BOOK ONE : LISTENERS AND READERS

:: WINTER 2001

the problem with empathy :: 3/5/01

The nice thing about their apartment is that it’s on the top floor of the building, and she actually has a skylight. It’s just a tiny plastic bubble-dome, the easiest thing in the world to never notice after moving in, except that she’s set her room up in a loft style— the bed raised to fit a little desk beneath it —so she gets to have her face close to it at night. And she stares out into a square of lit air. It never gets dark enough in Chicago to see stars, but she feels comforted just by her awareness of being surrounded by gulf.

She lies in bed, cold even under two blankets, and she listens to Toy and Mark out in the common room, going up against one another on the Playstation. Laughter and cursing. Whitenoise explosions and the snare of automatic weapons fire, on a TV jacked up loud.

She used to feel like things were migrating through the land: people, ideas. Johnny had known about a group of kids who had trained themselves in pyrotechnic arts and were traveling around the country in two vans, cobbling together momentary festivals of pagan intensity in city after city, planting germs of carnival brilliance throughout America like gutterpunk Appleseeds. Johnny had known about a punk house in Philadelphia where everyone lived for free, which drew visionary crazies from everywhere: he kept promising that he would take her. But now everyone seems so sedentary, so tethered; she wonders what has inhibited that flow of nomads. It had really seemed, for a time, like everything was going to crack open. Chaos never died.

She used to attend the School of the Art Institute at Chicago. It had been exciting at first but she’d gotten bored with the whole deal pretty fast, the bland visions of the other students, the arrays of tedious requirements. And then she’d met Johnny, a little scowling clown with self-cut hair and razor marks up and down his arms, and Johnny felt bored and boxed-in, too, and they made out for the first time one night when they were coming back from somebody’s party, stoned and drunk and fucked-up, kissing sloppy in the dinged-up metal box of the elevator that they were riding up to the floor where his room was. He didn’t come that first time, but even that felt right to her in some weird way. He had made her come; the first guy to do that, and the fact that he didn’t come himself seemed to obscurely balance things out, realign the tally sheets.

She used to practically live with Johnny. He dropped out of SAIC and got an apartment. (She’d stayed in, but only to get student loan money and take advantage of the room and board for which her parents were footing the bill. She stopped going to classes entirely, though, so that scheme fell apart after a single semester.) They told themselves that going to Barnes and Noble and reading the art books for free would teach them more about art than the SAIC, and for a while they were diligent about going down there and doing just that. (Sometimes they would steal the books, too, Denise especially. She still looked mostly like a sweet blonde high school girl: she could hold a book right in her arms and walk through the security gates; when the alarm would go off they’d just wave her on her way.) But then the drugs started to be a bigger part of their time, and she went into the slow world a certain distance and then held still, but Johnny went further in. Things began to complicate then. He stopped answering his phone, and one time he was in the shower and the phone rang and out of pure sickness of listening to it ring she picked it up and found herself listening to Johnny’s worried parents. They spoke in a plucked and tentative way, as though afraid they might offend her, and listening to them was agonizing; she understood completely that they would try forever to figure out what was happening to their son and she understood completely that, if they continued in this gentle and useless way, they would never even get close. She felt hopeless on their behalf, and then became angry that they couldn’t even perceive the hopelessness of their own attempts, and she finally blurted it out, again and again. Your son is a junkie. Do you understand?

She used to, she used to.

They came and took him. It may have been the next day. They drove out from Ohio and negotiated him into the car. She might never have figured out what had happened if he hadn’t left a confused message on her answering machine. The key is under the mat. There was shouting in the background: between the mom and dad, it seemed like. Come take what you want; they won’t let me bring it. I love you baby. The key is under the mat, OK? Take what you want. I’m going to be back real soon. They’re taking me; there’s not enough room in the car for everything. Love you.

She was living in a dorm room with one other girl and she was going to be kicked out in another month. She let herself into his apartment. The major stuff was gone: the stereo, the TV, most of the CDs. The floor was littered with books and papers and clothes and half-finished assemblages. She took as many of the books as she could carry in a single trip. She’d meant to go back and take more— even if she didn’t have the room she could maybe sell them to a used book shop —but she didn’t go back. It just seemed too hard. She wishes that she’d taken some of his art, even a single piece of sculpture, just so she could have something to remind her of him. She’s not sure why she didn’t; maybe she really did believe he was coming back. The landlord probably threw it all out once he realized he’d been stiffed. It was only once she’d begun to think of all that art being tossed that Johnny began to seem dead to her. It was only then that she began to realize that there might be a problem with empathy.

For her the accident is to remain alive.

Earlier tonight, after The Simpsons, there was this other show on, some stupid thing; nobody was really watching it but the TV was just on. She’d paid attention during one brief moment when the father of the show explained to his son about empathy. Empathy is putting yourself in the position of other people. So that when they feel bad, you feel bad. The son responded: then why would you want empathy?

She’s begun to drift off despite the sounds of interpersonal annihilation emitting from the common room. She looks out through the skylight at the expanse of empty space above her. When she closes her eyes then opens them again it is still there. Even though it is nothing.