He told Emma, but when he tried to show her, his face betrayed him, lying flat and white. Perfectly tic-less. Emma asked him if it was psychosomatic, and then apologized quickly, saying one of her greatest flaws was her tendency to pathologize. She stared at him while he stared at the off-white stucco behind her. In the blurry field of his vision, he registered her eyes flickering as they moved across him.
That afternoon, they lay head-to-toe in his bed, working supine on their laptops in silence. Every so often, he felt the bed shift slightly as she adjusted her position and sometimes he thought she was watching him, but he never caught her eyes. When she left him at dusk, a bit before dinner, he took himself for a walk to the grocery to buy milk and a bag of carrots. On the way back, he cut diagonally across the intersections, his empty suburbia awash with the transient, glassy light of an early evening sky.
●
No one believed him when his face started twitching. In public, his lips held themselves in a half-smile and his subconsciousness was cool and placid. But soon enough he’d be alone, and the whole facade would slide away. Miniature muscle spasms cascaded one by one across his face, an asymmetrical domino effect from his chin’s small cleft to the brown wisps at his temples, and back again.
He assumed it had started in his sleep. Every morning, he’d feel as if tiny creatures were wriggling from his cheekbones, his nose scrunching lopsidedly and at random as he blinked himself into consciousness. Then it began happening whenever he was at rest: watching a film on a Friday evening, staring vacantly into the rushing dark underground train, alone in the elevator at school, on turning off the light in the evenings. Sometimes, he imagined himself through a hidden camera, grimacing when he felt his face still before he’d fully registered its movement. The mirror was no help. His reflection looked certain of itself, impassive to the spasms that emerged when he was out of sight.
●
Two months after he’d noticed the first twinge, he called his mother in Montana. He said it straightforwardly, no worry in his voice. Facial tics, he said. Or mimic spasms. I’m not quite sure, but do you know? His mother, a retired cardiac surgeon, did not. He could hear his mother casting about for an empathetic statement—that seems annoying, at the very least—just as they’d discussed in their family teletherapy sessions. His father was always saying that his mother just wasn’t “genetically predisposed” to express herself, but it’s not as if the rest of them were any better. Most of the time, his father watched him watch himself watch his younger sister Soraya stare, dead-eyed, at something near the wall of her college dorm room, probably her roommate’s aging hamster. Sometimes he’d hear the click of keys as the therapist took notes.
She said she supposed she could check the normal websites. I’m sure someone’s doing research on it nowadays; there’s so much funding for silly stuff. Sorry, but you know, heart disease is the leading cause of death in America, and the NIH is funding clickbait like what type of vape is better for you.
There came the recognizable puttering sound from the speaker, the ambient rhythms of cabinet doors opening and closing in her kitchen. Her inability to carry on a conversation without multitasking had only gotten worse since her retirement last July. He envied her busyness, which took the form of beekeeping most recently (she sent him a few weighty honey jars packed in old leaves of the Missoulian, and because she hadn’t figured out her straining technique, he kept finding bug appendages in it), but every so often she’d send the somewhat defunct family group chat a mirror selfie, grim-faced, modeling the newest cashmere amalgam. She had promised him a sweater for Hanukkah, and he couldn’t remember if she dyed it or not—he remembered her mentioning the natural potency of spinach juice in their call two weeks ago, but she might have been quoting an article half-read in preparation. He envisioned the soft green material growing over the autumn months, a distraction from her newly quiet life.
It always helps me to remind myself of my time traveling in India in the eighties. There is so much hardship in the world, Sweetheart, and we are just so lucky to have what we have and live where we live. She continued similarly, and he heard her start the dryer in the background, a scale of synthesized wind chimes lasting for a beat too long.
He linked his fingers into the wisps of his bangs and pulled them until the skin on his face stretched enough to burn. He saw himself as someone else might, deranged, the profile of a tortured young man tearing himself apart. He could hear his heater murmuring behind him. He could hear himself breathing in the echo of the phone.
Mom, I have to go see someone, sorry. Tell Dad and Soraya I’ll call them soon. I just have a thing next week that I’ve gotten caught up in. Thanks for the advice.
●
The next day, on waking, his face maintained a trembling frown as he reached toward his phone and began a slow scroll of his inbox. Again the following day, he felt himself squinting, the ceiling of his room blurred through his interwoven eyelashes. Cheeks bunching into the corners of his eye sockets, nose held in dramatized disgust. He wasn’t sure whether it was a lingering impression of a dream because he couldn’t remember ever remembering them. He began to sketch caricatures of himself, journals filling steadily with these rigid expressions. Here he was scowling, eyes offset and hair drawn in whorls of rushed crescents. In another, the semblance of a thin, forced smile, to which he’d added tiny dots as substitutes for the freckles he wished he had. He dropped his pen often, the muscles in his hands weak from sleep, and ink stains started appearing on his comforter like new stars.
Next, he asked Rosa and Henry. He tried to force himself to relax—shoulders away from ears! and eyelids soft! and other earworms, louder than expected, from the few yoga classes he’d attended recently. Henry and Rosa asked about his quality of sleep and his caffeine intake. Their sweet concern felt unwarranted, but he answered them earnestly all the same. Rosa and Henry told him they were there if he needed them.
●
One day in late October he went to the pool downtown to meet Emma. It was a small, dark pool and she was the only swimmer. He walked over to her lane and waved at her as she turned. A few drops of the splash she made imprinted as dark circles on the bottoms of his khakis. She stopped herself underwater like a diver, arms spreading outward, snow-angel-style. Suspended and submerged, her limbs looked like rope through tempered glass, wobbly and thin. He imagined her as an alien, silicon-capped and amphibious, himself as an early explorer of a watery planet. The surface of the pool bulged as she made her way up toward him.
She was breathing heavily. She said she’d need to shower and then they could go to dinner; could he wait for ten minutes as she got ready? She pulled herself up onto the deck, wiping the dampness out of her eyes, palms briefly pressing into the sockets.
He sat on the bleachers, hands pressed under his legs, observing the pool return to its truest and most reflective state as the ripples of Emma’s swim grew imperceptible. He was alone in the great concrete room and the sky outside the windows was empty and black and solid. He could see an image of himself in the glass and its inverse in the pool, the perfect oval lenses of his glasses shining, opaque and saturated with fluorescent light. He thought he saw the corners of his mouth twitch down in the water, but it could have been a latent ripple.
At the restaurant, they had braised greens with fish sauce and oily anchovies with butter spread on a baguette. She ordered a Sapporo but gave most of it to him.
Sally is coming into town, he said.
By Sally, you mean your mother, right?
Have I ever mentioned any other Sallys to you? She’s worried about my face.
Should she be?
Emma had eyes that reminded him of a forest, irises littered with leafy green and brown hues. He wasn’t ever sure if he was looking at her or looking at her eyes, and he worried she felt the distance in his gaze, that she knew he couldn’t really see her. They’d been dating for two years, and she’d never met his family, but she always acted as if she knew them. That thing you do with your hair reminds me of your mom, she’d say. The way you drag pieces of it past your eyes, like little windshield wipers, when you’re feeling particularly neurotic.
He told her his mother was visiting in just over a month, that she’d texted him in August to confirm the weekend: December 1st through 3rd, does that work for your schedule?
Do you want to meet her?
Do you want me to?
She sipped, blinked, watched him like a young cat might, curiously observing his movements before pouncing in play.
Why haven’t you been to see the doctor yet? Why not just save her the trip?
●
In November, he started taking selfies everywhere he went, hoping to capture a tic in motion. His phone’s camera roll filled with blank stares, soft smiles with eyes angled off-center, watching the screen instead of the camera. On the bus, someone’s head loomed behind him, peering over his shoulder as he took photo after photo of himself, chin forward, nose flared, serious looking. In class, he tried to take discreet photos under the desk, but half of the picture would turn out obscured by the scratched, gum-stuck underside, and the other half was mostly his neck and chin. He sent some of the more promising ones to Emma, the ones that were just distorted enough to indicate movement, or the ones that looked nice accidentally. Emma usually responded lol, love it. Sometimes, just a thumbs-up emoji.
He did go to the doctor, once. Made a late-afternoon appointment online with someone in primary care that his insurance promised would be in-network. It was windy when he arrived at the hospital, and he stood outside watching other patients and their families walk through the revolving doors. His cheeks felt raw and sensitive. When it started to snow, he joined them, told the secretary waiting at the front desk, Dr. Marjan, I think.
Oh, I’m so sorry, Dr. Marjan is out today. She’s just had a baby. Did you make an appointment online? Sometimes the system just doesn’t update. Why don’t we find another time for you?
He paused, nodded. Went back out the way he came in, following a pair of twins that looked about six years old. One tripped and fell on the snowy sidewalk and started to cry. The other one, who was behind her sister, broke down immediately. The little girls sat there together, sobbing, as their mother tried to pull them up and toward the parking lot. He listened to their piercing duet as the bus pulled away.
●
True to her word, his mother took him and Emma out to dinner the night she arrived. She asked about their work. She stared at each of them in turn.
He had picked Emma up from the pool and her hair was slowly thawing in the hazy light, rigid ringlets regaining their elasticity as they began to drip onto her shoulders. She was saying something about him and he couldn’t quite hear across the table. The water from her curls was pooling into drops on the shoulders of her suede jacket and the tiny pools had grown large enough that they reflected several of the lights in the restaurant, amorphous, studded, glowing bursts of gold.
Without warning, his mother reached out to pull his chin toward her. He dodged.
Sweetie, are you OK?
Emma, now: You look like you’re in pain.
He reached up to touch his cheek. It seemed as if he was frowning, but he couldn’t tell whether he was trying to concentrate or not. His mother and Emma had the same expression on their faces, the same one he thought he had on his.
His head shook, a universal refusal, both to negate their concern and to shake away any expression that may have caused it. He wasn’t in pain, he said. Their eyes lingered on his mouth.
Through the window of the restaurant, they looked muted, like stone, faces turned away in observation of each other, a blindly trimodal assemblage, breathing, alone. ◼️
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