The Golem and the Messiah Trilogy

Part 1, Chapter 2: Empathy

Chapter 2: Empathy

I am an empath. Six years old when we first discovered my power to heal someone else, a little boy with a cancerous bone tumor. We were wrestling and I grabbed his leg, the one with the cancer. The back of my eyes exploded with light. I felt his pain and his fear and his sorrow and his yearning to be free of it all surge through me like an electric current. Moments later he closed his eyes, exhaled and smiled, but it took two adults to wrest his leg from my grip. His tumor was gone when he was tested by Resistance doctors the next day. I was in bed, sick as a dog.

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The Hate Crime Authority controls and closely monitors all hospitals and clinics. We can’t just drop a sick child off at a Federation hospital with a fake ID. We need to forge perfect credentials and comprehensive digital footprints for the entire extended family to fool them. It takes lots of time and lots of money and sometimes a sick child can’t wait. That’s when they would call me.

All of the afflictions I healed in my childhood felt the same to me, regardless of the actual disease or injury. They all felt like terror just at the farthest reach of my fingertips. Terror and the deepest possible yearning for freedom from pain. At this point, after a hundred or two healings, there is no pain and there is no fear I haven’t already felt. My father told me once that real freedom is the freedom to walk away, the freedom not to participate. But real freedom, believe me, is a sudden release from terror and pain. And the faintest smile of exhausted relief when it finally goes away. I’ve already lost everyone I ever loved. It saddens and angers me that I couldn’t heal any of them. But my losses and failures explain why I am fearless now and cannot be broken by the Pain Experts of the Hate Crime Authority. That’s why I smile like Mona Lisa, like my father.

My mother was an empath as well. All she had to do was touch someone and she instantly knew every character flaw and weakness and ambition and fear hidden deep inside them. She knew things they didn’t know about themselves. It always came to her in a hot flash. She told me once that the psychic pain and turmoil she felt in me when she held me in her arms as an infant was almost unbearable. But I think the psychic pain and turmoil she felt was mostly her own, what she passed along to me in embryo and what I returned to her like a karmic gift. I don’t know if she ever healed anyone except, perhaps, my father. And that had nothing to do with her empathic powers. That was love. Nevertheless, she told me he was mostly inconsolable and unreachable in his solitude. But I think he was inconsolable because he was wise.

There’s a difference, of course, between empathy that heals in service to others and empathy that hurts others in service to yourself. One draws the pain out and smothers it. The other draws the pain out and releases it for use as a weapon against others. One seeks the truth. The other seeks the advantage. As a healer I sought the truth. Now with my parents gone and no one left to protect me I seek the advantage. Now I am my mother’s daughter. Now I have her eyes. But I have my father’s sad Mona Lisa smile.

My parents didn’t just die in a skirmish with the Hate Crime Authority. They were betrayed by a high-ranking member of the Resistance. They walked into an ambush.  I know who betrayed them. She took my hand at the secret memorial service for them and offered her condolences. I felt her duplicity. As my mother’s daughter I decided right then and there to take my time with her and knew instinctively that she is far more useful to me where she is, where she thinks I don’t know. Better for me as a leader that she and others still think of me as a healer, or so both my mother and father counseled before they were killed.

The other Resistance leaders around me are driven almost entirely by ambition. But they are tedious ideologues, just like the leaders of the Federation. Incompetent for the same reason. My father told me once that nothing is more dangerous or foolish than an ideologue in power. You can be competent, he said to me with a laugh, or an ideologue. But you can’t be both. Not, he said, when you are constantly searching for redemption. Eventually ideologues kill in the name of moral righteousness. Eventually they eat their young. But they are mostly useful idiots for truly skilled predators like my mother and father. Neither of them was an ideologue. They were the purest of totalitarians, unadulterated by fealty to any ideology except power, and loyalty to each other.

My best friend Carlos tried to kill my mother on my twelfth birthday, the day she and my father fled the Federation and joined the Resistance. We had kissed in secret for the first time just the week before. I felt a bolt of energy shoot through me the moment our lips touched. I thought it might be love but it was chemical deception. Turned out Carlos was just a twelve-year-old ideologue, incompetent and compliant like most Resistance twelve-year olds and most Federation twelve-year olds. His assassination attempt against my mother failed when he accidentally shot and mortally wounded Emma Goldstein instead.

Emma was a former midwife and founder of the Resistance Network. She delivered my mother in the year 2000. Three decades later my mother authored and enacted the ZeroGrowth Directive that instantly transformed Emma from a midwife into a fugitive and drove her underground. Emma once described the abortion mandate for unauthorized children as my mother’s concession to the ideologues who surrounded her. My mother described it to me as the price of power. Of course the same directive forced her underground when she became pregnant with me. She once explained to me how she knew I would be willful, not just because I was her daughter, but because I was hardly a cluster of cells in her belly when I drove her, maybe the world’s most powerful woman at the time, back like a newborn into Emma’s arms.

Emma raised and protected me until my mother and father joined the Resistance, the fateful night Carlos killed her by mistake, minutes after I met my father for the first time. She was a wise leader, a compassionate caretaker, and no ideologue. I knew and loved her as a friend and confidant. She knew me only as a healer. Carlos knew me only as a healer as well. He’s long gone now, delivered directly into the hands of the Federation after his bullet missed my mother and killed Emma. He missed my mother but the only thing I miss about him is the kiss. Neither of them are around now to know that I’m no longer only a healer.

In order to protect unauthorized children from the Hate Crime Authority parents in the Resistance must be separated from their children and children must be raised communally in the shadows until families can be relocated, if possible, to territories not controlled by the Federation. Parents caught with unauthorized children in Greater New York are sent to CUNY Re-Education Centers where they are sterilized, coerced over time to renounce their own children, betray the Resistance, and pledge loyalty to The Golem. Apparently re-education is not an exact science because some of them, like my mother, make their way back to the Resistance. Most, however, are assigned new roles in life among the Others, the sex workers and support workers who live in the outer boroughs of the city and travel to Manhattan only to service the Ones, the Federation ruling class.

Some months after I was born and safe in Emma’s arms my mother re-emerged from the underground and surrendered herself to the Federation where she was publicly humiliated, re-educated, and re-assigned as a sex worker for the Ones, eventually for just one One. My father, sole proprietor and owner of Greater New York, claimed her for himself, as she knew he would. That was the secret deal she struck with Emma in exchange for my safety. My protection in exchange for my father’s trust and state secrets. Although he knew nothing about me or Emma or the secret deal to protect me, he knew my mother, and he didn’t care much about anything else. He was just happy to have her back in his arms. My mother’s touch made him whole and protected me. Her eyes, he told me once, sparkled like fire agates, deep brown and flecked with sentinels of amber and green that kept everyone, friend and foe alike, at a respectful distance.

Once captured, unauthorized children are re-educated also and eventually placed with childless families of the Ones. I am told that nothing is more ruthless or cold-hearted than a Reform, a re-educated child. The Ones who are required by state edict to adopt Reforms know they are being watched and judged at every moment. Life for them is a constant state of terror.

I am quite sure that most of the children raised underground by the Resistance would make excellent Reforms. I wonder sometimes if Carlos is now a Reform. I’m pretty sure I would give up my own soul and a thousand others just to see the stars in the night sky again, inhale the cool country air, and catch another glimpse of the moonlit stallion. According to my mother, to know someone is to know their deepest fears. Everything else is guesswork and faith and statecraft. My deepest regret is that I may never again see the night sky. But the Federation cannot take from me what I have already lost. Other than my fear of never again seeing a blanket of stars I am fearless and dangerous. Especially because sometimes I am secretly more golem than messiah.

The first time my mother watched me heal someone she was horrified by how sick I became afterward. Empathy turned outward, she told me one day, will eventually kill you. It will eat you up and leave you with nothing, she warned. She didn’t live long enough to tell me what would happen if I turned it inward instead. And she never told my father about her own empathic power. This is our secret, she whispered to me the night I met my father for the first time, the same night Emma was shot and Carlos was exiled. This, she said with a sense of urgency in her voice, belongs just to us. The very next day, the day after my father learned about me and my power to heal, he predicted as a quiet aside that those I will remember aren’t the ones I heal. Those you will remember, he said with a sad smile, are the ones you cannot heal. So my mother was a closet empath and my father was a closet storyteller. They both reserved their deepest lessons for me and me alone.

Perhaps my own transition from messiah to golem in the absence of my parents is instructive. Empathy, it seems, is a strange creature. Turned outward at first it emerges as the kindness of strangers. Turned inward with nowhere to go it devours you whole, feeds on your viscera, and chews your bones. Empathy turned inward becomes something else entirely, like the cutest of puppies that one day grows to become a rabid wolf, driven mad by its own pathology, ravenous and insatiable once it turns outward again, this time as The Golem.