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?”
“On which of your thoughts you’re going to choose to indulge in.”
“Is this about my worrying I’ll get stuck like this?”
She nodded again. “Our thoughts create our emotions. So if you fixate on your worst-case scenario, you’ll make things harder for yourself.”
“You want me not to fixate on the worst-case scenario?”
“I want you to start practicing the art of self-encouragement.”
“So when I catch myself worrying, I should try to convince myself that things are going to be fine?”
“That’s one way to do it.”
“But what if I don’t believe it?”
“Then keep arguing.”
I was supposed to argue myself into feeling optimistic? “I’ve never been great at optimism,” I said.
“That’s what the arguing is for.”
“I’m not very good at arguing, either.”
“Maybe this is a chance to get better.”
But I’d learned long ago that arguing didn’t get you very far. “Can you give me a hint?”
“Try to step back and look at the big picture,” Dr. Nicole said. “That’s where you can see it more clearly.”
“See what?”
“That no matter what happens, you will find a way to be okay—whether your prosopagnosia is temporary or permanent.”
“My proso…” I asked, giving up on the word halfway through. “What’s that?”
“That’s the condition you have right now,” Dr. Nicole said, “based on these test scores.” Then she handed me a diagnosis: “Acquired apperceptive prosopagnosia.”
I waited for those syllables to make sense. But they didn’t.
So she said it again. “Acquired apperceptive prosopagnosia.” Then she added: “Also known as face blindness.”
Five
AND AFTER ALL that, to add massive insult to once-in-a-lifetime injury, who should I run into in the elevator of my building on the very morning I came home?
You guessed it.
The one-night-stand guy. The Weasel.
Fresh back from the hospital, I had walked in slow motion through the lobby of my building, holding my breath as faceless people wandered blithely around me.
I kept my eyes to the carpet, stepped gingerly through the elevator doors, and pressed the button to the top floor—my hair smelling of hospital shampoo and gathered in a careful, stitches-covering ponytail. I was trying with all my might not to accidentally knock that cork in my skull loose while also holding back a tsunami of life-altering realizations about the week I’d just been through … just as the Weasel himself catapulted through the closing doors and tossed his arms up in victory as he cleared them at the last second.
Let’s just say he wasn’t matching my fragile energy.
I couldn’t recognize his face now, of course. Or anything else about his rather nondescript self. What I did recognize—other than his terrible personality—was the red-and-white non-vintage vintage bowling jacket.
There couldn’t be more than one of those walking around.
Oh my god! The Weasel! I’d forgotten about the woman in his bed. I’d meant to go find his apartment that night and wake her up and get her the hell out of there—but in all the hubbub of, ya know, the brain surgery, I’d forgotten.
He wasn’t still holding her captive in there, was he?
I thought about asking.
But that’s when he turned to me, all friendly and breathless, and said, “Made it!” The way a nice person might talk to another nice person.
I kept my eyes down and edged away.
Really, pal? You think you can just wildly bad-mouth your one-night stands and also get to be a normal member of society?
Not on my watch, buddy.
I wasn’t going to be complicit in this nice-guy gaslighting. Also: What the hell? What adult just sprints through a building lobby willy-nilly like that? What if he’d slammed into me? What if I’d hit my head and the plug in my skull had popped like a champagne cork—and then it was right back to the hospital?
I wasn’t used to feeling fragile. And I definitely didn’t like it. So I glared at him, like, Thanks a lot for reminding me.
I could deduce that he was smiling, even despite his puzzle-piece face. Those big teeth were pretty unmistakable.
How dare he?
It was frustrating beyond measure to look straight at a person and have no idea what he looked like. Especially since I really might have to pick him out of a lineup someday.
One of the tips Dr. Nicole had given me for coping with the sudden lack of faces in the world was to notice other things about people. Most of us used faces by default, she’d explained, but there were plenty of other details to notice. Height. Body shape. Hair. Gait.
“Gait?” I’d said, like that was a stretch.
“Everybody’s walk is a little different, once you start noticing,” Dr. Nicole said, doubling down.
So I tried it on the Weasel. What did he have besides a face?
But I guess I wasn’t very good at this yet. All that really stood out was the bowling jacket—which had the name Joe embroidered vintage style across the chest. The rest? Shaggy hair falling aggressively over his forehead. General tallness. Thick-framed gray hipster glasses.
And I don’t know what else. Arms and legs, I guess. Shoulders? Feet?
This was hard.
Normally, in elevator situations with strangers, even if you accidentally talk at the start, you settle back into standard elevator behavior pretty fast: eyes averted, quiet, as much space as possible between bodies.
But I could feel the Weasel breaking the rules. Standing too close. Trying to make eye contact.
Oh god. Had he thought I was checking him out just now?
I felt a sting of humiliation. That was scientific research, damn it!
I dropped my eyes straight to the floor and edged even farther away.
Unmistakable we-don’t-know-each-other body language.
But maybe he didn’t speak that language? I could feel him studying me as we rose to the next floor. “Great sweatpants,” he said then, his voice still at maximum friendliness.
“Thank you,” I replied. Nice and curt.
“Are they comfortable?”
What? Who cared? “Yes.”
He paused, and I thought my one-word answers had done their job. But then he revved back up. “How are you doing today?”
How was I doing? What kind of question was that? “I’m fine.”
“You look good,” he said, like he was somehow qualified to state that opinion.
A memory of his saying the words nothing but blubber popped into my head, and it was all I could do to push out two clipped syllables. “Thank you.”
“How’s your health?”
My health? Um. We weren’t going to talk about my health—or anything at all about me. I didn’t know anybody who lived in my building well enough for a conversation like this. Except possibly Mr. and Mrs. Kim, who lived on the ground floor.