Empathy, p.1
Empathy, page 1
Empathy
Empathy
Hoa Pham
Copyright © 2022 Goldsmiths Press
“Empathy” first published in 2022 by Goldsmiths Press
Text copyright © 2022 Hoa Pham
Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross
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d_r0
For Alister, Max and William for sharing my true empathy.
Hanoi – Vuong
We have always been we. Then they forced us to become you and I.
When I was a little girl, I would look in the bathroom mirror to reassure myself I was not alone. The girl in the mirror smiled at we when I smiled at her. We would press against the mirror with our hands and all I would feel was the cold surface against my skin.
I learnt quickly not to tell the Department about what I did, nor to reveal anything to the lady who thought she was being kind by visiting and reassuring we. Occasionally I thought of telling one of the other foster children. Exchanging secrets made you friends. But I didn’t need friends with we hiding behind the mirror. And besides, I could not rely on other people not to give me away.
Today I look in the mirror and know that despite my lover Camille I am truly alone. I put on make-up, though I’m not sure why. The taste of the lipstick and hint of perfume make me feel adult. Today, when I finally meet we, I’m anxious and full of trepidation. It’s been twenty years and what I have longed for is coming true.
My curiosity abounded when they told me I could finally meet her – under the watchful eye of the Department. The Department had brought me up with other foster children in Việt Nam. They gave me food and shelter, and schooling. We were the privileged ones, we were told. In the compound you could go to university if you were smart and knew what to tell them.
I did not tell them that I was missing my multiple eyes. They punish you for thinking about we instead of me. So I learnt to hide it at an early age and the phantoms of my sisters kept me company in that enforced solitude.
Now finally I was about to meet one of them again after twenty years.
This morning I had worried over my appearance. I didn’t want her to think that I was one of them, that I was the Department. But I knew I would be searched, and I had to seem to be one of them in order to access her.
I had bad dreams the night before. About being angry, hiding under a table and being yelled at by monitors. When I had woken up, sweating, I was doubly aware of the camera in the corner of my flat that watched me as I slept. Camille was fast asleep by my side. She did not sleep lightly.
I had never been to a rehabilitation centre before. The barbed-wire fences were imposing and during the strip-search I pretended I was at my regular medical check-up. The monitor sent with me was searched too, and that reassured me. Her name was Evelyn, an English Vietnamese-speaking researcher for the Department. She dressed casually, in jeans and a white shirt.
“I will come in with you and then leave you alone,” Evelyn assured me.
The steady wink-wink of the security cameras following me told the lie, as did the green identity bracelet they snapped around my wrist.
The detention centre was modern with stark pale-green walls and metal doors.
When we passed the first round of security and were in the inner wing, I felt a stare on my face. I looked up and one of the guards, dressed in black, was taking in my dress.
“I’m her sister,” I said.
They wanted us to be treated as normal citizens. The guards and staff were not told officially that we were multiples, but I was sure word would get out. That Việt Nam had succeeded in cloning was the biggest open secret in the world. Most of the Western world had said it was fake news, and overseas we were considered quintuplets rather than clones.
The guard snapped to attention at Evelyn’s discreet cough and escorted us into the secured ward.
“We want what’s best for Lien,” Evelyn said to me as we walked down the detention-green corridors. “She is a sick woman.”
I nodded, trying to seem calm and ignoring the tension in my stomach. I was so nervous I wanted to throw up. I had only seen her picture before they took me here, and that night I had looked in the mirror tracing the contours of my cheeks with my fingers.
Dark lacquer eyes, dark hair and the same cheekbones. We were multiples and yet the expression on her face haunted me the most. It was of horror and shock.
I didn’t want to meet a murderer.
But I wanted to see my multiple sister who had been company for so long. Other children had imaginary friends. I knew my multiples were not imaginary. They just weren’t physically there with me.
Be prepared for disappointment, Evelyn had told me in the car. She’s not like you.
Not like we.
I wanted to feel connected again. I wasn’t allowed to tell my colleagues where I was going – all my life I had had to hide my true nature from the world. Now, finally, I was allowed to admit it, in rehabilitation.
Was the rehabilitation for her or me?
I did not know. I was clever and they knew it. I did well at school and was accelerated into university.
Just standing next to Evelyn made me ill. I had pretended I was normal until I saw that picture. I thought I had adapted to the world I was supposed to live in. I was a success. But now…
I hated Evelyn then as she let the guard open the door to where Lien was staying.
“Lien.” Evelyn’s voice was deceptively neutral. “Vuong is here to see you.”
Evelyn gestured for me to come forward.
I walked into the padded cell under the glare of the fluorescent lights.
Sitting on the couch, Lien was hunched over, her black fringe hiding her face. She was dressed in the blue denim of the rehabilitation centre and suddenly she looked directly at me. I was fixed by her gaze and I stared back into eyes that mirrored my own.
We.
The door closed behind me and I flinched. I knew we were to be left alone, but this girl had murdered her foster father with her bare hands.
Tears welled up in her eyes. She threw her arms around me, clinging, and I held her back. I found myself crying too.
Suddenly we were back there, and I was no longer me, I was a multiple with my sister. We then touched palms together and she smiled.
“Are the others coming?” she asked, and my throat closed.
“I don’t know.”
“I dream of we. All the time. I want to see the others. They can’t have all turned out as good-looking as you.”
I laughed, and I heard the strain in my own voice. She was identical to me and the irony did not escape her. There was a glint in her eye that I recognised from my own watchfulness. In the corner was the camera, recording, recording for prosperity what we did and said for the Department. We were unique, and we were multiple.
“I was told,” I said carefully, “that I could see you first. Then they don’t know.”
“Ah.” Something settled in her eyes and I knew that her stare, smiling, wondering, was reflected by mine.
“I’m the bad one,” she said ruefully, and I laughed again. “But what he did was wrong.” Her words shocked me back to reality. I was in a rehabilitation centre. Killing was wrong. “Have you seen the others?”
“No.” It was the truth.
She could not stop smiling and we embraced like multiples again. Then reluctantly she stepped back, still holding my hand.
“They do not like us showing affection,” she said, looking at the camera over my shoulder.
“I know,” I said.
She sat back on the couch and I sat on the bed.
“Have you come to take me out of here? Be my sponsor?” The hope in her eyes devastated me.
“No. They… don’t want us to be together. They want me to just talk to you. They thought… that perhaps I could make you feel better.” The false words, the Department’s words, dropped like stones from my mouth. I hoped she could not see the lie in them. “They want to understand why you did what you did. To make sure the other multiples do not do the same. Somehow with all their batteries of tests and rehabilitation they have not understood.”
“You make me feel better just being here. I’ve been good so they let me see one of we.”
She started to cry again and this time I initiated the hug. Lien was so ground down by the Department she had slipped up and called us “we.” Maybe this was what they wanted to do to her. Break her.
“Is your monitor good?” she asked. “She seems nice. She visited me a couple of times before she told me she monitored you.”
“She’s all right.” I said. I did not want to admit that I was rarely monitored nowadays, that I was the healthy one.
“The monitors here are kind. They wouldn’t make us eat… meat. Everyone in rehab is so different and the monitors just accept us the way we are. There are some real weird ones in here though.”
My nerves pricked up when she mentioned meat. She had eaten pork before killing her foster father. Evelyn had told me that the foster father had a clean record as a farmer. It was eating the pork that had catalysed her, that had tipped her over the edge. At least that was the reasoning that she gave to the Department.
I ate meat on the odd special occasion. I preferred eating rice and fish. Evelyn commented that neither of us multiples had explored much in the way of food choices once we were exposed to the outside world. We stuck to what we knew.
Repetition did not scare we. Change did.
“Do they know you are a multiple?”
Her eyes shifted to the camera. “The staff know. They told me… that they wouldn’t tell the others. I think some of them might suspect… But we don’t talk about the past here. We talk about the future, what we’re going to become.”
The Department mantra coming from Lien’s mouth without a hint of irony frightened me. I looked into her lacquer-deep eyes and she smiled, stirring something inside me. The bond was intense, hypnotic.
I didn’t want to fall prey to it. I wanted to be able to walk away from here. But something essential to me was filled by holding Lien’s trusting hand – I was a multiple of a killer. At least that was what the Department told me.
“What do you do?” she asked, and her keen curiosity frightened me, paralysed me. She wanted to know everything, like we did. But I had adjusted too well, and I could not share everything. I wanted to be I, not we. I did not want to kill.
“I’m a psychology researcher.”
Her eyes shifted to the camera. “You aren’t here to study me, are you? You need an ethics clearance for that.”
“No!” Her suspicion cut me to the quick. I wanted to do well by her. “I’m your designated next of kin. After your father… died…”
“You don’t need to dance around it. I know he died. I know I did it. I have reason for what we did.”
Her hand squeezed mine and I wanted to back away.
“Lien, I didn’t kill your father. We are not we anymore.”
This basic lesson, hammered into us when they released us, made her face crumple for a moment. Then she straightened up and let go of my hand. When she turned her gaze to me again she was cool and distant.
The sudden retreat from our intimacy left me stranded in the rehab room. I glanced at the camera and remembered why I was there.
“I know what my rights are now,” she said softly. “And yours. I know you are different. They told me you were different from me. The Department raised you. At least I had a family.”
I took a step back from her.
“Hurting me isn’t going to get you out of here, Lien. And you had a family. Why did you kill him?” I asked her directly. I wanted out of the room.
“He made me eat pig.”
“Is that a good enough reason for killing him?” Evelyn had told me she had attacked him. She spared me the details.
“The pigs were we,” she said simply. I stared at her aghast. Had she bonded with all the pigs? “There were many of them. All the same. They were like we. And he killed them!” She started crying again, noisily.
This time I didn’t touch her. Was it my job to reason with her?
I looked at the door. It remained closed. Then I stared at the camera. The red light winked at me. They were watching. They knew. They weren’t going to let me out.
“The pigs aren’t we,” I said softly and touched her hand. Again that shock of feeling linked me with her. She stopped crying suddenly like a tap. I had the feeling she had been crying for a long time and she was exhausted.
That was why they wanted me here. To remind her of her multiple nature. Her human nature.
And to remind me.
Her intent stare did not unnerve me this time. Instead I shared her stare, my mirror image. I could have killed. I could have murdered a human being. But I had not.
That was what made me me.
“Pigs are animals,” I said and she frowned. “Killing humans is wrong.” I stopped myself from completing the logical conclusion. Killing animals for food is all right. But I couldn’t tell her that. She clearly disagreed.
You can’t show the same empathy to animals as humans and survive. Not in Việt Nam, anyway.
Behind me the door opened.
Automatically we stopped holding hands and faced Evelyn.
“What did we learn today?” Evelyn asked and the ritual monitoring question made we want to throttle her.
“We are not we. The pigs… are not we,” Lien said like an obedient doll.
“And Vuong?”
My suspicions bloomed. This was an intervention for me too. I wondered what I had done to need a monitoring lesson.
“She is not me,” I said as if I was five years old again.
“You can say goodbye now. Vuong will come again.”
I would?
Lien embraced me but we did not press cheek to cheek. Instead we stood a healthy distance apart, the way we had for all those monitors all those years ago.
“I look forward to seeing you again, Vuong. Thank you, Evelyn.” Lien politely bowed her head, and I knew the civility she wore was a mask.
My mask almost slipped as I left her alone in that padded cell.
I am free. And she is not me.
“You will see her again,” Evelyn told me. “She’s very difficult to reason with. It is the first time she has identified herself away from the pigs to us. She’s a vegan and believes that animals are we. So she killed her father in retaliation. We don’t know why she suddenly objected to eating pork. I didn’t want you to push her too far.”
I frowned, gazing at Evelyn, wondering if she had been one of the many monitors that were assigned solely to we.
“Will I get to see the others?”
“We’ll see.” Evelyn escorted me out of the rehabilitation centre, her attention elsewhere.
I chewed on my lip as we walked out of the inner wing, oblivious to the stares of the guards upon me. I wanted to curl up in a foetal ball and cry, like I did when I was five and was told we were going to be split and brought up away from each other.
It was wrong that Lien was in rehab. Instinctively I knew what she meant by the pigs being we. They cloned animals too, identical animals.
“What do you think of her?” Evelyn asked after we were strip-searched again and escorted out into the car park.
I looked at Evelyn and the tears we had shed in front of their mechanical eyes must have shown on my face. “Don’t make her eat meat.” Evelyn nodded as we got into her car to drive me back to the flats.
“How do you feel?” she asked me before starting the ignition.
“Upset. I’ll come again to visit her. She shouldn’t be alone.”
I shouldn’t be alone, my thoughts echoed, but I did not tell the monitor that.
Evelyn drummed her fingers against the steering wheel.
The Department did not really care about we. They wanted us to be healthy individuals.
All the old resentments that I thought I had put away from my childhood rose in me again. It was because of Departmental largesse that Lien was in a rehabilitation centre.
She would not have killed or thought the pigs were we if we had been there to remind her.
But I had to co-operate with Evelyn.
I wanted to see the others.
I wanted to be we again.
Berlin – My
Sometimes I just sat on the windowsill of our apartment and felt the wind against my skin. I looked down at the busy straight-line streets, at the fractures that were Berlin, and wondered at the fissures gaping under there.
History was present in the concrete and tourists took pictures of what used to divide us. Though I was a born German, I was also Vietnamese, and this difference made me a stranger.
