Sympathy

by Olivia Sudjic

  She threw herself on the bed and began making a noise like a wild animal.

  “We need to go somewhere. Like one of those isolation cabins your friend was talking about.”

  “But what if he changes his mind and then I’m in Boston?”

  I shrugged.

  “I know I only want him,” she said between sobs, the syllables all wrong, “because he doesn’t want me. How is that even possible?”

  “It’s normal to want what we can’t have,” I said soothingly.

  “No, I mean how can he not want me?”

  “Look at the manual. See what it says? Every time you contact him or reply to one of his messages, you have to start the thirty days over from the very beginning. He needs to miss you. To know what it feels like not to have you. Trust me, that is literally the only way he is going to understand what a terrible mistake he’s making.”

  Mizuko sniffed.

  “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I consulted the manual. “Anyway, it says that you’ll meet someone new on or around day twenty-five, when you’ll be radiating breezy confidence.”

  Once she had seen the high-spec little film that the cabin company had made, in which all the cabins had names and one was marketed as being especially good for writers who needed to disconnect, she was feeling more optimistic about the plan again.

  “I’m down on men,” she announced, “but pro holidays.”

  I looked up the details, but they weren’t launching until the following month.

  “It’s hopeless,” Mizuko said. “I can’t do it anymore.”

  But she agreed that the best way to stop herself from thinking about him would be to get writing again. She had an idea about a girl called Grainne who refused to eat anything in case her boyfriend had concealed an engagement ring inside it. Grainne was so afraid she’d swallow her engagement ring and choke that eventually she couldn’t swallow at all and died.

  “But I’m not sure about it . . . I think maybe I need . . . stuff that doesn’t have him in it.”

  A change of scene, I suggested, might help her get stranger’s eyes.

  “Okay. Why don’t you plan it, then? Make it a surprise for me. I love surprises.”

  The morning of our departure, Mizuko went downstairs to give Michi in her crate to the doorman. He loved looking after her, she said. She made him do it all the time. I went to get provisions from the deli. I bought, amongst other items, two Scotch eggs, since this is what my mother always bought for long car journeys. Mizuko had apparently never seen one before.

  “What the fuck is that?” she said as she rifled through the bag.

  I explained the concept.

  “Thank god. I thought it was a mouldy lemon.”

  We were going to Texas for a “long weekend,” as I kept calling it, even though neither of us had any kind of work to do on either side of it. I’d thought of going to Texas first simply because Mizuko had a friend whom she’d spoken highly of and said she wanted to visit in Austin—a poet and professor. After I looked up his name on Facebook and saw how single and attractive he was, I decided that was out. But Texas had given me another idea.

  “So I have an idea for you—for a story,” I said slowly as the cab pulled away from the kerb, when it was too late for her to get out. I didn’t know how much of Mark and Susy she’d retained since our first meeting, when it had come out all haphazard as a result of nerves and drinking and my sense that this was the one time I would get to impress on her our cosmic symmetry.

  At first I think she misunderstood what I was offering her.

  “But he’s not there, your dad, right? Your adopted dad, I mean. We wouldn’t be going to visit him.”

  I took a deep breath. Clearly I had not impressed it on her hard enough.

  “Right. No, he’s not there. He’s almost definitely dead. But we could go there and just, you know, have a look. You could write about me going to find him or something, like the descendent of the man saved by Sugihara or whatever. You know, a tracking-him-down kind of story.”

  She didn’t seem to get the reference. I maybe knew the details of her life and memories better than she did.

  “What was it called?”

  “W-a-x-a-h-a-c-h-i-e. Look up Superconducting Super Collider.”

  When she’d finished reading about it, her face looked animated in a way I hadn’t seen since she talked about the Japanese diplomat. Then she made me repeat the details of the story. When I finished, I must have made that blank, bland look. My nose twitched as if I were about to cry. I wasn’t, but I did want her approval. I wanted her to write a story about it.

  “You look like a little rabbit,” she said, putting her arms around me and giving me a brief, hard hug before looking into my face again and biting her lip in a way that suggested she wanted to smile. I closed my eyes and waited for her soft mouth to land on mine.

  “For the cover I want the period stain on a white chair.” I opened my eyes in surprise. “Why the face? Thrillers always have blood. What’s the difference?”

  “True.”

  I saw the taxi driver glance at us in the rearview mirror.

  “You’re sure you don’t mind me writing about it?”

  I shook my head vehemently. “No. It’s yours.”

  For the first time I felt like someone had really seen me. But I didn’t know what it was exactly she’d seen, so I didn’t want to speak of it or gesture to it in case that betrayed the fact that I didn’t really own the thing.

  “Silvia used to call me that,” I said abruptly.

  “Call you what?”

  “Rabbit.”

  When I had looked up domestic flights, they had all, at this short notice, been absurdly expensive, and I felt I could not abuse Silvia’s trust by using her credit card for them. Mizuko shook her head and said she would have paid, since the train was going to be hell.

  “Well, I guess I thought it needed to be more of an experience. A train sounds more romantic, doesn’t it? And what about hitchhiking? I thought that’s how we could get from the station.”

  I had thought that as a spoiled rich girl she might have seen the charm in this shoestring itinerary, but it seemed she did not.

  We took three trains, which were miserable, and slept in our seats, then hitchhiked only the very last bit.

  The first time we waited by the side of the road, I began (belatedly) to wonder if anybody actually still did this or whether it had stopped in the sixties. Most of the people who picked us up clearly did so because of Mizuko. If I had tried to do this alone, no cars would have stopped. I looked out my windows for the places where the debris had landed, imagining human body parts, a heart and a torso and feet from the space shuttle that fell to earth when Mizuko turned twenty-one.

  Dallas was forty minutes to the south of the site, and as we got closer, the landscape became lunar and the people who gave us rides became ranchers and farmers. We got dropped at the Ellis County Courthouse, which we looked into briefly. Then we went into the Ellis County Museum, which had lots of dusty velvet hats, parasols and quilts, mannequins on top of the cabinets, and, once I had asked where to find them, maps and memorabilia from the SSC. We found a B&B close to the town square, where each room was named and styled after an author. Mizuko chose the Will Shakespeare room on the second floor, which promised a private balcony for morning coffee, afternoon refreshments, “or soliloquies.”

  “For a long time,” I read to her from my device, “no one knew what to do about an aborted supercollider. The federal government liked the idea of converting it into an antiterrorism training facility. Someone made a movie there, about a supercomputer that controls a little army of robots. Ellis County sometimes used it as a warehouse to store Styrofoam cups. Then there was a plan to turn it into a mushroom farm and then a secure data storage centre, but the investor slipped on ice and died.”

  “Perfect,” Mizuko said, noting it down.

  “And what exactly does the new owner of the
site do?” she asked our host that evening.

  “Lots of stuff. Guar gum slurries, fluid loss additives, buffers, breakers, friction reducers, spacers, specialty cement additives, root stimulators, micronutrients, nitrogen stabilisers, animal nutrients, coil cleaners, degreasers, and carwash products. The company is called Magnablend.”

  “And could you maybe take us there tomorrow?”

  “Course I can—if you really want. You won’t be able to see much. I can’t get you inside or anything.”

  “That’s fine.”

  There was a pause in which it appeared he was reluctant to leave our table.

  “Do you like living here?” Mizuko asked politely.

  “I do indeed—lived here pretty much my whole life.”

  Mizuko beamed at him, and he finally left us to eat.

  Back in our Shakespeare-style room, I began to look at her phone while she showered, but she came bursting out of the bathroom door and I had to throw it beside me.

  “Just checking the time,” I said quickly.

  She was dripping wet, but she’d had an idea for the story and wanted to write it down right away before she forgot. She preferred me not to speak during these moments. I studied her as she typed.

  I did not think I was gay. I compared the feeling roused by the sight of Mizuko without a towel to my memory of Ingrid in her swimsuit in the Hamptons, her marmoreal skin and compact, androgynous figure. Maybe I was. Sometimes it felt more like I was looking at women with the eyes of a man, the man directing Maria Ozawa with a POV camera. Now that I had seen them together, I often looked at Mizuko with Rupert’s eyes. With the eyes of all the men who looked at her that way. In some fantasies I would take on the personas of people in her phone, imagining I was them. I was plagued by dreams/nightmares in which I was watching her get pounded, her expression usually one of fury. This was a totally different thing from how I’d felt when we’d kissed and she had held me through the night. But it wasn’t completely different from how I replayed it in my head now, again as the voyeur. It was almost more exciting that way, to watch us kiss, than the kiss itself had been. Still, I’d had a hopeful feeling that the moment might be repeated on our long weekend, but the room had twin beds, and it appeared that that phase of the experiment was over for Mizuko.

  My eyes strained across the gap. She was holding her phone close to her face, turned away from me, and it emitted a halo of light around her head. Finally she put it on the bedside table between us and fell asleep. I kept my attention on it. I waited. I nearly fell asleep. All at once it lit up and began rutting on the table: zzz zzzz zzzzzzz. I reached out and grabbed it before the noise could wake her. Reading Rupert’s message, I realised I was weirdly warm all over.

  By morning my fingers felt like my feet once had from continuous walking in Manhattan—blistered and bleeding, having been unable to stop. I went over it all again, again and again, not caring that I was running her battery low and she might suspect. In some there were props—marbles in her mouth, a set of plastic vampire teeth, white socks. In one she was cutting up a fruit with pink-handled scissors. Little erotic dioramas. Rupert had contorted her into these poses and taken the pictures. I fell asleep fantasising about her and him and sometimes me. Her gold chain tinkling, her dark hair against his chest and then tipped down her back as she sat upright, pale and shuddering. When I wasn’t watching from the side, I was between them. A gold hairline crack.

  And then I felt a rush of cold air. I saw her face narrowing suddenly as the other side of the picture came towards me; I had been caught watching them through a window. And then I was awake, and shocked to see her standing.

  “What are you doing?”

  She didn’t reply.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Just shutting the window. Go back to sleep.”

  At breakfast the host showed us where to find which cereal and which kind of milk. They didn’t have almond or coconut options, so Mizuko ate hers dry.

  Mizuko asked him about the space shuttle that had crashed to earth on her birthday. He said they had seen a piece of debris on the very same laminated tablecloth I had my elbows on at that precise moment. One of their guests had ignored the police warnings, removed something from a debris field, and attempted to sell it on eBay. People in those days, she agreed, assumed their actions online couldn’t be traced.

  We got into his truck. As he drove, Mizuko explained what our mission was about. Not the part about Rupert, just how she was going to write a story about my dad and the abandoned SSC and it was going to be called “The Nomad.” I sat bolt upright in the back when she said this (she was sitting next to him in the passenger seat). I didn’t know it already had a title.

  The host pointed across a prairie towards an industrial train trundling past with tankers on it. “I think there’s going to be a storm. I’d better get back soon.”

  We got out of the truck and found a spot where we could see into the compound with a pair of binoculars he kept in the glove compartment. It looked, he said, essentially the same from the outside, at least from this distance, as it had before. To keep the existing acronym, SSC, Magnablend even named their new facility the Specialty Services Complex. Only slight depressions in the landscape suggested the shafts that had been sunk underneath.

  “Come on,” Mizuko said. “Let’s get closer.”

  It was hard to imagine a landscape less like New York. While the bedrock in Manhattan, except in the middle under Central Park, is said to be perfect for the construction of tall buildings, the geology here, lying over the Austin Chalk, was perfect for building underground. The Austin Chalk is “a geological formation that arcs from Mississippi to Mexico”; I had read about it extensively before I got to Silvia’s. The land had to be suitable for tunneling, since the SSC was to be “one of the world’s largest tunneling projects,” so for that alone the site was perfect. Another advantage listed in the shortlist of sites Silvia had in her crates was “connectivity to the world.” Meaning, I suppose, that it was central. Where we were currently standing would have been the centre of a ring 4 metres in diameter and 84 kilometres in circumference. There would have been 4,728 magnets 17 metres long, 2 million litres of liquid helium, and around 2,000 people, mainly physicists, living there full-time. The abandoned tunnels had now been filled with water. We dropped stones into them to hear the splash.

  “So you could actually get into it before?”

  “Yup,” our escort said. “Some physicists even broke in once and took a lot of photos.”

  “Of what?”

  “Rust and decay.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Masochists,” Mizuko said. Her face darkened. I felt sure she was thinking of her own self-destructive habit of looking for evidence of Rupert with other girls.

  “So it was just empty for twenty years?”

  “Yup. They made a big deal outta the wrong sort coming here—thieves and dropouts and stuff. There was graffiti, but there weren’t—it wasn’t as bad as Magnablend made out. They said there were—”

  “Multiple alcohol and drug parties.” I’d read every article.

  “What’s a drug party?” Mizuko asked, grinning.

  I shrugged, embarrassed.

  “So in theory, the Higgs boson could have been found right here, yes?” She dug her toe into the earth. “Like, two decades ago.”

  “Yes,” I said. “And instead they found it in Geneva, the year before last.”

  “On Independence Day?”

  “July Fourth was when they announced it, yes. It could have been found anywhere. At any time. There’s not just one.”

  “Right. But remind me exactly what it is again. I’m made of them, correct?”

  Over the course of our journey I had nearly exhausted all the real-world metaphors I could think of to answer this question, none of which had satisfied her except the most anthropomorphic, which required adjusting the science.

  “They’re particles. The basic building blocks
of the universe. They are particles which can’t be divided up or made into anything smaller.”

  “Okay. And what do they do?”

  “They give things their mass. When a particle travels through the Higgs field, which is all around us”—I waved an arm around the emptiness—“it interacts and gets mass. The more it interacts, the more mass it has. Think of it like . . .”—I felt for something she would get—“Instagram likes mounting up on a picture.”

  “Kim Kardashian’s boson.” She seemed pleased with her joke.

  “I guess. So before, we could detect different particles and know them by their mass, but we didn’t know why they had that mass until someone came up with the idea of the Higgs field.”

  “And that guy was your dad?”

  “No. Not really—well, no. He was just someone who wanted to help find it. And the Higgs boson is an excitation of the field. That’s what quantum—”

  “Stop. You lost me. Give me another analogy. I understand the field of snow or the fish realising it’s in water, but what was going to happen here? Stick with snow.”

  “Okay, imagine the Higgs bosons are snowflakes. The collider that was being built underneath here was going to send huge snowballs along a track, nearly at the speed of light, then smash them together. A machine with hundreds of sensors would have caught and sifted the debris.”

  “And then they would have tracked it?”

  “Not yet. The moment they find it can’t be sensed directly. The Higgs is unstable. It splits up into particles. It’s only after millions and millions of collisions that these fragments accumulate and become a swelling on a graph. The more data there are, the bigger it swells, until it’s undeniable.”

  “So then they say they’ve made the discovery?”

  “Then they know they’ve found a trace of the Higgs, yes.”

  “Because I’m thinking in terms of a narrative arc. When would the big celebratory reveal happen?”

  “At the very end, I guess. But remember, that’s not my dad. He didn’t find it. That didn’t happen here. This place got cancelled and we left. That’s the story, the end of it.”