The Lemon and the Bell

Soren's grandmother kept lemons in a blue bowl by the window, and the afternoon light came through them so that they glowed like small lamps. He was holding one. It was cold from the windowsill and heavier than it looked, and the skin had little dimples that caught against his thumb.

The doorbell rang. It was the old kind, a real brass bell somewhere in the wall, and it did not go beep. It rang, a bright trembling sound that hung in the air after it stopped.

Grandmother went to answer it. Soren stayed where he was, holding the lemon, and something snagged in him.

The sound and the lemon had happened at the same instant. The ring and the yellow and the cold weight and the smell of the peel he had scratched with his nail. All of it had arrived together, in one piece, like a single thing called now.

But that was wrong. He knew that was wrong.

He had read it in a library book about the brain, a fat one with a cracked spine. The sound went to one part of the brain. The color went somewhere else entirely, the back of the head. The smell went to its own old corner. The feel of the cold skin went to a strip across the top. Four different rooms. Four different streets in the city of his head, and the messages did not even travel at the same speed. Light is faster than sound in the world. Inside the brain, the wiring for some things is slower than for others.

So the ring and the yellow had not actually reached him at the same time. They had arrived at different rooms at different moments by different roads.

And yet he had felt them as one.

He set the lemon down. Picked it up again. Rang the moment back in his memory and tried to pull it apart, the way you separate the strands of a frayed rope.

He could not.

The yellow would not come loose from the cold. The smell would not unstick from the brightness of the bell. They were welded. Whoever had welded them had done it so perfectly that Soren, standing right inside his own skull, could not find the seam.

"Who builds the now," he said out loud, to no one.

Grandmother came back with a flyer in her hand and put it on the counter. "Just an advertisement," she said. "You look like you swallowed a wasp."

"When the doorbell rang," Soren said, "and I was holding the lemon. Did it feel like one thing to you, or like a lot of things?"

She thought about it the way she thought about everything, slowly, drying her hands on a towel. "One thing," she said. "A doorbell-while-holding-a-lemon thing."

"It can't be one thing," he said. "The sound and the color don't even get to your brain at the same time. They go to different places. Nobody sews them together. There's no part that does the sewing. They looked and looked and they can't find it."

Grandmother folded the towel. "Then how do I know it was one thing?"

"That," said Soren, "is the problem."

He wanted to test it. He wanted to catch the brain in the act, the way you might catch your own eyes moving if you watched them in a mirror at just the right speed. He went and got a glass of water and a spoon, because the kitchen was where things could be tried.

He tapped the spoon on the glass. Ting. He watched the water shiver. He did it again with his eyes shut. The ting still felt like it belonged to the spoon, to his own hand, to the exact spot on the glass. Even with no eyes, the sound knew where it came from. Something had decided, before he was even aware of it, that this noise and this place were the same event.

He opened his eyes and tapped a different spot. The sound changed and the brain stuck it to the new spot without asking him. He had no say in it at all. It was being done for him, under him, faster than he could think, by some part of himself he was not allowed to meet.

That was the thing that made his arms go cold.

It was not out there in space, the binding. It was not a telescope problem, a thing too far to see. It was the closest possible thing. It was happening behind his own eyes, in the only place he could never go, and it was doing the most important job there was, making one world out of scattered pieces, and he could not catch it, and nobody could, not yet, not the people who studied it their whole lives.

He picked the lemon up one more time. Held it in the light.

"Soren," Grandmother said. "You've gone quiet."

"I'm trying to find the part of me that makes me feel like one person," he said. "Instead of like a sound and a color and a smell that happen to be standing near each other."

She laughed, but not at him. She came and stood beside him at the window. "And?"

"I can't find it," he said. "But it found all of this." He turned the lemon. "It already put the yellow and the cold and the smell together before I even knew there was anything to put together. It's the best thing I do and I've never once watched myself do it."

Grandmother looked at the bowl of lemons glowing in the light. "All my life," she said softly, "I thought the world came in one piece."

"It doesn't," said Soren. "You make it come in one piece. Everybody does. Nobody knows how."

He wrote it down then. His hand moved fast across the page, the doorbell and the lemon and the four rooms and the seam he could not find, and at the bottom, pressing harder than he meant to, the question: who is doing the joining.

The doorbell rang again. Bright, trembling, hanging in the air.

Soren froze with the pencil still on the paper and tried, in the half second the sound was alive, to feel it arrive in pieces.

It arrived whole. It always arrived whole. The yellow of the lemon rose to meet the ring, and he could not, with all his attention, catch the moment they became one.