Sympathy

by Olivia Sudjic

  After I left the Rooiakkers’, leaving my bag on the chair, I went to meet Mizuko at a bar near her place, and she ran through the gist of what Dwight was going to say and what I was going to say back. When we actually finally spoke, on the phone while Mizuko went outside for a cigarette, he kept saying, “All I’m going to say is . . . ,” but that was never all he said, and so that was all I kept thinking about, this disconnect between what he was saying he was doing and what he was really doing, and not the important thing we were supposed to be talking about.

  “What did he say?” Mizuko said as she returned to the table.

  “Lots. Mainly he said he hadn’t actually been using it to physically meet up with people. He said he didn’t really see what the problem was with just messaging. He assumed that I knew he was on it. He said everyone was.”

  Mizuko handed me a cocktail in a marmalade jar. “He’s just like Rupert—I don’t think he really gets it that you’re even breaking up with him.” I may have given her the impression, at least initially, that things between Dwight and me were more serious, more like an actual relationship, than they really were. She reached out her hand, and I grasped it. “No.” She indicated my phone on the table. “Show me.”

  I passed her my phone.

  “Yup. Definitely him.”

  She compared a picture of him to the screenshot she had. In this, he was still “Active 2 minutes ago,” as if time had stopped. “I recognized him from your Instagram.”

  In the midst of all the other news—and it did really feel like it was all starting to kick off—this piece of information thrilled me: that she had actually studied certain scenes from my life too.

  “‘Renaissance man and Rainmaker,’” she read aloud. “What a dick. And why are random words in caps? Mendokusai.”

  She pushed her hair back from her face, put her finger to her lips, and repeatedly stroked her nail down the centre of the groove above it. Mendokusai translates loosely as “too troublesome” or “I can’t be bothered.”

  I sucked hard on my straw and removed a soggy leaf that was blocking it. “What is this?” The drink was leaving an odd taste in my mouth and I was starting to feel nauseous again.

  “Mint julep.”

  “Oh.”

  It was eleven-thirty.

  Maybe because I was pregnant, or because I now knew I was pregnant, it had an unpleasant metallic taste.

  “You need to get rid of him. You need to never talk to him again. Block him right now, actually. Remove him as a friend. Unfollow. Delete, whatever. Here, I’ll do it.”

  I snatched the phone back.

  She studied me, determining whether the action came from disobedience or sadness. I made the face.

  “Oh, poor Rabbit, at least we’re both single at the same time.”

  A bus with a large TriMe 3 on the side rumbled past, and we both looked at it, back to each other, and then away again. I tried to make myself cry about Dwight for her, but tears wouldn’t come. I played back some things—driving on the Long Island Expressway, walking by the ocean, lying in the park, drawing the butterfly—but then my thoughts returned to the fact of Dwight trying to lure Mizuko into a hookup of some kind, and I had to fight against the urge to jiggle up and down in my seat.

  My expression must have looked pained.

  “Let’s be real for a sec. He was probably just bored at home, getting off. Doesn’t necessarily mean he likes me more than you, or even reflect that badly on you, just makes him look like a fool.”“Why a fool?”

  “I mean I would never . . .” She waved her hand in the air. “He must be mad if he thinks I would actually go there.”

  I thought for a moment that she meant she would never get with a boyfriend of mine.

  “He’s like a four, and he’s definitely not my type.”

  I was silent for a moment.

  “Don’t get me wrong—I can totally see what you saw in him, that’s not what I mean. I’m too old for him, that’s all.”

  She closed her eyes, restarted with a deep breath. I could tell she was about to launch into one of her Internet speeches. I knew the gist by now. My generation, her generation, blah blah blah, Armageddon.

  This time I decided to interrupt. “So why are you on TriMe?”

  She looked shocked for a moment, and then as if she pitied me. “Rabbit, don’t get angry, not with me.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound angry.”

  “I know. It’s fine.”

  What was fine? I wondered. Nothing was fine. I thought back to all the hours spent, mainly while on Provigil, deciphering Rupert’s gnomic responses. The most common and infuriating was It’s fine.

  She said she was going to use the bathroom before we left, and I read the most recent messages on her phone without moving it from its position next to her light-blue Columbia card. The last one was from three hours ago.

  I’ve seen so many cute videos you’d like but have to stop myself from sending them to you. Have you seen the monkey being pampered?

  I recoiled from the device as if it had bitten me.

  I scrolled back up through the chain between her and Rupert. They were still sending each other nude pictures, saying they missed the way certain things felt. After I put the phone down my hands were shaking.

  I miss the way you feel.

  I miss the way you feel.

  I miss the way you feel.

  The physicality made me feel sick. The message had his muscles and shoulders and sinewy arms. It moved. I could not stop staring at it, and it reminded me that while I had direct access right now to Mizuko’s mind through her device, only Rupert had access to the rest, even though I was the one there, right next to her. When she came back I had a kind of furious rushing in my ears and I couldn’t look directly at her.

  Then, when we got up from the table to leave, I assumed I’d be going with her, but she said she was meeting “some friends.” She repeated this reason for not spending the evening with me three more times that week. I couldn’t come because the three different hosts each had a very small table. Everyone she knew in the city had a very small table. Or an average-size table in a very small room. Rooms too compact for me. Yet much bigger than her phone, on which a whole universe could be simulated. I imagined if every single thing in her device—every dick and columbia.edu address, every person or thing she had ever corresponded with who was now trapped inside it in limbo—was given back its real, physical mass. I pictured the chaos. The dicks would push through the windows in the Dutch paintings and into her first-year students. Michi would moult all over, or maybe eat her owner’s spit the way pets eat such things. I would be there too, breaking all the dicks.

  But even though she had so many social engagements, and work to do before term started, Mizuko accompanied me to Planned Parenthood. She led the way through the metal detector and into the waiting room, where there were leaflets on every surface that read PLANNING IS POWER, with the same in Spanish. I filled out the forms and I felt her watching my pen. I saw her note the way I hovered over the various ethnicities on the form. First the “white” box, then to airspace over the “black” box, a kind of momentary hesitation, a protest of stillness, a staring into the abyss of everything I did not know about myself. She, like me, was made of halves.

  I thought I was there to have the noninvasive medical abortion (a pill), but when the doctor examined me he decided I had to wait to have a surgical one, because the fetus was by now more like twelve or thirteen weeks. The size of an egg. When I heard this, tears pricked, which, as I was lying on my back at the time, began to scald my eyes. “I don’t know why I’m crying,” I said. I also felt sure it could not be so far along, that it must simply be because of my last, irregular period that they had made this calculation. I was sure conception had to be the last night in the Hamptons, which would make it more like five or six weeks. How had it happened before that? In my sleep?

  In my folder, which I had to give back to reception, I found a scan of my
womb, captioned with the time and date, September 2, on smooth photo paper. I couldn’t see anything, though I searched and searched, just as I hadn’t been able to see the rabbit in the moon. I was due to return on the first available appointment, the day after the play Walter had tickets for, at the same place, the Margaret Sanger Centre on Bleecker.

  Outside, there was nothing moving. The street was cordoned off, with thick black smoke rising from a manhole. Yellow Cabs were crawling past the diversion like the slow wasps that signify summer’s end. We decided to walk, or rather, I started walking, and without looking up from her device, Mizuko followed me.

  “You’re so strong,” she told me. “You’re so brave.”

  21

  * * *

  It’s hard to explain how an infatuation actually starts. It’s a state so all-encompassing that it’s almost impossible to remember how it felt to live inside your own head before it began. Everything that precedes it becomes a pathway that was always leading there. Time before is valuable only as a resource with which to create a persona, to bind the object of the infatuation closer. I had given my (partially fabricated) past life to Mizuko to make a story that in the end never got told. Or not by her. It is also hard to explain the intensity of the infatuation itself. There is rarely an explanation that seems reasonable to anyone but you. Unless you’re part of a cult or viral phenomenon, so that when you weep outside the object of your infatuation’s hotel room, you do so in the company of millions. There was no such mass hysteria surrounding Mizuko when I knew her, though from the articles and blog posts I read about her now, I fear it’s growing. It was easier in my solitude then to assume I was special. The only person who appeared to harbour feelings to rival mine was Rupert, and maybe, from the way she talked about them, one or two of her students. The day after she accompanied me to the Planned Parenthood appointment, Mizuko’s classes began again, and I decided I should follow her. Between classes, she usually worked in the Papyrology and Epigraphy Reading Room on the sixth floor of the Butler Library. I told her I thought it was a good idea to be at her side, or just behind her, as much as possible, on and off campus, to keep Rupert at a distance. The first time I saw him, he was leaning against the fluted columns outside Dodge Hall. When I walked towards him he pretended not to see me, stubbing his cigarette out and walking away. He had the kind of outrageous arrogance that was sometimes misinterpreted as diffidence, and if not diffidence then Britishness, which allowed him to get away with loitering.

  In Dodge Hall I perused the noticeboards, which rustled their many layers every time the doors by her classroom swung open. They were thick with flyers and notices with teeth cut into them. Someone was charging twenty dollars per hour for in-your-home cat companionship; someone else, or the same person, was charging ten times that for chakra balancing. It wouldn’t be too difficult, I reassured myself, to find something if I really had to. Silvia’s credit card was burning a guilty hole through my wallet.

  The door to one professor’s room was ajar, revealing a man in a tweed jacket, his face obscured by a bookcase. I snuck a handout from the tray outside the professor’s office, then found where Mizuko’s locker was, covered in stickers. I wondered if I should slide a love note into the narrow slit of the door. She might find it touching. Someone banged their locker open beside me and I carried on down the corridor and headed out of the building again. I walked along the main walkway that intersected the campus and became 116th Street at each end. Because of the constant surge of people, students and general public, in all directions, this was the hardest topology to monitor. I sat down on a step to read the handout, imagining what it must be like to live Mizuko’s cerebral life here. I messaged her but got no reply. I hated it when she did this. Especially if she posted something in the meantime, underscoring her silence. Anytime a silence extended for too long, I assumed she had found out something bad. That I hadn’t really messaged Rupert for her. That I had been secretly looking through her phone. Or the other, far worse things I was keeping from her. When I wasn’t with her and couldn’t follow her, I spent my time watching her go on- and offline.

  I was worried that she had tired of me. Like the “Nomad” story, maybe I did not have enough mileage. I did not know how to stay distant from her in order to maintain her interest while getting as close to her as I wanted to be to cultivate attachment. I could see that the charm of what appeared to her to be coincidence was wearing off. My understanding of her had become expected, my familiarity anticipated: the logical, unremarkable outcome of really knowing her. No more magical than predicting the days of the week in the correct order. Real intimacy, I worried, pushed people away from you, not closer. Of course I had one surprise for her that, if I engineered it subtly, organically enough, might cement my place in her life for good.

  I sat there until the streetlamps came on and the darkness became unequivocal. Still I got no reply, even though I knew her classes were over by now. Finally, though I had wanted to suggest it in person, I sent her another message.

  Hey, you’re probably busy now but I thought we were going to meet up later? I also thought you might like to come with me to this.

  I’d looked up the play online and pasted a link to a positive review into my message: “An immersive, site-specific production, an adaptation of the Greek tragedy Alcestis.” Everyone has to wear masks, I added, to reinforce that this was no basic Broadway invitation. This was cultured, literary, edgy—she could take part.

  As usual, sight of the word seen nearly triggered an orgasm, or I was going to throw up—I couldn’t tell. The play was definitely her kind of thing. Finally she replied with a single word: Yes. It wasn’t SO YES, but it was definitely better than nothing.

  I managed to track her down, and that evening things almost went back to how they had been before our trip, which had made things feel strained between us. I felt back where I belonged: in her bed again, eating something dairy-free and frozen, passing the cold metallic spoon between us, the warmth of her mouth still appreciable at the centre, the silver smoothness reminding me of her tongue, soft as velvet.

  Now that things seemed better, I wondered if I had been too hasty. The idea of taking her to the play didn’t seem as wise now that she was really coming. But now she really, really wanted to go. She said she’d already read all the reviews before I’d sent her the message. It had been completely sold out for months; tickets were being sold on eBay for four hundred bucks, and she’d given up. How had my friend managed to get some? She made me explain about Ingrid, Robin, and Walter. Who they were and what they each did. My chest constricted as I spoke. I asked her more about the play to change the subject. She had read the original; she was interested to see what they had done, like it was a house she’d once lived in.

  When she went to take a bath, I took her phone instinctively but found that she had changed her password. I tried to work out her new one by tilting the screen under the light so that the heaviest fingerprints might show me. There were, of course, a stampede of fingerprints everywhere. I thought back to how I’d guessed her password so easily in the auditorium before the talk. Things which had at first felt like signs, if I analysed them for too long, ended up feeling like the movements of my own reflection in dark glass.

  “Have you changed your password?” I said when she came back, trying to make the broad, innocent rabbit face.

  She frowned. “Yesterday. But I’m going to get an upgrade soon to one of those ones that knows your fingerprint instead.”

  I felt the nauseous shiver in my stomach—everything from rage to empathy to morning sickness—that I had grown used to and now thought of as being love.

  On the evening of the play, we arrived at the entrance to the theatre, which was not a theatre, sometime after the others, as she had insisted on circling around Madison Square Park smoking a joint beforehand because she said it would heighten the experience. As we entered, we were each given a white mask with a lip like a manta ray, and a playing card, mine an eight of
hearts, that was then hole-punched, which dictated the group of five “guests” you entered the building with. Mizuko went ahead of me and I had to wait. They’d split us up on purpose, and I noted, without enthusiasm, that along the dark corridor leading in from the street there were signs everywhere which encouraged you to forgo friends and enjoy it alone. I waited in line for the next elevator with a group of strangers. I hated it already, and the plastic toggle from the back of my mask was pressing painfully into my skull.

  The first room I came to was all marble surfaces and sliding glass doors. After that I remember dark woods, a cemetery, and a cavernous room with strobe lights. From what I could tell, and when I could find them, the protagonist was suffering from a midlife crisis. His wife, Alcestis, spent a lot of time crying on a big white bed or kneeling before a small gold statue of Shiva placed at one end of a deep purple yoga mat that had been exaggerated in length and stretched out like a hall carpet. I saw one bit when the lights changed around the bed so that it became a cage with Alcestis trapped inside. I also managed to see a bit when Alcestis had a lock of her hair cut off with a knife like the one kept by Walter’s pool. I had thought there were only three floors, but Mizuko told me after that there were five. In truth, I spent the whole time doing the opposite of what was instructed: forgoing the play and searching for my “friend.” Instead of following the characters around the maze, I tried to train my eyes to spot Mizuko, Robin, and Ingrid. With masks it was nearly impossible, and I didn’t even know what the Rooiakkers were wearing. With Mizuko, every girl with long dark hair turned out to be someone else.