Empathically Yours

Anhedonia, they told me. The inability to experience pleasure. It just fucking figures. I mean, right?

All kids are strange but there was something really strange about me, and all teens are moody but I was... just not balanced out in the way that teens balance out, wild joy surging out of wild rage or inexplicable sadness. I had reached my twenties before they told me. Anhedonia. I'm not depressed, I'm just a stranger to feeling good.

But it's not as bad as it might sound. I don't know. Does it sound bad? Do you value your small comforts, your guilty pleasures, your illicit thrills?

I know that you do. I don't think I'm really all that interested though.

Take this afternoon for example. Walking back to work after running a minor errand. Ah, Marjorie at the desk had said when she saw me heading out. Taking the chance to stretch your legs and enjoy this weather! God, it's been a long winter. If I had to wait one more day for spring...

And I walk around her desk at a careful distance, but I still can't help sensing it -- how close she is to tears, like always, like every goddamn day. I used to think it was her boyfriend. That was two boyfriends ago. I guess it's just her: That's just Marjorie.

A block from the bank I see an old woman crumpled against the side of a building, a cardboard sign and a cup of change on the sidewalk and a filthy blanket wrapped carelessly around her shoulders. Please, the sign says. Hungry, the sign says. I really don't want to, I really don't want to feel her hunger or her resentment or any of the other things they feel, these people who live on the street. But I find I don't even have to keep my distance. She's been out here a while, fading in the sun, being eroded by the elements. There's hardly anything left, just a wisp, just a crisp, just hardly anything, and I would probably have to be there under that blanket with her to get a tingle of her misery.

But then, on my way back to the office, I see two kids playing, skipping along a long low wall that divides the sidewalk from a little corporate garden with the kind of grass you don't walk on unless you want to risk cancer from the hi-octane pesticide they dump all over that shit. Those kids, laughing and sporting, I stray within twelve feet of them and then it hits me --

Jesus, how it felt to be their age. About 9 I guess, giggling and jumping and full of ideas. Every small thing is a big thing, every moment is hours long, they're so impatient and so hungry, eating day after day and can't wait for more days to devour, but every day is endless in itself. And they are so fascinated with places and colors and sounds, their young minds still so ringing and blank... And taste, how the popsicle jolts on the tongue the way a battery jolts, especially tart flavors; how things smell, closets and cellars and attics. The hair-raising texture of synthetic cloth ground between the teeth when they chew on their shirts. I used to do that when I was their age, and it was so very intense, like the entire world is intense for these kids right now. Some of what they feel is pleasure, I suppose, and some of it is pain, or it's maybe even gross, but it all makes a dent -- an impression -- and everything -- the sky, the ground, the air itself -- carries a charge, the stars above and the darkness they sail through, the whole and the all -- the universe is vibrating --

For a moment, I want to stay in the field of their vivid sense impressions. I want to linger in their vivid responses. It's been a long time since I remembered this, felt it myself or felt it secondhand. I could use a pick-me-up. But I don't have the time to spare, and anyway... who wants to run the risk of stopping in his tracks too close to a couple of little boys? These days you look sideways at a kid and a lynch mob comes after you. Sometimes I want to send out my own lynch mob, a regular Spanish Inquisition to torture, or maybe just torch, that bastarding uncle whose hands found their way to my tender places and covered them over with scars.

His eyes got tender and misty. You know that I love you, he said, and his words had nothing to do with his feelings. He was wrapped and warped and nothing about him felt right. It didn't make any sense. It was black, like falling into a void, like... it was... Inside him was something terrible, just too fucking terrible. It scared the living fuck out of me. I mean, it literally scared me so bad I had my very first ejaculation, jetting a few meager drops of seed onto his hand.

And he lifted his hand and licked it off and then he slapped me, and what he felt at that moment was very plain. It was one of the few times a feeling came with words: You're disgusting. You aren't supposed to enjoy it, you faggot.

You faggot, you faggot. Still echoing in me, something I forget to hear, like a ringing in my ears, sometimes so loud and so pressing -- and sometimes I don't even notice it. A ringing, or a scream. A scream that never ends. A scream of terror and disgust. That fucking rapist? He was disgusted with me? -- Well, and so he was. I got that. That was the only thing I understood about that afternoon. I get it, oh I get it, oh I do.

Anhedonia. Or maybe it's something deeper than an inability to experience pleasure -- like a terror of pleasure, a terror of sending out the wrong signal, anything that might be an invitation. Or maybe it's a conflict between pleasure and self-preservation. An ice in the spine that stops any surge of urge or excitement from going anyplace, leaves it dead and desiccated.

I see it, I sense it, I feel it from afar. Your skin is a window for the rest of the world, but mine -- mine is a barrier. I drift out of range of the kids and I don't feel them any more, and I sort of shake it off and then, not feeling it, I don't really pine to feel it. I only longed for it when I had it... when I had it second hand.

I walk back in and skirt by Marjorie, who is on the phone to someone, and it sounds like a business call but it feels like something packed with hurt and drama, not just a casual exchange. Whatever. I don't need to eavesdrop on this stuff.

That's when I round a corner and see Ned, my manager. I hardly ever see Ned, which suits me fine, because Ned is this weird culty guy who talks about sales figures and projections like a fucking guru, and he paints in words that make you want to do his bidding, tapestries of words that make him seem like a genius. Well, not to me, but to everyone else, to the people that matter, and I know that underneath he's a mess, but that doesn't matter because I don't matter.

Goddamn Ned, man. He's fucking one chick and just a month ago he proposed to another one. What the hell is he doing? I know he doesn't love either one of them. I mean, I can hardly not know, right? In fact, he loves Emilio in the mailroom. What a bozo, right? Who does he think he's fooling? But I guess he's fooling everybody, including himself.

"Milton!! Milton Berle, comic genius, how's my man! Great to see you!" That's Ned with his shtick. My last name is Milton, and no my first name is not Bradley. Christ, I've heard that before. Ned thinks he's being... Actually, I don't know what he thinks he's doing. What a putz.

But I'm getting a cold trickle down my back because it's not great for him to see me. He's got a green gash of fear running through him, a fear so intense it's like nausea. Just at the sight of me. What the hell? Is he in some kind of trouble? Am I?

It doesn't take much longer to find out. An hour later I get a visit from Leon in Accounts. What he has to tell me turns that cold trickle of apprehension into the fucking forty days and nights of the great fucking flood. Ned, the goddamn schmuck, has been skimming. He's evidently been trying to make it look like I'm the guilty party.

Leon from Accounts leans in close, his affect and manner all warm and reassuring, and underneath he's cold and dry as a snake. He's asking questions in a friendly way, but really it's just his forked tongue testing, tasting the air for lies... Have I noticed anything strange about my paperwork? About the reports? About, say, my pay stubs? Any strange notices, like balance statements from overseas accounts? Seems he's been using my name, Ned has, on his offshore transactions. Leon finishes up after forty-two minutes, satisfied that I am ignorant and innocent. A fool maybe, or a schnook, maybe, but not a thief. Nothing you could call real relief in that, though. Holy fucking crow, I have to talk to the FBI next week.

So after work, on my way home, I walk into the gourmet bodega on 46th street, knowing that any pleasure I never felt I now will never feel, knowing I have got sucked up the asshole of an asshole and how meta is that? -- and there is no escape from it.

And that's the moment it happens. You are coming out the door just as I am heading in, and we nearly crash into each other, and we do a little dance and dodge and for a moment... just a few seconds, as we catch one another's gaze and you laugh a little, and then I start to laugh also. I feel the cloth of my shirt collar on the back of my neck and it's rubbing me just a little, but I think I am about to fucking come right there. And the lick of light that stretches through the window to lap at my arm, Christ, it's like a blowjob from the sun.

And there's something else, something like a great teal-colored ocean, heaving toward the sky with tides of laughter, with shouts and raptures... I can't explain it. You people have three hundred words for pleasure and I have none. But that's what I'm feeling, all because you radiate it and you drown me in it. I think I am about to fucking cry and fall on one knee and propose. And I want it. I feel the world through you, second hand, but I feel you first hand, and so I push forward to feel the world through you first hand, and I... and it... And we feel good. Just trading a glance, a smile. We feel good.

Anhedonia.

Or is it simply that before now I was never in love?