In the last week I felt her withdrawing. What was once everywhere, an ocean I imagined myself to be drowning in, was now barely deep enough to bathe in. I saw her warmth draining away and couldn’t stop it. On night twenty-nine, I couldn’t sleep and got up to use the bathroom. When I turned on her bathroom light a fan started whirring, and this woke her up, so I had to turn it off and pee in the dark. When I got back into bed she was evidently awake, furious but silent, with her eyes shut tight. Then she opened them suddenly, reached her hand out, and I thought she was reaching for me so went towards her and accidentally knocked her arm so it pushed the glass she was reaching for over and then it smashed on the floor.
“Leave it. Do it in the morning.”
“Day thirty,” I said.
“I know.”
I woke up to find a bloodstain on the sheets. For a moment, half asleep, I was scared that her head wound had opened. Then I realised I’d got my period. My first since, confirming that I was no longer pregnant. The sight of the round red stain, in the exact middle of the white sheet, was a relief. When I got up to clean the stain I forgot about the broken glass and it sliced into my feet.
She was angry and told me to clean the floor as well. I crouched down and remembered my nightmare the night Silvia became ill. I hadn’t thought of Silvia in weeks.
I could see she needed novelty. I didn’t need to climb inside her skull to know that. It was visible in every move and word she said. Slowly my presence had become second nature to her again, and it had happened before I’d been ready, without the long-waited-for embrace.
That day, day thirty, was the day snow came. While she worked on finishing the last paragraph of the last chapter, I did not leave the apartment. I watched from her window, as if from a ship that had been becalmed, as all around grew white and still. Then I got up. Moved things around. Usually when I did this, it attracted her attention. Not this time. I couldn’t sit down, but I couldn’t stand either.
At about six in the evening she got up from her chair, walked towards the wall, and crossed off the final day on the chart. A big red line through the number. “I’m done,” she said. “It’s finished.”
I tried to smile.
“I think maybe we should celebrate,” she announced, “to mark this day.”
She came behind me, took the glass of water I was holding out of my hands where I sat, put it on the coffee table, then stood before me. I imagined her bending forward, her mouth floating like a blossom towards mine, damp and pink and metallic. I imagined her lifting her dress and sliding my finger inside her, to a hard place that made me hold my breath and press my tongue into my teeth. I imagined she held it there with such force that it was hurting the little triangle of flesh between my fingers. I wanted to release the tension from the moment. To relieve the imagined pressure on my finger. I looked up at her face, wondering what she wanted me to do, but her eyes were closed. It would need to be me who did it this time. I wondered if all this time she had been daring me to take control. My hand hovered. The same trepidation as when I’d unfollowed. It would have to be now.
The intercom sounded so loudly it seemed to shake the apartment. We both jumped.
“Who the fuck is that? You answer it,” she hissed.
I cleared my throat.
The buzzer was being held down. Rupert’s voice became audible through the door. He was calling her name.
I could see she recognised his voice too, but her expression was otherwise indecipherable. I looked through the peephole and his face bulged towards me, so I stumbled backwards into the apartment.
“What should I do?” I whispered.
I turned round to find that Mizuko had rushed into her bedroom. “I can’t let him see me like this,” she called. “Tell him I’ll be right out. He can wait in there with you.”
I looked out at the fire escape. It was dark and the snow hid most of it, the flat planes of white making the ground look much closer than it was. I considered the time it would take to unscrew the lock on the window.
I heard her pulling on clothes. I grabbed my backpack, went to the window, the screw dusty but easy to loosen. In one swift motion, I slid out into the cold.
As I climbed down the face of her building, I could not shake the feeling that this was exactly the kind of thing one of her characters, one called Rabbit, would, in the last scene, end up doing. By the final level I wondered if she was making me do it, telling me to run, so I obeyed. I did not stop until I reached the street.
28
* * *
At the bottom, I stooped, panting, looking back up for a white face at the window, which didn’t appear. I blinked at the moon. People were dashing through the street, over the grey ramparts. I saw properly for the first time that the city had changed season. Everything looked smooth and strange, some things beyond identification under a shroud of snow. I put my hand against the icy metal of a streetlamp. The world became quiet. I stood still. I couldn’t walk away. I continued staring back up at the window, waiting. I waited so long my neck ached, and my back, where my kidneys were, did too, from the cold. It didn’t feel like there was any option but to wait. Someone like Susy would have gone back. Denied everything. Wrestled the situation back under control. But something was compelling me to stay where I was. To see if Mizuko would come to me. Or maybe, as the psychic had suggested, the evil spirit was following me and wanted me to be alone.
After half an hour, the mounting sense of rejection was too much to bear, and I began to inch along the street. I’ll never, ever, ever come back, I told her with my mind. Who is going to look after you now? I’m going to start walking, and if you don’t come and stop me, that’s it. It’s done. It’s over. It’s dead. On reaching the corner with Nussbaum & Wu, I stopped again. Waited for her hand on my back. The nothingness hung in the air. It was worse than rejection. It stops here. At this corner. When I turn. Now.
For a moment I felt a kind of relief. A sensation of freefall similar to what I’d felt on my first walk in New York. I could go anywhere, be anyone; no one knew me. I began following banner signs that hung from streetlights, advertising a free exhibition of Romare Bearden’s “Black Odyssey” at Columbia. It was open for another fifteen minutes. The rooms in the exhibition were warm, but I could barely make out the scenes in the picture frames. When I reemerged it was very dark, starless, and colder. Too cold to snow.
The glow of the streetlamps sat heavy and thick above me. As I walked aimlessly, in the direction of downtown, I returned to my theories. That Mizuko and I shared the pictorial equivalent of DNA. That a sympathetic magic existed between us, no matter how far apart we were pulled. That we defied physical laws of time and space, waves, gravity, the rules laid down by physicists which governed our physical universe (earthquakes, tsunamis) and physical bodies. And yet somehow our connection had led to the opposite of intimacy. My search had led to its opposite. I had never felt so isolated and disconnected, even from myself.
I wondered if it had been a bad move to leave like that. I wondered if I should go back up. I had been so wound up and tense for the last week, waiting for the end, that I’d just run for my life. Assumed the buzz at the door was the sign to flee. ZZZ ZZZZZ ZZZZZ ZZZZZZZ. TIME UP! THIRTY DAYS OVER. Intruder detected. I had taken only my small bag, which had Mizuko’s copy of The Golden Bowl in it. I had left without any of the stuff in the drawer, and without retrieving my device from Perry’s storage room.
I had to go back for that, at least. It would help weigh me down. Stop the floating feeling. And maybe she would be there, in the lobby, or coming out of the elevator. With Rupert?
“You just caught me, I was about to leave. Here you go,” Perry said, sliding it across the desk. “And you didn’t even miss it, right?” His tone was sarcastic.
“Right,” I said, forcing a smile, gripping it in my freezing hand. “Did you let him up?”
“Who?”
I stared hard at him.
He began to look uneasy. “I went do
wn to the storeroom for, like, a minute. Is there a problem?”
“No,” I said, but I knew my voice gave me away. “Everything’s fine.”
“You wanna check it still works?”
I looked down into the dark screen, tap-tapped. My own face reflected back at me. I was waiting for Mizuko to come. To tearfully take me back upstairs.
“I guess it’s out of power.”
I knew mine had gone too.
I moved along the street, away from her building, as if I were adrift in deep space. Up or down, left or right—these were no longer meaningful choices; whichever way I went, there was nothing behind anything. I walked aimlessly towards Riverside Drive. The verges belonged to a strange new park, packed shiny and tight like cheeks crusted in salt. I walked until the cold got so deep into my bones that I couldn’t feel my feet hitting the ground. I went up to Grant’s Tomb, then across to Sakura Park, where the pagoda was covered in snow. I cleared snow off the swings. It was the quietest I had heard the city.
I could see the Rooiakker apartment clearly through the slim, leafless trees, and walked across what turned out to be very deep, unmarked snow to get a better look. Each footstep held for a moment and then broke under my weight so that my leg would plunge down to the knee. The snow got into my shoes and melted into icy water. I reached the edge of the park, where it drops away onto Claremont, and saw the lights come on just as I stood there. I crouched down. I stayed there for a long time, wondering if anyone would come out. After twenty minutes, when no one did, I got to my feet, stiff and cold and wet. Then I walked down—down, down, down, until I reached the Apple Store at the bottom of the park, where the crowds began and gave me warmth and someone asked for directions but I couldn’t make any sound come out.
When I turned up at Dwight’s in Dumbo, I could no longer feel my body.
“I need to borrow money for my flight home.”
“Hey,” he said.
His upper half was contained in a shirt that was tight and navy, and I noticed a gamy smell coming from him. He said he was pleased to see me, and I said “likewise,” in a way that could have been heard as insincere by someone not raised a Mormon. He said it was lucky I caught him as he had been travelling a lot for work and was currently in between Airbnb guests. Instantly I remembered everything I hated about him. But it was, in a way, comforting to know that he had not changed at all.
Dwight’s company made me feel even more anomic. I watched us without interest, heard us only faintly, like strangers below my window.
He told me about his latest client. “We want ‘Realising the Potential of a Connected World,’ but somebody already has that.”
He was holding a silver bottle like a bullet that had the name of his gym on it. He waited, but I didn’t have any comment to make about the slogan.
“I’ve also been invited to be on the panel for a conference about smart cities.”
I remained silent. I could not even pretend. Then he showed me the hare in his freezer that he was going to make a ragu out of. I asked him to explain smart cities to keep him talking while I used his laptop. His screensaver was still set to the incomprehensible map of the subway system. I began looking for flights.
“Oh, look,” he said, smiling. “There’s one of my ads.”
It had snuck up at the side of the tab I had open. What is the reason for your travel? Business, leisure, family?
He cooked for me, even though it was nearly midnight. Hare pappardelle. He said it was supposed to be funny. I must have looked blank, as he said he didn’t want me to be upset. I said I wasn’t upset, I was tired and upset about something else. He was convinced I was upset about the pasta sauce and said that since hares are also called snowshoe rabbits, because of their big feet, we could call it that instead if I liked. Snowshoe ragu. He said it as if I were a baby. A baby that he needed to feed with a spoon like a train going into a tunnel. Then he laughed and laughed and laughed.
Dwight had gone hunting for the hare himself, upstate. He had his snowshoes in the hall for effect. He pointed out their special bindings. I thought of him tracking the hare and the hare probably thinking that he was just a big joke in expensive snowshoes. It was likely because the hare thought of him as a total joke that he had managed to shoot her, because she had sat down to laugh and hadn’t been able to stop. The hare that had died laughing slow-cooked while he told me the story. The whole apartment smelt of it by the time we went to bed. He’d removed the bones and left the meat in chunks, soft enough to extrude through the colander and out into something glossy. After I ate, I found I had forgotten the name for everything and could no longer even remember where I was, or that I was unhappy.
As he carried me from the sofa, he said he was too tired to change the bed linen from his last guest, so would I mind if we just slept in those sheets?
“Oh.”
“Yeah?”
“Was it a couple?”
“No, a single woman.”
“Bit creepy.”
“But not really.”
“Here, charge my phone.”
I get what I call big-small dreams. They’re not exactly dreams; they lie in wait for me on the border between sleep and wakefulness. I have had them ever since I can remember. I have them in addition to the falling sensation that most people get right before they fall asleep. Big-small refers to the sensation of big meeting small. Of strange scales, which seem to contrast so greatly that the moment of their meeting is like an explosion, which then collapses all distinctions between them for one instant. A unity of opposites. First I am nothing but a tiny, tiny person with a tiny, tiny hand, and I am pushing on a door that reaches from the ground up to the sky, in slow, slow motion. My minute hand moves towards the door over what feels like an infinity; the explosion when my hand and the unimaginably giant door meet—click—lasts only one second. Less. The instant after the explosion the ratio flips and I am nothing but an enormous finger pad, each line in the skin like a tyre track, magnified a million billion times. There is a tiny pin, the sharp point of it, and my spaceship finger is moving down towards it, slowly through space. When it pricks the skin there is the explosion and it flips again until I fall asleep or I wake up.
On my tour of Japan we were shown rocks that rise out of the sea like vast incisors, with a house built into them and a proper roof on top but only a tiny archway carved into the rock, where the sea seems to have whittled it away. My big-small dreams look a bit like that. Tiny fingertips with mighty power. One thing becoming its incompatible opposite and back again. I know that this sensation signaled that I was beginning to wake up. My finger began to hover before an enormous Mizuko doll. Then at some point during the night, Dwight began to have sex with me. I was full of pasta and had no power in my limbs and no voice to stop him. He had recently, but not recently enough, shaved his scrotum so that it grated against me like sandpaper.
Waking in the morning, I had to remember grief all over again. It was sunny, a white winter sun, and that made me sad. He was pacing the room speaking to someone.
“Apparently she’s really good at html, which is all I care about . . . Yeah, yeah.” Pause. “Yeah, my favourite part was, Steve, do you need me to condense that for you?” He slapped his chest and laughed. “Right, right. I told them it’s fallen through the cracks because it’s no one’s baby.”
He saw me staring at him from the covers and grimaced. “Sorry,” he mouthed. I shrugged.
If I stayed in any one position for too long, the gnawing pain of having lost Mizuko would overcome me. I climbed out of bed. I thought of her; I pushed back. Would she miss me? I pushed back. Silvia had written, You have to develop some self-control. But that idea made me think of the way Mizuko had written Kegare in thirty days and of Zen Buddhist nuns, which made me think of Mizuko sitting in a little dojo in a black kimono with long sleeves, tracing her lineage back to Shakyamuni Buddha and no longer caring about me or what secrets I had kept.
His call was finished.
&n
bsp; “So you need me to lend you the money for the flight?”
I said he was very generous—he shut his eyes and beamed, an expression of beatific helplessness, as if to say he could not stop the flow of generosity charging towards me, he himself was fully charged, but that I did not want his help any longer.
“Honestly, it’s fine. I got an app that finds me ones that are cheap as shit, like five hundred bucks. Let me lend you the money. You can pay me back when you get to your mom’s house.”
“No. I mean it.” I didn’t want to owe him anything.
29
* * *
I went to Amsterdam. I had taken care to avoid walking past it whenever I had run errands for Mizuko. Now that the dark metal benches, the railings, and the strip of grass that snaked around the exterior were snowed over, I almost didn’t recognise it.
Nat was in Silvia’s room, wearing black, with black sunglasses pushed up into her hair. She was collecting up Silvia’s things, alongside a nurse. Silvia’s funeral, she told me without ceremony, had been that morning. The nurse looked like she might have been about to comfort me, but Nat said, “Don’t bother. And don’t be fooled by her good manners.” And, turning to me, “I’ve told them all. Told them that you’re a devil.”
I stared at the floor, feeling tears pricking at my eyes, my vision blurring.
“She’s the devil disguised as a little lost orphan,” she said in a raised voice, addressing Silvia’s emptied room. I stood in silence, the nausea from all those weeks ago returning. “Though you did manage to pull the wool over Silvia’s eyes with all your pleases and thank-yous.”
The nurse, whom I didn’t recognise, quickly exited the room carrying a stack of folded sheets. I wanted to appeal to her with my eyes, but Nat had now fixed hers on me, and I could do nothing but stare back at her as tears started to fall. The sharp, superficial pain at being spoken to unkindly had obscured the deeper pain, which had not yet turned into something hard and heavy.
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