I Went for a Drive

I’m lying on the hard 'bed' of the MRI machine waiting for instructions over the intercom from the technician in the next room. Take a moment for those quotation marks to really sink in. I’m to lie here motionless for an hour. It’s been 30 minutes and my body is screaming.

"Okay, the next scan will last 3 minutes. We’re going to do your orbits, so please close your eyes and try to look straight ahead."

Wait. What? I close my eyes and try to look straight ahead. Though my head is clamped in an ergonomically-questionable vise and the vise is positioned inside a loud plastic donut¹, a clever set of mirrors allows me to look down the length of my body, through the MRI room, and through the window looking into the technician’s office. This is doing wonders for my claustrophobia, a condition I currently don’t and never have suffered from. Maybe they could lose the mirror and find a fucking mattress. I suppose the mirror also helps me look straight ahead - with my eyes closed. Something is off here. Maybe it’s just me, but for the sake of this narrative, try looking at something 20 or so feet away. Now close your eyes for 3 minutes. Or 20 seconds. Then open your eyes. Are you still looking at the same spot? Are you like me - eyes wide open, cross-eyed, panicked, dashing to focus on that spot once again, hoping no one noticed? Regardless of your own results, I think you can imagine the situation I’m in. 

I fail the first attempt. I close my eyes tight, perhaps a little too eager, and immediately start seeing an explosion of shapes and colors, which my eyes track wildly. We try again. This time, finding the view into the room useless, and the bed cutting off circulation to most places in my body², I decide to conjure a place in my mind — something for my eyes to focus on in the absence of that disembodied view of my feet.

The following happens faster than I think — the place a suggestion at most. The first thing I think of is a horizon. It appears as a light gray plane below a blue sky. There are no clouds. The horizon is curved, though I believe I several exaggerate the earth’s actual curvature. Almost at the same time, the next thing I think of is a gate, far off in the distance — one of those Japanese Shinto gates, vermilion and ancient, though stripped of all detail. Why a Shinto gate? Well, I was in Japan about a year ago, and Shinto gates are cool. I don’t know. With the gate, a road appears - or rather, a pair of lines which converge under the gate, the space between the lines a darker shade of gray. 

    I then start to move. Or the gate moves, it’s unclear. The gate comes towards me, and as I cross it, another appears far way, this one approaching faster than the last. And then another appears. Soon, I’m traveling so fast the gates start to merge into a blur.  There’s nothing to focus on but a point of empty space where the next gate has yet to emerge. Then the machine stops, and I’m back in the room, back on the bed, head in a vise, waiting for instructions. 


Marco Chimienti
14.12.16

1. If you’ve never had an MRI, you may not know just how fantastically loud they can be. Listening to Fuck Buttons (actual band name) is a good approximation.

2.There’s this concept in physics where bodies in equilibrium apply equal and opposite forces on each other, which I like to imagine means the bed is just as uncomfortable with me as I am with it.