Face 48

by Clark Nida
(revised 18 March 2025)

 “It was a long time ago,”  said the little old nun with cheeks brown and crinkled like walnuts.  “Over the years I have come to understand that it was a symbol.  A token.”  She shook her head: her English was scarcely up to what she wanted to say.  “I mean—an ikon.”

She sorted doubtfully through my pack of 100 computer-generated cards, each showing a different face in the same stylised blue veil.  In a double-blind experiment it is essential that the experimenter knows neither the subject’s choice, nor the correct answer.  In that way the “Clever Hans” effect can be controlled:  the case of the counting horse that proved to be responding to unconscious cues from its trainer. So when a subject chose a card, she was instructed to insert it into an envelope without showing me.

“They never stop asking me: did it really happen?  Oh yes, it really happened.  For me.  But there are levels of reality.  Faces…  aren’t they at the lowest level?”  She dropped a card and bent down awkwardly to pick it up.  “What does it prove to recognise a face?  Or not?”

She had a point.  I felt stupid.  Why hadn’t I chosen a nice safe project on the inner-city environment, as my supervisor had suggested?  Why was I running a standard facial identification test on women who’d claimed to have had a vision of the Virgin Mary?

Those not repudiating their experience in later years had mostly become nuns.  Which was why I was once more pacing highly-polished parquet floors instead of dog-fouled pavements.  I went to a convent school, but religion was part of the childishness I shed when I unbraided my pigtails and let down my long black hair.  It’s a style I’ve never bothered to change: it goes with the black-rimmed glasses.

Suddenly the old nun gaped at me, her toothless jaw sagging.  Without a word she put her chosen card in the envelope.  But by her shock of recognition I knew which card it would turn out to be.

Face 48.

As subject after subject took my test, the card began to transcend the pack and escape from the trammels of my working life.

I got a distinction, in spite of the examiner’s reservations about Marian apparitions for an MSc topic.  I had Face 48 blown-up and framed.  I hung it in my loo and spent ages just sitting there looking at it.

For a computer-generated face it was remarkably realistic.  One hundred pictures, spanning the concept-space of facial characteristics.  The whole ensemble runs to billions, but I felt safe restricting the output to young/female/Jewish.  Each face, by definition, was the picture of no one at all.  Yet everyone who’d ever been born resembles each of those 100 faces to a greater or lesser extent.

I had measured that extent.  I had then used cluster analysis to show the existence of a cluster in concept-space, one centred on Face 48.  It was support, of a kind, for the hypothesis that some of my subjects had seen the same person. Totally unexpected—and totally unwelcome: an MSc experiment is only meant to be a training in methodology. A rational researcher, with a mind unclouded by superstition, would reject the notion that my subjects had seen anyone at all, let alone the same person.

So who—or what—made the cluster?

In my dissertation I’d been careful not to write BVM or Mary, Our Lady, Señora or Gospa.  I’d used words like complex and archetype.  Psychology is all about calling things by their right names.

My first job was in West Hartlepool and it gave me no time to dwell on the matter.  That is, not until I’d experienced my very own “Marian apparition”.

I ended each day frayed and exhausted.  My job was to assess a stream of disturbed young people from appalling backgrounds.  Three-quarters had been abused in childhood, often by stepfather or older brother.  Most had experimented with solvents or drugs by the age of nine.

Just when I imagined I’d seen it all, Melanie walked into my life.  I’d read her file, so I pretended I was ready for anything.  But the moment I set eyes on her, a bolt of lightning shot through me.

She was Face 48!  Straight out of the picture frame and into my office.  “OK gimme the crap,” she said.

But I could not “give her the crap”.  She smouldered at my silence, then a glimmer of amusement creased her eyes. “Shit, another bloody dyke,” she spat.  “Well now, sister, what can I do for you?”

“Won’t you sit down?”  I said, shamed by my husky voice when at last it came.

In the ensuing interview I was supposed to be the figure of authority, and she the submissive one, allowing for some residual rebellion.  Yet it was me who was the disturbed one.  Melanie spoke in a flat voice, completely in control.  Like a spirited horse with an inexperienced rider, she went along with me because it was her good pleasure to.  She walked out of my office without looking back, chin held high, as if she didn’t care a toss if she never saw me again.

Which just goes to show how wrong initial impressions can be.

Around 2 a.m. I was called out of bed to drive through freezing fog to Winterton, the mental hospital near Trimdon in South Durham.  Melanie had been admitted c/o the police in a frenzied condition, high on some concoction the staff had stomach-pumped her for.  Where she got the strength from I do not know, but it took four nursing assistants to hold her down.  The reek of rotten apples indicated that paraldehyde (50cc intramuscular— aka “chemical cosh”) had been added to the witches’ brew surging through her blood vessels.

The treatment room was wrecked.  She had been screaming my name and on being told she couldn’t just call out for someone she’d only met once and expect them to come running, she’d vowed to take the ward apart, screw by screw.

Now Winterton had plenty of experience in handling such people, but on this particular occasion they judged it expedient to ring me at home to ask if I recalled the young lady in question.

Did I recall her!  If I had wanted to forget her, it was the last chance I’d be given.

As they told me afterwards, no sooner did she hear my voice in the corridor than all the fight went out of her and she flopped like a rag doll.  We talked quietly for over two hours, because it was five o’clock before I crawled back into bed.  Not that it mattered because I didn’t sleep.

Nobody asked me, they simply added her to my brimming caseload.  Just about every agency in Cleveland knew Melanie, but nobody was that eager to help me out.  Not that she was any trouble, face to face.  The endless trouble she caused me was always when I wasn’t there.  They told me I was the only person she addressed in anything resembling a civil manner, in any tone of voice but a scream.

It was impossible to keep my private life secure.  She found my home address all by herself.  Just about the first thing she said when she’d completed her inspection of my flat was “Why do you have a picture of me in your loo?”

Dare I give her the real reason—or a believable one?  Cravenly I opted for the latter.  In the same bored voice I said “So I don’t have to shuffle out of the bedroom and into the bathroom.”

She sniffed, as if that was my problem, not hers.

In those days doctors had no qualms about slapping the label schizophrenic on patients and doping them with Luminal to bring the condition under control.  But with Melanie there really wasn’t any condition to control.  I found her observant and critical—oh-so critical!  But she was as likely to criticise her own behaviour as anyone else’s.  She was just another perverse, inexplicable thing in her perverse, inexplicable world.

But person was the wrong word to use of her.  She would make use of three or four personae.  But she wasn’t a “person” in any meaningful sense of the word.  She was a convergence of sensation: a critical agent—but an agent without an author.  Perceptive, intelligent, brilliant even, she was sensing—but not sensible.  Responding—but not responsible.  Aware—but not conscious.

I began to think of her as The Golem: the animated clay doll in Hebrew folklore that had no soul, because it hadn’t been created by God. Then it struck me with a shock she might almost be computer-generated.  Yet she had battened onto me in a soulful way I was powerless to shift.

Then something happened between us which made it impossible to maintain a professional relationship.  She arrived one night after I’d gone to bed, rain-soaked, chilled to the marrow and shuddering violently. The thing to do was dry her off and take her back to bed with me. Next morning I showered my smell off her skin and powdered her with rose talc in every crease. Then kneeling down before her I worshipped her.  My holy statue.  We got dressed and she left without a word.

In a poisonous fug of guilt I walked to work.  I was certain I’d never see her again and I spent the day feeling wretched.  I anticipate no afterlife, but if there’s such a thing as hell then I am for it.

I begged for Melanie to be removed from my caseload, but my boss wouldn’t hear of it.  “You’re the only one she responds to,” he told me.  “Or ever has.”  But Melanie blurted out the truth to a social worker from another agency and I was called to account.

I was not ashamed.  I was angry.  “You refused to take her off my caseload.  You told me I was the only person she responded to.  So isn’t it best not to enquire too deeply into my methods?”

My boss urged me to deny it all.  “Who are they going to believe:  a professional woman without a stain on her record—or a walking bundle of bad news?”

Now my training in psychology has disabused me of any sense of spirituality, especially one fit to serve as a moral compass.  Instead of God’s grace, or the devil’s temptations, I see neurotransmitters and endorphins. But am I being mindlessly superstitious in prizing integrity?  Just what do we think we are, that we feel the need to lie about it?

So I refused to deny it—and I lost my job.

I lost touch with Melanie as well. I heard she’d got in with a bad crowd—I mean, really bad.  There was one boy in particular—whether she was attracted to him because of the things he did, or whether it was she who incited him, I’ve no idea.  Perhaps a bit of both.  But I don’t believe for one moment she actually chose to be evil.  Like me, she was a researcher into the life-sciences.  But unlike me, she didn’t need the right results to gain a qualification.  She needed to know the capabilities, the limitations, of this bizarre phenomenon:  the interpersonal relationship.  Her new friends erected a whole new dimension.

One night in Sunderland they stole a car and the four of them careered down the A19 at 150 miles an hour—straight over the Peterlee roundabout—straight into a car transporter grinding up from Teesside.  It was no big deal to be called out in the middle of the night by the police on her account.  But this time it wasn’t to Winterton. It was to Casualty in Sunderland Royal Infirmary.

She recovered consciousness to say a few words.  I had been holding her hand for an hour or so when I felt her fingers tighten feebly on mine.  Her puffy lips moved awkwardly.

“Why do you bother with me?”

It was all she said. No sense of guilt in it, no apology, no self-pity even.  Just a profound puzzlement.  I stared at her shattered face, pipes up her nose and bandages taped over two blackened pits that were her eyes. Face 48 was gone. She was a clay doll.

Unless we are stamped with the Face of God we’re nothing but clay.  Clay which bleeds and clots and goes sooty violet and a nasty yellow when treated roughly.  Colours you see in thunderclouds, when God is angry.

What could I say?  Dare I give her the real reason—or a believable one?  I could only think of what the textbook says.  From the moment you first meet someone, your attitude to them is basically determined by their resemblance to people you’ve known.  The love they bask in, or the enmity they endure from you, has all been earned by someone else.

But in Melanie’s case, that “someone else” was a computer-generated face.  A picture of a person that did not exist and never had.  A cluster of points in concept-space.  A symbol.  A token. I mean—an icon.

“You reminded me of someone…”  I faltered on the threshold of a lie, but it didn’t matter.  She wasn’t listening.  She wasn’t there anymore.

But I went ahead and said it anyway. “Someone… that meant something to me.”