Fool for Love

“What can I do? I called Orbitz.com and had them change his ticket to next week and charge the fee to his credit card, but he’ll just change it back. Careful with the eggs.”

“You should have canceled his credit cards. Give me the butter; you’re cutting it totally wrong. You have to do something, if only for my sake. I’m not even halfway done interviewing him.” Kathy was writing some article about gay Christians as her tryout assignment for Salon.com, a gig she’d wanted for years. “Go after him.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

I couldn’t very well tell her that it was because Bill was the first person I’d ever dated who I didn’t want to be when I grew up and the thought that we might not be together forever made me want to vomit up my spleen and therefore I was just going to act like this wasn’t happening until it went away, so instead I said, “Because I’m going to be very busy for the foreseeable future knitting a scientifically accurate model of the human brain,” and then I spilled granulated sugar all over the floor.

When I got back to my apartment there was a note on the door from Bill that I threw away without reading. (Okay, that’s totally a lie; I read it and all it said was, “I’m bringing my cell—call me, sexy” and naturally there was no way I was going to call him, especially not after the P.S. that said “Nice try with ‘Bleak House,’ punk—they reran it late last night and I’ve already watched it—so there,” so I decided to pretend I had thrown it away without reading it.) I started to watch another episode of “The Golden Girls” but it was the one in which George Bush visits Miami and I felt I didn’t need to get any angrier than I already was, so I pulled out some paper and started Googling and making diagrams. I figured the thing to do was to knit all the cortices and lobes and structures separately and then stitch them together at the end.

I would start with the amygdala, I decided, the area of the brain that controls aggression and fear. (I know things like this because I once briefly dated a neuropsychiatrist. When he dumped me he said it was obvious that I had a hyperperfused locus ceruleus so I told him it was obvious he was an asshole.) The amygdala seemed an appropriate structure on which to take out my own aggression—it’s not like I’m a moron, the metaphor was staring me right in the face—and the amygdala is also small, about the size of a walnut, so it was a less frightening first step than, say, the parietal lobe, which is huge and controls perception of touch, pressure, temperature, and pain. I looked through my yarn stash (I hate that term but that’s what they call it), and after briefly considering a gorgeous soft green alpaca, went with a cheap purple polyester, as I suspected it was more appropriate for an ex-gay. I started knitting according to the diagram I had drawn up, yanking the yarn hard as I went. That fucker. Right with God, my ass. I yanked the yarn so hard, in fact, that my stitches were much tighter than usual and I ended up with an amygdala the size of a grape, which wouldn’t do at all, so I had to rip out all the stitches and start over.

Then I got some sparkly red yarn and moved on to the cingulate gyrus, the strip on top of the brain in the middle that governs error detection. There were so many errors here I didn’t know where to begin to detect them. For a while I focused on Bill’s error in going to this stupid conference, and then as I knit, I moved on to his other errors, like not liking Bette and believing in God in the first place. Then it occurred to me that maybe the error was mine, in dating him for ten months. I mean, he hadn’t come out until three years ago, and if that hadn’t set off warning bells in my mind then it was my own damn fault. It wasn’t quite as bad as when Kathy’s ex-boyfriend dragged her with him to a Renaissance Faire held by the Society for Creative Anachronism—I tried my best to hide my dismay and be supportive but she could tell I was appalled, though the fact that she was going dressed as a thief mollified me slightly—but he was still obviously wrong for me and I should have seen it. My ex-boyfriend the neuropsychiatrist used to say that the cingulate gyrus was the root of all evil in the world. Privately I thought that my ex-boyfriend the neuropsychiatrist was the root of all evil in the world, but the right moment to tell him this somehow never came around, and with Bill’s latest announcement I was beginning to wonder if maybe it wasn’t the cingulate gyrus after all.

By now it was time for reruns of “Law & Order: SVU” to start. I’ve already seen all but one of the old episodes but I watch religiously, hoping that they’ll show the one I haven’t seen, in which Stephanie March is killed (though the surprise revelation about that had already been ruined for me by seeing the follow-up episode the next season). Unfortunately the episode on at the moment was neither that one nor one of the ones in which Christopher Meloni removes his shirt, so I turned off the TV and checked my email.

In addition to all the spam offering me good mortgage rates or asking me if I wanted a fuckfriend (actually I thought those ones were kind of touching, in a weird way), there was an email from Bill. “Hey, sexy,” it started. “People here are very strange. No one is wearing Marc Jacobs at all—there’s a lot of polyester. But they’re talking about some interesting things. I don’t agree with everything they’re saying, but it seems worth listening to at least a little bit. I’m thinking about you, though, and—” Hmph, I thought. I’d rather have a fuckfriend. I hit Delete without reading any more.

By the time I fell asleep that night I had most of the limbic system arrayed in pieces before me but for the sake of variety I figured I’d take a break and skip to the parietal lobe. I started with the angular gyrus, which controls our understanding of metaphor. I wondered if it would be possible to have an angulotomy and remove my own ability to understand metaphor. I would probably find the modern world much easier to live in, not to mention reality TV’s being a lot more entertaining. But as the angular gyrus took shape on the needles (yellow and orange striped cotton) it looked so cute that I decided I really couldn’t do without it.

Bill called again the next morning and this time even though he did an entire verse and chorus of “La Isla Bonita” I still didn’t pick up the phone. I called Kathy and asked her to come over and look at the brain I was knitting.

“That’s really disgusting,” she said. “If I were dating you I would make you throw it away.”

“I would never date someone who would make me throw this away,” I answered snippily.

“You’re just going to let him go?”

“Kathy, he thinks Jesus can magically turn him straight. He belongs in a lunatic asylum.”

“Yeah, but have you seen his abs?”

I said that wasn’t funny and could she please leave because I had an occipital lobe to knit?

The occipital lobe is a large structure in the back of the head that deals with vision. I have no visual perception—well, not none, I mean, but I hate museums and art galleries because I never understand what I’m looking at, and back when I was driving I caused eleven car accidents—and when I learned about the occipital lobe I immediately understood that my problem processing visual information was the result of the trauma I suffered to the back of my head when I was two (“I did watch him!” my father apparently insisted to my mother; “I watched him climb up on the sink, I watched him fall down, I watched him start bleeding all over the floor.”). As the knitted occipital lobe slowly grew—I decided, for variety, to use a cable stitch with this—I realized that museums and art galleries were all well and good but that my brain injury had given me true inner vision, which was much more valuable. I was knitting with a chenille yarn, which was irksome because it had no give and take, but it was shiny so I kept with it.

That night’s first “Law & Order: SVU” was the one in which Christopher Meloni works out in his undershirt and then takes it off and puts it in his locker, so I took a break, though by knitting during commercials I had the occipital lobe almost done by the end of the show. Before “Designing Women” on Lifetime Television for Women and Gay Men, I got a good chunk of the parietal lobe done. (My hands were getting tired by this time, so I used size 15 needles, which I usually hate, and a chunky weight yarn. Dark blue.) I imagined that I was actually knitting a voodoo brain, and that once the parietal lobe was finished, I would have the power to control Bill’s perception of touch, pressure, temperature, and pain, especially pain. I would stick needles into different parts of the knitted parietal lobe and he would all of a sudden get really cold or feel an unbearable agony in his right elbow. Then I figured, why stop at the parietal lobe? Fiddle with the hippocampus and erase his long-term memory, poke the hypothalamus and make him really horny. Let’s see him try to be an ex-gay then. Then I deleted fourteen emails from him without reading them—I’m telling the truth this time—and made three cups of chocolate pudding and ate it all (I used Splenda, of course, but still).

“Noah, you have to call Bill.”

It was unclear to me why Kathy should be standing over my bed yelling at me in the middle of the night. Obviously it was a bad dream, so I pulled the covers over my head, turned over, and shut my eyes again.

“I’m not kidding. My editor just called me and told me that he’s moved my deadline up to Monday.”

I stuck my head out of the covers and looked at the clock. “But it’s five in the morning.”

“My editor keeps weird hours.”

“How did you get in here?”

“I still have your keys from when you went to Italy and I watered your plants. Now call Bill and get him back here.”

“I can’t do anything about it until I’m done with the brain.”

“Then get out of bed and finish the fucking brain right now.” She pulled the covers off me and dragged me out of bed. “Where is it?” I pointed to the closet and she went over and started throwing pieces of brain at me. “You’re ridiculous,” she said as the cerebellum (which governs movement and balance) came hurtling through the air at my head. “Bill is the best thing that ever happened to you. Maybe he’s a little weird sometimes with his mumbo jumbo Jesus crap, but I can’t believe how immature you’re being. And I don’t have time for this”—here was the brain stem (alertness)—“because I have a dissertation about American natural history museums at the turn of the century to write, so would you just grow up?” I ducked to avoid the temporal lobe (auditory stimuli).

I’d never seen her so mad, not even the time her mother said, “Well, I’m sure that shirt looked good in the store.” I was done with all the parts of the brain except for the orbitofrontal cortex (delayed gratification), the lateral prefrontal cortex (assessing alternatives to decide on a course of action), and the ventromedial cortex (understanding emotion and meaning), and I didn’t want Kathy to yell at me any more so I figured, okay, my knitted brain will have simply been partially lobotomized and Bill clearly doesn’t understand emotion or meaning anyway, so I might as well start stitching it all together. But there was chocolate pudding all over my diagram so it was a little difficult to tell what was supposed to get attached to what (and my ex-boyfriend the neuropsychiatrist had dumped me before I learned where everything went) so I had to make it up. While the sun rose and Kathy watched TiVoed recordings of the “Barefoot Contessa” on the Food Network, I sewed the hippocampus (memory) to the occipital lobe (vision) and attached them both to the hypothalamus (sexual arousal) and then stuck the cingulate gyrus (error detection) on the side but then I realized I was sitting on the angular gyrus (understanding of metaphor) so I got that in as best I could and then I stuck the amygdala (aggression and fear) on top. “There, I’m done,” I said. “Are you happy?”

Kathy looked at what I held in my hands. “That’s not a brain.”

I looked down at it. She was totally right. It was a mess of yarn of different materials and colors, uneven and graceless, bulging here and stretched thin there, with no discernable shape. “Hmm.”

“I mean it’s interesting. But it’s not a knitted brain.”

I looked at it some more. It was kind of compelling, in a gross and messy way. “Maybe it’s a knitted soul.”

“Whatever it is, you’re done. Now would you call Bill?” She handed me the phone.

I dialed, and without waiting for any kind of response, spoke all in one breath (okay, maybe not all in one breath but nevertheless I didn’t leave room for a word in edgewise). “Hey, Bill, it’s me. Stop calling me. I haven’t read any of your emails and I’m not going to return any of your messages and I will continue screening until one of us dies so you might as well give up. I hope you meet a nice girl and marry her and make Jesus and your mother very, very happy. If Becki Cramer calls I’ll make sure to give her your number.” Then I put the phone down.

Kathy looked at me, stricken. “That wasn’t what you were supposed to say.”

“I guess learning what a soul looks like has unexpected consequences, huh?”

We stared at each other for a while longer and then she left. I picked up the knitted soul and turned it over in my hands, trying to figure out which way was up. One way it looked like a chocolate cake, but a from-scratch chocolate cake, not from a box; another way it looked like my dog Fang from eighth grade (he was a Bichon Frisé). Then it looked like Christopher Meloni. Then it looked sort of like a giant version of Dick Cheney’s nose. Then I turned it back so it looked like Christopher Meloni again. Then it didn’t look like anything I could recognize. I went over to the computer and looked up two phone numbers.

When I dialed the first one, the phone rang and rang on the other end (hello, voice mail?) but somebody at the Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art finally picked up and I said, “Um, I have something I wonder if you’d be interested in, maybe in memory of Daisy Gilford,” and then I described the knitted soul as concisely as I could (which wasn’t very) and before I was done she said yes they were very interested and I should send it for their metaphysical gallery, and I wrote down their address.

I dialed the second number. The finger I’d kept on the hang-up button when I’d pretended to call Bill before was trembling. I was subjected to the loathsome hold music forever (God, I need to get a speakerphone) but when an actual human Delta representative finally answered I told her, “I’d like a ticket on your next flight from LaGuardia to Asheville, North Carolina, please.”

After I’d hung up, I put the knitted soul on top of the television, adjusted it until it looked comfortable, ate a bowl of Wild Berry Cheerios with 2% milk (I know, I know), went into my bedroom, and started to pack.