The Empathy Exams (12 page)

There is no function designated for this last part. This present tense, when the hero turns to some archaic work of early Russian Formalism to understand how her face was hurt, how something quiet happened to the rest of her as well.

There is no function designated for how this essay might begin to fill the lack or liquidate the misfortune—replace the eyes, the heart, the daylight. Everything I find is stained by a certain residue: all that blood. My face will always remind me of a stranger. And I will never know his name.

PAIN TOURS (I)

La Plata Perdida

This is how you visit the silver mines of Potosí, the highest city in the world: First take an airplane to El Alto, where some people’s hearts collapse under the altitude as soon as they step off the plane. El Alto is at 4,061 meters. Potosí is higher. You take a bus to Ororu, and another one from there. You might share your seat with an animal. You might see a movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. These are popular on overnights: Van Damme fighting terrorists, killing bad guys, speaking the mouth-awkward language of another dubbed tongue.

When you get off the bus, Potosí will look like other Bolivian towns—old women roasting ears of corn over open flames, sidewalks full of skinny dogs and broken appliances—until it looks different: the pastel walls around its central plaza, the elegant balconies, the stately courtyards. Maybe you think it’s beautiful. Maybe you think it’s too much, too colonial, a little gauche. Maybe later, the memory of these buildings will make you feel a bit sick in the heart.

People come to Potosí to see the famous silver mines of Cerro Rico, so you will see them too. Take a tour. Smile politely when the man behind the desk tells you that the miners will get a cut of the money. Tell him, in your beseeching Spanish, that this is very nice. Put on your gear: boots and overalls, a bandanna over your mouth. Take a van to the miners’ market. Here, you will find severed goats’ heads sharing tables with Che Guevara ski caps.
¡Viva la Revolución!
There are shiny white skins, unfurled, that are the long stripped interiors of animals’ intestines.

But you are here to buy presents for the underground men: bright sodas whose flavors are colors instead of fruits; sticks of dynamite; coca leaves in small blue bags. These are gifts for the miners but really, of course, they are gifts for the givers: you will
give something back
, as they say, and this pleases you. You will cover your subterranean tracks.

Listen carefully to your guide, Favio, an angry man your own age. He is barely twenty-five but he has three brothers in the mines and two young sons who will work here too, someday, unless he can pay their way out. Then he smiles slightly and says, “
but you did not come to hear about my life
,” and you did, of course, always greedy for other people’s lives, but first you must listen to the rest because listening is a gift too, or this is what you tell yourself: the tentative idea that this knowing can make a difference.

So
¡oye!
Listen up. They call Cerro Rico the mountain that eats men because it already has, six million so far. Potosí
conquistadores
got rich on its silver and they built all kinds of pretty courtyards in town. But six million, my God. You glance sheepishly at your gifts: your lucky dynamite, your grape soda.

The mountain is full of mouths but you only visit one: a dark hole on a hillside littered with crusty old jeans, long discarded, dirty beer bottles and toilet paper, small mounds of human excrement. Here, you are told, is where the miners eat and drink and shit between back-to-back twelve-hour shifts.
Oh, yes; yes, of course.

You find the mineshaft bearable at first, a cool dark hallway, until it absolutely isn’t: two-ton trolleys barreling down thin infrastructure, steep tunnels full of foul dust, all of them snaking toward the center of an unbelievable heat. Sometimes you have to kneel. Sometimes you have to crawl. Sometimes you pass miners, cheeks bulged with mounds of half-chewed coca, and someone gives them bottles of soda while the guide asks: “How are you?”

Favio gives you the scoop on President Evo. Everybody thought he’d make it better but then he didn’t. Evo calls the miners his brothers but still keeps raising their taxes. There have been strikes. There have always been strikes. Things are “under discussion” in La Paz. You nod. You know there must be questions worth asking but what you ask is: “How much longer until we get to level three?” You are having a little trouble breathing. Your bandanna is gummed with gray dust.

In level three, at the end of the ventilation tubes, you see two men standing at the bottom of a dark hole. “Let me tell you how we get through the day,” Favio says. “We miners, we are always telling jokes. These men were probably telling jokes just before we came.” They have been underground for five hours and they’ve got another seven left. Do they want some dynamite, as a gift? They do.

On the way out, you pass the statue of a demon. He is called
Tío.
The Uncle-Devil. He’s got a cigarette in his mouth, a beer in his hand, and a big wooden erection in his crotch. The miners are mainly Catholic but down here they worship the devil. Who else could possibly hold sway? They worship until they are thirty-five, or maybe forty, and then they die. They die from accidents or silicosis, a disease one calls “the uniting of dust in the lungs.” They leave their sons behind to work a mountain with a little less silver than the one their fathers worked, and their fathers before them.

At the exit, there is sunlight and clean air. This is something. But you catch sight of yourself in the darkened glass of your minivan—your cheeks black, neck black, lips black—and the truth is you look like a devil too.

Sublime, Revised

The warning, as ever, is also a promise:
This program contains subject matter and language that may be disturbing to some viewers.
It’s a promise the same way an ambulance is a promise, or a scar, or a freeway clogged around an accident.

The show is called
Intervention
, and each episode is named for its addict: Jimbo, Cassie, Benny, Jenna. Danielle lines up twelve prescription bottles on the coffee table while her eight-year-old says, “I know real mommy is just waiting to come out.” Sonia and Julia are anorexic twins who follow each other around the house so that one won’t burn more calories than the other. Everyone has a wound: Gloria drinks because of her breast cancer. Danielle takes her mother’s Percocet because her father is a drunk. Marci drinks because she lost custody of her kids because she drinks.

Andrea is twenty-nine. She hasn’t lived with her husband and children for nine months. She spends her days drinking rum carefully rationed by her mother. She takes a drink and tells her mother, “This one is because you never got me counseling.” She keeps a bottle of Captain Morgan in one hand and a liter of Pepsi in the other. She has bruises all over her body from where she’s tripped over chairs, fallen into door frames, landed on the floor. Excessive bruising can be a sign of compromised liver function, the show tells us. We are given scientists’ eyes. We can see the purpling damage for ourselves.

The camera work is an experiment in turning monotony into something interesting. The fatigue and stamina of addiction are kept electric by compression: time-lapse shots of a bottle’s sinking line of whiskey; a cancerous pile of empties in the corner; a time-line of photos that ticks off stations of the cross, sinner to martyr to corpse: smiling baby gives way to pockmarked meth ghoul gives way to sullen mug shot.

Sober Andrea talks about her responsibilities. Drunk Andrea talks about her afflictions. She toasts the twin nodes of trauma that constitute her life: an absent alcoholic father and a rape at fourteen. When she is drunk, she doesn’t believe she can do anything but hurt.

The structure of the show implicitly endorses her narrative of victimhood. It needs a story to tell, after all, and she’s fashioned one—a story patterned by the saving, satisfying grace of cause-and-effect: get raped, get silenced, get abandoned, get drunk. The television program needs a genealogy for her dysfunction. Getting drunk is more interesting when it can be read as a ledger of traumas rather than their source. Recovering alcoholics sometimes talk about feeling like they never got the Life Instruction Manual everyone else got. Here’s a substitute set of imperatives: lose a job, get drunk; lose a child, get drunker. Lose everything. Andrea has. So get sober. Maybe she will.

The father of her children, Jason, barely greets her when she comes to visit the kids each month. She still calls him the love of her life. He says, “What’s up?” and keeps cooking lunch. He declines to be interviewed by the program. He doesn’t participate in the intervention. He’s given up. He’s not crying on the other side of the bathroom door, or yanking the bottle from her hands. He’s just gone.

We’re not gone, though, we viewers. We stay with Andrea after she tells her children good-bye. We see her get drunk, again. We see why it might have been hard for Jason to stay.

The shows takes care to emphasize, over and over again, that the participants have agreed to be on a reality TV show about addiction but don’t know they will face an intervention. Given that the biggest reality TV show about addiction in America today is
Intervention
, this is a bit difficult to believe. But the point is, people want to believe it. They want to know something the addict doesn’t. They want the intervention to be climactic, surprising, and powerful. They want to be in on it.
Don’t throw your life away, Andrea
, they’d say, if they were in the room.
I think you can make it.

In his theory of the sublime, eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke proposes the notion of “negative pain”: the idea that a feeling of fear—paired with a sense of safety, and the ability to look away—can produce a feeling of delight. One woman can sit on her couch with a glass of Chardonnay and watch another woman drink away her life. The TV is a portal that brings the horror close, and a screen that keeps it at bay—revising Burke’s sublime into a sublime voyeurism, no longer awe at the terrors of nature but fascination at the depths of human frailty.

The professionals who moderate the show’s interventions are called “Interventionists,” a title that seems better suited to a block-buster film about the Apocalypse. I imagine a slick troop of heroes, clad in black, giving an ultimatum to the world about its addiction to capitalism or oil. These Interventionists are mild-mannered grand-parents dressed in business casual. They almost always stress the singularity of the intervention—“You will never get another chance like this,” they say. They mean what they hope: this moment will divide the addict’s life into a cleanly spliced Before and After.

It’s true, of course: the addict will probably never get another intervention like this—which is to say, on reality TV—but this is precisely the difference between the addict and his audience. For the regular viewer, the once-in-a-lifetime intervention happens every Monday night at nine. The unrepeatable is repeated. Every week is a relapse, the viewer thrown back into addiction after last week’s vow to stay clean. Epiphany is succeeded by another intoxication. A grown woman throws up on her mother’s couch once more. A needle jams into the same junked vein. Disturbance is promised, recorded, dissolved—then resurrected, so it can be healed again.

Indigenous to the Hood

Start the Gang Tour at a Silverlake building called the Dream Center, where grown adults cluster around the bus like kids on a field trip. Pay sixty-five dollars and take a complimentary bottled water. Notice the church group from Missouri, twenty-strong and blond, and eye their grocery bag full of snacks: Teddy Grahams, Pringles, Cheetos. Notice the surprising number of Australians. They pace restlessly. One of them is named Tiny, but he isn’t. He appears to be here with his son, a teenager in baggy shorts and braces.

Alfred is the tour’s founder and guide. He’s a marine turned gangbanger turned entrepreneur. He’s cracking Inner City Jokes. His phrase. Like: “We don’t need the windows open cuz we don’t do drive-bys.” Also, we can’t have them open because the bus is air-conditioned. Alfred has hired three other guys to help lead the tour—ex-gang members who had trouble finding other jobs with felonies on their records. They’ve turned their experiences into stories for travelers. They are curators and exhibits at once. When they’re not giving tours, they’re doing conflict mediation in the communities these tours put on display. Your sixty-five dollars will fund this work.

Your friend the screenwriter arrives bearing a half-drunk chai that disappointed him. He compliments your tactful yellow dress, neither Crips blue nor Bloods red, and you remember elementary school field trips downtown. You and your fellow Westsiders were given careful instructions about gang hues. Your subconscious still follows them. The Missouri group leader is a buzz-cut guy whom Alfred affectionately calls Pastor. “Where’s Pastor?” he says, when he’s talking about something Pastor might be interested in.

On board the bus, the jokes continue—“In the event of an emergency, you’ll find bulletproof vests under your seats”—but the scenery changes. Silverlake bungalows give way to the warehouses of downtown and the signage of a hybrid city—papuserías and pho shops, Spanglish enticements:
Thrift Store y Café.
1-800-72-DADDY promises dads it can get them custody or at least visitation rights.

Each guide stands at the front of the bus to tell his story. One guy, let’s call him Capricorn, points out the projects where his first girlfriend still lives. “Still won’t take my calls,” he says. Another guy lays down statistics: every felony, every sentence, every prison, how much coke he got busted for each time. One guy describes a brutal turf war on the first day of junior high, when the kids from three different elementary schools—each one loyal to a different gang—were all jammed together for the first time. They started clapping at each other until the police came. You think clapping is a kind of hand signal. You learn it’s not. You learn boys get their first guns when they’re eleven or twelve.