The Michigan rehab team gives me a face-shock kit. It comes in a black zippered carrying case in two parts. The gun-like part holds D batteries, and there is a thin piece of plastic extending from it that the therapists call a wand. It looks like a toilet-paper tube with a pencil sticking out of it. The wand has a black fabric-covered tip. The second piece is a box with a lever, which adjusts the voltage from one to ten. The two pieces are connected by a cord.
The idea is to touch the wand to the parts of my face that are paralyzed and to shock them into movement. Once the muscles are shocked enough and have moved enough by force, they will remember how to do it on their own. The surgeries damaged some of the facial nerves that control movement. I still have feeling on the paralyzed side of my face, so when I pull the trigger on the gun I feel it, like a sharp yank, and a flash of light behind my eyes. The therapist says this is lucky: Her husband has movement but no feeling, so he cannot tell if he has food on his cheek or is drooling. I envy him.
For about two months, I use the kit at least twice a day, and picture Claude, smoking, or turning a steering wheel, or I think of a photo of us at his graduation where we are arm in arm in our dress clothes and he is looking over at me, laughing, and I am smiling straight at the camera, my face moving so naturally. I shock and I shock and I shock, and the muscles move for a fraction of a second, then nothing.
I will not be talked into smiling for pictures—the asymmetry is too awful. The only way I will tolerate being in a photo is wearing my sunglasses, staring expressionlessly at the camera, my mouth a straight line, waiting for it all to be over.