I used to take the five-thirty red line into Dallas for my job at the ad agency downtown. On the ride there, still half dreaming, I’d lean my head against the train window and listen to old episodes of Radiolab.
It was while listening to an episode one morning that I first heard about the woman whose sense of direction had suddenly and mysteriously rotated ninety degrees: one quarter turn to the right.
“East-west became north-south,” she explained. “Like in Colorado here, the Rocky Mountains are on the west end of town. When this happened to me, they moved to the north end of town. But everything else moved with it.”
“Did it ever happen again?” the host asked.
“Over and over and over,” she said.
On Sundays we go see J’s dad. It’s been four months since a stroke turned his brain into scrambled eggs. Now, he sits in a recliner in his underwear watching murder mystery shows on Amazon Prime.
His favorite one is set in Canada in the 1890s. The detective is this guy Murdoch. He’s unconventional, but he always gets his man. When everybody thinks it was the butler, he thinks it was the bank teller. When everyone suspects suicide, he suspects untraceable poison.
I sit on the other side of the room trying to read, but this show is impossible to ignore. It’s written in that blunt PBS style where every line is so clear and straight forward you can’t help but pay attention.
“It was the bartender, wasn’t it?” I say, looking up from my book forty-five minutes later. “The bartender did it, didn’t he?”
Four months earlier, on Mother’s Day, 2023, my father-in-law had what was initially described to us as a “massive stroke.” Later his stroke was re-described to us as “not massive, technically,” but “still pretty big though,” before being officially diagnosed as a medium-sized hemorrhagic event on the left side of his brain.
He was rushed by ambulance to Medical City in Plano where he underwent an unsuccessful emergency surgery to remove a blood clot from somewhere deep inside his brain. The clot, the surgeon explained, had been partially removed, which was not the same thing as being completely removed.
“Completely removed,” he said, “would have been better.”
By the time J and I got to the hospital, around seven-thirty in the morning, the surgery was over, but the prognosis was still uncertain. Because there was technically still a blood clot in my father-in-law’s brain, he was technically still having a stroke. This technicality, along with the fact that they’d entered his brain through a major artery in his groin, would only later strike me as being, now that I thought about it, pretty weird.
That a stroke could go on for so long.
That the way to a man’s brain is through his crotch.
At the time, though, I couldn’t make much sense of anything. So I accepted everything with the detached nonchalance of a guy who has no idea what’s going on. When the doctor returned a few hours later to tell us that there hadn’t been a blood clot after all, that the scanner had been wrong, that this happened with scanners sometimes, that sometimes they were wrong, I accepted this too.
While I was relieved that my father-in-law was going to pull through, I couldn’t help feeling that the whole thing had been a bit anticlimactic. I thought he was going to die and had prepared myself for all the emotional devastation, catharsis, and then eventual personal transformation that the death of a father-in-law had to offer. That he was now going to live took some getting used to.
It wasn’t until I was falling asleep later that night that I wondered: If there hadn’t been a blood clot, what had they removed?
These are weird days. Everybody says so. I was talking to my friend Michael Wheaton about it the other day. He agreed that things have been a little off lately.
“Is it a mid-thirties thing?” I said, about the offness.
“It might be a mid-thirties thing,” he said.
My father-in-law’s stroke, an event that has certainly turned our lives upside down, happened at a time in my life when I was feeling a little turned around to begin with. Specifically, I was feeling turned to the left. A few weeks earlier, J and I had rearranged all the furniture in our bedroom, overcome one afternoon by the compulsion home renters sometimes get to make small, arbitrary adjustments to their interior decorating scheme in the hopes that one of them might improve the quality of their lives. You never know what might improve the quality of your life and it’s worth giving a few things a shot. And so we’d moved our bed from the east wall to the north wall and our couch from the north wall to the west wall and our dresser from the west wall to the south wall and our bookshelf from the south wall to the east wall—we had, essentially, rotated the room ninety degrees—so while I’d become accustomed over the years to sleeping east to west, I was now sleeping north to south, everything at a right angle to where it had been before.
Our decision to rearrange our furniture now, after years of not re-arranging our furniture, which had followed a decade of not re-arranging anything, had been inspired by a five-minute YouTube video I’d seen about the art of Feng Shui. A Swedish man with a Swedish accent had explained to me—an American man with American sensibilities—the basic dos and don’ts of an ancient Chinese system of interior decorating designed to harmonize the energy in your home. I’d never thought about the energy in our home before and had certainly never harmonized it, although now that he mentioned it, I had been feeling a little off lately, out of tune, both with myself and my surroundings.
“We have an energy problem,” I told J after watching the video, suddenly aware of certain glaring mistakes we’d made when it came to the basic layout of our bedroom. For one thing, our bed was facing the doorway, a common mistake, but one that has been known to let good energy out of the room and bad energy in, creating a kind of reverse energy flow that may have been at least partially responsible for the rampant inner malaise I’d been experiencing recently, a condition that had gotten so severe I’d even mentioned it to my doctor, a man whose name was pronounced, but not spelled, “Liar.” He’d asked me all kinds of probing questions about my diet and medications and exercise routine but had failed to ask even one question about my interior decorating choices, specifically my bed’s relation to my doorway, which I was now starting to suspect was likely responsible for many of the energetic and harmonic issues I was experiencing in my life.
And so we moved our bed to the left, and we moved our couch to the left, and we moved our dresser to the left, and we moved our bookshelf to the left—we had, essentially, rotated our entire room counter-clockwise—and not only experienced the immediate energy boost the YouTube video had promised, but also the unsettling feeling of our entire world having shifted one quarter turn to the left.
In a fluke of sanity, my father-in-law’s entire, month-long stay in the hospital only cost seventeen-hundred dollars I couldn’t help wondering, though, if a bigger, much more devastating bill was still coming soon, or had possibly already been overlooked.
The day he came home, his sons moved his leather recliner from the den into the living room, and J downloaded his favorite shows onto his iPad. I asked J if it was too soon for me to buy him a t-shirt featuring the logo for the band The Strokes.
“Yes,” she said, unimpressed.
The first Sunday we visited J’s dad, I watched him watching himself in a full-length mirror J had propped up against the couch. I could tell by the way he was looking at himself that he was having an out of body experience. This, I supposed, made my experience an out-of-out-of-body experience; the body I was out of, in this case, not being my own. I wasn’t sure whose it was. We’d been trying to figure that out. Our best guess was that it’s my father-in-law’s, but I wasn’t entirely convinced.
“He’s still in there,” my mother-in-law would say sometimes, stroking his forehead. I agreed, but when I’d watch him examining his body in the mirror—poking at it, prodding at it, and otherwise attempting to familiarize himself with it—it was hard not to think of him as being trapped in there.
In any case, this new version of my father-in-law was taking some getting used to. At first, we weren’t sure what this new version had to do with the old version, although we all agreed that we liked this new version better. He’s quieter. Gentler. Less preachy. The old version had once told my wife, when she’d come home from college with a nose ring, that she was too ugly for him to look at now. This new version hadn’t said anything like that yet. This new version could only speak in short phrases and none of them made any sense.
“The thing about it is. . . ” he’d say and trail off.
“And also. . . this. . . ” he’d say, gesturing to an imaginary object.
“And also. . . that. . . ” he’d say, gesturing to another.
While I watched him watching himself in the mirror one day, I was reminded of a technological glitch I’d recently experienced on my webcam at work. I’d noticed the glitch during a routine Monday morning meeting when we all meet over Zoom to discuss what we have going on that week. I never have anything going on, so I usually just tell people about whatever show I’ve been watching on Netflix. In this case, it was a show called Is It Cake? in which judges try to decide if it’s cake or not. It was while describing a particularly compelling episode featuring baked recreations of a telephone book that I first became aware of the glitch.
While I watched myself talking in the small box in the corner of my screen—a common-enough out-of-body experience for remote workers like me—I noticed myself feeling a little more out of body than normal, a kind of double removal in which I felt unfamiliar with the body I was out of. It was not until the meeting was ending that I realized what was going on. My image, which is normally displayed as a mirror image, had somehow become unmirrored and was now displaying what might be called my Real, Actual Self.
I’d read about this phenomenon recently, which can also be created using a non-reversing mirror, a device created by connecting two regular mirrors at a ninety-degree angle so that your image, which is reversed in one mirror, is then reversed back in the other: A kind of infinitely reversing mirror, sometimes called a TRUE MIRROR.
Like me, most people find the experience of looking at themselves in a true mirror disorienting at first. Then, quickly after that, overwhelming. It’s not uncommon for people to break down into tears or experience an acute and overwhelming sense of body dysmorphia. Although unlike typical body dysmorphia, in which people are unable to see their bodies accurately, in a true mirror, you are no longer able to see your body inaccurately, an experience most people find off putting, if not deeply disturbing.
It’s late September now. Someone is putting hatch chiles in all the guacamole. Families of squirrels are playing tag between the trees. Pigeons have started migrating to wherever.
While trying to find that old episode of Radiolab about the turned around woman, I accidentally listened to an episode about homing pigeons. They can find their way home from anywhere. For decades, scientists have been trying to figure out how they do it. They’ll blindfold them, put them in a magnetized box, slowly spin them around, and drive them a thousand miles out into the desert. By the time the scientists return to the lab, the pigeons are there waiting for them.
“So how do they do it?” the host asked.
“I have a very easy answer,” the scientist said. “We don’t know.”
In contrast to the homing pigeon, an animal incapable of getting lost, Dallas has recently been infiltrated by cicadas, an insect that is practically impossible to find. They attach themselves high up in the trees and between the slats of the fences and rev themselves up like buzz saws at all hours of the night and day. They molt and leave papier-mâché facsimiles of themselves everywhere. Decoy analogues. Little ghosts that you can crush into powdered sugar. A year from now—if scientists are to be believed—millions of them will wake up from their seventeen-year hibernation and emerge into the southern United States like an Old Testament style plague. In the meantime, there are the early risers to deal with.
Every time I hear one of these things outside my window in the morning, I can’t help thinking they must be feeling a little lost. Woken up twelve months early from their deep space cryosleep. An alien lifeform on a distant planet.
What’s going on here? they’ve got to be thinking. And where is everybody?
Lately, I’ve been wondering the same thing.
I text people.
“Where are you?” I say.
They’re at their daughter’s dance recital. They’re at Little League practice. They’re at Costco scoring major savings on common household items by buying them in bulk. A forty-five pack of toilet paper for $35.53. Three gallons of maple syrup for twenty bucks.
“I’m at Costco,” they say. “Where are you?”
There is the disorientation of finding yourself in a different place. And there is the disorientation of finding yourself in the same place except it’s all a little different. Suddenly and mysteriously turned around, flipped upside down, rotated ninety degrees to the left.
In that Radiolab story—which I finally found and re-listened to in an effort to get all these facts straight, and if not all these facts then at least most of these facts, part of my ongoing commitment to a little something called journalistic integrity—the woman eventually found a doctor who believed in her condition. And not only believed in it, but had treated thousands of patients just like her: people prone to losing their bearings at any moment, for no apparent reason.
It is possible, medically speaking, for nothing to change and everything to be different. Or like Sarah Manguso offers in her essay “Perfection”: “. . . if you know where to stand, you can get lost in a forest of three trees.”
When my father-in-law makes a gesture like the sign of the cross, that means he needs to take a shit. Lately, in an effort to not shy away from the hard and beautiful lessons this life offers us if we are willing and paying attention, I’ve been helping out with what J’s mom calls “the icky bits.”
The bathroom doorway is too narrow for his wheelchair, so I wheel my father-in-law into the guest room where there’s a camping toilet full of Tidy Cats kitty litter. I pull his pants down to his ankles and help him balance on the toilet. The first time I saw my father-in-law’s penis, just hanging there as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on, I knew I’d crossed a threshold.
There it is, I thought. There’s no going back.
“This is kinda weird, huh,” I’d said, trying to break the ice. I flashed back to being the nineteen-year-old boyfriend his daughter brought home to dinner one night.
He smirked.
“Well okay then…” he said.
I happen to be writing this—whatever it is—at a time in my life when I’m not only feeling a little turned around and a little upside down but a little itchy as well. A flare up of the psoriasis that can lie dormant in my skin for years before emerging like an Old Testament style plague. The sixth one, I think. Just after pestilence. Right before hail.
Psoriasis is a glitch of the autoimmune system. A case of the body not recognizing itself. I don’t blame my body. Sometimes I can barely recognize it either. When I tried to renew my driver’s license a few years back, my new photo was flagged in the computer system as being a “potential impersonator.” The person I was impersonating, in this case, being myself.
“Are you yourself?” a man behind a metal desk asked me, in somewhat more official terms.
Then he asked me to prove it.
It’s not uncommon, halfway through your life, to catch a glimpse of yourself in the bathroom mirror and experience a brief but disorienting lack of recognition. It’s not uncommon to look around and wonder where you are, exactly, and how you got here. It’s not uncommon to develop rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, and various other autoimmune mix-ups in which your body, not recognizing itself as itself, starts working against you.
“Try putting this stuff on it,” my new dermatologist told me during my most recent psoriatic flare up. He handed me a tube of what appeared to be Crisco cooking oil. I’d found this doctor on my insurance company’s website and had chosen him based purely on his name, which was pronounced, but not spelled, “Charlatan.” I was also intrigued by the description of his practice, which claimed he was a doctor of both dermatology and aesthetics. A man trained in the art and science of how things should look, how our faces and features should be arranged, a sort of feng shui of the human body.
It wasn’t until I was in his office, however, that I realized that this man—this “Charlatan”—was not only significantly more successful than me but also significantly younger. He wore a golden strap around his wrist that he hadn’t even bothered attaching a watch to. His skin glowed with a surplus of collagen and vitamin A. He still seemed capable of learning new vocabulary words and recalling them instantaneously, operating purely on flash memory, unlike me where most of my vocabulary has already been sealed up in long-term storage where it can take days or sometimes even weeks to load up a single term, and where adding to the lexicon seems far beyond my operating system’s capabilities. And so I’d found myself in the awkward position of having to take this guy seriously. It felt a little backward if I’m being honest. And if not backward, then certainly turned to the left. “So,” I’d said, looking down at the tube of stuff. “I should put this stuff on it.”
“Yes,” he’d said patiently, and a bit condescendingly I noticed, squeezing out a small amount onto the back of his hand and rubbing it in as if to demonstrate how tubes of stuff worked. “Just put this stuff on it.”
It’s not like I thought I’d have all the answers by now, but I have more questions than I expected. Like: What is that? And: Is it cake?
The answer, more often than I ever would have expected, is that yes, it is cake. Although, in this case, it was more of a lemon meringue pie. J’s aunt made it. She’d flown down from Canada in that surprising and mysterious way that strokes have of bringing families together.
In the four months since the stroke, I’d spent more time with J’s family than I had in years. There were the long afternoons in the hospital waiting room with nothing to do but play spades and watch Beverly Hills Cop. There were the long afternoons at J’s parents’ house with nothing to do but listen to Murdoch solve mystery after mystery using old-fashioned common sense and the belief that things are not always—or, perhaps, ever—what they seem. There was Father’s Day, when I’d watched J take her dad to the bathroom, and when they returned, I’d seen him squeeze her arm, and I’d watched her press her forehead against the top of his head, maybe the first genuine display of affection I’ve seen between them in seventeen years.
And then there was the lemon meringue pie, which was not cake, and which turned out to not even be pie, really, but more of a pie topping: a Styrofoam-like chunk of condensed milk and sugar formed into the shape of a cumulonimbus cloud, baked at a temperature so low that it merely required the oven door to be closed and the light to be left on. My psoriasis was clearing up by now, but my child-faced doctor told me to cut sugar out of my diet or risk another flare-up. While I appreciated his input, I’d found it a little hard to take seriously because, for one thing, what did this kid know about it? And for another thing: How dare he? And so I’d eaten the meringue, and then I’d eaten another meringue. They were, I told myself, practically made of air. More like breathing than eating. And later that night, wired from all the sugar buzzing around in my system, I’d wandered half-sleeping out into my living room, now an extra quarter turn to the right after our recent rearrangement, where I woke up hours later, disoriented and delirious, thinking there was somebody in my house only to realize that it was me.
