Head Case (12 page)

I show him a picture of my MRI on his laptop, as if it's a party gag. It's been seven months since it was taken, but I still feel as if the image is superimposed on my face for all to see. He shows me an X-ray of his spine, twisted into a question mark as Minerva said. I ask him if it hurts, and he says quietly, “All the time, to varying degrees.”

On his laptop, he shows me a photo of a famous mathematician whose spine and limbs are so twisted up in angles that he resembles a Picasso portrait. “Charles Proteus Steinmetz. I pasted a copy of that photo on my math textbook cover in high school. Bent. I like to think of us as bent.”

He tells me the story of another famous mathematician who became so enamored of the story of Snow White and the evil queen that he eventually killed himself by eating an apple he laced with poison.

“Alan Turing, the British computer scientist, was found dead by his housekeeper, a half-eaten apple next to his bed. It was the fifties. Two years earlier, Turing was given the choice of jail for acts of homosexuality or a dose of chemically castrating hormones; he chose the hormones. He was obsessed with
Snow White
, the Disney cartoon, especially the wicked witch. The apple was laced with cyanide.”

We fall in love with fairy tales and mythologies; the ones we grow up with, the ones we inherit, and the ones we create for ourselves. Since my MRI, I have been turning the story of my childhood over and over in my head like a riddle. (
Why is a raven like a writing desk?
)

I'm now groping for my bearings in the same place where I have always lived: my body. Sometimes—for example, when I'm trying to navigate my way toward a destination for the first time—this new information about my neurological sense, or lack of sense, of perception clicks so sharply into focus that I feel dizzy, sick, physically overwhelmed by a fresh clarity about my own functioning. I am frightened by this new person who I have always been.

This diagnosis feels half of a gesture, a key without a lock to turn in it. My instinct is to act on this information, but how? I see different doctors or neuropsychologists, I write about it, sometimes I talk about it, trying to find the proper corresponding action to this new information about myself. I meet other people jiggling their own keys of insight into their own sets of mismatched locks, in therapy, at bars, in writing workshops. Sometimes we trade keys just to see if that will make any difference.

Charlie gestures back to the photo of the small pretzel-twisted man. “Steinmetz renamed himself at Ellis Island, when he was forced to flee Germany due to his socialist leanings. He chose his middle name, Proteus, from a nickname his German professors had given him, for the shape-shifting sea god.” We're leaning together over his laptop, our knees touching, then our hands.

Being seen for the first time by someone new, feeling desirable for the first time since my diagnosis, I want to see myself as he sees me, as he sees himself. I want my pain to make me special too, like the scientists he reveres or the writers I admire.

Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, the author of
Alice in Wonderland
, wrote himself into his story as the Dodo because he had a stutter that forced him to pronounce his own last name “Do-do-do-Dodgson.”

“I just need to move my arm,” Charlie announces awkwardly, first putting it on the couch behind me and then pulling me closer to him.

We make out for a while, then he says, “I'd like you to stay in my bed tonight.” He has this manner of speaking where everything sounds declarative.

I say, “OK.”

He says, “And I'd like you to take your dress off.”

In contrast to my aversion to touch, sex pulls me out of the world of language; it's an escape from the constant running narration in my head. Then the trouble becomes about vulnerability, rough terrain for anyone who learned early on that masking your weaknesses is the only way to avoid embarrassment. However, there are different kinds of vulnerability, and one kind can look and feel like another. Nakedness can be a way to feel seen without actually risking being known.

I laugh and say “OK” again and start to unzip my dress, which has a fire engine pattern on it, as if it was made out of old pajamas. His bed is a loft, and not long after I climb into it he has his hands tight around my neck. In the split second between that moment when I push his hands down and when he moves them gently to my hips and keeps them there, I remember that we are essentially strangers and of course this interaction is all based on assumptions. But I'm desperate to be seen, and I want us both to keep making and testing assumptions for now.

The next day is New Year's Eve. I'm heading back to Portland with the friend who originally dropped me off in Seattle, who's having a party at her house. Before I leave, I invite Charlie to meet me in Portland for the party that night. “I mean, you know, if you want. A bunch of my old college friends have driven up together from California; we'll probably end up at that party tonight.”

*   *   *

Until Rabbit started tap-dancing on top of the broken pay-phone booth outside the restaurant, I felt as if we were all pretty much under control. After the waiter came out of Montage, the late-night diner where had eaten, to tell him, “If you don't get down, I'm calling the cops on all of you for real this time,” we all got quiet, and those of us prone to introspection began to rethink the evening's events.

I could see how Charlie, not used to large gatherings of Johnston alums, must have felt overwhelmed. At the party, we had both drunk a potion that he brought down with him (Charlie said that it was weed distilled in Everclear, but it looked and tasted like swamp water), which had both heightened and muffled our senses. Now everything is loud and bright and smudged at the edges.

Frank, a former RA (we used the term
community coordinators
), clasps Charlie's hand and says:

“You know what, Charlie? You're all right. I like you. In fact, you know what I'm going to do for you? Just for you. Tonight, I grant you an honorary degree from the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies. I can do that, because my brother went there too and he's married to another Johnston alum and I even worked there. I have the power to grant honorary degrees. OK, so give me your hand.”

“Dude. You're already holding my hand.”

“Right. OK.”

The guy gives Charlie's hand a firm shake. “I now proclaim you honorary Johnston!” The rest of us whoop and yell “Buffalooooo!” and slap Charlie on the back as he smiles bashfully.

We count eight different years of Johnston alums between the twelve of us, and then there's this guy who drove all the way from Seattle to hang out with me on New Year's Eve. That he is the same guy whom I met ten years ago in the art room at Sacramento Country Day only proves that wheels are turning in a cosmic sense tonight.

Before we get kicked out of Montage, I'm playing with the candle on the table, passing my fingers over it and whisking them away until my friend Peter extinguishes it between his fingers, chirping, “All gone!” Someone at the other end of the table yells something about chocolate cake, and someone else gets into a tiff with one of the waiters, who turns around and yells, “Ice bath for table four!” Two bus boys, both carrying two pitchers each of ice water, arrive and pour our glasses. I lose track of Charlie. He's there across the table from me, and then he's not. I try his phone; no response.

I peek around outside the restaurant into the pouring rain, and I can't find him. I call his phone again; still no response. I can't remember where he parked the car. He left, really left. He's gone back to Seattle. It was all too much, too soon.
I
was too much, too soon. I can't cry around the New Year's revelers on the street, so I shuffle back to Montage.

“Charlie's gone,” I say to Peter, resigned. “I can't find him.”

“He probably just went to the bathroom.”

“It's been a while.”

“Let's not worry about it until we get back to the cars.”

“How the fuck are we getting home?”

“Jennie's driving. Don't worry, she hasn't been drinking.”

“Yeah, but there aren't enough cars.”

“Cole, it's fine. Logistics are taken care of. Here.”

He swipes a candle off a nearby table and places it in front of me. He waggles his fingers over the flame, almost touching it, calling out “whooo!” as if he's on a roller coaster until I start giggling.

We're waiting for the check when Charlie unceremoniously sits back down at the table.

“Hey.”

“Hey, I thought you headed back to Seattle!”

“Yeah. Sorry. That green stuff was too much for me. I had to sit in my car and listen to some Zappa to calm down.”

I go silent.

“I'm sorry, I was just really overwhelmed.”

“Here's what I'm not understanding.”

I hesitate.

“Who the fuck listens to Frank Zappa to calm down?”

We both crack up.

*   *   *

How and when do you decide that you can trust someone?

Here is what I deduce about Charlie: He's a good person, a slightly sad person; whatever happens, he won't really hurt me intentionally. He probably won't reject me; at least not tonight. In the physical pain that his back causes him, he too has an invisible experience rooted in his anatomy that colors everything he does.

I'm already engaging in the cognitive dissonance that is essential to falling in love. If I remember now that good people have been hurting good people unintentionally from the beginning of time, that that is essential to being in a relationship, that I've hurt and been hurt by well-intended people more often than I've been hurt by sadists, then I would never date again.

The morning after New Year's Charlie and I are sitting at breakfast in the Doug Fir Lounge, the restaurant connected to the Jupiter Hotel in Portland designed to look like a combination log cabin and 1970s swingers club. “I can't move to Southern California for you,” he says. “But there's this graduate program in Santa Barbara I've been looking into. It's like computer stuff mixed with art.”

I look down into my coffee cup and roll my eyes. This is a ridiculously premature conversation. I don't so much date as fall into entanglements. I don't have any idea
how
to date. In entanglements the only certainty is that one person or the other will be let down, but the advantage over relationships is that this will happen quickly, rather than slowly.

When I get back to Valencia, Charlie starts calling me every night. On Valentine's Day, he sends me the dress that I was thinking about buying to wear to his sister's wedding. I've never been courted in a straightforward manner before. It's bewildering and overwhelming, and I'm most afraid that it will stop; so I try to stop it first. I write him an email telling him that I can't financially afford to be in a long-distance relationship, but his phone calls don't stop and I don't stop answering them.

In March, he asks me to come stay with him in Seattle for the summer, and then later that week he takes it back. A play that I wrote is being produced in a festival at school, and he visits to come see it. That summer I visit him in Seattle for a few days. A few days become a week, a month, and then a couple of months, until the summer is almost over.

One especially hot August afternoon, we dangle our legs off the edge of his loft bed and try to have a conversation about what it is that we're doing. It's warmest in the loft, but it's also closest to the fan that he's tied to the ceiling.

“In software development, there's this phase called
beta testing
. It's the transitional stage where we work out the bugs before taking the software public. Let's consider this summer beta testing.”

The difference between relationships and software is that relationships are continually in transition. You can spend a lifetime, if you are lucky, trying to work the bugs out with another person.

Over the summer, Charlie and I become immersive foreign exchange students in each other's worlds of neurosis. He has systems and measurements for everything. Laundry: first the quarters go in and then, before starting the machine or putting the clothes in, the lint tray is cleaned. Never clothes before lint tray; this is incorrect. A single tiny dot of soap on the sponge for washing dishes, no more and no less. He does everything, from mixing drinks to fixing up his bike, with delicate precision. Every day, he wears jeans and the kind of black T-shirt purchased in packs of five at a big chain store. His world is like science fiction to me; I am fascinated. I measure everything in drips and splashes. My wardrobe is not generally described as either understated or consistent.

This is a symbiotic relationship. I am the little bird on the back of the hippo, cleaning his ears. I am leeching off Charlie's understanding of the spatial world. When we hold hands crossing the street, we look just like any other couple holding hands and crossing the street. There is a certain gentleness, what I can only describe as a quietly good-hearted feeling, to this relationship that I have not experienced before.

At the end of the summer, Charlie gives notice at his job at Boeing. In September, he will start his MS at the Science and Media Arts program at UC Santa Barbara.

It takes about an hour and a half to get to Valencia from Santa Barbara. It takes some money and courage; when Charlie visits me in graduate housing almost every weekend, I do my best to dole out what little I have of both. He tells me that my room assignment this year is a reflected mirror image of my room last year—the unmovable furniture that was on one side of the room last year is on the other side this year—and though I don't recognize this myself, I believe him. I set the room up by myself this year and can't get over the eerie feeling that everything I've touched—my mirror, my printer, my books, my clothes—leans a little to the right.