The Nix(141)

Sebastian gave her a look of mock surprise—cocked his head and raised an eyebrow and smiled.

“I thought he was nuts,” he said.

“No. He’s looking for people he can be himself around. Aren’t we all?”

“Huh,” Sebastian said, and stared at her for a moment. “You’re different, aren’t you.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” She wiped the sweat off her forehead.

“You’re sincere,” Sebastian said.

“I am?”

“Quiet, but sincere. You don’t talk much, but when you talk you say what you mean. Most people I know talk constantly but never say anything true.”

“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.”