It never ceased to amaze me how she just had the facts always, in her head. It occured to me that if, or when, she died, a whole load of facts, a body of knowledge, might disappear without a trace.
Or maybe it was already too late; you only get one first love. She was mine, but I had not been hers. She was only going to look for some echo of it, and if I had made the right noises, that echo might have been me for a while.
The sharp, superficial pain at being spoken to unkindly had obscured the deeper pain, which had not yet turned into something hard and heavy.
The whole time I hadn’t slept with anyone at university had made it harder and harder to finally do it. Like spending too long on a very high diving board, until finally you have to exit ignominiously, the same way you climbed up.
Mizuko loved reading the dictionary. She liked it when there were multiple meanings for words and when opposite meanings could be contained.
Waking in the morning, I had to remember grief all over again. It was sunny, a white winter sun, and that made me sad.
Well, then, what’s the plan now? You can’t stay here forever.’My plan was indeed to stay there forever.
My ability to make up lies on the spot chills me as much as it saves me.
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 until they bulged, I was post-truth.
I felt the nauseous shiver in my stomach—everything from rage to empathy to morning sickness—that I had grown used to and now thought of as being love.
The messages must be stuck somewhere in the tube of light underneath the ocean that connects London and New York.
Email is the scourge of our age,’ said Silvia. ‘Email and cancer.
Maybe, as Mizuko said, we won’t even really die, just carry on in the feedback loop we are stuck in. Instead of connecting with new things, widening our worlds, algorithms have shrunk it to a narrow chamber with mirrored walls.
I was on the sidewalk, buffering, wondering if it was okay to follow people in real life.
No order, no pattern, just chaos. Lots of little universes separated by invisible screens . . .
I couldn’t decide what kind of person she was, whether she was one of those insects that look exactly like wasps but aren’t . . . I just wanted to know if she would sting.
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 I couldn’t stop it.
I began to cry but maintained my shouting through it, like a wind through sheets of rain.
Man with goatee. Man who looked like a Beatle. All the Beatles at once. Woman wearing newspaper hat. I’d grown used to how weird New Yorkers were, and I could fit them into types.
She was limp and pathetic and woozy and I loved her, I realised, even more because I knew how completely it was doomed.
Yeah!’ I said again, widening my eyes and nodding slowly but emphatically to show that she had seen into my own symmetrical soul.
To me, it was clear proof of the existence of supersymmetry, the idea that every particle has a partner. She was mine.
Suddenly I had to laugh. It was like realising you definitely need to projectile vomit when you thought you had it under control in some imprisoning form of public space.