When I wrote back to Silvia, I kept it secret. Partly because it felt good to have a secret and partly because I tended to avoid doing or saying anything that might cause a disturbance in the house. I liked it when things were quiet.
To answer her first letter’s provocation, Silvia told me that she did not have email or a cell phone. She would sooner die than possess either. She had decided to write to me when she did, yes, inspired by the discovery of the Higgs, but also because she was at that time starting to lose the use of her right arm, meaning that soon she would not be able to write on her typewriter and so she would be cut off. She said she’d become increasingly isolated, marooned in her Upper East Side apartment. It seemed from the way she wrote about it that she was unhappy about this, but when I finally pitched up at her door, I began to view her solitude more as a lifestyle choice. In any case, she had decided to write all the letters she had ever meant to write, and send them, before she could no longer do it. She had recently been widowed by her third husband, Rex, and so was writing her acerbic letters to me in between reading her condolence cards and shredding them.
I can now make educated guesses, having both been to Japan and felt depressed myself, about what Mark might have wanted from moving to Tokyo. To surround himself with people who didn’t know him, couldn’t disappoint him, strangers who didn’t speak his language but whose ceremonial politeness reached across. Otherwise it was a bizarre plan to go to Tokyo, given that the bubble had burst and Japan, the victim of a “liquidity trap,” was already in the first of its Lost Decades. I don’t know if he was properly employed by the bank he claimed to be working for. Susy says he was, Silvia says he wasn’t. He said he worked at Tsuki Bank, which was owned by Himura Securities, the company Mizuko’s grandfather started. By the time Mark joined, it was known as a “zombie bank,” just being kept afloat by the government, with no one doing any real work, though on a typical day Mark left home at 8 a.m. and returned at 2 a.m. He said he was friends with other men at the bank, with whom he went to play mahjong in the evenings and sometimes just sit with, watching NHK television until very late. Silvia thinks this was all made up and that he just sat on a bench in the park and wandered around Tokyo on his own.
Nothing about moving to Tokyo is very clear, because Silvia did not come with us. All that is certain is that three of us left New York in 1993 and only two of us left Tokyo for England in 1994.
When I was ten, wanting a conclusion for what had happened in the interim, I faked his suicide note. I tea-stained it, burnt the edges with a candle, hid it in an old shoebox, and then pretended to find it in the attic. Susy saw past my attempt and forbade me from going up there, but I still did in secret. It was sifting through those things as a teenager—the beautiful ornaments, scrolls, and prints the dusty boxes contained, as well as all the packets of real photographs of me, nearly three, in front of temples and neon crossings—that started my fixation with Japan. I wanted to restore, maybe more like invent, the future suggested by their contents.
Susy seemed to have decided my birth family could not be as interesting to me as hers, because she used the former as a threat. I could go back and live with them if I was so unhappy with her. It was a clever strategy, leaching the rebellion from the idea. My cursory searches of the Internet found nothing. Susy maintained she had lost the adoption papers in our many moves, but Silvia felt sure she had destroyed them to keep me from straying. Silvia also blamed Susy for her long silence, as well as for Mark’s abandonment of physics and relocation to Japan. She blamed her most of all for his disappearance. They had barely spoken in the aftermath of that. In my replies I went over all the contradictions Susy had glossed over—about Silvia, the SSC, Tokyo, and Mark. Silvia pulled each one apart in her responses, not angrily but with a sense of moral duty, as if Susy’s falsehoods presented a tiny fish I might choke on and which she had to debone for me until it became just a few white flakes on a spine. When she was done, the spine itself became a sharp little skeleton key to pasts which resembled mine.
In quantum mechanics, no object has a fixed position, except when colliding with something else. The rest of the time it is midflight. Silvia’s letters helped me to finally get away, but they also, for a while, made me feel more rooted to where I was. Silvia hadn’t got to grips with any modes of communication that did not require a person to be fixed. The most technologically advanced tool she owned apart from her shredder was a cordless landline. This meant I felt fixed when I corresponded with her. Every time I opened one of her envelopes, I had the exhilaration of arriving, after a long journey, at a familiar place.
I told her about my studies, and in return she would send reviews and clippings from The New Yorker and the New York Times about books she had found interesting. These were the first things I found in my college mailbox that weren’t my own essays handed back to me or university-wide mailings. Sometimes she asked me what my plans were for after university, and I said I didn’t know. I said I didn’t want to think beyond my exams at that point because then I would freak myself out. She said that sounded wise, because after exams life became just a series of days and weeks and years with no markers and very few rules, and nobody told you what to do anymore. I said this freaked me out even more. She said I might want to come and visit her in New York if I didn’t know what to do with myself when I was free.
After the exams, everyone else poured outdoors into the sunshine to do the things they had been waiting to finally do now that they no longer had to study. I didn’t feel free at all. I felt bereft. Agoraphobic. Even though philosophy wasn’t the subject I had most wanted to study, I had liked studying and running to a schedule. I had loved a particular tutor. At our last meeting, this tutor told me to “go have fun, go wild,” and I’d burst out crying. Within days I had developed a debilitating fatigue. I ached, I had dry eyes. I lay in bed but could not sleep. Then a rash appeared on one side of my torso. It was dark and patchy and a doctor said it was from stress. Since I was waiting, with growing dread, for the results of my exams, stress seemed likely. But when I got my results, which were fine, and there was nothing else which tied me to any dates or places and nothing else to wait for, things started to feel really bad. No one was coming to watch me in the graduation ceremony, so I decided to skip it. Technically, I hadn’t actually told Susy it was even happening, as I hadn’t wanted her to make a spontaneous and unnerving decision to come.
I lay on my single bed for hours after graduation, until there was a knock at the door and an old crone put her key in the lock, hearing no answer.
“No,” she said, annoyed. “You’re not supposed to be here now. They’ve rented out these bedrooms over the summer to conference guests from Kuala Lumpur.”
I went back to my mother’s. I itched all over. My rash became raw. I drifted along in a kind of haze—never really awake, never really able to sleep. Then I began getting migraines and panic attacks. When I tried to speak I kept forgetting words or reversing them in my sentences, making me feel like a foreigner. I remember the first time it happened: a waitress in a café asked what I meant when I tried to ask for “a tap glass of water.” It definitely wasn’t as humiliating as it felt at the time, but soon I barely left the house, and then, the longer this went on, I found it less and less necessary to leave my room. My eyes felt cloudy. Each bit of my body felt strange to me, as if someone else’s hands were attached to my arms, and this weird, foreign feeling crept up and up until my brain felt like it was in the wrong head. Even the skin on my face felt like someone else’s, like I could have peeled it off without its hurting, the way you do candle wax that has cooled on your finger. Whatever I did, I felt like I was impersonating myself.
Susy asked me to help with one of the joyless art therapy retreats she occasionally hosted at our home for people with many feelings. If someone held a door open for me, I had to pretend to walk through. When I answered the house phone, I found myself having to think about how to make my voice sound like what I remembered it soun
ding like before this feeling had come over me.
Silvia was convinced it was the outcome of too much time spent online, eroding my memory and brain. She had read many articles about kids who had exactly the same thing, though mainly in South Korea and Taiwan, and said I should be out and about, meeting people and being active. I said I didn’t have the energy, but I didn’t say that I also didn’t have any friends who were friends I could see in real life. Most of my friends were behind screens, dispersed in random parts of the globe thanks to my having been signed up to a school for kids whose parents were always moving. Silvia sent me all kinds of clippings to alleviate my anxiety, or at least my sense of being unique. She underlined some of her typewritten words in pen: Stress. Shrinking population. Recession. Housing market. Occasionally she suggested that I might be depressed on account of my anemic graduate ambitions. In an effort to inspire me, she sent quizzes, flowcharts, personality tests which were supposed to help you work out what you were meant to do with your numberless days.
I couldn’t work the flowcharts. I couldn’t get down them. I pawed and then retreated from the first question like a dog stuck at the top of a staircase. I could not think more than one hour forward in time. The only direction to move, it seemed, was back. When I considered the future, on the other hand, I felt like I was shrinking.
Get a job,
Silvia wrote,
any job. Just to give you some dignity. Or, better yet, come here, no dignity needed.
I couldn’t go anywhere, I assured her. I might have locked-in syndrome. I might have had a stroke. I lay in bed in my old bedroom, my mother making alarming thudding noises in the attic. But the wisdom of what Silvia said did slowly dawn on me, and after some research, I found a way to make minuscule amounts of money without leaving my bed, writing marketing copy for a company that made diagnostic toys for children with autism. I used this money for buying lottery tickets and playing online poker, spending hours picking my numbers for the former until my login timed out. The gambling was perhaps the healthiest of my pursuits. One morning I opened a link contained in an email from a girl called Miki, who said in the subject box that she wanted to be my special friend. Nothing appeared particularly amiss until I clicked on the link.
Having never before watched any kind of pornography, I quickly caught up on everything I’d missed. I liked scenes with Asian girls, and one actress especially, called Maria Ozawa, who was half Japanese, half French Canadian. She made movies for a Japanese porn company called Attackers. It wasn’t that I had gone specifically looking for videos which simulated rape, torture, and bondage, but those were the films which happened to have the girl I liked best acting in them.
During this pornography/gambling/autism period, a fear was planted in me that I was infertile. Though I had never contemplated the idea of having my own children before, for some reason I decided I could not, and this became a symbol of my utter uselessness and dislocation from normal society. I first remember it coming over me as I was listening, in and out of sleep, to a radio programme coming from Susy’s room, during which it was announced that an osprey called Lady had broken her own record. She had laid her sixty-ninth egg at age twenty-nine, and had flown to South Africa and back to do it. Birdwatchers had noted in the middle of the night that her behavior had changed, and hundreds of people had been watching her lay the egg through a live stream broadcast all over the world. I woke up fully at this point, cold and sweating. As I lay listening to the birdwatchers praising Lady’s accomplishment, I did an online self-diagnosis on my phone for slightly irregular periods and decided I had polycystic ovaries and total sterility. The family line, I told myself, wherever it had started, ended with me. They played a recording of people cheering as Lady stood up to reveal Egg. I was only twenty-two, but I felt like I’d failed already.
At this point my correspondence with Silvia lapsed. Or my replies did. As usual, her letters arrived, trying to rouse me, comparing my indulgent postgraduate malaise to Mark’s after the cancellation of the SSC and offering advice on how to shake it off.
You should be waking up every morning at the same time, eating avocados, and going to visit places of historical interest. You should be playing with animals and updating your collections—didn’t you say you had some? You should be applying for real jobs and going for long walks. You should limit the time you spend online and read or write instead. What good is your degree otherwise? You should also, sweetheart, as I have said before, COME TO NEW YORK. It is so healthy to be somewhere where the view always changes without your having to move. Just come and sniff the air.
Move was underlined in red pen.
Cancer had moved into every part of her body. She later told me that pushing the invitation was not so much for my benefit as for hers. In the end I earned a tiny portion of the money towards my flight from my online job and she made up the difference. She thought it was character-building for me to at least try to earn a portion of the fare. I remembered this later and felt guilty when I saw the inscription on the building I walked past on my way to see Silvia in the home she had been moved to on Amsterdam Avenue: THE HABIT OF SAVING MONEY WHILE IT STIFFENS THE WILL ALSO BRIGHTENS THE ENERGIES. IF YOU WOULD BE SURE THAT YOU ARE BEGINNING RIGHT, BEGIN TO SAVE.
In the end I guess it was that which hooked me—the idea of another beginning, begun right. Although Silvia had offered to help me understand at least a part of my origins (not my birth parents, written out entirely except for the lost adoption forms), I wanted to build—half reconstruction, half my own design—a version that belonged entirely to me.
When the ticket confirmation arrived in my inbox I punched the air, staggered downstairs, unsteady on my wasted legs, and told Susy I was going to New York. Her face fell. To find my real parents, I added. I had decided to stop caring about what was real and what was not, because it never seemed to trouble her.
In the weeks before my departure, when she saw that I wasn’t going to change my plans, she started telling me instead that I should hurry up and go, as if it were she who had planned this all along. But she looked at me now and then like she was slightly afraid, even impressed. In the end she even drove me to the airport, saying the whole way that she was glad I’d finally listened to her advice and booked a flight. I sat in the passenger seat in silence, saying goodbye to it all through the car window. It felt good but strange to be outside the house. There was a heavy blue cloud with a narrow strip of white at the horizon so that the sky looked very low. Under it, Olde Worlde streaked into the past. Places I had known forever, but the landscape had already begun to feel foreign to me. It looked like memory already. Mock Tudor houses, dinky cars, a white man digging in a field next to a parked tractor and a yellow Labrador at his side, two people—a white man and woman—both in black trousers and brown jackets crossing a railway line, a flock of white-and-red turkeys running through the forecourt of a white-and-red petrol station, a dilapidated lawn, an old white man cycling through a mud-green field with a red hunting cap on, the flaps under his collar tied tightly, and a young white man wearing an FBI sweater selling grapes by the roadside. I peered at them, Little Englanders, as though they were people from another time. When the view became suggestive of the airport, for the first time I began to feel that it was all really happening. I sat up straight in my seat when I started to see the signs under the white motorway bridges, dipping like whale backs below the grey sky.
Waiting to board the plane, I counted how many hours I had before me without an Internet connection. Silvia had mailed me a short, slim book about New York, a long essay she loved, which I planned to read on the journey. The essay seemed to be from a long time ago, but the writer also said it was the duty of the reader—meaning a reader in the future, just like me—to bring the city up to date.
“When a young man in Manhattan writes a letter to his girl in Brooklyn,” I read, holding the book close to my face under my lone spotlight, “the love message gets blown to her through a pneumatic tube—pfft—ju
st like that.”
5
* * *
My first morning at Silvia’s, like most of the mornings before I transitioned fully to Eastern Time, was shocking pink. I woke up with the sensation of floating, levitating between the sofa and a pink triangle of light which edged down the slope of my forehead, over my eyes, and towards my chest as I lay still, thinking. Mainly I was thinking about the pinkness, the startling colour of it everywhere. I had never woken so high up, and so effortlessly early, and with nothing obscuring the dawn. It felt like a time and a colour I had been missing my whole life.
I went to get my journal—again, as on the Van Wyck Expressway, intending to note the light quality, in place of any more concrete feelings—but when I returned from the hall where I’d left my unpacked suitcase, the colour had already started to dissolve.
When Silvia finally emerged to get the papers from outside the front door, she looked more the way I’d hoped she would and less like the spectral presence that had stood over me in the night. She looked clean and beady-eyed, her hair wet, with one roller in it. She opened and quickly shut the door again, the papers rolled in the bony crook of her arm. I could hear the sound of muffled barking. I disliked dogs, and it was usually mutual. My impression of Silvia was of a bulky middle perched on tiny legs. For the rest of the time that I knew her, she almost exclusively wore the same pinkish pyjamas and a lamb’s-wool throw with sheepskin slippers. She had maybe six sets of the same. The only time she modified her dress was for medical appointments, when she added coats and scarves no matter the weather outside. She had shorn white hair that I remember resting my hand on later, when we were in the hospital. When it wasn’t wet and flattened against her skull, it was very soft, like an earlobe. Then eyebrows which were no longer there but delicate creases where they had been once. She said she had no need for eyebrows anymore anyway, as nothing surprised her. Beneath them, her stately liver spots, and her calm, all-knowing eyes. Even her lips were a line, smooth as an envelope, with a paler part beneath where the bottom gums pressed against the skin of the chin.
Sympathy Page 4