Reading the essay “Fog Count” in Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams felt similar to dreaming in the way it meandered. The first couple of paragraphs explain that she’s looking for quarters in a West Virginian town in order to bring them to prison, where she will visit a man named Charlie and will buy food and drinks from the prison’s vending machine for them to share. She spends time explaining who Charlie is as a person, how they met, and who he is to her. Charlie is an ultradistance runner, a former addict, a father, and much more. They met at an 
extreme ultrarun, and now they’re penpals. Jamison reached out because she thought his life was interesting. Bits of Charlie’s life in prison and some of the contents of their penpal letters are sprinkled throughout, and Jamison briefly explains the crime that put Charlie in prison.
She switches to talking about the friend she stayed with during her visit to West Virginia, and her “ramshackle house strung with Mexican fiesta flags and skirted by an apron of oddly comforting debris: a pile of old dresses, a bucket of crushed PBR cans, an empty tofu carton with its plastic flap crushed onto the dirt.” She spends a few pages on the house and the town, trying to explain their “magic”. She reveals it through tiny, seemingly inconsequential details and an anecdote about a Boy Scout troop.
Then, very suddenly, she’s back to searching for quarters, and then she’s off to the prison. The rest of the essay is told through one continuous scene, starting with driving to the prison and ending with leaving it. The reader learns more about Charlie and all about the conversation andemotions that came from her visit.
Reading through this essay felt like falling into one story and then into another and another and then back into the first. The author leads you through a maze, and when you think you’ve reached the middle you find yourself at the start again, but with more knowledge than before. It makes it a very compelling story.
This one doesn’t directly mention Jamison’s exploration of empathy, but it’s clear that she’s thinking about it. Visiting hours end at 3pm, and Jamison is very aware of that fact as that time approaches.
“Three o’clock is just another hour in the day but it is also these things: the difference between me and Charlie, between our clothes and the dinners we’ll eat that night, between the number of people we’ll touch in the next week, between those liberties the state has deemed appropriate for his body and for mine. … Three o’clock is when one of us goes, the other one stays. Three o’clock is the end of the fantasy that his world was open or that I ever entered it. When the truth is we never occupied the same space. A space isn’t the same for a person who has chosen to be there and a person who hasn’t.”
There isn’t quite a guilt present, but there’s some form of Jamison feeling for Charlie. She writes about running in one of her letters, and questions the decision. She is wary of feeling like she’s bragging about the life she gets to live and the life he doesn’t. Even here, she recognizes that she was only ever a brief visitor, someone who could never understand the kind of life he is restricted to, and she does her best to empathize with it.