Sympathy

by Olivia Sudjic

  I gave up my journal. I had a secret, which meant that noting qualities of light felt futile. I had been planning on recording the trip for Silvia, but I no longer thought it seemed like a good idea. Even a censored version would only make her feel left out. Besides, I told myself, I was far more interested in what Mizuko was up to than in recording what I was doing. Her world looked neater, so much less threatening than the realities of mine.

  I suppose Nat thought our discussion would be the end of it. That generation tends to think in terms of beginnings and endings. They don’t understand what you can do with the Internet, or how there’s no end to things, no way out. They don’t understand that nothing stays private and nothing goes away. It’s like the wave—the back catching up with the front.

  Walter began teaching Thom to play chess, and Dwight, to the delight of both twins, introduced the ice-bucket challenge. Though technically, as Dwight pointed out, the ice-bucket challenge was a viral phenomenon and required the use of a device to capture it, it corresponded to a real cause and so was permitted by Ingrid. Dwight’s videos of Ingrid bucketing Walter, the twins together getting soaked by Nat, and Ingrid being soaked by Thom (though he staggers under the weight, misses, and the icy water mostly falls on him) are all still online.

  “Aren’t you going to join in?” Dwight emerged beside me, panting. It would have been the ideal time to instigate my water-fight rules, had I had the heart just then. I looked over at Robin stroking his digital camera. As long as he stayed out of the group activities, I could stay out too. I shook my head. Dwight shrugged and walked away. I sank back, deeper into the parallel universe I had found. I’d scrolled back in time three years to Mizuko’s very first picture and was now working my way forwards again so I could follow her footsteps in a more logical sequence rather than randomly clicking on pictures of her.

  A recent haircut taken at the hairdresser’s.

  A black-and-white picture of a woman (Sada Abe).

  A Dorothy Parker quote: “Lips that taste of tears, they say, are the best for kissing.”

  The picture of the picture of her birthday—that was a TBT to her twenty-first; her thirty-second had been in February.

  An image she had found of a tattoo she wanted—a three hares tattoo. This was destiny.

  Then I saw Rupert’s face. He was sitting drinking coffee and holding a Wall Street Journal. I gasped.

  There were more. A trip to Europe to meet Rupert’s parents, who were pictured shelling peas in a country garden with red brick walls and climbing roses.

  Fuck fuck fuck.

  “Excuse me?”

  “What?” I must have said it aloud.

  “What are you doing?” Robin said. I’d forgotten where I was.

  “Nothing.” I looked up.

  A pause.

  “I’ve been stuck on a crossword clue for days,” he said. “I thought perhaps you might be able to help. You’re always so quick. Nine letters, and the clue”—he looked back at his iPad screen—“is a quotation from the Book of Numbers, I know that much. Chapter twenty-three, verse twenty-three, ‘What hath God wrought,’ and the other bit of the clue is ‘Morse.’”

  “Sure.” I turned away. “Let me think.” I covertly typed the clues into my device. “Telegraph?” I said, too quickly. “That was the first message ever sent, wasn’t it?”

  “Very good.”

  I went back to Mizuko, moving through her pictures with Rupert like a termite. I scrutinised captions, following her grand tour. When the next picture failed to load immediately, I watched the grey wheel with growing impatience. The Wi-Fi seemed to have stopped working.

  “Creator and destroyer,” Robin called out to me. Luckily, I did know that one.

  “That’s easy. Shiva.”

  “You’re good.”

  It could not be coincidence. It seemed to me then more likely that I was a pawn in a vast conspiracy that stretched all the way back to Silvia’s first letter and linked everyone who had come into my life since the discovery of the Higgs boson. First Rupert, in Tokyo, then again at university when we were watching the tsunami unfold, then Silvia’s invitation to New York, Nat’s invitation to Roosevelt Island, Dwight’s invitation to Central Park, Ingrid’s invitation to Claremont Avenue, and then Dwight’s unorthodox invitation to my new family to all please spit. If that could be put down to chance, then chance might just as well be called fate. In either case, it seemed obvious to me that my special purpose in life was to unravel Mizuko’s mystery for her.

  The July sun was hot, and I must eventually have fallen asleep. I woke up as it was getting dark; everyone else had gone, and my nostrils were full of the smell of citronella and immolation. I was on the same lounger, and Robin had his hand on the outside of the crotch of my swimsuit. It was light and trembling, the hand of an old man. I could feel a sliver of the skin of his thumb against the skin on my thigh.

  “Alice,” he whispered. He pressed his fingers down a little harder.

  I shut my eyes; my body began to shake. I tried to control it but could not. Playing dead seemed to be the only option. I tried to feign sleep, sleep without complicity, counting in my head, barely breathing, locking my jaw, trying to freeze my body, but it shook harder the more I tried to control it, to shut it down. Shaking, waking, shockwaves radiating out from the epicenter where his hand lay.

  “Food!” Dwight called out from the kitchen.

  I kept my eyes shut. It wouldn’t be real unless I saw it.

  I felt the hand lift. Where it had lain felt suddenly cold. A raw, tender feel like the skin had been peeled back. Footsteps on wood. Silence. He must have crossed the grass. Footsteps on gravel. A screen door whined.

  I kept counting. I stayed there until Dwight called out again. “Alice! C’mon. It’s ready!”

  I pretended I had sunstroke and went to bed. I still had that prickly, shaky feeling up my legs, as if I’d just been in a car crash.

  When Dwight came to our bedroom after supper, he was distracted. He had become even more obsessed with the missing plane after the second one, another Malaysia Airlines flight, was shot down over eastern Ukraine.

  “The numbers are spooking me,” he said as he got into bed.

  I tried to sound normal. “Because it’s the second time, you mean?”

  “No—well, yes, that too. Listen, though: Flight 17, Boeing 777, first flew July 17, 1997, exactly, like, exactly seventeen years to the day before it crashed, July 17.”

  “It’s weird,” I said evenly, not turning to look at him.

  I felt hot and was still shaky so got up to wet my face. I ran the tap. It was a stupid modern tap. A jet of individual strands, high-speed, spurted forth. They hit the ceramic of the basin with such force that most of the water was lost before I could catch it. I tried to cup some of it to splash on my face. The water stung my hands. It was impossible. I began to cry.

  Dwight came and stood behind me. “What’s wrong?”

  I gulped. Pressed my hands into my eyes. “All the water is coming out as individual strands,” I said, choking.

  He looked blank.

  “So I can’t get it in my hands—it just goes everywhere. I want it to be in one smooth column.”

  “But it’s water. What am I supposed to do about that?”

  I began to cry harder.

  With no immediate solution, Dwight got into bed, annoyed. When I returned he was facing away from me, towards the wall, reading the back of Walter’s Wine for Dummies book. I turned onto my side, away from him, and closed my eyes.

  I was still awake by the time the sun rose behind the muslin drapes and birds began singing, lying with the sheet pulled up to my chin, listening for footsteps. To escape thoughts of Robin, I went to my shrine. There were three new pictures since I’d last looked. I no longer felt like I was doing anything wrong—secretly looking at her like this, touching her pictures as I slid down, down, down while she slept. It was public, after all; anybody could have come across it by chance. Nor di
d I feel guilty on behalf of the Rooiakkers any longer. In the end, I kept it secret from Robin and Ingrid because I wanted it to stay mine. A space that belonged to me. I reached her first picture again. I had that thing in the moment before you fall asleep when everything connects. Mad, allusive; when you lie back, so tired your eyes are smarting, and then suddenly your eyes roll open again so wide, because you have understood something, something big.

  At breakfast the next morning Robin acted like nothing had happened, which, after a while, made me feel like I had imagined it, and which then made me feel bad, like maybe I should apologise.

  “I found your pawn!” Thom cried triumphantly from under the breakfast table.

  Ingrid flinched.

  “I’m teaching them to play chess,” Walter said quickly as Thom flicked the pawn across the table towards him.

  The morning was overcast. Rosa emerged with a red scarf around her neck, a SpongeBob SquarePants T-shirt, and a pink woolly hat with a white hygiene mask pulled up from her mouth onto her forehead. She looked like she had just been spelunking with a head torch.

  “Rosa, take that off,” Ingrid snapped. “Those aren’t toys. They belong to your father.” She shot Robin a look. “The air is too clean for him here,” she said mockingly. “He misses the city.”

  “He doesn’t like breathing germs,” Thom said defensively.

  Robin remained silent. Rosa sat opposite him, glaring under the mask. She was daring him again. I shuddered and went back to my story. I was in the middle of my third reading of “Kizuna.” That became how I got to sleep most nights after that, letting sleep overpower me despite my fear of it, gradually losing myself in Mizuko’s descriptions of the black wave until unconsciousness descended, muzzling me like a white surgical mask. And then in my dreams it seemed that everything I read was materialising around me.

  Nat demanded, as it was our last day (the first of August), that we go into town for lunch. She’d barely seen anyone here. We drove in a convoy of three cars. I went with Dwight, sitting in the back with Thom while Ingrid sat in the front. As she undid the elastic that held her wet blond hair, I caught a blast of shampoo on the wind. I imagined running my fingers through it the way Robin might. Did he still? Or was that why he had put his hand on me?

  Everything in the town was dedicated to someone. There was even a plaque on a rock.

  “They’re running out of things to dedicate,” Ingrid observed.

  Everywhere we went there was someone Walter or Nat knew. Nat even took a tour of the neatly rowed tombstones in the graveyard, pointing out dead people she’d been acquainted with in life.

  “What kind of chairs are those?” Thom asked, indicating the white ones that were everywhere, milky smooth, with narrow slats and broad backs.

  “Adirondack,” Nat replied.

  “They’re all over,” he said. “It’s like the whole of the outside here is actually somebody’s home.”

  It was true, I thought. It didn’t really feel like we were actually outside.

  “Also,” Nat added, “I don’t want to alarm anyone, but everywhere we go I see Alec Baldwin. It’s like he’s following us.”

  It wasn’t that Robin was feeling awkward or guilty, I decided; he was ignoring me. He was supposed to be contrite, and then it would have been up to me what to do about it. Instead I felt embarrassed and could choose nothing.

  At lunch, Dwight explained TriMe, now fully rolled out and making headlines.

  “I don’t understand your job,” Nat said finally.

  “Brand,” Ingrid said, rolling her eyes at her mother.

  “Is that a real word?”

  Unusually, Robin came to Dwight’s aid. “It’s a Norse word that meant to leave a mark on something, to burn a mark into it. Like livestock . . .”

  There was a loud thud and Nat screamed. An enormous stag beetle had dropped onto the table. It brooded, as if planning its next move, before flying straight into the wall and dropping down dead. I felt intensely claustrophobic, trapped, and I wanted nothing more than to go back to the city.

  When we got home from lunch it was late afternoon. Dwight put music on, his road-trip playlist, blasting it out of the speakers in the woods. “Sympathy for the Devil” reverberated between floodlit trees, and he came careering outside, howling the woowoos at us. I didn’t help Ingrid and Nat prepare the salad for dinner, which was my usual task. I no longer felt I could try to belong with these people. I turned instead to Mizuko, who was spending the evening having a bath. The series showed her reading material (Joan Didion) and her scented candle (Diptyque) and her shell-pink toenails perched on the gold taps at the end of the tub. The last was a selfie with two pink flower emojis placed strategically over her chest where the soap bubbles were not dense enough to cover her.

  Meanwhile, it was to be our last barbecue, and I never wanted to see another blackened chicken wing as long as I lived. Dwight began droning on about his work trip to San Francisco again. Nat asked him about earthquakes, and then there was a discussion about other unstable regions of the world and a long, inaccurate explanation of tectonic plates by Nat, using the dinner plates, for the benefit of the twins. Walter was quoting from one of his own articles about how we lived in uncertain and liminal times. Then he and Dwight started talking about artificial intelligence—robots that could detect earthquakes. This turned into Walter’s claim that soon robots would be doing everything for us, from detecting brain tumours to defending criminals, and eventually no one would have any need for human intelligence.

  Robin snapped. “Would you fuck a robot?” he snarled. “Would you want to wake up next to one in your bed?”

  There was a long silence. Nat had shut her eyes very tightly.

  “Yes, I would,” Walter said calmly. “I would.”

  “Me too!” Dwight agreed, with feeling.

  Ingrid got up from the table and told Rosa and Thom to clear.

  Maybe it was Ingrid who suggested using TriMe or downloaded it herself. Or maybe it was both of them together, by mutual consent—some perverse revenge on his wife for sleeping with Walter, or Ingrid trying to twist a knife harder into his front than into his back, where it seemed to be having little effect. But I suspect it was him, without her knowledge, using some pictures he had of her in her bathing suit to set up shop as a couple. One of the things I knew about TriMe was that an account could be accessed on only one person’s device at a time, even if the profile was set to “couple.” I had protested that surely this meant that people—lone men—could pretend to be part of a couple, to have a nice liberal wife, in order to seduce women. Dwight hadn’t denied it. “We’re working on it” was all he’d said.

  Later that evening I lay still and silent whilst he fucked me. He seemed more into it than he had in weeks, as if the conversation about fucking robots had flipped a switch. We didn’t use a condom; I still thought I was sterile and he said he’d pull out in time. He didn’t.

  The Long Island CVS pharmacy is a tasteful olive green, unlike any of the ones I had seen in the city. Dwight drove me there first thing while everyone else was packing. I had never taken the emergency contraceptive before and read the instructions and side effects carefully before I did.

  “Don’t bother,” Dwight said, uneasy in the driver’s seat, holding out a bottle of water to me.

  “Don’t bother taking it or don’t bother reading about it before I take it?”

  “They always say risk of death, dizziness, nausea, flulike symptoms. It’s psychosomatic.”

  When we returned from the pharmacy, everyone was busy loading up the cars. I walked through the gate in the hedge, then stopped dead. There was a body hanging from the big tree where the frog and the snake lived. I walked slowly towards it, wondering how to make a sound above a whisper and as loud as a scream for help. When I went nearer, I saw that it was only the black plastic sheath with the red Saks logo on that Nat had for transporting her smart outfits. It had a handwritten label that said BLACK CARDIGAN (cardigan c
rossed out and replaced with suit) and then the word evening crossed out and replaced with the word funerals! So the label now read BLACK SUIT, FUNERALS! I exhaled deeply and went inside to get my own bag. I had seen Ume hanging from the tree.

  17

  * * *

  “Why are you all black?” Silvia said before hello. “Did someone die on your nice vacation?”

  I had purchased my black sack, the priestess uniform I had adopted to mimic Mizuko’s. We had returned from Walter’s a few days previously. I had mainly slept over at Dwight’s, having everything I needed with me, and had gone shopping in Brooklyn that morning on my way back to Morningside Heights. I was uncomfortable. I hated the warm, sickly air inside the home, and on this occasion particularly I was filled with sweetish nausea. For those patients who were not Silvia I felt almost no pity, only disgust.

  Monitoring Mizuko meant that I had begun to find any other distractions or demands on me irritating. The home and its inhabitants were especially incompatible with the beauty and dark humour of Mizuko’s worldview. I scrolled. There was the original photograph of Mizuko at her twenty-first birthday, in her costume based on the tokusatsu film Warning from Space. I had watched the film online at the Rooiakkers’ house before the trip and convinced Dwight to watch it with me by promising him it would have lots of special effects (special for 1956). In the film, an alien race descends to Earth to warn everyone about an impending disaster. They are trying to warn one man who might have the power to stop it, a professor of astronomy, but they can’t make contact with him and instead scare ordinary people in the streets of Tokyo shitless, just because of how they look—these big black starfish with an eye in the middle of their gut—until one of them comes up with a plan. They get hold of a photograph of a famous female celebrity, and one of the aliens volunteers to undergo “transmutation” so that it looks exactly like the woman, whom everyone in Tokyo loves. The doppelganger manages to infiltrate the right circle and explains that a rogue planet (Planet R) is on a collision course with Earth. Mizuko’s costume is so cute. She has little pastel stars on her shoulders, a white jacket like a spacesuit, a white helmet, and a little antenna with a pink heart on the top. While Dwight and I were watching the film, Ingrid came in and asked us to turn it down. She was trying to do her kundalini yoga and harness the truth.