Late, past 7 PM: Frank Rutherford still in the lab and nearly faint with suspense. If there were thunder, it was too distant to be heard, and would not disturb the shock-mounted optical table; if lightening, it could not penetrate the darkness of the lab. The air-conditioner off for an hour as further precaution.

Nevertheless, a scent of ozone, of a brewing electrical storm. Perfect. Why didn't he close everything up and go home; start over tomorrow? Impossible, the experiment nearly complete -- just a few moments more. Perhaps he'd have something this time. His assistant, Henry, sighed twice. His daughter, Shirley, drummed her fingers impatiently on the arm of her chair.

The timer rang. Frank switched on the ambient lighting. The beam had split and, as planned, bounced back onto the now luminous sphere before him which still obscured his daughter's face.

He refocused the laser and saw the film which enveloped the surface of the sphere begin to fog, the fog arrange itself. Color seeped in. Slowly at first and then there it was: A hologram of the mind! An abstract of the brain! The cauliflower revealed in all its intricacy! Its crevices and canyons unfurled and furled again like seaweed.

He knew the vast expanses displayed were mere illusion as the beam explored and charted, charted and explored. Right lobe, left lobe, frontal lobe. But now what -- behind the frontal lobe, between the left and right, several centimeters from the top?

Imagine central -- blankness, absence of content, nothingness, shadows, dusk, emptiness -- nothing. He held that thought: nothing. “I see nothing there,” he said at last, as though quite sure.

Henry spoke up. “There is a little something. Looks like Robert Motherwell's Death in the Afternoon. Or a Jackson Pollock.” Henry full of artistic allusions these days; full of himself since his name had appeared along with Frank’s on a recent paper. "What I mean, looks like salad, or stew; looks like chili the way Jeannie makes it."

“Not bad, Henry. Although one cannot say apt.” But nothing like what Frank saw; for Henry's comments made no mention of satirical martial parades -- which he'd not noticed, evidently, although the stenches of death, the incense of pain, torn flesh were present as in Motherwell's elegy. As for Pollock, not likely, another inappropriate pictorial reference for the brain of a nine-year-old girl, the image neither rectangular nor flat.

Nor canvas and paint. Not at all. For Frank discerned, but faintly, deep within the spherical helmet in which the hologram dwelt, Shirley's delicate profile, short curly hair.

“Sit still, Shirley,” he said. More anger and shock in his tone than intended.

“Then how about: Blank in the middle,” Henry ventured, nothing if not discreet, "surrounded by a sort of argyle pattern?”

“Yes. You are too kind.” Frank's protective reaction, one as guilty as the other. A classic case of scientific objectivity subjugating itself. “Exactly. The image, then, is fixed in place?”

"Absolutely," Henry said.

They loosened the sphere, slid it gently up, removed the blindfold from Shirley’s eyes. She held out her hand.

Frank gave her two dollars as agreed. Her palms were grimy, her eyes blue and candid still. He held her with his gaze. She backed toward the door, skipped through, grinned, and ran.

Henry tidied up the lab. “Well, it worked, I guess.” He put on his coat, turned to go. “I didn’t know Shirley was ill. What a damned shame.”

“Nonsense! She’s a perfectly healthy girl.” Frank’s voice lacked conviction. He tried to smile.

Wind and rain, lightning flashed as Henry stood in the threshold. “Good-night, then.”

Frank nodded and locked the door, set the sphere to bridge two stacks of books, directed the laser's beam.

He was determined to see it through. For what floats in the vision of my small daughter cannot be too much for me, he thought, and tried to focus on the hologram's central blankness despite distractions. On all sides were scenes of wit and charm: rainbows, stars and moon, crazy grandmothers, newsboys struggling with the Sunday Times, jigsaw puzzles and roller skates.

“Now then,” he muttered, attempting complacency, “ignore all that." He'd come this far and must complete the journey. He focused on the central glowing blankness despite hordes of wild horses; rearing, violet and orange. Despite heaps of oriental carpeting and other woven art strewn at random beneath the horses’ hooves; despite cunning wooden boxes with secret panels holding ancient coins in place; despite tutus and ribbon ankle-lacings, despite postal sheets from Olympic Games, modeling clay, and paper dolls with many, many dresses. Perhaps Shirley wasn't ill, after all.

Nicely done, he thought. He circled the table. Well-integrated and fairly interesting; grace notes of jewelry scattered all about; his mother’s pearls, his wife’s engagement ring, his service ribbons, and sparkly things to hold back a girl’s hair. Three spotted ponies, a bicycle in the rain, tin-can stilts hanging from the eaves. What a healthy imagination she had!

Except, of course, for the center where . . . the broken wings of birds, perhaps not birds, perhaps not wings, the sun is blinding! Interpose the marigold, its hard metallic petals, humming birds in flight, bluebirds in flighted dotted lines of blue behind the trees where summertime the rains expose new evidence of the Pleistocene . . .

He stepped back from the globe scornful of his petty subterfuges, weary with the effort not to see, to keep the serpent out of view.

He drank a glass of water and turned to George Gaylord Simpson’s The Meaning of Evolution (page 332) for refreshment: "Organic development of new perceptual or, at least, sensory apparatus does not seem to be required for future human evolution."

How true! He agreed wholeheartedly. Yet there it was. He shivered, steeled himself, altered his being, resolved to see. Steadied his hand, noted the date, wrote with care: The central sun, the third eye . . . we who have it don’t look ahead, our eyes insanely roll about, avoiding . . . He had begun to rid himself of the hypnotic suggestion that the center was blank.

With Simpson’s book at his elbow: "There is no logical support here for the conclusion that the reptiles dwindled, and many became extinct, because they were replaced by birds and mammals." Simpson at his elbow, a logical support, he bent once more to his task and clearly saw the serpent smile, the skulls of reptiles, cousins, millions gone . . . the frozen seasons . . . a rending birth, dismembered death, the pitted bones of albatross. . . .

The vision left him cold and shaky. My poor, poor child, he thought. How did she go so sunnily through her days, this monstrous vision in her brain?

He heard footsteps, a syncopated knock. “Mother says you must come to dinner now.”

He opened the door, searched her face for a clue. “Come in, Shirley.”

Her eyes met his, then fell away, short spiky lashes in groups of three. A veiled Medusa. He caught his breath at the thought and was ashamed; she was his own.

She bent over the globe, he had no time to stop her. “Oh, how marvelous!” she cried. “Yes, it’s exactly what I see. In my mind. It’s always there, even when I’m not really looking.” She was obviously very pleased. “Now may I have the lessons?”

“The lessons?” She referred, he soon realized, to the ballet lessons for which she’d been pleading all summer. “What? What is here to reinforce your ideas on that score? I don’t see the connection.”

But that’s me!" Her smile was radiant. She saw something there he didn't see. She turned out her feet and bent her knees, raised her arms above her head. “The prima ballerina is me! You see, I’m not too old to begin!”

It was then he began to suspect the experiment had not gone entirely as planned. Henry, a bit of a gourmand, had seen various foodstuffs, he reflected. And now Shirley thought she saw ballet in her future, vindication of a far-fetched dream.

How then, had everything been so monstrous, there at the very center? Had some dark and alien consciousness fallen across the film during his own examination?

As Shirley tugged at his sleeve, he acknowledged darkness as his own. But alien, surely never.

§ § §

Anna Sidak's short stories have appeared in Literary Potpourri, Linnaean Street, Gator Springs Gazette, Pig Iron Malt, Pindeldyboz, Neal Storr's Oasis, and other literary journals.

She is a fiction editor at In Posse Review.

This piece was first published in INK POT #2 - 2003, a literary journal.

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