Cyborg Ear, Cyborg I: A Memoir of Passage

Calibration

We anchor our universe by referring to known things. When I turned my hearing aids on, I would make a small tsk sound with my lips to check the volume. A small, repeatable, precisely known sound.

These days, I am far beyond tsk. I look for other things by which I can measure my ears. One is the shower. All my life, I've been just barely able to hear the shower in my left ear. It's not an especially loud sound, but it's a sharp, concussive, enveloping sound amplified by tiled walls – so I could hear it, even unaided.

This morning, I find that I can hear the shower again. The world still sounds dull and distorted, but perhaps my hearing is coming back. Maybe.

In the evening, Elvis, my cat, cuddles on my lap while I watch TV. After a while I realize I can hear his purr a little bit.

I hunch over him to put the microphone of my hearing aid close to his face. I listen to his breathy little brrrr sound. I try to memorize how it sounds.

Shower's gone.

So's Elvis's purr.

Stanford Hospital

July 25, 2001

If someone brought me fifty years into the future, took me to this CAT scanner, and said, "Mike, this is a time machine," I would probably believe it. The machine looks like a portal into another dimension. Its appearance is elegantly simple: a square white slab, ten or so feet high, with a manhole-sized ring in the middle. I am surprised by how slender the slab is, only about a foot and a half thick. Green and red numbers in LED diodes on the front add considerably to the aesthetic effect. I strongly suspect they are there solely to look cool, since all of the information must also be displayed on the computer in the control room.

The technician shows me how to lie on the table which will position me inside the ring of the scanner. It all turns out to be very simple. Nothing needs to be injected, I get to keep all my clothes on. I just have to lie there quietly for about ten minutes. The apparatus spins around my head very, very fast, reminding me irresistibly of the portal in that cheesy TV show, Stargate. Out of the corners of my eyes, I can see laser light flickering across my face. The table inches me along a millimeter or two every few seconds in a firm but not ungentle mechanical peristalsis.

To my surprise, I feel an artless joy. This is just where I love to be, deep inside great big heavy machines which are doing mysterious invisible things at high speed. I am eerily aware that, right now, the computer is slicing up my head with X-rays, executing untold thousands of lines of code, assembling megabytes of data which will lay bare the inmost contours of my inner ear and brain. Words like sagittal, transverse, and spline drift through my mind, although I am only vaguely aware of what they mean. The poetry of technology.

Incongruously, I wonder: Does thinking about a CAT scan during a CAT scan affect how one's brain looks to the computer?

Today it sounds like the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir is having rehearsal sessions in my head. Soaring, empyrean music. It sounds like the Ave Maria, with the phrase ora, pro nobis repeating itself over and over. It must be from my auditory memory of the opening credits of the film Polish Wedding.

I wouldn't exactly say the music is wasted on me, but it is a pity I'm Jewish and agnostic.

Stanford Hospital

August 4, 2001

This is the other large machine which will peer into my head. Unlike the elegantly slender CAT scanner, the MRI machine is hulking, huge, enormous. It is a cylindrical magnet so powerful that when turned on, it can yank unsecured oxygen tanks into its maw from across the room.

I am deprived of every piece of metal on my body and slid tenderly into the machine's narrow beige vagina. The computer may get inside me eventually, but today, I am getting inside it. This passage entails lots of clinical sex with machines, both penetratively and receptively. Tiresias I am, both male and female, living many lives.

I lie very still, as per instructions. I cannot help eyeballing what little I can see: the off-white curve of the chamber, blankly emitting the confining grandeur of Washington Metro stations; the metal array encircling my head to focus the magnetic field lines.

I catch myself thinking it would be a nice idea to position a small TV above the patient's head, to fill the lonely forty-five minutes. But it would probably be destroyed by the magnetic field. Machines can't survive in here. Only organic creatures can.

The MRI grinds, clicks, and hums around me in a rattling parody of the female orgasm. It is having all the fun. Somewhere out of sight, megabytes of data stream onto a server's hard disk. I just lie there and think of California.

Today it sounds like the music in 2001 when the ship Discovery first appears on the screen. The camera slowly pans its length while something by Khachaturian plays. Slow, tuneless, wandering music. Perfect for being stuck between Jupiter and Saturn.

I must have watched 2001 twenty times in my life. Now it's watching me.

Serves me right.

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