Nathan Hill - The Nix

“Thanks?”

“Also you have ink all over your face.”

“What?”

“Ink,” he said. “All over.”

She looked at her fingertips, blackened by the newspaper, and put it together. “Oh no,” she said. She reached into her backpack for her cosmetics. She flipped open the compact, looked into the mirror, and saw what had happened: dark black streaks across her forehead, cheeks, temples, exactly where her fingers wiped away the sweat. And this was the kind of moment that could wreck her whole day, the kind of moment that would usually summon the tightness, the panic: doing something foolish in front of a stranger.

But something else happened instead, something surprising. Faye did not have an episode. Instead, she laughed.

“I look like a Dalmatian!” she said, and she laughed. She didn’t know why she was laughing.

“It’s my fault,” Sebastian said. He handed her a handkerchief. “I should use better ink.”

She rubbed away the smudges. “Yes,” she said. “It is your fault.”

“Walk with me,” he said, and he helped her up and they left the shade of the tree, Faye’s face now clean and bright. “You’re fun,” he said.

She felt weightless, happy, a little flirty even. It was the first time in her life anyone had ever described her as fun. She said, “You have a good memory, mister.”

“I do?”

“You remembered my name,” she said.

“Oh, well, you made an impression. That thing you said at the meeting.”

“I wasn’t thinking. I just blurted it out.”

“You were right, though. It was an important point.”

“It was not.”

“You were suggesting that sometimes what people want sexually is in conflict with what they want politically, which made everyone uncomfortable. Plus that group tends to pounce on shy people. It looked like you were in trouble.”

“I’m not shy,” she said, “it’s just…” And she stopped to find the right word, the correct and comprehensible way to say it, then skipped the explanation altogether. “Thanks for speaking up,” she said. “I appreciate it.”

“It’s no problem,” Sebastian said. “I saw your maarr. ”

“My what?”

“Your maarr. ”

“What is a maarr ?”

“I learned about it in Tibet,” he said, “visiting this sect of monks, one of the oldest Buddhist groups on earth, met them while I was abroad. I wanted to meet them because they’ve solved the problem of human empathy.”

“I didn’t know that was a problem needing to be solved.”

“Oh sure. The problem is, we can never really feel it. Empathy. Most people think empathy is like understanding someone else or relating to them. But it’s more than that. Real empathy is the actual corporeal feeling of someone else’s emotions, so that it’s experienced not only in the brain but also in the body, the body vibrating like a tuning fork to the sadness and suffering of another, as in, for example, you cry at the funerals of people you never even knew, you feel actual physical hunger when you see a starving child, you get vertigo when you watch an acrobat. And so forth.”

Sebastian glanced at Faye to see if she was interested. “Go on,” she said.

“Okay. Well, if we follow this to its conclusion, then empathy becomes like a haunting, a condition that is impossible since we all have separate egos, we’ve attained individuation, we can never really be another person, and that’s the great empathy problem: that we can approach it but cannot realize it.”

“Like the speed of light.”

“Exactly! Nature has certain boundaries — perfect human empathy being one of them — that will always be slightly beyond our reach. But the monks have solved the problem this way: the maarr. ”

Faye listened in wonder. That a boy was saying such things. To her. Nobody had ever spoken to her this way. She wanted to wrap her arms around him and cry.

“Think of the maarr as the seat of emotions,” Sebastian said, “held deeply inside your body, somewhere near the stomach — all desire, all yearning, all feelings of love and compassion and lust, all of one’s secret wants and needs are held in the maarr. ”

Faye placed her palm on her belly.

“Yeah,” Sebastian said, smiling. “Right there. To ‘see’ someone’s maarr means recognizing someone else’s desire — without asking, without being told — and acting on it. That last part is essential: The ‘seeing’ is not complete until one does something about it. So a man only ‘sees’ a woman’s desires when he fulfills them without being asked to do so. A woman ‘sees’ a hungry man’s maarr when, unprompted, she gives him food.”

“Okay,” Faye said, “I get it.”

“It’s this active sense of empathy that I love so much, the sense that one must do more than quietly relate to another human. One must also make something happen. ”

“Empathy is achieved only by deed,” Faye said.

“Yes. So at the meeting, when I saw the group begin to criticize you, I turned their attention away, and in this way I saw your maarr. ”

And Faye was about to thank him when they came to a clearing and, ahead of her, she saw people, heard chanting. She’d been hearing some slight noise during their walk, as they moseyed counterclockwise around the Behavioral Sciences Building, taking the zigzagging route necessary on a campus that had few direct paths from anywhere to anywhere. It had grown louder as Sebastian told his story of empathy and monks and seeing her maarr.

“What’s that sound?” she said.

“Oh, that’s the demonstration.”

“What demonstration?”

“You don’t know? There are posters up everywhere.”

“I guess I didn’t notice.”

“It’s the ChemStar protest,” he said, and they emerged into the courtyard of the monolithic University Hall, the tallest, most intimidating building on campus, by far. Whereas most of Circle’s buildings were squat three-story things, University Hall was a thirty-story monster. It was visible from everywhere, looming over the trees, fatter at the top than at the bottom — anonymous, boxy, tyrannical. It looked like a beige concrete exoskeleton had been scaffolded around a slightly smaller, slightly browner building. Like every other campus structure, this one had narrow windows too small to fit a body through. Except, that is, for the top floor. The only windows on the entire campus that looked big enough to jump through were located suspiciously, almost invitingly, on the campus’s highest point — the top floor of University Hall — and this fact struck some of the more cynical students as malevolent and sinister.

Here dozens of students were on the march: Bearded, long-haired, angry, they shouted at the building, shouted at the people inside the building — administrators, bureaucrats, the university president — holding signs that showed the ChemStar logo dripping with blood, that ChemStar logo Faye knew so well. It was stitched brightly on the uniform her father wore to work, right there on the chest, the logo’s interlocking C and S.

“What’s wrong with ChemStar?” she said.

“They make napalm,” Sebastian said. “They kill women and children.”

“They do not!”

“It’s true,” Sebastian said. “And the university buys their cleaning products, which is why we’re protesting.”

“They make napalm?” she said. Her father never mentioned this. In fact, he never talked about work at all, never said what he did there.

“It’s a benzene and polystyrene compound,” Sebastian explained, “that, when jellified and mixed with gasoline, becomes a sticky, highly flammable syrup that’s used to burn the skin off the Vietcong.”