Monochrome

I used to have these dreams. 

They all started the same. I’d start off on my rooftop, under a midday sun, and feel my weight kind of flow through me. Like it was leaking out the top of my head. Then, when it was all gone, the last gram leached from the ends of my hair, my feet would lift. And I rose, and rose, and rose, up past the tree, the telephone wires, the three-storied behemoth on the other side of my block. The roads would shrink. People became ants. I’d rise into the clouds, feel their clammy embrace, drift past them. The world shrugged into a sphere. The ground lost its texture. Then the air ran out and there was only smothering darkness. 

I’m on the rooftop now. It’s not midday and I’m not dreaming, because I can see the stars and feel the shingles pressed awkwardly into my back. I’m waiting for meteors - they said they’d come tonight - but the stars stay quite stationary. It’s cold and space is far away enough to ignore, so I decide enough is enough and we’ll try again in five or ten or fifteen years or whenever the scientists say it’ll happen. I push back the attic window and clamber through, shutting it just before my cat slips out onto the roof tiles. Maybe it’s because it’s dark that I don’t notice it then. But I feel it, just for a moment, that slight tilt of the world, that flicker of uncertainty, before I turn away and shuffle down the stairs like a normal person.

This is the first time. 

–-

The second time happens some months later, on a Tuesday evening. I like to go grocery shopping on Tuesdays, when most people have done their shopping for the week on Saturday or Sunday, and the stragglers have dragged themselves to the store by Monday. So the aisles are mostly empty as I push my cart through aisles of canned soups and bread. I’m reaching for the chicken noodle when it happens. This time I notice when the colors blink out and everything is set in shades of gray, like a faulty frame in a video. This time there is soup in my hand so I drop it and it clangs on the ground. The can dents, and I stand and wish the soup had exploded everywhere so something could tell me I was right for gasping. Instead, I pick up the red can and nestle it amongst the green vegetables and stare hard at the frozen fruit in my cart, until I am sure they looked exactly as they should and maybe I just need to lie down. 

--

I’m scared after that. I don’t know what to do if the colors leave, if the world is stripped to simple light and shadows like it is for everyone else. I go to a therapist for three weeks but after the fourth session I can tell she thinks something is wrong with my brain and she wants to lock me up somewhere where they can fix me. I thank her for her services and catch the first bus that arrives. It’s not that serious anyways. It only really happened once, for a moment, and I could’ve imagined it. Brains are funny, after all. 

--

But in my dreams, the ground is gray by the time I’m in the clouds. 

--

The third time is when I know it’s real. This time it lasts hours. I have to excuse myself from a meeting to go throw up in the bathroom.

--

“They’re leaving me,” I tell my sister on the phone. I’m cutting onions, but I don’t cry. I never have. Will onions make me cry when the colors leave forever? The doctors are too confused about my eyes to know something like that. 

“Oh no,” Mara says, distracted. She has three children and is shepherding them to their separate extracurriculars. I’m cutting onions because I need something to do with my hands. “Have you told them? At work?”

I shake my head then remember she is two thousand miles away. “No.”

“Oh no,” she sighs. 

We stay quiet. A needy voice yells for Mom and there is vigorous rustling on the other end of the phone.

“Do they go all at once?” my sister asks, minutes later. “Or slip away here and there?”

“All at once. Like a screen is put all over the world and suddenly they’re…gone.” 

“You should tell them.” 

“I know.” My onion is cut so I scrape the pieces into a tupperware and open a can of soup. I eat it over the sink, cold. “I will.”

--

Mara is the first one I told about the colors. I was scared, for a long time, there was something horribly wrong with me and my mind was beginning to melt away. That maybe someone divine had sent me these visions of beauty as consolation just before an untimely demise. But Mara never thought so. She’d collect things from around the house and put them in front of me, demanding that I sort them by color. She cried when I told her that rocks were not red or pink or purple. She taught me that it's impossible to describe the colors to someone who has never seen them. There is no language to capture the things I see. 

I was ten when I sat at our dinner table and noticed that the water looked a bit strange. “The water looks a bit strange,” I told my mother. Something like that. She was busy writing something down and nodded without looking up. My father wasn’t home. He was on the TV screen, Senator Mayder, wearing his senator tie and his senator smile. I reached for the platter of chicken, I remember because the cook tried something new and it looked disgusting, and let my elbow knock the pitcher over. My mother yelled something. Mara yelped. I shrugged and sat back in my seat when the water in the replacement pitcher arrived and looked like its normal hue.

Then our fat old cat came and slurped at the spillage and crumpled and died, and the maid was discovered with poison in her pockets, and my mother wept and called me a hero. Soon my parents were listening to me and my vivid visions, and when I graduated high school the government scooped me up and set me up with my very own Food Safety Division. I stared at screens of camera feeds and clicked on vegetables that looked too brown, milk that looked a bit yellow, bread with spots of green. They were gathering data, they said. Something about wavelengths and validation and the law of large numbers. They started building machines that could see like me.

Senator Mayder wasted no time in plastering my face in the news and on billboards. A Visionary! they proclaimed. The Father of A Visionary! they proclaimed. They all call me a hero now. I wonder what they will believe in when the colors are gone for good. 

--

The colors vanish forever in the middle of filming a live special on the Tuesdays with Morrie show.  

“What inspired you to use your gift to help with national food quality?” Morrie is asking me. He leans in a little closer and steeples his hands, resting his chin on his fingertips. He’s good. 

“Oh, you know,” I wave my hand around. I feel dizzy. It must be the lights, or the dismal ham and cheese scone I scarfed down two minutes before action. “The President told me to.” 

Laughter in the audience. 

“A visionary and funny!” Morrie claps. “No but really, what inspired you?” 

I lean back in my stiff chair, as if considering. “I’d have to say my father,” I say. My stomach feels like it does in that moment the elevator starts to go down, or the car goes over a bump. Suspended. Weightless. I didn’t know ham and cheese could counter the effects of gravity. “He’s dedicated his whole career to helping people in his community and state. I’ve always wanted to be just like him.” 

I can picture Senator Mayder in his hotel room in god knows where, nodding in approval at his TV screen. 

“Wow,” Morrie says. And then I’m weightless but I’m wide awake and my feet are on the ground, but the colors are gone from everything and somehow, I know they will never be back. I know it the way I knew the first time, when they left but everything was too dark to really see. The world slides off its center. I’m fighting the bile rising in my throat as Morrie calls for a commercial break. The walls are closing in on me. The lights are so white. 

“So,” Morries says to me quietly, his mic off. “Next is the segment we talked about. I’ll show you two things and you tell me if they’re the same color. Sound good?” 

I nod, because I’m on television and the senator is watching, and what else can I do? “Sounds good.” I smile and look at the sea of excited gray faces, before I have to turn away and stare at the blank, blank wall. 

--

Mara calls me that night. “They’re gone,” she says. It’s late for her. The kids must be in bed. 

“How?”

“How’d I know? I was watching. I saw when they left. I could tell.” 

We are quiet. 

“Did you tell them?” she asks softly. “At work?” 

“Of course I did.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.” 

--

On Wednesday I’m at the office at 8:50, staring at my screen. I have to remind myself to slow down, to make the random clicks seem real. They call me into the meeting room at noon. 

“We noticed some differences between your selections this morning and the predictions made by our algorithm,” a woman in a long white coat, Martha, says. “Do you have any idea what might be going on?” ‘

My brow furrows. “That’s strange. The images today have been pretty straightforward.” 

Martha nods and writes something down on her clipboard. There is some debate around the table. 

“Maybe the algorithm is wrong?” I suggest. 

“It’s possible,” a man in the corner says. “But recently we’ve had it up to 99.79% accuracy.” 

“And it’s currently deployed across all quality assurance mills in the country,” someone else chimes in. “If it’s wrong, we could be poisoning millions. Should we do a recall?” 

“Let’s halt the mills for the day,” Martha steps forward. “Issue that recall. We’ll figure this out, one way or another.” 

I nod and shrug and go back to my computer, clicking away.

--

Cold soup is significantly worse if it’s also gray, I’ve learned. I’ve got chicken noodle heating up in the microwave when Mara calls again. 

“What?” I say, setting the phone on top of the microwave and jabbing at the speakerphone button with my knuckle. 

“What’s going on, Elena?” she says. “They’ve stopped the mills. You said you’d tell them! You said you told them!”

“I did!” I reach for an onion and a knife. “It’s just-”

“It’s just what? Oh, Justin, don’t step in that!” 

“They came back.”

“They what?”

“The colors. Like last time. I have them again.” 

“But Elena-” 

“They just wanted to make sure, that’s all. That’s why they stopped the mills.” 

“How does that make any sense?” 

I shrug and  pop open the microwave door and begin mopping up the boiled-over soup. “Listen, Mara, I’m busy.” 

“With what? You never-” 

“Dinner. Bye!” I use my chin to hang up and leave the rag and the soup in the open microwave. I go back to the onion and bring the knife down viciously, until I’ve speared the vegetable and part of the cutting board beneath it. 

Without the colors, it seems, onions do make you cry. 

I float into the living room and turn to Channel 7, and there he is. Tie and smile. He’s talking about the mills, and a picture of me flickers up next to his face for a moment. Everyone is confused. I’m already gasping for air, and the ground is far away. I reach for the bottle of merlot on the mantle. 

By the time my gray father disappears from the TV, I have finished my soup and stumbled towards bed with my arms outstretched. My eyes are shut tight - better not to see at all. I feel the thick duvet and pull it back, lay my pillow flat, and strip off all my clothes in a pile by my feet. I let the covers fall around me and pull me deep into the gravity of the mattress. 

In my dreams, I pray, they will come back to me. 

--

On Thursday, I’m called into a conference room with Martha, three scientists and engineers, and a projection of the Secretary of Agriculture. 

“Hi Elena,” Martha smiles. Everyone has grooves between their eyebrows and marks on their noses where their glasses have been resting. 

“Hello.”

“I saw you on that show a few days ago. You looked great.” 

I nod.  

“Elena,” the Secretary says on screen, adjusting her glasses. Martha picks up her clipboard. “We need to speak about the labeling discrepancies from yesterday. We ran some lab tests, and the results favor the algorithmic predictions.” 

“Interesting,” I say. My bag is still on my shoulder. 

“Is everything okay on your end? We’ve never seen this many contradictions in the data before.” 

“Actually,” I stand. “I was thinking that it’s been a long time since I’ve taken a vacation. In fact, I don’t think I have ever taken a vacation. Isn’t that funny?” 

Martha frowns. 

“If you’re feeling overstretched, we can accommodate-” the Secretary begins. 

“No worries,” I push my chair in. “I know how we can fix it. I’ll just take my vacation time now.” 

“Elena-” Martha starts, but I rush out the door and down the stairs and disappear into the streets, just another head full of gray hair.  

--

It’s hard to sleep that night, with the phone ringing and ringing. I sleep in spurts, waking up every half hour tangled in sheets and drenched in sweat. My throat is dry. 

I give up some time after midnight, scrounging under my duvet for the thick socks I like to wear to bed but inevitably shed while unconscious. I flip them right-side out and slip them on. My cat brushes against my shins and winds through my legs like a fur-covered snake. I don’t bother turning on the lights. 

My legs feel heavy as I climb up the stairs, hand on the railing to drag me forward. The night air is cold when I squeeze out on the roof, and the stars see me and blink. They look the same, at least.

I think about calling Mara, but she’ll be asleep. Better not bother her. Instead, I close my eyes, wanting the weight to leave me, wanting to fly up and see the greens and reds and blues. But I won’t. I never will. I’ve been left with nothing but the shadows.

I used to rise in my dreams. 

Now, I can only fall.