Sympathy

by Olivia Sudjic

  I was hallucinating from exhaustion, but I showed him Silvia’s framed photographs and I told him the stories that went with them that she had told me. The jacaranda flame tree from the holiday house, the rockery, the blue-tongued lizards that came out when the family ate shrimp in the garden. Then we ordered takeout, and as he ate, he seemed to forget his solemnity.

  “Can I fuck you in the shower?”

  I had noticed as I gave him the tour that he seemed particularly excited by Rex’s bathroom.

  “No,” I said. “That’s where—” I cut myself off.

  “Can I fuck you on the floor?” he continued, undeterred.

  “Is this a poem?”

  “Can I fuck you in the doorway?” Dwight stood up and put his hands on the frame where the saloon doors were, testing it.

  “No.”

  “Can I fuck you in the chair?” And then, before I could decline, “Can I fuck you on the couch?”

  “Not much rhymes with couch,” I said angrily.

  “Pouch?” he said, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “Cock pouch?”

  “I think you mean codpiece. Such a jerk.”

  Dwight had said that one of the things he thought was special about me was my knowledge of history—specifically, armour. For some reason it had been an interest of mine when I was about nine or ten: what soldiers had worn to battle throughout history. And, equally inexplicably, it appeared to have come up more than once in conversation with him. This was when he taught me how to make the butterflies, the tool I used with Mizuko when she decided I had the zeitgeist. He’d learnt about it from someone he’d worked with, essentially a Venn diagram on its side, angled to evoke wings. “We can apply this tool to you,” he said, “to help you work out what you want to do with your life. In one circle you put all the problems going on in the world, in the other what’s unique about you. In the middle you work out what your purpose here is.”

  Sound knowledge of antique armour had gone into the circle of things that were special about me when I couldn’t think of any and was maybe being a bit difficult, given that Dwight was trying to help me. We had not yet managed to write anything in the middle circle, the body where the two wings overlapped, but he said that it might take a few days or even months to hit on.

  Ignoring my refusals, Dwight now took my hand and dragged me towards Rex’s bathroom. I put my free arm out and grabbed hold of the doorway. I didn’t want to set foot in it.

  “Fuck off,” I said. “Seriously. Fuck. Off.”

  I dropped to the ground and stayed there after he disappeared into another room, reliving the moment of finding Silvia all crumpled and moaning. The stain on the bathmat was becoming a more saturated yellow. The smell of dying flowers seemed to be getting stronger. I looked at the bath and the white plastic handles, imagining how it might feel to be old. Then I remembered that I had left the roses I’d bought for Silvia at the feet of the nurse in the ICU.

  That night I dreamt about the roses laid at the wrong feet—the feet of the nurse. Each bit of the dream was like a hyperlink. I pressed on one, wanting answers, and it took me to another. I could never get to the meaning at the bottom of any of the bits. When I reached for the petals of the roses, I was touching a metal seatbelt buckle in a coach, driving by night through a remote place, with a band of mist running parallel to the glass I leant against. Luminous service stations appeared, slowly and then abruptly through the gauze of mist, and slid away again. When I put my hand on the glass of the window it landed on the stone exterior of a university and we went to the top of it, where there was a small garden on the roof. Much later, when I recounted the dream to Mizuko, reading her the notes I had written in my journal, she said it had features of Tokyo University, that my tree sounded like the special gingko there, that one building I described sounded like the kendo building by the football pitch, and that the tunnels under the rooms were like the subway under the engineering department.

  “Yes,” I said, “I was probably dreaming about that.”

  Back in the dream, on the roof, we had to choose from a selection of flowers again. I took the roses again, intending to give these to Silvia to make up for the mislaid ones, and when I cut the stems, suddenly I was in a corporate breakout area with Dwight and Walter. “The kind of love we’re dealing with,” Walter said, as if playing back something that had already been discussed before I arrived, “is beyond words.” “That is correct,” someone I instinctively knew from his tone to be the CEO said. “That is why you cannot like us on Facebook. We will not be joining Facebook until you can love us on Facebook.”

  People around me who had been on the coach and the roof but were now with me in the breakout area got up one by one and stuck pink and yellow Post-it notes like petals to a flip chart where notes were being gathered. Dwight read them out. They were written in Silvia’s shaky red ink, which she used for warnings:

  Roses are like kamikaze love pilots.

  Roses are like suicide love bombers.

  The CEO decided that he did not like so many mixed metaphors, and so the meeting broke down. As we left the room I ran over to tell him what my Post-it had said, feeling sure it would change his mind: “Love is like those hot towels you’re given at some restaurants and then give back when they are cold.” He looked at me with disdain. “How would you know?”

  I woke up to a noise that I slowly realised was Dwight laughing beside me.

  “What are you laughing at?” I said angrily. He laughed so easily he could have done it while unconscious, but I could tell he was awake, looking at something on his phone, from the ghoulish glow, the halo of hair lit up on his shoulders. It was four in the morning. He turned to face me.

  “I’m watching this diver high-five a shark. Look.”

  I sent Dwight away early, about eight, after he attempted to eat some ancient cereal Silvia kept that he found two weevils in. Then I returned to the hospital, to be told that Silvia was in “a state of moderate distress.” When she had heard them discuss putting her into a facility, she had assumed they were talking about somewhere like Castle Senior Living and had said absolutely not. I looked up where they meant on Amsterdam Avenue and showed her the pictures on my device. She began pleading with the hospital chaplain, who was making his round.

  “You’re sending me up there?”

  “Just for a short while, as I understand it—a matter of months. Then you can go home if we get you some appropriate live-in help.”

  “But I’ve got her”—she cocked her head in my direction. “She’s my Girl Friday. Besides, I’ve spent my life avoiding anything above . . .” She faltered. “I’ve avoided going up there for twenty years.” She looked to me for help. “Too many ghosts.”

  13

  * * *

  I still have the list I made as I was packing up her things:

  2 dresses (yellow and blue)

  1 white jacket

  6 underpants

  3 vests

  4 pairs pyjamas

  Valise

  Eye drops

  Water

  Pillow

  Pills

  Applesauce

  Books

  Cane

  Vodka

  T brush/T paste

  Trays and liquid soak

  Gloves

  Wipes

  Q-tips

  Vitamins

  I knew she wouldn’t wear anything but pink pyjamas; still, I wanted her to feel she had options. They confiscated pretty much everything but the clothes, saying that such things brought in from outside were not allowed for legal reasons. The first time I visited her in her new home, I took gerberas. Her mouth was so dry she couldn’t speak at all, so I only learnt her verdict on them once I had helped her ease the dryness with some contraband vodka, utilised a new tongue scraper she had been given, and turned up the humidifier in her room.

  “They’re roadside flowers,” she said, spit quivering on her lip, “for roadkill.”

  The second time I took a mixed bo
uquet that reminded her of crematoriums. During every visit, the conversation again came close to asking me to help end her life.

  “They keep trying to make me wear a thing”—she rattled her bony wrist, then let it fall back onto her stomach—“so they can track me. They want to chip me like a dog between my shoulders. They want to know how long it takes me to crap and how often I go so they can tell whether I’m crapping or snuffing it.” A shadow passed over her face. “I just want to be invisible.”

  Dwight had gone to California for work. My new routine, now that he was gone and Silvia had moved to the home on Amsterdam Avenue, was crossing the park to visit her. I would exit where the carriages lined up at the West 77th Street Arch, the rickshaw riders climbing down and unfurling prayer rugs as I passed, the asphalt roar of skateboarders in my ears. There was something surreal, acutely fairy-tale about it—a replica wilderness in the middle of the neat chessboard, me crossing to reach the sick grandmother who was now on the other side of it. There were also costumed children at picnic parties romping under trees and canopies decked with tissue pompoms and candy-coloured bunting, which added to the effect. I lingered like a balloon from parties past, low on the ground, observing the kids filling up water bombs under the park taps. I would time my visits so that after I left I could walk further up to hear the Riverside Church bells chiming seven in the warm, wide evenings, right by where Mark, Susy, and I had lived. The sky was always full of birdsong and evening smells, piano music from a window, the stone buildings glowing against the blue, like cream poured over something tart and hot.

  It was nearing the end of June. My three-month visa was drying up fast, which I kept pushing to the back of my mind, and I found myself looking at everything with a new kind of longing. I thought that if I was ever able to live in New York, Morningside Heights was the neighbourhood I’d want to be in.

  During this period, which was about two weeks, what comes up must come down came to mean that if I went to visit Silvia, which was up, I at some point had to leave and come back down. It was a long, long way, and I refused to take the subway. I insisted on walking as a kind of pilgrimage. Dwight lent me his bicycle, which he was always falling off, but I didn’t dare use—it was expensive, too big for me, and had no gears. I was too afraid to ride it and too attached to my walking, but pretended in my messages to him that I did ride it and was grateful for the loan.

  On one of my visits I arrived to see two microscooters outside Silvia’s room, parked in the hallway alongside various mobility aids. For a moment I wondered if something had happened to Silvia and whether there was a new occupant in her room. I knocked on the door rather than going straight in.

  “Enter!” Not Silvia’s voice.

  Nat was there, with Ingrid and two small children, who were sitting in the corner sharing one device.

  “Alice!” Nat said. “Just talking about you.”

  The children were Ingrid’s, Thom and Rosa. Twins. I didn’t realise Thom was spelt that way until later, because his father insisted upon the h so distinctly that he almost pronounced it when saying his son’s name, so that I too started breathing the h heavily when I said it in his father’s presence, as if I had to clear my throat. Out of the two, only Thom seemed interested in meeting me. He stood up to shake my hand and then returned to the corner and his sister and their game.

  “Since you’re here, let me fill you in on the plan.”

  Nat had become hysterical about how far the home was from Silvia’s apartment on the Upper East Side and said it was “nonsensical” for me to be going back and forth all the time. She kept mentioning a gang of young boys who had been convicted of raping a woman in the park, and Ingrid had to keep reminding her that that had been two decades earlier and in any case they had been acquitted.

  “She’ll get raped,” Nat promised. “I’d have you at mine, but Ingrid’s so much closer.”

  Ingrid, standing right next to her mother at this point, exhaled audibly and nodded with her eyebrows raised very high.

  “What’s raped?” Rosa looked up from the corner as if something were being given out that she might want.

  “It’s what happens to girls who walk through Central Park on their own at night,” Nat explained, as if this were just the system the park authorities had. Same as trash collection.

  Rosa returned to the game.

  Nat determined that the sensible thing was for me to move in with Ingrid while Silvia was in the home. Ingrid and Silvia did not appear to feel the plan had been finalised. I messaged Dwight from the corner of the room as the women argued about it.

  She seems to think I’m some kind of delinquent, I typed.

  Did you push back? This was a phrase I heard Dwight use constantly and understood to mean resist, but which still snagged somewhere in my brain. I had spent my whole life being malleable and solicitous to people. Pushing, pulling, or any type of force, did not come naturally.

  Not really.

  “We live right over there, Alice,” Ingrid said at last with resignation. “It would be good if you were close to Silvia, we think.”

  She’s hot, Dwight messaged back. Walter definitely wants to bang her. He meant Ingrid.

  It happened that Ingrid’s nanny had been fired the previous day for cursing at Rosa. It was an inconvenient time, as the summer vacation had begun. Ingrid often worked from home, but the kids were driving her crazy. She would love to have me stay if I wanted, just to watch them occasionally. The offer, put like that rather than as Nat had phrased it, made me feel mature. It also suggested that I might still have moments when I could be solitary without getting raped. I had seen adults walking alone while their charges scattered birds, miles ahead on their scooters. Their faces seemed full of wisdom. But it is difficult to tell whether something is an opportunity or a trap when you are put on the spot. I felt the six eyes of Silvia, Ingrid, and Nat boring into me as I accepted. Nat looked at me with an indecipherable expression, somewhere between fascination and annoyance but fixed, as if watching a fly that had lost its way out of the room.

  Nat turned to Silvia, lying in state.

  “In other news, I’ve found you a doula, sweetie,” Nat said.

  “You want to do what?”

  “It’s a bit like a midwife, but for someone who is dying.”

  “Mom. Please.”

  “I want you to meet her. Frank recommended her to me after Lisa died. Most people don’t know how to deal with dying people. They just go on about everything else except the main thing.”

  “Mom. Not the time.”

  “Exactly. Exactly my point. There you go.”

  “Can you maybe come outside for just a minute, please.”

  Ingrid and Nat disappeared.

  “It’ll be good for you,” Silvia said when the door was shut, “if you’re sure you don’t want to go home to Susy. Don’t be polite—just say no if you’d rather not, or if you want to go back home to England. I’ll be fine.”

  She seemed to have forgotten that time was almost up on my visa. I said I was sure.

  “I know it’s a pain to relocate. But it’ll be much better for you to stay with other people, I suppose. They’ll be a good surrogate family. Much better than being alone without the choice of company, anyway. Hopefully it won’t be for long. I’m sorry I’ve been such a disastrous host.”

  It shouldn’t have felt that way, but I could only think of it as yet another rejection.

  When Ingrid told me their address, I thought I’d misheard. They had recently moved to Claremont Avenue, where Mark and Susy had lived, right next to the music school, at the top of a building that overlooked Sakura Park, which is where Mark had made friends with the statue. I was expected the following afternoon. Dwight, who’d got back from California a few hours before, went with me. I’d bought gifts for my hosts this time. Wine that Dwight had chosen with an app that did something if you took a picture of the label. I realised I no longer knew what children played with, or maybe I had never known. In the e
nd I bought two turtle erasers, one pink and one green, from a gift shop on Lexington. The shop assistant insisted on taping them inside plastic for me before she could hand them over. She said they were a choking hazard, even though they were sold loose so could be choked on before they reached the checkout, or the minute they were taken out of the store. I assured her I had no plans to put the turtles in my mouth. Her insistence made me angry, and I told her the rule was illogical. Since losing my temper with the nurse, I had found that I was getting angry more and more of the time.

  “You’re angry at the system. It’s just to do with being in the city,” Dwight assured me. “It means you’re going native.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Developing a healthy distaste for authority.”

  I rolled my eyes at him, but a part of me was thrilled to hear it.

  By the time we reached the northern end of Morningside Heights and found the right door, I was sweating. I had only a very small bag of clothes and my journal. (Everything in my small bag must still be there, or I suppose Ingrid will have chucked it. She kept their home spotless. She said she was so anal about it because Robin was OCD about germs, but really she was by nature a total control freak.)

  “It’s the penthouse,” Dwight said, squinting into the midday sun.

  The street had that sad summertime feeling that you want to push on to see why it hurts. Behind us, men were sitting on top of the buttressed wall. There were radios playing, soft Spanish lilts and the slush sounds of melting cool boxes. In front of us, the Rooiakkers’ building was pale and slim-bricked. Six floors, with a fire escape snaking across the façade. The glass doorway was surrounded by dark green marble, with dark roses on the right side. I peered into a ground-floor window with drawn, discoloured blinds. I checked the building number, in stick-on gold squares with slanting black numbers. I hesitated on the step.