Inattentional Blindness

NOTHING IS REAL, Leda realized, looking at a rat.

The rat ran in circles, chasing its tale, a small whirling cyclone that blurred the floral brocade patterns tattooed on its sides.

There was a tree that the rat was under.  This tree had leaves the same deep-red color as the rat.

“Is that rat even real?” Leda asked Maddie.

Maddie laughed. “What rat?” Her voice was raspy like she needed water.

“No really,” Leda asked. “Is there a rat?”

Maddie didn’t answer. She was lying on her back on the ground, knees bent, staring at the sky. She looked like a bird in her floppy black dress, her legs like pigeon legs with their turquoise scales.

“Is it or isn’t it?” Leda kind of wanted to strangle her for not answering. This was important. There was nothing more annoying than not knowing if something did or did not exist.

“Why does it matter?” Maddie asked.

That was valid, Leda had to admit. It didn’t matter if the rat was real, because nothing was really real. Anyway, there wasn’t any point asking Maddie, since she wasn’t an expert on what was real and what was an illusion any more than Leda was.   

“The human brain takes sensory inputs and converts them into recognizable imagery,” her AP Psychology textbook said. Which meant that your brain could show you whatever it wanted. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think that was reality. 

Mr. Suda played a video, with six teenagers throwing balls back and forth. 

“Count how many times,” Mr. Suda said. 

So Leda counted. She wanted to get the number exactly correct. 

“Fifteen,” she whispered, when the video ended. 

Which was right, but there was something else. In the midst of all those kids, their disconcertingly bland jeans and t-shirt outfits, a gorilla had strolled across the screen, done a little dance, kept walking. Mr. Suda played the video again to prove it was true. 

Leda had completely missed the gorilla. She was too busy counting. 

According to the textbook, this was called inattentional blindness.

Seven kids did see the gorilla. The bad students, Leda noticed. They weren’t counting the balls, just staring at the screen, so of course they saw him. 

Another reason people didn’t see reality, the psychology textbook said, was prejudice. 

Like when Amadou Diallo pulled out his wallet but the police saw a gun, so they shot him forty-one times. They saw a gun that didn’t exist because Amadou Diallo was black. 

The textbook called it implicit bias. The tendency to see what you expected to see, based on your assumptions about different types of people.

Amadou Diallo was murdered by the police over ten years ago, Mr. Suda said, but most police forces still did not receive training to counter their prejudiced assumptions that made their brains turn wallets into guns.

“The bottom line here,” Mr. Suda said, “is that just because you see something doesn’t mean that it’s real.” 

It had made sense to Leda during class, in an abstract intellectual way. But now it was happening to her. Here, on this bench way up in the hills, in the park in Berkeley. Now she understood it. 

Like, her hands. She held them in front of her face. They looked kind of meaty, especially in the palms, like they were made of meat. Of course, they were made of meat. Around the edges, though, their borders wavered, like maybe borders of things weren’t real at all. Also if she wiggled her fingers she could see an eyeball in the palm of each hand. If she tried to look directly at the eyeballs, they disappeared.

Because they weren’t real. Because nothing was real. It was all an illusion created by our minds. Our minds could show us anything they wanted to.

Leda’s voice coming from outside herself said: My parents aren’t real. So nothing they do can hurt me. 

“Your parents hurt you?” Maddie asked. 

“No,” said Leda. “I didn’t say that.” 

In Leda’s psychology class, they made a list of things that didn’t exist outside of human perceptions of them. 

Sorrow.

Happiness.

Love.

America.

Money.

The sound of running water.

The smell of cut grass. 

A cool breeze.

The color yellow. 

“Animals can see the color yellow,” Tracy Wong pointed out, her nose wrinkled like this whole lesson was stupid. “Or smell the grass.”

“Animals see something,” Mr. Suda said. “If they look at a yellow flower, their brains construct some representation of it. But is what they see yellow?”

Tracy nodded but she looked like she still thought it was stupid. Leda found it pretty convincing, though. In fact, she found it extremely compelling, almost mind-blowing. She hated showing teachers when she agreed with them, but she could feel her head nodding involuntarily.

Of course yellow didn’t exist.

Yellow wasn’t a real thing out in the world. It was some kind of—she tried to remember her physics class, if they’d covered this when they talked about light—frequency, wasn’t it? Just a type of light reflecting off a type of surface. Brains turned that frequency into a color, and probably it wasn’t even the same color for different people, much less for a horse or a dog or a bee.

“I’ve got one,” Trevor Hagopian said. “The number ten.”

No one could agree about that one. 

Maddie had read that LSD would make your self disappear. There would be perceptions, but there wouldn’t be a you perceiving them.

“Ego is an illusion,” Maddie said. “I mean, you know, the Freudian sense of ego. The part of your mind that make you think you exist as, like, a coherent entity. The part that thinks about itself.”

That’s what Maddie wanted, to make that self-perceiving part disappear. 

“I’m so sick of always being myself,” she said. “Like, do you ever say something and think, yeah, I would say that. I’ve probably said that a hundred times before.” 

Leda knew what she meant, but she didn’t feel it that way. She wasn’t exactly sick of her self. What she was sick of was the thing that hung over her self, that watchfulness she could never get rid of, that feeling of responsibility. 

“It’s illegal,” Leda said. 

Maddie squinted at her like she was calculating an angle. Light glinted off her silver eyeliner.

“Is it immoral?” she asked. 

Leda thought about it. 

“Well, depends. Could it kill you?” If she took it and died, it would make her family really upset. That would be immoral, or at least extremely not nice. It was kind of a person’s responsibility to try not to get killed. 

“No,” Maddie said. “If you take too much, worst thing is you go insane.” 

Going insane, while not great, was obviously a lot less bad than dying. Which begged the question: how much responsibility did a person have to her family, anyway? It wasn’t like she could never do anything crazy or adventurous, just to protect them from every possible undesirable outcome. If that was the case, she would never travel, or have a one-night stand, or even, if you considered the true dangers in everyday life, drive a car.

Driving a car was probably way more dangerous than taking LSD, she thought.

Maddie's boyfriend Casey gave them the acid. He was twenty-one and had his own apartment in a basement in Berkeley. He wanted Maddie to take molly, to take it with him. But Maddie was only interested in acid, and not with Casey. 

“Really what I want is to expand my mind,” Maddy told Leda. “He’s just going to want to talk about stupid stuff. I don’t want to talk about stupid stuff.”

Leda was lying on the bench now. In front of her face were a bunch of tiny yellow flowers. 

“What plant is this?” she asked. 

“Yarrow,” said Maddie. 

Yeah. Row. 

“Yarrow,” Leda said. “It’s an herb?”

“It’s an herb,” Maddie said. “It’s like.” Loud, deep inhale. “You put it in lotion and stuff.”

It seemed like something Leda had seen before, seen lots and lots of times, probably by the side of the highway. How funny that it was in fact very, very beautiful, with tiny delicate butter-colored petals around a center that was made up of more tiny flowers, fuzzy tiny yellow flowers. Inside those were even more flowers, all yellow. Onward, into the center of the flowers, a train plowing through a yellow tunnel, a tunnel of all lightness instead of dark. Inside there were bees, small clever bees that darted back and forth leaving long trails of bee shadows behind them, so that it was unclear whether there were a hundred bees or one bee and a hundred bee shadows. 

The whole world is yellow, her voice outside her said. This was important. This was possibly the most important thing she’d ever thought of. Will you remember, or should we write it down? 

“Yellow doesn’t even exist,” Maddy said. 

How did you know that? 

“You told me, remember? The color yellow doesn’t exist.”

That was true. That person called Leda had told that person called Maddie. And it was true that just a few days ago, Leda had been very sure that the color yellow didn’t even exist. 

But now it seemed like the only thing that existed. 

Yellow yarrow yellow yarrow yellow since the beginning of time had been there an ancient thing older than anyone alive older than millennia older than yarrow bees butter lemons an eternal frequency a constant so we live and die but the yellow stays the same and we are just part of the yellow each individual life part of this eternal truth that we see yellow and in that way yellow is more like god than god is if there even is a god.

Leda raised her head from the bench and sat up. Everything was giant all of a sudden. Trees so tall and green and brown and commanding that she covered her face with her hands so she wouldn’t have to look at them all at once. It felt like she might have splinters in her cheek. She opened her hands slowly, letting the trees in only a few at a time.

Casey and Maddie were having an argument, Leda remembered. It had been going on for a while.  It was about nachos, something like:

I just think goat cheese tastes better.

That’s a joke. Nobody puts goat cheese on nachos.

I’ll never do it again, because I am never, ever cooking for you, ever again.  

Casey was next to Leda, trying to put his arm around her like they were buddies. His hair was shaggy and blond on his head and all over his face and neck. His brown t-shirt had holes in it and it was all sweaty.

“Leda probably eats her nachos with regular cheese,” he said. 

“I don’t like nachos,” Leda said. 

She ducked under his arm to get it off her. He was really tall, she felt it more with him right next to her, a giant steaming cavern of person-meat.

“Wait.” She started working the day backwards. The trail, the park, walking from Maddie’s house, where Leda’s mother had dropped her this morning. “Why are you here?”

“I just stopped by to make sure you girls were okay.” His teeth were too big for his mouth, and he had one of those twirling mustaches with the pointy ends. 

He didn’t usually, but right now it looked like he did. 

“We’re fine,” Leda said. “You can leave.” 

Maddie didn’t say anything. Her face was dark angry purple like a storm cloud. 

“Are you okay?” Leda’s mother asked. 

It was two hours later, and Leda was in her apartment. Standing in her bedroom—she shared it with her brother Freddy, but he wasn’t home—looking at the one poster. It was Freddy’s poster, for the movie of Brittle Fortress which was his favorite online game. The image was of a broken-looking castle. But it had a face in it, too, a giant, laughing face the size of a real human head, that sunk back from the surface of the paper like she was wearing 3D glasses. 

She had the feeling her mother might have asked her this question a few times already. 

“I’m fine,” Leda said. She couldn’t remember if the normal thing would be to turn around and look at her mother or just keep staring at the poster while they talked. 

“You're supposed to be out with Maddie all day,” her mother said. A suspicious tone, that tone when she was angry that Leda was lying, even though she didn't know what about. “How did you get home?” 

It took Leda a minute to remember the answer. Casey had driven her home. They had walked down the trail in a line, Maddie in the front, angry, Leda in the back, watching the hourglass sweat stain spreading across Casey’s t-shirt.  Maddie and Casey were arguing the whole way, about how Casey never gave her any space, how Maddie should be grateful he’d gotten her the acid in the first place, how Casey was a controlling asshole, how Maddie didn’t realize how good she had it.

Leda remembered a police car next to Casey’s car, parked on the side of the road near the trailhead. Leda was sure they were all going to get arrested, the guy in the ripped t-shirt, the high-school girls covered in stray leaves from the bench. Everyone knows, Leda thought. But the cop inside the car just stared down at his phone like he had way more important things to deal with while they walked past and got into Casey’s station wagon and drove away.

“Maddie’s friend drove me,” Leda said. 

“Maddie’s friend,” Leda’s mom said. A sharp stinging phrase like a slap. It echoed in Leda’s head, louder and more contemptuous each time: Maddie’s friend, Maddie’s friend, Maddie’s friend. The mouth a snarl, eyes flashing red. Teeth gnashing as she spat the words at Leda, a stream of words Leda couldn’t follow, too frightened by the flare of nostrils and flash of fangs. 

Leda blinked her eyes to slow the monster down. 

Then she remembered. Her mother didn’t exist. 

You don’t exist, she whispered to herself. You don’t exist. 

She blinked her eyes slower and slower, willing her heart to slow to the same pace. Reminding herself that her mother did not exist, until she really didn’t.

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