The Sweater Argument

"That one's green," Soren said.

"That one is not green." Maya held the sweater up to the gray window light. "It's green and something else."

"Green and what else?"

"I don't have a word for it." She turned it. "It's like there's a second color hiding inside the first one. You really don't see it?"

Soren looked. It was a green sweater. He put it in the green bin.

The shop belonged to Ms. Okafor, who ran the fundraiser table and had asked them to sort donations by color so shoppers could find things faster. She was in the back, arguing with the card reader, which was doing the thing where it refused money. The rain went at the window in long slow drags.

"Try this one," Maya said. She dug through the pile and handed him two socks. "Same color?"

"Same color. Both brown."

"Nope." She laid them across her knee. "This one has red in it. This one has red and a little bit of that other thing. The hiding thing."

"They came off the same pair, Maya."

"Then somebody dyed them on different days." She sounded completely sure. "Or the dye faded weird. But they are not the same."

Soren held both socks right up to his eyes. He turned them toward the window, then toward the ceiling light, then back.

"They're the same," he said. Then, because he was honest: "To me."

Maya put the socks down and looked at him for a second.

"Say that part again."

"To me. They're the same to me."

"You keep doing that." She wasn't accusing him. She was noticing. "You keep saying to me. Like you already think we're seeing different things."

"Because you keep splitting colors that don't split."

"They split for me."

They went quiet. The card reader beeped angrily in the back.

Soren pulled out his notebook and wrote down: two brown socks, Maya says different, I say same. Then he wrote: green sweater, Maya says green plus one. He drew a little box beside each and left the boxes empty, because he didn't know yet which of them was wrong.

"Okay," he said. "Test. Close your eyes."

Maya closed her eyes. Soren shuffled the pile, picked out five things that all looked plain brown to him, and laid them in a row.

"Open. Sort these by color. However many colors you see."

Maya opened her eyes and moved fast. Two here. One here. One here. One back with the first two.

"Four," she said. "Four different browns. This pair matches. The other three are all doing their own thing."

Soren looked at the row. He saw brown. One brown. Maybe one of them was slightly lighter, but that was lightness, not a different color. He wrote in the notebook: I see 1, maybe 2. She sees 4. Same objects.

"One of us is broken," Maya said cheerfully.

"Or neither of us is." Soren was staring at the row. "That's the part I don't like. If you were making it up, you'd get it wrong when I mix them up. You didn't get it wrong. You put the pair back together with your eyes closed in between."

"So I'm not making it up."

"So you're seeing something that's actually there." He tapped the pen against his teeth. "Which means it's there in the sock. The color is in the sock. It's been in the sock the whole time."

"And you just can't get to it."

"And I just can't get to it," Soren agreed. That was the strange part. Not that Maya saw more. That the more was real, sitting right there in the wool, waiting, and his eyes walked past it every single time.

Ms. Okafor came out wiping her hands. "Card reader hates me. How's the sorting?"

"Ms. Okafor," Maya said, "how many colors are in the rainbow?"

"Seven. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet." She said it like a rhyme she'd known since she was small.

"See, that's a number somebody picked," Maya said. "The rainbow doesn't stop at seven. It just keeps going and we chop it into seven because that's how many words we felt like having."

Ms. Okafor laughed. "You're going to be exhausting as a grown-up." She went back to fight the card reader.

Soren wasn't laughing. He was thinking about eyes. He'd read that the eye catches color with little cells in the back, and there were three kinds, one for reddish light, one for greenish, one for bluish, and every color a person could name was those three cells arguing about how much of each.

"Three kinds of catchers," he said slowly. "Three. That's what makes all the colors I see. Every one. Mixed from three."

"So?"

"So what if you have more than three."

Maya stopped with a sweater half-folded.

"A fourth kind," Soren said. "A fourth catcher. Tuned to something in between the ones I've got. So where my three catchers say brown, done, one answer, your four catchers say brown, and also this other reading that I don't have any cell to hear." He looked up. "You're not seeing a made-up color. You're seeing a real difference that my eyes literally can't take a picture of."

"How many extra colors would that be?"

"I don't know. If three cones make everything I see, and you have four," he did the shape of it in his head and gave up on the exact number, "it's not a few more. It's like, everything I see times more. Millions more, maybe. A whole layer."

Maya sat down slowly on the pile of unsorted sweaters.

"So this whole time," she said, "when I said that's green and something else, and you said no it's green, and I thought I was bad at colors"

"You were better at colors."

"I thought I was wrong."

"You were seeing a color that doesn't have a name because almost nobody's around to name it." Soren looked back down at the row of browns. Five sweaters, and only one of them knew what the other four actually looked like. "I'm in a room with more colors than I can see. Right now. They're on the socks."

The rain kept dragging at the window. Maya picked up the two brown socks again, the ones she'd sworn were different, and held them side by side in the gray light.

"Okay," she said quietly. "This one. The hiding color in this one. I'm going to try to tell you what it's like."

Soren opened his notebook to a clean page and clicked the pen.

Maya looked at the sock for a long time. Then she looked at the window, and the shop, and the green bin and the blue bin and the whole ordinary room. "It's like," she started, and stopped, and started again, and no word she reached for was the right one, and she kept reaching anyway.