Free The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison

more or less one of them. I am trying not to itch. I am trying not to think about whether I’m itching. I am trying not to take my skin for granted. Sometimes my heart beats too fast, or a worm lodges under the skin of my ankle, or I drink too much, or I am too thin, but these are sojourns away from a kingdom I can generally claim—of being okay , capable of desire and being desired, full of a sense I belong in the world. But when I leave the Baptist church on Slaughter Lane, I can’t quiet the voices of those who no longer feel they belong anywhere. I spend a day in their kingdom and then leave when I please. It feels like a betrayal to come up for air.
    Doubting Morgellons hasn’t stopped me from being afraid I’ll get it. I buffered myself before the conference: “If I come back from Austin thinking I have Morgellons,” I told my friends, “you have to tell me I don’t have Morgellons.” Now that I’m here, I wash my hands a lot. I’m conscious of other people’s bodies.
    Then it starts happening, as I knew it would. After a shower, I notice small blue strands curled like tiny worms across my clavicle. I find what appear to be minuscule spines, little quills, tucked into the crevice of a fortune line on my palm. I’ve got these fleeting moments of catching sight, catching panic. I’m afraid to submit myself to the public microscope inspection because I’m nervous something will be found and I won’t be able to let go of it.
    It actually gives me an odd thrill. Maybe some part of me wants to find something. I could be my own proof. Or else I could write a first-person story about delusion. I could connect to the disease with filaments of my own, real or imagined, under my skin.
    If you look closely enough, of course, skin is always foreign, anyone’s—full of strange bumps, botched hairs, hefty freckles, odd patches of flush and rough. The blue fibers are probably just stray threads from a towel, or from my sleeve, the quills not quills at all but just smeared pen ink. But it’s in these moments of fear, oddly, that I come closest to experiencing Morgellons the way its patients do: its symptoms physical and sinister, its tactics utterly invasive. Inhabiting their perspective only makes me want to protect myself from what they have. I wonder if these are the only options available to my crippled organs of compassion: I’m either full of disbelief, or else I’m washing my hands in the bathroom.
    I’m not the only person at the conference thinking about contagion. One woman stands up to say she needs to know the facts about how Morgellons is really transmitted. She tells the crowd that her family and friends refuse to come to her apartment. She needs proof they can’t catch the disease from her couch. It’s hard not to speculate. Her family might be afraid of catching her disease, but they might be even more afraid there’s nothing to catch; maybe they’re keeping their distance from her obsession instead. I hear so much sadness in what she says— tell me it’s not contagious, so everyone will come back —and so much hope for an answer that might make things better; that might make her less alone.
    Kendra tells me she’s afraid of getting her friends sick whenever she goes out to dinner with them. I picture her eating sushi downtown—handling her chopsticks so carefully, keeping her wasabi under strict quarantine—so that this thing in her—this thing with agency, if not category—won’t get into anyone else. Her fear underscores an unspoken tension embedded in the premise of the conference itself: the notion that all these folks with a possibly contagious condition might gather together in the same confined space.
    The specter of contagion actually serves a curious double function. On the one hand, as with Kendra, there is the shameful sense of oneself as a potential carrier of infection. But on the other hand the possibility of spreading this disease also suggests that it’s real—that it