Page 56 of White Lights
For a moment, nothing happens. Then—
Her eyes fill with a vast desert wilderness, not unlike Death Valley. It’s a scene from a movie. Dez is dropped into the action immediately as the camera moves across the wild, rough landscape. Soonsomething moving frantically in the distance comes into focus. A man’s bare, muscular back. He’s running. Dez hears the labored grunt of his breathing. It’s so real, she feels his fear.
Good filmmaking.
Now the focus pivots away from him, back in the direction he’s run from. Toward what looks like … a shimmering translucent wall. It’s magnificently strange and yet somehow familiar.
“Don’t blink!” Dr. Ezekiel reminds her, and Dez strains not to. She stares hard into the device and sees that on the other side of the translucent wall, the landscape is completely different. Lusher and more verdant than what the man runs through. A wild orchard of a thousand trees, the air alive with birdsong. Dez thinks she smells honeysuckle, jasmine, like she’s right there in the midst of it. She feels the wall luring her, almost calling her name. She holds her breath, willing the man to go back. It’s obvious he’s running the wrong way.
“Almost finished!” Dr. Ezekiel’s voice is strained and urgent. “Eyes open!”
Tears prick Dez’s eyes as a blinding light, brighter than anything she’s ever seen, flashes through the tiny lenses. A fire ignites near the base of the translucent wall. So hot Dez feels it singe her eyes. But still, she doesn’t blink. Behind the fire, she sees someone wielding the fire, using what looks like a massive diamond sword. The camera pans between the sword wielder, the fire, then back to the man who’s running from it, growing more distant in the frame.
A sob rises unexpected in Dez’s chest.
“You may close your eyes,” Dr. Ezekiel says.
Dez doesn’t want to, doesn’t want to miss a frame of this bizarre, engrossing film, but her eyes ache, and at last, she succumbs. She lets her eyelids drift closed for a fraction of a second.
On the other side of her blink, the vision before her is gone. Through the lenses, only blurry white remains.
She feels … sad, depleted. She can’t explain why except whoever made this film possesses an exceptional talent, and Dez wants to see more of it.
But it’s gone.
“Access granted,” Dr. Ezekiel says as Dez lifts her face from the kinetoscope. She finds herself back in the room, blinking rapidly to adjust. A blurry Rafe golf-claps.
Dez wipes her eyes, dragging from them something sticky and stringy, reminiscent of …
“Are these spiderwebs?” She swats at the stuff on her face.
“Perfectly natural, perfectly safe,” Dr. Ezekiel says, handing Dez a small mirror and pointing to a spot on her face where a tendril remains. “The scenes you saw are quite old.”
“They looked so modern,” Dez says.
“What did you see?” Rafe says.
“A glass wall,” she says softly. “Some kind of orchard. A man was … running.”
Dr. Ezekiel and Rafe exchange glances.
“What?” Dez says. “Why are you looking at each other like that?”
“Of course it’s private, what one sees in the kinetoscope,” Dr. Ezekiel says. “You don’t have to tell anyone anything about it.”
“How does it work?” Dez asks.
“Strong images,” Dr. Ezekiel explains, “widen our inner apertures. So that you’re able to see with more than the ordinary eye. What you just saw, you saw with your mind’s eye.”
Dez is familiar with the phrasethe mind’s eye, but she’s always taken it to mean imagination, an inner realm of daydreams, fantasies disconnected from what her physical eyes perceive.
“The mind’s eye is where we see truth,” Dr. Ezekiel says.
Dez nods. This is how she’d like audiences to see her films, with widened inner apertures, receptive to truth.
“Is that why I felt so—”
“Invested?” Dr. Ezekiel says. “Yes. The mind’s eye is difficult to open, but when the right images flood the soul—with beauty, pain, desire, really any true point of view—I’m able to capture an imprint of it. Which I then use to make a key, granting you access to the facilities at Acheron.”
