The Empathy Exams (26 page)

Sinofsky and Berlinger started making this third film in 2004. For long stretches of time, eight or nine months, they filmed nothing. There was nothing to film. Which was part of what they wanted to show: for these boys, nothing was moving. Jessie got a tattoo of a clock on the top of his bald head. The clock had no hands. Time was standing still. In certain ways, of course, it wasn’t. Damien married a woman he’d been corresponding with for years. They had a Buddhist ceremony in prison. Jason told the cameras he was still living his life. “You make the most of the hand you’re dealt,” he said, something he learned to believe because he couldn’t survive believing anything else.

The Epilogue to the Epilogue

One of the first and only men accused of witchcraft in America was John Floyd of Massachusetts. He had seven children and some land in a place called Rumney Marsh. In 1692 he was placed in an underground prison later known as the Salem Witch Dungeon. The accusation went something like this: a girl held a cloth he had touched, and she swooned. Centuries later it went like this: three boys wore black, and people swooned. There was music they liked, and people swooned. There were three children who bled, and people swooned. A monument in Danvers dedicated to those accused of witchcraft reads: “Say you are the child of the devil and you will not hang.” The Alford plea that released Damien, Jason, and Jessie essentially meant they pleaded guilty while maintaining their innocence. They officially conceded that the jury had had enough evidence to convict them.

Here’s the funny thing about this case: the films didn’t simply document the story, they also became part of it. In physics, they call it the observer effect: you can’t observe a physical process without affecting it. The films brought the case into the public eye, pissed off many of the folks involved, and earned the convicted men a slew of celebrity supporters who funded their defense for years. This wasn’t a story about three poor kids getting a bad break then getting it rectified. This was a story about three poor kids getting a bad break then getting a lot of money then getting it rectified. Without these films, these men never would have gone free. Which means the films eventually documented an ending they helped write.

Jason resisted the Alford plea at first, not wanting to admit—after all these years—to something he hadn’t done. He did it to save Damien’s life.
Say you are the devil and you will not hang.
Evil needs to be confessed to be contained. Confession pins the possibility of wrongdoing, contours it to the body of a single rusted knife from the bottom of a trailer park lake, imprisons it inside the circumference of a tattoo on a bald scalp—time standing still, evil confined to a body, three bodies, and these bodies confined to a place. Until they were set free. These bodies, at least. We are still left with this human fact, this need to turn sorrow so unequivocally—so insistently, and ruthlessly—to blame.

Our hearts lift at the final film’s epilogue, its
deus ex machina, ex curiam, ex odeum.
God out of the machine, the court, the theater. We see Damien leave with his wife. We see Jason reunited with his mother, who looks even gaunter than she did twenty years ago. We know Jessie will eat some barbecue with his dad and finally get some hands tattooed on his clock (set to 1:00 p.m., the time he walked out of the circuit courtroom). We know the other two will party—as they say, like rockstars—with Eddie Vedder in a Memphis hotel. These simple facts feel like impossible miracles. We get hungry for specifics: What does sunlight feel like to these guys? What about wine? Or hamburgers? The liberty of choosing how to spend the ordinary moments of a day? Will Jason ever get to Disneyland? Will he ever take his children? Will he ever have children to take? We can ask: Where did these boys go when they were released from the Varner Unit of the Arkansas Department of Corrections? We can ask: Who remains?

GRAND UNIFIED THEORY OF FEMALE PAIN

The young woman on the bus with a ravaged face and the intense eyes of some beautiful species of monkey … turned to me and said, “I think I’m getting a sore throat. Can you feel it?”

—ROBERT HASS, “Images”

We see these wounded women everywhere:

Miss Havisham wears her wedding dress until it burns.
The bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress.
Belinda’s hair gets cut—
the sacred hair dissever[ed] / From the fair head, for ever, and for ever!
—and then ascends to heaven:
thy ravish’d hair / Which adds new glory to the shining sphere!
Anna Karenina’s spurned love hurts so much she jumps in front of a train—freedom from one man was just another one, and then he didn’t even stick around.
La Traviata
’s Violetta regards her own pale face in the mirror: tubercular and lovely, an alabaster ghost with fevered eyes. Mimi is dying in
La Bohème
, and Rodolfo calls her beautiful as the dawn.
You’ve mistaken the image
, she tells him.
You should have said “beautiful as the sunset.
”

Women have gone pale all over
Dracula.
Mina is drained of her blood, then made complicit in the feast:
His right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood … The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk.
Maria in the mountains confesses her rape to an American soldier—
things were done to me I fought until I could not see
—then submits herself to his protection. “No one has touched thee, little rabbit,” the soldier says. His touch purges every touch that came before it. She is another kitten under male hands. How does it go, again? Freedom from one man is just another one. Maria gets her hair cut, too.

Sylvia Plath’s agony delivers her to a private Holocaust:
An engine, an engine / Chuffing me off like a Jew.
And her father’s ghost plays train conductor:
Every woman adores a Fascist / The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you.
Every woman adores a Fascist, or else a guerrilla killer of Fascists, or else a boot in the face from anyone. Blanche DuBois wears a dirty ball gown and depends on the kindness of strangers.
The bride within the dress had withered like the dress.
Men have raped her and gone gay on her and died on her. Her closing stage directions turn her luminescent: “She has a tragic radiance in her red satin robe allowing the sculptural lines of her body.” Her body is
allowed.
Meaning: granted permission to exist by tragedy, permitted its soiled portion of radiance.

The pain of women turns them into kittens and rabbits and sunsets and sordid red satin goddesses, pales them and bloodies them and starves them, delivers them to death camps and sends locks of their hair to the stars. Men put them on trains and under them. Violence turns them celestial. Age turns them old. We can’t look away. We can’t stop imagining new ways for them to hurt.

Susan Sontag has described the heyday of a “nihilistic and sentimental” nineteenth-century logic that found appeal in female suffering: “Sadness made one ‘interesting.’ It was a mark of refinement, of sensibility, to be sad. That is, to be powerless.” This appeal mapped largely onto illness: “Sadness and tuberculosis became synonymous,” she writes, and both were coveted. Sadness was interesting and sickness was its handmaiden, providing not only cause but also symptoms and metaphors: a racking cough, a wan pallor, an emaciated body. “The melancholy creature was a superior one: sensitive, creative, a being apart,” she writes. Sickness was “a becoming frailty … symbolized an appealing vulnerability, a superior sensitivity [and] became more and more the ideal look for women.”

I was once called a wound dweller. It was a boyfriend who called me that. I didn’t like how it sounded. It was a few years ago and I’m still not over it. (It was a wound; I dwell.) I wrote to a friend:

I’ve got this double-edged shame and indignation about my bodily ills and ailments—jaw, punched nose, fast heart, broken foot etc. etc. etc. On the one hand, I’m like, Why does this shit happen to me? And on the other hand, I’m like, Why the fuck am I talking about this so much?

I guess I’m talking about it because it happened. Which is the tricky flip side of Sontag’s critique. We may have turned the wounded woman into a kind of goddess, romanticized her illness and idealized her suffering, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t happen. Women still have wounds: broken hearts and broken bones and broken lungs. How do we talk about these wounds without glamorizing them? Without corroborating an old mythos that turns female trauma into celestial constellations worthy of worship—
thy ravish’d hair / Which adds new glory to the shining sphere
—and rubbernecks to peer at every lady breakdown?
Lady Breakdown:
a flavor of aristocracy, a gaunt figure lurking lovely in the shadows.

The moment we start talking about wounded women, we risk transforming their suffering from an aspect of the female experience into an element of the female constitution—perhaps its finest, frailest consummation. The old Greek Menander once said: “
Woman is a pain that never goes away.
” He probably just meant women were trouble. But his words work sideways to summon the possibility that being a woman
requires
being in pain; that pain is the unending glue and prerequisite of female consciousness. This is a notion as old as the Bible:
I will greatly increase your pains in child-birthing; with pain you will give birth to children.

A 2001 study called “The Girl Who Cried Pain” tries to make sense of the fact that men are more likely than women to be given medication when they report pain to their doctors. Women are more likely to be given sedatives. This trend is particularly unfortunate given the evidence that women might actually experience pain more acutely; theories attribute this asymmetry to hormonal differences between genders, or potentially to the fact that “women more often experience pain that is part of their normal biological processes (e.g., menstruation and childbirth)” and so may become more sensitive to pain because they have “to sort normal biological pain out from potentially pathological pain”; men don’t have to do this sorting. Despite these reports that “women are biologically more sensitive to pain than men, [their] pain reports are taken less seriously than men’s.”
Less seriously
meaning, more specifically, “they are more likely to have their pain reports discounted as ‘emotional’ or ‘psychogenic’ and, therefore, ‘not real.’”

A friend of mine once dreamed a car crash that left all the broken pieces of her Pontiac coated in bright orange pollen.
My analyst pushed and pushed for me to make sense of the image
, she wrote to me,
and finally, I blurted: My wounds are fertile! And that has become one of the touchstones and rallying cries of my life.

What’s fertile in a wound? Why dwell in one? Wounds promise authenticity and profundity; beauty and singularity, desirability. They summon sympathy. They bleed enough light to write by. They yield scars full of stories and slights that become rallying cries. They break upon the fuming fruits of damaged engines and dust these engines with color.

And yet—beyond and beneath their fruits—they still hurt. The boons of a wound never get rid of it; they just bloom from it. It’s perilous to think of them as chosen. Perhaps a better phrase to use is
wound appeal
, which is to say: the ways a wound can seduce, how it can promise what it rarely gives. As my friend Harriet once told me: “Pain that gets performed is still pain.”

After all I’ve said, how can I tell you about my scars?

I’ve got a puckered white blister of tissue on my ankle where a doctor pulled out a maggot. I’ve got faint lines farther up, at the base of my leg, where I used to cut myself with a razor. I’ve got a nose that was broken by a guy on the street, but you can’t tell what he did because money was paid so you couldn’t. Now my nose just has a little seam where it was cut and pulled away from my face then stitched back together again. I have screws in my upper jaw that only dentists ever see in X-rays. The surgeon said metal detectors might start going off for me—he probably said
at
me though I heard
for
me, like the chiming of bells—but they never did, never do. I have a patch of tissue near my aorta that sends electrical signals it shouldn’t. I had a terrible broken heart when I was twenty-two years old and I wanted to wear a T-shirt announcing it to everyone. Instead, I got so drunk I fell in the middle of Sixth Avenue and scraped all the skin off my knee. Then you could see it, no T-shirt necessary—see
something
, that bloody bulb under torn jeans, though you couldn’t have known what it meant. I have the faint bruise of tire tracks on the arch of my foot from the time it got run over by a car. For a little while I had a scar on my upper arm, a lovely raised purple crescent, and one time a stranger asked me about it. I told him the truth: I’d accidentally knocked into a sheet tray at the bakery where I worked. The sheet tray was hot, I explained. Just out of the oven. The man shook his head. He said, “You gotta come up with a better story than that.”

Wound #1

My friend Molly always wanted scars:

I was obsessed with Jem & the Holograms’ rival band the Misfits when I was five, and wanted to have a cool scar like the Misfits, which I guess was just makeup, but my mom caught me looking in the bathroom mirror … trying to cut my face with a sharp stick to get a cool diagonal wound on my face …

Eventually she got them:

I have two mouth scars from my bro’s Labrador (Stonewall Jackson, or Stoney for short) who bit me six years apart, first when I was six and he was a puppy, and then more seriously when I was twelve. I needed stitches both times, first two and then twenty-something … I was very much aware that I was no longer ever going to be a beautiful girl in the traditional sense, that there was some real violence marking its territory on my face now, and I was going to have to somehow start high school by adapting my personality to fit this new girl with a prominent scar twisting up from her mouth.