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RELIEF WASHED over me each time I opened my eyes. I never saw or tasted any of the brightly colored liquids in my dreams. Vials of tonics appeared in front of me only when I was awake, followed by Edgar’s soothing voice.
“Drink up, Calla,” he said. “This will have you back on your feet again in no time.”
I lifted my head and sipped. The orange liquid was so bitter that it sucked all of the moisture out of my mouth. It tasted about as bad as the sour red one that made my lips pucker. Red and orange were better than purple, though.
The purple tonic didn’t taste bad. It was syrupy and vaguely reminded me of plumples. But after drinking it, I’d fallen into a deep sleep and dreamt that I was walking through an underground hallway lined with prison cells. Valcas was there, seething and straining against his bindings.
I moved on to another cell before he noticed me. Sandra Argan sat alone, wearing a pair of travel glasses. She laughed as she distorted personal photos of me into grotesque figures. I shuddered and kept walking.
In the next cell Valcas, freed from his shackles, stood in front of the door. He shouted at me through the window, tightly grasping its iron bars.
“You will never be safe! You will never be safe!”
He removed his glasses. The pupils inside his creepy blue eyes twisted into hypnotic spirals. They spun round and round, pulling me toward him. I screamed as the spirals grew larger. I gritted my teeth and resisted their pull.
The right eye spiral sucked me in like a vacuum, in through his eye and into another room. There, Sandra and Valcas, hand in hand, raised glasses of laramile in salute to a large audience of half-masked criminals with lascivious grins, all on a bright white background.
I refused to drink any more of the purple tonic.
***
“HE—HE SAW ME,” I BLURTED one morning.
Edgar looked over at me from an assortment of glass tubing that covered one of the living room end tables. He stopped what he was doing and walked over to me.
“I was worried about that,” he said. “I found you collapsed near the love seat, barely breathing. You were clutching the travel glasses to your chest. You’ve been drifting in and out of sleep for two days. What happened?”
“I know you told me not to, but I did. I’m not sure why. I put on the travel glasses. He saw me.” I sank back onto my sweaty pillow, ashamed.
The inventor stooped over me, his weary eyes growing large. “Were you able to see Valcas?”
“Yes, he was in bad shape, injured. He looked like he was, maybe still is, a prisoner?”
Edgar considered this. “Could you make out where he was, Calla?”
“No. I only saw him. Everything else was blank, empty.” I squeezed my head with my hands, trying to numb the tension of a building headache.
“I see.”
The inventor shuffled through the chest of drawers and pulled out a small leather notebook that I hadn’t seen before. I strained to watch as he thumbed through its pages, noticing that unlike many of the technical notebooks at the workshop, this one was not in Edgar’s handwriting.
“Hmm, yes. Here we are. How very interesting. Likely, very likely. May I borrow the travel glasses?”
“Edgar, no! He’d see you too! Then Valcas would know that I’m with you. And then—”
“Calla,” Edgar interrupted, “these notes were written by a friend of mine who developed much of the technology used in cell phones and video game visors. I wonder whether this technology was later built into the pair that I modified for Valcas. The detail that I still do not comprehend is why you could see Valcas but not his surroundings. This leads me to believe that he also did not see your present environment.”
I vaguely began to understand that the travel glasses could also be used as a means of communication. “How long do you need them?” I asked.
“Let me start with a few hours. I never experimented with such a feature because I presumed that I’d created the only pair of travel glasses in existence. That, however, was a very long time ago.”
Just when I thought Edgar was going to space out, he added with an out-of-place chuckle. “Calla, it’s a good thing that you sought to find the creator of these particular glasses. Who knows what trouble you may have found if your search would have been broader.”
Edgar’s experiments on the travel glasses went on through the night. From the living room I could hear him muttering to himself. Just when he thought he’d found the answers he was looking for, he would stumble upon a new feature that would generate a fresh flux of ideas. This called for additional experiments. The cycle of discovery and further experimentation did not end until late into the next morning.
I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep until the glasses were safely returned to my backpack. I’d apparently slept a lot during the last couple of days. Since Edgar wouldn’t let me touch any of his experiments, I tried to be useful by making sure that he had a constant supply of tea. Meanwhile, I zoned out by rereading an old diary, a travel journal that was the closest writing to a novel available in the workshop.
Earlier, Edgar had told me that he purchased his collection of personal diaries and travel journals from various secondhand vendors before retreating to the workshop in the woods. His explanation, of course, triggered another Edgar-staring-into-space episode. For that reason, I made sure that I kept this particular journal out of sight. I was pretty sure he didn’t buy it. The diarist tenderly and fondly mentioned Edgar in it numerous times.
I ran my fingers across the journal’s smooth cover, remembering my own library of books still at Uncle Al’s cottage. Red leather covered tightly bound pages of thick parchment. Daylilies were etched into the leather, as well as “Se vedemo.”
The author had a heavy writing hand and wide looping penmanship. Weekly entries provided descriptions of an extended holiday taken throughout several regions of what is now Italy. The author signed each of her entries with her name, Shirlyn Hall. Shirlyn introduced herself in the diary as the sixteen-year-old daughter of an inventor from Folkestone, England.
A young suitor, Romaso Bredani, presented her with the blank journal one afternoon at a festival in Venice as a parting gift. He explained that “se vedemo” was not a good-bye but a Venetian phrase indicating hope for future meetings, more literally “if we see each other again.” Shirlyn left with her parents for their subsequent destination that same day.
Shirlyn’s entries often reverted back to the topic of Romaso even after she returned to her family’s estate in England. In bits and pieces throughout the journal, Shirlyn described Romaso’s liquid brown eyes, his impish grin and the way he stood before her when presenting the journal on their last day together. His English was broken, but Shirlyn found that charming. She’d recorded her favorite phrases used by Romaso, sometimes combining them with her own in describing the way she saw the world around her.
Throughout my time at the workshop, I’d browsed through nearly half of the journals in the washroom library, each vivid with descriptions of specific persons, real individuals who had lived in defined time periods and about whom there was enough physical and behavioral detail for me to search for if necessary. Edgar had welcomed me to take as many of these diaries as I wanted. He had no particular use for them. I did, however. When I wasn’t reading it, I kept Shirlyn’s journal in my backpack. It inspired a plan—one that I didn’t feel comfortable telling Edgar about.