I started to feel scared when I saw Nussbaum & Wu on the corner, the signs for Nails and the Housewares store on the corner opposite, which told me I was there. Her building was still there, and showed no signs that anything had changed. It remained an imposing mushroom grey, with a set of classical columns flanking the doorway. In the centre, above the entrance, an iron fire escape climbed down the façade. Dark window frames bit into the stone. Still the familiar red steps up to the door. White air-conditioning units protruding from the windows. Same decorative moulding and cornices. Hers was on the top floor—the sixth.
The bodiless voice of Perry, Mizuko’s doorman, surprised me as I tried to slip past his usual spot in the entrance. His head buoyed up from behind the desk.
“Hey, Alice.”
I had often picked up deliveries from him, and he must have grown used to seeing me there. Perry told me the story, the bits he’d seen with his own eyes: the paramedics, the arrival of the mother from Japan; the rumour in the building he’d had to quell that it was Ebola, and the little that Hiromi had told him when she got back from visiting her daughter in the hospital the previous few nights. Mizuko lived a ten-minute walk from St. Luke’s, and Hiromi had gone back and forth several times daily. Visiting hours for critical-care patients were limited to fifteen-minute intervals but could be repeated throughout the day. Late last night Hiromi had left for the airport, explaining that Mizuko had now recovered and would be coming home soon, but she had to get back—she had work, and she’d had to leave her elderly mother, who was very frail, alone while she was away. She needed to go back to her.
Every time he said Mizuko’s name out loud I felt some of the old nausea creeping back. The faint feeling. I felt my magic power slipping away.
“She got a parasite of some kind. That goddamn cat, I bet. Demon. Disgustin’ animal. She’s not even supposed to keep a pet in the building. I got me and my whole family checked out by the doctor ’cause we had it stayin’ with us when you two went off on your trip to the desert. Did I tell you she had a seizure right here in the middle of the lobby?”
I nodded. “Where’s Michi now?”
He pointed a finger heavenwards.
“Dead?”
“No, no—upstairs. I think her mother’s been feeding it.”
He let me in with the spare key Hiromi had been using. “Did you see?” he called out after me as he headed back down the hall. “That guy at the hospital in Dallas died today.”
“Mmm,” I said. I didn’t know who he meant, and was grateful when the elevator doors closed behind him.
Begins with flulike symptoms. Extreme tiredness, fatigue, breathing problems, dead limbs, strange sensation of sore throat . . . Some people make a full recovery from encephalitis. But for many, encephalitis can lead to permanent brain damage and complications, including
memory loss
epilepsy, a condition that causes repeated seizures
personality and behavioural changes
problems with attention, concentration, planning, and problem solving.
I’d never heard of it, and it was the kind of thing I could imagine Mizuko cooking up. I told myself she wouldn’t go that far for a story. I reminded myself of what Perry had said. The paramedics. Unless she had somehow done it to herself? People did, it seemed, do things like that. I searched self-infected parasite. People seemed to order them online and swallow them fairly regularly. Weight loss, digestive problems, all kinds of things. I tried not to doubt her. I wanted to believe it, and that some benign force was turning the tables in my favour.
Michi was hiding under the sofa. I bent down and she shrank from me.
“Hi, Michi! So is it you I need to thank?”
We rarely get the chance to see things anew. I remember a Latin translation that caused me to fail an exam at school because one of the words, translated for us at the bottom of the page and intended to help, was invalid. I read this to mean false, null, illegal. The opposite of valid. But it was meant to be understood as invalid as in a sick person. It torpedoed my entire translation. Instead of tending to the sick, the priests were being accused of fraudulence and neglecting their duties. Even though it didn’t match up with the grammar, or the story, I kept on returning to that word to check, and every time I saw it only as I had done already—invalid, null, void.
It took some minutes for the new situation to sink in. Pretty much the only scenario I had not imagined was that I would be able in some way to start over. And yet it seemed a miraculous erasure had occurred—as simple as deleting a search history or restoring factory settings, a memory neatly wiped around just the mark I had made on it. Except for her phone, of course. That would have to go.
I realised I did not know precisely what a seizure was. Stop a moment to think of your life without Wikipedia. Sweet source of eternal comfort. Ministering angel of information. Think of your life without the option to Internet search.
A seizure is a sudden surge of electrical activity in the brain. A seizure usually affects how a person appears or acts for a short time. Neurons conduct electrical signals and communicate with each other in the brain using chemical messengers. During a seizure, there are abnormal bursts of neurons firing off electrical impulses, which can cause the brain and body to behave strangely. The severity of seizures can differ from person to person. Some people simply experience an odd feeling, with no loss of awareness, or may have a trancelike state for a few seconds or minutes, while others lose consciousness and have convulsions (uncontrollable shaking of the body).
I tried to imagine it. The seizure. Her brain’s electrical impulses travelling towards me across the grid.
The apartment had a new kind of smell, like minty chewing gum and boiled rice. It looked different, but I could not at first say how. There were some new things: a pale pink rice cooker, some tea canisters and packets of the same surgical masks Robin used. I flinched, and then felt something brush my ankle. I looked down to see only the leaves of Mizuko’s indoor plant, a kind of palm. Some of the lower leaves had begun to die, but in a way that seemed strange the longer I looked at them. A perfect curve from green to brown, an exact line between life and death. There was an old pizza box in the trash. The crusts rattled like bones inside when I picked it out. I tried a piece of pepperoni against my tooth. It was hard and covered in amber dust. Days old.
Before I touched anything else, I went straight to the cabinet in the bathroom where Mizuko kept her Provigil and, pumping spit into my mouth, swallowed one. Then another. I went to the bedroom. At this point I realised I had not thought through all the possibilities. I saw my confession; it was like seeing a friend from your infancy, whom you are too shy to approach now. It had been opened but replaced inside its brown envelope, my childish handwriting, her address and the word urgent, all laid out perfectly on the freshly made bed. Next to it another envelope, this one unopened, a similar creamy thickness to the one I had enclosed my fish in, with neat Biro kanji on the front. Water, child. Her name.
I found her phone. It was out of power. Once charged, it was still useless to me—I did not have her thumb. I put it in my pocket. Then I turned to the envelope. Its physical relation to my brown one suggested it was a reply.
25
* * *
“You got a delivery to make?” Perry indicated the various packages under my arm.
I nodded.
“I didn’t think nobody wrote letters nowadays.”
I nodded again, then shook my head instead.
“Kids your age are all emails and Facebook. You want me to send them for you?”
I shook my head, clutching them tighter, and started moving towards the door.
When I took it, I had her justification for “Kizuna” ringing in my ears: “You own everything that happens to you.”
Here was an envelope. It was right here in front of me, so it had happened to me, even if it wasn’t addressed to me. In any case, it appeared that Hiromi had read what was in mine.
I
n all the assumptions I had made about Mizuko’s paternity, I had not thought much of Hiromi’s inner life. She was the piece of the puzzle that didn’t really fit unless I sanded her edges down. I steeled myself with the notion that if anyone was to blame for the blood knot that now tied Robin and Mizuko together, it was her, not me. But also I had never considered that she could be a victim of any kind, because Mizuko had never presented her that way. Mizuko was the victim. Hiromi was the adult. Adults could not be victims. Her job had made her seem an even less sympathetic character. I mean, she made machines that looked after old and vulnerable people in their homes, removing the need for human contact. In my mind she was close to a villain, and I worried that she might have fitted her invalid daughter’s apartment with various sensors—a telephone that could check a person’s pulse or glucose levels, or a toilet that scanned waste for signs of disease, the kind of things her company made. Maybe, I wondered as I ripped open the back of the envelope, she had been tracking my movements since I had entered her daughter’s apartment.
The first thing to say is that I couldn’t even read the letter. Not directly. It was written in Japanese, so once I had opened it, having readied myself on a bench above Morningside Park where I could see for miles, I had to get up and go find someone who could. I guess that when I did, any trace of moral boundary disappeared, but at that point I felt no more responsibility to Hiromi or Mizuko than I did to the tiny basketball players whose shouts and thuds and ringing metal I could hear echoing from the park courts below me. The women were in that moment strangers, playing a different game from mine, and the rules from one did not apply to the other.
I first approached someone on the street who looked convincingly Japanese, but she wasn’t. Next I approached a woman in a Japanese supermarket I knew of nearby, but she looked at me with fear in her eyes. Then I saw an Asian-looking kid sitting in the window of a Starbucks, and he confirmed that he could read Japanese. I offered him some money and he agreed, writing in between the lines the words he could.
As I have mentioned, the practical consequences of something are often indirect and unforeseen. I think of that when I think about what I wrote in my not-entirely-true confession. The World Wide Web was originally invented for physicists at the Large Hadron Collider to share information, to share objective facts, to find one version of the truth that cannot be denied. Its architects can hardly be blamed for the plague they have let loose. Sometimes it’s the other way round: you know only the consequence and not the origin. I read today about an earthquake supposed to happen in America any moment now. Scientists worked it all out from a place near the Washington coast called the ghost forest, where all the cedars are dead, killed by saltwater. The ground in which they were rooted dropped down during an earthquake—the growth rings told the researchers this because they all died simultaneously, not slowly but suddenly. The scientists matched what happened in the ghost forest to what happened on the northeast coast of Japan, thousands of miles west.
On the eighth day of the twelfth month of the twelfth year of the Genroku era, a six-hundred-mile-long wave struck the coast. Though tsunamis are the result of earthquakes, no one felt the ground shake before the wave hit—it had no discernible origin. When scientists began studying it, they called it an orphan tsunami, like an orphan line on a printed page. Finally they matched that orphan to its parent. The pieces fit together perfectly. And now they have tubes with samples of the seafloor, history written for people who can read it, people who can then work out the earthquake’s recurrence interval, a two-hundred-and-forty-three-year cycle.
I walked through the heart of Columbia, 116th Street, part of the same route Mizuko had walked with me that first time, when her silky coat had been floating on the summer air and everything had felt so smooth and easy that I’d wanted to laugh. I laughed now, not with happiness or because anything was funny but in solidarity with myself. I could choose any reality I wanted, and Mizuko would have no choice but to live in it with me, at least for a while. She’d chosen me once already, in a way, it had been a choice of sorts, and that was enough, it was permission. I walked all the way to the Hudson River and found a spot where I could stand looking down over the water. I took my brown envelope, still with her name and address on it, still marked urgent. Then I extracted Mizuko’s phone from my back pocket and put that inside too. Then I put those into a large plastic zip-lock bag from her kitchen. I put in her other device, her little MacBook, as well to weigh it down. Then I sealed all of them—my confession, Mizuko’s two devices—sliding the zip slowly and with ceremony, and dropped the bag down into the fast-flowing river.
It was what I had imagined I’d do with my fortune fish on Roosevelt Island—return it to water—only this time I had actually managed to. When I saw the bag disappear beneath the surface, I had to clench my teeth and suck my tongue against the roof of my mouth to stop some primal sound from escaping. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder and let out a cry of surprise.
“Can you take my photo?” a stranger said.
“Sure.”
I walked back past Saint John the Divine. I had never been inside. Something about the outside of it had always oppressed me. It was built on the site of an orphan asylum, and the external architecture, as Robin had described it, had the look of a schizophrenic. It was originally supposed to be all in one style, and then the plan was changed, but some of it had already been built, I suppose. And I think that happened more than once. There was a lot of stop-starting and abandoning and subsequent revivals. It is still not finished. So construction and restoration are going on at the same time. And that was fine, I told myself, it would be fine. There was never one truth. Even the Higgs could still be used to prove opposing theories, its mass falling between them on a chart. Besides, I told myself, my breathing heavy, eyes widening till they bulged, I was post-truth.
That night, lying in her bed but without her, I dreamt of Ume’s thick feet in beige ribbed socks, secured within double-strap leather, hanging from a tree before she was cut down, the same dream that haunted Mizuko in “Kizuna,” and a voice calling me from darkness at the bottom of the ocean.
26
* * *
She came back to me at 10.01 the next morning, a mirror time, as I’d expected.
Keys turned.
“Hello?” I called.
No reply.
When I came into the living room, she looked only a little alarmed to see me. “Where’s Mom? Perry said she’s gone.”
I nodded. “How are you feeling?”
She didn’t look at me as she spoke. “Drowsy. Sick.” The words came out automatically, as if she were used to answering the question. Then she said, “It’s weird to be here. I feel like I’ve been gone for years.”
“But you remember me?”
She turned and faced me for a moment. “Yes. You’re Rupert’s friend.”
She circled the apartment slowly, unsteadily, practically oblivious to my presence. I tried to make myself feel the way I imagined she might. I thought about how I’d feel if someone had taken the whole summer away from me. A part of me was relieved at the idea. I wondered whether it was better to lose all your memory and start over completely or to lose only a part of it so that the job was part construction, part restoration, like the cathedral. I thought of returning home to find that something had been taken from you, or destroyed. I thought of the wasp—a mud dauber, as Thom had informed me, assuring me that they were solitary creatures who hardly ever stung—that had plagued my bedroom at Walter’s. Every time Dwight or I opened the door it would appear, head straight for the blue book on the second-lowest bookshelf, and disappear behind it, where it would begin making a high-pitched sound like glasses shaking in a cabinet or a screw coming loose. I had peeked behind the blue book and seen that the wasp had made a series of cylinders that looked like miniature urns. There were five of them on the paper edge which faced the wall. I had stared at them for a long time, then taken another book and sliced them away. The ne
sts had left five sandy marks behind, like fingerprints. Instantly I felt that this was a wrong thing to have done. The mud dauber, who’d learnt her flight path by heart, continued to return and to dive hopelessly at the bookshelf, as if she could not believe it—what I’d done. Her long labour of love, the painstaking creation of a home for her young, had disappeared. She came back again and again, in an ever greater frenzy, until I could not watch anymore and decided I had to kill her the next time she flew in.
I brought Mizuko some green tea. “Can I get you anything else?”
“Where’s my cell phone?”
I shrugged. “Maybe it’s still at the hospital. Did you collect your belongings?”
“They said I didn’t come in with anything. They just showed me the cut-up clothes I was wearing, in a plastic bag, and I said no thanks, I didn’t want them back.”
I shrugged again. “I’ll look for it—you sit down. But I did a bit of research while you were in the hospital. They say looking at screens should be avoided for a while at first.”
She lay gingerly on the sofa, as if she’d never tried the position before. “But how come you’re here?”
I carried on pretending to look under and around things, opening drawers and shifting papers haphazardly.
“I wanted to look after you when you came out, of course. Your mum had to go back to Tokyo. I spoke with Perry, and we think it’s best if I stay for a bit. With you.”
“When I first woke up I thought . . .” Her voice trembled. “I couldn’t really move my mouth or make words, but I felt instinctively that we were so much better with each other. She was being like a proper mom somehow, and I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought, but it felt really good to know she was there. I felt bad, almost. That she was being so nice to me.”
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