White Space

“Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t prove something like that. You just know.”

“But what’s that?” Lizzie pressed. “What’s knowing? It’s still all just stuff that happens in your head, right?”

“Come on, there’s more to it than that.” Emma felt a sweep of … not déjà vu, exactly, but a feeling that she was having an argument with some older version of herself: a girl who wouldn’t let the Great Bloviator off the hook. No, stop that; you are not her. She put her hands on her cheeks. “I feel my face. I’ve got a real cut from a real steering wheel.” I got a girl killed. I’ve got titanium skull plates and scars. “I hear you. I see you.”

“But the tools for all that are in your head. Like you touch something, but then you give it a name.” Lizzie picked up her memory quilt. “This is a quilt because we say it is. That’s how you write yourself—don’t you get it? Everything you know is because of what happens inside your head. Without your brain to turn this”—she gave the bunched quilt a shake that made its glass tick and chime—“into cloth and stitches and glass, you wouldn’t know what it was.”

“No. Thoughts and perceptions aren’t tools. They’re not really real. You can’t hold or even see them.” Which wasn’t exactly true, she knew; you could take a picture of the brain and see what parts were firing when, say, you saw a pencil or tasted an apple. “I mean, when I think about making or writing something, it doesn’t just happen. First, I have to have the idea, and then do something with it. The idea comes first. Ideas are …” She groped for the right word while at the same time thinking how odd it was that she was having this conversation with a little girl who couldn’t be more than five years old. “Ideas are energy. When you strip it all down, thought is just a bunch of the right cells firing at the right time in the correct sequence. That’s all ideas are. Thoughts are physics and chemistry.”

“Emmaaa.” Lizzie did an eye-roll. “What do you think thought-magic is? A pen and paper are just tools to make thought-magic real, but that doesn’t mean they’re the only tools.” She held up the galaxy pendant, stitched into its spiderweb. “The Sign of Sure is a tool. It helps you find your way between Nows and see better. Dad’s Dickens Mirror, and his special paper and ink, and Mom’s panops—they were just different tools for grabbing and fixing thought-magic. And even then, it’s why Mom had to make Peculiars to hold the extra thought-magic, so everything stayed where it was supposed to.”

“Stayed where it was supposed to. You mean, on the page,” Emma said. Weird how talking this out, actually thinking about it, calmed her a bit. Maybe because thinking and science are what I’m good at. She almost understood this, too; she could feel her mind inching toward some kind of comprehension, the way Meg Murry had groped after that tesseract and what made a wrinkle in time work. The whole character-from-a-book thing, she didn’t buy. She was a person, and that was that, right? Right? But she’d felt the heat from the galaxy pendant, that cynosure, feeding off her thoughts, her intentions. And in the blink or whatever that was at the slit-door, I felt a click, a change, like House was trying to hammer it home through my thick skull: the Dickens Mirror is a tool.

Or a machine?

And what’s a story but symbols penned in black ink on white paper? The symbols wouldn’t mean anything if there wasn’t White Space, that blank page. It’s the emptiness that defines the shape, that tells me that the symbol I’ve just written is an a or an s.

“So the … the fog that came after you and your mom,” she said. “That wasn’t just the thing your dad pulled through the Mirror?”

Lizzie shook her head. “Mom said that when the Peculiars melted, all the thought-magic that wasn’t able to go anywhere got loose. So the fog’s all of that tangled up with the whisper-man and … and …” Lizzie’s lips shook and her face tried to crumple again.

“And your dad?” Thinking, It’s like burning a log. The wood vanishes, but it doesn’t really go away. Its energy is released as heat. The energy changes form, that’s all. So the fog is …