Head Case

by Cole Cohen

  “Middle Sister, Carly Cohen, is the smallest, at five feet four inches, and the most poorly studied. It is also the middle in age. Middle Sister is a stratovolcano consisting primarily of basalt but also erupted andesite, dacite, and rhyodacite. Middle Sister is also known for affection for young adult literature and the sale section at J. Crew or, preferably, Anthropologie. No reports on its potential for eruptions have been made. Silent but deadly, folks, silent but deadly.

  “South Sister, Marni Cohen, also known as Mo to locals here in Oregon, is a long, steep, nontechnical hike that can be easily completed in a day by reasonably fit hikers. This particular volcano is also known for its gigantic Jew-fro, which is studiously maintained, and a tendency toward sarcasm and adopting stray animals and roommates. Little-known fact: South Sister, while being quite thin itself, is situated above a thrift store specializing in clothing for plus-size ladies, located in the basement of the surrounding territory. Popular starting points are the Green Lakes and Devil’s Lake trailheads. Aaaand that concludes our tour of Three Sisters, folks.”

  My father is the only one there to greet me at the airport, with our traditional family greeting. “Hey, it’s Uncle Heshe!” he yells and waves his arms. This started when I first returned from college for breaks, and now it’s been going on for so long that I’d be vaguely insulted if I didn’t receive the proper familial airport greeting. We leave immediately for the giant Asian supermarket, where we eat at the food court without paying. I’m not sure if my father believes that because he teaches courses on ethics he transcends ethical obligations, or that teaching ethics justifies his personal obligation to subvert traditional concepts of justice and morality, such as paying for lunch. I tend toward feelings of affection for my father’s spotty moral code, especially when it lands me free duck in chili sauce. Rule breaking makes for great father-daughter bonding.

  We decide to check out the new aerial tram, a cross between a ski lift and a giant silver bean that glides over I-5 from the South Waterfront District to the hospital. Neither of us mentions that this is the first time that we’ve been back to this hospital together since he accompanied me for my MRI. As we glide over the pines and the tops of houses, I’m reminded of that PBS painting show that I used to draw along to with my crayons when I was little, the one where the smiling host with the scrub-brush hair encouraged his audience to paint “happy little trees.” I grip the guide bar by the window. A man on his cell phone next to me is arguing with the person on the other end of the line about his health insurance. The ride is pretty short; not long after we leave the ground we’re pulling into the shiny metal dock on the other side of the hospital.

  “Let’s get a coffee.” Dad points out a coffee stand behind the glass hospital doors.

  “What can I get you?” the woman behind the coffee cart asks.

  “What can you get me?” my father asks back.

  “What can I get you?” she asks again.

  The woman smiles nervously, unsure if this is a game or if he’s truly irate. This is how routine interactions with my dad usually begin.

  “Are you making fun of my accent?” he asks.

  “No, sir. Are you from New York?”

  “No, I’m just putting this on for you.”

  We walk around the hospital with our coffees, looking at the donated art.

  “This morning, I asked my intro-to-ethics class what they did this weekend, and they just stared back at me like a bunch of morons, slouched over with their backward caps.”

  “Huh.”

  “So I said, ‘Come on, you didn’t do anything this weekend? Nobody saw a movie? Nothing?’ and finally this one girl in the back raised her hand and I called on her and she said, ‘Why would we tell you what we did this weekend? You’re just going to make fun of us.’”

  “So what did you say to that?”

  “I explained to her that when someone from New York makes fun of you, it’s a sign of affection.”

  “And how did that go over?”

  “Nothing. They just stared at me.”

  * * *

  I get together with Carly and Mo for drinks at a Tiki bar in Northeast. Over coconut-shaped cups with wheels of pineapple wedged on the brims, we don’t talk about why I’m here or Mo’s piece, but we agree to meet for “sister drinks” whenever I’m back in town. We never did this before my MRI, when we all lived in the same town. I think, I hope, that by moving away I’ve created some space for them. We still go to the same bar every time, where the dehydrated blowfish on the ceiling smile their frozen fanged grimaces and the stoic wide-mouthed Polynesian statues overhear our drunken confessions and spats. For all of our differences, we are united by umbrella drinks.

  In the morning, my mother is taking me to Pacific University Medical Center for the eye exam. She will come into the exam room with me. Long ago, I found it much easier to let my mom join me in exam rooms rather than be peppered with a series of questions about why I didn’t ask this or that or what the doctor said exactly. I can never answer these questions to my parents’ satisfaction, and when they send me to an exam with a list of their questions, I usually forget to ask them or don’t do a satisfying job of recounting the answers. Since the exam was ordered by someone in the Department of Social Security, my parents and I are both extra-anxious about how to behave.

  The waiting room has two built-in couches, parallel from each other as if the patients are all in the same subway car. I can see my file already on the receptionist’s desk as I check in for my appointment. I take a seat on the couch next to my mom and wait. It’s 9:00 a.m., the place is empty. Every so often a different young man in a dress shirt and tie walks up to the reception desk, but there’s a noticeable absence of white coats or the usual sense of urgency. “Intern Coter to the reception desk, Intern Coter.” I realize that the young men I’m seeing are all medical interns. The young man who walks into the waiting room to call my name and shake my hand has pudgy cheeks and thickly gelled hair. His shirt is lavender, and his tie is purple, with a gradient of polka dots that eventually change color from dark purple, toward the knot, to light blue at the bottom of the tie. He looks more likely to sell me a car or a religion than to check my eyesight. He leads us to the exam room, where he asks me to read the letters on a variety of charts.

  “Well, you’ve got twenty/fifteen vision. Better than twenty/twenty. So let’s write in twenty/fifteen, just because we can…” I’m not sure if he’s talking to me or to himself as he scribbles in my chart. “Now, let’s test your peripheral vision.” He walks me down the hallway toward a closed door. He opens the door, and inside are three more formally dressed men in their early twenties looking into a variety of giant lenses encased in white plastic. They look like 1950s high school students crowded around a chemistry set. These guys decide the fate of my disability claim? I take a deep breath and try to calm myself with thoughts of brunch afterward. My assigned intern is having a hard time getting the attention of the other ones. “Hey, guys? You guys, I have a patient in here? Are you here with a patient?” His strained professional tone makes the other junior optometrists scatter out of the exam room.

  “OK.” He turns back to me. “Have a seat right here, please.” He gestures toward a stool as he fumbles around with some papers and instruments and darkens the room. “Wow, that is a terrible eye patch; let me get you a better one.” The junior optometrist hands me an eye patch, which I place dutifully on one eye. I’m already sneering so the patch doesn’t feel particularly out of place. “OK, now if you will just stick your head in here and rest your chin on the strap…” I turn around on the stool to face a white plastic half sphere, like the inside of a giant globe, with a little black cushioned bench toward the bottom for my chin. Still wearing the eye patch, I place my chin on the bench. The junior optometrist sits on the other side of the half globe, peering through a tiny pinprick lens in the center. I am trying to recall my geometry. Which is convex and which is concave? I decide that since concave has the word
cave in it and my head is in a little head cave, my end must be concave.

  Inside the head cave, my job is to follow a dot of yellow light with my eyes until I can’t see it anymore. Whenever the dot enters or leaves my field of vision I am to click on the clicker in my hand, which appears to be wired to the globe but doesn’t make any sound other than a quiet click when I press it with my thumb. After a while this gets boring. It’s not long before I’m pretending to myself to be a chicken embryo floating inside an egg just to keep myself awake and entertained.

  Afterward, the junior optometrist brings in the head optometrist, whom I can’t help but think of as the daddy optometrist, certain that this is more a seminary or an orphanage than a medical center. I imagine the head optometrist lecturing on vision by day before doling out gruel to his charges before bed. The head optometrist reports that there’s nothing wrong with my eyes. “You do have a shorter range of vision in your left eye, but in order to qualify for any kind of vision disability you’d have to have about twenty percent visibility left, which clearly you do not have. I recommend that you see a neurologist or someone in physical rehab.”

  This is the part that my mom has been waiting for, the postexam question-and-answer period.

  “So why did they send us here?”

  The optometrist looks at my file.

  “Well, it looks like they sent this file to an optometrist, and he couldn’t make a call because there was no previous eye exam on record. So they sent you for an eye exam.” There was no previous eye exam because this is not an issue of my eyes as physical organs; this is an issue concerning my brain and the information it does or does not send me about what my eyes are seeing.

  Let’s say you’re walking down a city street with a friend. Up in the sky, you see a big red balloon.

  “Look!” you say to your friend, pointing.

  “A balloon! Look!”

  You point at the sky. But your friend does not see the balloon. “Up there!” you cry. You point again, your finger following the balloon, but your friend does not see it. “Look, see, right there! By that building!” But your friend still does not see the balloon. “Look! Look!” You repeat the command and wave and point until you become exasperated. You are frustrated with your friend for not seeing what you see.

  “This exists!” you are yelling, but if your friend doesn’t see it, then obviously your friend cannot confirm it. My testimony is not what I witness but what I miss, a testimony of exasperation.

  Teachers are exasperated with me for not understanding what they are trying to teach me; friends are exasperated with me for “playing dumb”; my parents are exasperated by scheduling and shuttling and reminding me; my sisters are exasperated by the attention I take up; strangers are exasperated when they give me basic directions and I ask them to repeat them and then I thank them and walk off to do the exact opposite of what they said; bosses are exasperated by training and retraining me for remedial tasks like filing or working a cash register.

  “Look!” they are saying.

  “Look! It’s right here! Can’t you see it? Look closer! Harder! For God’s sake, just open your eyes and look!”

  I fill out new medical forms for every doctor or specialist I see. At Dr. Volt’s, Dr. Z’s, at the optometrist’s office, I fill out new patient intake forms over and over again until my personal medical history begins to take on its own rhythm. The history of my body becomes a mantra chanted before each new doctor visit. My grandfather’s colon cancer, my grandmother’s breast cancer, my mother’s thyroid disease, my father’s high cholesterol. The conflicting moment when I choose, over and over again, to lie about my history of depression; the ritual of filling out forms is a ritual of taking stock of my body and the bodies of my family; past and present, alive and dead. I place a check mark where these bodies have failed themselves, a check mark where my body fails itself.

  A doctor’s chart is information about the body that’s been gathered and organized for assessment. It is data used to confirm, to predict, to plot a course of action. But the narrative of my body has refused the traditional course of action of familiar hospital dramas. I walk out of each doctor’s office with more information, data charted, but without a prescription, a cure, a recovery. I want desperately for someone to say, “Here, take this, you’ll feel better.” The story of diagnosis has two endings: recovery or death. Traditional medical narratives do not have much to tell us about coping.

  At a certain point, the walls of each new waiting room begin to constrict like a swollen throat. I’m trying to assess for myself what I can heal and what I need to learn to live with, but the brain is tricky territory. Once we think we’ve mapped it, we slip down another new corridor. The path that we’re certain is responsible for remembering how to ride a bike has a trapdoor that leads to memories of when your bike was stolen when you were seven. How will I know when I feel better? Will it happen gradually, or will my spatial world just shift into focus one day as I am out running errands? Just what is it that I’m looking for? And if I am cured, if I am healed—then who am I?

  Two weeks after my eye exam in Portland, my pending Social Security claim concludes as it began, with another phone call from someone lacking a full name.

  “Hi, Nicole? This is Pam. Your case has been reviewed, and they’ve agreed to grant you disability, but we don’t believe that you should be placed in charge of the checks, so we’d like to put someone in charge of them for you.”

  I laugh. “Yeah, that’s smart. That’s a smart move.”

  Pam doesn’t laugh. I wonder if she’s bored, or if she’s not allowed to laugh; she probably doesn’t find my lack of basic math skills as funny as I do in this moment.

  “Is there someone I can put in charge of these for you? Is there someone who handles your bills for you?”

  “Um. Can I put two people?”

  “No, you can only put one.”

  Choosing between two parents is a potential minefield. I go with my mother, whose name is already attached to my bank account because she wrote and sent out monthly checks for me when I lived in Portland. When I lived in Portland, I brought my monthly bills over to my parents’ house, and my mother and I worked on them together. Left to my own devices, I have a hard time reading the bills and understanding how they came to a certain total, an issue that’s exacerbated by my tendency to mail the wrong check to the wrong company without realizing it, resulting in mysterious double billings the following month. When I do it with someone else to double-check me, slow me down, and explain the charges, I can take care of my bills efficiently. On my own, I regularly end up in a quagmire of extra fees and phone calls to track down checks that I swear I mailed out on time. One of the great ironies of how I live is that to be a responsible adult I need help to take care of basic adult tasks.

  On my own, I feel like a failure because my mangled attempts at flying solo only highlight over and over, with ridiculously consistent and vividly excruciating results, the basic things that I cannot do. I push back against taking responsibility for my weaknesses—by plunging head-on into a department store or concert hall where I will inevitably become lost, by sending out my own bills only to get double billed next month—because I want to believe that I can be like anyone else. I want to prove something by doing these things on my own. But for me, the key to becoming an independent adult is in learning to determine when a task is suitable for me and when it isn’t, to know when it is appropriate to challenge my own understanding of my limitations and when I’m just getting myself into a bigger mess. It makes sense that I can’t accept my own disability checks, but I still find it embarrassing. Pam calls my mother, who names my father as her backup.

  “What do we do now?”

  I’m on the phone with my friend Kristy, the first person I call with the news of my legal disability status. Most people get disability benefits as a result of a tragedy or a disfigurement or an illness. For me, nothing happened. Nothing changed. Now, nothing changing is changing my life
in significant ways. I am finally becoming the person I have always been.

  “Do we have a barbecue?”

  “Cole, if they aren’t trusting you with a check, I’m pretty sure you can’t be trusted to hold a barbecue.”

  “Oh, right. I guess I’ll just have to have my mom hold the barbecue for me.”

  I want some ritual to mark this transition into being. But nothing really happens. A couple of weeks later, my mom deposits the first check in my bank account, and slowly, over time, something starts to shift inside me, like a lens coming into focus.

  For the first time, my perception is being validated. Someone sees what I see and shouts, “Yes, yes, there it is! Over there!” And still, until the phone call from Pam, it felt highly possible that my application for disability status would be rejected, ultimately negating my experience of the world. It felt possible that the federal government would call and say, “You’re fine. Your father maybe didn’t pay enough attention, and your mother maybe paid too much. It’s not something to make a federal case of.”

  This isn’t the worst of worlds by far, but it is my world, and even though you can’t see it, I am going to ask you to believe in it. On the one hand, I hide in plain sight; I pass. On the other hand, I am doubted.

  June 2009

  Oakland, California

  Graduating from CalArts after two years of classes and workshops is like scrambling out of a bomb shelter into the postapocalyptic rubble of a world populated by the undead. While we were ensconced in workshops debating the use of first-person plural, the rest of the country grappled with the 2008 financial crisis. As we crafted performative cut-up homages to Rrose Sélavy, people more in touch with current affairs—those who are losing their homes to impossible mortgages, who can’t find jobs, those we are joining—are looking to mythical immortal creatures for entertainment and catharsis. Books and TV shows are all about vampires or zombies. What we want and what we are horrified by are often the same. We’re both the bloodthirsty zombie who kills to feed and the hero who happens upon a crossbow in postapocalyptic lower Manhattan. We want to live forever, and we want to bash in the head of anyone who dares to live forever. Financial analysts are pointing out that sales of horror movies and lipstick are up. The only time that your biological impulses make it impossible to think about anything is when you’re either terrified or orgasmic. Banks collapse, unemployment rises, the housing market crumbles. In 2009, we are all gasping for breath. I’m poking my head out of my art school bomb shelter, looking to run for cover. “MFA! Mother Fucking Artist!” the school of visual arts graduates chant as they walk up to the podium during the graduation ceremony. When so little is in your control, that’s when you amp up the bravado.