Blurring the Boundaries: Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction

Michael Martone

148 Michael Martone Asymmetry I could actually close my eye. I had to think about it. Think, “Blink!” to blink. But it wasn’t so much a blink. It was more like weightlifting, locating the muscle of the lid and then sustained concentration, feeling as if I was hauling down an overhead garage door through muscled telepathy. No, it was more hydraulic, the fluid replaced by a fluid energy that I forced, via my mind, to flow. The lid slid down. Not so much a blink, though, but an elaborately constructed squint—a wreck of creased skin, debris of lashes, twitching. I closed my eye. I think I thought I couldn’t feel it. I had to go see it for myself. asymmetry 149 I think there are a dozen cranial nerves. VII is the facial nerve that provides the underlying architecture of animation, of expression. Two branches crisscross out of the brain, tickle the ears threading beneath the lobe, and then fan into the face to message the underlying muscle. These nerves are not about transmitting feeling. Afflicted, I could still feel my face and my face could feel. Hot, cold, pain, pleasure. No, the nerves there are about transmitting feeling, not to the brain, but broadcasting outward, staging muscle into the semaphore of expression, the wigwag of how we feel, not what we are feeling. It is more than a little bit creepy to think of the entities that dwell in the nerve fabric that knits up our own thinking, the viruses latent there below, inside. Chicken pox nesting in the ganglia since the childhood infection and outbreak, cracking open and hauling itself, hand-over-hand, along the strand of the nerve to the skin there to express itself as shingles. Rashes, cold sores, lesions. My face afflicted was featureless and smooth. Ironed, wrinkle-free. Not the usual mo of a virus, the telltale trail of cell death. But, perhaps, they think, 150 michael martone a virus creeps, sleepwalks along the sheath, makes it swell, fail. Antiviral agents do nothing to the nothing that is the palsy. A latent virus might short the nerve or, for all they think, it might not. Middle Falling Actions Rising Action End Beginning The famous map of narrative is cockeyed. It’s not the isosceles triangle we imagine we imagine. The beginning, middle, and end. Like the heft of letters in the phrase “beginning, middle, and end,” narrative is asymmetrical, skewed, shrinking as it expands after the spike, a sloping away. The sighing dénouement. Not a mountain in cross section as much as the gesture of a drift, the sheer face of the cliff all eroded on the lee side of the climax. The upside-down checkmark trails off . . . It started with a smacking of my lips. I smacked my lips. I have a bowl of yogurt at night, most every night, a dessert, watching The Daily Show. I use a spoon, an old Northwest Airlines asymmetry 151 flatware spoon. And that night spooning the yogurt into my mouth, squeegeed off the spoon by my lips, I half-heard the smack. I couldn’t have made the sound. Odd, I half-thought. Bell’s palsy is diagnosed by excluding other causes the paralysis mimics—tumors, diabetes, Lyme disease, asymptomatic herpes zoster, head trauma, stroke, especially stroke. Stroke because it shares with Bell’s the rapidity of the attack and its handedness. But in the differential, a stroke blacks-out a sizeable side of the body’s real estate while Bell’s blanks only one side of the face. Bell’s is, then, what it’s not. Idiopathic. Cryptogenic. That night, I brushed my teeth. I tried to spit in the sink. The spit, instead of streaming toward the drain, vectored to the right and welled on the left, leaking out there in that corner of my mouth. Spitting, I had never given it a second thought. It seemed to be something one just does effortlessly, unconsciously until one is made conscious of it. I brush with my right hand. My hair is parted on the left. I don’t look in the mirror as I brush my teeth but look 152 michael martone down into the ovoid stainless bowl. I put the brush down, turned the right (facing me) handle “on.” Cold water. And cupped...