“Okay, Ivy. Thank you for nothing. How about you then, Rose?”
It’s a black and white photo, developed on thick white paper. Even though the vehicle on the paper is painted in shades of black and white and grey, Rose can push the colorless surface away and see the real colors of the image underneath. The vehicle is drab green.
She stares at the photo, tilting her head to the side, concentrating on it because the image is beginning to vibrate and lift from the page. The vehicle becomes a floating rotating, three-dimensional model, on which the doors and hood open and close.
She sucks in a breath and looks around to see if Ivy, or Dr. Shaw or anyone else can see it. She turns back to the sound of Dr. Shaw tapping the photo to regain her attention to it.
Words and symbols come into view and hover over the face of the photo as if they are floating on the surface of an ocean. This is a new experience for Rose. Nothing like this has ever happened to her before, at least she can’t remember if it has.
The sensation of the photo coming to life is dizzying. She feels as if she is falling backward in her chair. She lurches forward to correct the feeling of tumbling over. Motion sickness triggers sour bile to rise in her throat. She forces it back down into the pit of her rolling stomach. Her head is spinning like a toy top. She can read and understand the meaning of the words written in English, but they jockey for position with strange symbols before her eyes. The unrecognizable symbols swaying on an invisible pendulum are unfamiliar to her.
She thinks she should know the strange language, if language is, in fact, what she sees here. She can’t decipher any of it. She recites what she thinks Dr. Shaw wants to know about the photo.
“U.S. Army Jeep, manufactured by Dodge Brothers Corporation, three-quarter ton, four-wheel drive, olive drab green.”
She waits for him to write it down. He doesn’t. She swallows a gulp of air into her lungs, so hard she can feel her ribs aching. She settles back into her chair and waits for another image.
“What just happened to you, and how do you know so much about the vehicle in this picture?”
She’s uncomfortable. She can feel Cane, and Hawthorne, and Lily, and Aster’s eyes glued to her, drilling into her. Even Ivy, who has stopped sneering, and staring at the wall, and has turned her interest to her. She’s hoping the answer to Dr. Shaw’s question will lift off another picture somewhere to help her explain herself, but it doesn’t. She has no idea how she knows so much about the jeep and decides the best thing to do is say nothing at all.
“How do you know the color of the jeep is olive drab green when the photo is black and white?” said Shaw, inspecting at the photo himself.
“Isn’t everything here painted green?” Rose says.
Shaw nods his head slowly and writes. “Very impressive skill you have there, you know?” I would be very interested in knowing just what all else you have floating in your pretty little head.” He turns to Ivy who is still studying Rose. “Can you do that, R – Zero – Six – E? Can you look at a picture and know everything about the thing on it?”
Ivy returns her gaze to the wall.
He turns back to Rose. “What else can you tell me, R – Zero – Five – E?”
More information than she cares to know is bubbling to the surface of her brain. It tickles like goose down brushing the grey matter. Collected bits and pieces of trivial information have taken form and flashes before her eyes.
Overheard snippets of conversations, barked orders, a cacophony of discussion in the corridors at night, and the posted map to escape the building in the event of a fire, have Rose with useful information that she can’t keep from spilling out of her mouth. “Camp Able, Brownsville, Texas, 7th Field Hospital.”
Shaw drops his pencil. His mouth opens, he consciously makes himself close it, so it’s not hanging open. He peers into her eyes. “Please, continue.”
“Original troop capacity of 2,237 officers, 19,247 enlisted men and women. There are less than seventy-five soldiers still here, and there are twelve children who you keep here to study. I bet there were more once. I bet you did something awful to them. I bet you cut pieces off from them until there wasn’t anything left to cut on. Didn’t you?”
Dr. Valentine is right, you are different, and soon…” he taps her on her forehead, smartly, with the end of his pen, “we will see just how different you are, Rose.”
Rose leans back to take a much-deserved rest in her little desk. The falling sensation has subsided. She smiles because for the first time Dr. Shaw calls her by her name. “Let me show you one more photograph, Rose. What do you make of this one?”
The photograph he’s showing her means nothing to her. It’s of a vast machine hovering in the black of night. A spewing jet of fire is escaping out from below the hulking thing. It’s lit by enormous beams of light coming up from the ground, but still, only a small portion of the machine’s silhouette is visible.
Though she’s never seen anything like it, the design of the thing feels familiar to her. There are no ‘English’ words written on the photo, only the strange symbols that only she can see because they aren’t really there, they just, sort of appear. She tries to hide any emotion on her face which would give her away. She feels a vague connection to the thing in the photograph. She shakes her head, no, and shrugs her shoulders. It must have worked because Dr. Shaw places the photo along with the others back into the box. She’ll file the symbols from the photo away in her little box.
“That’s enough for now. R – Zero – Five – E and R – Zero – Six – E, go to Dr. Valentine’s table,” says Shaw.
She does as he instructs her and moves to the next table to be assessed by Dr. Valentine. Rose decides that she likes Tuesdays most of all because she gets to spend time with Dr. Valentine.
When she’s released back into her room the day is mostly over. She can sense the darkness behind the exterior walls of East Wing, and the humidity rising behind her blocked-up window. The light bulb is still lit. Her slippers, she kicks them into the corner, and she remains on the gurney. It squeaks beneath her body, though she weighs hardly anything. She can feel the coiled springs through the thin, musty mattress pad.
The light flickers overhead and dies out, and the stars on the ceiling glow happily. Rose feels her insides rumble hungrily… wantonly. She’s craving something, but she doesn’t know what that something is. Nevertheless, life-giving energy wells up within her, all the way from the tips of her toes to the very ends of her hair. It courses through her like currents of unbridled, raw electricity. Like the spark of life itself running up and down the length of her spine and dancing in her stomach.
She slides from the gurney. Her feet hit the cold tile with a clammy splat. Something is happening, something important. She feels the rumble of it inside of her before the rumbling manifests itself into an actual glorious sound. The smell seeps in from around the edges of the boards fitted securely across the window. A scent even better than Dr. Valentine’s peach fragrance.
Rain.
Rose can’t hear it splashing against the barricaded window boards. She listens to the thunder. She’s dizzy; not dizzy like when Dr. Shaw slipped her the medicine before, but happy dizzy, thirsty dizzy, confusion swims in her brain. She feels dehydrated, her mouth and tongue are dry and sticky. She can’t cry no matter how much she wants to.
She sways drunkenly, almost falling. She’s entirely and appropriately intoxicated by the falling rain. She grabs the bars on the window casing, so she doesn’t fall to the floor in a boneless pile of flesh, overcome by the smell of it. She places her forehead against them so forcefully that they make blunt, elongated imprints into her into it.