The Empathy Exams: Essays

by Leslie Jamison

  When Julian comes in from his first loop, it’s almost dark. He’s been out for twelve hours. I feel like I’m sharing this moment of triumph with Laz, in some sense, though I also know he’s promiscuous in this sort of sharing. There’s a place in his heart for everyone who runs his gauntlet, and everyone silly enough to spend days in the woods just to watch someone touch a yellow gate.

  Julian is in good spirits. He turns over his pages to be counted. He’s got ten 61s, including one from The Power of Positive Thinking, which came early in the course, and one from an account of teenage alcoholism called The Late Great Me, which came near the end. I notice the duct tape has been ripped from his pants. “You took it off?” I ask.

  “Nope,” he says. “Course took it off.”

  In camp he eats hummus sandwiches and Girl Scout cookies, barely manages to gulp down a Butter Pecan Ensure. He is debating another loop. “I’m sure I won’t finish,” he says. “I’ll probably just go out for hours and then drop and have to find my way back in the dark.”

  Julian pauses. I take one of his cookies.

  He says: “I guess I’ll do it.”

  He takes the last cookie before I can grab it. He takes another bib number, for his second round of pages, and Laz and I send him into the woods. His rain jacket glows silver in the darkness: brother robot, off for another spin.

  Julian has completed five hundred-mile races so far, as well as countless “short” ones, and I once asked him why he does it. He explained it like this: he wants to achieve a completely insular system of accountability, one that doesn’t depend on external feedback. He wants to run a hundred miles when no one knows he’s running, so that the desire to impress people, or the shame of quitting, won’t constitute his sources of motivation. Perhaps this kind of thinking is what got him his PhD at the age of twenty-five. It’s hard to say. Barkley doesn’t offer a pure form of this isolated drive, but it comes pretty close: when it’s midnight and it’s raining and you’re on the steepest hill you’ve ever climbed and you’re bleeding from briars and you’re alone and you’ve been alone for hours, it’s only you around to witness yourself quit or continue.

  At four in the morning, the fire is bustling. A few frontrunners are in camp preparing to head onto their third loops, gulping coffee or taking fifteen-minute naps in their tents. It’s as if the thought of the “full weight of loneliness” has inspired an urge toward companionship back here, the same way Julian’s hunger—when he stops for aid—makes me feel hungry, though I have done little to earn it. Another person’s pain registers as an experience in the perceiver: empathy as forced symmetry, a bodily echo.

  “Just think,” Laz tells me. “Julian’s out there somewhere.”

  Out there is a phrase that comes up frequently around camp. So frequently, in fact, that one of the regular racers—a wiry old man named “Frozen Ed” Furtaw (like Frozen Head, get it?), who runs in sunset-orange camo tights—has self-published a book called Tales from Out There: The Barkley Marathons. The book details each year’s comet trail of DNFs and includes an elaborate appendix listing other atrociously difficult trail races and explaining why they’re not as hard.

  “I was proud of Julian,” I tell Laz. “It was dark and cold and he could barely swallow his can of Ensure and he just put his head in his hands and said: Here I go.”

  Laz laughs. “How do you think he feels about that decision now?”

  It starts to rain. I make a nest in the back of my car. I type notes for this essay. I watch an episode of The Real World: Vegas and then turn it off, just as Steven and Trishelle are about to maybe hook up, to conserve power for the next day and also because I don’t want to watch Steven and Trishelle hook up. I wanted her to hook up with Frank. I try to sleep. I dream about the prison tunnel: it’s flooding, and I’ve just gotten a speeding ticket, and these two things are related in an important way I can’t yet fathom. I’m awoken every once in a while by the mournful call of bugle Taps, like the noises of a wild animal echoing through the night.

  Julian arrives back in camp around eight in the morning. He was out for another twelve hours, but he only managed to reach two books. There were a couple of hours lost, another couple spent lying down, in the rain, waiting for first light. He is proud of himself for going out, even though he didn’t think he’d get far, and I am proud of him too.

  We join the others under the rain tent. Charlie Engle describes what forced him back during his third loop. “Fell flat on my ass going down Rat Jaw,” he said. “Then I got up and fell again, got up and fell again. That was pretty much it.”

  There’s a nicely biblical logic to this story: it’s the third time that really does the trick, seals the deal, breaks the back, what have you.

  Laz asks whether Charlie enjoyed the prison section. Laz asks everyone about the prison section, the way you’d ask about your kid’s poem: Did you like it?

  Charlie says he did like it, very much. He says the guards were friendly enough to give him directions. “They were good ol’ Southern boys, those guys,” and I can tell from the way he says it that Charlie considers himself a good ol’ Southern boy as well. “They told us: Just make yer way up that there holler … and then those California boys with me, they turn and say: What the fuck is a holler?”

  “You should have told them,” says Laz, “that in Tennessee a holler is when you want to get out but you can’t.”

  “That’s exactly what I said!” Charlie tells us. “I said: when you’re standing barefoot on a red ant hill—that’s a holler. The hill we’re about to climb—that’s a holler.”

  The rain is unrelenting. Laz doesn’t think anyone will get the full hundred this year. There were some stellar first laps but no one seems strong enough now. People are speculating about whether anyone will even finish the Fun Run. There are only six runners left with a shot. If anyone can finish, everyone agrees, it will be Blake. Laz has never seen him quit.

  Julian and I share a leg of chicken slathered in BBQ sauce. There are only two left on the grill. It’s a miracle the fire hasn’t gone out. The chicken’s good, and cooked as promised, steaming in our mouths against the chilly air.

  A guy named Zane, with whom Julian ran much of his first loop, tells us he saw several wild boars on the trails at night. Was he scared? He was. One got close enough to send him scurrying off the edge of a switchback, fighting stick in hand. Would a stick have helped? We all agree, probably not.

  A woman clad in what looks like an all-body Windbreaker has packed a plastic bag of clothes. Laz explains that her husband is one of the six runners left. She’s planning to meet him at the Lookout Tower. If he decides to drop, she’ll hand him his dry clothes and escort him down the easy three-mile trail back into camp. If he decides to continue, she’ll wish him luck as he prepares for another uphill climb—soaked in rainwater and pride, unable to take the dry clothes because accepting aid would get him disqualified.

  “I hope she shows him the dry clothes before he makes up his mind,” says Laz. “Choice is better that way.”

  The crowd stirs. There’s a runner coming up the paved hill. Coming from this direction is a bad sign for someone on his third loop—it means he’s dropping rather than finishing. People guess it’s JB or Carl—must be JB or Carl, there aren’t many guys still out—but after a moment Laz gasps.

  “It’s Blake,” he says. “I recognize his walking poles.”

  Blake is soaked and shivering. “I’m close to hypothermia,” he said. “I couldn’t do it.” He says that climbing Rat Jaw was like scrambling up a playground slide in roller skates, but otherwise he doesn’t seem inclined to offer excuses. He says he was running with JB for a while but left him on Rat Jaw. “That’s bad news for JB,” says Laz, shaking his head. “He’ll probably be back here soon.”

  Laz hands the bugle over. It’s as if he can’t bear to play Taps for Blake himself. He’s clearly disappointed that Blake is out, but there’s also a note of glee in his voice when he says: “You never know what’
ll happen around here.” There’s a thrill in the tension between controlling the race and recognizing it as something that will always disobey him. It approximates the tense pleasure of ultrarunning itself: the simultaneous exertion and ceding of power, controlling the body enough to make it run this thing but ultimately offering it to the uncontrollable vagaries of luck and endurance and conditions.

  Doc Joe motions me over to the fire pit. “Hold this,” he says, and shoves a large rectangle of aluminum siding in my direction. He balances a fallen tree branch against its edge to make a tepee over the fire, where the single remaining breast of chicken is crisping to a beautiful charred brown. “Blake’s chicken,” he explains. “I’ll cover it with my body if I have to.”

  Why this sense of stakes and heroism? Of course I’ve been wondering the whole time: why do people do this, anyway? Whenever I pose the question directly, runners reply ironically: I’m a masochist: I need somewhere to put my craziness; type A from birth, etc. I begin to understand that joking about this question is not an evasion but rather an intrinsic part of answering it. Nobody has to answer this question seriously because they are already answering it seriously—with their bodies and their willpower and their pain. The body submits itself in earnest, in degradation and commitment, to what words can only speak of lightly. Maybe this is why so many ultrarunners are former addicts: they want to redeem the bodies they once punished, master the physical selves whose cravings they once served.

  There is a gracefully frustrating tautology to this embodied testimony: Why do I do it? I do it because it hurts so much and I’m still willing to do it. The sheer ferocity of the effort implies that the effort is somehow worth it. This is purpose by implication rather than direct articulation. Laz says: “No one has to ask them why they’re out here; they all know.”

  It would be easy to fix upon any number of possible purposes: conquering the body, fellowship in pain, but it feels more like significance dwells in concentric circles of labor around an empty center—commitment to an impetus that resists fixity or labels. The persistence of “why” is the point: the elusive horizon of an unanswerable question, the conceptual equivalent of an unrunnable race.

  But: how does the race turn out?

  Turns out JB, Jonboy, a relatively new kid on the starting block, the returning champion’s best support crew, manages to pull off a surprising victory. Which makes the fifth paragraph of this essay a lie: the race has nine finishers now. I get this news as a text message from Julian, who found out from Twitter. We’re both driving home on separate highways. My immediate thought is: shit. I wasn’t planning to focus on JB as a central character in my essay—he hadn’t seemed like one of the strongest personalities or contenders at camp—but now I know I’ll have to turn him into a story too.

  This is what Barkley specializes in, right? It swallows the story you imagined and hands you another one. Blake and Carl—both strong after their second loops, two of my chosen figures of interest—didn’t even finish the Fun Run.

  Now everyone goes home. Carl will go back to his machine shop in Atlanta. Blake will help his daughter train for the trials. John Price will return to his retirement and his man-wagon. Laz, I discover, will return to his position as assistant coach for the boy’s basketball team at Cascade High School, down the highway in Wartrace.

  One of the most compelling inquiries into the question of why—to my mind, at least—is really an inquiry around the question, and it lies in a tale of temporary madness: AT’s frightening account of his fifth-loop “crisis of purpose” back in 2004.

  By “crisis of purpose,” he means: “losing my mind in the full definition of the phrase,” a relatively unsurprising condition, given circumstances. He’s not alone in this experience. Brett Maune describes hallucinating a band of helpful Indians at the end of his three-day run of the John Muir Trail:

  They watched over me while I slept and I would chat with them briefly every time I awoke. They were very considerate and even helped me pack everything when I was ready to resume hiking. I hope this does not count as aid!

  AT describes wandering without any clear sense of how he’d gotten there or what he was meant to be doing: “The Barkley would be forgotten for minutes on end although the premise lingered. I HAD to get to the Garden Spot, for … why? Was there someone there?”

  His amnesia captures the endeavor in its starkest terms: premise without motivation, hardship without context. It was not without flashes of wonder:

  I stood in a shin-deep puddle for about an hour—squishing the mud in and out of my shoes … I walked down to Coffin Springs (the first water drop). I sat and poured gallon after gallon of fresh water into my shoes … I inspected the painted trees, marking the park boundary; sometimes walking well into the woods just to look at some paint on a tree.

  In a sense, Barkley does precisely this: forces its runners into an appreciation of what they might not otherwise have known or noticed—the ache in their quads when they have been punished beyond all reasonable measure, fatigue pulling the body’s puppet strings inexorably downward, the mind gone numb and glassy from pain.

  By the end of AT’s account, the facet of Barkley deemed most brutally taxing, that sinister and sacred “self-sufficiency,” has become an inexplicable miracle:

  When it cooled off, I had a long-sleeve shirt. When I got hungry, I had food. When it got dark, I had a light. I thought: Wow, isn’t it strange that I have all this perfect stuff, just when I need it?

  This is benevolence as surprise, evidence of a grace beyond the self that has, of course, come from the self—the same self that loaded the fanny pack hours before, whose role has been obscured by bone-weary delusion. So it goes. One morning a man blows a conch shell, and two days later—still answering the call of that conch, another man finds all he needs strapped to his own body, where he can neither expect nor explain it.

  IN DEFENSE OF SACCHARIN(E)

  Human speech is like a cracked pot on which we beat out rhythms for bears to dance to when we are striving to make music that will wring tears from the stars.

  —GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, Madame Bovary

  Saccharine is our sweetest word for fear: the fear of too much sentiment, too much taste. When we hear saccharin, we think of cancer: too many cells congealing in the body. When we hear saccharine, we think of language that has shamed us, netted our hearts in trite articulations: words repeated too many times for cheap effect, recycled ad nauseam. Ad nauseam: we are glutted with sweet to the point of sickness.

  Some Ideas about the Thing: I have an entire trash can in my kitchen full of empty artificial sweetener packets. It’s small. It’s not that small. I keep it next to the stove, out of sight from visitors.

  If sentimentality is the word people use to insult emotion—in its simplified, degraded, and indulgent forms—then “saccharine” is the word they use to insult sentimentality. It traces back to the Sanskrit sarkara, meaning “gravel” or “grit.” It meant “like sugar” until the nineteenth century, when it started to mean “too much.” It started as a concept but turned into a danger. Scientists fed their lab rats loads of saccharin and then they started getting bladder tumors.

  My college roommate took a photograph of me the night before a physics final during our sophomore year. In this photo, I am lying on my bed. She has piled empty cans and bottles all over my body to show how much Diet Coke I’d consumed that day. You can only see my face and hands. Everything else is covered.

  The Thing Itself: is just a powder, so light that a little bit drifts onto my counter each time I tear open another packet. Gravel or grit—something pounded to dust.

  When I was young, I lived in a house with windows for walls. During the long days of summer, I sat on our deck and watched blue jays fly into the glass, knock themselves out, drop stone-like to the redwood planks below. Mostly they were trying to get in but sometimes—and this was worse to watch—they’d gotten trapped inside and were trying to get out again. I told my mother that the birds m
istook our windows for the surface of the sky. She took my hand and showed me a bush growing just beyond our front door. She said the birds got drunk on its berries, which were orange like rust stains and full of sugar. She said the birds couldn’t stop eating them. They got strange and woozy. That’s why they kept on crashing.

  I didn’t know about fermentation back then but I did know about sweetness, its shameful thrall. I knew things about those birds, even as a child: the glass sky was flatter and harder than they imagined, and through it they could see a world it wouldn’t let them reach.

  When I was eight years old, my parents gave me a glass of wine at a dinner party. It was two-hundred-dollar wine but I didn’t know that. I snuck into the kitchen and dumped in a spoonful of sugar to make it taste better. I felt ashamed of this, but didn’t know why. I couldn’t think of how to defend myself, or why I would need to.

  In Madame Bovary, Félicité the maid is always scuttling away from some new abuse at the hands of her self-involved mistress. She seeks sweetness as consolation: “since Madame always left the key in the sideboard, Félicité took a small supply of sugar every night and ate it when she was all alone in her bed, after she had said her prayers.”

  How could sugar still be necessary after prayer? It offers salve to the physical body, immediate comfort, something the flesh can trust while the spirit is being patient. Think of the sadness of two women living in the same house, both hungry for stolen increments of different pleasures—text and lust and sugar—both keeping these pleasures secret because they are ashamed to admit their hungers.