Twinfinity: The Arena (5-7)

CHAPTER 5

A New Horizon

∞

Whitney woke up early Sunday morning. She wasn’t brought out of her sleep by an alarm clock, or the sound of a car horn, or by the morning cry of a rooster. None of these things were capable of reaching the neurons of her brain. What did bring her out of her sleep were the aching pains of her muscles. Nearly every muscle in her body felt the way that a tree sounds as it is slowly falling over when someone cuts it down.

But the pains she felt as she laid in bed were nothing compared to those she felt as she swung her legs over the side of it. Those pains were as if a thousand tiny firecrackers were exploding throughout her entire body. The pains, however, were worth it.

For the first time in her life she felt like she was something. She wasn’t sure what that was yet exactly, but she was something. Before that she didn’t feel like she was anything but her thoughts and imagination. She wasn’t a student at any school. She wasn’t an athlete like Tommy, or a cook like Carol Anne, and she wasn’t a real-estate agent like Blake. The only words that could be used to describe her were a blind and deaf couch potato. Other than that she had nothing.

It didn’t mean that she wasn’t smart. She was and she knew that. They lived close enough to the school so that she could piggy back with Tommy and she would spend most of her days during the school year in Tommy’s head. She would listen in on the lectures, study his books, and would often give him the answers to the test questions that he didn’t know. Her memory was immaculate.

Whitney forced herself to get out of bed. She cringed against the aching pains in her muscles and she had to walk very slowly through the house. She had no idea of what time it was, but time really didn’t have much meaning to her anyway. She made her way through the house, through the back patio door, and to her favorite lounging spot—the reclining lawn chair.

Whitney’s memory was so immaculate that she could navigate her way through the house without the use of any kind of aids. She didn’t use a seeing cane, didn’t wave her hands through the air searching for walls, and she didn’t scoot her feet like a robot. She could imagine the layout of the house so clearly that she could visualize every nuance of it as if she was seeing it. Of course it helped that she had seen it so many times through Tommy’s eyes. Without that original visualization from which to draw upon, she would just be guessing.

Whitney sat on the lawn chair and leaned it back. It must still be fairly early in the morning, because she barely had any sense of the sun. It was definitely out there, and definitely coming over the horizon, but it was still early enough that there was no real heat coming from it. That meant that Tommy probably wouldn’t be up for a while. That was just fine with her, because she was in no shape to do much anyway.

Oh my God I feel like I’m gonna die, she thought to herself. She had made fun of Tommy a million times before for complaining about the pains he felt after a really hard work out. She had been smart enough to separate herself from feeling those pains of his herself, but she didn’t have that option with her own pains.

Pinky, ring, index, middle, pinky, ring, index, middle. Whitney touched her thumb to her fingers in this pattern. It was something she did whenever she was feeling anxious about something. She usually did it just after separating from Tommy because she often had separation issues after leaving him. Spending time in the seeing and hearing world and then suddenly being shut out from all sources of light and sound was usually a difficult task. Touching her thumb to her fingers somehow made her feel better. It calmed her and centered her. She did it as she lay on the lawn chair because the screaming pain of her muscles was deafening.

She imagined the pain going away as she repeated the finger dancing pattern and the faster her fingers moved the less her muscles seemed to hurt. Whitney paused her fingers on her lap. Hmm, she thought. Am I imagining this? She moved her arm in a wide, sweeping circle. It still hurt, but the firecracker, creaking pain was less than it had been before. She began her finger dancing again and again she focused on the pain receding. She imagined the pain draining from her body as if it were rainwater washing down a gutter. It did feel like it was working, and before she knew it she felt as if she hadn’t strained her muscles at all.

Sweet! She thought. They say no pain no gain, but maybe they didn’t know what they were talking about!

She was relieved that she wasn’t going to have to walk around all day like a rusted robot, but it still didn’t answer her original question. She had something that was personal and specific to her. She had finally found something that she was actually good at, but what she hadn’t found, or didn’t know, was what she was going to do with it?

And she still didn’t have an answer for that, because ultimately, it didn’t make sense to her. She had no idea how she was even capable of doing the things that she had done in the arena. Common sense dictated that Tommy should absolutely dominate her in everything they did or tried together. Tommy was the one that could see. Tommy was the one that could hear, and Tommy was the one that was athletic and active. She was just a couch potato (or a reclining lawn chair potato–whichever way you wanted to look at it).

But from the very start of their mock battle she had felt very comfortable. Having swords in her hands had felt as natural to her as a slice of pizza would feel to a fat kid. And what to do with those swords seemed to be a natural instinct to her. It was as if she had spent the first twelve years of her life as a penguin that was born in the middle of the desert. Suddenly she was thrust back into the arctic and suddenly she was surrounded by water, but that was no big deal because surviving the cold and swimming were not activities that she needed to be taught. They were hard wired into her brain. But only the discussion wasn’t about the arctic cold or swimming. The discussion was about swinging a sword and using it to either deflect and offensive blow, or to deliver one of your own.

She could do both.

But to who? She asked herself. I’m blind and deaf and just because I can fight an opponent (my brother) in a world that he creates in his mind (the arena) doesn’t mean that I could do it while I was stuck in a world in which I cannot hear or see anything.

So what did it mean? Why could she do it then? It had to mean something. Didn’t it?

She wanted it to mean something, but reality kept stepping its way into her mind. The reality was that the world had no place for swords. Reality said that bringing a sword to a gun-fight was a stupid idea and the modern world had cast swords away a long time ago. So, good at it or not, her talent seemed pretty unspectacular.

The morning sun began to smile its rays down on her and she was able to feel the beginning of the warmth from it as a cloud kissed its way by it. Whitney returned the smile of her own to it because, finally, she had something to smile about. She may not have a reason to keep up with the sword fighting in the arena—at least not a logical one—but that didn’t mean that she was going to stop. She knew that much for sure. As a matter of fact she was looking forward to the next time that she could give Tommy another good thrashing.

CHAPTER 6

Learning a Lesson

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Whitney laid on the recliner until the eventual tap from Tommy came to her forehead. The moment that her family had started getting up and around she had known it, but she was enjoying the morning sun so much that she felt no compunction to get up and around, nor did she feel any immediate or urgent need to piggyback with Tommy. She knew that they would be spending the day in the arena because that was the plan.

Good morning sleepy head, she said to Tommy as soon as the piggyback was completed. She noted through Tommy’s eyes that the sun had made its way more than a quarter of the way up in the sky and that meant that it was about ten in the morning.

“Good morning,” he answered back, but there was something about the way that he said it that Whitney didn’t like.