The Intrusion

Four

[Andy]

The ceiling fan spins above my head. The rhythm pulses like the gears in my mind, grinding away at each other and wearing themselves down to nothing. I pull the pillow out from under me and press it against my face, closing my eyes to block out the lights of the city. They seep in through my window like knives slicing into my room.

There was a girl across the street in one of the units in the Lion's Gate Building this evening.

I think she saw me.

I couldn't actually see her eyes, but somehow, I knew. A connection rushed between us like a flow of energy streaming across the street the moment our gazes met.

No one has ever seen me before when I've been watching.

It scared me.

I backed away from the window, came into my bedroom and shut the blinds. I had to be alone after that. Even that small amount of contact was too much for me right now.

I haven't had much connection with people lately. I work from home, so I don't get out much. I go to the grocery store every Friday after work, and I go for coffee at the shop on the corner on the weekends, but I don't really have friends. And, I don't know if I really want friends. I'm not very good at talking to people.

I'm more content observing. I like people, but I don't like to interact with them. I like to be in my own mind, imagining what life would be like as one of these other people with one of these other lives.

When I was a kid, I didn't understand why I couldn't switch consciousness with someone else. As a six-or-so-year-old, it seemed to me I should be able to decide I wanted to be someone else for a day and try it out. I thought, maybe, that other person might have to agree with me to switch before we could do it. But, I saw no other preventative reason why I couldn't do it—like in Freaky Friday.

As an adult, I know it isn't possible. It seems silly to think about it now. But when I was six... It seemed real.

When I was little, I also thought I should be able to fly. I convinced myself that if I flapped my arms hard enough I would be able to do it. Once—I was probably only about seven at the time—I climbed up to the top of the shed in our backyard and jumped right off the roof, flapping my hands like crazy. I landed in the grass. I didn't break anything, thankfully, but I gave my mom a real good scare.

I had a lot of weird ideas about things when I was a kid, but who doesn't? The world is still new when you are young. You don't know what's possible yet and what isn't.

Another idea I had was about colors. I knew that everyone knew which color was red, and which was blue, and which was yellow, and orange, and green and purple. But I thought that everyone saw them differently, and that we had just all learned that the one that looks like this is blue and the one that looks like that is yellow. We can't describe colors with any other word than the name itself, or if we can, we've always associated that descriptive word with that specific color, so how would I know if yellow looks the same to you as it does to me?

I thought that everyone's favorite color looked the same, because clearly it was the best color, but we all had a different name associated with it. For me, it was blue. For my sister, it was pink.

As an adult, I don't believe that we all see colors differently, of course. But still, I've never found any solid evidence to disprove that idea. We can't see through anyone's eyes but our own. And if you did put someone else's eyes in your skull, it wouldn't make a difference. The color comes from your brain interpreting what the eyes see. So you'd have to put someone else's brain in your head in order to know, and then you wouldn't even be you anymore. So you wouldn't know. (And also, on another note, where would you have gone?)

When I was eight, my older sister Alice showed me this trick she learned in science class. We had just finished wrapping the presents we had gotten our parents for Christmas, and Alice picked up two of the colored-pencils that we had been using to write the to-from cards. One was yellow, and one was blue. She held one pencil in each of her hands, stretching her arms out in front of herself, and showed them to me. Then, she walked around and stood behind me. She explained that she was going to slowly move one pencil from behind me to the side of my head. She told me to keep looking forward and to tell her when I saw the pencil.

So, I waited patiently, and finally a colored pencil sneaked from behind my head into the corner of my eye.

"What color is it, Andy?" she asked.

"It's blue," I told her.

At that she broke into a fit of laughter, and I turned around and looked at her.

"It's red!" She held the pencil out in front of my face and shook it for emphasis. "Andy, it's red!"

And I looked at the pencil that was in her hand again, and she was right! It was red!

"Hey!" I whined. "You cheated! You switched the pencils!" She had to have! The pencil had been blue a second ago. I was sure of it!

"How could I have?" Alice teased me. "This is the only pencil in my hand! I set the other pencils down on the table!"

"But, but," I stammered. "That's not fair, Alice! You cheated. You only showed me the yellow and blue pencil to start with! I didn't know you had a red pencil!"

Alice giggled. "Come on, Andy, it's just a trick."

"But how did you do that?"

"It's science," she said with a flip of her blonde hair and all the air of superiority an eleven-year-old can produce. Alice was convinced she was the most intelligent person in the world. Or, at least the most intelligent of the two of us, which was true.

"How does it work?" I asked.

She went on to explain that everyone is color blind in their peripheral vision. In your peripheral vision, you really only see in black and white. But the mind doesn't show it to you in shades of grey, of course. The mind fills in the blanks. It knows what color things are supposed to be because it has seen them before, so it imagines that color in—like coloring in a coloring book. The trick my sister played worked because, since I had only seen the yellow and blue pencil, my mind knew that the color of the pencil would either be yellow or blue, so it picked one. It didn't realize the possibility that the pencil could be red.

The mind is capable of filling in a lot of blanks. When something happens that we don't understand, it comes up with a way to explain it. Or, if something happens that shouldn't be possible, like a red pencil when the only two options are yellow and blue, the mind covers it up and fills it in with what it should be. We miss what is really there.

I think there is more to the world than what we perceive. I think there is something behind the mirror—something beyond that glass that we can't see because our mind has replaced it with something that makes sense. Our mind creates a reflection of our reality so we won't see what's really there.

I'm no scientist, I'd have to ask my sister, but yeah. There's something more to all of this. Or, at least I've got to think that there is.