The Empathy Exams: Essays

by Leslie Jamison

  In the false American imagination, West Virginia is a joke or else it’s a charity case; but more than anything it is unseen, an invisible architecture of labor and struggle; and incarceration shares this invisibility, hidden at the center of everything; our slipshod remedy for an abiding fear, danger pinned to human bodies and then slotted into bunk beds you can’t see from any highway.

  Charlie is one of these bodies. His story is the story of a system that strip-mined the American housing market and peeled away whatever it could, leaving the economy on stilts—land on stilts, subprime-hollowed earth—and balancing an impossible future on dreams and greed. Now we try to live in the aftermath. We punish where it’s possible. We take a systemic tragedy and turn it into neatly packaged recompense: time served.

  I follow my GPS to 1600 Industrial Park Road. I don’t make a right turn into Beckley or a left turn into Beckley. The road simply becomes Beckley. I pass an empty guard’s hut and find myself curving between strangely manicured banks of lawn and clusters of forest that remind me of nothing so much as a country club.

  I do everything wrong.

  First, I go to the wrong prison. FCI Beckley consists of two facilities: a medium security prison and a lower security Satellite Camp. I know Charlie is housed at the Satellite Camp—along with other minimum-security guys, mostly there for drugs or white-collar crimes—but for some reason I think I still have to get processed at the main building. This is not the case. The guard on duty shows his irritation at my ignorance. Before we discover this large mistake, however, he has the opportunity to point out my smaller ones: I’m carrying my purse. We’ll need to put that in a locker. I’m wearing a skirt. He was a very young man with a very long sentence. I want to tell the guard: “My skirt is long! I’m wearing underwear!” I feel my body as an object and agent of violation. I feel suspected and imagined.

  I fill out a visiting form alongside an elderly couple. I notice the woman has a plastic baggie full of quarters and dollars; I feel a kind of kinship. She is also looking ahead to the vending machines—has come prepared to offer her son snacks, at least, and company, if she can offer him nothing else.

  I wait while the guard gets off the phone. It seems like he’s talking to someone who is about to check himself in. “Self-surrender?” The guard says into the receiver. “You can bring a Bible and your medications.” Strange to imagine a man at home, or wherever he’s calling from, being told the terms of how he will be systematically stripped of almost every possession, a thousand freedoms.

  Once he gets off the phone, the guard resumes telling me things I have messed up: I don’t have Charlie’s number written on the form, because I don’t have it memorized; but he can look up his name, which I have also spelled wrong because I’ve gotten so flustered, and that’s when the guard tells me I need to go back down the road to the Satellite Camp.

  At the Satellite Camp, the guards are nicer, but I am still doing things wrong: I park on the wrong side of the lot. I still have my purse and I need to put it in my car. I feel like saying: But up there they had lockers! I want to show off my knowledge of something. Anything. My purse is a black canvas bag with a yellow dinosaur on it. Officer Jennings is almost ready to make an exception. “A dinosaur exception,” I say. Jennings likes this. The guys down here at the Satellite Camp seem open to speaking this way—as humans, joking around. Jennings asks me whether Charlie ever got that cyst drained. I say I’m not sure. I have also failed at being a good pen pal.

  I hear them call Charlie’s name on the loudspeaker. I’m thinking of the families who’ve got the routine down cold, who have its every motion committed to muscle memory. There’s a certain heartbreak to knowing this minutiae so well: the inmate number, the plastic bag of quarters, the jeans and the hard chairs and the faces of the guards, each one’s particular tolerance for humor, the twist and curve of the roads, the eventual selection of BBQ chips or gummy fruit snacks; the motions of greeting and exit, how you might carry yourself differently saying hello and saying good-bye.

  Charlie stands at the visiting room entrance: a handsome man nearing fifty with short silvering hair. He’s wearing big black boots and an olive uniform, his number printed over his heart. I’m not sure about the rules. Can we hug? Turns out we can. We do. But there are other rules: Charlie isn’t allowed to use the vending machines, only I am, so he has to tell me what he wants; and we’re not allowed to sit next to each other, only across from each other, for reasons I’d rather not consider. When I look at all the chairs arranged around the room I see there is often one singled-out, apart from the others: the inmate’s chair, facing everyone.

  Over the course of our visit, my Fay-ut-vul quarters buy us the following: a block of peanut-butter cheddar crackers, a bag of M&M cookies, a bag of Cheez-Its and one of Chex Mix, a Snickers bar, a huge “Texas”-sized cookie as big as a child’s face, a Coke, a Diet Coke, and two grape-flavored waters—the second one a mistake, or else a free gift to me from the Bureau of Prisons. Our table turns into a miniature landfill.

  It’s a Monday, not a weekend, so the visiting room isn’t crowded. Nearly everyone stays until three. We’re an ecosystem. The family sitting next to the vending machines reminds me to take my left-over twenty cents. Two little girls are obsessed with the thin line of ants near the window, marching easily out of prison. One of the girls starts telling Charlie about a sorcerer, and something about her birthday, a monologue that remains largely unintelligible until she pauses to say, quite clearly: “I hate evil.”

  Charlie says, “I do too.”

  When these girls first came in—with their pretty, dark-haired mother—Charlie told me he heard their father got reduced time for telling on an innocent man. I hate evil. What do we call a government with marijuana laws so strict that one man has to tell on another so he can get out in time for his daughter’s fifth birthday?

  The girls seem so comfortable with their father—eager to sit on his lap, laugh at his funny faces, gratuitously court his already-granted attention—but this ease feels deceptive. They must associate this place with long drives, nebulous fear, men in uniforms, and their mother’s sadness.

  Two frail old white women arrive. One hangs her pink cane on the back of a chair. The cane matches her lipstick. The women are eventually joined by a large black inmate. Charlie watches my face. He smiles, “Not what you were expecting?” He tells me these women are raising the man’s kids. They show him photographs. They buy him a bag of pretzels. Caitlin, the little girl who hates evil, tries to grab the pink cane. “Not a toy!” her mother shouts. The old woman doesn’t appear to notice. She calmly reaches two orange-dusted fingers into a bag of Cheetos, brings another one to her dry painted lips, and watches her tall friend stare at the changed face of his own child.

  Charlie and I spend the first few hours talking about his case. He offers a few theories about Nordlander: probably Nordlander was a kid who got his head flushed down the toilet; maybe he thinks Charlie was the kid who flushed it. I find myself growing restless. Why is that? I feel like I’m in the middle of a story Charlie has already told—which is probably true, but it’s also the story behind his confinement. It’s the story that shapes everything about his life. Of course he’d want to keep telling it.

  I feel a pressure to separate my stance from Charlie’s—to make myself author, and him subject—but I also feel it as an act of violence to disagree with him about his own life in any way. I want to talk about his life here. I want to talk about who he has become in this place, what it has summoned from him. But I realize my interest betrays the privilege of my freedom: life in here is novelty to me; for Charlie’s it’s day-in, day-out reality. For me it’s interesting. For him it’s terrible.

  Charlie indulges my curiosity. He tells me he sleeps on a bunk bed in an open room divided into fifty cubicles, like a corporate office, only the partitions are cinderblock and no one can leave. He tells me about the black market currency (stamps) and where the fights usually happen (the TV room an
d the basketball court). He tells me how life is different across the street, in medium-security, where he’s heard footballs full of coke are tossed over the fence and guards get paid to pick them up. Across the street guys are owned and rented. Sex acts aren’t seen as gay. “Suck a dick here in camp, it’s because you want to,” Charlie explains. “Across the street it’s because you needed the money, or you were forced.” He’s speaking softer so the old women behind us won’t hear.

  I can’t figure out if hearing all this brings me closer to Charlie or simply illuminates the gulf between us. Am I learning his world or simply perusing its memorable specifics, shopping like a tourist in the commissary? Sometimes Charlie says, “I’m giving you this,” before offering an anecdote. His prison life is only mine at his bequest. I’m giving him my attention and he’s giving me something else—not the currency of stamps but rather specifics, intimate access—or its texture, at least—granted by way of details.

  Charlie is generous with specifics. He tells me that back in July he spent two days running 135 miles around the prison’s gravel track. He timed it to coincide with the Badwater Ultramarathon, a race “out there”—through the flat, baked reaches of Death Valley—that Charlie has finished five times. Charlie only stopped running laps for mandatory count, at four o’clock, and then to sleep. These days he organizes a workout group: a guy named Adam, a guy called Butterbean, and the camp’s only Jewish man, Dave, who has an incarcerated wife and a six-month-old baby born in prison. Butterbean has lost fifty pounds since he started training with Charlie, Adam more than a hundred.

  But Charlie isn’t popular with everyone. He tells me some of the white guys don’t like that he doesn’t like their racism; and a black guy called him a “white cracker motherfucker” after UNC beat Duke last March. The guy was a Duke fan, and Charlie had been gloating. But Charlie is generally tactful. He knows he has to let the older black guys shush the younger black guys when they’re playing poker too loud; a middle-aged white guy has no place telling them to be quiet. But he also tells me he’s not afraid to get in another guy’s face. You have to be an asshole—just a little bit—if you don’t want to get pushed around.

  Not getting pushed around is a relative concept when the government is telling you where your body can and cannot be.

  “I’m easy to ignore in here,” says Charlie. He’s learned that weekends are especially difficult—people are busy with their own lives and aren’t in touch as frequently. He feels it most on Fridays. I remember how he described Fridays in his letter: squares of unknown fish, rowdy dominoes late at night, no race to look forward to the next day. He can’t do the smallest, simplest things—send a text, for example, or leave a message on someone’s phone, or have a conversation that isn’t punctuated by the constant automated announcement of his incarceration. He lives in another world, and speaking to him always involves speaking across the border between that world and the one we call ours, the one we call outside, the one we call real.

  Charlie tells me about his notion of “inner mobility,” something he picked up from Jack London, which basically involves just that—going somewhere else when he’s not allowed to go anywhere. For Charlie, inner mobility means reading books, but it also means following his imagination into other places, other scenarios: “I don’t treat it like fantasy,” he says, “where I always end up naked with the beautiful woman.” Instead it’s something trickier, less like wish fulfillment and more like making himself vulnerable to circumstance—one of the many subtle liberties this place denies: the freedom to be acted upon by many frames, many scenarios, rather than the single abiding context of incarceration. The principle of inner mobility is double-edged, opportunity and consequence: “I am free to nap when I want, go for a run when I want, fall in love, jump from a building, or eat cake till I puke,” he says. “The most important rule of my inner mobility is that I must follow the trail where it leads and sometimes that is not going to end well.” This articulation of desire fascinated me—to follow the trail wherever, not just someplace good. Incarceration doesn’t simply take away the ability to get what you want, it takes away the freedom to screw up—binge on cake or jump from too high or fuck the wrong folks.

  Charlie tells me he stopped asking friends to come because it felt too painful to watch them leave. Wish You Were Here is just a Band-Aid over Wish I Was There. Wish You Were Here is never quite enough. When he tells how that moment of departure hurts, we both know we aren’t exempt. No matter how much we talk, or what we talk about—no matter how well Charlie describes prison, or how well I listen—our visit will end. Every moment we spend together gestures toward this horizon of departure—like the perspective point in a painting, everything refers to it. Confessing it does nothing to dissolve it.

  Three o’clock is just another hour in the day but it is also these things: the difference between me and Charlie, between our clothes and the dinners we’ll eat that night, between the number of people we’ll touch in the next week, between those liberties the state has deemed appropriate for his body and for mine. Every guy inside has a dream for when he leaves, Charlie says: one guy wants to sell workout videos based on his prison fitness regimen; another guy wants to run an ice cream boat.

  Three o’clock is when one of us goes, the other one stays. Three o’clock is the end of the fantasy that his world was open or that I ever entered it. When the truth is we never occupied the same space. A space isn’t the same for a person who has chosen to be there and a person who hasn’t.

  The neglect here is almost unimaginable—and it’s not just neglect from the Beckley staff but from the world itself—the world that has carried on with its daily business while keeping all these men invisibly deposited elsewhere, in a slew of the nation’s most obscure corners. On the outside, you can think about prison for a moment and then you can think about something else. Inside, it’s every moment. It’s impossible to ignore.

  The fog count comes at three o’clock—on a perfectly clear day—and some of us exercise our right to disappear and others are reminded that they no longer can. One man exercises his right to run 540 times around a gravel track. What happens when you confine a man whose whole life is motion? I guess that, those laps.

  Maybe tonight I’ll dream those endless acres of moonscape beyond the beauty lines. Maybe I’ll meet that stranger again. Maybe he’ll come back to the greasy diner. Maybe I’ll buy him a Coke, or a cookie the size of his face, and he can stand for every man who’s ever had a story and I can stand for everyone who hasn’t listened hard enough. I’m easy to ignore in here. I’ll ask that stranger every single question any person ever asked another person. I’ll ask enough questions to dissolve rhetoric and cinderblock partitions; I’ll ask him enough questions to make him visible again, so many questions we’ll have to stay in the dream of that diner forever.

  Fog counts come when the sky goes opaque and movement feels possible, when the boundaries between the free and the quarantined are harder to see—never dissolved, only hidden—and so the tallies arrive with greater urgency: those who have done wrong are tallied, those who haven’t are tallied beside them, and all around the perimeter is a border backed by guns—or the threat of extended sentences—and this border runs like a scar across already scarred land. Prison is a wound we keep tucked in those parts of the country that can’t afford to turn it away, who need its jobs or revenue, who must endure the quiet violence of its physical presence—its “Don’t Pick Up Hitchhikers” warning signs, its barbed fences—the same way a place must endure the removal of its mountaintops and the plundering of its seams: because a powerful rhetoric insists we can only be delivered from our old scars by tolerating new ones.

  PAIN TOURS (II)

  Ex-Votos

  Frida Kahlo wore plaster corsets for most of her life because her spine was too weak to support itself. She painted them, naturally, covering them with pasted scraps of fabric and drawings of tigers, monkeys, plumed birds, a blood-red hammer and sickle, streetcars like
the one whose handrail rammed through her body when she was eighteen years old. The corsets remain to this day in her famous blue house—their embedded mirrors reflecting back our gazes, their collages bringing the whole world into stricture. In one, an open circle has been carved into the plaster like a skylight near the heart.

  Charles Baxter once found what he called “the last appeal” in a scene from Sherwood Anderson, a woman running naked in the rain, begging attention from an old deaf man. “Her body,” he writes, “her last semiotic appeal, or vulnerability, or precious secret—it’s all of these things, but it will not be reduced to one meaning—carries the burden of her longing, and becomes the record of erasure.”

  Frida’s corsets hardened around unspeakable longing. They still frame an invisible woman, still naked in her want, still calling to deaf men in the rain. I find them beautiful. She would have given anything, perhaps, to have a body that rendered them irrelevant.

  Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera were married on August 21, 1929. She was twenty-two, he was forty-three. She used to call the two of them “pareja extraña del país del punto y la raya,” strange couple from the land of dot and line. In her diary, she draws them as Nefertiti and her consort, Akhenaten. Akhenaten has a swollen heart and ribs like claws around his chest. He has testicles that look like a brain, a penis that looks like his lover’s dangling breast. Below is written “Born to them was a boy strange of face.” Nefertiti carries in her arms the baby Frida couldn’t have.

  We find Diego like a virus through the diary pages. “Diego, nothing compares to your hands … The hollow of your armpits is my shelter … I have stolen you and I leave weeping. I’m just kidding … My Diego: Mirror of the night.” Once: “He who sees the color” and beneath that, of herself, “She who wears the color.” Sometimes just, “DIEGO.” Or “Diego, beginning. Diego, builder. Diego, my father, ‘my husband,’ my child.”