The Body Farm, page 20
○
Schools closed. Businesses went remote. At Hannah’s office, a few junior members of staff lost their jobs, no longer needed to restock the copiers or fetch coffee. Hannah’s own work was easier at home, streamlined by solitude.
She told no one about the vanishing of her sense of taste. It was too profound, too achingly personal, and at the same time too silly, given the backdrop of a world teetering on the brink. Her sister caught the virus and was in bed for a week, followed by her husband, who was sick for even longer. The kids either didn’t catch it or didn’t show symptoms. They went feral, from what Hannah could tell over the phone, snarling and gibbering in the background as Jo coughed wetly into a tissue and her husband moaned in the other room.
Virtual meetings were a joke, fifteen faces stacked in boxes like fish in an aquarium, the boss droning on, the chat filled with reports of whose uncle tested positive, whose grandmother was on a ventilator. Hannah wore pajama bottoms off-screen, under her smart blazers. She kept her feet bare. She found herself watching her own face almost exclusively, the turn of her throat in the light, the flutter of her restless fingers as she gestured. She wondered if the others were all doing the same, each narcissus granted a private rectangle in which to gaze.
The normalcy of her own face was both reassuring and haunting. There was her broad nose pointing down like an arrow, her thin lips, her elegant brows; she looked the same as always. No one would know that her tongue was as dumb as her fingertips now, all its specialness gone. No one would know that food had become a chore, the dull answer to a nagging question. Hungry? Food. Without smell, without taste, the stuff on Hannah’s plate was not a meal; it was matter, mere solid substance, differentiated only by temperature and texture, hot or cold, dry or damp, crisp or soft. She might as well have snacked on clay and sand.
Her dreams were filled with creamy cakes, steaming plates of nachos, the grease of fresh pizza, and the snap of peanut brittle. Hannah woke with a hunger that could not be satiated. Wasn’t there a Greek myth about someone in a similar quandary: starving and parched, surrounded by fresh water and ripe grapes, just out of reach?
The CDC claimed that outdoor activity was fine, probably safe, almost certainly safe, even recommended, so long as one was masked and maintained a six-foot distance from other humans and did not step into the contrails left by fast-moving joggers or cyclists. Hannah took long walks around her neighborhood, despite the persistent rain. She gave other pedestrians a wide berth, crossing the street to avoid them, eschewing even eye contact, as though a momentary gaze could be infectious. In her slicker and rain boots, she moved with urgency. She had the nagging sense that she was looking for something out there.
She lost weight without meaning to, without thinking about it, noticing the change only when she saw herself in her reflecting pool during a Monday meeting. Hollows beneath her cheekbones, the gaunt jut of her chin. She did not hear one word her boss said, fixated instead on her new, narrow face.
As soon as the first tests for the virus became available, Hannah hurried to her doctor’s office. She was desperate for anything that might explain her predicament. Loss of smell was a symptom, she now knew, though loss of taste did not seem to be, and she did not have any of the other usual indicators either—sore throat, difficulty breathing, cough, headache, blood clots, pneumonia, fever, or death.
The results were negative. However, the doctor explained that the tests were so new as to be somewhat unreliable. In addition, Hannah had first developed her anosmia long enough ago that even if she had been infected then, the antigens from the virus might not show up in her blood now.
“What does that mean?” Hannah asked. “What’s happening to me?”
“We’ll keep an eye on it,” the doctor said. “It’s hard to know what’s what. This virus is unlike anything else I’ve seen. This virus . . .” His gaze lifted to the window, and he never finished the sentence.
○
Then came the day when the volume on Hannah’s laptop stopped working—at least, that was what she thought at first. Everyone in the morning meeting seemed to be mumbling, their voices tinny and fractured. “What?” she said, leaning close to the speaker. “Are you on mute? What did you say? Can you repeat that?”
You’re yelling, Hannah, someone wrote in the chat.
Their voices drifted further away. Mouths moved. Her boss was gesticulating, one hand rolling in midair, everyone else nodding along. Hannah tilted her head right and left, doglike, watching herself onscreen. No sound came from her laptop.
Something’s wrong with my connection, she typed into the chat. I’m going to sign out and back in again.
She went to fill the kettle while her computer was buffering. She used to prefer coffee, but tea was a comfort now in a purely tactile way—the heat in her palms, the cloud of steam against her cheeks. Besides, tea had never offered much in the way of smell or taste, whereas every sip of coffee was a brief but devastating loss.
Leaning against the counter, Hannah watched the rain bejewel the windowpane. A gray, dreamy day. She wondered if she ought to call her sister, if she had the bandwidth to take on that litany of understandable but overwhelming complaints. Jo had recovered quickly from the virus, but her husband was still bedridden, and the kids were home all day now. No school, no playdates, no routine, the impossibility of working remotely with children at one’s elbow, no privacy, no end in sight.
Hannah reached for her phone and saw steam gushing from the spout of the kettle, a frantic, silent blast.
For a moment she did not understand. Everything was breaking down—first her laptop, then the kettle. And the rain, that was broken too. A downpour splattered the kitchen window, urgent drops that smashed into shards and distorted the world outside, but there was no accompanying rhythm, no patter or splash.
Hannah snapped her fingers. Silence.
She clapped her hands. Silence.
She put her palms over her ears, tried to locate the thump of her own heart.
“Help me,” she said, and she felt her larynx tighten, her tongue lift, the mechanism of her voice functioning like always, producing nothing she could hear.
○
During the MRI, tears welled up and poured down in a slow waterfall. Hannah did not wipe them away, even as they dripped into her ears; she was not supposed to move. Last time, there had been electronic creaks and groans as the machine took scans of her brain, but this time she was caged in suffocating stillness.
The journey to the emergency room had been a farce. Hannah intended to drive, but the simple act of picking up her keys left her reeling; the absence of the cheerful jingle of metal on metal, that homey, everyday chime, was more than she could bear. Instead, she booked a rideshare on her phone, but that presented its own problems. Standing on the street corner, Hannah was bewildered by the lack of ambient sound. She stared into the trees, watching birds open and close their beaks like defective automatons in a museum exhibit, their electronic music stilled by age and disuse. Wind gusted; Hannah could feel its breath, but there was no accompanying rustle of leaves. A plastic bag wafted past in eerie silence.
Probably her driver honked. Probably he called to her and waved. Only when the man got out of his car and approached her, red-faced, did Hannah snap to attention. Beady eyes, maybe he smelled like cigarettes or sweat, he seemed to be yelling, flecks of spittle, was it possible he was singing opera? She had so little to go on.
“I can’t hear you,” she said finally. “I can’t hear anything.”
It was impossible to tell if she had pitched her voice correctly—too loud, too low? Her voice was theoretical now.
To her surprise, the driver smiled. He began to gesture at her, changing the configuration of his fingers and bumping the heels of his palms together. Sign language, Hannah realized. She had never studied it. Why would she? Was learning ASL part of the man’s training to become a rideshare driver? That seemed unlikely.
“I just lost my hearing this morning,” she told him. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”
He stared at her in alarm, obviously concerned that she might be insane. She did not blame him; what was happening to her did sound insane.
How long had she been in the MRI machine? She opened her mouth to ask the technician, then remembered that she would not be able to hear the answer. What if they had forgotten about her? What if they had all gone to lunch? What if they had left for the weekend? What if she died in here?
She breathed, waited, breathed and waited.
○
They sent her home without a diagnosis. We’ll let you know, the technician scrawled on a piece of paper. The lobby was overrun by people who were coughing—or pantomiming the act, anyway, lurching forward in a spasm, hand over the mouth. Hannah could not hear them, left to imagine their hawking and rheumy breath. Flushed faces, fevers. She wrapped her scarf around her face to protect herself from germs and hurried out with her head down.
○
At the window, Hannah sat for hours, watching people go by and imagining the click of heels, the carillon of children’s voices. Enough passersby wore masks now that the occasional bare face seemed indecent. It was mostly men who went about this way, mouth and nose exposed and spewing particles. Sometimes a husband and wife would walk past, the woman masked, the man apparently unwilling. Hannah observed it all, cataloguing these little injustices.
Framed in a window across the street, a fat tabby lolled in the sunlight, sometimes grooming its luxurious mane, sometimes charting the paths of birds, sometimes locking eyes with Hannah with an expression rather like sympathy. Two indoor cats, they kept watch over the street together.
Finally the doctor got back to her with results. The takeaway from all the scans—the MRI, the audiologist’s report, the painful probing of nose, mouth, and ear—was that medical science was stumped. According to every metric, Hannah was a healthy woman. The only thing that belied the numbers was her own experience, her own testimony.
Poss. psychosomatic, the doctor wrote at the end of his email. Referring you to psychologist.
Hannah resisted the urge to throw her laptop across the room. She vowed to find a female physician who would take her experience as truth, who would not treat her as hysterical. Just as soon as she could make an appointment among the thousands of sick and dying people infected with the virus, desperate for aid.
○
A steady rain settled in for weeks, unrelenting. Hannah no longer took walks around her neighborhood. Though the CDC continued to recommend outdoor exercise, it was too frightening in her current state. Everything startled her. An airplane in the corner of the sky made her flinch. A jogger in her peripheral vision triggered some latent prey response; she would cower like a zebra on the prairie flanked by a lion. There was never any warning now—no distant grumble of airborne engines, no car horn, no footsteps. She kept whirling around to see what was behind her. Anything could be back there, a mugger, a truck bearing down on her, a tornado.
The shock of her loss—her many losses—left her weary and timid. She slept often and suddenly. Fatigue overtook her on the couch, in the bath; she had never been a napper, but she had also never been so tired. There was less of a delineation now between dreaming and waking, between day and night. The sky was always gray, rain fell, her senses were muted and muffled as though in a nightmare, it was hard to keep track of what was real. Her orbit shrank: bed to couch to kitchen stool and back again. She ordered groceries online and sanitized them as the internet had instructed. The news was filled with the virus, so she turned it off; her own suffering was so intense and bizarre that she could not summon empathy for others, even the dead.
She was not sure how the hours passed, but they did.
At the emergency room, she had taken a hearing test, sitting in a fabric box with headphones on, the technician staring at her through a thick pane of glass. Hannah was supposed to raise her hand each time she heard a beep or buzz. She did not raise her hand once. The technician shone lights in her ears and measured the bounce of her eardrum with a sharp-edged machine. Everything about her auditory system appeared normal, the cochlea vibrating, the minuscule bones dancing. But the signal was not being transmitted to her brain.
It was the same for her nose. The air was rife, as rife as it had always been, with the molecules cast off by tuna sandwiches and rose petals and underarm sweat, sucked up by Hannah’s nostrils with each breath and scanned by her olfactory nerves—and then a malfunction, a lack of communication, the data sitting in somebody’s inbox, never passed up the chain.
Taste too. So many chemicals in every kind of food, in water, in metal, in paper, in human skin, all the things Hannah had licked and nibbled in vain over the past few weeks, searching for stimulation. Her taste buds were doing their job, collating and categorizing the data, but her cerebral cortex never got the memo. Her body was healthy, her brain was healthy, but one could not communicate with the other.
This raised a terrifying question: Was she a body, or was she a brain? She had always thought of herself as the former. She had believed that her mind and flesh were inextricable, smelling and tasting and hearing the whole of the world together simultaneously. But now she was beginning to suspect that the real Hannah consisted of nothing more than the three pounds of gray matter tucked in the cocoon of her skull. Her body was a vessel—not the essence of herself but a mere vehicle. The real Hannah was a tiny pilot locked in a windowless, soundproof room, receiving information from the outside world only through a network of nerves.
She did not see. Light entered through her corneas, blazing on her retinae, transfigured by her photoreceptors into electrical impulses, whizzing up the optic nerve to the cockpit. She did not feel. Touch receptors in every inch of her skin sent signals along the bundled fibers of the spinal column. The tiny pilot got these precious messages and knew, from a distance, what lay beyond that protective sheath of bone. Everything Hannah had ever experienced came to her secondhand, delivered through the tubes and wires of her nervous system. One by one, these links were breaking down, leaving her brain, that tiny pilot, marooned, insensate, inside the useless vehicle of her anatomy. What had she lost? What could she yet lose?
○
Her father had died when she was six. She still missed him, a vague ache, though she remembered only a little about him distinctly anymore: his bristly beard, a sneeze like a cannon blast, and the smell of peppermint soap.
Her mother died when Hannah was in college. After the funeral, empty of tears, she and Jo sat up late, drinking wine and arguing about the soul. Her sister believed in heaven. She believed that their parents still existed in some recognizable form, spirits or ghosts or angels, waiting for their daughters.
Hannah did not. She was the analytical one. Like most siblings, she and her sister had grown up both in sync with and in opposition to each other. Jo was a romantic, a daydreamer, hopeful and well-liked. Hannah lived in her senses, in reality, believing what she could perceive. Her parents were gone, but she would remember them. In this way they would live on—in the minds and memories of their loved ones.
That night, she and Jo stayed awake until dawn. Neither of them wanted to face the possibility of sleep, which would lead inevitably to the terrible awakening on the other side, the funeral over, nothing left to plan and prepare for, only the unending, aching absence of their mother. So they sipped their wine, got another bottle.
At one point, Hannah’s phone rang. She checked the screen—another grieving relative—and did not answer. Slumped on the couch, Jo snickered. Then she straightened her spine and, in a dead-on imitation of their mother, chirped, “Ring ring!”
“The Mommings!” Hannah gasped, beginning to laugh. “Oh my god, the Mommings!”
She had almost forgotten. Their mother had been sick for years, long enough that she had lost much of what made her unique, including the little quirks her daughters had loved and mimicked throughout their childhood. Certain everyday events—a particular sound, a smell—would elicit specific reactions from their mother, a combination of words and gestures, offered the exact same way every time they happened.
The phone was one of them. Whenever a telephone sounded in her presence, their mother would lengthen her spine like a ballerina and sing out on a high note, “Ring ring!” She would do it in public, in a work meeting, on the bus, anywhere.
Peanut butter was another one. Their mother preferred the oily, organic kind that required stirring, and whenever she opened a new jar she could be found circling her hips in concert with the knife and chanting in a deep bass, “PB for me!”
When Hannah and Jo were young, they had cataloged all the Mommings and could reliably make each other laugh to the point of wetting their pants by imitating them. Now, pouring more wine, they named and incarnated each one.
“Moment of silence,” Hannah said, bowing her head solemnly. Their mother had done this in a restaurant whenever there was a crash of dishes hitting the floor.
“Nothing better,” Jo purred in honeyed tones, laying her palm on her belly. The taste of chocolate provoked this response and no other.
“Boom,” Hannah said, shimmying her palms like a hummingbird’s wings. Their mother’s reply to thunder—low voice, jazz hands.
Both sisters were crying now. Hannah could not tell if it was the laughter or the grief or the wine.
“Oh, oh,” Jo said, leaning forward, spilling from her glass. “We forgot the best one.” She mimed a chef’s kiss with her fingers and murmured throatily, “Petrichor!”
It was not raining that night, but for a moment Hannah could have sworn she smelled the pungent musk of parched earth melting beneath a drizzle. And for a moment her mother was there with them, standing at the window, gazing out at the night sky, inhaling the first caress of moisture against the dusty ground—the heady aroma rising, suffusing the air. A little miracle, rain after a dry spell. Certain stimuli were so perfect and holy that they required pause and acknowledgment, both gestural and verbal. That was the glorious truth beneath the silliness of the Mommings. Their mother had loved the world so much that it moved her to celebration.
