The Faces Of Strangers

“I was crossing the street at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-Fourth Street and a car barreled into me. I remember flipping over onto the hood but not much else after that.”

They asked her to recall what she had been doing, where she had been going.

“I’m home from college on spring break. I have to go to Myrtle Beach with my friends. We’re leaving. They’re going to leave without me.” She had attempted to rise out of the bed, but her wrists and ankles had been tethered there beneath the blankets. They asked her to recall her name—“Nora,” she’d scoffed. They asked her to recall the names of the people standing in front of her. “Dr. Li, Dr. Charles, Dr. Kelly.” They asked her to name the couple sitting on either side of her bed, each holding one of her hands. She rolled her eyes. But when the request was repeated, she stared into each face with determination and focus for what felt like hours before she turned her head, slumped back into the pillows and said that the exercise was stupid. The woman had broken down then, biting her hand so as to contain her tears, and the man had come over from his side of the bed to comfort her. Nora had watched all this, as she had watched Doctors Li, Charles and Kelly exchange glances and purse their lips before they scribbled copious notes into their individual ledgers. One of them picked up the phone in her room to make a page, and in moments, a flurry of men and women in white coats descended upon the room.

After a number of days, questions and tests, the team of neurologists and orthopedists gathered the man, her father Arthur, and the woman, her mother Stella, into the hallway to deliver their diagnosis in hushed, hurried tones. Arthur had erupted in the hallway at the mention of the words. “That’s ridiculous. Nora knows why she’s here. She knows her name. She can remember what color her sheets are, what kind of cake she had on her fifteenth birthday. She knows who she is.” This time, it was Stella who calmed him, walking him into the stairwell, where his angry shouts echoed and bounced off the landings and banisters.

In the end they told Nora everything, from her broken femur to the damaged sliver of fusiform gyrus in her brain. How could such a tiny piece of spongelike matter make such a difference? The doctors had tried to soften the diagnosis by reinforcing the fact that Nora could still function regularly on a daily basis. She could eat, study, get a job, find a husband.

“Not really sure how that one is relevant,” Arthur had smirked in the hospital room while Stella held her daughter’s hand. “Everyone knows you would have no trouble in that field even with a bag over your head.” The neurologists weren’t entirely certain of the long-term effect this might have, but the terminology was enough to scare the Grands: brain damage. Nora had forced herself to smile at her father’s attempt at levity, but brain damage was brain damage. Whenever people mentioned it, there were always a few shocked moments thereafter, with audibly sharp intakes of breath and sympathetic sighs exhaling them.

By the time Nora was released into the care of her parents and a borrowed wheelchair, she had lost all track of time. Her father wheeled her from the elevator and into the foyer, where her eyes lit on familiar things. She took in the pile of colorful throw pillows in the corner, the twin towers of stacked magazines on either end of the coffee table, the plush couch that had long since broken its spine but was so comfortable that the Grands couldn’t bring themselves to part with it. Even the word familiar had become familiar to her. She cherished the word now, because when the doctors used it, it meant that she was doing well, that she could identify things. Familiar was always one step closer to being normal. From the threshold of the dark dining room, she could hear whispered rustlings and excited murmurs.

“She’s here,” a voice whispered. She turned to look back at her father, that not-quite-yet-familiar face, but one she was retraining herself to know in the antiseptic starkness of the hospital room. He smiled down at her and pushed her farther into the room, where a flashbulb went off, illuminating a few bobbing balloons and a group of people gathered around a large cake.

“Welcome home!” they chorused together, and broke into embarrassed giggles at their seemingly rehearsed symphony. Nora knew she should smile so she did, but there was a halting in the way her cranial muscles worked, taut and obdurate, as though coming out of hibernation. She engaged her brain, forcing her lips to purse together and show her teeth, but she didn’t mean it. She didn’t even feel it. Seven strangers smiled back at her. She turned back to look at her father. He licked his lips and smiled even harder, glancing at the woman who stood just off to the side, methodically massaging each digit of her fingers as though she were taking a tally. Nora could see the gold stars twinkling in the woman’s ears. She smiled harder at their presence, at their continuity. She was forever grateful for those gold stars that helped her identify her own mother.

A boy approached her, holding out his hands. “Welcome home, Nor,” he said. “I really missed you.” He bent over to hug her and the floral smell of Pert Plus mixed with the metallic scent of the oil he used to clean his flute wafted off him. Her brother, Nicholas. She remembered the scent in the hospital room as he had sat by her side, watching her concernedly and narrating the play-by-play of his recent wrestling matches. Her own brother had been distilled to a smell. She found herself hoping that he kept up with flute practice and being that hygienic boy whose sweaty wrestling practices encouraged him to wash his hair every single day. As he leaned in to her she put her arms around him and breathed him in. She wanted to pack this smell, to put it in a little atomizer and spritz it every so often so that everything around her smelled just like him. But that left six others. Behind Nicholas came a tall girl with a cleft chin. She had sandy hair and wore a retainer across her top teeth. When the girl bent down, she whispered, “Claire” in Nora’s ear, like a blessing. Nora looked up at her best friend, grateful for the answer to an unasked question. Claire tightened her grip on Nora then, and Arthur had to put his hand on Claire to remind her that Nora was still very weak.

“Sorry,” Claire whispered, backing away, her eyes glittering with tears, the ridge of that perfect cleft chin quivering with sadness. One by one the others came forward—her friends and classmates from high school, from her childhood, from the building. They each whispered their names in her ear like an invocation, and Nora felt glad that she’d had each of their names on the tip of her tongue as they leaned down. All except one; when the last boy approached her, she flinched and turned her head down. She hadn’t meant to be rude, but she couldn’t place anything about this boy, from his polo shirt to his porcupine hair. His arms were reaching out to embrace her, but this boy couldn’t look more like a stranger to her. He looked up at Arthur before he came any closer to Nora, his eyes beseeching him. Nora couldn’t see behind her, but Arthur had shrugged his shoulders sadly and shaken his head. Stella had whispered, “Maybe later, Jason. She’s probably exhausted.”

Jason backed away, nodding, and joined the group of girls and Nicholas, who were still using the dining table as a sort of barricade between them and her wheelchair. Nora turned her head slightly and whispered toward her parents. Whispering was all she seemed to be capable of right now. It seemed to be the only tone appropriate for the situation. Anything more and everything would appear normal. “I need a minute, Dad.”

Arthur patted Nora on the shoulder and swung her chair toward the hallway. As she passed the group of people, they were all nearly indistinguishable in a huddle. There was only enough time to recognize that her brother was wearing a maroon hoodie with Harvard emblazoned across the chest before she was wheeled down the hall to her room. The late-afternoon light softened the walls, glancing off a window outside to illuminate all the framed photos on the walls and on her shelves.

“Just wheel me to the vanity. I can take it from there. My hands are fine, you know.” She shook them jazzily.

“I know you can do it, honey. I just don’t want you to tire yourself out.”

“I have to get used to it.” He parked her where she had requested and kissed her softly on the cheek. “We’ll be in the dining room. Just call if you need anything.”

Nora nodded and waited until the door had clicked shut. Once she was alone, she looked up. Purple bruises blossomed under her eyes and her lips were red and chapped. Her cheekbones looked all wrong to her, as did even the color of her eyes. They had been brown, she’d thought. But now they looked gray. She was looking at a stranger. This face was unknown to her. This face, this entire temperament was like an arranged marriage to a person she would have to spend the rest of her life with, sight unseen. She shut her eyes, turned her wheelchair away from the mirror and buried her face in her hands. She didn’t want to look at herself anymore. She didn’t want to look at anyone.

Everything felt drained—her brain, her heart, her tear ducts. There was a tentative knock at the door, and when it was pushed gently open, Harvard walked in, wafting that burnished flowery aroma.

Nora looked up. “Nicky...?” she asked.

He nodded. “Here’s how I see it, Nor. I figure that now we’re even. You’re face blind. I’m left-handed. The playing field has finally been leveled.”

“How is that leveled?” Nora said. “Being left-handed is not an affliction.”

“I can’t tell you how many wrestling matches I’ve lost because of it,” Nicholas said.

“Last I checked, being left-handed wasn’t classified under brain damage. And when’s the last time being left-handed ever caused social suicide? ’Cause that’s what this is, you know. I’m fucked.”

“It’s not that bad. It’ll get easier. It’s just hard now ’cause it’s new. Look, I got you this,” Nicholas held out a small black notebook toward her. “I thought it might help.”

“What is it?” Nora took it from him. The pages inside were blank except for the first one, which had Nicholas’s name on top.

Nicholas Grand

5ʹ10ʺ

Hazel eyes

Broad shoulders

Handsome

Stunning smile

“You’re too young to be resorting to the Personals section. What is this?”

Nicholas grinned. “It’s a face book. You make notes on people. That way, you can put the descriptions to the faces.” Years later, when that ubiquitous social media site would seemingly take over the world, Nora would remark that if only her brother had taken his idea to the internet, he might have been the millionaire by his thirtieth birthday.

“And I see this one has been written extremely objectively,” Nora said, arching an eyebrow.

“Well, you can amend those based on whatever helps you remember.” Nicholas grinned.

“Thanks, Nicky.”

“We can go back out and start working on it together,” Nicholas said, nodding toward the door. “Starting with Jason. How about ape-like?”

“I know Mom and Dad did it to help, but I didn’t ask for all that.” Nora sighed, waving her hands in the direction of the dining room. “I didn’t even ask to come home from the hospital. I would have been fine sitting propped up in that bed for the rest of my life, with the doctors shining their little penlights in my face, whispering all around me like I had lost my hearing. Gesturing toward me as though I had gone blind. No, asshole, I can hear and see just fine. The problem is that I can’t remember your face.”

“The mind is funny,” Nicholas said. “Your brain is probably exhausted from everything that’s happened. You’ll be okay, Nor. We’ll all help you.”

She looked at his sweatshirt. “What happened, did you get into Harvard while I was in the hospital, boy genius?” Nicholas looked sheepish.

“No, this is the one Claire gave you. I stole it while you were in there, ’cause it smelled like you.” He raised his arms above his head and peeled it off, offering it to her. She accepted it and buried her nose in it.

“Now it smells like you.”

“Really? What do I smell like?”

“Pert Plus and flute oil.”

He sniffed under his arms. “Add it,” he said, nodding toward the notebook. Nora scribbled down the observation onto Nicholas’s page. “What about me? What do I smell like?”

Nicholas leaned toward her and breathed in. “Raisins.”

“I don’t even like raisins.”

“I know. That’s what’s ironic.”

“I can’t believe I didn’t recognize Jason. That was some mind fuck.”

“It’s okay. It’ll take time. Though if you ask me, Jason is definitely worth forgetting.”

“I guess that’s one way of relegating an ex-boyfriend to the recesses of your mind. Or literally forgetting about him altogether.” Nora smiled at her brother, but she could feel tears building in the back of her eyelids, threatening to weaken her resolve, forcing her to screw her eyes shut and bury her face in her hands. Nicholas held her tight, and while she tried to hold her tears in, they burned her eyes as they trickled out from behind her fingers.

* * *

The ironic thing was that when Nora was in high school, she’d known every single person in her graduating class of five hundred. She’d started introducing herself to everyone and, by the middle of her freshman year, waved to everyone in the hallways. That overfriendliness had begun as a defense mechanism at first. Saying hi to everyone seemed less obnoxious than saying hi to no one, so she began associating herself with them all—the cheerleaders, the football players, though she’d never been to a school game. She waved to the kids who dressed in black trench coats and who played that fantasy card game Magic on the sixth floor outside the English department. She waved to the theater kids, and the preppies, and even the teachers—the ones she’d had the years before. The ones she’d inherit the following one. She’d felt strange doing it at first, waving and acknowledging everyone. But that had been in high school. That had been before the accident.

Shortly after she’d been brought home from the hospital, her parents had given her space, encouraging her to take all the time she needed to heal. They let her postpone her return to college until she felt ready. But at the end of what would have been the second semester of her junior year, on a dark overcast Saturday afternoon, Stella had silently placed a few books on Nora’s bed and walked out of the room. Nora had waited until her mother’s footsteps had faded away down the hall before she vaulted herself out of her desk chair and limped over to read the titles. Facing Your Fears, Understanding Facial Recognition, Face Prosopagnosia Down. Nora had seen it as a personal affront. This is what you have, the books were calling. This is your new label and you can’t shed it until you recognize who you have become. She needed some kind of protection from the elements, from herself, even, so she’d cracked open the covers and learned how to combat this feeling—this feeling of helplessness, of unfamiliarity. There were tricks and tools you could use. But a lot of it relied upon good friends and people that you could trust inherently. And at the time, she wasn’t sure she could get that. She didn’t know how to talk about her situation. She couldn’t very well introduce herself to some stranger that didn’t have any specific identifying demarcations and expect them to become friends with her.

She rolled over now and hugged her knees to her chest. I can’t do this. She swallowed hard, pushing back tears that were poised to spill. It’s too difficult. I want mandatory name tags. My brain hurts. It was exhausting, having to focus even harder on everything all the time, to have to imprint someone’s face onto your brain. It wasn’t the way it used to be, where you made casual eye contact upon meeting someone. Now she was forced to devour faces with her eyes.

After a few silent moments of crying, she sat herself up and went into the adjoining bathroom. Her face was tan from the summer, but crying had whitewashed it so it appeared pale and gaunt. She squeezed her eyes shut and examined herself in the mirror. Thank goodness for that beauty spot right on the crown of her cheekbone. But she would never forget her own self, would she? She gripped the edges of the ceramic basin with both hands, feeling as though she herself might sink through the tiles. Her mascara was bleeding down her face; she looked like a sad clown in a Marcel Marceau sketch. A limp washcloth hung from the edge of the sink where she’d left it this morning, and she polished her face with it. A new person appeared, clean of the mask of makeup. It was so surprising to her how different she looked without it, completely new, washed out, as if she’d just been born. But that thought made her start crying all over again. How can I not even recognize myself, she asked through blurry vision as she stared menacingly at the mirror, engaging with it, pushing herself to recollect some aspect of who she was, what she looked like. She used to think her features were so striking, but clearly they weren’t. Clearly her features looked to her naked eye like anyone’s features, because she didn’t even look like herself. Not to her, anyway. When was this going to stop? Would this eventually turn into a dull headache that might only pierce the edges of her memory? Her memory was the one thing she had. Other than faces, she remembered everything. Vacations, graduations, those mundane family moments that suddenly seemed so precious. It was faces that escaped her entirely.

* * *

She felt daunted by the day’s task of attending this group, already drained by the prospect of conjuring features, memorizing jaw formation and the way dimples poked like divots into faces. She would have to concentrate extra hard when someone addressed her, her eyes keen for signs of nail biting or cuticle peeling that might tip her off on his or her identity. She had promised her mom and Dr. Li that she would attend the group and see what it was all about. She hadn’t promised to commit to it, but if Dr. Li thought it would help, she would go. Maybe she’d start to feel a little like herself again. Maybe that light would finally start to turn back on in her life.

NICHOLAS

Tallinn

September 2002

When Nicholas’s plane departed after the hour-long stopover in Stockholm, the light had already been waning, highlighting islands floating like clusters of paint chips. Tiny crystals of ice spider-webbed across the glass window, splintering the dark outside into tiled mosaics of uncertainty. With the plane starting its descent over Tallinn, the sun was completely gone, and Nicholas felt the darkness seeping into his chest and sticking to his insides, eclipsing light and hope. He had considered that he might be homesick, but he was more fearful of the unknown, of the foreign, of the discomfort that might await him. He stretched his arms overhead, his fingers striking against the light and air panel. As the plane circled over a postage-stamp-sized tarmac, the fear saturated him completely like a sponge. He focused on shaking it off with the same concentration he used to approach a wrestling match: fiercely and with conviction. But fear clung to him like a straitjacket, pinning his arms to his sides and rendering him helpless.

As he stepped through the doors of the plane, warm air whipped through the slats of the air bridge, attacking him like another fold of ammunition. Even the immigration hall with its warm halogen lights didn’t soften the pall that seemed to have settled over him. He handed over his passport with his Estonian visa plastered inside. The control guard scarcely glanced at him or the pages inside before stamping it heavily and passing it back across the divider. Nicholas felt warm and turgid from the compression of the plane as he made his way down a long ramp that led to Arrivals. The hall was practically empty; just a few limp businessmen holding laptop bags and searching for their drivers; flight attendants walking briskly past him, their heels clicking against the floor as they wheeled their bags away from the airport as fast as they could.

Either the passengers on his plane had been incredibly fast to collect their belongings, or no one had checked in any bags. Nicholas’s suitcase was the only one making a plaintive, circuitous path, and as he pulled it off, he noticed Paavo walking toward him. Paavo was even wirier than Nicholas had remembered, as though the slightest flick of a finger might upset him. His fine, blond hair was so light that he appeared bald. He remembered how Barbara had mentioned her pleasure with this partner match, how much she had thought Paavo and Nicholas would have in common. Nicholas could hardly believe that he would share any common ground with this boy. He remembered how skittish Paavo had been at orientation, how pale and wan he’d looked, and how that hulking Russian student had come bursting into the conference room to announce that the Estonian boy had passed out in the bathroom. Paavo had been all right—mostly dazed and extremely embarrassed. But Nicholas couldn’t help but think that he’d gotten the short end of the exchange student stick.

“Nico,” Paavo said. “Welcome.”

“Nicholas.” He gripped the handle of his suitcase and put his hand out. “Paavo. Good to see you. You feeling better?”

The boy nodded and looked away. “It was nothing that day. I hadn’t eaten.” He took Nicholas’s hand and reached for the suitcase handle with his left. “Was the flight all right?”

“It was long,” Nicholas said, stifling a yawn.

“I hope you are hungry. Mama has been cooking all day for your arrival.”

“I’m starving. I slept through the meals.”

“Come,” Paavo said, turning toward the door. “Papa is in the car outside.”

“I forgot how good your English is.”

“I told you—mostly everyone in Estonia speaks English. After all—” Paavo turned around to face Nicholas, who stopped short behind him “—it is easy when there are only three words in the English language. What are they?”

“Huh?”

“It’s a riddle.”

“Oh. I give up.”

“The English language,” Paavo exclaimed triumphantly. “Get it? One—The. Two—English. Three—Language?”

“Right,” Nicholas said, forcing a smile.

“Anyway, you’ll pick up some Estonian while you’re here. I think you’re taking a class at school. But I can teach you some things, as well.”

“I’d love that.” Secretly, Nicholas wanted the information, vocabulary and pronunciations to travel by osmosis from Paavo’s brain to his own so they could skip all the embarrassing times when Nicholas would feel inferior to Paavo, when he would feel beholden. Nicholas had a good ear—that’s what Senora Hall told him in Spanish II—but he wasn’t sure where his talents lay in a language that sounded as though it had more vowels than consonants.

Nicholas followed Paavo meekly toward the door, feeling as though he were being brought to the gallows. In the small embankment outside baggage claim, the brisk air sent a shiver down his spine. Was it still September in Estonia? It felt so much colder. He zipped his jacket up to his nose, breathing in the salty, damp flavor of his unwashed self. He squinted at the streetlights; their contrast against the inky sky was blinding. A small brown Lada chugged at the curb, streaked with gray stripes of dirt as though it were aging. Paavo swung his suitcase into the trunk and nodded toward the passenger seat.

“Please sit in the front.”

Nicholas opened the door and ducked his head, folding his legs in front of him. The car was warm and smelled like petrol and peppermint. “Papa, Nico. Nico, this is my father, Leo.” The man in the driver’s seat looked nothing like Paavo. He was broad and brown and hairy, reminding Nicholas of a big Russian bear. Leo grunted and grimaced, which Nicholas translated into a greeting and a smile. The evasive Estonian smile would emerge eventually. Coaxing it out of Leo would be one of Nicholas’s first challenges in the Sokolov household. Paavo’s father pulled at the gears, squeaking the car out of the airport road and onto a slip of a highway.