The Flash You Already Knew

"Click it faster," Maya said. "As fast as it goes."

Soren held the clicker over the laptop. Their booth was supposed to test reaction time, but nobody wanted to slap a button for a raffle ticket. So Maya had changed the game without asking him first.

"New rule," she announced to the kid in front of them, a third grader named Pim. "I flash a picture. You tell me what it was. But I flash it so fast you swear you didn't see anything."

Pim shrugged. Maya nodded at Soren. He pressed the arrow. A picture jumped onto the screen and vanished, quick as a blink, quicker.

"Beach," Pim said.

It had been a beach.

"Lucky," Soren said.

"Again," said Maya.

Soren clicked. A photo flickered and was gone before Pim's eyes could even finish opening on it.

"Dog. A dog jumping."

Dog. Jumping.

Pim won a raffle ticket and ran off. Maya turned to Soren with the look she got when something didn't fit yet.

"He didn't see those," she said. "You saw how fast they were."

"He saw enough."

"No. Watch." She made Soren flash one for her. "Ready, go."

The screen blinked. Maya flinched like she'd missed it.

"Kitchen," she said. "Somebody cooking. I don't know how I know that. I didn't see it. I just know it."

Soren checked. A woman at a stove.

He slowed down inside. "Say that again. The part about not seeing it."

"I knew what it was," Maya said, "before I felt myself look. Like the answer got there first and the seeing showed up late."

Soren picked up his clicker and turned it over in his hand. He liked the parts of a thing that didn't work the way you expected, and this was one of those.

"That's backwards," he said. "You're supposed to see it, then understand it."

"I know."

"Do it to me."

They traded places. Maya clicked the arrow hard. A picture stabbed onto the screen and was gone.

"Crowd," Soren said immediately. Then he frowned. "How did I say that? I don't remember a single face. I don't remember a single person. But I knew it was a lot of people in a place. I knew it the way you know a word is on the tip of your tongue, except the word already came out."

Maya checked the laptop. A stadium full of people.

"Again," he said. "But this time I'm going to try to catch myself seeing it."

She flashed it. He stared at the empty screen afterward like a person who'd turned around too late.

"Forest," he said. "And it beat me. The knowing beat the looking. I tried to feel myself notice it and the answer was already standing there waiting."

"Forest," Maya confirmed.

They ran picture after picture at each other, faster and faster, daring the screen to be too quick. It was never too quick. Mountain. Birthday party. Highway at night. Soup. Every time, the same strange order: the meaning arrived, and the feeling of seeing came trailing behind it like a little brother who couldn't keep up.

"It's like the picture goes around me," Soren said. "It doesn't wait for the me that decides things. It goes straight to some part that already knows what a forest is and hands me the answer."

"And then the slow me takes credit," said Maya. "The slow me thinks it saw it."

A woman wandered up to their booth. Their teacher, Ms. Adeyemi, holding a coffee and a clipboard, mostly here to count raffle tickets.

"How's the reaction booth," she said, not really asking.

"It's not a reaction booth anymore," Maya said. "Flash a picture at me. Too fast to see."

Ms. Adeyemi sighed the sigh of someone behind on a clipboard, but she clicked. The screen flickered.

"Two people arguing," Maya said. "By a car."

The teacher looked at the laptop, then at Maya, then back at the laptop. "That's... yes. That's exactly the photo." She set her coffee down. "You couldn't have seen that. That's a tenth of a second."

"About that," Soren said. "It only needs about a tenth of a second. We timed it on the clicker. After that it doesn't matter how fast you go. The gist is already through."

"The gist," said Ms. Adeyemi.

"The whole thing at once," Maya said. "Not the pieces. I never get the colors right, or how many people, or what anybody's wearing. Just what it is. Beach. Fight. Forest. The meaning comes through whole and the details don't come at all."

Ms. Adeyemi clicked one for herself, by accident almost, and made a small sound.

"I knew it was food," she said quietly. "Before I knew I was looking."

"That's the part," Soren said. He had stopped clicking. "That's the part I keep getting stuck on. There's a you that already understood. And it's not the you that feels like you. It got there first and it didn't ask permission."

For a second none of them said anything. The carnival noise of the gym went on around the booth, a hundred kids and balloons and squeaking sneakers, and somewhere in every one of those heads the same thing was happening over and over, faster than feeling, the world arriving understood before anyone noticed it had arrived.

"Do me again," Maya said. Her voice was different now. Lower. "But don't tell me when."

Soren waited. He let her settle. Then, without a word, he clicked.

The screen flashed and went blank.

"River," Maya said. "Somebody fishing."

And then she laughed, because she had said it before she had decided to look. Soren reached for his notebook on the table and clicked the screen once more, watching Maya's mouth, timing the gap between the flash and the first word out of her.