Hello Stranger(17)

Some of them asked you to look at two pictures and decide if they were the same person or a different person. Some of them asked you to study a set of faces and then find those people later in groups. Some of them showed you famous people with their hair removed. They specifically did not ask if you could name the person—because recalling names is a different brain system. They asked only if you could recognize them.

Could I recognize them?

I could not.

It was all—and I mean this in the fullest sense of the word—nonsense.

From celebrities to presidents to pop icons to Oscar winners, all the faces in all the tests looked totally indistinguishable. I couldn’t tell the difference between Jennifer Aniston and Meryl Streep. I couldn’t tell Sandra Bullock from Jennifer Lopez. It was like looking at pickup-stick piles of facial features. I could tell that these people had faces. I could see the pieces of the faces. I just couldn’t tell what the faces looked like when you put the pieces together.

That feeling you get when you recognize somebody? That little pop of recognition? I looked at hundreds of faces that day, and I never felt it once.

By the end of the fifth test, I was in tears.

“That’s enough for today, choonks,” Dr. Nicole said, putting her arm around me for a side hug.

“Did you just call me chunks?” I asked. What on earth could that mean?

“Choonks,” she corrected. “It means sweetheart in Trinidad.”

That felt really good for a second. I liked being a sweetheart.

But then I started crying again.

She squeezed my shoulders tighter. “I know it’s a lot.”

“The thing is…” I said, really giving into the crying now. “The thing is … I just don’t know what’s going to happen to me.”

“We’re not going to worry about the future,” she said. “We’re going to focus on the here and now. You’re healing great. You’ve taken care of your cerebrovascular issue. You’ve done the hard part.”

She was patting my back now.

My thoughts were churning like a cement mixer. “What if,” I said, voicing my worst fear, “I get stuck like this?”

That’s when Dr. Nicole shifted her position to face me. I looked down at my blanket. “When I hear you say unproductive things,” she said then, “I’m going to call your attention to them and challenge them.”

“Did I say an unproductive thing?” I asked.

She nodded.

“What did I say?”

“Here’s a hypothetical question,” she said next. “If there’s a five percent chance something bad will happen, and a ninety-five percent chance that things will be fine, which one is more likely?”

Was this a trick question? “That things will be fine?”

She nodded. “I want you to work on that.”

“Work on what?”

“On which of your thoughts you’re going to choose to indulge in.”

“Is this about my worrying I’ll get stuck like this?”

She nodded again. “Our thoughts create our emotions. So if you fixate on your worst-case scenario, you’ll make things harder for yourself.”

“You want me not to fixate on the worst-case scenario?”

“I want you to start practicing the art of self-encouragement.”

“So when I catch myself worrying, I should try to convince myself that things are going to be fine?”

“That’s one way to do it.”

“But what if I don’t believe it?”

“Then keep arguing.”

I was supposed to argue myself into feeling optimistic? “I’ve never been great at optimism,” I said.

“That’s what the arguing is for.”

“I’m not very good at arguing, either.”

“Maybe this is a chance to get better.”

But I’d learned long ago that arguing didn’t get you very far. “Can you give me a hint?”

“Try to step back and look at the big picture,” Dr. Nicole said. “That’s where you can see it more clearly.”

“See what?”

“That no matter what happens, you will find a way to be okay—whether your prosopagnosia is temporary or permanent.”

“My proso…” I asked, giving up on the word halfway through. “What’s that?”

“That’s the condition you have right now,” Dr. Nicole said, “based on these test scores.” Then she handed me a diagnosis: “Acquired apperceptive prosopagnosia.”

I waited for those syllables to make sense. But they didn’t.

So she said it again. “Acquired apperceptive prosopagnosia.” Then she added: “Also known as face blindness.”





Five


AND AFTER ALL that, to add massive insult to once-in-a-lifetime injury, who should I run into in the elevator of my building on the very morning I came home?

You guessed it.

The one-night-stand guy. The Weasel.

Fresh back from the hospital, I had walked in slow motion through the lobby of my building, holding my breath as faceless people wandered blithely around me.

I kept my eyes to the carpet, stepped gingerly through the elevator doors, and pressed the button to the top floor—my hair smelling of hospital shampoo and gathered in a careful, stitches-covering ponytail. I was trying with all my might not to accidentally knock that cork in my skull loose while also holding back a tsunami of life-altering realizations about the week I’d just been through … just as the Weasel himself catapulted through the closing doors and tossed his arms up in victory as he cleared them at the last second.