She looked away and studied a piece of shell on her nail very intently. “I had an abortion once,” she said. “I didn’t want to end up like my mother.”
She hadn’t talked about anything like this—of her life before Rupert—since the breakup. Nor, which I found even stranger, had she ever written about it.
“I’m going to have a shower.” Her first since Rupert had ended it. “See you in a bit.”
I sat on the sofa compulsively eating purple radishes. Michi sat at my feet. I gazed into her malevolent, squashed face, her pearly eyes, no longer red, and pink nose. According to a schedule pinned to the wall, Mizuko’s first class, on September 3, would be called “What Language to Write In? 3 p.m. Dodge 413.”
I listened intently to the sounds of ritual cleaning. I took another pill. She was in there for what felt like ages. How good it must feel, I thought, looking at my own quail egg, to have your tight little shell just peeled clean off like that. Like Mizuko had managed to do practically in one motion. One second of ecstasy before you are eaten. I accidentally dug my thumbnail into the white. When she returned, I was completely wired, staring at the door waiting for her to emerge.
“I feel better,” she said with a sigh of relief.
“We should go out somewhere tonight,” I said, recalling the part of the manual which said this should be attempted on the fifth day. For me, the promise of the thirty-day no-contact rule lay in the bullet point that said at the end of the thirty days you wouldn’t even want your ex back anymore, so it didn’t matter if the method hadn’t worked.
She sat down next to me in her towel, letting the top part of it drop around her waist as she wrung her hair out. I looked straight ahead.
“Can’t,” she said. Her long wet hair had left a trail of water droplets from the bathroom to the sofa. “If I go out, I’m guaranteed to bump into him. Especially if I’m trying not to or trying not to think about him. It’s the law of opposites, and certainly the law of breakups in New York.”
“Unique New York,” I said.
“What?”
“Unique New York, unique New York.” I smiled. “Try it. Unique New York. Unique New York.”
“Unique New York,” she said doubtfully. “Unique New York.”
“That’s it. Unique New York. Carry on. Faster.”
“Unique New York, unique New York.”
“Faster.”
“Unique New York unique New York unique . . .” A smile began to spread over her face too. “Oh god, yes. Unique New York. That feels good.”
I’d brought her into my tunnel.
If you were wondering whether I had looked at everything on her phone while I had it, then: of course. I thought that would be obvious, but maybe you’re not like me. Maybe you don’t snoop. Good for you. It was the most surreal experience at first—to be holding the device, the source of her power, the source of contamination. It felt kind of like holding her brain, and I held it like that, my palm flat, my right index finger light and quick, as if the phone were jellied or slimy. Whilst it was in my possession I covered as much ground as I could. I put in keywords to hook the kind of thing I most wanted. Sensible words like Rupert, Hunter, Mother, Father, and, because I could, a few like sex, sexy, fuck, and fucking. I just wanted to see what would come up. Sometimes messages she had not yet seen, so I had to Mark Unread. I went back and forth to the bathroom so many times to look at it that she had actually noticed and asked me if anything was wrong.
The first thing I infiltrated, after I’d read her most recent messages from Rupert and ascertained that no, they had not been discussing me at any point the previous evening, was a folder marked SOCIAL. Inside this I found Dwight’s 3 logo for TriMe. My finger froze when I saw it.
After all the sex research I had done while isolated in my room after graduation, admiring Maria Ozawa, I suppose I should have been prepared for the kind of images Mizuko had been swapping with random strangers. It wasn’t even what they depicted that was so shocking, but that I knew this person was a real person. I had to sit down mainly because I was shocked, but also because I was turned on. I suppose it was a fight-or-flight response to seeing the pictures. I froze and then fought. Fought in the sense that I masturbated frantically on her bathroom floor looking at pictures she and Rupert had taken of themselves in a mirror. It was a bizarre, not necessarily pleasurable feeling. My blood had run cold, but slowly, as if all the hot had run out; something in my heart felt like it might be breaking, and yet I could not stop. By the time I was done, I had pins and needles and my ass was numb from the ceramic tiles.
“You’ve been in there for ages,” she called. “Are you okay?”
I deleted any incriminating search history and tried to stand up, but my legs were so dead I nearly fell over and had to cling on to the towel rail, which was scorching hot. “YES!” I said, everything throbbing.
She was crouching on the sofa, and when I came out she beckoned. “I want to show you something.” She had her laptop. Probably more pictures of Rupert. I didn’t know how to act after what I’d just done. Her device was in my back pocket and was burning a hole. A hole through which all Rupert’s dick pics were protruding and giving me little electric shocks.
“I’ve been researching writing retreats in Wyoming. I’m looking for ones with no Wi-Fi,” she explained.
I waited till later that evening, when she had reached the angry phase of her breakup cycle, after we had finished a second bottle of wine, and played the road-trip playlist Dwight had put on in the car and later boomed from Walter’s outdoor speakers. Mizuko did wild dancing in the living room, moving like she was possessed, mumbling the verses and wailing the chorus.
“We should go somewhere,” I panted, jiggling my limbs beside her. “On a road trip, you know? We could go on the retreat together.”
“You need to submit writing in order to be considered.”
“I could submit some of yours.”
Mizuko smiled and shrugged, ignoring the suggestion. She was still not wearing a bra after her shower. She let her vest’s left strap slip over her narrow shoulder. I watched her stamping her feet and pounding her thighs and tossing her head, waiting for her to agitate the remaining strap. She circled near me. I went to refill my mug of wine.
I have reproduced this memory almost every day since it happened. So many times I no longer know that it did happen, this one moment, hyperreal, which rends everything in two. When I come back she bends over me, closing her eyes and extending her neck, exposing her throat, her head thrown back so that her nose nearly touches the tip of mine. I look at the thin skin of her eyelids and see her eyes moving beneath them, and wonder if she is imagining other people in other places instead of me and where she is right now. When she opens them again, looking confused that I have not kissed her, I ask her if she wants more wine, and she slowly pulls a single strand of her hair out of my mouth as I try to speak, tender but strange—the ticklish sensation inside my mouth as her hair is drawn out. This is it, I think, this is the tipping point. The manual foretold it. And from now on I am falling. She kisses me. A single thread of spit draws out between us as she pulls away; she breaks it with her nail.
When we go to bed, nothing is mentioned, but she wraps her arms around me and holds on through the night.
20
* * *
In the morning, the only sign that anything had changed was that Mizuko announced she was finally feeling mentally strong enough to go outside unaided. She asked for her phone back, and boosted by the kiss, though still neither of us spoke of it, I consented.
Outside meant for a walk, she said, and she wanted to go alone, and then later, to a restaurant with her friends that evening, to which I could come if I didn’t have plans. After she got back, I lingered around her all afternoon, waiting for the kiss to be repeated. I had spent the night dreamily replaying it, seeing it from the outside rather than from within the kiss, as if I were watching us on film. But it did not happen again, and when she did n
ot return my loving gazes, I began to wonder if we’d moved too fast. She was still grieving over Rupert, after all. I told myself to be patient.
She spent ages getting ready for dinner, at last emerging from her closet wearing an elegant black dress, full skirt and narrow bodice, with the marshmallow-white sneakers she often wore. I watched as she selected a wide-brimmed black hat, earrings, and an ornate handbag. All her things looked expensive. She had her baby-blue perfume bottle in her hand. This had been the revelation, now I was with her in a real, physical sense—her smell. Now I knew what the milk-and-wood scent was; I could pick it out everywhere, throughout the apartment, where it mingled with sandalwood incense. It’s one of my many smaller regrets that I can barely smell her scent when I spray it on myself now. I’ve become immune.
“You look great,” I said.
“Thanks.”
I tried to slow her movements with my eyes, to catch her attention in the mirror by staring directly at her. When she continued, oblivious, I wondered whether I should go up behind her, hold her waist like I had done the previous night.
I took two steps towards her, lifted my hands—suddenly made of lead—towards the small of her back, leaning towards her neck uncertainly. I opened my mouth to speak. I don’t know what I was going to say—I think her name.
Muh—
She felt my breath on her neck, or heard it, and spun around to face me in alarm.
“You look,” I stammered, “amazing.”
“You just said that, silly.” She giggled and turned back to the mirror.
I wanted to ask why she was making the effort. I had liked her recent disintegration. The greasy hair and smudged eyeliner had been reassuring. She seemed to read my thoughts, however.
“We might bump into Rupert.” She said it without taking her eyes off her face in the mirror.
The restaurant was Italian. Three of her friends came. They were from Yale, not Columbia. It was tough. Mizuko kept telling them how great I was and how smart and how funny. She introduced me like a new pet, and of course the attention thrilled me, but it also meant I couldn’t speak. I barely said a word, and the friends kept looking at me expectantly. I went to the bathroom to get my shit together and scrolled through some pictures of my trip before I met her, some anecdotes to recall, but still no words would come, certainly not great or smart or funny words. Not the kind they were waiting for. I wanted Mizuko to tell my stories for me, which would also tell me which ones had made an impression on her. She seemed to find everything to do with my relationship with Dwight hilarious, but I didn’t feel like talking about that in front of her friends, not now that she and I had kissed. I wanted to phase him out of the equation in case she thought he was an obstacle. When I finally thought of something that didn’t involve enemas or old people, the words would pile up in my mouth, reluctant to expose themselves to their audience, and I’d have to swallow them down again.
The situation got worse when they came back to her apartment after and someone put on music. An advert interrupted during a moment when I was the person nearest the laptop, and so somebody said to me—quite threateningly, I felt—Put something else on. Obviously I forgot every song I have ever heard in my entire life. In one swift tug, like the tablecloth trick where everything is supposed to remain on the table gone wrong, every name of every artist disappeared too. The only keywords I could think of were the ones on a toy keyboard-and-tape-recorder combo I’d been given as a child, and I hadn’t known their meaning even then. Bossa nova, for example.
I said I couldn’t think of anything, any music, except silence, and retreated to the corner of the room, pretending to busy myself by scouring the bookcase there, which held little gatherings of figurines as well as Mizuko’s many books. Heirlooms, she had informed me. It was one of the few times she had mispronounced an English word. She said it like hair loom. Karakuri are mechanised puppets, or automata, from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The word means device according to Wikipedia, both mechanical devices and deceptive ones. Mainly they were made simply for entertainment, but some of them could also serve tea or shoot an arrow. These had belonged to Ume’s father, Mizuko’s great-grandfather, who had given them to Ume when he died, and they had, Mizuko said, inspired her mother’s obsession with robotics when she was growing up. Ume had given some to Mizuko. I loved looking at them, but I didn’t touch. I was too afraid I’d break one. In our attic at home there were two. One was already broken, but the other I had loved to play with. It was made up of a miniature black mountain with an old granny on the top sitting in an armchair, and a little rabbit that ran around and around her at the base of the mountain when you turned a handle.
“Tell us about Rupert,” one of the friends demanded. I spun around. They were sitting in a ring on the ground. Mizuko was in the kitchen. The girl beckoned. “We never met this asshole. Are you friends with him?”
“No way,” I assured them.
“But that’s how you met Mizuko, right? Through Rupert.”
“Well, yes,” I said, moving my tongue around my teeth as if looking for something stuck there. I didn’t know what else to say.
Mizuko reappeared from the kitchen, carrying beers, a cigarette in her mouth. “Take,” she said through her partly closed lips, gesturing to the bottles in her hand.
“Alice was just telling us how she knows Rupert,” the friend said.
Mizuko sat down in the ring, ashing her cigarette into a beer cap. She waited for me to begin, as if she hadn’t made me go over everything I knew about him a hundred times already.
“We did a guided tour of Japan together,” I explained. “And then went to college together.”
“But he’s older,” Mizuko interjected. “He’s twenty-eight, and you’re, what, twenty-six?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Such a baby!” Mizuko crowed. Everyone agreed, and one of the more patronising friends stuck out her bottom lip.
“And what was he like at college?”
“Weird,” I confirmed.
“How?”
“He once pretended to be in Africa when really he was still hiding in his room on campus. Or not even in his room, actually—in a Winnebago.”
I felt that the story had been so much better, had made him sound so much stranger than this, when I’d told it before, but I couldn’t tell it as I had to Mizuko. When I’d first told her, the night we met, she was entranced. She hadn’t even known that the whole coma episode, with Rupert being knocked off his bike, was connected to the Winnebago and the West African harp. She had made me feel fascinating. A font of wisdom. (“Why did he never tell me that? I’m beginning to feel like I barely knew him. Go on.”)
Now the conversation drifted, and one of the friends started talking about how one of her other friends’ younger siblings, also at Yale, was about to launch a company that made beautiful Scandinavian-inspired wooden cabins that people could rent for off-grid retreats. “It’s all part of that tiny-house movement.”
“Microhouses,” I interrupted. “They’re Japanese.”
“Same thing,” the friend said. “The idea is you get away from everything. It’s aimed at writers, I guess”—she nodded at Mizuko—“and millennials. Like you,” she said to me with a grin. “But it’s ridiculous. It costs, like, three hundred bucks and you’re paying to be marooned in an empty little cabin in the middle of nowhere. Well, Boston. It’s a smart business plan, I guess. Making people pay for nothing. Or what used to be free.”
“I’d do it,” Mizuko said.
“Definitely,” I said. I kept my eyes on her, trying to fuse us together again with a private, knowing look. I found it harder to push her buttons—to elicit the same reactions of surprise and thrill—in the company of people who actually knew her.
That night she got straight into bed while I cleaned up and put the bottles down the chute. She was too drunk and tired to even brush her teeth. “Do it for me,” she murmured.
“Sure,” I said, padding into
the bathroom, wetting her toothbrush, and extruding a tiny ball of toothpaste onto the bristles. When I came back she was snoring with her mouth wide open.
In the morning Mizuko shook me roughly awake. She was holding her device by my face where it was half hidden in the pillow. I hate other people being awake before me, and I woke with a horrible lurching feeling.
“He says I’m being demanding of him. What should I say back?”
I sat up, blinking sleep out of my eyes, and reached for the phone, which this time she did not give to me but held so I could see it from a distance.
“I can’t see the screen,” I complained. She brought her hand closer for my consultation but still did not give it to me.
I read.
“Say he can’t just turn you off and on again every time there’s a problem. You can’t just reset.” It killed me that Rupert knew he could just evaporate and reappear again whenever he wanted.
Rupert had suggested meeting up with her, and twenty minutes later, after lengthy negotiation with me, Mizuko replied, saying that she would meet him only if it was to get back together.
“But I want to see him period,” she complained. “Now he’s just going to say he doesn’t want to see me.”
“Trust me, he won’t.” But this was exactly what I hoped.
Ping!
“See?” Mizuko flung the phone at me and, pointing her chin towards the ceiling so that her hair fell away from her face and the ends skimmed her thighs, screamed.
“What?”
“He did.”
“This is because we’re not following the thirty-day rule.”
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