**Inspired by the dedication and bios in my psychology textbook. Names have been changed.**
Dedicated to my friend and colleague Drew Johnson
-Jeffrey B. Isaacs[1]
Most people thought Jeff and Drew both resented titles, but neither Jeff nor Drew ever saw it that way.
“The thing is,” Jeff once tried to explain at his East Campus suite’s party in the ‘80s, “that what we see is never truly as we see it. We go through life calling things as we perceive them, not acknowledging, for example, the work of our eyes nor tricks of light!” The Barnard student he was talking at nodded. Jeff noticed her aqua-lined, hazel-flecked eyes dart above his shoulder to the guy behind him. “So when we call someone ‘friend,’ for example, we know that that’s true from our point of view, but not necessarily from both sides. That other person may not agree. That’s the best metaphor I can think of…” Jeff smiled. “As an English major, maybe you’d be able to do better?”
She made eye contact with Jeff and smiled politely back, as if to say, “Yes, I could do better than a young Steve Buscemi doppelganger.”
Drew’s luck was not much better at the University of Washington. His eye contact was always deemed creepy. Drew tended to shrug it off – he saw no reason to settle down in college anyway.
By the time both Jeff and Drew had acquired their respective undergraduate degrees, they both chose to pursue a PhD at the University of Michigan. Jeff joked to his acquaintances that instead of experimenting in college, he chose to pursue a graduate degree in experimental psychology. Drew could not make this joke because he did indeed study experimental psychology in college, although he had made variations of this joke in the past.
Between Jeff and Drew, the joke totaled two well-meaning chuckles and one well-meaning smirk.
Drew was neither short nor tall. His hair was light brown then, and he had much more of it, although he never let it grow too long. He was intensely thoughtful though rarely quiet. His irises were grey when he wore his grey shirts, and blue when he wore his blue shirts. When he wore his black suit with a white shirt, his iris pigmentation was anybody’s guess.
Drew wore the suit to make a good impression on his potential roommate and mostly so that he would have something to talk about regarding perception. Allison had said this guy studied engineering and psychology, but Drew decided to skip the research on robots and rely on their common ground.
The two met in a café on Bonisteel Blvd. Both noticed that the other smelled of awkward, hotel-brand, “spring fresh” body wash. Jeff had decided to wear his brain tie, the blue one with the inaccurate but charming map of the cerebral cortex.
“Hello,” said Drew, extending his hand. “I’m Drew. Pleasure to meet you.”
Jeff reciprocated Drew’s greeting and shook his hand, a bit too strongly, though Drew mentioned later on that he saw this as a sign of trustworthiness.
The men sat down at a small, round, wooden table and ordered black coffee. They sat in silence after ordering, until Drew complimented Jeff’s tie.
“Thank you,” Jeff said, although he was quick to add, “But surely you know that this map is inaccurate.”
Drew laughed. “Yes. Is that space with the eye supposed to be the occipital lobe? There, under the – towards the middle of the –”
Jeff looked down and laughed as well. “Yes, I suppose it is.”
The coffee came eventually, and Drew added some sugar to his, which Jeff almost didn’t respect but later learned to appreciate. In part to avoid the scent of spring fresh body wash and in part because they did not mind each other’s company, Jeff and Drew decided to share a very affordable apartment in Ann Arbor.
Graduate school was decidedly less difficult than Jeff expected, though Drew had a bit of trouble. The October of his first year, Jeff began to spend long nights with a girl named Lisa. She was a ballerina, had warm brown eyes, she had written a physics textbook as an undergrad, her lips tasted like salted caramel, and her touch sent tickles up his spine. After spending more time with her – though, given, correlation doesn’t equal causality – Jeff began to spend more time watching changing leaves and listening for music in the park. Drew noticed that Jeff would mention her more often than not, though Jeff hadn’t introduced them yet.
Mostly, Drew spent long nights in the library with sweetened black coffee and textbooks. Sometimes he would come back to the apartment when confused birds had already started to chirp and Jeff would still be up, turning a pencil in his hand and staring out the rusted window of their very affordably sized kitchen.
“Do you think I’m in love with her?” Jeff called out to the hallway as Drew creaked the apartment door shut behind him.
“With Lisa?”
“Yes.”
Drew walked into the kitchen and put down his briefcase. “It’s quite possible.”
Jeff nodded. “Do you ever think—”
“Quite often, yes,” said Drew, with one of those mouth-slightly-open grins others either found charming or disarming.
Jeff gave a weak smile. He turned away from the window.
“Do you ever think you might die alone?”
Drew thought about this for a moment. “Well, no, not completely alone. I’ve got friends, I’ve got colleagues. I suppose I don’t have a Lisa, but not all of us do.”
Jeff nodded. “But do you think I’m in love with her?”
Drew shrugged and sat down at the kitchen table.
Soon enough the conversation had shifted to the extraordinary functioning of the ear of a bat, and how terrible human listening is in comparison.
In the winter, Jeff and Lisa went ice-skating on the lake. Afterward, Jeff brought her back to the apartment for a dinner. Drew was in attendance. Neither Jeff nor Drew found this weird, so Lisa decided not to either. They watched a movie, Jeff and Lisa cuddled on the couch under a blanket and Drew on the good recliner. Jeff and Lisa fell asleep, so Drew tried to be quiet as he cleaned the dishes.
In the spring, Jeff sat on a blanket as Lisa demonstrated her ballet skills in the park. She turned on her bare foot in the fresh grass, looking at Jeff the whole time with a clever grin and whipping her head at every rotation. “It’s important to focus on one point as you turn,” she explained as she spun. “Otherwise the turns get dizzying.”
When Jeff got back that night, he announced that he did, indeed, love Lisa. He had plans to marry her, he told Drew. Not soon, not in the next year – not in the next two years even, maybe. Drew smiled, congratulated him, and made no mention of the ice cream date he had just been on with a beautiful financial secretary. Jeff told him congratulations weren’t in order, at least yet, and to calm down.
“Anyway,” Jeff threw in, “how was the library tonight?”
“Oh, good,” said Drew.
In the summer, Jeff went back to New York and Drew fell further in love with the beautiful financial secretary. Her name was Amy, and she loved him for his half-smile and the wholeness he saw in the world. Drew loved Amy for all the same.
In the fall, when Jeff got back to Ann Arbor, Lisa told him that she was moving to China to study in Hong Kong and did not want to be in touch.
“I thought we were going to get married some day,” Jeff sighed one night and rested his head on the kitchen table. “Maybe she never saw it that way. She was never as bright as she seemed anyway.” He lifted his head and turned to Drew. “I blame pheromones. I mean, I could probably write a textbook too if I sat down for long enough!”
“Humans don’t emit pheromones. Do we have pasta?” asked Drew.
“Top cabinet,” said Jeff. “Hey, do you think I could write a textbook?”
“Maybe if I helped.”
By the winter of his second year of graduate school, Drew brought Amy back to the apartment for dinner. Jeff, at this point, was purposefully and fully immersed in his studies, although he made the time to meet Amy.
“Amy, this is my friend and colleague Jeff. Jeff, Amy.”
“It’s Jeffrey, now, actually,” said Jeff.
“Friend and colleague, huh?” Amy smiled. “Both?”
“Sure,” nodded Jeff. “We’re actually writing a textbook together soon. So definitely colleagues.”
Dinner was spaghetti and meatballs and it was the most legitimate food the men had cooked in months. Jeff fell asleep on the couch, and Drew and Amy did the dishes. They stayed up afterwards on his navy cotton sheets discussing the universe, Amy’s head resting on Drew’s lap.
“I mean, when you think of the span of time…” Amy began, absentmindedly running her finger along Drew’s rough palm.
“Well, how long have we been together now?” Drew asked.
“Oh, gosh… a year, maybe?”
Drew thought for a moment, then looked at Amy’s lips. “I’d like much more time with you, if you’ll allow it.”
Amy looked up, sat up, and turned around. She kissed him softly, then they sat there for a moment, looking at each other and smiling. “I think I’ll allow it,” Amy said.
Neither Jeff nor Drew resented titles—Jeff was simply assumed to be the best man at Drew and Amy’s wedding. Jeff didn’t feel the need to mention that he was best man in his toast, though Amy Johnson would eventually mention it off-handedly in her speech.
After Michigan, Dr. and Mrs. Andrew and Amy Johnson moved to California to be with Amy’s mother, and Drew became a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford. The couple then moved into a house on the East Coast, joining the Psychology and Business departments at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Jeffrey B. Isaacs joined the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis. Both Jeff and Drew taught courses at their respective universities, and unbeknownst to them, both were deemed “Really good professor[s] with great sense[s] of humor. Exams can be tricky tho [sic]” on RateMyProfessor.com. Both men busied themselves with research on human behavior and response times. Both men looked straight ahead, their lives zooming by in their peripheral vision.
One night in early December, Jeff returned to his perfectly affordable one-bedroom, sat down at his kitchen table, looked out the window, and started to turn a pencil in his hand. After a minute or so, he took out his book of contacts.
The phone rang once, twice, then a child answered. “Hello, Johnson residence! May-I-please-ask-who-is-calling?”
Jeff laughed to himself. “Hi, this is Dr. Jeffrey Isaacs. May I please speak to your dad?”
The child pulled the phone away and shouted, “DAD! THERE’S A DOCTOR ON THE PHONE FOR YOU AGAIN!”
Jeff chuckled and waited. There was some shuffling of phones on the other end.
“Uh, hi, hello, this is Drew.”
“Drew! Hello. It’s Jeff.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Jeff? Jeff Isaacs!”
“Yes! I know we haven’t spoken in a while, so I wanted to—”
“Jeff!” Drew exclaimed. “It’s so great to hear from you! Amy, it’s Jeff!”
“Jeff? Jeff Isaacs?” Amy called from a distance.
Jeff laughed. “As I live and breathe.”
“Tell Jeff I say hi!” Amy shouted.
“Amy sends her regards!”
“My warmest regards back to Amy. Drew, you couldn’t tell it was me?” Jeff asked.
“I was just expecting a… another call,” said Drew. “But I’m glad it’s you. How’ve you been? Have you heard from Lisa?”
“Drew, Lisa and I broke up at Michigan, be serious for a moment!”
“Right, right, yes…”
The two caught up. Jeff told Drew about his recent research on Wernicke’s aphasia. Drew told Jeff about his two children, Alex and Stephanie—about Alex’s recent recital and his failed attempts to interest Alex in harmonic frequencies, about Stephanie’s science fair project on color vision in their family dog, about his own recent research on Broca’s aphasia. They continued talking about their lives and respective universities, until Jeff brought it up.
“Listen, you were right that I couldn’t write a textbook on my own. Would you like to join forces? Work together over summers and perhaps over other university breaks to write the best damned text on perception the world has ever seen?”
“Of course!” Drew began, then he was quiet. “Jeff, listen, I need to… It’s… Do you remember that blue tie? That tie you had with the cerebral cortex and I saw it and I said that the brain didn’t look quite right—”
“It was a laughable map of the cerebral cortex,” Jeff interrupted.
Drew chuckled and agreed. Then he found a way to tell Jeff that his CAT scans, as well, didn’t look quite right. But the prognosis was good, said the doctors.
Jeff stared out the window of his kitchen. “Is the prognosis good enough for you to co-write a textbook?”
Drew smiled. “Yes, I suppose it is.”
Between treatments, phone calls, and scattered meetings, it took Jeff and Drew ten years to write and publish Sensation and Perception. The men mostly managed it through phone calls, spending as many summers together as they could manage in a home in Aspen. During their fifth summer together, Alex and Stephanie were both old enough to go to camp, and the band was, as the saying goes, back together again. Jeff and Drew sat on low couches on the porch, their knees awkwardly high, discussing the Olfaction chapter. Drew was undergoing chemo in a hospital nearby. He had only thrown up twice this week, though at this point it would be three. He excused himself and headed inside through the creaky screen door.
Amy was working on her laptop in the kitchen as she heard the door slam behind Drew. “Dee? You okay?” She looked at him. He stopped and gave her a weak smile.
“I’m good, sweetheart. Just going to rest for a little while,” Drew said, continuing to walk toward their bedroom.
Amy watched him climb the stairs until she heard the bedroom door close and couldn’t hear him anymore. She closed her computer, stood up, poured out two tall glasses of blueberry iced tea, and went out to sit with Jeff.
Jeff focused intently on the plush, green hills off the porch and tapped his pencil against his notebook.
“Mind if I sit next to you?” Amy asked. She did, and placed the iced teas on the table. Jeff nodded but did not turn around. “Jeff, you’ve been such a good friend to Drew all these years…” Amy began. Jeff turned around abruptly. She sighed and turned toward the mountain. For a few minutes, they sat there and listened to the birds, feeling the breeze wash over the porch. Then Amy picked up her own glass and handed the other one to Jeff.
“Drew used to always tell me that my peripheral vision should be blue,” said Amy. “Is that true?”
“What do you mean, he always used to tell you?” asked Jeff, taking the glass from her and setting it back on the table. “He’s upstairs, Amy.”
She took a drink and gulped. “I know. I know. He just doesn’t talk as much as he used to. But he said it would be blue. That there were only blue receptor cones in the outer corners of my eyes, so that I should only see blue there.”
“Yes, that’s correct and quite perplexing.”
Amy chuckled softly. “Oh, completely perplexing. And then I said, ‘Well, I don’t see blue in my peripheral vision,’ and he said that was because of my memory. Because I remembered what was supposed to be there so my memory filled in the blue monochrome with full color.”
“Yes, also quite perplexing.”
Amy sighed. “He’s not quite here anymore, is he?”
Jeff furrowed his brow and turned to her. He picked up his iced tea. “Dear God, Amy, you know he’s right upstairs.” Amy took a sharp breath. Jeff held tighter to the perspiring, cold glass, looked around, and stood up abruptly. He moved toward the door, then paused and turned.
“We want to write 15 chapters altogether,” said Jeff. “Do you think we can manage it?”
Amy grinned, her eyes shining. “As long as he helps you.”
By the time the second edition came out, Jeff felt the need to rewrite the dedication. He tried a few options, then settled on what he and Amy perceived to be right.
Dedicated to Dr. Andrew Johnson
to Drew
Dedicated to my friend and colleague Drew Johnson
-Jeffrey B. Isaacs
[1] Andrew Johnson and Jeffrey Isaacs. Sensation and Perception. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Print.