The room is too hot. Luke switches on his fan. He’s never been allowed to open the window, not even at nighttime. There’s too much pollen, according to his mother, and moths, carrying poisonous dust on their wings, even in October.
Luke’s reading. When he reads, he almost feels like other people because he can read books in exactly the same way other people do, even if he does have trouble picturing some of the scenes. He’s never been able to play videogames, because all videogames seem to require you to travel on some sort of journey through vast improbable lands. Luke’s only experience of travelling has been to the other end of the house and back. The first time he tried to play a videogame he felt anxious and lost as soon as the character moved from the starting point. Luke’s never really experienced being lost and if being lost in the real world is as terrifying as being lost in a fictional one then maybe staying in this room isn’t that bad. But then again, Luke would still give anything to go out.
The book he’s reading now may as well be science fiction. It’s set in an office and Luke’s been having trouble creating the location in his imagination. Most of the time when he reads, he automatically places his most familiar image of, say, a house, or an apartment, or a field, into his imagination as required. But all his stock locations come from the TV or from films. If any action in a book takes place in an apartment, Luke’s imagination accesses one of the apartments in Friends. If anything takes place on a boat, Luke sees the inside of the Titanic. For Luke, there will always be several Titanics to choose from: an old black-and-white one, a Technicolor one with people in fifties clothes, one that keeps still like a photograph, and a huge Hollywood one with Oscars and celebrities. The idea that each of these images represents a real object that Luke can’t see – well, if he can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. There is no real Titanic, just the pictures. Or: there are several real Titanics.
Luke doesn’t use the word ‘real’ very often. He doesn’t talk about the real world or things being realistic and he doesn’t ever preface sentences with the words: in fact. Nobody really notices that he’s weird, though, or, at least, not more weird than other people they meet. Maybe Julie notices but she’s always been a bit weird herself. Luke thought for a long time that maybe other people didn’t read books the same way as him. When he asked Julie she said she’d never really thought about it. He mentioned some book they’d both read recently that included a scene set in a hospital. When he asked her to describe her image of the hospital in the book, it was different to his. But when he asked if the image was similar to anything else – like, was it a hospital she’d actually been to, or maybe one from the TV or a film – she’d sort of gasped and said it was the set from Casualty, and she hadn’t even realised. So maybe Luke isn’t that weird.
Sometimes he dreams he’s left this room. But the place he goes is a world made up of TV fragments, like a photo-fit, or those TV-clip shows they have on ITV: TV about TV. And after all, what else is he going to dream about? He’s never seen the real outside, and you have to fill in the gaps somehow. If Julie ever played word-association with Luke and said the word ‘car’, he’d say ‘Knight Rider’, or ‘Christine’. He’d never say ‘street’, or ‘bus’, or ‘lorry’, or ‘motorbike’. So he dreams he’s escaped into the TV, which is no escape at all. That’s why he’s reading more books, and that’s why he wants to go out.
Julie once showed Luke a book that he couldn’t understand, of paintings by Escher. He couldn’t understand the outside world, or even his life; in the same way, he couldn’t understand Escher. Julie tried to explain to Luke that Escher’s paintings were ‘impossibilities’, or optical illusions, that stairs couldn’t really do that: they couldn’t really go up and down at the same time. Luke just thought, Why not? Why couldn’t stairs do that? Julie got very frustrated with him at the time because she couldn’t understand why he didn’t see the impossibility. But if it turned out that every staircase outside this house was like an Escher painting, Luke wouldn’t be surprised.
Luke’s mind’s still searching for an image of an office. The best it can do is the one from some American TV show about a lawyer, an open-plan mêlée of secretaries and computers and intrigue and people dressed in thin designer skirts. But it doesn’t fit properly with the book and the chapter therefore feels uncomfortable, as the action fails to fit the location. The next chapter is set in a factory. Luke gives up. What’s a factory? He can see big nineteenth-century furnaces and smoke and women in hairnets with cigarettes and children dressed in rags. Where would that image have come from? It’s not right, anyway, so Luke closes the book. He’ll look up factory images on the Internet tomorrow.
Yawning, he decides to go to bed. But before he does, he checks his e-mail. Apart from some of the usual crap, there’s an e-mail from someone called Ai Wei Zhe, who says he’s a healer staying in Wales. Luke’s e-mailed Internet healers before, but he doesn’t remember sending his details to this one. Maybe he’s responding to one of Luke’s newsgroup messages. There are lots of Luke’s cries for help floating around out there on newsgroup servers, but it’s very rare for someone to respond to one of them. This one says he may be able to help Luke.
Luke sends an e-mail straight back. Then, feeling suddenly more awake, he checks one of his newsgroups. While he’s doing that, a second e-mail comes through from Ai Wei Zhe. He asks for Luke’s phone number and for Luke to tell him when would be a good time to call. Luke immediately sends back a message with the number. He says he’s awake now if Ai Wei Zhe would like to call him. Shaking slightly, Luke disconnects from the Internet and waits. Nothing. He goes to clean his teeth and change into his pyjamas, still shaking and still not feeling particularly tired. He checks he really is disconnected from the Internet and that his phone’s not somehow engaged. Then it rings.
‘Hello?’ says the person on the end of the line. ‘Is that Luke?’
‘Yes, it is,’ Luke says. ‘Is that Ai Wei Zhe . . .?’ He has trouble pronouncing the name and makes Wei Zhe sound like Wednesday. ‘I hope it’s not too early or anything . . .’
‘No, Luke. Don’t worry. I always get up at dawn,’ the voice says. ‘And call me We i .’
‘OK.’
His accent sounds half American, half Chinese. ‘You have an unusual problem?’
‘Yes,’ Luke says. ‘I’m allergic to the sun.’
‘The sun is yang. The sun gives life.’
‘Not to me.’
‘No.’ Wei laughs. ‘Have you seen a doctor?’
‘Yes. A long time ago.’
‘But not recently?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I just haven’t. I um . . . I don’t like the doctors, but that’s not why.’
‘Then why?’
‘I don’t know. They just haven’t come. They stopped coming a while ago. I guess it’s because this thing I have – XP – is incurable, so there’s not much they can do apart from telling me to keep my curtains closed. This doctor my mother knows – he updates my medical certificates, but apart from that, nothing happens.’
‘I see. And you’ve always been like this?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve never heard of this . . . XP before, but perhaps it’s just terminology. I have heard of cases where people can’t be exposed to sunlight, however; but I have not ever actually met anyone with this condition.’
‘Can it be healed?’ Luke asks.
‘We will soon find out.’ Wei laughs again. ‘Perhaps you are too much yin.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, being allergic to yang. This is fascinating.’
‘Uh, yeah, I guess so.’
‘Sorry. It probably isn’t that fascinating for you, huh?’
‘No.’ Luke smiles. How can he put this? ‘I want to dance in the fields,’ he says.
‘You do, huh? Then we must try to heal you.’
‘You think you can?’ Luke asks again.
‘I don’t know. If the problem is in your body, maybe. If not, well, maybe.’
‘Oh. I think it is in my body.’
‘Well, we’ll see. Look, do you have a fax machine?’
‘Yeah,’ says Luke. ‘Well, a scanner and . . .’
‘Fax your medical documents. You have them?’
‘They’re in the house. I’ll find them.’
‘Fax them to me and we’ll speak again on Monday.’