Preternatural

CHAPTER ONE

Eternity is a white room.

Karen had always hated white walls. They were the first thing she attacked, once the cleaning and disinfecting phase was over, every time she moved. Landlord White, the cheapest, most popular color in any paint store, covered everything. Past histories scrawled on walls ("Fuck you! I love you/hate you!") in blood or crayon. Scuff marks, handprints (I was here, unique in my fingerprints if nothing else), shit stains. Karen hated white walls; they hurt her eyes.

"Molecules," she remembered her fifth-grade nun explaining, and she'd startled everyone, including herself, by shouting out: "Yes, I know; I can see them!"

Wrong on all counts. One did not shout out in a Catholic school classroom; one raised one's hand and waited to be called on. One did not contradict the nun, who had just explained that molecules were too small to see, by claiming one could see them. And one did not, if one were Karen Rohmer, speak out in a classroom at all. Her fourth-grade nun, in a year-long campaign to humiliate her into sullen silence, had seen to that.

She hadn't really cried out, only thought she did. Why then had everyone in the class turned, open-mouthed, to stare at her in her silence? Someone, something else - beside her, inside her - had cried out in her stead, a parallel-universe self (an established science fiction writer, Karen understands these things now) shouted clear and defiant: "Yes, I know; I can see them!"

She could. Every time she stared at a blank white wall, it moved. Little flashes of light danced in rhythmic, prescribed circles (clockwise, counterclockwise, both?) round about their own circumspect, circumscribed orbits, long before she'd ever heard the word "orbit" - science wasn't taught with any seriousness in Catholic grade schools pre-Sputnik; that Beat-the-Russkies fervor was a year or more away - continuing their dance behind her eyelids when she closed them. What were those little flashes if not molecules dancing in their orbits to form the seeming solidity of a wall?

Karen thought she should be frightened at the knowledge that nothing was solid, that everything - the desk she sat at, the clothes she wore, the potato-face of the nun looming in its own black-bordered orbit above her, her very own hand - was made of molecules, too-small-to-see entities with spaces in between! It was not frightening, but exhiliarating, like the thought of the boring stretch of concrete between school and home being not static, not permanent, but hurtling constantly through space, its molecules dancing faster in the torpid summer than the gritty winter. If they danced fast enough, would she fall through?

Somehow she'd always known none of this was real, because she'd seen the molecules no one else could see.

When she was twelve, Karen's first eye exam indicated that the vision in her left eye was four times worse than that in her right. "Lazy eye" it was called then, something which could have been corrected with an eye-patch when she was four if anyone had been paying attention. "Lazy eye" was all Karen heard, getting used to wearing glasses - blue plastic harlequin frames with rhinestones in the corners - knowing it was somehow all her fault. When you went to Catholic schools, everything was.

Eternity is a white room where the walls move. Karen has not painted the walls this time. She sits on a bare wood floor, knees up, back against a white wall, aware of a vague redolence of urine from the corners, writing. Slight and forty-something, measuring out eternity on a grey-tinted legal pad with a cheap ballpoint pen. What does she look like, what is she wearing, what does it matter? It is science fiction she writes, and in that venue physical descriptions of characters human are always less important than descriptions of characters alien or precise analysis of the properties of tungsten.

Aren't they?

"Create Your Own Universe" has always one of Karen's favorite panel-discussion topics. Wedged between biochemists and nuclear engineers who dabble in fiction writing, she with her soft-spoken undergrad degree in English lets them natter on about nucleosynthesis and event-horizon anomalies until the moderator notices she hasn't said a word. Given the floor, she asks her fellow panelists: "If you were writing a murder mystery, would you spend the first chapter describing the chemical composition of the sun?"