The Phantom Limb (10 page)

“We used to live in Centerville. Then we moved here.” He didn't say that his mother was in the hospital; he didn't want it to sound as if he was asking for sympathy. Instead, he said, “And I found this real cool thing in our new house: a mirror box.”

“What's that?” Kravetz asked.

Isaac described the box to him and what you could do with it.

“Hey, man, I'd like to see that sometime,” Kravetz said.

“Sure,” Isaac said. He didn't say anything about the phantom limb—that would be too unbelievable at this point. But he could tell that Kravetz was fascinated by the idea of the mirror box itself. Isaac decided to work at getting him on his side, so that
maybe
he could help him get the twins on his side too.

And now Isaac felt that he really needed a friend. Not just to help him, but for the companionship.

After school let out, Isaac checked his brakes, just to be sure, and then rode his bike directly home instead of going to the hospital. He knew something strange was going on, but Vera had seemed OK yesterday. And he had to look at his collection of optical illusions again, in case Grandpa was right and there really
was
something he might be able to use to stop whoever it was from hurting Vera—and him.

Grandpa was asleep on the couch when he got home. Isaac wondered if he was tired or if he was slipping back into his disoriented state. Yesterday he had hoped that Grandpa was getting better, that the
situation with Vera might be bringing him out of the deep depression he had been in. Because that's what it had been, Isaac suspected now: depression, not dementia.

Isaac went upstairs to look at his collection of illusions. In general, he was most fascinated with the Menger sponge, the cube with the smaller and smaller holes. After toying with it for a minute, he looked up and saw the spiral aftereffect. Why hadn't he noticed it the other day? It was a long rod with a wheel on the end of it. The wheel was white with a black line on it that spiraled into the center. When the wheel turned, it looked as if the spiral was zooming down into the center, pulling you along with it. Then, when you looked away, whatever you saw seemed to be zooming toward you. The effect was dizzying. It was a simple but powerful optical illusion.

He heard footsteps behind him. Grandpa had woken up and followed him upstairs.

“The spiral aftereffect!” Isaac said with excitement.

“That particular model was almost as hard to find as the Menger sponge,” Grandpa said, then yawned.

The white disk with the black line spiraling down into it was much bigger than the toy Grandpa had given him when he was five. It was about a foot in
diameter. There was a dial with numbers from one to ten on the two-foot-long handle. Isaac picked the spiral aftereffect up, stared at the disk, and turned the dial that made the disk spin—which one you chose determined how fast it went. It turned slowly at first, and he watched as the black line began moving down into the disk, away from him, pulling him along with it. He turned the dial farther, until the disk was spinning faster and faster. Now he felt he was falling into it, and he actually stumbled forward.

“Look away from it now,” Grandpa told him.

Isaac followed his instructions. When he looked away, the table seemed to zoom toward him. It was so disorienting that he fell to his knees, closing his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, the table had stopped moving.

“Effective, isn't it?” Grandpa said with a slight smile. “If you stare at a moving object in a particular direction for even a short time, stationary scenes you look at right afterward appear to move in the opposite direction. Some people call it the waterfall effect. If you stare at a waterfall for about a minute, and then look at the rocks at the side of the waterfall, the rocks appear to be moving upward.”

It actually made me fall down,
Isaac thought.

He couldn't get it out of his mind that he had fallen down after looking at the spiral aftereffect.

Grandpa put his hand to his chin. “Maybe you could use it to your advantage?”

“Yeah!” Isaac said, excited now. “The way I see it, Dr. Ciano must be the one who's ordered the amputation. So maybe I could somehow cause her to have an accident—something that would get her out of the way for a while, which would delay the amputation. That would give us time to get Mom out. Nobody would believe a
toy
could do that. And Grandpa … it was all your idea!”

Isaac and Grandpa both started laughing. It wasn't the situation that was funny—they were laughing because they had just solved a problem together.
This is how Grandpa and I used to laugh together before he got sick
, Isaac thought. He realized how much he had missed those times.

There was just one thing missing.

Vera.

 

FTER THEY STOPPED LAUGHING, GRANDPA looked around at all the boxes. “There! I knew I made a point of saving the box the spiral aftereffect came in. Good thing nobody was dumb enough to throw it out.” He went across the room to get it, and Isaac thought,
I wanted to throw that box out.

Grandpa handed it to Isaac. “You get the spiral aftereffect and do what you need to do with it … I need to take a nap.” He was slipping away again. His periods of alertness were sporadic.

In his room, Isaac turned his attention to the mirror box. He wanted to try an experiment using it
and the spiral aftereffect. He knew that if the spiral aftereffect appeared in the mirror, Joey Haynes would be able to see it.

Isaac started spinning it inside the box.

The phantom limb slid into the mirror. After a moment it began to shake, as if the spiral aftereffect was making it dizzy. A phantom arm, dizzy? Was it possible? This spiral aftereffect was so large that it took up all of the mirror. Isaac stopped spinning the disk, put it back into his left hand, outside the box, and carefully laid it on his desk. He had wanted to get Joey's reaction to it before he did anything else.

The phantom limb slapped its hand excitedly on the floor of the box, then made a thumbs-up gesture. Isaac knew this meant the phantom limb was very happy now because the trick was something that Isaac had discovered on his own and showed to Joey.

Isaac withdrew his hand from the box. The phantom limb held up three fingers. It made an OK sign with its thumb and index finger, waved happily, and disappeared.

Isaac sat on his bed with the spiral aftereffect and began studying it more closely. He had to understand
exactly how to spin it at the right speed to make the right effect.

Looking at the numbers on the disk, he began turning the dial. At one, it spun quite slowly, and there was not much of an effect. At two, he began to see the line slide slowly down inside the disk. He went up to four, and now the line was really spinning down inside it. Isaac dared to turn it all the way up to ten. The effect was so strong that it pulled him right off the bed.

He quickly looked around the room. Everything in his room was converging toward him. It was as though the whole room was about to crush him. The feeling was very real, all because the spiral aftereffect took up his whole field of vision. The speed at ten would have to be used against the person who was endangering Vera and himself, he decided. The sensation would easily knock someone over.

When the sensation stopped, Isaac put the spiral aftereffect into its box and went back to the mirror box again. He felt sleepy.

He knew what was coming.

But this time he was looking into a different bathroom, not clean and white and perfect like the
first one or rustic like the second. There was old-fashioned wallpaper and a flowered shower curtain. The linoleum on the floor was worn. And there was nobody in the room.

Then he heard the door open and, a moment later, the lock click. A young girl appeared in the mirror, holding up a plastic baby doll that was about eight inches long. Its clothes had been removed.

The little girl was so short that only her head and her arms with the doll appeared in the mirror. Her face was still blurred.

“Bad baby! I told you not to do that,” she said so softly that Isaac could barely hear her. She had locked the door and now she was whispering: she didn't want her parents to know what she was doing in there. “Bad,
bad
baby!” she said again. Then, with her tongue pushed slightly out of her mouth, she began twisting one of the doll's arms. She twisted the arm around backward and pulled at it, grunting slightly. There was a slight crack, but the arm remained attached. She kept pulling, harder and harder, until the arm was at right angles to the doll's body. With one final burst of effort, she snapped the arm off.

The little girl beamed, as happy as if it were
Christmas morning. She dropped the severed arm into the sink. “Oh, my dear little baby,” she suddenly cooed as she lovingly rocked the doll, “Mommy will make everything OK now.”

Isaac was shocked by the little girl's cruelty and then by her elation. The image faded, and he was looking into the mirror box again. The phantom limb had returned and was trying to tell him something. It held up three fingers, as it had done before, and shook them at Isaac.

“Three?” Isaac said out loud.

The phantom limb shook in disagreement. It held up three fingers again.

Isaac tried again. “Third?” It made him think of the games of charades his parents had sometimes played at their dinner parties. From upstairs, he had listened to them guessing and laughing. This, however, was deadly serious.

“Three's company?” Isaac suggested.

The limb shook itself in exasperation.

What on earth was the limb trying to say? Everything the phantom limb had shown him so far was important, so this must be important too. He would have to figure out its meaning in relation to the little
girl—whoever she was—and her amputation of her doll's arm.

He quickly pulled his hands out of the mirror box. The phantom limb folded its fingers down over its palm in a sorrowful gesture, and left. Isaac put the box in the closet right away.

He went downstairs to do something about dinner. Grandpa was not asleep on the couch, as Isaac had expected. Instead, he was looking at a copy of
Scientific American
. Isaac told Grandpa what the phantom limb had done, how it was trying to tell him something. He also told him about the “mirror dream” he had just had.

“But it's not ‘three,' ‘third,' or ‘three's company,'” he said.

“Hmm …” Grandpa squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, thinking hard. “Well, it could be ‘triptych.' Or ‘troika.' Maybe even ‘triad,'” he suggested.

“What's a triad, exactly?” Isaac asked.

“I … I seem to remember it might mean two different things,” Grandpa said. “I think it could be a musical term for a particular three-note chord.”

“Well, Joey Haynes
did
play the piano,” Isaac said. “But how could that connect with the little girl
mutilating her doll? What's the other meaning of triad?”

“Any group of three, like three closely related people.”

“I wonder if that's what the phantom limb meant. But
which
three people? It still doesn't make a lot of sense.”

Grandpa shook his head and sighed. “I can't stop thinking about that little girl and her doll. Whoever that girl is, she's sick—and dangerous. We've got to get your mother home. Fast.”

Isaac knew that. But he still didn't know how he was going to zap Dr. Ciano with the spiral aftereffect. When—and how? He had to catch her off guard, so she'd injure herself and have to be away from work for a while. But everybody at the hospital was so vigilant. The whole idea seemed impossible.

And he wondered: Who was the woman who had “accidentally” come into Vera's room? Why had she smiled at him so strangely when she saw him right after the endoscopy? It was almost as if she knew what had happened to him.

After dinner was over and he was back in his room, he puzzled over the whole situation as he sat at his desk, trying to concentrate on his homework. He
was falling way behind in his schoolwork and would probably fail his upcoming tests. But he couldn't concentrate on any of it. All he could think about was how he could use the spiral aftereffect and get Vera out of the hospital before anything really terrible happened to her.