Daughter of Time 1: Reader Read Free Page B

the brain. But those are very rare. Mostly, it’s half-remembered somethings you can never quite place.
    Those were my visions of my own future, of my illness, of the soon-to-be nurtured tumor in the middle of my head. The doctors were amazed I could still see. The mass was the size of a golf ball then – quaint to me now, really. Near the back of my brain, it was lodged, growing, between what neurologists call the occipital and parietal lobes. These are basically big slabs of your brain that do different things. The occipital lobe, at the very back of your head, processes visual information from your eyes (which are at the front of your head – God works in mysterious ways, believe me). The parietal lobe does a lot of things, like sensing where you are, navigating, working with numbers, moving objects. No, I’m not a doctor. What I am is a freak with a freaking tumor growing in the middle of all this stuff, so, well, it matters to me.
    The tumor was mostly growing out towards the occipital lobe like some elliptical golf ball, crashing into all those cells that process information from my eyes. The doctors were amazed I wasn’t blind yet. My parents looked sick listening to all of this. I was half-scared, half-remembering some blurry future where all this stuff wasn’t nearly the worst that was going to happen to me.
    “It appears to be a fast-growing tumor,” one of the doctors said. “Many children’s tumors are, growing quickly, the cells dividing quickly like the rest of the growing body, but even worse. This is very serious, and very difficult to treat. We recommend you send her to specialists. We can’t treat her here.”
    So began the long search for doctors across the country. Nebraska has some good medical facilities in Omaha, but they still referred me to New York, to Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. My parents were on the phone for hours and hours to doctors and relatives in the area. By then we’d all seen enough doctors’ offices to last a lifetime. And all the time, the brain scans showed the thing inside my head kept getting bigger. We prepared for a long trip to the East Coast.
    Then one day, just like in the dream, without a phone call or any kind of warning, three black cars with tinted windows pulled up to our farm. Out of these cars stepped the men of that nightmare that I relive over and over again. They came, they tried to convince my parents to release me into their “care,” and when my parents would not, they took me by force.
    When I awoke from the blackness, I was being roughly unloaded from the car by one of the burly men in a suit, maybe the very one who knocked me unconscious. He threw me over his shoulder, grunting as he carted me towards a bland building covered in metallic gray like some enormous warehouse. In my foggy vision it seemed so unimportant, so featureless and unreal, yet it would be my home for many years to come. My prison. A place from which, as the man had promised, I would not escape.

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Madam, I have come from a country where people are hanged if they talk.  —Leonhard Euler
     
     
    While I lived as their prisoner, before I was sold into slavery, I knew in my heart that I had no hope of escaping. I had no hope of living very long. The things they did to me, the conditions of my life convinced me that I had gone to hell, or hell on Earth, and that my time here would be the final years of torture before my death. Because I did not understand anything, had none of the knowledge that I would later slowly piece together, their purposes seemed meaningless, random and obscene – torment without any goal except to drive me mad, to tear all hope from the soul of a young child.
    When I lay unconscious on the ground in the cornfields my dad had planted himself – that was my last day in Nebraska. I never returned. Now, returning is impossible. That day was the last time I would ever see my parents. At the time, I didn’t know what had happened to them. You might