I made my way to room 237 so the secretary could give me the paperwork, then to the Babinski building, named after an early-twentieth-century neurologist. His portrait was by the entrance, on a small enamel plaque: Joseph Babinski (1857–1932).
I learned that he was mainly known for a neurological exam that consisted of stroking the arch of grown-ups’ and babies’ feet. His concept of pithiatism (from the Greek πείθειν, to persuade) was less famous but still had a huge impact on many soldiers after World War I. Shell shock was, at the time, an unknown phenomenon. In the vein of Professor Jean-Martin Charcot, the father of neurology, Babinski had defined a new form of hysteria: many of the men to return from war suffered from issues that, lacking a clear causal relationship, remained orphaned.
Orphaned.
Yes, that was very much how I’d always felt, this sensation of not belonging to any community. Not deaf enough to be a part of Deaf culture, not hearing enough to be fully within the hearing world. It all came down to what I’d convinced myself to be or not be. The collateral damage that had chipped away at my self-worth and my confidence were, for those soldiers, orphaned issues that they struggled to make sense of. Did the void in me come from that? An absence that had to be filled by excess?
“With you, things are tout noir ou tout blanc,” I was always told. Wholly black or white. But I kept hearing it as “trou noir.” Black hole.
“You hear what you want to hear.”
How could I have convinced them otherwise?
But this was perfectly real, and the hospital was shining a light on the hole at the center of it all.
My mother was beside me, staring at the newspaper. She pointed at the front page: “Look, it’s the first photo of a black hole.”
*
The room was on the third floor. I could leave my belongings there; I had a full schedule and a procedure to undergo. A nurse came to ask me slightly odd questions, such as my morning routine: Bath or shower? Jacuzzi, please.
The nurse left me there, befuddled, then so did my mother. I still couldn’t really believe that my ears had landed me here. I’d tried so hard to get them to keep this secret, only for them to squeal on me and trap me within these four white walls to reckon with my past.
I’d tried to manage things as best as I could after so many years of denial then so many years of fighting that denial, contorting my life one way then another, but this loss had blown everything to pieces.
The door opened and a nurse by the name of Eddy came in to puncture my eardrum and inject a fluid directly into my auditory organ. The anesthetic was pointless, nothing more than a procedure to carry out so that patients believed that something was being done. But when I saw the needle, I couldn’t believe it. He was going to stick that into my ear? I could feel my eardrum puckering like an oyster that had just had lemon squeezed on it.
The hospital stay also involved seeing a psychologist, a tall woman with sad eyes. She waved elegantly for me to sit in a chair facing her and explained that this meeting was an informal conversation to assess my prospects as a hard-of-hearing person. I gave her the bullet points of my career: a practically spotless academic record and a degree without any help.
The psychologist took down all this information, looking serious, and sketched out a summary, repeating herself any time I furrowed my brow. I’d worked so hard to adapt that I had to be on the verge of collapse; dealing with this new degree of hearing loss might well revive old specters of trauma.
I wasn’t alone on that front, she went on, all hard-of-hearing individuals went through bouts of depression, a result of the cumulative effort that hearing society didn’t see. It’s hard to measure this effort and it’s not easy for friends and family to understand this, or any other invisible disability. Those who are hard of hearing have a tendency, at times, to cut themselves off from other people.
At the sight of my face consumed with questions, she suddenly shifted to a reassuring tone: “There are solutions, and one of them is a cochlear implant.”
“But with an implant I won’t hear the way I did before.” “Your brain will have forgotten what ‘before’ means.”
Then she added: “It’s true that there’s a sense of mourning. Something’s lost, yes. But there’s no knowing what, in turn, might be found.”
*
The hospital stay was dependent upon my file’s continued existence. Documents were added to it, but nobody read them; it was merely a prop to justify my presence. My days were a long string of pop quizzes that somehow left the quizzers no less quizzical. “What are you here for?” “How long has your stay been?” “What procedure are you undergoing?”: a morass of faces asked me a morass of questions because they didn’t read the file.
My file got lost, but I was told not to miss any of my appointments. “Which ones?” I asked. “My colleague will get back to you about that.” Except they were all colleagues and not a single one bothered to get back to me about that.
My trust in medical institutions was crumbling. I hated the doctors doing grand rounds with a gaggle of interns trailing behind like crabby teenagers being dragged through pouring rain on a field trip to Dieppe.
Everything was weighing on me: within the room’s confines I was an ailing woman, a future implant recipient. The one place away from prying eyes was the chapel, a seventeenth-century edifice shaped like a Greek cross, hidden within the hospital grounds. I generally steered clear of such religious spaces, but every other room had already let me down. The chapel was under the patronage of Saint Rita, an Augustinian nun and the patroness of impossible causes. I could pray to her. I wrote a note for her, even though I knew she wouldn’t be reading my file either.
Each day I dragged my IV drip to the chapel, the stand’s wheels clattering on the stones. Then I made my way, in a slow, silent procession, with my metallic pole for a shepherd’s rod, to the Babinski building. And each fluorescent-lit night, back in my room, I chewed my bland food.
I dreamed that my soldier was tucking me in while I slept, singing a song with no consonants. Saint Rita twirled her skirts layered like a nesting doll to fend off the cold. The consonantless song disappeared amid the snow, the bass line crackled, the vowels snuffed out at the snowflakes’ least touch.
I never heard the door open in the morning even though the nurse yelled before entering. The nurses seemed annoyed. Even in the ORL ward, not hearing was still a class war with the hearing.
On the last day, I had an appointment with a specialist so I could be released: “There haven’t been any conclusive results,” she pronounced as she handed over a folder thick from appointments.
As I made my way down hallways, up paths, and across the lawn toward the exit, I tried to get my mind around my silence-future.
__________________________________
From Jellyfish Have No Ears. Copyright © 2022 by Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle. English language translation copyright © 2024 by Jeffrey Zuckerman. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
