WHEN I OPENED the bathroom door, moving in slo-mo with the shock, I kept my eyes pointed toward the floor, which felt like the safest place. I got as far as the threshold before slowing to a stop.
“Sadie?” Dr. Nicole asked.
“I can’t see my own face,” I said then, a little breathless. “I just checked in the mirror, and it’s not there. I’m faceless.”
But Dr. Nicole wasn’t giving in to my drama. “You’re not faceless,” she said, steering me gently by the shoulders back to bed, “you just have edema.”
I wanted to be practical about it. Matter-of-fact. I wanted to fully understand that this was just a little brain glitch.
But there was nothing matter-of-fact about it.
I walked away from that mirror feeling … lonely.
No matter how alone you ever are in life, you always have yourself, right? You always have that goofy, imperfect face that forgets to take off its mascara before bed and wakes up with raccoon eyes. That one crooked lower tooth that the orthodontist never could manhandle into place. Those ears that stick out a little too far. Those lines on either side of your smile that always look like parentheses. That slight dimple at your chin that’s just like your mom’s.
Of course those aren’t the only things that make you you.
You are also your whole life story. And your sense of humor. And your homemade doughnut recipe. And your love for ghost stories. And the way you savor ocean breezes. And the appreciation you have for how the colors pink and orange go together.
You’re not just your face, is what I mean.
But man, it sure is a big part of you.
Like your shadow. So faithfully and constantly with you, you don’t even notice it.
It’s just always there. But then one day it’s gone.
Except it’s not just the shadow that’s gone. It’s the person making the shadow.
You. You’re gone.
And the idea that anything could just disappear at any moment is something you suddenly understand in a whole new way. The way I did for a long while after my mother died.
“It’s like I’m not here,” I said to Dr. Nicole, my throat getting thick. “It’s like I disappeared.”
“You’re right here,” she said, taking my hands and squeezing them before holding them up to show me. “You know these hands, right?”
I nodded.
“Here you are,” she said. “You haven’t gone anywhere.” Then she gave me a hug and said, “But let’s not look in the mirror again for a while.”
She wanted to get down to business. She was organizing some tests for me to take on her laptop. While I waited, a random thought occurred to me: Peanut.
“This doesn’t apply to animals, right?” I asked.
“What?” Dr. Nicole asked.
“I’m suddenly worried that when I get home, I won’t be able to see my dog.”
“You’ll definitely be able to see your dog.”
“His face, I mean,” I said. “I need that face. It’s my primary mood-lifter.”
“I understand,” Dr. Nicole said, attention still mostly on her work.
“This face thingy’s only for human faces, right?”
At that, she paused. “Mostly,” she said, “yes.”
“Mostly?” I asked. “What does mostly mean?”
“There’s not a lot of research on animal faces. There has been some research on cars, though.”
“Cars?”
“Some people with this condition have trouble recognizing their cars. They can also have trouble with direction. But it hasn’t been studied enough to understand why or how.”
“So…” Somehow this felt like the worst news of all. “You can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to see my dog’s face?”
But she wasn’t going to let me descend into self-pity. “Guarantees are overrated.”
I must have been spoiling for a fight. “Guarantees are underrated.”
But she didn’t take the bait. “Let’s just take one question at a time.”
* * *
DR. NICOLE HAD queued up some facial recognition tests for me to take to see how bad it was. “This’ll give us a baseline,” she said.
The tests—the Glasgow Face Matching Test, the Cambridge Face Memory Test, along with a few others—were all online. She rotated the laptop toward me.
I folded my legs and geared up to begin. I was usually pretty good at tests. But I would not be acing these.
These tests were hard. Like if you made a kindergartner take the SAT.
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?”