Tell Me Again Who Are You? by Heather Sellers
1. Harvard University
For the test, my first Harvard test, I am lying flat on my back.
I’m at the university of my dreams.
Finally.
I’m taking the test. I’m one of the people who loves taking the test. I’m one of the girls who thought: I should go to Harvard. But I never knew how. Or where it was.
For the test, my body and brain are wedged in this white plastic MRI tube in a dark room in a dusty lab by a navy yard. My arms are pinned at my sides, and my face is in a white plastic cage with metal wires, stuffed with packing material, sponges in this case, lodged all around my face.
I could be shipped to the Alps.
Mark me fragile.
The test is called Same Different. Same Different is created by a neuroscientist, tiny slim Galit Yovel. She keeps popping in to check on me.
Faces, morphed by a computer to 10, 20 and 30% difference, denuded of hair and ears, flash before my eyes on a tiny computer screen duct-taped in the top of the MRI tube.
In my sock feet, black yoga pants, and a paper-thin white T-shirt, perfectly still, on my back, I click Left Same. I click Right Different.
A bug, trapped in a giant’s drinking straw.
If I can’t tell what faces are the same and which are different, I am diagnosed, I am prosopagnosic. Face blind. Able to see faces, but unable to read them.
I hope to fail this test. I am trying my hardest. Because I want an accurate score. But if I fail, I have a diagnosis, a passport, a Greek term: prosopagnosic. A way to explain, a reason to say tell me again, do I know you?
Because so far, I have been winging it.
When I was a child, my mother was one people called peculiar; people said you are like your mother and don’t be like your mother. Everything wrong seemed like it came from her. I was a nervous person. (Because of her.)
When I was dating, and could not tell the men at the bar apart, which one was the one I came in with, I got lucky. I got lucky a lot. When you are twenty, and adorable I had a great ass no one appeared to be using faces it’s called flirting.
But then I got married. Fast, at nearly forty years of age, and I couldn’t recognize this man, at the grocery store, wrong man, at the races, 5Ks we ran together, only not together. Dave is fast, and kind, and he said, “I don’t think you can tell people apart.” We were watching a movie. I was asking, “Have we seen any of these people before?” And he said, “It’s like with Gayle Kuipers. When you didn’t know her.” And I said, folding into his good arms, “Oh my god. It’s a thing, isn’t it.”
And then I did what we do now: Web research. I did what my mother used to do: I wrote the government a letter. The Department of Rare Neurological Disorders. (You can have a thing where your family members seem to be imposters, people pretending to be the real members. Who hasn’t had some version of that? Who isn’t intrigued – wanting to have that just for a day.)
The government sent a packet of information.
Like in the old days!
This was not the first time I contacted my country for mental health information.
One of the Web sites they directed me to: www.faceblind.org. At Harvard.
Diagnosis: a coupon, a passport, an apology, and an invitation, maybe a cure. At least maybe it’s a kind of fraternizing with the concept, the cure.
But in the tube, I can’t breathe. My chest feels wrapped with bands. I want out of the tube very badly, even worse than I want to be officially Face Blind, Officially Explained to at least my husband and myself.
To get calm, I try to imagine Harvard’s brick buildings around me, the beautiful church I saw when I walked across the diamond shapes of grass. It’s going to be worth it! Soon you are going to know! The mystery will be solved, the marriage healed!
But when I try to imagine the rest of the world outside the dark room, the bright tight white tube, I feel like I have to get out of the tube.
I feel like if I don’t get out now I will die.
Sometimes I feel that way about being in the world.
I am not actually in a tube at Harvard University, but I will not figure that out for several weeks. When an $80 check comes from MIT. And I write Galit, and the e-mail goes to MIT.
MIT!
My whole life I wanted to go to Harvard and study, be a lawyer or an architect or famous. When I was in junior high, I was turning primitive. I was in the white-kid classes, the Academic Track, but I was not able to read books, only eat them. I craved paper, I had to always have some paper in my mouth. I began skipping classes and failing them, spending my days at the Orlando downtown library, dreaming I was a scholar, and Harvardian, as I researched pica. The craving for unnatural substances. You could crave shit, stones, leaves, string. I read about everything that could go wrong with a person and I felt better.
I just had one thing.
I diagnosed my classmates. Those girls in orange University of Florida sweatshirts, the boys who rooted for Duke. When asked, I said (or, more often, wrote – there were weeks I couldn’t speak) “Harvard or MIT.”
“You are not,” Andrew Snedeker said one day, sneering. And I said, “I know.”
And that afternoon I read about the component parts of the sperm. And sexual addiction and homosexuality and pedophilia. I didn’t think, yet, about my mother when I was reading up on psychological disorders and dreaming about my college career.
From each page of the DSM I read, I had to tear off the corner, tops only, and eat it.
Sometimes, you’re face blind. Sometimes, you really just can’t see.
* * *
There is no diagnosis code for the inability to recognize other humans.
The science literature says prosopagnosia is extremely rare, usually caused by a stroke or injury to the head.
You pronounce it like this: pro. Like you are for something. Soap. Nice and clean. You are for cleanliness.
Agnosia, there’s a lot of those, that’s the easy part. It’s any kind of not-knowing. Not knowing, well, it’s even more common than knowing.
Think: agnostic.
Dr. Ariagno of Michigan Medical and Dr. Donders, Spectrum Health, both told me to my face: this would be extremely unusual, if you had this. It’s just very rare. They both said they had never seen it before.
Donders gives me the Benton Face Test and Famous Faces. I pass with a C+ on the first, photos of women and men from the sixties in funny haircuts and sideburns, stiff clothes. The images are forty years old. We had no television in my mother’s house, no newspapers, no radio. No framed things. No photos on the walls.
Those are all conduits for the voices.
“I wouldn’t know these people anyway,” I told the doctor.
He said the test takes that into account.
I had the urge to peel a corner of that page, the thick card-paper that held the faces of maybe Johnny Carson, maybe Shakespeare, maybe Martin Luther King.
* * *
In the tube at not-Harvard-but-MIT, I click Same. Different. Galit’s faces are just faces – real human faces from contemporary times, with their hair and ears brushed away. The faces pop and zip across the computer screen; these are the fastest faces I have ever seen.
Lodged in my left hand is a plastic ball, like a baby ear irrigator. That’s my emergency squeeze. That’s my Get Me the Fuck Out.
It also means, if I am asked a question over the loudspeaker, Yes.
If I freak out, I can’t scream. They will not hear me. Over the amazing pulsing roar.
In order to explain this to other people, I have to understand it myself. To understand myself, I need to look inside.
I’m on a listserv with 117 other face-blind people. Some of the face blind are experts at diagnoses, and list like advanced degrees, letters after their names, ADHD, B/P, IBS, CAP.
Is this a good use of our time, to diagnose?
This obsession, this listing of disorders, this pronoun “my.” My ADHD, my hearing loss, my topographic agnosia.
Is it a sickness masquerading as self-care?
These diagnoses, they’re like popular kids, you feel you have to like them, have to want to be like them.
There is no cure. There is no treatment. If I am prosopagnosic, nothing will change. If I am designated officially face blind by the Prince and Princess of Weirdest Neurological Glitchdom Ever, I still won’t know you. If you put your hair up, if you wear a hat.
If you ride by on a bike in a helmet and say “Hey, Heather!” I will call out, “Who is it?”
And you will say.
And then I will know.
It’s hard to know how much of a problem this is.
Sometimes when a stranger calls my name, I look away.
“Has the Valium kicked in?” Brad says over the microphone. Tall cute Brad, a postdoc collaborator of Galit’s. Brad, who looks like an actor. Not a particular actor, just tall and strong and vibrant and cool.
The kind of person who would be famous.
“Sure,” I say.
I’ll say anything to get inside my brain, to snag a view. And I want to be the best little prosopagnosiac they have met. I want to be invited back.
I am at freaking Harvard, and I want to do well.
Truth be told the Valium hasn’t kicked in, it hasn’t even nudged the door, or impressed upon the anxiety in any way whatsoever. There is no cushion other than the foam around my head. My friend Ann says about painkillers, they don’t kill the pain at all, nothing really takes away the pain. She says, “They just make it so you aren’t so terrified it won’t be more than you can stand.”
* * *
This morning, Brad picked me up in the lobby of the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston, and we took a cab to Harvard. It was like a date. Brad was wearing the same T-shirt as the day before, a ragged pale yellow intentionally ancient shirt with a cartoon monkey on it. A monkey I have seen somewhere before. A cool-person monkey.
I asked him how he got interested in prosopagnosia. He said a friend of the family, his mom’s friend, had it and he got interested. He talked about his family, asked me about mine. Did anyone else have it?
It wasn’t the kind of family, I tell Brad, where you would notice something like that. I want to tell him: my parents are criminally insane. I feel like Brad, with his little monkey T-shirt, his newly beat Converse, his pinky ring, Brad can handle anything.
Instead, I told him how I couldn’t recognize my husband’s children at school pickup, at the theatre, how I hugged the wrong man in the grocery store, thinking it was Dave. How my colleagues remained unidentifiable after a decade, how I kept introducing myself to neighbors at the park, and how they’d point out they lived next door. “Hi, I’m Heather, I live just over there.” Pointing to myself, and then my house. The weird stares.
How if the man who lives next door is standing in the next door driveway, I have no clue who he is.
“So, do you think I have it?” I asked him as the cab curled over The Big Dig. I want to know how I am sounding. I don’t want to be a faker, an exaggerator.
“We’ll soon find out,” he said. He smiled nicely.
* * *
A name, a diagnosis – it’s like an answer complete with love and attention presets.
What could be more seductive than that?
The search for a name, a diagnosis. Someone with hands to lay on your shoulders, a someone smart who says, “Yes. You. You are it. You are the perfect example. You are my life’s work.”
* * *
In the terrible nightmare tube, the noise is the deafening sound of a fighter jet.
I am not allowed to move my head. No smiling, I am crying. Where is the Valium, my buffer, the silk blanket of drug? Am I feeling it and I just don’t know? I have never taken Valium before. Maybe my brain is Valium-blind.
Brad and Galit are behind a radiation barrier; looking inside my brain for light. I want to marry Brad and Galit. I want to be always experimented upon.
I have to look up, and up is a tiny mirror, the size of the ones in a lipstick case. The size of rolling papers.
My head is anchored with sponges, vibrating as the giant roars. Tears are slipping out of my eyes, itching my cheeks, my neck, I’m getting sponges wet.
I don’t know where the light is coming from, but the tube is bright from within. My brain is tilted back – I’m feeling very brainy (though I am not actually at Harvard, I’m at MIT, though I won’t figure that out for two more days) – and I’m looking into a mirror at the top of my brain’s cage, which reflects a computer screen taped onto the back end of the straw, where the giant’s mouth would be. The glass screen has a jagged crack across it. The tape hasn’t always held up.
The rooms are messy, the floors dusty, and the researchers Brad and Galit talk over a microphone, over the fighter jets and I can’t actually understand a single word they say, their voices are muffled hollers.
WAB BLAH BLAH MA, HIFF OO U PLEASE SQUEEZE THE BALL?
I squeeze. There’s a loud set of clicks, like angry roosters have landed in a mass on top of my tube.
The rumbling and screaming start again.
I thought the Valium would drop me off a cliff.
Brad says when their supervisor did Same Different in the tube, he fell asleep. Ken, their supervisor, spoke with me this morning. He is soft, and beautiful and brilliant and calm. He has prosopagnosia, Brad says. Not as bad as yours. Not nearly. He was really impressed when you said you didn’t recognize your colleagues, yeah, that was great, Brad said to me as we walked out, past the animal guards.
This made me feel like I belonged at Harvard as I suspected I always did. This was good weird news, the best kind.
So far I have been watching an episode of The Simpsons. My brain is perhaps being tuned to the tune of Bart and Lisa.
Then, it’s all white, with the giant scar scratch and then, fast, the faces start flashing on the broken screen.
You will want to know what this looks like. It’s like a casino or bar game. It’s like those pop-up menus that torture your computer.
It’s a bald woman.
Flitting around with her close personal friends.
A beautiful bald woman. Like a model, everything seems large and perfect about her.
* * *
One time, Dave (I wish so badly he was in the room, holding my foot, which sticks out of the tube, corpse-like) said, Can you describe your face?
I smiled. What an excellent question, I have never thought about that before. And I smiled again, because now I was drawing a blank.
My face?
I tried to see it.
I couldn’t see it.
I know it’s heart-shaped and small and cute, I said. But that is because I have been told this. We were looking at photos of me that my friend Pat had taken at the Saugatuck Dunes.
I can see it, but I can’t imagine it, I said.
Dave said, What about your mother’s face?
It’s like she’s standing there, right there, and I can put my hand through her, like those ghosts in the dining room at the Haunted House in Disney. I can almost see it. There is a face there. It’s not a ghost without a face.
How would you describe the face? he said softly.
I took a sip of my wine. I leaned into him. We were sitting at my kitchen counter.
I can’t describe, I said. I can see it, but then there’s this weird series of gaps. Like when you are running on railroad tracks. There’s her face, there’s her, here I am, I see her. She has a face, but I don’t know that face. It’s a placeholder. It’s an energy that stands in, for her. For her herness.
He said, How about your dad? Your brother?
Same.
* * *
Different.
The bald woman appears on the cracked computer screen in my little lipstick mirror in the tube. She floats – dashes really, this disembodied head, across the screen. Her face is always the same size. About one sixth of the size of the screen. She alternates her slide to the left, slide to the right. You never know where she will pop up. It’s fast, it’s hard to keep up. I’m never sure when I press Different. They all look the same. I can’t tell if it’s four women, serving in a rotation, or many, many women with subtle superfine differences.
I’m guessing.
Like I have been all along.
It feels like an arcade game, where you have to shoot the duck.
I should have told Galit, did I tell Brad? I drive on the wrong side of the road. England didn’t scare me like it did other members of my high school class. All this backwards.
I don’t want to do anything to wreck up the data, but this mirror, this gal is moving so fast – I don’t know.
I keep waiting for a new girl, a different face. Someone with ears, something I can hang on to.
Same.
Same.
Same.
Same?
I need a question mark button.
Here’s a face, different! The eyebrows look more intense, like they are underlined.
Otherwise, she looks the same to me.
* * *
People I can recognize: the weirdly outlined.
The very tall, the very short, the freaks. The bent or broken, the mentally ill, the extremely ugly. People with long hair or astounding hair. Superbly frizzy, intently braided, spectacularly combed-over (thank you, Donald!). Anything big, wrong, or emphatic affecting the outline = good. Useful. Some people come with handles. Some you can’t tell from all the other knives in the drawer.
I am not able to recognize myself in mirrors, photographs, or home movies.
Beautiful people are the sum of the perfect average; they are very difficult to tell apart. In magazines, it seems like the same model. I can’t tell Cindy, Julia, Christy.
Galit says: What’s amazing is that the brain can tell faces apart at all. They mostly look the same. We are interested in how the brain does that.
* * *
Brad and Galit are running the tests from a bank of laptops they take everywhere, plugged in now to a hardware console with a sign atop that reads “Monkey MRI.” When I asked, they said, no, no, no. There aren’t monkeys in this part of the building. They are upstairs.
But I did check for short dark hairs on the bedsheet as Galit was strapping me in.
It feels like a monkey was here.
Same.
Different.
A dozen tests.
The first one, Famous Faces. I click on his laptop space bar, and a famous face comes up. He says, Is this familiar? I said, Yes. This test isn’t timed, he said. Take as much time as you need.
“Jim Carrey?” I say. I’m feeling like I am off to a good start on this test.
“That’s me,” he says. “I just put that in there for fun.”
I can feel my face fall. Mean trick.
I sip my water.
Stare at the screen.
“Do you look like Jim Carrey?” I say. I want to be wrong and I want to be right. That tension is at the center of the diagnosis quest.
He says he does look like Jim Carrey, people say.
I give myself full credit for that one.
The only other famous face I get is Robert Downey Junior. These are just faces. Cropped of ears, much hair. Later, I retro-identify Nicholas Cage and Julia Roberts. She was the first one. Those lips, those teeth. I think I can really see teeth. They aren’t affected by the not-seeing. They can shine through.
I miss: Elvis, Brad Pitt (he looks like everyone), Mel Gibson, Jennifer Aniston, the whole crew.
After the famous faces, Brad asks me a bunch of names.
Do I know who Brad Pitt is? I do. Do I know Reagan? Do I know Winston Churchill?
I do. I do. I do, of course.
Do I know Tony Blair?
I know who he is. I don’t know that I have ever seen a photo. I don’t have television. I rent DVDs because they come with the answers, who’s starring.
I see the magazines in the grocery store, I know who is pregnant. I keep up with the famous people, who they are marrying, what they hit up against, were nominated for, got addicted to.
But evidently I don’t know them, not that personally. Not well enough to say hi.
Brad tells me I am the second worst person to fail this test. The only man who did worse than me was hit on the head by a car accident.
He is amazing with birds, but he can’t find a face at all.
He can’t even figure out what a face is.
2. I Do Not Recognize Myself in Photographs
The summer I graduated high school, I told my neighbor Evelyn, when she asked where I was going to college, a fat lie. “Harvard,” I said.
She said, “I am not surprised.”
Two months later, at age seventeen, I am on a bus headed north out of Orlando. I am going to college. Not Harvard. Florida State University. To me it sounds grand, like Oxford, like the Taj Mahal.
I am not exactly sure where Florida State University is, how far until Tallahassee.
Part of me is happy to be tucked safe in this metal tube on wheels; I like the leaping dog, who looks more like a fast grouchy panther, on the Greyhound sign. I like him better than the Trailways sign, which is red, white and blue. Kind of tacky, kind of trying too hard.
Part of me is terrified.
I am one day late for college. I am missing orientation.
I am going to college because there is so much I want to find out. I just want to know and know and know and know.
I have three thousand dollars cash in a hidden compartment in my brown leather purse. My purse has a large cursive H embroidered on it in black. I have a notebook where I write everything down.
Writing it all down makes me feel like I am getting what.
At this exact moment, I just want to be going faster.
Harvard: I don’t know how you would get there – I don’t even know what state Harvard is in, exactly. It’s a huge feat, one of my biggest so far, that I figured this out.
I sit back in my hard grey seat. I try to catch eyes with the driver in his big flat mirror.
I am trying to get him to ask me, Where are you going, little lady?
So I can say College.
So I can tell a true story.
If he would just look my way.
* * *
My mother says full-time work would teach me what I needed to know. She says she believes in hard work.
My mother doesn’t have a paying job.
I have worked four jobs since I was eleven years old: mowing, babysitting, swimming lessons instructor, day camp counselor; then I replaced mowing with Chi-Chis and babysitting with Disney.
She says I am not prepared for college, I will wash out. You need to work, she says. She comes by my dad’s house, bangs on the door, then runs down the sidewalk, leaps back in her truck. And he yells, Go talk to your mother.
* * *
The night before I go, my father weeps. Says don’t leave him. Go to Valencia, go to junior college, take his car. But every time I went out there, to find out more about Valencia, a college named after an orange, way east of his house, I got lost.
I ended up at the beach, in Christmas, out of gas, in trouble, all of them at once. I can’t go to junior college. People going to Harvard do not go to junior colleges.
* * *
At my guidance counselor appointment, one was required before you graduated, Mrs. Jenkins said, “I heard your boyfriend hits you.”
I said no. I was crying.
She looked at me long and hard.
I stared at the floor.
I had no idea what to do or say or hope for, how to plan.
She said you can go to any one of these schools. She handed me a gold form. She said, Check a box. I can write a letter. You will have to come up with $450 deposit. Tomorrow.
I said I wanted to go to Harvard.
She said those decisions had been made, long ago.
These were our choices, she said. She tapped a long skinny shapely black plastic pen on the form. “Pick one.” She leaned over her snow globes collection.
I closed my eyes and cried and I picked.
That night, when my father passed out on the sofa, Ruby long gone home, I wrote the check, and rode my bike down to the post office and under a really hot almost purple Florida moon, I stuck the thick envelope of forms addressed to Florida State University in the chubby blue mailbox on Orange Avenue. I kissed the envelope before I sailed it in there.
I listened: soft landing.
3. Recognition Errors
There’s also a sign on the lobby door that says “Do not Feed the Scientists.” I concentrate on this. I wait for the Valium. I feel like I have to get out of the tube. What’s the point of this?
BLAGH MAH MAG, HAF WEE PAH PLEASE SQUEEZE THE BALL?
I squeeze.
I feel like I have floated so far out of the normal Heather world.
I wonder if they can see that I thought Monkey MRI.
It’s animal rights awareness week, and that’s why the extra security guards all around this building, Brad said.
The endless buzzing the jets and the crows, it continues, and I click my buttons, forever, Same Same Same Same trying to stay very still. If the face of this morph woman looks different, I click Different.
Sometimes I click the wrong button. The faces are coming really really fast, like a subway train speeding past.
It’s a blur of faces. They pop up on different places on the screen, so that it’s nothing like a subway station platform where you are standing, really, at all, but more like you are jumping on a trampoline as the train flies.
I click Same Different for an hour.
Then I say, I have to get out. I have to get out.
* * *
The last night I saw her, I told my mother don’t pull any stunts, don’t follow me, please don’t embarrass me by coming up there.
My mother said I was compounding all my mistakes. She said she wouldn’t let me leave. She would call the police.
I said to her: I have one goal in life.
“What’s that?” she’d said harshly.
“Not be like you.”
We were in my father’s driveway. She looked stronger, calmer after I said this thing. I’d been waiting, wanting to say it for years. I never thought I would be brave enough.
“Thanks,” she said. “You really know how to hurt a person.”
She drove away in her little truck, chugging, like she and the truck were both choked up.
I thought: this is the last time I will ever see her.
I was full of premonitions then.
* * *
They are very, very young, younger than me. Galit is going to teach neuroscience at the University of Tel Aviv in the fall. Brad is going to be a faculty member at the University of London in psychobiology.
Like a nightmare, I lose all sense of time and purpose. Do they know what they are doing?
What is the point of this? People are dying!
When Galit comes in, the noise stops. It feels like everything wrong with me is healed.
She slides me out. I grin. I sit up, stretch. I can’t believe myself, my own bravery. I am terribly claustrophobic.
“Can we do some more or do you have to stop,” she says.
“Stop,” I say. I wipe tears off my face.
“You did great,” she says. “Was it okay?”
“It was hard,” I say. “It was a long time.”
“An hour,” she says. “But it looks like we got good data.” She says she will call me tonight at my hotel to tell me what they find.
If I can’t see faces, she will know for sure.
I say thank you.
She says I did so well. She says thank you. For someone with claustrophobia to be willing to help them. She is just very grateful.
You did great, she says again when we are getting in her car with Brad, and I feel like a million bucks.
She says, weaving over aspects of the Big Dig, You clicked Same a lot.
I did the best I could, I say.
I sink into the backseat.
I am at Harvard, a person probably making a C – .
* * *
That evening I walk around the city. I stand on the Boston Common. I hear women speaking French, men Dutch, and maybe Chinese. Everyone looks smart and there are a lot of ducks and babies. I walk around, feeling smart and helpful.
I have wanted to be at Harvard my whole life. Ever since I heard about it, from my father, who said, he should have gone to Harvard. To study law. Not going was the biggest mistake he made besides leaving us kids with my mother.
In my hotel, I have dinner at a famous oyster bar. I have six kinds of raw oysters. I compare each one. Same, Different. The metal taste is good, it tastes like how being in the MRI machine felt.
While I slide my oysters into my body, I read the Bhagavad Gita, which I keep calling the Bhagavad Vita. I order a second glass of chardonnay.
I listen to the conversation next to me, two men, drinking water, eating chowder, talking about running, how many miles a week they go. They are forty, they say, like me. I want to add to the conversation – I am forty, I run – but I’m very very happy with my oyster shells, my book, my wine, my perfect mood. I have accomplished this huge thing today I lay in a tiny terrible scary tube. All by myself. For one hour. I donated my body to science. I don’t want to do anything to mar my good mood. So I stay quiet. They leave.
The most difficult school. I would never get in, my dad always said. What I needed, he said, was the school of hard knocks. And he’d bang me on the head, and laugh, a laugh that sounded like he was forcing something bad out, something in him that refused to leave.
In my hotel that night, I take a bath and wait for Galit’s call. I have gobs – too much – Estee Lauder Intuition bath bubbles coating my skin like a bad idea. I soak and sweat. I get out, not feeling cleaner, just coated. I flash back to how she and Brad flicked open their laptops, how their very own laptops ran the MRI. How I’ll want to tell my husband, Dave, what kind of laptop, Apple? That’s part of the story he’ll like. If it’s Apple, if I know what kind.
I wait for the phone to ring, for the red button to light up. I’m wanting this terrible news: your brain doesn’t work like a normal brain. I need this sentence, as a passport, so when I travel in the country of normal people, neurotypicals, I can say, it’s proven. See?
I’m not like you, but trying really hard.
So I won’t feel insane, just helpful, when I say to both of us, Can you tell me again.
Who are you?
4. Affinity for Likeness
On the bus, above my head on the rack, like a cheerful white cloud, I have my own white suitcase, filled with my dad’s old college clothes, because it’s up north, Tallahassee, it gets cold there. A mustard alpaca sweater, three of his neckties from Chicago, a red plaid vest, grey wool shorts from the fifties. Wrapped in the clothes are my books, my novel notebooks, my journals, my book of wisdom quotes.
On a pale green index card: my father’s address, my mother’s phone number.
I get nervous and I can’t remember for the life of me.
I get nervous and I can’t remember a fucking thing.
On the bus, I do not want to be seen. No girl, I believe, does. I want to make up a whole new life. Don’t look at me now while I am trying to do that.
On the bus card I’m flicking around, all you can see is O and O, with a hole in the middle of the word.
I am dying to talk to the driver. I keep testing out different words in my mouth. He is looking in his big mirror as much as he is looking at the road. I lean forward. I wonder if my face is filling up his view.
Then, we stop.
We aren’t even out of Orlando, really.
I am already late to college by a day and now I am in Okahumpka, Florida, sitting in a bus.
The driver calls out “Okahumpka!”
He yanks open the doors, steps out of the bus. He lifts up the bus sides.
Okahumpka. Really, Okahumpka is still Orlando. Okahumpka touches Orlando like the pancreas touches the liver.
My mother is fully capable of driving to Okahumpka. She’s driven here before, I was with her. She might have called my father. He might agree: Heather has to be stopped. There’s a window in his drinking, about 8 p.m. at night, a window where she can get in, and they can sometimes agree on what to do about me. Then it closes. Then it was never there.
I review my card.
There are so many stops: Ocala, RS Ocala Pilot Station, Leesburg, Belleview, Gainesville, Alachua, Lake City, Live Oak, Madison, Monticello.
I had no idea we would be stopping at all these towns. I feel queasy knowing it now. I thought you just got on a bus and it took you where you were going.
Two black women get on the bus. They are wearing the most beautiful hats.
Three more women get on. They are in church dresses and they have boxes of food. There are no children. They do not stop talking. The driver says, “All aboard.”
I close my eyes. Please let my mother not be running towards this bus.
Already, I am learning so much.
5. Losing Your Data
The phone rings and I jump off the Boston bed like electricity.
“Hello?” I say. Heather, I’m thinking, what do you really hope for here? Are you worried they found a brain tumor. Are you remembering: there is no treatment, no cure?
“I have terrible news, I’m so sorry,” Galit says.
“Ah!” my whole body says. I stand up in my hotel room, which is two old rooms made into one gorgeous nice new room. Terrible news. Terrible news. I’m shaking.
“We lost all the data,” she says. “I was worried when they said they were working on the machine this weekend. But we tested, we thought we were okay. The data, it’s all junk.”
I say. “So we do not know? If my face area lights up?”
“We have nothing,” she says. “Can you come in again?”
“No,” I say. “I took the Valium. I don’t have another. There isn’t anything I can do?” At Harvard, I want to say to Galit, how is it possible the computers and machines don’t work? Whose fault is this, I want to say. Do you know how hard that was, all those faces? Laying so still?
“I am sure we can get a Valium. I will call Brad. He will know someone. I hate to ask. But we have nothing. No data. I’m sick about it. And, there is another thing. My husband specializes in claustrophobia. He’s a therapist, cognitive behavioral. He has helped a lot of people.”
“I don’t know,” I say. I’m shaking all over. My hands are sweating. I wanted to know tonight. I tell her I am leaving Sunday evening.
“I have to think,” I said.
“He could come over now,” she says. “He thinks he can address the issue in one session. But there is not pressure on you.”
“We’re going to fix my brain, my claustrophobia, this is like a complete workover,” I joke. “I’ll go back to Holland a whole new person.” I’m smiling, nodding, using my free hand to say cheerful! Sorry! When mostly, it just seems like things are breaking.
I can’t do it again, lay there, with tears pouring out of me, for an hour, in a profoundly confused situation, a true nightmare, bald women who all look alike but some are different and I want to get the answers right. I always want to get an A.
I call Dave. What should I do?
“How was the big meeting?” he says. His voice is pushy cheerful, like a thing catching up to itself.
“We talked about that last night.” I try to breathe. I’m rubbing my thigh with my free hand. I am looking up at the ceiling of my palatial Park Plaza room. “This is the face thing.”
“The face thing!” he says, busted. The cell phone crackles.
I want to say, Have you been drinking a lot? When did you start today?
Dave says he doesn’t think the man should come to my room and experiment.
He thinks I should just come home.
I tell him about Brad calling, not finding the Valium, then calling back, saying “We remembered, Serena!” And how I thought that was so perfect, a woman named Serena, she has the Valium, this woman named evening, night, late, love song. A postdoc friend of theirs. I wondered what her area of study is and Brad said: attention.
The brain on attention. This is what that looks like.
Dave says, “Do they like the book?”
And I say, This isn’t those people. This isn’t that. The meeting with Bedford St. Martins was two days ago. We already talked about it! This is the face people. I don’t sound happy. I wish I had called someone else.
This is my husband.
Who is, how on earth have I not seen this before, like my father.
This is my father not remembering our conversations from the night before, the night before that. He isn’t seeing me at all. He’s not even looking my way. He is drinking, he wants to be blind.
“We’re breaking up,” I say.
I pretend the static is a lot worse than it is. And I disconnect.
* * *
I take a bus to college. It is nothing like running away from home. Even though my father said, “Baby, don’t go. Stay here with your ole Daddy,” and that broke my heart. Even though my mother said: “I will not let you get away with this. This is unconscionable.”
I’m on the bus, and Bird’s breath is bad. Real bad. Like a cantaloupe in a hot room. He is short, and sits turned towards me on his seat. He got on in Ocala, and has had his arm around my seat.
I can feel the heat off his red-tan flaky skin, and the whole metallic energy of Bird who is about as much like a bird as a bucket.
Bird smells like rubber and something melted and sun, too much sun. Maybe beer, too, something sour. My father never smells like this.
Bird tells me his life story. It’s not a pretty picture.
I close my eyes.
The driver is never going to talk to me now. He’s thinking I’m going down a bad path.
I do not know how to get rid of this Bird.
“So you’ve never had a boyfriend? Not a single one?” Bird says. He has a cracker accent, and talks like he has a mouth full of loose teeth.
“I told you,” I say. My throat is tight, all the way down to my stomach. It hurts to talk. There is so much I haven’t said.
“So you don’t like to have fun? Or you don’t know about fun?” Bird says.
Be more nunlike, I command myself. Drive him away with your goodness.
Bird tells me his third wife left him because she thought he was an alcoholic. He says he likes to have a good time and there is no crime in that. Is there a crime in that? Do you think there is a crime in that?
He says he is a free man, a free bird.
He leans in closer. His palm is resting on my shoulder. I push down further into myself. Why is this happening to me?
His breath gusts across my face. “You like to have fun, right? Would you like to get down with the Bird? I’m a party Bird!” he says, louder. “Very rare species in these parts.” He laughs really hard. I can hear that in him there is some kind of goop.
I lean forward, look at the floor. It’s rubber-ribbed, black.
Maybe I could throw up.
In Palatka, I do not get off the bus even though I have to go to the bathroom so bad. It’s a long, long stop. The Bird disappears. We get a new driver. The new driver is black. First thing he does when he gets on the bus, he thanks me for sitting up by him.
“You can be my eyes and ears,” he says. He has a minister’s voice. “Okay? You going to see your kin? You got kin up this way somewheres? Where I’m taking you tonight, Young Lady?”
“I’m going to Tallahassee, sir,” I say. “That is my final stop. Do you know our arrival time?”
We are just backing out of the stall. It’s nearly dark, a heavy North Florida evening.
There is a loud knock at the door of the bus. The driver opens it. I want to shout, No, don’t. I fear my mother.
Bird.
He climbs back on. He shows the driver his ticket. “I’ve added one additional stop – I’m going up one more stop, because I think my life is going to change. I think I’m about to become a very lucky man. That Palatka bus, it runs in the morning?”
“Ten a.m.,” the driver says. He says it like you would say, “Welcome to the Promised Land.”
I close my eyes, squish down into the corner as much as I can. Bird is tapping my arm, then it turns to stroking. I slap his hand.
“What?” I say.
“I brought you some gum.” He acts like we have known each other our whole lives.
The driver doesn’t look at me.
Bird hands me the piece of gum. It is not wrapped. Lord knows where he got it from.
“This is your stop,” I say. “This is where you are supposed to be.” I point out the window. I feel like a teacher. I’m surprised how strong I am.
Bird suddenly looks furious, redder.
“You, get off,” I say.
Someone from the back of the bus yells, Let’s get going.
The night is hot, and the sky is spooky, the night clouds are different here than in Orlando. I walk past the Waffle House, which is anchored into a hill under the Travelodge. I am in Tallahassee, Florida, at midnight. It’s August. I am going to start college in the morning, or something like college. I have finally made it.
I’m in the middle of a busy five-lane street, in the turn lane, between cars, under the streetlights. I’m trying to cross. The light is green. I’m liable to be run down by the people hollering at me. My white suitcase is banging my shins every step.
I cross the street, horns honk. I’m grinning. I’m doing fine. I smile and wag my head around, as in, I’d wave if I could, but I have this suitcase, I’m moving in.
City smart, I am thinking. Street smart.
I have bus legs – stiff, long-feeling, weak – but I try to walk strong, swag my hips, show I know my stuff. I walk in this way across campus, probably two miles. I’m staying at the Ponce de Leon Motel tonight. I walk in the lobby. The food cooking is Indian.
I smile.
“Name?”
“Heather,” I say.
The man in the scarves stares at me.
“Sellers!” I say. “Sellers!” This is the right answer.
I am doing well. I’m going to be so fine. Tomorrow, I will go to late registration. I will get a terrible schedule that will make me popular and well-known: ceramics, massage, water ballet, pocket billiards, writing.
I do not want these classes.
Boys tell me it is a schedule they have in their dreams.
I will buy books for real classes, I’ll go to the library every day. Six boys have asked me out. Sara says no one has asked her out. She says, “How do you meet these people?”
I tell her the truth: I have no idea.
6. A Knock at Room 1273, Park Plaza Hotel, Nearly Midnight
“Are you ready to kill the monster?” Iftal leans forward, smiling, rubbing his hands. If people are scared of bridges, but every morning hundreds of people drive across bridges, then we too can do this thing.
I have taken notes on his talking. I believe what he says, about fear. It all sounds great. Why am I going to a psychotherapist, to talk, when there is this efficient workable way?
“We kill him!” Iftal says, grinning, like a kid. He stands up.
“Right now?” I say. I’ve been sitting on this hard formal rose sofa in the lobby of the Park Plaza Hotel with Iftal Yovel, Galit’s husband, for an hour. His degree is from Northwestern. Even I am calling it CBT now, cognitive behavioral therapy. He said it doesn’t matter about the head injuries, the trauma, that’s all okay. That isn’t really part of what we do.
Iftal says, There is no fear, only fear of fear. There is no such thing as claustrophobia.
“People think they have a thing, he says. It’s not a real thing. The tube can’t hurt you. The small spaces, you won’t die. You feel you will die. But you are just afraid of that feeling – which is a very uncomfortable feeling, granted. But you won’t die.”
It doesn’t matter, beaten, abandoned, tortured. When we were babies, 10,000 years ago, we were afraid if we were in a small space, in a crevice. Our heart rate went up. Our fear responses increased our chance of survival.
The mind is dumb. The body dumber. We are wired to freak out about high places, narrow places, small places, but this information is 10,000 years old, older. Iftal says small places can’t kill us. The mind-body just thinks this. We are smarter. We can create a gap.
He says, “Let’s go do it.”
“Right now?” I say. I was thinking I would just get the book he suggested. I do not stand up. This was just a talk. Wasn’t it?
“Yes. Yes. The MRI is tomorrow, yes, you are leaving? I think we can do it in one hour.”
This wasn’t our hour?” I make my hands flap around, to designate the space of the talking. I took notes. I wrote down the books he said to read. I will never read them.
He is nodding, waiting, smiling, rocking on his toes.
Maybe he doesn’t understand everything I say. I haven’t understood all of his words, our accents are different. I just go with it, like I do with people, faces, after a while it becomes clear who they are, what is said, or it doesn’t, and it doesn’t matter.
He said he tells his clients that if other people are doing it – driving over the bridges of Boston, scary, yes – in masses, we must use this – and there he hit his forehead with his palm – to override this – hitting the back of his head quickly with the same hand.
We get in the elevator.
“How are you in elevators?” he says.
I push 32. I’m thinking of Aristotle, and how the mind is in the heart. Maybe brain can’t trump heart. Maybe the heart is too weak to face down 100,000 years. Maybe the baby wins every time.
“Fine,” I say. The elevator whooshes up.
Where is Galit, the Princess of the Kingdom of Brain? Home with the twins. Where’s Brad? Who am I in Boston, this Heather meeting with a CBT researcher in the middle of the night in a hotel?
I do not recognize myself.
Fortunately, I am used to that.
“You will not need the Valium. I do not want you to take it. You have a great chance to finish off the monster tomorrow. I am so excited for you to not take it.” As we go in my hotel room, “We have to kill the monster,” Iftal says. “We kill him, and you are free! You have a chance. Any chance you have to kill him a little more, always take it. The Valium, it just makes it worse.”
I do not tell him: I will not do the tube without the Valium. At least a few safety crumbs.
“What is scary to you in here, this room?” Iftal says.
“You.”
I get in the closet.
“What will freak you out now?” he says through the closed door. I can feel his body leaning against the door.
I can’t believe I am sitting in the dark in a closet on the thirty-second floor. I can see in my mind’s eye the ironing board, and out in the city, the lit-up bridges, flanging out of Boston like electric cords.
He jangles the doorknob. “Do you see the monster?” he says. “Is he near?”
Yes, I say. I’m smiling.
“Are you laughing at him? That is good! That is good! See!”
This is the weirdest thing I have ever done in my entire life. I want to call my friends. I want Dave to see.
Iftal bangs on the door, hard. Then it is quiet.
The monster grows.
We do it again.
Again and again and again.
He screams. Kicks the door. I sit there, and stare at the monster, and he’s right. It grows smaller.
Nothing can scare me. It’s just weird.
“I am cured,” I say. “You must go home to Galit.”
Iftal looks like he has killed the monster himself. “You are cured,” he says. “No Valium needed.” He throws his hands over his head. He shakes my hand.
I’ll be using half Valium, half CBT.
Just to be on the safe side.
“Thank you,” I say.
“My wife was so upset. She was so upset. I had to help.” He bows, slightly, takes his coat, and I walk him to the door.
I lock the door, change into my sleeping shirt, brush my teeth, and put up my hair. I set the alarm, and call again to confirm my wake-up call.
I get under the covers, and breathe.
I wake up at 6:59, one minute before the alarm.
* * *
It’s our first college Saturday night. Sara Simko and I sat with a lonely-looking boy at lunch, and we invited him to watch the movie with us. We three are on Sara’s burgundy sleeping bag in the attic of Landes Hall. Sara wears an FSU necklace, an FSU watch, and all her folders are burgundy with gold Florida State University! She has scoliosis. She sits with a prim stiffness. Her brown hair is lacquered back into thick wings. Fans are blasting us with hot air. Around us, kids are sprawled on the floor, eating popcorn, draped on sheets, sofas, each other.
The movie is hard to follow. This is my real life. My first real life.
I’m in a red skirt I sewed out of a vintage pillowcase. I have on lipstick, my hair is brushed and silky, and I’m pretty. I sit on my hands because they sweat so much, but other than that, I can’t think of anything that is wrong. I look at the other kids in the room.
In the movie, two people are making love.
I saw Linda, my father’s wife, estranged, Linda the woman who beat the shit out of me, again today at the Spaghetti Station. Maybe it’s not her. I see her a lot. A lot of women look like her. I see her every day, at least once. I see her when I open the door to the public bathrooms. And I wonder if she is following me or if I am turning into my mother.
“Who is that, have we seen her before?” I say to Sara. She shoves the popcorn bowl – a plastic Tupperware thing from her set, she has a popper, too – towards Todd.
Sara is wincing.
The lovemaking woman is now in the living room, in Africa, and the lover man is riding off on a horse.
“Have we seen either of them before?” I mean, before the love scene.
“Shh, Heather. Yes, sweetie. That’s Meryl Streep. Meryl Streep. Same person. Whole movie, she’s the star.”
Sara whispers that she will tell me if it’s ever not Meryl Streep.
All the men wear hats.
Next Saturday, I have a boyfriend.
We have so much in common. He says his parents are crazy; I say, Mine too! He’s Catholic; me too. He is from New York. I am from Orlando. He is majoring in International Relations. I love to travel. He has written a poem. I tell him, I have written a novel, and I am working on a new one.
He says, “No way.”
Michael Mahon takes me to the Spaghetti Station. When I come back from the bathroom, he has moved to a new booth. Because I am newly cool, I do not ask him why. Because I am sexy and fun, I sit right next to him this time, I lean over, and kiss him.
He laughs, and says whoa.
I see we have different food than our food. Different plates.
I look around.
Michael Mahon, or someone who looks a lot like him, is setting down money. On our table. At my old booth.
Is walking out the door.
I run out – it’s Tennessee Street, the street I came in on, it seems like years ago I rode that bus! – but I don’t see him anywhere. The sidewalks are crawling with college students. In their uniform khakis and pastel polos and Miami Vice hair. Smelling of Stetson. I run through the herd.
Sunday, I do not leave my dorm room. I study for my Psychology test. And go to my experiment. Where I have to hold my hand in ice cold water until I can’t stand it anymore.
I last five seconds.
“Is that good?” I say. “How does it compare?”
The researcher says she can’t tell me anything about the experiment because that would ruin it. Her hair hangs in greasy
strings and she calls the next person. Michael.
There’s a million Michaels, it’s not him.
In the hall, I wait in line for my proof form.
“They use us like rats, it’s sick.”
“It’s totally illegal.”
I have to do four more experiments. Everyone has to do five.
Sara called me all day, she says, standing in my doorway. “Worried sick!” She fiddles with her FSU necklace, and I invite her in for water.
I was at my experiment.
Did you do the cold one?
I tell her yes.
Did you and Michael break up?
I tell her no. Maybe. I do not know.
And truly, I do not. He reminded me of Bruce Springsteen, I say.
But he was very non-Christian, Sara says.
I don’t say anything.
We sit on my bed. She rubs my back.
“Oh, sweetie,” she says. “We have to teach you to flirt better. And I want to just try eye shadow. Just let me try. We can wash it off. Right away. No one has to see!”
* * *
I’m changed back into my regular clothes at Harvard. For the tiniest moment, I was naked at Harvard.
“What’s the results?” I say.
“You pressed Same a lot,” Galit says. “I’ll know more after I run the numbers.”
“Will I get to know – ” I say. I’m not sure what to say. I am expecting her to hand me a report, handouts, graphs, charts. I am thinking she is going to sit down with me and go over all this at a table, and we will have Cokes. It will take hours. But when we are done, I will understand everything about how the brain works, what mine is doing, it will be as clear as a Discovery Channel special, friendly as a Nova. Useful as antidepressants, clever as pie.
Galit says I can write her with any questions, and the article will be out she hopes in a month, and she will e-mail me the citation.
And she drives me to the museum.
The whole way through Boston backstreets, I try to think of questions. I’m feeling so let down. I’m feeling like what was the point again? That I have forgotten what it is I came here to do. That I am missing the prize.
When I get out of her car, I thank her again for the ride. And I tell her to thank her husband, it was way too nice of him to come and help me.
“It’s the least I could do. And you were much less anxious, yes?”
“You can tell him, cured in one hour. I am a complete convert to CBT. Tell him it worked great. You don’t have to tell him I took a tiny quarter of the Valium.” I smile, and Galit laughs.
“You were very calm. Very different from yesterday.”
I walk across the park to the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum and while I am walking, I call Dave. I say, I did it. I did great. I definitely have it, for whatever that is worth! My brain doesn’t work. But, I made it through, I used the cognitive behavior skills, and a little Valium.
He says, “Are you still in Boston?”
There’s a scratchy silence.
I wonder if he remembers I had to decide to do the MRI again. When we talk on the phone at night, by morning he’s lost the data.
Every time.
Why am I the one who keeps forgetting?
“Can you believe I had a man in my room at midnight shaking my closet door, can you even believe I was awake at midnight? I think it is the weirdest thing I have ever done,” I say. I am not crying. I’m not sure if I am building a bridge for him or presenting a test.
“That’s right,” he says, long and slow, big aha. In a tone that sounds incredibly dense and simultaneously wise and caring. “I remember something about that.”
I press the red circle with the dot. Pretending it was a bad connection.
What I love about the museum is nothing is labeled. There are no name tags, no names to the faces, it’s how art and stuff exists in your own house. So it is easy to pretend the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum is my house. There are a few paper labels, stuck to the walls or furniture, and signs saying don’t sit here, don’t place any object here. But they say things like “Oil on canvas, purchased in 1922 from Venice.” And in this way they are more interesting to me than titles, the names of artists. Face after face, portrait by portrait, I move through the rooms. My legs are tired, my face is smiling, my bag is heavy, with my yoga-MRI suit, my journal, the remains of lunch. I sit in the courtyard. Nasturtium vines grow three stories high. I love courtyards, tile, fountains, light. I imagine this room in winter. I pretend this room is mine. And as I sit there, pretending to be Isabella Stewart Gardner, pretending I am her, I think about my constant need to find out what do I have and who am I? Am I trying too hard to see inside my brain? What is it I wanted Galit to tell me, exactly? Because I am a professor, do I believe vocabulary words and definitions are the same thing as knowledge, answers?
I breathe in the mossy dank courtyard smell. I look up into the rest of the house, the doors open on all the floors to this central chamber, this giant square tube of light that makes the center of the house.
Some women from England pass by, and I pretend I invited them for dinner.
A string quartet finishes, and the first floor fills with noisy people.
A man tells his wife everything that is written in the free brochure, nothing in the house can be moved, she acquired these things on shopping trips to Europe, after her husband died, as though he himself has always known this information. As though the brochure didn’t exist.
“You see, nothing here can be moved. That’s what she dictated in her will. So that vase, the vase in the courtyard, that’s tipped over? They can’t even pick it back up. The paintings that were stolen? When we go upstairs, you will see just the empty frames. Because they can’t do anything with them. That would be making a change. Everything has to stay exactly where it is. Forever.”
The woman nods.
I stand up from the damp cement steps, and step out of the courtyard, feels like a rainforest.
I think: this is alluring, this idea that nothing is moving, nothing is changed. People want there to be one house where everything stays exactly the same. Not to mention controlling chaos from the grave, that’s pretty appealing, too.
What did I want Galit to tell me?
Did I want to change the course of neurobiological research? Did I want the world to stop?
My claustrophobia is cured, perhaps, and I know, for sure, I have it and I can tell my doubtful friends I am Harvard-certified prosopagnosic, it’s almost as cool as having a degree from there, having been studied.
I think I wanted the whole Galit article devoted to me.
Is this what we all want? Our own experience enshrined in an article or in a museum so people can visit and know oh, this is what it is like to be you?
I wander through the rooms, see the empty frames where the stolen paintings were, the funny wrought-iron Venetian bed, all the old letters, the dusty chairs, and tiny paintings set on tables, at right angles by windows, back-to-back because she liked to sit and stare into the faces of these subjects, and she liked them lit that way.
By the time I am too hungry to look at any more of Isabella’s crazy rich wonderful weird collection, I know that there isn’t anything for Galit to tell me.
My brain’s responses are a sentence – maybe not even a sentence, maybe just a diamond or a circle – I would rather be a diamond, I guess – on a graph in her article.
The research isn’t about me.
None of it is about me.
It’s not even about prosopagnosia.
Prosopagnosia is only interesting because of what it tells about how the normal brain functions.
I think we all want someone to say: you are the single most fascinating of all the humans. We want to focus on you.
That’s what love is. We want to devote volumes to your case.
Flying home from Harvard, I try to conjure fear so I can practice my monster technique, but I am not afraid of flying.
I’m afraid of Dave not asking me about the trip, or asking questions that aren’t important to me. I’m afraid of not caring enough about what happened to him while I was gone.
I’m in the very back row, pressed into the window. I search around in my brain for the 100,000-year-old baby, but nothing, no discomfort. I feel like my brain has been dusted, cleaned out with one of those static electricity wipes.
Like the MRI blasted away a few layers of neurosis. Like we shined a flashlight in the crannies, and wiped.
I sip my seltzer, and close my eyes. I can’t tilt my seat back, so I sit up and doze, strapped into the hard little airplane chair.
I’m a girl steering a brain, flying through space, like a neuron, with a destination, and a heart, and I am still wondering. What do I know now?
Galit said what she is studying is this: there are two processes, face detection and face identification. They are definitely dissociated. Do they co-occur or do they follow each other in time?
Her theory is that face blind people process faces like normal people process objects. DPs don’t have the mechanism for making fine discrimination among faces.
She’ll send me the paper when it’s finished.
I want to ask her, will I be referred to by my initials, HS? That’s how I’ve seen it in the articles I have been reading. I always wonder who they are.
When I get home, I circle my house, trolling up and down the blocks, not wanting to go home. Driving past people. Do I know you? Do I know you?
Driving right through. What can be known.
Heather Sellers is completing a book of creative nonfiction titled Face First which includes “Tell Me Again Who Are You?” She is the author of the short story collection, Georgia Underwater (Sarabande Books, 2001). This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.