Sympathy Read online

  “Origin stories make us feel secure; untangling them can undo us.”

  That is the first line of “Kizuna.” It was also the first of her stories I read.

  Sure, I thought. Yup. I started to imagine that those words were even written by me. Reading about her life felt like pressing my two hands together. She seemed a perfect match. I made her into my origin story—a way to explain myself to myself, as if she alone would give me a reason for being in the universe.

  New York is my birthplace; that’s why I went back, which is how I met her. I went there hoping I’d fall into place. It was spring 2014. The Malaysian Airlines flight had recently gone missing, and on the flight over I was terrified I’d disappear into grey ocean and be lost forever. As a result, I did some of my best existential thinking on that plane. Suspended, disconnected, stationary, yet hurtling through the sky at hundreds of miles per hour, unable to effect any change at all.

  I remembered when I had first heard the words what goes up must come down. My mother discussing some kind of comeuppance. Now I think of my flight to JFK and the trajectory I have been on since: the apartments on floors that got lower and lower to the ground, until I moved into a basement. What goes up must come down was a maxim I’d heard my whole life, so often and in so many different mouths, like glass made fuller but dull by the sea. On the plane I understood it in a new way, a way that blew my mind with the simple, universal truth of the words. When the captain announced that we were at last making our descent, I reacted to the inevitable news as if I’d been called on to land the plane myself. Although my view was thick white cloud, I had to screw my eyes shut. When the seatbelt signs went off and each row broke into a frenzy of personal electronic noises, I was the only person who remained in my seat. I stayed until the last passenger had passed me, and read my landing form over multiple times, digesting all the forbidden articles. Fruits, vegetables, insects, cell cultures, disease agents, snails, soil. With great care, I copied out Silvia’s address from one of her envelopes, even though I knew it by heart. I checked the form again. Gambling? Yes. Violent pornography? Yes. Moral turpitude? Not quite yet.

  In the end I outstayed my tourist visa by some months (four), accruing what is called “unlawful presence,” meaning I am barred from reentering the United States for three years. Though the customs hall was heavily air-conditioned, I was sweating, and on being asked the purpose of my visit, I blanked. Being born in New York, I had once possessed a U.S. passport, but my mother had claimed that for tax reasons I should give up my American nationality and get a British passport to match hers. The man at the desk took my picture, then feigned interest in the gap-year stamps I had collected, I suppose to signal that he was more human than his outsize shoulders suggested.

  “Cambodia? They eat a lot of crazy things out there. Seems like they eat whatever runs past them.”

  “Yes,” I said with a big smile, even though I do not hold that view myself.

  I was ready to mimic, to learn customs, to please.

  Reacquainted with the enormity of my suitcase, I decided not to try the subway just yet. In the back of a cab, a ribbon of text slid from right and vanished left at the bottom of a screen set into the partition, bringing breaking news of an escaped elephant, followed by a drive-by shooting in Queens. Because the language was the same, I was not prepared for just how foreign-feeling everything was. I had to tell myself that this was a place once populated by Native Americans, where there were arrowheads in the ground. I reminded myself of it often during my time there. Every time something happened to make me feel like an alien, I thought about the Native American arrowheads. A certain sensibility in the soil which slipped into the water that came out of the taps, tasting so different.

  We rode most of the way to Manhattan alongside a law enforcement vehicle, a van that said CORRECTIONS in blue along its body. It was the kind you expect to see John Malkovich jumping out of and then fleeing into the graveyard that bordered the road. I was immediately transfixed. Everywhere I looked I saw movies. There were backyards, garages, solid-looking porches, clapboard houses. The words downtown, crosstown, uptown, also solid as tree trunks. I had brought a little brown journal with me. Silvia, who was in her eighties and would be my host, had recommended the idea, suggesting that, like saving money, it might aid my recovery. I turned to the first page and, interested primarily in lighting effects, wrote: beautiful light on Van Wyck Xpwy, oily afternoon sun, anointing my forehead. Mizuko later mocked me when I showed her, but that was exactly how it felt: an ancient sunburst that had anointed so many before me, bestowing on them a second, or third, beginning.

  Outside Silvia’s building, the air was damp and delicious, with a diffuse smell like a mysterious cinema snack—a prickly, popcorny breeze that made me feel light-headed. I forgot to tip. I realised as I shut the boot, exhaust hot through my jeans, that I was ready either to cartwheel for miles or to collapse where I stood. Her building was on East 72nd, constructed from glass and mirrors, and looked after by three identical men—all, I think, called Tony—who supposedly took turns but were always huddled together behind a desk in the lobby.

  “Go right up,” they chorused. “Twenty-three, apartment A.”

  It was an efficient lift. My stomach lurched and I put my arms out behind me. I wanted to stop off at another floor so I’d have more time. I hadn’t thought of what I might say as I crossed the threshold. I had all the big conversations rehearsed but not the start or the build-up to them. At her door I knocked a few times, but there was no answer. I considered returning to the lobby but then tried the door, and it opened.

  “Hello?” I called, gripping my case. “It’s Alice.”

  I waited to be acknowledged. An intense heat emanated from within. Slowly I made out that the hall was lined with mirrors, glinting darkly, with Persian rugs along the bottom. I took cautious steps, calling Silvia’s name. It occurred to me that it might be a hoax. There was a chance I’d been writing back and forth with a very wise and supportive Nigerian scammer who had for two years been effecting the typewritten script of a grandmother with cancer. It was plausible. My mother had once received a beautifully descriptive email explaining that a Nigerian astronaut had been left on the moon since the seventies, was in good spirits, but was ready to come home if she could help. Surely, I told myself, even such creative people did not deal in typewritten letters.

  The first door I came to was slightly ajar. There appeared to be a figure beneath a sheet laid out on the sofa. I’d been taught not to disturb sleeping figures and so retreated. After some minutes I decided I should make a noise and located a bathroom. It was covered floor to ceiling in framed photographs of Silvia and her late husband. The area around the sink was littered with Spry cinnamon mints, and there were a few different iterations of a plastic device, like a larger-than-normal turkey baster, perched around the bath. I flushed the toilet, but the flush was too gentle, barely a whisper. When I emerged, the body was still sleeping.

  I tiptoed through the rest of the apartment. It felt like I had intruded onto the set of an American sitcom, and I was surprised to see that each room actually led somewhere, with enormous windows so that you could see across the city for miles. There were three bedrooms, two with en suite bathrooms. One had clearly been a man’s and was now annexed as a study. One was filled with boxes. The other was Silvia’s, though she never slept there and later told me I should sleep in it myself because the bed had the best mattress and she always slept on her sofa anyway. There was a living room that was also a dining room. It had saloon doors into a kitchen, the guest WC that I had used, and then the den that Silvia was currently sleeping in, with a television playing TCM on mute. Back in the living room, I picked up a pair of binoculars from a coffee table. The city was still there. After twenty minutes, I sat down on the living room sofa and immediately fell asleep.

  When I woke again, the sky was dark, but the orange glow of the streetlamps radiated upwards. Silvia was standing in front of me.

/>   “Who’s that?” she said, peering.

  “Alice,” I said through other words in my dream.

  “Who?”

  “Alice. Hare,” I qualified. “I’m here.”

  “You’re not supposed to be here until tomorrow.”

  “Oh,” I said, starting to right myself.

  “I didn’t want you before tomorrow. I’ve had an operation.”

  “Sorry,” I began, trying to stand up.

  “Okay,” she said, and shuffled back into her den.

  I listened and waited, blinking in the up-lit dark and feeling that everything was upside down. After a few minutes, in which I could hear her fall asleep again by the resumption of shallow breathing, I lay back and tried to breathe deeply, because I could feel that I was about to get locked into the anxiety attack that had threatened at various points on the journey every time I thought about the plane that had disappeared into thin air. I felt unreal, like a phantom in her apartment that she’d walked right through. My breaths were getting shorter and faster, as if I were sucking on a straw with no opening, until I felt my lungs expand much too much, so that when I tried to exhale it felt as if they had stuck together and were tearing from the effort of pulling apart again. Then I was crying, gulping and crying, also then roaring. Then, when no one came, the tears stopped and I was very still and totally quiet, like an infant silenced by the profound shock of something shiny reflecting on the ceiling. Except all that had happened was that the sound of the roads far below had made a pin drop, locating me, reminding me where in the world I was, that I was really there, and it had stunned me.

  I settled back onto the pillow and recalled the start of my correspondence with Silvia, or the scammer pretending to be her, nearly two years before. July 2012. The summer before my final year of university. I was ploughing through a reading list outside on a khaki canvas camp bed from the army surplus store. Most of the furniture we owned was portable in some way. I came inside when I heard shouting. My mother was standing in front of the television set. We watched a room full of physicists officially declare the discovery of the Higgs boson. Peter Higgs, a kindly-looking, beaky-nosed man, shed a single tear. My mother cried too, much more than Higgs. “Okay,” I said, patting her. “But it really doesn’t have anything to do with us.”

  A week later I got the letter from New York, with a postmark dated the day of the discovery.

  Dear Alice,

  So it turns out we are immersed in an ocean. No doubt you will have read about the discovery of the Higgs particle. It makes my brain ache to think of the largest machine—they keep saying it’s the size of Chartres Cathedral—finding the smallest particle in existence. Do they talk about it at your school? Forgive me, you are over that by now. Are you still studying? I wonder what sort of girl you have turned out to be. I last saw you when you were very small, and I assume now you are much bigger. I suppose you will wonder why I am contacting you again after so long. Well, I don’t feel like going into it much unless you want to know. If you do, write back.

  Yours truly,

  Silvia Weiss

  3

  * * *

  I had little trouble appropriating parts of Mizuko’s origin story because in practice my own origin story didn’t belong to me, and it was always evolving. If I challenged anything—dates, names, places—my mother would respond not with an answer but with a question, like why didn’t I go and find my real parents and leave her in peace? She meant my birth parents, and each of us knew that was impossible. One was dead; the other had been in prison but was maybe dead by then too. I knew almost nothing else about them.

  Memory is our first tool. We learn the face of whoever feeds us, and other things—less corporeal. We remember feelings, or persistent doubt. Then it starts to trip us up, starts to manipulate and mess with us. I suppose you could say I went to New York that spring because I wanted to escape, in England, what Mizuko’s therapist had named a toxic cycle of self-doubt. I wanted a single, coherent narrative to explain who I was and what it was I was supposed to be doing.

  In fact both my mothers were possessive of facts. With my second one, every detail, if you record and compare, is contradictory. The main focus is always her absent husband, my second absent father, Mark. Sometimes he is a deserter, his memory despised and insulted; other times he gets to be a kind of destiny that is worshipped and wept over. How I fit into the picture has continually shifted. I have been a marriage-saver and a marriage-ruiner. The one line she’s held on to throughout is that I will mess everything up if I try to lay my hands on any part of it. I’ve told her practically nothing about last year.

  When Mizuko asked me to sum up my childhood in a word, I said claustrophobic. Susy would never ever, she assured me, let me go. But I should have said contradictory, since at other times it was the opposite. I would wander around our cottage on my own or settle secretly in the attic, where she kept countless fragments of fact in unpacked boxes. The sheer volume of information was overwhelming, rendering it close to useless, and I think she intended it to be, to put me off searching through it. It would have taken a million robots a million years to reassemble what had really happened to us from looking in our attic.

  In her letters, Silvia gave me her version of events.

  I’ll start with when you were born. Manhattan in 1991. I called you Rabbit. That was what I called Mark when he was a little boy too.

  Rabbit’s stuck, at least for me, in my head. I often say it aloud to myself, or aloud but in my head. Rabbit. I prefer it to Alice Hare, and I was in heaven when Mizuko started calling me Rabbit too.

  You might have had another name before Alice, but your real mother fled with that detail (among others) from the maternity ward of Lenox Hill Hospital in her green gown

  —I imagine her balloon-belly leading, bottom winking—

  to surprise a red Moishe’s moving van on its way downtown. She was smashed like a watermelon before anyone could ask what, if anything, she might have had in mind for you. Neither, having a flair for surprises, had she told your father you even existed. Himself, disdaining both women and authority, would most likely not have followed orders anyway. He was incarcerated in Baybram Correctional Facility for crimes that require, for their successful undertaking, something as poetic as an “abandoned and malignant heart.” It became clear that your real mother, who could not have afforded even your delivery, had no plan for you that the state could execute, though the authorities raked through her few personal effects for a clue.

  I know, from what Silvia told me, that inside the steaming belly I had so recently exited they found only collard greens, string beans, whiting, and schnapps, and that those who saw the accident reported that my mother’s last words were barely intelligible, seemingly addressed to herself: “Nigger, leave me alone, let me be. My son will blow your brains out.”

  All the best stories begin like that, Mizuko said when I told her. Lucky you.

  You were put up for adoption. My son, Mark Hare, and his wife, Susy, took you in. They had a name ready: Alice. I was there when you were handed over, a tensile ball of fists and fuzz, a lifetime of fairy knots. They were older than normal parents. Mark was a physics professor, Susy was an illustrator, at least on the adoption forms, and they lived near where he worked at Columbia University in Morningside Heights.

  This is the bit I had heard over and over from Susy. I knew they met there as undergraduates, during the student protests in 1968. I’ve been told the story so . . . many . . . times. I think everybody who has ever had even the briefest encounter with my mother knows it.

  Their first conversation was broadcast on the student radio station, WKCR. Susy, then Susannah and eighteen, an earnest freshman from England, interviewed Mark.

  “Very tall, strong arms, one raised in a fist like a divining rod” (the divining rod, a staple, is one of Susy’s few landmarks in the story). It pleased me that when I fact-checked Silvia’s letters, all their details appeared online, rooting it in the real,
repeated almost word for word. It made Silvia feel comforting, as if with her I finally stood on solid ground. Back then I had no reason to mistrust the medium; it seemed reassuring, impersonal, objective, with no particular bias or axe to grind. Google was the arbiter of truth.

  Susy wanted student voices for her “Columbia in Crisis” segment. Most of the Class of ’68 used their graduation as a platform for another protest. The ceremony was conducted at Saint John’s that year, and many students hid radios under their academic gowns, silent until they burst into Bob Dylan, when WKCR played “The Times They Are A’Changin’” and the students marched out into the sunshine.