CONTENT WARNING

Empathy

by Dominic Belmonte

One morning

She wore red shoes.

Not like the look-at-me red worn by the confident and the brazen. Not the power red Pauline was wearing, sitting on the prosecutor’s side with that I-know-I’ve-won sneer as she watched Rudy Pelletier one-eye me on the witness stand. Her shoes were not proud red, nor defiant red, but a child wanting to be a woman red. Red of blush, of past sunset dusk. A waif’s red.

There were signs of first-time risk in her make up too, inexpertly rouged, and her yellow as sunflowers dress, bunched over her thighs to the right and knotted by his hand.

And he is there. Oh yes, he is there; not smug defiant as he looks in his accused seat now.

  I deepen my empath,  include every nuance I can see as I hold onto the crystal paperweight, a beveled disc with “SS” carved on it. I witness and will report. Rudy Pelletier was in Susan Schuwert’s room. He surprised her, tossed her fifteen-year-old frame, bejeweled, and rouged, to the floor, lifted and raised her skirt, tying it to the right, and afterwards smashed her skull’s left side with this paperweight, held in my hands. I also can see its crafter some twenty years earlier, a dark, worried man who fretted aloud singing songs in Polish. I can also see the lanky clerk who placed the paperweight on display at Macy’s with others. But at the forefront of my vision kneels Rudy, janitor Rudy, ruthless Rudy, who pounded Susan “Sissy” Schuwert’s skull with it as he lay atop her finished and shamed.

But neither Pauline, nor the judge will care about her shoes, or her makeup applied as a fifteen-year-old does, the delicate child hand wanting nothing more than a night of laughter away from the harshness in her house.

My eyes remain open.

  “Ms. Groot,” Pauline said softly, with the ease confidence gives you, “As a recognized authority on empath witnessing, can you identify who was at the scene of Susan Schuwert’s murder on the evening of Thursday, August 28, 2173?”

  See? No interest in the details. But rest now, Sissy. Justice is old, slow, bombed into ashes and ever blind, but prevails today, slowly regaining form in this shattered half-country, with the object of your pain in my hands.

  “I can report that I, Empath Layna Groot, can witness Rudy Pelletier at the scene of Ms. Schuwert’s murder on the date stipulated.”

  “You saw him?”

“Unmistakably, wearing a blue denim shirt, jeans pulled down about his ankles. His hand on the paperweight. He delivered the blows that caused Ms. Schuwert’s fatal injury.”

Neither Pauline nor the judge would care about his eyes as I see him on that date in that room. Sated eyes. Alewives on the shore eyes.

That was it. There is no cross examination of an empath. Too much research proved our efficacy, allowing those who master the gift to rise above the centuries’ past mockery of psychics, with their campy drawing of hands palming pentagrams, tarot cards and pretending the dead speak. Our stature raised through the finding of all those abducted and murdered children, the bodies and positions identified by touching soccer uniforms and dance togs, bicycle seats and Lego blocks. My forebearers detailed where their found bodies lie, under snowbanks or CCC forests, behind rest stops and logging roads, and the early empaths could further describe their killers, soldiers with name tags, abductors by description, parents through the touch of a murder weapon. The Provisional Justice Department of 2075 decreed empathetic witnessing a valid science, unassailable in administering justice in the post-Debacle period. Empaths were ruled incapable of deception. We see what we see. I am one of only sixteen in the nation found and trained during the Second Recruitment to help bring swifter justice to our ravaged half-nation. The Provisional Attorney General assigned us to states in order of their Original Union ratification. By birth an Illinoisan, I was assigned after training to Bunker Hill, Illinois, two hundred forty miles south of my girlhood home. East of the Mississippi we mete justice. Beyond westward lies madness, anarchy swallowed within militant chant and fire power, religious fervor, and cannibal adjudication. There is no threat of invasion while the west continues to self-destruct. Let those murderers eat their young, may God condemn their camouflaged, khaki souls.

Later evening.

After court, I am driven back to my apartment, where I sit with gloves on that allow me not to see back, and I can pretend to think forward. If my ungloved hands touch the wall, I see the painter’s face and know why he aches. If my naked hands touch the cabinet door, every past renter appears: the girl with the cleft palate who sang, the couple who mated on the toilet, the old man whose stroke ended his life. And further, I could see the wheezing man who installed the cabinet, the Mexican who crafted the wood with smiling eyes, the wood manufacturer meshing dry timber into form. Every object I touch holds for me the entry backwards to who held it prior and did what and felt what. In here I do not want to shoulder that burden.

  I do not reflect about my childhood. Think what you want about my youth: abused bed wetter. Passed from cousin to uncle to feel and suck. All false. All true.  But believe me, by fifteen the word was out within my town: watch out for that Layna. She got the touch. Not the voodoo that requires gloomy light or animal blood, not the kind drawing suckers from the suburbs to “talk” to dearly departed for solace or forgiveness about the pain poorly seen. My touch was dead-on, determined by whatever object I held. “You’ll find the rest of this will under a Big Thrill magazine in the back seat of a white Tesla flattened at the Polk Street Wreckers shop in Pecatonica.” “Your Mary was whipped with this pistol by Anthony Alcevedo in the bathroom of a house on Comanchee Drive in Peoria.” Was not too long before sad faced strangers paid my parents liquor money for the location of their dead lover or missing object. My no malarkey manner attracted the Institute’s attention, though dad would try to stretch out the drama by taking folks to my bedroom to intone “It was here that her power developed. Can you feel the energy?” in hopes of getting an extra ten spot for lies. Fifteen seconds of holding the whatever and the scene shot into my head like the Viewfinders of the 1900s. “The man is called Jay, tall and muscular, and has a tattoo of deer antlers on his neck. He stabbed Tommie’s back. He leans on his car, a Pontiac with New Hampshire license plate O Alpha Tango 4143. Boom. One call, and the police find and arrest Wild Jay Cernoch driving up I-95 toward Kittery with Tommie Reinhold’s remains in five plastic bags. Tommie Reinhold—his was the case that brought the Colonel to my father’s den and convinced him to allow me to go with him to EINA: Empathy Institute, New Atlanta—to strengthen what I could already do since back in the dark I’m-not-telling part of my youth at the Groot manse in Wauconda, Illinois, long may that town fester.

I was perfect for their empath training because of their insistence on unfolding all the truth. Never tell the comforting lie, never attempt to craft the partial, gentle revelation. It was the same as I began, not making my vision a parlor game to vie for center stage attention or a boy’s eye. The half-truth does not serve justice. Finding lost car keys or uncovering family indiscretion does not restore justice in a country trying to rise from anarchy. That is what the beefy Colonel said, he with the sweaty brow and the sky-blue shoulder insignia with a downcast eyeball atop it, like that Magritte painting, but without the red stain, or the sere leaf, or the slivered orb. He held out his hand and I took it and said, “Your dad couldn’t make it to your All-Star game, and you cried until Coach Jesse yelled at you to stop.” Like a toddler I sat there waiting for an approving grunt. Colonel Beefy’s eyes narrowed but talk about country and duty persuaded my parents who kissed me off to this man who brought me to smoldering New Atlanta. Do not tell half-truths, I was told, and assigned to this nine hundred square foot flat outside Meinecke Industrial Park, to learn the methods by which the Colonel and his team nurtured and honed my gift.

Oh yes, I learned. Naivete is a quaint friend you abandon so you can edge closer to the newly dug ravine, allowing your spine to tingle. By then you are so involved in the newness of the moment and the specialness of your vision, you glide into the task. “Channel your focus.”  “Search the scene.” “Absorb the nuance.” The Colonel was big on three-word commands. And like a beach-side dog who loves big head pats from strangers, I impressed and outclassed. The Colonel would assess my empathy with previously solved cases from other states—small town misery whose tale would not cross state lines, or big city warfare victims from across the tumultuous East. I could not be fooled.

The Sikes case won me the gold star. Harlan and Emma Sikes, stabbed in their trailer home in Deerhaven Mobile Home Park, South Carolina. Albie James Ehrens was convicted and had served ten years before his cellmate lover gave information that compelled The Revived Freedom Project to convince the state to reopen the case. The Colonel handed me Harlan’s robe. I could see his scratches on the pipestem he kept in that robe pocket packaged in an evidence bag three time zones away. With my fingers kneading the robe I did not see Ehrens at all, but Dillon Arnell standing above Harlan, in his Target red, asthmatically wheezing, his name plate pinned above the shirt pocket, slashing. I channeled my focus. I searched the scene. The Colonel beamed. Good dog. “Try another. This here’s a hard one, Layna, it’ll stump.” No chance. Every victim’s case: naked teens with budding breasts, hunky hustlers, bleeding asses and old women smothered by pillows. I certified the identification of sixteen murderers, matched photos of scenes kept in file cabinets eleven hundred miles away, described facial expression, fluid transfers. It all flowed in my head like a stag film festival. Oh, look, another weapon, oh look, he entered her while killing, or after killing. Subject verb. Subject verb. “Channel your focus.” Yes, his socks stayed on. “Search the scene.” No, he removed the left-hand ligature, but not the right. “Absorb the nuance.” Yes, he sang a spiritual as he redressed her, and fixed a loose banister spindle.

My mind recreated with unerring accuracy. And the bone I received at the end was this quiet apartment in an industrial park, gloves on, food and transport provided by the New State of Illinois. But the price of seeing the ravine and the body lying atop it-- you cannot feel. You cannot squeal. You can neither mourn passing nor its circumstance. And you can never, never close your eyes. No, look down the ravine until you can count the pebbles. Do not mourn. Be there at the not there. Witness.

Much later that evening

We were never told we had to lead chaste lives, or that our contribution to the reconstruction of American society necessitated the deconstruction of our own. With only sixteen of us, bound together but never meeting or training together, the Colonel and his people enjoyed ease in surveilling our activity. We were free to amble about New Atlanta as training allowed, see whatever sights remained not disfigured. My chaperone-handler from Maine, Sgt. Anita Qua, said little. The Colonel expressly ordered me never to place ungloved hands on anyone in the unit. I could tell in Anita’s eyes she would relax the rules for me. I never knew if any of the others broke or went psychotic from the isolation and the testing. I was too busy being the good dog to care, but they gave me some leeway, being their star. My walking about energized me with warm air and time not in the training room describing half-heads and viscera.

The Earl Bar, on Flat Shoals off from Highway 23, contained the dust and debris from centuries past but was low and flat enough not to be bomb targeted. It still served liquor and hosted the occasional singer-songwriter to whom no one paid attention, because music long ago stopped saving or nourishing. No one says anything about my gloves. No drink can blur my vision anyway—once the object is in my bare hands the path is clear and sober and bloody but nursing a Jim Bean while wearing gloves closes the curtain enough.

Sal was not interested in my gloves. Sal, whose last name also started with Sal- (Salustro? Salvorelli? Salemi?), wanted me, and in his Southern US Italian hybrid nonsense conveyed want as inelegantly as any XY. We rutted in the bathroom stall when the music was loud. My arms may have encircled his neck, but my hands stayed up. I knew a moment’s touch above ungloved wrist would show me the cruelty of Sal Sal, his crimes, and I didn’t want all my waking hours focused on the detritus of anger, shame, and ridicule, revenge, jealousy, and illness. It was enough to walk back to Meinecke slightly damp amidst the hollowed core of a slowly regenerating town within a slowing reviving half-country.

Early morning

My transfer to Illinois was abrupt. No ceremony with cake, no final exam to pass, no goodbye rut with Sal Sal, placed in this dingy apartment here on the outskirts of Bunker Hill, away from the casual sometimes nuclear violence that defined the state before. I sit and await a call that informs a ride to the courthouse to do as trained and, like a good puppy, receive in return food and a place to sleep. I need no case review, nor picture, no crib sheets nor time to practice. I am instantly there: clear, focused, accurate, certified. Then I come back here and stare at the ecru walls and reflect. For back is the only direction I can go.

I thought for a while that I serve my country, what remains of it, and my country must view me as valuable. I really serve justice, my eyes open rather than blinded, not swayed by favor or prestige. I hold not the scale from images long ago nuked, but my sword, “the thing,” iron or cloth, stone, or plastic, hand-made or natural, that reveals the gory, gushing, spewing pooled circumstance upon which a human used that object. In this apartment the sun traverses its skein, yet wherever future exists, I am not consigned to it. I am not privy to it. I will not take part in it. My future is the time between returning from court and my next call. Unable to bend to passion, I recall the passions of someone that brutalized another. I bear witness to those whose futures stopped. If I try to look forward, all I touch uncovers past, where the secrets lie: under baseboards and forest floor, dump sites and river sides.

But I hold a secret, here in this shapeless apartment without picture, doily, wall hanging or drooping peace lily, holding this blanket with embroidered comets, outgassing away from the sun, towards the future. I bought it in what remained of Lenox Square, in that sad town where Sal Sal ruts another, in a building odds favor is on a street named Peachtree. I could sense Sgt. Qua nearby, but she didn’t feel my presence in this store worth reporting, more largesse bestowed on their star dog in training to bring justice to the Prairie State. I told the woman who sold the baby blanket it was a gift, my gift, when each morning brought vomit and heave in waves that would only still with my head down and my ungloved hands on my head. I reached out for it at 22 weeks when the pain was so intense it propelled my remnant child onto it, the size of an orange, with coffee ground black blood encircling “the product of conception.” My daughter’s remains stained the comets in the center dark, black holes impervious to light or gravity. And I sat, here in this apartment of nothing, ungloved, holding this blanket containing the dried effluvial remains of Empatheia, my daughter, expelled to this new half-country where passion leads only to death, where I sit in judgment, my hands on objects, to report and through that report, condemn. Here, with the sun just opening under the drawn shade, the phone ringing, with this blanket in my ungloved hands, I can easily see and put aside the quietly humming Asian woman who wove it. I can see in my daughter’s blood the there that is not there, the edge of future stilled, like water, not eddied, not flowing. There. I witness and report.