The Empathy Exams (16 page)

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 mistook 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.

I know I’d find something to steal from Emma’s sideboard, if given the chance. I’ve always tucked indulgences away from others’ sight. I spent years bending over my lattes so that nobody could see how many packets of aspartame I’d shaken into them.

I hated
Madame Bovary
when I was sixteen, and its heroine too. I thought they were too emotional, novel and protagonist alike, too overt with their passions. But I love it now—the book, if not its heroine. I enjoy analyzing her melodrama, even if I haven’t forgiven her for indulging it. I also want it for myself. I always have: those highs and lows of feeling, everything turned superlative. I’ve lifted emotional blueprints from Emma just like she lifted them from books of her own. The same hunger sends us to prayer and sugar and sweetener and text: the rush of comfort that comes from quick taste, the body suddenly filled with a sensation beyond itself—foreign and seductive.

Sentimentality is an accusation leveled against unearned emotion. Oscar Wilde summed up the indignation: “A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.” Artificial sweeteners grant the same intensity—sweeter than sugar itself—without the price: no tax of calories. They offer the shell of sugar without its substance; this feels miraculous and hideous at once.

This isn’t to say that sweeteners are the same as sentimentality—or even a perfect symbol for it—but simply to suggest that a similar fear is operative in these different spheres of taste. Both terms describe sweetness—emotion or taste—that feels shallow, exaggerated or undeserved, ultimately unreal. The gut reacts toward and against, seeking a vocabulary to contain excess, to name and accuse and banish it: too much sentiment, unmediated by nuance; too much sweet, undisciplined by restraint. The hunger for unmitigated and uncomplicated sensation carries on its tongue an unspoken shame. “You are a little soul carrying around a corpse,” Epicetus once said. The body is a monstrous thing that turns the soul grotesque, and that sentimental craving for a quick fix of feeling, or sudden rush of sweet, feels like the emotional equivalent of that cumbersome luggage—corporeal and base—an embarrassing set of desires that our ethereal, higher selves have to lug around. Melodrama is something to binge on: cupcakes in the closet.

Texts are dispatched by the clean guillotine strokes of these accusatory words: saccharine, syrupy, sentimental. We dismiss sentimentality in order to construct ourselves as arbiters of artistry and subtlety, so sensitive we don’t need the same crude quantities of feeling—those blunt surfaces, baggy corpses. We will subsist more delicately, we say. We will subsist on less.

In a review called “Tides of Treacle,” James Wood describes the texture of a novelist’s sentimentality: “Again and again, one catches [her] in the process of exaggerating a good idea, of adding sugar to a mixture already sweet enough.” In a song called “Sentimental Movie,” Axl Rose croons: “I’m peeking on for some pain,” watching and addressing a beloved who is shooting up to shut pain down: “put on a pad on your vein.” But even Guns N’ Roses—the band that gave us Slash ripping his ferocious guitar solo on the open plains—shares a disdain for sentimentality, “peeking on” at feelings that are ultimately hollow: “This ain’t no Sentimental Movie / Where dreams collect like dust.” Sentimentality inflates a feeling into something that can’t sustain itself—a dream shape—that ultimately flakes off into dust, grit or gravel, useless remains.

In “What Is Wrong with Sentimentality?,” philosopher Mark Jefferson describes it as “an emotional indulgence that involves misrepresenting the world,” but also specifies its mode of misrepresentation (“a simplistic appraisal”) and its potential consequences: “a direct impairment to the moral vision taken of its subject.” The danger of sentimentality is that it might distort emotions to excuse or sustain societal evils, and Jefferson stresses that it is “not something that simply befalls people.” He speaks of sentimentalists as “hosts” complicit in harboring their own indulgent feelings: “we don’t know … why it is that certain emotion types are more likely hosts for it than others.” His rhetoric summons the image of a worm coiled in our stomachs, waiting for whatever melodrama we find to feed it. I have recurring dreams about parasites, alien creatures that hatch from eggs beneath my skin, and I imagine Jefferson showing up inside them, shying away as I explain my condition:
I’ve got a bad case of the sentimentals.