I'm Sure You Won't Believe This

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My mother's father, Reuben Hoffman (you can look him up), had a defect in his color-responsive cells, the cones of his retina--making him colorblind. He passed the X-chromosome to my mother, and she forwarded the darned thing on to me, and to my younger brother, too. You get a lot of you-know from people--friends, family--everyone, for the most part, when they find out about the colorblindness. I mean, you're not missing a leg or commoding into a bag. They can make fun of you if they like and not feel badly later. That's all fine. It's not so bad, really. I can see most colors anyway, just not the dorky ones.

In my youngster years, my folks dragged me to eye doctors of every different stripe. They don't have glasses for colorblindness, and because Grandpa Reubie had the handicap, everyone knew the deal. Still, they took me to these clinics and so-on, and finally I started developing a speech impediment because I began to believe that something else was wrong with me. I couldn't meet my friends' eyes. I became afraid of everything and everyone. Life was torment. I developed a rash of hives that colonized my chest and belly--looked like a grove of bing cherries ripe enough to pick.

One night in July when I was nine years old, I woke up from a dream so intense that after-images of molten lava and wild, sensual beasts from sweltering jungles spread across the midnight of my bedroom. I ran to the hall and shut the door behind me tight, but the images crept through shadow cracks, stalking me wherever I chose to flee.

Soon I was in my mother's arms, hysterical and gulping for air. My father turned on the lights and I thought that would save me from these dreams that had followed me through my waking, but instead the images became clear as reality.

I vaguely remember my life flopping over on its side. Things happened: ambulances arrived; long needles riddled me; people smiled and told me everything was swell; people cried. But the black-pearl eyes of rearing snakes remained, and tigers grinned ear to ear, and everywhere I looked the earth cracked and dissolved and flowed into boiling, liquid stone.

There are many hospitals and clinics in Madison, Wisconsin, but the one I woke up in--the Waisman Center--was a psychiatric ward. The Waisman Center (like I say, you can look it up) forms one of the central attractions for scientific researchers in the Western Hemisphere. I was nine years old, and nine year-olds know little about such things. Let me just say this: when I first tell a Madison friend that I spent an entire year inside those walls, they look at me as if I have become something taboo, unspeakable.

But there's nothing terrible about the Waisman Center. This isn't a holding pen for incurables saturated with pools of vomit and worse in corners, and nurse-junkies scoring deals with the late-night pharmacist. Patients at the Waisman Center are exceptional more often than they are "special", as the politically-corrects like to say. Strangely enough, over the course of that year, I learned that I, too, was an exceptional human being.

When I woke, the images from my nightmare remained with me, but I felt a calm unlike any I had known at that point in my life. Of course, this was the friendly work of narcotics. I did not know what narcotics were, but when you consider the constant state of anxiety that had been my life for almost a year and a half, you can be sure that I would not have cared two whits whether they were spiking smack into my veins. What I am trying to say is this: I felt good.

I recognized Dr. Canin immediately. I had visited his clinic only three times during that endless parade of doctors and tests, but he was a huge man with a huge crooked face that smiled even when there was nothing to smile about. I suppose there was nothing to smile about then--what with me waking up at the Waisman Center and seeing animals and lava that no one else could possibly see--but I was smiling like it was the best day of my life.

"You feel good, don't you?" he asked, and I laughed as if I had never laughed before in my life. And as I laughed, the strange hallucinations that accompanied me also laughed--though silently. I told Dr. Canin everything, expecting him to lose his smile at last.

"I understand," he said, instead. That's why we're here."

This is what the doctors had learned: my visual cortex was translating color and light in a unique way. The commonly accepted model of vision postulates that certain cells in the primary visual cortex (labelled V1 cells in experimental monkey brains) expand and contract in response to wavelengths in light, but not to color; other cells (labelled V4 cells) respond to color rather than to wavelength. Nevertheless, V1 cells and V4 cells are irrevocably connected to each other through yet another system of cells (labelled V2 cells). None of these cells requires experience or a priori knowledge of color to produce what we call color vision. Most colorblinded people experience a deformity in the retina that prevents contraction or expansion of certain areas of cells, V1 through V5, when shorter wavelengths pass through the eye's lens.

But I am different. Human beings use a separate region of the brain to learn certain habits that coordinate various motor and visual functions. This region is called the cerebellum. The cerebellum makes activities like juggling and riding a unicycle possible. Apparently, at some point in my fetal development, my cerebellum attempted to coordinate my visual responses with certain minute, muscular activity in my eyes in order to compensate for a lack of V2 cells. While occasionally our brains will relegate tasks to unlikely brain sections, the cerebellum is not normally capable of appropriating control of such function.

All of which is to say that, for some reason, I make visual and memory contact with the added dimension of time. In effect, I see things longer than you do, and often, I believe, I see things a fraction of a second before you do, as well. More, my visual imagination merges with visual reality, and over the course that year, I learned to control and manipulate that connection.

All of that is really beside the point I am trying to make. It doesn't really matter to me whether or not this brings any value to your life. It has always been a difficult thing to explain, and in the last fifteen years of my life I have decided not to explain.

Still, I am in a precarious position, now. I have been accused of cheating at an event that took place in October of last year. This event was such a silly, stupid event, and the prize was insignificant. My accusers should feel nothing but shame at the obscure need that drives them to pursue an utterly useless revenge. So pathetic are they, that although they attempt to call me names and even issue physical threats, I would still not respond. My friends suggest that I just keep the prize and thumb my nose in their direction. Normally, I would.

This event took place at the 2004 Telluride Beer Festival. I had been to the festival once before, during my college years, and to my knowledge, no such event occurred when I was there in 1995. Even if it had, I am certain I would not have cared.

But this time I was attending with my girlfriend. . .ex-girlfriend, now. She left me halfway through the festival, and I'll spend no more space here discussing where she went. But it happened that inside a grill-your-own-steak joint, Telluride was sponsoring a jigsaw puzzle contest.

Yes. That's all this is about. Each contestant paid one dollar with the festival admission bracelet to enter, and was seated in front of a single table. Each had a box with the same 500-piece puzzle: the image of the white-capped mountain. The winner received $50 and free Porterhouse at the restaurant.

I completed my puzzle in ten minutes.

Copyright ©2004, ©2005, ©2006 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved.
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