Empathy

[mallorys_camera]

Back in my cocaine ho days (daze?) – which I'm not particularly proud of but hey! you are what you are, you've done what you've done – I can remember spending hours crouched behind blinds by the open window, finger to my pulse, monitoring the street traffic below so that if someone – God forbid – decided to come upstairs and knock on my door, I'd have a cover story ready for why I was crouching by the window.

Four consecutive days of watching cable network news channels feels something like that. Jag city.

The weirdest thing about it is the let-down you feel when you finally have to stop.

"Don't worry, honey," says Ben this morning. "After two weeks in various sports facilities, people will start rioting! Just as soon as it dawns on them that however miserable their lives were before, at least they were free to come and go as they pleased. You'll get your Bad Behavior fix, trust me. Ladies & gentlemen, a big round of applause please for America's Permanent Underclass!"

Also Max popped in several times this week. My big boy with that mop of unruly hair! So different from the Borstal Boy look he effected while he was living under my roof. "You know it's weird," said Maya when she was over the other night. "I never saw a resemblance before. But you guys actually look like each other now."

I thought the same thing.

Of course, Maya was the real reason he'd come here on break. They'd officially "broken up" when high school ended. A mature decision, I'd thought. Long distance relationships are simply not doable at eighteen. But the emotional bond remains plus I figure Max counted on getting his ashes hauled.

Don't think that happened.

"So, are you looking forward to going back up?" I asked yesterday afternoon. We were sitting on the front steps waiting for Robin to get home from school to say good-bye one last time to the older brother he adores.

"Yeah, I am," said Max. "Deep Springs seems like a very sane place. In contrast, the rest of the world seems really fucked up. Particularly the stuff in New Orleans."

"It's supposed to seem smaller," I said. "I mean the place you grew up in after you come back. You look around and it all seems like a dollhouse somehow. And it stays that way until you hit thirty when all of a sudden it seems infused with incalculable mystery, like a Ray Bradbury short story. Or – at least that's the way it happened for me. Anyway, I'm really glad you didn't take that Tulane scholarship."

Tulane in New Orleans was one of the places that had offered Max a full ride.

"Yeah, me too."

"How's Tessa?" Tessa was a classmate who was scheduled to start at Tulane this week, who'd shown up in New Orleans last weekend, only to be immediately evacuated.

At least evacuation had been an option.

"She's messed up," said Max, frowning. "All she does is cry."

"Well, that's understandable."

"Is it?" Max shrugged. "I guess. It's kind of a drag though."

Teenagers are solipsistic, I thought. I could remember being a teenager once. All you saw of people then was a sagittal slice – this time, this place. You had not yet learned that trick behind empathy which involves averaging people across every time and space.

Comments

[cat-herder.livejournal.com]

Good God, poor Tessa. Poor people in NO. Two of my cousins went to Tulane and a good friend of mine was born there. The whole world really is small and connected.

I think I have to cut the line to the newsfeed, too. I've been popping Ativan all week.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I finally had to declare a moratorium on news. Endless itertions of horrifying images. I like what your father said about (in yr most recent entry) about the tire burning in the middle of the freeway.

Yes, New Orleans is horrible, horrible, horrible beyond description. At the same time it's the media's job to turn us into passive zombies in front of the tube so they can sell commercials: they did a boffo job of that with me. Some
of what they broadcast was true; some of it was unchecked rumor. I think newspapers are probably more reliable sources of information for events like this because they employ fact checkers. But reading a newspaper doesn't give you the same worker-bee-in-the-burning-hive-mind jolt that televisions do.