Sympathy

by Olivia Sudjic

  After a while my incessant commentary on the oneness of all beings became a low murmuring and finally silence as I lay back against the cool, miraculous solidity of the cell wall. A voice to my left asked if I was okay and I told it I loved it and was deeply sorry I did not know its name. My cells—the cells in the skin on my back—felt like they were popping one by one wherever I pushed into the wall. I tipped my head back. From somewhere behind me, beyond a bright rim, I heard singing.

  I don’t remember them asking me any questions. All I remember is giving Mizuko’s name as my own. Then, when I was released without charge, I walked west, thinking of Columbia floating westward, stringing telegraph wire behind her—a picture I’d seen pinned to a noticeboard in Dodge Hall. I muttered the words Go West until my jaw could not move anymore. I had a dry, bitter feeling in my mouth. I walked under sky spreading pink, through Prospect Heights and then north through Fort Greene, saluting strangers who caught my eye on their way to work. I could have gone to Dwight’s, but then I remembered we had broken up, and then I remembered Mizuko. My cell had been returned to me inside my purse, but it had died. I wanted to continue walking, or my legs would not let me stop. I felt as if I were being directed, and so I felt I could let my mind wander and be free, knowing it was all being taken care of. A benign force was propelling me on. I stopped in front of a sign that tumbled a blood-red LED message perfectly in time with my heartbeat, over and over again in a way that hypnotised me for some minutes:

  HAVE A GREAT DAY AND

  MAKE GOOD CHOICES

  HAVE A GREAT DAY AND

  MAKE GOOD CHOICES

  HAVE A GREAT DAY AND

  MAKE GOOD CHOICES

  YES, I promised, the words moving through my veins.

  I crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and arrived at City Hall. I am a daughter of this city, I announced, one arm held aloft, the exact pose I imagined when Susy spoke of Mark as a young man, the divining rod, as a few early workers and street cleaners continued on their way.

  The pink sky began to cloud over, and gradually the oneness of the universe began to drain away. The light became white cloud, bleached into ordinary. I noticed I was sore and incredibly thirsty. I sat down on a traffic island that for a moment I thought was the park on Pearl Street, which confused me for some minutes, making me think I had not come up at all but gone down further. The thought exhausted me, so that I could not stand up again. I asked a passerby, who confirmed that I was in midtown, and this exchange gave me a small amount of energy to stand and walk again. Only when I got to Silvia’s, smiling feebly at the doorman, who recognised me and gave me a key (something I’d never had when I’d lived there with Silvia), did I remember that she was now in Amsterdam and that I was technically still staying with the Rooiakkers.

  I considered heading towards her place, but the thought of going all the way up there now made my legs buckle. The apartment was deadly quiet and I could hear my breath and my heartbeat in my ears as if I were deep underwater. Pressure on my back. Suddenly cold, a shadow over the sun, a biting feeling in my kidneys. I stood by the sink running the tap, passing my hand in and out of the soft flow, in and out, drowning the sound of my breathing with the pummel of water on metal. New York tap water had never done anything to quench my thirst. I went into my old bedroom. I lay down width-ways on the bed, keeping my feet on the floor, but a sharp pain, as if I had leant on a burning hotplate, seared through me, making me leap up again. My phone bleeped from the pillow, where it now had enough power to turn itself on. As I held it, smooth and solid in my hand, I remembered.

  The cordless phone began ringing, ringing, stopping, ringing. I went back into the hallway to hear the message. It was Amsterdam. Call back. I went looking for aspirin in the kitchen but forgot what I was looking for. I realised I smelt homeless and became so desperate for a shower that I began undressing right there in the kitchen. Disrobing like a child, dropping the strange things I was wearing onto the floor with disgust, and limping, hard-footed, as though my feet were all bone, towards Rex’s bathroom. Skin a rabbit. I wanted to remove every layer, right down to the muscle. There I stopped, shocked by the sight of myself in the mirror. I was covered in bruises: some small and distinct as grapes, some faint and stippled, others cloudy and creeping like rot—finger marks, bites, grazes. I stood on the edge of the bath to see the whole of me at once, pushing my hair from my shoulders to see how they climbed right up around my neck. I was mesmerized. It was like I was looking at somebody else, but when I touched them they hurt just like it had hurt when I lay on the bed. I could, I thought, tell that I was pregnant. My breasts were fuller, and there was a very soft swelling between my hipbones. I felt dizzy standing on the side of the bath, felt something give as if a sinkhole had opened up beneath me. I half fell, half lowered myself onto the bathmat. Don’t hit your head. Was it the drone or had I told myself? I’d heard it in the voice of Susy, who greatly feared slippery surfaces and had always said this type of thing as if I might be intent upon concussion.

  If I had had a friend other than Mizuko to call, this would have been the moment. I would have said, I think I have just accidentally taken part in a gangbang in a dingy basement that looked like a serial killer lived there before being escorted off the premises in a police van after everyone in the neighbourhood called 911 to report a disturbance. Then they might have come over and held me for a bit, stroked my hair, got me to an STI clinic. I would have realised that Mizuko was a terrible human being. But I had no one to call except her, and she didn’t answer, and so this was not a funny story or even a surprising story I could tell someone and I continued to think of her as a goddess.

  When I got into the shower I felt a tiny astringent something as the shampoo foam ran between my legs, something puckering, like there was a small tear. I heard the sound of the voices at the party gurgle up at me from the plughole and I began to shake. Mildly at first, then violently, until I had to steady myself by holding on to the plastic handrails.

  When I finally turned the water off I realised I was bleeding. I checked my body in the mirror, but I knew already. I became very stern with myself and sat on the toilet in the brace position. If I am not stern and businesslike with myself in moments like these, which are not planned for, then I know I will have an anxiety attack. Out of the shower, where the water had disguised it, the slow bleeding became fast haemorrhaging. When it was over I turned to face the toilet bowl and knelt down to look at what was inside. The blood was clotted and dark at the bottom but sending up red billows like a flare that was turning all the water pink and opaque so that it became rapidly more difficult to see what was in there. A part of me held on to the idea that this was occasionally a feature of pregnancy in the early stages. I had read, under the lists of fruits and vegetables, that spotting could sometimes happen. I reached my hand into the water and tried to dredge the bottom. I did not want to flush it without being sure. I searched for images of miscarriage online—kneeling by the toilet, gripping the ceramic with my free hand in order to try to stop my shaking—and then used the toothbrush holder to scoop out the pink water and transfer it carefully into the sink with the plug down. I worked meticulously and calmly, using my hands as a sieve, until I found what I was looking for.

  23

  * * *

  Please pick up.

  Then, to give this message a different weight, more gravity than the near-identical ones hovering above it, I asked if, since she had had her abortion administered by mouth—which means you are fully conscious when it happens, like a heavy period—she had seen the fetus when it came out, and if so, if she wasn’t too busy doing whatever it was she was doing, wherever she was doing it, would she perhaps check on the tiny, fleshy part of me I had saved from the water?

  No reply.

  Not even seen.

  Or, I added in a second message, I could send her a picture and she could evaluate remotely.

  Sent stayed grey and flat. I waited for the blue—the bright, beautiful blue that wo
uld create a neural pathway between us.

  To make it absolutely impossible for her to ignore me unless something was very, very, imminent-apocalypse kind of wrong, I sent one more:

  I really need you right now.

  I turned back to the sink, considered the rich red sashimi I had salvaged. In texture similar to what I had spat into the toilet bowl of the Japanese restaurant with Mizuko. I laid it in the palm of my hand to examine. I looked for bones. I couldn’t see anything remotely human, and yet I felt a kind of kinship I had never felt before. As I held it, it appeared to move, then to shrink and curl up at the edges like one of those fortune fish.

  It occurred to me that my follow-up appointment at Planned Parenthood had been booked for today. I wondered whether I should call them and cancel. Was it like that? Like a dentist? Even if this wasn’t it and I was still pregnant, I did not feel like today was the right day to be sedated.

  “Strange, strange thing,” I said to the fish. Its edges were crisping in the central heating. “It’s like you knew the date.”

  As I went on cradling it and it became increasingly leathery and indestructible-looking, I considered the prophecy I’d fulfilled. I had claimed to be pregnant—this had come true. I had decided to get rid of it, and that too had come to pass, a matter of hours before I was due to be sedated and have it suctioned out. A tingly feeling arrived in my fingertips. A powerful feeling, ten times the intensity of taking photographs. At the same time a part of me, however, felt bereft of exactly that feeling. Though I had chosen already, I had been cheated of the feeling of having chosen, good choice or bad, and had it replaced with a kind of inevitability. A box somewhere on a form, the black box, had been ticked once, and that was that. What had happened, the way the world had become receptive to me, its native daughter, now felt like no choice at all.

  Mizuko still did not reply.

  I laid my fish on a piece of kitchen towel. I took one of the last four Provigil pills I had in the beaded purse Mizuko had lent me, which I had managed to hang on to from both the party and the police station. I positioned myself in front of Silvia’s library, got down four books from a shelf at random, and waited for the tunnel to open.

  The first was about classical civilisations. I focused on creating exact mental pictures of the artefacts described. The materials: wood, stone, clay, glass. The small objects: phials, coins, beads, rattles. The simple tools. I thought of the textures—linen, wool, metal, earth. Soon the sound of the city below faded out. I wanted to fill my mind with as much of this other, older world as possible so that there would be no room in it for her. So that she would not even have been born yet. In this world, she had not abandoned me at a party, because she had never existed. Her sudden, anachronistic appearance in this world of amphorae and togas would be greeted with shocked silence, and she would have to retreat again, embarrassed, as if she had stumbled into the wrong room.

  I got to a subheading, “Vestal Virgins.” They got to live together in Rome’s only college of full-time priests—daughters of the city—and they lived free from the usual obligations, like marriage and children. That could be me, I thought. I’d definitely have been a vestal if I had lived then. The cordless phone rang out somewhere in the dark, shimmery heat, but I ignored it. The vestals took a vow of chastity and spent all their time observing rituals, the main one being to tend a fire that was never allowed to go out. And that’s Silvia’s central heating, I thought, vowing to live with the discomfort more gracefully. On the ides of March the virgins processed around various shrines, picking up little human figures made of rush, reed, and straw, and then went to the Tiber, where they threw them into the water. The book suggested that these figures were substitutes for human sacrifice and absorbed all the pollution and evil within the city, so sacrificing them brought about purification.

  My eyes were dry, and I forced myself to blink. I felt my brain accelerating. I lay on my back on the living room floor.

  Silvia’s phone rang again, mocking my silent one. I ripped the cord out of the wall, and the abrupt peace gave me not just relief but the feeling of mastery. This was, I supposed, what Dwight meant by pushing back. Resisting forces that were unpleasant or disagreed with you. Noises that threatened to oppress you. I returned to my spot on the carpet, where I lay on my back with my knees up to help my cramps.

  I stared intently at my phone. It lay next to my head on the carpet. The longer I stared at it, the less I recognised what it was. It had turned into a stranger. A deaf-mute. Dark and resolute. Nothing about it suggested that it might be an object one could communicate with. Stroking it with my fingers or holding it to my head and trying to talk felt as useless as talking into a stone. I flipped over and shot my arm out to surprise it. Snap out of it! It felt horribly light in my hand. So insubstantial compared to the impression it gave of solidity. I found a picture of one of her favourite scenes from The Parent Trap, with subtitles along the bottom. I offered it up. Bait. I waited. No one liked it. She did not like it. By dusk, an angler quitting empty-handed, I deleted.

  I decided to leave the apartment and take my little red fortune fish across to Roosevelt Island, where I had met Dwight, Walter, and Ingrid for the first time. I sealed the fish in one of Silvia’s heavy cream envelopes, deciding that like a vestal, I would proceed to the triangular park at the end of the island and throw it in the water.

  Outside, everything seemed to be thrumming, making the same noise as the noise inside my brain, but much louder. It seemed to be that way round, rather than that the noise in my brain came from outside it, but it became hard to tell. It had a kind of rhythm—dugadug dugadug dugadug—like a chain in the teeth of something, drawing up an anchor from somewhere far below. The sky vibrated with the sound, shifting thick, then thin, rippling, some great murmuration behind it.

  I made it to the park before closing and climbed the steps that led up to the triangle of grass very slowly, unsteady on my feet, holding the envelope in both hands and close to my chest. At the top I walked straight through the middle of the triangle towards the vanishing point, to the open granite enclosure at the southern tip of the island. Once there, I sat down on the stone blocks, cold despite the sun, and stared vacantly into the grey wake—the current made it look like the island was moving—until I felt a light touch on my arm and heard someone telling me it was time to go home. And where was that?

  I got up to go. The warm bath of serotonin and dopamine had now fully evaporated. I began to despair. I didn’t cast the envelope into the water. I found I couldn’t part with it yet. When the park closed, I sat down on a bench by the funicular and made long, air-tearing noises, my lungs heaving and grating. And then I fell asleep.

  When I woke up I was disoriented. It was dark and my bones ached. The metal grille of the bench had burnt itself into my bruises. With panic, I saw that my device was nearly out of power. I could not let it die even for a moment in case it would be the one moment she tried to call.

  I went back to Silvia’s, noticing the emptiness more acutely this time, now that it was dark and there was no familiar sound of TCM movies or light flickering from her den. I sat on the floor just inside her front door, charging the phone at the first plug socket. But here the Wi-Fi symbol was showing only the very epicenter, no radiating waves, so I shunted further and further until the cord wouldn’t stretch anymore.

  How could we have got this far, got this close, for her to disappear? I haunted her, vehemently refreshing every few seconds, watching the wheel spin like an instrument of torture. Cranking the walls and floors and ceiling so that they moved closer and closer in. The picture from the party was still her most recent. I stared and stared and stared at it.

  WHERE ARE YOU

  When the Provigil finally wore off, I realised I was desperate for the bathroom. But after I’d been, I had not taken two steps before I needed to pee again. I went back, repeated. I stood up again. I needed to go again. I sat down again; this time there was only one drop. I got up and left the bathr
oom again, and then again the burning sensation of having to pee. I spent most of the night in the bathroom, in this cycle, on repeat. Every time I tried to leave I felt as if I needed to pee again and my bladder would drag me back in. If I managed to pee, even one drop, I would be rewarded with a sharp, burning pain that subsided for only a second before it was replaced with the desire to do it all over again. My device was still taunting me with its black mirror. I jabbed at it and it told me only the time, or it told me numbers. I felt sure that on the twin times or the mirrored times she would call, and when they came I would tense up, and then she wouldn’t.

  I threw the phone across the room. She made me terrified and sick and I depended entirely on her for sustenance, even though what she gave me was as good as air. I wanted out. I started to look at flights home from the floor of the bathroom, Skyscanner open on one tab, a cystitis symptom checker on another, and Mizuko’s arrested online activity on a third, fourth, and fifth. It was unlike her not to have posted anything for over twenty-four hours.

  I was out of Provigil. I needed a new visual stimulus. I began searching for images of the bedrooms at the NoMad. For images of Robin and Ingrid. I looked through Dwight’s pictures. I looked at the routes between their three apartments on Google Maps. This helped me to create pictures in my mind of what she was up to. I imagined that when she had left the party, she had gone back to the restaurant, up to a hotel room at the NoMad to join Ingrid and Robin. My inflamed urinary tract—the desire always to pee, squeezing every last drop of liquid from my body until there was nothing left—now felt absolutely connected to Mizuko’s failure to respond.