“Well, not the end. Then he left you and your mom, right?”
I faltered. “Right.”
I felt as if she had slapped me hard across the face, and my eyes swam, hot and salty. The rejection was bigger than the present moment itself. I understood now why Susy was still engaged in a lifetime of denial that the same man who had fixed her, made her part of his furniture, would turn into the one who left her behind.
Mizuko walked me to the truck with her arm gently through mine. She seemed delighted by the tears, saying “There, there” in a comforting voice but adding that what she was really looking for anyway was emotional residue, so tears were good. I could cry all I wanted. She didn’t care so much about facts, she explained. But I had felt increasingly that this was what was reassuring about the flatness, the physical emptiness. It was an objective, indifferent landscape—desert and space. Things could be broken down into exactly what they were: earth, sky, storm, train, road, house. I imagined the enormous ring that would have curved under our feet. The particles firing round it again and again until they collided at such force that they released their secret.
The truth was, I had little emotional residue that didn’t, in my mind, have Mizuko as its author. The reflection of her face shone in every tear. I could no longer separate out what I felt was my story and what I felt was hers. Susy had occupied every space of that kind in relation to my own history. The only relation to Mark left to take had been an intellectual one. I was the archivist. The critic. The would-be physicist. When I was growing up, anything closer, anything more like identification, always made him evaporate under the weight of my girl-child body. After I’d impersonated him to write the fake suicide note and then pretended to find it in the attic, my brain had cordoned off an area of itself like a derelict house. He became even less real than he had been before. The substance of him was gone, as if my letter exposed him as nothing more than a teenage girl with a box of matches. I had realised, as I composed his words, that I didn’t really have any unanswered questions for him except ones about physics, the rules which had governed people for so long and now seemed to be disappearing or irrelevant. The emotional question became why Susy had rejected me. I was interested in that shift, from actively wanting to actively not wanting. Why could we not have found a way to share the grief and make our own little corners of it, the way I had shared Silvia’s space?Susy wouldn’t settle on one version for this reason, and her words slid around whenever I tried to pin one down. As a result, her grief had become ugly to me, because the story made no sense. It was like one of those Escher drawings which my favourite tutor had framed above her desk and which I hated: hands drawing hands.
The host and I waited by the truck while Mizuko walked around taking final pictures. She wanted me to take one of her, but just as she passed her device to me, it ran out of power.
“Can you take it on your cell and send it to me?”
“Sure, or I can just post it.”
“No,” she said, “send it to me. I want to post it.”
“Can we both post it?”
“No.”
I kept getting the same error notice. There was no signal there.
“I’m having a problem connecting.”
“Send it to me when we get back, then.”
This picture was part of a carefully crafted post-breakup narrative. She wanted to create the impression that she might have a new boyfriend or some kind of male acquaintance in Rupert’s absence. She was relying on his friends seeing it and telling him. I never featured in these pictures. My shadow was the closest I got. I had shelved expectations of another kiss; the intensity of not kissing now worked almost as well—the proximity and denial. But even though she explained why I could not publicly feature in her long weekend, since it wouldn’t be sufficiently ambiguous or suggestive of a new boyfriend if I did, I was hurt that I was consistently written out of our life together, and I often looked back over all the pictures she had taken of or with Rupert and wondered when my turn would come.
It came, in a way, that afternoon. But in Polaroid form, and it was not made public. We were sitting in a café in the main square, waiting to leave. She asked me why I’d once wanted to become a physicist and why I hadn’t done it. I tried to sound even in my responses. Talking about it made something in my voice tremble. I missed studying physics then so much it stung, tried to deny the possibility that it was the only path that would have been the right one, the only discipline that could have contained and defined me, and that now it was too late, I was a blur, a finger smear of data; all I was left with was the zeitgeist.
Give me time, give me space, give me waves. Rules for how bodies behave.
A part of me had also begun to suspect she was deceiving me somehow, because she seemed so interested in my life all of a sudden. I was half waiting for her to turn around and say, Only joking. She didn’t. Instead she wanted me to explain, again, the main theories that would be either proved or disproved as a result of the Higgs.
“Which do you believe in?”
“Supersymmetry,” I said without hesitation.
“And that’s what your dad believed in too, right?”
I nodded.
“What is it?”
“It predicts a partner particle for each particle that we know exists.”
“So cute. But what if it’s something else? Like, what was it called, the multiverse?”
I was pleased she had remembered at least something from my repeated explanations. “Certain physicists like the idea that someone, something bigger and outside of us, cares. But if we are random, a freak accident”—I shrugged my shoulders and tightened my grip around the coffee cup—“then there is no care. Nothing has been painstakingly revised and fine-tuned. No one’s made everything exactly the way it is on purpose to bring us into being exactly who we are. It would be the end of physics, I guess. No order, no pattern, just chaos. Lots of little universes separated by invisible screens and—”
“My therapist would say you’re projecting the loss of your father onto the Higgs boson.”
I raised my eyebrows and made a face to indicate that I was uncomfortable with her psychoanalysing me. Really, it felt good.
“How do you feel now we’re here? Does it bring back any memories?”
I realised then that Mizuko was trying to make me cry. I knew about her crying thing from the TriMe messages. I knew that she liked it when the bottom lip stuck out and the chin puckered. Pretending to cry is like pretending to laugh; after a while you really are. Before I knew it I had hot tears streaming down my cheeks and Mizuko had dipped into her bag under the table and pulled out her mini pink Instax camera and taken a Polaroid of me. She shook it and I continued to cry, harder. Then she laid it on the table and let it develop without saying another word.
We got a train—a sleeper car—the whole way back. It took nearly two days, and the view was dull. For her, at least. I looked out the window and saw similarities between the landscape and that of the exclusion zone she’d driven through on her way to Minamisōma with Ume.
“Where do you think you could publish it?” I asked after a long silence. My mind had been leaping ahead as I gazed out the train window, and I had got to a vision of a dedication: For Alice. Or maybe even in code: For Rabbit. She smoothed her hair and said that though she had started off excited by the idea I’d offered her for the story, she’d decided it didn’t have enough mileage. If anything, it had taken her back to the idea of mining her own family history. She wanted to return to the unfinished novel. By taking my story, I now saw, Mizuko had been testing the boundary between us, waiting to see whether I would hold up a hand and say Stop. When I hadn’t, she’d decided she didn’t actually want it. Like many rich people, she seemed to think things weren’t worth having if they came at so little cost.
“I get it—I do get it that it didn’t work out for you,” she said slowly, half looking at her phone, “but don’t you get it that it would be so easy for my father
to get in touch if he wanted to now? It’s not like it used to be.”
I began to feel tearful.
Like it used to be meant, presumably, more moral and less networked times, Victorian times, when if people lost touch they lost touch for good. Not for good as in for better, but forever. Or possibly she meant that in more moral, less networked times, like the Victorian times, illegitimate children were more problematic than they are today. I asked which it was.
“Look, either he doesn’t know I exist or he isn’t curious to find me. Where I am isn’t even relevant. I could be anywhere in the world and it would be just as easy for him to find me if he wanted.”
I was glad we were going back to the city, and I was glad, above all, that we were not hitchhiking back. I had been carrying around a very definite and growing sensation of nausea, my stomach clenching like a fist without warning, meaning that on the way to Waxahachie we’d had to ask one driver to let us out only five minutes after she’d taken pity on us and stopped to pick us up. Ever since I’d met Mizuko, I’d put it down to Provigil and falling in love. Then, because of my secret voyeurism situation with her and Rupert, I’d decided that the nausea was most likely a moral punishment, compounded by paranoia, sexual fantasies, and semipermanent arousal, but by now, because I was more nauseated and yet hungrier, I had begun wondering whether it wasn’t something else, like a tapeworm. Even on the train back, though it was better than being in a car, I was taking Kwells for travel sickness, to keep the nausea at bay. By the time we arrived in Penn Station—after a long time spent staring miserably out the window—I’d figured it out.
I read the instructions three times. As I bore down on the test strip with the stream of my urine, the tip turned pink. I laid it on the floor and watched it from the corner. I was in the Rooiakkers’ bathroom again. I’d gone back intending just to get my stuff and say, Hey, thanks for everything and bye, but they weren’t in, and then I hadn’t been able to resist doing the pregnancy test in my pocket right there and then in their beautiful bathroom, even though I knew it was inappropriate. I thought back over each and every one of Dwight’s hushed ejaculations: outside, over, onto, never into me except then. Walter’s house had to be the culprit. Although I had reached this conclusion, when the test did too, I was appalled. Something moved inside my stomach. The flick of a fish tail. I lay back against the wall with a feeling like resignation.
I now understood a new way in which sex with Mizuko, if it ever did happen, would be completely different from sex with Dwight, in that no part of it would suggest reproduction. It would not imply the fusion of two separate things into a new thing. Orgasms would be waves, bringing in nothing and taking out nothing, emptying us and then letting us swim again. With Dwight, there was no danger of intimacy but there would always be the threat of sperm and egg uniting. That’s what I’d been thinking of, I guess—my journey to the CVS pharmacy for the morning-after pill—when I’d told Mizuko I was already pregnant. I’d since implied that I’d already had a termination. Now I needed to do it for real. I was pretty sure it was the kind of thing she’d be very up for doing. There was a high likelihood of some criers in the waiting room. It was the kind of outwardly sisterly act she’d do simply so that she could use it for herself. Very occasionally she had contradicted her hostile stance on having kids by saying things like “I do actually want them, I think, and I want them to be so cute it makes me sick. And I want them to have paws,” and then immediately she’d say she didn’t really need a child because she had Michi’s little paws.
I started composing her a message from my long bed at the Rooiakkers’. Despite my urge to get out of there before Ingrid and Robin came home, I was too physically exhausted to go any further and had collapsed in my old bedroom. I fell asleep in the middle of writing the message, my phone on my chest.
In the morning, one arrived from her.
At first I thought I was in big trouble. She’d sent a screenshot of her TriMe account. I swore under my breath. Did she know? But when I looked closer, I realised what it was.
A message from Dwight on TriMe, screenshot on Mizuko’s phone, now saved on my phone. A hierarchy I couldn’t immediately make sense of.
Then she sent a follow-up message with the words Isn’t this your boyfriend?
He was using an alias. A combination of numbers and letters.
Mizuko’s, as I already knew, was Pearl. Every night I’d lain awake or on the bathroom floor replaying her and Rupert, or her and any of the strangers in her phone. I tried to imagine her being called Pearl for real. The pedant in me wanted to tell her that pearls are basically little shiny prisons that contain dead worms, intruders, skeletons, bacteria. The exhibition at the Museum of Natural History I had seen with Dwight at the start of the summer had a series of x-rays showing how the worm is trapped in the layer of mantle inside the shell.
Yes, that’s him, I replied.
Now that I was really pregnant rather than simulating pregnancy, I decided that the psychic who had crossed the street to tell me she could feel my vibrations had been quite correct after all. It seemed I could bring things into being just by holding them in my mind. A lemon, an avocado, a turnip, soon fully formed with nostrils and ribs, each body part downloading faster than you expected.
Don’t think of it that way or you’re going to lose your shit completely. I know it’s bad timing. Does he know?
No, I typed back.
I watched a reply being composed. The instant I replied my power was gone and I felt the foreboding again, my breathing became heavy, the three grey dots quivering as I exhaled.
I know how you’re feeling—a bit nuts—but trust me. If you have to think of it, think of it as a parasite. In fact, it’s not even that, it’s feeding on another parasite, no offense—you’re hardly independent.
The crying laughing face three times.
A protozoan living in the digestive tract of a flea living on a dog. That’s all you’ve got, I promise. It really isn’t lovable.
I nodded dumbly to myself, alone in the long bed in the twins’ playroom. I missed sharing with her.
Can I come over or are you busy?
Busy
Later?
Could meet at 11?
OK. Will book appointment for this afternoon at Planned Parenthood. Will you come?
Sure. And message him to say it’s over.
But maybe it is what I’m born to do. Like a salmon.
How like a salmon?
The way they swim back from the ocean to their natal river and spawn, you know? They go right to the mouth of the river they were born in to have their babies.
After that I didn’t get a reply.
I was too tired to walk to meet her, even though it was so near. I could, I thought, perhaps borrow one of the twins’ scooters, scoot one block behind Riverside Church and cross to the side with the Olive Tree Deli. That was the midway point between us. There was an uphill section between 120th and 119th, however, so there I’d have to dismount and sling it over my shoulder. I felt impatient that I couldn’t just teleport there, be inside her bedroom with one click. I stayed in bed and continued reading about salmon spawning on my device. I learnt, to my dismay, that as they swam into fresh water the female fish “lost their stomachs,” which disintegrated inside them to make more room for eggs, and once they had laid the eggs they became listless, died, and were washed downstream and onto riverbanks where they were eaten by bears.
I sent Dwight a message that I copied exactly from the template Mizuko had suggested, without adding any personalisation. It’s over. With the screenshot for why.
Once I saw the confirmation he’d seen it, I began to get up, dress—putting my hand on my stomach every so often—and pack my things. I could hear Ingrid in the kitchen.
Done, I typed to Mizuko.
I waited for some sign of approval. I could see she’d read the message.
For a while, neither she nor Dwight replied. I sat down again on the bed. Until one of th
em did, I didn’t feel like I could leave the room. I waited for fifteen minutes.
Three pineapples from Mizuko.
I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to glean from that.
I sent back two girls holding hands. Thank you.
I tried to tiptoe past the kitchen to the elevator.
“Sorry to hear about your boyfriend,” Ingrid called out.
“Ex,” I said.
She must have heard from Walter, who must have already heard from Dwight. Or maybe she was in touch with Dwight directly now. I walked reluctantly back towards her. At least Robin did not appear to be here.
“I’m off,” Robin said, suddenly emerging from their bedroom. ‘I’ve got that lunch at one and then I’m out this evening too.”
“Thank you for your input into the circle of trust,” Ingrid muttered.
He stopped just before the elevator and said in a tight, sarcastic voice, “Hello, Alice. Nice to see you again.” Then he left.
“We’ve got the tickets to that play on Friday that Walter asked us to get. Robin and I need to go because of the way he behaved on holiday, and I’ve just been told Dwight isn’t coming now you two have had a bust-up, so would you still come? You can bring someone else—a friend? I don’t want it to be just Walter, Robin, and me.”
I swayed on the spot: a rising wave of nausea. “Sure.”
“Okay, great. I’ll forward you the details. When was the last time you visited Silvia, by the way?”
I backed away from her question so fast that I left one bag on a chair. The last time I had tried to visit Silvia had been right before I’d bought the pregnancy test and was the reason for my being in the neighbourhood in the first place. I’d gone straight from the train station, determined to make it before closing time. They had told me to come back later because she was asleep, and obviously I hadn’t. I’d gone to the pharmacy and then decided that since I was so close, it made sense to get my belongings from the Rooiakkers’.
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