You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know

by Heather Sellers

I said, “Let me call you right back.” I called Helder, and he laughed and laughed and laughed. “Now you are telling the world. I love it. And it’s very efficient!” He asked me: Did I want to do this? Did I see a downside? I would miss a day of work. That was a downside. But I knew that if I’d seen a show on face blindness when I was younger, my life could have been much easier, much sooner. “I think I can explain this really well, and I don’t think many people can. I think there are a lot more people who have this disorder than we know. I have to do this.”

  A couple of hours later, a producer was sitting in my living room, out of range of the camera. Standing by my bookcase was a very cute sound guy—Chuck Taylors, messy buzz cut, thick lips—with a box of dials strapped to the front of his body. “We’re good to go,” he said.

  The producer, Nancy, said to talk like we were girlfriends just having a chat. Giant lights and a silver umbrella made me squint. My eyes watered. My hands were sweating.

  Nancy leaned forward, smiled. “This had to be hard on your husband. You couldn’t recognize him. You got divorced.”

  All my furniture was moved against the walls and a giant silver-white screen was behind me. I was dizzy; this all felt pretend, when the very point was to stop pretending. I was angry at her for turning questions into statements, for making Dave look bad.

  Helder had said to enjoy myself and to talk slowly. I took a deep breath. I talked slowly. Dave-slow. “That would make a good story, but no. Dave was really great about the face blindness. He helped a lot.”

  Nancy got back on her cell phone.

  The windowless production van was parked outside. Through my windows, I spied neighbors on the sidewalk, talking and pointing at the van.

  Nancy set the phone on the floor between us again so her producer in New York could hear everything. “But surely it was part of it. You went up to the wrong man? That had to be really hard on . . . your husband.” She looked at her notes. “Dave. David. Dave? David?”

  I explained that this was exactly what was so hard about the disorder. I never knew when I’d recognize someone and when I wouldn’t. It was much more complicated and much more confusing than that.

  “On the phone you said you thought you were mentally ill.”

  “Yes.”

  “Talk about that. Just chatting, like we are just girlfriends, chatting. Terrifying. It must have been terrifying.”

  “Well,” I said, “I knew something was wrong. I walked past my closest friends and they’d come up to me and I wouldn’t know right away who was who. I had long conversations with people who clearly knew me very well, and I had no idea who I was talking to. Then I made a vow: no more faking. That’s when I ‘came out.’ ”

  “Recently, I take it.”

  “Now,” I said. “I’m in the process.”

  When she asked me about my parents, how they had handled my confusion as a child, I said the line I’d gotten from Helder that morning. “That would be a whole other episode.” I smiled. I said no more.

  She waited for me to say more. I could hear the equipment humming. I looked into the camera. I could see my face in the glass on the lens. I smiled at myself. I smiled at America.

  After a long, awkward silence and another brief conference on the cell phone, the producer said, “She won’t talk about it. She won’t say.”

  The producer put the phone back down on the floor. She didn’t sound so “girlfriends” anymore. She sounded like she was trying to sound like Diane Sawyer. “There’s no cure for what you have. You were probably born this way. If researchers came up with a cure—surgery, training, a pill—would you do it?”

  “No,” I said quickly. “I wouldn’t ever change my brain.”

  “Really,” she said. She let her jaw go slack, her mouth hang. “You don’t want to be cured.” She said it like you’d say, You don’t want a brain.

  I speechified. I pretended I wasn’t talking to television, to a camera, but to a convention of philosopher-therapists. Face blindness, in my mind, had saved my life. It was the means by which I learned to recognize myself. It was true that face blindness had isolated me from the world, been hard on friendships, made work difficult. But I loved face blindness now. I thought of it as great training for being a writer: I had to go over each person, again and again, paying attention to the tiny details that made them distinct. Face blindness might have been better training for writing than graduate school had been. Writing and face blindness required the same patience, the same commitment to slowness. They forced a similar kind of willingness to hang out in frustration and ambivalence. Failure rates were high in both camps. In both, writing and recognizing, one had to hang back, leave spaces for the truth to emerge in its own time. I had come to the point where I couldn’t imagine my life without face blindness. It was how I knew how to know the world!

  Nancy said, “Really. You wouldn’t take a cure. You wouldn’t want to know your husband’s face, your own face?”

  “I do know them,” I said. I was calm and clear and not-sweaty. “I know them when I’m looking at them. I always have them with me. A face is just a label, a handle. I’m committing much more important parts of a person to memory. I’m not on the surface. I’m focused on the essence of the person, the soul.” This sounded lofty and I laughed and the cameraman said, “No, it’s good.” The soundman said, “Sincere. And fascinating.” He adjusted his cool dials.

  “You have no photographs displayed in this house,” the camera guy said. He was burly and warm, dark hair, big and brilliant-looking.

  The sound guy said, “She’s face-blind, man. That’s part of it. Right?”

  I said I wasn’t sure.

  “Albums, snapshots, video—we need visual components.” Nancy had the cell phone to her ear. “Are they upstairs? Where’s your family? Where are your photographs?” she said to me. “Yes,” she said into the phone in the same breath. “We’re getting photos of the mother, the family, right now. Yup. Yup.”

  Nope, nope, I thought. You are not.

  The cameraman said we were losing light. “We need high school yearbooks, family photos, definitely photos of your mother and father. Think visual! Do you have siblings?”

  “There aren’t any,” I lied. “I don’t have photographs.” The past was rushing in. I had to lean hard against the door to my childhood to keep it from flooding in.

  After another series of calls to New York, they filmed me typing my book—this book—at my dining room table. The camera guy took a vase of black-eyed Susans from my kitchen counter and set them by a pile of books they’d chosen from my bookcase. He loved the light streaming in through my dining room windows. It looked pathetic, the way they set it up, like a bad straight-to-DVD movie about a Struggling Writer. A jar of pencils!

  They asked me to look thoughtful, stare out into space.

  I can’t do that, I said. I can’t do this. I can’t impersonate a writer. But I did it.

  The producer rushed over to an antique mirror I had hanging by the door. The glass was old and wavy. “This is perfect! Come and check your lipstick, like you’re on your way out.”

  I couldn’t do that. I explained again: It’s a perception problem, a processing problem, it’s not visual. It was so important to get that right. Nothing ever looked wavy, I said. It was hard for us to remember noses, lips, eyes, but faces weren’t altogether missing, or distorted. I reminded her about the new research: face recognition skill lay on a continuum. As many as one in fifty people—two percent of the world’s population—were significantly impaired, unable to easily distinguish faces. People needed to understand the disorder for what it was or they’d never be able to know they had it.

  “We will get it right,” the producer said. She told me not to worry. “But let’s just get you adjusting your hair, you know, like you’re going out, looking in that mirror. One last little final check.”

  We got in my truck and drove around town. The producer instructed us to look for people I might know but would not be able
to recognize. I kept telling her: I’m not going to know. And I recognize people all the time. If they are in a place I am expecting to see them, I’ll know. But if they are out of context, or I haven’t seen them in a few weeks, I may or may not. It’s not a disorder you can rely on. And I’m not going to know when any of this is or isn’t happening. It’s unfilmable.

  We parked behind the shoe store downtown. A man waved at me as we walked across the parking lot behind the shoe store. “Do you know him?” the producer said. “Jim, Jim, are you rolling?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I was quick trying to think, Who could that be?

  “I think we just missed it!” she yelled at him. “We just missed it. It happened. We missed it. Okay, we need another one of those. Be ready, guys. Tell us when that’s about to happen again, Heather, okay? We need you to communicate with us. We need your help here. You are the only one who knows.”

  I trotted along Main Street. I was the only one who didn’t know, of course. But it didn’t seem like they were going to get that.

  Down Main Street, the cameraman walked backward out in front of me. There was a microphone hanging over my head on a boom: I felt like a little fish on the end of a line. I walked “naturally” in my purple dress. I pretended I was window-shopping. I checked out my butt in the plate glass of the Lokker Rutgers store. My butt was looking good.

  No one came and said hi. No one asked, Is this television? Suddenly the sidewalks, which had been crowded with shoppers, were empty. The producer said, “Weren’t there just a whole bunch of people walking down this street?”

  The camera guy said, “We lost all our background. I’ve got no background.”

  The soundman said, “In New York we’d be fighting people off. This is really, really weird. Not one person has tried to get in the shot. It’s like they’re avoiding it.”

  “It’s the Midwest,” I said. “They’re going to give you privacy. They’re being polite.”

  “Where would there be people—people who know you?” the producer said again. She was standing across from me with her arms crossed. Her entire career was founded on recognizing people and showing them to other people. She wasn’t going to get prosopagnosia. Not today. It would be like me understanding calculus.

  As we walked back to the truck, the cameraman said, “How do you know who I am?”

  I couldn’t tell if he was kidding or serious.

  After they left, I called my mom. I told her, “Write this down: Tomorrow morning, seven twenty-five a.m., the Today show. I think it’s on NBC. It might be ABC.”

  She was excited. She read it back. “National television! My beautiful daughter! I will be watching. You can count on that! I will be watching with all my ears and eyes! Oh, my beautiful daughter.”

  She didn’t ask me why I would be on television.

  Maybe she thought: Of course my daughter will be on television. Maybe it didn’t matter why: it was her daughter. Or maybe this was triggering a fairly complicated paranoid response; television was one of her least favorite things in the world. Perhaps she had to keep a superbly narrow focus in order to muster and sustain the only appropriate reaction: excitement. If she asked for details, if it became too real, it would be too threatening. What if the topic of the program somehow led people to her? I will protect you, Mom. I will always keep you safe.

  I called my father. I told him I was going to be on the Today show. He should watch, tomorrow morning. Did he want me to call him and remind him? No, he said. No, no, no, no, no.

  Daddy, I said. I’m going to ask you a question.

  “Wah?” he said. He sounded flat, and close to death, but he had sounded that way for twenty or thirty years. I got all choked up. I knew he wouldn’t answer and I knew I would ask anyway. “What was the secret, the thing about Mom you won’t tell me?”

  He said this: “If you tell anyone, I will kill you. If you tell her I told you this, I will kill you.” His voice was suddenly hard-edged and clear. I sat forward in my seat; I curled my big toes under my little ones. I froze.

  “I wrote her papers.” He was working hard to speak, forcing the words out, but they were all coming out. “In college. She wasn’t passing any of her classes. For one, I paid the TA to change her grade to Pass. For another, I wrote all her papers. And she got her degree . . .” There was a long pause. Then he said: “She kept hitting me! And once I beat the shit out of her! But she got her degree.” He hollered the word “degree.” “She not know!” He sounded on the verge of tears.

  This was the secret? I envisioned my mother, bound up with psychosis, flailing against my father, not able to read, concentrate, write, get through the day evenly. “I’ll never tell,” I said. “That was sure real nice of you. To help her.”

  “Bye,” he said.

  “I love you,” I said. I didn’t know if he heard. I liked it to be the last thing I always said.

  I called Dave. I had to tell him the big secret. He was at work and he went out and stood on the balcony to talk to me. I heard the wind in his phone. “He’s not a bad guy,” he said. He joked about how funny it was for an educator to have academic fraud as a family secret. I told Dave about the Today show. He warned me not to be surprised or hurt if my parents forgot to watch it. I knew they’d watch it. This was the climax, this was the perfection of everything, this was my official entrance into the normal world. I knew they’d watch it.

  I asked Dave if he’d mind waking the boys. I wanted them to see it, to understand face blindness, to know I wasn’t crazy, like their mother.

  He said he’d try. He planned to watch. He would be late for work in order to watch and he was there for me if I needed him, or anything at all.

  Four

  I dragged the dog up onto the couch with me, and clicked on the television. I wouldn’t have recognized Matt Lauer without the helpful little label that popped up on the bottom of the screen occasionally. It would be so great if in real life the name of everyone could pop up, just when needed. “Face blindness—fascinating,” he said. Then he said it again, exactly the same way. “Face blindness—fascinating.” I went and got my tea.

  There were commercials, and then, after a piece on Britney Spears, who had not yet lost custody of her children, Matt Lauer said it again, “Face blindness—fascinating!” and then, in the way of television narration, a series of nesting boxes, the story opened and unfolded and then there was Holland, Michigan, my little town, footage of Eighth Street, where I was walking down the street in my purple dress with my straw purse. My arms are really long! I thought. My gait was syncopated, horsey. Then there was a pretty-faced woman talking to someone; purple dress, huge hair, straw purse. Oh. It was me. There were some facts on face blindness. Sufferers couldn’t recognize their own friends and family. While it could be caused by stroke, now researchers felt it also ran in families, and genes were involved. There was a graph, a chart, a person getting an MRI, sliding into the tube. I wondered if that was me. I thought of Iftah and the monster. The tiny ancient brain.

  A family was interviewed. A face-blind man cried because he’d never seen his wife’s face, and I thought people weren’t going to get it, weren’t going to understand. I thought of Lorna: it takes five times. This man who had the wife, he could see her face every day. Why was he saying that he couldn’t see it? He couldn’t remember it, but he could go look at her. I was on the edge of my seat. I was wiggling all over my couch and holding my dog and talking to him. It’s different from this. This isn’t it! I wanted to jump in and explain the parts they were misapprehending, the things they were telling wrong.

  Then, at the end of the segment, as music played in the background and the hosts of the show explained where people could get more information, there I was on national television, fake-writing in my living room. This part of the piece came out exactly as I had feared: I didn’t look like a real writer but more like a woman who owned way too many cats.

  The voice told America, “And so, day by day, she struggles to m
ake sense of her disorder. And her world.”

  After that a car commercial came on and I jumped around my living room. Everyone knows!

  My phone rang. My mom was breathless. “You are probably being besieged with calls.”

  “You saw it!”

  “So I won’t keep you long. Oh, honey, you were fabulous. You are my beautiful brilliant daughter! So articulate! My goodness! You have lost weight too. You look so strong.” Then she said she was more than willing to send me three thousand dollars in order to get braces so I could fix my poor crooked teeth. They were my only drawback, my only detrimental feature.

  I paused. I sat down. The bubble burst. I said she didn’t have to do that. She said that was the one little thing she noticed that wasn’t perfect. She said, “You were so much more articulate than those Harvard people! Those well-trained, brilliant men! You were better! I just wish you would have stuck with your expensive dental work. It’s all my fault, really.”

  She never once mentioned the topic of the program, and she never referred to any of it again—ever. For her it must have hit way too close to home.

  I called my father’s house. No answer, no answer, no answer.

  I walked the dog. At Dave’s apartment, Junior and his girlfriend were standing on the sidewalk, right outside the back door. They were arguing, both talking at once. Junior said hello and leaned down and scratched the dog’s head. Michaela repeated herself loudly. “You were there that day! We studied it in psychology. You were there. Prosopagnosia. It was on the test.”

  “No,” Junior said. “It doesn’t exist. It does not exist.”

  I paused. Slow down, I said to myself. Leave space. He was a teenage boy. He was focused on his girlfriend, and getting to the beach, and Chee-Zee bread sticks, five for two dollars. My brain, and its funky little glitch, weren’t high on the list.

  “Junior,” I said. “Y’all saw the show? Wasn’t that pretty cool?” I tried to sound like a general, friendly person who lives down the street. I tried to imagine how the dog would approach this verbally, were he able to contribute along these lines: gentle, gentle. I tried not to need anything from this.