SoMa Literary Review - Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human

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Rebuilt:

How Becoming Part Computer

Made Me More Human

By Michael Chorost

Houghton Mifflin - 224 pages

Chapter 1: Broken

I’m impatient. It hasn’t been a good morning. I’m on a business trip and have just arrived in Reno, where I’m supposed to interview people at Tahoe for a study. But the car rental at the airport won’t take my debit card. I spend half an hour canvassing the other outlets, no luck. Finally a man at one counter kindly points me to a courtesy phone.

“Dial 133. It’s Enterprise. They usually have cars and their rates are okay.”

I pick up the phone. I can hear it fine with my hearing aids, even amid the ruckus of the baggage claim. Yes, they have cars available. The voice directs me to the shuttlebus outside the airport.

It’s the last telephone call I will ever make with my natural ears.

Paperwork signed, I wait for my car. I fidget. I might as well have driven here instead of flying. And then –

That’s odd. The traffic sounds fuzzy all of a sudden. Instead of their usual decisive vrump, the cars have started making a whispery sound as they go by, as if plowing through shredded paper. And they sound a hundred yards away, even though I’m right by the road.

It sounds like my left hearing aid’s battery is going. Even though I’m wearing two hearing aids, only the left ear really counts. The right ear is so poor that it can only hear vague rumbles. My left ear is my conversation ear, my telephone ear, my radio ear.

I switch batteries in a practiced little pas de deux of the hands: left battery into the right aid, right battery into the left. That doesn’t make any difference. I guess they’re both going. I pull out a battery pack from my suitcase, do a second changeout, and wait for the familiar rush of clean, loud sound. But it doesn’t happen.

I can’t have two broken hearing aids at once. It’s as absurd as two tires blowing out at the same time. As I get in the car I’m breathing shallowly, and it’s not because of the altitude. I roll the car window down, fiddle with my left hearing aid’s volume control, wait for my ears to miraculously clear. All the way up to Tahoe, I’m monitoring on all frequencies, and –

this doesn’t sound right

Gotta be the batteries. I’ve just got a pack of bad batteries. At the hotel I check in, then go to the Long’s drugstore and buy three sets of 675s. It costs me fifteen dollars and thirty-seven cents. Right there at the checkout counter, I rip the batteries out of their plastic case and put them in.

That doesn’t help either.

In the car I spread both aids out on the passenger seat and methodically try every possible combination of tubes, batteries, and earmolds. Nothing works: the day is like a coin that always comes up tails.

“It’s got to be earwax,” I say to myself out loud, looking out the windshield to the big red-and-white logo of the store.

I’ve got to get someone to look in my left ear for earwax. Maybe the clerk at the hotel? She had proved to be a lissome woman with blond hair layered over black, whose full lips pouted as her hands explored a keyboard I couldn’t see. Maybe she would also take me into her arms and tell me that everything would be all right. Now that would be customer service.

I’ve never had earwax trouble in my life. But I’ve also never had two hearing aids fail on me at once, either.

Emergency room. Now.

* * *

The ER is quiet, so while waiting for the doctor I conduct an impromptu interview with the nurse. The study is on the region’s social problems, and I might as well start collecting data. The nurse proves to be a fount of information. But as she talks, a chilly realization takes hold of me.

“Nancy,” I say. “Are you talking about as loudly as you were when I first came in?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“But I’m not hearing you as well as when I came in. Before, I could mostly hear your voice. Now I’m only getting little bits of it.”

I’m having to lip-read her more and more. With perceptible speed, the world is becoming softer and softer. Every half an hour, I am hearing less than the half hour before. It’s like being an astronaut in the movie Apollo 13 watching the oxygen tank’s gauge inexorably sliding down to zero.

Reflexively, I think to myself: It’s the battery.

Oh no it isn’t. I have not only just lost part of my hearing, I am losing all of it. Minute by minute. I am going completely deaf, right here, right now, while sitting on this table talking to this nurse and scribbling notes.

The nurse goes off to see if she can find the physician just a little bit sooner. In a few minutes he appears, listens grave-faced to my story, then looks carefully in my ears.

“Your ears both look the same,” he tells me after I put my hearing aids back in. “There’s no fluid behind the eardrums. No redness or swelling.”

I can barely hear him, even though I’ve twisted the volume wheels on both my aids up to max. I usually set the volume at three. Now it’s at five, the top number on the dial. I need it to be at six. Six is my world of a few hours ago, the place where footsteps and birds and telephones live. If I could just get it to six.

“I’m also feeling a little dizzy,” I say cautiously, knowing the implications but trying not to think about them. The inner ears also control the sense of balance. I feel lightheaded, off-kilter, ethereal, as if I had just downed a shot of vodka. When I’d gotten down off the exam bench to greet the doctor I had first looked down at the floor to check how far away it was. On the fly, I’m reorganizing the way I deal with my visual field. I’m finding that if I turn to look at something too fast, my head swims. To stop that from happening, I’ve started squinting and holding my eyes steady as I turn my head.

The doctor goes off to call a specialist. I peer around the curtain to watch him at the nurses’ station down the hall. The phone’s spiral cord skitters over the counter as he paces back and forth.

He comes back, speaking slowly and carefully so I can read his lips. “It could be a virus in the inner ear. I want to prescribe you steroids and antivirals. They’ll treat swelling caused by viruses like herpes –“

I’m unraveling his words one at a time, and this creates a kind of myopia of the soul. The words are roaming around in my brain and not slotting in anywhere.

“Herpes? I don’t have herpes.”

“It’s not that. It’s an antiviral.”

Steroids. Antivirals. Vertigo. It is sinking into me that this is not earwax, this is not an equipment problem, this is not a minor health scare. I am in deep trouble. My mission is aborted. My life has changed forever. Six is lost, unreachable, in a place beyond where the volume wheel stops. Whip right around Truckee, take the fastest trajectory back home.

The day is July 7, 2001. I’m thirty-six years old. I’ve just finished my Ph.D. After a decade of grad school I’m learning what it’s like to have a real job and the beginning of a career. I’m starting to meet people. I’m beginning to have a life.

I have always been hard of hearing. That’s not the same thing as being deaf. To be hard of hearing is to have partial hearing, which my hearing aids remedied by amplifying sound. They hurt, itched, and whistled, yet they enabled me to take my place in a hearing world. I went to school with people who heard normally. I could use the telephone and understand the radio. No one ever taught me sign language. I often stumbled; I had to ask for repeats; I constantly missed jokes and struggled at parties; but I got by, a reasonably successful child of a lesser god.

I’ve always been hard of hearing. I can’t go deaf.*

Not now.

Eight hours later I return to the rental bureau, only to find it closed and deserted. A sign directs me to deposit the key and call for a courtesy cab. A yellow arrow points helpfully to the location of the phone. I go and stare at it, feeling like Snoopy in a world filled with signs saying NO DOGS ALLOWED. The lot is vacant, not a human being in sight. What do I do?

Perhaps I have just enough hearing left to hear a yes. I pick up the phone and dial.

“Mmmm mmm mmbpm bbmm verumf hmm bmm, berum hmmm hmm-hmmm grmmm.”

“Hi, I’m at the Enterprise rent-a-car lot and I need a ride to the airport. The sign says to call. Can you send a cab?”

“Erumm vrmm nerpmm mmm mmbpm ermm bmmm arimm, mmmbpmm bmm hmm ermmm –“

“I’m sorry, I’m deaf and I can’t hear you. Could you just say yes or no? Just say whether you can send a cab. Just one word, please. I’m at the Enterprise rent-a-car near the Reno airport, on” – I look around desperately, my ears ringing like chimes as my head swivels – “Mill Road.”

“Ssssss burumm bmm pmmb erumm bmm pmm arumm emm er berumm bmm pmm bmm erumm burumm.”

Human beings are not binary creatures. You can ask as clearly as possible for a single syllable, yes or no, 1 or 0, but the instinctual apparatus of social communication is not easily turned off. Even audiologists will blather on at me while they are holding my hearing aids in their own hands, and I have to smile tolerantly and hold up my hand to stop them. To people who hear normally, complete deafness seems to be inconceivable. Complete blindness can easily be simulated by closing one’s eyes, but even the best earplugs cannot fully shut out the world. The ears are always on, always connected. To talk is to be heard.

But I have gotten just enough of the sibilant, the ssss in Yes, to get the message. “Okay, I hear you saying yes, thank you, I’ll wait for the cab.”

I hang up, praying that all the phonic baggage trailing that one syllable was not yes, but it will take an hour, or yes, but you have to call this other number, or yes, we will send a cab right away, sir, if you would just say again where you are.

I stand there and wait, clutching the tow handle of my suitcase as the sun pivots and falls, as appalled by the enormity of the parking lot as a castaway who has just watched his last message in a bottle drift out of sight.

* * *

In the maze of doctors’ visits that take place in the next few weeks, a phrase that comes up over and over again is cochlear implant. When people go deaf, it is usually because something is wrong with a snail-shaped organ called the cochlea, which lives behind the eardrum, about an inch and a half inside the skull. (The word cochlea comes from the Latin word for “snail.”) The entire function of the rest of the ear – the ear canal, the eardrum, the three little bones of the middle ear – is just to get sound to the cochlea. The ear canal funnels sound toward the eardrum, which vibrates. Three little bones transmit the eardrum’s vibration to the base of the cochlea (that is, the big end of its spiral.) Ripples travel through the fluid inside the cochlea from its base to the apex. As they go, they perturb about 15,000 cell-sized hairs lining its inside. Seen at magnification those hairs look like a field of grass, and in fact they behave like one, literally rustling in response to sound waves just as blades of grass undulate to the wind’s touch. Each hair is connected to a nerve ending, which sends signals to the brain when the hair is moved by sound.

If all of the hairs are physically damaged – and that appears to be what has just happened to me – the nerves can no longer be stimulated, and profound deafness sets in. But the nerves themselves are usually still intact, and can be triggered with implanted electrodes under computer control. That is what a cochlear implant does.*

Becky Highlander, my new audiologist, explains to me how it works. She’s a slender blonde woman with a direct gaze and a deadpan sense of humor. Lipreading her is not so hard right now, because I’ve been all over the Web researching the device and already have the big picture. Holding up one of the implants, she tells me that the process would start with sound going into the microphone at the headpiece. The headpiece would stick to my head, held there by a magnet inside the implant. The microphone would convert sound into electrical current and send it down a wire running under my shirt to a waist-worn computer (or processor) on my belt. The processor would analyze the sound, ultimately yielding a stream of bits (1s and 0s.) It would send those bits back up the wire to the headpiece, which would then transmit them by radio through my skin to the computer chips in the implant.

Those chips would send signals down a wire going to my cochlea through a tunnel drilled through an inch and a half of bone. A string of sixteen electrodes coiled up inside my cochlea would strobe on and off in rapid sequence to trigger my auditory nerves. If all went well, my brain would learn to interpret the stimulation as sound.

Getting the implant would make me, in the most literal sense, a cyborg.

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