Bitter in the Mouth

by Monique Truong

  What I wanted to know about myself I never read in a book in high school, college, or law school. I saw it on television. Three years ago, in 1995, I saw myself, or rather my doppelgänger. He was a British man in his late thirties with thinning blond hair. I had just turned on the television and was about to turn off the sound, but I didn’t because of this man’s speech pattern. He was fighting with his words. Some were jumping out too quickly and he was trying to impede their progress. Others were reluctant to emerge, and he had to spit them out with deliberate force. As I listened to him, I realized that his speech pattern was in fact no pattern at all. The only things rhythmic about him were his eyes. He blinked them in rapid succession as he paused, stalled, recoiled, and unspooled his words. I lit a cigarette, inhaled, and turned up the volume.

  “Mr. Roland, would you say that living with synesthesia has been disruptive to your to day-to-day life?” the interviewer asked, her own cadence broadcast-smooth.

  “Would you say that living with your sense of smell or your eyesight has been disruptive to your day-to-day life?” Mr. Roland asked the interviewer, in lieu of a response.

  The camera cut to the interviewer’s face as she attempted to process what Mr. Roland had just posed to her. Hoping to make her case in another way, she then asked, “Can you describe for me the tastes that you experienced as you said those words?”

  “Certainly. Mashed peas, dried apples, wine gum, weak tea, butter unsalted, Walkers crisps.…” Mr. Roland replied.

  What I was experiencing at that moment wasn’t an out-of-body experience. It was an in-another-body experience. Everything but this man and me faded into darkness. He and I were at the two ends of a brightly lit tunnel. We were point A and point B. The tunnel was the most direct, straight-line route between the two points. I had never experienced recognition in this pure, undiluted form. It was a mirroring. It was a fact. It was a cord pulled taut between us. Most of all, it was no longer a secret.

  I don’t remember getting up, but I must have. I do remember kneeling in front of the TV. I touched the image of Mr. Roland’s face as his words jumped, swerved, coalesced, attacked, and revealed. As the interview continued, he became more comfortable with the interviewer, and his facial tics and rapid blinking lessened. He masked what he couldn’t control by taking long sips from a glass of water (or perhaps the clear liquid was gin). He also turned his head slightly and coughed into his left hand, which provided him with a second or two of privacy. It soon became clear to Mr. Roland and to me that the interviewer wanted him to perform for the camera. After each question-and-answer exchange, the interviewer would ask him for the tastes of her words and then his. Mr. Roland was oddly obliging, much more so than I would have been in his position. I soon realized that his pool of experiential flavors, in other words his actual food intake, was very British and that he didn’t venture far from home for his gastronomical needs. “Curry fries” was the most unusual taste that this piano tuner from Manchester listed. The word “employment” triggered it, he told the interviewer. I said “employment” aloud and tasted olives from a can, which meant I tasted more can than olives. I felt more than a tinge of envy.

  The interview, which appeared to be taking place inside of Mr. Roland’s kitchen, segued to an MRI scan of Mr. Roland’s brain, followed by a series of tables and graphs that documented the blood flow to different areas of his brain as he was experiencing a “state of synesthesia.” The voiceover, a deep male voice more smug than authoritative, defined synesthesia as a neurological condition that caused the involuntary mixing of the senses.

  What a poor choice of words, I thought, and one that Mr. Roland surely must have objected to as well. Is your hearing or your eyesight involuntary? They are automatic and, if you’re lucky, always present.

  Mr. Roland—not his real name in order to protect his privacy, according to the voiceover—suffered from auditory-gustatory synesthesia. (Suffered? Mr. Roland and I both have dropped dead and are now rolling over in our respective graves. We suffered your insult, sir!) The voiceover went on to list other forms of synesthesia—each combination more fantastical than the next, each combination a couplet (and sometimes even a triplet) to the ingenuity of the human brain.

  The voiceover promised a baker in Terre Haute, Indiana, who saw colors when he heard music, every note bringing with it a vivid shade on the color spectrum. There was a flutist in Hamburg, Germany, who experienced flavors as shapes and textures. Her favorite was white asparagus, which was a pleasing hexagonal form with smooth bumps all over its surface. There was a writer in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, who saw all her words in colors because each letter of the alphabet appeared to her in a different hue. According to the voiceover, the name of the writer’s hometown, with its preponderance of vowels, which were jewel tones of reds and oranges and pinks, was her favorite word. The Tuscaloosan wrote instruction booklets for a manufacturer of toasters, blenders, food processors, and other small home appliances. Even the voiceover, insensitive as he was, found this fact worthy of further exploration.

  The interviewer appeared again on screen, this time walking up to the front door of a suburban house, a minivan parked in the driveway of its attached two-car garage. It could have been anywhere in America. The camera was peering over the interviewer’s back as a woman in her mid-forties opened the door and asked the interviewer to come inside. I knew that this had to be the home of the Tuscaloosan. The interior of the house—every visible item within it—was white. The sudden disappearance of colors was disorienting. I thought my television was losing its reception. I thought that the voices of the interviewer and the Tuscaloosan had become quieter and suddenly more difficult to hear, as if they were in the midst of a snowstorm. I even turned up the volume on my television set to compensate for the misperceived muffling. The effect was so jarring and complete because both the Tuscaloosan and the interviewer were dressed in white from head to toe. The former was in a white sundress and the latter in a white pantsuit. The interviewer had dressed according to the request of the Tuscaloosan, who found great comfort in and was therefore very protective of the sanctuary that she had created inside of her own home. The written word was visually stimulating enough, the Tuscaloosan told the interviewer. Of course, not all the letters were pleasing to her—the letter w was the color of a rusted car fender and o was a ring of green phlegm—but she was always “emotionally stirred by them,” as the Tuscaloosan put it. So much so that she often found it overwhelming after a long day of writing and editing at the office to take in the colors of her surrounding world as well. The Tuscaloosan likened it to a butcher who goes home and finds a big piece of steak, a pork loin, and a chicken for dinner every night.

  “The butcher loves what he sells but would rather have tofu on most nights,” the Tuscaloosan said, smiling shyly at the interviewer.

  “Ms. Cordell, given your chromatolexic synesthesia, the fact that you became a writer seems to me a natural fit. But may I ask why instruction booklets?” the interviewer asked.

  “You mean why am I not a poet or something more interesting?” Ms. Cordell shot back, as if she had heard this objection to her chosen genre too many times before.

  “Well, yes. You said earlier that you were emotionally stirred by words. Why not channel that into writing that is more, well, creative?”

  My patience for the interviewer was growing thin. Because the Tuscaloosan’s relationship to the written word is different from yours, I wanted to shout at the television set.

  “Because my relationship to the written word is different,” replied Ms. Cordell. “I’m moved by letters and words in the way that you may be moved by the colors of a sunset or a field of wildflowers or the inside of a slaughterhouse.”

  Ms. Cordell, almost as obligingly and patiently as Mr. Roland had, explained that sometimes a letter would dominate a word, causing the other letters around them to cower and become dim. The u in “instructions,” for example. Because of its location right in the middle of the word, its neon-pi
nk glow was the star of the show. The letters in “techniques,” however, were more of an ensemble production. The new-grass green of the t gave way to the lemon-pie-filling e followed by c, with its black Labrador sheen.

  Ms. Cordell then abruptly stopped her description of the cooperative spirit of “techniques.” She must have seen the look in the interviewer’s eyes, which I could clearly see too, because the camera was documenting it. I saw there a mixture of fascination and disbelief and pity. I know it was the pity that made Ms. Cordell silent.

  Forget about the interviewer. Better yet, pity her. She has only five senses. Go on, Ms. Cordell, tell me what the word techniques does to you. It makes me taste cheesecake, graham cracker crust and everything, I wanted to tell her. I lit another cigarette and took a couple of long drags instead.

  “Words are more than little definitions on a page for me. If I wrote a ‘beautiful’ sentence or a line of a poem, it would be beautiful only to me,” Ms. Cordell said, after a long pause during which she had closed her eyes and shaken her head from side to side.

  I was back in the tunnel of light, and Ms. Cordell was point C.

  “I write this sentence in every booklet: ‘Always follow these safety precautions when using this appliance.’ I never tire of the sentence because it shimmers with golden light throughout. Do you see what I mean?”

  The interviewer couldn’t see what Ms. Cordell meant. Nor could I. Not really. But the difference was that I believed her. The interviewer didn’t.

  Black-and-white photographs of Ms. Cordell as a young girl were now fading in and out of the screen, as her voice recounted how she had first tried to tell her mother about her world. She was six years old, and her mother slapped her so hard that she fell backward, hitting her head on the linoleum floor. The bump on the back of her head, so tender that it forced her to sleep on her stomach for a week, taught her to keep the colors to herself from then on.

  If Leo had walked into our living room at that moment, he would have had me committed. He had just moved into the brownstone, and we were then in the only honeymoon period that we would ever share. On those mornings when he was already up and at the hospital, he left a note on his pillow so I would wake up to a “good morning” from him. During my long days at the firm, he called and left messages with my secretary, requesting that Ms. Hammerick “call her doctor for an appointment.” Every day, he brought home small potted plants to fill our windowsills with green growing things. (I made him stop when I learned that they were from the bedsides of patients who had passed away.) Even at this apex of his love for me, Leo would have put me away.

  I was on my knees in front of the television, and not only my hands but my face was also pressed against the screen. I was no longer as interested in seeing the images as becoming one with the images. I wanted to give the six-year-old girl who would grow up to be Ms. Cordell—not her real name also to protect her privacy—a hug and tell her about Mr. Roland and me. I knew that the information about our existence would have comforted that little girl in Tuscaloosa because it would have comforted the one in Boiling Springs. I would have written to her that “Tuscaloosa” tasted of candied sweet potatoes, the kind that we southerners served at Thanksgiving, complete with a topping of marshmallows and crushed pineapples. I would have asked her for the colors of the letters l, i, n, d, and a. She would have written back, her words dipped in proprietary ink, indelible to her, made visible to me.

  I stood up and stepped back from the television in order to light my third cigarette in a row. The incomings were returning, and I wanted to experience Ms. Cordell’s world and not mine for as long as possible. The photographs of her as a young girl had given way to old home movies. She was in a long dress with a corsage around her wrist, and beside her was a woman who, given the resemblance, must have been her mother. They both had the same pixie nose that seemed out of place in their otherwise serious, angular faces. The voiceover returned to say that synesthesia was hereditary and could be passed along via either the maternal or the paternal side of the family. The condition, according to the voiceover, was most often found in women. There was the sound of a key turning a lock. Leo was home. I turned off the television and went into the bathroom to put out my cigarette. I was ashamed of both acts.

  When Leo moved in, I had agreed to no longer smoke inside of the brownstone. He said smoking would kill me and that the smoke would get into the upholstery of the Knoll split-rail love seat, which had moved into the brownstone along with Leo. (He called it “the Knoll,” as in “please don’t put your feet on the Knoll!”)

  The moment I heard Leo at the door I knew that I didn’t want him to see Ms. Cordell or Mr. Roland. I didn’t want him to diagnose them as delusional or schizophrenic. Nor did I want to see that look of fascination, disbelief, and pity in Leo’s eyes. I wanted to continue to love him.

  Very early on in our relationship I knew why Leo had fallen in love with me. His reasons were so simple and devastating that I immediately forgot them. I willed myself never to think about them again. For almost eight years, I didn’t. But when he told me that he was moving out along with the Knoll and all the other pedigreed pieces of furniture that he had brought with him, I suffered a total recall. He loved me because he loved hearing the sound of his own voice. Or as he had put it at the end of our first date, I was a “reallypopcorn goodcannedpineapple listenerAmericancheese.” That was the simple reason. The devastating reason was that I was rare, probably one of a kind. My southern accent, my Vietnamese face, my Boiling Springs, my Baby Harper, my Yale, my Columbia, my Dolly Parton, my unfettered appreciation for his subpar lovemaking and limited vocabulary of seduction, my love of the Law, my baton twirling, my dance moves, my childhood intimacy with Jesus. Leo had never met anyone else like me. The connoisseur in him found that difficult to resist. Leo was also a perfectionist and, in the end, that part of him opined that I was too flawed to keep. When Leo moved out, the only thing that I didn’t regret was my instinctive reaction not to share my synesthesia with him. I had withheld and it felt good.

  After Leo went to bed that night, I locked myself in the bathroom, turned on the fan, and said “synesthesia” aloud. I tasted capers, which made me follow with “thing,” the word that made me taste tomatoes, because the two flavors complemented each other and because I could. I thought about Mr. Roland in Manchester. I wanted to know whether he played this game when no one else was around. Whether he preferred sweets to sours, and what words were most bitter in his mouth. Most of all, I wondered whether he had ever thought about traveling beyond the northwest of England and exploring, perhaps, the sun-drenched coasts of the Mediterranean and the flavors that flourished there. It would do him good, I thought. I said good night to Ms. Cordell and imagined that the dictionary was her favorite book. I thought about the flutist from Hamburg and whether the rest of the program had featured an interview with her or whether she alone had refused to share her world with the grasping-at-straws interviewer and the assume-the-worst voiceover. I thought about this flutist’s definitions of “touch” and how they differed from mine. I fell asleep sitting on the floor of the bathroom, my back resting against the tub, thinking about the baker from Terre Haute and whether his record collection was organized spectroscopically.

  I knew that I had watched a program on PBS because there had been no commercials. Also, the interviewer, while not particularly astute, didn’t have much makeup on and had flyaway hair. In my office the following morning, I checked the TV schedule and found the name of the program. I did some research and found an address to which I wrote away for a transcript and a tape of the show. I had them sent to the firm’s address. When they arrived, I read through the transcript and found that I had missed the first third and the last third of the program. The transcript began with the scientific theories on the causes of synesthesia, which were many and which I skimmed. I wasn’t interested in the theories. I was interested in the effects. I wanted to know about the flutist and the baker. I knew that Leo would
have been horrified by my lack of scientific curiosity, but the theories, the scans, the tables, and the graphs made me feel like a lab rat. Or worse, a person with an incurable disease.

  The transcript revealed that the flutist from Hamburg—identified as Mrs. Ostorp but also not her real name; her two daughters had objected to its use, fearing it would violate their privacy—had passed away before an interview with her could take place. Mrs. Ostorp left behind a diary that she had kept since she was fifteen years old. It wasn’t a daily diary but more of a compendium to which she would add an entry whenever she encountered a new flavor. Some entries were stunning in their simplicity. A ripe plum was a five-spoked wheel, not polished smooth but worn by use. Some were many pages, with the entry for “labskaus”—a hash of corned beef, potatoes, onions, beets, and salted herrings topped with a fried egg, a gherkin, and pickled herring—at an astounding fourteen and a half pages long. The transcript stated that while Mrs. Ostorp had one of the rarest, or rather the least documented, of the fifty-four known forms of synesthesia, her case would always remain a question mark because she never agreed to a cerebral blood-flow test, which would have documented the changes in her brain metabolism during a state of synesthesia. In other words, there was no proof of Mrs. Ostorp’s world except for her words, which couldn’t be relied upon. Insufficient. Unreliable. Refutable.

  No wonder her daughters didn’t want their mother’s real name used in the program, I thought. Who would want a liar, a fabulist, a crackpot for a mother? The next time someone tells me the sky is blue or the soup is too salty or the upholstery is nubby or the music is too loud, I’ll ask for a cerebral blood-flow test and the resulting tables and graphs. Otherwise, I’ll shrug my shoulders and say, “Prove it.”