Sympathy

by Olivia Sudjic

  Shunga translates as “spring pictures.” They were mostly created during Japan’s elective seclusion from the rest of the world, when no one but the Dutch were allowed in, and then only to a manmade island for trading, often bringing news of Western developments in technology and medicine. Japanese weren’t really allowed out, either. That was, at the time, how I understood the pictures. Fantasies of penetration, of breaking through. Overlapping bodies. Mizuko would not have agreed. Later, around her, I had to keep any Orientalist projections to myself. Sometimes she would tell me playfully that I had a Japan fetish, in a voice that sounded pink and soft, and sometimes she would say it like I was truly, truly sick. I can’t look back at the shunga exhibition or write about it now without thinking of Mizuko. Even though she wasn’t there with us, even though I did not yet know of her existence, it feels to me like she was: a spectral presence, watching us from the dimness between the spotlights over each glass case.

  In Japan, the erotic is not blue but pinkku—pink. I suppose that is why they are called spring pictures, because of the blossom. Pink is also the merging of red and white, the two colours which in Shinto represent female and male. In the West, pink is pretty much for little girls and lesbians. To me, it is Mizuko and the colour of New York.

  As we went round the exhibition, Dwight informed me that I was a heavy breather and he had been wondering when to tell me. “It’s okay,” he said when I looked embarrassed. “It’s not a deal-breaker. We all have our things.”

  “Thangs?” I said, but he had already turned to examine a drawing of an enormous erect penis.

  I backed away, holding my breath.

  Mizuko was one of the thousands of early adopters who had signed up for Dwight’s app before it had been released. She is, or was, who knows now, what Dwight would call “free.” The kind of woman Dwight admired, and yet infinitely more refined in her liberation than he could have appreciated. She had, for example, a crying fetish. It has a name—dacryphilia. Mizuko liked to see people crying, and to comfort them. It wasn’t a sadistic thing, not really; she didn’t exact any form of physical punishment. It was just “cute.” She would get someone talking about sad things that had happened. She didn’t like it to seem inauthentic, the crying. She didn’t want the person to be playing the victim—that didn’t work for her. To be genuinely turned on, she had to know they were in an emotional state of some kind. She often took Polaroids of the crier. She had a pink Fujifilm Instax Mini 8. A crying Polaroid of me got added to her collection once. It records a moment when I was happiest, because I knew I was giving her pleasure.

  Mizuko rarely cried, except about Rupert Hunter, who made her cry all the time. With anything else, sadness usually made her hard. As in impenetrable. God, when I write about her, every word does that. Turns to innuendo. I mean, she’d threaten to disappear to a mountain monastery rather than cry. She’d say ominous things, for example that she felt stagnant, or she wanted to leave New York. She once claimed the city was selfish and writing was selfish. Sometimes, if she was really sad, she would stamp her feet and recite a poem by Kenji Miyazawa, rousing herself with the closing lines:

  when there’s drought, shedding tears of sympathy

  when the summer’s cold, wandering upset

  called a nobody by everyone

  without being praised

  without being blamed

  such a person

  I want to become

  This mainly happened after she had been drinking. She would begin saying her life was meaningless and that she was a terrible writer, and by dawn she would have talked herself round, back into thinking she was a genius.

  Mizuko knew writing was her calling, and this certainty fascinated me, as I had spent a lot of time talking about callings with Dwight and he seemed genuinely angry that I didn’t know what mine was. “It’s not just going to come to you if you don’t try,” he said as we were walking back to Silvia’s from the shunga exhibition. “You have to actively go to it—it won’t come to you.” This to me seemed contrary to his philosophy about how everything in life should be user-centric. If life was user-centric, your future should just head straight for you, or behave like a self-driving car.

  I was about to say so, but at that exact moment a woman crossed the street towards me. She removed the earpiece that was attached to her cell and reinserted her straw into her Frappuccino with a noise that made Dwight wince.

  “Hey, can I just stop you a sec?” she said to me.

  “Okay,” I said uncertainly, looking at Dwight.

  “So I’m picking up really strong vibrations off you.” She said this like I might want to know if I had magical powers. Dwight moved between us, as if to block them with his body, but she stepped around him. “I had to cross the street to let you know. Here, take my card.”

  I snatched it before Dwight could take it. He seemed to feel all strangers belonged to him.

  When I got home, I didn’t show Silvia the card either. Silvia believed absolutely in her power to see the future, but not in anybody else’s. She was able to predict what movie would be on TCM every evening without fail. When I got home that evening she said, “It’s going to be My Fair Lady tonight, because it was Gone With the Wind this afternoon. Cecil Beaton,” she added sagely, “made the Ascot costumes black and white because the English king had died and the court was in mourning for six months. Who else would tell you that kind of thing, eh?”

  She continued talking as I took off my shoes and sat down on the carpet beside her sofa.

  “I went to an exhibition,” I said, knowing this was the kind of thing she liked me to be getting up to.

  “Where?”

  “New York Historical Society.”

  “Did you take my membership card?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but it had expired. Don’t worry—I had the money.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Quilts.”

  “With the bee man?”

  “Dwight.”

  “Dwight?”

  I nodded.

  She tapped her glass for a refill. “Throat’s dry.”

  When I came back in with her vodka, she was watching repeat footage of the Tony Awards. Once I had given her the drink, she spoke in a burst as if she had been waiting to get her words out.

  “There are so many conditions these days.” She jabbed a finger at the television. “Lesbian gay bisexual . . . And there are so many initials—too many, frankly.”

  “LGBT?”

  “Q,” she added, still scowling at the television. “That’s the name of the activist group.”

  “Okay. I’ll watch out for them.”

  Silvia had an appointment at six that evening. It was at the surgery that overlooked the East River where they did medical imaging and there was a constant whir of MRI scans. This time we were in the waiting room until nine. Whenever we were in a waiting room and her appointment was running late and I had got to the end of whatever article I was reading to her, Silvia would tip back her pea-size head and say, “I should have brought War and Peace.” But this time she didn’t say it. She didn’t seem to be getting frustrated with the wait at all. Instead she seemed withdrawn, shrinking in her chair, wrapping her lamb’s wool around her. She closed her eyes as if trying to retrieve something buried in the past or apprehend something rocketing towards us from the future.

  When the nurses finally called her name, I offered to go in with her.

  “No.” She said it more firmly than I had ever heard her speak.

  As I waited in the Siberian air conditioning, the hum of invisible machinery became louder and louder. Maybe simply because the waiting room had emptied out and it was now only me sitting there and one woman behind the desk to absorb it. I had been given forms to fill out on Silvia’s behalf. I was used to these and now knew her personal and medical information by heart—no prosthetics, no magnetic dental work, not diabetic. The ominous rumbling of the machines became impossible to ignore. I suddenly had the sense t
hat by signing her name on them, impersonating her, I was about to push her out of this world and into some other place where I wouldn’t be able to get to her.

  Back at home, she did not want to watch My Fair Lady and asked if I could shut the door to her den.

  I woke up at dawn because I heard a noise. I went to investigate and found Silvia standing in the dark corridor, her back to me, creeping painfully slowly towards the kitchen. I had one of those flashes—the sea-glass feel of a well-worn phrase. The name of the game which I had always played with my mother, though she was mostly unaware of it, and yet which I had never considered the actual sound of:

  Grandmother’s

  Footsteps.

  11

  * * *

  I went back to bed but then heard her speaking on the telephone.

  “I’m sorry to be so insistent—”

  I sat bolt upright again.

  “—but I’m so helpless here, and you sound very reluctant to send anybody.”

  I’m here, I thought. I’m coming.

  I opened the door without knocking. Her eyes did not meet mine, but she gave no sign that my presence was unwelcome, so I sat on the floor next to her in Dwight’s WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS T-shirt and underwear. The carpet was itchy against my legs, tucked under me. They had grown scaly, I now noticed, probably from Silvia’s relentless central heating despite the temperature outside.

  She went quiet and let the phone slide down beside her.

  “Everything okay?”

  “He’s not too slick, that one.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s not too slick, that one,” she repeated.

  “How come?”

  “I had to hold while he cleaned up the coffee he spilled all over himself. And no one’s coming.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Silvia handed me an orange phial—pills I hadn’t seen before—and gave instructions: “Not crushed, not dissolved. Finely chopped.”

  I chopped them on a block in the kitchen as if they were carrots. It occurred to me that if something were to happen to her, I had no idea what to do. There were no instructions for that.

  There was a radio in the kitchen. It seemed like the controls had once made sense to someone and then that person had disappeared or died and then someone else had messed it up so that now it made no sense to anyone. Apparently it was never really turned off, only tuned so that most of the time it brooded, suspicious and silent. None of the buttons seemed to make any long-term difference, but occasionally it would burst into life of its own accord. As I was chopping the pills, it came on. Screeching and then burbling, distorted sounds like something gone backwards, and then ghostly voices talking right to me, the opening of a portal to yet another world, it felt, then disappearing again into hazy sound. I was sure I made out my name. I pressed the off button down hard and kept pressing until the noise stopped. I shook the feeling out, jerking my neck violently. I took the chopped pills to Silvia, who had fallen asleep. I left them on a piece of notepaper, drew a circle around them and wrote the time as 03.40, then went back to bed.

  I woke up again an hour later knowing something was wrong. I knew that first, before I knew where I was. My laptop was charging in the dark like a lighthouse. I had been having a bad dream where the carpet of my bedroom in England was strewn with tiny shards of glass. To walk across the room, which in the dream I had to do, over and over, I had to tilt my head from side to side to try to see the light shining on them so they would reveal themselves to me in the pale thread. As I adjusted my course to avoid the ones that flashed warnings, I would inadvertently step on others. In the dream I sat on my old bed, upturned the sole of each foot in turn, and saw that the skin was ridged and lumpy, inverting the normal folds of flesh. The skin appeared to have resealed. I had to squeeze each ridge and let the glass prise its way out until both my bed and the carpet were covered in blood.

  Out of the dream, I moved very cautiously across the room and listened for sounds from Silvia’s den. I thought I could hear moaning. I knocked on the door and there was no answer. Sometimes this simply meant she had too parched a throat to answer, but when I opened it she wasn’t on the sofa. Then I heard a groan from Rex’s bathroom.

  Silvia was on the floor.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Been trying to give myself an enema,” she mumbled. “Arm won’t work.”

  I didn’t know what an enema was, but it looked like a highly personal experience. From the floor Silvia directed me to the last Fleet Enema twin-pack she had left after her numerous failed attempts and a pair of latex-free gloves. She looked at me with an expression both fearful and sheepish, but her face then wrenched free of those secondary concerns and returned to overriding agony.

  “I feel like I’m going to explode,” she said. “Do something.”

  Her voice was faint and gargly, and I was alarmed to see a kind of white crust in the corners of her lips. Her forehead had a film of sweat and her damp hair was flattened to it. Her skin was an alarming yellow, the bones of her temples stretching it like a hide.

  “I’m sorry to ask you,” she kept saying, “so sorry,” but there was a pleading look in her eyes. “I’m so sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

  “What did the doctor say?”

  She could only grunt.

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t go to hospital?”

  “I don’t want to,” she moaned. “Can’t. Have to wait for a lifetime. I don’t—”

  “It’s not that I don’t want to do this,” I said. “I’m just worried that we maybe need to get proper help. Professional help.”

  Another spasm of pain screwed her eyes shut and she cried out, so I fell silent.

  I gave her two enemas in the end, neither of which alleviated anything at all. She was on her side, gurgling, pale and naked except for her slippers, me crouching beside her, trying to be as gentle as possible. Midway through the second, I thought she was pointing at the message on Dwight’s dumb T-shirt, but she was looking at my foot, a mark once a blister, now a scar. I had dozens of them from walking so much.

  “Oh no, Alice, have you done something to your foot?”

  “I’m fine,” I assured her, almost smiling at the question, given the circumstances. “It’s fine.”

  I had never felt responsible for the life of another human being before. I felt young: powerful and without a clue. I wondered if now might be the right time to tell her I loved her. There was a sickly smell of dying flowers and stagnant water. I decided against it. She gasped as I squeezed harder. The bathmat beneath her faintly yellowed. Morning began filtering in through the Venetian blinds, striping us.

  I laid her back on the sofa in her den. She insisted on a second round of sleeping pills, which finally knocked her out for an hour while I sat next to her, monitoring her breathing and gripping the cordless telephone. When she came round, the pain had gotten worse.

  “I think we should call one of your doctors. Or 911.”

  She nodded when I said doctors, shook her head quickly when I said 911.

  I got her black leather book and found the names of the doctors we saw most: Griffin, who was her GP, and McKurtle, who seemed to focus on the cancer, whose opinions Griffin often dismissed but who was the more sympathetic of the two. I decided to call McKurtle first. I thought his voice would soothe, whereas Griffin might shout at me, but the hard-nosed receptionist said he was with a patient, so then I called Griffin, who said to come in a taxi, he would see her right away.

  She could barely stand, and once she was standing, each movement took forever, as if there were something sticky in the air. The viscous feeling—as if we were wading through spit—was relieved only by the swooping speed of the elevator. Silvia kept chanting the word sorry, sorry, the whole way to Dr. Griffin’s surgery, until she couldn’t make sounds anymore, after which she just mouthed it, over and over.

  I waited outside while Griffin examined her. His waiting room was covered in framed photographs t
hat he had taken of his trips to Vietnam and Cambodia. They were close-ups of exotic flowers and grasses, temples and fields. I remembered what the official in customs had said to me about the diets of Cambodians. That time seemed unreal to me now, but sitting in the surgery, acting as Silvia’s sole guardian, felt no more real in its place. I promised myself that I would tell her I loved her when she came out.

  I waited. Thoughts occasionally landed on me like bird feet, the grip of a claw sharp and sudden, and then disappeared. It breached the rules of the surgery, which were printed on little grey cards, to take out my phone, so I scanned both editions of Dr. Griffin’s best-selling book on kidney stones. I felt like I might still be asleep. The stickiness in the air was still there. Everyone moved so slowly. The way in which the receptionist, the nurse, and Griffin had all reacted so nonchalantly to the crisis made me feel as if either I was the only one awake or I was the only one who wasn’t.

  Griffin wanted us to go to hospital: he suspected that Silvia had appendicitis. He said there was no point in calling an ambulance because a taxi would be quicker.

  “But she can’t walk,” I said. “How am I supposed to get her into a taxi?” I thought of potholes. I thought of traffic. Silvia’s face was ashen. Sweat poured down her neck and darkened her pink collar. “And what do I tell them when we get there?”