Sympathy

by Olivia Sudjic

  I was still expecting Silvia to talk to me directly about Mark at some point, but it seemed she felt either that she had said everything she needed to in her letters or she couldn’t do it in person. It was so different from life with Susy that at first I couldn’t understand it. How could someone be sad, deeply, permanently sad, as she had attested in her letters, and not need, as Susy evidently did, to draw everyone else into her misery?

  “Do you not miss him?” I asked finally, broaching the subject a few days after she had given me the crates.

  “Rex?”

  “Mark.”

  “Of course.”

  “So then . . .”

  “You just start to accept that you can’t do anything to change the facts. You can’t control what happens to you in life, so you learn to let go.”

  The facts, according to Silvia, were that Susy had pinned Mark down when he hadn’t wanted to be pinned. I noticed she would deflect any conversation about Mark to talking about Susy.

  “She made him retreat as far from any emotional warmth as possible—deep into equations and the desert—and when that got pulled out from under him, he had nowhere left to go.”

  “So you think he killed himself?”

  “Yes.” She blinked. “I know he did. I knew my son, and he was so different that last time I saw him, before you all left. He looked like he’d just completely checked out already. After he disappeared, when no body was found, my friends tried to persuade me to get therapy. I went once and the therapist told me I didn’t need to come back as there was nothing wrong with me—it’s everyone else that’s the problem.”

  “A therapist said that?”

  “In so many words, yes.”

  He had loved me, Silvia said, but in an abstract, detached kind of way. As a little goofball that belonged to someone else. He would have made a good uncle.

  “Susy had this whole different idea of who he was,” she said, rousing herself and pointing a finger at me. I felt the anger in her voice. “She thought he could handle the blood and guts, the innards of life, but he wasn’t ever that kind of boy.” She gasped as if in physical pain. “He even found it difficult to say he loved me when he was little. It made him kind of freeze up when we said goodnight, so we just used a special hand squeeze instead. He was very good at empathising with people at a distance. If he saw a homeless person or there was a sad story in a movie he’d cry, he’d be more upset than perhaps was normal, but Susy made it her mission to get emotion out of him at close range and he just turned to stone.”

  I considered this. A perverse part of me found myself wanting to defend Susy. I tried to imagine her, fresh off the boat, arriving at Columbia. Finding someone who made her feel like she had a place in this strange new world. It was easier to feel pity for her from far away. Now that Silvia had given me the crates, I guessed I was free to draw my own conclusions, and that was the main difference between the two women.

  Following that awkward and unusual conversation, Silvia suggested I go up to look at the Columbia campus. It was the day before Memorial Day; she explained that everyone in the city would therefore be wearing white. She suggested that I wear white too, but I said I didn’t really have anything but a white T-shirt and she said that was no good. She offered to lend me a white linen suit she had in her closet with a pair of white leather brogues. I was too polite to refuse, since she seemed unusually animated by the idea of dressing me up, and I was fascinated by her closet, full of smart city clothes I could not imagine her wearing when I looked at her pink pyjamas.

  The minute I got outside, it occurred to me that it was possible Silvia had not been outside on Memorial Day for a very long time. No one else seemed to be wearing white, except very occasionally a troupe of handsome sailors. I walked the whole way there, a relic in white linen and shoulder pads, the white shoes (a size too small) cutting painfully into my heels. First across the park and then up further until every other car had a fish bumper sticker and every other shop front was Redeem and More Church of God or the Church of God in Christ, Inc.

  I felt the stares and became grudgingly angry at Silvia for putting me through this well-meant torture. The discomfort reverberated in my belly. I had mainly been subsisting on iced coffee and green juice, consumed in transit. I’d lost weight, which I’d noticed only because my clothes were looser, and I’d begun to think I could live on air. I found that it helped with my walking meditations in order to achieve my trancelike state. On the way up to Columbia I spotted a place called Miss Mamie’s Spoonbread Too. This promised “down-home Southern dishes and sides served up in a country-style kitchen with a red checkered floor.” I thought it would also make a good tile for my Instagram.

  At my table, I began writing in my journal.

  Saw the outside of Natural History Museum. Tired so went to sit on a bench. Sat next to two cool Asian kids who were squeezed together at the end of one. A wide stone bench. They were both looking down at their devices. The bench was set down beneath an engraved slab which read NATURALIST. I looked at the other benches—different professions were inscribed above them.

  As I wrote I was unsure why this memory, alongside equally dull observations about light quality, was taking precedence over any ruminations about weightier matters. So far I had not written anything in my journal about anything that I imagined Silvia would deem useful. I wondered if in choosing the bench I had had a subconscious motive. Was this to be my profession? A naturalist.

  I carried on up toward Columbia. The sidewalk was smooth and wide, the buildings punctuated with unbroken views through to the river. I watched a suited man holding a shiny gift bag stride ahead while a small woman in a pink kimono, white socks, and wooden clogs moved carefully and slowly behind him. I felt myself resisting Silvia’s suggestion of going all the way up to the Columbia campus. I hovered, feeling that not to go would disappoint her and appear somehow ungrateful and unorthodox, while sensing that to go would put me in a bad mood or in some way compromise the persona I was beginning to fashion. The longer I hesitated, the more anxious and conflicted I felt. Going seemed like the right thing to do—like eating vegetables, or getting sleep—and I usually felt better obeying instructions than not. It is probably more like the storyline you were expecting. Don’t all adopted kids, or abandoned kids, neglected or dislocated kids, feel a certain way? I had thought I would feel excited by it, or compelled simply because I knew Susy would have tried to stop me. And it seemed that Silvia expected me to want it, and so I wanted to want it to please her, but now that I was here, I found that I didn’t. I wanted to forget it all. For the first time in my life, I felt like I could.

  Half an hour or so went by, cars passing on either side of me as I sat on a bench in the middle of the two lanes, from which vantage point I studied the furry green exterior of a Barnard building. It was overwhelmed by an ivy brighter and greener than any I’d ever seen. There was no brick, or stone, or whatever the material was, visible. The façade was wholly organic, with only hints of the architecture underneath, and recesses that marked windows. It was thrilling in contrast to the surrounding metal, stone, and glass, but the longer I looked, the more it began to take on a dystopian air, like a scene from a lost city. This, I supposed, was what it might look like were academia abandoned as the SCC had been. Was this what the city would look like when knowledge was no longer enough? When the desire to turn inward, surrendering entirely to one’s own private world of nonresistance, overwhelmed, like creeping ivy, our desire to know worlds beyond it?

  The building’s aspect became so profoundly depressing that I felt desperate to leave but suddenly unable to do so. My limbs became lead. I wanted to weep for future generations. I blamed myself. This is the reason you must respect your elders—I sensed that the strange, disembodied controller had come back, the disapproving drone operator or whoever it was, pulling me upright. Not so fast! it said. It would be wrong, in fact it would be rude, not to preserve something of the past. I felt a prod, though no one was behin
d me. Go up there! The voice had a Dickensian, moralising quality. It was certainly conservative. It’s your duty to the ancestors. Doesn’t matter whether they’re directly yours or not. It’s the principle of the thing. You can’t just stop halfway. You’re supposed to be following in their footsteps. I stumbled to my feet as if the bench had tipped me forwards.

  In my mind, this quest, resistant as I now felt towards it, was steeped in the self-help language that was all over Instagram, which chronicled so many million journeys of self-discovery. I don’t know what those people felt they didn’t know about themselves, but I think it’s fair to say I had some legitimate concerns. Have you ever truly, keenly felt like you don’t know who you are? Do you ever do something and think, Who is at the controls? Like some mad pilot has locked you out of the cockpit? I definitely do. I feel a kind of vertigo that makes me shake afterwards. I guess we all feel it when making a difficult-seeming choice, and sometimes you seriously don’t know what you want because you don’t know who you’re supposed to be, or who you want to be. Physics, my first and second families, my philosophy degree, had all failed to help me answer that question. The former has led me to wonder whether I am one of an infinite number of Alices in multiple universes. A quantum fuck-up, which is someone who fucks up in every one of those universes but in different ways. My first family took no care at my making, and my second family got me, essentially by mistake, out of a million possible babies going spare. It was Silvia’s offer to come to New York, an offer which had a simple yes/no answer, that finally pulled me out of that. I could make the choice because I knew I wanted to be the type of person who said yes. When I did, it was as if all the lethargy, all the time spent motionless in my bedroom, had been to allow for the winding of something tighter and tighter, so that now I had to get physically as far away from Susy as possible or implode.

  As I moved through the part familiar, part unfamiliar topography of Columbia, I tried to imagine being Susy, looking out for Mark always. Stalking him, essentially. I imagined I was stalking the ghost of her stalking the ghost of him. There was potentially something comforting about this, to see a pattern emerging. I tried to enter the building Susy had often mentioned as being where Mark had spent most of his time working, but having located it with the Columbia map, I came up against twin revolving doors, which both had signs that read, PLEASE USE OTHER DOOR.

  Walking around the campus did not have the emotional intensity I had once hoped for, now feared. I guessed there had been a lot of modernisation. It savoured less of sixties activism than I had imagined it would based on Silvia’s accounts. I did see that the sign on a bathroom in one of the campus buildings had been changed from WOMEN’S ROOM to WOMEN’S WOOMB. Other than that, little political ferment was obvious. The one place that did give me the feeling—similar to the moments in Tokyo when I had been sure a memory was coming back—was Sakura Park. This is the small park right by where I had lived, beside the school of music on Claremont Avenue. It was green and canopied with linden trees. Somehow it was quiet and I stopped hearing the big red New York Sightseeing buses rumble past. When I lay in the grass by the pagoda, I had a fleeting recollection of being tiny. Of looking at blades of grass as objects of fascination, broad as my fingernails. The swings too did something. Their chains tinkled, and that sound did something too, it was hard to say what. Whether it was memory or clairvoyance. As I walked around, I noticed more things which struck the same chord. A tōrō, a heavy stone lantern, at the northern end of the park. This had been installed when New York became Tokyo’s sister city. I feel sure now that it was a kind of second sight, but I did also know such details from Silvia’s letters. Parts of which I could recall word for word, having read them so many times before my arrival.

  The bronze statue of General Butterfield, in the southeast corner of the park, became my son’s mute sympathizer. The general’s likeness was cast by the sculptor better known for his presidents on Mount Rushmore, who’d had a studio at Saint John the Divine. In life, Butterfield (an avid composer of bleak bugle calls) had been beset by an English wife of his own, who, much like your mother, I’m afraid, continued to dictate his whereabouts even in death. The general’s wife directed the executors of her will to erect an enormous statue of her husband, stipulating where and in exactly what pose. In accordance, the sculptor depicted the general at a heroic size, in full dress uniform, head held high, arms folded in defiance, and on a rock intended to simulate the faraway terrain of his proudest achievements.

  Much of this is borne out, almost word for word, by the signs in Sakura Park. Every time Silvia was proved correct this way, I felt stronger, surer of myself. By six, gold light began radiating from the West Side, and I found myself drawn towards the river. More from Silvia’s letters came to life as I stood there.

  You had just started speaking, but he seemed to have forgotten how. Whole days went by without his saying a single word. When he did communicate, your mother said he gave “only the merest of hints” that he was suicidal, a distortion I never forgave her for. She wanted me to think everything was fine. She always thought she could manage people, as if we were all little children like you. I later found out from him that he had spent most of his newfound unemployment, if not on the couch, then staring at the Hudson. A few people drown in the waters around New York City each year. The Hudson moves swiftly, pushing bodies out to sea. The water can travel at the speed of four knots, and it is the same for the East River, which races on the other side. He would walk the approach of London plane trees to and from Grant’s Tomb, sometimes with you tottering at his side, and then back toward the apartment you were staying in via Sakura Park.

  I stood looking down at the Hudson for a long time, until the empty feeling, the dizzy feeling behind my eyes, reverberated so much that I shook. I thought it might be best to try and eat. All I’d ordered in Miss Mamie’s was iced coffee. I wandered back towards the university, through the emptying main thoroughfare, into a deli which had a bad smell. Walked out again and headed across the street to a sandwich store, Subs Conscious. But the sight of all the spills and flaps of meat, gelatinous, oozing sauces, made me sick. I looked for something plain, like a yoghurt, but could only find yellow, crayon-smelling pots called banana pudding.

  In person, New York was not exactly like I’d hoped. The initiation seemed indefinite. I was Zeno. I was walking and walking, I couldn’t stop, but I never got there; if anything, I felt further away.

  Apart from walking, the other compulsion of the two I had developed since arriving was the posting of pictures. At first this helped to counter the strange sensation that in pressing ahead, I was in fact being pushed back. What I haven’t properly conveyed is that it wasn’t actually a social activity at this point, as I had no friends, and second, it wasn’t even instant, as I couldn’t actually post pictures unless I was somewhere with a Wi-Fi connection, because I was trying to avoid expensive roaming charges. This meant that I couldn’t get online for large portions of the day, which helped fuel the other addiction—the trancelike walking—and that when I arrived at somewhere, rarely by design, I saw only what was immediately apparent, not what Wikipedia said about it. The observations I wrote down in the journal I kept are therefore often grand and also naive, as if I am the first to discover something, or totally missing the point of it.

  As I didn’t have any followers at this point, taking pictures was really only for my benefit. But I noticed that there was a difference between just taking them and posting them so that they were public. The first made me feel okay. The second made me feel good. Like bursting a bubble in bubble wrap, or plucking a hair from the root, but after a while, when more random fitness gurus and a few strange men with pictures of their cars and weird personal mottos started following me, I felt like I had joined up with something bigger than myself. I sensed that whatever I was doing was in some way happening on a grander scale.

  I still didn’t really know what it was, though, that I was doing. I guess I was following i
nstructions—come and sniff the air. Well, I was sniffing. I was scratching and sniffing. Occasionally Silvia had enquired after the state of my career aspirations. She seemed to think I would make a good journalist. Maybe it was the way I looked like a kind of Wall Street Grace Jones in the white linen suit. I must have reminded her of her heyday. Silvia had once been a journalist.

  She’d suggested it first that morning: “Why don’t you just be a journalist?” I found myself having to explain that it was trickier now to just be anything, except an entrepreneur, and particularly with newspapers and periodicals like the kind she’d worked on, which had a kind of moribund vibe, and the people who had made it had only the very tip of the sinking ship and weren’t keen to share it.

  “Did you see Titanic?” I’d asked.

  “Yes. But in my day—”

  “Well, now it’s like the bit at the end.”

  “So what do you like doing?” she had said, with a hint of exasperation. “Isn’t there anything you’ve seen in the city that caught your attention?”

  I hesitated. “So far?”

  She nodded.

  “Walking,” I said helplessly. “And taking pictures.”

  She shifted more upright on the sofa. “Really? I didn’t know you’d brought a camera with you.”

  “Oh, I haven’t.”

  “So then how—”

  “On my phone. That’s how everyone takes pictures now, I guess.”

  Silvia looked revolted, and I felt worse than I had done at the start of the conversation.