Alia was born in a crime scene. A police report was made at the Surry County, North Carolina sheriff’s department and it described in grisly detail the scene of what was presumed to be no more than ten bodies, and the baby girl that was found crying in the bathtub of a remote log cabin. It was as though she had been barricaded inside, there were towels and rags stuffed into the seams of the door to make it difficult to knock down, and the baby was nestled comfortably inside the tub as though she had been placed with care. The initial report described it as a murder scene, and gardening tools were the presumed murder weapons because of the jagged nature of wounds on the body. The writer of the report used the word “claw” many times; “…like victim one’s throat was clawed out…”, “…the backs of several victims have long claw marks that were likely the cause of death…”.
When the girl was taken to the hospital she was given the name Alia Doe. A scrap of paper had been pinned to her shirt and the nurses presumed that whomever had saved the girl’s life intended to name her Alia.
Alia does not remember this time of her life and she has no one to tell her. It would not be a point of pride for the woman, she wouldn’t share the story to gain cool points with acquaintances. It would only reinforce the notion that something, most likely aliens, has been trying to get rid of her because it know what she knows, that aliens are coming for Earth and the invasion will be disastrous for humanity. She has a very pessimistic, paranoid view of the world, but she is not defeated by the odds that she perceives are stacked against her. It fuels her devil may care attitude; it’s the reason she is fine to be homeless and hitchhiking North Carolina, because everything is precarious despite whatever illusion of stability.
And this point of the precarious nature of everything was proven when Alia realized that all of her notions about everything were likely false because her life was off the track that she perceived it to be on.
It’s proven by the fact that Alia is not what she used to be.
She is searching for what she was, she was searching for it, probing the corners of her mind, of her memory.
It was a pitiful physical reality, the beautiful woman dusting over, alive and growing, hair and nails twisting into the vignette of neglect.
But inside, she had to know and she pushed the boundaries of her knowledge in her frantic pursuit, to know, she must know, and then it was too much.
What is beyond what you know? What is outside of your experience and knowledge, what is there? Had she tumbled out of her mind?
She had fallen into the resonance of a past, of her past, not her past, but hers before the current one. She was Alia before Alia, before Alia, and she could be that because even if it was gone, it still resonated; it left markers that the universe would come to each time it rolled over. Alia was probing the consciousness of the Alia she was in a previous aeon of the universe, and she had found her way there frantically, accidentally. The journey back to herself was relatively easy after she remembered who she was. As she inhabited the life of her previous self, she was so immersed in it that she easily forgot that she was not in the right place, but only visiting to gather more information about what had happened to her to make her lose the abilities she had become accustomed to.
Alia sits alone in a house that is not hers. She knows this house, it has been her home for a couple years now, but since she went blind, Alia has been searching for understanding.
She had lost her sight gradually. It’s not that she has ever been able to see particularly well, decades of staring into the sun had taken its physical toll, she just always recognizes – whether consciously or not – every place that she finds herself and every person that she encounters, and it is as though her brain expresses this preternatural memory or awareness as a view of the world that conforms to what human beings perceive as perfect vision.
But shortly after she returned to North Carolina from Georgia, Alia noticed that the lines of things were growing fuzz, and landscapes gradually became smeared pastels that registered movement, but only barely. And there was a pervasive black spot on her field of vision, like a black hole that seemed to warp the limited colors she could perceive around it. She wasn’t interested in burdening anyone with the news of her impairment, she was only interested in knowing why.
In the back of her mind, Alia knew this day would come and she had hoped to prepare for this eventuality, but how does one prepare for the sensation of losing access to the visuals of the world? She could not prepare herself, she could only remind herself of the possibility and often this made her appreciative of whatever sense she had that allowed her to enjoy the scenes of nature around her.
As she sits alone, she is studying her own mind, prodding around inside for what has changed. She has been locked in a near constant meditative state for months now, and though she has the answer that she sought, she has a fundamental misunderstanding of where she accessed the answer.
The journey into the mystery of her subconscious had allowed her limited access to her aeonic memory; she had accessed her life in a previous aeon of universal existence and this had shown her why she had lost her vision and she could no longer access the solar futures. She had struggled to access the minds of others, but she mostly attributed that to the fact that she could not see anything. And this was all apparently because the resurrection of the human Darker had caused souls in the afterlife to be drawn away from their positions and pulled toward some unknown force that hoped to compensate for the loss of the resurrected soul; heretofore referred to as the suck. Alia learned that she was powered by the Aje, a mass of souls on a different plane of existence, and the Aje had suffered losses in the suck, which depowered Alia and left her without her vision. It would slowly return as the Aje slowly recuperated and Alia was relieved to know this.
She just has to wait it out.
“Alia, I washed everything, all the sheets and curtains in the house. I cleaned it from top to bottom,” Brittany comes through the front door with bags in her hand, talking as though she is continuing a conversation with Alia she had been having before she entered. “I got some stuff for you.” She sits next to Alia who looks very fragile on the couch. She has lost weight and her cheek bones are more pronounced, there is a darkness in the bags under her eyes. Brittany had tamed the mess of her hair, and it lay like a heavy sheet past her shoulders with a prominent patch of gray that had not been there before.
“Clay and Ivan will be here soon,” Brittany says. She puts a hand on Alia’s knee who smiles and puts a hand on top.
“Thank you, for everything. I’m sorry about the house,” Alia says. She has apologized again and again like a period to her sentences. She is not aware of how long she had neglected her physical environment and to her, it could have been years. She remembers so much detail about her life as an IP captain and she can’t be sure how much of it she had experienced before she remembered that she didn’t belong there.
“I’m sorry there was no one here when you needed somebody,” Brittany said sincerely. “You have helped a lot of people. If not for you I would still be a hulked out slave to whatever that red man was. The world needs you Alia, it’s only getting stranger. It’s only getting worse. I’m sorry I can’t stay for the bigger reunion, I have to get back to the island. I’ve been running this big bed and breakfast down there. It’s so nice Alia. You have to come see it. Make Ivan and Clay bring you soon.”
They hug one last time and Brittany leaves Alia sitting where she has been for months.
The world through Alia’s eyes is not black and devoid of light. Closing your eyes will not approximate Alia’s experience. The sun damage to her eyes has caused a physical impairment that obscures the picture her brain constructs of the world she sees because the receptors in her eyes that register the lights of the world are damaged and either sending impartial or incorrect information to the brain, or not sending information at all.
After regaining herself, she fumbles around the house relearning skills that she had taken for granted as a sighted person. She could find the food Brittany had left in the refrigerator, and she could hear it up in the microwave. She dressed herself, she found her favorite shirt and slacks by touch in the dresser. She walked outside into the heat of the summer. Sweat beaded almost instantly on her knows and she felt moisture over her eyelids; it was hot. She felt around for chair that Clay usually occupied when he wasn’t working out in the backyard, and she sat there trying to remember what the scene had been. The front lawn wasn’t as big as the back, but there were two big shade trees with big green leaves were probably singed around their edges in this heat, Alia thinks. The lawn sloped up to the sidewalk and then the road, and there was a driveway along the left side of the lawn from Alia’s position that was paved all along the side of the house. To her right, there were the low row of bushes in front of the house and at the far edge of the yard were wild bushes that Clay would definitely want to trim back when he was home; they had overgrown in the spring months.
Alia imagined that there are people walking on the street; kids chasing an ice cream truck, shirtless teens dribbling basketballs as they head to the nearest court, drug dealers trying to be inconspicuous.
It was all coming back to her, very slowly, but surely.
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