Sympathy

by Olivia Sudjic

  “What are you up to now?” she said finally, giving up.

  “I think I need to decompress,” I said, pleased with this word, and then, inspired by the talk to take the initiative more often, “Shall we get a drink?”

  “So yes,” was her reply. SO YES, I thought to myself, writing it in loop-the-loop letters across the sky.

  As we walked down Broadway to a bar Mizuko had thought of, we passed a bookshop. As with all her favourite things, I already knew what and where they were, so I mentioned it before she did. “This is my favourite bookshop,” I said.

  Outside the bookshop we heard a fragment of conversation between an older woman and a younger woman, an assistant, who was wresting a book out of a red bookshelf standing outside the shop door. “I know someone who’d love it, but they’ve gone and died,” the old woman said to the younger woman, who looked embarrassed. We seized on it with our eyes and turned to each other, panting with stifled laughter. It wasn’t necessarily as funny as our laughing suggested. Perhaps the laughter was prompted by having just left the Holocaust behind. But I believe it communicated to Mizuko that we had the same sense of humour, as well as the same taste in bookshops, the same ear for what was funny and how. And we were fixing on things, or at least I was. I wanted to make it natural, the encounter and our subsequent fast friendship, as if it had all happened by chance.

  My boyfriend at that time had told me that very week that love is really the feeling of atoms from exploded stars reunited after billions of years.

  “Who said that?” I had asked immediately, knowing that he would not have come up with this himself.

  “A physicist,” he replied after a hurt pause.

  He’d read the most recent New Yorker cover to cover, as he liked to be able to pass things off as his own. I found myself thinking of it again as I and Mizuko walked, and now I knew that it was true.

  After examining something on her phone, Mizuko changed her mind about which bar she wanted us to walk to. She was also suddenly desperate to pee, so we stopped at a café called Nussbaum & Wu. I waited outside while she asked to use the bathroom. I remember I felt unsure, now that the side-by-sideness had been broken, whether I should stay. It seemed easy to roll from the Hungarian to the Holocaust to here, but now she was gone, and I was creeping about on the sidewalk and it broke up the flow. What was a perfectly acceptable thing to do online seemed wrong in this context. I imagined that she was standing in the bathroom waiting, hoping I would go away. Maybe she was texting Rupert right now along these lines: Your friend STILL here. Help. And then I imagined his reply, with wording I was more sure of: NOT my friend. You were one who invited her along. Why are you always so nice to people you don’t even know?

  I had been staying in New York for some months by this point, but I had not yet fully acclimated. Or at least, saying I hadn’t yet acclimated was still my default with people who asked how it was going. Like professing to be tired or stressed or suffering from a minor ailment is the default when you’re not in a new city. As I waited for her to return, I determined not to make this the default, but by the time she came out again I had gotten so nervous I couldn’t say anything except “Ha.”

  “Hi,” she said, unfazed.

  She was all grace, continually saving me like this, and yet it also made me sense that the moral distance, the distance of civilised adult years, between us was widening all the time. It made me doubt my actions, the wisdom of what I was doing. Before I could answer, her phone rang. Out came the smashed watermelon. Rupert, I thought, pushing my tongue into the back of my top row of teeth.

  But after the way she greeted the caller, it became clear that it was not Rupert. In fact, it became clear quite quickly that it was a call about Rupert. A call that began in great audible detail very abruptly, no doubt precipitated by a messaging exchange, which had presumably been going on in the bathroom while I was on the sidewalk, buffering, wondering if it was okay to follow people in real life. I dithered in a circle around a scaffold pole as I waited. When the conversation showed no signs of ending, I began to swing around the pole. With each swing towards where she stood, rooted to the spot, I could hear the words Mizuko was saying, and then, on the other side of the pole as I swung away from her, I could hear only the traffic on 113th Street.

  “He sleeps much better with me. But I sleep so much worse because I’m so stressed that he’s not getting enough sleep.”

  “Hey hey, he could have taken a teaching post at Saskatoon. He stayed here for me.”

  “Bad.”

  “Bad since he stopped drinking.”

  “I’m not allowed to be quiet, but he’s always quiet.”

  “Here’s the line—”

  “Here’s the line and if you cross it . . .”

  I did a few more turns around the pole before sensing that this might possibly be very annoying. It was Mizuko’s turn to be silent as she listened to the person on the other end. I knew this was the kind of call I should probably not be present for, but wasn’t it also rude just to walk off and leave her without explaining or saying goodbye? I supposed I could retreat to the stoop of one of the buildings around the corner, but without my presence there as a reminder, the call might last even longer. But was it rude to make her sense my physical presence? What was the Japanese etiquette on this point? I wondered.

  “The good times are really good.”

  “No, I can’t take it.”

  “He always insists on coming, like he doesn’t want me to be around anyone else, and then always bails.”

  “He was shaking at the table.”

  “Two days in a row he leaves in a bad mood, but I barely have any real friends left.”

  “Apart from you, yes.”

  “I gave the ticket away.”

  I realised that Mizuko was indirectly including me in this conversation, even though she wasn’t explicitly describing my presence or mentioning me by name. It was a significant moment for me, being tacitly relayed as part of her call to a friend. I was now a real person with real effects on her life.

  “Everything’s about him, but he can’t commit to anything. He can’t even commit to a musical instrument. I can’t take it.”

  I tried not to look like I was taking any of this in, which was impossible because it was so encouraging.

  “Yeah, I think it’s because of his family.”

  “They’re British.”

  “Mm-hmm, really uptight.”

  “Yes, I think he even has a title. He’s like son and heir.”

  I turned her words over in my mind as I pretended to play with my phone.

  Sun and hair

  Son and heir

  Sun and air

  “It’s not always like this—he just blames everything on me. He blames all tension on me. It’s so unfair, so unfair.” It was the same so, I realised possessively, as So yes.

  “It can’t all be me. I’m so fed up of being blamed for everything, June, I can’t take it anymore.”

  I made a mental note of June’s name to search for later.

  “I’m not always easy, but no one is. I don’t want to break up with him, but he can’t say all the problems are down to me and me just swallow it.”

  “I don’t want to walk. A lot of the time I’m very happy.”

  It was June’s turn to speak, but only briefly.

  “He just walked off.”

  “I’d just love there to be a third person with us, because I feel like I’m going crazy.”

  An impatient silence while she waited for June to finish.

  “You’ve been in lots of relationships—you know that’s not true.”

  I began listening very intently now and not hiding it. What was it that June could know?

  I had no idea where this conversation was leading me, but it seemed to be a secret tunnel straight into Mizuko’s head.

  “It’s not cheating.”

  “She told me to embrace it.”

  “She told me I’m not mentally ill, i
t takes two.”

  “She would fucking tell me that because that’s what therapists do.”

  “Exactly, it’s immaterial.”

  “But he was having a panic attack—an anxiety attack. He did it in Paris twice. One at the airport. I need to be better at dealing with it.”

  “He can blame the relationship all he wants, but he has his own issues.”

  She vacillated between defending herself and defending Rupert, which reminded me of my mother.

  “He is working on them.”

  “Neuroptical therapy kind of working on them.”

  At least it sounded to me at the time, standing in the street with the noise of the wind and the cars and the passersby, that she said neuroptical, but when I tried to search for it after, the only likely-looking result was “NeurOptimal neuro feedback,” described as “an amazing therapy with benefits for autistic-spectrum disorders, ADHD, Lyme disease, depression, anxiety, and eating disorders, to name just a few.” It seemed to involve lying in a comfortable chair with sensors placed on your head and ears, listening to music while “neurofeedback” provided the central nervous system with moment-by-moment feedback on its current activity and then the brain used this information to improve itself.

  “I just get fed up with its all being about him and his feelings.”

  “It’s just the way he says things. If I mention meeting anyone that’s my friend, he immediately tenses up and says, Well, I don’t want any pressure this weekend.”

  “I suppose I feel like I owe him chances.”

  “Oh fuck, he’s trying to get through now. Shall I answer?”

  Mizuko looked down briefly at the object in her hand as it morphed from June to Rupert.

  “Hi, baby, are you okay?”

  “No, that deli place on Broadway.”

  “Are you all right, baby?”

  “Speaking to June.”

  “I’m worried about you. I do feel like you’re suffering from anxiety and I want to help you.”

  A long pause.

  I decided to signal walking. I split my middle and index fingers into two legs and alternated them forward and back in the direction of the subway. Her eyes flashed and she held up her palm to convey a stop sign.

  “It can’t be all me—it’s not humanly possible.”

  Or was it a goodbye/okay, you go sign?

  “I understand, baby, but I feel like we need to be able to talk as adults and you shut me out.”

  “What am I doing that’s so shit?”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “You didn’t say it like that, baby.”

  “Why can’t you meet me halfway?”

  I searched her face for a sense of whether this was a metaphorical meeting or whether, having spent an hour and a half hearing about genocide, waiting for her to pee, and then listening with saintly patience to her two consecutive phone calls for about fifteen minutes now, she was going to leave me here to meet him.

  “It often feels like we’re not even a couple.”

  “But you never reply to them. It’s like I’m having a relationship with myself.”

  And once again I was content to let the conversation take its course.

  “Couples do things for each other without it seeming like a chore. With Andy and Sophie, Andy . . .”

  Rupert did not care what Andy and Sophie did, but I resolved to find them later too.

  “You’re the only one.”

  “You . . .”

  Stop, I willed her. S-T-O-P.

  A divine, unseen force heard my thoughts and translated them into sound, triggering a car alarm. Its piercing, insistent noise ended the call.

  8

  * * *

  Sometime before we met, a friend at Columbia gave Mizuko a book that was always next to her bed. She liked to pick it up and read parts of it to me. It essentially said that my generation used the Internet too much. Hers was fine. It also pointed out that the carbon that fuels our electronic life is melting the icecaps. The melting ice is relieving gravitational pressure, and this, the book said, meant that the Japanese earthquake in 2011 was “no coincidence.” There was a picture in it of a lonely Japanese house adrift in the Pacific, which Mizuko would shove at me occasionally as if I were personally responsible for the devastation.

  When we met, we were both online constantly. In fact, I would say I was only online constantly because she was, and I was monitoring her usage. For her, the Internet was primarily a tool of self-promotion and reinforcement for her multiple selves while for me it became a tool designed for the sole purpose of observing her. It was the only way I could have been brave enough to approach her in real life, having dissected the pictorial equivalent of her DNA in advance.

  I still have a Google map with pins in it that she made. She sent it to all newcomers or people visiting New York who asked her for recommendations, because she didn’t have time to do a new list for everyone. Some of the pins have gone grey so you can’t click on them anymore, but you can still read her sweetly enthusiastic, dairy-free annotations:

  almond milk lattes are the best!

  best vegan ice cream ever!

  get the scallion pancake!

  compost and blueberry cookies!

  We once went to a place from the list together, and she ordered an “S&M” salad and a raw juice called “Spanking.” I kept the receipt because it felt like something particularly significant was happening in the development of our friendship that she would make that selection. Other things I saved indiscriminately, simply because I was less clear what, if anything, they meant. Remnants of all the chunks of time and money we spent together, like receipts and ticket stubs, I kept as if I knew that one day I would have to account for what really happened.

  Mizuko said that she and I were “born either side of a divide.” I felt that she was trying to create one when she said things like this. And yet she didn’t want to push me too far. She wanted to keep me, I think, on the other side of this invisible line, for me to watch her, which was good for her self-esteem after Rupert appeared to lose interest, or, I hoped, so she could watch me watching her. I was an object of curiosity. She used to ask me questions like “Do you really not remember chain letters? Did you even have those growing up? I guess you didn’t grow up IRL,” and I wouldn’t even need to reply; she’d have made her mind up. She seemed obsessed with my generation. She had led a class about how my generation couldn’t physically cope with books anymore; they had been rewired and could now learn only through “gamification.” These little morons, she explained, had to be able to interact and adapt and insert themselves somehow into everything; otherwise it wasn’t worth knowing. “I’m a Digital Immigrant,” she said primly. “You’re a Digital Native.” That name drove me nuts. Digital Native? Not me, I said. Only I didn’t say it, I thought it and then nodded, because I would take any name she gave me and be anything she asked me to be, even though it pained me to be made into anything but her image. Apart from everything else that was wrong with it, back then I was, if anything, a digital novice. I had no idea.

  Now I make sure everything I do is encrypted. I have tried to educate my mother too. She is always making up dumb security questions and passwords using maiden names or using public Wi-Fi in coffee shops or falling for phishing scams. I have told her she should think of encryption like a letter in a sealed, addressed envelope rather than a postcard. To imagine whenever she is using her web browser that she is walking down an ordinary street. She can be seen by anyone. Susy needs real-world metaphors like this to understand. I have taken more advanced measures to keep my private business private. The main thing I rely on is an operating system called Tails. It provides me with total security, anonymity, and amnesia.

  At the time, despite Mizuko’s insistence on this digital divide, I was sure her mind worked like mine. Her thoughts were nonlinear, more like a lattice, and this predisposed her to getting distracted. She would get lost in Wikipedia wormholes, so lost that she would som
etimes have to disconnect the Wi-Fi or give her doorman her electronic devices. I said I wanted to help. After she was discharged from the hospital, I said that I saw my role as midwife to the birth of her still unfinished book, Kegare, helping out with memories she had lost over the summer, cleaning up, doing chores, playing house whilst she wrote the Great Japanese American Novel. Apparently that level of concern and care was in itself distracting.

  “I know you—you’re standing there looking for things you can move around,” she said, sensing me behind her. “You’re like a beaver.”

  It gave me the sensation of being loved that she knew me as well as this, and then it made me think of my home and my mother, whom I had not thought of in months.

  I got so caught up with Mizuko, my beautiful, quantum self, that I neglected many of the reasons Silvia gave for why I should come to New York in the first place. Next to me are three frosted plastic crates that slot one on top of the other so they become a cabinet. The contents, mainly clippings and letters, belonged to Silvia. Under my desk is another plastic storage box, which has things in it that I collected myself from my time in New York. I have lived with this mini-museum for a long time, and I’m sure the right thing to do is to convert it into something else, something lighter. I want it to become so light it could float away. The heaviest thing is a copy of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl. This belonged to Mizuko and was the one she used to write her thesis as an undergraduate at Yale. In her more fatalistic moods, Mizuko often said that novels were dead because we have the Internet everywhere we go now and we can find out anything we want to know straightaway, which tends to kill a plot. That was why she wrote just about real life. It feels true in some ways. In other ways, I reassured her, stories must be more like chess, a game of perfect information in which all the moves that can be made are right there in front of you, but the problem is knowing what your opponent knows and what she plans to do.