Sympathy

by Olivia Sudjic

  I saw she had not touched the tea. I removed the stewed teabag and ran some hot water into the cup. Michi seemed to sense that she was a prime suspect and didn’t come out from wherever she was hiding.

  “I really don’t want to be alone right now. I shouldn’t be alone. I was so depressed thinking I was going to come home to an empty apartment. I couldn’t remember Rupert’s number.” Her voice tightened as if she were going to cry.

  I reached an arm around her, told her to lean on me. “Well, it’s fine, because I’m here and I’m not going anywhere. I promise.”

  When she leant stiffly and obediently towards my chest, I saw that she had a bald spot on the top of her head like a Capuchin monk. It thrilled me to see it. I breathed a sigh of relief.

  “It’s going to be fine.”

  27

  * * *

  The first immediate difference in her personality I noticed was that she had become religious about personal hygiene. Though she didn’t leave the apartment, she used hand sanitizer to go on every journey, between the kitchen and the hall, her bedroom and the bathroom. Though for Perry Michi was in disgrace, Mizuko refused to accuse her of anything, and when I urged her to let me take her to the vet, she shook her head. I asked her to tell me about what the parasite had looked like in the x-rays—a ribbon—and how long—two centimetres—and what the scans of her brain had looked like—gyoza—and how the doctors had first spotted it—a strange ringlike thing. I tried to imagine burrowing into her, eating my way all the way up into her brain. To a hippocampus that she said was cute and looked like a seahorse.

  We decided that from now on I would deal with Perry, delivery boys, and tasks that required leaving the apartment. I wanted to be her link to the outside world and so happily played the role of tributary, bringing her gifts and tokens. Sometimes, on my way back from an errand for her, I imagined I would open the door and see a trail of clothes leading to her bedroom and find them there together. Sometimes Rupert and Mizuko. Sometimes Robin and Mizuko. Sometimes Ingrid too. Sometimes all four. This got stronger the longer I was away from her, until when I came up in the elevator and walked towards the apartment the feeling would make my heart pound and I’d have to push my key into the lock and run into the bathroom, lean my back against the wall, and reach my hand between my thighs.

  The second immediate change was that she got migraines, which meant she often had to lie in bed with her curtains drawn against the daylight. At first she ate most of her meals in there, and every so often I’d find food, like the furry skin of an edamame bean, under the pillow. When she did leave her bed she was listless. As well as banning digital devices, I said she wasn’t allowed to read books at first. Not for the first week of convalescence. Sometimes I bought a newspaper, scanned it, and then read to her in bed about beheadings and infectious diseases and chokeholds. I also got her interested in the missing plane, and I seemed able to hold her attention on that for a while.

  “The black box that investigators are searching for is about the size of a shoebox, weighs around 10 kilograms, and is actually orange.”

  “Orange?”

  “They changed it so they were easier to find.”

  “Okay.”

  “Shall I carry on?”

  “Yes.”

  “‘Aviation experts warned back in March that the crucial moments of doomed Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 may never be discovered, as the black box that records details of the flight may have overwritten key data.’” I looked over the top of the newspaper to check she was still listening. Her eyes were wandering around the room.

  “‘A black box actually consists of two boxes, a cockpit voice recorder and a data recorder. The flight data recorder records a stream of flight information, while the cockpit voice recorder stores conversations and other noises made in the cockpit.’”

  “Say that again?”

  I repeated myself more slowly.

  “Got it.”

  “‘Each of the boxes is about the size of a shoebox and weighs around 10 kilograms. They are made of aluminium and are designed to withstand massive impact, fire, and high pressure. Although the original flight recorders were painted black, the color was changed to orange to make them easier to find by investigators.’”

  “Typical.”

  “‘The black box on Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is made by the U.S. firm Honeywell Aerospace. It is programmed to record cockpit communication on a two-hour loop and delete all but the final two hours.’”

  “Why?”

  I frowned and continued reading, this time in an exaggerated way. “‘This is because it is normally the last section of a flight that determines the cause of a crash. In the case of Air France flight 447, for example, the cockpit voice recorder provided a valuable insight for investigators into the confusion that overcame the pilots. In the case of MH370, however, it is thought that the crucial moment for understanding the flight revolves around the period during which its communications systems were disabled and it took a sharp turn westward before flying silently for about seven hours. Although the flight data would have survived had the boxes been found in time, the discussion in the cockpit immediately after the flight lost contact with air traffic control would have been overwritten, unless power to the recorder was lost at the same time. The black box sends out a ping, activated by immersion in water, that can be picked up by a microphone and a signal analyzer from about a mile away. However, the battery of the pinger on MH370 lasts for only thirty days, and so even if the boxes are found, the mystery may never be solved, as six months have passed since the tragedy. The depth of the area of ocean that investigators are searching ranges from 1,150 metres to 7,000 metres. The detector could have picked up the black-box pinger down to a depth of about 6,100 metres, or 20,000 feet.’”

  “My head hurts. I’m going to take a nap. Finish reading it to me later.”

  “Do you want some water?”

  “That’s your solution to everything—drink more water.”

  She had said she could imagine me as the otoban san at school, which means the little person on duty, the one who volunteers to clean out the rabbit hutch. It’s true that I was conscientious, full of plans and rules. Since my kidney infection I had been scrupulous about drinking water, and I said we should see her unmooring, her memory loss, the loss of her devices, as a big opportunity. Brisk, businesslike platitudes I had heard from Dwight. She had always talked of going off-grid, I reminded her. I would now hold her to it. Maybe a retreat to some tasteful Scandinavian-inspired cabin in the woods where a person could build up her soul and psychic defences again. Columbia could find a substitute teacher. I said we could treat it like an experiment—try to make it to thirty days.

  “Like a Zen Buddhist nun?”

  “Yes, I guess.”

  She smiled weakly.

  “I’ll set you up a little shrine at your desk to write. I could go to some flea market and buy a typewriter.”

  “I wouldn’t know how to use one. I’d just use a pen.”

  “Yes, sure, a pen is fine.”

  “A nice silky one.”

  “Yes, I’ll go out and choose you a nice silky pen.”

  “And what would I write about?”

  “Oh, anything. You could write about this—about the hospital and losing your memory, about the parasite, the seizure. You could make up the bits you don’t remember . . .”

  “My mom going home.”

  I paused. “That part too.”

  In solidarity, I said I would give my device to Perry and have him lock it away for me in storage until the thirty days were up. It would soon be, I reminded her, November, National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo, which she’d planned to get her students to do. She could try to finish hers that way, but starting early, in October. She looked uncertain at first but gradually became excited by the idea. I outlined our neo-Luddite manifesto to Perry, and he looked both confused and impressed as he put my device in a little box.

  I had t
hirty days. These, if I was careful, could be made into what felt like thirty weeks, or even—if I was very careful, and very frugal, and broke them down into small enough fragments—into thirty years. Her brain seemed to have rewound to the exact moment she’d collapsed on me outside the Magic Johnson Movie Theatre. She was limp and pathetic and woozy and I loved her, I realised, even more because I knew how completely it was doomed. I wanted to calibrate every moment of it, to curate each day like a picture. While I would probably never have her undivided attention if she was writing, I would at least have control over what came in and out of her life in isolation. She had, after I had stirred her up about the most recent abandonment, vowed never to speak to her mother again. Same for Rupert, she promised. He was the real parasite. He had drained her of all her energies. He didn’t really want her to be a successful writer with new friends. He was jealous. He was demented. He could not be allowed to trap her into that cycle again.

  I suggested we get rid of whatever traces of Rupert were left around the apartment. I bagged T-shirts, odd socks and cufflinks, a letter he’d written something on the back of.

  “Do you need this?” I asked, turning the letter over to its printed side. It was a bank statement.

  “No. And chuck the electric toothbrush. He bought it for me,” she said glumly. “Whenever I put it in my mouth I think of him.”

  I went straight to the bathroom and bagged it. “I’ll buy you a nice normal one.”

  She looked at me as if I were the most understanding person in the world.

  “I’m normally a fun person. I just can’t stop being sad right now.”

  “You are fun.”

  She gave a pitiful sigh.

  “Anyway, I’m not going anywhere—don’t worry.”

  She did look worried. “Sometimes when he hugged me he would hold on for such a long time, and sometimes he squeezed really hard, like he would never let me go, but then I’d always be waiting for him to go instead of just enjoying him holding me. I’d be waiting for the moment when I would feel his arms loosening around me. I was so fearful of that gradual loss of pressure.”

  I looked at her hard. “Well, now you can breathe, without him weighing down on you all the time. You can get your own space back. Make new memories.”

  She nodded feebly.

  “We can do it together.”

  A baby bubble of laughter. My heart soared. It made everything feel okay, this natural, hiccupy sound.

  After we rid the apartment of Rupert, I suggested that it was possible that her cowardly mother had installed sensors, which brought on a second denuding of the apartment, with multiple trips to the garbage chute, both of us back and forth like marching ants. You could hear the stuff slide away to the very bottom of the building. The first things we suspected were the kettle and the bathmat, but once we began putting pressure on them, most of the appliances and furnishings in the apartment turned out to be a part of a conspiracy, devices intent on manipulating us in some way, distracting or spying on us. Physical things were dispatched. I had a drawer, and the photograph of Ume remained, but by the time we were done the apartment looked very bare, containing little but the mattress, two lamps, her grandfather’s kintsukori bowl, a collection of nonfiction books, The Golden Bowl, a dictionary, and a thesaurus. Mizuko loved reading the dictionary. She liked it when there were multiple meanings for words and when opposite meanings could be contained. I started reading the Henry James novel. Let her tell me certain anecdotes again.

  I knew the loop we were on.

  There had been one kiss before—after the movie, before the seizure—and now I was waiting for it to replay itself. I put my faith in it. That’s how a loop worked. I could ask her questions that were not really questions. I knew the answers. I could even quote her, pretending I didn’t know she had said it already. I could move at inhuman speed, meeting her wherever her mind darted, like a machine that had been built to know her.

  Do you think we will still create statues of people in the future?

  Answer: No, because we will know too much about them.

  “Oh my god.” Mizuko put her hand to her face. “You’re telepathic.”

  I could regurgitate her opinions from old statuses. I had a memory that went forward in time as well as back. Sometimes I knew a thing about her and I had to wait—wait for ages as a weird demented look came over me—until she would finally give me a relevant opportunity to use it. Sometimes there wouldn’t be an opportunity exactly, but I’d manhandle it into one. And then she’d look at me oddly and say, “Well, maybe we’re twins.”

  There was that familiar face. The face of someone drinking in kindness from a stranger. It was like time travel. The steps of a dance that only one of us knew. Next, I was sure, would be the kiss.

  The following day I set her up with pen and paper. I remember my relief, sliding into blackness, to see her begin. I felt sure my place in the story would now be cemented—she wrote about real life, osmosing whatever was in front of her onto the page. She was writing Kegare, the half-finished novel, longhand, starting over because she had thought of a new way to “make it work.” I was happy for her writing to take longer, because then I thought our time could go on longer. But she was writing in Japanese. I knew only that kegare was a Shinto concept. It was a kind of defilement, “a spontaneous result of amoral forces.” Things that produced kegare included death, menstruation, disease, and childbirth, but it could also be produced just by mixing up different physical spaces, like the outside and the inside. Kegare would be the result if you brought the outside in with you, for example by not taking off your shoes. It could be transmitted from person to person, even indirectly, through touching the same things and breathing the same air. There were rituals you performed both to contain it and to dissolve it.

  When I asked her about her idea for the story, she said it was to do with how the tsunami had mixed everything up: objects and spaces and people displaced, the insides of homes sucked outside and the outside pushed in, with sofas in the branches of trees and a muddy car that had ploughed into a bedroom. The mixing up of these realms had created impurity. When I asked her what was different now, in what way precisely she had found a way to make it work, she would say only that it had been inspired by my generation. The way we thought we were so tuned in to the rest of the world, gleaning information at the touch of a button. In fact, she said, we were drawing a veil over it, or, the worst of us at least were letting ourselves ooze out over everything else.

  “Like what? Bleeding, sweating, crying?”

  “Yes. But even just the way you see the world and you project it, project yourself, onto other things.”

  “Doesn’t everyone do that?”

  “Yes, and they always have, it’s just getting easier and easier. The scale is new.”

  It was always disorienting when she did this. I had seen her as a vital part of forming the way I saw myself, by seeing, reflected back to me, a body of history and experience that I felt we shared, which was more than family and DNA could do to shape a person. Yet she saw herself nowhere in me. She was fully formed, and nothing about me was special except my phony intuition into the workings of her own mind. To her, I was only a splinter of some much larger entity that she wished to place under a microscope.

  Sometimes I would get a small window into what was going on in her writing, when she would look up from her work and ask for a synonym. She was convinced a word existed, a noun, that meant the loss of feelings for someone who was formerly loved—a word for the act of falling out of love. I said I couldn’t think of it. It wasn’t in the dictionary either, not the one she wanted. At moments like these I knew she was in danger of Wikipedia. I would watch as the thought of giving up my experiment and searching online crossed her face and then I would point resolutely to the hand-drawn calendar we’d taped to the wall. Not yet. Time was not up.

  Left to our own devices, or lack of them, we became a cult, and yet one in which I was never sure which of us was th
e charismatic leader and which the gullible follower. I still can’t decide whether it was actually me who had a tyrannical hold over Mizuko or just she who held one, holds one, over me. I sat behind her in the bath and washed her hair for her, around the part which had been shaved and now had stitches. But as the thirty days dwindled I began to mistrust these too. I touched them with searching fingers. They might signify all kinds of things, I reasoned. None of it told me for certain that she had lost her memory. I greatly regretted jettisoning her phone and laptop now. If I’d been calmer, if I’d had more time to hide things and make good choices, I would have had them unlocked and ransacked them for information on her whereabouts while she had been out of contact. These black boxes were now somewhere in the river, their pings slowly fading. We didn’t wash her hair much, and it developed a nice tacky texture. I liked to look at the short patch on her skull, growing quickly, which told me she could not know. Gradually my bruises from the night of the party turned bluish grey. Mizuko never asked about them. By the time they faded I had a fretful feeling. She was in my hand, the size of a plum, by turns an object and a living thing I was afraid of.

  She was supposed to go for checkups, but the hospital had no means of contacting her and Mizuko said it wouldn’t make a difference anyway. She had found the hospital experience traumatic, and besides, the way they had dismissed her from Accident and Emergency the first time proved that they were incompetent. They hadn’t even been able to keep her electronic devices safe in the patient property lockup. She didn’t ever want to go back there.

  She would work until six or seven every evening. Then we usually ordered food and drank beer. I would often wake her up by accident in the middle of the night.

  Stop jerking.

  You keep jerking.

  Sometimes I could be happy, imagining a benevolent future, but the luminous, happy mood would always shift overnight and by morning we’d wake up in different positions and strange tangles and things would be wrong without my knowing why.