Sympathy and Its Instruments

We met in a hotel bar in Dalkey, which was Tana’s suggestion and Patricia’s concession. Patricia would have preferred somewhere less charming — a motorway service station, maybe, or a hospital cafeteria. Somewhere fluorescent and without opinion. She distrusted atmosphere the way other people distrust salesmen: it was trying to sell you something, and the thing it was selling was feeling, and feeling was the enemy of seeing clearly. But Tana wanted the bay visible through the window, and the afternoon light on the water, and the particular quality of an Irish pub that has been serving drinks long enough to have stopped performing Irishness. So Dalkey it was.

I arrived first, which I regretted immediately. Arriving first meant choosing a table, which meant making a decision that would frame the entire conversation, and I was not confident I could frame anything involving these two women. I picked a corner booth with a view of Dublin Bay because it seemed neutral, then realized nothing about this meeting would be neutral. I ordered a glass of water and waited.

Patricia came in wearing a coat that looked like it had been selected to avoid being remembered. She sat down across from me without greeting, glanced at the menu, and said, “I don’t want to talk about psychology.”

“That’s going to be difficult,” I said, “given what the story is about.”

“The story is about behaviour. Psychology is what people invent afterward to explain behaviour they find uncomfortable.” She ordered a gin and tonic, then added, “No lime.” The bartender, a young man with an earring and the careful neutrality of someone who has learned not to have opinions at work, nodded and left. Patricia watched him go. “That boy has a very clean face,” she said. “I always wonder what people with clean faces are hiding.”

Tana arrived twelve minutes late, apologized to no one in particular, and slid into the booth beside me. She smelled of rain and something herbal — not perfume exactly, more like she had walked through a garden on the way in. She looked at Patricia with the expression of someone meeting a distant relative they had been warned about.

“So,” Tana said. “We’re writing about a woman who steals identities.”

“She doesn’t steal them,” Patricia said. “She borrows them. That’s different. A thief knows the thing doesn’t belong to her. A borrower believes she’ll give it back. Or she believes ownership is beside the point.”

“Is it beside the point?”

“Of course it is. Identity isn’t property. You can’t lock it in a safe. If I walk into this room and start doing everything you do — wearing your coat, drinking your drink, laughing at the same moments — have I taken something from you? Or have I simply demonstrated that what you thought was yours was never really held?”

Tana considered this. I could see her considering it — the way she tipped her head slightly, the way her fingers moved on the edge of her glass. She was a person who thought with her whole body, which was the opposite of Patricia, who thought with a scalpel.

“You’re describing it from the borrower’s perspective,” Tana said. “I’m more interested in the woman watching it happen. The therapist. The person who sees the pattern forming but can’t name it, because naming it would mean admitting that the therapeutic space she built — her safe room, her green armchair, her fifty-minute hours — was never as contained as she believed.”

“The therapist is a frame,” Patricia said. “She’s a window we look through. I’m not interested in the window. I’m interested in what’s on the other side.”

“But the window is dirty,” Tana said. “That’s the whole point. She has her own past, her own fractures. She can’t see Niamh clearly because she can’t see herself clearly. The investigation — if you want to call it that — is compromised from the first session.”

Patricia drank her gin. “You want to make this a story about the detective. I want to make it a story about the crime.”

“I want to make it a story where you can’t tell the difference.”

They looked at each other. The bay threw light across the table, shifting as a cloud moved. I realized I had been holding my breath.

“Can I ask about the setting?” I said, because someone needed to break the silence and I had accepted that my role in this conversation was to be the person who said the obvious thing so that one of them could tell me why it was wrong.

“Dublin,” Tana said, immediately. “It has to be Dublin. A city small enough that social circles compress — you run into the same people at the same gallery openings, the same charity runs, the same Italian restaurants in the same neighborhoods. Niamh’s infiltration only works in a place where proximity is unavoidable. In London or New York she would be invisible. In Dublin she’s ambient.”

“The city doesn’t matter,” Patricia said.

“The city always matters.”

“The city matters to you because you’re Irish and sentimental about rain. The mechanism — the slow absorption of another person’s life — works anywhere. It works in a village. It works on a cruise ship. The architecture is human, not geographical.”

“Fine,” Tana said, and the word had a blade in it. “The architecture is human. But humans live in places. And places have weather, and light, and the particular feeling of walking past Georgian houses in the rain when the stone looks like it’s dissolving. If you strip that out, you’re left with a case study. I don’t write case studies.”

“I do,” Patricia said, and smiled for the first time. It was a very small smile, the kind that acknowledges a difference without apologizing for it. “I write case studies about people who fascinate me. The setting is whatever room they happen to be sitting in.”

I wrote in my notebook: Place as mood vs. place as irrelevance. Don’t resolve this — use both. The therapist’s office is Tana’s (the beeswax, the cornices, the light). Niamh’s interior is Patricia’s (stripped of geography, pure mechanism).

“What about the therapist’s daughter?” I said. “When does Niamh get to her?”

“Late,” Patricia said. “The daughter should arrive late in the story, like a complication in a disease that was progressing on schedule.”

“God,” Tana said. “A disease.”

“What would you call it?”

“I’d call it grief. Or longing. Or the thing that happens when a person grows up without being taught who they are, and the only way they learn is by watching other people and copying the parts that seem to work. I’d call it the saddest crime I can imagine.”

“It’s not a crime,” Patricia said. “That’s what makes it interesting. There is nothing illegal about changing your hair. There is nothing illegal about joining someone’s book club. There is nothing illegal about becoming someone’s friend. Every single thing Niamh does is, individually, innocent. It’s only when you see the pattern that it becomes sinister. And even then — is it sinister? Or is it just a woman trying to assemble a self from the materials available?”

“You keep defending her.”

“I’m not defending her. I’m refusing to condemn her before I understand her. There’s a difference. Although I suppose in your country that distinction has always been controversial.”

Tana laughed, surprised. “That was almost charming, Patricia.”

“I am never charming. Charming is what Niamh is, and look where it gets people.”

I asked about the ending, because I was worried about it. An ending was where a story this ambiguous could collapse — tip too far toward resolution and you’d have a diagnosis; tip too far toward mystery and you’d have a shrug. I said as much, and Patricia set down her glass with the careful precision of someone placing a chess piece.

“There should be no ending,” she said. “Not in any conventional sense. The therapist should be left watching, unable to intervene, unable to even articulate what she’s watching. She knows something is wrong. She suspects something is predatory. But she cannot prove it, and the ethical architecture of her profession — confidentiality, the therapeutic relationship — has become a trap that keeps her inside while the threat moves freely. The story ends with her sitting in her office, knowing less than she did at the beginning.”

“I agree about not resolving it,” Tana said, “but for different reasons. You want the ending unresolved because you find ambiguity aesthetically satisfying. I want it unresolved because that’s how it actually works. I spent years covering crime in Dublin. The unsolved cases aren’t the dramatic ones — they’re the ones that just stop. The evidence dries up. People move on. The file stays open on someone’s desk and nobody ever closes it because closing it would mean admitting they failed. That’s how this story should feel. Not dramatically ambiguous. Just… stopped.”

“Those are the same thing.”

“They are not the same thing. Yours is a philosophical position. Mine is an observation.”

“Every observation is a philosophical position.”

“Every philosophical position is an evasion of the particular.”

They were both right, which was the problem. I sat between them feeling the tectonic pressure of two people who agreed on the destination but could not agree on why they were going there. I wrote in my notebook: Ending = the therapist at her desk, rain on the window, daughter slipping away. Not a revelation. A continuation. The horror isn’t that something is happening — it’s that it will keep happening, past the last sentence, into the silence after the story.

“What about Fiona?” I said. “The first woman. The one who moves to London.”

“What about her?” Patricia said.

“Do we see her? Do we ever get her perspective?”

“No,” they said simultaneously, and then looked at each other with the mutual surprise of people who had stumbled into agreement against their will.

“No,” Tana repeated, more slowly. “Fiona is reported. Fiona is evidence. The therapist assembles her from social media posts and secondhand accounts and her own anxious extrapolation. We never see Fiona directly. We see the shape she leaves behind.”

“The negative space,” Patricia said.

“Yes. The negative space. And the question of whether the negative space was always there — whether Fiona’s curated life was always hollow and Niamh simply exposed it — or whether Niamh hollowed it out.”

“Both,” Patricia said. “It’s always both. People who get borrowed from are never entirely solid to begin with. That’s not blame. That’s architecture.”

I wanted to push back on that — on the idea that the victim’s fragility is part of the mechanism, that being borrowable is a quality of the borrowed rather than the borrower. But I wasn’t sure Patricia was wrong. And the discomfort of not being sure she was wrong was, I realized, the exact feeling the story needed to produce.

“I keep circling back to the wine glass,” Tana said, after a stretch of silence in which all three of us watched the bay. A sailing boat had appeared from somewhere, its white triangle implausibly crisp against the grey water. “The detail about how Fiona holds her wine glass — by the bowl, not the stem. That’s the kind of thing that makes my skin crawl, but I can’t quite say why.”

“Because it’s too specific to be accidental,” Patricia said. “If Niamh had adopted Fiona’s general style — her clothes, her vocabulary — you could explain it as admiration, as the normal social mimicry that everyone does. But the wine glass. That’s a gesture so small, so individual, that copying it requires study. Sustained, close observation over time. The kind of watching that a lover does, or a painter, or a predator.”

“Or a person who has never had a gesture of her own.”

“You keep coming back to that. The sympathy.”

“And you keep running from it.”

Patricia looked at Tana with an expression I could not read. Not irritation, not respect — something closer to recognition, as if Tana had named a thing Patricia had been circling without landing on. “I am not running from sympathy,” she said. “I am trying to keep it from ruining the story. Sympathy is the most dangerous tool a writer has. Used badly, it explains everything and forgives everything and turns your monster into a patient with a diagnosis and a treatment plan. I want Niamh to be irreducible. I want the reader to finish the story and still not know what she is.”

“I want that too,” Tana said. “But I want the not-knowing to hurt. I don’t want it to be a cool intellectual puzzle. I want it to be the specific, awful feeling of a mother watching her daughter befriend someone she cannot warn her about. The not-knowing has to have a body. It has to live in a specific woman, in a specific chair, in a specific room that smells of beeswax.”

“Your beeswax,” Patricia said, and it might have been a dismissal or an acknowledgment.

“My beeswax,” Tana agreed. “And your ice. The story needs both.”

We sat for a while after that, the three of us looking at the bay without seeing it, or seeing it too well. The sailing boat had moved behind the headland. The light was doing what Irish light does in the late afternoon — thinning, losing its argument, conceding the point to grey.

I asked one more question, the one I had been avoiding. “Whose story is it? The therapist’s or Niamh’s?”

“The therapist’s,” Tana said. “Obviously. She’s the narrator, she’s the one with something to lose, she’s the damaged witness whose own past makes her unreliable.”

“Niamh’s,” Patricia said. “Obviously. The therapist is just the last person to watch her work. The story is about what Niamh does, not about how it makes someone else feel.”

“It can’t be both,” I said, though I suspected it could.

“Of course it can’t,” Patricia said. “You’ll have to choose.”

“You’ll have to fail to choose,” Tana said. “You’ll have to write it so that both readings coexist, and the reader can never fully settle into one. The therapist thinks it’s her story. Niamh knows it’s hers. Neither of them is wrong.”

Patricia finished her gin and set the glass on the table with a small definitive sound. “I will say one thing about your Dublin, since we’re here and the light is doing that thing you like. There is a quality to this place — the compression of it, the way everyone is two handshakes from everyone else — that does serve the story. In a larger city, what Niamh does would be invisible. Here, it has witnesses. And the worst thing about witnesses is that they see everything and can prove nothing.”

Tana looked at her. “Was that a concession?”

“It was an observation.”

“Every observation is a philosophical position.”

Patricia stood up. “I need to leave before you start being right about everything.” She put on her coat — the coat designed to avoid being remembered — and paused at the edge of the table. “One more thing. The recovered memories. Niamh’s childhood. You must not answer whether they’re real.”

“I know,” I said.

“You say you know, but you’ll be tempted. You’ll want to give the reader a foothold. Something to stand on while they decide what kind of person Niamh is. Don’t. The ground should be wet all the way through.”

She left. The door closed behind her. Tana and I sat in the silence that a person like Patricia leaves behind — not empty, exactly, but cleared. As if the air had been recently and thoroughly used.

“She’s right about the memories,” Tana said, after a while. “But she’s right for the wrong reasons. She wants them unresolved because ambiguity is elegant. I want them unresolved because that’s what trauma actually does. It refuses to be verified. You carry these fragments — a cellar, a man’s hands, a smell you can’t place — and you can never know if they belong to you. That uncertainty isn’t a literary device. It’s a condition. It’s the ground you stand on when the ground is gone.”

She gathered her bag, her jacket. The rain had started, as it does in Dublin, without announcement, as if it had been raining all along and the dry spell was the aberration.

“I think the hardest thing about this story,” she said, standing, “will be the daughter. Aisling. Because we need the reader to be frightened for her, genuinely frightened, without being certain that there is anything to be frightened of. Fear without an object. That’s the thing I keep trying to write, over and over, in different forms. The moment when you look at someone you love and realize you have no idea what is standing next to them.”

She left. I sat with my water and my notebook and the view of the bay, which had gone dark now, the rain erasing the line between the water and the sky. I had two positions I could not reconcile: Patricia’s Niamh, who was a mechanism, a borrowing engine, fascinating and cold; and Tana’s Niamh, who was a wound, reaching for warmth, heartbreaking and perhaps dangerous precisely because heartbreaking. The story would have to hold both without flinching, without choosing, without letting the reader off the hook.

I paid the bill and walked out into the rain, which was the kind of Dublin rain that doesn’t fall so much as accumulate — on your collar, on your eyelashes, on the inside of your thoughts. I had not resolved anything. I had not arrived at a plot. But I had arrived at the feeling the story needed: the particular terror of watching someone you cannot read, knowing that your inability to read them is either your failure or their design, and that the difference between those two things might be the difference between compassion and catastrophe.

The rain did what it does. I walked back toward the train.