I just got back from a week in Madrid. The woman at the front desk of the hotel I was staying in was delightful. We chatted maybe four times a day. She told me where to find really good pizza (Nap), when to go to El Rastro to find the best bargains, how to get to the Prado Museum, all sorts of stuff about Spain and Madrid and Barcelona. We even swapped stories about living in New York.
I have no idea what she looks like.
Apparently I have what’s called aphantasia. I don’t remember faces.
According to Dr. Adam Zeman, Honorary Professor of Neurology at the University of Exeter, aphantasia is “the inability to have a visual experience when we are thinking about things in their absence,” which is close, but doesn’t quite capture what it is, at least for me.
Before you get all boo hoo, I think it’s important to say that while I hate the term “experience aphantasia,” I’d rather hear that than that I “suffer from aphantasia.” I don’t suffer from aphantasia any more than you suffer from an inability to dunk a basketball or sing a perfect E flat. Suffering from something implies that you feel its loss. I’ve always had this thing (or this lack of thing), so I don’t know what it’s like not to have it.
What I do suffer from is lactose intolerance. In college, my friend Siobhan and I used to get half gallon bricks of Breyer’s ice cream, put them on the table between us, and dig in, each of us with a spoon and a smile. One night we polished off almost three. Starting sometime in my 20s I couldn’t do that anymore. One spoonful of ice cream could make me pass out. So yeah, I suffer.
By the way, I can’t tell you what Siobhan looked like.
I can tell you what my wife looks like. Ish. And while there aren’t very many people who understand that aphantasia is a thing, among those that do, most of them can’t get their heads around the fact that aphantasia is not binary. I can remember some faces, important faces, in the same way that my sister can remember how to get to the Dollar Tree from her house even though she gets lost trying to find the guest room when she’s starting anywhere but the living room.
It’s also important to distinguish between remembering and recognizing. I may not be able to conjure the details of my wife’s face when it’s not right there in front of me, but I know it’s her when she walks into a room. Especially if the room happens to be in our house. Context helps.
Could I pick my wife out of a police lineup? I’d like to think so, but I find comfort in the fact that I’ll never have to. My wife has a hard time making a right turn on a red. The greatest crime she’s likely to commit is wearing white pants after Labor Day.
My wife is beautiful and you’d be forgiven for thinking that her beauty is wasted on someone like me. It isn’t. I may not have clear and specific memories of her features, but I have clear and specific memories of looking at her features and thinking “Holy shit. This woman is beautiful!”
Besides, so many things about her are much more important than the way she looks. When I think about my wife, I think about the way she is. The way she smells. The feel of her skin. The kindness of her heart. The incisiveness of her mind. I can recognize her by her breathing, if not so much by her photograph.
It’s pretty likely there’s a genetic component to aphantasia. When I was a kid, I’d sometimes watch the Mary Tyler Moore show with my mom. Every time Mary had a wardrobe change, which could happen five times an episode, Mom would ask, “who is that?“ For me, it became easy to see that it was Mary Richards, either because the story would make no sense if it wasn’t or because I recognized the trill of her voice when she’d say “Oh, Lou!”
People like me––like us––we come up with workarounds. For my mom, it was to ask me for help. For me, it was to pay attention to other signals, stuff that I could make sense of.
True story: Back when I used to work as a director in Hollywood, I went to lunch at a “secret” restaurant––one of those places that had no sign, where you had to know someone to get in. I remember seeing some dashing guy sitting a couple of tables away with an elderly gentleman. The guy looked polished––rich, coiffed, well-dressed, fit––like someone at the top of his career and I figured he must be some movie star, taking his father or uncle, visiting from out of town, to lunch. Sweet, right? I tried to figure out who he was, but I couldn’t place him.
At some point I got up to use the restroom and I guess I didn’t notice that the older man had left the table. The restroom was locked, but the door opened just as I tried the handle. It was the older man, surprised, coming out. He said, “Pardon me.”
It was Gene Hackman.
Had he not said those two words, I would have never known.
I had the opportunity to work with a lot of famous people, some of them really big names: Martin Sheen, James Coburn, Howie Long, George Lopez, Shyla Stylez, Billy Ray Cyrus. In between set-ups, we’d sometimes chat about what it was like. The remarkable thing is that their experience was an awful lot like mine. They’d run into somebody who looked maybe familiar and couldn’t tell whether it was a person who might have a profound effect on the trajectory of their career or a fan.
When I was just starting out, I worked in the building next door to Gold’s Gym. The coffee shop across the street had better coffee than the office, so just about every morning I’d walk over to get a cup. One morning I saw a beautiful Rolls-Royce convertible turn the corner. The driver looked familiar, so I stared, trying to figure out if it might be someone I knew. He saw me staring and stared back.
Giving each other the benefit of the doubt, we waved tentatively to each other.
Over the next couple of years, this happened regularly and as it did, we both became more confident in our relationship. Until one day when I was going to get a coffee with one of my coworkers, I saw the Rolls-Royce come around the corner and without hesitation gave the driver a full-on friendly wave. He gave me a huge wave back, flashing a grin I knew I’d seen before.
My coworker turned to me in awe. “You’re friends with Arnold Schwarzenegger?” he asked.
I can’t tell you what my coworker looked like.
BRIAN BELEFANT used to be good looking, but now he has a dog, and not just any dog, but a friendly, goofball dog who loves everybody except Santa Claus. His short stories appear in Free Spirit’s 2023 Christmas Anthology, Story Unlikely, and Half and One. His story ‘The Beneficiary’ was shortlisted for the Backchannels 2023 Fiction Prize, ‘American Foreign Policy’ was shortlisted for The South Shore Review Flash Fiction Contest, and ‘Mikey Hansen’ was longlisted for the Masters Review 2023 Winter Short Story Award for New Writers. Brian’s novella ‘The Sultan of Garbage’ is scheduled to be published by Atmosphere Press. He’s currently at work on his second novel.