“We know so little,” Brad said. “But we’re getting inside the black box. I’m optimistic we’re going to learn lots in the next ten years.”
“Ten years,” I said. “I’ll be almost fifty.”
On some level, I’d expected the testing itself would be a kind of cure: that I would return to Michigan with a better brain, improved perception. Now, as I leaned on the glass and watched people walking across the campus, I realized I was not ever going to recognize people by face. Things weren’t ever going to be any different. Prosopagnosia research wasn’t for prosopagnosics. We were simply providing, with our unusual wiring, a pathway into the black box, insight into consciousness and how it works. Other people would benefit. For example, we might help the government improve its software for identifying terrorists at airports. Right now, computers were terrible at face recognition—although, like me, they were excellent at gait.
There was a lot that I would simply never know. I was never going to know when I became face-blind. Whether I’d ever known faces normally, ever been headed down that path. I was never going to know how I might have turned out if childhood had been even one notch easier. I was never going to know—really know—what my mother’s life had been, what her illness had been, if she’d been diagnosed and kept it a secret—any of it. She would remain a mystery, and I had to let her go.
What I did know was a hell of a lot about the nature of not-knowing. Which is, by definition, the opposite of mental illness. It’s philosophy.
“Monkey MRI!” I said, reading the sign over the door. In the window a bumper sticker warned: Please do not feed the scientists.
In a glass control booth, Brad and Galit fired up their lap-tops. In the adjacent room, I lay on my back, perfectly still, in my socks, black yoga pants, and paper-thin white T-shirt. My lucky MRI outfit.
Galit was worried I would fall asleep. She kept talking to me over the microphone. I’d taken a Valium, but I assured her I was wide-awake, never more awake in my life. I was checking for monkey hairs as I lay on the hard little bed. I worried, with all these electrodes on my head and chest, that Galit and Brad could read my thoughts. My arms were pinned at my sides, hands folded over my stomach. Humming under my right hand was the Same/Different box, with its two buttons. My face was packed with sponges and cloth in a white plastic cage with metal wires. I could be shipped to the Alps. Mark me FRAGILE.
Galit said the first test would take two hours. It would reveal the exact landscape of my face-processing area. Was it missing, defective, or just not plugged in? I would look at face after face, and they would study activity in my brain.
Galit was dressed all in black, like a cat burglar. She peered up at me. “If you are scared, you can squeeze the ball. I’ll come right in—right away—and zip you out.” She pressed the ball into my hand, then scooted out of the room and closed the door.
I wanted out. What was the point of this, if there was no cure? I was helping science. But I didn’t want to help science. Science was fine. I wanted to go home. I closed my eyes.
The last time I’d done this, Dave had held my foot, like it was a baby bird he’d raised himself. Now my foot just lay there, sweaty, frozen, at the far end of my body. I wondered if we’d ever connect again, me and Dave. It felt like he and my mother were part of my old life, and this tube was sending me into my new life, reconstituting my molecules, resetting my counter to zero.
When I opened my eyes, deep in the tight tube, I saw a little mirror, the kind that comes in a lipstick case. I looked into it and my stomach whooshed, like I was tipping backward. I was falling out of myself. Where the heck was the Valium floor, the cottony dulling, the pleasant fog?
The Simpsons came on the screen, behind my head, reflected in the little makeup mirror, and I jumped. Galit’s voice blared into the speaker by my ear: “WE ARE NOW TUNING. WE ARE NOW SETTING UP. BE PATIENT, PLEASE. THANK YOU.”
The machine roared and banged.
“IF YOU ARE READY TO BEGIN, WOULD YOU PLEASE SQUEEZE THE BALL?”
I squeezed. An oval photograph of a woman’s face—just a face, no hair, no ears—raced across the computer screen, flashing at different points like a laser show. Then another face skittered across the screen like a skipping stone and was gone. One after another, faces skated across the monitor, black and white and bald. They all looked exactly the same. Was this the real test? Was it a trick?
“WHENEVER YOU ARE READY, PLEASE BEGIN.” I pressed Same. Same. Same. The faces kept coming, dozens of them. They all looked exactly the same. An occasional face had dark eyebrows. When I saw those eyebrows, I clicked Different.
I wanted out. I had my panic ball, but I was scared to squeeze it. If we stopped, we’d have to start over.
The machine quieted to a dull roar. Galit stared up into the tube at me. “You are saying Same a lot. You understand the test?”
I said yes. I said I wished there was a button for Not sure. YES.
She asked, “Can you go a little longer? We are getting really good stuff.”
I said okay.
After three hours, we finally stopped. I said thank you. I put on my regular clothes. In the elevator, Galit said that she was very grateful that someone so claustrophobic was willing to help them. She would call me tonight with the results.
I felt like a million bucks. I felt molecularly altered. I was part of their life’s work, part of their magnum opus. I was fresh. I was done. Not cured, but seen.
That evening I walked around Boston feeling smart and complete and helpful. I felt like I’d run a marathon, finished an advanced degree. On the Common I heard French, Dutch, Chinese. Everyone in Boston looked focused, like they had a thesis statement.
Back in my hotel room, I took a long, hot bath and waited for Galit’s call. I wished Dave were with me. I wanted to tell him about the funny monkey sign. I wanted to tell him about the MRI and everything I’d learned and how messy the lab was—at Harvard! I wanted to ask him about his day, and see it in my mind’s eye as he talked.
This, of anything that had happened so far, was always the thing that felt the most like healing: telling Dave what I saw, what I knew, and having him see it. And then getting to do the same for him.
When the phone rang, at 10:34, I jumped off the bed like electricity.
“I have terrible news, I’m so sorry,” Galit said. “We lost all the data.” She explained that technicians had been working on the machine over the weekend. She and Brad had tested the equipment and thought everything was okay, but evidently not. “We have nothing,” she said. “Can you come in again? I hate to ask. We have nothing.”
“No,” I said. “I took the Valium. I don’t have another. I’m leaving in the morning. And I’m claustrophobic. There isn’t anything you can do?” It was Harvard!
Actually, there was something she could do. Her husband was a cognitive behavioral therapist who specialized in claustrophobia. Possibly he could help. He could be at my hotel—like that.
I called Dave.
“How was the big book meeting?” Dave said. His voice was pushy cheerful, like a thing catching up to itself.
“We talked about that last night.” I took a breath and tried not to be rude. I looked at the ceiling, where there was a faint stain in the shape of Marie Antoinette’s head. “This is the face thing. Today was the functional MRI.”
“The face thing!” he said. The cell phone crackled.
Dave said no, he didn’t think a strange man should come to my room and experiment with cognitive behavioral therapy. He thought I should just come home. I knew I was face-blind. He believed me. I didn’t need proof. I’d helped these people as much as I could. He missed me. He was slurring his words, like he had stones in his mouth.
Dave said, “Do they like the book?”
“This isn’t those people. This isn’t that. That was the meeting two days ago. The textbook publisher meeting. We already talked about it! This is the face people.”
I hated how I sounded.
“We�
��re breaking up,” I said. And I disconnected.
“Are you ready to kill the monster?” Iftah, Galit’s husband, leaned forward, smiling, rubbing his hands.
“I am not,” I whispered.
There was no reason to be afraid. This fear was just an old remnant signal from the brain stem. The brain is very dumb! Iftah said. We can learn to override it. There is no fear, only fear of fear. There is no such thing as claustrophobia.
We were sitting on a sofa by the elevators in my hotel. He talked. I took notes. He asked me what I was afraid of in the tube and I told him: suffocating, not being able to get out.
He said I could get out.
No, I said. I have to squeeze the ball and wait for your wife.
But what would happen to you while you wait? What is the danger you fear?
I wanted to go to bed. I didn’t want to get in the tube again. I didn’t need to cure my claustrophobia; it was the least of my problems. “Well. I’m afraid I’ll die. I feel like—”
“It is a feeling state. You see? You won’t really die. You can’t. There’s no deadly spiders or deadly toxins . . . nothing in the tube is really dangerous. You just want to get out. You don’t need to, though. Nothing bad can happen in the tube. You just lie there. Right? In a tube. It’s a tube,” he said.
The more he talked, waving his hands, pleading, the better it sounded. When we were babies, ten thousand years ago, we were afraid if we were in a small space, in a crevice, and with reason: if a baby was wedged in a tight space, it was dependent on someone else to get it out. Our heart rate went up. Our fear response increased our chance of survival. Not anymore. Not for a long time. But the limbic brain, the oldest part of the brain, still thinks all tight spaces are equally dangerous. This brain—good for a baby, good for a cavewoman—was a very dumb brain, an old brain. It was not a helpful part of the brain for people who lived in cities, in our century, with elevators and cars and MRIs. The old remnant brain sent a strong powerful signal in situations where there was no longer any danger. A long time ago, a plastic tube would not have been something you went into willingly. Now it was safe. The old brain hadn’t caught up with civilization. It was always erring on the safe side, and its version of a safe side was thousands of years out of date.
I smiled and nodded. How did I not know all this already?
He talked about his other patients. There were many situations now—bridges, skyscrapers, glass walls, airplanes—that would have been dangerous ten thousand years ago but were in fact not dangerous to the modern human. The old brain just didn’t know any of this, and there was no way to get a message to it. We had to draw on the new brain and remind it, willfully, to ignore the old alerts, no matter how convincing they seemed to be. We could override those impulses.
“It’s a monster in your brain. We kill him!” Iftah announced, grinning like a kid. He stood up. He motioned to me to stand. He put his fists in a fighting position.
“Right now?” I said. I thought we were just having a talk.
He was nodding, waiting, smiling, rocking on his toes. He looked at the door to my room. “We give it a try. Galit is so upset. She feels so badly.”
I was moved by the lengths to which he was going to help his wife.
This was not the person I was used to being: I walked down the hallway, grinning, with a stranger following me. I unlocked the door to my room. At the threshold, Iftah hit the front of his forehead with his palm. “We must use this,” he said, and smacked the back of his head with the same hand, “to overcome this.”
In the room he said, “Well, what is scary to you in here, this room?”
“You.”
He laughed. “What would be really scary?”
I walked across the room, nudged my suitcase out of the way, and stood by the small closet. “I would go in here.”
He said to go in. I did and he closed the door.
“What will freak you out now?” he said through the closed door.
I could hear and feel his body leaning against the door. And the monster leaped. I couldn’t believe I was sitting in the dark in a closet in a hotel room with a man, a stranger, leaning on the door. I had never been further from who I was, and at the same time I suspected somehow I was becoming myself in there. This, I realized, was the gap. It was funny and fascinating.
He jangled the doorknob. “Do you see the monster?” he said. “Is he near?”
“Yes,” I said. “He is here.” I was smiling. It was like the monster was on the screen in the MRI tube, and I was clicking at him. I was scared, but not in the way I thought I would be. It was so goofy. I was outside the scare, having it—it wasn’t having me. Maybe for the first time in my life.
“Are you laughing at him? That is good! That is good! See!”
Iftah banged on the door, hard. I shook, startled, and then I was still. It was quiet. The monster grew. I kept watching him. He didn’t take over. There was a gap. I was able to see the monster. I could see just what Iftah was talking about.
I heard Iftah leave the room. He came back, running, threw himself against the door, rattling the knob, pounding.
Again and again and again. He screamed. Kicked the door. I sat there and stared at the monster, and Iftah was right. Each time he pounced, the monster grew bigger, but never as big as before. Whenever I jumped or startled, I turned up the volume on watching, and each time I did this, the fear got smaller, always much smaller than the time before. Until it was just really hot in that closet, and extremely boring.
I came out of the closet. “I am cured,” I said. “You must go home to Galit.” I was automatically picking up his accent, his cadence.
“I see this. No Valium needed.” He threw his hands over his head. He shook my hand. He was so handsome and happy. It was the weirdest evening. I wanted Dave to see it. I should have called him back.
In the morning, in a new building, in a different room, I sailed through the test; I wasn’t scared at all. Galit would e-mail me the results by the end of the week, but clearly, she told me, I was profoundly face-blind. In the fusiform face area, there was not even a flicker.
She said, “You were very calm. Very different from yesterday.”
I was not the same as yesterday. I was different.
Flying home, I tried to conjure fear. I wanted to practice my monster technique. But I was not afraid of flying, and my ten-thousand-year-old baby brain had no trouble floating above the clouds. We had three seats all to ourselves, me and my brain.
Dave said he’d tried marriage four times now and he was done trying to change. This was the problem with me and Dave: all I wanted to do was change.
4
One
“Take a stand,” Helder said in every session. “Take a position, stake a claim.” I didn’t need to feel good and calm about it. I needed to override the old system: I could count on it feeling wrong. Getting past the feeling state—that was our work. “State a belief and end the sentence with a period, not a question mark.” Face blindness, he felt, had so secured me to uncertainty that to believe my own point of view was a challenge.
“How?” I kept saying. “How?”
Helder wanted me to see the divorce through. It was hurtful to Dave to lead him on. I didn’t want to get divorced, because getting a divorce is painful and sad and ugly and consuming and flat-bottomed and heavy, as failure mixed with confusion always is. Although I had filed for divorce in March—almost two years to the day since Dave and I had married—the court date was so far off, it wasn’t real. I had kept my distance from Dave since the end of April, though, after I came back from Boston. I knew if I didn’t we would hug and feel terrible about everything all over again and want to not hurt each other. We’d go out to dinner and talk and talk and forget why it had been so hard, that it had been hard at all. I knew I wasn’t ever going to fully understand my relationship with Dave. He was my family. It was like divorcing my arm.
I pretended I had to. I pretended Helder was making me. I’d b
een someone else when I married Dave; none of this seemed fair to him. But on July 11, I would, on my own, make it official.
We could always get back together again later, I told myself.
Wednesday mornings were divorce days in the Ottawa county courthouse. Wednesday, July 11, was the hottest, steamiest, stickiest day of the year so far. I put on a pink Zoë bra, my best bra, and a white linen skirt and suit jacket that I’d originally bought for a job interview. Dave had helped me pick them out. I hadn’t slept at all. I kept going over my list of why we had to get a divorce. Every minute, I resisted the urge to call Dave and say, Don’t let me do this and I am so sorry. What if I didn’t show up for the hearing? Could I still get divorced later? Would it count against me?
Dave was not contesting. With respect to the divorce, he was in default, which sounded drastic but simply meant he wasn’t fooling with the paperwork. He was Bartleby-ing this one: he preferred not to be divorced. Dave did not want to separate, he did not want to buy a house, he did not want to fight, he did not want to discuss how much or exactly why he was drinking; he did not want to have home-cooked dinners together. But he wasn’t fighting it. There was nothing to argue over, no children between us, no houses, no boat, no car, not even a stereo or a weed eater. There were the dishes Junior bought me for Mother’s Day, but no one knew where those were anymore. We’d never lived together. Pseudo-relational, Helder had called it. A sham marriage, Junior had called it. I wanted to think of it as a good first draft. I had made a mistake in knowing who I was. I had a long way to go, still, in recognizing myself, and I felt selfish that I hadn’t known more when I’d married Dave.
We’d had our last fight a couple weeks after I’d come back from Harvard with my diagnosis. With the boys’ support and a flurry of e-mails to their girlfriends, I had planned a night at my house with David Junior and Jacob—pizza, Dr Pepper, and Trivial Pursuit on my porch. Dave would come too. Dave agreed to all of it. Peter Helder said it was a great idea to stay connected to the boys. But not the Dave part. “You’re separated. You aren’t married. You have to stop pretending.” Helder used the word “fantasy” a lot, and I countered him: I’m divorcing Dave, but I’m not ending the relationship. This is my family. I can’t have no people at all.
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