Sympathy

by Olivia Sudjic

  32

  * * *

  I’ve been following an American man, an “adventurer,” which could be any American man, who has been hunting the missing plane. In Nosy Boraha, a Madagascan island, he recently found a bag—brown leather, pale stitching, green tartan. Crusted in salt and darkened with water damage, the zip detached except at the ends. On the same beach he also found a camera case, the sole of a shoe, and a prayer cap. Another bag turned inside out and ravaged so that every seam hung loose from the body like tentacles. On a sandbank off Mozambique he found a white triangle that appeared to be a piece of plane. The object has the words NO STEP printed on it. The authorities of the countries searching have decided that if nothing is found by the time they have covered the entire 46,000-square-mile search area, a search which is due to be completed this month, the hunt will be left unresolved. The adventurer promises he won’t give up.

  I don’t know if I can either. I am currently using Google’s Street View to follow the route Hiromi would have taken from her daughter’s apartment to the river.

  I walk my eyes along West 113th Street to Riverside Drive. This part of the route has been photographed by the satellite in bright sunshine at the height of summer. Then, when I urge the arrow on, crossing Riverside Drive towards the water, the satellite images become wintry. As I push through the bank of trees that separates Riverside Drive from Henry Hudson Parkway, the dazzling summer light, white gold radiating upwards from car bonnets and green leaves, turns to a malevolent winter orange, emanating from an unknown source in the overcast sky. The images show another time from the street before, and I suppose the whole map, the whole world, is made of these different bands of light. But I can’t help thinking of the shock I felt when I finally realised it was winter, on exiting Mizuko’s apartment. The summer was long gone, but I hadn’t noticed until then.

  When I come out the other side of the dual carriageway, onto the Hudson River Greenway, the trees instantly lose their leaves, as if in fright at the speed I move, the stress of the jump, and they become black and bare. Silhouetted against an even darker sky. The eerie orange light is gone. It is bleak. The city has a hopeless aspect—grey water and dimly distinct sky. It was here that she waded out into the river, clutching her large suitcase to her chest, the handle of which she had security-padlocked to her belt. In addition to what she had brought from Tokyo, she’d packed a lump of loose concrete, an ornamental paperweight of Mizuko’s, a doorstop which had also belonged to Mizuko—a clear glass orb with air bubbles suspended inside—and a large leather-bound dictionary for good measure.

  When I got back to thinking that way, I felt like I was trapped and that communicating with Mizuko (but really just myself) was the only way I could be led out of the maze I had created for myself. I didn’t know whether she had deleted the accounts or blocked me. I held on to the idea that she was angry because I had run out on her, when all anybody ever did was run out on her. She didn’t reply to my emails. I only had her Columbia one, and I realised that by now that might be defunct. The messages must be stuck somewhere in the tube of light underneath the ocean that connects London and New York. I wanted to tell her what I knew, but I couldn’t.

  WHERE ARE YOU, I mouthed at the screen.

  I was actively looking for her name at first, but after a while it just started popping up even when I wasn’t. I’d searched her name enough times by that point so that anything to do with her would seek me out without my soliciting it. At first this gave me a perverse kind of hope, as if she were trying to be in touch even though she now appeared to have either blocked me on everything or shut down her online self so that she was totally sealed off and private. I set up the alerts for her name. It was through trying to find her that I discovered I was being impersonated. Someone had used my public pictures and set up a fake account. There were pictures of me and Dwight and Mizuko, with our real names and odd, hostile captions I hadn’t written. The false sense of mastery I’d once had in creating these little image grids was inverted. Anybody could do the same to me. I became convinced that I was being watched.

  Because self was still leaking everywhere, a part of me began to think it was Mizuko rather than a stranger. I hoped that there might still be a reunion. I hoped it in the shy, sly way hope comes out of the jar, the mistranslated box, last—after everything and everyone else has escaped.

  I guess I haven’t really broken my pattern, because now I am writing this, almost as compulsively as I wrote my first confession. As I wrote, a feeling of peace came over me. Then, as I wrote more, the feeling of peace left me and was replaced by sadness, guilt, then anger all over again until I got back to peace. When I wrote about Mizuko she felt less real, so in a sense I think when I started I was trying to empty her rather than bring her back. Writing in short bursts usually made me feel ordered and together, as if I had just taken a shower. If I did it for too long, it started to feel like I was having a nightmare. I would start to feel like it wasn’t even me writing it, like watching someone access your desktop remotely, or the drawing of the hands that are drawing each other.

  My reflections amount to a love story that is mostly made up, from memories that are mostly false, between people who were mainly not there. The things for which she was not there have her in them now more deeply because of her absence, and her effect on my way of seeing them. Anytime I note her absence from a thing, she arrives at once, as if summoned, entrenching herself more deeply than she exists in my memories of times when she was there, so that time, the sequence of what really happened, seems to curve around her. I found it hard to write the bits where the things that were at first surprising or even shocking became normal incrementally until I couldn’t see that they were anything but normal, because everything else had shifted just one centimetre here and one centimetre there, moving at the speed fingernails grow, until finally everything just clicked into exactly the wrong place.

  The purpose is no longer just to possess Mizuko but to give back what I took from her. The law of opposites says don’t send a message to your intended recipient if you want her to read it. So I am making it public. This rule has also been at work on me while writing. At first I thought I was writing to her, for her, about her. It is still all those things on the surface, but now it is deeper, wider. I scrolled back through the pictures I have saved to the cloud today, and suddenly it went at a crazy speed all the way to the beginning. I feel I am complicit in what happened to Hiromi. Initially my instinct was to hide my role—certainly not to write about it. The earlier confession went so wrong, and I was ashamed. I think I tipped it into the real. I go back to the convenience store, my words frozen on the screen as if inscribed in stone. Words I can’t delete or wash away into an ocean. I think of her body sinking with the weight of them. Just when I think they have sunk to the bottom, they float back up. They fill the air. When sunlight catches on webs in the garden I think of them; they break and blow around me. I pull out moulting hairs and let them go but find them later on my clothes. They stick.

  I hope when this is done I’ll be able to get back into my happy gardening vibe that was so healthy for me. I want to go back to my routine and my morning ritual with the compost, but it will probably be that my life will split in two. New Leaf Gardening in Wood Green will be happening in parallel to a fantasy that runs along the bottom of that screen like a ticker. Alice will be fine. Rabbit will stay up tonight, and every night. Resending and resending, reopening the page to see if she has responded, if anyone has. The spinning wheel will make my eyes hurt and everything else will go dark.

  Acknowledgments

  Emma Paterson, for everything. Lauren Wein and Elena Lappin, most sympathetic of editors. Jon Gray, for his excellent cover. In their different ways, Pilar Garcia-Brown, Rosie Price, Zoe Nelson, Stephen Edwards, Rachael DeShano, and Liz Duvall. Colin Thomas, both for his generosity and for his wonderful daughters. Quentin Jones, Osamu Watanabe, ONS and Taka Ota, for fated introductions, guided tours of Tokyo, early book buying,
and a language lesson. For their inspiration, Jane Partner, Tamara Follini, and Gayle Guest. My grandparents, John and Su, for their coffee machine, kindness, and moral support, and my parents, for their infinite patience.

  About the Author

  OLIVIA SUDJIC was born in London in 1988. She studied English literature at Cambridge University, where she was awarded the E. G. Harwood Prize for English and made a Bateman Scholar. She lives in London.

  Find Olivia Sudjic online!

  www.oliviasudjic.org

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