Free Empathy by Sarah Schulman Page A

shop and pay someone else to cook and serve me breakfast. Then I will go home and do errands and make notes. Then I will make phone calls. Then I will do something else. Then I will go to the gym. Then I will eat dinner in a restaurant. Then I will go to an art event. Then I will go to a bar or watch TV and get drunk or maybe I will find a twenty-one-year-old who will feel sorry for me and have sex with me. Then I will go to sleep.”
    â€œAnd if you were not a victim, then what?”
    â€œIf was not a victim I would wake up around noon and have sex with someone who did not have a job to go to either. Then she and I would talk about what geniuses we are. Then I would get a phone call from a fancy museum and mail from a foundation. Then my girlfriend would do the vegetable shopping. Then I would go to the gym. Then she would tell me that I am brilliant. That I am a great artist.”
    â€œHow are you going to get from here to there?” Doc asked.
    â€œI don’t know,” Cro-Mag said.
    â€œI can see why,” Doc said.
    Later Doc placed Cro-Mag squarely in relation to his other issues. Was mankind de-evolving? Survival of the least interesting?
Doc was willing to continue this study of the stupefaction of the privileged, but he had to be careful. Too much time with Cro-Mag was like watching television. Like holding a magnifying glass to a bottomless pit.
    They became what they beheld , he remembered, and gave Blake the last word.

Chapter Nine
    Frail state. Frightened star. Sensual feeling. Anna was doubly affected. Recognizing others’ masturbatory habits, she too needed a feeling and not a thought. But that raised the question of style and what one was. It’s a romance, that’s for sure. Some mythical visceral experience or a box a person fits into for other purposes. Something to swear by, even more. She’d never thought about this before.
    On the street there was a Hyundai seething with criticism. Then Anna digressed back to that desired state where think is a sequence toward a solution. It’s all about logic. Anna stared ahead at the dirty city street. She had to concentrate really hard to think it through for herself. Something wasn’t right. There was something not true about Doc. There was something a little off. Thank God for logical conclusions: they are an activity of pure permission.
    She noticed a young homeless man doing the Sunday Times Magazine crossword puzzle. Anna couldn’t know how badly he felt.
    â€œCan’t you say something nice?” the homeless man asked when he caught her staring.
    â€œUndulating vulvas,” Anna said. “Pistachio, sky blue, red-andwhite stripes, bare blue ass kiss, guess who.”
    â€œOkay,” the guy said. “Now back to the insults.”
    The next woman who passed wore eyeglass frames whose color reinforced the illusion that she was a redhead.
    Maybe that explains the problem I’ve always had with female identification , she thought . It’s like looking at Picasso’s Three Women only to come away thinking, “My breast is your thigh.”

    These thoughts illuminated the weird formation that broke up Anna. The whole experience became some sort of bucolic mutilation as she climbed the stairs to therapy.
    â€œSo what brings you to therapy today?” Doc asked.
    â€œWell, there are a number of things on my mind,” Anna said. “I was sitting in NYU Medical Center, in the Co-Op Care, massaging the feet of another friend of mine who is dying, in this case named Paul. Then I realized that I have a lot of unresolved anger.”
    â€œWhy do you massage the feet of dying people?”
    â€œWell,” Anna answered, “the reason we massage the feet of dying people is because they have been in bed for a long, long time and have poor circulation in their feet. They need to be touched but chest catheters and IVs get in the way. Besides, they can’t sit up. By rubbing their