Sympathy

by Olivia Sudjic

  The Golden Bowl has her notes, which continue to make me happy and sad at the same time. Seeing her mind at work, knowing that she had thought of other things and been charmed by other subjects before me. The cover has a woman with a loose bun, a romantic but off-limits green dress, and elbow-length gloves. Beside her are three yellow books and a green hat, and she is sitting on a bench staring at the viewer with disdain. Between pages 60 and 61 there is still a scrap of lined A5 notepaper with square holes in the margin where it has been ripped out of a ring binder. On it is a list, broken down into four subdivisions: TO BUY, TO GET, TO DO, TO PAY. From looking at the back, where she has turned the page on its side and drawn a calendar which begins on Tuesday and runs until Sunday, I can tell that the list concerns her twenty-first birthday. On Wednesday there are three bullet points, spaced down the column according to the segment of the day. At the top it says “back to NY,” in the middle it says “5:15 wax.” At the bottom is a boy’s name I don’t recognise. The next day there is a name I do recognise, because I met its owner. She was a friend of Mizuko’s from Yale. On Friday it says “4 p.m. nails” and, at the same level as the two names written in for the previous two evening slots, another boy’s name I don’t recognise but which is not the same as the first boy’s name.

  On Saturday there is a flurry of aphoristic activity at 1:30, 3:30, 5 p.m. (the mysterious initials MD), 6 p.m., and 7 p.m. At 9 p.m. are the names of two more men (not the same as either of the first two), who I assume must have been in charge of music at the birthday party from that point, since succeeding them at 10 p.m. are the names of two other men, one of whom I recognise—a DJ who was still friends with her by the time I knew her. I never met him, I just know his name from following her. On Sunday it says “Yale” at about the middle of the day. One thing from the list gets me every time. “TO BUY: camera film.” Every time.

  Mizuko was born in 1982, which means she turned twenty-one in 2003—when I was twelve—and that she used a real camera to take photos at her birthday party. I respected her; she was an authority figure, a guide . . . but sometimes I wondered if my young blood was the draw for her, and I would be relieved that whatever else might change, the years between us could not close.

  Also to buy are tinfoil, matchboxes, labels, stickers, mini-sparklers, pink roses, Satellite Wafers, pens, and something shoes (a brand of shoe, I think), which is crossed out. On the TO DO division of the to-do list is an Emerson essay, which makes me reevaluate certain assumptions. When I knew her, it felt like she just knew everything and could quote everything, and not like she had ever had to absorb it by effort. I looked up Satellite Wafers because I didn’t know what they were. Turns out they are the American name for Flying Saucers. Looking at her handwriting makes me feel like she is lightly touching me by mistake, on the arm or the back. Some of the notes in the margins of the book itself are in Japanese, and these make me jealous, like I am looking at her but not touching, or watching her touch someone else. I try to imagine her writing the list and the calendar on the paper, not yet even twenty-one, younger than me, with adolescent concerns, recently arrived from Japan, but it seems impossible that she could ever have been younger than me.

  Before I met her, I saw pictures she had posted of the original printed photographs of her twenty-first birthday party, which she must have taken with the film on the TO BUY list. She looked exactly the same. Her hair was still long and dark and sat flatly either side of a central parting. Her eyebrows in the photographs are the only thing that make her seem younger. They have been overplucked and are not as long as her eyes are wide, but still, like everything else about her, they are perfectly symmetrical. In the photo she is pressing her finger just above her top lip towards a deep philtrum—a word that I felt came up too often in her stories—which I know that Rupert liked to put the tip of his finger into also. His academic ability to provide the correct words for things extended to body parts and their absences, such as the philtrum, and was held in high esteem by Mizuko. I told her that philtrum, unless spoken by a medical professional, was the kind of phony word that appears in ads using love stories to sell mobile phone plans. My then boyfriend had made one of those ads, which I showed her as proof.

  When I try to remember how she looked without using pictures to aid me, I think of her outline first. Sometimes she wound her dark hair up into two plaited doughnuts on either side of her head. Whenever she worked on her novel, she would begin by sitting down but would soon be crouching on the seat of the chair. She said she preferred to crouch on things rather than to sit on them. Somehow it made her look even more beautiful, crouching, even smaller and more impossible as a creature. At other times she wore one bun, right on the top of her head. Always one bun in the bath. Her hair had blunt, thick ends as if it had recently been cut. I knew it had been, and I’d run my fingers over the picture taken in the hairdresser’s many times.

  From there, I move inward. I think of her beautiful clothes and jewellery. She had very simple gold jewellery, but it was unlike anything I ever found in shops. When I asked her about it she said it was inherited, as if it were a special type of milk or meat, and I felt annoyed that Susy had never given me any jewellery like that. She always wore a gold chain with rings on. When she was close by, it jangled like a cat coming towards you, so that when I hear a cat following me behind a hedge or down the street I still feel cold joy in my stomach. The ring on the chain with the most sentimental value to her was a wedding ring that had belonged to her grandmother.

  For our first meeting, she wore a white blouse and black culottes, what some people call a skort, or her skirt was so short on her thighs that I assumed it had shorts hidden underneath it, but then, she was comfortable showing her body in a way I was not. She would never pull her skirt down in a breeze, she would just let it billow about her as if it didn’t even register. She had short, shapely legs. She was, that first day, wearing little white leather clogs like hoofs that made her legs look more elegant because the clogs were so ugly. She had a long, lightweight coat made out of beige silk hanging on the back of her chair, and a black leather bag swung to one side over the coat. I located her from behind. The coat was rolled up at the sleeves. This accentuated her thin wrists and long fingers when she put it back on. Under the table she had slipped one foot out of her clog, and the other was half in, half out, so I could see that she had crazy small feet in real life. They didn’t seem like the kind of feet that could support a body. And I had never seen her walk. To date I had only known her through her mainly static online presence, or videos in which she captured one small movement, which was then repeated on a loop. When she did walk, to the bathroom between the chairs and the customers leaning back in them, oblivious to her manoeuvres, the sight felt strangely moving and profound, like a baby, or a veteran getting out of a wheelchair, or a deer in snow. That is perhaps overdoing it. Maybe I didn’t quite know that at the time, but it was striking. If you have not seen a deer in snow, I mean: moving with precision, but as if she might leap away in a completely different direction at any moment.

  The second story by her I read—also about origins—was written just after her twenty-first birthday. This fell on the day a space shuttle disintegrated during reentry over Texas and Louisiana, killing all the astronauts on board. She said the party had been ruined but at least she had managed to make something good out of it afterwards. A piece of insulation had broken off and hit the wing during the launch, so there was a hole. When the shuttle reentered the earth’s atmosphere, it slowly broke apart. Notable places that had debris included a university and several casinos. Searchers also found “human body parts, including arms, feet, a torso, a skull, and a heart.” Some worms living in Petri dishes enclosed in an aluminium canister “survived impact with the ground and were recovered weeks after.” I verified this on Wikipedia. The worms were on the spacecraft for research into the effect of weightlessness on bodies. Apart from the worms, people also found data from a disk drive—results from an experiment on
the properties of certain kinds of liquids. There is a special property in things like lava, ketchup, whipped cream, blood, paint, and nail polish. They flow in a certain way. In this story, first published in a Yale student magazine, Mizuko wrote about how on that birthday more than any other, because it was her twenty-first, she was expecting to hear from her father, and so she and her mother had a big row on the phone from Japan to America, and how then the space shuttle crashed and only some worms in a Petri dish survived. Mizuko told me about all this and then said we had to listen to Kate Bush, as if this were the obvious next step in female friendship.

  It was especially unfortunate that the shuttle had disintegrated on her twenty-first birthday because the party had been space-themed. That is why she had the Flying Saucers/Satellite Wafers on the TO BUY section. My nearest newsagent in Wood Green does not sell Flying Saucers, but a kind of old-timey food shop has just opened on the high street that sells vintage sweets and I bought a little plastic bucket full of them. My current ritual is to open my mouth and place the pale pink disc lightly on my tongue. At first there is no taste, as if it is a communion wafer. Then, as it settles, I feel it start to stick. I leave it, not biting, waiting for the spit that gathers in my mouth to dissolve the rice paper. Everything is suddenly wet. It breaks apart and then there is the powder texture of the sherbet, the taste sweet at first but then sour. When I swallow I think of her smooth, easy handwriting and her Biro moving on the paper of the Henry James novel.

  As in the book, Mizuko herself was given a golden bowl. But rather than being covered in gold to hide a crack, hers is an example of the Japanese art of fixing broken pottery by filling the cracks with gold. The bowl belonged to Mizuko’s family. It had been an ordinary ceramic bowl in the family butsudan—the special miniature cupboard or portable shrine Japanese people have—for a long time, in one piece, but it broke during the earthquake that Mark disappeared just before, in, or after. Mizuko’s grandmother had it repaired using the technique.

  Mizuko explained it to me like this: “Instead of the breaking diminishing the bowl, its resilience made it even more valuable and filled it with new meaning. It became a living object when it broke.”

  I said that that was beautiful, and she said, Of course.

  To sum up: my attachment to her was cultivated through her pictures and photographs and quotes and all the things she put online, not just because of what they were and how they related to me, but because of the attitude, the way of seeing the world they suggested. The way she saw and spoke about things was the exact way I wished I could see and speak about things. I began to try to look at plain, ordinary-seeming things the way I thought she might look at them and so try to remake them like she did. And yes, primarily it was the pictures of her that did it for me, but also the pictures of things. She transfigured ordinary pavement markings into arresting images, for example. She could do the same to slants of light, shadows on brick, foam, feet. I told her once, very earnestly, drunk, that I was a plain thing she managed to transfigure into something more interesting by looking at me. In that sense it can sometimes be good to be plain-looking, because it is a temptation to those who pride themselves on having a good eye.

  That much I know to be true. I have yet to decide why she chose me. My plainness, my youth, and my interest in Japan all help to explain what first drew Mizuko to me and across the age gap, but she didn’t say these things explicitly. The one thing she did say suggested it. I remember showing her this trick I learned about how to work out what your special purpose was in life—a kind of diagram.

  “So this is the part where you write down what’s special about you, in this intersection of the circles, there.”

  “About me?”

  “Well, we’ve done yours, so what’s special about me?”

  “You?”

  She thought for a long time and I started to feel uncomfortable. Finally she looked like an idea had come to her. “You have the zeitgeist.”

  That is still all I have written down, just “the zeitgeist.”

  I remember when she finally also noted that I dressed like a figure in a Dutch painting, too late to add to the diagram, which she had not noticed when she was introduced to me.

  All Mizuko’s outfits were puritanical. Monochromatic. This was why I dressed like a figure in a Dutch painting, that first day and every day after, because I studied her pictures (some of which were of the paintings themselves) and their captions: This is everything.

  I’ve pretty much given up trying to pin down what she saw in me, and instead I’ve tried to come up with an answer for what happened to me as a result of her minor interest. Even before she knew I existed, I saw myself in her, and whenever I did anything, I was watching her in my rearview mirror. I was like a rubbernecker who causes another crash by mistake. Things often happen that way, crashing into something when you have your eye on something else. Kathleen Drew, the scientist researching seaweed whose work unintentionally saved the starving population of Japan. The idea of an invisible something permeating space, interacting with particles to provide their mass, was first deemed “of no obvious relevance to physics.” This irrelevance, of course, was later discovered as the Higgs field. You don’t always know what it is that you’ve found.

  It was like I’d aborted one search and started a new quest but the World Wide Web had not forgotten the first. Some sinister controller behind it all still remembered I was in the market for a father figure. Finding the Internet incomprehensible, suspecting it to be by nature immoral, my host provided me with alternative research tools. On my third day, Silvia, who had still not felt the inclination or the necessity to probe me much beyond greetings and goodnights, told me to go into the bedroom full of boxes and locate the three crates that are now under my feet. They then contained Mark’s things, mainly childhood remainders and funny school memorabilia, and items from Silvia’s own life in scrapbooks and folded letters. Books, including Quantum Field Theory, Special Relativity, Perfect Symmetry, The Primeval Universe, The Popper-Carnap Controversy. She said I could look through these if I wanted, and I supposed it was her way of breaking the ice—letting me know things, as promised, without saying them herself. But it was noticeable how much ice there was to break, and how much less close to her I felt now that I was actually there.

  As I began to sift through them, I was not prepared for how excruciatingly personal a lot of it was. I wondered if Silvia had intended this or hadn’t looked through them herself recently. I was trying to work out why she wanted me to have them, especially when at least half of their contents turned out to be unrelated to Mark. I wondered whether it wasn’t a test, like refusing the last thing in the dish when your host offers it to you.

  I could hear wheezing in the next room as she did the exercises demanded of her by her physical therapist, whom until recently she had approved of but who had that day scandalised her by confessing to having met her husband online. She was on to number six, the buttock squeeze—saying “tight, tighter, tightest,” lifting her tailbone slightly off the sofa, holding, relaxing, repeating.

  What I did read then, mainly the angry exchanges (faxed) between Silvia and Susy, and even ones in which Silvia had implored her to let me visit, did not make me feel any closer to Silvia, nor to Susy or Mark. The intimacy and admissions the crates contained, raw and unvarnished, faintly repulsed me. I shut the lid on them as if they were embarrassing odours or bodily secretions.

  Most of the time Silvia and I kept to our separate spaces. There were days in which all she could do was sleep sitting up or lie awake horizontal. She hadn’t slept in her own bed since Rex died. Sleeping on the sofa in the den had started when he was very sick and nurses had moved into the apartment. To move back again would mean that a new normal had been accepted. Sometimes she would come into one room from another and sense something, or its displacement. A life stirring somewhere. And then she would realise it was me and she would look down and ask why I was inside wilting on such a nice day. So there w
as no explicit bonding. Certainly not the kind you might be expecting if you like films like The Parent Trap as much as Mizuko and I did. We watched it together once, and I dared to say that we were like two little Lindsay Lohans in the isolation cabin, to which she made a kind of grunt.

  When Silvia did speak, her voice would often dry out midsentence, and at these moments I would seize the opportunity to suggest turning the heating down. She would always refuse. She was very thin and very still, so she was always cold. Because of the cancer in her throat, Silvia claimed she found not just speaking but eating and drinking (nonalcoholic beverages) very difficult, so there was no structure of mealtimes or getting to know one another that way. The first portion of my trip was therefore largely mute. Nil by mouth. And it followed me, the muteness, whether I was in or out of her building. Nor did I eat much of anything. Inside, I never felt hungry. The central heating, despite the rising temperatures outside, was always up to maximum, and so the air moved in shimmering waves. My stomach shrank. The heat dried up your words even if you didn’t have cancer in your throat. But in the silence an unspoken understanding was growing between us. Although we weren’t related by blood, I think we could relate to each other as solitary beings.