I did know. She had said this many times the previous evening.
“Well, not stopped, but for us, you know, I told you what it used to be like, we had definitely been doing it much less. Like once a day, and really fast. None of that amazing morning sex where you forget who is who.”
I swallowed hard.
“We used to do it constantly, but in Paris the most romantic thing he did was roll cold Perrier cans from the minibar on my feet because I had blisters.”
This sounded good to me.
“My feet were so sore I had to crawl around our bedroom, even on the carpet. I know I shouldn’t give him, like, a second chance, or a tenth, whatever it is now, but—”
I let her talk, imagining her crawling on her hands and knees around the Parisian hotel room, since she did not seem to want anything more from me than occasional solidarity, and as she talked I wandered around the bedroom, touching things I recognised. It was the same feeling of recognition, but much sharper, that I had had when I had arrived in New York and Tokyo. I guess that’s the same for most new places now: the new feeling is the sense of actually being there, standing in the place you have already seen remotely, not what is actually there.
Her apartment was on the top floor of a building with an elevator and a concierge and a bike room. She’s since moved, so at one time there was a listing for it that had photographs of the inside, taken with a fisheye lens, which had the disorienting effect of making it look much bigger, with all new stuff in it. I screenshot the pictures and zoomed in as far as I could go before it pixelated.
The next day I said she should eat something: What would she like? But she said she was still feeling sick, that thoughts of Rupert had pushed all hunger away, and she wouldn’t know what she could stomach, or if she could eat at all, until she saw food. We went to a deli one block away. I tried to get her to pick something, but she was distracted, selecting only a garlic bulb in a white mesh sock and swinging it around in a threatening way.
“Look at this,” she commanded, indicating a display of postcards. She was holding up one with an ox.
“What?”
“Rupert is an ox.” She alternated between shaking and nodding her head as she verified this on her device. “Yup, he’s a fucking ox, I should have known. I should have fucking known.”
“What are you?”
She spun the display. “A dog.”
I spun the wheel looking for me.
The Ram
1919, 1931, 1943, 1955, 1967, 1979, 1991, 2003, 2015
People born under the sign of the Ram are artistic, creative, elegant, honest, warm-hearted, timid, and charming. They are also pessimistic, vulnerable, and disorganized. They depend on material comforts and are very quick to complain. They do not handle pressure well but can find their own solution to a problem when given time. The best professions for Rams are gardeners and actors. They are compatible with Pigs and Rabbits but should avoid Oxen.
I found her a Greek salad—something told me this might be what she needed; I suppose I was thinking, Fresh, Greek island, Mediterranean holiday—but when I caught up with her again in the next aisle, she was in tears.
“What’s wrong?”
She pointed at a packet of extra-long grissini sticks. “His favourite. I buy them specially for, for . . . because he loves them so much and I—I—”
The bread aisle was too much for her. I tossed the salad box back onto one of the shelves, the wrong one (something I would never do in normal circumstances, but we were in the midst of a crisis, or a miracle, depending on whose point of view you took; either way, the rules of normal life had gone out the window) and suggested we go to the cinema instead.
“To see what?”
I listed the first option that came up.
“Is it to do with love?”
“No. I don’t know.”
She said nothing. We were standing outside.
“Summer is always such a depressing season,” she said. I nodded and began to list times and locations. She chose the Magic Johnson movie theatre for a three-thirty showing. Because it was such a beautiful day outside, there was no one else in there except for one or two irate people with hay fever. But the movie was to do with love, and so we left halfway through, but not before Mizuko had rested her head on my shoulder. When she leant on me, it gave me shape. It rooted me to the spot. Coming out into the hot sunlight after the cool darkness of the cinema was like a rebirth. I came out knowing for certain what I wanted to do with my life, what to put in the body of my butterfly. My calling. My quest. My meaning. My path. My purpose.
She was worried that she was going to be sick. Her eyes were glassy and she did, out in the light, look pale.
“You’re just hung over,” I reassured her. “You need a Coke. Can I get you a Coke at least?”
She nodded weakly. A single tear slid down her face. I wondered, weird to lick it? Yes. Don’t lick. I went to the kiosk in the cinema, bought a ridiculously expensive cola, and pushed a straw in it for her in the way that made a vein pop in Dwight’s neck. I went out to where she was sitting on the sidewalk.
“Here.”
She looked up as if she didn’t recognise me and took the drink.
The look unnerved me. She was clearly experiencing some kind of post-traumatic shock, and I realised I couldn’t trust her to remember me if I left her side for a minute.
I took her home, exuding the altruism of a kind stranger who did not want to leave her alone for her own good. She did not seem to see this as a sacrifice on my part. It did not occur to her that I might have other people to see, other casualties and broken hearts to attend to. She said she had always felt more soothed by strangers than by people who were supposed to be close to her. “People like—” She faltered. She couldn’t say his name without crying.
I suggested she try the butterfly game. She said I had the zeitgeist. I was doing everything I could think of to keep her away from her phone, trying to entertain her. She mainly stared blankly down at the lock screen of her device, unresponsive sometimes even to direct questions. These were silences, I suppose, in which such a person, a real stranger or new acquaintance, would have excused herself and gone back to her own home, but it didn’t feel like I had one to go to even if I wanted to leave her, which I didn’t.
“Fuck!”
She held up her device to show me, but I already knew from the look of sheer panic mixed with crazed joy that had come over her face. As she held it out to me, the screen went dark and the vibration stopped. I made my face broad and innocent but was fairly sure I had achieved it with my mind.
“Don’t call back,” I said. “Here, give it to me. I’ll keep hold of it so you won’t be tempted.”
Her jaw clenched and her eyes widened like I was about to hurt her, like I was about to take away her child. She pulled it to her body, away from me.
“Give it here,” I insisted, placing my hand on her wrist and prising it free with my fingers like an ama diver, freeing the delicacy from a rock with a little spatula. “Trust me.”
19
* * *
At home, I settled her on the sofa and brought her cat. While living with the Rooiakkers I had overcome my fear of small dogs (really it was all pets, even my mother’s; I didn’t trust them) and knew from Thom how soothing holding one could be.
“Take it,” I insisted, holding the cat aloft.
“Her name’s Michi.”
“Take Michi.”
Every time I did something like this—pretended to be ignorant of something I knew as well as I knew my own name—I congratulated myself. Michi was all over Mizuko’s Instagram. She was obese and ostentatiously fluffy. She let herself be placed in Mizuko’s lap.
“She isn’t very well, poor thing. See, she’s got pinkeye.”
Michi had curled herself to face me and I saw that her eyes were a hideous blood red.
“I have drops for her, but I keep forgetting to do it. Do you want to do it, maybe? She scratches a b
it when you do.”
“Okay, I can do that. Anything else?”
“She’s not allowed outside. She’s a house cat. That’s why there’s net over the windows. Just be careful when you open and shut the door, because sometimes she makes a break for the hall.”
“Okay.”
“And can you go buy me some tobacco?”
“Sure.”
When she was feeling stronger, I suggested we go to the Morgan Library. She said she was sorry she was being a bad host, given that I was a newcomer to the city. I knew the library was one of her favourite places—it said so on her Google Pin. It would get her inspired to start writing something again, or carry on with the novel she’d abandoned, I said. Also I had never been. First she showed me the room where the signs of the zodiac were depicted in the ceiling. Kids from some kind of summer camp, maybe ten or eleven years old, were lying under the rotunda looking up and a guide was telling them a story, so we sat on the floor too.
“The ceiling paintings depict the three major literary epochs represented in the collection. We have Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau. You name it, we got it.”
“I love Walden,” I whispered in her ear. “And The Scarlet Letter.” They were listed on one of her posts from a few years before, when people had nominated their social-media friends to list their ten favourite books, with reasons why.
“Likewise.”
We followed the tour into the original library, to the tapestry depicting avarice personified by King Midas.
“Who knows what happened to King Midas?” the guide asked.
No hands went up.
“No one?” She paused. “Okay. Everything King Midas touched turned to gold.” The children seemed impressed. “Now, you might think that sounds kinda cool, but you think about it a little longer. Do you really want everything you touch—your food, your pets, your best friend, your mom—to turn to gold?”
“Noooooo,” they chorused.
“Imagine it, though,” Mizuko said to me suddenly, “if everything you touched . . .”
A feeling crept over me, and I had the distinct impression she was looking at my mouth as she spoke. I felt my lip itch as though a wasp had landed on it.
“You wouldn’t ever be able to have physical contact with anyone without killing them,” I replied stiffly, trying not to move my lip too much.
“Do you ever wonder . . . like why, or like how, people started kissing?”
I had to fight the urge to put my tongue out onto my bottom lip and feel for the wasp. If it was there it would sting me; the only thing to do was remain still. I must have frowned.
“I’m serious. How did the first kiss happen? Did two people just randomly decide to put their faces together exactly, like nose to nose, so that their lips lined up and then kind of mush them together?”
“I guess.” I said it through a clenched jaw, trying to keep my mouth as still as possible.
There had been lots of signs. Explicit signs. We were now so close that we had nowhere to go but back. Unless it was possible—I wondered—to go through? It felt like staring into a mirror, never actually touching the other body even though you pressed yourself against it.
Rupert sent a message to her phone, which I still held captive, every couple of hours, and I did not report them. Even without this information, Mizuko was on a continuous cycle of breaking up. As soon as I began to think she was improving I would have to begin all over again. I came to know the stages in great detail. From tears to rage to glassy-eyed exhaustion to shock and back again. I wanted to find a way to disrupt the cycle somehow and suggested she try something trademarked, a method I found online for her called the thirty-day no-contact rule. She was very interested in this, and even paid for a PDF manual you could buy once you had read the free introductory section on how the method worked. It was “guaranteed” to bring back any ex, no matter how bad the breakup had been, but you had to cut them completely out of your life as if they were a cancer. It was not just a case of ignoring them and refusing to spy on them; you had to take proactive measures to guard against their presence in your life. They needed to be locked out completely.
As she read it, I administered Michi’s eyedrops, ordered takeout with her credit card, and borrowed some beautiful silky black clothes she pointed to on her rail instead of going home to change. The manual said to immerse yourself in distractions like salsa, swimming, or learning a language.
“What do you think?” I asked when I could see she had stopped reading for a moment, opened another tab on her laptop, and was scrolling through pictures of a girl she thought Rupert liked. “Do you want to try it?” If she refused, I would have to confiscate that device somehow too, I thought. It wouldn’t be long before he tried violating her boundaries by email. Now that I’ve had firsthand experience of Mizuko’s silence, I can imagine the chokehold under which Rupert must have been suffering. Tighter and tighter the more messages he sent without replies. I guess I’m lucky he didn’t do something crazy.
I had never been tempted to take drugs of any kind and especially not mind-altering ones, but when Mizuko introduced me to Provigil, which she described as mind-enhancing, I took two. I was feeling a little wound up already, a little edgy, a little over my head too quickly, but she made it sound like you felt more in control, not less. She said she used it to write, or to level herself out sometimes. I did not want to be excluded from whatever it was that she was going to be doing that day, even though I had once observed someone get stuck after taking Provigil the day before he had to submit a fifty-thousand-word dissertation, insisting on conducting his word count by hand and restarting every time he lost his place. You had to be strategic about when you took it if you didn’t want to get stuck. Mizuko acknowledged that this was true. She had once gotten stuck in front of her bedroom mirror, unable to stop applying a shaft of dark red lipstick until she had eroded it to the hilt. When there was no more red in the tube, she began tracing the same circuit with her finger.
I got the same selfish tunnel vision Mizuko promised she got. It was exhilarating to imagine I was sharing a similar tunnel, if not the same one. And obviously I got stuck on her too. Everything else went blurry while she became more arresting, with something like an angora texture at her edges. When I had to go to the bathroom, I sprayed her perfume in the air and walked through it.
“You smell nice,” she said as I returned.
“What of?”
“Me.”
I noted how much more strongly my nervous system reacted to her praise compared to when Dwight had told me I was quirky and the air had felt stagnant and mildly oppressive. This time the combination of the compliment, the mid-August heat, the perfume, and the smell of her cigarettes, which she smoked inside, made me feel like I was going to faint. At this stage, I thought that my increasingly debilitating waves of nausea might be a side effect of Provigil.
From then on we spent days on it at a time, going on quests without leaving the apartment—searching for things, counting things, breaking things down. I sometimes take it now. It gives me an attention span that, if I am careful, if I choose the right Wikipedia trail, can keep her at bay for hours. Occasionally it backfires and reminds me of her more than any artefact or sound or picture I have. A line stretches out, wire-tight, under the ocean, a pipeline I can walk back along.
I think it was the fourth or fifth day I had spent at her place and I hadn’t been back to the Rooiakkers’ once. I suppose they assumed I was with Silvia by day and Dwight by night. Thom sent one message saying, “Are you in tonight for pizza?” and I replied, “No thanks.” But I hadn’t visited Silvia since I’d left to catch Mizuko in the Hungarian café, and had mostly been ignoring the messages I’d got from Dwight until one arrived that afternoon telling me that there was a crisis and I needed to come right away. I called him and got no answer. Paranoid that it had something to do with Mizuko and my discovery, now the only category of crisis I could imagine, I left the apartment, telling myself I could risk
leaving her for an hour. On my way I saw one of the ads for TriMe that Dwight had promised I would.
When I got back to hers, Mizuko didn’t even ask me what had happened. She was looking at pictures of her and Rupert together and crying. Worried that Dwight would discover it on my person, I’d left her phone in the bread bin, where she’d evidently found it.
“I saw the picture you posted. A swarm of bees? That was the emergency?”
I bristled. I wanted her to think, despite my pledge to stay at her side, that I had a life outside her walls. “My boyfriend keeps them on his roof. They got out. Tried to make a new nest behind a neon sign in a beauty salon opposite his building.”
“I know.” She sounded slightly hurt.
She had just taken one more from the Provigil blister packet because she said she had something to finish for her first seminar when teaching started again in a fortnight. I tried to make my voice sound innocent and cheerful.
“He needed help getting them back in. You have to wear these funny boots and masks and catch them using a—” I could see she was not listening. I left the sentence in midair, pretending I was finished.
I began laying out food on the coffee table next to her feet. I had bought snacks from the deli on my way back. She slipped down onto the floor and began rolling a quail egg across the tabletop, crunching its speckled shell, laboriously picking, then pulling as a whole section attached to the silky membrane came away. She appeared mollified by the gifts.
“What have you decided to do about—” She made a graceful curving motion to imply a pregnant belly.
I froze. I had forgotten about that. At that moment I couldn’t get my brain to contemplate the question, mainly because she had asked me a question at all. About me, not Rupert or, at the most, Rupert and me and how we knew each other. There had been an exquisite moment when I had seen that she suspected, from the slightly exaggerated version of my conversation with Rupert about the view in Tokyo, that we might have been lovers, or at least that a one-night stand had taken place, and I could see both that she’d been jealous and that I had risen in her esteem. I couldn’t even imagine an answer that a pregnant person might say. I blinked furiously, made a show of having something in my eyes.
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