The Empathy Exams (9 page)

When does empathy actually reinforce the pain it wants to console? Does giving people a space to talk about their disease—probe it, gaze at it, share it—help them move through it, or simply deepen its hold? Does a gathering like this offer solace or simply confirm the cloister and prerogative of suffering? Maybe it just pushes on the pain until it gets even worse, until it requires more comforting than it did before. The conference seems to confirm, in those who attend, the sense that they will only ever get what they need here. It sharpens the isolation it wants to heal.

I can only be myself when I’m here
, is something I heard more than once. But every time I left the dim rooms of Westoak Baptist, I found myself wishing its citizens could also be themselves elsewhere, could be themselves anywhere—in the lavish Austin sunshine, for starters, or hunched over artisanal donuts at a picnic table on a warm night. I wanted them to understand themselves as constituted and contoured beyond the margins of illness.

I think of how Paul always does his grocery shopping half an hour before closing time so he won’t see anyone he knows; I think of the bald man sitting behind me on the second day, whose name I never learned, who doesn’t do much besides shuttle between a bare apartment and an unnamed job; I think of a beautiful woman who wonders how any man could ever love her scarred.

Kendra is terrified by the same assurances that offer her validation. She has proof of fibers in her skin but no hope of getting them out, only a vision of what it might look like to be consumed by this disease entirely: a thousand bloody photographs on her computer, a soup of larvae on her cell phone testifying to the passing days of her life.

What did Kendra say?
Some of these things I’m trying to get out, it’s like they move away from me.
Isn’t that all of us? Sometimes we’re all trying to purge something. And what we’re trying to purge resists our purging.
Devil’s bait
—this disease offers a constant feeling of being lured, the promise of resolution dangling just out of reach. These demons belong to all of us: an obsession with our boundaries and visible shapes, a fear of invasion or contamination, an understanding of ourselves as perpetually misunderstood.

But doesn’t this search for meaning obfsucate the illness itself? It’s another kind of bait, another tied-and-painted fly: the notion that if we understand something well enough, we can make it go away.

Everyone I met at the conference was kind. They offered their warmth to me and to each other. I was a visitor to what they knew, but I have been a citizen at times—a citizen subject to that bodily unrest—and I know I’ll be one again. I was splitting my time between one Austin and another; I was splitting my time between dim rooms and open skies.

One of the speakers quoted nineteenth-century biologist Thomas Huxley:

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.

I want to sit down in front of everyone I’ve heard—listen to their voices in my tape recorder like a child, like an agnostic, like a pluralist. I want to be the compassionate nurse, not the skeptical doctor. I want the abyss, not the verdict. I want to believe everyone. I want everyone to be right. But compassion isn’t the same thing as belief. This isn’t a lesson I want to learn.

It wasn’t until the seventeenth century that the words
pity
and
piety
were fully distinguished. Sympathy was understood as a kind of duty, an obligation to some basic human bond—and what I feel toward this disorder is a kind of piety. I feel an obligation to pay homage or at least accord some reverence to these patients’ collective understanding of what makes them hurt. Maybe it’s a kind of sympathetic infection in its own right: this need to go-along-with, to nod-along-with, to support; to agree.

Paul said, “I wouldn’t tell anyone my crazy-ass symptoms.” But he told them to me. He’s always been met with disbelief. He called it “typical.” Now I’m haunted by that word. For Paul, life has become a pattern and the moral of that pattern is,
you’re destined for this.
The disbelief of others is inevitable and so is loneliness; both are just as much a part of this disease as any fiber, any speck or crystal or parasite.

I went to Austin because I wanted to be a different kind of listener than the kind these patients had known: doctors winking at their residents, friends biting their lips, skeptics smiling in smug bewilderment. But wanting to be different doesn’t make you so. Paul told me his crazy-ass symptoms and I didn’t believe him. Or at least, I didn’t believe him the way he wanted to be believed. I didn’t believe there were parasites laying thousands of eggs under his skin, but I did believe he hurt like there were. Which was typical. I was typical. In writing this essay, how am I doing something he wouldn’t understand as betrayal? I want to say,
I heard you.
To say,
I pass no verdicts.
But I can’t say these things to him. So instead I say this: I think he can heal. I hope he does.

LA FRONTERA

San Ysidro

I’m at the busiest land border in the world. I get across quickly because I’m headed in the right direction, by which I mean the wrong direction. I’m going where no one wants to stay. On the opposite side of Highway 5, a sparkling line of gridlock points north toward the United States of America.

Over there, the traffic lanes are supermarket aisles. You can buy popcorn, cookies, lollipops, cigarettes. You want coffee? You can get it from a boy barely tall enough to reach your car window. You want the paper in Spanish? Great. In English? Maybe. You want an animal-print towel? There are hundreds.

I’m headed to a literary gathering held in Tijuana and Mexicali that’s been billed as an
encuentro.
I’ve gathered this means something between “festival” and “conference,” but when I think of
encuentro
I hear the word for “story” (
cuento
) coaxed from the word for “encounter” (
encontrar
)—an intersection that hints at what will happen at this upheaval of debauchery and roundtables: Stories will be currency, people will be signing books, people will be confused, people will be making book deals, people will be talking shit about Mexicali and wishing they were in Oaxaca. People will be having sex. Nothing will happen on time. Cookies will be served with Styrofoam cups of coffee in the morning. Cocaine will be served in bathroom stalls at night.

This is 2010. I hear that Tijuana has gotten much better in the past two years, which is what the American media has recently begun to say as well. But variations and fluctuations are inevitably glossed over in conversations where we, up north, talk about how bad it’s gotten “down there.” Of course,
down there
isn’t one place but a thousand, and the truth is it’s gotten better in Tijuana and much worse in Tamaulipas and simply stayed horrible in Ciudad Juárez, where life is so violent it’s hard to understand the gradations between bad and worse.

Someone tells me about living in Tijuana during the worst months—not so much about living under the constant threat of violence but about
talking
about living under constant threat of violence. It’s impossible to speak, she says, when you’re still in the middle of it.

This is what it was like in Tijuana, a few years back: Even when people got together for dinner, somewhere private, they wouldn’t focus on what their lives had become: scared to go drinking, scared to go to work, scared to catch a bus or buy a pack of cigarettes or cross the fucking street. Now they can talk. Speaking is easier when the worst has been pushed out of earshot—past the point of being taunted, by delusions of safety, into some vengeful return.

Tijuana

Avenida Revolución is lined with the hollowed husks of cheap tourism. Empty bars stand like relics of a vanished civilization felled by its own hedonistic excess: silent dance floors framed by thatched walls and faux-jungle decor, balconies full of tiki torches and flapping banners advertising tequila happy hours no one is attending. The clubs feel like foreclosed homes. The tourists have been scared away. Some must still come, I suppose, but I don’t see any of them on the streets. The Centro Cultural Tijuana has a surprisingly lovely domed ceiling fitted with squares of glass that filter the sunlight into jeweled colors: fuchsia, tangerine, deep mint. But the only people I see inside are men selling bus tickets to other places.

Everyone is hawking wares along the streets, but no one is buying. If I wanted, I could get all kinds of things: a zebra-striped burro, postcards showing ten pairs of titties and the red stump of a Tecate can in the sand, a little frog carved by an old man
before my very eyes
and fitted with an actual cigarette between its wooden lips. I could get a T-shirt printed with the stoic face of Pancho Villa or the inevitable face of Che, a T-shirt with a joke about beer, another T-shirt with a joke about beer, a T-shirt with a joke about tequila, a T-shirt with a joke about mixing beer and tequila, or a T-shirt that gets to the heart of what all this drinking is about (this one in English: “I Fuck on the First Date”). Conveniently enough, there’s a hotel across from all these kitsch bodegas that advertises rooms for ninety-nine pesos an hour. I don’t see anyone going in or coming out.

The whole time I am thinking of Tijuana two years ago, the never talking. All across the border, other towns are still in the thick of this unspeaking. The people who call Ciudad Juárez the most dangerous city in the world are the ones who don’t live there.

I think maybe if I walk the streets where someone was afraid, where an entire city was afraid, I’ll maybe understand the fear a little better. This is the grand fiction of tourism, that bringing our bodies somewhere draws that place closer to us, or we to it. It’s a quick fix of empathy. We take it like a shot of tequila, or a bump of coke from the key to a stranger’s home. We want the inebriation of presence to dissolve the fact of difference. Sometimes the city fucks on the first date, and sometimes it doesn’t. But always,
always
, we wake up in the morning and find we didn’t know it at all.

I wake up in the morning and get
huevos con jamón
at a place called Tijuana Tilly’s. I could have gotten a waffle but I didn’t. I could have gotten
pan francés
with whipped cream, but I didn’t. I’m going authentic. I’m eating with a publicist named Paola and a novelist named Adán. They both get waffles. Paola tells me she can’t believe that DF (Mexico City) is quite possibly the safest place in Mexico these days. Not what she’s used to. Adán tells me Mexicali, where we’re going to meet the other writers for the conference, is relatively safe as well.
Relatively
is an important word around here.

Mexicali, in any case, is two hours east. It first exploded during Prohibition, just like Tijuana, but otherwise they’re not much alike. Adán’s Spanish is fast and I’m not sure if I’m getting the gist of what he’s saying—or at least, the right gist—because it seems like he’s talking about an underground town full of Chinese people. As it turns out, my Spanish is close. During the 1920s, Chinese laborers outnumbered Mexicans in Mexicali by a ratio of eight to one, and a network of subterranean tunnels connected their opium dens and brothels to those eager and prohibited Americans living just across the border.

Tijuana blurs. Once I leave, I’m eager to talk about it—the way you’re eager to talk about a dream when you wake up, afraid it will dissolve if you don’t pin the details to their places, sketch a path between absurdities. As soon as I leave it, I think, what
was
that city? It was an unlit hallway next to an office with broken windows (my hostel) and a plate of shredded pork cooked with oranges (my dinner). It was a band composed of young men called La Sonrisa Vertical (the Vertical Smile) and a band composed of old men, I don’t know what they were called, who asked repeatedly for more Charles Shaw Shiraz and played the hell out of their electric guitars. They had two eggs perched on their amp, maybe raw, maybe hardboiled, not making any sense but belonging absolutely where they were.

Mexicali

If the road into Tijuana is clogged with guns and cars and men in uniform, the pageantry of American panic, the highway out is dust ravaged and ghostly, snaking from the outer barrios to the gaunt hills of a frontier desert. Beyond city limits, shacks perch on muddy slopes strewn with bits of wall and fence. Many have been wrapped or roofed in billboard posters. They look like presents. Their sides show the giant toothpaste tubes and human smiles of advertisements. Eventually, the slums give way to an infamous highway known as the Rumorosa, a roller coaster that twists and dips through the hairpin turns and rock-slide slopes of bleached red mountains.

At a lookout point halfway to Mexicali, where the road drops off raggedly to our left, we emerge around a bend to see the partially blackened wreckage of a semi-truck. The cab is inches from the edge of the cliff. A man is curled fetal on the ground, bleeding from his forehead. He doesn’t look dead. There isn’t an ambulance in sight, but a priest stands over the man’s body, blocking him from the noon sun and muttering words of prayer, waving at the passing cars:
Slow down, slow down.
It must be ninety in October and this man wears black vestments that soak up the whole of the heat. His cross glitters silver. The grill of the truck glitters silver behind him.

It’s not just that violence
happens
here—intentional, casual, accidental, incidental—it’s that the prospect and the aftermath of violence are constantly crowding you from all sides: men with machine guns on the Avenida Revolución, growling dogs leaping into SUVs to sniff for drugs, a drunk passed out in front of the
panadería
, a driver so tired or tweaking he barrels his semi into a cliff. We pass a soldier standing alert with a semiautomatic in his hands, apparently guarding the giant pile of scrap tires behind him. There’s nothing else in sight. The soldiers of the country stand ready against an uncontrollable violence, perched on trash, their guns pointed at thin air.