miss the gig with Urban Dingo?”

  He laughed incredulously. “You remember that? It’s coming up. I wanted to pull out, but the band would have lost the gig. Now I don’t have to worry. Maybe you’ll be well enough to come along and cheer your old da on.”

  “Maybe,” I said, thinking: He is telling me he wasn’t sure I would wake up.

  * * *

  That evening, early, Dr. Reed came with another doctor and they did a series of tests. The next day I had a CAT scan and some other tests that involved electrodes being glued to my head and connected to beeping machines. Nothing hurt, but the doctors’ presence was the hardest thing to endure because of how the concussion had affected my senses. I was drained by the smells and the bursts of emotion I felt whenever they touched me.

  At one point I tried to tell Dr. Reed about how the smells seemed to be associated with people, but a doctor I had not seen before had come in to mess with the machines and he snapped at me: there were no smells; I was just imagining them because of the concussion. Then he started talking to Dr. Reed about prescribing a stronger sense suppressant. He came over to the bedside as he spoke, and I nearly gagged because he stank horribly. Weirdly, when I looked at Dr. Reed, I could only smell roses and dirt and a sort of disinfectant smell, and even though her expression was politely interested, I had the strong impression that she didn’t like the other doctor. She said that she preferred to phase out the sense suppressants altogether. He started to argue, and Dr. Reed gave a pointed glance at me and they left the room. I was glad because, whether or not his smell was imaginary, it was really revolting.

  I listened and was surprised to find that I could make out some of the words the two doctors were saying, even though the door was closed.

  “… hysterical … typical schoolgirl … these drugs could be …,” the other doctor said.

  “Dr. Austin, I don’t … not necessary …,” Dr. Reed murmured.

  I stopped listening and went back into the darkness, exhausted.

  I probably sound stupid because I didn’t recognize what had happened right away, but finding I had been in a monthlong coma was a shock, and for a while I was always so tired that it was hard to think. I was discharged a couple of days later, after a whole lot more tests that showed nothing.

  I felt fine except for the fact that my senses went on bringing me weird and unwanted smells and surges of feelings, even with the sense suppressant. I was beginning to dread the thought of it wearing off: what if I was bombarded with input like the first time I woke, and went into a coma again? If it hadn’t been for the odious Dr. Austin wanting to keep me on the stuff, I might have asked Dr. Reed if I could keep taking it. But as it was, Dr. Reed gave me one last pill before Da took me home, telling me the drug would work its way out of my system over a week, and that my own senses would gradually readjust.

  On the drive home Da told me they had organized a little welcome-home party for me. I think he wanted to make sure it was all right. I didn’t know if it was or not. I could smell coffee grounds on him and also a little bit of the ammonia stink, but there was also the lovely caramelized sugar smell. It was as if Da really did smell of those things.

  Of course, the first thing I noticed when I went inside the house was how it smelled. I stopped inside the front door, sniffed, and gave a sigh of pleasure. It wasn’t just that my family had cooked a feast of all my favorite things, or that they had filled the place with flowers. It was like the house itself gave off one of those not-real fragrances my senses had got into the habit of conjuring up in response to people. The sweetness of it seemed wonderfully familiar, and I tried to figure out what it was as Da ushered me gently along the hall.

  They were all sitting around the kitchen table smiling, even Serenity, and I had to work really hard to keep the smile on my own face, because for a second I nearly staggered back under the force of their attention. It seemed to push at me like a strong wave at the beach. Then there were the smells: cut grass, hot strawberries, expensive perfume, violets, licorice.

  A pot began to boil over. Jesse raced for it, and Mirandah yelled at him not to use the tea towel but to get a dishcloth. The minute they turned their attention away from me, I felt as if a truck that had been bearing down on me had pulled back. I sat down on the nearest stool, my legs shaking.

  Before I could begin to think about what had happened, Mum put Luke into my arms. Still dazed, I looked down into his face. He smelled of the same scent as the house, and he had changed so much while I had slept. He had been an unopened bud, and now his little hands waved around and reached out for things, and the cloudy blue of his eyes had become a lovely greenish gray. He was looking at me, just as the others had done, but I didn’t get any feeling of pressure from his gaze. It rested on me with the same sticky, light innocence as his fingers, asking nothing, saying nothing.

  Gradually, I grew calmer. It was as if a tiny stream of quiet was trickling into me from him, and the longer I looked, the deeper the pool of quiet became until, eventually, it soothed all the tangled taut nerves and sinews in my body. I was fascinated to find that, whenever I was forced to look up to answer a question and the pressure of my family’s combined attention became intolerable, I had only to look down at Luke to feel soothed and gentled again.

  I ate a bit, but the meal tasted as bland as hospital food because of the drug in my system. I didn’t have that much appetite anyway, and it was awkward to eat holding Luke, but I didn’t want to let him go. I followed Mum’s lead, smiling a lot without saying much, and pretty soon, everyone dropped back into their usual roles. Mum stared dreamily into the candle flames and smiled at me from time to time. Da served and laughed and broke into little bursts of song. Jesse strummed his guitar and talked about some complicated article he’d read in the papers. Serenity chewed her nails and stared out the window. And Mirandah talked about her boyfriend, Ricki, while she sewed the hem on a yellow skirt. She had shifted from purple to yellow while I was unconscious, and her wardrobe was going through an overhaul.

  I sat, happy to be among them, although it seemed to me the whole
family had grown louder. And not only them. The radio was turned down, but I kept being distracted by its low babble; then there was the phone ringing, people chewing their food and laughing or grunting, Jesse strumming his guitar.

  Within an hour I started feeling really exhausted, and Da, who must have been watching for it, said I should go to bed. I didn’t argue. Jesse stepped forward to take Luke. I gave him up reluctantly, my hand brushing against Jesse’s. The cut-grass smell instantly became very strong, and I got this stunning jolt of static electricity and the feeling of something enormous and dreadfully cramped seething and churning inside Jesse, wanting to get out.

  When he glanced into my face to say good night, I could tell from his expression that he had felt nothing.

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later I was in bed, and although I wanted to think about what had just happened with Jesse, I was asleep before my head hit the pillow. I didn’t wake up again until the following afternoon, and everyone was worrying. Over breakfast, which still tasted bland, I told them I was fine. Jesse said I just needed to get used to being awake again.

  I held Luke and stayed up for a little, but soon I felt tired and went back to bed and slept some more. And that’s how it went for a week, the noises and smells growing stronger each day as the sense suppressant wore off.

  Da said I didn’t have to think about going to school until I was ready. The truth was that school seemed like it belonged to another life. I couldn’t imagine ever going there again. I couldn’t imagine having a normal life.

  Then one day, I woke up and saw on the bedside clock that it was only ten in the morning. I hadn’t woken that early since before the accident.

  I just lay there for a while. The bed seemed so soft and warm, and I let myself sink into the feeling. How had I never noticed what a perfectly wonderful bed it was? The way the pillows were exactly the right height and softness, and how beautiful the rich red of the quilt cover was, like sleeping wrapped in a cotton dusk.

  I turned to snuggle deeper, and my eyes fell on Serenity’s side of the room.

  I had never much liked Serenity’s mortuary decor, and since the accident all of the blackness she surrounded herself with seemed almost tangibly heavy, like huge lumps of jellied night. Whenever she was in the bedroom, I heard this sinister whispering—obviously another trick of my haywire senses, but even so, it fit. I shuddered and turned onto my other side, but I could still feel her half of the room behind my back, the white of the death lily glowing in the midst of the blackness like some ghastly fang.

  “Get a grip,” I muttered.

  I noticed how silent the house was. I thought of The Day of the Triffids, where the main character wakes up one day and can’t hear any of the normal things he would have heard and that’s the signal that the world as he knew it had ended. Only I could still hear cars and even the air brakes of trucks on the highway that ran past the other side of our neighborhood. The silence was inside the house, and it was an incredible relief to hear nothing nearby but my own breathing and the ticking of my bedside clock.

  I padded downstairs barefoot and found I was the only one home. I felt an incredible surge of relief, and something in me that had been coiled tight finally unwound. The minute I relaxed, I realized that I was ravenously hungry. A box from the health-food shop was sitting on the table. Once a week, when she remembered, Mum poked a list under the door of the shop, and they delivered the next day. Among the supplies were fresh mushrooms. I decided to make mushroom risotto for dinner as a way of signaling to the family that I was on the way back, because suddenly it seemed that it might really be so.

  I melted butter and chopped garlic and mushrooms to fry in it, then I stirred in brown rice and vegetable stock. I hadn’t cooked since the accident, and the scent of the fresh mushrooms and garlic was almost intoxicating. I took a long, deep breath and felt like I had never smelled mushrooms before that moment; that all the other mushrooms in the world were pale shadows of these; this garlic, the blueprint for all garlic. I wanted to laugh, but I couldn’t jolly myself out of the intensity of what I was feeling. It occurred to me, as I dished out a bowlful of risotto, that for the first time I wasn’t resisting the new intensity of my senses.

  I sprinkled on Parmesan cheese and ate a mouthful, concentrating on the taste. The flavor was like a small but potent explosion in my mouth; it made me dizzy for a moment. I felt like I could eat that risotto and die, because it was so complete in every way that it contained the meaning of life. It was not just the taste of the sauce and the nutty flavor of the cheese. The feeling of soft mushroom and grains of buttery rice against my tongue filled my whole body with pleasure.

  I ate three mouthfuls, and then sat panting, drained by the vividness of what I’d felt and wondering if I would have the energy to get upstairs again. Then I heard music from one of the neighbors’ houses. It was a piece Serenity had played over and over on her cello when she was learning it a few years back.

  I closed my eyes and focused until the music seemed to grow louder. I felt like I had never heard that song properly before. Every note sounded itself out separately, just as the rice grains had done in my mouth. It was like I was going into the song and it was being magnified in me tenfold, a hundred fold, a thousandfold its usual self. I felt like I could listen to the music forever and ever, it was so complex. Following every nuance and flourish, I was on the edge of understanding why Serenity had loved it so much, and the thought drifted into my mind that, if I understood, it would tell me something about Serenity and the darkness she was building around her.

  The music ended, and an announcer introduced the latest hit track from the Rak. Electronic music chewed into the bright day, ratty and savage. It was like something alive trying to gnaw its way into my skull. It made me think of a phobia I used to have when I was little. An older kid had told me that earwigs got their name because they liked to crawl into a person’s ear and gnaw at their brain to make a little cave for an egg sac. I used to stick plugs of Plasticine into my ears at night, until one melted and the doctor had to remove it.

  The memory had taken me away from listening for a few seconds, and the music had faded, but as I listened again, it grew louder and more brutal and vicious until I began to feel sick.

  I put my hands over my ears, but the music came through, earwigs of sound devouring my brain.

  Abruptly, the song ended. I was sweating and half slumped against the wall, a headache bashing around inside my skull and my jaw hurting from clenching. My upper lip felt wet. I reached up and touched a finger to it and was shocked to see that it was red. The music had made my nose bleed.

  “What the hell is going on?” I whispered.

  I washed my hands and face in the sink. When I was sure my nose was no longer bleeding, I put the pot of risotto in the fridge. I sat down to think through what was happening to me. Because being hypersensitive didn’t explain how music could affect me so strongly. Or why I kept smelling things that were not there, or why I associated those smells with certain people. I had been telling myself the smells were coming from some sort of scent bank in my brain that had been damaged and was randomly spilling its contents. But I suddenly felt absolutely certain that the smells were real, even if they were not coming from real things. Maybe whatever had happened to my brain had made my sense of smell so acute it could detect things that people normally couldn’t smell—intangible things.

  I thought of Dr. Reed’s dirt-and-roses smell and her air of distracted sadness, wondering if I was smelling whatever it was that she was thinking of that made her sad—or the sadness itself. The coffee-grounds smell I experienced when I was close to Da seemed to be permanent, so maybe it came from something in his essence that didn’t change. But his pine-needle scent came and went, as did the smells of ammonia and caramelized sugar, so they might come from things he was thinking or feeling at certain moments.

  It was wild to imagine that thoughts and feelings could give off scents, let alone that a person
’s essential self might have a definite odor, but the more I thought of it, the less crazy it seemed. Dogs always seemed to know when you were sad, and how could they know? It had to be that they could smell your sadness because their sense of smell was much better than a human’s.

  I began to feel excited, because if I could come up with a scent dictionary that connected feelings and thoughts with smells, it would almost be like having the means to read people’s minds. But my elation faded when I remembered that overload from my extended senses had put me back into a coma. And look how a bit of bad music had affected me.

  Obviously, I was going to have to find some way to protect myself or at least to control what I was taking in, and not just from my sense of smell. I had been able to use Luke as a buffer, and I figured he affected me differently because he hadn’t grown into judging things yet. But I couldn’t carry Luke around with me all the time, and even if I could, he was going to grow up and change.

  I got up to make myself a cup of tea, being careful not to concentrate on the scent. The rich, sweet steam plumed up into my face, and as I blew and sipped, I debated ringing Dr. Reed to tell her what I had figured out. But I was pretty sure I would just sound like someone who sees martians and has this whole rational-seeming theory about why no one else can see them. Because if there was something going on in my brain that a test would show, she would already have found it.

  Anyway, I wasn’t sick, so why talk to a doctor? I was positive that the accident had done something to the part of my brain connected to my five senses, extending them in some way. All I had to do was to find some efficient way of controlling input before I blew a fuse.

  By the time anyone came home, I had discovered that I could use one sense to distract another. For instance, I had forced myself to listen to more earwig music on the radio, and used mouthfuls of apple to shift my attention from hearing to taste just when it was getting unbearable. But it was a bit of a balancing act, because the minute I started focusing on the apple, I started to swoon into that.