Sympathy

by Olivia Sudjic

  WHERE ARE YOU

  Somewhere, signals were being scrambled. Neurons were firing out and being deflected. There was a blockade. An invisible dome that bounced my missiles right back. Maybe the Rooiakkers were to blame. Sex game gone wrong. Ties tied too tight. That happened all the time. Bodies in suitcases. Forgotten safe words. Circulation cut off. Something was stuck, that was clear. I wondered if I should go to their apartment. I imagined myself loping towards Claremont Avenue. Unhand that woman! I pictured punching Robin in the stomach repeatedly. But I could only do this through pictures. I could not imagine my real, physical body ever entering their perfect, pristine home again. The idea quickly made me feel ashamed. They’d be laughing. Dwight would be too, and Walter. Robin’s stomach would take the punches like Plasticine, my hand sticking in and being sucked into it like a trap. I imagined Mizuko’s eyes narrowed in catlike pleasure.

  WHERE ARE YOU

  I had sent the same message so many times the words formed perfect columns underneath their predecessors. That’s quite cool, I thought. I sent another.

  WHERE ARE YOU

  I hoped that if something had happened to her—not a sex game gone wrong, but something that absolved her of guilt for this torture—she would look at this when she finally got to her messages and think it was funny or cute. A performance piece. Endurance art.

  I went to the kitchen for more water, not for thirst but so I’d have something to pass through my kidneys, saw the stranger’s clothes on the floor, and for a moment thought there was an intruder in the apartment, until I remembered I’d worn them to enter it myself. I tried to imagine what Silvia might advise me to do at this moment, and returned to the stack of books to try and re-create the effects of Provigil without the pill itself. I arranged them in a ring around me and left my device on the other side of the ring, telling myself I could not go to it, nor to the bathroom to gratify my phantom urge to urinate, until I had read one whole book cover to cover, after which I was allowed out of the ring to use the bathroom and to check the time—which was no longer time like a time of day or night but digits, a numbered countdown—and then I had to return to the ring to read another and start the process over again. For double immunity, I imagined Silvia overseeing this system in the silence of the apartment, but I could not control my thoughts or keep her out of them. She’s going to be dead, I thought. She’ll be dead, and then everything will be fine.

  I turned the lining of Mizuko’s purse inside out. Coins, pellets of gum, fuzz and hair, receipts, and one Provigil fell to the floor.

  At last I felt myself glide into the familiar state of deep concentration. My brain oily and smooth again, the fragments put back together with gold, all the tangled paths narrowing to one, whose sides rose up and enclosed me like a tunnel. I felt my powers return. The ability to unlock the meaning of every sign if I just looked at it hard enough.

  When I order the drug now in England, it arrives inside a pouch for rose-hip supplements. Did it affect my behaviour towards her at the time? I don’t know. It locks you into your own way of seeing things, I suppose.

  I came to a chapter about Pandora. At last everything starting to make sense. A chain between me and—dugadugadugadugaduga—her. I came to a word that made me slap my forehead in astonishment. My phone is the jar. My phone is the fucking jar. The mistranslation of pithos, a large storage jar, as box, Silvia’s book told me, is usually attributed to Erasmus when he translated Hesiod into Latin. Fucking hell, I thought, shaking my head at this flagrant textual corruption, my teeth chattering. That’s big. I should note that down. I looked for my journal and realised it was at Mizuko’s. Was she reading it now? Laughing with Rupert at my juvenilia?

  The combination of my urinary tract infection, the oppressive central heating, and my concern for Mizuko’s unexplained silence meant that the Provigil did not last as long as usual at its normal intensity. I felt the chain stick, and then the other metaphor I was using to help make everything more bearable, the tunnel, also begin to disintegrate. This happened before I had even finished the book, and so the last few chapters were a struggle. I had to read them with my hands cupped around my eyes like blinkers. When I finally finished it, I allowed myself to go to the bathroom and then, only then, to check my phone.

  Nothing.

  Twenty-four became thirty-six became forty-eight became blocks that were days, not hours. I guess this would be when she had her seizure and Perry called the ambulance.

  It was the medium itself, I now felt, as much as Mizuko, that I was enslaved by. I began to run from room to room. I’ll exhaust myself again, I thought, and then I’ll fall asleep and I won’t know that time is still passing. I had removed her timestamp from WhatsApp for her during the breakup with Rupert, but she had since reinstated it. I checked it right before I started running. She had not been active in days. When I stopped running, it said “active 19 minutes ago.” I gave a sharp intake of breath, hit myself in the head with the heel of my hand, and threw the phone to the floor as if it had scalded me.

  Maybe she has lost her phone.

  Maybe someone else has it.

  Maybe she lost it at the party.

  Maybe Rupert has it.

  Maybe she is now using Facebook from her laptop and so that is why she is active on there—

  Maybe Robin has it.

  —but cannot read any of her messages and her phone just rings and rings.

  It would truly be wonderful, a miracle, I thought, if she had mislaid it, because then she would be unable to contact the Rooiakkers on TriMe. Or see my WHERE ARE YOUs.

  I had, while chained to the toilet, downloaded TriMe with the idea of standing outside her building and seeing if the proximity made her appear on my screen. I was already inundated with messages from white men saying that their girlfriends had always wanted to have sex with a black woman. But now every time I got a message alert I thought it might be her, so I decided I had to disable it. Her silence had to mean something. I could only bear it if I thought of it as a message I had to decode. Not an absence. In the stillness and silence of Silvia’s apartment, I sat down on the floor, prayed that it was still and silent where she was too. Then I lay down and prayed that the prone position I was currently in was her position too. Alone. I had black magic. I closed my eyes, darkness, as if that might let me see what she saw. A neon-pink 3 flickered and instantly disappeared again into the dark. The sight of it on my own device now made me sick. I held my finger down on the menu screen; each little app logo began to vibrate. I deleted the 3. I contemplated deleting everything. Cleaning it all away. The idea had a charm, a self-cancellation, many little suicides, a way to dispatch myself without actually going anywhere.

  I did not cancel my many selves completely, because then if she did try to get in touch with me, I would never know. I would do just one more thing. One gesture. I poured myself a glass of Silvia’s vodka, circled my phone a few times, then pounced on it. Unfollow. It felt good for one second.

  I may also have been experiencing a sympathetic form of encephalitis—encephalitis being inflammation of the brain, which she was diagnosed with. The numinous glow was always a false dawn. Each time the screen returned to darkness, I would stare at the faint greasy patina of my fingerprints, tracing the configuration of buttons I’d pressed to induce this fever. Unfollow. I began looking for loopholes that might let me undo what I had done. They hadn’t even been real buttons. They didn’t exist except in the instant I’d brought them into being by touching the now-dark glass. They were, I recited, buttocks clenching with the memory of Dwight, skeuomorphisms. Part of a gratifying simulacrum which overlaid an invisible field whose laws I couldn’t hope to understand, much less reverse, designed to make me feel as if I’d depressed something when in fact I hadn’t.

  I lay on my back willing it all to end. After a time, I found a small section of the carpet that let me feel something else. A cool spot that grew cooler and larger the harder I pressed into it, until it became the exact outline
of me. Until, after a brief panic that I might be incontinent as a result of the UTI, doomed to die alone, leaving only a stain on Silvia’s carpet, I felt revitalised, and ruthless. I decided to confess everything. I would write the truth of the matter down. I would be brutal and unsparing to us both, and after reading it she would see herself as I saw her and so understand me as I really was. Now I wonder whether everything would have turned out fine if I hadn’t. I saw it as a message of love. A ritual cleaning. A stripping back of everything I’d tried to conceal from her. How I loved her, how I hated her, how it wasn’t really chance that had brought us together, how in another way it really was. The patterns and paternity I had uncovered.

  I wrote quickly, sensing that the appropriate time for confessions was drawing to a close, after which one would be most unwelcome. I suppose I also wrote it anonymously, though that didn’t signify anything but my intimacy with her at the time. If someone had sent me something like that, I’d have assumed it was from her.

  I felt myself swimming to the surface as I wrote. My legs kicking, my arms outstretched and grasping, as if very soon I might be up in the light. Once I had finished I felt exposed, as if the sea had drawn back from the shoreline like lips revealing gums. It would be impossible, I thought, after reading it over to myself, for a wave not to come rushing back in. It would be impossible for her not to come back to me with all the force of shifting earth, rearing ocean, a wall of water behind her. I admit that some parts of it were fairly provocative—they were intended to be. As I say, any response seemed better than silence.

  So that it couldn’t be instantly forwarded to the others it implicated, and to endow it with a sense of occasion, I decided to print it rather than emailing. She had said she only read things properly in print, could only really, truly understand something if she could hold it.

  Outside, I felt an invisible field all around me that I swam in, every step slower than the last, the air thickening until I felt like I was wading through ketchup. Crowds seemed to form and throng around me wherever I stood. I had grown accustomed to being nameless and faceless in the city. My anonymity—the impersonal nudge and natter of the crowd. But now every face I passed showed some kind of recognition. First, the guys in the lobby seemed much friendlier than usual, then my homeless friend on the bench was back and acknowledged me with a hopeful wave. Then people I didn’t know. Random people on the street looking at me as if they knew me, and I thought I heard one or two whispering my name. The city knew me. It could distinguish my cry from a million other cries, the way people say mothers know the cry of their own child.

  I went to use a computer in a convenience store that no longer exists but that seemed to be built entirely out of stacked newspapers and six-packs of bottled water. I can see the interior of the store now: narrow and dusty, with baroque flourishes of vacuum-packed fruit. I was now excruciatingly thirsty, despite being enclosed by walls of water, and still desperate to pee, so that I wondered if I was in fact hallucinating. I tried to be quick, but I had to find a system of moving the mouse, directing its capricious rollerball where I didn’t want it to go in order to get where I did. The keyboard had an unpredictable delay between my typing and words appearing, so that first I typed wrong and then I deleted wrong and then I got trapped in that circle over and over. After ten minutes I considered aborting the enterprise, but then the screen froze and so I couldn’t. Abandoning it then would have meant leaving my confession open for all to see.

  I doubt if anyone had used that computer in years. The screen was set into one of those busts, warm beige, like ancient stone at sunset. The warmth increased with its resistance. I was clearly dragging it back into a battle it had been assured was over. When I thought I’d won, the printer closed ranks. It was then that I made the first public sound that I had made in days. “Fuck,” I said, like a bark.

  I paid for the printing, a correct stamp, and a large brown envelope. Brown hands appeared over the counter with a receipt, which was faintly comical to me but which I kept as proof that I had sent something. I like to collect evidence of my life, and I also like to leave it around for others to puzzle over. I began pulling at the hairs on my clothes and letting them fly around, so that if, for example, I was murdered after this, my DNA would be all over the city and the case would remain a talked-about but unsolved mystery.

  I was so jumpy, so unaccustomed, since my correspondence with Silvia, to using real mail, that I very nearly inserted the envelope into a waste-disposal unit. But I did send it. Or rather, I dropped it into the correct metal box to be sent. I wanted it—very literally—out of my hands. For someone else to bear the weight of it. I calculated she would receive it within forty-eight hours.

  I went home and waited for each of those hours to elapse. As much as I feared her reaction, I feared her continued silence more. Yes, some things resisted. Some things felt like countersigns. The keyboard had been chalky, the keys stuck. I didn’t have the right change. But I don’t think that if I had waited for this episode to pass, I would have been able to avoid writing what I wrote. I don’t think it would have passed unless I’d written and sent it. It was about twenty pages long in total, with various subheadings and footnotes. The part I regret is the assumption that she’d actually gone back to the hotel. The perversions I imagined to be taking place. The depraved scenes that had come to me, composites of images I had seen on her phone, with faces and features reallocated. I had wanted to goad her into admitting it, because I didn’t know if she had, so I wrote about it as if I knew for sure. The more I wrote, the higher my fever raged, waves of arousal and anguish coming faster until I had to type with one hand and quiet them with the other between my thighs.

  When another forty-eight hours had dragged by and I still hadn’t heard from her, I asked the guys in the lobby if they would mind calling my phone to check that it was working. It was an English phone, so I figured this was reasonable, and I started to acquire a more stable frame of mind. Maybe there hadn’t been enough in my account to pay my phone bill. Maybe I’d reached my roaming limit. The phone proceeded to vibrate in circles on the desk, and everyone at that moment began grinning as if we were all friends.

  At first, sending the confession by real mail had felt like a genius device. I would not have to sit by my phone and watch for the signs that indicated it had been sent and seen. Slim but solid paper would, I hoped, convey me better. Now I had to consider the very real frailties of the system. Ludicrous, in fact, to entrust something of such magnitude to a mailman. A perfect stranger. I looked up stories of nefarious New York mailmen. There was one who had willfully upturned the lives of ordinary people like myself by hoarding 40,000 pieces of undelivered mail. The city was crawling with thieves and malcontents. And yet how treacherous, I thought, after such neutrality, bordering on indifference, and occasionally open hostility, when the whole city finally seemed alive and tremulous to my touch, a seething structure reaching out to meet me and accommodate my every move, as if I had been expected and was welcome there, that she was the only thing in it that would not respond.

  24

  * * *

  This kind of torture has a particular name, of course. As you’ll know already, I had been ghosted. And at this point you’re thinking, She should have walked. Disconnected. Got the fuck out. Let me tell you, there was no out. It was a locked box stronger than any magician ever broke free from. As indestructible as it was invisible, made of nothing but permeating everything.

  When I headed up towards her, eight days had passed. Despite my solitary confinement, I felt talked out.

  “Can you tell the difference,” the sky asked slyly as I walked out again under it, “between a sunrise and a sunset?”

  I considered. It was a metallic twilight, the dying sun invisible but for the many lucid reflections bouncing off the buildings.

  “No,” I said.

  “No? In that case, why should this be the end?”

  Neon began to sizzle into life as I started walking. I could
hear it, a growing intelligence all around me, as if a swarm of bees crawled behind every glinting surface. I remember thinking, I must simply be native now, a fluent speaker. Just by walking, I had learnt the city’s language. I understood all the coded messages flying around, each one with its distinct smell and colour becoming integrated in my mind, and I saw who sent them and where they went and who read them. I could suspend each one of them—hold them in the air like flies in a spiderweb—then set them moving again with a motion of my wrist. The chefs in rubber shoes, bent over, smoking, the invisible people hunched inside sleeping bags, the dazed businessmen leaving work, all on their cell phones, became parts, and their parts became cells, and their cells became smaller until they were the same as what throbbed in the sky and all around me. I could now connect the sour smells of rubbish overflowing with the chlorine disinfectant from outside the table-dancing club and the place under the bridge which always smelt of urine, and it was a pattern. Like a musical phrase that repeated. Every neon sign I looked at I could see through and through and through into the wiring and then the particles firing and then the smaller things inside those.

  I reached the park at 73rd and headed towards Levin Playground. I stuck my head into the spray hissing from the pale granite drinking fountain. On the other side of the park I moved faster. Along 96th to Columbus. I looked down to see a trail of small footprints like a cat’s; “Amazing,” I said aloud, shaking my head in wonder. The prints had left their imprint in fresh sidewalk, leading me towards her.