Empathy & its lack

Or, what we learned from a stalker.

Dec 06, 2022

Steam is billowing —

— from the surface of the pot; the water is almost boiled. Our kindling was damp this morning, so I used a lot of cardboard and coconut husks to light the fire: it makes the room smoky as the stove musters heat whilst I feed branches in various stages of rot into its round mouth.

Your thumbs are seeking music to infuse our morning and our daughter is a tangle of limbs in the hammock. Soon there will be hot water for your coffee, my cocoa, her porridge; and I will add soursop leaves and slivers of reishi that I seized from the forest deadwood to brew in the pot throughout the morning. This is our living sanctuary, holy as though nobody had ever obtruded upon it.

Alfred had a grudge against you —

— because he thought that you had placed a curse upon him. On a Monday night in the first week of October, Alfred scaled the 10-foot high fence of the compound you were sleeping in alone; he carried a duffel bag containing four long machetes, all of which he had sharpened scrupulously for the purpose of mutilating you.

Alfred was not a stupid guy (he had graduated from Harvard in East Asian Studies) and he was not a bad guy, either. Probably his quirks endeared him to those who love him; he was sensitive (to a fault), a compelling storyteller and gifted musician, and he told us back in 2018 that he had healed himself from depression by natural means.

But what Alfred termed ‘depression’ on his initial screening was, we later learned, ‘diagnosed schizophrenia.’ His father (with the resigned sigh common amongst the forlorn parents of disgraced prodigies) told us about Alfred’s condition when it became clear that his grudge about the curse was a pathological fixation and deadly serious.

Five days prior —

— to the birth of our son, and three days before the borders to Vanuatu would close for twenty-seven months in March 2020, Alfred had accosted you at a lonesome place by the ocean. You had been driving a load of polypipe to construct the water supply for a nearby village and had discovered Alfred walking up the road to our place. Save for the stretch of rugged coastline that swelled before you, there were no witnesses to the brief exchange you had with him that day.

“Remove the curse!” he had screeched at you, wielding his machete. “Just take it away, and I’ll leave you alone!”

“There is no curse,” you had told him, firmly. “There never was. You are healed. Leave us alone.”

Alfred had then appeared to consult whatever sub-astral phantasms were conducting him on his quest (he called these voices “the Light”) and withdrew his threat.

“OK. If you say so. But if it comes back, I will return.” And he left, turning back towards the village where a boat was waiting for him.

A cyclone washed that lonesome place clear away a few days after he had accosted you there, as though the land itself couldn’t countenance the violence Alfred had enacted upon it. We called his father, who then informed us about Alfred’s diagnosis, and later told us that he had taken the very last flight out of the country on March 12th, 2020.

The borders closed, our baby was born, and we forgot all about all about Alfred and his stories and threats and knives in the midst of everything else that happened after.

There is nothing like —

— a schizophrenic guy running loose with a few sharp machetes for testing the limits of one’s compassion. There is nothing like the thought of those machetes dangling over the heads of you and our child for testing my faith in the miraculous and the strength of my most fervent prayers of mercy.

In the twenty-eight hours during the first week of October when Alfred was hunting you down with those knives of his, whilst you were staying in town on business and I was in the forest with our child, my appeals to heaven were on his behalf, not yours.

For you and I have already passed through the hell of bereavement; we have already learned that there are far worse realities than physical death. The cessation of life is not something that defeats us, but is rather more like a practical inconvenience to the execution of our purpose.

No, there wasn’t any need to pray for you: there isn’t a shred of sin in your heart, and you are protected by the presence of love that guides you and flows through your actions, your way of being in the world. If you had died that night beneath Alfred’s knife, he would have inflicted far greater suffering upon himself than he could ever have attempted upon you to avenge his grudge.

It is very hard to write —

— about the origin of Alfred’s grudge, because he spent months describing his version of what happened in fanatical, exacting detail: his emails to us plotted the nature of the curse, how it was executed and its various horrific consequences (and how we were to blame for every single one of them). His stories have occluded and distorted my own memory of the events (and I have a good memory).

He wrote a 24-page long essay, including footnotes and appendices, about the various occult practices we concocted for the purpose of defiling his psyche; and then informed us that he was submitting it to all the major newspapers. In a gesture of consideration, Alfred cautioned us to prepare ourselves for the shock of exposure that his tell-all story would likely bring.

His stories are so compellingly crafted that even I found myself wanting to believe them. He recounts wholly imaginary events with such acuity and fastidious attention to nuance and detail that there is no space for ambiguity, no narrative arc left unsealed from his disarmingly omniscient narratorial consciousness (although every character bar himself, the Wounded Hero, comes across as rather flat; I am amusingly represented as a kind of puppet-accomplice to your master-magus).

Overall, Alfred’s craft is good; indeed, his style of storytelling is unnervingly similar to my own. But he has a tendency to draw his reader along through the realms of subjective experience towards some rather bizarre conclusions. An example:

Just as I was about to board the motor boat, the driver spilled a cannister of gasoline all over the boat’s floor. As we motored away, our faces covered to protect us from the toxic smell, [the name of my partner] waved from the shore, still shirtless and smiling, still not eating, still as inscrutable as he had been upon my arrival.
The image of that man on the shore struck me, and it has become a scene which has replayed in my mind time and time again. It was accompanied by an unusual and frightening sensation that there on the retreating shoreline was not some disagreeable, and ultimately forgettable, acquaintance of little importance to my life, it was actually the incarnate Jesus Christ.
And the savior had judged me for not recognizing him and had cast me out of his bosom, the garden of natural safety, and into the darkness of a fossil fuel powered world on the brink of annihilation.
With furrowed brow, I shook off the feeling and turned to face the sea.

At first we read Alfred’s stories as a cry for help, and responded gently; there was no curse, and so we were not in a position to remove it, as much as we wished him relief from his suffering. After months of escalating accusations, once it was clear that his conviction of our culpability could not be assuaged by any defense, entreaty, or call to reason, we just flicked everything he wrote into our spam folders.

But then Alfred wrote directly to me, explicitly threatening the safety of our daughter. To this we responded, firmly requesting that he cease and desist with his accusations and leave our family alone. It was at this point that we started to really wonder who it was that we were dealing with.

It is true that Alfred’s stories —

— are well-written, but none of the media outlets ever took him up on them. His conviction of victimhood is just too absolute to be real. To me, he represents a compelling example for how we script the parameters of our lived reality through the stories we tell ourselves; and when we write those stories down, they assume a form of substantial truth, even as they expose our biases and delusions.

Alfred’s schizophrenia heightens his gift of storytelling, for his unique sensitivity makes it possible for him to represent what he experiences, in words, as real. But his particular neurological wiring prevents him from experiencing the basic human emotion of empathy, meaning that the story he has told himself about the curse is the reality; he felt it was real, and what he experienced later showed him it was so.

Without empathy, we do not feel connected with other people and their stories; we are not open to other realities than our own. In that space of disconnect, it feels wholly and incontrovertibly true that there are perpetrators out there with subtle, maleficent abilities that can warp one’s psychic equilibrium and accordingly spoil one’s life.

It is so tempting to believe these stories! At some point, I believe that we all do.

When I look soberly —

— at the cause of Alfred’s grudge (that is, not reflecting on it through a grudge of my own) my view is that it came from the disappointment of unmet expectations.

It often happens in community that people project their ideals and dreams upon a project and its vision, then invent an internal reality where becoming part of it will result in their permanent unconditioned happiness. When a person comes to experience the community for themselves and it turns out different from what they imagined (and it always does) that person may respond in two different ways:

Adapt their expectations to the living presence of the place, what it offers, and who is there. This requires a willingness to grow in and with the community, understanding people’s different approaches to the project’s vision, and the patience to live out the process of one’s own disappointment with the goal of fostering deeper connections with the group one has joined.
Experience the disappointment of unmet expectations as a personal insult and offence. This usually leads to blaming the community for not aligning with their exact personal needs, which may (or may not) have been expressed prior to their actual visit. This grudge will be locked in time with the memory of their experience, unchanging even as those who aggrieved them move on with their lives.

I have seen the second scenario play out many times in nearly a decade of community living, but Alfred — due to his diagnosis, his concealment of it when we screened him, and his genius for masking his condition with storytelling — has been the first to embody that disappointment as a hard trigger to underlying psychosis.

Of everyone who was living here, Alfred chose you as the screen on which to project the sum of his disappointment with the community; and that disappointment (“I gave up everything to be here and it didn’t meet my expectations!”) became an irrevocable trauma of existential scale and scope, a grudge that encompassed and eclipsed all the disappointments he had faced in his life (and he had faced plenty).

In a reality that only made sense to him, Alfred invested an image of you with supernatural powers; you became a malevolent figure who could torture his psyche in horrific and invisible ways. He suffered a complete psychotic breakdown which lasted for over a year, and you were to blame for it.

Alfred was not a stupid guy —

— and he was not a bad guy, either. But his stupid plan to avenge himself upon you turned out badly. When I found him slumped outside the administration building on the afternoon of the first Sunday in October (ladies and gentlemen of the jury) Alfred had already traveled halfway around the world and all the way across the island by the most circuitous and inefficient possible route in order to find you.

I did not recognise him at first; it had been nearly four years since our last personal encounter, and he had physically changed a lot. He had lost his muscle tone and his hair hung in ragged dreadlocks; he wore sneakers and long trousers, quite incongruous with the tropical climate. I didn’t know it was him until I heard his accent; he was waiting for you, he said, and although his voice was gentle his eyes were burning as he spoke.

He had been slumped like that on the porch all afternoon as I, wholly oblivious to his trespass, had been playing with our daughter in river and doing our ordinary Sunday things. Beside his supine body was a dark-grey duffel bag that appeared to contain only a single long object, which I immediately and instinctively identified as a Dangerous Threat.

Alfred was convinced that you were somewhere on the premises and demanded to see you. By then John, our carpenter, was standing beside me for protection. Alfred ranted a lot at both of us, his voice at once softly-spoken and aggressive; he didn’t believe that you were absent, so we put you on video link so that he could see the flat where you were staying, the street behind you, the buildings in town.

“Come and meet me here,” you said to Alfred, as though he were an old friend. “Come back to town, and we will talk things over.”

Begrudgingly, as one whose plans for retribution had once again been thwarted, Alfred agreed to depart immediately.

“I’ll be there tomorrow,” he said, “by noon.”

“By noon,” you returned; “I’ll be waiting for you.”

“Good,” uttered Alfred.

Once that was settled, we had to get him away from us. He started ranting at me again, fiercely and with venom but with the same softness in his voice, as though unable to embody and sustain the energy of authentic anger. I mostly pitied him, though I was eyeing the duffel bag with caution. And then amidst all the usual fictions, he said something that made me actually afraid.

“I don’t want to harm you or [our daughter]. You will know the truth when you see God. But I must make him see the truth so he can understand what he has done to me. He needs to see God.”

Alfred caught the look of fear in my eyes, and his face contorted with satisfaction.

“Good. You’re afraid. Because if I don’t find him down there, I will come back here for both of you.”

“Go, Alfred.”

I stayed back while John followed him down the road, walking a few paces behind him. The last words Alfred spoke to me were probably intended as a final gift of spite and malice, but instead filled me with pity:

“I caused the death of your son. And I caused [our project founder] to die!”

Oh, Alfred —

— when will you learn, I thought; but there was work to be done. I had to call you back and tell you that Alfred was planning to actually kill you this time, and I had to write a really awful email to Alfred’s parents, and I had to compose the police report of Alfred’s trespass and then collect evidence for the restraining order you would be lodging against him.

It took Alfred more than two hours to walk to the nearest village; it was well after dark by the time he arrived. That evening, he drank kava with the local guys and warned several people that you were a black magician and that he was on a mission from God to kill you.

(“Good for my street cred,” you told me later; “he makes me sound really powerful!”)

The island that we live on is not a big one; everybody knows each other, and so we had the privilege of real-time surveillance of Alfred’s crusade through the boat captains and truck drivers whom we have known for years. We knew that he arrived in town shortly after 2pm on Monday, and we knew where his lodgings were, and we knew that he was still carrying his duffel bag.

His circuitous route had left you ample to time to file the police reports, meet with the public solicitor and submit your application for a restraining order to the magistrate’s court. You did all of these things in the state of calm, equipoise and good humour with which you execute whatever practical task you are attending to (flushing out the boat motor, building a wall, repairing the generator, dealing with a stalker…)

I felt grim all day and wanted the whole thing to be over. I nagged you to tighten up security arrangements at the compound, which you did. I sent you this article, insisted that you read it in full, and implored you not to underestimate Alfred because he was probably watching you and waiting for nightfall.

The last thing our daughter said to me before going to sleep: “I wish Alfred had never come here.” She said it.

Shortly after 7pm that night —

— Alfred scaled the 10-foot high fence of the compound you were sleeping in alone; he carried a duffel bag containing four long machetes, all of which he had sharpened scrupulously for the purpose of mutilating you. He entered at the rear of the building through the vacant lot next door where he would not be observed by the watchman patrolling the foreyard. Alfred had been watching and waiting for nightfall.

He removed one knife from the duffel bag and placed the rest of his belongings beside the fence. The security lights were on, unnervingly bright, and he moved into the shadow of a concrete stairwell, still holding the knife close to him. He was physically depleted after many days of travel, and the effort of climbing the fence had exhausted him. He lay down on the grass, mentally consulting whatever entities had compelled this second act of trespass for guidance on the next move.

You were upstairs sharing a reverent and prayerful text message exchange with me, for in that moment both of us were feeling aligned with the Grace of the miraculous, the presence of Love, and sensing a heartfelt mystical connection with the son whom we had lost in life but as an angel watches over us. We were in a space of trust and surrender, and we both went to bed in our separate places. And then it happened.

The job of the night watchman —

— is to survey the perimeter of the compound once per hour, shining a large torch about the premises. In the interim, he sits in a little shed in the foreyard and plays games on his phone. In five years of service, he had never once seen an intruder; yet it happened, at a quarter past seven that evening, that he decided to walk the perimeter and came upon Alfred lying in wait beneath the concrete stairwell leading up to the flat.

Alfred jumped to attention when he saw the flash of the torch-beam; and as the watchman approached, Alfred raised the machete over his head as though to strike him with it. But then the night watchman — the dear, blessed, saintly night watchman who saved the day and your life — conked Alfred over the head with the flashlight and took his knife away from him.

Terrified, Alfred fled to the foreyard and tried to climb the locked front gates, denting and distorting them in a frenzy of desperate movement. The watchman chased him there, calling out to you in the flat above. Then he pulled him away from the fence and forced him to lie flat on the ground of the foreyard, subduing Alfred with the threat of his own machete, and shining the torch directly into his face.

You had answered the watchman’s call and come down from the flat; the police and the watchman’s supervisor were immediately summoned. There was a period of about ten minutes between Alfred’s capture and the arrival of the police. A bystander stood witness on the outside of the fence, and the intruder found himself dispossessed of his weapon and surrounded by three men of greater stature and strength than himself.

In spite of the violent turns brought about his condition, Alfred is meek by nature and was initially repentant. He declared, on witness accounts that have been verified both by the police and the local magistrate:

“I’ll never come back. I promise I’ll leave you alone. I will never come near you or your family again. You haven’t done any witchcraft; I was wrong about everything. Please call the police. I need to get locked up for my own safety.”

But his story soon changed; Alfred then addressed the watchman:

“He is a black magician! He is a bad man and he put this curse on me. I've been speaking with God and he knows what [my partner’s name] is doing!”

And it was probably the worst disappointment of them all when, in response to this revelation, the night watchman simply laughed in Alfred’s face.

Things turned out badly —

— for Alfred, but they could have been much worse. He was detained in custody for three days before getting deported to Fiji, handcuffed, by police escort. If we had wanted to punish Alfred, we could have submitted our case to the public prosecutor and pressed charges for two acts of criminal trespass and a breach of the restraining order you had filed with the local magistrate that day.

But we did not want to punish Alfred: we only wanted to make sure he couldn’t come near us again, so he was deported from the country. All the officers involved were reluctant to accede to our request for leniency, as it did not conform with due process; but by then Alfred’s parents were part of the police investigation, and they provided contacts for the doctors who had treated him.

This is not really the end of the story, because we do not know what has become of him. We do not know to what extent he still clings to his grudge, or whether he still truly believes all the stories he has been telling about us. We let him go free in the hope that the people who care about him will make sure he is treated for his illness, but we cannot even be sure that has happened either.

When someone like Alfred enters into one’s life, it is a challenge to sustain the position of empathy; how much can you really empathise with a person who is threatening to kill you?

It is really only possible when we hold within ourselves the certainty that we are neither victims of Alfred’s crimes nor the perpetrators of the suffering that led to them; and in dropping those stories, my conscience is clear.

Now we are seated —

— around the kitchen table, drinking in the quiet pleasures of early morning: you with your coffee, me with my cocoa, and the remnants of our daughter’s porridge lingering in the bottom of a bowl as she engages her small figurines in fervent dialogue. The smoke has dissipated as the fire burns hot, with all the fuel that I have put in the stove transforming into cherry-red coals commingling at its base.

On one side of the table is you and on the other side is me, and we are looking at each other; we smile, knowing that this peace is the only thing that is real.