Partly

J. Roz Foster

1.  ‘True’ could mean the same thing as ‘false’ 

2.  This might be a plane of existence much like the dream world  

3.  You can’t be sure your face is on unless you touch it or have a mirror handy

The third point had been more or less my own. 

Earlier that year, I’d noticed that I could not see my face—a thought that often surfaced during my sober hours (as I was now), but which had not been developed without the help of several doses of a very clean strain of acid.  I’d met the chemist in my Victorian novel class fall term. 

While I’d attended lectures already in full contact with the cosmos a number of times before, today was only like most days.  I was suffering from a deprivation of sleep, which did have natural semi-hallucinatory effects, such as the whitish-yellow glow around the students’ heads in front of me and the traces of color that the lecturer’s thick hands left in the air as he gestured from the podium.  I found that these effects were not at all unpleasant; in fact, they offered a rather delightful ethereal feel to my day—delightful, that is, if my face stayed where it was supposed to be.

As my palm cupped my jaw on that afternoon, I felt the tips of my fingers making deep impressions in the soft skin of my cheek and I believed without much hesitation that my face was still there. 

“There is no zuch theeng,” the speaker said, “as zometheeng.”

I watched a flesh colored tracer sweep across the lecturer’s face and as this streak of light faded, my mind wandered into the depths of this habit of mine, this habit of losing my face.  That year, I found that my face would disappear sometimes and I would have to place and keep my hand on its surface for several minutes or see it reflected in glass before my belief in its integrity settled in.  Looking on my reflection worked best to convince me that it had not, in fact, left me for good.  For instance, if I lost my face while walking in the city, I might turn to see my features in the windows of shop fronts.  In the car, I would pull my rearview mirror down to check.  But more often than not such visual aids were not available and I would have to put her hand on my chin, my cheek or my lips to maintain an acceptable level of confidence in my face.  I hoped the gesture made me look ponderous and not merely as silly as I felt in the act.  I felt guilty when I did it.  Indulging myself from time to time in the idea that my face had somehow vanished was, after all, rather childish. 

In the lecture theatre, I doodled a woman’s head in the margins of my notebook.  She had a shadowy hollow where the face should have been.  Long tendrils of dark inky curls, like my own, framed the void. 

There was something comforting, I thought, in being brushed over with the soft and obliterating hairs of this momentary madness, for on realizing that my face might have gone, a rush of terrifying isolation would consume me and then subside to a sense of myself as a very familiar, but unnamable, sort of idea.  Without other notions to clutter me, I believed that emptiness, that point of blankness, that utter absence, was likely my purist state.  And because it was my least muddled self, I reasoned that I should try to be at ease with it in case that mode of being were to overtake me permanently in life—which, I thought fiercely, it absolutely would not.  Because what if that space was not one of transcendence, but of stark raving madness plain and simple?  At that, I shook my head a little and set my pen down from my doodle in order to knock superstitiously on the sticker of wood grain that had been smoothed over my plastic foldout desk. 

I would absolutely not go mad.

Knock, knock, I knocked on the desk.

Baudrillard had heard my knocks and a pause in his speech alerted me to his presence once more.  When I looked up, I found that his eyes, from behind the large rounded lenses of his thick glasses, had snapped to my own and there remained.  One of his eyebrows raised in stern query.  He waited in silence. 

With my hand on my chin and a finger pressing hard on my lips, I nodded him on as if I had found his most recent words decidedly enlightening and had knocked in lieu of shouting, ‘Amen.’

When the lecture ended, I summarized in my notebook what I thought the instructor had proposed:

The lecture halls were behind me to the west.  My senses were deadened with the uniformity of brightly colored enamel and dulled with the even cadence of my pace through the university’s three most expansive parking lots.  Blinding streaks of window glass passed and passed in my periphery.

At this hour in the afternoon, the lots were filled to maximum capacity and looking at them dead on reminded me of the dizzying, disconcerting optical patterns that government issue headstones made on wide green lawns.  Several cars paced the rows for a spot.  A few of them stalked pedestrians as the latter made their way to their own cars.  A black fastback had begun to follow me in hopes that I would relinquish a space for it.  I shook my head in its direction to let it know that I hadn’t driven.  My apartment was only one street beyond the lots.  The fastback rolled on at my signal.  Its tires spat asphalt gravel, a slow shushing with intermittent pops.

I let my eyes blur a little as I walked, wondering vaguely if there was a way to see ‘through’ or ‘further into’ the glinting enamel fields.  I thought of those stereoscopic images in which flat pictures gave way to unmistakably three-dimensional images if I let my eyes go a little out of focus.  The first one I’d ever seen had been a photo filled to its edges with shiny, vibrantly colored candy pieces—not unlike an aerial view of the lots.  I remembered that when I’d realigned my eyes to look on the photo, most of the candy had seemed to recede while bunches of it appeared to move forward and to hover just in front of the picture, like handfuls of candy without hands.

With my eyes faintly crossed, I looked on the university lots with the vague hope of finding a similar dynamic, but they did not birth a new dimension as the stereoscopic photo had.  They only seemed to dome nebulously.  I doubted that the bend I perceived corresponded to anything factual, even to the literal roundness of the earth’s horizon, since my eyes were not equipped to detect that.  Besides, I wasn’t looking at the line where the enamel rooftops met the blank blue sky.  The curving I saw seemed very close, as if some warp in space-time were just a few feet off, moving with me as I walked.

The idea made me wonder what it would be like to find out that I had been enclosed within a round glass screen, a screen onto which the lots were projected, like colored light.  What if I were truly walking within some sort of a globe-shaped theatre, a concealed mechanism that rotated with my steps, one that provided me with only the sensation of being a body that moved through space and time?  As I continued visualizing the circuitous walls of this orbicular dramatic device, I became more and more convinced, despite the clarity of emptiness in the air around me, that I could see it.

Walking on and on through the lots, I entertained the possibility that my environment might not actually be ‘seen’ at all, but, instead, was an inseparable continuance of myself; that is, that I was the hidden projector.  How was it anyway that I had come to believe so whole-heartedly in the existence of an external world when any comprehension of such a plane always took place on an internal stage?  Bearing that in mind, it seemed feasible that there were no such things as ‘objects.’  The appearance of separate objects, like cars or people, could have been a kind of trick.  I felt indignant about it from within the elliptical scene, but amazed, nonetheless, at the verisimilitude of the show. 

In an extended shrug of bewilderment, my arm shot out before me, and as my hand crossed the vivid landscape of polished cars, my view seemed to liquefy at the edges of my fingers. 

I pondered further that if someone had played a joke on me to convince me of a world of objects when there was no such thing, the jester could only have been myself.  Before there was this stuff called matter and the speed of light and comfortable shoes, I might have been a thing stuck in a vast expanse of nothing with little to do but tell itself a story to assuage its boredom.  If it was an eternal thing and could find the story in itself to tell, then why wouldn’t it make a place like this and contain it all within something like time to oppose its limitless nature, perhaps even to define itself more completely by the opposition of measure?  And then, from within the story, it would glance the truth at moments like these—these long, blank, unpopulated walks in which it was allowed the luxury of illimitable musing.  It would have tiny and temporary epiphanies sprinkled throughout its life in time about the scarce instance—the grand luck!—of being in matter. 

In spotting itself here—mattering—it would say to itself: I am experiencing a condition with limits!  Each moment passes away, one right after the other, leaving me so quickly that my breath can barely keep up.  I continually disappear and reappear as a body in time, hoping my lungs will arrive in the next moment and won’t leave me sputtering in this solid, bright air or hang me again, a bodiless head—  Was it a head?  Perhaps it was more like a small parting in dark matter marking a minute difference from the rest of it.  A concavity.  A mouth-shape in black oil choking on its own fluidity, ruminating on the moment’s constancy—its passing.

Behind me, rows of multicolored cars shone in the sun.  I waited for the traffic signal at the intersection across from my apartment complex.  Cars sped by on the street, accelerating out of a long, sweeping curve in the road from the southeast.

“Change,” I said to the light.

It did not. 

I focused my concentration and tried to shift some belief or switch inside my mind, for if I were the only extant being and the universe a figment of my imagination, then this light should, “Change,” if I wanted it to.  I squinted.  “Change.”

The light glowed on, red.  Red.

When the light finally changed, I stepped from the curb to the street. 

A car horn jarred me, blaring long and loud.

The split second before I was hit, I tried to figure out how I had seen nothing in what was a relatively large space entirely within my field of vision and then, with not a second having passed from that instant to the next, there was, in that same plainly observable space, a speeding, skidding ton of metal and glass.  On impact, I felt as if I had not been hit from the side but, rather, dropped from the roof of a very high structure.  I felt as if I had then landed on the front of a car that was, so very oddly, standing upright on its back bumper, perpendicular to the ground. 

As quickly as my sense of space had shifted, it was flung back with what seemed even greater violence.  I tumbled up the hood and windshield and my right leg, my ribs, my left arm and shoulder broke in swift succession.  I left streaks of blood on the white enamel hood and room and a blue webbed glass windshield in my wake.  Spinning in an arc through the air, my eyes wide to watch, I felt caught within a measure of time slowed to gradations of moments.  The spectral phases of a second fanned out to reveal yawning hollows in the ether, yawning hollows into which I saw so plainly what was.

And what was not.

My face was crushed into the street.

Six days after the accident, I woke without a name. 

I remembered the corner, the car, the smell of burnt rubber and the force with which my head had hit the asphalt.  I could not remember anything else about myself, about who I was or, at least, who I had been.  In my mind, there was only the impact and the 'now' where stark white light rushed from an unadorned window in a great and constant blast to bleach out the details of the room, along with the details of my life. 

One of my arms seemed dead while the other was strapped down tightly to the edge of the mattress.  A transparent tube of clear liquid rose up from the inside of my elbow and disappeared behind my head.  My left leg moved, but the other I knew by instinct I should let stay very still.  My mouth was sticky.  My throat was dry.  I shifted my neck slightly and, as the back of my head throbbed with a new sharp pain, I thought with alarm: My face. 

I could not see my face. 

Neither able to move my numbed arm nor to lift the other, since it had been strapped to the bed to protect what I groggily noted was an I.V. line, I could not satisfy the compulsion to press my fingers to my chin, my cheek, my lips.  Uncertain if my face was there or not, I began to feel queasy and as the seconds ticked on, my panic rose.  I became convinced that there was, in fact, a gaping, empty hole in the front of my head, clear in color and blank like air. 

Like the warm arms of a loving friend, a giddy absence rushed through me.  This vacancy, this void, this lack of me seemed far more kindred than a name would have been and when a nurse came in, I was laughing. 

I felt warm and calm in whispering hoarsely to her through my chuckles, “Is my face still on?”

The nurse answered, “Partly.”