The Empathy Exams (19 page)

“Let’s be honest,” said Warren Beatty. “That song was about me.”

When we criticize sentimentality, perhaps part of what we fear is the possibility that it allows us to usurp the texts we read, insert ourselves and our emotional needs too aggressively into their narratives, clog their situations and their syntax with our tears. Which brings us back to the danger that we’re mainly crying for ourselves, or at least to feel ourselves cry.

Mark Jefferson claims that sentimentality involves a choice. His theory holds that people choose to engage in distorted representations of reality so they can feel things in response. He describes sentimentality as a particular kind of inherited distortion, a “fiction of innocence” that demands complementary fictions of villainy, and that these fictions create a “moral climate that will sanction crude antipathy and its active expression.” I agree that sentimentality permits these fictions, but I don’t think these fictions always create the kind of moral climate he fears, nor do they necessitate the unequivocally reductive aesthetic response (“crude antipathy”) assumed by his argument.

I think sometimes sentimentality inspires antipathy and sometimes it doesn’t; sometimes this antipathy is useful and sometimes it isn’t; sometimes compassion gets summoned instead. I think the presence of choice—in our responses to sentimental fiction—also suggests the possibility of more self-aware reception: we can let ourselves feel without letting those feelings stand unexamined.

The truth is, I resist something in sentimentality too. I’m afraid of its inflated gestures and broken promises. But I’m just as afraid of what happens when we run away from it: jadedness, irony, chill. I’m not immune to the siren call of either pole. My own work was once called “cold fiction,” which I don’t think was wrong. I made Sophie suffer but I didn’t make her care about it. I’ve caught myself in all stages of the sentimental guilt/indulgence cycle: clutching tragedy and then fleeing its ramifications; taking refuge in feelings gone molten or frozen in compensation.

I’m not the first voice to call for sentimentality in the wake of postmodern irony. There’s a chorus. There’s been a chorus for years. Once upon a time, it was directed by David Foster Wallace. Now it’s directed by his ghost. “An ironist in an AA meeting is a witch in church,” he wrote in
Infinite Jest
, and for him the deeply earnest clichés of recovery represented one vector of literary possibility: the recuperated sentimentality of “single-entendre” writing, big crude crayon-drawing feelings that could actually render us porous to one another—clichés that he positioned inside the infinitely complicated landscape of his imagined worlds. He was searching for literature that could make our “heads throb heartlike,” that could hold feeling and its questioning at once.

I believe in the possibility of this heartlike throbbing. I believe in the possibility of Christmas risks. I believe in an interrogated sentimentality that doesn’t allow its distortions to be inherited so easily. I want to make a case for the value of that moment when we feel sentimentality punctured—when we feel its flatness revealed, that sense of a vista splitting open or opening out. Something useful happens in that moment of breakage. After the sugar high, always, dwells a sharpened sense of everything not sweet. If the saccharine offers some undiluted spell of feeling—oversimplified and unabashedly fictive—then perhaps its value lies in the process of emerging from its thrall: that sense of unmasking, that sense of guilt. We try to wring tears from the stars but can’t ever quite forget the cracked kettles of our attempts, or the ways our music is always broken.

I want us to feel swollen by sentimentality and then hurt by it, betrayed by its flatness, wounded by the hard glass surface of its sky. This is one way to approach Stevens’s primary noon. We crash into wonder—fling ourselves upon simplicity—so it can render us heavy and senseless, deliver us finally to the ground.

FOG COUNT

It’s early morning and I’m hunting for quarters. Downtown Fayetteville is quiet and full of stately stone buildings: mining money, probably. We’re in the heart of coal country. The corner diner isn’t open yet. The “Only Creole Restaurant in West Virginia” isn’t open yet. City Hall isn’t open yet. Its window holds a flier raising money to build a treehouse for a girl named Izzy.

I’m looking for quarters because I’m headed to prison. I’ve been told they will be useful there. I’m going to see a man named Charlie Engle, with whom I’ve been corresponding for the past nine months. He has promised that if I bring quarters we can binge on junk food from the vending machines while we talk. Visiting hours are 8 to 3. It makes me nervous to think about talking from 8 to 3. I’m afraid I’ll forget all my questions or that my questions are wrong anyway. I’m plotting my meals in advance: vending machine breakfast, vending machine lunch. I’m already thinking about what I’ll do—what I’ll eat, who I’ll call, where I’ll drive—once I’m out.

Charlie and I met two years ago at an ultramarathon in Tennessee, several months before Charlie was convicted of mortgage fraud and sentenced to twenty-one months at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Beckley, in Beaver, West Virginia.

Charlie is a cat of many lives: once-upon-a-time crack addict, father of two, professional repairer of hail damage, TV producer, motivational speaker, documentary film star, and—for the past twenty years—one of the strongest ultradistance runners in the world. Charlie started running in eighth grade:
I was awkward and gangly and self-conscious pretty much all the time, except when I was running
, he wrote to me once.
Running made me feel free and smooth and happy.

Charlie’s accomplishments are well known in the ultrarunning community: he’s run across Death Valley; he’s run across the Gobi; he’s run across America. He has trekked hundreds of miles through the jungles of Borneo and even more through the Amazon. He’s climbed Mount McKinley. In 2006 and 2007, he ran forty-six hundred miles across the Sahara. The journey was documented in a film and it was this film, incidentally, that set his legal nightmare in motion.

The story of Charlie’s arrest and conviction is long and harrowing, but here are the basics: an IRS agent named Robert Nordlander started wondering about Charlie’s finances after watching the Sahara film. He wanted to know: how does a guy like that support all his adventures? I’ve tried to understand Nordlander’s curiosity as vocational instinct. Perhaps he wonders how strangers pay their taxes the same way I wonder how strangers get along with their mothers, or what secrets they keep from their spouses.

Nordlander opened an investigation, and he didn’t find anything wrong with Charlie’s taxes. But instead of closing the case, he pushed further. He authorized garbage dives. He authorized tactics that wouldn’t have been possible before the Patriot Act. He started looking into Charlie’s properties. He sent a female undercover agent—rigged with wires—to ask Charlie out to lunch. Charlie was single at the time. He said yes. He tried to impress. He said his broker had filled out a few “liar loans”—standard shorthand for stated-income loans—and that non-confession pretty much sealed the deal. In October 2010, Charlie was convicted of twelve counts of mail, bank, and wire fraud. Nordlander had won his case at last.

Charlie’s case was also part of a much larger story: the fallout of the American subprime mortgage crisis. His conviction, one imagines, was largely fueled by the general knowledge that things had gone terribly wrong and the sense that people should be held accountable. So Charlie was held accountable. He was held accountable for something millions of people did, something he still alleges—with compelling evidence—he didn’t do. He became a convenient scapegoat for the inevitable collapse of a system fueled by recklessness and greed.

At the time of his arraignment, Charlie was engaged. His engagement didn’t survive the trial. He was imprisoned a state away from his teenage sons in North Carolina. He lost his corporate sponsorships. He lost two years of racing. He lost the right of motion. He lost—as he’d tell me later, quite simply—a lot.

I first wrote Charlie a letter because I was fascinated by his life. It gave me a sense of vertigo to know that when we’d met, in the hills of Tennessee, he’d had no idea what was about to happen, how everything was going to change. I wondered what incarceration was like for him.
Running made me feel free and smooth and happy.
His body was a body that found solace in moving itself across territory—across deserts and jungles and entire nations. The core of his life pointed its finger at the very fact of what incarceration
does
, which is to keep someone in one place. I wanted to know: What happens when you confine a man whose whole life is motion?

One thing that happens is you turn him into a good pen pal. Over the course of our correspondence, Charlie was smart and funny and honest. He steered himself away from anger about his incarceration, but he did so with such intentionality, such earnest and visible effort, that the anger itself emerged as a negative shape carved in the margins. Charlie described it as a cliff; he had to pull himself back from the brink.
My anger is immense and I hate the feeling that I am losing control, which happens mostly when I let that anger breathe.
He looked for what he could salvage:
Like all difficult things, if we can remain open … something positive will come. That said, I am still a bit baffled about what good will come from this for me. I lost a lot.

He wrote about his mother, who was slipping into dementia:
I miss her. I can say that it’s unfair for me to be away from her and it would be true.
He wrote about women:
I have never gone this long in my adult life without sex. I don’t think I could have ever gone a year alone out there.

“Out there,” incidentally, was a phrase I heard frequently at the Barkley Marathons, the ultrarun where I first met Charlie. It’s a brutal race of around 125 miles (it changes year-to-year) through the briar-studded hills of Tennessee. At Barkley, “out there” meant in the wilderness, on the course, getting lost or getting found or whacking your way through underbrush. “Out there” meant you were in motion, doing the thing, winning or getting beaten. “In here,” in prison, was the opposite of all that; it was never getting lost, never going where you hadn’t already been.

Some weeks Charlie’s letters were written from a low-down place:
My mother is getting worse, my knee is getting worse, my attitude is getting worse.
Or:
Today I awoke full of fear.

He was forced to stop running on the prison track because of an injury that turned into a Baker’s cyst, a huge swelling behind his knee. He wrote about the incredible frustration of trying to get treatment:
I have spent more than 90 days just trying to see the doctor. The neglect here is almost unimaginable.

At Christmas, he sent a photocopied cartoon: a bearded Santa behind bars staring at a puny tree. “Wish You Were Here” was crossed out and replaced by “Wish I Was There.”

Writing to Charlie often made me feel guilty. I wrote about something as simple as walking around my neighborhood, with its methadone clinic and its blossoming pear trees, and felt like there was no way to communicate my world to Charlie that wasn’t rubbing salt into the central wound of his life. I wrote about running in the rain—
by the end I was so soaked I didn’t even feel separate from it
—and how running in New Haven rain reminded me of running in Virginia rain with my brother, past a fish factory on the Chesapeake, after our grandfather died.
Maybe I’m an asshole to write to you about running
, I wrote, but sent the letter anyway. I thought it might connect to something Charlie had mentioned about running around the prison’s gravel track during a storm. It was the best time to run, he’d written, because everyone else went inside. It was the only time he got to be alone. Talking on the phone with Charlie was even stranger: a voice announced, at even intervals,
You are talking to an inmate at a Federal Correctional Facility
, and I walked down Trumbull Street in the twilight while he sat somewhere—in a little plastic booth? I couldn’t even picture it—and when we got off the phone, I ate roasted trout at the nicest restaurant in town while he headed off for another stretch of top-bunk reading into the late night.

I liked when we wrote about the past, because it meant we were on equal footing—or rather, he had more past than I did. As he put it, more life experience under his singlet. We both wrote about drinking and using, and stopping drinking and using. Charlie wrote about being an addict with twenty years of sobriety in a prison where he suspected no one else—out of more than four hundred men—had gotten clean before arriving. In his twenties, Charlie ran a hail-repair business that took him all over the country—chasing nasty weather and its comet trail of damage, chasing eight balls in the worst neighborhoods of shitty midwestern cities. He hit bottom getting shot at by angry dealers in the wrong part of Wichita. He would have gotten more time for what he was guilty of back then than he got for what he’s innocent of now.

I wrote about the one-legged traveling magician I’d met in Nicaragua, years before, who was a drunk and whose drinking made me unspeakably sad; how I thought of him years later—when I tripped, drunk, on a pair of crutches of my own. I wrote about trying to take a girl, newly sober, out to a raptor refuge near Iowa City—
To see the wounded owls!
I’d promised her, as if these broken birds were some wonder of the world—and how I’d gotten lost, and driven in circles until we finally sat on a bench smoking cigarettes instead, and how I felt like a failure because I wanted to make sobriety seem full of possibility but instead I’d made it seem full of disappointment.

For a week, in the spring, Charlie and I wrote letters every day. We made a ritual out of noticing. We focused on particulars. He described an argument about an unpaid debt, a bigger guy approaching a smaller guy: “Blood on my knife or shit on my dick, I
will
collect what I’m owed.” He wrote about the evolution of his Fridays: draft beers for a quarter in his drinking days, pre-race rest days in his sobriety. In prison they were something else entirely:
Every Friday for 15 months, lunch has been a piece of square fish of unknown origin, along with too-sweet cole slaw and potato chips I won’t eat. Friday means very loud inmates late into the night, playing cards or dominoes. Fridays mean there will be another movie shown, a movie I refuse to watch because I never want to even pretend that I am comfortable here.