“What is it?” she said, after we had adjusted the volume.
“Some fucked-up Japanese movie,” Dwight answered, staring in horror at the giant starfish-shaped alien about to undergo transmutation. Ingrid came behind us. Her perfume smelt good, and I felt Dwight stiffen as she leant over him on the back of the sofa, her hair brushing my arm.
“I know this one. I’ve seen it. Robin made me watch it once.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. That thing is about to turn into a woman.”
“Spoiler alert,” Dwight said.
“Robin loves this type of stuff. When I first met him he had a kind of Japan fetish. Hence all the pseudo-Japanese features in here, with the sliding screen doors. Let me tell him you’re watching it.”
“Hey!”
I snapped back into the room. Silvia rattled the adjustable table that was fixed to her bed. She told me that they were taking it out on her. When I asked who, and what they were taking out, she said years of oppression. I realised she was referring to the mainly black nursing staff and felt a part of me ball up inside. The Wi-Fi was slow. I switched to roaming. I was rewarded with Mizuko’s face—a toothbrush protruding from her rosebud mouth—in a bathroom mirror. She was wearing a grey slip. She must have woken up late. It was already three in the afternoon. The caption read CARPE DIEM.
I felt I had developed a deep affinity with her, as if she were a child star I had grown up with, against whose milestones I remembered my own experiences happening in parallel, as well as various theories, based on her stories and what I could find out about her life online, and what only I—and now Nat—knew. I couldn’t piece together precisely how Robin and Hiromi had met. I’d found, after much trawling, a search result for a Hiromi Himura on a webpage that did not seem to have been properly indexed, which in some way connected her with Imperial College. The year listed was the year before Mizuko’s birth, but many other years were also listed, and I couldn’t be sure whether my search terms made it clear what I was looking to find. Her name might have been appearing in connection with this page simply because she had been affiliated with the University of Tokyo, which in turn might have had connections with or held an academic conference of some kind—I didn’t know what—with Imperial College. My search terms, highlighted yellow to show why the engine had picked this out for me, were woven into JavaScript, and others were written in Japanese, so that I didn’t know exactly what I was looking at or whether parts of the page were just not working.
I had spent so much time looking at things through Mizuko’s eyes, from her exact height or posture, that I felt I could almost predict what she was about to do next. I had decided that I wanted to see her in person somehow, to see if she was even real, not some glitch in which I could see myself in another universe. Initially I had been thinking of trying to stage a collision when she was alone in a public place like the park, but she usually cycled everywhere, even the smallest distances, so my opportunities seemed slim.
Silvia poked her feet out of the end of the bed and asked me to fit her little velvet slippers on them because she was cold.
“Any more ideas about what you want to do yet? Maybe Ingrid could give you an internship?”
“Mmm. Maybe.”
“No?”
“I think . . .” I wasn’t giving her my full attention. “I think I would have to know how to use CAD and stuff.”
Suddenly I felt a rushing in my ears and the prickly car-crash feeling behind my knees. Mizuko had followed her toothbrush selfie from fifteen minutes ago with an aerial shot of a table and a male hand in view, wearing a watch I knew from her other pictures as Rupert’s. They were inside the Hungarian Pastry Shop, which Robin, and therefore the twins, called the Hungarian Café, metres away from where I was now. I had been there with Robin and the twins once and I recognised it from the red paint on the wall beneath the rail and the crispy strata of the cake. In any case, she had just tagged the location, so there could be no mistake. If I stuck my head out and to the right, its red-and-white-striped awning could nearly be seen from Silvia’s window.
“Hey.” Silvia poked me with her bony foot. “Tell me things.”
She wanted to know about Walter’s glass house, exactly how modern it was, and then to dictate a letter to be mailed to an old friend who lived in France. I forgot to mail it because I was so desperate to make it to the café before Mizuko and Rupert left. I still had the letter in my pocket at the Holocaust talk. I still have it. It’s part of the collection under my desk, dated August 10.
From the corner of red I could tell their table was situated at the back and on the right, if you were looking from the entrance. The choice of beverage there is not like what coffee shops in most cities offer now. The choice is beautifully simple. The only cold drinks on the menu are milk, Coke, orange juice (which can be either small or large), seltzer, and cold cider. Hot options include only American tea or coffee, café au lait (which is American coffee with hot milk), hot chocolate, and other teas, which are just called “special teas” and served in a pot. I accidentally ordered milk at first because I was so nervous, then switched to coffee and added a gelatinous cake so I could spend longer there if I needed to. EXPECT A MIRACLE TODAY, advised a rainbow sign by the cash register.
The last time I had been there I’d observed a steady stream of Columbia students, who were territorial about their work spots and writing nooks. I have still got my guest check, which says your name and how much you owe. I kept my eyes on the girl serving me. It was possible that Rupert would recognise me first, but I worried that he would then try to avoid me by leaving. I took a spot near the entrance but facing the back of the room so that I could intercept them if he tried to escape. The waitress called out my name when my coffee was ready and I scowled at her. That was when I first looked directly towards where they were. I could see the back of the empty chair on Mizuko’s right and then her back next to it. The solid black curtain of hair. I wanted to go to it, pull it back to reveal her so I could be sure she was not some shadow trick of cyberspace.
Luckily Rupert sat opposite her, so that I would be able to catch his eye when I went to the bathroom, which was just behind the end of the counter on the left, about three quarters of the way towards the back. That was my plan: enter the bathroom, rehearse my surprised face in the mirror, exit, catch Rupert’s eye, go over, ask intelligent questions re: Columbia, say, “Actually, yes, by crazy coincidence I am thinking of studying for an MFA just like yours! I guess you might even be my teacher then.” Begin at the beginning. Know nothing. Tabula rasa. At the same time, part of me wanted to distinguish myself. To let her sense the bond we shared straightaway. Maybe subtly hint at some of my secret intelligence. A special handshake. A nod. I now completely understood how criminal masterminds could so easily get caught before the big reveal—the temptation to boast about the execution was huge.
I pulled the bathroom door shut behind me. The trap was set, a loop on the ground for the little white foot, a net that would appear from nowhere. Someone had written out the molecular structure of LSD across the ceiling. I didn’t need to pee, but I sat down on the seat and stared up at its constellation above me in order to measure a natural length of time before reappearing. I was aware that as a guest of Silvia’s, and now of Robin and Ingrid’s, I was about to transgress a code. An ancient host-guest code. But then, hadn’t all of them already done that? Did all New York belong to people and families in their homes already, or might a part of it, maybe not a physical part but the part that buzzed and throbbed and shone most brightly by night, be mine? Sitting on the toilet seat, I felt anxious for a new reason. Up until now, it had all belonged to me. The information was contained. I held it—literally—in the palm of my hand. I had been perving on what Mizuko chose to make public without her even knowing I existed. She knew nothing about me. By meeting her in person, face to face, I was sacrificing some of this power, tipping the scales between us.
I unlocked the door, advanced tw
o steps, and produced my grotesque mask of surprise, which Rupert stubbornly didn’t see. I took two more steps—grandmother steps—so that I was right next to their table. They still did not look at me. I felt I couldn’t do it twice, the surprised face, in case someone else had noticed it. I could tell from his animated expression that he was in the exact middle of telling Mizuko a story.
“But then I literally bumped into Uri, you know, that guy at Oberlin?” He clapped his hands together to demonstrate the climax of his story.
“Rupert!”
They both turned at once.
18
* * *
As you know, it worked like a charm. I hovered for a while, asking polite questions, dropping in interests I had siphoned from hers. Then I retrieved my belongings from my table and tangled up the chair legs as I tried to sit down at theirs. The handle of my white enamel cup was too small for me not to burn my knuckles as I drank, but even when it had cooled I left it on the table half drunk to prevent them from leaving. I discovered then, as Rupert declined the ticket for the Holocaust talk, that it is relatively easy to get instant gratification if you are not too worried about what comes after.
“After” began at dawn.
Exactly when the plastic bottle snapped me out of my nightmare with the dead body in the mud, the cat pounced, and Mizuko said cat and turned over a few times until we were back to back. When I finally managed to regulate my breathing to match hers, after the shock of the snap and then the sound of her voice, I watched the whole room turn pink, then red, then white. We’re back in that room again. Mizuko’s bed. The bed in the centre of the bedroom, the centre of the universe, books stacked above the matte-black radiator and against every wall.
When I was finally able to move, I staggered, head pounding, to the bathroom. In the mirror I saw that my face had bloated because of the shellfish she’d ordered. There was a brute ridge where my eyebrows should have been, deforming the shape of my eyes and the bridge of my nose. I looked not unlike Quark from Star Trek. Though it had been worth it, a million times, to spend the evening with her and to sleep in the same bed, I did not particularly want her to see me like this. You could just leave now, the authoritative drone voice said sensibly, and then request to follow her. That is the etiquette here really. You’ve outstayed your welcome already. She barely knows you, and you’re in her bathroom talking to yourself. Sure, it’s a little tacky to run out on her this early, but she said her apartment is for intimate friends only, remember? She also said it was haunted, I reasoned back. Well, you’re here, aren’t you?
But if you leave, I cautioned Quark in the mirror, that’s it. You might not get a second chance. Or I guess you might, but you know it won’t be at this intensity. It’ll be formal and involve saying you’ll meet up for coffee and then it probably won’t happen. Rupert will be there if it does, or he’ll probably tell her that you are seriously lame and not worth following up with. Right now she doesn’t know that. Don’t go.
A hasty retreat then, without goodbye, would not, I decided, sit well after the night that preceded it. We had, I felt, bared small pieces of our symmetrical souls to each other, fast, as if playing one of those breathless card games, and I had pretended to be as moved as I had been the first time I uncovered it all myself, back in East Hampton.
I went back to the bedroom, where Mizuko was still unconscious. I had a message waiting for me from Dwight. I’d assured him that today would be the day my period was due, my first since our trip to CVS, and so he wanted to know if it had arrived on schedule. He’d saved the date in his phone. August 11. His presence, intruding into her bedroom with such a crass question, changed the atmosphere immediately.
I replied, No but packet said it might alter cycle and also mine are often irregular because poly. I had explained to him that I believed my ovaries were speckled with cysts.
Where are you now?
At Silvia’s, on Amsterdam.
How’s she doing?
Fine, I typed, feeling sweat pricking my skin under my shirt. No change here.
“Can you get me a glass of water?”
My heart plummeted into my stomach, and then my stomach dropped, with the new weight it was carrying, into my pants. I held myself like I had to pee.
“Good morning.” It came out with unexpected force; I’d been preparing for so long to say it but still wasn’t ready.
“Not tap, the electrolyte water in the fridge.” She groaned without lifting her head from the pillow. “I can’t even—”
I backed out of the room, into her kitchen. Every surface gleamed as if it had never been used. The fridge was full of neat white boxes.
“Take whatever you want,” she called hoarsely on hearing the clink of glass inside the fridge door as I opened it, handling everything softly, like an intruder wearing gloves. “I think there’s a Paleo muffin. Whatever you want.”
She was desperately hung over, minus the adrenaline that enabled me to ignore it. She raised her head on the pillow, turned down her phone’s brightness, and began jabbing at it.
“No reply from Rupert,” she said grimly as I handed her a glass of water. “He does this. It’s a control thing.” I nodded. Of course he did, the bastard. “Why don’t you message him and suggest that the three of us hang out today? He’ll reply to you. Especially if you haven’t seen each other for ages. Say you want a proper reunion.”
“Sure. If you want.”
I pretended I had Rupert’s number, and pretended to be typing the message as she composed the exact wording for me so that she didn’t sound desperate or like she was coercing me. It had to sound, she explained, like it was my idea. I pretended to hit Send. I felt like a child playing with a toy phone modelled on the grown-up object. I didn’t mind exaggerating my friendship with Rupert, since she seemed to think she might get to him by me. I could always claim later that the message hadn’t sent—say something about its being a British phone.
“I’ll let you know what he says.”
She spent the morning waiting for the reply in bed, glued to CNN images of the Ferguson shooting, looking like a bird that had flown into a window.
“No?” she kept asking, and I would shake my head.
“No.”
I never wanted there to be a too-big silence between us. It made me nervous. Silence was only okay if one of us was looking at a device. There had to be near-constant communication or I felt we would come unstuck from the fast new intimacy between us. I feared that in silence, things I’d meant to keep hidden would rise up by themselves, like steam from an open manhole.
Rupert called time on their relationship approximately three hours and twenty minutes after I didn’t send the message inviting him to hang out, so instead of me leaving or him coming, we spent the whole day together, she and I. She lay in bed like a sick child, limply scrolling through pictures, occasionally crying out in pain or making disgusted noises at what she saw. Though Rupert shunned social media (making him godlike to Mizuko), they had all the same friends, so it was only a matter of time, she promised me, before she saw something she didn’t want to see. Something that was painful.
“I’m going to have to get an entirely new social scene if I want to avoid him,” she said, hunting for evidence of him amongst her friends’ feeds. I made a sympathetic face, but my heart leapt up onto her, beat its fists on her heart, yelled, Me Me Me!
“I just feel”—she put her hand on her stomach and repeated herself for what felt like the tenth time—“like I’ve had everything inside me ripped out.” She made a ripping motion. “But then I talk to you and I forget for a bit and then I remember and I feel it all over again.”
When she was not pacified by her device, she spoke continuously about him. If I had known then what I do now, I would have realised that what I wanted was impossible. The more she said about her love for him, the less I should have hoped. Instead, being naive, I saw only how she might be persuaded if I provided her with whatever she needed. If I was there to le
an on, and if my chest retained the exact imprint of her exquisite head, then she would need only that spot on which to rest. Of course what I should have done was copy Rupert’s lead and try to carry on where he left off, treating her like shit. Or maybe it was already too late; you only get one first love. She was mine, but I had not been hers. She was only going to look for some echo of it, and if I had made the right noises, that echo might have been me for a while.
“Sometimes he makes me feel like I am wrong to give up on him because he could be everything I want him to be, and other times he makes me feel like I am such a fucking moron and that I should have given up on him the second I met him because he is never going to be able to be what I want him to be. It’s like the longer I’ve been with him, the less I’ve known him—he’s only ever been getting fuzzier the whole time. Sometimes I worry that he will just vanish forever, and sometimes I think I’d prefer that so I don’t have to deal with the fact of him not wanting me, or wanting someone else. We had basically stopped having sex, you know?”
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