The Phantom Limb (2 page)

Vera's seizures had worsened. She couldn't teach anymore and was ordered to stay home. Then a special unit in a hospital about a hundred miles away was highly recommended as the best place for treating her symptoms, so they had to move again.

The hospital helped them find inexpensive housing, so they moved just before school started.
Even though the new place had two floors, the rooms were small and gloomy. It was a real contrast to the house they had lived in before his father died. But it did have a storage room where Isaac could display his optical illusions. Isaac often escaped to that room, where he could study his collection in peace.

When he got to the house, he locked his bike in the garage and went straight to the storage room upstairs.

There was still some stuff in the room that had belonged to the previous owners. The day Isaac saw the place for the first time, he had looked through their things quickly, once, and found some faded black-and-white pictures of an old man and woman with a boy and a girl. The real estate agent told them that the boy had died in the hospital, but he didn't know of what.

The boy had been looking straight into the lens when the picture was taken. When Isaac looked at the picture, it was as if the boy was looking at him.

He quickly refocused on his optical illusions. In the corner of the room was a table with an odd array of objects arranged on it. Isaac's collection.
He studied “The Snake,” a jagged purple and green picture. When you looked at it from the side, it appeared to be moving menacingly toward you, even though it was really completely stationary. Next to it was “All Is Vanity,” the famous picture of a beautiful woman looking in a mirror. But when you looked at it for a moment longer, the whole thing turned into a skull. He loved his real model of the Necker cube, which was an outline of a cube made out of wire whose front and rear surfaces kept seeming to switch back and forth, so that sometimes the cube appeared to be pointing right and other times left. Before Grandpa had gotten confused, he told Isaac that when the cube did that, it was rotating through the fourth dimension.

He was most proud of his actual model of the Menger sponge. He had seen drawings of this bizarre object in books about chaos and also online, and when he found out that someone had actually made a three-dimensional model of it, he had insisted on special-ordering it immediately. It was so delicate, it had to be hand-delivered to their door, cushioned and protected in many layers of padding.

It was a cube, about a foot on each side. A cube-shaped hole was cut out of each face of the cube.
Inside the empty cubes, a square hole was cut out of each surface. If you did this an infinite number of times, you ended up with an object that had infinite surface area and zero volume. If somehow you were actually
inside
something like this, everywhere you went you would be entering a smaller space than the one you had just left. That's what was so terrifying but also so intriguing about it. To Isaac, it had the fascination of a horror movie.

Grandpa had once explained how the cube worked. “An iteration is every time you make the next set of smaller holes. Theoretically, by the fiftieth iteration the cubicles are the size of atoms.” Grandpa said that Isaac's model had only three iterations, or otherwise it wouldn't hold together at all. “A Menger sponge with four iterations made out of business cards would weigh a ton,” he said.

Isaac really missed the old Grandpa and the way things used to be.

When he finally managed to drag his eyes away from the Menger sponge, there was a sudden bright glint. He blinked. Then he looked over by the window to see where the sparkle of light was coming from. But it wasn't coming from outside. Over in the pile of stuff the previous tenants had left, he saw an object
he hadn't noticed before. It was unlike anything he had ever seen.

Isaac squatted down to examine the object. It was an open rectangular wooden box, simple and unadorned, with a bottom and four sides but no top. In one of the long sides there were two round holes that were just the right size so that you could stick your hands and forearms into the box. Inside the box—between the two holes and bisecting the box across its width—was a dusty mirror, with a reflecting surface on each side. That's what had caught his attention.

Isaac was fascinated. At first, he hesitated. Then, with his left hand on the floor, he stuck his right hand and forearm into the hole on the right side of the box. When he looked down into the box, he could see his right hand and arm, and also the reflection of his right hand and arm in the mirror. So it looked as if both his hands were inside the box. But he could
feel
his left hand on the floor. It was an extremely peculiar sensation to
see
his left hand in one place and at the same time
feel
it in another place. It was as if he had two left hands. He pulled his hand quickly out of the box, and the sensation stopped instantly.

It was an optical illusion all right! It sure felt weird
to see his hand in one place and feel it in another. Isaac had the very strong sensation that the box also had a real function. But what? Had it belonged to the boy in the picture—the boy who seemed to be staring at him? Had the dead boy put his hands into the box a lot? The thought gave Isaac the creeps.

Did the box have anything to do with the boy's death?

 

SAAC REALLY WANTED TO TELL GRANDPA about this box with a mirror, but how could he? Grandpa lived in his own world. Mostly he stayed in his room. At first, Isaac had felt sorry for him, especially right after Gram died. Before she died, he had been so full of life—a brilliant physiologist who had done important research on the heart muscle. Isaac's interest in illusions and puzzles was because of Grandpa, who had helped him start his collection. But slowly Grandpa had slipped into another world. He could no longer do anything by himself. He had become a slob. At first, Isaac was just bored and annoyed with him. But after his father died and
Grandpa moved in with them, his presence became so unbearable that Isaac tried to avoid him as much as possible. His disdain pushed Grandpa further into his other world.

Isaac took the box to his room, dusted it off, and carefully put it on his bed. Then he went to the computer and logged on to Google. He typed in “box with a mirror” and read down the list of selections until he came to the one that said “mirror box.” He clicked on it.

There were two pictures. Near the top was a man looking to his right, with two hands in front of him, each hand a different shade of gray. Near the bottom was a drawing of a mirror box, exactly like the one Isaac had just found. The text explained that a doctor named V. S. Ramachandran had invented the mirror box as a way of helping people who had had a limb amputated.

Obviously, some past tenant was an amputee. Then Isaac felt a chill. Had the teenage boy who died in the hospital been the amputee?

Isaac continued reading. The article reported that a very large percentage of amputees have what is called “phantom limb pain,” which means that they feel pain—often excruciating pain—in the limb that
has been cut off. Frequently, it feels as if the limb is bent into an uncomfortable position. Often, when an arm has been amputated, for example, the amputee feels that the missing hand is clenched—that the fingers and fingernails are pressing into the palm much harder than could ever happen with a real hand—and the pain of it is unbearable. Medications didn't help. Hypnosis didn't help. People had to live for years and years with this phantom pain—phantom, because the limb wasn't there. But the pain itself was very real.

Then this neurologist, Dr. Ramachandran, had the idea of making a mirror box. Let's say the person had a complete right arm and hand but his left arm had been amputated below the elbow. If he put his whole right arm into the right hole of the mirror box and then put his left arm, with the stump, into the left hole, and if he then looked down into the right side of the mirror, the reflection would show a complete arm and hand. Because a mirror image is reversed, the mirror showed
a left arm and hand
. It looked as if the amputated limb had somehow grown back. The amputee could move his complete arm and hand, and it would look as though his missing arm and hand were doing the same movements. So
if he felt that his left hand was painfully clenched, he could
un
clench it by unclenching his right hand.

And when he did that, the pain went away.

It seemed unreal, like magic. But with patient after patient, the mirror box made the pain disappear. It was the only thing that worked.

Isaac was enthralled. Here was an optical illusion that wasn't just a game. It had a real function—as he had suspected—and it really helped people. He felt a macabre excitement.

Isaac clicked on more of the “mirror box” sites. He found an article that talked about bizarre sensations that two people could create with the mirror box. He spent so much time reading about the mirror box that, before he knew it, it was time for dinner—at least for Grandpa, who liked to eat early. Resentfully, Isaac left the box and went down to the kitchen.

Their old house had had a large dining room. The dinner parties there had been full of stimulating conversation and laughter, which Isaac used to hear from his room. His father was always telling humorous and fascinating stories about his travels, entertaining everybody. He had been a primatologist, and every summer the three of them had gone to
Africa and lived in the jungle so his father could study chimpanzees. Isaac wished his father were here now so he could share the mirror box with him.

His mother had often played the piano at their parties, and the guests had listened intently. The food she cooked was always wonderful.

Before checking into the hospital, Vera had cooked and frozen some of her best meals, so that there would be food available that Isaac could prepare quickly and easily for him and his grandfather. He pushed things around in the freezer until he found the chili, his favorite. He needed comfort food tonight, after the bad week at school and his fascination with—and confusion about—the mirror box.

He thawed the chili in the microwave and found the generic sauce for it in the fridge. He got it all ready and then went upstairs and knocked on Grandpa's door. He heard Grandpa get up. Isaac waited for him and then followed as he shuffled downstairs.

There was no dining room in this house. They ate their meals in the little breakfast alcove off the kitchen, called a nook, which had a built-in plastic table like a cheap diner and a small window in the corner. Isaac and Grandpa sat across from each other. Grandpa stared out the window, but it was clear from
his blank expression that he wasn't really seeing anything. As usual, he hadn't shaved or combed his hair.

Isaac brought Vera's steaming chili out on warmed-up plates. Her chili
was
amazing. It didn't have ground beef; instead, the meat was in soft cubes, like a stew. There was a lot of garlic in it. Isaac missed the special sauce Vera used to put on it—
pico de gallo,
which had lots of real chili peppers, red onions, tomatoes, lime juice, cilantro, and fresh avocados. It was wonderfully spicy, but not
too
spicy. Just exactly right for Isaac's taste. He could never find anything like it in a restaurant.

Isaac dug in with gusto. Grandpa, as always, just picked at his food. He never seemed to notice what he was eating; clearly, it didn't make any difference to him.

Isaac would have liked to tell the former Grandpa about the mirror box and what it was for and how well it worked. Instead, he kept his discovery to himself and thought back to the young boy who used to live here. He must have had an arm amputated. Isaac wondered why.

Another of the online articles had mentioned a game of sorts that two people can play with a mirror
box. Isaac wished there was someone he could try it with, but there was no one around.

He was almost finished with his dinner when he heard a loud noise. He looked over at Grandpa and saw that he had spilled his bowl of chili all over his lap.