The Empathy Job

*This one came from thinking about how we perform emotions at work, and what it'd be like if someone could literally see through the act. Hope you enjoy the slow burn and the messiness of two adults figuring out what they actually want. Thanks for reading.*

I got this job two years ago by lying through my teeth, which is a funny thing to say out loud given where I work, but there it is. The Museum of Emotional Heritage, junior curator, age thirty-four, current employee of the month so many times running that they stopped putting my photo up because the frame was wearing out. What they don't know, and what I will deny under oath if this ever gets read aloud at my funeral, is that I have been quietly editing the collection for about eighteen months, and my numbers have never been better.

Here is how the lending works, for those of you who live somewhere sane. Somebody walks into the museum, pays a fee, and borrows a gem, which is a small glassy thing about the size of a marble that stores a recorded human feeling. Grief from someone who survived it. Joy from a wedding. The specific calm of a woman I have never met who apparently used to sit on her porch in the rain. You hold the gem, the feeling plays through you, and for twenty minutes you are having somebody else's Tuesday. It is legal here in San Junipero, it is regulated, and it pays my rent, so I have made my peace with it.

My peace came with an asterisk. The raw gems, the ones straight from the vault, are honest, and honest feelings are a mixed bag. The archive's joy comes with a little static in it, a faint doubt underneath, because the person who recorded it was wondering if the marriage would last. The grief comes with beauty in it, which people find upsetting, because they came to cry clean and instead got complicated. So I started polishing. Nothing dramatic. I would open a gem on my editing bench and nudge the warmth up a few points, smooth the doubt out of the joy, trim the beauty out of the grief, and suddenly people were leaving reviews that said finally a museum that understands me. My borrow rates tripled. Lyle, our director, thinks I have a gift.

The gift is a settings menu and a complete lack of scruples, which I suppose is a kind of gift.

I do feel bad about it, sometimes, in a low-grade way, like a headache you decide to live with. The feelings I loan out are not the feelings people actually had. But the people borrowing them leave happier than they came in, and nobody has ever once complained that the grief was too tidy, so I file my guilt under miscellaneous and move on with my day. That worked beautifully for eighteen months.

Then came the Tuesday when Lyle called an all-staff meeting.

The meeting room at the museum seats about fifteen people and has a window that looks out on the fog machine we use for atmosphere, and on that Tuesday it was full, all fifteen of us plus Sonia Jensen squeezed in late with a coffee that was as big as a small dog. Sonia is twenty-nine, junior curator like me, gunning for the senior spot, and she has the smile of a woman who reads your performance reviews before you do. She sat down next to me and whispered, "Whatever this is, it's either layoffs or money, and I've decided it's money."

"Always nice to be around an optimist," I whispered back.

Lyle stood at the front looking as if he had rehearsed being casual, which for Lyle is any man standing anywhere. He is forty-one, wears the same gray blazer as a uniform, and once dated a PR consultant for a year before she took a job in another city, which I only know because he mentions it when funding is threatened, the way other people mention a childhood dog.

"So," he said, "good news, mostly. The board has approved a full authenticity audit of the archive. Every gem, top to bottom. We have a specialist coming in, visiting, very well regarded, Roland Lowe. He'll be with us for, I'd guess, six weeks."

Sonia said "money" under her breath with such satisfaction that I nearly laughed, and then the rest of what Lyle said landed on me like a dropped gem case. Authenticity audit. Every gem. The word authenticity has a specific meaning in this building, and that meaning is does this recording match the donor's original baseline, and I had spent a year and a half answering that question with a settings menu.

"Now, Roland is not here to find problems," Lyle continued, in the tone of a man whose job was literally to find problems before other people found them. "He's here to certify the collection so we can expand lending into the northern district. This is growth. This is good. Kris, he's asked to shadow your bench process specifically, since you're our top performer, so make him welcome."

Fourteen faces turned toward me with varying amounts of envy, and I said something like "great, love an audit, big fan of paperwork," which got a laugh and bought me about four seconds of cover while my internal monograph screamed. Six weeks. Six weeks of a specialist sitting next to my bench, where the settings menu lives, where my whole beautiful fraud lives, and the best part, the truly excellent part, is that Roland Lowe does not just compare paperwork. The man is famous, in the small world of people who care about gem forensics, for reading emotional residue off a gem by holding it, without any equipment at all, and telling you what the recorder actually felt. He is a human baseline. I could edit the gems all day and it would not matter, because the fraud detector has skin.

I spent the rest of the meeting doing calm breathing with the enthusiasm of a hostage, and Sonia elbowed me twice and said "this is huge for your file, shadowing an audit," and I said "yes, huge, can't wait," in a voice I hope she read as humble rather than as a woman calculating exit routes through the fog machine.

* * *

Roland Lowe arrived on a Thursday, which I know because Thursdays are when we restock the lending desks, and he showed up at ten in the morning already holding one of our gems like it had personally disappointed him. He is thirty-eight, tall in the way that makes you notice door frames, with reading glasses he wears pushed up on his head like a decoration, and a handshake that lasts exactly as long as it should and not a second more.

"Kris Kruger," I said. "Top performer. You've been warned, I assume."

"I was told you have excellent numbers," he said, setting the gem down on my bench with what I felt was unearned carelessness.

"The best numbers. Statistically suspicious numbers, some have said."

He looked up at that, one beat, then said, "Joke?" and I said, "Mostly," and he wrote something in a small notebook, and I decided I hated the notebook and everything it stood for.

The first week was actually fine, in the way that a dental appointment is fine once the drilling starts and you've surrendered. He followed me through my intake process, which is real and legitimate, I catalog, I check the donor baseline file, I run the standard calibration, all true. The editing step I do after hours, alone, when the vault is closed and God is looking the other way. He asked good questions, took notes, and had a habit of holding each gem for a few seconds before handing it back, rolling it in his fingers, and I learned quickly not to watch him do it because he watched me watch him do it.

"You do that on purpose," I accused him on day four, tagging a grief gem with slightly more force than necessary.

"Hold them?"

"Read them."

"Everyone reads them," he said. "Most people just don't notice they're doing it. You've got residue all over your hands right now, by the way. You tagged the Delaney grief this morning. There's rain in it." And there was, faintly, a smell of rain off my own wrist where the gem had sat, which was creepy and correct, and I laughed it off and went home early and did not sleep.

The problem with Roland, I discovered over that first week, is that he is not intense about work the way Lyle's old archivist girlfriend allegedly found him, he is intense in the worse way, the way where he notices everything and says only a fraction of it, and you spend your evenings wondering which fraction. He drinks his coffee black. He thinks my jokes are jokes, mostly. He told me once, at the end of a long shift, that the visiting archivist he dated three years ago left because he cared more about the collection than about people, and he said it flat, like a fact he'd filed, and I said something kind and stupid and he almost smiled, which did something to my afternoon that I chose not to examine.

Then came the Thursday of the Delaney gem.

The Delaney grief is our flagship lending piece, our most borrowed item, and I had polished it within an inch of its life, smoothed out the anger, warmed up the sorrow, made it into grief you could enjoy, and Roland had held it that morning for a long time, longer than usual, rolling it in his fingers with his eyes half shut, and I had stood there feeling like a liar in a court where the judge could smell perjury.

He set it down, took off his glasses, cleaned them on his shirt, put them back on, and looked at me, and I want to state that whatever he saw in my emotional residue, he earned it, because I was radiating guilt like a space heater.

"Your process," he said, "is very clean."

"Thank you."

"Too clean," he said. "The Delaney baseline has an anger spike at the fourteen second mark. Every grief recording has one. Grief is mostly anger wearing a coat. Yours doesn't."

"Maybe the Delaneys were very well adjusted," I said, and heard my own voice do the thing it does when I'm buying time, going up half an octave, bright and helpful, the exact fake enthusiasm that got me hired here two years ago in the first place.

He didn't laugh. He didn't accuse me of anything either, which was worse, he just wrote in the notebook, and closed it, and said, "Walk me through your calibration again tomorrow. Slowly. I'd like to watch your hands."

I said sure, tomorrow, slowly, hands, in the voice of a woman already Googling fog machine exit routes, and when he left the bench I sat down and put my forehead on the cold metal surface and thought, with real clarity, that I had approximately six days to become an honest woman or commit the most elaborate forgery of my life, and that knowing me, the smart money was embarrassingly split.

* * *

He gave me six days before he came for the vault, which I choose to read as a courtesy.

It was a Wednesday, nearly eleven at night, and the vault does this thing after hours where the climate control hum swallows every other sound, so when Roland Lowe's voice came out