A Blinding Light

By Mehreen Ahmed

Just when Lizzy Crimson was leaving the art exhibition, a black and white picture hanging on the far side of a wall caught her attention. It was unbelievably mesmerising, and surrealistic. It looked like a downing of the sun at night. But the bright light that it emanated were white and diffused. The black patches were like ash clouds. Strands of tree branches swayed across the portrait.

Lizzy was drawn like magnet to iron ore. She hadn’t seen anything like it. She stood before it, and gazed. Seconds, and minutes passed, she couldn’t figure out. Then an odd hour passed, still she didn’t know what she was looking at? At a glimpse, the image didn’t make much sense. It looked like the clouds of night. The round sun going down. But this could not be because there wouldn’t be sun at night. Could the round ball be a full moon then? That was plausible, however, the twigs looked far too thin for any branch of a tree.

Anything could be possible in surrealism, she knew. But she wasn’t convinced. She looked deeper and deeper. She didn’t read the note pinned by the picture, because she was so enamoured by the rawness of the quality of the art. Then when she wasn’t happy with any of her interpretations, she sat down in front of it feeling miffed. She tried to see it from a different perspective. And from this angle, she saw something. A sensation ran through her. She saw something different. It was neither the sun, nor the moon, or the stark pointy branches sticking out like skeletal fingers. It was the other. The otherness that shook her.

She took a closer look, even closer. Now she made a break through. The image was not surrealistic, but hyper-realistic. It was a scan image. A scan of the human eye in the back of one’s head. The twigs were but thin wisps of hair fallen across the scan camera.

‘By Jove, I would never have known that the scan of the back of the eye could look so beautifully nature-like in black and white,’ she mused.‘But then the beautiful band of a colourful rainbow, didn’t look like rainbow we view either in a hyper-reality. It looked different; a vast collection of water droplets, of many sizes and shapes. The two distinct realities of a parallel world, one hinged on the other for existence.