“Didn’t I tell you not to do that?”
But Lucinda was looking around. “It’s very … bohemian,” she said, like that was the nicest thing she could come up with.
“How did you get up here?” I demanded.
“Mr. Kim gave me the code.”
“You met Mr. Kim?”
She nodded, still looking around. “He kept calling me Martha Stewart.”
At that, I stifled a smile. Mr. Kim always had everybody’s number. I sighed. “That’s actually a great nickname for you.”
She considered that. Was she complimented or insulted?
Either way, I didn’t like seeing my worlds collide. “Don’t bother Mr. Kim, okay?” Mr. Kim, along with the whole Kim family, belonged to me.
But she wasn’t listening. “You live here?”
I could have lied, I guess. But maybe I was tired of lying. And it was hopeless anyway. She was here. It was what it was. “It’s temporary,” I said.
And then, with her trademark decisiveness, she pulled out her wallet, scanned down her credit cards, and took one out. “Take it,” she said.
“I don’t need it,” I said.
“Just take it,” she insisted. “Your dad will never know.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“This one gives you points,” she said, waving it at me.
“So?”
“So every time you use it, we’re making money.”
“That is not how that works.”
But she gave me a wink. “Just use it. I do all the bills, anyway. I’ll never tell.”
How dare she act like I needed her?
I never needed anyone. Ever. For anything.
And the reason that was true? The reason I never let myself do a very simple thing like need other people that the rest of humanity got to do all the time? That reason was standing right here in a hot-pink sweater.
I took hold of her shoulders and steered her toward the door. “I don’t need your help. And I don’t want you up here. And I’m changing the passcode. So go home, okay? And take your credit card with you.”
She didn’t fight me. She left without protest.
But it was only after I’d dead-bolted the door that I saw, on the table beside it, looking defiantly up at me … her credit card.
* * *
IT ONLY HIT me, really, after I’d gotten rid of her.
My entire life up until now had been a before. And now I was in the after.
I couldn’t see faces. Not even my own.
I was face-blind.
Maybe I’d stay that way, and maybe I wouldn’t. But one thing was certain. I would never be the same.
It was like suddenly finding myself on an alien planet. Even in the hospital, where caretaking was literally the job of every person I interacted with, people felt strange and foreign and vaguely unsafe. Either I was thinking about all the missing faces and working to avert my eyes, or I was staring at them, still disbelieving, or I was forgetting about my brain situation—and then looking up only to be startled by yet another faceless face.
To be clear, I knew intellectually that the faces were still there. If I looked carefully, I could see the individual parts. What I couldn’t do was glance at a face and know in an instant exactly who that was and remember everything I’d ever learned about that person. Or in the case of strangers: know immediately that I didn’t know.
This new way of being was a conscious process of deduction. There was nothing effortless about it.
Now, most of the time, rather than trying, I just let everybody be a blur.
My conscious mind understood what had happened. The FFG wasn’t working. Got it. Just a little brain snafu. Not reality. Just a glitch in my system.
But my subconscious mind—the one that wasn’t too used to having to rethink reality—was deeply, profoundly freaked out.
I could understand in theory that I was face-blind.
But in practice? It made no sense at all.
I learned pretty quick from obsessive research on the internet that two percent of the world’s population has face blindness. So I definitely wasn’t alone. Out of 8 billion people in the world—and I got out the calculator for this—there were 160 million other people who were face-blind. Besides me. That figure was larger than the population of Russia. We could start our own country and compete in the Olympics.
Except a lot of them, it turned out, didn’t know they were face-blind.
I had a kind of face blindness known as acquired. The kind people procured somewhere along the way—strokes, head injuries, brain surgery. Most people with acquired face blindness know they have it. If you’ve always been able to recognize faces and then suddenly you can’t anymore … you notice that.