He stared at the Polaroid.
“What do you see, Joe?”
“A gravestone.”
“Open your mind.”
With expectations that he could not put into words but that nevertheless caused his heart to race, Joe searched the image in his hand. “Granite, bronze… the grass around.”
“Open your heart,” she whispered.
“Their three names… the dates…”
“Keep looking.”
“…sunshine… shadows…
“Open your heart.”
Although Rose’s sincerity was evident and could not be doubted, her little mantra—Open your mind, open your heart—began to seem silly, as though she were not a scientist but a New Age guru.
“Open your mind,” she persisted gently.
The granite. The bronze. The grass around.
She said, “Don’t just look. See.”
The sweet milk of expectation began to curdle, and Joe felt his expression turning sour.
Rose said, “Does the photo feel strange to you? Not to your eyes… to your fingertips? Does it feel peculiar against your skin?”
He was about to tell her no, that it felt like nothing more than what it was, like a damned Polaroid, glossy and cool—but then it did feel peculiar.
First he became conscious of the elaborate texture of his own skin to an extent that he had never before experienced or imagined possible. He felt every arch, loop, and whorl as it pressed against the photo, and each tiny ridge and equally tiny trough of skin on each finger pad seemed to have its own exquisitely sensitive array of nerve endings.
More tactile data flowed to him from the Polaroid than he was able to process or understand. He was overwhelmed by the smoothness of the photograph, but also by the thousands of microscopic pits in the film surface that were invisible to the unassisted eye, and by the feel of the dyes and fixatives and other chemicals of which the graveyard image was composed.
Then to his touch, although not to his eye, the image on the Polaroid acquired depth, as if it were not merely a two-dimensional photograph but a window with a view of the grave, a window through which he was able to reach. He felt warm summer sun on his fingers, felt granite and bronze and a prickle of grass.
Weirder still: Now he felt a colour, as if wires had crossed in his brain, jumbling his senses, and he said, “Blue,” and immediately he felt a dazzling burst of light, and as if from a distance, he heard himself say, “Bright.”
The feelings of blueness and light quickly became actual visual experiences: The banquet room began to fade into a bright blue haze.
Gasping, Joe dropped the photograph as if it had come alive in his hand.
The blue brightness snapped to a small point in the centre of his field of vision, like the picture on a television screen when the Off switch is clicked. This point shrank until the final pixel of light hung starlike for an instant but then silently imploded and was gone.
Rose Tucker leaned across the table toward him.
Joe peered into her commanding eyes—and perceived something different from what he had seen before. The sorrow and the pity, yes. They remained. The compassion and the intelligence were still there, in as full measure as ever. But now he saw—or thought he saw—some part of her that rode a mad horse of obsession at a gallop toward a cliff over which she wanted him to follow.
As though reading his thoughts, she said, “Joe, what you’re afraid of has nothing to do with me. What you’re truly afraid of is opening your mind to something you’ve spent your life refusing to believe.”
“Your voice,” he said, “the whisper, the repetitive phrases—Open your heart, open your mind—like a hypnotist.”
“You don’t really believe that,” she said as calmly as ever.
“Something on the Polaroid,” he said, and heard the quiver of desperation in his voice.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“A chemical substance.”
“No.”
“An hallucinogenic drug. Absorbed through the skin.”
“No.”
“Something I absorbed through the skin,” he insisted, “put me in an altered state of consciousness.” He rubbed his hands on his corduroy jacket.
“Nothing on the photograph could have entered your bloodstream through your skin so quickly. Nothing could have affected your mind in mere seconds.”