Bloodhound

INE YEARS AGO, on an April morning in San
Francisco, I awoke to a concussion that seemed
to silence everything around me. I noticed halfpainted
canvases lying haphazardly around the room; I ran
my fingers along an eggshell-white wall punctuated with
slivers of light filtering through half-shuttered windows.
I felt strangely disconnected from my environment.
There was something that hung
like a veil over my perception. It
was first apparent that something
was wrong when I took a bite of a
falafel sandwich that morning and it
hung like tasteless cardboard in my
mouth. Later that morning, I drove
through the rush-hour traffic on the
smoggy highway that cuts through
the valley between San Francisco
and Sacramento, unmoved by the
exhaust that was out streaming in
through my open window.
At a time I had worked at a fondue
restaurant where the odors of
melted cheese and broth were
particularly strong. Some days they
made me want to gag, and some
days they made me hungry, but they
were always there, permeating my
clothes and hair long after they were
washed. For some reason, I didn’t
notice them that day. I thought it had
something to do with the fog of my
concussion, but when I went back to
the kitchen to dump out a pot of
My concussion came after a day
of trespassing to take photos in a
Bayview-Hunters Point graffiti yard
with an old college friend. Afterward
we went to a bar, where after one
single beer and a puff of medical
marijuana, They told me I’d passed
out cold, and promptly transported
me to a hospital by an ambulance
where I was given a dismissive
diagnosis of a mild concussion.
“You’re in the Tenderloin—we see
this all the time,” the attending ER
physician told me, before sending
me home to be watched by my
friend overnight. Other than the
bruise to my head, I thought I was
okay when I drove home to work the
very next morning.
ater my general practitioner
would order a string of tests—an
EEG with forced hyperventilation
and strobes to test for epilepsy,
a fasting blood-glucose test, and
an MRI to look for potential brain
and skull injury all in an attempt to
17 seeing smell