Empathy

by John Richmond

  “Shit,” Charlie smiled. “Okay.”

  “I don’t know what it’ll mean. I don’t know if it’s permanent or if it’s because of what’s going on in my head or how it’ll—”

  “I’ve fallen in love with you, too. And no, I have no expectations.” He took her wrists and kissed her on the forehead. “I’ll take what I can get and be happy about it.”

  Emily exhaled. “Sure know how to steel a girl’s thunder, don’t you?”

  “You looked like you were in pain. I figured I’d release you. I’m a nurse, we’re compassionate motherfuckers.”

  “I have amazing taste. I’m in love with a man who uses the words ‘compassionate’ and ‘motherfucker’ in the same sentence.” Charlie turned around and she smacked him on the butt.

  Fifteen minutes later she watched that same butt—now in blue scrubs—slip out of the door. Emily sighed from her position on the couch and reclined. She had the remote, a still warm cup of coffee and the slowly fading afterglow of a long night of stellar sex.

  She clicked on the TV and scrolled through the ludicrous number of choices. Charlie had one of those gray plastic satellite dishes that seemed to sprout from every other balcony and apartment window in New York like an alien species of mushroom. You could tell a lot about a person from what he paid to watch on television. Charlie, for example, was more into history, technology and monster movies than sports. Except for a channel that seemed to specialize in competitions involving enormous Swedish men throwing around small cars, telephone polls and washing machines. Every third contestant was named Magnus or Thorsten or some shit. He was big on the health and science feeds, of course, with a show called Plastic Surgery Disasters marked for recording on the DVR. Emily sang a line from an old punk song.

  “California uber alles. California UBER alles. Uber alles. California. Uber alles—Cal-ih-forn-yah, ooh, ooh.”

  Emily switched off the TV and put down the remote. She sighed again, hummed another bar and looked around the apartment from her perch on the couch. The digital clock on the oven read 10:49AM. She blew a strand of hair off her face. The fact that she could read the oven clock from the couch was a testament to the size of living spaces in Manhattan. Charlie’s entire one-bedroom, including his bathroom and walk-in closet, was only about the same square footage as her kitchen and dinning room in Janesville. And according to him this was a pretty big place. He had good intel.; a fogey with rent-control had died two years ago and he’d snapped up this place long before anyone else caught wind. It paid to have friends in the morgue.

  Emily tried to imagine her old house in Janesville. How long had she been gone? Less than two weeks, but it seemed like months. Emily closed her eyes and walked up the cracked concrete path to her front door. Her mother had wanted slate flagstones, but Daddy had said they were too expensive; he could mix and poor the concrete for the cost of a single bag of dry mortar. In her memory, it was a clear sky day, the blue dome yanking an ache from her chest as she craned to look over the roof peak. There was that patch of shingles a little darker gray than the rest. Daddy said that was water damage, a rip in the tar paper underneath. Emily didn’t need to knock on the door; it swung open to one of the worst days of her life.

  * * *

  “EM, SIT DOWN.” Daddy sounded funny. His voice was his voice, but he didn’t sound like he was in himself. “C’mere, honey.” He swept her up—always so easy, Daddy was stronger and bigger than anyone—and sat her on his bench of a thigh. Emily started crying in a slow leak that came from the surface of her. All the feeling beneath was flat and swamp-water cold—this was her father, a resignation, the death of some part himself. She knew it before he said it. “Your Mommy’s—” his voice broke over a sob, Emily’s came a nano-second after, a near perfect mirror. “She’s, uh,” he looked up at the ceiling, his eyes red and wet, “she’s not going to be here for dinner tonight, honey.”

  * * *

  TEARS SQUEEZED FROM Emily’s eyes now as her legs drew up under her on Charlie’s couch. She left the memory kitchen then, hopping off her father’s warm lap and allowing the house to digest her. Forward now a couple of days, the wake.

  * * *

  HER FATHER WAS seeing off the last of the well-wishers at the front door. He wasn’t crying on the outside, but Emily could feel it in his insides (their insides), sharp with grief and shredding against themselves. He was eating glass and it was tearing her to pieces. She sat on the stairs in her fancy black velour dress a few minutes after the last of the guests had left. Dishes of food heaped the counters and cards spilled from every available surface in the living room—polite, outsized confetti.

  Her mommy had been so pretty, but the casket had been closed. The man had pushed the gun into her mouth and pulled the trigger until she was empty. He’d been a patient of mommy’s; that much she understood from the little her father had told her. And when he had, a rage rattled within so great that the light around the edges of her vision flashed for a moment. But Daddy had only been able to talk about it a little before the black sadness welled up and took them both. It was too big to speak through, almost to breathe through. He’d been a patient that Mommy had tried to help and he’d done this to her, to them.

  Emily sat on the stairs, awash in an emotion, some hers some her father’s. He drifted into the hallway holding a casserole—one of approximately three hundred—the neighbors and relatives had brought. He stared down into the mass of noodles and baked cheese. Who the hell was going to eat all this anyway?

  “Why did they bring so much food, Dad?”

  He looked up at the little crow perched at the top of the stairs.

  “Huh?”

  “How come they brought over so much food?”

  “They think they’re helping out, honey.”

  For a moment, they were both quiet. The house was a silent hole in the world. A car hushed past outside.

  “It’s not like there’s more of us,” Emily said.

  “I know, honey.”

  “There’s less. There’s one less. We don’t need that much food. It’s stupid. They’re stupid.”

  Emily stared at her father’s right hip, her eyes big and far away. They cleared and flashed to his. “You’re going to kill him, aren’t you, Daddy?”

  She felt his anger rise, but knew it wasn’t for her. Whenever Daddy was angry with her there was always a little laughter behind it. This was for him, The Patient. The anger rose like a pillar, but the sadness followed. It flowed up the pillar like black ivy, cracking it, pulling it down. “I can’t.”

  “Why not? You’re the police!” She stood up and gripped the railing. “You could take your gun.” She was speaking quickly now, seeing it. “You could find him and you could shoot him.” In her child’s mind it was like a shoot-out in an old western movie. The Patient in a tall black hat on a dusty street, her Daddy in his dress blues, the ones he wore today. The Patient would pull his gun, the one he’d used on Mommy, but Daddy’s big, veined hand would have already moved to his hip, yanking the big silver .375. There would be the huge POW! and a puff of white smoke from the barrel. The Patient would fall, clutching his chest.

  “I CAN’T,” he shouted and threw the casserole to the floor. The glass dish exploded. For a moment, Andy Burton stood and looked at the mess of pasta and cheese and sauce. It was all over the floor and speckling the side of the staircase. It looked like gray matter. His shoulders hitched. He looked up at his daughter. “He’s already dead, Em. He killed himself right after he sh—,” his shoulders hitched and lowered, “right after he shot your mom.”

  Andy turned and walked into the kitchen like it was a parade march. Emily turned and ran into the bathroom at the top of the steps. Andy leaned over the kitchen sink and Emily knelt down in front of the toilet. They both wept as they retched.

  * * *

  EMILY SAT UP straight on Charlie’s couch. Breakfast wanted to make a second appearance. She leaned over and stared at her feet—just breathe, it’ll pass. A m
inute later, she was better. What was going on with her? Emily thought she knew; it was Charlie. He’d opened her heart up again, and not only where the good feelings rising to the surface but the bad as well. Feelings that she could finally process on her own, free of outside interference.

  She scootched her butt to the edge of the couch and placed her hands on her knees. Emily took a deep breath, let it out and asked herself a question: “What do you feel?”

  For a moment, she had nothing, just the white noise of all those other feelings misting against her skin, but nothing resolving of her own, nothing clear. She tried again, closing her eyes, breathing and asking the question. “What do you feel?” It was like an amnesiac staring into the Manhattan phone book and asking, “Which one of these is me?”

  An image came now of an Old West town. Bleached woOdin sidewalks guarded an empty street paved with white dust. Buildings the color of Utah sandstone flanked the scene and black-eye windows ate the light. Wraiths of cloud smeared a hard blue sky. The sun fell like lead but there was no warmth. Like Janesville in January, the air was sterile, chill.

  She stood at one end of the street. There was nothing but her and the intermittent wind. A creak of old wood from the saloon. The batwing doors opened and a man in black stained the entrance. Shadow hid his face, but this was an old daydream for Emily. Any second now The Patient would amble out into the light, his black boots clocking on the scuffed planks. He would reach for that shitty little Saturday night special he’d used on Mommy, and then Daddy would appear and put him down.

  He didn’t come out. He didn’t draw. He put an arm on each of the batwing doors and kind of leaned there, his head down, silent. Emily waited, watched. A sphere of russian thistle tumbled over the street and disappeared behind the empty general store. (On the couch, Emily’s brow wrinkled.) She called out to him. “Hey! You comin’ out or what?” He didn’t move. She moved a few steps toward him. Her footfalls jangled silver. In past daydreams it had always been Daddy in the street with The Patient, but his time he was nowhere. Emily put her left hand to her hip and found the pistol riding there. She knew it would be Daddy’s .357 before her fingers touched the oiled steel. He’d carried a Glock-19 in the last few years of his life, but back when Mommy had been taken from them it was still the big old .357. Emily stopped dead in front of the saloon.

  “I asked you a question, mister. You comin’ out or not?”

  The man raised his head and looked at Emily. She stepped back (ching!) and gasped. A pair of molten nickel eyes burned beneath the brim of his hat. A whisper rasped out like a gila monster’s tongue. “I feel you,” he said.

  Emily opened her eyes. The man from the hospital waiting room, the Phobia Killer, Dr. Drummond Fine. That hadn’t felt like any daydream she’d ever had. That had felt like a…a, shit, she didn’t know. Like remembering backward? She hugged her shoulders. Emily looked around the small apartment. She had to get out of here for a while, she was just freaking herself out sitting alone and playing with her subconscious.

  Twenty minutes later, she emerged into a late morning street, hazy blue with humidity, but cool for June. She hadn’t been to Central Park yet and you couldn’t be in New York without doing that. First thing’s first, though, she needed a guide and the guide she had in mind was under doctor’s orders to get more exercise anyway. A brisk walk would do him good. Emily flipped open her cell and dialed. A moment later she was hailing a cab and asking Samuels if he was ready to leave the hospital.

  “You’re the hospital shuttle service then, Miss Emily?”

  “Yes, but we’re only staying at your place long enough for you to get on your strolling shoes.” She threw a smile over the phone. “You’re showing me the park today.”

  “A pretty woman and a fair weather day. Excellent. Ten minutes?”

  “See you soon—wait. How’d you know it was a ‘fair weather’ day? Have you been out of the hospital already?”

  Samuels threw a smile of his own. “You’d have asked me for a stroll in park if the weather was foul?”

  “Right. Duh. Ten minutes. Bye.”

  “Ciao.”

  A yellow cab jerked over in response to her upturned arm, Emily climbed in and they drove away. A vintage, bottle-green VW Beetle puttered away from the curb half a block behind them. The driver kept a respectable distance from the cab. The car’s former owner lay folded in the trunk, a rigored claw clutching his chest in the dark.

  * * *

  “ONE WONDERS,” MUSED Samuels as they strolled along a path through a lightly-treed area of the park, “what this place was like before we hornswoggled it out from under those wild injuns.”

  The massive cubist architecture of the Metropolitan Museum of Art pushed up out of the earth. The obelisk of Cleopatra’s Needle sliced the breeze over their right shoulders. A pair of speed-walkers whispered by in space-age fabric. Emily watched them and their perk bottoms swish away into the mellow light. “Probably just like this,” she said. “But I’m gonna’ guess that the injuns didn’t speed walk in bacteria-resistant spandex.”

  “No,” Samuels said. “I’m going to guess that this place was all very tall trees, low light and very little underbrush from the burning.”

  “Burning?”

  “The Indians periodically burned out the underbrush to make their hunts and travels easier. The trees were so old and huge that a little fire-clearing never hurt them.”

  Samuels put his hand on Emily’s forearm, stopping them on the path as if to observe a deer in the wild without disturbing it. A burst of clever, old man shot up her arm but she blocked it, shifting the white noise wall over in that direction. She followed his gaze to the top of a knoll snuggled up next to the museum. An homeless man—not as old as Samuels, but close—sat with his shirtless back to the sun. Long white hair, course and dirty, flowed over his bronzed shoulders. His musculature was arboreal—a man/tree combination. He pulled a New York Times out of an old duffel and opened it with a smart snap and fold.

  “If he were missing an eye,” Samuels whispered, “I would tell you that we were looking at Odin.”

  “Odin? Like Thor and Loki? That Odin?”

  Samuels turned a broad grin on her. “You continue to impress. I was under the impression they only taught Christian mythology in the Middle West.”

  “Pretty much did, but you can’t keep that kind of thing out of Saturday morning cartoons. So, how come a semi-retired accountant knows about Norse gods?” They started walking again. “Thought you people were only good for crunching numbers.”

  They took a slow right toward the lake and began an amble up Cedar Hill. A shirtless man covered in tattoos and ropy muscle played Frisbee with a yapping Jack Russell terrier.

  “It’s a more interesting question than you might think. It’s true that I see the world in terms of numbers and balance; equations.” Samuels clasped his hands behind his back and looked skyward. “You know, it’s rather like filling in potholes. Or, at least, it feels like that.”

  Emily resisted the reflex to reach out and taste his feelings. “Not sure I follow you.”

  “Well, I suppose it’s a bit obsessive, but by solving various imbalances in the world, I feel as though I’m filling in potholes, smoothing over the imperfections. It’s just how I experience things.” He was quiet a moment. “It’s kind of lazy of me, to tell the truth.”

  “Lazy?”

  “Let me give you an example: If I were to look at a painting with the eye of a computer—and I mean computer in the classic sense, one who computes.”

  “Okay.”

  “I would see a colors and shapes, textures. Now, if the painting were a very good one in the classic sense, I would see very little to fix. The colors would complement one another; the shapes would fill equivalent spaces. Neither side of the painting would be heavier than the other. Does this make any sense to you?”

  “Sort of? But, I mean, isn’t the best art asymmetrical?”

  They crested the top of cedar
hill. The leaves of a cherry blossom shivered over pewter bark. Samuels turned and surveyed the hillside with its myriad sunbathers. “There,” he said, “does this distribution of skin cancer seekers look balanced to you?”

  Emily let her eyes roll over the waves of green grass and the bodies floating on them. “No, there are more people over toward the left than the right.”

  “That’s right. If we use that heavy woman in the blue bikini as our median point for the space, we have exactly thirty-five people on the left and twenty-one on the right.”

  Emily took a moment to count, but had to do it twice because the people were arrayed randomly. “Jesus, you just knew how many of them there are by glancing?”

  “No, I’m not like one of those marvelous and pathetic autistic people you read about who can count toothpicks and know the square root of the first twenty digits of Pi and so on. No, I was just counting them as we walked. I’m always doing that—counting, taking stock, filling in internal inventories. Just an old habit, but as I said the way I experience the world.”

  “But lazy, right? I still don’t get that.”

  Samuels looked back down the hill and took a deep breath. “The shade of blue on the fat woman’s bikini reminds me very much of a cornflower sky I saw over an Iowa farm field when I was very young. I kissed a beautiful girl in that field. The rocks jutting up through the grass are solid, crystalline conduits directly to the heart of the earth herself.”

  Emily smiled, saw the world through his eyes, nodded.

  “You see, it takes work for me to see the world that way. The numbers are just there, but if I don’t use my other eyes, I’ll miss so much of the rest.”

  They moved on and their conversation made way for the sounds of the park: more fitness folk padding, running, rolling by; the occasional shout of a child; a distant siren wail; the roar of the city’s breath. Sunlight dripped through oak and sycamore that had seen decidedly fewer than five-hundred summers, pointilizing the concrete walk, slipping over the toes of their shoes. They sighed in unison, but Samuels spoke first.