The Fourth Pillar

THE THREE PILLARS of Smet Egal were striking, coding and radical empathy.

Leda was worst at the empathy.

The striking was her favorite, the straight punches, the kicks, the palm strikes. The coding was mostly a lot of homework, but she’d always been decent at homework. She even enjoyed the physical conditioning, which wasn’t technically a pillar but was crucial for developing the skills for the striking and the coding.

Really it was just the empathy that was an issue. Not so much empathy as a thing per se, but the way they drilled it. Always the final half-hour of training, Leda sitting across from one of the blank-faced, thick-necked dudes in the class, trying to feel his feelings.

Smet Egal is a modern martial art first developed in Quebec but now practiced around the world, said the framed statement on the wall.

The academy was in a repurposed office space, walls painted with thick, hollow-sounding plaster. Next to the statement were two competition photos of Master Philippe, one of him punching a guy in the face, the other of him on a first-place platform, gold medal around his neck, regulation black laptop tucked under his beefy triceps.  

Smet Egal is the only fighting system to integrate both human empathy and computer network hacking into a more traditional curriculum of physical attacks.

“Let your gaze fall on your partner in an unconcerned manner,” said Master Philippe, stalking around the room like a stressed-out lion. “Keep your focus soft and un-specific.”

Leda always thought about the same thing during the empathy drills: pull-ups. She would stare at the thick neck across from her, study the white collar of his uniform, the little black stiches, and think about pull-ups so hard she might as well have been actually doing them.

All of this to avoid letting the thick-necked guy know what was really in her mind, her deepest horror and mortification, the thing that was always in her mind, which was Jonathan.

The school’s only black-belt and senior student. He’d invaded some deep part of Leda’s psyche and she couldn’t get him out.

He’d started out neutral, just the guy who led the warm-ups for Master Philippe. But a few months into her training, she found herself thinking about him all the time. First she thought he was silly, and then she thought he was nice, and then one day she couldn’t think about anything but him. Not just at the academy, when he was right there in front of her, but everywhere. Walking home through the park past the giant mosaic heart statue. In her bed trying to sleep. At her desk at work, entering numbers into spreadsheets.

Lately he’d started appearing in her dreams, a tawny, sinewy figure who beckoned Leda by a tilt of his head. Get over here. The details of his face were unclear, a blurred approximation of what a face should be. Dark caverns for eyes, a rosy circle of lips centered between sharp angles of jawline.

In the dream, she melted with desire at the sight of him. But she woke up with her heart racing and soaked in sweat, like from a nightmare.  

She tried everything she could imagine to cure herself. Herbs, meditation, self-hypnosis. Online therapy.

“I’m trying to get this guy out of my head,” Leda said to the middle-aged woman on her laptop screen. “He’s invaded my mind, like, literally.”

The woman smiled calmly. Her eyes were puffy and her hair looked like it had been dyed too many times. 

“Obsessive thoughts can be very uncomfortable,” she said. “It can feel like a loss of control.”

“No, but he’s literally in my mind,” Leda said. “I mean literally literally.”

“Literally literally,” the woman repeated.

Leda tried to figure out how to make the woman understand.

“I think he’s doing it on purpose. He has powers of radical empathy.”

“Do you think you might be projecting that?” the woman asked. “Based on the helplessness you feel in this situation?”  

“No, I don’t think so.” Leda thought about it for a second. “I’m pretty sure he’s actually using some kind of technique to get inside my mind.”

The woman frowned and looked downward. Leda could hear her fingers clicking on her keyboard.

“I think you might need more help—more support, than I am able to provide,” the woman said, still typing. “After this session, you’ll receive an email describing more comprehensive services to address your situation.”

The screen went black, and a message popped up: We hope you enjoyed your session.

Leda read the email that showed up in her inbox about services for mental health emergencies. It said that people experiencing persistent delusions should call 911.

“What does he look like?” Maddie asked.

They were at HandleBar, one of those places with drinks from the twenties, everything bitters and sloe gin. Maddie was vaping, which you weren’t supposed to do in bars but no one ever stopped her.

“I don’t know,” Leda said.

“This dude is invading your brain,” Maddie said. “And you don’t know what he looks like?”

“I think I know,” Leda said. “I just can’t describe it.”

She conjured him in her mind, looking for specific details. There was nothing that stood out, no piercing blue eyes or olive skin. His skin, his hair, his height, all of it was just—medium.  Brown eyes, or perhaps they were gray. Hair short, kind of a sandy brown color. He looked basically like anybody. Or maybe she just actually didn’t know what he looked like.

“But, like, you find him attractive?”

“I find him.” Leda sighed. Just thinking about it was like being kicked in the stomach. “Beautiful.”

“Oh, shit,” Maddie said, blowing a long stream of vapor that hung suspended for a second, then started to fall downward before it disappeared. “This is bad.”

Leda nodded and ordered another round of drinks.  

“Jonathan is a good name for a guy who doesn’t look like anything,” Maddie said.

“It’s ridiculous.” The drink was making Leda feel a little better, something called a Mary Pickford with lots of pineapple and rum. “What the fuck is wrong with me?”

Leda watched Jonathan in class the next day, trying to find something distinctive about him, something that made him stand out. Was he funny? Not particularly. There was no sign of him being particularly smart, either. Did he have nice lips? Were his eyebrows interesting? Did he have large, muscular calves?

There was nothing. No specific feature or attribute that could explain why, when Leda looked at him, he glowed straight into her like he was made of uranium.

He led warm-ups, the same ones they did every day. Jump rope, sit-ups, push-ups, pull-ups, squats, meditation, self-effacement drills, binary drills and coding practice. Twenty or so students in white uniforms, moving in unison. Master Philippe skulked around the edges of the gym, like he usually did, inspecting equipment, checking things on the computer, frowning while Jonathan gave corrections.

“A little lower,” Jonathan said, pointing at thick necked guy’s squat. Or squinting at the new guy’s laptop: “You forgot the semicolon.”

Jonathan never gave Leda corrections. It definitely wasn’t because she was doing everything perfectly. He just didn’t want to say anything to her. That was clear to Leda. He knew—could easily sense, with his exquisitely-trained powers of empathy—that every flexed muscle fiber in her body longed for him to say something to her, anything. Even just, A little lower.

And he wasn’t going to give it to her.

If anything, her training had only gotten worse since he’d invaded her mind. She could still barely do one pull-up, her knee alignment was horrible on her squats, as always, and she stumbled clumsily through the trickier coding drills. But lately her punches seemed to be getting weaker, her kicks slower. There were days when she faced the striking pads held by one of her fellow students, and felt it would be easier to just quit than muster the strength to hit them.

There was a new woman in class, Alana. The guys greeted her with familiar nods like they knew her already. She wore a black belt like Jonathan and Master Philippe, the only woman with a black belt Leda had ever seen. Also as if that weren’t threatening enough, she was tall and thin with giant dark eyes and high cheekbones like a model.

Leda hated her instantly. She knew it was wrong to hate another woman, but she couldn’t stop it. The hate was as strong and involuntary as her love for Jonathan, and pretty obviously not unrelated.

 The psilocybin therapist had long gray hair and a round face like the moon. She was called Sonny and she charged a thousand dollars for individual sessions, which Leda couldn’t afford, so she did a group session for three-fifty.

“I would do it with you,” Maddie said, who had found the therapist on Groupon, “but I’m taking my printmaking workshop then.”

The session was Leda and three other women on floor pillows sipping mushroom tea, while Sonny glided around them in a gauzy tie-died dress and straw slippers. There was music playing, some kind of chimes. They started out sweet and melodic, then became thick and resonant, then expansive beyond their boundaries like they were changing the structure of the air where the sound waves traveled through.

“Visualize the challenge or difficulty you are hoping to solve,” floated Sonny’s voice through the chimes. “Try move into it, to get to the center.”

Leda watched the faces appearing and receding in the ceiling. She tried to conjure Jonathan’s face, but all she got was a blank outline. Lines showing his borders, but nothing in the middle, a blankness that was almost painful to look at.  

She felt a hand on her arm. Sonny’s voice, a smell like cinnamon somewhere very close.

“Something’s broken in your aura,” Sonny’s voice said. “You’re under the sway of a powerful magic.”

The cinnamon got stronger, and Leda was shoved into the middle of Jonathan’s outline. She fell into it, down, down, down into darkness. Finally she thunked into a place. It was a small, cold place lit by a spotlight. Next to her was an indistinct object behind a curtain of smoke. She waved the smoke away, which took a long time and stung her eyes. When she could finally see the object, which was supposed to give her some insight into Jonathan’s control over her, it was her brother Freddy, sitting on the edge of his bed playing video games with his headphones on.

It rained on Thursday night, a hard rain that hadn’t been in the forecast on Leda’s phone. It was a light drizzle when she left the academy, but halfway through the park, it began to fall hard and sideways, so that even if Leda had brought an umbrella, it wouldn’t have helped much. She pulled up the hood on her sweatshirt, wrapped her arms around her body, braced herself against the water pelting straight into her face.

The park was well-lit and usually busy with foot traffic, even at ten at night. But tonight there were only a few sad dog-walkers under umbrellas, and some even sadder umbrella-less commuters like Leda, getting soaked on their way back from work or someplace else. And then, oddly, a man sitting on a bench up ahead. Even with his umbrella, he must have been getting soaked. Something was wrong with him to be sitting in the rain like that, seemingly young and fit and in decent clothes and a nice umbrella, no reason to be sitting out in a storm. She got ready to run or fight.

“Wanna share my umbrella?” the man said as she walked past.

She shook her head and clenched her fist in her pocket.

Then she recognized something about the voice. She turned to look at the man. It was Jonathan.

Jonathan sitting on a bench in the miserable rain, leisurely surveying the path like this was his regular late-night hangout spot. In a gray sweatshirt and the same blue track pants she’d watched him leave the academy in just fifteen minutes earlier, now soaking wet at the hems.

Her stomach lurched, not entirely fear and not entirely excitement, a vomit taste in her throat. She wondered if this was real life or the dream.

Beckoning with a tilt of his head: get over here.

They both said, at the same time as though with one voice, “What are you doing here?”

“This is my walk home,” Leda said. “I’m here every night.”

“Well then.” For the first time ever, Jonathan looked straight into her face. His eyes were brown, it turned out, a medium shade of brown that made Leda think of toast. “I guess maybe I was looking for you.”

It was so amazing that she forgot about the rain pouring down on her, or maybe it stopped.

Leda had been avoiding Alana in class for as long as she could. Every time Master Philippe told them to choose their own partners, Leda would drop her eyes and shift closer to one of the thick-necked guys, until he said, “Uh, you want to pair up?”   

Until tonight. Master Philippe had chosen partners for them. “You two,” he said, pointing first at Alana, then at Leda. Which meant Leda was going to spend the next thirty minutes staring at Alana’s ridiculously high cheekbones and doe-like eyes, pretending that she was reading her mind rather than thinking with obsessive focus about pull-ups.

“Sit with your partner and be present,” said Master Philippe. He was sitting on a child-sized plastic chair which made him look even more giant than usual. “Don’t worry about feeling his feelings yet. Calm your mind.”

Don’t fuck this up, Leda told herself. Because there was no way Alana could be allowed to see what was really in Leda’s mind.

Jonathan appearing like a dream, on the bench in the rain.

Jonathan walking her home under his umbrella.

Jonathan kissing her by the mosaic heart sculpture.

Jonathan kissing her two more times. Once under the rose-covered trellis that marked the exit of the park. The last time in front of her apartment, as he said goodnight, politely refusing her offer to come inside.

Jonathan’s smile as he left, warming her insides against the cold, wet night.

Leda didn’t remember what they had talked about as they walked, no particular topics or details. She had a strong sense that there had been conversation, and that this had been sweet and intimate and connected to important topics close to each of their hearts. But maybe they had just walked in silence. Maybe the whole thing—the walk, the conversation, the kissing—had been a hallucination.

It had been almost a week, now, without any acknowledgment from him, any sign of affection or annoyance or disturbance. Right now he was sitting across from another student, one of the interchangeable pack of guys, cross-legged and waiting for the drills to start. His face was calm, blank, except for that barest hint of a smirk that seemed to appear any time she was looking at him, even though he was never looking back at her. Or maybe it was there when she wasn’t looking at him, too. Maybe that was just how his face looked.

“Once your mind is calm,” said Master Philippe, “you can slowly begin to allow your partner’s emotions enter your range of perception.”

She angled herself away from Jonathan and fixed her gaze on Alana. Which just made her think about Jonathan even more, about the obvious fact that Alana was quite possibly the most beautiful woman Leda and presumably Jonathan had ever seen. She imagined the two of them meeting up secretly after class, holding hands, kissing in front of the mosaic heart in the park. For a moment, she felt extremely certain that this was the reason Jonathan was ignoring her, that he had weighed Leda against Alana and come to the only reasonable decision. That Jonathan and Alana were having a passionate love affair or possibly just extremely hot sex.

I’m going to have to do the psilocybin again, she thought. Or maybe just a different online therapist.

That was when the whooshing began. A feeling like wind in Leda’s head, something breaking. A wave was coming towards her, crashing over her, saturating her like she was made of cloth. It was Alana’s feelings. They were flowing into Leda’s body and she could feel them as though they were her own. And those feelings were pity.

An overwhelming wave of pity. No questioning it: Alana felt very, very sorry for her.

The force of it made Leda gag. She clutched her stomach and fell over backwards, coughing.

Then she was floating. Weightless through the air, above the heads of the thick-necked guys, up to meet Alana by the ceiling, just under the acoustic tiles with their chaotically scattered little holes. 

Don’t make a face, said Alana’s voice inside Leda’s head. You’re making a face.

Leda tried as best she could to wipe off any expression. She was scared of falling to the floor, crashing onto all those dark-haired and tawny-haired and bald heads below her, but she tried not to show it.

Tomorrow night, Alana’s voice said. Meet us at seven. Twelve forty seven West Street. Twelve forty seven. Repeat it.

Leda repeated the numbers in her mind. Twelve forty seven. She wondered how she would remember, once she was back down on the ground, with no chance to write it down until class was over.

It’s one plus one plus two plus three, said Alana’s voice. Don’t forget.

For a moment, Leda saw the numbers floating in front of her face, like on a movie screen. One two four seven. Then they dissolved into a small, golden knife that seemed like it wanted to speak to her. But before it could, there was a hard vibration next to Leda. She looked up and saw Master Philippe. His feet shook the floor as he paced the room, surveying the empathizing students.

She glanced to her right, saw Jonathan and his big-necked partner, all the big-necked guys in pairs. No one seemed alarmed at how Leda had just been on the ceiling.

Alana was still sitting across from Leda, her face a blank mask of meditative focus. Leda looked into her dark eyes, which had seemed model-disdainful but now appeared something more like warrior-fierce, saw an anger and an urgency there that seemed to say without speaking: don’t tell anyone.  

“You came,” Alana said.

She opened the door before Leda even had a chance to knock. Either the place had security cameras or Alana was psychic, or both. She was wearing dark leggings and boots, an old, ripped t-shirt and a rolled bandana around her head. Leda had never seen in her anything but the Smet Egal uniform. Something about her regular clothes made Leda think of a pirate.

The address on West Street looked pretty much abandoned. A storefront with papered-over windows, a sign on the door reading Sewing Machine Repair. No doorbell.

Leda had skipped Master Philippe’s class to come find whatever Alana was leading her to, and she never missed class. She had been there on her birthday, training in silence and without celebration. Even on Maddie’s birthday, which Leda was not allowed to miss, she went to class first and met up with everyone at the bar afterwards. Right now they would be doing warm-ups. She wondered if Jonathan noticed or cared that she wasn’t there.

She followed Alana up a flight of stairs to a door that Alana unlocked using a key from around her neck, and into a room that looked like a dive bar or a biker club or maybe the common room of a really edgy fraternity. Black-painted walls covered in posters, a dented disco ball hanging from the ceiling, ripped plaid couches against the walls. Shelves against the far wall filled with boxing gloves, striking pads, a stack of regulation laptops and an assortment of heavy glass liquor bottles.

On the floor in the middle of the room, a dozen women were sitting in a circle. At least a dozen women, maybe more, Leda would count them later. All different sizes and skin colors, some sporty in workout clothes, some in fishnets under their shorts, some with pink hair or black hair or no hair at all. No one in uniforms or belts. At least two trans women, tall and leggy like Alana, and one woman so butch that Leda would have assumed she was a man if she passed her on the street.

“This is our Smet Egal gym,” Alana said. “Women only. Sit down, we’re just starting.”

Leda sat in a space they had left for her between the very butch woman and a woman wearing a turquoise petticoat over workout shorts.

“So I told you all that Leda would be joining us tonight,” Alana said. “She’s from Philippe’s academy. She was being targeted by a bravery-thief.”

“Jonathan,” two or three of the women said at once, groaning out his name like he was some kind of running joke. There were murmurs of agreement around the circle, a few bitter laughs.

Leda could feel her face turn red.

“Girl, don’t feel bad. He’s famous!” The woman in the petticoat grabbed Leda’s arm, then pulled her hands back like Leda was a hot stove. “Sorry, are you okay with being touched?”

Leda nodded.

“Oh good, because I suck at keeping my hands to myself.”

Someone in the circle muttered something like seriously. The woman grabbed Leda’s arm again.

“Sorry, but that’s just how I am,” the woman said. “Y’all know I’m working on it. Anyway, there’s no shame in getting caught by a bravery thief. I think most of us have.”

Around the circle, women nodded, raised their hands to be counted, made sounds of agreement.

“Bravery-thief,” Leda said. “I don’t know what that is.”

“That’s someone who uses their empathy training to steal your bravery,” Alana said. “It’s an abuse of Smet Egal.”

“Why do they do it?”

“Girl, who knows?” the woman in the petticoat said. “They get off on it or something.”

“Show of dominance,” said one of the trans women. She had deep cocoa skin and was wearing jean-shorts and a lot of necklaces.

“Sex,” said the butch woman next to Leda.

Alana raised her voice to cut them off.

“Bravery is basically the most important commodity in the universe,” she said. “If they can take your bravery, you won’t be able to do Smet Egal. Actually, you won’t be able to do anything. You’ll turn into their servant, or you’ll quit. That’s why one element of our mission is to protect all Smet Egal women from Bravery Thieves.”

“Do they only do it to women?” Leda asked.

“No, they do it to men, too,” Alana said. “But that’s not our problem.”

She pulled a long, gold knife out of her boot. Its polished blade flashed the colors of the disco ball, red and green and blue, as she held it in the air in front of Leda.

“You can train with us if you want,” she said. “Every night at seven. We’re called the Dagger Sisters. If you join, this will be your weapon. You just need to swear to uphold the safety and happiness of every woman who practices Smet Egal. Including yourself.”

Leda thought about it. It would mean giving up Master Philippe’s academy. No more thick-necked dudes, no more uniform, no more blank-faced stoicism. No more trying to turn herself into no one in particular. No more Jonathan, that smirk when she looked at him and he didn’t look back.

It was a surprisingly easy decision.   

“I thought there weren’t weapons in Smet Egal,” she said. “Just striking, coding and radical empathy.”

“That’s how the men do it,” Alana said. “We use knives.”

Leda reached out, took the knife by its handle. The swirling patterns carved into the metal felt solid and cool under her fingers.

“I’m in,” she said.

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