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Back The Double Save as PDF
Chapters (63)
  1. 1
  2. 2
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  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
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  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
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  55. 55
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  58. 58
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  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. Acknowledgements

He smiled. ‘Hold the paper in front of you and cover your left eye. How many circles do you see now?’

‘Two.’

‘Now, focus on the left circle with your right eye, and slowly bring the paper closer to your face. How many circles do you see?’

‘One.’ She wrinkled her brow. ‘How does that work?’

A sense of triumph flushed his cheeks. Was that all it took to cheer her up, a silly optical illusion? He was surprised she’d never come across it before.

‘Our eyes have a blind spot,’ he said, making a rapid sketch of the human eye. ‘At the point on the retina where the optic nerve enters, there are no photoreceptors. So the brain fills in the blank space with its best guess, using information from the surrounding image. When the circle on the right entered the blind spot of your right eye, your brain filled it in with the white of the paper. Everything we see,’ he said, shifting into full lecture mode, ‘is a construction of the brain. It creates an image based on the electrical signals it receives from the photoreceptors on the retina. Since there are variants in our photoreceptors based on our DNA, it’s possible that what you see and what I see is not exactly the same. For example, if we were to look at the same red carnation, your perception of “red” might be different to mine.’

A shadow crossed the girl’s face, and her eyes took on a panicky look. A mood shift, difficult to parse. Had he cast a pall over what was meant to be a moment of wonder?

‘All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream,’ she murmured.

He gave her a questioning look.

‘My grandmother had a thing for Edgar Allan Poe. I’d never understood that line before.’

Tears welled in her eyes, and he waited for her to say more, but nothing disturbed the silence except the rustle of a Japanese maple, its few remaining leaves, the colour of dried blood, trembling in the breeze. He looked at the girl in alarm and mumbled some excuse before slipping away. What had he done? A place this fraught with fragile minds and delicate sensibilities had no room, apparently, for disturbing facts about the universe, or the byzantine workings of the brain. From now on, he would keep his thoughts to himself.

11

Vidor blinked at the sight of Dr Lindstrom seated in one of Gessen’s wingback chairs. Had he stumbled into the wrong room? He’d been feeling out of sorts since breakfast, queasy and unsettled as if he’d eaten a plate of bad eggs. It didn’t help his feeling of unease that on his way over to the main building, the weedy man who shared his chalet passed him on the footpath, his head wrapped in a bandage, seeping blood.

‘Where is Dr Gessen?’