Head Case (10 page)

“Hemineglect,” I parrot.

“You don't recognize things on your left side. You
see
them, but your brain ignores them, or it takes longer for your brain to process them. You favor things, people, on your right side.”

“OK,” I say, lamely. I am right-handed; that's about all that I can vouch for.

“Stand up. We're going to do an experiment.”

I jump off of the examining table, and Dr. Z stands up and approaches me. He is standing in front of me, a few inches away.

“OK,” he says, stepping to my side. “What side am I on now?”

I twitch my fingers on the side of my body that he's standing closest to and mime writing my name.

“Right?”

“Yes, right. OK, how ya feeling?”

“OK.”

“So.”

He takes one long, swaggering step to the other side of my body. My stomach flip-flops.

“And now?”

“Oh, yeah. Don't do that,” I snap reflexively.

Surprised by my own reaction, I smile apologetically. He laughs.

“See?”

I nod.

“This makes you uncomfortable.”

I nod again, slowly. I'm becoming increasingly annoyed with this new game, which only makes Dr. Z more gleeful.

“Yeah, this maybe makes you anxious?”

I look down at the floor.

“My stomach feels queasy.”

“Exactly!” Dr. Z nods enthusiastically. “Sooooo…” He swoops back over to my right, and I ease up instantly. “We have to exercise that left side of yours.”

When I apply this information retroactively to reframe my day-to-day life, it fits so well into my experience that I'm surprised that I've never considered it. I often feel crowded or anxious, and because of that I have tended to think of myself as difficult or antisocial. Since I am not conscious of which is my left or right side, it never occurred to me until now that I'm more often uncomfortable when approached from the left, especially by strangers. I always considered my sensation of queasiness a symptom of my anxiety; I figured that my stomach was flip-flopping because I was nervous, not knowing until now that my disorientation is rooted in a physical condition. Until Dr. Z's experiment I never realized how much the churning in my stomach feels like motion sickness.

I now know that the queasy feeling in my stomach when a vehicle whizzes toward me or past me at an incalculable speed should not be dismissed. Its origins are rooted in both a physical manifestation of my weakened perception and the reality that a car is headed in my direction at an incalculable speed, which also induces anxiety.

Each time I sit in Dr. Z's waiting room for weekly sessions that summer before leaving for grad school, I bring the same book, an oral history of the postpunk movement. He tells me that my craving for repetitive four-chord structure is linked to the weakness in my right parietal. I need to strengthen my brain, not coddle it. This means moving all of the folders on my computer to my left side, sitting to the right of the professor in my grad school workshops, anything to force my right brain to process information coming from my left side. He prescribes highly structured classical music and opera in foreign languages, preferably non-Germanic because it is less like English, to be listened to through the left headphone only. I try, but it is like tightening my head in a vise; it makes every muscle in my body tighten in resistance, which must be the point.

*   *   *

“Do you remember learning to tie your shoes?” my mother asks.

“No, I know it was late. How old was I?”

“I don't know, I just remember that we kept having to buy you Velcro shoes because you couldn't get the hang of tying them.”

I laugh. In my memory, I had Velcro shoes because I
liked
Velcro shoes, but I realize that she's right. I liked them not just for the sound of the Velcro ripping but because they fastened without laces. Tying one's shoes really is a complex process, if you stop to think about it—all of the places that your fingers have to go, when to release the knot, when to loop; it's a deft bit of handiwork.

“We kept showing you, kept teaching you little tricks, but it wouldn't stick.”

“Well, eventually I got the hang of it,” I say.

“Yes, you know how to tie your shoes now. Right? Do you know how to tie your shoes now?” my mother asks.

“Yes, Mom, I know how to tie my shoes.” Then, while I'm on the phone with her, I examine my shoe collection. Pink ballet flats, black zip-up boots with wooden heels, dark red wedges, slip-on sneakers. “Oh my God, I don't even own any shoes with laces.” I rack my brain and remember a pair of rubber-soled boots with laces that I left at home in Portland because they were too warm to bring to California. OK, one pair. Good.

“You need to go to a shoe store to make sure that you can still tie shoes,” Mom says.

“Mom, obviously I know how to tie my shoes. I just … it would seem that I still prefer not to.”

“And then there's the grocery store. The vegetables are always to the left or right, and the dairy is always in the back because everyone needs milk and they want to make you walk through the whole store.”

I pause. “This is a mystifying conversation,” I say.

She sighs. “I know, I know, but how many grocery stores have you been in in your life?”

“Well, that's sort of the point, isn't it?”

“We've never really talked about this before, have we?” she asks.

“This is what I worry about,” she says, and I feel rotten. “I've seen you; I know you have this much trouble in a grocery store. But then let's go to the next step: there's a box store. And then bigger than that: there's the mall. And then after that there's downtown, there's figuring out the bus and the streets and where to get off and once you're off how to figure out which way you're headed, and then, after all that, let's say you have a job interview.”

“I know.”

She's referring to my recent search for a job in Portland before I learned I had been accepted to grad school. I was late to or completely missed several interviews, and when I did show up I was a wreck, sweaty and anxious, already worried about the trip home. Eventually, my parents began picking me up and dropping me off for job interviews. I am unemployed and being chauffeured around by my parents. I have begun to wonder why I went to college at all. My mother continues, “And then there's bigger cities…”

“And backpacking through Europe,” I say.

This sounds snide, which is not what I meant, so I try to explain: “Joe just got back from Europe; people backpack through Europe by themselves. This is, like, a thing that people do. They do it in books all the time. I've always wanted to do that.”

My mom says, “I just think … even if you went with someone, you'd just be so confused and dragged around by people that I don't think you'd even enjoy it.”

When I was a child and my father still had the job in public relations, we traded houses with families in other countries several times. We put up a listing for our house, in Berwyn, a suburb of Philadelphia, with a description that included the number of our bedrooms and bathrooms and cars and pets, and if someone from Paris or Barcelona who was also listed in the book of listings wanted to swap houses with us for a month, they would send us a letter. That was how we went to Europe. I was a child then and not expected to do anything other than tag along. Now, as an adult, I am dead weight.

If I'm going on a road trip, I print out the directions from a map site in list form, so that I can read them to the driver instead of looking at a map. To my credit, I am also an excellent playlist maker and snack provider. And I never ask if we are there yet.

“Do you remember,” I ask my mother, “did I seem this afraid of crossing the street before? It's getting so I'm getting confused and I can't remember straight.”

“Well, if other kids wanted candy, they would just run across the street to the candy store,” she says. “But you always wanted to wait, to go with someone else. And when we crossed streets, you always stayed close. I didn't think anything of it; I figured if you wanted to wait to cross the street with me, well, that was fine. But you were the first. Maybe if I had Carly or Marni to compare you to, and they were crossing streets on their own and you weren't, maybe then I would have been worried. And then when you got older, you learned to hide it; you just crossed when all your friends crossed, and you learned to hide it from yourself as well.”

“All that happens is that you're more cautious than other people when you cross the street,” one of my friends later weighs in, and I nod. But I'm thinking,
That's all that happens to you
. I pause, I frown, I hesitate, I pause again, I wait, maybe put a foot out, and eventually I cross. I'm striking a terrifying bargain between the moving object (a car), and a fixed object (myself). I can't really say what I thought of this before the diagnosis because I didn't know that there was anything to think about it. When I did get down on myself for being so cautious, it fell under the umbrella of being a generally anxious person. It hadn't occurred to me that I might be anxious because I was processing information differently from the way other people process it; I didn't think about processing information at all. The generally anxious person crosses the street to get to the other side, just as the person with the neurological condition or the blind person does. Like the crossing chicken, I thought “why” was beside the point. At the time, thinking about crossing seemed to be the problem itself, rather than a step toward a solution.

*   *   *

Dr. Volt wants my father to have an MRI too. Everyone—Volt, my father, my mother, my sisters, me—is certain my father will have a black hole like mine on his MRI. It's the only explanation as to why my father and I are both terrible at math, horrible with directions, and unable to keep track of time. We are not allowed to partner off on errands together, lest my mother or my sister Carly be sent in to retrieve us when we become lost or forget why we even set out on the road to begin with.

My mom and I are seated across from each other in a wooden booth in a coffee shop down the street from Nell's office. Mom has just picked me up from my latest neurofeedback appointment with Nell, and now we're waiting together for my father to call from Dr. Volt's office with the results of his MRI. If he has a hole in his brain as well, it may prove that a genetic link is the cause of the atrophy. However, these holes with cranial fluid in the brain are more common than most people realize, though not usually as large as mine. If my father also has a hole in his brain, the next step will be to call in my sisters for scans. Dr. Volt has urged us to get in touch with relatives on my father's side who may be willing to have an MRI, but most of my father's side of the family are Orthodox Jews who don't speak to us.

One of my fondest memories of hanging out with my father is when he picked me up from my job selling books at the Borders in the newly opened Bridgeport Village, a ritzy mall in the suburbs. It's the only open-air mall in Portland, where it rains nine months out of the year, but a little rain never got in the way of anyone's lust for Egyptian linen or sea-salt scrubs.

That day, my father stepped out of his car, surveyed the landscape of lunching ladies and manicured teenagers with armfuls of shopping bags, and proclaimed in his thick New York accent, “All of these people deserve to have hot molten lava poured down their throats.” I loved him for saying loudly and succinctly what all of us working there spent all day thinking to ourselves.

It was not as much fun, however, when I brought home my first boyfriend and my father looked him over and quickly labeled him “mediocre.” Or when he tells me that I don't really need that bowl of ice cream. The man has no filter and no interest in attaining one. He also has three daughters and one wife, who volley back, or cry, or yell, or sulk, or stomp away to their respective rooms. While our reactions vary, his do not. “Can't you take a joke?” he says. Sometimes we can, sometimes we can't. Humor is our best defense, to deflect the joke back at him or draw attention to another relative. When I'm the target, I'll shoot back a joke about Marni's nipple rings getting stuck in her sweater. This is how we show love, and how we survive.

I anxiously play with the straw in my iced coffee. My mom is gripping her cell phone. “If he doesn't … if it comes up clean, well, then, I guess I just married an asshole.”

The phone rings. There is a short burst of chatter, ending with my mother asking my father, “Well, what now?” She snaps the phone shut. “No hole. Clean.” She is clearly disappointed. Shock is becoming a familiar sensation rooted in my stomach. It's official. I am the only one with this condition. I hadn't realized how much I had been counting on my father's company, partially resenting sharing this with him and also grateful for a physical validation of our link.

When my father is overtaken by dark periods of depression, he always turns to me and intones, “You know how it is.” He has witnessed my own dark periods. When complicated theories come easily to me, I know it is his gift that I am using. I was certain that we shared this too—that the vague sense that he and I were more strongly linked, for better or for worse, than he and my other sisters, would be brought to light on the stark, undeniable film of an MRI.

When we get home, my dad tells me that Dr. Volt asked him if he had any difficulties telling time. “I explained to him that time is merely a construct. That's Hegel,” he says, gleefully.

Ever since I can remember, when either of my sisters or I have complained about doing the dishes or other chores, my father will intone, “Aristotle says, ‘There is no justice in the family.'” I probably wasn't even ten yet when my father first asked me whether a tree falling in a forest makes a sound if no one is around to witness it. I am still learning how to answer him.