We were booked in for an executive session at empathy camp. The office was ablaze with rumors, curiosity, poisoned bravado. There would be diaphanous maidens, hallucinogenic truffles, sex magick, crying circles. We would dig our keys out of our throats and open doors only seen in the corner of your eye, in particularly feverish and sludgy dreams.
We were bundled into a van one Sunday morning, snatched from our errands or our slumber. There was myself, George, Terrance, Susan, Ayomide, Gabriel, Azeez, Dunstan, Godwin…all the big names from tiers five and above. I could only guess at a few of the identities as we sat cuffed, draped in heavy robes and spit hoods. There were others. too. Other figures that seemed carved from Plasticine or lard and wheezed and giggled whenever the momentum of the van pushed you into them, against those soft bodies nestled in mounds of hessian rag.
After several hours of what must have been tortuous driving along little better than dirt tracks, we arrived at Empathy Camp. We knew it was Empathy Camp due to the plastic banner hung between two scaffolds that said EMPATHY CAMP in thick red paint, straining at it’s eyelets in the wind. “Reminds me of a car boot sale,” chuckled Gabriel, and I was inclined to agree. We were in a muddy field, churned into oblivion as if by rockets and mortars. A few took tentative steps forward, until our driver barked at them to wait for our invigilator.
One of those figures took off their spit hood to reveal a sedimented face, layers and layers of thick flesh pressed down and across their skull as with a trowel or a giant’s thumb. Our invigilator, the driver said, Agata. Agata had many years of experience at Empathy Camp, she explained softly from one side of her ruined mouth. She had trained generations of leaders, powerful men and women who for some reason found it difficult to relate to their subjects, those little people who somehow smelled their faithless incomprehension, their fish-eyed cruelty from a mile off. Hell, she had once been just like us, but she had such a profound experience that she decided to become an invigilator. Isn’t that something? She said it again, barely more than a whisper. Isn’t that something?
Our quarters were several pop-up tents at the edge of the field, clearly made for children. We stacked ourselves inside like logs, our limbs poking out from under zippers to be mangled and made pliable by the freezing rain. Azeez and Godwin slipped into the same sleeping bag, shivering in their embrace. We all reckoned they would be the first to go, to be shipped back, if such a thing were possible, to wait in their corner office for the inevitable knife in the back, some underling who could taste the coppery changes coming on their lips…
Agata stayed in a concrete pillbox in the center of the field, nearly invisible in the weeds and sod. She invited me in, once, before it happened. There I saw the soapstone basin and the pictures of everyone who ever attended the camp, wheatpasted to the rough walls. She would meditate on them daily. She would imagine where they were, their positions and orbits fixed like tiny LEDs in a planetarium, spinning through the endless night. I asked her if she slept in the basin and she laughed. I asked her about the bunker. She said it had once been used by scared children to wait for the war, and then by scared teenagers to drink cheap wine and molest each other. Isn’t that something? Can you imagine? She said that a lot, as it turns out. Can you imagine how they felt? What that feels like?
Our first classes were as expected. We took our daily cocktail of uppers and downers and writhed in the mud, competing on who could crawl on their belly for the longest. We chattered our teeth on the nettles, we ran our hands over the struts of the electric pylon that fizzed and crackled mightily in the scrolling mist. We were told to imagine our loved ones, if we had any. Failing that, to imagine those we held our tightest social contracts with. Our bowls club, our mistresses and pretty boys, the woman that came over to fix the self-checkout machine when we attempted to scan through vodka as carrots. Godwin wept, muffled under his hood. He’d changed his name to Gideon that morning, after the uppers but before the downers. Ayomide got up and walked towards the sound of the A-road and didn’t come back. Susan caught trench foot and wrapped it in a shopping bag. I felt my stomach fill with air and worms, and knew that I was going to come out stronger and more brittle, the flakes of what I was suspended in a new lattice, one that the warm breezes of Empathy Camp would gust through until I died.
We practiced our skills on those golems of lard who had shared our initial journey. They chuckled and wept on command. One of them took photos of us constantly on its phone, smiling and chuckling to itself. One of them played the role of a colleague with an incurable nerve disease. Sheathes of bone are growing along my synapses, it would repeat. I’m sorry, we would repeat. I can’t imagine. What that feels like.
After a fortnight, all those who remained had been changed. Our skin had grown tough like Agata’s, marbled and compressed in blues and greys as if many lifetimes had passed across us. I no longer felt pain as I bathed in the nettles. I could read every micromovement of mouth and eye, mapping them onto some universal locus that neither myself nor my quarry understood. Gideon had been weeping constantly, and two dark patches stained his hood like those of a poorly kept Maltese. Yet the source of his tears had changed, if not their frequency.
On the final day, certification day, we lined up on our knees. Agata presented us with our certificates, complete with an online redemption code, and collected our photos, making us pose against a whiteboard she had brought for the occasion. She led us to the bunker and instructed Gideon to lie in the soapstone basin, which he did, shivering.
A blue flame leapt up from the rim of the bowl, so hot it pickled and crimped the air with brown halos, tall enough that it brushed against the damp concrete roof. Gideon didn’t scream or wail. He twisted, his limbs moving of their own accord to currents and convections we did not understand. The same way anything burning moves, in increments of failing before a total collapse. Agata spoke as we watched. Can you imagine how that feels, to be him? Some of us shrugged. Under my hood I pursed my lips. Isn’t that something, I muttered through the crusts and sores. What it felt like. Isn’t that something.
Alexander James 