“I’ll read it.” I smile at her. “Thank you.”
She smiles at me. “You’re welcome.”
And we’re having what feels like a moment. Suddenly, the air isn’t just filled with bows; it’s filled with some sort of electric current that links her seat to mine.
She does the impossible—slices through the current by speaking first. “So are you ready for this?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
At first I’m amped. I talk her ear off, telling her about every online test I’ve taken and this guy with prosopagnosia named Bill Choisser who lives in San Francisco and is an old bearded dude who wrote a book about face blindness, which he’s posted on the Internet for all to read. All about the impact being face-blind has on school, work, relationships, life.
But the closer we get to Bloomington, the quieter I get. I can feel the air going out of me. What am I going to find out? Will Dr. Amber Klein be able to help me? Should I be going to New Hampshire instead to see Brad Duchaine? What if this whole trip is a waste of time? What if they tell me I’ve got some serious illness? What if I find out it isn’t face blindness, but cancer of the brain?
“I can almost feel you thinking right now.”
I look at her.
“Did you forget I was in the car with you?”
I’m so deep in the forest of my mind that yeah, I almost did.
“Sorry.”
We pass a sign: BLOOMINGTON … 10 MILES. I feel my stomach drop and land somewhere around the gas pedal.
“Does this thing have a radio?”
“Does it have a radio. What do you think, woman? Christ almighty.” I hit a button and music fills the Land Rover, taking up all the space around us. I try to concentrate on the words, on the melody, but then she starts searching through songs, and this feels like my brain—fragments of words, fragments of melodies, fragments of moments, fragments of things.
Finally, she finds a song she likes, and then she cranks it.
“Disco? Are you fucking kidding me?” I reach for the radio, but she smacks my hand away. I reach around her hand, and she smacks it again, and then it’s not about turning off the music, it’s about touching her, and our hands are flirting. Finally, she grabs my fingers and holds on to them. And that electric current is sparking out of my thumb, my pinky, and the fingers in between. I cough because What the fuck is happening? I say to the car, “I’m so sorry this had to happen to you, baby. I’m sorry you ever had to hear this. I’m sorry I ever had to hear this. I’m sorry I’m still hearing it.”
Libby hollers, “What? I can’t hear you over my own singing and this amazing beat!”
Now she’s singing as loud as she can AND dancing. She lets go of my hand and yells, “Spontaneous dance party!” and goes on singing, but now she’s dancing bigger and broader, like she’s onstage somewhere.
“I love to love, but my baby just loves to dance, he wants to dance, he loves to dance, he’s got to dance.”
“What the f—?”
“The minute the band begins to swing it, he’s on his feet to dig it, and dance the night away. Stop! I’m spinning like a top, we’ll dance until we drop …”
It’s pretty much the corniest song I’ve ever heard, but Libby is into it. She’s grooving all over the seat, shaking her shoulders, shimmying toward me and away. She winks at me and belts it out louder, and she’s a terrible singer. So I start singing along with her, kind of self-defensively.
And then we’re dancing in unison—heads bobbing to the right, to the left, shoulders forward, shoulders back. Now we’re yelling the words, and I’m pounding on the steering wheel, and she’s got her arms in the air, and it’s the best song I’ve ever heard, and now I’m smiling at her.
And she’s smiling at me.
And it’s a moment.
A definite moment.
She says, “Watch the road, Casanova.” But she says it in this soft voice that I’ve never heard her use before. “Just remember, whatever we learn today, these tests don’t change anything.”
I like the way she says we, as if she’s in this with me.
“You’re still Jack Masselin. You’re still a pain in the ass. You’re still you.”
I am having a moment with Jack Masselin. If you’d asked me a couple of weeks ago or even two days ago if I could imagine such a thing, I would have laughed until I laughed the breath right out of me. This is the thing about life outside the house, though: you never know what might happen.
I think he feels it too, but I’m not sure.
He’d better feel it too.
It had better not just be me over here, by myself, on my own, having a moment over him as opposed to with him.
I act like La la la, no big deal, let’s go to Bloomington, let’s see if you’re really face-blind. But inside my chest, my heart is clenching and unclenching and skipping beats and fluttering like it’s about to burst its way out of there and fly around this car. I fix a smile on my face and stare out the window and think, Oh, heart, you traitor.
The lab is busy. An assistant leads us to Dr. Amber Klein (light brown hair, sharp cheekbones, glasses). She is dressed all in black, her sleeves rolled over her elbows, and her hair swept up in a kind of no-nonsense way. She’s probably around forty. The lab is also black, floors, walls, ceiling. The room is divided into cubicles by curtains—black, of course—and it feels like we’ve wandered onto the set of a music video. Libby wears purple and I’m in green, and we stand out like beacons.