Sympathy

by Olivia Sudjic

  Immediately I had many burning questions for her, all of which seemed too complex to broach except one: “What’s the Wi-Fi password?”

  “No idea,” she replied, engaged in a one-armed struggle with the rubber band around the papers. “Sorry about last night—my medication is pretty strong. You are supposed to be here. I thought it was tomorrow, or the day before, and I got mixed up about which day my operation was on when I booked your flight.”

  Her voice was frail.

  I stood up. “No, not at all. I’m sorry if—if I arrived unannounced. I didn’t have a number to call, and downstairs they said to go straight up.”

  “Oh yes. They do know who you are. They’re very helpful boys. I’m always calling them up to do things for me.”

  I began to speak, but she shuffled away and the conversation was over.

  Later I realised that Silvia’s manner diverged, at least at first, from her letters because she found it difficult to speak and was often heavily sedated. She wished to communicate with me only when it suited her. When she was not in the middle of something else—usually reading. When she had something particular to say. When she was feeling well, and when her speaking apparatus was well lubricated. None of these conditions happened all at once for a while.

  Silvia seemed to have settled in her den with the papers, so I wandered over to the window. You couldn’t see the East River exactly, but there was a sense of it from the light that bounced off the water and some very narrow shining cracks visible between buildings. The sight of the city was like a machine that I could not isolate the significance of any part of. Later, when I had learnt my way around by walking, I could situate myself when I stood in that same spot looking down. I could trace an imaginary line to Mizuko’s, beyond that to Columbia, and, on the far side of it, Claremont Avenue. On a diagonal line back down and east across Central Park I would soon be able to add Nat Rooiakker’s place, practically across the street from the Metropolitan Museum. After that I could go further, imagining behind me, backwards and over the bridge, what I would soon know to be Dwight Nutt’s place in Dumbo.

  An hour or so later, Silvia shuffled in from the den again and showed me around the apartment I had already seen, with a croaky guide to garbage disposal, mail, laundry, a porcelain dish where she kept tip money for delivery boys, and the schedule for when the cleaner was due to come. She also handed me a credit card with a PIN number written on a Post-it, for “emergencies.”

  “You won’t need your own key,” she explained. “I always leave it unlocked and I’m always here. If I’m not, you’ll be with me.”

  I wrote down a list of various tasks as she dictated them to me. My main duties comprised receiving deliveries and paying for them, taking prescriptions to Duane Reade, winding Silvia’s watch (which she found impossible because of her increasingly useless arm), crushing pills, twisting bottle caps and lids (such as that on eyedrops), and other intensely satisfying ministrations, which I accepted gladly and later tried to re-create when I took care of Mizuko.

  My first official engagement was receiving a delivery of twelve bottles of vodka. The big ones, not the miniatures. I was charged with releasing each bottle from a heft of packaging, then laying six in the freezer, side by side. I did so with a jaunty swing of my arms from box to freezer drawer. I put the remaining six upright in the cupboard. Once I had completed this task, Silvia informed me that I needed to take her purse to buy a new kettle from Bed Bath and Beyond and that on the way there, or, if I preferred, on the way back, I was to introduce myself to Donna and Denise, identical twins in their late forties who took it in turns to have cigarette breaks and who worked in a grocery store across the street. They had been helping her, before I came, with supplies. She said I could take a stroll around, pick up the kettle, and say hello in any order I chose.

  I am going to switch to using the word elevator, as it was a word I had to start using to make myself understood. The woman who joined the elevator on the twentieth floor had stumps for fingers, which I could not stop staring at, and then I could not stop wondering whether I should have offered to press the button for her or that would have been worse. They went towards the gold buttons, casting a fleshy tint, and I shivered and she saw. I had to remind myself I was really here in this shiny, sitcom world, an audience whose reactions could be seen. I bit my lip hard as punishment. The speed of the elevator drop made me dizzy. I hadn’t eaten since the previous lunchtime, when I had been too anxious to eat much, and I felt billowy, the April breeze outside moving me more than any sense of direction.

  Walking the streets felt instantly different from driving through them in the cab from the airport. The mythic scale of the buildings shrank me at the same time as it made something grow in size inside me. I began to sense this feeling, the first manifestation of what became my special power, travelling towards my fingers, a gradual itch that became harder and harder to ignore, until I realised that along with the feeling there was something ulterior. I wanted to take a picture.

  I stopped on a bench and contemplated the blank canvas of my Instagram account. It was six months old but with no pictures and only a handful of followers, whom I did not know and who mostly appeared to be corporate robots, perverts, or porn stars. I had so far used it only to survey the progress made since school of people I barely knew or had never known. I also followed many beautiful women on personal journeys, pursuing their dreams with a ruthless determination that left me exhausted. It had been a constant torment during my seclusion. Now it was different. I wanted the world to know I was here, not me as I had been but a self constructed from bits of New York. My vision zeroed in on a city made up of little squares. I began popping them like vitamins.

  As I continued walking I began shaking out my arms, rolling my neck back and around, tugging at my hair and clothes, tracing my finger along walls. Silvia had been right: some kind of transfusion was happening as the outside came rushing in. It was good to be somewhere where all you had to do was arrive—where that was all that was expected. My first walk took me, without my having made any perceptible decisions except one left and one right, to East 65th and Park. I stopped all of a sudden at a narrow white townhouse where the sidewalk smelt of fresh laundry. It seemed that something in my feet, controlled remotely, had brought me to a halt. My brain, calmly hovering above like a drone, had not made the command and was surprised by it. This stroll is over, my feet said; time to turn back. I stood still. Not wanting to stop walking, to stop touching things and taking pictures, but I sensed that Silvia was waiting.

  A small boy stood sucking his teeth at me while he waited for someone to unload something from the boot of a car. I stared back at him, repossessing my feet and then my body, drawing myself upwards and making my stomach taut. I admired his monogrammed uniform, wondering what a Preschool of the Arts might be. I realised it must be three already. Children were walking in formation along the sidewalk, all in yellow overalls and holding on to each other like a human school bus. There were also older ones—tribes of girls in partial school uniform with sprain-injury socks over their knees and elbows. Thick hair elasticked in low ponytails, flowery kit bags, after-school tangerines, pastel Converses, orthodontics. The care with which these luminous angels were marshalled along the street, the ease with which they were normal and good, lay all over them in a healthy sheen. None of them felt familiar. I stared longingly after them, wondering which of them I might have been if I’d stayed here to grow up.

  Everything at this point was pretty. There was dogwood and sprays of blossom shining on black branches. This was the first picture I sent out into the world. Sometimes I return to it and note how many hundreds of weeks have passed since and how much has changed. From then on, from that blossom branch, I was addicted to walking around the city, documenting it, breaking it down so I could hold it. I explored alone, on foot, occasionally using buses or taxis when it got dark and my feet were bleeding.

  My solitude, as Silvia and the slim book she had given
me had promised, no longer felt like a burden but a gift. As I walked, my thoughts could leave my body. I had no more itinerary than the blossoms descending towards the gutter or alighting on the arms of benches. I floated down every morning from the Upper East Side, ending up around SoHo or City Hall. I liked gliding, like a robot on the ocean floor, from point to point on the city grid. When I came home, exhausted, I would stick my head into Silvia’s den and holler triumphantly, “New York is the best place in the world!”

  It is certainly the best place to walk that I have been to. You don’t have to have any idea where you are going; you can advance without being aware of anything but vague progress into time stretching out before you. In this way I discovered moments of light-headedness, which led to a feeling that my body was somehow becoming less and less material. The exact opposite of what had happened to me at home in England, when everything had become gloopy and masklike. I felt, after a time, like I could float upwards, into the air, as well as down. At its most intense, I felt like I was only a heartbeat inside my brain.

  You can also cope better with strange things when you are slightly tripping out like this. It is certainly easier to fall in love with a stranger. You can answer the question “How you doing today, señorita?” in a way you never would in England, if you were asked, which you wouldn’t be. You can get talking to a woman who is wearing a smart grey suit but sitting on the sidewalk, begging. There will likely be a snappy dachshund parked beside her in a pram when you realise you have no coins in your purse, only dollar bills. This will not embarrass you; you’ll just give the bills. You can wonder with detached amusement what a Philly cheese steak is and make your mistaken judgment based on the smell of spicy sausage in the air, which in fact comes from an adjacent cart you should have gone to instead. People will make comments about how slowly you count the change. Doesn’t matter. It’s novelty. It might as well be another language. You can pass a man holding something strange and highly personal in the street and look away because it feels like he is doing it on purpose to make people look. You can sit in a café downtown whilst a family holds hands in prayer and gives thanks because somebody graduated today, and you can watch them unselfconsciously because they are so deep into it. On the Lower East Side, you can count the ornamental cockatoos within dusty windows. In midtown you can buy something for allergy season when you see a warning about it outside a juice shop. You can do whatever you like—you can go completely mental—and no one gives a shit.

  6

  * * *

  Japan is the opposite. As everybody knows, it is a place that cares deeply about attention to detail. This is at the root of all the other impressive national stereotypes about Japanese people—being polite and respectful to strangers and their personal space, obeying rules, keeping a shared environment pristine, cooperating. I had finally returned to Japan for a few weeks as part of my year out before university, to see for real the mini-Japan my mother kept in the attic, collecting the stamps the U.S. customs official would later admire. As I waited for my case, black wheelie bags were going round like identical sushi, all neatly wrapped and shiny in plastic, and dummy bags were going round too, with rhetorical questions on them and an imagined Person A and Person B who might go home and realise they had each other’s bags. Their futures altered, their lives entwined forever. I considered taking someone else’s bag just so this simulation would play out.

  Outside, I felt sure that I remembered the warm rain and, encouraged by this, a woman who bowed deeply to me. She continued bowing until, as far as she knew, with her eyes to the ground, I was long past looking. It seemed rude to ask if I knew her when I felt so sure I did. An old man in a smart uniform helped with my correct case, covered in stickers I had peeled away to their white fuzz. Then he bowed too. That is the thing I liked best about Japan: all the soothing acts of ceremony and little rituals, which made me feel like no moment was too small for me to hold and keep. The maid who cleaned my room even took a polythene bag that I had intended to throw away and folded it into a neat little square.

  I try to remember moving there as a child. I try to remember the ground shaking, but now I know I am thinking of news reports and clippings from the attic, or Mizuko’s stories, so I allow myself only a series of neat mental pictures. In them my silhouette varies gradually, and, like a flipbook, the faster I go through them, the more I appear to be running.

  Susy sometimes said the earthquake happened just after and other times just as, or just before, Mark decided to get lost. As a national natural disaster, it was a good, roomy cover for whatever really happened between them. If it hadn’t occurred, no one could have tolerated for so long the victim she became. She talks about Mark constantly, unaware, or unconcerned, that she has come full circle at the end of a sentence. She does not accept whatever it was that took place and so has a compulsion to repeat her stories to me or, better, to strangers, whose polite incredulity grants her some kind of temporary relief.

  Although the real split between us came when I returned to New York, my solo trip to Japan marks the fault line. There was even an earthquake just as I landed—a small one. For the most part, I feel like I have managed to separate my memories, my way of seeing things, from hers. If, very occasionally, I feel us move together or overlap again, I have to stand still, and when I do I feel like my feet are sinking, as if water is coming up through fractures in the ground. There is a sudden stomach lightness, a toe wetness, the floor beneath giving way as her vision seeps into mine. The feeling isn’t exactly unpleasant. Sometimes in New York I went to places Susy had spoken of, following her footsteps like chess moves, not to know more about her so much but as if this would somehow grow me up too.

  Though Susy didn’t know about my real itinerary (if she’d found out exactly where I was going, I’m sure she would have taken my passport), my gap year involved a guided tour of Japan with a few days in Tokyo alone first. To get to my hotel, I rode in a beautiful blue taxi with a glowing orb on top, milky with navy kanji. It was clear to me I did not fit in. When the taxi stopped in traffic, an old woman in the adjacent taxi, with cavernously large ears pushed forward by her face mask, stared at me, unblinking, through the window. Outside my hotel were three men employed just to stand on the same zebra crossing, waving and halting traffic, who would drop their arms and stare whenever I passed.

  Outside Tokyo, everything got smaller and I felt even bigger. Millions of fireflies and moths floated and sparkled in the half light, taunting my human bulk as I walked in silence behind the tour group. We took a bullet train to a town that was preparing to celebrate the festival of Tsukimi, the moon-viewing festival based on the Japanese folk tale “The Rabbit in the Moon.” The story of the rabbit in the moon deeply affected me, even though when the tour guide pointed out the pareidolia that identifies the markings in the moon as a rabbit, I seemed to be the only one who couldn’t see it.

  Some people in the town did not seem to care about the festival and were watching football on TV. The players were dotted about in neon green. They looked unreal, the way they might be seen by the forgotten man in the moon and the rabbit if they were watching the floodlit pitch forlornly from above. The occasional wash of noise and the sight of the screens, their halo of green flickering when the tour guide had promised an authentic experience of moon viewing, caused one of our group to complain because it wasn’t “historically accurate.” The man, who seemed to think the events of the story had a basis in historical fact, demanded to be taken somewhere more historical, and so we went to a temple, where some people, copying the example of our guide, prayed to their ancestors. I hung back and watched.

  The man had a family—a wife and a son a bit older than me. Something about them interested me, and I began watching them exclusively. On the last evening I saw the son alone and walked over to him.

  “I’m Alice.”

  I realised that I was drunk as I said my name. He turned to me with a face that showed he also knew this, answering in a deadpan way, “I�
��m Rupert.”

  He didn’t say anything else for a while, but as it was the last night of the trip and we were back in Tokyo at a nice hotel, I persevered, because I was lonely.

  “This is the edge of town in a way.”

  “The edge of town?” he asked, as if pleased to be talking about something with a parameter, though Tokyo still sprawled far beyond it.

  I did deep nodding and let there be a pause so that we could look at the view together and so that he might say something else.

  When he finally did, it was, “It looks like a necklace,” meaning the lights and the roads.

  I considered and agreed that they looked like rubies or emeralds.

  After a while he stopped looking and walked away without a word. I went back to my room and spent all night contemplating whether it was possible in life not to be constantly let down. If it could ever be worth pinning your happiness to another person, when all other people ever seemed to do was disappear. Tokyo was a place you could quite happily exist alone and be self-contained. It seemed to promise that it was better to be by yourself.

  When I got back from that trip I was insufferable. I trailed Susy around the house reading koans under my breath to annoy her, so that sometimes she would turn around and say “What?” and I would smile and say “Nothing.” It pleased me greatly that I had managed to conceal the trip from her. When I began university, in the autumn of 2010, I did not make any attempt to hide or even temper my obsession. If anything, I exaggerated it, sleeping on a mattress on the floor, lining up a series of strange rocks and twigs which stood for the whole universe outside my door, drinking exclusively green tea or brown rice tea while deep in books about Japanese history and culture. I ate only Japanese food, spoke only about Japanese philosophers, and read only Japanese literature, which I bought in translation mainly but also, as souvenirs, in Japanese. I told people who asked that I had lived there for longer than I had. I made up other things too, I’m sure, which I can no longer remember. When the chain reaction of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster happened the following spring, I talked about it as if I were an authority.