Holding Up the Universe (24 page)

October first is a Tuesday. I play sick and hide the keys to the Land Rover so Marcus can't take it to school. When a tall boy with shaggy hair comes into my room and starts yelling at me, I figure it's him. “I know you've got the keys, you faker.”

I cough loudly.

He starts digging through my shit—bookshelves, drawers, closet. He's picking my jeans up off the floor and searching the pockets.

I hack away like I've got tuberculosis until a woman appears at the door and wants to know what in the Great Fanny Adams is going on.

In answer, I cough myself ragged, which makes her point to the door and tell the tall/shaggy boy to get the hell downstairs. NOW. The woman says, “Do you need anything before we go?”

“I'll be okay.” I don't actually mean to, but I sound like a martyr. I cough a little more.

And then she's gone, and I lie still, listening to the leaving sounds that are happening downstairs.

I hear the front door slam, and I lie there another minute. I hear a car engine kick in, and then I'm up and at the window, counting the bodies down below. The woman climbs into one car with this little kid, and a man with thick dark hair gets in another car with the tall/shaggy boy. I watch them pull away and turn in opposite directions at the end of the block, first one and then the other. Like that, I fly into motion. I'm grabbing the keys from beneath the mattress, pulling on clothes, running down the stairs, shoving a bagel in my mouth, jumping in the Land Rover, and heading across town to Libby's.

Libby's neighborhood is street after street of these new houses that look identical, one after the other. There's nothing to distinguish her house from the rest of them except for the girl who lives there. She's waiting for me on the curb, wearing this purple dress, and it reminds me of something an actual
woman
would wear, tucked here, loose there, fitted there. Her hair is down and lit up by the sun.

I can see beauty. The more symmetrical the face, the more average the person looks to me because there's this
sameness
to them, even if other people think they're hot. A person has to have something unique about them. Libby's face is symmetrical, but her beauty has nothing to do with sameness. I recognize it as she swings the door open and climbs into the car. She's graceful, especially for someone so large. She kind of swoops in like Tarzan, kicks off her shoes, and wiggles her toes. Her toenails are purple too.

I say, “You look great.”

She cocks her head at me. “Are you flirting with me, Jack Masselin?”

“I'm just stating the obvious.”

She pulls her hair off her neck, and I want to say
Don't do that. You'll disappear before my eyes.
But then you can tell she rethinks it—maybe she remembers that I've told her this before—and lets it fall back around her shoulders.

Then she hands me something wrapped in Christmas paper and about fifty bows. “Happy birthday. If you can't tell, I like Christmas paper best.”

“You didn't have to do anything.”

“I wanted to. Open it.”

I tear off the wrapping and the bows go flying. She picks one up and sticks it to her hair, right over her left ear. She picks up another and sticks it to the knee of my jeans. I pick one up and stick it to the end of my nose and then stick one on the end of her nose.

She says from behind the bow, “Open, please.”

It's a book.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
by Shirley Jackson. At first, I'm thrown. I wonder if she knows. She must know I was the one who sent this to her at the hospital. I look at her, but she's got this wide, open smile on her face, and I can see that no, she doesn't know.

I flip through the book. It's not the same copy I sent her years ago, but it's still well worn and well read.

“I wasn't sure what to get you because what do you get the boy who has everything, including face blindness? So I thought I'd get you something I love. It's my favorite book. You don't have to read it, but the girl, Mary Katherine—Merricat, they call her—she reminds me of, uh, me, I guess. And…I don't know. I thought you might relate to her too.”

“I'll read it.” I smile at her. “Thank you.”

She smiles at me. “You're welcome.”

And we're having what feels like a moment. Suddenly, the air isn't just filled with bows; it's filled with some sort of electric current that links her seat to mine.

She does the impossible—slices through the current by speaking first. “So are you ready for this?”

“As I'll ever be.”

At first I'm amped. I talk her ear off, telling her about every online test I've taken and this guy with prosopagnosia named Bill Choisser who lives in San Francisco and is an old bearded dude who wrote a book about face blindness, which he's posted on the Internet for all to read. All about the impact being face-blind has on school, work, relationships, life.

But the closer we get to Bloomington, the quieter I get. I can feel the air going out of me.
What am I going to find out? Will Dr. Amber Klein be able to help me? Should I be going to New Hampshire instead to see Brad Duchaine? What if this whole trip is a waste of time? What if they tell me I've got some serious illness? What if I find out it isn't face blindness, but cancer of the brain?

“I can almost
feel
you thinking right now.”

I look at her.

“Did you forget I was in the car with you?”

I'm so deep in the forest of my mind that yeah, I almost did.

“Sorry.”

We pass a sign:
BLOOMINGTON…
10
MILES.
I feel my stomach drop and land somewhere around the gas pedal.

“Does this thing have a radio?”

“Does it have a radio. What do you think, woman? Christ almighty.” I hit a button and music fills the Land Rover, taking up all the space around us. I try to concentrate on the words, on the melody, but then she starts searching through songs, and this feels like my brain—fragments of words, fragments of melodies, fragments of moments, fragments of things.

Finally, she finds a song she likes, and then she
cranks
it.

“
Disco?
Are you fucking kidding me?” I reach for the radio, but she smacks my hand away. I reach around her hand, and she smacks it again, and then it's not about turning off the music, it's about touching her, and our hands are flirting. Finally, she grabs my fingers and holds on to them. And that electric current is sparking out of my thumb, my pinky, and the fingers in between. I cough because
What the fuck is happening?
I say to the car, “I'm so sorry this had to happen to you, baby. I'm sorry you ever had to hear this. I'm sorry I ever had to hear this. I'm sorry I'm still hearing it.”

Libby hollers, “What? I can't hear you over my own singing and this amazing beat!”

Now she's singing as loud as she can AND dancing. She lets go of my hand and yells, “Spontaneous dance party!” and goes on singing, but now she's dancing bigger and broader, like she's onstage somewhere.

“I love to love, but my baby just loves to dance, he wants to dance, he loves to dance, he's got to dance.”

“What the f—?”

“The minute the band begins to swing it, he's on his feet to dig it, and dance the night away. Stop! I'm spinning like a top, we'll dance until we drop…”

It's pretty much the corniest song I've ever heard, but Libby is
into
it. She's grooving all over the seat, shaking her shoulders, shimmying toward me and away. She winks at me and belts it out louder, and she's a terrible singer. So I start singing along with her, kind of self-defensively.

And then we're dancing in unison—heads bobbing to the right, to the left, shoulders forward, shoulders back. Now we're yelling the words, and I'm pounding on the steering wheel, and she's got her arms in the air, and it's the best song I've ever heard, and now I'm smiling at her.

And she's smiling at me.

And it's a moment.

A definite moment.

She says, “Watch the road, Casanova.” But she says it in this soft voice that I've never heard her use before. “Just remember, whatever we learn today, these tests don't change anything.”

I like the way she says
we,
as if she's in this with me.

“You're still Jack Masselin. You're still a pain in the ass. You're still you.”

I am having a moment with Jack Masselin. If you'd asked me a couple of weeks ago or even two days ago if I could imagine such a thing, I would have laughed until I laughed the breath right out of me. This is the thing about life outside the house, though: you never know what might happen.

I think he feels it too, but I'm not sure.

He'd better feel it too.

It had better not just be me over here, by myself, on my own, having a moment
over
him as opposed to
with
him.

I act like
La la la, no big deal, let's go to Bloomington, let's see if you're really face-blind.
But inside my chest, my heart is clenching and unclenching and skipping beats and fluttering like it's about to burst its way out of there and fly around this car. I fix a smile on my face and stare out the window and think,
Oh, heart, you traitor.

The lab is busy. An assistant leads us to Dr. Amber Klein (light brown hair, sharp cheekbones, glasses). She is dressed all in black, her sleeves rolled over her elbows, and her hair swept up in a kind of no-nonsense way. She's probably around forty. The lab is also black, floors, walls, ceiling. The room is divided into cubicles by curtains—black, of course—and it feels like we've wandered onto the set of a music video. Libby wears purple and I'm in green, and we stand out like beacons.

Dr. Klein offers us chairs behind one of the black curtains, so it's as if we're enclosed in a small room. She boots up her laptop and says, “I understand you need to be home by late afternoon?” She's wearing an actual watch, and she checks it now: 9:54 a.m.

“There's a bit of a curfew situation.” I smile at Libby and she smiles at me. She's still wearing the bow over her left ear, but her smile reminds me of the one my mom wore during Dad's chemo appointments. Like she's determined to make the most of things for the sake of him/me, when she knows how hopeless it really is.

“I'm going to run you through a series of tests.” Dr. Klein sits down and starts clicking away at the keyboard.

Libby says to me, “I'm actually going to wait outside. I saw a Starbucks nearby. Just text me when you're done.” She takes my phone and types her number in. When she hands it back, I feel this weird panic.

She hesitates over my shoulder. “Unless…I mean, I can stay…” But I can tell that she doesn't want to stay, and I wonder if maybe it's the whole doctor/brain setting that's bugging her.

“Nah, I'm good.”

I watch her go, hair swinging.

Dr. Klein says, “Does anyone in your family have prosopagnosia?”

“I'm not sure. Why?”

“Face blindness is often genetic, but there are three categories of prosopagnosia: acquired, developmental, and congenital. It can also be a symptom of other disorders, such as autism. Did you ever experience a fall or a childhood illness of the brain?”

“I fell off the roof when I was six.”

“Did you hit your head?”

“Could something like that cause face blindness?”

“Yes. It's not as common as developmental prosopagnosia, but it's possible.”

“I banged it pretty hard. I had to have stitches.” Instinctively, I reach for the thin raised line along my scalp.

She types away, and as she does, it hits me:
This woman is going to dig around in your brain. You can't hide from her.

She wants to know what kind of tests were done after I fell, and then she wants to know if I was able to recognize faces before the age of six.

The honest answer is
I don't know.
Yeah, I had every test imaginable to see what damage had been done to my brain. But did I know people by their faces back then? I'm not sure.

She says, “Certainly your parents would have noticed a difference if you suddenly had trouble recognizing everyone.”

“I think I've always been good at compensating and covering up. I mean, even back then. Maybe I could recognize people before, but I was so young…”

“Did your parents notice behavioral changes?”

“My mom said they expected me to become this cautious kid, but I got louder. She says that's when she started going gray.”

I give her a smile, but she's busy typing. I sit there looking around, telling myself to
man up, son, stop feeling nervous.
In a minute, she folds her hands in her lap and begins talking. “I'm not sure how much research you've done, Jack, but one of the earliest documented cases of prosopagnosia dates from 1883…Lewis Carroll was rumored to be prosopagnosic. The next time you read
Alice in Wonderland,
you might see the clues…I'm sure you're familiar with identifiers. As you know, hairstyle and clothing can change on a daily basis. We've met a lady who identifies people by their wedding rings because this is an identifier that rarely changes…”

She's about to see everything you're hiding.

Suddenly, I feel naked. I actually have to look down at myself to make sure I'm still wearing clothes.

The first test is famous faces. This is similar to one I took online—photos of celebrities with their hair and ears removed. Dr. Klein says, “Okay, Jack. The clock isn't ticking here, so feel free to take as much time as you need.”

She turns the laptop around so that I can use it. A face appears on the screen. It's just an oval with eyes, a nose, a mouth. If I look at it long enough, it doesn't look like a face at all, but a planet pocked by craters and shadows. One by one, I type in the names, but to be honest I'm making shit up.

When I finish, we go right into the next test. Dr. Klein says, “The system that processes reading emotions on a face is separate from the system that reads features. Can you typically tell if a person is angry or sad or happy?”

“Almost always. I can't recognize faces, but I can read them.”

“That's because there is a visual processing system that exists only for face recognition, and specifically only human faces. Your dog or your cat is actually identified by your brain as an object. The configural processor is what allows people to see the face as a whole and not just its individual parts.”

This test is about identifying emotions. I want to think I nail every one of the answers, but I actually don't have a clue.

Next is a series of upside-down faces. I'm supposed to match them to the right-side-up faces, but I can't. I know I can't.

The more defeated I feel, though, the more energized Dr. Klein appears. She leans over the laptop. “Humans who have no problem recognizing faces are very bad at identifying upside-down ones because once you turn that image upside down, you can no longer use the configural processing strategy to recognize that face. So you start using a feature-by-feature strategy instead, which is how we identify objects. It's comparable to how you are with regular faces because the human processor only works with upright images. Unlike monkeys, who are adept at recognizing other monkeys, no matter the orientation.”

The thing I take from this is
Even monkeys recognize each other.

“Now we're going to test your ability with object recognition. This way, we can know it's strictly a face recognition problem and that it doesn't extend to objects.”

I sit there matching houses, cars, guns, landscapes, animals, and suddenly I'm thinking,
What if I get these mixed up too, all these things I've never had trouble identifying? What if I only thought I recognized a cat, a dog, a house, a car, but I find out I don't know them any better than faces?
I sit back for a minute and close my eyes, mostly because I want to get away—from this computer, this lab, this campus, my own head.

Dr. Klein says, “I want you to remember that everyone gets some right and some wrong. It's how the test was designed.”

Which doesn't make me feel any better. But I open my eyes. I go on.

I feel even worse with the next one, the Bald Women test, which is photo after photo of regular, non-celebrity females with the hair and ears missing once again. I'm supposed to hit a button if I see one that looks different, but they all look the same to me so I don't even bother trying—I just hit Same over and over.

The last test reminds me of an eye exam. I lean on the chin rest and press my forehead against this contraption that looks like a mask. Dr. Klein wants me to study the computer screen, where there's a small camera pointed at my pupils. This, according to her, will record my method of processing a face.

“Normal perceivers go for the internal features of the face and use a triangular sequence that moves between the eyes, the nose, and the mouth. Prosopagnosics, on the other hand, start with the external features, such as the ears and the hair. They usually avoid the eye region.”

This sounds about right. And then I wonder what Libby is doing and where she is.