Sympathy

by Olivia Sudjic

  They got married in 1976. Your mother looked like a dessert. Mark began working toward becoming a professor at Columbia. I guess he felt claustrophobic, having been born, raised, and then worked his way up in academia within the same two-square-mile pocket of Manhattan.

  Susy always says she knew he was the man she would marry right after she first slept with him. She had gotten up, dressed with her back to him where he lay in bed, then sat on his one armchair in his poky student room. As she sat there, watching and waiting for him to wake, she got that intuition that her period was about to arrive, slightly ahead of schedule. She leapt up at once, but it was too late. Mark refused her offers to recover his chair, saying, perhaps still high or half asleep, that it was a marker. A stain that made her part of the furniture. I have never heard her tell that story and not found it slightly creepy, but she always uses this anecdote as if it were a litmus test of good masculine character. He sounds nice, she will say about some man, but you can see she’s thinking he wouldn’t pass the period-stain challenge like Mark.

  After he finished his PhD, Mark accepted a position as a theoretical physicist at Columbia. A theory emerged to explain the elementary architecture of the universe. He began focusing on superstring theory, and gradually M-theory. M stands for mother of all theories, magic, mystery, or matrix. It is an adaptation of superstring, a simple equation by the standards of particle physics, that, if proved, will “reconcile what we think of as incompatible things, explain the nature and behavior of all matter and energy.” And he became, shall we say, preoccupied. Susy (Mark was the one who contracted her from Susannah to Susy, the abbreviation of superstring theory) was in awe but could not work him out. I guess women love mystery. Trust me, you want to go for a nice, safe one like my late husband, Rex. I made that mistake with Mark’s father. Your mother doesn’t like there to be things—any things—that exclude her. Physics was like a secret language between Mark and his friends. She used to make jokes, funny for no one at all. Things like, “As a physicist, he should be taking more interest in the physical, or in patterns which repeat, and small things, like babies.” She raised it around so many mortified acquaintances and waitresses that, because Mark would do anything to avoid a scene, they began trying for a baby even though it wasn’t the right time with his research. They tried for four years without success.

  I knew a lot about their sex life already, because, in that area, at least, my mother has no filter.

  I remember the year it became an issue, when I sent Susy to a doctor, because it was when the Chinese loaned two pandas, Ling Ling and Yun Yun, to the Bronx Zoo. I had decided I wanted a grandchild by this point. I guess now that it seemed possible I might not get one. I did a lot of reading about the mating process the zookeepers were trying to facilitate. I think pandas lose their libido if a human walks through their enclosure, much as a human would if a panda crashed through the bedroom.

  Susy mentioned the pandas too. Mark was a kind of Ling Ling, the male panda. To get him interested in mating, Susy would create a set of imperceptible conditions—the right temperature, the right light, the right meal—and to boost the chances of this rare, involuntary urge—the Great Hump Day—occurring at a moment when she could make use of it, she barely left his side.

  Though she went with him pretty much everywhere, even to work, where she would seat herself in a library near his office, she was oblivious to him. She had wished so hard, for so long, for a particular future to manifest itself in a blue cross that the blue cross overlaid Mark’s face.

  I know the feeling.

  Mark said to me that whenever he woke up, Susy was lying beside him, already waiting, with her eyes wide open. She kept talking about how they would soon be the Three Hares. That’s the famous symbol of the three hares chasing each other, something Mark had explained to her once, early on, before he knew how she would turn it against him, as a classic example of rotational symmetry. My only input was names. I always said it would need to work in a crisis, over a loudspeaker, and in a foreign accent.

  When I stayed with her, Silvia could always be counted on to summarize the nature of something about to happen so that then there was little need to actually do it. Susy still wanted to do it, and had dutifully chosen a name with an eye on death, destruction, and crisis management.

  I made a list of all the possible things Alice might rhyme with if yelled down a busy street, and it didn’t appear there would be many emergencies where you would mistake Alice for palace, malice, or chalice. Susy stopped going to all the expensive doctors I’d sent her to. She believed by going to fertility doctors she was pulling infertility toward her. Instead she read horoscopes and did Tarot cards. The paved footpaths in Riverside Park were riddled with cracks. It was all code. I remember she even bought that candy that comes with messages inside and left the pertinent ones on Mark’s side of the bed, which went undiscovered and were slept on, leaving troubling brown stains on the sheets. My cleaner then was Mark’s too, and she used to complain about it all the time.

  But the big sign came when she was standing by the Alice statue in Central Park. She got talking to a young woman who swiftly became her friend, confidante, and then, despite Mark’s and my attempts at intervention, surrogate. Susy could befriend women at the speed of light. I always say that those friendships are more like falling in love and always finish as quickly. And of course the surrogate ended up miscarrying the first Alice. So Susy was forty-one by the time she finally brought you, Alice II, home in a Moses basket.

  This is my favourite part of this particular letter . . .

  By then they lived on Claremont Avenue in professorial housing. It was covered in snow when we carried you up the steps of the building. It was January 19, 1991. I have a Polaroid I’ll show you when you get here. In the hour between leaving and returning, there had been a power cut and water had flooded everywhere. The long, dark hall was knee-deep, the elevators were out of service. Mail had floated out of an open mailbox on the bottom row, spooling all manner of personal information around the faux plaster columns. I hated that apartment. I remember Mark looking so depressed, and I made, in retrospect, an ill-judged joke like “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

  I had to admit that it seemed a lot of what Susy had told me about that particular moment appeared to be true. Once I had even found the note that my mother had said was pinned to the noticeboard in the entrance when they got home to the flood:

  Dear tenants, someone has a faulty flusher in their toilet. If you notice your toilet is not flushing properly, or if you hear noise when you flush, please notify the super.

  Thank you, Ramon

  Susy told me that Mark smiled, took the note off the board, folded it neatly, and put it in his pocket. This was normally the thing she would have done—something that seemed out of the ordinary and was perhaps a sign—but she was carrying me in the Moses basket and had no free hands.

  “What are you going to do with that?” she asked him.

  “Mark this day.”

  Then he had apparently started humming “The Power of Love” in the flooded hallway, lined with broken columns just like in the music video for that song where Luther Vandross is up to his shins in water and the screen crackles with electricity bolts, suggesting an invisible field of love permeating a Roman-bath-themed nightclub.

  At first, when I was a child and my mother used to recount the homecoming, bringing it into sharper relief each time until you’d think it had happened the morning of her telling it to you, I thought it was a story about how happy Mark must have been to finally be a father. That’s the way she tells it. Even before Silvia got in touch, as I grew up I realised that by that point he was a forty-four-year-old particle physicist, and so gradually I saw that singing Luther Vandross was another kind of sign. He was losing it. My arrival meant he could finally leave the city, where he was cracking up under the conviction that he was wasting his one chance to be great. For him to take the note meant that, like Susy, when
he wanted something badly, any rough-edged, fragmentary thing became as smooth and unequivocal as an arrow.

  Mark was by then part of a team setting up the SSC (Superconducting Super Collider) in Waxahachie, Texas. It was, if you know nothing about physics, supposed to have been what the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva later became, except the American version, of course, was going to be ten times more powerful and hunt the Higgs boson “ten times faster.”

  In 1988, the year of that first, miscarried Alice, the area around Waxahachie was chosen, by a committee that included Mark, as the site for the collider. He was then enlisted to convince coastal academics to move there. Young physicists had followed, not yet in his footsteps, but his directions. Settlers in big white sneakers, mavericks in Hawaiian shirts. Though he still lived in New York, he had been spending more and more time in Dallas (Susy, for national security reasons, was forbidden from accompanying him) and less and less at Columbia or the Morningside Heights apartment, where Susy occupied herself by drawing. Her condition for relocating to Dallas had been that they would first adopt and that she and Mark would write and illustrate a children’s book together, Alice in Dallas, which would make particle physics accessible to three- to six-year-olds.

  Seventeen shafts were sunk and fourteen miles of the tunnel bored out of Austin chalk before the site was abandoned. Congress pulled support, canceling funding, citing fears about committing to its projected cost. Many physicists went to Wall Street; a few who remained got involved in ranching.

  That’s from an article Silvia showed me. Susy sometimes says that too, wistfully, as if cattle might have been the answer. Other times, depending on her mood, she speaks self-importantly about her sacrifice—as if the fate of American science, the discovery of the origins of the universe, rested solely on Mark’s permanent physical presence there.

  When it was cancelled, Mark felt betrayed, not, I now know, by Congress, and not by the physics community, and not, Silvia assured me, by me, but by Susy. If she hadn’t made him wait in New York until they found me, if he had been there, in the field, sooner, he was sure the project would have succeeded. I’m sure he felt guilty. Not for us, but for all the other families and lives he had uprooted, abandoned in the middle of the desert, and exposed to early failure.

  In 1993 he and Susy came ingloriously back to New York, with you in tow of course. You had just started talking. You came right back to the same bit of Morningside Heights, but his Columbia accommodation had been reallocated in your absence. For a year you all stayed in an apartment owned by one of Mark’s friends—another professor, who at that time rarely used it—in the area. Someone had used pieces of boat interior to establish a new life within the building at some point, so the apartment looked like a 1930s art deco ocean liner inside.

  I imagine this to be the kind of unique interior that can only have come into being when one of the residents came into the possession of an ocean liner and didn’t know what to do with it.

  It was possible it was supposed to thematically connect the building with the Hudson, but it bothered Mark that there seemed to be no explanation for your new surroundings. I remember when I first visited you there, he was sitting in the middle of the apartment, sleepless and malevolent-looking. He didn’t look like himself at all. All of the rooms intercommunicated, so you could see from the hall to the living room and from there to the dining room. He had the central vantage point on the couch, and he kind of glowered at me and didn’t say anything. It did not, I told him, as usual trying to make light of the situation, match the buoyancy of the building. He ignored me. I could see it was this deliberate sabotage. He was in opposition to everything around him. None of it made sense anymore. He had gotten used to seeing his equations overlay every surface, and the blank white walls held no meaning for him. He moved with his eyes only, conversing with every object, sometimes as if he were trying to sink it, sometimes as if he were just trying to restore it to its original course, somewhere out to sea, by force of will.

  When its rightful occupant needed the apartment back and we had to disembark from the ocean liner, we moved in with Silvia.

  Just when I got you settled in, Mark revealed that he was accepting a job at a bank in Tokyo. Trading desks, he told us, wanted quiet, clever men who could bring scientific theories to chaos. He had, apparently overnight, made up his mind to quit both physics and America.

  Susy tried to ship Mark’s armchair—the dark period stain had been hidden under new upholstery—but Mark was no longer available for compromise. He had already embraced Japanese minimalism, and the chair could not be part of our ascetic life there.

  The bare minimum was shipped ahead, and you three followed a week later. I came in the taxi to the airport. I remember I hummed a kind of hymn to Saint John the Divine, an unfinished monument that to me embodies all the qualities I so admire in physicists who wait a lifetime for a theory to be proved. We sat in silence and stop-started, making incremental thrusts along 125th Street, just as schools were being dismissed. As we passed the Apollo Theater, Susy turned to you—you were sitting in between us, Mark was sitting in the front. She looked at you with big, meaningful eyes, of course addressing me and Mark, and said something like “Feels like moving to the moon, right, Alice?” And I remember you began to cry. Such a heartbreaking sound that I could have cried too, but I couldn’t because I was so angry. I already blamed her. If I’d known it was the last time I was going to see him, I wonder how I might have tried to stop him, what I would have said. I go over emotionally manipulative maternal speeches in my dreams. Do you know Volumnia, Coriolanus’s mother? I remember the last “conversation” Mark and I had pretty well, because we barely spoke and your mother did most of the talking with the taxi driver while we listened and I tried to tell him by looking into the curve of his right ear that I was forbidding him to leave even though I was coming to say goodbye. The driver had polite questions, phrased as if all four of us were going on a happy vacation, and Mark left Susy to field them from behind. We were given a brief history of the driver’s wife and son.

  “Are you going to have another one?”

  “Wife?”

  “No, son.”

  “Yes, I hope so.”

  “Do you have a name yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  When we drifted into silence, the driver said brightly, “My name is very short.”

  “That’s important,” I said. “Names have to work in a crisis. What is it?”

  “Haseeb.”

  “Spelled H-a-s-i-b?”

  “No, H-a-s-e-e-b.”

  “So not that short, then.”

  At which my beautiful son finally turned, shooting me a look that meant STOP.

  4

  * * *

  In the time which passed between the discovery of the Higgs in July 2012 and my arrival in New York in April 2014, I came to know Silvia through her letters, which she always typed on a typewriter. Through whatever she chose to tell me, piece by piece. There could be no rushing ahead, and sometimes I grew impatient waiting for a response to arrive, but there was never a time when I asked her a question and she didn’t give a direct answer.

  I had considered trying to find and contact her before she found me. There had been projects at school—some of which I knew better than to bring home, and others that I thought might be harmless enough—which required grandparents. A teacher once encouraged us to ask our grandparents for recipes to put in a class cookbook that was supposed to show how life had changed between rationing and microwaves. I suggested Silvia. It did not go down well, and Susy, in her rambling explanation for why I could not, went as far as to claim that her mother-in-law had passed away.

  The discovery of the Higgs boson opened up more questions than it answered. The implications, plus the letter from not-dead Silvia, meant I became even more concerned about my place in the universe. I’d wanted to study physics at university, but Susy had barred me from continuing past school, so I’d opted for a degree in philo
sophy instead. As far as the physics went, the space I inhabited was either the centre of some cosmic attention or one self-important speck in an infinite multitude, a bubble in an ocean of foam. Either there were physical laws, which governed every single thing that happened to me and thus connected me to everything else subject to those same laws, or everything I thought and did and everything that happened to me was essentially a mistake, in which case what was the point of physics? I consumed all the news reports when I was supposed to be revising for my finals. Some people claimed that the finding meant our universe could be doomed to fall apart.

  Philosophy works best when you come up with a highly improbable, impossible, or imaginary scenario to test something—you work out what something is by what you can deduce that it is not. Creating little fantasy scenarios is what I liked about it.

  I enjoyed Descartes’s demon, Locke’s soul swaps, the neo-Lockeans, and especially quantum theory, which said that an exact replica of you could suddenly appear somewhere—next door, or in another country, or even on another planet. That replica would be identical to you: same memories even, but the unity wouldn’t last long. Different environments would estrange you; for example, your replica’s parents might emigrate.